Glad you said this, saved me the same rant... and big thanks to Munk's reply with the direct links.
Hell, the EMBED tag supports alternative content, couldn't they at least use that?
Side note: I learned about the alt-content when I was cleaning up a flash-based site in Frontpage XP of all things (Fp being the only app I've found that can reliably clean up Dreamweaver-caused messes), and FP asked me if I wanted to include alt-content for non-flash visitors. YES YES YES! And happy we were, til I had to run the site back thru Dreamweaver -- which REMOVED the alt-content without even asking me. *MRNG*
Very interesting. Seems America is in the same situation as 1870s Europe, while China is now the new America.
ISTM an argument might be made that Europe never really recovered, which eventually led to WW1. One wonders if there is a parallel in our recent willingness to shoot up parts of Asia in the name of Democracy.
Sometimes I think a return to relative isolationism might not be a bad thing.
"Here's an idea, how about we disband corporations that break the law and sell off all their assets? Corporate death penalty."
While I agree with you in principle -- what happens to the people whose jobs will then get downsized, as happens with every merger -- and face it, this is a forced merger (albeit perhaps of various parts rather than all at once). And what happens to consumers who can no longer buy the late company's desirable or even necessary products, or whose warranties no longer exist?
And I can foresee this being abused as an exit-and-acquisition strategy: commit wrongdoings knowing that the feds will dismantle the company, then be "part of the solution" by being hired for big bucks by the acquiring company, while said acquiring company gets the assets for fire-sale prices. (I vaguely recall that something like this was indeed common practice in the past.) If current oversight isn't catching abuses, what makes you think future oversight will do better?
So while I love your idea in principle, the problems such a solution can generate could be worse than the disease.
My alltime most loved wine came from an Idaho vineyard. Unfortunately I've reached the conclusion that it was a mistake or fluke, because I've not liked their other products nearly as well.
I haven't found it uniformly so. Some cheap white wines mellow out over time, after they're opened. I've sometimes rejected a wine because it just didn't taste good, thrust it back into the fridge (opened, mind you, tho with the cork shoved back in), and forgotten it for months... when next I taste it, it's lost that rawness that I dislike about many wines, and become both more tasty and more drinkable.
I wouldn't have thought it would work that way -- I'd expected to wind up with a bottle of vinegar, but several times have been pleasantly surprised.
An AC suggests gparted as included on the Ubuntu live CD... um, how do I get to that? last time I tried Ubuntu, v8, the default partitioner that comes up during install went thru the motions but did nothing. Doesn't sound like the same tool...??
Thanks very much! Your words gave me enlightenment.:D
(Really, they did. I experienced a small but worthy breakthrough in my still-dim understanding of linux.)
In the past I'd let Ubuntu do whatever it wanted (it's been test-flown on a dedicated system); this last time, v8 went thru the motions but neither repartitioned the disk (I tried both manual and automatic) nor installed anything. [scratching head] Next time I venture into linux, it's back to Mandrake, er, Mandriva for me!
I vaguely recall that Partition Magic recent-version does linux filesystems -- presumably one could apply that in the usual way to kill or shrink an unloved swap partition, not much different from merging FAT partitions. -- Is there a FOSSish PMagic replacement that's *reliable*? I've become disenchanted with the latest incarnation (crappy activation scheme and no floppy-usable component).
Hell if I know... my XP machine has been running 24/7 for over 6 years and it's never been a problem. (It's almost never rebooted, either. Uptime record is 11 months.) That box has 768mb RAM; the most I've ever caught WinXPPro using is about 450mb, and that was when I had a bunch of image-editing apps up at once. Otherwise its main jobs are handling my digital camera, making backups of clients' data, and playing DVDs and other media.
Its almost-twin brother (with 1GB RAM) with Win98 has never complained either, other than as noted, and it's run 24/7 since 2001.
How do you set linux to have no swapfile? Use small words, linux is not my native tongue:)
I've been running Win98 and XP with no swapfile for years; as noted above, the only thing that complains are a few stupid Photoshop plugins. When system RAM considerably exceeds the OS's max usage, why waste time swapping it out?
The "how much swapfile" question is the oldest troll in the book:)
However... since I'm here anyway...
On machines with more RAM than Windows reasonably uses, ie. over 512mb, I've been running without ANY swapfile for the last 10 years, or with only a very small swapfile when some braindead app insists on it (the only things I've encountered with this issue are Photoshop plugins). Performance is better and nothing else gripes about it.
Hmm.... How much does linux really need? Can its swap function be turned off entirely, on systems with RAM exceeding its needs? if so, how does one do that?
Exactly. Believe whatever claptrap you like so long as you don't put it onto MY life. Then you get points for honest AND you get points for defending my rights.
Unfortunately, elections get won or lost on people failing to grok this. Frex, when Reardon ran for Gov of CA... he said that he personally didn't believe in abortion, but that he had no right to impose that belief on anyone else. This was quickly twisted around to "Reardon will do away with your right to get an abortion!"
Yep... most people would rather have five dollars today, than one dollar today and a dollar every week for life. Didn't used to be that way.:(
It's akin to the psychological difference between "being poor" and having no money. Give the "poor" person five bucks and he'll buy a McBurger and a lottery ticket. Give the person with no money five bucks, and he'll buy enough food to cook meals for a week.
I grew up in a household with no money, but we were NEVER "poor".
If that's so... ISTM that we'd have been a lot better off trying to get a "sphere of influence" started in... oh, say, Russia or India, either of which might have been more interested in an alliance than a war.
I've wondered about that too. How does someone with $3000/month income get into a $3000/month mortgage?? Oh, adjustable rates. THIS year it's just $1000. NEXT year, it'll be $3000. You'll get a raise by then, won't you??
From your previous post, "We stopped seeing homes as a place to live, and starting seeing them as a way to make a quick buck by "flipping" them after some minor improvements."
No shit. And the upshot is that now ordinary people on ordinary wages can no longer afford to buy an ordinary house, and often can't afford to RENT it either.
This is the same mentality as everywhere tho -- CEOs are doing the same thing with business. Get in, "improve" the bottom line, grab that golden parachute, get out before the "improvements" collapse the business; take your very selective resume to the next company, rinse and repeat. It's just flipping for businesses.
No one seems content with steady and stable anymore. Gotta have "growth" or they're not happy.
Yep... and I agree, neither McCain nor Palin has a simon-pure record.
But I recently started reading one of Obama's own books (The Audacity of Hope)...Oh dear. This is NOT a safe personality to hold that much power. This guy has WAY too much baggage, AND lets it control and shape his behaviour and his viewpoints... and how he expresses that reminds me WAY too strongly of certain schizos I've had the misfortune of knowing.
And having known too many people with similar "issues" in Real Life, I find that more scary than I do an outright self-serving asshole. Given these choices, I'll take the asshole over the psycho.
And most of the time it's okay to understand something well enough for all practical purposes, rather than perfectly. We may not perfectly understand gravity, but apples still reliably fall from trees.
An old story that illustrates this, uh, well enough for all practical purposes;) ===========
All the boys and girls in a high school are arranged on opposite sides of a gym. This question is posed to a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer:
If the boys and the girls decrease the distance between them by 1/2 every 20 seconds, how long will it be until they meet?
The mathematician recognizes the rule of halves and says, "They will meet in an infinite amount of time."
The physicist says, "There's no such thing as infinite time... they will never meet."
The engineer says, "Well, in about 5 minutes they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
That's become my problem with Obama, and my present picture was generated entirely by his own words. I don't give a flip if he was raised Muslim, or Communist, or Martian; people can learn new values and overcome how they were raised. What bothers me is that he seems to overvalue his self-image of having been being part of these ideologies, and seems to value them FOR being on the fringe (in American terms, anyway).
I wouldn't care if he was an honest Muslim. I might not even care if he was an honest Communist, at least then I'd know what we're being sold. But this identifying with the fringes business... I've known too many people like that in Real Life. I'd be seriously afraid of them being in major office.
Slashdot Mirror
Frontpage ENCOURAGES you to use alt-content for flash, even if you don't know enough to do so (in fact that's how I learned it could be done).
Dreamweaver REMOVES that alt-content, without even asking permission!!
Such was my experience when I had to work on a flash-based website. And guess which editor most flash-centric sites are built with.
Glad you said this, saved me the same rant... and big thanks to Munk's reply with the direct links.
Hell, the EMBED tag supports alternative content, couldn't they at least use that?
Side note: I learned about the alt-content when I was cleaning up a flash-based site in Frontpage XP of all things (Fp being the only app I've found that can reliably clean up Dreamweaver-caused messes), and FP asked me if I wanted to include alt-content for non-flash visitors. YES YES YES! And happy we were, til I had to run the site back thru Dreamweaver -- which REMOVED the alt-content without even asking me. *MRNG*
Very interesting. Seems America is in the same situation as 1870s Europe, while China is now the new America.
ISTM an argument might be made that Europe never really recovered, which eventually led to WW1. One wonders if there is a parallel in our recent willingness to shoot up parts of Asia in the name of Democracy.
Sometimes I think a return to relative isolationism might not be a bad thing.
"Here's an idea, how about we disband corporations that break the law and sell off all their assets? Corporate death penalty."
While I agree with you in principle -- what happens to the people whose jobs will then get downsized, as happens with every merger -- and face it, this is a forced merger (albeit perhaps of various parts rather than all at once). And what happens to consumers who can no longer buy the late company's desirable or even necessary products, or whose warranties no longer exist?
And I can foresee this being abused as an exit-and-acquisition strategy: commit wrongdoings knowing that the feds will dismantle the company, then be "part of the solution" by being hired for big bucks by the acquiring company, while said acquiring company gets the assets for fire-sale prices. (I vaguely recall that something like this was indeed common practice in the past.) If current oversight isn't catching abuses, what makes you think future oversight will do better?
So while I love your idea in principle, the problems such a solution can generate could be worse than the disease.
There are vineyards in Idaho, too.
My alltime most loved wine came from an Idaho vineyard. Unfortunately I've reached the conclusion that it was a mistake or fluke, because I've not liked their other products nearly as well.
I haven't found it uniformly so. Some cheap white wines mellow out over time, after they're opened. I've sometimes rejected a wine because it just didn't taste good, thrust it back into the fridge (opened, mind you, tho with the cork shoved back in), and forgotten it for months... when next I taste it, it's lost that rawness that I dislike about many wines, and become both more tasty and more drinkable.
I wouldn't have thought it would work that way -- I'd expected to wind up with a bottle of vinegar, but several times have been pleasantly surprised.
An AC suggests gparted as included on the Ubuntu live CD... um, how do I get to that? last time I tried Ubuntu, v8, the default partitioner that comes up during install went thru the motions but did nothing. Doesn't sound like the same tool...??
A six year old unpatched Windows :)
It doesn't have net access, so if it ain't borked, I don't fix it.
Thanks very much! Your words gave me enlightenment. :D
(Really, they did. I experienced a small but worthy breakthrough in my still-dim understanding of linux.)
In the past I'd let Ubuntu do whatever it wanted (it's been test-flown on a dedicated system); this last time, v8 went thru the motions but neither repartitioned the disk (I tried both manual and automatic) nor installed anything. [scratching head] Next time I venture into linux, it's back to Mandrake, er, Mandriva for me!
I vaguely recall that Partition Magic recent-version does linux filesystems -- presumably one could apply that in the usual way to kill or shrink an unloved swap partition, not much different from merging FAT partitions. -- Is there a FOSSish PMagic replacement that's *reliable*? I've become disenchanted with the latest incarnation (crappy activation scheme and no floppy-usable component).
Hell if I know... my XP machine has been running 24/7 for over 6 years and it's never been a problem. (It's almost never rebooted, either. Uptime record is 11 months.) That box has 768mb RAM; the most I've ever caught WinXPPro using is about 450mb, and that was when I had a bunch of image-editing apps up at once. Otherwise its main jobs are handling my digital camera, making backups of clients' data, and playing DVDs and other media.
Its almost-twin brother (with 1GB RAM) with Win98 has never complained either, other than as noted, and it's run 24/7 since 2001.
So, dark matter is stuff that isn't there??
Reminds me of this:
As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away!!
[pulls ZPM, hooks it up to something more useful]
***POP***
Ooops...
How do you set linux to have no swapfile? Use small words, linux is not my native tongue :)
I've been running Win98 and XP with no swapfile for years; as noted above, the only thing that complains are a few stupid Photoshop plugins. When system RAM considerably exceeds the OS's max usage, why waste time swapping it out?
The "how much swapfile" question is the oldest troll in the book :)
However... since I'm here anyway...
On machines with more RAM than Windows reasonably uses, ie. over 512mb, I've been running without ANY swapfile for the last 10 years, or with only a very small swapfile when some braindead app insists on it (the only things I've encountered with this issue are Photoshop plugins). Performance is better and nothing else gripes about it.
Hmm.... How much does linux really need? Can its swap function be turned off entirely, on systems with RAM exceeding its needs? if so, how does one do that?
Actually, they seem to have patented the absence of ideas, which is to say, they've patented -- Nothing. ;)
Exactly. Believe whatever claptrap you like so long as you don't put it onto MY life. Then you get points for honest AND you get points for defending my rights.
Unfortunately, elections get won or lost on people failing to grok this. Frex, when Reardon ran for Gov of CA... he said that he personally didn't believe in abortion, but that he had no right to impose that belief on anyone else. This was quickly twisted around to "Reardon will do away with your right to get an abortion!"
Interesting. Now, what if something similar were done today? get rid of the "lack of information propagation" part, and how would this work?
Yep... most people would rather have five dollars today, than one dollar today and a dollar every week for life. Didn't used to be that way. :(
It's akin to the psychological difference between "being poor" and having no money. Give the "poor" person five bucks and he'll buy a McBurger and a lottery ticket. Give the person with no money five bucks, and he'll buy enough food to cook meals for a week.
I grew up in a household with no money, but we were NEVER "poor".
If that's so... ISTM that we'd have been a lot better off trying to get a "sphere of influence" started in ... oh, say, Russia or India, either of which might have been more interested in an alliance than a war.
I've wondered about that too. How does someone with $3000/month income get into a $3000/month mortgage?? Oh, adjustable rates. THIS year it's just $1000. NEXT year, it'll be $3000. You'll get a raise by then, won't you??
From your previous post, "We stopped seeing homes as a place to live, and starting seeing them as a way to make a quick buck by "flipping" them after some minor improvements."
No shit. And the upshot is that now ordinary people on ordinary wages can no longer afford to buy an ordinary house, and often can't afford to RENT it either.
Check out these threads for how it affects real people in real life:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/montana/44408-why-some-people-so-mad.html
This is the same mentality as everywhere tho -- CEOs are doing the same thing with business. Get in, "improve" the bottom line, grab that golden parachute, get out before the "improvements" collapse the business; take your very selective resume to the next company, rinse and repeat. It's just flipping for businesses.
No one seems content with steady and stable anymore. Gotta have "growth" or they're not happy.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed all that :/
Yep... and I agree, neither McCain nor Palin has a simon-pure record.
But I recently started reading one of Obama's own books (The Audacity of Hope) ...Oh dear. This is NOT a safe personality to hold that much power. This guy has WAY too much baggage, AND lets it control and shape his behaviour and his viewpoints ... and how he expresses that reminds me WAY too strongly of certain schizos I've had the misfortune of knowing.
And having known too many people with similar "issues" in Real Life, I find that more scary than I do an outright self-serving asshole. Given these choices, I'll take the asshole over the psycho.
Help yourself... I first heard it from my college Physics professor, in 1972 :)
And most of the time it's okay to understand something well enough for all practical purposes, rather than perfectly. We may not perfectly understand gravity, but apples still reliably fall from trees.
An old story that illustrates this, uh, well enough for all practical purposes ;)
===========
All the boys and girls in a high school are arranged on opposite sides of a gym. This question is posed to a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer:
If the boys and the girls decrease the distance between them by 1/2 every 20 seconds, how long will it be until they meet?
The mathematician recognizes the rule of halves and says, "They will meet in an infinite amount of time."
The physicist says, "There's no such thing as infinite time... they will never meet."
The engineer says, "Well, in about 5 minutes they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
That's become my problem with Obama, and my present picture was generated entirely by his own words. I don't give a flip if he was raised Muslim, or Communist, or Martian; people can learn new values and overcome how they were raised. What bothers me is that he seems to overvalue his self-image of having been being part of these ideologies, and seems to value them FOR being on the fringe (in American terms, anyway).
I wouldn't care if he was an honest Muslim. I might not even care if he was an honest Communist, at least then I'd know what we're being sold. But this identifying with the fringes business... I've known too many people like that in Real Life. I'd be seriously afraid of them being in major office.