There are going to be switching costs no matter which way you turn it.
Maybe they switch to new versions of Windows and/or Microsoft Office. Depending on which versions they switch from and to, this could provide for a similar or dramatically different (ribbon, metro) experience.
Maybe they switch to Linux and/or LibreOffice. Depending on where they switched from and what they switch to, this could provide a similar (e.g. pre-ribbon Office to LibreOffice) or dramatically different (e.g. NT to Unity) experience.
Even if they don't change the software, there will be switching costs, because people will be used to different software than whatever the city would be refusing to upgrade from.
So, really, there is no avoiding switching costs, no matter what you do, and the study's choice to evaluate "comparable technological level" solutions doesn't seem so unreasonable.
However, in order to make a profit, banks were then obliged to slap on a whole new range of exceptional and penal charges in the small print and to give their customers the hard sell for a bunch of other financial products that they didn't need
Or they could just make money from the difference between what they pay you when you lend them your money and what you pay them when they lend you other poeple's money.
So we're stuck with a model in which the selection and presentation of results must of commercial necessity be orchestrated for profit
As far as I know, web search engines have been free to use as long as there have been web search engines. The most lauded search engines are those that present the results that the user is most interested in at or near the top of the results. If they do a good job of this, many people will use the search engine, and it becomes sort of the start page of the world wide web for those users. That's prime advertising space, and, as far as I know, that's how search engines have always made their money. Apparently, it also works better if the advertisements that are shown are relevant to the user's interests. This all sounds to me like the users' interests and the profit motive are pretty well-aligned.
(contrary to the current trend I prefer small phones)
Interesting that you mention that. I had completely failed to notice, but after years of smaller and smaller phones, the trend for at least smartphones is now larger and larger.
Incidentally, if you already knew which phone you wanted, wouldn't you have been better off buying it online instead of in a store?
I don't know if arrogance is more prevalent in nerds than in the general population. I do have the impression that there is an inverse correlation between arrogance and actually being knowledgeable. Generally, the more you know, the more you realize that (1) things tend to be more nuanced than they first appeared, (2) there are a lot of things you don't know (3) there are a lot of areas where others know more than you do. That's one thing.
The other thing is being interested in other people and getting along with them. Speaking for myself, for a long time, there were a lot of things I was more interested in. At some point, that changed, and I became very interested in how people work and what sorts of things make them happy. I read a few books about this, and "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is a classic that I would recommend.
I've always enjoyed making people happy, and I don't think I've turned away a lot of people by arrogance or other annoying characteristics, but, looking back, I can see that I have definitely improved a lot in how I deal with people. As a result, I am now much happier. It's not just that I have more friends and am receiving signs that they appreciate me more, it's also that this has really helped me get ahead in life. As it turns out, a lot of things in life depend on who you know more than on what you know. And really, dealing with people and making them happy is very rewarding.
To answer your questions: I think nerd arrogance tends to come from the feeling that they generally know better than other people. You may actually know better. There will also be cases where you are wrong. In either case, it's probably better to be humble about it. Feel honored that someone values your knowledge and considered opinion and asked for your input. Don't present it as the ultimate truth, but say something like "The common way to do that is $technique_that_is_well_known_In_your_circles" or "I think that $something_you_have_concluded_from_observations". That way, the other person can feel that they learned something and draw their own conclusions, rather then having been told the truth by some person who thinks they know it all.
As for trouble in your career and relationships, yes, that's a very good point. I think most people will encounter trouble in those areas, and getting more knowledge on how to deal with common situations will definitely help you do better than you would just blundering through. Besides "How to Win Friends and Influence People", I can also recommend "Getting to Yes", "Further Up the Organization", and "101 Things I Wish I Knew when I Got Married" (it applies equally well to relationships not involving marriage). Think of it as the nerd approach to life: read the manual, and you will know more and do better than the average person.;-)
Finally, the fact that you asked about it shows that you are interested in doing better. That's the most important step. Now that you know you care about this, you have the motivation to work on it. In all honesty, I think this already puts you in a great position to do better than many people. Good job! I hope you find my input helpful. Let me know how it goes!
Most software patents today are written in functional terms. If courts would faithfully apply the 1952 Act, limiting those claims to the actual algorithms the patentees disclosed and their equivalents, they could prevent overclaiming by software patentees and solve much of the patent thicket problem that besets software innovation.
I'm not sure this would fix the problem. Sometimes, the fact that the algorithm is patented is the problem. Think about it: if a patent didn't cover the idea of generating a sorted sequence from a potentially unsorted one, but only covered quicksort and its equivalents, would that still be a problem? I'd say it's better than covering any implementation of any sorting algorithm, but I'm not sure the resulting situation is really where we want to be.
Who cares? Graphics don't make games better, particularly not when they are already more than good enough in general.
An earlier version of me would have agreed with you. However, when I compare the beautiful graphics in some PC games from recent years with the graphics in Wii games of similar genre, the graphics on the Wii are simply a turn-off.
That doesn't mean there aren't also games on the Wii that are a ton of fun to play and worth it regardless of the graphics being in a different class. That's why I have the Wii. But good graphics can be part of what makes a game great, and as far as I can tell, the Wii has never done really impressive graphics. I'm hoping that the Wii U will do better, is all.
What I really want to know is two things: (1) What are the graphics capabilities and (2) What new fun input methods will there be?
Graphics: because the graphics on the current Wii are, frankly, sad. PS3 and Xbox 360 are way behind the state of the art on the PC, but that gap is small compared to the gap between either of those consoles and the Wii. I can see why a lot of game publishers wouldn't want to release for Wii: their games are going to look terrible.
Input methods: I feel this has been the great driver of success for the Wii. Where pre-Wii console gaming consisted of a joypad and maybe a gun or a steering wheel, the Wii revolutionized gaming with the Wiimote and the balance board. By now, Microsoft and Sony have copied this, and I would argue that Kinect is actually ahead of what Wii offers (though there are some things the balance board can do that Kinect can't). Is the Wii U going to offer something similarly compelling?
Check out Olimex: https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html, particularly the upcoming A13-OLinuXino. My understanding is that they are making hardware that is vaguely similar to the Raspberry Pi, but with full documentation.
I'm in the same situation you are in, but I am just happy they are improving the board in response to the feedback they received. And so quickly, too. I wish all hardware vendors did that.
I also really don't feel bad about not getting a free upgrade. I paid my $35 knowing full well that I was paying for an early version that would likely still have some kinks to be worked out. The wait is long, but they told me it would be.
I feel they are handling this well, and I really hope the Raspberry Pi becomes the roaring success it seems to be on its way to becoming.
Yeah, I feel a bit dubious about that. I wasn't too excited about made in the UK in the first place (nothing wrong with capital flow to poorer countries in my book), but it's Sony, too. I really don't want to be putting money in Sony's pockets after the stunts they've pulled in the last decades.
Will there be an option to buy 2.0s by a specific manufacturer?
This could work well. Indeed, there is something to be said for having C with a few extensions being a lot better for application programming than plain C.
On the other hand, a lot of real-world C++ code is as crappy as it is exactly because people write it as if it were C with a few extensions, rather than taking advantage of other C++ features that would make it actually nice to read.
As an example of this, it helped me a lot when I finally realized that, in C++, you can use almost any well-implemented type as if it were a primitive type like int. Memory management in C++ is a bitch and leads to lots of ugliness, but, in most cases, it simplifies to having your object created at declaration time and destroyed when it goes out of scope, much like an int would.
On the gripping hand, you can't use the approach that makes C++ nice to read in all cases. Because you have to call an object's destructor exactly once, after the last time the object is used and before the last reference to the object is lost, you need some way to keep track of this. This is where a lot of the complexity in C++ programs comes from, and a lot of the bugs, as well.
I wish the GCC developers good luck. I'm happy they're switching to a more expressive language than C. I don't know if C++ is the best choice they could have made, but time will tell.
From a design perspective that is an important distinction, and it's the reason why so many Nokia smart phones sucked from a usability point of view, even though they had a decent hardware design.
I'm going to disagree with you here. One of the reasons Nokia phones have historically been so popular in Europe is that their usability was GREAT, whereas many of their competitors sucked. Especially the early smartphones running Microsoft OSes.
I haven't used the new Windows-based Nokia phones, but all my favorite phones before that have always been Nokia phones, whereas all the non-Nokia phones I've ever owned have always been disappointing.
I moved to the San Francisco bay area last year and I'm loving it. Things to add to what AC said:
* Good weather. * There is something here for everyone. If you like quiet, you can live in the suburbs. If you like more lively, you can live in one of the cities. You can go surfing and skiing on the same day. * Yes, house and groceries are expensive. On the bright side, if you work for any of the tech companies, you will easily be able to afford things. * Regarding visas: If you get a job with one of the larger tech companies, they will sponsor your visa. It may take a while before visas become available, though, as there is a quota. * Companies here are definitely looking for more good people to hire, so if you have the skills they need, your chances of getting here are pretty good.
I don't know about the other places that have been mentioned, so I'll save the commenting on those to people who actually live there.
When you use laws to advance your agenda, you will find that the effects are not what you intended. These "good guys" appear to believe that enforcing the GPL would result in more mobile devices with all software on them open sourced. But that, of course, isn't going to happen. If a company does not want to release the source code now, it will not release the source code in the face of legal sanctions either. It will simply stop shipping the product.
Got any numbers to back up that claim? I know of several cases where vendors have, from the get-go or after legal action, made source code available. At least some of those vendors still ship devices + GPL code (DLink is an example of a vendor that initially resisted, but now provides access to the source code). I don't know of any vendors that have stopped shipping GPL code when made to comply with the license. But that's just what I know. If you have data that shows there is a significant trend in either direction, please share.
How do you mean "there wont be job"? I thought elementary school was for giving kids a basic set of knowledge and skills, not to train them for any specific line of work. Programming teaches analytic thinking, logic, and gives some insight into how computers work and what sort of things they can and cannot do for you. These are useful skills to have in life, even if you don't actually end up developing software for a living.
This is awesome! The claim earlier in the thread that far infrared penetrates similarly to x-ray means that far infrared could be used instead of x-ray for this purpose.
What makes them so different? The package management system? Or maybe just the love and care given it?
I think it's the care and love. It's not just the upgrades to new major versions of the distro, it's also updates within the same major version, and how well things work to begin with.
Debian and Ubuntu use the same packaging system, and I have had great experiences and terrible experiences with both of them. Ubuntu made a name for itself by providing a very polished, complete experience out of the box. Since then, they seem to have been chasing new features at the expense of quality. I haven't had an Ubuntu install work completely right since 2008 or so. And that's clean installs, I'm not even talking about upgrades.
Debian stable, for all that their long release cycles are ridiculed, really care about quality control. Basically, the new release goes out only once it has been extensively tested and either all known critical bugs have been fixed, or at least the known bug count for the new release is substantially lower than that for the existing release. Almost as a bonus, their upgrades usually work perfectly, they support a huge number of packages, and they support a great number of architectures. On the other hand, Debian is more a "build your own experience" distro than a "get a polished, complete experience out of the box" distro. I like this, but I certainly see the value of having a complete, polished system out of the box, too.
Alas, even though Debian has done better for me than any other system I have ever used, even with Debian I have had problems; once, a system wouldn't come back up after a kernel upgrade. Another time, the Exim configuration was broken by an upgrade. Ok, so it's only two issues in over 10 years and hundreds of upgrades, but still, it means Debian is not perfect.
In terms of packaging systems, I believe Debian was the first to really make automatic dependency resolution and single command distro upgrades work, at least for binary packages. However, the rest of the world has mostly caught up now; some distros use the tools developed by Debian, some use others, like Yum, and as far as I know, they all work. So I really think the difference is in the quality control and the priority it gets. What is the top priority for the people behind the distribution? Is it quality? Is it shipping the new release on schedule? Is it including the latest software? You have to do all of those to an extent to be relevant, but when push comes to shove, I think Debian is one of the few distros that will sacrifice everything to quality: they will delay their release and they will throw out packages that are not adequately maintained. If a distro has different priorities, it is not surprising that quality suffers somewhat.
I think the subtlety here is "asleep in the cockpit". It's a good thing pilots sleep on long flights. It would be even better if they only entered the cockpit once they are suitably awake again.
Re 2 vs 3 people: you may be thinking of the "2 pilots and a flight engineer" crew that planes used to have. As far as I know, it is largely just 2 pilots now (on long flights, there may be multiple pairs).
I panicked. I climed out of my sleeping bag, climbed into the front seat, started my car, and pulled a 360 before I realized what the hell was going on. The other driver probably thought I was nuts.
Oh, I thought that was just your way of saying "hi".
As far as I know, commercial aircraft have never had radar to detect traffic. They do usually have weather radar, but that's for detecting bad weather, not traffic.
There is TCAS, but I don't see how that would have avoided this. Sure, the pilot could have thought "TCAS doesn't say anything is there, so I'll just continue on", but is that really what you expect a panicked pilot to do?
Also, avoiding anyway is probably the right response: safety systems do fail, and you're not going to score any points by saying "but TCAS didn't say there was any danger" if there is a real collision, because you and your passengers will be dead.
The real story is that operating vehicles while impaired causes accidents. We know this. That's why we regulate it; there are limits on how many hours in a row you can work, how much sleep you must have had, how much alcohol can be in your blood, and more. Apparently, it wasn't enough to prevent this incident.
I use Mutt. I've also used various incarnations of Mozilla Mail, KMail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, a few webmail systems, and done test runs with a few mail clients I forgot the names of.
In the end, I came back to Mutt. It's the mail client I'm most productive with. I customized it to work the way I want. I'm used to it.
I think Mutt's strengths are: * Customizable. Mutt is fairly easy to customize, and the customization goes a long way. Define things you want to do in terms of s-lang functions or shell commands, bind a key to them, and boom, now you can do everything you often do with a single keystroke.
* Good support for multiple e-mail addresses. I have a single account that I use with multiple e-mail addresses. Mutt makes this easy. A number of other mail clients I have used make this tedious. Some do not support it at all.
* Works in the terminal. I like to work in the terminal. I know many people don't. But if you do, this is an advantage.
* It works. I never have problems with it. I wish the same was true of all mail clients I've used.
Weaknesses: * Slow on large maildirs. I have folders with tens of thousands of messages. These take long to open. Part of this is "many files that need to be statted, and stat is slow", but part of it is implementation choice. Some mail clients are way faster at this.
* Slow on IMAP folders. It looks like Mutt fetches messages or message headers one by one for each message. My mail server is over 100ms away. This makes things slow. My fault? Mutt's fault? Anyway, it's a disadvantage. Some mail clients do better.
* Wastes screen real-estate. I like that Mutt works in the terminal. But it wastes space. Graphic-mode mail clients can fit more information in the same space than Mutt does.
Slashdot Mirror
There are going to be switching costs no matter which way you turn it.
Maybe they switch to new versions of Windows and/or Microsoft Office. Depending on which versions they switch from and to, this could provide for a similar or dramatically different (ribbon, metro) experience.
Maybe they switch to Linux and/or LibreOffice. Depending on where they switched from and what they switch to, this could provide a similar (e.g. pre-ribbon Office to LibreOffice) or dramatically different (e.g. NT to Unity) experience.
Even if they don't change the software, there will be switching costs, because people will be used to different software than whatever the city would be refusing to upgrade from.
So, really, there is no avoiding switching costs, no matter what you do, and the study's choice to evaluate "comparable technological level" solutions doesn't seem so unreasonable.
However, in order to make a profit, banks were then obliged to slap on a whole new range of exceptional and penal charges in the small print and to give their customers the hard sell for a bunch of other financial products that they didn't need
Or they could just make money from the difference between what they pay you when you lend them your money and what you pay them when they lend you other poeple's money.
So we're stuck with a model in which the selection and presentation of results must of commercial necessity be orchestrated for profit
As far as I know, web search engines have been free to use as long as there have been web search engines. The most lauded search engines are those that present the results that the user is most interested in at or near the top of the results. If they do a good job of this, many people will use the search engine, and it becomes sort of the start page of the world wide web for those users. That's prime advertising space, and, as far as I know, that's how search engines have always made their money. Apparently, it also works better if the advertisements that are shown are relevant to the user's interests. This all sounds to me like the users' interests and the profit motive are pretty well-aligned.
Aside from the fact that british did that for 250 year and are still doing it and their country hasn't imploded
Not sure that's the best example. On that timescale, I think you may find that Britain has collapsed quite a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_empire#Decolonisation_and_decline_.281945.E2.80.931997.29
(contrary to the current trend I prefer small phones)
Interesting that you mention that. I had completely failed to notice, but after years of smaller and smaller phones, the trend for at least smartphones is now larger and larger.
Incidentally, if you already knew which phone you wanted, wouldn't you have been better off buying it online instead of in a store?
I don't know if arrogance is more prevalent in nerds than in the general population. I do have the impression that there is an inverse correlation between arrogance and actually being knowledgeable. Generally, the more you know, the more you realize that (1) things tend to be more nuanced than they first appeared, (2) there are a lot of things you don't know (3) there are a lot of areas where others know more than you do. That's one thing.
The other thing is being interested in other people and getting along with them. Speaking for myself, for a long time, there were a lot of things I was more interested in. At some point, that changed, and I became very interested in how people work and what sorts of things make them happy. I read a few books about this, and "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is a classic that I would recommend.
I've always enjoyed making people happy, and I don't think I've turned away a lot of people by arrogance or other annoying characteristics, but, looking back, I can see that I have definitely improved a lot in how I deal with people. As a result, I am now much happier. It's not just that I have more friends and am receiving signs that they appreciate me more, it's also that this has really helped me get ahead in life. As it turns out, a lot of things in life depend on who you know more than on what you know. And really, dealing with people and making them happy is very rewarding.
To answer your questions: I think nerd arrogance tends to come from the feeling that they generally know better than other people. You may actually know better. There will also be cases where you are wrong. In either case, it's probably better to be humble about it. Feel honored that someone values your knowledge and considered opinion and asked for your input. Don't present it as the ultimate truth, but say something like "The common way to do that is $technique_that_is_well_known_In_your_circles" or "I think that $something_you_have_concluded_from_observations". That way, the other person can feel that they learned something and draw their own conclusions, rather then having been told the truth by some person who thinks they know it all.
As for trouble in your career and relationships, yes, that's a very good point. I think most people will encounter trouble in those areas, and getting more knowledge on how to deal with common situations will definitely help you do better than you would just blundering through. Besides "How to Win Friends and Influence People", I can also recommend "Getting to Yes", "Further Up the Organization", and "101 Things I Wish I Knew when I Got Married" (it applies equally well to relationships not involving marriage). Think of it as the nerd approach to life: read the manual, and you will know more and do better than the average person. ;-)
Finally, the fact that you asked about it shows that you are interested in doing better. That's the most important step. Now that you know you care about this, you have the motivation to work on it. In all honesty, I think this already puts you in a great position to do better than many people. Good job! I hope you find my input helpful. Let me know how it goes!
I did.
Here is a link to the text. Chapter one is where reality meets fiction.
If you prefer other formats than HTML, those are available, too.
Here is the crucial quote from the abstract:
I'm not sure this would fix the problem. Sometimes, the fact that the algorithm is patented is the problem. Think about it: if a patent didn't cover the idea of generating a sorted sequence from a potentially unsorted one, but only covered quicksort and its equivalents, would that still be a problem? I'd say it's better than covering any implementation of any sorting algorithm, but I'm not sure the resulting situation is really where we want to be.
What are the graphics capabilities
Who cares? Graphics don't make games better, particularly not when they are already more than good enough in general.
An earlier version of me would have agreed with you. However, when I compare the beautiful graphics in some PC games from recent years with the graphics in Wii games of similar genre, the graphics on the Wii are simply a turn-off.
That doesn't mean there aren't also games on the Wii that are a ton of fun to play and worth it regardless of the graphics being in a different class. That's why I have the Wii. But good graphics can be part of what makes a game great, and as far as I can tell, the Wii has never done really impressive graphics. I'm hoping that the Wii U will do better, is all.
What I really want to know is two things: (1) What are the graphics capabilities and (2) What new fun input methods will there be?
Graphics: because the graphics on the current Wii are, frankly, sad. PS3 and Xbox 360 are way behind the state of the art on the PC, but that gap is small compared to the gap between either of those consoles and the Wii. I can see why a lot of game publishers wouldn't want to release for Wii: their games are going to look terrible.
Input methods: I feel this has been the great driver of success for the Wii. Where pre-Wii console gaming consisted of a joypad and maybe a gun or a steering wheel, the Wii revolutionized gaming with the Wiimote and the balance board. By now, Microsoft and Sony have copied this, and I would argue that Kinect is actually ahead of what Wii offers (though there are some things the balance board can do that Kinect can't). Is the Wii U going to offer something similarly compelling?
Check out Olimex: https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html, particularly the upcoming A13-OLinuXino. My understanding is that they are making hardware that is vaguely similar to the Raspberry Pi, but with full documentation.
I'm in the same situation you are in, but I am just happy they are improving the board in response to the feedback they received. And so quickly, too. I wish all hardware vendors did that.
I also really don't feel bad about not getting a free upgrade. I paid my $35 knowing full well that I was paying for an early version that would likely still have some kinks to be worked out. The wait is long, but they told me it would be.
I feel they are handling this well, and I really hope the Raspberry Pi becomes the roaring success it seems to be on its way to becoming.
Yeah, I feel a bit dubious about that. I wasn't too excited about made in the UK in the first place (nothing wrong with capital flow to poorer countries in my book), but it's Sony, too. I really don't want to be putting money in Sony's pockets after the stunts they've pulled in the last decades.
Will there be an option to buy 2.0s by a specific manufacturer?
This could work well. Indeed, there is something to be said for having C with a few extensions being a lot better for application programming than plain C.
On the other hand, a lot of real-world C++ code is as crappy as it is exactly because people write it as if it were C with a few extensions, rather than taking advantage of other C++ features that would make it actually nice to read.
As an example of this, it helped me a lot when I finally realized that, in C++, you can use almost any well-implemented type as if it were a primitive type like int. Memory management in C++ is a bitch and leads to lots of ugliness, but, in most cases, it simplifies to having your object created at declaration time and destroyed when it goes out of scope, much like an int would.
On the gripping hand, you can't use the approach that makes C++ nice to read in all cases. Because you have to call an object's destructor exactly once, after the last time the object is used and before the last reference to the object is lost, you need some way to keep track of this. This is where a lot of the complexity in C++ programs comes from, and a lot of the bugs, as well.
I wish the GCC developers good luck. I'm happy they're switching to a more expressive language than C. I don't know if C++ is the best choice they could have made, but time will tell.
From a design perspective that is an important distinction, and it's the reason why so many Nokia smart phones sucked from a usability point of view, even though they had a decent hardware design.
I'm going to disagree with you here. One of the reasons Nokia phones have historically been so popular in Europe is that their usability was GREAT, whereas many of their competitors sucked. Especially the early smartphones running Microsoft OSes.
I haven't used the new Windows-based Nokia phones, but all my favorite phones before that have always been Nokia phones, whereas all the non-Nokia phones I've ever owned have always been disappointing.
I moved to the San Francisco bay area last year and I'm loving it. Things to add to what AC said:
* Good weather.
* There is something here for everyone. If you like quiet, you can live in the suburbs. If you like more lively, you can live in one of the cities. You can go surfing and skiing on the same day.
* Yes, house and groceries are expensive. On the bright side, if you work for any of the tech companies, you will easily be able to afford things.
* Regarding visas: If you get a job with one of the larger tech companies, they will sponsor your visa. It may take a while before visas become available, though, as there is a quota.
* Companies here are definitely looking for more good people to hire, so if you have the skills they need, your chances of getting here are pretty good.
I don't know about the other places that have been mentioned, so I'll save the commenting on those to people who actually live there.
When you use laws to advance your agenda, you will find that the effects are not what you intended. These "good guys" appear to believe that enforcing the GPL would result in more mobile devices with all software on them open sourced. But that, of course, isn't going to happen. If a company does not want to release the source code now, it will not release the source code in the face of legal sanctions either. It will simply stop shipping the product.
Got any numbers to back up that claim? I know of several cases where vendors have, from the get-go or after legal action, made source code available. At least some of those vendors still ship devices + GPL code (DLink is an example of a vendor that initially resisted, but now provides access to the source code). I don't know of any vendors that have stopped shipping GPL code when made to comply with the license. But that's just what I know. If you have data that shows there is a significant trend in either direction, please share.
How do you mean "there wont be job"? I thought elementary school was for giving kids a basic set of knowledge and skills, not to train them for any specific line of work. Programming teaches analytic thinking, logic, and gives some insight into how computers work and what sort of things they can and cannot do for you. These are useful skills to have in life, even if you don't actually end up developing software for a living.
This is awesome! The claim earlier in the thread that far infrared penetrates similarly to x-ray means that far infrared could be used instead of x-ray for this purpose.
What makes them so different? The package management system? Or maybe just the love and care given it?
I think it's the care and love. It's not just the upgrades to new major versions of the distro, it's also updates within the same major version, and how well things work to begin with.
Debian and Ubuntu use the same packaging system, and I have had great experiences and terrible experiences with both of them. Ubuntu made a name for itself by providing a very polished, complete experience out of the box. Since then, they seem to have been chasing new features at the expense of quality. I haven't had an Ubuntu install work completely right since 2008 or so. And that's clean installs, I'm not even talking about upgrades.
Debian stable, for all that their long release cycles are ridiculed, really care about quality control. Basically, the new release goes out only once it has been extensively tested and either all known critical bugs have been fixed, or at least the known bug count for the new release is substantially lower than that for the existing release. Almost as a bonus, their upgrades usually work perfectly, they support a huge number of packages, and they support a great number of architectures. On the other hand, Debian is more a "build your own experience" distro than a "get a polished, complete experience out of the box" distro. I like this, but I certainly see the value of having a complete, polished system out of the box, too.
Alas, even though Debian has done better for me than any other system I have ever used, even with Debian I have had problems; once, a system wouldn't come back up after a kernel upgrade. Another time, the Exim configuration was broken by an upgrade. Ok, so it's only two issues in over 10 years and hundreds of upgrades, but still, it means Debian is not perfect.
In terms of packaging systems, I believe Debian was the first to really make automatic dependency resolution and single command distro upgrades work, at least for binary packages. However, the rest of the world has mostly caught up now; some distros use the tools developed by Debian, some use others, like Yum, and as far as I know, they all work. So I really think the difference is in the quality control and the priority it gets. What is the top priority for the people behind the distribution? Is it quality? Is it shipping the new release on schedule? Is it including the latest software? You have to do all of those to an extent to be relevant, but when push comes to shove, I think Debian is one of the few distros that will sacrifice everything to quality: they will delay their release and they will throw out packages that are not adequately maintained. If a distro has different priorities, it is not surprising that quality suffers somewhat.
Not that I disagree with you, but isn't running your entire life around your career pretty much what most people do?
Thanks. Reading the report was interesting. Of course, I should have done that in the first place. That will teach me. :-)
I think the subtlety here is "asleep in the cockpit". It's a good thing pilots sleep on long flights. It would be even better if they only entered the cockpit once they are suitably awake again.
Re 2 vs 3 people: you may be thinking of the "2 pilots and a flight engineer" crew that planes used to have. As far as I know, it is largely just 2 pilots now (on long flights, there may be multiple pairs).
I panicked. I climed out of my sleeping bag, climbed into the front seat, started my car, and pulled a 360 before I realized what the hell was going on. The other driver probably thought I was nuts.
Oh, I thought that was just your way of saying "hi".
As far as I know, commercial aircraft have never had radar to detect traffic. They do usually have weather radar, but that's for detecting bad weather, not traffic.
There is TCAS, but I don't see how that would have avoided this. Sure, the pilot could have thought "TCAS doesn't say anything is there, so I'll just continue on", but is that really what you expect a panicked pilot to do?
Also, avoiding anyway is probably the right response: safety systems do fail, and you're not going to score any points by saying "but TCAS didn't say there was any danger" if there is a real collision, because you and your passengers will be dead.
The real story is that operating vehicles while impaired causes accidents. We know this. That's why we regulate it; there are limits on how many hours in a row you can work, how much sleep you must have had, how much alcohol can be in your blood, and more. Apparently, it wasn't enough to prevent this incident.
I use Mutt. I've also used various incarnations of Mozilla Mail, KMail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, a few webmail systems, and done test runs with a few mail clients I forgot the names of.
In the end, I came back to Mutt. It's the mail client I'm most productive with. I customized it to work the way I want. I'm used to it.
I think Mutt's strengths are:
* Customizable. Mutt is fairly easy to customize, and the customization goes a long way. Define things you want to do in terms of s-lang functions or shell commands, bind a key to them, and boom, now you can do everything you often do with a single keystroke.
* Good support for multiple e-mail addresses. I have a single account that I use with multiple e-mail addresses. Mutt makes this easy. A number of other mail clients I have used make this tedious. Some do not support it at all.
* Works in the terminal. I like to work in the terminal. I know many people don't. But if you do, this is an advantage.
* It works. I never have problems with it. I wish the same was true of all mail clients I've used.
Weaknesses:
* Slow on large maildirs. I have folders with tens of thousands of messages. These take long to open. Part of this is "many files that need to be statted, and stat is slow", but part of it is implementation choice. Some mail clients are way faster at this.
* Slow on IMAP folders. It looks like Mutt fetches messages or message headers one by one for each message. My mail server is over 100ms away. This makes things slow. My fault? Mutt's fault? Anyway, it's a disadvantage. Some mail clients do better.
* Wastes screen real-estate. I like that Mutt works in the terminal. But it wastes space. Graphic-mode mail clients can fit more information in the same space than Mutt does.