Sigh. No it won't. The sort of bitching being done about Vista is just the same as the sort of bitching which went on when XP was new. But ultimately, despite all the bitching, like good little sheep almost everyone upgraded to XP. Apple remained a tiny niche player, as did Linux.
Exactly the same thing will happen now. The bitching about Vista relative to XP is no different to the bitching about XP vs Windows 2000 and Windows 98.
Re:the real issue isn't when the stop selling OEM
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
Extended support doesn't finish until 2014. Even so, XP won't suddenly cease working in 2014. I know people still running Windows 95, and support has long ended for that.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
Your comment about updates shows that you perhaps haven't used a modern Linux distro (perhaps in at least 7 or 8 years). My CentOS desktop Linux system - I just click on the update icon in the upper right, and... well, it updates. It's not like Windows Update either which just updates Windows, it also updates Firefox, OpenOffice and all the other non-OS programs from just one or two button clicks. It's actually far easier than Windows Update.
I do agree with you that Linux isn't going to appear on the desktop in large numbers any time soon. Even if Linux was provably twice as good as Windows, it still wouldn't pick up more than a couple of percent market share - and it won't do, because major manufacturers of PCs just pre-install Windows.
Most people I know in the United States have at least two vehicles (or sometimes, even three). They commute in one, and use another for trips. The car used to commute with can easily be electrified.
Gasoline has a far, FAR higher energy density than even the best batteries we have today, let alone what was available 100 years ago. It has nothing to do with the Victorian elite, it's to do with having a useful driving range and fast refuelling time.
Sir Clive? Reviled? Hardly - Sir Clive has a great deal of respect (especially by those who grew up with the Sinclair Spectrum). He certainly wasn't reviled. We liked Sir Clive because he brought an affordable colour computer with decent capabilities to the masses (the Spectrum was about 1/3rd of the cost of the Commodore 64).
So - not only the old chestnut about the weatherman's predictions for next week and how this relates to climatologists, but now the old chestnut about the impending ice age being predicted in the 1970s! The ice age thing you mention was something almost entirely stirred up by the media. It certainly wasn't something that was generally scientifically accepted and supported by mountains of evidence, unlike CO2 forced climate change. An ice age was not predicted in the 1970s by scientists in scientific journals. An article in the sensationalist, popular press doesn't make it any more so.
If you're going to be a global warming denier, it behooves you to choose some more convincing arguments than a 1974 media scare story which was not generally accepted by climatologists, and it also behooves you to not put forward the argument that climatology and meterology are the same thing, because they are not.
Power. It's all about power. It's the same reason why there are so many asshats wanting ops on IRC - they get some kind of self-gratifying power over other users on the channel.
MMORPG users want to automate it because the automation can probably do it faster and quicker than they can, leaving them with some kind of wizard character they can use to push around other players.
The thing is the Trinitron TV still looks much better than any LCD or plasma standard def TV, or high def TV showing upscaled standard definition. HD signals on an HDTV look better, but most of the HDTV content isn't particularly interesting to me. There's simply no point me changing it until HD is ubiquitous. The picture on the Sony is as good as you get for standard def, the colours are all still vibrant. (I also don't watch enough TV to really warrant replacing it any time soon, either).
Ironically, if you go to the store looking for aspirin, you WILL find ten different products calling themselves 'aspirin'! In the United States, aspirin has not been a protected trademark for the best part of a century.
but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
I can't take any text seriously that uses this old chestnut - totally ignoring that meterology and climatology are _not_ the same thing.
An analogy: take a pan of water, and put it on a gas stove. The meterologist's job is to predict where convections will occur at some time (a few seconds) in the future. In this chaotic system, it becomes harder and harder to predict the exact position and strength of individual convections on a period greater than a few seconds. The climatologists job, on the other hand, is to say if you turn up the heat by 50%, the water will boil in X minutes, and if you also cover the pan with a lid, the water will boil in Y minutes (were Y X). The climatologist can predict this with a fairly good degree of accuracy, given that he knows how much extra energy turning up the heat puts into the water (analagous to the sun warming up), and how much energy the lid traps (analagous to greenhouse gases).
It does not follow that climatologists are wrong, just because a meterologist can not tell you with much confidence whether it will be raining at 11:30 two weeks on Tuesday. Climatology and meterology are two different disciplines, and anyone who's argument includes the old saw about "climatologists can hardly be right if they can't tell me the weather at 11:30am two weeks on Tuesday" is almost certainly making an extremely dubious argument to begin with.
You'd have to have very low energy requirements or be awfully rich to do that with today's technology. Remember, to be off-grid with solar you need at least 10 times the wattage in solar panels than your average power consumption.
Why this much extra? Consider a 100 watt peak panel's generation averaged out over the course of a sunny day:
Already half of this day there won't be enough light to get any power (or any appreciable power) - the period from dusk to dawn, so the average output is already 50% of the peak rating of the panel.
The panel will only provide peak power when the sun is directly perpendicular to the solar panel. Assume your roof is angled ideally such that the panel is pointed directly at the sun at mid day: by 3pm, your panel is generating less than 30% of peak (and before 9am, the same). By 4pm you're usually down to about 20% of peak. The panel will only generate its peak rated power within approximately 15 minutes either side of mid day. It rapidly falls off outside these times.
Even a thin layer of cirrus cloud, where you still have a bright day and sharp shadows cast on the ground, will reduce your panel's output at mid day by about 50%.
This wouldn't be a big deal if solar panels were dirt cheap, but they are not. This is why solar power is really not feasable except for a few locations (locations where it's cheaper to install panels and battery storage rather than pay for someone to run the power line out to the property). We really need solar power to be about 1/20th of the price per watt than it is now for it to really make any headway.
Oh, yeah - it makes you feel safer - but it doesn't actually make you one bit safer. How does a camera intervene to stop you being mugged? It can't. All it can do (if the operator happens to be watching) is let someone know that an ambulance should be dispatched (and arrive in about 20 minutes) to scrape up your bleeding battered body off the pavement. The chavs who did this to you evaded identification by the camera by the simple technological measure of a hood and a long billed baseball cap.
Having actual police officers on the other hand would actually prevent the attack.
The cameras are just feel good. They won't make you any safer at all.
It's nothing like having a policeman standing there, and you know that stupid. If you were attacked, what would help you most:
- policeman who can intervene - CCTV which can just passively watch
Sure, the CCTV will be able to play what happened at court when your attackers were caught and charged with murder, but you're still dead. If there was a policeman there you'd probably still be alive.
Pervasive CCTV means you can not only just passively monitor what's going on, but you can trivially and opportunistically track a person. It's not a great stretch given the pace of technology that in a couple of decades it will be automatically and pervasively track everyone who walks through a town pervasively covered by CCTV.
The difference between having a bunch of police doing the same is: - police are single units and hard to network, and therefore some effort must be made to track a person by a number of individual officers. This means opportunistic tracking of everyone just because you can won't happen. - police can react to violent crime and stop the crime from occurring, a CCTV camera cannot intevene in a fight to break it up
You can bet that as soon as it's possible to automatically track everyone (and the already installed all pervasive CCTV network makes this easy), they will do it. Incidentally, there is some level of privacy in a public place: privacy of the thoughts in my mind, privacy of where I'm going from and to (random people in public can't tell unless they stalk you), privacy of a conversation with a friend.
In Nineteen Eighty Four, Winston Smith could also see the cameras, indeed, he knew the coverage of the telescreen's camera in his flat to seek refuge from its gaze.
It's likely she can - no doubt a legal defence fund would be very rapidly forthcoming from readers of Groklaw. Being a trained paralegal, she can do most of the footwork herself and would need to spend less money with a law firm. It's also likely that SCO would be out of business long before they could ever get her near a court, after all they still have the IBM and Novell cases to get through yet.
I can tell you first hand that GSM phones intefere very badly with aircraft COM radios. It happened to me while intercepting the localiser on approach to my local airfield, and the inteference completely obliterated any chance at communication with ATC. Fortunately, my friend (who was actually the pilot flying - fortunately, I'm also instrument rated because it was a dark, rainy night, so I could take over and continue the approach) found his phone fairly quickly and shut it off. If you own a GSM phone, you'll be familiar with the sound of the inteference, because you can hear it on any nearby radio.
GSM phones do intefere quite badly with com radios on aircraft - I've experienced it (if you've owned a GSM phone for any length of time, you usually know when you're getting a call before it actually starts its ring tone, because of the BIP B B BIP B B BIP B B BIP BRRRRRRRR noise you get through any nearby radio or speaker). I've had that happen on an instrument approach to an airport. No communication with ATC was possible until my friend found his phone and turned it off.
GSM phones are particularly bad for interfering with things. I'm an instrument rated pilot, and I was flying with a friend, and we were landing back home after an hour and a half flight. It was the typical 'dark and stormy night', well - not really stormy, but very dark and it was raining, and we were in the clouds. It was my friend's first for-real instrument approach.
ATC gets us on an intercept with the localizer. Not long after the localizer needle unpegged and started heading towards the centre of the instrument, my friend's cell phone went off. He'd forgotten to switch it off. Immediately, all communications with ATC were obliterated by an extremely loud "BIP B B BIP B B BIP B B BIP B B BIP BBRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!" through the com radio, which went on until my friend found his cell phone and switched it off. No voice communications were possible while this was going on.
Fortunately, I could take over the controls right away - it didn't appear to be interfering with the localizer or glideslope - and fortunately, he found his phone quickly and shut it off (there'd be nothing like missing an ATC call to tell you to break off the approach). The distraction certainly wasn't helpful, and had it been a single pilot IFR operation (i.e. just him on his own without another pilot to take over the approach), he would have almost certainly had to abandon the approach.
The simple solution to the last problem, and one that's probably inevitable (indeed, they did this to us back in 1995!) is to hold a viva voce review of the year. Each student has a 15 minute interview with a panel of three lecturers, who have looked at a selection of their work and ask questions about it to explore whether the student really understands it.
It is time consuming and uses resources, but really an oral test is probably the only way you're going to find out whether the student was parroting the material or actually understands it.
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Sigh. No it won't. The sort of bitching being done about Vista is just the same as the sort of bitching which went on when XP was new. But ultimately, despite all the bitching, like good little sheep almost everyone upgraded to XP. Apple remained a tiny niche player, as did Linux.
Exactly the same thing will happen now. The bitching about Vista relative to XP is no different to the bitching about XP vs Windows 2000 and Windows 98.
Extended support doesn't finish until 2014. Even so, XP won't suddenly cease working in 2014. I know people still running Windows 95, and support has long ended for that.
Your comment about updates shows that you perhaps haven't used a modern Linux distro (perhaps in at least 7 or 8 years). My CentOS desktop Linux system - I just click on the update icon in the upper right, and ... well, it updates. It's not like Windows Update either which just updates Windows, it also updates Firefox, OpenOffice and all the other non-OS programs from just one or two button clicks. It's actually far easier than Windows Update.
I do agree with you that Linux isn't going to appear on the desktop in large numbers any time soon. Even if Linux was provably twice as good as Windows, it still wouldn't pick up more than a couple of percent market share - and it won't do, because major manufacturers of PCs just pre-install Windows.
No, it just means the site maintainers mysteriously drop dead from irradiation from polonium-210.
Most people I know in the United States have at least two vehicles (or sometimes, even three). They commute in one, and use another for trips. The car used to commute with can easily be electrified.
Gasoline has a far, FAR higher energy density than even the best batteries we have today, let alone what was available 100 years ago. It has nothing to do with the Victorian elite, it's to do with having a useful driving range and fast refuelling time.
Sir Clive? Reviled? Hardly - Sir Clive has a great deal of respect (especially by those who grew up with the Sinclair Spectrum). He certainly wasn't reviled. We liked Sir Clive because he brought an affordable colour computer with decent capabilities to the masses (the Spectrum was about 1/3rd of the cost of the Commodore 64).
So - not only the old chestnut about the weatherman's predictions for next week and how this relates to climatologists, but now the old chestnut about the impending ice age being predicted in the 1970s! The ice age thing you mention was something almost entirely stirred up by the media. It certainly wasn't something that was generally scientifically accepted and supported by mountains of evidence, unlike CO2 forced climate change. An ice age was not predicted in the 1970s by scientists in scientific journals. An article in the sensationalist, popular press doesn't make it any more so.
If you're going to be a global warming denier, it behooves you to choose some more convincing arguments than a 1974 media scare story which was not generally accepted by climatologists, and it also behooves you to not put forward the argument that climatology and meterology are the same thing, because they are not.
Power. It's all about power. It's the same reason why there are so many asshats wanting ops on IRC - they get some kind of self-gratifying power over other users on the channel.
MMORPG users want to automate it because the automation can probably do it faster and quicker than they can, leaving them with some kind of wizard character they can use to push around other players.
1993 vintage Sony Trinitron TV here.
The thing is the Trinitron TV still looks much better than any LCD or plasma standard def TV, or high def TV showing upscaled standard definition. HD signals on an HDTV look better, but most of the HDTV content isn't particularly interesting to me. There's simply no point me changing it until HD is ubiquitous. The picture on the Sony is as good as you get for standard def, the colours are all still vibrant. (I also don't watch enough TV to really warrant replacing it any time soon, either).
Except Zilog's far from gone. I have a few chips on my work bench which were manufactured by them less than 6 months ago.
Ironically, if you go to the store looking for aspirin, you WILL find ten different products calling themselves 'aspirin'! In the United States, aspirin has not been a protected trademark for the best part of a century.
I somehow doubt the Mayans got anywhere near the accuracy of my NTP-synchronized nixie clock.
I can't take any text seriously that uses this old chestnut - totally ignoring that meterology and climatology are _not_ the same thing.
An analogy: take a pan of water, and put it on a gas stove. The meterologist's job is to predict where convections will occur at some time (a few seconds) in the future. In this chaotic system, it becomes harder and harder to predict the exact position and strength of individual convections on a period greater than a few seconds. The climatologists job, on the other hand, is to say if you turn up the heat by 50%, the water will boil in X minutes, and if you also cover the pan with a lid, the water will boil in Y minutes (were Y X). The climatologist can predict this with a fairly good degree of accuracy, given that he knows how much extra energy turning up the heat puts into the water (analagous to the sun warming up), and how much energy the lid traps (analagous to greenhouse gases).
It does not follow that climatologists are wrong, just because a meterologist can not tell you with much confidence whether it will be raining at 11:30 two weeks on Tuesday. Climatology and meterology are two different disciplines, and anyone who's argument includes the old saw about "climatologists can hardly be right if they can't tell me the weather at 11:30am two weeks on Tuesday" is almost certainly making an extremely dubious argument to begin with.
You'd have to have very low energy requirements or be awfully rich to do that with today's technology. Remember, to be off-grid with solar you need at least 10 times the wattage in solar panels than your average power consumption.
Why this much extra? Consider a 100 watt peak panel's generation averaged out over the course of a sunny day:
Already half of this day there won't be enough light to get any power (or any appreciable power) - the period from dusk to dawn, so the average output is already 50% of the peak rating of the panel.
The panel will only provide peak power when the sun is directly perpendicular to the solar panel. Assume your roof is angled ideally such that the panel is pointed directly at the sun at mid day: by 3pm, your panel is generating less than 30% of peak (and before 9am, the same). By 4pm you're usually down to about 20% of peak. The panel will only generate its peak rated power within approximately 15 minutes either side of mid day. It rapidly falls off outside these times.
Even a thin layer of cirrus cloud, where you still have a bright day and sharp shadows cast on the ground, will reduce your panel's output at mid day by about 50%.
This wouldn't be a big deal if solar panels were dirt cheap, but they are not. This is why solar power is really not feasable except for a few locations (locations where it's cheaper to install panels and battery storage rather than pay for someone to run the power line out to the property). We really need solar power to be about 1/20th of the price per watt than it is now for it to really make any headway.
Oh, yeah - it makes you feel safer - but it doesn't actually make you one bit safer. How does a camera intervene to stop you being mugged? It can't. All it can do (if the operator happens to be watching) is let someone know that an ambulance should be dispatched (and arrive in about 20 minutes) to scrape up your bleeding battered body off the pavement. The chavs who did this to you evaded identification by the camera by the simple technological measure of a hood and a long billed baseball cap.
Having actual police officers on the other hand would actually prevent the attack.
The cameras are just feel good. They won't make you any safer at all.
It's nothing like having a policeman standing there, and you know that stupid. If you were attacked, what would help you most:
- policeman who can intervene
- CCTV which can just passively watch
Sure, the CCTV will be able to play what happened at court when your attackers were caught and charged with murder, but you're still dead. If there was a policeman there you'd probably still be alive.
Yes, listen to the interview - it's as funny as hell.
Unfortunately, all to often the politicians just use weasel words to avoid answering the question, even when re-asked a dozen times.
Pervasive CCTV means you can not only just passively monitor what's going on, but you can trivially and opportunistically track a person. It's not a great stretch given the pace of technology that in a couple of decades it will be automatically and pervasively track everyone who walks through a town pervasively covered by CCTV.
The difference between having a bunch of police doing the same is:
- police are single units and hard to network, and therefore some effort must be made to track a person by a number of individual officers. This means opportunistic tracking of everyone just because you can won't happen.
- police can react to violent crime and stop the crime from occurring, a CCTV camera cannot intevene in a fight to break it up
You can bet that as soon as it's possible to automatically track everyone (and the already installed all pervasive CCTV network makes this easy), they will do it. Incidentally, there is some level of privacy in a public place: privacy of the thoughts in my mind, privacy of where I'm going from and to (random people in public can't tell unless they stalk you), privacy of a conversation with a friend.
In Nineteen Eighty Four, Winston Smith could also see the cameras, indeed, he knew the coverage of the telescreen's camera in his flat to seek refuge from its gaze.
It's likely she can - no doubt a legal defence fund would be very rapidly forthcoming from readers of Groklaw. Being a trained paralegal, she can do most of the footwork herself and would need to spend less money with a law firm. It's also likely that SCO would be out of business long before they could ever get her near a court, after all they still have the IBM and Novell cases to get through yet.
I can tell you first hand that GSM phones intefere very badly with aircraft COM radios. It happened to me while intercepting the localiser on approach to my local airfield, and the inteference completely obliterated any chance at communication with ATC. Fortunately, my friend (who was actually the pilot flying - fortunately, I'm also instrument rated because it was a dark, rainy night, so I could take over and continue the approach) found his phone fairly quickly and shut it off. If you own a GSM phone, you'll be familiar with the sound of the inteference, because you can hear it on any nearby radio.
GSM phones do intefere quite badly with com radios on aircraft - I've experienced it (if you've owned a GSM phone for any length of time, you usually know when you're getting a call before it actually starts its ring tone, because of the BIP B B BIP B B BIP B B BIP BRRRRRRRR noise you get through any nearby radio or speaker). I've had that happen on an instrument approach to an airport. No communication with ATC was possible until my friend found his phone and turned it off.
Let me give you an example, then.
GSM phones are particularly bad for interfering with things. I'm an instrument rated pilot, and I was flying with a friend, and we were landing back home after an hour and a half flight. It was the typical 'dark and stormy night', well - not really stormy, but very dark and it was raining, and we were in the clouds. It was my friend's first for-real instrument approach.
ATC gets us on an intercept with the localizer. Not long after the localizer needle unpegged and started heading towards the centre of the instrument, my friend's cell phone went off. He'd forgotten to switch it off. Immediately, all communications with ATC were obliterated by an extremely loud "BIP B B BIP B B BIP B B BIP B B BIP BBRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!" through the com radio, which went on until my friend found his cell phone and switched it off. No voice communications were possible while this was going on.
Fortunately, I could take over the controls right away - it didn't appear to be interfering with the localizer or glideslope - and fortunately, he found his phone quickly and shut it off (there'd be nothing like missing an ATC call to tell you to break off the approach). The distraction certainly wasn't helpful, and had it been a single pilot IFR operation (i.e. just him on his own without another pilot to take over the approach), he would have almost certainly had to abandon the approach.
The simple solution to the last problem, and one that's probably inevitable (indeed, they did this to us back in 1995!) is to hold a viva voce review of the year. Each student has a 15 minute interview with a panel of three lecturers, who have looked at a selection of their work and ask questions about it to explore whether the student really understands it.
It is time consuming and uses resources, but really an oral test is probably the only way you're going to find out whether the student was parroting the material or actually understands it.