You hit the mark. Microsoft has been on a downhill slide since 98SP2 and ever since, each new OS release has been from my standpoint more opaque and harder to use. I resisted Win2K for a long time because you couldn't just jump into DOS. I hate the way 2K locks every file a program looks at, and the way it tries to preview files. You can't turn off AutoPlay without a registry hack that has side effects. If 98 didn't have those fatal security flaws I would still be using it.
XP has all the issues of 2K and then some, and no advantages at all. Now Longhorn is going to be shipped with shackles. I would probably not buy it just based on this trend, but add DRM and Vista looks like a nightmare to me.
What sucks is that I've never bought XP retail, I hate XP, but Microsoft has gotten me to pay for XP three times in the price of new laptops. And three more licenses when I replaced those with Win2K. No wonder Gates is a multibillionaire.
Stop trying to imply that Windows is used to fly the spacecraft, or in any other mission critical app. What are you trying to prove with that rambling, jumbled argument?
Oh, and NASA does run this junk, we supplied software for a Windows based system on the Space Station a few years ago.
Is that ISS system mission critical? I didn't think so. Many of the IBM laptops floating around the ISS run Win2k, and that's fine, they don't fly the spacecraft. But in terms of ops, the Shuttles avionics software runs on IBM AP-101S computers with 256 kilobytes of memory. Windows has never been considered, and in fact its complexity and bloat would be a serious liability and danger to flight operations and life and limb.
No wonder NASA refuses to run this junk. Can you imagine having to replace hardware in space, then being unable to return to Earth because the computer can't connect to Redmond to validate the license?
I'll vouch for Thinkpads. These stay together - I dropped one four feet onto concrete once at Security at Midway. It was bent like a banana but still ran perfectly. I bought another with cracked LCD from eBay. The jarhead owner not only had stepped on it but spilled beer into the back. It ran anyway. On the IBM/Lenovo site you can download the hardware manual. Anyone with the slightest mechanical ability and simple hand tools can take apart a Thinkpad down to the back shell with that info. I did that, cleaned all the parts, hosed out the dried beer and put it back together with new screen - and no parts left over.
I've had several of these and also a Dell and a Snoy. Those feel like cheap plastic flexi-fliers compared to even the R50 and the Sony had a mobo failure and was scrapped. These things only come in jet black, no attempt is made to catch the consumer eye with lame gimmicks and cuteness. My IBMs have been purchased used off eBay (one was a refurb). No Thinkpad has had a component failure. The one thing that seems generally weak is the DC Power-In jack - don't knock that around. Now that Lenovo has taken over (including support) so far nothing has changed.
IBM has always had tremendous Linux support, & they provide drivers for all OS making it easy to downgrade to Win2K (I won't run XP) and I can't see why anyone wastes time with thin plastic junk.
Absolutely right. Even if not browsing for extensions and you know exactly what you want, it still takes forexer due to the poor implementation of search and piss-poor organization of the extensions page. It looks like it was laid out when there were only a dozen or two extensions and failed to scale. It's actually easier to google for the extension because the Google search will take you right in.
I think he means "killer app" is analogous to what a superior OS needs to get leverage against an inferior, albeit better marketed and entrenched OS. It's an old analogy, before most people's time. This is how Apple Computer originally succeeded against early day rivals Commodore etc. Until VisiCalc came out, home computers were something hobbyist geeks played with: $2000 hardware to add 2 and 2. At the time the thrill was simply HAVING a computer.
In the same sense it is what *nix lacks against Microsoft Windows. In the current sense it would be something needed for Firefox to kill IE, as its obvious, native superiority is not enough to beat IE in the current marketing environment.
Any starvation in the world is a distribution problem. I do my best to feed the starving, I've made more than my or your share of contributions, however certain corrupt governments and warlords seem to have the habit of taking the food shipments for themselves. Beyond that, just a few minutes ago CNN reported how fat people in 3rd world countries are becoming, quickly closing the gap with our own fat poor. However, the aforementioned corporation has put forth DRM'ed food as the solution to this starvation "problem" and judging from your response you bought it, all of it, 100 percent.
Exporting GM food and techniques is not the solution to the starvation problem. Why are you so hell-bent to lock in poor third-world farmers to licensing GM seeds, as if I didn't know.
GM foods have the ability to cure hunger in certain places.
This is a case where the solution is worse than the problem.
1) No more saving the best seeds to be replanted, new seed must be licensed every year. This not only has legal force (see Canadian Supreme Court decision in favor of Monsanto), but from not on, they only eat if they have money to pay Monsanto. There is no going back, refer to that court decision. The seed Monsanto sells produces a sterile crop. Monsanto has a de facto monopoly on worldwide crop seed production.
2) The GM supercrops form a genetic monoculture that create a situation ripe for a worldwide famine. We are one bug away from a total wipeout. The last time so few strains were cultivated, the population of Ireland was decimated. Ask millions of dead Irish if having only two or three varieties of potatoes is enough. Then ask the Board of Monsanto, they will beg to differ. Further, the GM crops have been altered to resist RoundUp, a Monsanto pesticide, thereby locking farmers into one company's pesticide and forcing other pesticide companies out of business. Of course, we are now seeing RoundUp resistant weeds, so back to square one, except Monsanto has achieved monopoly both on seed and pesticide, and farmers are locked into their sterile crops.
GM in and of itself is not evil. I am not a corporation hater. However, Monsanto,s implementation sucks. To put something as critical as worldwide food production in the hands of one unaccountable company, places us one accident away from worldwide famine.
I said that the term cracker should be used because it already had a malevolent connotation,
Is it because "cracker" is also pejorative term for southern whites? Yeah, it's unlikely that Cletus and Cooter will r00t your b0x, however the confusion exists when the general public reads headlines such as CRACKER STEALS 100,000 IDENTITIES
Online sites in generally haven't gotten it right. If you can't read it on the porcelein throne, it isn't perfect.
Asking for "perfect" is asking too much. However.... wasn't there a recent article about a device where the news would be printed on the TP? That seems ideal, as it would make it very easy to express your opinion of the news once finished on the "throne."
Skins isn't it, either.
Generally agree with your other points. PDF=bloated, proprietary, DRM'ed. AJAX and Flash are impractical for content- Why make content if you don't want it found?
Personally, I enjoy a well-implemented html news site such as signonsandiego.com -- it more or less mirrors the paper edition, but has additional photo galleries and is updated in realtime.
He asked the size and speed. All that can be inferred is the energy of the strike. The mass can be derived from that along a range of impact speeds, but the diameter is nothing but pure guesswork.
For instance, if the meteoroid was iron, it could deliver the same impact in a smaller package. If it was primarily carbonaceous chondrite, it would have to be much larger.
Note in the summary only the diameter is given (stated as fact), not the mass or speed of the object. The summary was weak from a scientific standpoint. You would think the danger of moondust is that it kills on contact or something.
Last time I checked, the "right" to free healthcare was missing from said constitution, along with the "right" to a job, the "right" to free housing, etc...
Apples and oranges. The second amendment was included by the Founding Fathers because said fathers used their guns to successfully depose a repressive government, and foresaw the requirement of an armed populace to bear arms as a deterrent to keep the government from becoming too repressive in the future. There was nothing about self-defense.
There is no right to free healthcare or free housing - other than the Framers believed the freedoms preserved in the Constitution gave everyone the ability to get it for himself. No constitutionally guaranteed rights provide services and products to the people - they only provide freedoms from governmental interference. If services and products were given away, it would not be the "government" that would be the source. Rather, it would be your fellow citizens paying for it. For instance, there is no governmental guarantee of a television in every household, but that didn't stop it from happening, or the occasional bill to guarantee television in every household.
There is no "right" to a job because that in incompatible with a free society. Your rights as a business owner would be severly limited if you had to hire every unsuitable applicant because they had a right to it.
It's completely legal in the US. The transaction is handled through a licensed gun dealer. The penalty for not doing this is much higher than the hassle and small fee (usually $20 -$40). There are many gun auction sites which have prospered under the eBay ban.
In any event do not let your reflexive dislike of guns distract you from the point, which is that eBay has the power to stop all politically incorrect auctions (even if legal) while taking little to no action against hundreds of auctions with millions of dollars of fraud which is probably illegal down under as well as in the US. If eBay put half the effort it does into stopping fraud as it does in stopping the seamier, but legal, auctions that it just doesn't like, then we wouldn't be talking here today, would we?
I don't know, maybe he's not trolling. Not only do I not like SP2 for the reasons I'll get into below, I still run Win2K SP4 on most of the PCs on this lan. The one exception is a R40 which came with XP and I haven't had the time to upgrade to win2k, as all it does is delete spam and I don't really work with it that much. All I've done is reset it to the Classic interface but you can still smell the XP Inside.
In August another machine with a factory XP install which had gotten SP2 died mysteriously overnight after accepting yet another automatic Windows update. A random windows corruption happens, but doubt was thrown when one of the WIn2k machines lost windows the next week so I turned off all automated updating from Microsoft. I didn't like them auto-rebooting anyway.
Both these machines' drives scanned clean in postmortem, they run behind a hardware firewall, and we also run zonealarm and F-Prot AV. They all have IE but it's rarely used and it's encased in the popupcop wrapper anyway. All software is paid for, the products are all together in case of a BSA visit. I'm done with updating, these things run beautifully as long as MS doesn't fuck with them. Frankly, Windows Genuine Advantage and Microsoft XP Product Activation gives me the willies. WTF do they harass paying customers while the pirates get away with their custom disks w/ no activation. XP SP2 sucks, beyond the gross Fisher-Price interface, there are certain problems, expecially pertaining to deleting files from flash cards that XP suffers from, that make it unusable in my business.
I think another poster mentioned the bind eBay is in. It can't assume responsibility by actively policing the site, so unless it wants to see it's stocks plummet, and the entire business model to open the floodgates, it's the intelligent (albeit not altruistic) move to make.
If this is indeed the case, that will be eBay's downfall. If that's policy, it's absolutely incompatible with eBay's mission. How can eBay actively police and ban legal items such as firearms (there's no legal reason or logic to do so, but eBay is motivated to do so by it's managerial culture) while turning a blind eye to millions of dollars in fraud.
None of this adds up, but I sincerely hope you all sort it out, because I use and like eBay. it's like a search engine for physical objects. But believe me I will jump ship the minute an alternative appears unless eBay straightens out its act.
I find it tough to believe that eBay is doing all it can to stop fraud as you claim. That simply doesn't jibe with fact. If you honestly believe that, all I can tell you is that you'll never solve it looking at it from the inside. You are operating with the limiting beliefs of corporate monoculture, and you definitely need fresh eyes from the outside.
Open your eyes and look through these posts. There are so many good ones. There are excellent suggestions in these posts, including everything Ebay needs to do to stop fraud, and for that matter Paypal also. You have computers and programmers, I assume. How hard would it be to detect and flag all those new high end Private auctions on zombie accounts posted from mismatched country/IPs. That is the simple east obvious elementary first step which you refuse to take. Jesus, I hope Google eats your lunch.
I wouldn't touch a seller with a 93% rating. That means seven out of every 100 deals go bad to the point of negative feedback. Because people are so reluctant to hand out negatives no matter how well-deserved, out of fear of retaliatory feedback, the actual number of unsatisfactory transactions is three or four times that.
Feedback is a difficult thing to analyze. Like you mentioned, the 100% positive virgins can be manipulated like a puppet. A guy who has taken one recently may be trying extra hard to prove he is not a shitty seller. But the guy who has taken three or four may no longer give a shit about customer service. And one thing I am certain of is that every deal I have made with a sub-98 percent seller has had problems.
Your arguments are the same as when someone first suggested water cooling for engines. And the 24 foot idea is just nuts. I doubt they're going to run pipes all the way to the muffler. Probably the most heat will be available right at the exhaust manifold(s), which are mounted on the engine. Taking into consideration the role exhaust manifold heat has in engine efficiency, the best heat source would be some kind of heat exchange at the downpipe which would be about a foot from the engine. Personally I am glad finally someone is utilizing all that wasted energy, and I'm just wondering what took them so long. Probably BMW was distracted by putting all that insane crap in the cockpit, including Windows CE. I guess I'd always thought the best way to do it would be to generate electricity directly from the heat and we were just waiting for that technology. There's still a ton of energy at the radiator, but it's not available as steam. Of course, for the cars sold to the US, the manufacturers will be unable to resist the power and will devote the most of the energy gained to horsepower output, instead of maximum increased fuel efficiency (as an example, look at the Lexus hybrid SUV).
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You hit the mark. Microsoft has been on a downhill slide since 98SP2 and ever since, each new OS release has been from my standpoint more opaque and harder to use. I resisted Win2K for a long time because you couldn't just jump into DOS. I hate the way 2K locks every file a program looks at, and the way it tries to preview files. You can't turn off AutoPlay without a registry hack that has side effects. If 98 didn't have those fatal security flaws I would still be using it.
XP has all the issues of 2K and then some, and no advantages at all. Now Longhorn is going to be shipped with shackles. I would probably not buy it just based on this trend, but add DRM and Vista looks like a nightmare to me.
What sucks is that I've never bought XP retail, I hate XP, but Microsoft has gotten me to pay for XP three times in the price of new laptops. And three more licenses when I replaced those with Win2K. No wonder Gates is a multibillionaire.
Stop trying to imply that Windows is used to fly the spacecraft, or in any other mission critical app. What are you trying to prove with that rambling, jumbled argument?
Is that ISS system mission critical? I didn't think so. Many of the IBM laptops floating around the ISS run Win2k, and that's fine, they don't fly the spacecraft. But in terms of ops, the Shuttles avionics software runs on IBM AP-101S computers with 256 kilobytes of memory. Windows has never been considered, and in fact its complexity and bloat would be a serious liability and danger to flight operations and life and limb.
No wonder NASA refuses to run this junk. Can you imagine having to replace hardware in space, then being unable to return to Earth because the computer can't connect to Redmond to validate the license?
I'll vouch for Thinkpads. These stay together - I dropped one four feet onto concrete once at Security at Midway. It was bent like a banana but still ran perfectly. I bought another with cracked LCD from eBay. The jarhead owner not only had stepped on it but spilled beer into the back. It ran anyway. On the IBM/Lenovo site you can download the hardware manual. Anyone with the slightest mechanical ability and simple hand tools can take apart a Thinkpad down to the back shell with that info. I did that, cleaned all the parts, hosed out the dried beer and put it back together with new screen - and no parts left over.
I've had several of these and also a Dell and a Snoy. Those feel like cheap plastic flexi-fliers compared to even the R50 and the Sony had a mobo failure and was scrapped. These things only come in jet black, no attempt is made to catch the consumer eye with lame gimmicks and cuteness. My IBMs have been purchased used off eBay (one was a refurb). No Thinkpad has had a component failure. The one thing that seems generally weak is the DC Power-In jack - don't knock that around. Now that Lenovo has taken over (including support) so far nothing has changed.
IBM has always had tremendous Linux support, & they provide drivers for all OS making it easy to downgrade to Win2K (I won't run XP) and I can't see why anyone wastes time with thin plastic junk.
Absolutely right. Even if not browsing for extensions and you know exactly what you want, it still takes forexer due to the poor implementation of search and piss-poor organization of the extensions page. It looks like it was laid out when there were only a dozen or two extensions and failed to scale. It's actually easier to google for the extension because the Google search will take you right in.
That's an awesome idea, but you'd have to share the broswer cache. Mua ha ha!
It's called generating "buzz," they are testing the waters much like that goddam Google OS WalMart PC.
I think he means "killer app" is analogous to what a superior OS needs to get leverage against an inferior, albeit better marketed and entrenched OS. It's an old analogy, before most people's time. This is how Apple Computer originally succeeded against early day rivals Commodore etc. Until VisiCalc came out, home computers were something hobbyist geeks played with: $2000 hardware to add 2 and 2. At the time the thrill was simply HAVING a computer.
In the same sense it is what *nix lacks against Microsoft Windows. In the current sense it would be something needed for Firefox to kill IE, as its obvious, native superiority is not enough to beat IE in the current marketing environment.
Any starvation in the world is a distribution problem. I do my best to feed the starving, I've made more than my or your share of contributions, however certain corrupt governments and warlords seem to have the habit of taking the food shipments for themselves. Beyond that, just a few minutes ago CNN reported how fat people in 3rd world countries are becoming, quickly closing the gap with our own fat poor. However, the aforementioned corporation has put forth DRM'ed food as the solution to this starvation "problem" and judging from your response you bought it, all of it, 100 percent.
Exporting GM food and techniques is not the solution to the starvation problem. Why are you so hell-bent to lock in poor third-world farmers to licensing GM seeds, as if I didn't know.
This is a case where the solution is worse than the problem.
1) No more saving the best seeds to be replanted, new seed must be licensed every year. This not only has legal force (see Canadian Supreme Court decision in favor of Monsanto), but from not on, they only eat if they have money to pay Monsanto. There is no going back, refer to that court decision. The seed Monsanto sells produces a sterile crop. Monsanto has a de facto monopoly on worldwide crop seed production.
2) The GM supercrops form a genetic monoculture that create a situation ripe for a worldwide famine. We are one bug away from a total wipeout. The last time so few strains were cultivated, the population of Ireland was decimated. Ask millions of dead Irish if having only two or three varieties of potatoes is enough. Then ask the Board of Monsanto, they will beg to differ. Further, the GM crops have been altered to resist RoundUp, a Monsanto pesticide, thereby locking farmers into one company's pesticide and forcing other pesticide companies out of business. Of course, we are now seeing RoundUp resistant weeds, so back to square one, except Monsanto has achieved monopoly both on seed and pesticide, and farmers are locked into their sterile crops.
GM in and of itself is not evil. I am not a corporation hater. However, Monsanto,s implementation sucks. To put something as critical as worldwide food production in the hands of one unaccountable company, places us one accident away from worldwide famine.
Farnsworth: One pound of stem cells please!
Farnsworth: Wait a minute- doesn't Ali have advanced Parkinson's? Right now he coundn't beat a baby. On second thought give them to him!
Is it because "cracker" is also pejorative term for southern whites? Yeah, it's unlikely that Cletus and Cooter will r00t your b0x, however the confusion exists when the general public reads headlines such as CRACKER STEALS 100,000 IDENTITIES
Asking for "perfect" is asking too much. However.... wasn't there a recent article about a device where the news would be printed on the TP? That seems ideal, as it would make it very easy to express your opinion of the news once finished on the "throne."
Skins isn't it, either.
Generally agree with your other points. PDF=bloated, proprietary, DRM'ed. AJAX and Flash are impractical for content- Why make content if you don't want it found?
Personally, I enjoy a well-implemented html news site such as signonsandiego.com -- it more or less mirrors the paper edition, but has additional photo galleries and is updated in realtime.
He asked the size and speed. All that can be inferred is the energy of the strike. The mass can be derived from that along a range of impact speeds, but the diameter is nothing but pure guesswork.
For instance, if the meteoroid was iron, it could deliver the same impact in a smaller package. If it was primarily carbonaceous chondrite, it would have to be much larger.
Note in the summary only the diameter is given (stated as fact), not the mass or speed of the object. The summary was weak from a scientific standpoint. You would think the danger of moondust is that it kills on contact or something.
Apples and oranges. The second amendment was included by the Founding Fathers because said fathers used their guns to successfully depose a repressive government, and foresaw the requirement of an armed populace to bear arms as a deterrent to keep the government from becoming too repressive in the future. There was nothing about self-defense.
There is no right to free healthcare or free housing - other than the Framers believed the freedoms preserved in the Constitution gave everyone the ability to get it for himself. No constitutionally guaranteed rights provide services and products to the people - they only provide freedoms from governmental interference. If services and products were given away, it would not be the "government" that would be the source. Rather, it would be your fellow citizens paying for it. For instance, there is no governmental guarantee of a television in every household, but that didn't stop it from happening, or the occasional bill to guarantee television in every household.
There is no "right" to a job because that in incompatible with a free society. Your rights as a business owner would be severly limited if you had to hire every unsuitable applicant because they had a right to it.
It's completely legal in the US. The transaction is handled through a licensed gun dealer. The penalty for not doing this is much higher than the hassle and small fee (usually $20 -$40). There are many gun auction sites which have prospered under the eBay ban.
In any event do not let your reflexive dislike of guns distract you from the point, which is that eBay has the power to stop all politically incorrect auctions (even if legal) while taking little to no action against hundreds of auctions with millions of dollars of fraud which is probably illegal down under as well as in the US. If eBay put half the effort it does into stopping fraud as it does in stopping the seamier, but legal, auctions that it just doesn't like, then we wouldn't be talking here today, would we?
I don't know, maybe he's not trolling. Not only do I not like SP2 for the reasons I'll get into below, I still run Win2K SP4 on most of the PCs on this lan. The one exception is a R40 which came with XP and I haven't had the time to upgrade to win2k, as all it does is delete spam and I don't really work with it that much. All I've done is reset it to the Classic interface but you can still smell the XP Inside.
In August another machine with a factory XP install which had gotten SP2 died mysteriously overnight after accepting yet another automatic Windows update. A random windows corruption happens, but doubt was thrown when one of the WIn2k machines lost windows the next week so I turned off all automated updating from Microsoft. I didn't like them auto-rebooting anyway.
Both these machines' drives scanned clean in postmortem, they run behind a hardware firewall, and we also run zonealarm and F-Prot AV. They all have IE but it's rarely used and it's encased in the popupcop wrapper anyway. All software is paid for, the products are all together in case of a BSA visit. I'm done with updating, these things run beautifully as long as MS doesn't fuck with them. Frankly, Windows Genuine Advantage and Microsoft XP Product Activation gives me the willies. WTF do they harass paying customers while the pirates get away with their custom disks w/ no activation. XP SP2 sucks, beyond the gross Fisher-Price interface, there are certain problems, expecially pertaining to deleting files from flash cards that XP suffers from, that make it unusable in my business.
If this is indeed the case, that will be eBay's downfall. If that's policy, it's absolutely incompatible with eBay's mission. How can eBay actively police and ban legal items such as firearms (there's no legal reason or logic to do so, but eBay is motivated to do so by it's managerial culture) while turning a blind eye to millions of dollars in fraud.
None of this adds up, but I sincerely hope you all sort it out, because I use and like eBay. it's like a search engine for physical objects. But believe me I will jump ship the minute an alternative appears unless eBay straightens out its act.
Excellent article on this topic.
The new Hubble should be in Shuttle-serviceable orbit. Or dockable to ISS.
Open your eyes and look through these posts. There are so many good ones. There are excellent suggestions in these posts, including everything Ebay needs to do to stop fraud, and for that matter Paypal also. You have computers and programmers, I assume. How hard would it be to detect and flag all those new high end Private auctions on zombie accounts posted from mismatched country/IPs. That is the simple east obvious elementary first step which you refuse to take. Jesus, I hope Google eats your lunch.
If the words "WESTERN UNION" appear in the auction, it is probably a fraud, particularly if it is for a hot or expensive item.
I wouldn't touch a seller with a 93% rating. That means seven out of every 100 deals go bad to the point of negative feedback. Because people are so reluctant to hand out negatives no matter how well-deserved, out of fear of retaliatory feedback, the actual number of unsatisfactory transactions is three or four times that.
Feedback is a difficult thing to analyze. Like you mentioned, the 100% positive virgins can be manipulated like a puppet. A guy who has taken one recently may be trying extra hard to prove he is not a shitty seller. But the guy who has taken three or four may no longer give a shit about customer service. And one thing I am certain of is that every deal I have made with a sub-98 percent seller has had problems.
Your arguments are the same as when someone first suggested water cooling for engines.
And the 24 foot idea is just nuts. I doubt they're going to run pipes all the way to the muffler. Probably the most heat will be available right at the exhaust manifold(s), which are mounted on the engine. Taking into consideration the role exhaust manifold heat has in engine efficiency, the best heat source would be some kind of heat exchange at the downpipe which would be about a foot from the engine.
Personally I am glad finally someone is utilizing all that wasted energy, and I'm just wondering what took them so long. Probably BMW was distracted by putting all that insane crap in the cockpit, including Windows CE. I guess I'd always thought the best way to do it would be to generate electricity directly from the heat and we were just waiting for that technology. There's still a ton of energy at the radiator, but it's not available as steam. Of course, for the cars sold to the US, the manufacturers will be unable to resist the power and will devote the most of the energy gained to horsepower output, instead of maximum increased fuel efficiency (as an example, look at the Lexus hybrid SUV).