The problem isnt hardware support, it's install hell. [inane rambling deleted]
hold on, what year am i in? seriously install hell was a valid complaint 5 years ago,but I haven't used a *nix in 3 years where this was a valid complaint.
Then there is "Directory Hell" where the average user never wants to learn why a folder isnt a file, and why you cant view a folder full of family photos when you click open.
and this is different from windows how?
face it, if it weren't for spotlight on the mac, people who have trouble understanding the concept of files and directories (and I know there are many) are going to have problems on any operating system. and spotlight-like systems are being worked on and will most likely be available by default for every other desktop environment within a year (maybe two for windows).
pretty easy for me on ubuntu. 1) install mplayer and mplayer-plugin via synaptic 2) download the codecs file from the mplayer site and unzip into/usr/lib/win32 or somesuch (don't remember the exact directory, but it's documented in like a million places online.)
it seems to me that most major distributions are afraid of redistributing the codecs files from the mplayer website for legal reasons, so no one packages them up. for most distros that means you have to download them yourself, or use unofficial packages. for ports based systems like gentoo and *BSD that allow you to download files from arbitrary places as part of package installation, it's not really an issue.
you missed the point. the push is not for standards, it's for open standards. microsoft's word.doc format (which one? 95, 97, 2000, xp?) may indeed be a standard, but it is not and probably never will be open. in fact, if you read anything about the massachusetts decision, they actually considered using the ms office xml document format, and may have accepted it, if it were open. i think it would be great if microsoft gave developers the information they needed to develop software around the microsoft standard. but they haven't. and they show no signs of doing so in the future. so while we should go ahead and try to achieve that in the future, in the meantime, we still need standards that anyone can implement.
unless you would rather wait for the cows to come home for something that may never happen...
I had a friend who would get into fights like that with his girlfriend. You could always tell that they had an argument recently if you logged onto IM and saw both of them with >50% 'warn' levels. Eventually the fights would devolve to the point where they would stop sending each other messages and just start sending 'warnings'.
I wouldn't worry to mch about microsoft entering the anti-virus market. if they really knew anything at all about protecting against viruses, we wouldn't need so much anti-virus software in the first place.
Of course the downside is that you're working for the government.
I worked for the DoD as a summer job when I started college, and one of the consulting companies I worked for had a large number of government clients. I could never live with the amount of politics and beauracracy involved in a government job for any amount of money.
You are right about the benefits, though. Can't beat government work for good benefits, except maybe by joining the military. The fact that you don't seem to have to know anything or be capable of anything at all in order to get or keep most government jobs is probably a real plus for many people, too.
Hydro is limited by location and not very scalable because of it.
Hydroelectric power, although renewable, is still incredibly environmentally unfriendly. The incredible amount of environmental disruption that is causes is only slightly offset by the fact that it only affects the local environment rather than the global environment.
You don't have to, they are well known, even to me. The question isn't whether most people believe public transportation is better or worse than private transportation, the question is why. There are several reasons why having a car is better then public transportation, at least in the U.S.
One, as I mentioned, is that this country was pretty much built around the car as a method of transportation. When you have an entire transportation infrastructure that was built from the ground up around every single person driving their own car anywhere that they need to go, then it's no surprise that the car is the most viable method of transportation. If you've ever driven in Southern California, you probably know exactly what I mean.
Second is that highways in the U.S. are what economists call a free good. Since the street and higway budget in almost all U.S. cities comes almost entriely from property taxes, all Americans are already paying for our vast highway infrastructure even if we never drive. The actual amount that you spend on your car and the gas you fill it with is actually a very miniscule portion of what it really is costing you to drive everywhere you go.
There are numerous other reasons, and yes, some are inherent flaws in all public transportation systems, but those are the two biggest.
Don't get me wrong, I think that cars are here to stay, and I don't believe that any public transportation system is good for everything. But just having the alternative can help. For example, while neither my wife or I drive to work, we still drive most other places that we go. But just by the fact that neither of us drives to work, we save at least $50 a month in gas, and ten times that on car payments and insurance because we can live with only one car between the two of us.
Also, microsoft claims that compatibility with older office applications are important, and yet their xml format is not compatible with versions prior to 2003 and their binary format has many incompatibilities between versions both forwards and backwards.
Not quite. While Microsoft is usually very careless about forwards compatibility- many documents created in a newer version of Word cannot be opened properly in an older verion of Word- they are about as anal retentive about backwards compatibility as anyone else out there, and you should be able open pretty much any document ever created with any version of Microsoft Word should with any newer version, and save it in the newer version and it will look exactly the same.
I read his statement to say that they would not support Open Document format because there are things that you could do in older versions of Word that cannot be done with the Open document format, therefore it would not be possible to convert any given document to Open Docment without losing information.
This is probably true but utterly meaningless. After all, they support "Save As Text", "Save as RTF", etc. all of which are formats that are less capable than word doc format. Why would "Save as Open Document Format" be any less acceptable?
Never mind the huge environmental issue that comes from mining Uranium or refining it to the point that it could be used in a nuclear reactor. I'm not against fission as a power source, but I find it odd how many people can come up with ideas about how to handle the byproducts while no one ever discusses the problems inherent in getting the fuel sources to start with.
For a while (many years ago) there was serious talk of an open pit uranium mine near (upwind of, iirc) Fort Collins, Colorado. Fortunately, demand for uranium dropped substantially while it was still in the "talk" phase, else one of the largest cities in Colorado, and much of the surrounding area, would likely no longer be inhabitable.
We pay less for gas than the rest of the world, true, because there are less taxes on gas here than anywhere else. Based on the numbers I have seen, if you don't count all of the taxes, we are actually paying more for gas than much of the world, including most of Europe. The difference is that most other countries use the gas taxes to pay for their highway infrastructure (and in some cases subsidize public transportation as well) while most of the streets and highways budget in the U.S. is payed for by property taxes. Personally, I like the European way better- the people who drive on the roads the most should pay the most for them, rather than the people who live in the most expensive houses.(*)
However, the point of all of this is that a) price increases in gas due to changes supply and demand are going to be felt as much or more in the U.S. as they are anywhere else, and b) the "extra" money that much of the rest of the world pays for gas is still being payed by Americans, we just pay that money in our property taxes instead of when we buy gas.
(*) Of course, in many (most?) American cities that actually offer decent public transportation, property values tend to increase drastically as you get nearer to good public transportation routes/stops, so in these cases the people who are most inclined to use alternitives to driving are ironically paying the most for highway and maintenance and construction.
They are based in Spokanne (or near?) Spokanne, Washington, and have been for many years, if not always. I should know, my uncle works there.
Or did? I haven't talked to him in a little while... It sounds like this wasn't totally out of the blue. From the way he described it, people who worked there had been treating the job as "month to month" for some time now.
Anyways, I was pretty sure you were full of shit from the start, but when you listed Phoenix as an exotic location, it sealed the deal...
There is another benefit, too. Besides buying more fuel efficient cars, more people will be interested in building and using meaningful public transportation systems. Public transportation in the U.S. is abominable. A lot of that comes from the fact that much of the country was developed in a time when driving anywhere you wanted to go was a possibility, so things here tend to be very spread out, which makes efficient public transportation difficult to implement. Up until now, the major complaint most people have about driving has been traffic congestion. So rather than focus on meaningful public transportation, most people would rather see more/wider roads and highways, even though it's been pretty much proven that such increases do little to help congestion. Now that gas prices are reaching the point where they might be a real economic concern for some people, as opposed to a minor annoyance, maybe we'll see more people start to look for alternatives...
Personally, I do grumble a little bit now that it costs over $30 to fill up the gas tank even in my fairly fuel efficient car, but it doesn't bother me too much because neither my wife or I drive on a regular basis. It means that we'll have to budget a little bit more when we go on long driving trips, but that's about it. Over all, i think high gas prices that we are seeing right now are a) inevitable, and b) good for us.
And lastly, as an aside, I always find it amusing how much more Americans complain about gas prices compared to other people in the world, considering that our gas is still among the cheapest in the world. I guess that's what happens when you are brought up in a society where it is assumed that the only way to get from point a to point b is to drive.
Personally, I agree with you. I was merely pointing out that not enough people do (currently). They may eventually if they are left with no other choice, although I'm not sure how long that will take. But as it stands right now, there are very few people in this country who consider nuclear power to be environmentally friendly, particularly among the lobbying groups that actually affect (or attempt to) environmental policy.
two examples from a quick google search (and there are dozens more):
Sustainable Energy Coalition http://www.sustainableenergy.org/resources/technol ogies/nuclear.htm However, nuclear power still presents serious problems, such as waste disposal, decommissioning costs and the danger of nuclear accidents. These issues preclude the use of nuclear power as a safe, environmentally friendly and economic means of addressing climate change.
my life would be significantly easier if somebody wrote a plugin that allowed internet explorer to use the gecko renderer, and especially if there was some way to make it install on demand (e.g. gecko renderer activeX control). giving ie tabs and a search box are completely uninteresting to me, but give me a way to make pages i write look the same in ie as they do in firefox, and i will be a *very* happy camper.
A third (and probably most important) way that the government can help is to fund basic (and applied) research to help minimise the demand for CO2-emitting fuel sources. Most likely this will mean research into nuclear power - cleaner, cheaper fission plants in the medium-term, and fusion plants in the long term.
Hardly.. In the eyes of most environmentalists, (or at least the environmental lobbying groups) nuclear power is more of a threat to the environment than global warming.
The current measles vaccinations I believe should be good enough to last most people for their whole life. However, people who were born before the mid 70's, i believe, should have gotten a booster when they are around 20. From what I've read, a lot of people didn't.
All American children are immunized against a wide variety of diseases, but both immunizations and diseases can change over time and some immunizations are more effective for some people than for others.
I remember reading an article around the time of the first gulf war talking about a soldier entering basic training that came down with the measles. IIRC, Part of the the problem was that the measles vaccines that were used before the mid 1970's, although effective, were not as long lasting as the ones currently used. People were supposed to get boosters after ~20 years. However, few people did, partly because everybody assumed the measles was no longer a concern, and partly because the initial vaccination was enough to last many but not all people for most of their lives.
There were two initeresting points in the article. One was that, as part of his Army phyical, the soldier in question was scheduled to get his measles booster only a week or two after he was diagnosed. The other was that the (relatively) young docter had a very difficult time diagnosing what it was that the solider had, mainly because she had never seen a case of the measles before and didn't even really know what the symptoms were.
Anyway, one or even a few cases of measles is hardly an outbreak. Also, despite the submitter's snide comment, I fail to see any connection between this article and outsourcing.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isnt hardware support, it's install hell. [inane rambling deleted]
hold on, what year am i in? seriously install hell was a valid complaint 5 years ago,but I haven't used a *nix in 3 years where this was a valid complaint.
Then there is "Directory Hell" where the average user never wants to learn why a folder isnt a file, and why you cant view a folder full of family photos when you click open.
and this is different from windows how?
face it, if it weren't for spotlight on the mac, people who have trouble understanding the concept of files and directories (and I know there are many) are going to have problems on any operating system. and spotlight-like systems are being worked on and will most likely be available by default for every other desktop environment within a year (maybe two for windows).
pretty easy for me on ubuntu. /usr/lib/win32 or somesuch (don't remember the exact directory, but it's documented in like a million places online.)
1) install mplayer and mplayer-plugin via synaptic
2) download the codecs file from the mplayer site and unzip into
it seems to me that most major distributions are afraid of redistributing the codecs files from the mplayer website for legal reasons, so no one packages them up. for most distros that means you have to download them yourself, or use unofficial packages. for ports based systems like gentoo and *BSD that allow you to download files from arbitrary places as part of package installation, it's not really an issue.
you missed the point. the push is not for standards, it's for open standards. microsoft's word .doc format (which one? 95, 97, 2000, xp?) may indeed be a standard, but it is not and probably never will be open. in fact, if you read anything about the massachusetts decision, they actually considered using the ms office xml document format, and may have accepted it, if it were open. i think it would be great if microsoft gave developers the information they needed to develop software around the microsoft standard. but they haven't. and they show no signs of doing so in the future. so while we should go ahead and try to achieve that in the future, in the meantime, we still need standards that anyone can implement.
unless you would rather wait for the cows to come home for something that may never happen...
I had a friend who would get into fights like that with his girlfriend. You could always tell that they had an argument recently if you logged onto IM and saw both of them with >50% 'warn' levels. Eventually the fights would devolve to the point where they would stop sending each other messages and just start sending 'warnings'.
I wouldn't worry to mch about microsoft entering the anti-virus market. if they really knew anything at all about protecting against viruses, we wouldn't need so much anti-virus software in the first place.
Of course the downside is that you're working for the government.
I worked for the DoD as a summer job when I started college, and one of the consulting companies I worked for had a large number of government clients. I could never live with the amount of politics and beauracracy involved in a government job for any amount of money.
You are right about the benefits, though. Can't beat government work for good benefits, except maybe by joining the military. The fact that you don't seem to have to know anything or be capable of anything at all in order to get or keep most government jobs is probably a real plus for many people, too.
nope. rods per hogshead...
Hydro is limited by location and not very scalable because of it.
Hydroelectric power, although renewable, is still incredibly environmentally unfriendly. The incredible amount of environmental disruption that is causes is only slightly offset by the fact that it only affects the local environment rather than the global environment.
You don't have to, they are well known, even to me. The question isn't whether most people believe public transportation is better or worse than private transportation, the question is why. There are several reasons why having a car is better then public transportation, at least in the U.S.
One, as I mentioned, is that this country was pretty much built around the car as a method of transportation. When you have an entire transportation infrastructure that was built from the ground up around every single person driving their own car anywhere that they need to go, then it's no surprise that the car is the most viable method of transportation. If you've ever driven in Southern California, you probably know exactly what I mean.
Second is that highways in the U.S. are what economists call a free good. Since the street and higway budget in almost all U.S. cities comes almost entriely from property taxes, all Americans are already paying for our vast highway infrastructure even if we never drive. The actual amount that you spend on your car and the gas you fill it with is actually a very miniscule portion of what it really is costing you to drive everywhere you go.
There are numerous other reasons, and yes, some are inherent flaws in all public transportation systems, but those are the two biggest.
Don't get me wrong, I think that cars are here to stay, and I don't believe that any public transportation system is good for everything. But just having the alternative can help. For example, while neither my wife or I drive to work, we still drive most other places that we go. But just by the fact that neither of us drives to work, we save at least $50 a month in gas, and ten times that on car payments and insurance because we can live with only one car between the two of us.
Also, microsoft claims that compatibility with older office applications are important, and yet their xml format is not compatible with versions prior to 2003 and their binary format has many incompatibilities between versions both forwards and backwards.
Not quite. While Microsoft is usually very careless about forwards compatibility- many documents created in a newer version of Word cannot be opened properly in an older verion of Word- they are about as anal retentive about backwards compatibility as anyone else out there, and you should be able open pretty much any document ever created with any version of Microsoft Word should with any newer version, and save it in the newer version and it will look exactly the same.
I read his statement to say that they would not support Open Document format because there are things that you could do in older versions of Word that cannot be done with the Open document format, therefore it would not be possible to convert any given document to Open Docment without losing information.
This is probably true but utterly meaningless. After all, they support "Save As Text", "Save as RTF", etc. all of which are formats that are less capable than word doc format. Why would "Save as Open Document Format" be any less acceptable?
Never mind the huge environmental issue that comes from mining Uranium or refining it to the point that it could be used in a nuclear reactor. I'm not against fission as a power source, but I find it odd how many people can come up with ideas about how to handle the byproducts while no one ever discusses the problems inherent in getting the fuel sources to start with.
For a while (many years ago) there was serious talk of an open pit uranium mine near (upwind of, iirc) Fort Collins, Colorado. Fortunately, demand for uranium dropped substantially while it was still in the "talk" phase, else one of the largest cities in Colorado, and much of the surrounding area, would likely no longer be inhabitable.
We pay less for gas than the rest of the world, true, because there are less taxes on gas here than anywhere else. Based on the numbers I have seen, if you don't count all of the taxes, we are actually paying more for gas than much of the world, including most of Europe. The difference is that most other countries use the gas taxes to pay for their highway infrastructure (and in some cases subsidize public transportation as well) while most of the streets and highways budget in the U.S. is payed for by property taxes. Personally, I like the European way better- the people who drive on the roads the most should pay the most for them, rather than the people who live in the most expensive houses.(*)
However, the point of all of this is that a) price increases in gas due to changes supply and demand are going to be felt as much or more in the U.S. as they are anywhere else, and b) the "extra" money that much of the rest of the world pays for gas is still being payed by Americans, we just pay that money in our property taxes instead of when we buy gas.
(*) Of course, in many (most?) American cities that actually offer decent public transportation, property values tend to increase drastically as you get nearer to good public transportation routes/stops, so in these cases the people who are most inclined to use alternitives to driving are ironically paying the most for highway and maintenance and construction.
They are based in Spokanne (or near?) Spokanne, Washington, and have been for many years, if not always. I should know, my uncle works there.
Or did? I haven't talked to him in a little while... It sounds like this wasn't totally out of the blue. From the way he described it, people who worked there had been treating the job as "month to month" for some time now.
Anyways, I was pretty sure you were full of shit from the start, but when you listed Phoenix as an exotic location, it sealed the deal...
There is another benefit, too. Besides buying more fuel efficient cars, more people will be interested in building and using meaningful public transportation systems. Public transportation in the U.S. is abominable. A lot of that comes from the fact that much of the country was developed in a time when driving anywhere you wanted to go was a possibility, so things here tend to be very spread out, which makes efficient public transportation difficult to implement. Up until now, the major complaint most people have about driving has been traffic congestion. So rather than focus on meaningful public transportation, most people would rather see more/wider roads and highways, even though it's been pretty much proven that such increases do little to help congestion. Now that gas prices are reaching the point where they might be a real economic concern for some people, as opposed to a minor annoyance, maybe we'll see more people start to look for alternatives...
Personally, I do grumble a little bit now that it costs over $30 to fill up the gas tank even in my fairly fuel efficient car, but it doesn't bother me too much because neither my wife or I drive on a regular basis. It means that we'll have to budget a little bit more when we go on long driving trips, but that's about it. Over all, i think high gas prices that we are seeing right now are a) inevitable, and b) good for us.
And lastly, as an aside, I always find it amusing how much more Americans complain about gas prices compared to other people in the world, considering that our gas is still among the cheapest in the world. I guess that's what happens when you are brought up in a society where it is assumed that the only way to get from point a to point b is to drive.
I dont know. if you lost a heart, you might die before a new one could grow back...
Personally, I agree with you. I was merely pointing out that not enough people do (currently). They may eventually if they are left with no other choice, although I'm not sure how long that will take. But as it stands right now, there are very few people in this country who consider nuclear power to be environmentally friendly, particularly among the lobbying groups that actually affect (or attempt to) environmental policy.
l ogies/nuclear.htm
two examples from a quick google search (and there are dozens more):
Sustainable Energy Coalition
http://www.sustainableenergy.org/resources/techno
However, nuclear power still presents serious problems, such as waste disposal, decommissioning costs and the danger of nuclear accidents. These issues preclude the use of nuclear power as a safe, environmentally friendly and economic means of addressing climate change.
Conservation Council of South Australia
http://www.ccsa.asn.au/nic/SustDev/greenrg2.htm
Nuclear energy is the most dangerous environmentally destructive form of energy.
He also conveniently forgets to mention how many features present in MS' betas get dropped before the final release....
my life would be significantly easier if somebody wrote a plugin that allowed internet explorer to use the gecko renderer, and especially if there was some way to make it install on demand (e.g. gecko renderer activeX control). giving ie tabs and a search box are completely uninteresting to me, but give me a way to make pages i write look the same in ie as they do in firefox, and i will be a *very* happy camper.
but the OSX print driver model just isn't as well polished as XP's.
Yes, I particularly like how windows considers a printer attached directly to the network to be a "local printer port"
A third (and probably most important) way that the government can help is to fund basic (and applied) research to help minimise the demand for CO2-emitting fuel sources. Most likely this will mean research into nuclear power - cleaner, cheaper fission plants in the medium-term, and fusion plants in the long term.
Hardly.. In the eyes of most environmentalists, (or at least the environmental lobbying groups) nuclear power is more of a threat to the environment than global warming.
The current measles vaccinations I believe should be good enough to last most people for their whole life. However, people who were born before the mid 70's, i believe, should have gotten a booster when they are around 20. From what I've read, a lot of people didn't.
All American children are immunized against a wide variety of diseases, but both immunizations and diseases can change over time and some immunizations are more effective for some people than for others.
I remember reading an article around the time of the first gulf war talking about a soldier entering basic training that came down with the measles. IIRC, Part of the the problem was that the measles vaccines that were used before the mid 1970's, although effective, were not as long lasting as the ones currently used. People were supposed to get boosters after ~20 years. However, few people did, partly because everybody assumed the measles was no longer a concern, and partly because the initial vaccination was enough to last many but not all people for most of their lives.
There were two initeresting points in the article. One was that, as part of his Army phyical, the soldier in question was scheduled to get his measles booster only a week or two after he was diagnosed. The other was that the (relatively) young docter had a very difficult time diagnosing what it was that the solider had, mainly because she had never seen a case of the measles before and didn't even really know what the symptoms were.
Anyway, one or even a few cases of measles is hardly an outbreak. Also, despite the submitter's snide comment, I fail to see any connection between this article and outsourcing.
Indeed, They noticed him very quickly... He barely had time to issue a measly 72,000 prescriptions and they were already busting down his door.
ahh.... rott. what a great game. i haven't thought about that one in almost 7 years. their many variations of the rocket launcher were the greatest.
Too bad most programs are still single threaded.
Everyone always says this, but seriously, how many times are you only running one program?