Tell that to the students and instructors in the labs I support, many of whom keep clicking ye olde blue e instead of the shiny new compass right next to it in the Dock.
I like how everyone on Slashdot assumes that everyone else is like them.
Huh? I didn't assume everyone was like me; I just spoke from my own experience, to point out that a previous 100% universal generalization was incorrect.
What I love about Slashdot is how people read something and then imagine that it said something that simply isn't there.
Considering that the "Pentium" product name has been around for 12 years, and refers to a "5th generation" processor design that's pretty well obsolete, I'm surprised it took them this long to retire it. Maybe someone pointed out that "Pentium 5" would be literally repetitive and the fact that the brand is so "last century" started to sink in?
What does surprise me is that they haven't come up with a better product name to replace it. The whole point of using "Pentium" instead of "i586" was trademark and brand identity, and going back to numbers and letters loses that.
If you're just going to try to use the same software everywhere you go, what's the point of having different OSes at all?
Because a web browser isn't the only app I use. I use software on each of these platforms that isn't available (at least not always conveniently) on the others. But regardless of which machine I have in front of me, I like being able to use roughly the same methods to open and close web browser tabs, etc.
Do you honestly need 6+ computers in your house? Just curious is all.
"Need" is a strong word. {smile}
I could probably consolidate the web/file/mail servers into one box, I could use the G5 in my drawing studio (instead of the G3 next to my Linux desktop) when I want to view a QuickTime-format movie trailer, I could dual-boot into Windows XP instead of having a dedicated the-latest-crap-the-world-is-using system, and I don't really need a laptop to take out onto the front porch when the weather's nice or I'm on the road. But even if I eliminated the platform duplication, I'd still have at least one machine that can run Windows (for compatibility with the masses), one running Linux (for unencumbered solidity), and another running OS X (for it-just-works convenience and compatibility with my profession).
Behaving exactly the same on every platform, it turns out, is in fact a terrible drawback. Something anyone with a Mac ought to know.
I have a Mac (three of them, plus the ones I use at work), and I don't "know" this. Perhaps that's because I also have three Linux systems (plus the ones at work), and a couple Windows boxes (plus those at work). Over the course of a typical day I spend some time using each of these OSes, and the fact that Firefox looks and functions pretty much the same on all three platforms is a definite benefit for me. If I lived in an all-OS-X environment I might standardize on Safari or Camino and be happier because of their greater consistency with my other Mac apps. Or if I lived in an all-Linux environment I'd probably use Konqueror, and if I still lived in Windowsland all the time I might use K-Meleon for speed and safety, with IE as a compatibility backup. But I live in an ecumenical and polyglot world, where "the same on every platform" is in fact a virtue.
it shouldn't really matter that much, speedwise, whether or not there is an OSX86-native binary of Firefox or not
It's not just a question of speed. If I'm interpretting the what-Rosetta-won't-support statements from Apple correctly, translated PPC apps running embedded Java applets will not run on OSX86. The archetypal example of that is a web browser using a Java runtime environment. That makes an Intel-native version of Firefox necessary to maintain compatibility with a bunch of web-based apps and a fair amount of website candy. You can grouse about how horrid Java applets are, but it's a "failed" item on the capatibility checklist, which is Not A Good Thing for everyone's favorite cross-platform browser. (And it's another nail in the coffin of IE:Mac, which will never be distributed in Intel-native or universal binary format.)
But when a car hits another vehicle because the driver didn't exercise common-sense safety precautions, we don't blame the car. We blame the operator whose recklessness led to their accident. "I should be able to hit the brakes and have the car stop immediately," isn't a valid defense against being ticketed for failing to keep a safe distance from the car in front of you.
I didn't flame you; I flamed the idiot you're married to. The one who - despite the fact that she uses a piece of equipment that is world-renowned for losing people's work - went two hours without saving her document. You can shriek all you want about how computers shouldn't lose your work if you don't manually save it, but anyone without a learning disability should know that they do, and take some measures to avoid it if that concerns them.
My wife called me today to try to recover a couple of hours work she lost when her computer crashed.
The main problem here is that your wife is an idiot. She worked for a couple hours without saving her work... not even once during that time? Then she deserves to lose a couple hours' work. This is like complaining that your precious family heirlooms were stolen when you left them unattended in a busy location for a couple hours. I don't care if you're using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or even some high-availability OS that Never Crashes. Unless your apps were written by God Himself, they will fail on you. This is a fact that anyone who has used a computer for more than a few months should understand. And if you can't be bothered to press Ctrl-S or Command-S from time to time, I can't be bothered to feel sorry for you when you lose your work.
It adds two forms to your 1040: Schedule C and Schedule SE.
Yup. I operated some web sites that generated some income for a few years (back when AdultCheck was still an age-verification service to protect web site operators, not the commercial porn subscription service it later became), and these days I get a little on the side from GoogleAds. Schedules C and SE are all that this has added to my annual form-filling ritual.
About half your income from the blog will go to taxes.
That depends on what kinds of expenses you can justifiably charge against your income. Web hosting fees, the cost of equipment and connectivity (if you host your own site), etc. might count as valid business expenses. But don't try to work the cost of your own time into the equation, though. That only makes sense if the business and you are separate financial entities, and "it" is actually paying "you" money.
What an idiot. Look at the carnage afterwards. Nevermind the few people that lost their jobs, tragic as that is, the real damage is the money from pension and investment funds that was squandered. That is people having their entire retirement thrown away.
That's just how The Market works. It runs in cycles of boom and bust. It uses the irrational activity of the investment market to tear down old economic structures so that they can be replaced with more efficient ones.
Which is of course why those who hold The Market up as if were the sacrosanct invisible hand of God ought to be taken out and shot. It demotes human society to barbarism, with no regard for the better aspects of human nature: the capacity for compassion, cooperation, and reason. I'm not advocating communism, because that has its own problems, but deifying The Market to justify whatever it does is definitely not the answer.
For Solstice I bought myself a new digital camera, and as an old 35mm SLR user who chafes at the lags and limitations of the point-and-shoot I've been using for digital stuff, I was tempted by digital SLRs. But the size and especially the cost ruled them out. I compromised with the Olympus SP-500UZ, a high-end p-and-s camera with enough manual overrides and a strong enough optical* zoom (10x) to satisfy me. It's still not as responsive and easy to control as my trusty Pentax ME super, nor as pocketable as the auto-everything digital it's replacing, but it'll do.
But one feature I still miss with it is the one this Kodak tries to remedy: real wide angle. I have a 24mm film SLR lens which I consider a standard wide-angle lens, and this 38mm-equivalent on my new digital is a bit cramped. I would have preferred a shorter zoom with the same 10x range (such as 25-250mm equivalent), particularly since the far end of 380mm-equivalent on the SP-500UZ is a bit long for hand-holding anyway. Instead it has an auto-stitching "panorama" feature, but I think I'll stick to Photoshop for that trick.
*If I ran the world, manufacturers wouldn't be allowed to call it "digital zoom"; they'd have to call it "automatic in-camera cropping", and only list optical zoom ratios on the box.
If everyone use encrypted e-mail whenever possible, it becomes completely useless as something to base suspicions on.
Yes, but that's not going to happen unless "everyone" (or some approximation thereof) is concerned enough about privacy to consider using encryption. The only scenarios in which I can imagine that actually happening are those in which private no-back-doors encryption has already long-since been criminalized.
If you only encrypt the communications that contain sensitive information, then it is pretty obvious to even the dumbest of spys when you have something to hide. Encrypt everything, and no one will know if you do or don't have secrets.
But in just the same way, encrypting your correspondence will flag you as suspicious. If the original poster's concern about unwarranted government snooping is justified, then this is precisely the sort of thing that will draw their interest, lead them to investigate him through other channels, start carefully reading Mom's non-encrypted correspondence, scrutinizing her contacts, etc. Asking your friends and family to start using encrypted e-mail with you is a bit like inviting them to take flying lessons and Arabic 101 classes with you: legal and presumably innocent... but not if the presumption of innocence is being ignored.
It's patently obvious from looking at a globe and the position of the International Date Line that humans first arose in New Zealand, Fiji, and Kamchatka. Then Australia, New Guinea, and Japan, then China, etc. Some of the last to wake up were the Hawaiians, which is probably how the U.S. managed to conquer them so easily: they were still half asleep.
The simple fact is that most people don't really need tax software. It's not that hard to do by hand.
I figured my 2005 taxes in about five minutes last week, after the online "paycheck stub" was posted for my last paycheck of the year. And half of that was waiting for OpenOffice Calc to load. {rimshot} I'd previously looked up the new exemption, deduction, and tax rates for this year and plugged them into my spreadsheet, so it was really more like 10 minutes total, but all I had to do was replace last year's numbers with this year's numbers.
This ain't computer science, people; unless you're running your life according to the whims of the Tax Accountant Full-Employment Act (i.e. the latest rev. of the U.S. tax code), it's simple accounting that could've been done with VisiCalc. Or an actual physical spreadsheet.
Well, you might consider looking into this thing called the "scientific method". Instead of hopeful speculation, it uses actual tests of hypotheses, to see if they are correct or not. And while it has often been misused by people who try to come up with counter-explanations for any data which doesn't support the desired conclusion, that's frowned upon.
And in other news, Smith & Wesson and Sony have announced the development of a handgun which shoots live ammunition, but can also be used as a controller in first-person-shooter games.
Nintendo and Acme Sex Toys have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow, but are keeping hush-hush about their joint hardware/gaming venture, except to confirm that it would likely be rated "A" (for adults only).
I think that when people use their brains, they retain all those things.
Some do, but others don't. I used to know a guy in his late 80s who was intensely curious about the world, never stopped reading and exploring new subjects... and still found himself forgetting people's names, had to stop driving, etc. No Alzheimer's, just old age. You can point to examples of people who've kept their brains active and gush at how nimble their brains still are, but that's circular reasoning and selective sampling. How do you know the causality isn't reversed: that they stayed mentally active because their brains were still healthy enough to allow it... and people who just give up do so because their brains just aren't up to it anymore?
I didn't say the brain was immune. No, not yet. I just think there's good reason to believe it may well last well beyond 100 years.
And I asked you what that reason was. Lots of organs remain fit longer if you use them, but no one (including you) is arguing that the human heart and liver and colon and lungs and so on would last 150 years if given half a chance. Why do you believe that the brain is different? (Aside from wanting it to be true, that is.)
My understanding is that the brain doesn't die after 100 years, like the body does.
If the body didn't strangle the brain to death, the brain could probably go on living for a lot longer.
Where did you get this "understanding"? This notion seems to ignore the fact of increasing reaction times, decreasing recall, and other indicators that the brains of otherwise-healthy seniors are less fit than when they were younger. Obviously most people's brains would still survive for a time if their hearts and other organs didn't shut down (i.e. it's not usually the first organ to fail), but the notion that it's somehow immune to the same wearing-out process as the rest of the body seems unsupported, at best.
This guy clearly thinks the benefits outweigh the risk, but his opinion shouldn't be the one that decides.
Right. It should be up to the patient's.
What's so hard to grasp about informed consent and self-determination? You make sure that potential recipients of a treatment are given as complete a picture as possible of the risks and potential benefits, and let them decide. Not the doctor. Not the government. Not the HMO. Not the activists on one side or another of the debate. The patient.
Apparently you misunderstand what the BOFH personality is about: Making other people's lives difficult for his own convenience or just because he can. What I'm trying to do is to make things more enjoyable - or at least less frustrating - for the people who use the equipment I support, people who - because they don't know much about computers - depend on me to pick the best software for them.
As long as ye olde IE:Mac is on there, people who only know Windows will sit down in front of our Macs, see the blue "e", and click on it. It'll suck (especially for the college portal). If they notice that it's an antique they'll blame me for that, or they'll blame the university for having a sucky portal, but more likely they'll just blame the Mac for not being a Windows box. In any case, not a good way for a freshling Graphic Design or Digital Media student to get started. But if IE isn't there, they'll figure out what else they can use, find Safari or Firefox, use it, and... well, probably take it for granted. But that's OK; at least it's not a negative experience for them.
As for the phrase "my users", it's no more autocratic than the phrase "my boss" or "my parents" or "my friends". It's a shorthand for the "the people who use the equipment I support", and any negative implications you read into it are coming out of your head, not mine. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to the students and instructors in the labs I support, many of whom keep clicking ye olde blue e instead of the shiny new compass right next to it in the Dock.
Huh? I didn't assume everyone was like me; I just spoke from my own experience, to point out that a previous 100% universal generalization was incorrect.
What I love about Slashdot is how people read something and then imagine that it said something that simply isn't there.
What does surprise me is that they haven't come up with a better product name to replace it. The whole point of using "Pentium" instead of "i586" was trademark and brand identity, and going back to numbers and letters loses that.
Because a web browser isn't the only app I use. I use software on each of these platforms that isn't available (at least not always conveniently) on the others. But regardless of which machine I have in front of me, I like being able to use roughly the same methods to open and close web browser tabs, etc.
"Need" is a strong word. {smile}
I could probably consolidate the web/file/mail servers into one box, I could use the G5 in my drawing studio (instead of the G3 next to my Linux desktop) when I want to view a QuickTime-format movie trailer, I could dual-boot into Windows XP instead of having a dedicated the-latest-crap-the-world-is-using system, and I don't really need a laptop to take out onto the front porch when the weather's nice or I'm on the road. But even if I eliminated the platform duplication, I'd still have at least one machine that can run Windows (for compatibility with the masses), one running Linux (for unencumbered solidity), and another running OS X (for it-just-works convenience and compatibility with my profession).
I have a Mac (three of them, plus the ones I use at work), and I don't "know" this. Perhaps that's because I also have three Linux systems (plus the ones at work), and a couple Windows boxes (plus those at work). Over the course of a typical day I spend some time using each of these OSes, and the fact that Firefox looks and functions pretty much the same on all three platforms is a definite benefit for me. If I lived in an all-OS-X environment I might standardize on Safari or Camino and be happier because of their greater consistency with my other Mac apps. Or if I lived in an all-Linux environment I'd probably use Konqueror, and if I still lived in Windowsland all the time I might use K-Meleon for speed and safety, with IE as a compatibility backup. But I live in an ecumenical and polyglot world, where "the same on every platform" is in fact a virtue.
It's not just a question of speed. If I'm interpretting the what-Rosetta-won't-support statements from Apple correctly, translated PPC apps running embedded Java applets will not run on OSX86. The archetypal example of that is a web browser using a Java runtime environment. That makes an Intel-native version of Firefox necessary to maintain compatibility with a bunch of web-based apps and a fair amount of website candy. You can grouse about how horrid Java applets are, but it's a "failed" item on the capatibility checklist, which is Not A Good Thing for everyone's favorite cross-platform browser. (And it's another nail in the coffin of IE:Mac, which will never be distributed in Intel-native or universal binary format.)
But when a car hits another vehicle because the driver didn't exercise common-sense safety precautions, we don't blame the car. We blame the operator whose recklessness led to their accident. "I should be able to hit the brakes and have the car stop immediately," isn't a valid defense against being ticketed for failing to keep a safe distance from the car in front of you.
I didn't flame you; I flamed the idiot you're married to. The one who - despite the fact that she uses a piece of equipment that is world-renowned for losing people's work - went two hours without saving her document. You can shriek all you want about how computers shouldn't lose your work if you don't manually save it, but anyone without a learning disability should know that they do, and take some measures to avoid it if that concerns them.
The main problem here is that your wife is an idiot. She worked for a couple hours without saving her work... not even once during that time? Then she deserves to lose a couple hours' work. This is like complaining that your precious family heirlooms were stolen when you left them unattended in a busy location for a couple hours. I don't care if you're using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or even some high-availability OS that Never Crashes. Unless your apps were written by God Himself, they will fail on you. This is a fact that anyone who has used a computer for more than a few months should understand. And if you can't be bothered to press Ctrl-S or Command-S from time to time, I can't be bothered to feel sorry for you when you lose your work.
Yup. I operated some web sites that generated some income for a few years (back when AdultCheck was still an age-verification service to protect web site operators, not the commercial porn subscription service it later became), and these days I get a little on the side from GoogleAds. Schedules C and SE are all that this has added to my annual form-filling ritual.
About half your income from the blog will go to taxes.
That depends on what kinds of expenses you can justifiably charge against your income. Web hosting fees, the cost of equipment and connectivity (if you host your own site), etc. might count as valid business expenses. But don't try to work the cost of your own time into the equation, though. That only makes sense if the business and you are separate financial entities, and "it" is actually paying "you" money.
That's just how The Market works. It runs in cycles of boom and bust. It uses the irrational activity of the investment market to tear down old economic structures so that they can be replaced with more efficient ones.
Which is of course why those who hold The Market up as if were the sacrosanct invisible hand of God ought to be taken out and shot. It demotes human society to barbarism, with no regard for the better aspects of human nature: the capacity for compassion, cooperation, and reason. I'm not advocating communism, because that has its own problems, but deifying The Market to justify whatever it does is definitely not the answer.
But one feature I still miss with it is the one this Kodak tries to remedy: real wide angle. I have a 24mm film SLR lens which I consider a standard wide-angle lens, and this 38mm-equivalent on my new digital is a bit cramped. I would have preferred a shorter zoom with the same 10x range (such as 25-250mm equivalent), particularly since the far end of 380mm-equivalent on the SP-500UZ is a bit long for hand-holding anyway. Instead it has an auto-stitching "panorama" feature, but I think I'll stick to Photoshop for that trick.
*If I ran the world, manufacturers wouldn't be allowed to call it "digital zoom"; they'd have to call it "automatic in-camera cropping", and only list optical zoom ratios on the box.
I had no idea the House of Lords was so large!
Yes, but that's not going to happen unless "everyone" (or some approximation thereof) is concerned enough about privacy to consider using encryption. The only scenarios in which I can imagine that actually happening are those in which private no-back-doors encryption has already long-since been criminalized.
But in just the same way, encrypting your correspondence will flag you as suspicious. If the original poster's concern about unwarranted government snooping is justified, then this is precisely the sort of thing that will draw their interest, lead them to investigate him through other channels, start carefully reading Mom's non-encrypted correspondence, scrutinizing her contacts, etc. Asking your friends and family to start using encrypted e-mail with you is a bit like inviting them to take flying lessons and Arabic 101 classes with you: legal and presumably innocent... but not if the presumption of innocence is being ignored.
It's patently obvious from looking at a globe and the position of the International Date Line that humans first arose in New Zealand, Fiji, and Kamchatka. Then Australia, New Guinea, and Japan, then China, etc. Some of the last to wake up were the Hawaiians, which is probably how the U.S. managed to conquer them so easily: they were still half asleep.
I figured my 2005 taxes in about five minutes last week, after the online "paycheck stub" was posted for my last paycheck of the year. And half of that was waiting for OpenOffice Calc to load. {rimshot} I'd previously looked up the new exemption, deduction, and tax rates for this year and plugged them into my spreadsheet, so it was really more like 10 minutes total, but all I had to do was replace last year's numbers with this year's numbers.
This ain't computer science, people; unless you're running your life according to the whims of the Tax Accountant Full-Employment Act (i.e. the latest rev. of the U.S. tax code), it's simple accounting that could've been done with VisiCalc. Or an actual physical spreadsheet.
Well, you might consider looking into this thing called the "scientific method". Instead of hopeful speculation, it uses actual tests of hypotheses, to see if they are correct or not. And while it has often been misused by people who try to come up with counter-explanations for any data which doesn't support the desired conclusion, that's frowned upon.
Nintendo and Acme Sex Toys have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow, but are keeping hush-hush about their joint hardware/gaming venture, except to confirm that it would likely be rated "A" (for adults only).
Some do, but others don't. I used to know a guy in his late 80s who was intensely curious about the world, never stopped reading and exploring new subjects... and still found himself forgetting people's names, had to stop driving, etc. No Alzheimer's, just old age. You can point to examples of people who've kept their brains active and gush at how nimble their brains still are, but that's circular reasoning and selective sampling. How do you know the causality isn't reversed: that they stayed mentally active because their brains were still healthy enough to allow it... and people who just give up do so because their brains just aren't up to it anymore?
I didn't say the brain was immune. No, not yet. I just think there's good reason to believe it may well last well beyond 100 years.
And I asked you what that reason was. Lots of organs remain fit longer if you use them, but no one (including you) is arguing that the human heart and liver and colon and lungs and so on would last 150 years if given half a chance. Why do you believe that the brain is different? (Aside from wanting it to be true, that is.)
Where did you get this "understanding"? This notion seems to ignore the fact of increasing reaction times, decreasing recall, and other indicators that the brains of otherwise-healthy seniors are less fit than when they were younger. Obviously most people's brains would still survive for a time if their hearts and other organs didn't shut down (i.e. it's not usually the first organ to fail), but the notion that it's somehow immune to the same wearing-out process as the rest of the body seems unsupported, at best.
Right. It should be up to the patient's.
What's so hard to grasp about informed consent and self-determination? You make sure that potential recipients of a treatment are given as complete a picture as possible of the risks and potential benefits, and let them decide. Not the doctor. Not the government. Not the HMO. Not the activists on one side or another of the debate. The patient.
As long as ye olde IE:Mac is on there, people who only know Windows will sit down in front of our Macs, see the blue "e", and click on it. It'll suck (especially for the college portal). If they notice that it's an antique they'll blame me for that, or they'll blame the university for having a sucky portal, but more likely they'll just blame the Mac for not being a Windows box. In any case, not a good way for a freshling Graphic Design or Digital Media student to get started. But if IE isn't there, they'll figure out what else they can use, find Safari or Firefox, use it, and... well, probably take it for granted. But that's OK; at least it's not a negative experience for them.
As for the phrase "my users", it's no more autocratic than the phrase "my boss" or "my parents" or "my friends". It's a shorthand for the "the people who use the equipment I support", and any negative implications you read into it are coming out of your head, not mine. Get over it.
What? The camera has a flash.