Here's a question for 'em: Instead of forcing everyone to use the same desktop, what would be wrong with making Windows' underpinnings run various desktops, and *selling* the "Windows 8" thing as a desktop rather than as an OS?
Oh wait, isn't that what linux does? While I'm not a linux fan as such, that's one thing it does right -- you can use the same OS underneath with whatever desktop suits your fancy.
And the concept is certainly marketable -- look how well the Win95 "Plus Pack" (which was just a bunch of desktop enhancements) sold back in its day.
Before the rise of socialized medicine (and HMOs are just that, under a private label) and before health insurance became more or less mandated (via employer programs etc.).. I spent a day in hospital for $90. I went to a specialist for $10 (no waiting, I just called and came in). I had a procedure by a specialist for $60 (same day as I consulted him, no waiting). I got a whole bottle of meds for $3. Tell me how that was so much worse than $900/month for health insurance (remember, what doesn't come out of your wallet comes out of your paycheck, one way or another) and an uncertain wait to see a specialist?
In that case... WTF is with the cache in recent FF/SM/Moz family browsers? For a dozen tabs it can create 2000 directories, half of them empty. I finally put it on a RAMdisk to get rid of the massive fragmentation problem. And I discovered that the memory leak (about 100mb/day if allowed to run 24/7) is directly related to the cache -- if cache is cleared after every session, the leak becomes miniscule, a few megs instead of 100mb or more. If it weren't that I too-often have to root thru the cache to snag some file, I wouldn't let it have one at all.
I ran swapless for many years too, and the only reason I started allowing it again is because of stupid Photoshop filters that complain "not enough memory" if they don't find a swapfile. You are so right, the whole system is SO much more responsive without a swapfile (and even so sometimes on low-RAM systems).
Tho it occurs to me that since I use a RAMdisk to mitigate SM/FF's dreadful cache management, I could put a little tiny swapfile on the RAMdisk for those Stupid Filters to find...
For the past few months I've had to do a lot of Comparing Stuff Online, and that leads to as many as 25-30 tabs open 24 hours a day for 2-3 weeks at a time (any given tab is not closed til I don't need the info anymore, because when it's closed I may lose it entirely -- the pages expire, and it's a nuisance to save and reload the info).
[Speaking of Seamonkey v2.5 here] This itself did not use a huge amount of memory... what DID was the stupid cache management. Cache might have 2500 directories and 1500 files (no, that's not a typo)... WTF is with that? So I started tracking it, and the amount of cruft in the cache, mainly as empty directories, or directories with only a single file in them, was directly associated with increasing memory use. With only 4 or 5 tabs open but a "full" cache (all 100mb hacked up into a couple thousand directories) it leaks about 100mb per day. If I cleared cache after every session, then memory use was only about 120mb even with a lot of tabs open. If I didn't, memory use would just keep growing and growing (at one point it hit 1200mb, even with only 4 or 5 tabs open). This memory is not recovered until the browser is shut down and cache cleared.
Thanks to the stupid cache handling, I finally found a RAMdisk that works on WinXP and now SM's cache is on that. Its fragmentation on the HD was ridiculous, especially since it has the thousands of useless directories thing. At least it doesn't matter if the RAMdisk is fragmented all to hell (well, it does, but it only impacts itself).
"I see this ranting against corporate personhood as another form of theater."
I hadn't thought of that, but I think you've got a good point there... when times are bad, or going wrong, everyone wants a bogeyman to blame. For the gov't, it's OMG-terrorists. For the geek crowd, it's corporations.
What happens if Molycorp buys all the product the Chinese dump into the market, and resells it at more-normal prices??
I'm wondering how that would compare in terms of costs and profits, to Molycorp's own mining operations. (And why use up your own supply if some other yoyo is willing to mine it cheaply for you?)
I wind up with enough stuff on QuickLaunch that I deemed it needful to add submenus, which you do by simply adding subdirectories under the QuickLaunch folder. In fact, one of my items in QL is a shortcut to QL so I can add things quickly (drag and drop at the desktop isn't reliable; I've found at least in XP-SP3 it often causes the order of the icons to randomly migrate, which is annoying).
I also put a shortcut to the SendTo folder in QL, since that's another one I frequently change.
Ironically, one of my submenus under QL is called "Hardly Ever Used"... a handy place for stuff I hardly ever use, but can't remember the name or Start Menu location for otherwise and have grown tired of rooting around after.
Good idea, and it does help (I've done something similar, using wet towels instead of curtains).
If I have to work in the heat I wear a wet T-shirt. In our dry desert climate this is quite sufficient to keep me cool, and we've hit 122F degrees here.
Of course you can send a corporation to "jail" -- mandated downtime as a penalty for wrongdoing would be effectively identical to sending an individual to jail (mandated downtime in that person's life). It would be expensive in that the company couldn't earn any money nor make any profits for the duration, yet would still have to maintain their facilities (or let it fall to ruin, much as if you're in jail you might have to hire someone to house-sit so the tweakers don't strip the place).
However, it very likely would not be worth it in terms of human toll, since if the company is in mandated downtime, the workers are going to be out of work, because there quickly won't be any money to pay them -- no money in means no money out. So such a penalty on a corporation might be more damaging than the initial offense.... much as monetary fines and penalties ultimate must be made up as higher prices to their customers.
That's one reason I couldn't buy a Chevy, until you get back to practically an antique, they sit too low for me. I like being up a ways, not like a lifted truck but with a better vantage point than you get from an axle-eye-view. Other reasons being the infamous timing chain problem at around 130k miles (the symptom is they just won't stay properly tuned), more nickel-and-dime issues that are more likely to leave you stranded (eg. fuel line stuff), and if you really work 'em hard, they show it a lot more (thinner metal, lack of cross-bracing in the bed and tailgate). But still nothing like a Dodge for major repair bills. Not to mention Ford and Chevy parts are a helluva lot cheaper, and you can get genuine Ford parts for up to 25 years (and it makes a difference).
And I suppose the Cummins diesel has its merits (if it didn't come with that shitty underpowered Chrysler transmission attached), but you sure see a lot more old IH diesels and Powerstrokes still in service (except the 6.0, which by all accounts was a mess, thank you EPA). But Cummins has become the *fashionable* name in diesels, and if you drive anything else you must be some ignernt yahoo what don't know trucks, never mind that your old IH has 10x the miles on it and 1/10th the repair bills.
When/if my old F100 goes tires-up, I'm thinkin' about one of those middle-aged little Rangers with the "bigger" engine as an everyday runabout; good to hear I'm having Correct Thoughts.:)
As to the Mac fashion statement... I have an old Powermac G4 here, and the ONLY piece of the hardware that's not a standard IBM-compatible part is the CPU (the mobo appears to be one of those low-end Asus like eMachines used) and oh yeah, the keyboard; yet it cost 4x as much as the identical PC from two years previous (which is what it's the equivalent of), and I know cuz the receipt is still on the HD. The case is real pretty but unstable on the desk due to the funky design; the otherwise-nice Sony monitor has these weird-assed wide-stance tripod legs that require 2x the desk space to avoid falling off (it's a 17" and it wouldn't fit on the desk my old 19" did). And whose idea was a mouse cord only 18" long?? As to ease of use, it was clearly someone's first computer, and in addition to the $4000 it cost, it has another $2000 or so worth of software on it, yet it had been hardly used at all. Why? Maybe cuz the Mac interface is real pretty too, but if you don't have an existing document on the desktop, it can be hard to even FIND your programs. There's no menu; you gotta go dumpster-diving with the file manager, once you find it. But hey, it's a lot more fashionable than some cheap Winders PC, yeah! AND, it can't get *Winders* viruses (we won't mention Mac viruses, haha).
See? I am so within screaming distance of the nominal topic, I actually mentioned it in passing!:)
Living as I do within a couple hours of Beverly Hills, I see the mentality all the time... they paid $$$ for something at Macy's, so it's magically better than the exact same damn thing (remaindered, in fact) 6 months later for 10% of the money at Sam's Club.
As it happens I just saw current malware infection stats from one of the major antivirus researchers (I don't recall who by now), and for the Windows platform the infection rate was reported as... 0.7%. That's right, LESS than ONE percent. But when there are hundreds of millions of WinBoxen, that's still a lot of infected machines. *Naturally* the numbers of infected Macs look fewer when they're.. what, about 5% of the market? and you're counting total machines, not the per-capita infection rate.
[I don't believe in the much-vaunted *NIX invulnerability either, having read Hacking Exposed.]
Ha, your trucks are barely broke in. I'm drivin' a 1978 Ford F100 that I bought new. It's been more or less rebuilt over time, mainly because it's had to work like a big truck (the next one is gonna be an F350!) but it still runs good, and in 34 years it's never once left me by the side of the road.
But you are SOOO right about the Dodge owners... lotta cussin' about their high repair bills.:D (And is it just me, or do more Dodge truck owners drive like dicks?? damnear every time someone almost runs me off the road, they're in a Dodge.)
On that note, tho... I've been hunting for a used Ford, and have had all sorts of people I'd think would know better insist that I oughta buy a Dodge instead. And I'm like... so where are all the used Dodges of the era I'm looking at? (mid-90s) Oh, that's right, there ain't none!! Well, not very many, and they go for about half the money an equivalent Ford does, which oughta tell you something about the relative value of used trucks.
I dunno, I see Dodge truck owners doing it all the time... they paid too much money for that fashion statement so it's *gotta* be way better than the Ford truck. But guess which one spends more time in the shop and is less likely to survive hard use and reach a ripe old age.
Way back in the Olden Days of modems and floppy disks, the common saying among Mac users was "Viruses are a way of life" and BMUG issued weekly updates to their free antivirus for the Mac. So it ain't like there's no history there....
Never heard of him, but sounds like another Larry Elder, whom I greatly respect... [goes off, finds Dr.Williams' column] Yep, off in that same direction.
[plaintively] Since there clearly are plenty of sensible black folks available, why didn't we elect one of them instead??
And historically, where do you think your heirloom varieties came from? A: From the selective breeding and hybridization efforts of the distant past. They didn't all just magically appear as sports in someone's garden.
Oh, and what *is* a sport? A: an unexpected mutation or accidental hybrid. Many sports of the past are the heirloom varieties of the present.
While I agree with you about the quality and value (both as food and historically) of heirloom varieties, let's not kid ourselves that they're not the product of *someone's* attempt to manipulate nature. Otherwise we'd be grinding our teeth to the roots eating wild maize, not enjoying heirloom sweet corn.
We kinda already had this. Older motherboards (we're talking back in the 486 era) commonly had a boot-protection scheme, occasionally accessed via a jumper or more often via a BIOS setting. Set the machine up how you wanted, turn on the boot protection, and it would scream bloody murder (literally -- it produced a flashing red screen and a very loud siren) if anything tried to muck about with the MBR.
In fact to this day you can pretty much map the education level in Africa as an overlay of the British colonies, which had a policy of setting up schools for the locals everywhere they went. I'd also hazard that you can map the fading of this influence with another overlay of how much "self-determination" (read: corruption) each country has had since the end of the British Empire.
And if you want to see how it was where there was never really strong colonial control, I'd suggest observing the current warlords of the central Sahara.
Agreed re the handouts -- there's a big difference between loaning a guy a shovel so he can dig a ditch, and putting all the local ditchdiggers out of work.
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Got your goat, eh? :)
Here's a question for 'em: Instead of forcing everyone to use the same desktop, what would be wrong with making Windows' underpinnings run various desktops, and *selling* the "Windows 8" thing as a desktop rather than as an OS?
Oh wait, isn't that what linux does? While I'm not a linux fan as such, that's one thing it does right -- you can use the same OS underneath with whatever desktop suits your fancy.
And the concept is certainly marketable -- look how well the Win95 "Plus Pack" (which was just a bunch of desktop enhancements) sold back in its day.
Before the rise of socialized medicine (and HMOs are just that, under a private label) and before health insurance became more or less mandated (via employer programs etc.) .. I spent a day in hospital for $90. I went to a specialist for $10 (no waiting, I just called and came in). I had a procedure by a specialist for $60 (same day as I consulted him, no waiting). I got a whole bottle of meds for $3. Tell me how that was so much worse than $900/month for health insurance (remember, what doesn't come out of your wallet comes out of your paycheck, one way or another) and an uncertain wait to see a specialist?
In that case... WTF is with the cache in recent FF/SM/Moz family browsers? For a dozen tabs it can create 2000 directories, half of them empty. I finally put it on a RAMdisk to get rid of the massive fragmentation problem. And I discovered that the memory leak (about 100mb/day if allowed to run 24/7) is directly related to the cache -- if cache is cleared after every session, the leak becomes miniscule, a few megs instead of 100mb or more. If it weren't that I too-often have to root thru the cache to snag some file, I wouldn't let it have one at all.
I ran swapless for many years too, and the only reason I started allowing it again is because of stupid Photoshop filters that complain "not enough memory" if they don't find a swapfile. You are so right, the whole system is SO much more responsive without a swapfile (and even so sometimes on low-RAM systems).
Tho it occurs to me that since I use a RAMdisk to mitigate SM/FF's dreadful cache management, I could put a little tiny swapfile on the RAMdisk for those Stupid Filters to find...
For the past few months I've had to do a lot of Comparing Stuff Online, and that leads to as many as 25-30 tabs open 24 hours a day for 2-3 weeks at a time (any given tab is not closed til I don't need the info anymore, because when it's closed I may lose it entirely -- the pages expire, and it's a nuisance to save and reload the info).
[Speaking of Seamonkey v2.5 here] This itself did not use a huge amount of memory... what DID was the stupid cache management. Cache might have 2500 directories and 1500 files (no, that's not a typo)... WTF is with that? So I started tracking it, and the amount of cruft in the cache, mainly as empty directories, or directories with only a single file in them, was directly associated with increasing memory use. With only 4 or 5 tabs open but a "full" cache (all 100mb hacked up into a couple thousand directories) it leaks about 100mb per day. If I cleared cache after every session, then memory use was only about 120mb even with a lot of tabs open. If I didn't, memory use would just keep growing and growing (at one point it hit 1200mb, even with only 4 or 5 tabs open). This memory is not recovered until the browser is shut down and cache cleared.
Thanks to the stupid cache handling, I finally found a RAMdisk that works on WinXP and now SM's cache is on that. Its fragmentation on the HD was ridiculous, especially since it has the thousands of useless directories thing. At least it doesn't matter if the RAMdisk is fragmented all to hell (well, it does, but it only impacts itself).
"I see this ranting against corporate personhood as another form of theater."
I hadn't thought of that, but I think you've got a good point there... when times are bad, or going wrong, everyone wants a bogeyman to blame. For the gov't, it's OMG-terrorists. For the geek crowd, it's corporations.
"With his policies, Obama is targeting a carefully selected portfolio of voters in order to get reelected, regardless of the long term consequences."
This sounds remarkably similar to how corporate bean counters maximize short-term stock market numbers at the expense of long-term company viability.
What happens if Molycorp buys all the product the Chinese dump into the market, and resells it at more-normal prices??
I'm wondering how that would compare in terms of costs and profits, to Molycorp's own mining operations. (And why use up your own supply if some other yoyo is willing to mine it cheaply for you?)
I wind up with enough stuff on QuickLaunch that I deemed it needful to add submenus, which you do by simply adding subdirectories under the QuickLaunch folder. In fact, one of my items in QL is a shortcut to QL so I can add things quickly (drag and drop at the desktop isn't reliable; I've found at least in XP-SP3 it often causes the order of the icons to randomly migrate, which is annoying).
I also put a shortcut to the SendTo folder in QL, since that's another one I frequently change.
Ironically, one of my submenus under QL is called "Hardly Ever Used" ... a handy place for stuff I hardly ever use, but can't remember the name or Start Menu location for otherwise and have grown tired of rooting around after.
Good idea, and it does help (I've done something similar, using wet towels instead of curtains).
If I have to work in the heat I wear a wet T-shirt. In our dry desert climate this is quite sufficient to keep me cool, and we've hit 122F degrees here.
Of course you can send a corporation to "jail" -- mandated downtime as a penalty for wrongdoing would be effectively identical to sending an individual to jail (mandated downtime in that person's life). It would be expensive in that the company couldn't earn any money nor make any profits for the duration, yet would still have to maintain their facilities (or let it fall to ruin, much as if you're in jail you might have to hire someone to house-sit so the tweakers don't strip the place).
However, it very likely would not be worth it in terms of human toll, since if the company is in mandated downtime, the workers are going to be out of work, because there quickly won't be any money to pay them -- no money in means no money out. So such a penalty on a corporation might be more damaging than the initial offense.... much as monetary fines and penalties ultimate must be made up as higher prices to their customers.
Couldn't such a system use tidewater as its "motive force" for the needful moving water??
That's one reason I couldn't buy a Chevy, until you get back to practically an antique, they sit too low for me. I like being up a ways, not like a lifted truck but with a better vantage point than you get from an axle-eye-view. Other reasons being the infamous timing chain problem at around 130k miles (the symptom is they just won't stay properly tuned), more nickel-and-dime issues that are more likely to leave you stranded (eg. fuel line stuff), and if you really work 'em hard, they show it a lot more (thinner metal, lack of cross-bracing in the bed and tailgate). But still nothing like a Dodge for major repair bills. Not to mention Ford and Chevy parts are a helluva lot cheaper, and you can get genuine Ford parts for up to 25 years (and it makes a difference).
And I suppose the Cummins diesel has its merits (if it didn't come with that shitty underpowered Chrysler transmission attached), but you sure see a lot more old IH diesels and Powerstrokes still in service (except the 6.0, which by all accounts was a mess, thank you EPA). But Cummins has become the *fashionable* name in diesels, and if you drive anything else you must be some ignernt yahoo what don't know trucks, never mind that your old IH has 10x the miles on it and 1/10th the repair bills.
When/if my old F100 goes tires-up, I'm thinkin' about one of those middle-aged little Rangers with the "bigger" engine as an everyday runabout; good to hear I'm having Correct Thoughts. :)
As to the Mac fashion statement... I have an old Powermac G4 here, and the ONLY piece of the hardware that's not a standard IBM-compatible part is the CPU (the mobo appears to be one of those low-end Asus like eMachines used) and oh yeah, the keyboard; yet it cost 4x as much as the identical PC from two years previous (which is what it's the equivalent of), and I know cuz the receipt is still on the HD. The case is real pretty but unstable on the desk due to the funky design; the otherwise-nice Sony monitor has these weird-assed wide-stance tripod legs that require 2x the desk space to avoid falling off (it's a 17" and it wouldn't fit on the desk my old 19" did). And whose idea was a mouse cord only 18" long?? As to ease of use, it was clearly someone's first computer, and in addition to the $4000 it cost, it has another $2000 or so worth of software on it, yet it had been hardly used at all. Why? Maybe cuz the Mac interface is real pretty too, but if you don't have an existing document on the desktop, it can be hard to even FIND your programs. There's no menu; you gotta go dumpster-diving with the file manager, once you find it. But hey, it's a lot more fashionable than some cheap Winders PC, yeah! AND, it can't get *Winders* viruses (we won't mention Mac viruses, haha).
See? I am so within screaming distance of the nominal topic, I actually mentioned it in passing! :)
Living as I do within a couple hours of Beverly Hills, I see the mentality all the time... they paid $$$ for something at Macy's, so it's magically better than the exact same damn thing (remaindered, in fact) 6 months later for 10% of the money at Sam's Club.
As it happens I just saw current malware infection stats from one of the major antivirus researchers (I don't recall who by now), and for the Windows platform the infection rate was reported as ... 0.7%. That's right, LESS than ONE percent. But when there are hundreds of millions of WinBoxen, that's still a lot of infected machines. *Naturally* the numbers of infected Macs look fewer when they're.. what, about 5% of the market? and you're counting total machines, not the per-capita infection rate.
[I don't believe in the much-vaunted *NIX invulnerability either, having read Hacking Exposed.]
Ha, your trucks are barely broke in. I'm drivin' a 1978 Ford F100 that I bought new. It's been more or less rebuilt over time, mainly because it's had to work like a big truck (the next one is gonna be an F350!) but it still runs good, and in 34 years it's never once left me by the side of the road.
But you are SOOO right about the Dodge owners... lotta cussin' about their high repair bills. :D (And is it just me, or do more Dodge truck owners drive like dicks?? damnear every time someone almost runs me off the road, they're in a Dodge.)
On that note, tho... I've been hunting for a used Ford, and have had all sorts of people I'd think would know better insist that I oughta buy a Dodge instead. And I'm like... so where are all the used Dodges of the era I'm looking at? (mid-90s) Oh, that's right, there ain't none!! Well, not very many, and they go for about half the money an equivalent Ford does, which oughta tell you something about the relative value of used trucks.
I dunno, I see Dodge truck owners doing it all the time... they paid too much money for that fashion statement so it's *gotta* be way better than the Ford truck. But guess which one spends more time in the shop and is less likely to survive hard use and reach a ripe old age.
Way back in the Olden Days of modems and floppy disks, the common saying among Mac users was "Viruses are a way of life" and BMUG issued weekly updates to their free antivirus for the Mac. So it ain't like there's no history there....
Never heard of him, but sounds like another Larry Elder, whom I greatly respect...
[goes off, finds Dr.Williams' column]
Yep, off in that same direction.
[plaintively] Since there clearly are plenty of sensible black folks available, why didn't we elect one of them instead??
And historically, where do you think your heirloom varieties came from? A: From the selective breeding and hybridization efforts of the distant past. They didn't all just magically appear as sports in someone's garden.
Oh, and what *is* a sport? A: an unexpected mutation or accidental hybrid. Many sports of the past are the heirloom varieties of the present.
While I agree with you about the quality and value (both as food and historically) of heirloom varieties, let's not kid ourselves that they're not the product of *someone's* attempt to manipulate nature. Otherwise we'd be grinding our teeth to the roots eating wild maize, not enjoying heirloom sweet corn.
Reminds me of something older:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_(1972_film)
And by then maybe we'd realise we don't *need* 90% of that federal government, and will have sense enough to NOT rebuild it.
We kinda already had this. Older motherboards (we're talking back in the 486 era) commonly had a boot-protection scheme, occasionally accessed via a jumper or more often via a BIOS setting. Set the machine up how you wanted, turn on the boot protection, and it would scream bloody murder (literally -- it produced a flashing red screen and a very loud siren) if anything tried to muck about with the MBR.
[goes off, googles: kill with baseball bat]
Appears it may be not so uncommon, accidental or otherwise.
In fact to this day you can pretty much map the education level in Africa as an overlay of the British colonies, which had a policy of setting up schools for the locals everywhere they went. I'd also hazard that you can map the fading of this influence with another overlay of how much "self-determination" (read: corruption) each country has had since the end of the British Empire.
And if you want to see how it was where there was never really strong colonial control, I'd suggest observing the current warlords of the central Sahara.
Agreed re the handouts -- there's a big difference between loaning a guy a shovel so he can dig a ditch, and putting all the local ditchdiggers out of work.
And if the average citizen of Paris was armed, how many pickpockets do you think there'd be?
You'll find a bug in every fragged cluster...