I always think that using Laptops for gaming is a bit of a silly idea
I'm a new dad, and was a busy person before then. I use the laptop on my hour commute each way. Sometimes I watch DVDs, but often it's flight simulators that I use this time for (MS flight sim and an r/c flight sim). I have a much better desktop but it probably gets about a quarter as much use as my Dell Inspirion 9400 (which incidentally has been a nightmare but I'm still grateful to have a working laptop with an 8800GT in it). Latest and greatest? Phooey! Perhaps if flight sims weren't so unpopular at the moment. Still I'm glad - probably require internet connection to validate or some such rubbish if I was using the latest and greatest. I'm not adding a $30 mobile internet bill to get 10 hours a week of play.
It doesn't matter if it's compiler-dependent or not. The correct answer to that question is: "This code is badly written. It never makes sense to write i = i++. You probably mean i++."
I've seen i *= 0; and i *= 1; (actual variable name i) in commercially critical code (that is run multiple times every day!), but that's not the worst I've seen. I was saw code that was licensed for a hefty fee then for a decade, then sold for over $1 Million that included an easter egg (or rather code bomb) consisting of events for popup dialogs that were a conversation between Kirk and Spock as well as an april fools day joke that told the user their hard drive was being wiped.
Exactly. I'm in the camp that says some sort of programming test is fair for any level. If you're really a "Senior software engineer" with "excellent $LANGUAGE skills" then writing something like fizzbuzz will only take you two minutes, right?
Just for fun I decided to write FizzBuzz in Java after looking it up earlier today. Took me about 1.5-2 hours. No I'm not incompetent. I wrote an initial version. Tested it. Decided it wasn't efficient. Fixed it z(Wrote another version). Decided I didn't like the repetition in the code. Added a flag that would allow it to print the reasoning for writing the word out. Refactored it, and extended it to work with arrays of numbers and words (So Fizz Buzz Flop for example for numbers including or divisible by 3, 7, 5).
Of course I had the gist of it in under 2 minutes but my first working version certainly took longer than 2 minutes. I even had a cut and paste error that required about 3 minutes of debugging to fix. Oh and if you asked me to write it on paper, I'd have failed. I don't work in a linear way and I like to be able to re-arrange code. Are you sure I'm incompetent and you'd rather hire the guy that can speed code?
More importantly than just showing whether or not somebody can code, it shows whether or not they can handle simple tasks under pressure. I'm sure most of those applicants could have completed it at home when they're not being watched, but if they can't do it in an interview, then how are they going to perform on-site at a client, when a major bug just popped during a production push?
That's a very different sort of pressure. The pressure in a job interview comes from the people around you questioning your abilities. In most production environments you're there because your skills as an expert are required and usually in all but the most hostile and unhealthy places of employment people are there to help each other in a crisis. You'll find that people who are socially confident might do brilliantly at your simple coding excercise, while the best of geeks who would do brilliantly with a production problem may fall flat on his ass (ie. get nervous and stuff up the excercise) at your interview.
I'm usually socially confident but awkward. I tend to do very well at most tests (I have 2 degrees including a Masters and I haven't cheated at uni exam or assignment), but I've still borked a few interviews in my time due to nerves. The handful of times I've been on my own in a production crisis I've been commended on my work.
Speaking as someone with an astrophysics background, I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what it is. And likely no one else will unless and until a decent spectrum of the object can be taken. Because, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words (and, if you are diligent, a light curve), a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures.
I guess it depends on your definition of decent but here you go:
"Multiple spectra show five broad absorption bands between 4100 A and 6500 A and a mostly featureless continuum longward of 6500 A."
The problem is not a lack of spectra. They don't fit what's known. (However if by "decent spectra" you meanabsorption bands over the entire gamut of wavelengths, don't hold your breath)
I read it differently than both of you. I read that a crystal ball gazing tech evangelist once again decided he could tell the future, no matter how little economic or technical sense his vision of the future actually holds. I also wonder how much funding he's receiving from the general purpose FPU companies.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
The CEO of Ford knows what a carburetor is, but certainly can't identify the parts of one taken apart in front of him. That doesn't make him a bad CEO.
It does if the reason the company is failing is that their carburetor design is crap. A good boss has to be able to dig down enough to understand the problem and help his junior managers get a handle on fixing it.
Take a historic look at the companies that have produced the best products. Many of them were started by the boss who did all the small stuff and then moved up as he grew his business (and gained the appropriate business skills). Many others have hired the best techinical people they could find that could also manage their work themselves, and given them free reign.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
By output do you mean lines of code? For many non-technical IT managers, that's how you measure output. Incompetent programmers can often put out ten lines of code that should require one.
kloc is an awful measure of output. Always has been. Always will be. This is another reason a manager needs to understand the product/service his team are delivering. It makes him able to work out how difficult the tasks are and how well they are being tackled by his staff. If a manager can't tell how hard writing a compiler is (and I've seen this exact situation first hand) he'll end up overcommitting the team and think the star programmer is incompetent because he can't meet his target but the mediocre gui designer who sits next to him can.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
Remember, support comes out of a different manager's budget.
That is why at least some of the developers that work on an application should be the same people that follow it through to support. May not be possible for all Vendor software and off the shelf stuff but for in house work that's how I've worked for the last 8 years and 2 jobs. There's a lot more incentive to get it right if you're the one likely to get the support call at 3am because it's your turn to do the shift.
As a survivor of having a close relative commit suicide I can easily say that by the time they commit the act they are already mentally ill.
If someone were to slowly torture you, turning one piece of your body to mush after the next in the most painful agonizing way - I'm talking medieval torture - crushing bones, destroying internal organs slowly, cutting, stabbing, burning - pain that didn't leave you so you could sleep or eat or function - so that you knew you were going to die but that it were going to take a long time, and so that you knew all the best life had to offer was long over, wouldn't you consider suicide? There are diseases - cancers, degenerative diseases etc. that are very much like that. It always doesn't take mental illness - extreme pain is enough. Now also consider that some people are in similar degrees of emmotional pain.
You can of course redefine wanting to take your life as a mental illness, but to say mental illness is a pre-requisite speaks volumes for your limited experience and imagination.
I only hope you and I are never in that kind of pain. Suicide shouldn't be glorified (ala Heath Ledger) - that's destructive. However to show no pity for a soul in such pain that they're willing to take their life is also destructive.
Or investing in a bit aftershave, a bath, some flowers, and marrying a carpenter?...but there is a downside to having a wife named Bob who shaves more often than you do.
(Okay so it's not politically correct but how many attractive female carpenters do you know?)
Is it just me or is Mozilla becoming rather user hostile of late? I can't get over the way they forced through the "awesomebar" even though a lot of users have complained and don't like it. (In fact people dislike it so much there are extensions dedicated to trying to get something like the old address bar back. See oldbar and hideunvisited). It just seems that every time I hear about Mozilla and/or Firefox lately it's a valid complaint someone has that the company refuses to address or thinks it knows how to handle better and is shouting down the user. Not that they've been an example of how to listen to the community but lately it feels like Mozilla has been taken over from the inside. I was really happy with Firefox pre 1.0, and have steadily gotten less happy. I still use it because I'd rather have my nuts crushed than go back to IE. However it's become more of a pain in the arse with each release. I guess the choice is between sore nuts and a sore arse.
They probably are harder to write for Vista because the model is more strict; in other words, you can't get away with crap you used to be able to get away with.
Well the whole purpose of making it stricter - to get the drivers and OS to be more stable - has backfired.
So if the problem is that it's simply harder, then no, I don't think that's Vista's fault. (And no, I don't know if that really is the problem, I'm just speculating.)
Either way the same companies that made stable XP drivers are writing bad Vista drivers. Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
It's not much more bloated than XP (and I don't really care anyway), I do like the pretty effects, I don't think my rights are being restricted, and there aren't that many popups really, and I don't mind the ones that I do get.
You're drinking the cool aid. Take a look at the minimum specs for Vista (and take a look at the fact that most agree those minimums are too low). If you don't care that's fine. I do care and always will. I'll always prefer a capable machine to pretty windows effects, and I'm not the only one.
As for the popups again you may not care but I do and so do others. Reactions range from your placid "don't care" to annoyance and stress....and as for your rights not being restricted, depending on your point of view it's either fortunate or unfortunate that you don't do anything interesting with music and video content, because if you did, you'd soon hit problems.
This is pretty much wrong since service pack 1 was released.
Would you like a list of games that won't work with Vista SP1 but will work with XP? Or would you prefer links to gaming benchmarks that show how much slower games are even with Vista SP1 than XP? Actually I can't be bothered. Go look for yourself. Or not. The point is you don't care about the negatives and never will. That's fine but I shouldn't have to suffer just because you think a bog slow pretty piece of heavily restricted crap is what computing should be.
1. Create 1 fantastic movie using lots of unknown talent very well suited to the role and breakthrough special effects. 2. Follow up with second epic film with weak ending 3. Complete the trilogy with not so brilliant film. Basic plot still brilliant, but add Ewok side plot for marketting 4. Build up marketting empire. Sell toys and licenses to computer games. Revel in the special effects success of the first 3 films. Spend spare cash on special effects empire and loan out for other films. 5. When marketting empire wanes, executive produce 3 crappy equally spaced prequels. 6. Produce bad cartoons when it turns out that your usual talent is less animated than the animations.
After each step above Profit!!!
Next week: Hookers and blow. How to maintain a family friendly facade.
I generally think that most cults even CoS are "good" for the survival of their members against non-members
Really??? You think being forced to hand over all your worldly possessions, being told you're worthless and flawed constantly, and being forced to do things that make you unhappy (like fuck old men you can't stand the site of) improves your chances of survival? You have some odd ideas.
The trouble with capitalism is that continual inflation and continual growth are a requirement.
Communism has many problems, but the one you talk about above isn't one of them. You can offer people a guaranteed job but not guarantee that the job stays the same over long periods of time. You just have to offer people a job while they're willing to reskill instead of tossing them aside like refuse, and finding someone younger to pick up the new skill while forcing them to go out and find new work (which may require reskilling anyway).
No system is perfect. Captalism and Democrasy are no exceptions. Unfortunately if a system is unsustainable something will give and the system will either change or collapse. I know of no system which is sustainable in the long term, which is one reason I don't engage in any kind of politics (though I will say I value the freedom to choose what I do, and thus prefer "a free country" to an over-regulated government controlled system like Soviet block or Chinese communism).
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Of course this had nothing to do with code maturity and putting yet another burden on hardware manufacturers by changing to a new driver model yet again. (How many times was that in the last 2 decades!? DOS->Win95->Win98->WinXP->Vista).
I'd argue this man is incompetent because he doesn't understand that the first version of anything isn't going to be rock solid and stable. If you can't take that into account you have no business writing a new OS. Didn't Microsoft have driver certification programs? In fact don't drivers have to be signed? What the fuck happened to that?
I purchased an HP printer for that desktop system. It literally took me a week to get the damned thing to install.
Hang on isn't this the same company that has solid and stable XP drivers? Doesn't that say something? Perhaps Vista drivers are harder to write. Perhaps they're just not mature yet. However automatically blaming HP is unfair. It MIGHT be fair it if were just one company or a small group, but MOST companies had trouble. THAT to me suggests the problem IS in fact Vista.
How about Vista's own networking and file system drivers? Are they someone else's fault too? Because early on you'd be lucky to get a large file transfer not to just hang and estimate the age of the universe as when the file copy will finish.
Other than that, I actually like Vista Ultimate
Good for you. Hope you enjoy the bloat, the pretty effects and having your rights restricted left right and center? Oh and the popups. Can't forget the popups.
Vista has exactly 1 thing that I want in XP, and only if you go 64 bit. That is it allows addressing memory larger than 4GB. I am going to hold out on XP for as long as I can, then I'll probably move to Linux because I'll have lost the one thing I truly can't replace on XP - gaming. Gaming on Vista is shite compared to XP and will be for the forseeable future (with the exception of a handful of really hardware intensive resource hogging DirectX 10 games so encumbered with DRM I won't touch them anyway).
There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults. For a really good extreme example much more elloquently stated than I possibly could take a look at Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and look for a persuasive argument why Nancy and Ronald Reagan consulting fortune tellers and horoscopes might not be a good thing when Ron's got his finger on the nuclear button. Wiping out most species on the planet has to qualify as an evolutionary step backwards.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
You trip over your own feet and somehow, once you've landed, you're having sex with the most beautiful girl you've ever seen. Sure, it's possible
You jog in a clothing optional seedy part of town?? Please tell me where you jog so I can avoid it.
2 battery bays or a second mini battery that allows you to swap out a battery without having to hibernate or shut down would be much more useful to me. I could then carry as many batteries as I needed, AND have my Nvidia 7900GS. Might not work for air travellers though due to retarded rules about the number of batteries you can carry.
Don't knock 'em. They may not be covering all the bases, but they're out there in the real world blowing crap up and measuring the shrapnel.
The "getting out there and getting your hands dirty" part of science is vastly underrated. The best way to figure out what will really happen is to go on out there and do it.
Oh I'll knock 'em alright. You can't justify throwing out proper use of the scientific method, complete with controls, just because you're getting your hands dirty and entertaining people. What they do is NOT science, by any stretch of the imagination. The part of science that's vastly underrated is the years of toil and repetition that is required to achieve results in most cases (because if it's obvious and easy, it's probably already been done). Unfortunately that side of science isn't very entertaining so all you can do is provide a summary of what people have done. What can be done is use REAL controls, make your conclusions logically consistent, and qualify your results and the limits of your results. They could blow just as much crap up, if they didn't have to label a myth as busted or not when they'd only proven one sub-case based on a negative result. (Note that if they used proof by contradiction for some myths they could still come up with a definitive answer as to whether the myth is busted or not, but usually they just focus on their limited test and come up with an overall conclusion that does not follow for the general case).
Myth busters is not science - it's entertainment poorly disguised as science targetted at people who don't understand science, and as such it is misleading and dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
I always think that using Laptops for gaming is a bit of a silly idea
I'm a new dad, and was a busy person before then. I use the laptop on my hour commute each way. Sometimes I watch DVDs, but often it's flight simulators that I use this time for (MS flight sim and an r/c flight sim). I have a much better desktop but it probably gets about a quarter as much use as my Dell Inspirion 9400 (which incidentally has been a nightmare but I'm still grateful to have a working laptop with an 8800GT in it). Latest and greatest? Phooey! Perhaps if flight sims weren't so unpopular at the moment. Still I'm glad - probably require internet connection to validate or some such rubbish if I was using the latest and greatest. I'm not adding a $30 mobile internet bill to get 10 hours a week of play.
It doesn't matter if it's compiler-dependent or not. The correct answer to that question is: "This code is badly written. It never makes sense to write i = i++. You probably mean i++."
I've seen i *= 0; and i *= 1; (actual variable name i) in commercially critical code (that is run multiple times every day!), but that's not the worst I've seen. I was saw code that was licensed for a hefty fee then for a decade, then sold for over $1 Million that included an easter egg (or rather code bomb) consisting of events for popup dialogs that were a conversation between Kirk and Spock as well as an april fools day joke that told the user their hard drive was being wiped.
Exactly. I'm in the camp that says some sort of programming test is fair for any level. If you're really a "Senior software engineer" with "excellent $LANGUAGE skills" then writing something like fizzbuzz will only take you two minutes, right?
Just for fun I decided to write FizzBuzz in Java after looking it up earlier today. Took me about 1.5-2 hours. No I'm not incompetent. I wrote an initial version. Tested it. Decided it wasn't efficient. Fixed it z(Wrote another version). Decided I didn't like the repetition in the code. Added a flag that would allow it to print the reasoning for writing the word out. Refactored it, and extended it to work with arrays of numbers and words (So Fizz Buzz Flop for example for numbers including or divisible by 3, 7, 5).
Of course I had the gist of it in under 2 minutes but my first working version certainly took longer than 2 minutes. I even had a cut and paste error that required about 3 minutes of debugging to fix. Oh and if you asked me to write it on paper, I'd have failed. I don't work in a linear way and I like to be able to re-arrange code. Are you sure I'm incompetent and you'd rather hire the guy that can speed code?
More importantly than just showing whether or not somebody can code, it shows whether or not they can handle simple tasks under pressure. I'm sure most of those applicants could have completed it at home when they're not being watched, but if they can't do it in an interview, then how are they going to perform on-site at a client, when a major bug just popped during a production push?
That's a very different sort of pressure. The pressure in a job interview comes from the people around you questioning your abilities. In most production environments you're there because your skills as an expert are required and usually in all but the most hostile and unhealthy places of employment people are there to help each other in a crisis. You'll find that people who are socially confident might do brilliantly at your simple coding excercise, while the best of geeks who would do brilliantly with a production problem may fall flat on his ass (ie. get nervous and stuff up the excercise) at your interview.
I'm usually socially confident but awkward. I tend to do very well at most tests (I have 2 degrees including a Masters and I haven't cheated at uni exam or assignment), but I've still borked a few interviews in my time due to nerves. The handful of times I've been on my own in a production crisis I've been commended on my work.
Speaking as someone with an astrophysics background, I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what it is. And likely no one else will unless and until a decent spectrum of the object can be taken. Because, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words (and, if you are diligent, a light curve), a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures.
I guess it depends on your definition of decent but here you go:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf
"Multiple spectra show five broad absorption bands between 4100 A and 6500 A and
a mostly featureless continuum longward of 6500 A."
The problem is not a lack of spectra. They don't fit what's known. (However if by "decent spectra" you meanabsorption bands over the entire gamut of wavelengths, don't hold your breath)
I read it differently than both of you. I read that a crystal ball gazing tech evangelist once again decided he could tell the future, no matter how little economic or technical sense his vision of the future actually holds. I also wonder how much funding he's receiving from the general purpose FPU companies.
The CEO of Ford knows what a carburetor is, but certainly can't identify the parts of one taken apart in front of him. That doesn't make him a bad CEO.
It does if the reason the company is failing is that their carburetor design is crap. A good boss has to be able to dig down enough to understand the problem and help his junior managers get a handle on fixing it.
Take a historic look at the companies that have produced the best products. Many of them were started by the boss who did all the small stuff and then moved up as he grew his business (and gained the appropriate business skills). Many others have hired the best techinical people they could find that could also manage their work themselves, and given them free reign.
By output do you mean lines of code? For many non-technical IT managers, that's how you measure output. Incompetent programmers can often put out ten lines of code that should require one.
kloc is an awful measure of output. Always has been. Always will be. This is another reason a manager needs to understand the product/service his team are delivering. It makes him able to work out how difficult the tasks are and how well they are being tackled by his staff. If a manager can't tell how hard writing a compiler is (and I've seen this exact situation first hand) he'll end up overcommitting the team and think the star programmer is incompetent because he can't meet his target but the mediocre gui designer who sits next to him can.
Remember, support comes out of a different manager's budget.
That is why at least some of the developers that work on an application should be the same people that follow it through to support. May not be possible for all Vendor software and off the shelf stuff but for in house work that's how I've worked for the last 8 years and 2 jobs. There's a lot more incentive to get it right if you're the one likely to get the support call at 3am because it's your turn to do the shift.
As a survivor of having a close relative commit suicide I can easily say that by the time they commit the act they are already mentally ill.
If someone were to slowly torture you, turning one piece of your body to mush after the next in the most painful agonizing way - I'm talking medieval torture - crushing bones, destroying internal organs slowly, cutting, stabbing, burning - pain that didn't leave you so you could sleep or eat or function - so that you knew you were going to die but that it were going to take a long time, and so that you knew all the best life had to offer was long over, wouldn't you consider suicide? There are diseases - cancers, degenerative diseases etc. that are very much like that. It always doesn't take mental illness - extreme pain is enough. Now also consider that some people are in similar degrees of emmotional pain.
You can of course redefine wanting to take your life as a mental illness, but to say mental illness is a pre-requisite speaks volumes for your limited experience and imagination.
I only hope you and I are never in that kind of pain. Suicide shouldn't be glorified (ala Heath Ledger) - that's destructive. However to show no pity for a soul in such pain that they're willing to take their life is also destructive.
Or investing in a bit aftershave, a bath, some flowers, and marrying a carpenter? ...but there is a downside to having a wife named Bob who shaves more often than you do.
(Okay so it's not politically correct but how many attractive female carpenters do you know?)
After all most users who pirate Microsoft products discard most of them almost immediately.
Yeah that works doesn't it? If you violate someone's right's it's not okay just because you do it for a short time! Cuts both ways.
Is it just me or is Mozilla becoming rather user hostile of late? I can't get over the way they forced through the "awesomebar" even though a lot of users have complained and don't like it. (In fact people dislike it so much there are extensions dedicated to trying to get something like the old address bar back. See oldbar and hideunvisited). It just seems that every time I hear about Mozilla and/or Firefox lately it's a valid complaint someone has that the company refuses to address or thinks it knows how to handle better and is shouting down the user. Not that they've been an example of how to listen to the community but lately it feels like Mozilla has been taken over from the inside. I was really happy with Firefox pre 1.0, and have steadily gotten less happy. I still use it because I'd rather have my nuts crushed than go back to IE. However it's become more of a pain in the arse with each release. I guess the choice is between sore nuts and a sore arse.
Science class appropriate Creationalism audio presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGNRYNdVT7g
Wait till you try to play World of Warcraft from MARS!
An hour and a half (round trip) grind before you get anywhere whatsoever? Won't that be an improvement?
They probably are harder to write for Vista because the model is more strict; in other words, you can't get away with crap you used to be able to get away with.
Well the whole purpose of making it stricter - to get the drivers and OS to be more stable - has backfired.
So if the problem is that it's simply harder, then no, I don't think that's Vista's fault. (And no, I don't know if that really is the problem, I'm just speculating.)
Either way the same companies that made stable XP drivers are writing bad Vista drivers. Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
It's not much more bloated than XP (and I don't really care anyway), I do like the pretty effects, I don't think my rights are being restricted, and there aren't that many popups really, and I don't mind the ones that I do get.
You're drinking the cool aid. Take a look at the minimum specs for Vista (and take a look at the fact that most agree those minimums are too low). If you don't care that's fine. I do care and always will. I'll always prefer a capable machine to pretty windows effects, and I'm not the only one.
As for the popups again you may not care but I do and so do others. Reactions range from your placid "don't care" to annoyance and stress. ...and as for your rights not being restricted, depending on your point of view it's either fortunate or unfortunate that you don't do anything interesting with music and video content, because if you did, you'd soon hit problems.
This is pretty much wrong since service pack 1 was released.
Would you like a list of games that won't work with Vista SP1 but will work with XP? Or would you prefer links to gaming benchmarks that show how much slower games are even with Vista SP1 than XP? Actually I can't be bothered. Go look for yourself. Or not. The point is you don't care about the negatives and never will. That's fine but I shouldn't have to suffer just because you think a bog slow pretty piece of heavily restricted crap is what computing should be.
Course material week 1: Lucasfilm business plan
1. Create 1 fantastic movie using lots of unknown talent very well suited to the role and breakthrough special effects.
2. Follow up with second epic film with weak ending
3. Complete the trilogy with not so brilliant film. Basic plot still brilliant, but add Ewok side plot for marketting
4. Build up marketting empire. Sell toys and licenses to computer games. Revel in the special effects success of the first 3 films. Spend spare cash on special effects empire and loan out for other films.
5. When marketting empire wanes, executive produce 3 crappy equally spaced prequels.
6. Produce bad cartoons when it turns out that your usual talent is less animated than the animations.
After each step above Profit!!!
Next week: Hookers and blow. How to maintain a family friendly facade.
I generally think that most cults even CoS are "good" for the survival of their members against non-members
Really??? You think being forced to hand over all your worldly possessions, being told you're worthless and flawed constantly, and being forced to do things that make you unhappy (like fuck old men you can't stand the site of) improves your chances of survival? You have some odd ideas.
The trouble with capitalism is that continual inflation and continual growth are a requirement.
Communism has many problems, but the one you talk about above isn't one of them. You can offer people a guaranteed job but not guarantee that the job stays the same over long periods of time. You just have to offer people a job while they're willing to reskill instead of tossing them aside like refuse, and finding someone younger to pick up the new skill while forcing them to go out and find new work (which may require reskilling anyway).
No system is perfect. Captalism and Democrasy are no exceptions. Unfortunately if a system is unsustainable something will give and the system will either change or collapse. I know of no system which is sustainable in the long term, which is one reason I don't engage in any kind of politics (though I will say I value the freedom to choose what I do, and thus prefer "a free country" to an over-regulated government controlled system like Soviet block or Chinese communism).
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Of course this had nothing to do with code maturity and putting yet another burden on hardware manufacturers by changing to a new driver model yet again. (How many times was that in the last 2 decades!? DOS->Win95->Win98->WinXP->Vista).
I'd argue this man is incompetent because he doesn't understand that the first version of anything isn't going to be rock solid and stable. If you can't take that into account you have no business writing a new OS. Didn't Microsoft have driver certification programs? In fact don't drivers have to be signed? What the fuck happened to that?
I purchased an HP printer for that desktop system. It literally took me a week to get the damned thing to install.
Hang on isn't this the same company that has solid and stable XP drivers? Doesn't that say something? Perhaps Vista drivers are harder to write. Perhaps they're just not mature yet. However automatically blaming HP is unfair. It MIGHT be fair it if were just one company or a small group, but MOST companies had trouble. THAT to me suggests the problem IS in fact Vista.
How about Vista's own networking and file system drivers? Are they someone else's fault too? Because early on you'd be lucky to get a large file transfer not to just hang and estimate the age of the universe as when the file copy will finish.
Other than that, I actually like Vista Ultimate
Good for you. Hope you enjoy the bloat, the pretty effects and having your rights restricted left right and center? Oh and the popups. Can't forget the popups.
Vista has exactly 1 thing that I want in XP, and only if you go 64 bit. That is it allows addressing memory larger than 4GB. I am going to hold out on XP for as long as I can, then I'll probably move to Linux because I'll have lost the one thing I truly can't replace on XP - gaming. Gaming on Vista is shite compared to XP and will be for the forseeable future (with the exception of a handful of really hardware intensive resource hogging DirectX 10 games so encumbered with DRM I won't touch them anyway).
There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults. For a really good extreme example much more elloquently stated than I possibly could take a look at Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and look for a persuasive argument why Nancy and Ronald Reagan consulting fortune tellers and horoscopes might not be a good thing when Ron's got his finger on the nuclear button. Wiping out most species on the planet has to qualify as an evolutionary step backwards.
You trip over your own feet and somehow, once you've landed, you're having sex with the most beautiful girl you've ever seen. Sure, it's possible
You jog in a clothing optional seedy part of town?? Please tell me where you jog so I can avoid it.
usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful
This describes Slashdot exactly.
Here, I'll fix that for you, vim style...
1,$s/wonderful/adequate/g
2 battery bays or a second mini battery that allows you to swap out a battery without having to hibernate or shut down would be much more useful to me. I could then carry as many batteries as I needed, AND have my Nvidia 7900GS. Might not work for air travellers though due to retarded rules about the number of batteries you can carry.
Don't knock 'em. They may not be covering all the bases, but they're out there in the real world blowing crap up and measuring the shrapnel.
The "getting out there and getting your hands dirty" part of science is vastly underrated. The best way to figure out what will really happen is to go on out there and do it.
Oh I'll knock 'em alright. You can't justify throwing out proper use of the scientific method, complete with controls, just because you're getting your hands dirty and entertaining people. What they do is NOT science, by any stretch of the imagination. The part of science that's vastly underrated is the years of toil and repetition that is required to achieve results in most cases (because if it's obvious and easy, it's probably already been done). Unfortunately that side of science isn't very entertaining so all you can do is provide a summary of what people have done. What can be done is use REAL controls, make your conclusions logically consistent, and qualify your results and the limits of your results. They could blow just as much crap up, if they didn't have to label a myth as busted or not when they'd only proven one sub-case based on a negative result. (Note that if they used proof by contradiction for some myths they could still come up with a definitive answer as to whether the myth is busted or not, but usually they just focus on their limited test and come up with an overall conclusion that does not follow for the general case).
Myth busters is not science - it's entertainment poorly disguised as science targetted at people who don't understand science, and as such it is misleading and dangerous.