The Cuban American National Foundation seems like they have some kind of political agenda. Some agenda other than the actual truth. So you may want to take what they say with a grain of salt. All I can tell you is that I did live there, and I've actually been treated at the clinics and hospitals. I have been to Cira Garcia several times, which is probably the hospital that CANF is referring to. It is the only such hospital in the country. While I can't be sure that they don't have all kinds of fancy medical equipment hidden away in that building, what I have seen of it did not impress me in the slightest. Especially having myself heard the same things about the medical care there. I was in fact surprised do discover the truth. And dealing with them is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. Maybe party officials go there for free. I didn't know any. AFAIK it is mainly for sick tourists and the occasional rich Cuban. I have travelled and lived in a number of third world countries (mostly in SE Asia and Latin America), and I have yet to visit a country with more primitive health care than Cuba. Although I must say I haven't been to Africa. Thailand and Colombia are two examples of "third world" countries with health care orders of magnitude greater than Cuba. In fact those countries really do have pretty good health care. Somewhat comparable (but much cheaper) to first world countries but not quite there yet.
And as for that medical tourism site. Those people obviously don't know shit about Cuba. They make money on scamming gullible people. Do you get a refund when you find out that the medical infrastructure in one of their countries is nothing like what they claim? It really is sad to see that web site. People would be so much better off going to Colombia or Brazil or Argentina where they really do have good but cheap medical care.
On the other hand, if that tomato is grown by dirt-poor Cuban farmers who earn $10/day ROFLMAO. Unbelievable. How many times do people here have to post the actual wages in Cuba before people will catch on. Farmers don't make that much in their wildest dreams. My friend had an illegal job doing heavy construction work and painting (without any masks, respirators or other safety equipment of course). He was paid $2 per 8-10 hour day. And he was damn happy with that job. He didn't want to lose it. He was risking jail time for that $2 per day. Although jineteros (street hustlers) can make more than $10/day most people with legal jobs make no more than about $15/month for full time work.
As for the rest, it is true that domestically grown fruits and vegetables are available at farmers markets and are typically cheaper than we pay, but they are not that much cheaper. In some cases as much as 50% cheaper though. And the selection isn't that great. Although some of their vegetables are much, much better than anything you can buy in the US (with the possible exception of California). But most Cubans cannot even afford most of those. Anything not sold in the street (peso) markets are anywhere from 20% to 100% more expensive than you would pay for the same item in the North America.
but generally the Cuban healthcare system has got praise from everybody apart from the US I have never heard anyone who has actually experienced Cuban health care praise it. And I lived there for more than a year. Even the Cubans themselves who have been exposed their entire lives to pro-Cuban propoganda don't praise it. I suspect the reason that non-communists praise it is due more to Cuba's isolation from the rest of the world than anything else. In other words it is probably based on assumptions/guesses/rumors rather than actual experience. You wouldn't be praising it either if you ever had to visit a doctor or hospital there. You would see with your own eyes how primitive it is. And while I have seen plenty of first world doctors who were ignorant of recent medical advances, it is nothing like Cuban doctors many of whom haven't seemed to have caught up to medical breakthroughs that happened 20 years ago. It's not like they can check for recent advances on Medline or anything. All they have are old medical textbooks. I was grateful that they weren't still using leeches. Although even the doctors (who make $20-$40/month) in Cuba can't really afford a computer let alone an internet connection, maybe this new law will help bring Cuban doctors into the 21st century. Eventually. Extreme isolation has its price. Effective health care is just one of the casualties. Although I suspect that if you had to live on 10 USD per month your health care would be the least of your concerns.
Simply because every Cuban can get a band-aid and aspirin for free doesn't mean they have better care. Actually band-aids are only available at the best hospitals or clinics. And your injury would have to be pretty serious to get one. At least you can buy aspirin in stores if you have the money. But most people don't.
No. Prices for most goods are about the same or a bit higher than in first world countries. The $20/month figure is a bit on the high side actually. Most of the people I knew were lucky to make $12/month. The reason they can "survive" on that much is that rent and utilities are very, very cheap. The utilities at least are practically free, subsidized by the government. Most Cuban families also have ration cards in addition to the tiny wage, which gives them the ability to get some basic staples like rice and beans. Basically they have to learn to live with virtually no money at all. Cubans are very good at surviving, but that doesn't mean they are happy about the situation. They certainly are not. As for the computer thing, very few Cubans could ever dream of affording a $300 computer let alone an $800 one. At least computers are legal there now. It really is a very exciting development. You can bet that all of the upper class Cubans will be getting personal computers now.
Their facilities and services for foreigners is among the best in the world More bullshit from someone who has never even been to Cuba let alone used their medical care for foreigners. Where do you people come up with this stuff? I used to live there. It is not true. Their medical care, even for foreigners is about what you would expect from some poor country in Central Africa. I wish they would at least stop reusing needles.
Antimatter powerplant, antigrav flight, there ain't no way we're getting something like that for another 50 years. 50 years? For antigrav maybe 50,000 years or more likely never. Ditto for that stupid comic book suit. I am an adult. So I don't tend to watch movies based on comic books. The suit idea is clearly a weak attempt at selling some kind of action figure in addition to the movie tickets. It disgusts me to see this on slashdot.
All I care about is MTBF. I am so sick and tired of trying to get data off of crashed drives and restoring computers for family members (and myself) . Even with current backups, it's a hassle and disks fail at the most inconvenient time. I have had much more frequent and less predictable failures from flash drives than from hard drives. Granted it is not a completely fair comparison since the flash drives were being used in portable applications (i.e. cameras) and the hard drives were sitting comfortably in my computer case. However I am less than impressed with what I have seen of flash drive reliability. I have been using the same Seagate hard drive for a system drive for the last 10 years. Can any frequently used flash drive ever hope to store your data reliably for that length of time? Wear leveling my ass. You want to trust your data to unproven wear leveling schemes be my guest. Just don't complain when your data just disappears one day with no hope of recovery. That's another advantage to hard drives. At least you can get data off of a failing hard drive. This ability to gracefully/gradually fail so that you have a chance at recovering your data is not a bug, but a feature. One that you may be taking for granted.
They gave up on it. They just didn't have the expertise for making a real memory controller. At least that's what they said. These days 8 gigs of DDR2 would only cost around $80. A PCI-X 2.0 card or SATA 2 drive interfaced device with the slots and memory controller could probably sell for about a hundred. So we are talking under $200 for a battery backed 8 GB solid state drive that would be about as fast as the system RAM. Do incremental backups to the real hard drive in the background when there are free resources and have redundant rechargeable batteries as well as some source of power to keep them charged from the PSU even when the machine is "off" and you have a practical SSD without any of the disadvantages that make flash based SSDs only really useful for applications where durability/shock is a major factor or with size issues as in cameras or MP3 players or the Macbook Air.
It is amazing to me that even other geeks have fallen for the corporate hype machine. This current gen of "SSD" has little to do with the actual promise of a solid state drive. Have you all forgotten the original point? We were getting tired of the slow incremental increase in speed that magnetic platter hard drive technology was giving us. Hard drives were and still are typically the bottleneck in many applications. They are what is holding us back from instant response times.
These flash based drives are little more than a straw man or distraction from the true goal and promise of solid state drives. Gigabyte had the right idea with their I-Ram device but apparently they found making their own memory controller to be too difficult. That is something more appropriate for someone like Intel, they claimed. And I think this is actually a good point. So why aren't Intel and AMD pursuing such a device? I don't know the answer to that but I don't think it has anything to do with ability. Clearly Intel or AMD could make their own version of an I-Ram device that could have the potential to finally realize the dream and promise of the original solid state drive idea.
The appeal of using a flash based drive for storing my data eludes me. Limited number of writes. Check. Unproven and highly suspect reliability (I have had several flash drives for my camera fail on me at unpredictable times). Check. No great speed advantage to the horribly slow archaic magnetic platter technology. Check. Expensive. Check. Sounds great. Really.
It is the 21st century already and not only do we not have HAL 9000 computers or replicants or flying cars or lunar vacation spots or fusion, but we don't yet even have drives that are significantly faster than they were 20 years ago. I am sitting here tapping my fingers on my desk waiting for the revolution in data storage that surely must be just around the corner. I am sorry but these flash based SSDs are not it.
A toner cartridge is more expensive, but is cheaper in the longer run producing far more copies and it never dries out. It may not "dry out", but a toner cartridge can quite easily fail long before it has printed even close to its rated number of pages. It has happened to me. I intentionally bought the printer with lowest cost per page that I could find. This turned out to be a Lexmark T-610 due to the affordable "high yield" (25000 page) aftermarket cartridges. Unfortunately the first cartridge I bought died after only about 6 months and 200 pages. If you don't use the printer much it can be difficult to get the cost per page that you may have been hoping for from a toner cartridge. Although there are reports of toner catridges lasting a decade or more, the typical shelf life for a toner cartridge is no more than 2 to 3 years.
This sort of thing was really inevitable. I mean if you are going to ban porn with anyone over arbitrary age X, surely it is only being consistent to ban any other depiction of something that would be illegal if it were real. Slippery slope. And the slide will continue. While I do realize that in most cases the original act was probably legal this is difficult to know for certain. This is one difference from child porn where the original act was without a doubt illegal. However I do predict that violence in films and video games will eventually be targeted on both sides of the Atlantic. At least in some cases it can be shown to incite violence as well. Of course Hollywood is a powerful lobby on this side of the pond. So the UK will probably beat us to that particular milestone. Personally I find the idea of violence of any kind in porn to be a lot more offensive than any depiction of physical affection.
But that is a very negative view. We could also be seen as brothers or close friends or business partners. We are dependent on each other. So is most of humanity. I don't see the problem. Mutually Assured Destruction or Mutuallly Assured Development.
tags: democratswantpolicestatetoo or getridofrepublicanstosaveusfrom1984
Obviously just getting rid of Bush is not going to save us. Both democrats and republicans want big intrusive governments. The only difference seems to be that the republicans are in favor of borrowing and inflation to feed their spending addiction while the democrats are quite content to use old fashioned taxes more (in addition to the other methods). Both parties want to be spending a lot more of our money with each passing year. Both parties are funded more than adequately by Big Business. Do the democrats still talk about class warfare while at the same time proposing raising taxes on the poorest segment of the population with regressive tax schemes? I don't see the point to listening to anything they have to say. It is all lies and they will do whatever they please once elected. Idealists, however naive, are not elected anymore. Only pragmatists whose only beliefs are in serving themselves and saying whatever they think will get them elected.
The usual lament about mod points. Well said. Exactly right. There is no justification for this tax. How about cutting spending instead. The government is way bigger than it needs to be. And I can't decide which party is worse. After all the DMCA was put in place under Clinton's watch, no? Are we going to have corporate welfare like that *and* all kinds of fucking ridiculous new taxes. If this passes I will definitely be ordering more computer parts from Canada. Canadian internet retailers are going to love this. And for anyone who thinks that this tax can just easily be passed onto the consumer, you are in dreamland. Aint gonna happen. Look up the term "elasticity" in a microeconomics textbook. Most stuff that places like Amazon or Newegg sell are not exactly necessities in life. If stuff costs more people will buy less of it. Doesn't matter if the cost is profit for the gov't or for the business.
Performance of audio systems is not heavily affected by cables, if only the size of the wires is adequate. I cannot disagree with the (implied) logic here, and I can't speak directly to the issue since I cannot afford any fancy cables. However I must admit to drooling over these for my HD600s.
99.99% pure silver 24AWG Teflon insulated stranded conductors. How could any geek not at least be tempted by that? Even ones without "golden" ears? If you are going to spend money you may as well get something that will actually measure differently with a multimeter (in addition to qualifying as a precious metals investment).
At last. A patent lawsuit that I can find some humour in. Usually they are frustrating and sad. I would like to mod the whole article +1 funny. On a side note, all of my drives are Seagate. I have had good luck with them and dig their 5 year warranties. I have had an 80 gig seagate that until very recently I have been using as my OS drive without the slightest sign of problems since 80 gig drives were state of the art (is SOA or SOTA a valid acronym?).
How are you Gentlemen!! Perhaps you would be interested in my comparison of memory footprints The results may surprise you. Windows 2000 with SP5 has a slightly larger memory footprint than Windows XP without any service packs or updates installed. Due to the vastly larger memory requirements for Windows XP I always assumed that this would not be the case. It is only the service packs and other updates that make windows XP into the memory hog that it is. In the beginning it was (relatively) lean and mean. This threw me at first.
Actually it is mainly Asus's own lack of motherboard drivers for windows 2000 for my new motherboard that finally forced me to 'upgrade' from windows 2000 to XP. Although Razer has also dropped the ball by not supplying win2k drives for my new Diamondback 3G mouse. It seems that is really these vendors and not microsoft that truly force upgrades to their newer operating systems.
I am surprised no one has mentioned nlite or the torrents available for pre nlited versions.
Yes, regular encyclopedias can also be wrong. Yes, even 'authoritative' sources can be biased. The difference with Wikipedia is that some topics have actually been written by an author who is clearly no more than 10 or 12 years old who might have been writing a book report for school. And anything even slightly controversial can just end up in an editing war. So it is possible that you could read a popular misconception as fact. Don't get me wrong. I love Wikipedia. It tends to be the first place I go looking for information. And it can actually be a very well written introduction to any topic. But anything you read there needs to be verified from better sources before really accepting it as fact. I do think it has been noticeably improving over time however. I think it is much better than it was even a few years ago. Marking a topic as "controversial" and "citation needed" etc are all steps in the right direction.
Let me give an example. In 1995, a journalist named Richard Preston wrote a novel about the Ebola virus based on an article he wrote for The New Yorker. It was called The Hot Zone. It was a bestseller and I found it to be quite an exciting read. It is a superb example of what I like to think of as the fake documentary, a form of cheating as a way to make a work of fiction (or semi-fiction) have greater impact. The earliest story I am aware of that did this intentionally was Michael Chrichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969). In the preface and throughout that novel the story is presented to the reader as a retelling of fact. Some of his other novels like Jurassic Park also attempt this but mainly limit it to the preface. Chrichton is one of my favorite authors, and I do like the technique. An example of a film that attempts this was The Blair Witch Project. I thought that The Hot Zone took it a bit too far however by actually placing the book in the non-fiction section of bookstores and calling it "a true story" on the cover. So it is understandable that many people took the book as undisputed fact and not fiction or at least a sensationalist, misleading,(but exciting) piece of journalism.
After reading The Hot Zone a few times and finding it so exciting I decided to do a bit of internet research and general fact checking about it. I soon discovered that the book was considered laughable by most virologists and many of the doctors who were actually there. It was regarded as anything but an accurate portrayal of events. I did a bit more research and found out more specifically what Preston got wrong (a lot!). None of this information was particularly hard to find. So imagine my surprise some years later when I stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for Ebola. It read like a gullible 10 year old's book report on the fictionalized version of the virus found in Preston's book. I was sufficiently annoyed with the sensationalist and poorly written misinformation that I spent the next 12 hours of my life changing it to be more representative of the truth and citing my references as well. I could never bear to go back to the topic later always assuming that whatever 10 year old wrote it would just go re-edit it and all of my research would have been in vain. So it was several years before I actually went back to look again. Well, most of my contributions were indeed gone, but they were replaced by pretty decent information. I couldn't really find fault with it. In fact it may have been better than what I had written.
So whenever there are very popular misconceptions about a topic Wikipedia tends to be highly unreliable, especially soon after the popular source of misinformation has been published. The Ebola entry seems to have been one of the more glaring examples (thanks to Preston), but it also showed that the self-correction dynamic of The Wiki can eventually fix things too. Wikipedia can be such a wonderful resource, giving you a perspective that just cannot be found anywhere else, but it has to be taken for what it is. It cannot be blindly trusted.
For what it's worth, your basic two year old is breathtakingly smart, just not in the IQ sort of way You obviously haven't spent much time around children. Didn't Alex the African Grey parrot test as well as the average 2 year old human? Or are you talking about emotional intelligence?
[quote]The wave-particle duality question has been answered *very* satisfactorily.[/quote] Only quantitatively. But we cannot truly see beyond the equations to get any sort of insight into what is really going on there. While looking at electromagnetic "stuff" as either a particle or a wave may work out mathematically, it does little to explain what it "is" per se. The human brain just cannot really imagine such a non-thing. There is no picture for something that can be simultaneously both a particle and a wave. That does not invalidate the math or the concept. But to say that the question has been answered seems the height of hubris.
I have been running Windows since 1993, and every Operating System from them apart from Windows ME has ran flawlessly and crash for me. I haven't used ME and so won't comment on it. However I can agree that win95/98 crashed for me too. On a nearly daily basis. I would have to reinstall it at least once every 3-6 months for various reasons. Plenty of BSODs too. OTOH, DOS 5.0 was pretty stable and very fast. I quite liked it. I was so relieved when MS finally released windows 2000. Finally, a stable version of windows that could compete with Linux for uptime. As far as I'm concerned windows 2000 with SP4 was the best operating system that MS ever made and probably will ever make. If what you really meant to say is that you have never had a crash running windows 95/98 I don't believe you. I don't know what agenda you have, but you are lying. Everyone I have ever met has had lots of crashes with Win95/98. And I'm sorry, but blaming the hardware doesn't cut it. The same hardware can be used on Windows 2000 without the crashes. I should know. The computer I am typing on now in XP was the same one that I was running win98SE on. It looks like MS has finally overcome the major stability issues. Now they just have to fix the BLOAT and SLOWNESS issues and they'll be golden.
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The Cuban American National Foundation seems like they have some kind of political agenda. Some agenda other than the actual truth. So you may want to take what they say with a grain of salt. All I can tell you is that I did live there, and I've actually been treated at the clinics and hospitals. I have been to Cira Garcia several times, which is probably the hospital that CANF is referring to. It is the only such hospital in the country. While I can't be sure that they don't have all kinds of fancy medical equipment hidden away in that building, what I have seen of it did not impress me in the slightest. Especially having myself heard the same things about the medical care there. I was in fact surprised do discover the truth. And dealing with them is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. Maybe party officials go there for free. I didn't know any. AFAIK it is mainly for sick tourists and the occasional rich Cuban. I have travelled and lived in a number of third world countries (mostly in SE Asia and Latin America), and I have yet to visit a country with more primitive health care than Cuba. Although I must say I haven't been to Africa. Thailand and Colombia are two examples of "third world" countries with health care orders of magnitude greater than Cuba. In fact those countries really do have pretty good health care. Somewhat comparable (but much cheaper) to first world countries but not quite there yet.
And as for that medical tourism site. Those people obviously don't know shit about Cuba. They make money on scamming gullible people. Do you get a refund when you find out that the medical infrastructure in one of their countries is nothing like what they claim? It really is sad to see that web site. People would be so much better off going to Colombia or Brazil or Argentina where they really do have good but cheap medical care.
As for the rest, it is true that domestically grown fruits and vegetables are available at farmers markets and are typically cheaper than we pay, but they are not that much cheaper. In some cases as much as 50% cheaper though. And the selection isn't that great. Although some of their vegetables are much, much better than anything you can buy in the US (with the possible exception of California). But most Cubans cannot even afford most of those. Anything not sold in the street (peso) markets are anywhere from 20% to 100% more expensive than you would pay for the same item in the North America.
No. Prices for most goods are about the same or a bit higher than in first world countries. The $20/month figure is a bit on the high side actually. Most of the people I knew were lucky to make $12/month. The reason they can "survive" on that much is that rent and utilities are very, very cheap. The utilities at least are practically free, subsidized by the government. Most Cuban families also have ration cards in addition to the tiny wage, which gives them the ability to get some basic staples like rice and beans. Basically they have to learn to live with virtually no money at all. Cubans are very good at surviving, but that doesn't mean they are happy about the situation. They certainly are not. As for the computer thing, very few Cubans could ever dream of affording a $300 computer let alone an $800 one. At least computers are legal there now. It really is a very exciting development. You can bet that all of the upper class Cubans will be getting personal computers now.
They gave up on it. They just didn't have the expertise for making a real memory controller. At least that's what they said. These days 8 gigs of DDR2 would only cost around $80. A PCI-X 2.0 card or SATA 2 drive interfaced device with the slots and memory controller could probably sell for about a hundred. So we are talking under $200 for a battery backed 8 GB solid state drive that would be about as fast as the system RAM. Do incremental backups to the real hard drive in the background when there are free resources and have redundant rechargeable batteries as well as some source of power to keep them charged from the PSU even when the machine is "off" and you have a practical SSD without any of the disadvantages that make flash based SSDs only really useful for applications where durability/shock is a major factor or with size issues as in cameras or MP3 players or the Macbook Air.
It is amazing to me that even other geeks have fallen for the corporate hype machine. This current gen of "SSD" has little to do with the actual promise of a solid state drive. Have you all forgotten the original point? We were getting tired of the slow incremental increase in speed that magnetic platter hard drive technology was giving us. Hard drives were and still are typically the bottleneck in many applications. They are what is holding us back from instant response times.
These flash based drives are little more than a straw man or distraction from the true goal and promise of solid state drives. Gigabyte had the right idea with their I-Ram device but apparently they found making their own memory controller to be too difficult. That is something more appropriate for someone like Intel, they claimed. And I think this is actually a good point. So why aren't Intel and AMD pursuing such a device? I don't know the answer to that but I don't think it has anything to do with ability. Clearly Intel or AMD could make their own version of an I-Ram device that could have the potential to finally realize the dream and promise of the original solid state drive idea.
The appeal of using a flash based drive for storing my data eludes me. Limited number of writes. Check. Unproven and highly suspect reliability (I have had several flash drives for my camera fail on me at unpredictable times). Check. No great speed advantage to the horribly slow archaic magnetic platter technology. Check. Expensive. Check. Sounds great. Really.
It is the 21st century already and not only do we not have HAL 9000 computers or replicants or flying cars or lunar vacation spots or fusion, but we don't yet even have drives that are significantly faster than they were 20 years ago. I am sitting here tapping my fingers on my desk waiting for the revolution in data storage that surely must be just around the corner. I am sorry but these flash based SSDs are not it.
This sort of thing was really inevitable. I mean if you are going to ban porn with anyone over arbitrary age X, surely it is only being consistent to ban any other depiction of something that would be illegal if it were real. Slippery slope. And the slide will continue. While I do realize that in most cases the original act was probably legal this is difficult to know for certain. This is one difference from child porn where the original act was without a doubt illegal. However I do predict that violence in films and video games will eventually be targeted on both sides of the Atlantic. At least in some cases it can be shown to incite violence as well. Of course Hollywood is a powerful lobby on this side of the pond. So the UK will probably beat us to that particular milestone. Personally I find the idea of violence of any kind in porn to be a lot more offensive than any depiction of physical affection.
But that is a very negative view. We could also be seen as brothers or close friends or business partners. We are dependent on each other. So is most of humanity. I don't see the problem. Mutually Assured Destruction or Mutuallly Assured Development.
tags: democratswantpolicestatetoo or getridofrepublicanstosaveusfrom1984
Obviously just getting rid of Bush is not going to save us. Both democrats and republicans want big intrusive governments. The only difference seems to be that the republicans are in favor of borrowing and inflation to feed their spending addiction while the democrats are quite content to use old fashioned taxes more (in addition to the other methods). Both parties want to be spending a lot more of our money with each passing year. Both parties are funded more than adequately by Big Business. Do the democrats still talk about class warfare while at the same time proposing raising taxes on the poorest segment of the population with regressive tax schemes? I don't see the point to listening to anything they have to say. It is all lies and they will do whatever they please once elected. Idealists, however naive, are not elected anymore. Only pragmatists whose only beliefs are in serving themselves and saying whatever they think will get them elected.
The usual lament about mod points. Well said. Exactly right. There is no justification for this tax. How about cutting spending instead. The government is way bigger than it needs to be. And I can't decide which party is worse. After all the DMCA was put in place under Clinton's watch, no? Are we going to have corporate welfare like that *and* all kinds of fucking ridiculous new taxes. If this passes I will definitely be ordering more computer parts from Canada. Canadian internet retailers are going to love this. And for anyone who thinks that this tax can just easily be passed onto the consumer, you are in dreamland. Aint gonna happen. Look up the term "elasticity" in a microeconomics textbook. Most stuff that places like Amazon or Newegg sell are not exactly necessities in life. If stuff costs more people will buy less of it. Doesn't matter if the cost is profit for the gov't or for the business.
At last. A patent lawsuit that I can find some humour in. Usually they are frustrating and sad. I would like to mod the whole article +1 funny. On a side note, all of my drives are Seagate. I have had good luck with them and dig their 5 year warranties. I have had an 80 gig seagate that until very recently I have been using as my OS drive without the slightest sign of problems since 80 gig drives were state of the art (is SOA or SOTA a valid acronym?).
How are you Gentlemen!! Perhaps you would be interested in my comparison of memory footprints The results may surprise you. Windows 2000 with SP5 has a slightly larger memory footprint than Windows XP without any service packs or updates installed. Due to the vastly larger memory requirements for Windows XP I always assumed that this would not be the case. It is only the service packs and other updates that make windows XP into the memory hog that it is. In the beginning it was (relatively) lean and mean. This threw me at first.
Actually it is mainly Asus's own lack of motherboard drivers for windows 2000 for my new motherboard that finally forced me to 'upgrade' from windows 2000 to XP. Although Razer has also dropped the ball by not supplying win2k drives for my new Diamondback 3G mouse. It seems that is really these vendors and not microsoft that truly force upgrades to their newer operating systems.
I am surprised no one has mentioned nlite or the torrents available for pre nlited versions.
Yes, regular encyclopedias can also be wrong. Yes, even 'authoritative' sources can be biased. The difference with Wikipedia is that some topics have actually been written by an author who is clearly no more than 10 or 12 years old who might have been writing a book report for school. And anything even slightly controversial can just end up in an editing war. So it is possible that you could read a popular misconception as fact. Don't get me wrong. I love Wikipedia. It tends to be the first place I go looking for information. And it can actually be a very well written introduction to any topic. But anything you read there needs to be verified from better sources before really accepting it as fact. I do think it has been noticeably improving over time however. I think it is much better than it was even a few years ago. Marking a topic as "controversial" and "citation needed" etc are all steps in the right direction.
Let me give an example. In 1995, a journalist named Richard Preston wrote a novel about the Ebola virus based on an article he wrote for The New Yorker. It was called The Hot Zone. It was a bestseller and I found it to be quite an exciting read. It is a superb example of what I like to think of as the fake documentary, a form of cheating as a way to make a work of fiction (or semi-fiction) have greater impact. The earliest story I am aware of that did this intentionally was Michael Chrichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969). In the preface and throughout that novel the story is presented to the reader as a retelling of fact. Some of his other novels like Jurassic Park also attempt this but mainly limit it to the preface. Chrichton is one of my favorite authors, and I do like the technique. An example of a film that attempts this was The Blair Witch Project. I thought that The Hot Zone took it a bit too far however by actually placing the book in the non-fiction section of bookstores and calling it "a true story" on the cover. So it is understandable that many people took the book as undisputed fact and not fiction or at least a sensationalist, misleading,(but exciting) piece of journalism.
After reading The Hot Zone a few times and finding it so exciting I decided to do a bit of internet research and general fact checking about it. I soon discovered that the book was considered laughable by most virologists and many of the doctors who were actually there. It was regarded as anything but an accurate portrayal of events. I did a bit more research and found out more specifically what Preston got wrong (a lot!). None of this information was particularly hard to find. So imagine my surprise some years later when I stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for Ebola. It read like a gullible 10 year old's book report on the fictionalized version of the virus found in Preston's book. I was sufficiently annoyed with the sensationalist and poorly written misinformation that I spent the next 12 hours of my life changing it to be more representative of the truth and citing my references as well. I could never bear to go back to the topic later always assuming that whatever 10 year old wrote it would just go re-edit it and all of my research would have been in vain. So it was several years before I actually went back to look again. Well, most of my contributions were indeed gone, but they were replaced by pretty decent information. I couldn't really find fault with it. In fact it may have been better than what I had written.
So whenever there are very popular misconceptions about a topic Wikipedia tends to be highly unreliable, especially soon after the popular source of misinformation has been published. The Ebola entry seems to have been one of the more glaring examples (thanks to Preston), but it also showed that the self-correction dynamic of The Wiki can eventually fix things too. Wikipedia can be such a wonderful resource, giving you a perspective that just cannot be found anywhere else, but it has to be taken for what it is. It cannot be blindly trusted.
[quote]The wave-particle duality question has been answered *very* satisfactorily.[/quote]
Only quantitatively. But we cannot truly see beyond the equations to get any sort of insight into what is really going on there. While looking at electromagnetic "stuff" as either a particle or a wave may work out mathematically, it does little to explain what it "is" per se. The human brain just cannot really imagine such a non-thing. There is no picture for something that can be simultaneously both a particle and a wave. That does not invalidate the math or the concept. But to say that the question has been answered seems the height of hubris.