It used to be Mac User Interface gospel that any read process, from a disk or a network, could be aborted immediately by pressing Command-Period. For most browsers, they meet this guideline by mapping that keyboard shortcut to the "Stop" button of the browser.
IE for Mac is just about the only program I know of which completely breaks this rule. If it's building a page, "you shall sit there and wait for it, dammit! No, you may not abort the page-load. No, you may not minimize the window and do other things. You are hitting commands, but I can't hear you! Lalalalalalala!"
Moz/Chimera/etc. may bot be perfect, but at least they usually give you a fighting chance of aborting a process. They also die instantly on crash, rather than hangning forever without any indication that they stopped responding. I wish I had a nickel for every time I used "Force Quit" or "Kill -9" on IE.
It's hard to believe that MS is spending $10 Million a year on their California-based Mac solutions group, when this sort of thing is the best they can come up with.
My suggestion is simple: When you want to get rid of hazardous waste you own, whatever it is: a computer, a battery, a TV set, etc. It is, and should be your personal responsibility to dispose of it properly.
This is already the law in most places. If you are throwing PC's in the trash right now (especially monitors), you are breaking the law.
You should not be forced to pay that disposal fee up front, because you might not dispose of it. I can just see the owner of a PC recycling facility trying (unsuccessfully) to argue his way out of paying this fee.
I'm appalled at the suggestion proposed in the article because in introduces another tax, another barrier to entry in the PC business, and another layer of bureaucracy for the tech industry, while not actually solving the problem any better than improved enforcement of current toxic disposal laws could solve it.
Or, you make it illegal to dump them into landfills.
Which is what is already being done in most communties.
Instead of fining manufacturers for making something which is hard to throw out, or paying people to recylce, you just disallow throwing them out in landfills, like we do with used motor oil. If you don't want to dispose of your old PC properly, you have the option of leaving it on some shelf in your basement. Your call.
I think the reasoning behind this legislation is to encourage computer manufacturers to make their designs more breakdown-and-recycle-friendly.
Is that a joke? Computer design should focus on making systems that are easier to break down into base components!?
I stand astonished.
I just don't know where to begin.
Please tell me you are trolling, and don't really believe that the cost/benifit gap of recycling computers is best solved by mandating computers that are easier to break down into base components.
I find it interesting that you talk about monitors to emphasize how toxic computers are.
Computer monitors, like TV sets, are already banned from landfills in nearly every municipality in the US. You can't throw a monitor in your trash, and if you try, the trash collector is not allowed to take it. Those who do face very stiff fines.
Computers themselves have almost no lead, and the clock battery is pretty much the only toxic element. (By the way, throwing away batteries in landfills... also illegal.)
This bill is not about cleanign up the environment. It gives us no assurance that HP (or whoever) will handle my discarded PC's more responsibly than I will. All it does is create a new barrier to entry for small computer makers.
4) Smokers actually save health insurance plans money, because most smokers die young and quickly, while non-smokers tend to live long enough to get debilitating illnesses and survive for decades while making multi-thousand dollar medical claims every year.
Yes, he, as an individual, should bear the cost of its proper disposal... when he disposes of it.
The environment is far better off if he donates it to somebody that has a use for it, and if doing so avoids the disposal cost, he would have incentive to do so. However, if you make him pay for the disposal up front, you can bet for sure he will drop it off at the disposal site he already paid for when he no longer needs it.
Forced recycling programs often have negative repercusions, becuase the resulting incoming recyclable material ends up being overwhelming. In the US there are currently entire warehouses of paper turning into compost, because we turn our newspapers in to recycling centers much faster than they could ever be recycled. The same thing would happen with a computer recyling program where the cost is built into the price. You would end up with above-ground landfills of computers waiting to be broken down for recycling.
Besides, there already are proper ways available to dispose of PC's. Call your local city government for information about how to properly dispose of old hardware. You will not be forced to drink bottled water if this law fails to pass. (Actually, if you live in California, you might be forced to buy water anyway. A lot of agriculture goes on in California, and fertilizers & pesticides are much more dangerous to groundwater than an old 386.)
The thing is, many of the big playas in today's PC market, as well as up-and-coming "smaller" national brands, started out as little custom white-box shops. I'm sure that HP doesn't want a plucky little shop like Tran Microcomputers in Minneapolis to start doing mail-order business and become the next Dell, or even the next Omnitech. If the Trans of the world can be driven out of the market, that's one more potential threat that HP can forget about.
Every computer is made with recycled parts. Plastic, aluminum, silicon, hell, even the bread-boards that the circuits are put on could be recycled. The clock battery is just about the only part which is not easilly recylced.
The problem is, computers and computer materials have become so cheap that it is almost never worth the expense of hiring somebody to bust the thing up into separate materials. Even parts that don't need to be broken down for recycling could be re-used, but aren't. Anybody want a free AT motherboard? How about a 9" floppy disk drive? Didn't think so.
This will also be the case with that NEC "Eco" in 3-5 years. Obsolete computers are worth less than their raw materials.
The best way to dispose of an old computer is to not dispose of it. Give it away to somebody who still has use for it. Hell, even an old 286 or Apple II would be a great tool for a young kid to learn about how computers work. Building an operational computer out of junkyard parts would be a hell of an education.
* Paying the disposal/recycling costs on your consumables up-front; or * Paying them after the municipal dump heap has already poisoned your ground water?
The first one.
Many places don't have ground water to drill for at all. Where I live, it's there but not fit for human consumption anyway, due to all the nitrates in the soil (although it's excellent for watering your lawn!). We filter and sanitize all of our water from the river.
Here's a thought: disallow putting old computers in municipal dump heaps, classifying them as hazardous waste that must be handled separately. Oh wait, most states and communities are already doing that. What was the problem again? Oh, none? Okay then.
Whoever modded my post as a "troll" needs to re-read it a little more carefully. It wasn't a Linux-bashing post. I was just pointing out the fact that Linux was never created to break any new ground in OS technology, it was created to make existing technology available free, both as in beer and as in speech.
Damn, it's like walking on egg shells with some of these people.
News flash for ya: Linux has never lead, and never will.
Linux is a clone of UNIX. The GUI most distros ship with it is a hybrid of the "old-skool" UNIX X windowing system and Windows95. The most popular Linux office suite is a clone of MS-Office.
That is why copying yet another Windows or UNIX technology is a "great win for linux."
Linux is not about breaking new ground, it's about walking on the old ground freely and for free.
Apart from writer and director, those factors are likely to tell you very little about how good a show is. By tracking actors, it would probably assume that if you watched Seinfeld, you would like all three of the horrible comedies that the former Seinfeld stars made. (Come to think of it, moronic TV executives green-lighted all three shows by making the same assumption.)
What would be far more useful is tracking other users with your tastes. For example, I mentioned that I really grog "Buffy" and "The Sopranos". I also think "The Industry" is a brilliant show and think "Charmed" is utter crap. I would be willing bet that, if you sat 20 people who also like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" in front of "The Industry", 18 out of 20 would probably like it. However, "The Industry" has none of the connections you listed. We are talking about three very dissimilar shows. The only think linking Joss Whedon's take on the horror Genre with a David Chase show about mobsters, and then with a Canadian-made sitcom about media executives, is the inventiveness of the writings in all three shows. You could never quantify that, except by observing the opinions of the viewers, and carefully correlating them. Other fans of my favorite shows would probably be a good place to look for what other shows I might like.
Even with that logic, it's still not very accurate to say "viewer FOO likes these 6 shows, and lots of other viewers who like these 6 shows also like show BAR, so viewer FOO might like show BAR," (although that's still better than what you were talking about), because the data that really narrows it down is the reason why people like the shows. Those other people might like show BAR because a lot of them just happen to be Jenna Elfman fans, and show FOO stars Jenna Elfman. Since I can't stand that psycho, I would probably not like show, even if a lot of Sopranos fans do.
My point is, from what I've seen of TiVo's methods of predictive modeling, it's got a long way to go, and will probably never work very well until there is a critical mass of heavy TiVo users who take the time to give honest feedback to their TiVos. Even of you look at data about "like-minded" users, the system can break down unless it narrows things down correctly. "Will and Grace" fans who program lots of Playboy Chanel stuff (to convince their TiVo that they are not gay men) might end up causing women who always watch the NBC "Thursday line-up" getting lots of porn reccomended to them once "ER" is over.
What TiVo really needs is a "likes good writing" profile. Genre profiling only works if you have an unhealthy obsession with one genre or another. Most of us don't care if a show is a western, a lawyer show, a sci-fi, or whatever. We like shows that are done well, and hate shows that are not.
I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" every Tuesday, but have no interest in "Clueless", "Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", as I am neither a teenaged girl, nor am I obsessed with them.
A properly configured TiVo would see that I like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" and realize that thoughtful writing is what captures my attention, making reccomendations like "The Industry" when its on PBS (That's the US title for "Made In Canada", the funniest and smartest damn sitcom I've ever seen.)
Actually, while the term "Borking" is frequently used by Republicans to refer to character assasination, it was actually a left-wing lobbyist who first verbed the name "Bork".
When Bush The Elder appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Florence Kennedy, then president of the National Organization of Women told the press, "we're going to Bork him. We're going to kill him politically." Shortly afterwards, Anita Hill came forward to accuse him of sexual harrassing her several years earlier.
because he clearly doesn't understand that Sendmail is only an MTA and not a drop-in replacement for Exchange.
That's the whole reason for going with it. I would rather have an app that is "only" an MTA (and works), than the abomination that is an Exchange Server.
At the last company I worked at that had one, the Exchange Server was responsible for 80% of the emergency administration issues, and the guy who supported it worked easilly double the hours of any other techie in the office, trying to keep the damned thing working properly with chewing gum and bailing wire.
If by "not long" you mean "since the days of bufallo head pennies", you would be correct...
Back then they probably didn't think there were enough noteworthy presidents to put on the coins. We no longer have that problem.
What can I say, I miss the Ike dollar. It was huge, like a dollar coin should be. The Sacagawea coin looks like something from our allies to the north.
I must admit, though, I do find those goofy $2 coins the Canadians use to be kind of spiffy. Whenever I buy a $6 breakfast in a Canadian diner, I can use one to pretend I'm a cheap bastard by leaving only one coin for the tip.
Good catch, although he is also a Roman god, under the name "Cronus".
Why they used the Greek name instead of the Roman one, as they did with all the inner planets, probably has something to do with giving fits to TV newscasters reading about the Voyager missions. ("The NASA probe is expected to reach Uranus next week.") Even if you say it "urine us" instead of "your anus", the 12 year olds will still snicker at you.
Quaoar, on the other hand, is completely unrelated to classical mythology.
My point was that the low-end, disposable, grunt-work techs hired from Your Friendly Neighborhood Staff Agency probably don't need to know the business, because they won't be around long enough to learn it all, let alone use that knowledge.
Companies that have MS Exchange servers for the company mail often hand the task of maintaining it to such low-level techs.
The people who only know the business are unaware of the potential savings, efficiencies, etc., that current technology solutions can offer their particular business.
People who only know the tech are also unaware of how they can add value to a business, because they have no clue what that business does.
Tech people who also master an executive level understanding of a particular field (insurance, financial planning, transportation, medical care, manufacturing, general accounting, etc.) are worth a fortune to their companies, as are business people who master technology. Not only do such people find ways to save costs or improve income to the tune of millions, but they are also few and far between, cranking up demand for their services even higher among those companies who are shrewd enough to hire them.
Should the paper MCSE who runs your Exchange server be expected to know the business? No, I suppose not. Especially since you should probably lay him off as soon as your network administrators replace that server with a sendmail process on a spare UNIX box. But your development staff should know the company's business as well as any of the suits, if not better. I know you would probably rather pick up another programming language or some other skill that's easy to transplant between the jobs you change every two or three years (my attitude is very much the same) but sooner or later, you hit a salary ceiling as a general "hired gun" techie, and you need a deeper, more specialized knowledge of something before you are going to break past it.
The convention seems to be deities but not necessarily Roman ones.
Mercury: Roman Venus: Roman Mars: Roman Jupiter: Roman Saturn: Roman Neptune: Roman Uranus: Roman Pluto: Roman Quaoar: Some tiny Native American tribe from the LA area. So obscure, Google only has one hit for the Karma Whores to link to, and suggests that you must be asking about quasars.
If you break a convention and wait long enough, you create a new one, so in that sense you are correct, or at least will be if the new name sticks long enough.
Personally, I'm still irritated at US coins with people other than dead presidents on them, let alone selecting diverse pantheons for naming our planets, but then I'm just a stuffy old conservative.
As Homer would say, "I like my planets roman, my beer American, and by queers fuh-laming!"
Uh... that would be the cartoon Homer, obviously, not the one who wrote the Illiad and... oh fuck, what am I saying? This is slashdot. Most of the people here can recite seasons 1-5 of the Simpsons by rote, but have never read anything that wasn't published in English first, unless you count the stupid made-up slang of Gibson's "Neuromancer" as another language.
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"Developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers!"
IE for Mac is just about the only program I know of which completely breaks this rule. If it's building a page, "you shall sit there and wait for it, dammit! No, you may not abort the page-load. No, you may not minimize the window and do other things. You are hitting commands, but I can't hear you! Lalalalalalala!"
Moz/Chimera/etc. may bot be perfect, but at least they usually give you a fighting chance of aborting a process. They also die instantly on crash, rather than hangning forever without any indication that they stopped responding. I wish I had a nickel for every time I used "Force Quit" or "Kill -9" on IE.
It's hard to believe that MS is spending $10 Million a year on their California-based Mac solutions group, when this sort of thing is the best they can come up with.
This is already the law in most places. If you are throwing PC's in the trash right now (especially monitors), you are breaking the law.
You should not be forced to pay that disposal fee up front, because you might not dispose of it. I can just see the owner of a PC recycling facility trying (unsuccessfully) to argue his way out of paying this fee.
I'm appalled at the suggestion proposed in the article because in introduces another tax, another barrier to entry in the PC business, and another layer of bureaucracy for the tech industry, while not actually solving the problem any better than improved enforcement of current toxic disposal laws could solve it.
If you were worried about keeping up with hardware advancement via upgradability, you would not be buying a 1 GHz P-III computer right now, woudja?
Which is what is already being done in most communties.
Instead of fining manufacturers for making something which is hard to throw out, or paying people to recylce, you just disallow throwing them out in landfills, like we do with used motor oil. If you don't want to dispose of your old PC properly, you have the option of leaving it on some shelf in your basement. Your call.
Is that a joke? Computer design should focus on making systems that are easier to break down into base components!?
I stand astonished.
I just don't know where to begin.
Please tell me you are trolling, and don't really believe that the cost/benifit gap of recycling computers is best solved by mandating computers that are easier to break down into base components.
Computer monitors, like TV sets, are already banned from landfills in nearly every municipality in the US. You can't throw a monitor in your trash, and if you try, the trash collector is not allowed to take it. Those who do face very stiff fines.
Computers themselves have almost no lead, and the clock battery is pretty much the only toxic element. (By the way, throwing away batteries in landfills... also illegal.)
This bill is not about cleanign up the environment. It gives us no assurance that HP (or whoever) will handle my discarded PC's more responsibly than I will. All it does is create a new barrier to entry for small computer makers.
4) Smokers actually save health insurance plans money, because most smokers die young and quickly, while non-smokers tend to live long enough to get debilitating illnesses and survive for decades while making multi-thousand dollar medical claims every year.
The environment is far better off if he donates it to somebody that has a use for it, and if doing so avoids the disposal cost, he would have incentive to do so. However, if you make him pay for the disposal up front, you can bet for sure he will drop it off at the disposal site he already paid for when he no longer needs it.
Forced recycling programs often have negative repercusions, becuase the resulting incoming recyclable material ends up being overwhelming. In the US there are currently entire warehouses of paper turning into compost, because we turn our newspapers in to recycling centers much faster than they could ever be recycled. The same thing would happen with a computer recyling program where the cost is built into the price. You would end up with above-ground landfills of computers waiting to be broken down for recycling.
Besides, there already are proper ways available to dispose of PC's. Call your local city government for information about how to properly dispose of old hardware. You will not be forced to drink bottled water if this law fails to pass. (Actually, if you live in California, you might be forced to buy water anyway. A lot of agriculture goes on in California, and fertilizers & pesticides are much more dangerous to groundwater than an old 386.)
The thing is, many of the big playas in today's PC market, as well as up-and-coming "smaller" national brands, started out as little custom white-box shops. I'm sure that HP doesn't want a plucky little shop like Tran Microcomputers in Minneapolis to start doing mail-order business and become the next Dell, or even the next Omnitech. If the Trans of the world can be driven out of the market, that's one more potential threat that HP can forget about.
Every computer is made with recycled parts. Plastic, aluminum, silicon, hell, even the bread-boards that the circuits are put on could be recycled. The clock battery is just about the only part which is not easilly recylced.
The problem is, computers and computer materials have become so cheap that it is almost never worth the expense of hiring somebody to bust the thing up into separate materials. Even parts that don't need to be broken down for recycling could be re-used, but aren't. Anybody want a free AT motherboard? How about a 9" floppy disk drive? Didn't think so.
This will also be the case with that NEC "Eco" in 3-5 years. Obsolete computers are worth less than their raw materials.
The best way to dispose of an old computer is to not dispose of it. Give it away to somebody who still has use for it. Hell, even an old 286 or Apple II would be a great tool for a young kid to learn about how computers work. Building an operational computer out of junkyard parts would be a hell of an education.
* Paying the disposal/recycling costs on your consumables up-front; or
* Paying them after the municipal dump heap has already poisoned your ground water?
The first one.
Many places don't have ground water to drill for at all. Where I live, it's there but not fit for human consumption anyway, due to all the nitrates in the soil (although it's excellent for watering your lawn!). We filter and sanitize all of our water from the river.
Here's a thought: disallow putting old computers in municipal dump heaps, classifying them as hazardous waste that must be handled separately. Oh wait, most states and communities are already doing that. What was the problem again? Oh, none? Okay then.
As well there should be... but this bill is analogous to making Goodyear pay your disposal fee for you.
Damn, it's like walking on egg shells with some of these people.
Linux is a clone of UNIX. The GUI most distros ship with it is a hybrid of the "old-skool" UNIX X windowing system and Windows95. The most popular Linux office suite is a clone of MS-Office.
That is why copying yet another Windows or UNIX technology is a "great win for linux."
Linux is not about breaking new ground, it's about walking on the old ground freely and for free.
What would be far more useful is tracking other users with your tastes. For example, I mentioned that I really grog "Buffy" and "The Sopranos". I also think "The Industry" is a brilliant show and think "Charmed" is utter crap. I would be willing bet that, if you sat 20 people who also like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" in front of "The Industry", 18 out of 20 would probably like it. However, "The Industry" has none of the connections you listed. We are talking about three very dissimilar shows. The only think linking Joss Whedon's take on the horror Genre with a David Chase show about mobsters, and then with a Canadian-made sitcom about media executives, is the inventiveness of the writings in all three shows. You could never quantify that, except by observing the opinions of the viewers, and carefully correlating them. Other fans of my favorite shows would probably be a good place to look for what other shows I might like.
Even with that logic, it's still not very accurate to say "viewer FOO likes these 6 shows, and lots of other viewers who like these 6 shows also like show BAR, so viewer FOO might like show BAR," (although that's still better than what you were talking about), because the data that really narrows it down is the reason why people like the shows. Those other people might like show BAR because a lot of them just happen to be Jenna Elfman fans, and show FOO stars Jenna Elfman. Since I can't stand that psycho, I would probably not like show, even if a lot of Sopranos fans do.
My point is, from what I've seen of TiVo's methods of predictive modeling, it's got a long way to go, and will probably never work very well until there is a critical mass of heavy TiVo users who take the time to give honest feedback to their TiVos. Even of you look at data about "like-minded" users, the system can break down unless it narrows things down correctly. "Will and Grace" fans who program lots of Playboy Chanel stuff (to convince their TiVo that they are not gay men) might end up causing women who always watch the NBC "Thursday line-up" getting lots of porn reccomended to them once "ER" is over.
I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" every Tuesday, but have no interest in "Clueless", "Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", as I am neither a teenaged girl, nor am I obsessed with them.
A properly configured TiVo would see that I like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" and realize that thoughtful writing is what captures my attention, making reccomendations like "The Industry" when its on PBS (That's the US title for "Made In Canada", the funniest and smartest damn sitcom I've ever seen.)
When Bush The Elder appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Florence Kennedy, then president of the National Organization of Women told the press, "we're going to Bork him. We're going to kill him politically." Shortly afterwards, Anita Hill came forward to accuse him of sexual harrassing her several years earlier.
That's the whole reason for going with it. I would rather have an app that is "only" an MTA (and works), than the abomination that is an Exchange Server.
At the last company I worked at that had one, the Exchange Server was responsible for 80% of the emergency administration issues, and the guy who supported it worked easilly double the hours of any other techie in the office, trying to keep the damned thing working properly with chewing gum and bailing wire.
Back then they probably didn't think there were enough noteworthy presidents to put on the coins. We no longer have that problem.
What can I say, I miss the Ike dollar. It was huge, like a dollar coin should be. The Sacagawea coin looks like something from our allies to the north.
I must admit, though, I do find those goofy $2 coins the Canadians use to be kind of spiffy. Whenever I buy a $6 breakfast in a Canadian diner, I can use one to pretend I'm a cheap bastard by leaving only one coin for the tip.
Why they used the Greek name instead of the Roman one, as they did with all the inner planets, probably has something to do with giving fits to TV newscasters reading about the Voyager missions. ("The NASA probe is expected to reach Uranus next week.") Even if you say it "urine us" instead of "your anus", the 12 year olds will still snicker at you.
Quaoar, on the other hand, is completely unrelated to classical mythology.
Companies that have MS Exchange servers for the company mail often hand the task of maintaining it to such low-level techs.
It's a fair cop. I'm guilty as charged, but society is to blame.
People who only know the tech are also unaware of how they can add value to a business, because they have no clue what that business does.
Tech people who also master an executive level understanding of a particular field (insurance, financial planning, transportation, medical care, manufacturing, general accounting, etc.) are worth a fortune to their companies, as are business people who master technology. Not only do such people find ways to save costs or improve income to the tune of millions, but they are also few and far between, cranking up demand for their services even higher among those companies who are shrewd enough to hire them.
Should the paper MCSE who runs your Exchange server be expected to know the business? No, I suppose not. Especially since you should probably lay him off as soon as your network administrators replace that server with a sendmail process on a spare UNIX box. But your development staff should know the company's business as well as any of the suits, if not better. I know you would probably rather pick up another programming language or some other skill that's easy to transplant between the jobs you change every two or three years (my attitude is very much the same) but sooner or later, you hit a salary ceiling as a general "hired gun" techie, and you need a deeper, more specialized knowledge of something before you are going to break past it.
Mercury: Roman
Venus: Roman
Mars: Roman
Jupiter: Roman
Saturn: Roman
Neptune: Roman
Uranus: Roman
Pluto: Roman
Quaoar: Some tiny Native American tribe from the LA area. So obscure, Google only has one hit for the Karma Whores to link to, and suggests that you must be asking about quasars.
If you break a convention and wait long enough, you create a new one, so in that sense you are correct, or at least will be if the new name sticks long enough.
Personally, I'm still irritated at US coins with people other than dead presidents on them, let alone selecting diverse pantheons for naming our planets, but then I'm just a stuffy old conservative.
As Homer would say, "I like my planets roman, my beer American, and by queers fuh-laming!"
Uh... that would be the cartoon Homer, obviously, not the one who wrote the Illiad and... oh fuck, what am I saying? This is slashdot. Most of the people here can recite seasons 1-5 of the Simpsons by rote, but have never read anything that wasn't published in English first, unless you count the stupid made-up slang of Gibson's "Neuromancer" as another language.