The difference between the diamond planet discovery and climate science is politics. The reason amateurs attack the climate science has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with a political objective. But the same can be said for the supporters. Al Gore is not a climate scientist. He has a significant financial interest in climate science reaching a particular conclusion. He has significant investment in the whole business of climate change.
Now, I'll agree that most who attach climate science are kooks. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that the whole issue is so incredibly polarized that no legitimate critique of climate science ever gets a voice because it is universally written off with the overwhelming number of idiots on the right. According to "everyone", climate science is 100% settled and there is no questioning it. But once you get past the people pushing the political agendas and talk to the real scientists, you'll find that the attitude isn't so set in stone. They want to keep studying it so they can understand more about it because they don't all believe that it's 100% set in stone.
Scientists want to learn more. They want to understand the incredibly complex system that is our environment. They want to know more about how things work so they can make better predictions about what is coming. They don't care about pushing a political agenda. But they're too busy working on research to tell the general public that the politicians are misrepresenting their findings.
Did you not read my original post where I explicitly said that it's not Microsoft's fault? Did you not notice that I titled it "Boot time isn't Window's problem"? In a nutshell, I said basically that while Microsoft could have designed Windows a little better, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the people who write the software that launches when you log in. That software which smegs up the system with all sorts of activity is poorly written. And when you're stuck with it because IT doesn't want to change it, there's nothing Microsoft can do about it.
I'm happy that your IT department is an exception to the rule. It's great that you and your colleagues "get it". I wish all IT departments were run like that. However, how your department handles things doesn't make the slightest difference to what I'm talking about.
I don't know how it works where you are but all of the companies I work for have a "one size fits all" mentality when it comes to corporate IT. Yelling at IT to change something is like trying to push a rope. It just doesn't accomplish anything. They aren't interested in helping you get work done. They are only interested in keeping their costs down and that means applying the same image to every single computer in the entire company. And when you complain, their solution is to suggest applying the corporate standard as they close the ticket. Running it up the flag pole doesn't help because the IT management doesn't know a thing about computers beyond the cost to buy them.
That's all well and good but the problem is the anti-virus and other programs which insist on doing a full disc scan or index when they start up. They dig through the entire array every time I log in. And there's a lot of raw data there I use to do my work. I suppose the only real solution there is to put that array on a server somewhere and access it remotely from my desktop. That way I don't have to log in to the computer that has the array.
I'd love to be able to use the hibernate feature on my systems. However, corporate policy is a little short sighted. Big surprise, I know. I have to log off the PC when I leave for the night. I have to leave the PC running. At any time outside of normal working hours, a corporate IT person is supposed to be able to remotely log in to perform maintenance or push upgrades to my system. If they can't get in, I get written up (which, if it happens enough, can result in an "involuntary career path adjustment" for me). So I have to log in each and every morning, waiting for all of the startup crapware to finish bogging down my system.
The problem, as I see it, is that there are half a dozen or more applications all trying to start at the same time. You can try to push them to lower priority but they're all trying to do their thing at the same time. You get several applications using the network and scanning the hard drives, even at a low priority, and your system bogs down to the point of uselessness. Without the ability to use a delayed start on my corporate machines, I can't stop even lower priority processes from overloading my computer for several minutes.
Seems to me that the file is written only after all user applications have shut down and you're left with only ring 0 operation. Then when you start up, the entire file is loaded before ring 0 starts any user space applications. I'm pretty sure the operating system won't even keep a copy around once the boot process is over, and even if they did they'll overwrite whatever you do to it. So in order to manipulate the file, the malware has to have access to ring 0 already. And if that's the case, I think you have more important problems to worry about.
The problem with those delayed startup utilities is that I don't have the ability to put them on the computer that has the most bloatware. I cannot install software on my work desktop that has all that corporate IT crapware. And even with 16GB of RAM, I still have the problem of disk thrashing and slow network connections. I'm in a satellite office that has to connect to the main office through a relatively slow connection.
At home, I have the ability to control the extra software that gets installed. I still build all my own PCs. Not to save money but to make sure I install only the software I want to install. I have solved the slow logins at home by simply not having crap that bogs down my system for 20 minutes. In any case, I'm just running Windows in a VM so I can have access to the couple of things from Windows I like while being able to do all the rest of my work in Linux.
It's not that users can't hibernate when they "shut down" for the day. It's that the common solution for solving so many problems in Windows is a reboot at least once a week. Users are so accustomed to this that they just shut down out of habit.
The biggest problem I have when running Windows, especially in a corporate environment, is all of the crapware that doesn't start until I log in. Those are the programs that decide to do massive tasks as soon as they're started. They bog down the network connection and thrash the hard drive doing their startup scans. They make the desktop completely unusable for significant lengths of time after login.
I suppose the fast boot to a login screen is useful. I'm able to get to the login screen quickly and log in. Then I can go get my coffee and read the paper while the startup applications take forever to do whatever it is they are doing. But it still doesn't solve the core problem of having a computer that is up and useful to the end user in a reasonable amount of time.
Now, it should be obvious that the blame here is not entirely on Microsoft. They have no control over what crap the end user (or corporate IT monkeys) install on the desktop. They can't control what gets started up when the user logs in. Microsoft has no way to prevent an idiot from writing an anti-virus package that does a complete system scan (that bogs down the entire system while it's running) when it is first started by the user. There's nothing stopping a startup program from waiting for a slow network connection to time out, causing the entire startup process to basically hang. There's nothing Microsoft can do to prevent a program to rebuild it's entire search index at startup, thrashing the disk to the point where the entire system is unresponsive while it's running.
But Microsoft is not entirely blameless either. The root of the problem was the decision to make the console the central focus of operation.There is absolutely no reason why so much of the software has to start up as soon as the user logs in. There is no reason why it cannot be tied to the startup of the computer. And if that software was tied to computer startup there would be no reason it could not be identified for hibernation just like the kernel, resulting in not only a faster boot time but a faster time to actual usefulness of the desktop.
Well, that would make it an interesting project if you had to build the tools first. And that's probably not an unreasonable idea for Heathkit to look into given their target market...
That sounds entirely reasonable for cost. I last bought a resistor back in 2004 and had a difficult time finding one that wasn't through mail order. The sales monkey at Radio Shack didn't even know what one was. I half expected that no one made them any more. But I suppose they will never completely die out. It's good to hear that they're not prohibitively expensive.
TFA talked about the proliferation of cheap components post WWII that really made the kits practical from a cost perspective. With modern manufacturing technology all geared towards surface mount mass production, I wonder how easy it will be to find cheap components to use in the kits. Small surface mount parts are fine for manufacturing but it takes a lot more dexterity to solder them correctly than it does with the old through-hole technology. There's no way I want to even think about attaching a BGA socket on a board by hand.
Still, I would have a hard time believing that there is no demand for the through-hole components any more. Someone who knows more than I do should be able to tell me whether or not those are still available at a reasonable price these days.
I'm sick and tired of this fallacy being bandied around, day in day out, by those who don't seem to understand what Capitalism is. How do capitalists exploit people when the economic system is fundamentally based on voluntary, free trade?
Why don't you read up on Standard Oil and how they manipulated the free market to drive their competitors out of business? Then come back and we can have an honest discussion.
You probably need to study those cultures beyond watching them on some nature show. If you take a snapshot of the community from one perspective, you can see whatever you want to see. But watch them when they are choosing mates. They aren't going to reject boasting and self aggrandizing behavior then. Watch what happens during troubled times when resources are scarce and how the resources of the tribes are distributed. Watch them from all perspectives and you'll see their society is in no way communist.
I wish people weren't so selfish. But I don't confuse my wish for any kind of hope. My pragmatism tells me that greed is a survival trait we evolved with. It's in our DNA. Greed gave our ancestors the drive to get the food they needed. It gave them the desire to be bigger and better so they could attract the better mates. Greed leads to success even now. There's no way to get rid of it. Even in natural disasters, we take care of ourselves before we help others. If we have enough, then we help. And even those who help will use that fact in advertisements when they're trying to sell us things we don't want. Call it cynicism. I call it pragmatism. It's the way we are and it's unlikely we will ever really "evolve" away from it.
That's a nice sentiment but that's been proven false already. I believe it was the early Plymouth settlers (who numbered less than 200?) tried running a communal farm the first year they were in America. They almost died because of all the problems. After that, the land was split up and everyone was given ownership of their own plot. After that, they flourished.
Any time you have two or more people trying to implement communism, you have the trouble of conflicting interests and human greed. Those conflicting interests will always cause communism to fail to live up to the theory. Always. Now, I will also add that conflicting interests and human greed will cause most other political and economic models to fail as well. It's not just communism that has this vulnerability.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between the diamond planet discovery and climate science is politics. The reason amateurs attack the climate science has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with a political objective. But the same can be said for the supporters. Al Gore is not a climate scientist. He has a significant financial interest in climate science reaching a particular conclusion. He has significant investment in the whole business of climate change.
Now, I'll agree that most who attach climate science are kooks. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that the whole issue is so incredibly polarized that no legitimate critique of climate science ever gets a voice because it is universally written off with the overwhelming number of idiots on the right. According to "everyone", climate science is 100% settled and there is no questioning it. But once you get past the people pushing the political agendas and talk to the real scientists, you'll find that the attitude isn't so set in stone. They want to keep studying it so they can understand more about it because they don't all believe that it's 100% set in stone.
Scientists want to learn more. They want to understand the incredibly complex system that is our environment. They want to know more about how things work so they can make better predictions about what is coming. They don't care about pushing a political agenda. But they're too busy working on research to tell the general public that the politicians are misrepresenting their findings.
It does when corporate IT installs it on your computer and won't let you schedule it instead.
Did you not read my original post where I explicitly said that it's not Microsoft's fault? Did you not notice that I titled it "Boot time isn't Window's problem"? In a nutshell, I said basically that while Microsoft could have designed Windows a little better, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the people who write the software that launches when you log in. That software which smegs up the system with all sorts of activity is poorly written. And when you're stuck with it because IT doesn't want to change it, there's nothing Microsoft can do about it.
I'm happy that your IT department is an exception to the rule. It's great that you and your colleagues "get it". I wish all IT departments were run like that. However, how your department handles things doesn't make the slightest difference to what I'm talking about.
I don't know how it works where you are but all of the companies I work for have a "one size fits all" mentality when it comes to corporate IT. Yelling at IT to change something is like trying to push a rope. It just doesn't accomplish anything. They aren't interested in helping you get work done. They are only interested in keeping their costs down and that means applying the same image to every single computer in the entire company. And when you complain, their solution is to suggest applying the corporate standard as they close the ticket. Running it up the flag pole doesn't help because the IT management doesn't know a thing about computers beyond the cost to buy them.
That's all well and good but the problem is the anti-virus and other programs which insist on doing a full disc scan or index when they start up. They dig through the entire array every time I log in. And there's a lot of raw data there I use to do my work. I suppose the only real solution there is to put that array on a server somewhere and access it remotely from my desktop. That way I don't have to log in to the computer that has the array.
I'd love to be able to use the hibernate feature on my systems. However, corporate policy is a little short sighted. Big surprise, I know. I have to log off the PC when I leave for the night. I have to leave the PC running. At any time outside of normal working hours, a corporate IT person is supposed to be able to remotely log in to perform maintenance or push upgrades to my system. If they can't get in, I get written up (which, if it happens enough, can result in an "involuntary career path adjustment" for me). So I have to log in each and every morning, waiting for all of the startup crapware to finish bogging down my system.
The problem, as I see it, is that there are half a dozen or more applications all trying to start at the same time. You can try to push them to lower priority but they're all trying to do their thing at the same time. You get several applications using the network and scanning the hard drives, even at a low priority, and your system bogs down to the point of uselessness. Without the ability to use a delayed start on my corporate machines, I can't stop even lower priority processes from overloading my computer for several minutes.
Now, it should be obvious that the blame here is not entirely on Microsoft.
It's got nothing to do with Microsoft, and everything to do with using mechanical drives. Upgrade to an SSD, and your problems will vanish.
Right, because it's so practical to replace my 9TB RAID array with SSDs...
Seems to me that the file is written only after all user applications have shut down and you're left with only ring 0 operation. Then when you start up, the entire file is loaded before ring 0 starts any user space applications. I'm pretty sure the operating system won't even keep a copy around once the boot process is over, and even if they did they'll overwrite whatever you do to it. So in order to manipulate the file, the malware has to have access to ring 0 already. And if that's the case, I think you have more important problems to worry about.
The problem with those delayed startup utilities is that I don't have the ability to put them on the computer that has the most bloatware. I cannot install software on my work desktop that has all that corporate IT crapware. And even with 16GB of RAM, I still have the problem of disk thrashing and slow network connections. I'm in a satellite office that has to connect to the main office through a relatively slow connection.
At home, I have the ability to control the extra software that gets installed. I still build all my own PCs. Not to save money but to make sure I install only the software I want to install. I have solved the slow logins at home by simply not having crap that bogs down my system for 20 minutes. In any case, I'm just running Windows in a VM so I can have access to the couple of things from Windows I like while being able to do all the rest of my work in Linux.
for Windows Vista and better, anyway.
... so it works on OS X?
...and Linux?
It's not that users can't hibernate when they "shut down" for the day. It's that the common solution for solving so many problems in Windows is a reboot at least once a week. Users are so accustomed to this that they just shut down out of habit.
The biggest problem I have when running Windows, especially in a corporate environment, is all of the crapware that doesn't start until I log in. Those are the programs that decide to do massive tasks as soon as they're started. They bog down the network connection and thrash the hard drive doing their startup scans. They make the desktop completely unusable for significant lengths of time after login.
I suppose the fast boot to a login screen is useful. I'm able to get to the login screen quickly and log in. Then I can go get my coffee and read the paper while the startup applications take forever to do whatever it is they are doing. But it still doesn't solve the core problem of having a computer that is up and useful to the end user in a reasonable amount of time.
Now, it should be obvious that the blame here is not entirely on Microsoft. They have no control over what crap the end user (or corporate IT monkeys) install on the desktop. They can't control what gets started up when the user logs in. Microsoft has no way to prevent an idiot from writing an anti-virus package that does a complete system scan (that bogs down the entire system while it's running) when it is first started by the user. There's nothing stopping a startup program from waiting for a slow network connection to time out, causing the entire startup process to basically hang. There's nothing Microsoft can do to prevent a program to rebuild it's entire search index at startup, thrashing the disk to the point where the entire system is unresponsive while it's running.
But Microsoft is not entirely blameless either. The root of the problem was the decision to make the console the central focus of operation.There is absolutely no reason why so much of the software has to start up as soon as the user logs in. There is no reason why it cannot be tied to the startup of the computer. And if that software was tied to computer startup there would be no reason it could not be identified for hibernation just like the kernel, resulting in not only a faster boot time but a faster time to actual usefulness of the desktop.
Well, that would make it an interesting project if you had to build the tools first. And that's probably not an unreasonable idea for Heathkit to look into given their target market...
That sounds entirely reasonable for cost. I last bought a resistor back in 2004 and had a difficult time finding one that wasn't through mail order. The sales monkey at Radio Shack didn't even know what one was. I half expected that no one made them any more. But I suppose they will never completely die out. It's good to hear that they're not prohibitively expensive.
TFA talked about the proliferation of cheap components post WWII that really made the kits practical from a cost perspective. With modern manufacturing technology all geared towards surface mount mass production, I wonder how easy it will be to find cheap components to use in the kits. Small surface mount parts are fine for manufacturing but it takes a lot more dexterity to solder them correctly than it does with the old through-hole technology. There's no way I want to even think about attaching a BGA socket on a board by hand.
Still, I would have a hard time believing that there is no demand for the through-hole components any more. Someone who knows more than I do should be able to tell me whether or not those are still available at a reasonable price these days.
I've never had to sign for an Amazon delivery. The post office/UPS/FedEx always left it on the doorstep.
Good catch.
A market you have to manipulate is, by definition, not free.
I'm sick and tired of this fallacy being bandied around, day in day out, by those who don't seem to understand what Capitalism is. How do capitalists exploit people when the economic system is fundamentally based on voluntary, free trade?
Why don't you read up on Standard Oil and how they manipulated the free market to drive their competitors out of business? Then come back and we can have an honest discussion.
Again, READ the sentence I wrote. "walk TO the moon", not on it. TO. TO. Walk TO the moon.
You probably need to study those cultures beyond watching them on some nature show. If you take a snapshot of the community from one perspective, you can see whatever you want to see. But watch them when they are choosing mates. They aren't going to reject boasting and self aggrandizing behavior then. Watch what happens during troubled times when resources are scarce and how the resources of the tribes are distributed. Watch them from all perspectives and you'll see their society is in no way communist.
I wish people weren't so selfish. But I don't confuse my wish for any kind of hope. My pragmatism tells me that greed is a survival trait we evolved with. It's in our DNA. Greed gave our ancestors the drive to get the food they needed. It gave them the desire to be bigger and better so they could attract the better mates. Greed leads to success even now. There's no way to get rid of it. Even in natural disasters, we take care of ourselves before we help others. If we have enough, then we help. And even those who help will use that fact in advertisements when they're trying to sell us things we don't want. Call it cynicism. I call it pragmatism. It's the way we are and it's unlikely we will ever really "evolve" away from it.
Fair enough.
That's a nice sentiment but that's been proven false already. I believe it was the early Plymouth settlers (who numbered less than 200?) tried running a communal farm the first year they were in America. They almost died because of all the problems. After that, the land was split up and everyone was given ownership of their own plot. After that, they flourished.
Any time you have two or more people trying to implement communism, you have the trouble of conflicting interests and human greed. Those conflicting interests will always cause communism to fail to live up to the theory. Always. Now, I will also add that conflicting interests and human greed will cause most other political and economic models to fail as well. It's not just communism that has this vulnerability.