I think that the big difference is the size of the countries. The UK is relatively a small coutry, roughly the size of New England, (Maryland to Maine), but news in New England isn't restricted to New England, we get information about Florida, Seattle, Texas and California. The U.S. is roughly equivalent to the size and population of Western Europe, so your area of expertise (Western Europe) is roughly comperable to the size of most American knowlege of it's own continent.
Like every hot button issue, there are two and sometimes three sides to the story with little good information on both sides.
First of all Talking on a cell phone != driving drunk
These article uses simulators to study reaction time. Simulators != real world situations. In real world cases, talking on a cell phone only accounts for 1.5% of distracted driving accidents.
I heard an interview with the designers of the orignal cell phone/alchol study, and they were frustrated that their results had been interpreted in such a way. Most people talking on a cell phone are generally in traffic situations, with surrounding cars and reduced time to react if something happens. Drunk drivers on the other had generally cause accidents with eratic driving caused by reduced motor and cognitive functioning with many fewer drivers around. Remember that most drunk driving occurs at night with much less traffic.
Similators can show the similar results of reduced response time through impairment, but the not the source or real world effect of that impairment
Spyware and adware infections will not stop by simply using Firefox
While it won't stop users from installing spyware and adware, it will stop a majority of the pop-up that advertise these "useful" tools that people seem to love to have on their computer. It's because people constantly see the Bonzi Buddy on webpages, that people become interested and install the software. Firfox fixes some of those problems by blocking pop-ups. With Adblock (or Proxomitron which I love) the exposure and thus the temptation to install this crap is reduced.
In general, attractive people tend to be perceived as more intelligent, better adjusted, and more popular. This fairly well described phenomenon is the "halo effect". So your wife's "skill" at beauty extends to other categories that are not necessarily related.
I think that your wife is able to sell more items because her attractiveness halo extends into consumer electronics information. So most guys think that she knows lots about gadgets even though she may know almost nothing abut them. Simply because she's hot.
I've been to the National Cathedral... it's a beautiful place, even for pagans such as myself. Why would they carve a Darth Vader into the arches?
Though the Darth Vader head is new to me there has been a much scarier human "gargoyle" has been there for many years. This human gargoyle is a LAWYER.
For a brief history of gargoyles check this out Some info about the human "gargoyle" is near the bottom.
Korea, which I was in recently as well as many other modernizing southeast nations have in the last few years mandated that all vehicular public transportation, mostly buses but also taxis run on compressed natural gas. While this make greater economic sense in smaller countries or where the the infrastucture has yet to develop (India), I would not be surprised that if in the next 10 years that California or other "green" states begin the same regulation on public vehicles for further benefit of the public good.
VA LINUX...
Hey cmdrTaco, willing to give a little feedback about your job satisfaction working for VA "Linux/Systems"? And how have those stock options worked out?
Take care
You forgot something. If media companies were to add extra content like digital liner notes to its copy protected disks to make it more palatable to consumers, that disk won't play on the one device that can recognize it.
Now the music industry wants to change formats to encrypted digital disks. What are they offering us to switch? Extra content? Digital liner notes or cover art? DVD-esque interviews, band commentary?
This is one aspect of CD piracy that has consistently amazed me. One of the reasons that most people choose to buy a CD is that they want the liner notes and the case to go along with it. The tangibility of a new CD is impossible to replicate on a computer. That is until the the record companies start offering more digital content that invariably will become pirated. Still want to buy that Beck CD for the liner notes and that new CD smell? Now I can not only download the music, but print with more than passable quality the the liner notes, CD labels all for the cost of a jewel case, some paper and a CD-R. It only lacks that new CD smell.
This is the only thing that the napsterization of digital content has yet to do. There is no P2P application or group that I'm aware of that provides the liner notes. As more digital content is released, more of it will become pirated. This increased cost of production reduces the number of people willing to buy the media and making them more likely to pirate. Seen from the industry's point of view, it makes NO sense to add new features that would make it more vulnerable to piracy.
I went to my first Philly LUG yesterday, and look forward to celebrating the 11 anniversary of Linux at a the FDR park in south Philly near the stadium. Check out the PLUG's webpage. For those of you who weren't there. There is also going to be a hardware swap on the Saturday before the picnic. Unupdated information is available here
I heard a proposal about this about a year ago on NPR. Make some (U.S.) governmental agency, presumably the post office, responsible for creating an e-mail for everyone or at least available for everyone. As proposed, it would be a FREE (beer) and free (from spam) service. Tax payer dollars would be paying for it in the end. But I thought it was a very interesting idea, this way important notices from the government directed to you would could sent via snail mail and/or through e-mail. It would be a way for the government (good or bad) to get in touch with you if you had moved often or just prefer doing things online. License renewal coming up? They would send you a reminder. Male and 18, they would let you know that you have to register for selective service. Links to the IRS 'round tax time. Speeding ticket? It would "remind" you of the location of where to send the check, or the address of the courthouse. When you should be getting your tax refund. List of candidates for local, state and national offices during election.
I'm sure that it will certainly speed up the government end of communication, instead of having to rely on snail mail. It would certainly make the government more friendly (and perhaps more intrusive).
I think the key part to this though is that this mail must be able to be forwarded to another e-mail account. People wouldn't check their government account about back taxes they owe or about local elections. Most people don't care and aren't interested but if sent to an already existing account it would be useful.
I think the big question however is that would only the government have use of this e-mail account? I'm not sure how spam could be prevented otherwise. I have given none of my friends my hotmail e-mail address and yet I am spammed all day. In the end I don't think that it would "work" but an interesting thought.
Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at VerityStob@ddj.com.
Verity Stob has developed a new tool that will help you make rapid diagnoses of sick PCs. A rolling computer gathers "cruft." When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that's cruft. It is also the word "seperate," added to a spellchecker's private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by time upon all petty efforts of humankind. There.
At Laboratoires Stob, we have been working on the cruft crisis for a while. Recalling the maxim "to control a problem you must first measure it," we have devised a suitable metric, an index of cruftidity. Our first version, presented below, is based on a typical PC installation running Windows 2000. But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.
We would like to acknowledge our debt, in the construction of this instrument, to Rear- Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort. His 1805 scale of windspeeds ("Insurance Claim Force 8. Description on land: Tile blown off roof falls onto litigious neighbour's Toyota Shiny") is as valid and useful today as it ever was. Enough preamble.
Cruft Force 0. Virgin. Description: The "Connect to the Internet" shortcut is still on the desktop, and the "How to use Windows" dialog appears at logon. Menu animations and the various event-based sound effects -- even the dreaded Microsoft Sound -- seem cheerful and amusing. Likewise, a clandestine installation of the Blue Screen Of Death screensaver (complete with simulated reboot, natch) from the Sysinternals web site is hilarious. Compilers run crisply, and report only sensible, easily resolved errors. There are just nine directories off C:\.
Filled with the enthusiasm that goes with having a brand new machine, the user resolves to stick to the new-fangled security-conscious temp directory buried deep somewhere below Documents and Settings.
Cruft Force 1. New. Description: User has taken time to rename cutesy desktop icons incorporating the first person singular possessive pronoun.
Twice, the mouse cursor has done that poltergeist trick where, with the actual mouse stationary, it drifts three inches due east and then stops. For no reason at all. Works fine afterwards though. Brrrrrrr.
Cruft Force 2. Comfortable. Description: User has now got around to resetting Explorer so that "web content in folders" is suppressed. Something has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.
A strange entry is found in the System event log: MRxSmb: The redirector was unable to initialise security context or query context attributes. Assiduous googling of the key phrases, up web site and down newsgroup, establishes that, although many have wondered, nobody knows what this means.
Cruft Force 3. Lived-in. Description: One time in seven when the user starts Word or other Office 2000 app, instead of running, it pretends it is installing itself for the first time and starts a setup program.
Directory count in C:\ up to 17, and something has pooed a Paradox lock control file there, too.
Cruft Force 4. Middle-aged. Description: Amount of time from screen showing "real" Windows background to the logon box appearing is >30 seconds. Sometimes cannot "browse" other machines on LAN.
Get first real BSOD. Uninstall jokey screen saver, replace with SETI.
An extra disk of huge capacity has been installed. CD-ROM moves from drive F: to drive [:
Cruft Force 5. Worn out. Description: Some time after bootup, always get a dialog "A service has failed to start - BLT300." What is BLT300? Nobody knows. Although one can manually remove/disable this service, it always reappears two or three reboots later.
If one double-clicks a document icon, Word takes 4 minutes 30 seconds to start up. But it still works fine if started as a program. Somebody opines that this is due to misconfigured DDE. Or the Mars-Jupiter cusp.
Cruft Force 6. Limping. Description: [Delphi|Visual Basic|Java] suddenly remembers a trial shareware component -- deleted six months ago because it was rubbish -- and refuses to compile anything until it is reinstated.
"Web content in folders" Explorer setting switches itself back on unbidden. "Setup" programs start crashing while unpacking their own decompression DLLs.
Cruft Force 7. Wounded. Description: No longer able to logon using original account as the system freezes, so must logon as "Verity2" or similar.
There are now nine items in BOOT.INI: the original W2K starter, a brace of two- entries-each NT4s (one Turkish), a Windows 98, and three assorted Linuxen. Left to start up by itself, the machine chooses a broken installation of SUSE and halts with a kernel panic.
Cruft Force 8. Decrepit. Description: A virus checker is installed at the insistence of IT. This actually improves performance, apparently violating Newton's laws.
Blue Screens Of Death are served daily. The SETI screen saver, like ET himself, encounters difficulty calling home and despairing during an overnight run creates 312 copies of its icon in an (impressively expanded) system tray that fills half the screen.
Successful connections to the LAN are very rare.
Cruft Force 9. Putrefaction. Description: Can only see the 32-GB D:\ partition -- the one which has all the source code on it -- at every third boot. Directory count in C:\ up to 93, partly because some [one/thing] has put a complete (but non- working) installation of the Eudora e-mail client in the root.
Starting Control Panel shows rolling torch animation. The applet icons never appear.
Cruft Force 10.Expiry. Description: Machine only runs in Safe mode at 16-color 800×600, and even then for about a minute and a half before BSODing. Attempts to start an app are rewarded with a dialog "No font list found."
Ordinary dodges, such as reformatting the hard disk(s) and starting again, are ineffective. Cruft has soaked into the very fabric of the machine, and it should be disposed of safely at a government-approved facility. There it will be encased in cruft-resistant glass and buried in a residential district.
You know this sounds like an upcoming slashdot poll.
What is the most IMPORTANT distribution and direction for linux.
RedHat (commercial success) Mandrake (user friendlieness) Debian (integrity) Gentoo (speed) I only use CowboyNeal
I know that I should include SUSE in there, but I can't think of one item that particularly sets them apart. Yes I know that Yast2 is good but give me a break.
As a person who was on the Atkins diet for about 2 months, and quickly (7-10 days) lost 20 pounds I can attest to that this diet WORKS. But there are serious drawbacks. You must drink prodigious amounts of water to risk kidney problems. Eating steak with butter is no fun without a great baked potato, or steak french fries. And forget double cheesburgers. Trying to eat the meat without the bread is a messy proposition, and again no french fries to go along with it. I haven't been on many diets, but this diet quickly got very old, even after being able to eat small amounts of carbs.
Code naming software has really annoyed me. Jaguar for OsX. Longhorn for Windows. Palladium for the upcoming hardware software venture. AMD Corvette (before it was renamed). Does this kind of naming have any point or relevancy? What does naming an upcoming code base LIMBO mean?
Only a few astronomers are engaged in the search for potentially threatening comets and asteroids, in fact the total number of people working on this problem is less than the staff of one McDonalds
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the big difference is the size of the countries. The UK is relatively a small coutry, roughly the size of New England, (Maryland to Maine), but news in New England isn't restricted to New England, we get information about Florida, Seattle, Texas and California. The U.S. is roughly equivalent to the size and population of Western Europe, so your area of expertise (Western Europe) is roughly comperable to the size of most American knowlege of it's own continent.
You forgot the wikipedia link though if it's true then the Wikipedia article is now out of date.
First of all
Talking on a cell phone != driving drunk
These article uses simulators to study reaction time. Simulators != real world situations. In real world cases, talking on a cell phone only accounts for 1.5% of distracted driving accidents.
I heard an interview with the designers of the orignal cell phone/alchol study, and they were frustrated that their results had been interpreted in such a way. Most people talking on a cell phone are generally in traffic situations, with surrounding cars and reduced time to react if something happens. Drunk drivers on the other had generally cause accidents with eratic driving caused by reduced motor and cognitive functioning with many fewer drivers around. Remember that most drunk driving occurs at night with much less traffic.
Similators can show the similar results of reduced response time through impairment, but the not the source or real world effect of that impairment
THe topic is interesting!
I think that your wife is able to sell more items because her attractiveness halo extends into consumer electronics information. So most guys think that she knows lots about gadgets even though she may know almost nothing abut them. Simply because she's hot.
Uggh life is unfair.
Though the Darth Vader head is new to me there has been a much scarier human "gargoyle" has been there for many years. This human gargoyle is a LAWYER. For a brief history of gargoyles check this out Some info about the human "gargoyle" is near the bottom.
Korea, which I was in recently as well as many other modernizing southeast nations have in the last few years mandated that all vehicular public transportation, mostly buses but also taxis run on compressed natural gas. While this make greater economic sense in smaller countries or where the the infrastucture has yet to develop (India), I would not be surprised that if in the next 10 years that California or other "green" states begin the same regulation on public vehicles for further benefit of the public good.
VA LINUX... Hey cmdrTaco, willing to give a little feedback about your job satisfaction working for VA "Linux/Systems"? And how have those stock options worked out? Take care
A computer.
This is the only thing that the napsterization of digital content has yet to do. There is no P2P application or group that I'm aware of that provides the liner notes. As more digital content is released, more of it will become pirated. This increased cost of production reduces the number of people willing to buy the media and making them more likely to pirate. Seen from the industry's point of view, it makes NO sense to add new features that would make it more vulnerable to piracy.
Room for more pr0n and mp3.
Ughh I mean serious business applications
I went to my first Philly LUG yesterday, and look forward to celebrating the 11 anniversary of Linux at a the FDR park in south Philly near the stadium. Check out the PLUG's webpage. For those of you who weren't there. There is also going to be a hardware swap on the Saturday before the picnic. Unupdated information is available here
Trusted computing my ass... There can be no trust if trust has not been developed.
Ughh, this article would be nice if:
/. a while ago.
1. Worked in an office
2. Had a job
3. Had money to buy toys
4. Had time to play with them.
Other than that . . . GREAT article.
In spite of all of this I still want that rubber band gattling gun that was featured on
I heard a proposal about this about a year ago on NPR. Make some (U.S.) governmental agency, presumably the post office, responsible for creating an e-mail for everyone or at least available for everyone. As proposed, it would be a FREE (beer) and free (from spam) service. Tax payer dollars would be paying for it in the end. But I thought it was a very interesting idea, this way important notices from the government directed to you would could sent via snail mail and/or through e-mail. It would be a way for the government (good or bad) to get in touch with you if you had moved often or just prefer doing things online. License renewal coming up? They would send you a reminder. Male and 18, they would let you know that you have to register for selective service. Links to the IRS 'round tax time. Speeding ticket? It would "remind" you of the location of where to send the check, or the address of the courthouse. When you should be getting your tax refund. List of candidates for local, state and national offices during election. I'm sure that it will certainly speed up the government end of communication, instead of having to rely on snail mail. It would certainly make the government more friendly (and perhaps more intrusive). I think the key part to this though is that this mail must be able to be forwarded to another e-mail account. People wouldn't check their government account about back taxes they owe or about local elections. Most people don't care and aren't interested but if sent to an already existing account it would be useful. I think the big question however is that would only the government have use of this e-mail account? I'm not sure how spam could be prevented otherwise. I have given none of my friends my hotmail e-mail address and yet I am spammed all day. In the end I don't think that it would "work" but an interesting thought.
The New Adventures of Verity Stob
Dr. Dobb's Journal August 2002
Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at VerityStob@ddj.com.
Verity Stob has developed a new tool that will help you make rapid diagnoses of sick PCs. A rolling computer gathers "cruft." When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that's cruft. It is also the word "seperate," added to a spellchecker's private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by time upon all petty efforts of humankind. There.
At Laboratoires Stob, we have been working on the cruft crisis for a while. Recalling the maxim "to control a problem you must first measure it," we have devised a suitable metric, an index of cruftidity. Our first version, presented below, is based on a typical PC installation running Windows 2000. But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.
We would like to acknowledge our debt, in the construction of this instrument, to Rear- Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort. His 1805 scale of windspeeds ("Insurance Claim Force 8. Description on land: Tile blown off roof falls onto litigious neighbour's Toyota Shiny") is as valid and useful today as it ever was. Enough preamble.
Cruft Force 0. Virgin. Description: The "Connect to the Internet" shortcut is still on the desktop, and the "How to use Windows" dialog appears at logon. Menu animations and the various event-based sound effects -- even the dreaded Microsoft Sound -- seem cheerful and amusing. Likewise, a clandestine installation of the Blue Screen Of Death screensaver (complete with simulated reboot, natch) from the Sysinternals web site is hilarious. Compilers run crisply, and report only sensible, easily resolved errors. There are just nine directories off C:\.
Filled with the enthusiasm that goes with having a brand new machine, the user resolves to stick to the new-fangled security-conscious temp directory buried deep somewhere below Documents and Settings.
Cruft Force 1. New. Description: User has taken time to rename cutesy desktop icons incorporating the first person singular possessive pronoun.
Twice, the mouse cursor has done that poltergeist trick where, with the actual mouse stationary, it drifts three inches due east and then stops. For no reason at all. Works fine afterwards though. Brrrrrrr.
Cruft Force 2. Comfortable. Description: User has now got around to resetting Explorer so that "web content in folders" is suppressed. Something has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.
A strange entry is found in the System event log: MRxSmb: The redirector was unable to initialise security context or query context attributes. Assiduous googling of the key phrases, up web site and down newsgroup, establishes that, although many have wondered, nobody knows what this means.
Cruft Force 3. Lived-in. Description: One time in seven when the user starts Word or other Office 2000 app, instead of running, it pretends it is installing itself for the first time and starts a setup program.
Directory count in C:\ up to 17, and something has pooed a Paradox lock control file there, too.
Cruft Force 4. Middle-aged. Description: Amount of time from screen showing "real" Windows background to the logon box appearing is >30 seconds. Sometimes cannot "browse" other machines on LAN.
Get first real BSOD. Uninstall jokey screen saver, replace with SETI.
An extra disk of huge capacity has been installed. CD-ROM moves from drive F: to drive [:
Cruft Force 5. Worn out. Description: Some time after bootup, always get a dialog "A service has failed to start - BLT300." What is BLT300? Nobody knows. Although one can manually remove/disable this service, it always reappears two or three reboots later.
If one double-clicks a document icon, Word takes 4 minutes 30 seconds to start up. But it still works fine if started as a program. Somebody opines that this is due to misconfigured DDE. Or the Mars-Jupiter cusp.
Cruft Force 6. Limping. Description: [Delphi|Visual Basic|Java] suddenly remembers a trial shareware component -- deleted six months ago because it was rubbish -- and refuses to compile anything until it is reinstated.
"Web content in folders" Explorer setting switches itself back on unbidden. "Setup" programs start crashing while unpacking their own decompression DLLs.
Cruft Force 7. Wounded. Description: No longer able to logon using original account as the system freezes, so must logon as "Verity2" or similar.
There are now nine items in BOOT.INI: the original W2K starter, a brace of two- entries-each NT4s (one Turkish), a Windows 98, and three assorted Linuxen. Left to start up by itself, the machine chooses a broken installation of SUSE and halts with a kernel panic.
Cruft Force 8. Decrepit. Description: A virus checker is installed at the insistence of IT. This actually improves performance, apparently violating Newton's laws.
Blue Screens Of Death are served daily. The SETI screen saver, like ET himself, encounters difficulty calling home and despairing during an overnight run creates 312 copies of its icon in an (impressively expanded) system tray that fills half the screen.
Successful connections to the LAN are very rare.
Cruft Force 9. Putrefaction. Description: Can only see the 32-GB D:\ partition -- the one which has all the source code on it -- at every third boot. Directory count in C:\ up to 93, partly because some [one/thing] has put a complete (but non- working) installation of the Eudora e-mail client in the root.
Starting Control Panel shows rolling torch animation. The applet icons never appear.
Cruft Force 10.Expiry. Description: Machine only runs in Safe mode at 16-color 800×600, and even then for about a minute and a half before BSODing. Attempts to start an app are rewarded with a dialog "No font list found."
Ordinary dodges, such as reformatting the hard disk(s) and starting again, are ineffective. Cruft has soaked into the very fabric of the machine, and it should be disposed of safely at a government-approved facility. There it will be encased in cruft-resistant glass and buried in a residential district.
You know this sounds like an upcoming slashdot poll.
What is the most IMPORTANT distribution and direction for linux.
RedHat (commercial success)
Mandrake (user friendlieness)
Debian (integrity)
Gentoo (speed)
I only use CowboyNeal
I know that I should include SUSE in there, but I can't think of one item that particularly sets them apart. Yes I know that Yast2 is good but give me a break.
As a person who was on the Atkins diet for about 2 months, and quickly (7-10 days) lost 20 pounds I can attest to that this diet WORKS. But there are serious drawbacks. You must drink prodigious amounts of water to risk kidney problems. Eating steak with butter is no fun without a great baked potato, or steak french fries. And forget double cheesburgers. Trying to eat the meat without the bread is a messy proposition, and again no french fries to go along with it. I haven't been on many diets, but this diet quickly got very old, even after being able to eat small amounts of carbs.
Code naming software has really annoyed me. Jaguar for OsX. Longhorn for Windows. Palladium for the upcoming hardware software venture. AMD Corvette (before it was renamed). Does this kind of naming have any point or relevancy? What does naming an upcoming code base LIMBO mean?
Will LIMBO eventually become RH 8.0? Or are RH major releases tied to another criteria?
While this plane does look really cool, the second thing that it reminded me (right after the B-2) were unmanned planes.
It looks like Boeing may be implementing this design in other planes it's developing.
For those who are interested Here is a link to some of John Entwistle's and the Who's music. Yes I know I'm karma whoring, but someone has to do it.
Here's a link to some information about one of the most famous and asteroid/meteor explosions in history. It landed in Tunguska, Siberia.
My favorite quote is from Dr. David Morrison