And the person that just wants to turn the key, and have it work, is usually the same that kills someone during hour in the morning, because they're a freaking idiot. Those sorts of people shouldn't be allowed to touch anything made of more than one part.
And I'm not suggesting that she should be able to go in and tinker with a Makefile until something builds the way I can, let alone fix code. However, 80% of windows problems are idiotic configuration issues, maybe half the user's fault. The rest can be blamed on an OS that makes it impossible to configure things well. Switching to linux, learning it even as well as she has learned windows, she'd drop 40% of the config issues right there, another 10% of the coding problems (imo, half of the remaining 20%), and in time would eat away at the remaining 40% of config problems that can be blamed on the user. Inertia and MS Office are not good excuses to labor under shit like she did.
I don't like being disputed, even by those that are correct. However, you've mentioned the Amiga, however marginally, and I am forced to bow to your wisdom.
In any event, my own experiences of Word 2000 on Win2000, with P3's is that of 30+ second waits. Simply unacceptable, when forced to use it at work, I'd use notepad instead. Never tried Open Office, but I can only imagine. There is no way that there can/should be any delay past 1-2 seconds, on what would be considered even minimal hardware nowdays. Simply bloat, and totally unnecessary. Linux needs to beat windows by beating it, not imitating it.
Ultimate Office killer? A fast non-crashy word processor that did fonts and simple formatting prettily. A fast spreadsheet that did forumlas well, and didn't worry about anything else. A graphical SVG workshop (Use Moz as the player) and a simple, graphical frontend to MySQL. Is OpenOffice any of these things?
Her solution is to bite the bullet and really learn to use a computer. Redhat, Mandrake... though I don't like them, are far more acceptable than windows. The training wheels must come off someday.
Or she could buy a Mac next time. Hell, in many cases System 7 is still very serviceable, even more so for OS8 and OS9...
You mean the only time you were owned and knew it. With linux, software behaves consistently enough, that it's much more obvious when you've been nailed. The cable modem light blinking furiously, the hard drive whirring? Shit, something's up!
With Windows, you're left wondering if that's normal behavior...
1) Space considerations. You don't want space for yet 8 more DIMM sockets. 2) Trace complexity. Routing the little etched copper wires can be tricky, and this could easily result in 2+ extra layers of PCB. 3) Maximum addressability. On a modern machine, software could address an unrealistic amount of ATA/SCSI storage (assuming they've updated the standards with enough address lines on the bus). Doing it your way imposes limits (as fantastic as they might be). Keep in mind that while an onboard SCSI controller might be imposing hard limits again, you can always plug in another PCI card. 4) Corporate needs dictate storage that is seperable from the big iron's main logic boards. Even if it had your version also, this would end up being cache, not storage. 5) 25 years' worth of inertia. The old stanards are *the* standards. What good is a new fancy $50,000 "hard drive", if we have to buy a new $2 million sun server to use it? Why can't we use this in our $2 million sun server we bought only 19 months ago? 6) Makes too much sense. Remember, this is the industry that chose IDE over SCSI, for what? A nickel per unit of short-term gain?
Wrong again. Even if the essential code in OO is 50 megs (is it?) it wouldn't take more than 3-4 seconds to read it out into ram. It's plain old software asshattery. Not that we can blame Open Office, after all, this 18-20 second delay you speak of, is just their inferior imitation of the 30-45 second wait most MS Office users experience...
Next time, open up vi or emacs, or even for god's sake pico, and print from there. If your boss doesn't like plain fonts, then get a new job.
Control as far as security? I don't know about that. But we won't have this UNish squabbling over where to build it, nor will there be yet another layer of redtape for researchers to fight if they decide to take another direction in the research. As little money as we spend on fusion research, as little encouragement as fusion researchers are given... and we pull this stunt. Nice going, congress.
You might change your bet. Greg Bear is not only my second favorite author* (sorry Greg, but James Hogan is also one of your own faves, is he not?), but he has more than a little insight into what might happen in the world of phsyics, biology, even nanotech. Vernor Vinge names Bear as the author in particular who describes just what the singularity might be. Blood Music, Vitals, Moving Mars, all essentials. Darwin's Radio is a very compelling read, and a plausible explanation of all unexplained aspects of evolution.
He's worth the typical used bookstore cost, if nothing else.
* Note: I of course love all the classics, non-senile Clarke, Asimov, even semi-senile Clarke, but I identify with stories written after I was born. Can't help it.
So for you, exactness of duplication isn't enough, there has to be continuity of consciousness? I guess I can buy that.
More interesting, is thta you think copying could still work, even if only completed at the atomic level. While I have no doubt this might be an intelligent being, with mental facilities roughly equal to the original, I wonder how much difference there might be psychiatrically. I wonder if it would even be a recognizably similar personality.
You people need to read more Greg Bear, he gets it partly right in Eon, I think. There are some rather straight-forward components of the mind, and then there are others that can be copied (though if I understood it correctly, it has been a few years, not copied indefinitely) but not understood, called the "mystery".
Me, as non-religious as I am, tend to think there's more going on in the old thick skull. I hate to call it a soul, but c'mon guys... what if there is something quantum going on? If so, then maybe you can be copied, but the process is destructive. (FYI: Quantum teleportation now allows the copying of a quantum state on particles as big as an atom, but it destroys the original).
Brain uploading may make good science fiction, but I don't see it happening at all. Ever.
Development of a working nano assembler might do it (manufacturing capabilities would instantly become meaningless, since we would be able to produce enough of _everything_ for _everyone_. Don't tell me that won't change things...).
Of course it will change everything. I expect half the world to starve in the months after that event. Current trends in intellectual property law point to that already.
I thought the first did that, and about in the amount I found tolerable. The rest, I dunno. It's not that a movie can't make fun of itself, take Army of Darkness. Doesn't get more campy, more non-serious than that, and yet it's cool. The Tremors sequels struck me as truly pointless. Then again, when your claim to fame is being Alex Keaton's father...
What in the hell is a squirrel? Seriously. I've read through his stupid rules more than once, and obvious it's some jargon term (unless they really do hate the bushy-tailed rats?)... but I'll be damned what it refers to, other than some category of people.
Highlander was a decent B movie, and it might have been so even without Connery (though I feel Connery almost gives any movie some sort of respectability, with few exceptions).
Again, why the sequel? Doesn't the story itself sequel-proof this movie? I'm the kind of guy that watches Terminator, counting how many pigs Arnie nails in the copshop. (over 30, as high as 38, depending on whether he misses or not). The original Highlander alludes to as many as 8 immortals, total. We only see 5 in the movie, 2 of which are bit players, as it were.
Why is this important? It makes it semi-plausible. Could a group of up to a dozen or two immortal humans exist in today's society without their secrets being revealed? Maybe. Could a higher number do so? Probably not even a chance. So tell me, how can you possibly do a television series, where at least one dies every week, for how many seasons?
The sequels though. 2 was horrible beyond reckoning. 3 at least made a pretense of trying to work around the plot's limits, but was done so terribly. Mario Van Peebles? Ick. Not to mention, they literally ignored the existence of the second movie, and I'm pretty sure only fanfiction is allowed to do that, and only in extreme circumstances. 3 would be a train wreck of a movie in any sense, only that 2 and the series were so bad that it was hardly noticed.
Speaking of which, the series. Again. So absurd, they had to plagiarize bad Anne Rice concepts in the third season wasn't it (soon to be plagiarized by Buffy too). You know the entire Talamasca "watchers" group. Dumbest thing she ever wrote (and Anne Rice has written some really bad, really gay shit), and now it's automatically a part of the genre.
Alternate theory: The Tom Cruise Effect. Think about this a moment, when have you seen a watchable Tom Cruise movie lately?
Mission Impossible was just horrible. If Arnie is running from guys on skis with machine guns in True Lies, I can buy it. Most of the Bond actors, for that matter. If Jackie Chan does it, hell, he's probably doing it for real. But Cruise? I'm more of an action hero than he is. It had all the credibility that Chuck Norris has in Walker, Texas Ranger when they tripletake the spin kick that knocks the badguy out 5 minutes from the end... no, wait, it has less credibility than that. Chuck Norris probably could do decent action again, if he wanted to.
Eyes Wide Shut: Ok, Kubrick is on his death bed, conscious for only moments at a time. A worshipful film student is trying to extract the essentials for his last great film. Doctors and nurses bustling around. Suddenly, Kubrick sits upright in bed explosively, screaming "******* Tom Cruise". Maybe a car backfired down the street at that split second, obscuring the prefix "anyone but".
Minority Report: We do get to see Cruise's ripped out eyeballs, but until it's more interactive and the audience gets to do the mutilation themselves, it's only a small gratification. Where to begin? Yet another horrible movie of a cool Dick short, the director must also piss on the Mona Lisa and say that it improves the painting. Can anyone believe that his young son was kidnapped, murdered, maybe even violated beforehand when Cruise always has that "gee, I like to eat shit" grin on his face? In a day and age where all action sequences look contrived, how does he consistently manage to stand out with this ultra-contrived bullshit?
I would describe others too, but why be so redundant? Better to give you the formula.
Tom Cruise is a an ace (examples: fighter pilot, bartender, race car driver) whose star is rising, but he falls into a spiritual malaise that only a good woman can bring him out of. (Note: Formula only applies to pre-1995 career, effects of scientology perhaps?)
Prediction: Tom Cruise will star in the new L. Ron Hubbard film adapation.
The first was indeed fun, maybe even borderline "ok" in a B movie way. But why couldn't they let it end there? Certainly it wasn't some big budget moneymaker, where there was more cash to scrape up with a sequel. Weren't the others straight to video?
Also, what the hell was Scifi thinking? I mean, I don't expect perfection from a channel that considers The Butcher's Wife to be scifi, but damn.
Yeh, games are irrelevant. Just confused me for a moment, I guess. If something is unpolished like linux (but still more than just usable) then it's not ready, and if it's superpolished, then it's a "toy".
You're right on both counts though, is MS Windows ready for the corporate desktop?
Well, I could say things about the people fixing those machines. But that could still cause me trouble, even now. Heck, just applied for the open TST II position the other day...
Intel and AMD have both had minor supply problems in the past. Apple has shown several times recently, that they have no trouble supply large numbers of systems. Henrico County, VA has 26,000 iBooks, that college in florida whose name escapes me has 3500... There is no reason to expect that the shortage will last.
I agree it is an issue, but not nearly as critical as your comment paints it.
Um, as far as I know, the F500 didn't decide yesterday to switch en masse, so this isn't a problem. Assuming that they wait 3-6 months, before deciding to all switch to Apple simultaneously, this still won't be a problem.
Taking that into account, why would I bitch? Instead, I think I'll simply wonder why you replied so foolishly.
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And the person that just wants to turn the key, and have it work, is usually the same that kills someone during hour in the morning, because they're a freaking idiot. Those sorts of people shouldn't be allowed to touch anything made of more than one part.
And I'm not suggesting that she should be able to go in and tinker with a Makefile until something builds the way I can, let alone fix code. However, 80% of windows problems are idiotic configuration issues, maybe half the user's fault. The rest can be blamed on an OS that makes it impossible to configure things well. Switching to linux, learning it even as well as she has learned windows, she'd drop 40% of the config issues right there, another 10% of the coding problems (imo, half of the remaining 20%), and in time would eat away at the remaining 40% of config problems that can be blamed on the user. Inertia and MS Office are not good excuses to labor under shit like she did.
Same could be said for windows, though in reality it rarely happens with either.
The ratio of uberhacker to script kiddy being what it is, what I've said is much more applicable.
I don't like being disputed, even by those that are correct. However, you've mentioned the Amiga, however marginally, and I am forced to bow to your wisdom.
In any event, my own experiences of Word 2000 on Win2000, with P3's is that of 30+ second waits. Simply unacceptable, when forced to use it at work, I'd use notepad instead. Never tried Open Office, but I can only imagine. There is no way that there can/should be any delay past 1-2 seconds, on what would be considered even minimal hardware nowdays. Simply bloat, and totally unnecessary. Linux needs to beat windows by beating it, not imitating it.
Ultimate Office killer? A fast non-crashy word processor that did fonts and simple formatting prettily. A fast spreadsheet that did forumlas well, and didn't worry about anything else. A graphical SVG workshop (Use Moz as the player) and a simple, graphical frontend to MySQL. Is OpenOffice any of these things?
Her solution is to bite the bullet and really learn to use a computer. Redhat, Mandrake... though I don't like them, are far more acceptable than windows. The training wheels must come off someday.
Or she could buy a Mac next time. Hell, in many cases System 7 is still very serviceable, even more so for OS8 and OS9...
You mean the only time you were owned and knew it. With linux, software behaves consistently enough, that it's much more obvious when you've been nailed. The cable modem light blinking furiously, the hard drive whirring? Shit, something's up!
With Windows, you're left wondering if that's normal behavior...
1) Space considerations. You don't want space for yet 8 more DIMM sockets.
2) Trace complexity. Routing the little etched copper wires can be tricky, and this could easily result in 2+ extra layers of PCB.
3) Maximum addressability. On a modern machine, software could address an unrealistic amount of ATA/SCSI storage (assuming they've updated the standards with enough address lines on the bus). Doing it your way imposes limits (as fantastic as they might be). Keep in mind that while an onboard SCSI controller might be imposing hard limits again, you can always plug in another PCI card.
4) Corporate needs dictate storage that is seperable from the big iron's main logic boards. Even if it had your version also, this would end up being cache, not storage.
5) 25 years' worth of inertia. The old stanards are *the* standards. What good is a new fancy $50,000 "hard drive", if we have to buy a new $2 million sun server to use it? Why can't we use this in our $2 million sun server we bought only 19 months ago?
6) Makes too much sense. Remember, this is the industry that chose IDE over SCSI, for what? A nickel per unit of short-term gain?
Wrong again. Even if the essential code in OO is 50 megs (is it?) it wouldn't take more than 3-4 seconds to read it out into ram. It's plain old software asshattery. Not that we can blame Open Office, after all, this 18-20 second delay you speak of, is just their inferior imitation of the 30-45 second wait most MS Office users experience...
Next time, open up vi or emacs, or even for god's sake pico, and print from there. If your boss doesn't like plain fonts, then get a new job.
Spreadsheet? sc. 'Nuff said.
Control as far as security? I don't know about that. But we won't have this UNish squabbling over where to build it, nor will there be yet another layer of redtape for researchers to fight if they decide to take another direction in the research. As little money as we spend on fusion research, as little encouragement as fusion researchers are given... and we pull this stunt. Nice going, congress.
You might change your bet. Greg Bear is not only my second favorite author* (sorry Greg, but James Hogan is also one of your own faves, is he not?), but he has more than a little insight into what might happen in the world of phsyics, biology, even nanotech. Vernor Vinge names Bear as the author in particular who describes just what the singularity might be. Blood Music, Vitals, Moving Mars, all essentials. Darwin's Radio is a very compelling read, and a plausible explanation of all unexplained aspects of evolution.
He's worth the typical used bookstore cost, if nothing else.
* Note: I of course love all the classics, non-senile Clarke, Asimov, even semi-senile Clarke, but I identify with stories written after I was born. Can't help it.
So for you, exactness of duplication isn't enough, there has to be continuity of consciousness? I guess I can buy that.
More interesting, is thta you think copying could still work, even if only completed at the atomic level. While I have no doubt this might be an intelligent being, with mental facilities roughly equal to the original, I wonder how much difference there might be psychiatrically. I wonder if it would even be a recognizably similar personality.
You people need to read more Greg Bear, he gets it partly right in Eon, I think. There are some rather straight-forward components of the mind, and then there are others that can be copied (though if I understood it correctly, it has been a few years, not copied indefinitely) but not understood, called the "mystery".
Me, as non-religious as I am, tend to think there's more going on in the old thick skull. I hate to call it a soul, but c'mon guys... what if there is something quantum going on? If so, then maybe you can be copied, but the process is destructive. (FYI: Quantum teleportation now allows the copying of a quantum state on particles as big as an atom, but it destroys the original).
Brain uploading may make good science fiction, but I don't see it happening at all. Ever.
Development of a working nano assembler might do it (manufacturing capabilities would instantly become meaningless, since we would be able to produce enough of _everything_ for _everyone_. Don't tell me that won't change things...).
Of course it will change everything. I expect half the world to starve in the months after that event. Current trends in intellectual property law point to that already.
I thought the first did that, and about in the amount I found tolerable. The rest, I dunno. It's not that a movie can't make fun of itself, take Army of Darkness. Doesn't get more campy, more non-serious than that, and yet it's cool. The Tremors sequels struck me as truly pointless. Then again, when your claim to fame is being Alex Keaton's father...
When the least you can do still isn't enough, think about my own solution, metanet.
What in the hell is a squirrel? Seriously. I've read through his stupid rules more than once, and obvious it's some jargon term (unless they really do hate the bushy-tailed rats?)... but I'll be damned what it refers to, other than some category of people.
Highlander was a decent B movie, and it might have been so even without Connery (though I feel Connery almost gives any movie some sort of respectability, with few exceptions).
Again, why the sequel? Doesn't the story itself sequel-proof this movie? I'm the kind of guy that watches Terminator, counting how many pigs Arnie nails in the copshop. (over 30, as high as 38, depending on whether he misses or not). The original Highlander alludes to as many as 8 immortals, total. We only see 5 in the movie, 2 of which are bit players, as it were.
Why is this important? It makes it semi-plausible. Could a group of up to a dozen or two immortal humans exist in today's society without their secrets being revealed? Maybe. Could a higher number do so? Probably not even a chance. So tell me, how can you possibly do a television series, where at least one dies every week, for how many seasons?
The sequels though. 2 was horrible beyond reckoning. 3 at least made a pretense of trying to work around the plot's limits, but was done so terribly. Mario Van Peebles? Ick. Not to mention, they literally ignored the existence of the second movie, and I'm pretty sure only fanfiction is allowed to do that, and only in extreme circumstances. 3 would be a train wreck of a movie in any sense, only that 2 and the series were so bad that it was hardly noticed.
Speaking of which, the series. Again. So absurd, they had to plagiarize bad Anne Rice concepts in the third season wasn't it (soon to be plagiarized by Buffy too). You know the entire Talamasca "watchers" group. Dumbest thing she ever wrote (and Anne Rice has written some really bad, really gay shit), and now it's automatically a part of the genre.
Alternate theory: The Tom Cruise Effect. Think about this a moment, when have you seen a watchable Tom Cruise movie lately?
Mission Impossible was just horrible. If Arnie is running from guys on skis with machine guns in True Lies, I can buy it. Most of the Bond actors, for that matter. If Jackie Chan does it, hell, he's probably doing it for real. But Cruise? I'm more of an action hero than he is. It had all the credibility that Chuck Norris has in Walker, Texas Ranger when they tripletake the spin kick that knocks the badguy out 5 minutes from the end... no, wait, it has less credibility than that. Chuck Norris probably could do decent action again, if he wanted to.
Eyes Wide Shut: Ok, Kubrick is on his death bed, conscious for only moments at a time. A worshipful film student is trying to extract the essentials for his last great film. Doctors and nurses bustling around. Suddenly, Kubrick sits upright in bed explosively, screaming "******* Tom Cruise". Maybe a car backfired down the street at that split second, obscuring the prefix "anyone but".
Minority Report: We do get to see Cruise's ripped out eyeballs, but until it's more interactive and the audience gets to do the mutilation themselves, it's only a small gratification. Where to begin? Yet another horrible movie of a cool Dick short, the director must also piss on the Mona Lisa and say that it improves the painting. Can anyone believe that his young son was kidnapped, murdered, maybe even violated beforehand when Cruise always has that "gee, I like to eat shit" grin on his face? In a day and age where all action sequences look contrived, how does he consistently manage to stand out with this ultra-contrived bullshit?
I would describe others too, but why be so redundant? Better to give you the formula.
Tom Cruise is a an ace (examples: fighter pilot, bartender, race car driver) whose star is rising, but he falls into a spiritual malaise that only a good woman can bring him out of. (Note: Formula only applies to pre-1995 career, effects of scientology perhaps?)
Prediction: Tom Cruise will star in the new L. Ron Hubbard film adapation.
The first was indeed fun, maybe even borderline "ok" in a B movie way. But why couldn't they let it end there? Certainly it wasn't some big budget moneymaker, where there was more cash to scrape up with a sequel. Weren't the others straight to video?
Also, what the hell was Scifi thinking? I mean, I don't expect perfection from a channel that considers The Butcher's Wife to be scifi, but damn.
$10 says this thread is pulled once the scientology lawyers get a whiff of it.
Vud you like to pet my monkey?
Haha. But only if they got Devo to do the soundtrack. Besides, Meyers has been turning out alot of shit lately. *cough*catinthehat*cough*
Yeh, games are irrelevant. Just confused me for a moment, I guess. If something is unpolished like linux (but still more than just usable) then it's not ready, and if it's superpolished, then it's a "toy".
You're right on both counts though, is MS Windows ready for the corporate desktop?
Well, I could say things about the people fixing those machines. But that could still cause me trouble, even now. Heck, just applied for the open TST II position the other day...
Actually, everything I've said is with the exception of the Xserve. Haven't known anyone that didn't have some problem with them.
Intel and AMD have both had minor supply problems in the past. Apple has shown several times recently, that they have no trouble supply large numbers of systems. Henrico County, VA has 26,000 iBooks, that college in florida whose name escapes me has 3500... There is no reason to expect that the shortage will last.
I agree it is an issue, but not nearly as critical as your comment paints it.
Um, as far as I know, the F500 didn't decide yesterday to switch en masse, so this isn't a problem. Assuming that they wait 3-6 months, before deciding to all switch to Apple simultaneously, this still won't be a problem.
Taking that into account, why would I bitch? Instead, I think I'll simply wonder why you replied so foolishly.