True, but the longer it has to develop, the nastier the scar when removed; being part of a control group isn't supposed to cause unnecessary harm, even it's "merely" visible scars. (My mother waited several months, and has a dent-like scar on her forehead; it's not really visible, but it does make her really self-conscious.)
They're probably supposed to have an Rx from a Canadian doctor, but I've ordered enough human medications from Canada prescribed for my cats (for conditions like heart failure) to attest that while all places do require a prescription, they don't require that it be from a Canadian doctor specifically -- the norm is to get the prescription (mailed, faxed, or scan/email) and then call the vet to confirm it's OK. The most recent time I looked around was about 1.5 months ago, so I'd say my data is fairly current.
FWIW the pharmacies I've used have been recommended for several years by members of large discussion groups specific to a particular pet illness. For any people that are wondering, we all spend the time/money because the drugs control the condition so they can have a normal happy life for months or years (and we/they don't mind the extra bonding time of giving them a medicated "treat" once or twice a day).
I had the same attitude as you 2.5 years ago as I'd fallen for all of the hype, and almost went back to Windows when fed up with Ubuntu's flaws rather than give the other distros a try. I finally decided to at least try a few, and found they were just as easy to use as Ubuntu -- but a lot more stable and usually far more likely to listen to lowly users like me. Don't believe the FUD, Ubuntu isn't any more user friendly than other distros, and in many ways it's less so...
Sure, we all attacked XP for looking like a Fisher-Price toy, and slammed Vista because the hardware requirements meant a lot of people either couldn't use Aero or (as in my case) install Vista at all.
Compare the Windows 8 UI to that of Windows 98, though. While they're both much simpler than recent releases, the older one actually did make use of visual cues like gradients -- and it allowed the user to decide what color the various window elements should be. The new UI's lack of color to distinguish between parts of windows or shadows to differentiate windows made those screenshots look cluttered and a bit chaotic, as there are no visual cues to tell the user at a glance where the text/icons belong.
Comparing Windows 8 to various Amiga screenshots, from what I can tell the Amiga at least included bevels on its windows and outlined various user elements... What Windows 8 really reminds me of is the Apple IIgs operating system, though even GS/OS bothered to put lines in the titlebar to direct the eye towards the title.
Fellow KDE 3 fans should try Trinity Desktop, the team has been doing a great job and figures on releasing 3.5.14 this Fall if all of the blocking bugs are squashed. (I'm not on the team, just a fan of their work.)
Windows XP was the first release that merged the home & business lines -- before that, it was: home users: 95-->98-->ME business users: NT3.x-->NT4-->2000
The every-other-release curse was really just because it took a couple of years to kill enough bugs for each one to be acceptable, by which time its successor was in testing. Of course, even MS knew it was a lost cause for ME & Vista; it's a shame they escaped their cages, since only an incestuous relationship could explain something as horrifyingly twisted as Windows 8.
I don't know what decade they started, but by the 90s, it was normal for a community college to have some sections of lecture-based classes replaced with whatever commercially-created educational video series the local PBS affiliate was airing that semester. I recall seeing the idea applauded as the wave of the future whenever it was brought up in the media, basically for the same reasons that this project is.
(Note: I'm focusing on the quality of in-person vs. video classes on the same topic, but skipping the equally important issue of whether a university degree program at any level should mirror a vocational certificate.)
So, I took one class that way to fulfill a requirement for transferring into a UC school; to be honest, it would've been acceptable for facts I could've read about on my own, but it wasn't remotely as enlightening or helpful as attending classes in the same department. The main flaw was that the lack of interaction between the teacher & students or student-to-student -- laughing, exchanging comments, adjusting lecture/perspective on the fly based on feedback, etc. -- made the video equivalent to a "bad" instructor of the sort that spends the minimum amount of time/energy required to squeak by and whose students mirror them in learning.
My thought is essentially thus: if all you want is to learn the mechanics of something you're already interested in, video classes can be useful in the same way reading an instruction manual is. Otherwise: bad teachers exist in our schools, but the solution isn't to emulate them instead of replacing them with good or excellent ones...
Linux is at its lowest point in a very long time in terms of look-and-feel, polish, and usability in comparison to its commercial competitors. A lot of Linux users don't care about such things, and that's why desktop Linux never took off.... Meanwhile Win7 is polished and works well.
While I'd agree with that regarding GNOME 3 and Unity, I don't think that applies to all Linux desktop environments -- it's very easy in KDE 4 to pick and use a theme that very closely mimics Win7 or OS X, just with more customization options if you want them. KDE 4's main visual failing point IMHO is that there's a severe lack of diversity in the themes compared to GNOME 2 or KDE 3, as nearly everything looks to some degree like a variant of Windows or OS X.
The main reason I see Linux forever failing to capture the desktop market is that the application & environment/theme developers, being unpaid, have zero incentive to care what the users want. The result is desktop environments & applications that may suit the devs perfectly well, but from many users' points of view are clunky, missing features, or bloated with features they'll never use. It's the devs' right, of course, but that doesn't keep the end-result from being that Linux can't manage to gain a respectable percentage of desktop marketshare.
Open-source server and command-line tools are often best-in-class, but GUI development takes too much time, and ends up being single-platform. It's an area I don't think open source can compete with full-time developers paid to grind it out.
Well, don't forget as a starting point that "open source" doesn't necessarily mean that the software is free, or that there's a lack of full-time/paid developers on board. Firefox and OpenOffice are both open-source with paid developers, just to name two examples of FOSS projects that have or had paid developers on the team, even though they're dwarfed by the number of volunteers.
Anyway, even if we just touch on the well-known applications that can hold their own at the very least on a consumer level, if not for professionals, I can think of at least a few off the top of my head: GIMP, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice. I don't have much experience in terms of specialty software, but when I was searching for something my mother could use to view files from a recent MRI she had, it seemed like a lot of the software considered high-quality was cross-platform Windows/Linux and sometimes also OS X.
The fact that they're not commonly produced anymore doesn't mean plenty of people don't still own one; if nothing else, I've seen a heck of a lot of people taking about theirs on the AnythingButiPod and Rockbox (firmware) forums.
I virtually never see any players in public these days except at the gym. Even then, only about 10% of the people I see are using one, and it's usually in the size range that makes it impossible to tell if it's HD or flash-based.
Rewriting since my last one lost its paragraph breaks and got off-topic...
ADHD isn't a matter of the mind merely wandering, though -- the H means they're too hyperactive to remain still (they have to constantly be in motion of some sort), and the ADD means that they're completely distracted by sensory input and/or their brain leaps from one half-finished thought to the next. It's hard to make use of interesting ideas or solutions if it you're distracted by something else before you record it and/or can't focus long enough to work on it.
I think it's possible to rearrange one's life so it works well with an ADHD brain, just like I've set mine up to match my autistic brain, and likewise, if we can find a talent that our brain type compliments then we're golden, so to speak -- but that's the reverse of finding a way to make our condition work with the circumstances. That's why disability accommodations exist: so we can work to our full ability without being placed at an artificial disadvantage (i.e. disabled) by the man-made environment/society being sculpted to suit a different kind of brain/body.
Okay, trying that again now that I have it set to Plain Old Text to get paragraph breaks...
I agree that if the person can find a way to structure their schooling/life/employment to work well with ADHD, then the meds are unnecessary. As an autistic, I'm very much against using drugs or "therapy" on someone with the goal of making them function like a semi-broken neurologically-typical person -- but sometimes (like for my mom) they're bouncing off the wall and have a minute-long attention span regardless of what they try.:-/
If you're an artist or creative person you won't need them.
Not true at all. People working as writers (as in my case), artists, etc. still need to be able to stay in one place and focus on their task for extended periods, typically in the same Zen-like state someone working on a program has. If they write three sentences or spend five minutes working on an image, then wander off for two hours to do other stuff, then wander back for another few minutes, it won't get done or will be of poor quality, and they won't get paid. Now, if they can find a way to set everything up that's AD[H]D-compatible, then they can probably pull it off, but that applies to programming or just about anything else.
I agree that if the person can find a way to structure their schooling/life/employment to work well with ADHD, then the meds are unnecessary. As an autistic, I'm very much against using drugs or "therapy" on someone with the goal of making them function like a semi-broken neurologically-typical person -- but sometimes (like for my mom) they're bouncing off the wall and have a minute-long attention span regardless of what they try.:-/
"If you're an artist or creative person you won't need them."
Not true at all. People working as writers (as in my case), artists, etc. still need to be able to stay in one place and focus on their task for extended periods, typically in the same Zen-like state someone working on a program has. If they write three sentences or spend five minutes working on an image, then wander off for two hours to do other stuff, then wander back for another few minutes, it won't get done or will be of poor quality, and they won't get paid.
Now, if they can find a way to set everything up that's AD[H]D-compatible, then they can probably pull it off, but that applies to programming or just about anything else.
Except that ADHD isn't a matter of the mind merely wandering -- the H means they're too hyperactive to remain still (they have to constantly be in motion of some sort), and the ADD means that they're completely distracted by sensory input and/or their brain leaps from one half-finished thought to the next. It's hard to make use of interesting ideas or solutions if it you're distracted by something else before you record it and/or can't focus long enough to work on it.
I've had several ADHD friends, and my mother also has it. If they can work on something they're totally fascinated by, during the hours that work for them any particular day, move/pace as they need, avoid the foods/drinks that make it out of control, and control what they physically feel/hear/see/etc. then some of them can thrive. Mom is a classic case: she'll start cleaning her desk, then after five minutes remember that she wanted to make a phone call, start looking for her address book, find it but then notice that it's the shade of blue as her 2nd boyfriend long ago drove, try to look him up on Facebook -- so on and so forth.
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True, but the longer it has to develop, the nastier the scar when removed; being part of a control group isn't supposed to cause unnecessary harm, even it's "merely" visible scars. (My mother waited several months, and has a dent-like scar on her forehead; it's not really visible, but it does make her really self-conscious.)
They're probably supposed to have an Rx from a Canadian doctor, but I've ordered enough human medications from Canada prescribed for my cats (for conditions like heart failure) to attest that while all places do require a prescription, they don't require that it be from a Canadian doctor specifically -- the norm is to get the prescription (mailed, faxed, or scan/email) and then call the vet to confirm it's OK. The most recent time I looked around was about 1.5 months ago, so I'd say my data is fairly current.
FWIW the pharmacies I've used have been recommended for several years by members of large discussion groups specific to a particular pet illness. For any people that are wondering, we all spend the time/money because the drugs control the condition so they can have a normal happy life for months or years (and we/they don't mind the extra bonding time of giving them a medicated "treat" once or twice a day).
I had the same attitude as you 2.5 years ago as I'd fallen for all of the hype, and almost went back to Windows when fed up with Ubuntu's flaws rather than give the other distros a try. I finally decided to at least try a few, and found they were just as easy to use as Ubuntu -- but a lot more stable and usually far more likely to listen to lowly users like me. Don't believe the FUD, Ubuntu isn't any more user friendly than other distros, and in many ways it's less so...
Sure, we all attacked XP for looking like a Fisher-Price toy, and slammed Vista because the hardware requirements meant a lot of people either couldn't use Aero or (as in my case) install Vista at all.
Compare the Windows 8 UI to that of Windows 98, though. While they're both much simpler than recent releases, the older one actually did make use of visual cues like gradients -- and it allowed the user to decide what color the various window elements should be. The new UI's lack of color to distinguish between parts of windows or shadows to differentiate windows made those screenshots look cluttered and a bit chaotic, as there are no visual cues to tell the user at a glance where the text/icons belong.
Comparing Windows 8 to various Amiga screenshots, from what I can tell the Amiga at least included bevels on its windows and outlined various user elements... What Windows 8 really reminds me of is the Apple IIgs operating system, though even GS/OS bothered to put lines in the titlebar to direct the eye towards the title.
Fellow KDE 3 fans should try Trinity Desktop, the team has been doing a great job and figures on releasing 3.5.14 this Fall if all of the blocking bugs are squashed. (I'm not on the team, just a fan of their work.)
Windows XP was the first release that merged the home & business lines -- before that, it was:
home users: 95-->98-->ME
business users: NT3.x-->NT4-->2000
The every-other-release curse was really just because it took a couple of years to kill enough bugs for each one to be acceptable, by which time its successor was in testing. Of course, even MS knew it was a lost cause for ME & Vista; it's a shame they escaped their cages, since only an incestuous relationship could explain something as horrifyingly twisted as Windows 8.
I don't know what decade they started, but by the 90s, it was normal for a community college to have some sections of lecture-based classes replaced with whatever commercially-created educational video series the local PBS affiliate was airing that semester. I recall seeing the idea applauded as the wave of the future whenever it was brought up in the media, basically for the same reasons that this project is.
(Note: I'm focusing on the quality of in-person vs. video classes on the same topic, but skipping the equally important issue of whether a university degree program at any level should mirror a vocational certificate.)
So, I took one class that way to fulfill a requirement for transferring into a UC school; to be honest, it would've been acceptable for facts I could've read about on my own, but it wasn't remotely as enlightening or helpful as attending classes in the same department. The main flaw was that the lack of interaction between the teacher & students or student-to-student -- laughing, exchanging comments, adjusting lecture/perspective on the fly based on feedback, etc. -- made the video equivalent to a "bad" instructor of the sort that spends the minimum amount of time/energy required to squeak by and whose students mirror them in learning.
My thought is essentially thus: if all you want is to learn the mechanics of something you're already interested in, video classes can be useful in the same way reading an instruction manual is. Otherwise: bad teachers exist in our schools, but the solution isn't to emulate them instead of replacing them with good or excellent ones...
Linux is at its lowest point in a very long time in terms of look-and-feel, polish, and usability in comparison to its commercial competitors. A lot of Linux users don't care about such things, and that's why desktop Linux never took off. ... Meanwhile Win7 is polished and works well.
While I'd agree with that regarding GNOME 3 and Unity, I don't think that applies to all Linux desktop environments -- it's very easy in KDE 4 to pick and use a theme that very closely mimics Win7 or OS X, just with more customization options if you want them. KDE 4's main visual failing point IMHO is that there's a severe lack of diversity in the themes compared to GNOME 2 or KDE 3, as nearly everything looks to some degree like a variant of Windows or OS X.
The main reason I see Linux forever failing to capture the desktop market is that the application & environment/theme developers, being unpaid, have zero incentive to care what the users want. The result is desktop environments & applications that may suit the devs perfectly well, but from many users' points of view are clunky, missing features, or bloated with features they'll never use. It's the devs' right, of course, but that doesn't keep the end-result from being that Linux can't manage to gain a respectable percentage of desktop marketshare.
Well, don't forget as a starting point that "open source" doesn't necessarily mean that the software is free, or that there's a lack of full-time/paid developers on board. Firefox and OpenOffice are both open-source with paid developers, just to name two examples of FOSS projects that have or had paid developers on the team, even though they're dwarfed by the number of volunteers.
Anyway, even if we just touch on the well-known applications that can hold their own at the very least on a consumer level, if not for professionals, I can think of at least a few off the top of my head: GIMP, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice. I don't have much experience in terms of specialty software, but when I was searching for something my mother could use to view files from a recent MRI she had, it seemed like a lot of the software considered high-quality was cross-platform Windows/Linux and sometimes also OS X.
The fact that they're not commonly produced anymore doesn't mean plenty of people don't still own one; if nothing else, I've seen a heck of a lot of people taking about theirs on the AnythingButiPod and Rockbox (firmware) forums.
I virtually never see any players in public these days except at the gym. Even then, only about 10% of the people I see are using one, and it's usually in the size range that makes it impossible to tell if it's HD or flash-based.
Rewriting since my last one lost its paragraph breaks and got off-topic...
ADHD isn't a matter of the mind merely wandering, though -- the H means they're too hyperactive to remain still (they have to constantly be in motion of some sort), and the ADD means that they're completely distracted by sensory input and/or their brain leaps from one half-finished thought to the next. It's hard to make use of interesting ideas or solutions if it you're distracted by something else before you record it and/or can't focus long enough to work on it.
I think it's possible to rearrange one's life so it works well with an ADHD brain, just like I've set mine up to match my autistic brain, and likewise, if we can find a talent that our brain type compliments then we're golden, so to speak -- but that's the reverse of finding a way to make our condition work with the circumstances. That's why disability accommodations exist: so we can work to our full ability without being placed at an artificial disadvantage (i.e. disabled) by the man-made environment/society being sculpted to suit a different kind of brain/body.
Okay, trying that again now that I have it set to Plain Old Text to get paragraph breaks...
I agree that if the person can find a way to structure their schooling/life/employment to work well with ADHD, then the meds are unnecessary. As an autistic, I'm very much against using drugs or "therapy" on someone with the goal of making them function like a semi-broken neurologically-typical person -- but sometimes (like for my mom) they're bouncing off the wall and have a minute-long attention span regardless of what they try. :-/
If you're an artist or creative person you won't need them.
Not true at all. People working as writers (as in my case), artists, etc. still need to be able to stay in one place and focus on their task for extended periods, typically in the same Zen-like state someone working on a program has. If they write three sentences or spend five minutes working on an image, then wander off for two hours to do other stuff, then wander back for another few minutes, it won't get done or will be of poor quality, and they won't get paid. Now, if they can find a way to set everything up that's AD[H]D-compatible, then they can probably pull it off, but that applies to programming or just about anything else.
I agree that if the person can find a way to structure their schooling/life/employment to work well with ADHD, then the meds are unnecessary. As an autistic, I'm very much against using drugs or "therapy" on someone with the goal of making them function like a semi-broken neurologically-typical person -- but sometimes (like for my mom) they're bouncing off the wall and have a minute-long attention span regardless of what they try. :-/
"If you're an artist or creative person you won't need them."
Not true at all. People working as writers (as in my case), artists, etc. still need to be able to stay in one place and focus on their task for extended periods, typically in the same Zen-like state someone working on a program has. If they write three sentences or spend five minutes working on an image, then wander off for two hours to do other stuff, then wander back for another few minutes, it won't get done or will be of poor quality, and they won't get paid.
Now, if they can find a way to set everything up that's AD[H]D-compatible, then they can probably pull it off, but that applies to programming or just about anything else.
Except that ADHD isn't a matter of the mind merely wandering -- the H means they're too hyperactive to remain still (they have to constantly be in motion of some sort), and the ADD means that they're completely distracted by sensory input and/or their brain leaps from one half-finished thought to the next. It's hard to make use of interesting ideas or solutions if it you're distracted by something else before you record it and/or can't focus long enough to work on it. I've had several ADHD friends, and my mother also has it. If they can work on something they're totally fascinated by, during the hours that work for them any particular day, move/pace as they need, avoid the foods/drinks that make it out of control, and control what they physically feel/hear/see/etc. then some of them can thrive. Mom is a classic case: she'll start cleaning her desk, then after five minutes remember that she wanted to make a phone call, start looking for her address book, find it but then notice that it's the shade of blue as her 2nd boyfriend long ago drove, try to look him up on Facebook -- so on and so forth.