Oh, then my WinME definitely had some VxD drivers, cuz I recall it fishing a Win95 driver out of several options via pawing thru INI files (I can't recall if this was for the SCSI card or the sound card), and the Matrox vidcard definitely had the old type. Whether it had any of the WdM type, then... dunno. Mainboard was a Tyan server board which was rock solid (and did not have the rollover bug -- didja know that's actually in the hardware, and in only about half the hardware -- Windows just triggered it), and that helps under any circumstances. I'd seen others that were dead-stable too, even on seriously junk hardware like Packard Smell... which woulda had all older drivers and OS never touched since it left the factory.
Main reason I keep looking at linux (other than masochism) is that it's good to have alternatives, but as you say it's never really going to be viable for the masses unless and until they restructure the driver mess, and stop "removing" drivers for older hardware (while saying how good it is for old hardware, WTF? Few versions back Ubuntu pulled support for all vidcards over 5 years old!)... dandy for a headless server that does one job. Not so dandy for people with random hardware that does many tasks. It needs a wrapper so it can run any damn drivers including Windows drivers, instead of trying to force everyone to come to them with a linux driver.... and keep it updated. If it's supposed to be the OS for everyone, then stop locking out anyone who won't bow to your system, and to the GPL (which in its current incarnation is coersion, not 'freedom'. The BSD license is truly free.)
I've often said that developers should have to work on the slowest hardware that will even run their programs, so they know how the rest of us feel. The fullblown linux desktops are a prime example.
Yeah, I've heard all the excuses... they all boil down to "works for me, sucks to be you". That's not going to draw everyday users, tho it may draw ivory-tower bigots. It's been what, 20 years now? and it still has only about 1% of desktop users. You'd think that alone would cue 'em they're goin' at it wrong if they truly want to attract ordinary users. Most of us don't run server OSs. If you're only going for the server market (and there'd be nothing wrong with that, BSD as an example), admit it and stop bullshitting the rest of us.
All I've seen about Win9 so far is that it kinda reverts to Win7 in the interface dept (at least MS eventually learns from their mistakes, and does something about it!). What's this about $40 or even free?
I don't know anything about Alibaba as a company, or about their stock arrangements. But I do know that over the years the website has worked to become more buyer-friendly and to earn buyer trust. My main concern about this is that they don't go overboard with growth and ruin what so far seems to be a good thing.
Absolutely true. Canids and felids in particular hunt more for sport than for food. Wolves have been observed having all sorts of fun killing an entire flock of sheep. Foxes hunt and kill mice and birds without eating 'em. And I used to have a cat who did nothing but hunt gophers all day long; within 3 years he'd completely exterminated them in my neighborhood.
Incidentally my neighbor runs a twice-weekly foxhunt, tho the usual quarry is coyotes (mostly chasing, they usually don't shoot 'em). The local coyotes have gotten so into being chased by dogs that they come down to the kennel the night before a hunt and get the dogs all riled up and ready to go.
Female dogs that have never had pups will often kill puppies. Presumably fewer of someone else's offspring means more resources when you have your own.
[This is a consistent enough behavior that I warn clients in no uncertain terms to never ever leave the new puppy alone with the adult dog, most especially the spayed female adult dog.]
Another scheme by the labels is to sign up promising bands who are seen as competitors... and now that they're locked into a contract, they're never let produce an album. So basically they're eliminated as potential competition for the money-acts.
Any idea what the problem was, or maybe just trying to juggle two styles of driver access?
Now that you mention it, I'll have to check driver types when I have my old WinME setup handy again -- once I'd beaten it into submission, it ran 24/7 as the media-watching and image-editing box for two solid years without once needing a reboot (tho got restarted a couple times for twiddling hardware). Only got retired cuz I added an XP dual boot that took over the same jobs.
If mine had any VxD drivers, it woulda been the Matrox vidcard... but I became a Matrox bigot largely because their drivers never caused me any grief. Couldn't say that about various others.
Linux frustrates the hell out of me. I keep trying distros with hopes held high, only to find some showstopper issue (I am not willing to chase all over hell looking for fixes, it either works out of the box or it goes away), or that the performance is unbearably bad. Contrary to popular claims, I've found Linux with fullfledged desktops needs about 3x as much hardware to perform the same as concurrent Windows.:(
Undoing some mod points to reply here, but anyway...
Aside from how dogs have been selected to "read man" (see the results of testing police dogs, where it was found most were alerting not on drugs, but on handler expectations), a dog's nose can pick up even the slightest difference in a person's metabolism -- half a dozen molecules are sufficient for some dogs' noses to distinguish. In crude terms, when there's something "wrong" with the human's chemistry, which includes brain chemistry, they smell different from other folks (probably due to the metabolic byproducts being different). If that smells "wrong" to the dog, they're going to react against it, often with fear or aggression.
This is also why some assistance dogs alert to their owner's health status -- I know a guy whose dog goes nuts if he's starting a diabetic episode, and he's learned (the hard way) the dog is right even tho he hasn't any symptoms yet. He starts smelling wrong to her, so she throws a fit, and she notices well before the blood test does. (He's done multiple tests in a row to check against her reaction.)
Incidentally I have a dog who 'alerts' on certain abnormal personalities -- he's naturally trusting and loves everyone else, but acts like he wants to kill a very few individuals: One was a paranoid schizophrenic (among other symptoms, she heard voices and saw things that weren't there), another had bipolar disorder with severe anger issues, and so on. And this dog, who has an exceptional nose, visibly does the "take a sniff, then react" thing. I've learned that when this dog doesn't like someone, I had better pay attention, because he's always right.
[I'm a pro dog trainer with over 40 years experience. I notice these things.]
I hadn't heard about the CoD incident, but... [goes off, looks it up] holy shit, that's douchery of a high order. Tho I'm not sure the cops had much less douchery... I mean, 60 officers, WTF? I guess he can count himself fortunate they didn't overhear game gunfire and react by opening fire themselves.
If I had to wipe and reinstall Windows with any regularity, yeah, I'd be looking for a different OS. I don't spend all that time and effort getting it all just how I want it, only to have to replace it and start over. Reinstalling is against my religion. I use the damn machine, I don't just play with it. My OS setup is not disposable.
WinME was actually very good about drivers -- the install routine was smart enough to look for one that works even if it wasn't a WinME driver. I'd not seen that before and was suitably impressed. And while WinME sucked donkey balls out of the box, it could be made 100% stable -- turn off System Restore, apply 98Lite in default mode, and it goes from unable to even crash properly, to never crashes again. (Didn't help the sucky resource management, tho.)
But when we stoop to comparing FOSS to WinME... yeah, that shows just how...unrealistic... their expectations and performance really are. The driver structure is insane. You do NOT build ephemeral software (ie. liable to be updated, possibly often) into the kernel, and not expect to have the whole house of cards fall down too often for comfort.
Or with the average laser printer, plug in printer, don't bother with the install disk, select whatever is the nearest version of the HPLJ that Windows happens to have handy. (This also works for older inkjets and some pin-impact printers.)
As to TFA, didn't you know that no device is complete until it can play DOOM?:D
But yeah, methinks if software started from the perspective of the douchebag, 90% of the hacks would go away and the rest wouldn't be worth the trouble.
I'm not worried about the peeping tom. I'm worried about the peeping tom who is in fact a government snitch, since nearly any private activity could be construed as illegal, given the right spin and a motivated prosecutor, especially in a climate of moral panic.
No, what I was pointing out is that as "deregulation" was done where I'm painfully familiar with how it worked out (namely, Montana and California), said "deregulation" was a crock, and did nothing but increase costs for the hapless consumers. And I speculate that absent this bogus "deregulation", alt-energy might have been a lot more cost-competitive -- without raising prices on conventional-fuel energy.
In other words, they're doing exactly the inverse of the occasional U.S. states' so-called "deregulation", which in practice amounted to "sell off all our infrastructure to foreign investors, then buy back the product at an inflated price." Guess Germany figured out this doesn't work so well after all.
As I say above, that "green" energy might not be so expensive in a market that's not been "deregulated" in this fashion.
Also, cost in the U.S. varies as much as it does in the rest of the world. In California, it's closer to 25c/KWH (nominally it's lower, but you get into a higher rate tier at a level that would power one light bulb, and it goes up from there).... one of the "greenest" states. But the real problem is the so-called deregulation, not the energy source. Absent deregulation (aka "sell all our power generation facilities to foreign investors, who then charge us through the nose") the "green" energy might not wind up being that much more costly to the consumer.
I recall something I once read about the old Soviet Union:
Anyone was free to leave at any time -- provided they paid the exit tax, which was around a million dollars (which in the 1950s/60s was still a LOT of money).
A few years ago someone tried to get a similar measure on California's ballot as a voter initiative. Their proposal would have imposed a 50% exit tax, as well as a one-time tax on real property over a certain value of 50% of that value. They got as far as the last step before being approved for the ballot, which I guess goes to show the political climate in California.
The best treatment for distemper in dogs uses something similar: healthy dog is injected with Newcastle vaccine (yes, the stuff for chickens). Serum is harvested and given to a dog with active distemper infection. As yet this treatment is rarely used, but the recovery rate is very high (and extremely rapid), vs a high mortality rate with ordinary supportive hospitalization. Why this works is not entirely understood.
I use SeaMonkey (and PaleMoon when something insists on Firefox) and frankly it has a lot of the same problems. The newest incarnation of Google maps in particular has regularly stalled and crashed it, and run memory up over 1GB which it does not always return when the page is closed. It appears in part a byproduct of the cache structure (with no cache, the problem isn't as bad), and that may be filesystem-affected.
Slashdot Mirror
Which viruses, and which antibiotics? Is it the virus itself or does it rely on a host that's susceptible to antibiotics?
Oh, then my WinME definitely had some VxD drivers, cuz I recall it fishing a Win95 driver out of several options via pawing thru INI files (I can't recall if this was for the SCSI card or the sound card), and the Matrox vidcard definitely had the old type. Whether it had any of the WdM type, then ... dunno. Mainboard was a Tyan server board which was rock solid (and did not have the rollover bug -- didja know that's actually in the hardware, and in only about half the hardware -- Windows just triggered it), and that helps under any circumstances. I'd seen others that were dead-stable too, even on seriously junk hardware like Packard Smell... which woulda had all older drivers and OS never touched since it left the factory.
Main reason I keep looking at linux (other than masochism) is that it's good to have alternatives, but as you say it's never really going to be viable for the masses unless and until they restructure the driver mess, and stop "removing" drivers for older hardware (while saying how good it is for old hardware, WTF? Few versions back Ubuntu pulled support for all vidcards over 5 years old!) ... dandy for a headless server that does one job. Not so dandy for people with random hardware that does many tasks. It needs a wrapper so it can run any damn drivers including Windows drivers, instead of trying to force everyone to come to them with a linux driver.... and keep it updated. If it's supposed to be the OS for everyone, then stop locking out anyone who won't bow to your system, and to the GPL (which in its current incarnation is coersion, not 'freedom'. The BSD license is truly free.)
I've often said that developers should have to work on the slowest hardware that will even run their programs, so they know how the rest of us feel. The fullblown linux desktops are a prime example.
Yeah, I've heard all the excuses... they all boil down to "works for me, sucks to be you". That's not going to draw everyday users, tho it may draw ivory-tower bigots. It's been what, 20 years now? and it still has only about 1% of desktop users. You'd think that alone would cue 'em they're goin' at it wrong if they truly want to attract ordinary users. Most of us don't run server OSs. If you're only going for the server market (and there'd be nothing wrong with that, BSD as an example), admit it and stop bullshitting the rest of us.
All I've seen about Win9 so far is that it kinda reverts to Win7 in the interface dept (at least MS eventually learns from their mistakes, and does something about it!). What's this about $40 or even free?
I don't know anything about Alibaba as a company, or about their stock arrangements. But I do know that over the years the website has worked to become more buyer-friendly and to earn buyer trust. My main concern about this is that they don't go overboard with growth and ruin what so far seems to be a good thing.
Absolutely true. Canids and felids in particular hunt more for sport than for food. Wolves have been observed having all sorts of fun killing an entire flock of sheep. Foxes hunt and kill mice and birds without eating 'em. And I used to have a cat who did nothing but hunt gophers all day long; within 3 years he'd completely exterminated them in my neighborhood.
Incidentally my neighbor runs a twice-weekly foxhunt, tho the usual quarry is coyotes (mostly chasing, they usually don't shoot 'em). The local coyotes have gotten so into being chased by dogs that they come down to the kennel the night before a hunt and get the dogs all riled up and ready to go.
Female dogs that have never had pups will often kill puppies. Presumably fewer of someone else's offspring means more resources when you have your own.
[This is a consistent enough behavior that I warn clients in no uncertain terms to never ever leave the new puppy alone with the adult dog, most especially the spayed female adult dog.]
Dogs, cats, chickens, horses, various fish, some insects...
Hmm. Maybe it's just a living organism thing.
Another scheme by the labels is to sign up promising bands who are seen as competitors... and now that they're locked into a contract, they're never let produce an album. So basically they're eliminated as potential competition for the money-acts.
See also
Researching the "Rape Culture" of America
by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/facul...
Any idea what the problem was, or maybe just trying to juggle two styles of driver access?
Now that you mention it, I'll have to check driver types when I have my old WinME setup handy again -- once I'd beaten it into submission, it ran 24/7 as the media-watching and image-editing box for two solid years without once needing a reboot (tho got restarted a couple times for twiddling hardware). Only got retired cuz I added an XP dual boot that took over the same jobs.
If mine had any VxD drivers, it woulda been the Matrox vidcard... but I became a Matrox bigot largely because their drivers never caused me any grief. Couldn't say that about various others.
Linux frustrates the hell out of me. I keep trying distros with hopes held high, only to find some showstopper issue (I am not willing to chase all over hell looking for fixes, it either works out of the box or it goes away), or that the performance is unbearably bad. Contrary to popular claims, I've found Linux with fullfledged desktops needs about 3x as much hardware to perform the same as concurrent Windows. :(
Undoing some mod points to reply here, but anyway...
Aside from how dogs have been selected to "read man" (see the results of testing police dogs, where it was found most were alerting not on drugs, but on handler expectations), a dog's nose can pick up even the slightest difference in a person's metabolism -- half a dozen molecules are sufficient for some dogs' noses to distinguish. In crude terms, when there's something "wrong" with the human's chemistry, which includes brain chemistry, they smell different from other folks (probably due to the metabolic byproducts being different). If that smells "wrong" to the dog, they're going to react against it, often with fear or aggression.
This is also why some assistance dogs alert to their owner's health status -- I know a guy whose dog goes nuts if he's starting a diabetic episode, and he's learned (the hard way) the dog is right even tho he hasn't any symptoms yet. He starts smelling wrong to her, so she throws a fit, and she notices well before the blood test does. (He's done multiple tests in a row to check against her reaction.)
Incidentally I have a dog who 'alerts' on certain abnormal personalities -- he's naturally trusting and loves everyone else, but acts like he wants to kill a very few individuals: One was a paranoid schizophrenic (among other symptoms, she heard voices and saw things that weren't there), another had bipolar disorder with severe anger issues, and so on. And this dog, who has an exceptional nose, visibly does the "take a sniff, then react" thing. I've learned that when this dog doesn't like someone, I had better pay attention, because he's always right.
[I'm a pro dog trainer with over 40 years experience. I notice these things.]
I hadn't heard about the CoD incident, but ... [goes off, looks it up] holy shit, that's douchery of a high order. Tho I'm not sure the cops had much less douchery... I mean, 60 officers, WTF? I guess he can count himself fortunate they didn't overhear game gunfire and react by opening fire themselves.
If I had to wipe and reinstall Windows with any regularity, yeah, I'd be looking for a different OS. I don't spend all that time and effort getting it all just how I want it, only to have to replace it and start over. Reinstalling is against my religion. I use the damn machine, I don't just play with it. My OS setup is not disposable.
WinME was actually very good about drivers -- the install routine was smart enough to look for one that works even if it wasn't a WinME driver. I'd not seen that before and was suitably impressed. And while WinME sucked donkey balls out of the box, it could be made 100% stable -- turn off System Restore, apply 98Lite in default mode, and it goes from unable to even crash properly, to never crashes again. (Didn't help the sucky resource management, tho.)
But when we stoop to comparing FOSS to WinME... yeah, that shows just how ...unrealistic... their expectations and performance really are. The driver structure is insane. You do NOT build ephemeral software (ie. liable to be updated, possibly often) into the kernel, and not expect to have the whole house of cards fall down too often for comfort.
Your sig is amazingly appropriate. Now you know how to upgrade your project. ;)
Or with the average laser printer, plug in printer, don't bother with the install disk, select whatever is the nearest version of the HPLJ that Windows happens to have handy. (This also works for older inkjets and some pin-impact printers.)
As to TFA, didn't you know that no device is complete until it can play DOOM? :D
But yeah, methinks if software started from the perspective of the douchebag, 90% of the hacks would go away and the rest wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Nifty. But is it preserved when sold?
There are always "patented mining claims" for sale in my state. Does the patent convey with the title?
I'm not worried about the peeping tom. I'm worried about the peeping tom who is in fact a government snitch, since nearly any private activity could be construed as illegal, given the right spin and a motivated prosecutor, especially in a climate of moral panic.
Judging by the false-positives rate, a case might be made that they are in fact aiming for zero negatives.
No, what I was pointing out is that as "deregulation" was done where I'm painfully familiar with how it worked out (namely, Montana and California), said "deregulation" was a crock, and did nothing but increase costs for the hapless consumers. And I speculate that absent this bogus "deregulation", alt-energy might have been a lot more cost-competitive -- without raising prices on conventional-fuel energy.
In other words, they're doing exactly the inverse of the occasional U.S. states' so-called "deregulation", which in practice amounted to "sell off all our infrastructure to foreign investors, then buy back the product at an inflated price." Guess Germany figured out this doesn't work so well after all.
As I say above, that "green" energy might not be so expensive in a market that's not been "deregulated" in this fashion.
And another, which I forgot to put in the previous post:
http://4thst8.wordpress.com/20...
Also, cost in the U.S. varies as much as it does in the rest of the world. In California, it's closer to 25c/KWH (nominally it's lower, but you get into a higher rate tier at a level that would power one light bulb, and it goes up from there).... one of the "greenest" states. But the real problem is the so-called deregulation, not the energy source. Absent deregulation (aka "sell all our power generation facilities to foreign investors, who then charge us through the nose") the "green" energy might not wind up being that much more costly to the consumer.
On that note, an opinion piece on Nevada's 'encouragement' for Tesla's new plant:
http://4thst8.wordpress.com/20...
I recall something I once read about the old Soviet Union:
Anyone was free to leave at any time -- provided they paid the exit tax, which was around a million dollars (which in the 1950s/60s was still a LOT of money).
A few years ago someone tried to get a similar measure on California's ballot as a voter initiative. Their proposal would have imposed a 50% exit tax, as well as a one-time tax on real property over a certain value of 50% of that value. They got as far as the last step before being approved for the ballot, which I guess goes to show the political climate in California.
And it tends to be those ultimately proven wrong who spend a great deal of noise smearing opposing views as deniers and heretics.
The best treatment for distemper in dogs uses something similar: healthy dog is injected with Newcastle vaccine (yes, the stuff for chickens). Serum is harvested and given to a dog with active distemper infection. As yet this treatment is rarely used, but the recovery rate is very high (and extremely rapid), vs a high mortality rate with ordinary supportive hospitalization. Why this works is not entirely understood.
http://www.edbond.com/antidist...
I use SeaMonkey (and PaleMoon when something insists on Firefox) and frankly it has a lot of the same problems. The newest incarnation of Google maps in particular has regularly stalled and crashed it, and run memory up over 1GB which it does not always return when the page is closed. It appears in part a byproduct of the cache structure (with no cache, the problem isn't as bad), and that may be filesystem-affected.