I tried q4os and exegnu (or whatever it's called) too, but found PCLOS slightly more polished. I liked KDE3/4 (which Trinity follows from) but find KDE5 endlessly frustrating, so it was off to Trinity for me. The other desktops are okay (except Gnome, which I hate) but I find them too limiting; I can't get things quite how I want 'em, either for appearance (when you stare at it all day, this matters) or just How Things Work. If I'm going to have a simplified setup, I prefer JWM.
Thanks for the tip on the hotkey app; downloaded and I'll give it a look.
I've seen LXDE setups that looked nice, and others that were what-were-they-smoking! Me, I *loathe* Adwaita (and all the "modern" flat pastel looks) and usually wind up with a weird hybrid of Oxygen and Plastik, just to get some color and texture back. You'd probably hate my desktop.:)
Try the Trinity desktop. Operationally closer to Windows than is Cinnamon, and more configurable. (Admittedly I miss Win+E, but that can probably be fixed.)
I've been hunting for a linux I could love since 1998, and always they're too buggy or too annoying... but I think I've finally found it in PCLinusOS with Trinity desktop.
The problem with the Bay area is that it's cramped, and the easily-buildable ground has long since been used up. Either you build up the side of a mountain, or you build over farmland (much of which is swampy and a flood risk) and import your food from China, or you build way out toward Sacramento and have a 3 hour daily commute, or you don't build at all.
Consider that the permits before you can ever break ground on a single-family home are in excess of $130,000 (yes, JUST the permits!) and wonder no more why housing there is so expensive and in short supply.
About ten years ago the very cheapest residential property in nearby Pleasanton was $80,000 -- for a 400 square foot LOT with a converted single-car garage serving as the "house".
And I note that we don't hear anyone bitching about working for Facebook or how much it pays them; we just hear them bitching about how much it costs to live where both they and Facebook chose to be.
As to an ever-expanding economy and labor pool, that's only necessary to fund an ever-increasing entitlement class (exacerbated by union jobs where you can retire with full benefits at age 40). Absent that, stable or even shrinking would be as good or better (and might be better anyway).
Consider that FF's performance has become more and more sucky, and that fixes which goose it this much for megatab users are probably going to do the normal users a lot of good too.
I'd also consider that its large prey probably were no faster, for the same reason. T.rex didn't need to run any faster than its prey did.
Also, like most large carnivores today, it probably killed by attrition -- clamp on, bite chunks out of, and eat the prey alive once it stops resisting (as prey animals do fairly quickly when injured, compared to predators).
Further, large predators don't necessarily need sustained speed, especially when the prey ignores them most of the time (watch lions or hyenas walking right among water buffalo, and being entirely ignored). They just need proximity and a brief sprint.
Actually, it is. Frex levothyroxin has been extensively tested not only for shelf life, but also against several different tablet binders (turns out the old-fashioned binders have up to 6x better shelf life, but the newer binders lead to fewer manufacturing-level recalls). But trying to set a specific expiration date on each drug as pilled with each of a dozen common binders is another layer of complexity that's not cost-effective to either patient or manufacturer, so from what I've seen, they generally use the low-average for the expiration date, under the theory that it's better to discard still-effective drugs than to risk a bad outcome (not to mention a lawsuit) for the patient.
And typically the drug itself is very little of the cost (most of the cost, after R&D, is packaging and distribution), and most drugs are readily produced in bulk (and largely manufactured in India), so waste is not really the issue. And especially with microdosed drugs, manufacturing fails due to the difficulties inherent in evenly distributing a few micrograms among a million tablets are a much bigger source of "waste" (frex with levothyroxin, the batch-fail rate is about 50%).
So, yeah, a lot of the expiration dates are pessimistic, and some products will remain good for years after. Others do indeed lose potency (sometimes very slowly, sometimes quite quickly), or become toxic (frex, tetracycline deteriorates on a fairly predictable schedule, and can then cause catastrophic liver failure).
Storage matters too. Cold dry conditions reduce the speed of chemical reactions, thereby extending shelf life. But do you know where that pill was stored before you put it in your freezer?
Ah, might have had a hidden recovery partition, and dealt with existing installs fairly sanely.
I only use a phone as a phone, no apps or crap (in fact for the past couple years I've had the world's dumbest flipphone, what do you want for 12 bucks). I've also lived where the nearest connection was a fair drive away, nothing at home at all. Got a Wilson booster and went from zero bars to two bars (albeit rather spotty since it had to piggyback on the volunteer fire dept's booster), which at least sufficed for emergencies. It's USB-powered so can be used wherever you can plug it in.
Well, yeah, there is a pill to fix it... the typical cause of poor insulin metabolism is low thyroid, which is very treatable. (And TSH may still be normal, but tissue levels of T3 can be too low to function, which is why you should do the whole panel, not just the TSH test.)
Part of the problem with artificial sweeteners is that aspartame is a thyroid inhibitor, so can indeed make matters worse. When thyroid even a tish low, the body craves sugar to replace the energy it can no longer extract from its own stored fat, and pretty soon you've got a vicious cycle.
And speaking of thyroid inhibitors... when did the obesity epidemic really start? I think in the 1960s, and that the key factor was the switch from lard to shortening, which is made from soybean oil. Soy (and 3x worse, flaxseed) contains high levels of phytoestrogen, another thyroid inhibitor.
Huh. Thanks. I still have the WinME system (albeit in pieces in a box) and if I ever get around to setting it back up, I'll have to give that a look. I wonder if XP has such a function hidden somewhere?
I'm an old DOS-head myself, but got along good with Windows (I beat it into submission and it never dared misbehave)... until it left XP for parts unknown. Been trying for 18 years to find a linux that did as well for me, been damn frustrating, but lately some are to where I could live with 'em if I had to. In fact yonder frankenputer-in-progress is probably going to run PCLinuxOS with Trinity or KDE (or both), as my current favorite of the full-featured models. If I just need a boot disk, I use Puppy (Wary). I guess I like contrast.:)
I might have to try a Windows phone, given I don't like Android much. Then again, if it's basically Win8/10, I might not like it any better! but at least I'd know where to find its body parts.
My WinME was the first RTM and was never updated. Maybe they fixed the issues with System Restore in an update, I dunno. It certainly works great as of XP.
How did you restore from outside the OS? I know about restoring the registry from CLI, I've used that, but not a full system restore.
I never liked those K6-2 CPUs, but back then Acer used Supermicro mainboards and they were really solid. Had one in my W95 box, never a bit of trouble.
The trick with WinME was to apply 98Lite, then turn off System Restore. Before -- couldn't even crash properly. After -- never crashed again, and had an uptime close to 2 years (at which point it was retired in favor of XP). Resource heap management still sucked, being about on par with Win3.1, but even so it never quite fell over.
I've had zero luck with wireless and linux -- it sees the USB dongle and sees the router but can't connect.
And why won't ANY species of linux connect to my Actiontec DSL modem/router? it's set the way their tech support says should work (which is the default) but the best any distro could do was make the router sorta see it at 10Mbit (it's a gigabit router), but there was no usable connection. Gotta be a setting somewhere but I haven't found it.
Didn't have these issues with the late lightning-killed ZyXEL -- wireless invariably failed as above, but wired worked with zero effort on almost every distro I tried.
Conversely every species of Windows from W2K on up connects fine with both wired and wireless.
Argh, yes. I finally flung up my hands, unpinned everything from Win7's taskbar, and found a tweak to reinstate QuickLaunch, tho it refuses to be over on the left where the gods intended. But at least now I have it, and don't have pinned icons and running apps mixed together into a visual stew.
Win7's faster boot time appears to be a cheat via "display the desktop, then keep doing all the other startup stuff in the background". I run a single small startup app that starts onscreen, so I get to see how long Win7 actually takes to find all its body parts -- it doesn't load startup items til after everything else, and it's really no faster than XP.
It is pretty good about hardware and drivers, tho.
I've noticed if you want a bug-free visual experience, you have to run an Aero theme, which puts sharp limits on how you can customize it without building a theme from scratch; if you use a "classic type theme, there are many subtle but visually tiring errors and inconsistencies, as if it was never properly debugged (how did all these little mistakes creep in? XP had no such issues.)
As to networking and sharing files on the network, XP64 is perfectly consistent: point at something, properties, Share, click two boxes, and it works the same everywhere. But Win7 is all over the map -- one drive will share at the root, another only folders, the third not at all -- with the same settings.
I finally broke down and set up a Win7 box. It's on decently fast hardware that's been stable across a lot of OS tests, lots of RAM, fast HDs:
I *hate* Win7, and not just for the interface changes, which I've reverted toward XP as best I could (tho finally gave up on Windows Explorer and switched to Explorer++) .
Win7's Explorer (including anything using its APIs, like E++) is broken in subtle ways -- frex, get any sort of file error and after that it'll stall repeatedly until you give up and reboot. Many small but persistent annoyances in the interface, the userfile layout, quirks of behavior (can anyone explain why with identical settings, Win7 will share root of one drive, but not the next? and will share directories on the boot drive, but not on the data drive?)
I have none of these issues with XP nor XP64.... which will therefore remain my primary desktops for the foreseeable future. If for some reason I absolutely need to have a more "modern" desktop, well, PCLinuxOS (with KDE or Trinity) isn't bad, and at least the annoyances tend to be well-defined and specific to a single app or function, rather than scattered randomly all over the interface.
And yeah, I tried Win8/10, but if I wanted a cellphone for my desktop, I'd just use the bloody cellphone!
I will give Win7 this -- it's very good about being horsed onto different hardware (moved its boot drive to a completely different box and it just calmly reinstalled all its drivers). Performance is better than Vista, if not up to XP64 (which I have on almost identical hardware). And there are a few nice new features here and there, if insufficient to offset the annoying bits.
But the only way Win7 would ever be an everyday desktop for me is as a VM host for some other OS.
Then what the heck is the "allow applications to steal focus" setting that's been in Windows for ages? (admittedly you need to use TweakUI to get at it. But it appears to default to OFF.)
Yep, that old XP box really did have uptimes measured in years; was closing on 3 years when it got sorta retired because of a protracted crosscountry move. (WinME on the same hardware did almost as well... started off so bad it couldn't even crash properly, but applied 98Lite and disabled System Restore, and it never crashed again. Best uptime was a little under 2 years. Tyan motherboard and Matrox vidcard, stable hardware makes a huge difference.)
Then again, my original DOS6 box was just as stable, and all my everyday boxen have been solid, so now rebooting is against my religion.:)
My current champ is the XP64 box at about 8 months; likewise restarted only if the power is out too long or for dinking with the hardware, tho so far it hasn't had the opportunity that its predecessor did.
The other XP box is pretty good too, normally the only thing that knocks it down is a buggy flash stick (stay away from the Lexar 140GB, it does something rude). But the real leader is its boot drive... which presently has (are you sitting down?) power-on time of 78,202 hours!
Not impressed by Win7. Don't use it much but I've noticed if anything buggers up Explorer (or anything that replaces it, eg. Ex++) it never really recovers, and will keep hanging up in the same spot until I give up and reboot. Plus lots of odd little bugs and deficiencies that unfortunately more than make up for its improvements.
Win8/10 (no, I do NOT want a *&$^# cellphone as my desktop!) are what drove me to seriously hunting for a linux I can stand to live with (been looking a long time). So far the leader of the pack is PCLinuxOS, with either Trinity or KDE (or ideally, their unholy hybrid).
Not quite. The Windows rollover bug triggered due to a bug in the system's timer chip, and not all hardware had the bug. My Tyan S1830S (440BX) motherboards certainly didn't; my unpatched Win98 (and WinME, once I got it beaten into submission) had no problem staying up for months on end.
My longest uptime in that era was WinXP (no SP) on one of the Tyans, which ran 24/7 for eight *years* with only two restarts along the way, both due to power outages beyond the UPS's capacity. And that box did all the heavy lifting.
Thanks to that, I still think rebooting more than a few times a year is embarrassing, regardless of your OS.:)
Their cost estimate seems a trifle understated. Sounds like they're using standard water-well drilling equipment, and that'll cost you between $25 and $70 per foot, depending on how soon it hits rock and how expensive such labor is in your neighborhood. (Drilling rock is pricey.)
Interesting point. Now I'm wondering what will be the intersection of automation and UBI, since I don't foresee these increases in minwage being viable in the face of automation.
OT, and my real excuse for replying: What's the source of your sig? One of the most bloody insightful quips I've ever seen.
Actually, no. Dutch Elm disease never got west of the Rockies, because the carrier beetles couldn't survive crossing the mountains. In fact elms are making a comeback in the midwest, the disease having basically killed off its food supply and run out of places to go. And some elms are resistant. Also, most of the elms in the desert are Siberian elms, not American elms.
Pepper trees and oaks do not survive under the same conditions that elms can (in fact I've never seen an oak in the desert unless it had its roots in someone's septic tank).
Honey locust is another that seems to do just fine in the desert, with zero support. Junipers are native but the young ones need to be shaded by their elders for a few years til they get established, so they are not easy to spread or cultivate.
The other trees that do well are olives and Italian stone pines (these are usually the last survivors of prolonged drought, even after all else have died), but they'll need a few wet years to get established (should not be irrigated, tho, because that prevents deep root formation). Eldarica pine and saltcedar (tamarisk) were used a lot as windrows by the now-gone farms, but they were starting to die back as of about 2005.
These are all totally without irrigation, relying only on rain and groundwater... just some I knew where to find offhand:
Italian stone pine https://goo.gl/maps/Pf3nohGQdE... Used to be plum trees there too, but they died about 2005 (and dead trees soon get demolished by the ground termites). There's a much larger stone pine about 2 miles away, but too far off the paved road for Google.
commercial olive orchard, abandoned about 40 years ago https://goo.gl/maps/1c5TzyohYh... (unfortunately since mostly cut down and replaced with a solar farm)
elms -- these are volunteers, much smaller than the ones that were destroyed by the county https://goo.gl/maps/THhUE1hKUo... (turn around and look north to see how they do next to an occasionally irrigated field)
saltcedar (left) and elm (right) https://goo.gl/maps/89kpJh5pzw... And a mile or so away, would have loved to show you a great before-and-after of a huge healthy elm, and one the same age that had been topped, but the place burned (had been abandoned since at least the 1970s) and took the trees with it.
Actually, many of the highways in the desert north of Los Angeles used to be lined with elm trees -- which when I was living there, were big mature healthy trees despite getting no supplemental water whatsoever. (Judging from a few specimens where I was able to count rings, they were planted in the 1940s.)
Used to be, you ask? The tree-topping craze killed most of them, and your tax dollars paid for it, since L.A. County contracted with a tree trimmer who severely cut back all these formerly-healthy trees. Cut off most of a tree's healthy growth and that takes away much of its water and nutrient storage, forces it to regrow leafy suckers to get enough sunlight, and next prolonged dry spell, it starts to die.
And then they contracted with another "tree service" to cut down the sad remains and grind the stumps, just in case the beleaguered trees attempted to regrow (as elms will do, being persistent buggers).
Next contract was, I shit you not, for replanting trees along those same highways, tho far as I know this one has not yet been consumated.
This all happened about 10 years ago. I wish I had before-and-after photos; the contrast was stark and startling.
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I tried q4os and exegnu (or whatever it's called) too, but found PCLOS slightly more polished. I liked KDE3/4 (which Trinity follows from) but find KDE5 endlessly frustrating, so it was off to Trinity for me. The other desktops are okay (except Gnome, which I hate) but I find them too limiting; I can't get things quite how I want 'em, either for appearance (when you stare at it all day, this matters) or just How Things Work. If I'm going to have a simplified setup, I prefer JWM.
Thanks for the tip on the hotkey app; downloaded and I'll give it a look.
I've seen LXDE setups that looked nice, and others that were what-were-they-smoking! Me, I *loathe* Adwaita (and all the "modern" flat pastel looks) and usually wind up with a weird hybrid of Oxygen and Plastik, just to get some color and texture back. You'd probably hate my desktop. :)
http://www.doomgold.com/images...
Try the Trinity desktop. Operationally closer to Windows than is Cinnamon, and more configurable. (Admittedly I miss Win+E, but that can probably be fixed.)
I've been hunting for a linux I could love since 1998, and always they're too buggy or too annoying... but I think I've finally found it in PCLinusOS with Trinity desktop.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com...
The problem with the Bay area is that it's cramped, and the easily-buildable ground has long since been used up. Either you build up the side of a mountain, or you build over farmland (much of which is swampy and a flood risk) and import your food from China, or you build way out toward Sacramento and have a 3 hour daily commute, or you don't build at all.
Consider that the permits before you can ever break ground on a single-family home are in excess of $130,000 (yes, JUST the permits!) and wonder no more why housing there is so expensive and in short supply.
About ten years ago the very cheapest residential property in nearby Pleasanton was $80,000 -- for a 400 square foot LOT with a converted single-car garage serving as the "house".
And I note that we don't hear anyone bitching about working for Facebook or how much it pays them; we just hear them bitching about how much it costs to live where both they and Facebook chose to be.
As to an ever-expanding economy and labor pool, that's only necessary to fund an ever-increasing entitlement class (exacerbated by union jobs where you can retire with full benefits at age 40). Absent that, stable or even shrinking would be as good or better (and might be better anyway).
Consider that FF's performance has become more and more sucky, and that fixes which goose it this much for megatab users are probably going to do the normal users a lot of good too.
I'd also consider that its large prey probably were no faster, for the same reason. T.rex didn't need to run any faster than its prey did.
Also, like most large carnivores today, it probably killed by attrition -- clamp on, bite chunks out of, and eat the prey alive once it stops resisting (as prey animals do fairly quickly when injured, compared to predators).
Further, large predators don't necessarily need sustained speed, especially when the prey ignores them most of the time (watch lions or hyenas walking right among water buffalo, and being entirely ignored). They just need proximity and a brief sprint.
...then they penalize you for not driving. Brilliant!
Actually, it is. Frex levothyroxin has been extensively tested not only for shelf life, but also against several different tablet binders (turns out the old-fashioned binders have up to 6x better shelf life, but the newer binders lead to fewer manufacturing-level recalls). But trying to set a specific expiration date on each drug as pilled with each of a dozen common binders is another layer of complexity that's not cost-effective to either patient or manufacturer, so from what I've seen, they generally use the low-average for the expiration date, under the theory that it's better to discard still-effective drugs than to risk a bad outcome (not to mention a lawsuit) for the patient.
And typically the drug itself is very little of the cost (most of the cost, after R&D, is packaging and distribution), and most drugs are readily produced in bulk (and largely manufactured in India), so waste is not really the issue. And especially with microdosed drugs, manufacturing fails due to the difficulties inherent in evenly distributing a few micrograms among a million tablets are a much bigger source of "waste" (frex with levothyroxin, the batch-fail rate is about 50%).
So, yeah, a lot of the expiration dates are pessimistic, and some products will remain good for years after. Others do indeed lose potency (sometimes very slowly, sometimes quite quickly), or become toxic (frex, tetracycline deteriorates on a fairly predictable schedule, and can then cause catastrophic liver failure).
Storage matters too. Cold dry conditions reduce the speed of chemical reactions, thereby extending shelf life. But do you know where that pill was stored before you put it in your freezer?
But the individual's dose generally gets adjusted according to symptoms anyway, at least with drugs where dosage truly matters.
Ah, might have had a hidden recovery partition, and dealt with existing installs fairly sanely.
I only use a phone as a phone, no apps or crap (in fact for the past couple years I've had the world's dumbest flipphone, what do you want for 12 bucks). I've also lived where the nearest connection was a fair drive away, nothing at home at all. Got a Wilson booster and went from zero bars to two bars (albeit rather spotty since it had to piggyback on the volunteer fire dept's booster), which at least sufficed for emergencies. It's USB-powered so can be used wherever you can plug it in.
Well, yeah, there is a pill to fix it... the typical cause of poor insulin metabolism is low thyroid, which is very treatable. (And TSH may still be normal, but tissue levels of T3 can be too low to function, which is why you should do the whole panel, not just the TSH test.)
Part of the problem with artificial sweeteners is that aspartame is a thyroid inhibitor, so can indeed make matters worse. When thyroid even a tish low, the body craves sugar to replace the energy it can no longer extract from its own stored fat, and pretty soon you've got a vicious cycle.
And speaking of thyroid inhibitors... when did the obesity epidemic really start? I think in the 1960s, and that the key factor was the switch from lard to shortening, which is made from soybean oil. Soy (and 3x worse, flaxseed) contains high levels of phytoestrogen, another thyroid inhibitor.
Huh. Thanks. I still have the WinME system (albeit in pieces in a box) and if I ever get around to setting it back up, I'll have to give that a look. I wonder if XP has such a function hidden somewhere?
I'm an old DOS-head myself, but got along good with Windows (I beat it into submission and it never dared misbehave)... until it left XP for parts unknown. Been trying for 18 years to find a linux that did as well for me, been damn frustrating, but lately some are to where I could live with 'em if I had to. In fact yonder frankenputer-in-progress is probably going to run PCLinuxOS with Trinity or KDE (or both), as my current favorite of the full-featured models. If I just need a boot disk, I use Puppy (Wary). I guess I like contrast. :)
I might have to try a Windows phone, given I don't like Android much. Then again, if it's basically Win8/10, I might not like it any better! but at least I'd know where to find its body parts.
My WinME was the first RTM and was never updated. Maybe they fixed the issues with System Restore in an update, I dunno. It certainly works great as of XP.
How did you restore from outside the OS? I know about restoring the registry from CLI, I've used that, but not a full system restore.
I never liked those K6-2 CPUs, but back then Acer used Supermicro mainboards and they were really solid. Had one in my W95 box, never a bit of trouble.
The trick with WinME was to apply 98Lite, then turn off System Restore. Before -- couldn't even crash properly. After -- never crashed again, and had an uptime close to 2 years (at which point it was retired in favor of XP). Resource heap management still sucked, being about on par with Win3.1, but even so it never quite fell over.
I've had zero luck with wireless and linux -- it sees the USB dongle and sees the router but can't connect.
And why won't ANY species of linux connect to my Actiontec DSL modem/router? it's set the way their tech support says should work (which is the default) but the best any distro could do was make the router sorta see it at 10Mbit (it's a gigabit router), but there was no usable connection. Gotta be a setting somewhere but I haven't found it.
Didn't have these issues with the late lightning-killed ZyXEL -- wireless invariably failed as above, but wired worked with zero effort on almost every distro I tried.
Conversely every species of Windows from W2K on up connects fine with both wired and wireless.
Win8/10 was what made me get serious again about finding a linux I could live with. And...
Try PCLinuxOS with the Trinity desktop -- it looks and behaves almost like XP, and is more flexible than Mint.
Meanwhile, XP and XP64 remain my everyday desktops. Modern? Pfttt, who cares. They work, they're stable, and they don't constantly annoy me.
Argh, yes. I finally flung up my hands, unpinned everything from Win7's taskbar, and found a tweak to reinstate QuickLaunch, tho it refuses to be over on the left where the gods intended. But at least now I have it, and don't have pinned icons and running apps mixed together into a visual stew.
Win7's faster boot time appears to be a cheat via "display the desktop, then keep doing all the other startup stuff in the background". I run a single small startup app that starts onscreen, so I get to see how long Win7 actually takes to find all its body parts -- it doesn't load startup items til after everything else, and it's really no faster than XP.
It is pretty good about hardware and drivers, tho.
I've noticed if you want a bug-free visual experience, you have to run an Aero theme, which puts sharp limits on how you can customize it without building a theme from scratch; if you use a "classic type theme, there are many subtle but visually tiring errors and inconsistencies, as if it was never properly debugged (how did all these little mistakes creep in? XP had no such issues.)
As to networking and sharing files on the network, XP64 is perfectly consistent: point at something, properties, Share, click two boxes, and it works the same everywhere. But Win7 is all over the map -- one drive will share at the root, another only folders, the third not at all -- with the same settings.
Well! You're about to meet one!!
I finally broke down and set up a Win7 box. It's on decently fast hardware that's been stable across a lot of OS tests, lots of RAM, fast HDs:
I *hate* Win7, and not just for the interface changes, which I've reverted toward XP as best I could (tho finally gave up on Windows Explorer and switched to Explorer++) .
Win7's Explorer (including anything using its APIs, like E++) is broken in subtle ways -- frex, get any sort of file error and after that it'll stall repeatedly until you give up and reboot. Many small but persistent annoyances in the interface, the userfile layout, quirks of behavior (can anyone explain why with identical settings, Win7 will share root of one drive, but not the next? and will share directories on the boot drive, but not on the data drive?)
I have none of these issues with XP nor XP64.... which will therefore remain my primary desktops for the foreseeable future. If for some reason I absolutely need to have a more "modern" desktop, well, PCLinuxOS (with KDE or Trinity) isn't bad, and at least the annoyances tend to be well-defined and specific to a single app or function, rather than scattered randomly all over the interface.
And yeah, I tried Win8/10, but if I wanted a cellphone for my desktop, I'd just use the bloody cellphone!
I will give Win7 this -- it's very good about being horsed onto different hardware (moved its boot drive to a completely different box and it just calmly reinstalled all its drivers). Performance is better than Vista, if not up to XP64 (which I have on almost identical hardware). And there are a few nice new features here and there, if insufficient to offset the annoying bits.
But the only way Win7 would ever be an everyday desktop for me is as a VM host for some other OS.
Then what the heck is the "allow applications to steal focus" setting that's been in Windows for ages? (admittedly you need to use TweakUI to get at it. But it appears to default to OFF.)
Yep, that old XP box really did have uptimes measured in years; was closing on 3 years when it got sorta retired because of a protracted crosscountry move. (WinME on the same hardware did almost as well... started off so bad it couldn't even crash properly, but applied 98Lite and disabled System Restore, and it never crashed again. Best uptime was a little under 2 years. Tyan motherboard and Matrox vidcard, stable hardware makes a huge difference.)
Then again, my original DOS6 box was just as stable, and all my everyday boxen have been solid, so now rebooting is against my religion. :)
My current champ is the XP64 box at about 8 months; likewise restarted only if the power is out too long or for dinking with the hardware, tho so far it hasn't had the opportunity that its predecessor did.
The other XP box is pretty good too, normally the only thing that knocks it down is a buggy flash stick (stay away from the Lexar 140GB, it does something rude). But the real leader is its boot drive... which presently has (are you sitting down?) power-on time of 78,202 hours!
Not impressed by Win7. Don't use it much but I've noticed if anything buggers up Explorer (or anything that replaces it, eg. Ex++) it never really recovers, and will keep hanging up in the same spot until I give up and reboot. Plus lots of odd little bugs and deficiencies that unfortunately more than make up for its improvements.
Win8/10 (no, I do NOT want a *&$^# cellphone as my desktop!) are what drove me to seriously hunting for a linux I can stand to live with (been looking a long time). So far the leader of the pack is PCLinuxOS, with either Trinity or KDE (or ideally, their unholy hybrid).
Not quite. The Windows rollover bug triggered due to a bug in the system's timer chip, and not all hardware had the bug. My Tyan S1830S (440BX) motherboards certainly didn't; my unpatched Win98 (and WinME, once I got it beaten into submission) had no problem staying up for months on end.
My longest uptime in that era was WinXP (no SP) on one of the Tyans, which ran 24/7 for eight *years* with only two restarts along the way, both due to power outages beyond the UPS's capacity. And that box did all the heavy lifting.
Thanks to that, I still think rebooting more than a few times a year is embarrassing, regardless of your OS. :)
Their cost estimate seems a trifle understated. Sounds like they're using standard water-well drilling equipment, and that'll cost you between $25 and $70 per foot, depending on how soon it hits rock and how expensive such labor is in your neighborhood. (Drilling rock is pricey.)
Interesting point. Now I'm wondering what will be the intersection of automation and UBI, since I don't foresee these increases in minwage being viable in the face of automation.
OT, and my real excuse for replying: What's the source of your sig? One of the most bloody insightful quips I've ever seen.
Actually, no. Dutch Elm disease never got west of the Rockies, because the carrier beetles couldn't survive crossing the mountains. In fact elms are making a comeback in the midwest, the disease having basically killed off its food supply and run out of places to go. And some elms are resistant. Also, most of the elms in the desert are Siberian elms, not American elms.
Pepper trees and oaks do not survive under the same conditions that elms can (in fact I've never seen an oak in the desert unless it had its roots in someone's septic tank).
Honey locust is another that seems to do just fine in the desert, with zero support. Junipers are native but the young ones need to be shaded by their elders for a few years til they get established, so they are not easy to spread or cultivate.
The other trees that do well are olives and Italian stone pines (these are usually the last survivors of prolonged drought, even after all else have died), but they'll need a few wet years to get established (should not be irrigated, tho, because that prevents deep root formation). Eldarica pine and saltcedar (tamarisk) were used a lot as windrows by the now-gone farms, but they were starting to die back as of about 2005.
These are all totally without irrigation, relying only on rain and groundwater... just some I knew where to find offhand:
Honey locust
https://goo.gl/maps/7JmTwCs7Sk...
Eldarica
https://goo.gl/maps/7KXaZyXvZX...
Italian stone pine
https://goo.gl/maps/Pf3nohGQdE...
Used to be plum trees there too, but they died about 2005 (and dead trees soon get demolished by the ground termites). There's a much larger stone pine about 2 miles away, but too far off the paved road for Google.
commercial olive orchard, abandoned about 40 years ago
https://goo.gl/maps/1c5TzyohYh...
(unfortunately since mostly cut down and replaced with a solar farm)
elms -- these are volunteers, much smaller than the ones that were destroyed by the county
https://goo.gl/maps/THhUE1hKUo...
(turn around and look north to see how they do next to an occasionally irrigated field)
native desert juniper
https://goo.gl/maps/f6AEy3e87Y...
saltcedar (left) and elm (right)
https://goo.gl/maps/89kpJh5pzw...
And a mile or so away, would have loved to show you a great before-and-after of a huge healthy elm, and one the same age that had been topped, but the place burned (had been abandoned since at least the 1970s) and took the trees with it.
Actually, many of the highways in the desert north of Los Angeles used to be lined with elm trees -- which when I was living there, were big mature healthy trees despite getting no supplemental water whatsoever. (Judging from a few specimens where I was able to count rings, they were planted in the 1940s.)
Used to be, you ask? The tree-topping craze killed most of them, and your tax dollars paid for it, since L.A. County contracted with a tree trimmer who severely cut back all these formerly-healthy trees. Cut off most of a tree's healthy growth and that takes away much of its water and nutrient storage, forces it to regrow leafy suckers to get enough sunlight, and next prolonged dry spell, it starts to die.
And then they contracted with another "tree service" to cut down the sad remains and grind the stumps, just in case the beleaguered trees attempted to regrow (as elms will do, being persistent buggers).
Next contract was, I shit you not, for replanting trees along those same highways, tho far as I know this one has not yet been consumated.
This all happened about 10 years ago. I wish I had before-and-after photos; the contrast was stark and startling.