LEDs have a long, long way to go before they can be used in living or working spaces.
Really? Because I just installed under-cabinet lighting in my kitchen, entirely from LEDs. It's gorgeous, and it doesn't melt the chocolate chips in the cabinets above like the fluorescent lights (it was probably the ballast or something) that I ripped out and replaced with the LEDs. I think it looks better, too.
These "good" CFLs of which you speak aren't available to Joe Consumer (i.e., me); the ones you get at Lowes are certainly a different spectrum and temperature than normal incandescents; I've got them throughout the house, and while they don't bother me, you can certainly tell the difference between them and the incandescents that are in the dimable fixtures. Oh, and that's my main beef with CFLs: you can't put them on a dimmer switch.
Incidentally, under-the-counter LEDs were expensive. I was willing to pay the price for the kitchen because I wanted low-profile, low-temperature lighting, but ouch.
Leaving a bunch of software nerds 100% free to do what ever they want is a major mistake.Leaving a bunch of software nerds 100% free to do what ever they want is a major mistake.
The point here is that what the OP is describing is micromanagement. Every time I've seen this, it is because Management doesn't really know what they want, but whatever it is, they aren't getting it. So they cast about for solutions, or they get recommendations from people who really don't know shit but think they do.
There are two, entirely unrelated, issues here: requirements and risk management. Generally speaking, if the requirements are clearly defined, then the tools and the processes that are used to develop the solution is irrelevant to the goal. If you have clearly defined requirements (and a way of iteratively managing, updating, and clarifying them), then given a halfway decent team of developers, you can let them choose their own architecture, tools, process, development environment, and working hours; or even whether or not their in the office most of the time. This is a goal oriented philosophy, and it works perfectly well for a number of environments in the few companies that employ it (BestBuy being one of the most notable). There are a number of environments where it doesn't work, but software development is one where it does work.
The other issue is risk management, and while this is important, IME management spends way too much time worrying about this, and it results in far more micromanagement abuse than any other single factor. Risk management controls things like how difficult it will be to bring on new developers (e.g., choosing an obscure development language may make this more difficult), how much it will cost to maintain the product, and so on. Risk management should be considered, but by and large, when risk management is addressed the decisions are often made by the worst possible people in an organization -- ones who know a little about a subject but don't have any real depth and are too busy to look deeper into a product than just the shiny brochure. This is almost always how IBM Rational products are chosen in an organization: almost never by the people who have to use it. These decisions are almost always counterproductive.
The SUV safety myth was created by marketing pure and simple.
I can't speak for the truth of this, but I do have a related story.
I used to live in a place where I had to drive over a mountain pass to visit my family, which we'd fairly regularly, and this pass would regularly get heavy snow in the winter. Accidents were common.
One year, there was an accident that blocked all of the lanes, and as we were sitting waiting for it to be resolved, an officer was walking down the line of cars explaining to people what happened and how long it would take to get resolved. I chatted with him for a bit when he got to us, and he told me that most of the accidents in the pass were caused by SUVs. I told him that I thought that was odd, and he said that he thought it was because people who drive SUVs (*Sport* Utility Vehicles) think that having 4 wheel drive is going to stop them faster. Truck drivers, apparently, don't suffer as much from this particular idiocy.
Anyway, whatever the cop's opinions about the cause, I thought the data point about the proportion of accidents being caused by SUV drivers was interesting.
Weak security because of dynamic typing? You really have to elaborate on this, because like this it just makes no sense. How is a strong typed languare more secure than a dynamic typed one?
Yeah, security isn't the issue with typing, unless runtime type errors can cause your application to be insecure.
In any case, he was claiming that Java is strongly typed, which it isn't, or at least wasn't (in practice) until 1.5 and generics came along. Generics made it much better, but I've always found the type system to be pretty weak.
they're adding Ruby, which is a language very similar to javascript (certainly more similar than JS or Ruby are to Java and their ilk)
I call bullshit.
Javascript is a prototyping language, and is significantly in syntax and behavior from both Ruby and Java. Ruby has similar class inheritance rules and visibility syntax; Javascripts are entirely different.
It's like java, but not as fast, secure, or scalable.
It's like Java, only without hacks like "primitives". Unlike Java, it is a pure OO language, where everything is an object, and it provides a few significant OO features that are missing from Java, such as mix-ins and closures.
First off, if you don't pay for content, then don't be outraged when that content disappears. The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse every year due to piracy. All of my favorite PC game houses went bankrupt.
...
Most of my DVDs I buy used from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. They pretty much always have a 3 for $25 deal. I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.
Do you think the studios get any of that $8 per movie? I'd be surprised if buying used games, movies, or CDs helped push the industry along in any significant amount.
Politicians make their living off of the same vapourware every election-- and for some inexplicable reason, the masses keep buying into it. How about a short list?
Well, some of these things have been achieved. They just aren't perpetual.
1. Balanced Budget
Done, during the Clinton administration. Subsequently undone.
2. Peace in our time
We've had presidencies during which the US hasn't been in any open conflict with any other country. But this really depends on what you mean by "peace." Are we at peace if, somewhere in the country, some guy is beating his wife? Are we at peace if we're not at war with anybody, but somebody, somewhere, is? Are we at peace if we have an embargo on some other country?
3. Raise education standards
You could argue that the US is more educated than it ever has been. More people have advanced degrees than ever have, and more poor people have degrees. Public K12 education certainly hasn't been improving overall in a long while, but again, it depends on what standards you're measuring -- what's your definition of education standards?
4. Economic security
The last time that happened was when social security was instituted. I don't even know what this would look like -- everybody gets a guaranteed minimum wage? Everybody is guaranteed a job? The stock market only goes up? What?
Aww, no, see... I saw a chart just like the one you linked to from 1910, and the percentage of Nuclear power used in the world was 0%. By your logic, this means that Nuclear power is utterly impractical and won't be able to produce enough energy for a small country, much less the world.
Or did the fact that increasing the use of photovoltaics will consequently increase the percentages of photovoltaics on that chart escape you? What, exactly, did you think that that graph proved, other than current world use? Potential?
the entry level players (all are still around 400 bucks MSRP)
Dang. Buy a PlayStation 3 for $100 more, and get a full entertainment system with wireless.
I got a PS3 for X-mas; I wasn't paying much attention to the specs (I just wanted it for the games), but I've been impressed with it. Now that I know what a bargain I got on the BD player, I'm even more ecstactic.
Oh, and while I really do love the machine, I really do wish that Sony had gone ahead and stuck a regular IR port in it. Not being able to control it with my universal remote was a pain until I bought a $15 external IR remote for it; throw away the remote, just use the dongle.
parents aren't going to fork over extra $$ for it.
Hah! My kids are going to trounce those parent's kids. They'll be more popular (all of their friends will want to come see Ratatouille at their house, on the big, high-def screen); they'll be smarter, having all of the latest, non-obsolete technology; and they'll just be better, because they'll be technology winners (by association). Consequently, they'll have more success breeding, have more offspring, and eventually weed the Luddite parent's kids out of the gene pool. All thanks to Blu-Ray.
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, then we must address the problem of supply versus demand.
And to continue with this theme...
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, we'd acknowledge that "supply versus demand" is different in the world of electronic media than it is for physical product. The two variables in the equation of supply and demand are scarcity of supply, and strength of demand. Scarcity is (usually) driven by cost: if you build two chairs, the second chair costs you almost as much to produce as the first one does. Even in mass production, the difference in cost between the first and the 10,000th is infinitesimal compared the the cost difference between producing the first MP3 of a song and the second one. So, for intellectual property and electronic media (which, I'd argue, there is only a very thin boundary), the "scarcity" variable is almost irrelevant -- in this context.
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, we'd admit that the original purpose of intellectual property rights (including copyright) was to stimulate research, development, and production. The originator of the intellectual property was given certain rights to ensure that they could recoup their R&D costs and make some profit. It was not intended to grant them universal and exclusive rights in perpetuity; the authors of our IP laws were trying to find a balance between encouraging initial R&D, and all of the spin-off good that comes from having R&D released directly into the public. The main point here is that it has been recognized that it is better for the public to have no IP protection, and that IP protection itself can hinder new IP development. Obviously, with no IP protection, it will be more difficult for companies to recoup their R&D costs, which discourages R&D. But in the current climate, we've swung too far into the "protection" zone; there's no public benefit for submarine patents; there's no public benefit for perpetual copyrights and patents; and there's a mounting body of evidence that DRM is actively bad for the public.
That being said, it took me hours of work just getting it up to what I would consider basic functionality.
Everybody's experience is different, but I'm still surprised when I hear people have trouble with Ubuntu. I installed Kubuntu Feisty on a tablet PC (HP TC4200), and everything worked out of the box. Screen rotation, wireless, even the SD slot. The only manual configuration I did was to edit the Cups client config file to point to my print server. After having run Redhat for a couple years, and Gentoo after that for even more years, this was a pleasant, and shocking, surprise. Literally, I only had to edit a single conf file. I had more trouble getting my mother-in-law's Windows machine to recognize the Linksys wireless router we bought for it.
Experience varies with the hardware, but -- again -- I rate relatively obscure tech like a tablet PC as pretty challenging hardware.
I know "US Government Caught Manipulating Wikipedia" is a cool title, but seriously, does anyone think the US government, the CIA or the Vatican would be stupid enough to get caught if they actually wanted to influence a wikipedia article?
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, while it does big things badly, does small things badly too." -- Principia Discordia
Yes, I most certainly expect the US government to be stupid enough to get caught. Especially the current one.
OK, here is the deal... I just bought over $200 worth of music on CD and I absolutely guarantee that this will be the last music purchase I make from any RIAA backed artist unless they start recognizing fair use.
While you could entirely stop purchasing CDs, you could also do what I've been doing for the past four years: if you really want a CD, go look for it used on Half.com (or similar). Unless the CD is a recent release (or a very old one), odds are good that you'll find it. And none of the money you pay for the used CD goes to the RIAA (in the USA, at least).
Just because it is by microsoft people hate the product even if they never used it before.
I have to use Exchange at work every day. It sucks. My main gripes are:
It doesn't integrate very well with anything but Outlook
It often has problems with timezones and/or time changes. We get a week or two of screwed up scheduling twice a year, right around the daylight savings time change.
Resource scheduling is just stupid. If you forget and add a room as a required participant instead of a resource, it doesn't get scheduled, and ends up double-booked. This happens to everybody, even people who have been using it for years.
Sometimes it silently drops people from the invite list
That said, the free/busy tool is pretty decent, and the IMAP functionality is acceptable.
BTW, I've yet to meet someone who hates Microsoft Office (the "junk" as you call it, lol), as per your assertion.
Hi, I'm Sean. Pleased to meet you.
There. Now you've met someone who hates MS Office. I'd introduce you to my wife, but she hates Office so much that she hates people who like it, by association.
That's largely the reason why we're in the mess we're currently in. A bunch of people who would otherwise have voted Democrat if they weren't so unhappy with the choices in 2000 voted for third parties. I was one of them; I was trying to send a message. It would have been harder for Bush to steal the 2000 election if Gore's margin of win (popular vote) had been wider.
The fact is that in a first-past-the-goal system like we have in the states, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils then your vote is wasted. What we need is a change in how we count votes, such as Condorcet, ranked pairs, or approval voting. None of these is perfect (Condorcet is the most fair, but is complicated), but all of them are more fair than what we have in the states.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Because I just installed under-cabinet lighting in my kitchen, entirely from LEDs. It's gorgeous, and it doesn't melt the chocolate chips in the cabinets above like the fluorescent lights (it was probably the ballast or something) that I ripped out and replaced with the LEDs. I think it looks better, too.
These "good" CFLs of which you speak aren't available to Joe Consumer (i.e., me); the ones you get at Lowes are certainly a different spectrum and temperature than normal incandescents; I've got them throughout the house, and while they don't bother me, you can certainly tell the difference between them and the incandescents that are in the dimable fixtures. Oh, and that's my main beef with CFLs: you can't put them on a dimmer switch.
Incidentally, under-the-counter LEDs were expensive. I was willing to pay the price for the kitchen because I wanted low-profile, low-temperature lighting, but ouch.
--- SER
The point here is that what the OP is describing is micromanagement. Every time I've seen this, it is because Management doesn't really know what they want, but whatever it is, they aren't getting it. So they cast about for solutions, or they get recommendations from people who really don't know shit but think they do.
There are two, entirely unrelated, issues here: requirements and risk management. Generally speaking, if the requirements are clearly defined, then the tools and the processes that are used to develop the solution is irrelevant to the goal. If you have clearly defined requirements (and a way of iteratively managing, updating, and clarifying them), then given a halfway decent team of developers, you can let them choose their own architecture, tools, process, development environment, and working hours; or even whether or not their in the office most of the time. This is a goal oriented philosophy, and it works perfectly well for a number of environments in the few companies that employ it (BestBuy being one of the most notable). There are a number of environments where it doesn't work, but software development is one where it does work.
The other issue is risk management, and while this is important, IME management spends way too much time worrying about this, and it results in far more micromanagement abuse than any other single factor. Risk management controls things like how difficult it will be to bring on new developers (e.g., choosing an obscure development language may make this more difficult), how much it will cost to maintain the product, and so on. Risk management should be considered, but by and large, when risk management is addressed the decisions are often made by the worst possible people in an organization -- ones who know a little about a subject but don't have any real depth and are too busy to look deeper into a product than just the shiny brochure. This is almost always how IBM Rational products are chosen in an organization: almost never by the people who have to use it. These decisions are almost always counterproductive.
--- SER
I can't speak for the truth of this, but I do have a related story.
I used to live in a place where I had to drive over a mountain pass to visit my family, which we'd fairly regularly, and this pass would regularly get heavy snow in the winter. Accidents were common.
One year, there was an accident that blocked all of the lanes, and as we were sitting waiting for it to be resolved, an officer was walking down the line of cars explaining to people what happened and how long it would take to get resolved. I chatted with him for a bit when he got to us, and he told me that most of the accidents in the pass were caused by SUVs. I told him that I thought that was odd, and he said that he thought it was because people who drive SUVs (*Sport* Utility Vehicles) think that having 4 wheel drive is going to stop them faster. Truck drivers, apparently, don't suffer as much from this particular idiocy.
Anyway, whatever the cop's opinions about the cause, I thought the data point about the proportion of accidents being caused by SUV drivers was interesting.
--- SER
At least try... how about "fin impelled subaquatic hydrosphere-mobile" -- F.I.S.H.
--- SER
Yeah, security isn't the issue with typing, unless runtime type errors can cause your application to be insecure.
In any case, he was claiming that Java is strongly typed, which it isn't, or at least wasn't (in practice) until 1.5 and generics came along. Generics made it much better, but I've always found the type system to be pretty weak.
--- SER
I call bullshit.
Javascript is a prototyping language, and is significantly in syntax and behavior from both Ruby and Java. Ruby has similar class inheritance rules and visibility syntax; Javascripts are entirely different.
--- SER
It's like Java, only without hacks like "primitives". Unlike Java, it is a pure OO language, where everything is an object, and it provides a few significant OO features that are missing from Java, such as mix-ins and closures.
--- SER
--- SER
--- SER
--- SER
--- SER
Or did the fact that increasing the use of photovoltaics will consequently increase the percentages of photovoltaics on that chart escape you? What, exactly, did you think that that graph proved, other than current world use? Potential?
--- SER
I got a PS3 for X-mas; I wasn't paying much attention to the specs (I just wanted it for the games), but I've been impressed with it. Now that I know what a bargain I got on the BD player, I'm even more ecstactic.
Oh, and while I really do love the machine, I really do wish that Sony had gone ahead and stuck a regular IR port in it. Not being able to control it with my universal remote was a pain until I bought a $15 external IR remote for it; throw away the remote, just use the dongle.
--- SER
Just kidding. I don't have any kids.
--- SER
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, we'd acknowledge that "supply versus demand" is different in the world of electronic media than it is for physical product. The two variables in the equation of supply and demand are scarcity of supply, and strength of demand. Scarcity is (usually) driven by cost: if you build two chairs, the second chair costs you almost as much to produce as the first one does. Even in mass production, the difference in cost between the first and the 10,000th is infinitesimal compared the the cost difference between producing the first MP3 of a song and the second one. So, for intellectual property and electronic media (which, I'd argue, there is only a very thin boundary), the "scarcity" variable is almost irrelevant -- in this context.
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, we'd admit that the original purpose of intellectual property rights (including copyright) was to stimulate research, development, and production. The originator of the intellectual property was given certain rights to ensure that they could recoup their R&D costs and make some profit. It was not intended to grant them universal and exclusive rights in perpetuity; the authors of our IP laws were trying to find a balance between encouraging initial R&D, and all of the spin-off good that comes from having R&D released directly into the public. The main point here is that it has been recognized that it is better for the public to have no IP protection, and that IP protection itself can hinder new IP development. Obviously, with no IP protection, it will be more difficult for companies to recoup their R&D costs, which discourages R&D. But in the current climate, we've swung too far into the "protection" zone; there's no public benefit for submarine patents; there's no public benefit for perpetual copyrights and patents; and there's a mounting body of evidence that DRM is actively bad for the public.
--- SER
--- SER
--- SER
Experience varies with the hardware, but -- again -- I rate relatively obscure tech like a tablet PC as pretty challenging hardware.
--- SER
Just out of curiosity... do you also believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11?
--- SER
-- Principia Discordia
Yes, I most certainly expect the US government to be stupid enough to get caught. Especially the current one.
--- SER
--- SER
--- SER
- It doesn't integrate very well with anything but Outlook
- It often has problems with timezones and/or time changes. We get a week or two of screwed up scheduling twice a year, right around the daylight savings time change.
- Resource scheduling is just stupid. If you forget and add a room as a required participant instead of a resource, it doesn't get scheduled, and ends up double-booked. This happens to everybody, even people who have been using it for years.
- Sometimes it silently drops people from the invite list
That said, the free/busy tool is pretty decent, and the IMAP functionality is acceptable.--- SER
Hi, I'm Sean. Pleased to meet you.
There. Now you've met someone who hates MS Office. I'd introduce you to my wife, but she hates Office so much that she hates people who like it, by association.
--- SER
The fact is that in a first-past-the-goal system like we have in the states, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils then your vote is wasted. What we need is a change in how we count votes, such as Condorcet, ranked pairs, or approval voting. None of these is perfect (Condorcet is the most fair, but is complicated), but all of them are more fair than what we have in the states.
--- SER