Actually, I think the computers are pretty darned good. My first car was older than me - a 1969 Mk. 2 BMC Mini. Purely mechanical. Dynamo (generator) rather than an alternator and a simple relay-based voltage regulator.
My current car is a 1995 Audi A4 which I bought used a couple of years ago.
The Mini was much easier to fix - but I had to fix it all the time - make little adjustments, do the valve clearances, change the points and condenser etc. The Audi? Just do regular oil changes. It simply doesn't need to be worked on. The simple mechanical car always needed work to keep it running efficiently.
When I was a student, the Mini was more appropriate - I had way more time than money to fix it. But now, I'd rather have a car that simply needs a regular oil change most of the time, and only has infrequent major maintenance things (such as the cam belt, which all overhead cam cars will need doing). The Audi, despite being MUCH faster and much more powerful is quieter, smoother, cleaner burning, way more reliable and uses much less fuel than a car of similar power from my old Mini's era.
The trouble is as a not-very-large company ordering 70 workstations, this just doesn't happen. We have to pay for Windows.
However, since we have a corporate volume license from $PARENT, and we have an image we've built with our software load, we essentially pay for Windows TWICE - once on the pre-install which we don't use, then software rental on the corporate install.
The other TCO problem with Windows is in imaging. With a Windows image, all the machines have to be identical for the image to work or you get all sorts of interesting driver issues. Manufacturers keep changing their specs. You can get the same model of PC from HP and find it has a different NIC and a different chipset and a different video card even though it's apparently the same. With a Linux image, it seems so long as you've got the module, it just works without complaining. With a Windows image, the best you get is many "Found new hardware" dialogues (and the driver install may or may not work, and you have to sometimes feed it disks which is kind of missing the point of a hard disk image). Sometimes you get a machine that won't even boot. Windows is a royal pain for machines built from hard disk images unless you can make sure all your machines are identical.
But we're not even talking about a child molester or a rapist here - or even a violent criminal.
Is it proportionate to the crime that a *non violent* criminal should be subjected to rape and the possibility of HIV infection? That's not justice, that's barbarism.
Yes - the guy should be punished. No - he shouldn't be subjected to violent rape.
For 99% of home and small business users, a new Mac comes pre-installed with pretty much everything you need. If a business needs MS Office, it's available too.
The move to digital exchanges was inevitable - monopoly or not. It took something like 20 full time engineers to keep a 10,000 line Strowger (electromechanical) telephone exchange in operation. But with digital exchanges, you only need one engineer to keep six 10,000 line exchanges running. Even the most stultifying monopoly will see the savings in that.
Having said that, when I lived in Houston (GTE then Verizon when I was there) I was always mildly amused to see that I had to pay a few cents extra for the privilege of having touch-tone dialing. Yes, touch tone dialing was an additional cost paid service.
I had my Dad using a Linux desktop system with RedHat 8.0 (when RH 8.0 was quite new).
He got on with it just fine. He's about as computer illiterate as they come. I just showed him where the icons were for OpenOffice, KMail and Konqueror, and he was away.
I only replaced the machine with a Macintosh because the hardware was getting flaky.
For most uses, Linux *is* ready for the desktop and has been for a while. Just as many reasons as why Windows *isn't* ready for the home desktop can be made. It's merely inertia that's stopping it.
Sure, your mum isn't going to install Linux herself, but she isn't going to install Windows herself either. Nor are most not-savvy computer users going to install new hardware or software.
In the groups I subscribe to, I see very little spam at all, and the signal-to-noise ratio is excellent. Most web boards still don't have a UI anywhere near as good as even 'trn'.
Re:the only other ABCDE device I can think of...
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the ACARS unit on most airliners is also ABCDE... layout. The assumption is probably that most pilots won't be typists and therefore ABCDE... layout is easier for them to pick up especially as they make relatively infrequent use of this keyboard.
In Europe, people live a pretty good lifestyle. Yet the average western European consumes approximately HALF the energy of the average American. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/ene_usa_per_p er). The average British person uses *less than half* of what the average American uses. Life expectancy is just as good in western Europe. Healthcare is good. The quality of life is good. This shows it can be done and it won't result in a 3rd world country.
It's trivially easy for any healthy adult to drastically slash their energy usage - in winter, turn the heat down 2 deg C, in summer turn the AC up 2 deg C. Ride your bike to work instead of driving twice a week (or walk if you're close enough). That alone will make a huge difference in your personal energy usage, and it will improve your health too. Replace light bulbs as they blow with low energy replacements. Don't run the water continuously whilst brushing your teeth. Use a hand-powered lawnmower instead of a gas/electric one. Plant a tree if your yard is big enough. There are many things you can do on a personal level to make a serious dent in your energy usage.
The thing is there are lots of OSS innovations, not merely imitations. The World Wide Web is probably the most obvious example of open source before closed source (both web browsers and web servers were open source before the first closed browser/server appeared). There are plenty of other examples used every day (I think another poster to this thread mentioned at least half a dozen).
Talking of predatory pricing - have you noticed the price of MS Office doubles roughly every 60 months? It started dirt cheap to kill the competition, and now is much more expensive than the competition ever was.
They didn't go back - DUATS is still available and still used and still an official briefing method, although these days you generally use telnet (or a client that invokes telnet) to get the weather data. In 1998 at least you could still dial an 800 number to get it too.
Flight service stations still provide a briefing service and it was never intended that the FSS would go away (they were consolidated however, there's far fewer FSS around now than in 1990). The FSS is still necessary as you can't go onto the Internet and get DUATS when you are in flight. However, you can call flight watch (the FSS) on the radio and speak to a briefer. They are also available on the phone (1-800-WX-BRIEF) and provide pre-recorded area forecasts as well as an FSS briefer.
It will be necessary to have these stations for the forseeable future. I've been to plenty of small airports in the US where there is nothing but a scratchy telephone line where it's difficult enough to do voice, let alone data.
I think this was relatively common. Not sure what the technical reason for it was; I should ask my dad, he was a phone company engineer back when there was only one phone company.
Probably because the telephone exchange at the other end of the line was Strowger or crossbar (elecromechanical) rather than electronic or digital. The last Strowgers hung on until the mid 90s in some places.
You'd have to wait not until the physical copper was upgraded, but until the entire exchange was upgraded to digital or electronic.
If you're ever in London, go to the Science Museum. They have a rack of Strowger equipment actually hooked up there, with 8 telephones you can play with. Try getting all 8 in use, and then replace the handsets in quick succession. The sound of all the bi-directional selectors going home is sweet enough to make a brave man cry.
Also see http://www.light-straw.co.uk/ and google for 'Strowger', there's a recording out there somewhere from the inside of a 10,000 line Strowger unit in the late 1970s.
When my grandmother died a year ago, the telephone engineer who came to put sockets in to replace the hardwired phone was quite happy to give us the old rotary dial telephone.
To keep it original, I managed to obtain a junction box (the little box on the wall where the phone's leads were screwed into the incoming line from the exchange) and attach a short lead and RJ-45 connector to the other end so I could plug it into the sockets in my house, but not have to modify the phone.
The only trouble is when I phone friends in the USA, it's a lot of dialing:-)
The line to your house was probably fine - it was probably the telephone exchange equipment at the other end that didn't do touch tone. The odd Strowger exchange was still hanging on as late as the mid-90s as well as the odd Crossbar. Electromechanical switches just couldn't do it.
In Britain, there was a different problem - in the 1980s, many exchanges were electronic, but they couldn't do touch tone because of the frequency of the dialing tone (a 50hz purring sound at the time). It would have been easy enough to change the dialtone to the one we are familiar with today, but bureacratic inertia stopped it (We still have Strowgers and Crossbars - the dialtone must be the same over the whole country was the argument used). This eventually gave way when System X and System Y digital exchanges started to appear in the late 80s. System X and Y are still in use today.
After my grandmother died, I kept her 30 year old rotary dial telephone as something to remember my grandparents by. I obtained an original wall junction box for it and wired the RJ-45 plug to that instead of modifying the phone cord, so the phone is completely original. Still works like new.
Go to http://www.light-straw.co.uk/ for some excellent historic information on the British phone network. One of my favorite bits is the story from the international operator at Faraday House from the 1970s.
It's standard for the INS (not the airline) to ask this on an INS form (either the green I-94W visa waiver or the white I-94 form if you have a visa).
It is not asked by the airline on a blank piece of paper, and never has been - I've travelled to and from the US more times than I remember in the last 10 years, and only the INS has asked for this information.
Even then, all they ask for is where you are staying on arrival. They don't ask for the names of who you are staying with; merely the address. They don't ask for an itinery. You just put down the first place you are staying. There's only room on the form for one address anyway.
The airline asking for an itinery AND the names of people you are visiting is highly irregular.
Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.
Comparing a VCR to the origin of life is a bit well... comparing oranges to Boeing 747s.
Since the Earth cooled enough to support any forms of even the simplest life as we know it, it took THREE BILLION YEARS to go from the primordial soup to the first multicellular creature. With that amount of time and the right chemical mix, it's almost inevitable something self replicating will come from that.
Well, actually - using 3D effects in the UI is useful. I'd never have thought about it, but when I was looking for a new laptop, I decided to get an Apple PowerBook instead of a PC-based laptop.
I find simple things like drop shadows make the user interface a lot easier to use. When I have half a dozen windows up in Xcode, the shadowing gives an instant cue to the 'human visual system' on which window is in focus and what the current stacking order of the windows are. You instantly percieve which window is focused. With Windows XP or Gnome, it isn't anywhere as instantaneous for the human mind to see the window stacking order.
Sure, it's not something that causes a massive increase in usability, but it makes the UI just that little bit more pleasant to use by integrating with human visual cues better.
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Actually, I think the computers are pretty darned good. My first car was older than me - a 1969 Mk. 2 BMC Mini. Purely mechanical. Dynamo (generator) rather than an alternator and a simple relay-based voltage regulator.
My current car is a 1995 Audi A4 which I bought used a couple of years ago.
The Mini was much easier to fix - but I had to fix it all the time - make little adjustments, do the valve clearances, change the points and condenser etc. The Audi? Just do regular oil changes. It simply doesn't need to be worked on. The simple mechanical car always needed work to keep it running efficiently.
When I was a student, the Mini was more appropriate - I had way more time than money to fix it. But now, I'd rather have a car that simply needs a regular oil change most of the time, and only has infrequent major maintenance things (such as the cam belt, which all overhead cam cars will need doing). The Audi, despite being MUCH faster and much more powerful is quieter, smoother, cleaner burning, way more reliable and uses much less fuel than a car of similar power from my old Mini's era.
In the case of nuclear attack, I think the lack of fuel to put in the car would stop your car just as effectively as the EMP.
The trouble is as a not-very-large company ordering 70 workstations, this just doesn't happen. We have to pay for Windows.
However, since we have a corporate volume license from $PARENT, and we have an image we've built with our software load, we essentially pay for Windows TWICE - once on the pre-install which we don't use, then software rental on the corporate install.
The other TCO problem with Windows is in imaging. With a Windows image, all the machines have to be identical for the image to work or you get all sorts of interesting driver issues. Manufacturers keep changing their specs. You can get the same model of PC from HP and find it has a different NIC and a different chipset and a different video card even though it's apparently the same. With a Linux image, it seems so long as you've got the module, it just works without complaining. With a Windows image, the best you get is many "Found new hardware" dialogues (and the driver install may or may not work, and you have to sometimes feed it disks which is kind of missing the point of a hard disk image). Sometimes you get a machine that won't even boot. Windows is a royal pain for machines built from hard disk images unless you can make sure all your machines are identical.
But we're not even talking about a child molester or a rapist here - or even a violent criminal.
Is it proportionate to the crime that a *non violent* criminal should be subjected to rape and the possibility of HIV infection? That's not justice, that's barbarism.
Yes - the guy should be punished. No - he shouldn't be subjected to violent rape.
For 99% of home and small business users, a new Mac comes pre-installed with pretty much everything you need. If a business needs MS Office, it's available too.
Well, not quite.
The move to digital exchanges was inevitable - monopoly or not. It took something like 20 full time engineers to keep a 10,000 line Strowger (electromechanical) telephone exchange in operation. But with digital exchanges, you only need one engineer to keep six 10,000 line exchanges running. Even the most stultifying monopoly will see the savings in that.
Having said that, when I lived in Houston (GTE then Verizon when I was there) I was always mildly amused to see that I had to pay a few cents extra for the privilege of having touch-tone dialing. Yes, touch tone dialing was an additional cost paid service.
On a point of pedantry, GnuCash runs on pretty much any UNIX platform (*BSD, Solaris) as well as Linux.
I had my Dad using a Linux desktop system with RedHat 8.0 (when RH 8.0 was quite new).
He got on with it just fine. He's about as computer illiterate as they come. I just showed him where the icons were for OpenOffice, KMail and Konqueror, and he was away.
I only replaced the machine with a Macintosh because the hardware was getting flaky.
For most uses, Linux *is* ready for the desktop and has been for a while. Just as many reasons as why Windows *isn't* ready for the home desktop can be made. It's merely inertia that's stopping it.
Sure, your mum isn't going to install Linux herself, but she isn't going to install Windows herself either. Nor are most not-savvy computer users going to install new hardware or software.
In the groups I subscribe to, I see very little spam at all, and the signal-to-noise ratio is excellent. Most web boards still don't have a UI anywhere near as good as even 'trn'.
Actually, the ACARS unit on most airliners is also ABCDE... layout. The assumption is probably that most pilots won't be typists and therefore ABCDE... layout is easier for them to pick up especially as they make relatively infrequent use of this keyboard.
No one need die.
p er). The average British person uses *less than half* of what the average American uses. Life expectancy is just as good in western Europe. Healthcare is good. The quality of life is good. This shows it can be done and it won't result in a 3rd world country.
In Europe, people live a pretty good lifestyle. Yet the average western European consumes approximately HALF the energy of the average American. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/ene_usa_per_
It's trivially easy for any healthy adult to drastically slash their energy usage - in winter, turn the heat down 2 deg C, in summer turn the AC up 2 deg C. Ride your bike to work instead of driving twice a week (or walk if you're close enough). That alone will make a huge difference in your personal energy usage, and it will improve your health too. Replace light bulbs as they blow with low energy replacements. Don't run the water continuously whilst brushing your teeth. Use a hand-powered lawnmower instead of a gas/electric one. Plant a tree if your yard is big enough. There are many things you can do on a personal level to make a serious dent in your energy usage.
The thing is there are lots of OSS innovations, not merely imitations. The World Wide Web is probably the most obvious example of open source before closed source (both web browsers and web servers were open source before the first closed browser/server appeared). There are plenty of other examples used every day (I think another poster to this thread mentioned at least half a dozen).
Talking of predatory pricing - have you noticed the price of MS Office doubles roughly every 60 months? It started dirt cheap to kill the competition, and now is much more expensive than the competition ever was.
They didn't go back - DUATS is still available and still used and still an official briefing method, although these days you generally use telnet (or a client that invokes telnet) to get the weather data. In 1998 at least you could still dial an 800 number to get it too.
Flight service stations still provide a briefing service and it was never intended that the FSS would go away (they were consolidated however, there's far fewer FSS around now than in 1990). The FSS is still necessary as you can't go onto the Internet and get DUATS when you are in flight. However, you can call flight watch (the FSS) on the radio and speak to a briefer. They are also available on the phone (1-800-WX-BRIEF) and provide pre-recorded area forecasts as well as an FSS briefer.
It will be necessary to have these stations for the forseeable future. I've been to plenty of small airports in the US where there is nothing but a scratchy telephone line where it's difficult enough to do voice, let alone data.
Probably because the telephone exchange at the other end of the line was Strowger or crossbar (elecromechanical) rather than electronic or digital. The last Strowgers hung on until the mid 90s in some places.
You'd have to wait not until the physical copper was upgraded, but until the entire exchange was upgraded to digital or electronic.
If you're ever in London, go to the Science Museum. They have a rack of Strowger equipment actually hooked up there, with 8 telephones you can play with. Try getting all 8 in use, and then replace the handsets in quick succession. The sound of all the bi-directional selectors going home is sweet enough to make a brave man cry.
Also see http://www.light-straw.co.uk/ and google for 'Strowger', there's a recording out there somewhere from the inside of a 10,000 line Strowger unit in the late 1970s.
New Zealand did it the other way around apparently - 10 pulses for 1, 9 for 2 etc. Britain uses the same scheme as the US (10 for zero, 1 for 1 etc.)
When my grandmother died a year ago, the telephone engineer who came to put sockets in to replace the hardwired phone was quite happy to give us the old rotary dial telephone.
:-)
To keep it original, I managed to obtain a junction box (the little box on the wall where the phone's leads were screwed into the incoming line from the exchange) and attach a short lead and RJ-45 connector to the other end so I could plug it into the sockets in my house, but not have to modify the phone.
The only trouble is when I phone friends in the USA, it's a lot of dialing
The line to your house was probably fine - it was probably the telephone exchange equipment at the other end that didn't do touch tone. The odd Strowger exchange was still hanging on as late as the mid-90s as well as the odd Crossbar. Electromechanical switches just couldn't do it.
In Britain, there was a different problem - in the 1980s, many exchanges were electronic, but they couldn't do touch tone because of the frequency of the dialing tone (a 50hz purring sound at the time). It would have been easy enough to change the dialtone to the one we are familiar with today, but bureacratic inertia stopped it (We still have Strowgers and Crossbars - the dialtone must be the same over the whole country was the argument used). This eventually gave way when System X and System Y digital exchanges started to appear in the late 80s. System X and Y are still in use today.
After my grandmother died, I kept her 30 year old rotary dial telephone as something to remember my grandparents by. I obtained an original wall junction box for it and wired the RJ-45 plug to that instead of modifying the phone cord, so the phone is completely original. Still works like new.
Go to http://www.light-straw.co.uk/ for some excellent historic information on the British phone network. One of my favorite bits is the story from the international operator at Faraday House from the 1970s.
It's called 'man' for manual pages. They aren't 'help' pages, they are reference manual pages.
If they claim they don't make money off region coding cartridges, why are they doing it? Sounds like bullshit to me.
It's standard for the INS (not the airline) to ask this on an INS form (either the green I-94W visa waiver or the white I-94 form if you have a visa).
It is not asked by the airline on a blank piece of paper, and never has been - I've travelled to and from the US more times than I remember in the last 10 years, and only the INS has asked for this information.
Even then, all they ask for is where you are staying on arrival. They don't ask for the names of who you are staying with; merely the address. They don't ask for an itinery. You just put down the first place you are staying. There's only room on the form for one address anyway.
The airline asking for an itinery AND the names of people you are visiting is highly irregular.
Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.
i sino/rules.html
Obligatory linkage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elv
Umm...there *is* only one executable format for Linux, it's called ELF, and it's been the format since at least 1996.
Comparing a VCR to the origin of life is a bit well... comparing oranges to Boeing 747s.
Since the Earth cooled enough to support any forms of even the simplest life as we know it, it took THREE BILLION YEARS to go from the primordial soup to the first multicellular creature. With that amount of time and the right chemical mix, it's almost inevitable something self replicating will come from that.
Well, actually - using 3D effects in the UI is useful. I'd never have thought about it, but when I was looking for a new laptop, I decided to get an Apple PowerBook instead of a PC-based laptop.
I find simple things like drop shadows make the user interface a lot easier to use. When I have half a dozen windows up in Xcode, the shadowing gives an instant cue to the 'human visual system' on which window is in focus and what the current stacking order of the windows are. You instantly percieve which window is focused. With Windows XP or Gnome, it isn't anywhere as instantaneous for the human mind to see the window stacking order.
Sure, it's not something that causes a massive increase in usability, but it makes the UI just that little bit more pleasant to use by integrating with human visual cues better.