Ah, yes. Even compressed, this version better conveys the intended sense of the old maxim.
Wonder who was the first to codify it? I *think* I first saw it in some 1950s SF, and it was probably old then. Can't find the credit offhand (and I know it wasn't Brunner, because I don't read him).
Okay, so a little bitty program that generates the appropriate and matching registry entry... Even so, hardly so difficult that it's worth alienating any growing segment of their userbase... They'd best remember that eventually Vista will be 90% of their userbase (if Vista follows the same OEM-generated patterns as all its ancestors).
Well, that would be me. I have everything set so I can see it, and I think rooting around with RegEdit is "normal". My first move when confronted with a misbehaving system is to restart in DOS and have my way with the core files. And so on.
A lot of my frustration with linux comes from the tools being too hidden, with no surface clues as to where I should look for answers. I feel like I'm being shown aliases of the data, but not the data itself.
Maybe someone could compile the old DOS utility LIST (v6 source is public domain) for linux...
My experience parallels yours, and I maintain a similar array of systems. Fact is, Windows is extremely tolerant of "bad users"; in my experience it takes at least 3 years of *total* neglect to start showing negative effects, or a great deal of junkware and random deletia to mess it up beyond recall. Abuse a linux box the same way and see how long it lasts!
In my observation, linux does indeed need more fault tolerance and recovery capacity, and this video failsafe mechanism is a big step in the right direction. (Speaking as one who has been repeatedly frustrated in my efforts to find a wholly-satisfactory replacement for Windows.)
BTW if you don't know about ToniArts Easycleaner, you'll want to add it to your toolkit; by far the best registry scrubber. Tests best in every evaluation I've seen, and I've been using it routinely for 6 years and have never seen it screw up (and I've hand-vetted what it wants to kill). Freeware from http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/
There's got to be some easier solution -- maybe set up a temporary server where any affected users wind up by default, whose sole mission in life is to provide the fix, in the form of a tiny fix.reg file to download, and brief instructions. That way anyone having the problem can't help but trip over the solution.
Like it or not, ISPs can't turn their back on Vista forever, and not everyone already running it is going to hear about the fix. All they'll know is that "my internet is broken" -- and they'll tell all their friends "how crappy this ISP's service is". NOT good publicity, tho given what the ISP had to say for themselves, not entirely undeserved.
Reinstalling is against my religion... The only times I've seen a Windows system that was so fucked up I couldn't fix it, was when it had been abused and neglected for years on end, by installing every piece of shitware that came down the pipe, and "uninstalling" by randomly deleting the more-visible parts, and never once giving it any basic maintenance (kill tempfiles, defrag, run a registry scrubber).
The fact is, the average Windows system withstands a huge amount of outright abuse before it becomes unusable; what would happen to a linux box that suffered the same abuse?? Seriously -- what happens if you install every sort of incompatible shitware on your linux box, then uninstall it by deleting whatever you see that happens to have a remotely-similar name? I'd bet the results are no prettier than they are with Windows.
A big problem in geekdom is "I hate it, therefore I refuse to maintain it". Frex, a friend of mine loves DOS and Netware, and hates Windows. So he let his Windows box get into a state of neglect that he would never countanance on his Netware server or his DOS machine. So naturally the poor Windows box finally got unstable -- after 4 years of total neglect. I spent 10 minutes doing basic cleanup, defragged it, and it was good as new.
"I gave linux to my parents and it worked forever" doesn't count -- your parents are too afraid of their computer to mess with it much. If you really want to see how stable it is, give a linux box to someone who knows just enough about linux to be dangerous, and who can't resist installing everything they ever hear about, then when things get cranky, randomly mucks about with its innards. If it can gracefully survive that, without needing either a serious geek doctoring or an outright reinstall, then you can compare it to the abuse that Windows ROUTINELY survives.
See, this failsafe video thing recognises that -- because resolution is one of those things people who know just enough to be dangerous most often fuck with. So it needs to have a fallback mechanism (which BTW Windows has had for 12 years), both for the event of a hardware issue, and so users can't dig themselves into a hole they can't get out of. So hooray for Ubuntu, it's about bloody time, and I'll be ordering a new set of CDs right soon now.
As I just said in another post, the problem seems to be that many linux distros require VESA 2.0 support *IN HARDWARE*, and if this is absent (as can be the case even on modern video cards) the linux installer will freeze solid first time it tries to go into graphics mode.
I twigged to this when I realised that for some distros, on otherwise-identical hardware, the only difference between success and failure was whether the video card was S3 (no VESA 2.0 support in hardware) or Matrox (VESA 2.0 support in hardware).
Presumably some distros DO have software VESA 2.0 support, so they don't encounter the issue.
It would be nice to have this info up front; it would save a lot of "it doesn't work!" complaints.
I've frequently seen commercially-pressed linux install CDs fail to work -- they get as far as switching from text to graphical mode, then freeze solid.
The problem seems to be whether the VIDEO HARDWARE supports VESA 2.0 or not (and amazingly enough, even some halfway-modern cards don't). If not, the assorted linux installers apparently have no fallback and simply die when they try to invoke the VESA 2.0 graphics mode. But in no case did the installer test the video card FIRST.
"e)The fix is to set a registry key, which is easy for technical users, but a pain for those who don't know about it."
But it =can= be rendered very simple for nontechnical users: "Here's a fixkey.reg file. Save it somewhere, doubleclick on it, YES you want to add it to the registry, restart your system." I suppose there is an additional admin-permissions step in Vista, but... no reason the ISP couldn't provide the fix.
In fact, I got the feeling from the WFI site that *they* are the ones having trouble controlling their impulses toward children. There's something ugly going on in those minds, above and beyond just hating anyone they perceive as "immoral".
So what about all my old vinyl that has not been and will NEVER be released on CD? don't I have a right to format-shift it just as I would with a CD? how do they lose money if someone else happens to do the format-shifting for me?
The artist who made my favourite album just queried its publisher on my behalf, and was informed that no, it would NEVER be released on CD. This makes no one any money, so where's the loss if someone rips the thing and we who own the LP download it? (In fact, the artist sent me copies of the few rips he had!)
Well, here's a thought: how about adding the artists as defendents in countersuits against the RIAA cartel??
Or convincing artists that their best course is to HELP countersue the RIAA cartel?
The concept here being that artists can either suffer along with the RIAA cartel, or they can help fight it. Make the artists choose sides, so we know who is with or against their fans. It would be interesting to see how that affects sales!!
Yes, I imagine most contracts expressly forbid the artist from suing the label, even if it screws them over (which it does, indirectly, by making people too unhappy with the labels to buy their work). Is that sort of contract legal?
Actually, Lucas said (I quote), "There is no sex in the Star Wars universe", and has always very stringently enforced that prohibition -- insofar as they can *locate* the perpetrators.
And that is why all SW slash is published entirely underground (or sometimes just hasn't been noticed yet by LucasArts). Of course this hasn't affected its popularity one bit.
But that doesn't mean they have any right or ability to prohibit satirical works such as your example.
Thanks, didn't know that. Likely explains why the callboxes are close together in some areas and miles apart in others, too.
But it seems stupid to dismantle a working system that is already paid for... I still think the culprit is lobbying from cellphone providers who see callboxes as potentially cutting into their revenue, because now if you don't have a cell phone, OMG you could be stranded without help forever, and you wouldn't want to flag down a passing motorist, after all they could be a mass murderer!!
Of course they'll probably trash them on top of it, instead of giving them to the poorer counties, which ISTM are also those where cell phone coverage is most likely to be spotty or even entirely absent.
Side note: during my first trip thru California, back in 1971, we couldn't sit by the side of the road for 5 minutes without 3 or 4 cars stopping to see if we needed anything. Now, you could be visibly dying all over the pavement and no one would stop. Crime rates and the level of public paranoia, as usual, have little in common.:(
Ask yourself who stands to profit by replacing services whose hardware is long since paid for and cost essentially nothing to run, and you'll have the answer.
For Time, it's probably going to become something available only via GPS, much as cell phones provide the pressure to remove roadside call boxes.
If you're lost or broken down or injured on the CA freeways, better hope you've got a cell phone -- the state is busy removing all the callboxes, because after all everyone must have a cellphone, with all the emergency numbers they could ever need already programmed in, right?
Well, I don't have a cell phone. My neighbour doesn't. Lots of people don't. Lots of people don't need a phone surgically implanted in their ears, nor the $40/mo. bill for service we don't ordinarily need. Now if we're in trouble along the freeway, we're dependent on passing motorists -- all of whom will expect us to use our own cell phones, not bother them about it.
As to the Time service, it's useful considering how frequent power outages have become in California. Not everyone has a WWV-enabled clock, either.
"Progress" isn't supposed to be about FORCING everyone to march to the current drumbeat, but that's what it's become.
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Ah, yes. Even compressed, this version better conveys the intended sense of the old maxim.
Wonder who was the first to codify it? I *think* I first saw it in some 1950s SF, and it was probably old then. Can't find the credit offhand (and I know it wasn't Brunner, because I don't read him).
Okay, so a little bitty program that generates the appropriate and matching registry entry ... Even so, hardly so difficult that it's worth alienating any growing segment of their userbase... They'd best remember that eventually Vista will be 90% of their userbase (if Vista follows the same OEM-generated patterns as all its ancestors).
I know people who run 19" monitors at 640x480, because they HAVE TO, due to vision problems.
I have a number of clients who are elderly, and run a 19" monitor at 800x600, because that is the highest resolution that they can see properly.
So you're saying you're okay with locking out these users? They're hardly rare... your own grandparents are probably among them.
Well, that would be me. I have everything set so I can see it, and I think rooting around with RegEdit is "normal". My first move when confronted with a misbehaving system is to restart in DOS and have my way with the core files. And so on.
A lot of my frustration with linux comes from the tools being too hidden, with no surface clues as to where I should look for answers. I feel like I'm being shown aliases of the data, but not the data itself.
Maybe someone could compile the old DOS utility LIST (v6 source is public domain) for linux...
Yeah, but if someone can't figure out how to get unstuck from console mode, do you really expect them to know about those tools?
I'd think of them, because I'm an old DOS-head. But for anyone raised in the GUI era, well, they'd just be stuck.
BTW I don't know if Dean Ing misquotes someone or what (he didn't originate the saying), but the way I learned your tagline goes thus:
There are two kinds of fools: One says "This is old, and therefore good." The other says, "This is new, and therefore better."
My experience parallels yours, and I maintain a similar array of systems. Fact is, Windows is extremely tolerant of "bad users"; in my experience it takes at least 3 years of *total* neglect to start showing negative effects, or a great deal of junkware and random deletia to mess it up beyond recall. Abuse a linux box the same way and see how long it lasts!
In my observation, linux does indeed need more fault tolerance and recovery capacity, and this video failsafe mechanism is a big step in the right direction. (Speaking as one who has been repeatedly frustrated in my efforts to find a wholly-satisfactory replacement for Windows.)
BTW if you don't know about ToniArts Easycleaner, you'll want to add it to your toolkit; by far the best registry scrubber. Tests best in every evaluation I've seen, and I've been using it routinely for 6 years and have never seen it screw up (and I've hand-vetted what it wants to kill). Freeware from http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/
There's got to be some easier solution -- maybe set up a temporary server where any affected users wind up by default, whose sole mission in life is to provide the fix, in the form of a tiny fix.reg file to download, and brief instructions. That way anyone having the problem can't help but trip over the solution.
Like it or not, ISPs can't turn their back on Vista forever, and not everyone already running it is going to hear about the fix. All they'll know is that "my internet is broken" -- and they'll tell all their friends "how crappy this ISP's service is". NOT good publicity, tho given what the ISP had to say for themselves, not entirely undeserved.
Reinstalling is against my religion... The only times I've seen a Windows system that was so fucked up I couldn't fix it, was when it had been abused and neglected for years on end, by installing every piece of shitware that came down the pipe, and "uninstalling" by randomly deleting the more-visible parts, and never once giving it any basic maintenance (kill tempfiles, defrag, run a registry scrubber).
The fact is, the average Windows system withstands a huge amount of outright abuse before it becomes unusable; what would happen to a linux box that suffered the same abuse?? Seriously -- what happens if you install every sort of incompatible shitware on your linux box, then uninstall it by deleting whatever you see that happens to have a remotely-similar name? I'd bet the results are no prettier than they are with Windows.
A big problem in geekdom is "I hate it, therefore I refuse to maintain it". Frex, a friend of mine loves DOS and Netware, and hates Windows. So he let his Windows box get into a state of neglect that he would never countanance on his Netware server or his DOS machine. So naturally the poor Windows box finally got unstable -- after 4 years of total neglect. I spent 10 minutes doing basic cleanup, defragged it, and it was good as new.
"I gave linux to my parents and it worked forever" doesn't count -- your parents are too afraid of their computer to mess with it much. If you really want to see how stable it is, give a linux box to someone who knows just enough about linux to be dangerous, and who can't resist installing everything they ever hear about, then when things get cranky, randomly mucks about with its innards. If it can gracefully survive that, without needing either a serious geek doctoring or an outright reinstall, then you can compare it to the abuse that Windows ROUTINELY survives.
See, this failsafe video thing recognises that -- because resolution is one of those things people who know just enough to be dangerous most often fuck with. So it needs to have a fallback mechanism (which BTW Windows has had for 12 years), both for the event of a hardware issue, and so users can't dig themselves into a hole they can't get out of. So hooray for Ubuntu, it's about bloody time, and I'll be ordering a new set of CDs right soon now.
Did any linux zealots read this far?
As I just said in another post, the problem seems to be that many linux distros require VESA 2.0 support *IN HARDWARE*, and if this is absent (as can be the case even on modern video cards) the linux installer will freeze solid first time it tries to go into graphics mode.
I twigged to this when I realised that for some distros, on otherwise-identical hardware, the only difference between success and failure was whether the video card was S3 (no VESA 2.0 support in hardware) or Matrox (VESA 2.0 support in hardware).
Presumably some distros DO have software VESA 2.0 support, so they don't encounter the issue.
It would be nice to have this info up front; it would save a lot of "it doesn't work!" complaints.
I've frequently seen commercially-pressed linux install CDs fail to work -- they get as far as switching from text to graphical mode, then freeze solid.
The problem seems to be whether the VIDEO HARDWARE supports VESA 2.0 or not (and amazingly enough, even some halfway-modern cards don't). If not, the assorted linux installers apparently have no fallback and simply die when they try to invoke the VESA 2.0 graphics mode. But in no case did the installer test the video card FIRST.
In my observation, the reason is far simpler:
It's merely that most nerds have a surplus of "You're not the boss of me! You can't tell me what to do!!"
There are a thousand and one excuses, but they all boil down to that.
"e)The fix is to set a registry key, which is easy for technical users, but a pain for those who don't know about it."
But it =can= be rendered very simple for nontechnical users: "Here's a fixkey.reg file. Save it somewhere, doubleclick on it, YES you want to add it to the registry, restart your system." I suppose there is an additional admin-permissions step in Vista, but... no reason the ISP couldn't provide the fix.
You got it. All spontaneous generation. Goes to show you can't trust those pesky mitochondria around the womenfolk!
Why not just disable the link, or automatically redirect it to a generic page that explains what's going on?
In fact, I got the feeling from the WFI site that *they* are the ones having trouble controlling their impulses toward children. There's something ugly going on in those minds, above and beyond just hating anyone they perceive as "immoral".
So what about all my old vinyl that has not been and will NEVER be released on CD? don't I have a right to format-shift it just as I would with a CD? how do they lose money if someone else happens to do the format-shifting for me?
The artist who made my favourite album just queried its publisher on my behalf, and was informed that no, it would NEVER be released on CD. This makes no one any money, so where's the loss if someone rips the thing and we who own the LP download it? (In fact, the artist sent me copies of the few rips he had!)
Well, here's a thought: how about adding the artists as defendents in countersuits against the RIAA cartel??
Or convincing artists that their best course is to HELP countersue the RIAA cartel?
The concept here being that artists can either suffer along with the RIAA cartel, or they can help fight it. Make the artists choose sides, so we know who is with or against their fans. It would be interesting to see how that affects sales!!
Yes, I imagine most contracts expressly forbid the artist from suing the label, even if it screws them over (which it does, indirectly, by making people too unhappy with the labels to buy their work). Is that sort of contract legal?
Actually, Lucas said (I quote), "There is no sex in the Star Wars universe", and has always very stringently enforced that prohibition -- insofar as they can *locate* the perpetrators.
And that is why all SW slash is published entirely underground (or sometimes just hasn't been noticed yet by LucasArts). Of course this hasn't affected its popularity one bit.
But that doesn't mean they have any right or ability to prohibit satirical works such as your example.
The Best Buy here has about 20 aisles of music -- probably covering 6000 square feet of floor space. It's their largest single department.
They're also pricey enough that I never buy anything there.
Thanks, didn't know that. Likely explains why the callboxes are close together in some areas and miles apart in others, too.
:(
But it seems stupid to dismantle a working system that is already paid for... I still think the culprit is lobbying from cellphone providers who see callboxes as potentially cutting into their revenue, because now if you don't have a cell phone, OMG you could be stranded without help forever, and you wouldn't want to flag down a passing motorist, after all they could be a mass murderer!!
Of course they'll probably trash them on top of it, instead of giving them to the poorer counties, which ISTM are also those where cell phone coverage is most likely to be spotty or even entirely absent.
Side note: during my first trip thru California, back in 1971, we couldn't sit by the side of the road for 5 minutes without 3 or 4 cars stopping to see if we needed anything. Now, you could be visibly dying all over the pavement and no one would stop. Crime rates and the level of public paranoia, as usual, have little in common.
Thanks for the link! that looks like a handy tool.
Ask yourself who stands to profit by replacing services whose hardware is long since paid for and cost essentially nothing to run, and you'll have the answer.
For Time, it's probably going to become something available only via GPS, much as cell phones provide the pressure to remove roadside call boxes.
If you're lost or broken down or injured on the CA freeways, better hope you've got a cell phone -- the state is busy removing all the callboxes, because after all everyone must have a cellphone, with all the emergency numbers they could ever need already programmed in, right?
Well, I don't have a cell phone. My neighbour doesn't. Lots of people don't. Lots of people don't need a phone surgically implanted in their ears, nor the $40/mo. bill for service we don't ordinarily need. Now if we're in trouble along the freeway, we're dependent on passing motorists -- all of whom will expect us to use our own cell phones, not bother them about it.
As to the Time service, it's useful considering how frequent power outages have become in California. Not everyone has a WWV-enabled clock, either.
"Progress" isn't supposed to be about FORCING everyone to march to the current drumbeat, but that's what it's become.
And that requires javascript to access any content. When I saw that, I turned around and left. NO update is better than an untrustable update.