(I know, I know, off topic.)
That sounds about right. I think the Hummer brand has been the biggest publicity disaster, among many, of the past decade for General Motors. I have to believe millions of people avoided buying Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs, Cadillacs, and Saturns because they associate them with the makers of the best known gas-guzzling civilian vehicles in the United States.
Ford quality has improved dramatically in the past five years, at least in the US. Check JD Powers and Associates or TrueDelta.com.
I can't blame anyone who abandoned the US domestic automakers after getting abused in the 1980s or 1990s. But the automakers are genuinely improving their product quality, safety, and reliability now, and most people still assume their 2008 dealer lot is full of products as bad as their 1988 dealer lot.
For example, check crash ratings at www.iihs.org, which has the toughest crash tests in the US. Ford has some excellent models for crash safety.
A Linux port would be fantastic. But I quite seriously don't expect Diablo 3 until the second half of 2010 at the earliest. By that point, Wine should be able to handle it out of the box or with a few tweaks. (My hat is off to the Wine team. I never imagined they would get as far as they have.)
On the other hand, I think many home Linux PC users aren't necessarily running ancient hardware, just something with an old enough graphics card and "only" 1 GB of RAM or less that just doesn't cut the requirements I presume Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 will have.
If they announced the game today, a few weeks after WINE 1.0 went final, then WINE 4.0 will be out before Diablo 3.
A native Linux port would be great for many games. But it's likely WINE will be a better implementation of the Windows XP API than the one in XP itself before Diablo 3 hits the market.
No, the reasons for a lack of commercial Linux games are quite different:
1. Linux desktop users make up a tremendously small portion of the home PC market. The development effort to port everything to Linux and support it is likely not to cover the added costs.
2. Many people run Linux at home to get good use of hardware that can't handle Microsoft XP or Vista. Most modern games wouldn't run on those machines even if they were ported to Linux.
3. A portion of the Linux user-base are free software advocates, so some are philosophically opposed to purchasing proprietary software.
That's why Linux ports of big games rarely happen.
On the other hand, compatibility from generation to generation of Linux applications is pretty solid. WINE is a notable exception because using a few hundred volunteers to reverse engineer a Microsoft API built by tens of thousands of paid developers is a big deal. I'm astonished WINE is as good as it is.
No seriously, if you read the articles smorken linked to or do Google searches on it: sleep deprivation messes with your body's ability to regulate insulin. That boosts your appetite and it also increases fat accumulation, so it's a double whammy.
My commute is 2.5 hours total. I do exercise at least half an hour two or three times per week - it just isn't enough to offset the junk I eat.
Again, I'm not asking for sympathy or saying it's genetic or any bullshit like that. I'm fat, and it's my fault. I'm just saying that some lifestyles make it easy for even overeaters like myself to stay thin. Suburbs living and having a big family isn't one of them.
You're absolutely right, and I completely regret moving to the suburbs. But there are a number of obstacles.
I need to get someone (a complete moron) to buy my suburbs house for more than I owe on it. I technically owe $100,000 less than the supposed street value, but there are so many "For Sale" signs in the neighborhood it's ridiculous.
I like my job, and I work east of the house. My wife likes her job, and she works west of the house. The kids like their friends. If we move, at most one of us gets to keep the job they like, and that's it.
A lot of the biggest kluges in early Java have fallen out of favor:
1. Struts 1.x is huge, but it isn't being used as much on new projects. Newer frameworks like Tapestry, Wicket, Struts 2/Webwork, and Spring are far easier to setup and use, more flexible, or both.
2. EJB2 was an overengineered mess. EJB3 is viewed as far superior, and many major sites aren't bothering with EJB at all.
3. A lot of Java tools like Hibernate have moved from checked exceptions (which must be caught or declared to be thrown in the method signature) to runtime exceptions (which do not need to be caught).
The language definitely has warts. But the common open source (and for that matter, commercial) tools are learning lessons in ease of setup and configuration from Ruby, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Zope, and so forth. (I used web applications as the example domain because that's what I know a little about. I understand similar enhancements are happening elsewhere.)
On the other hand, the language standard library is big enough and has enough corner cases that the learning curve is enormous.
Same work hours? Same commute time? Same yard work? A wife even busier than you are? Three kids that are under the age of five?
Even if I could get buy on less than the six hours of sleep I get now, my kids' bedrooms are between mine and the steps. So instead of getting up half an hour early to exercise, me tip-toeing down the hall is enough to get two pre-schoolers excited to have breakfast and more playtime with daddy.
Instead, I get to exercise in the evening after they go to sleep. Then I'm too wired to drift off myself, and instead of getting to bed at 10:30 or so I'm up until 1 and a zombie the next day. I manage it about twice a week.
It's a question of time and priorities. I had a downright easy time staying then when I was single with a light work load.
Now I'm working more than 40 hours a week, commuting more than 9 hours a week, walking the dog, maintaining the yard, reading to the kids, and trying to keep my marriage healthy. All of the time and energy I used to have for cooking and exercising is gone.
It's much easier to get thin and stay thin when you have low stress, plenty of rest, and plenty of time for cooking and eating at a leisurely pace.
Maybe the guy or gal in the parent post works a 20 hour week and spends the rest of his time eating Cheetos and watching Captain Kangaroo reruns. But maybe he's as busy as I am or busier, and given a few months to relax and slow down he'd drop the weight as easily as I would.
"Eating fewer calories than you burn" to lose fat is just as true as "Avoiding everything that will kill you" to live forever and "making more money than you spend" to become independently wealthy. The devil is in the details.
When I was free to eat and exercise as I wished in college I was far slimmer than I am now, and I know plenty of retirees who had a pleasant and not terribly difficult time dropping fat after they had all the free time in the world to cook tasty low calorie meals and take up golf, dancing, biking, and other forms of exercise.
This is my third or fourth post on this discussion and I keep coming back to the same central theme. The suburbs is definitely linked to my obesity, and I have to believe that's true for other people. I spend way too much time commuting, I even drive longer to get groceries or get gas. I spend too much time on yard work. I spend too much time maintaining this house that is bigger than I need (it's 2100 square feet, better than some but still not good). All of this sucks away precious time I should be spending on proper lifestyle and my relationship with my wife and kids.
I have to believe millions of other Americans have similar problems. Many manage to say thin despite living in circumstances similar to mine, and I bow to their superior discipline (or luck, or whatever). But for myself, I'm confident I could overcome my character flaws in appetite and what have you if I wasn't so damn busy and tired.
As I wrote elsewhere, I'm a fat person that doesn't buy junk because it's cheap. I buy junk because I'm busy.
I was thin when I had plenty of free time to eat slowly and exercise right in college. Now that I'm juggling a long commute, housework, yardwork, a career, trying to pick up additional work skills to protect myself from being outsourced in my spare time, being a parent to three kids and a husband... the pounds just keep coming.
I have several relatives and friends who slimmed down quite a bit when they retired. The kids left the house, and they didn't have to waste time commuting or at the office, and it became easy to eat right and find time to exercise. No extra willpower involved.
I genuinely like basketball and lifting weights. I'm just too fucking tired.
The problem isn't cost. Rice, beans, veggies, flour, sugar, a garden, etc... are dirt cheap. Even the best value meals at the cheapest fast food restaurants or packets of noodle soups won't undercut cooking from scratch.
The problem is time.
When you eat slowly, you tend to eat less.
When you're well rested, you tend to eat less.
When you cook meals to eat when you are hungry, instead of waiting until you are very hungry, you tend to eat less. Cooking food takes time.
Cleaning up your dishes between meals takes time.
Cheap fresh produce doesn't stay edible as long as processed goods, so you have to shop more often. That takes time.
And of course, there's physical activity. An exercise routine (with a shower after each workout) takes time too. It's also harder to motivate yourself to exercise when you're dead tired.
Welcome to modern suburban America, where you work 55 hours a week, commute 12 hours a week, and then try to keep up with your yard work, your bills, your relationship with your spouse/significant other and children, and everything else in what time you have left. Home cooked meals with fresh healthy foods go out the window, and you're whipping up processed crap left and right and eating 900 calorie fast food meals.
I say all this as a guy who moved to the suburbs seven years ago, got fat, and now can't sell his house.:-D
More seriously, the working poor with much longer work hours and often two or even three jobs have it much harder.
Microsoft has the resources to re-architect their next operating system from the ground up and make something truly revolutionary. They won't do it for fear of breaking even more backwards-compatibility with existing apps and tens of thousands of developers who are comfortable with the existing APIs.
Java has the same problem. Changing the standard class libraries to be more consistent and clean would be wonderful. But tens of thousands of existing programs would need to be rewritten if they were to be ported forward, and tens of thousands of developers would need to re-learn the class libraries.
My bet is that the next big thing, whatever that is, will supplant Java before they ever fix the standard libraries.
1. Sun has a free (open source?) set of complete tests you can run to check compatibility between your implementation of the 1.6 JDK and the standard. Microsoft certainly does not.
2. BEA and IBM have successfully written their own implementations of the JDK 1.6 that do pass said tests. Wine is at version 1.0 and is an unbelievable accomplishment considering how small the development team is versus the monstrous resources Microsoft used to create Windows. But Wine 1.0 still has major and minor compatibility problems with hundreds of programs. You can't just slap the Office 2007 or Crysis installer DVD into your drive and have everything run on Wine.
On the other hand, as complicated as Java is, I would definitely consider a working implementation of the Windows API a much harder task to tackle, even if Microsoft did make it easy.
Aren't you talking about a social problem, not a language problem?
Use the class libraries you like, build your own replacements for the ones you don't in Java itself or in C, and then (and here's the tricky part) convince the people you work with to only use your stuff.
Rewriting all of the class libraries to be more syntax consistent and intuitive would be fantastic - but you break so much backwards compatibility you might as well give up and adopt Groovy or Scala.
I haven't driven a Vanagon, so I can't compare directly. We own a 2007 Honda Odyssey minivan, which we selected because it has the most total leg room in the class and near top crash ratings.
The turning radius is less than 37 feet, which makes it even with many modern midsize sedans and also makes it child's play to park. The handling is surprisingly good around curves and with quick lane changes, because the center of gravity is low.
The room behind the third row is not exceptional, but the third row seats are split-folding. If you are not carrying eight people, you can fold down one or two seats in the last row, and then your cargo capacity is pretty respectable.
And electronic stability control works wonders for emergency handling and rollover resistance, probably more than offsetting any inherent advantage your Vanagon possessed. (A Vanagon with stability control would undoubtedly be even better, of course.)
When something goes wrong with FOSS that you advocated for, more often then not it's your ass.
In addition to all of the previous excellent replies to this comment, I'd like to add one more: you can get commercial support for your FOSS software, and if you don't like the performance of your support company you can switch vendors.
That's all of the advantages of proprietary software plus more support flexibility on top of the ability to fix problems yourself.
No, actually, your Vanagon only offers more interior room by being one foot taller than most modern minivans. If not for that, it would offer less cabin space. And since the newer minivans are almost 2 feet longer, they offer more leg room, not to mention dramatically improved crash safety with a longer crumple area.
If you want to haul more than the 3500 pounds a minivan can handle, why not bite the bullet and get a truck?
Slashdot Mirror
(I know, I know, off topic.)
That sounds about right. I think the Hummer brand has been the biggest publicity disaster, among many, of the past decade for General Motors. I have to believe millions of people avoided buying Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs, Cadillacs, and Saturns because they associate them with the makers of the best known gas-guzzling civilian vehicles in the United States.
Ford quality has improved dramatically in the past five years, at least in the US. Check JD Powers and Associates or TrueDelta.com.
I can't blame anyone who abandoned the US domestic automakers after getting abused in the 1980s or 1990s. But the automakers are genuinely improving their product quality, safety, and reliability now, and most people still assume their 2008 dealer lot is full of products as bad as their 1988 dealer lot.
For example, check crash ratings at www.iihs.org, which has the toughest crash tests in the US. Ford has some excellent models for crash safety.
Certainly. But it's cheaper still to decide not to buy Diablo 3 at all, or to wait another three years (or whatever) until you buy your next PC.
A Linux port would be fantastic. But I quite seriously don't expect Diablo 3 until the second half of 2010 at the earliest. By that point, Wine should be able to handle it out of the box or with a few tweaks. (My hat is off to the Wine team. I never imagined they would get as far as they have.)
That's not a bad idea with the pre-orders.
On the other hand, I think many home Linux PC users aren't necessarily running ancient hardware, just something with an old enough graphics card and "only" 1 GB of RAM or less that just doesn't cut the requirements I presume Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 will have.
Come on! This is Blizzard we're talking about.
If they announced the game today, a few weeks after WINE 1.0 went final, then WINE 4.0 will be out before Diablo 3.
A native Linux port would be great for many games. But it's likely WINE will be a better implementation of the Windows XP API than the one in XP itself before Diablo 3 hits the market.
No, the reasons for a lack of commercial Linux games are quite different:
1. Linux desktop users make up a tremendously small portion of the home PC market. The development effort to port everything to Linux and support it is likely not to cover the added costs.
2. Many people run Linux at home to get good use of hardware that can't handle Microsoft XP or Vista. Most modern games wouldn't run on those machines even if they were ported to Linux.
3. A portion of the Linux user-base are free software advocates, so some are philosophically opposed to purchasing proprietary software.
That's why Linux ports of big games rarely happen.
On the other hand, compatibility from generation to generation of Linux applications is pretty solid. WINE is a notable exception because using a few hundred volunteers to reverse engineer a Microsoft API built by tens of thousands of paid developers is a big deal. I'm astonished WINE is as good as it is.
No seriously, if you read the articles smorken linked to or do Google searches on it: sleep deprivation messes with your body's ability to regulate insulin. That boosts your appetite and it also increases fat accumulation, so it's a double whammy.
My commute is 2.5 hours total. I do exercise at least half an hour two or three times per week - it just isn't enough to offset the junk I eat.
Again, I'm not asking for sympathy or saying it's genetic or any bullshit like that. I'm fat, and it's my fault. I'm just saying that some lifestyles make it easy for even overeaters like myself to stay thin. Suburbs living and having a big family isn't one of them.
You're absolutely right, and I completely regret moving to the suburbs. But there are a number of obstacles.
I need to get someone (a complete moron) to buy my suburbs house for more than I owe on it. I technically owe $100,000 less than the supposed street value, but there are so many "For Sale" signs in the neighborhood it's ridiculous.
I like my job, and I work east of the house. My wife likes her job, and she works west of the house. The kids like their friends. If we move, at most one of us gets to keep the job they like, and that's it.
Still, we're definitely kicking the idea around.
A lot of the biggest kluges in early Java have fallen out of favor:
1. Struts 1.x is huge, but it isn't being used as much on new projects. Newer frameworks like Tapestry, Wicket, Struts 2/Webwork, and Spring are far easier to setup and use, more flexible, or both.
2. EJB2 was an overengineered mess. EJB3 is viewed as far superior, and many major sites aren't bothering with EJB at all.
3. A lot of Java tools like Hibernate have moved from checked exceptions (which must be caught or declared to be thrown in the method signature) to runtime exceptions (which do not need to be caught).
The language definitely has warts. But the common open source (and for that matter, commercial) tools are learning lessons in ease of setup and configuration from Ruby, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Zope, and so forth. (I used web applications as the example domain because that's what I know a little about. I understand similar enhancements are happening elsewhere.)
On the other hand, the language standard library is big enough and has enough corner cases that the learning curve is enormous.
Same work hours? Same commute time? Same yard work? A wife even busier than you are? Three kids that are under the age of five?
Even if I could get buy on less than the six hours of sleep I get now, my kids' bedrooms are between mine and the steps. So instead of getting up half an hour early to exercise, me tip-toeing down the hall is enough to get two pre-schoolers excited to have breakfast and more playtime with daddy.
Instead, I get to exercise in the evening after they go to sleep. Then I'm too wired to drift off myself, and instead of getting to bed at 10:30 or so I'm up until 1 and a zombie the next day. I manage it about twice a week.
It's a question of time and priorities. I had a downright easy time staying then when I was single with a light work load.
Now I'm working more than 40 hours a week, commuting more than 9 hours a week, walking the dog, maintaining the yard, reading to the kids, and trying to keep my marriage healthy. All of the time and energy I used to have for cooking and exercising is gone.
It's much easier to get thin and stay thin when you have low stress, plenty of rest, and plenty of time for cooking and eating at a leisurely pace.
Maybe the guy or gal in the parent post works a 20 hour week and spends the rest of his time eating Cheetos and watching Captain Kangaroo reruns. But maybe he's as busy as I am or busier, and given a few months to relax and slow down he'd drop the weight as easily as I would.
"Eating fewer calories than you burn" to lose fat is just as true as "Avoiding everything that will kill you" to live forever and "making more money than you spend" to become independently wealthy. The devil is in the details.
When I was free to eat and exercise as I wished in college I was far slimmer than I am now, and I know plenty of retirees who had a pleasant and not terribly difficult time dropping fat after they had all the free time in the world to cook tasty low calorie meals and take up golf, dancing, biking, and other forms of exercise.
This is my third or fourth post on this discussion and I keep coming back to the same central theme. The suburbs is definitely linked to my obesity, and I have to believe that's true for other people. I spend way too much time commuting, I even drive longer to get groceries or get gas. I spend too much time on yard work. I spend too much time maintaining this house that is bigger than I need (it's 2100 square feet, better than some but still not good). All of this sucks away precious time I should be spending on proper lifestyle and my relationship with my wife and kids.
I have to believe millions of other Americans have similar problems. Many manage to say thin despite living in circumstances similar to mine, and I bow to their superior discipline (or luck, or whatever). But for myself, I'm confident I could overcome my character flaws in appetite and what have you if I wasn't so damn busy and tired.
As I wrote elsewhere, I'm a fat person that doesn't buy junk because it's cheap. I buy junk because I'm busy.
I was thin when I had plenty of free time to eat slowly and exercise right in college. Now that I'm juggling a long commute, housework, yardwork, a career, trying to pick up additional work skills to protect myself from being outsourced in my spare time, being a parent to three kids and a husband... the pounds just keep coming.
I have several relatives and friends who slimmed down quite a bit when they retired. The kids left the house, and they didn't have to waste time commuting or at the office, and it became easy to eat right and find time to exercise. No extra willpower involved.
I genuinely like basketball and lifting weights. I'm just too fucking tired.
The problem isn't cost. Rice, beans, veggies, flour, sugar, a garden, etc... are dirt cheap. Even the best value meals at the cheapest fast food restaurants or packets of noodle soups won't undercut cooking from scratch.
:-D
The problem is time.
When you eat slowly, you tend to eat less.
When you're well rested, you tend to eat less.
When you cook meals to eat when you are hungry, instead of waiting until you are very hungry, you tend to eat less.
Cooking food takes time.
Cleaning up your dishes between meals takes time.
Cheap fresh produce doesn't stay edible as long as processed goods, so you have to shop more often. That takes time.
And of course, there's physical activity. An exercise routine (with a shower after each workout) takes time too. It's also harder to motivate yourself to exercise when you're dead tired.
Welcome to modern suburban America, where you work 55 hours a week, commute 12 hours a week, and then try to keep up with your yard work, your bills, your relationship with your spouse/significant other and children, and everything else in what time you have left. Home cooked meals with fresh healthy foods go out the window, and you're whipping up processed crap left and right and eating 900 calorie fast food meals.
I say all this as a guy who moved to the suburbs seven years ago, got fat, and now can't sell his house.
More seriously, the working poor with much longer work hours and often two or even three jobs have it much harder.
Thanks for the correction.
Microsoft has the resources to re-architect their next operating system from the ground up and make something truly revolutionary. They won't do it for fear of breaking even more backwards-compatibility with existing apps and tens of thousands of developers who are comfortable with the existing APIs.
Java has the same problem. Changing the standard class libraries to be more consistent and clean would be wonderful. But tens of thousands of existing programs would need to be rewritten if they were to be ported forward, and tens of thousands of developers would need to re-learn the class libraries.
My bet is that the next big thing, whatever that is, will supplant Java before they ever fix the standard libraries.
1. Sun has a free (open source?) set of complete tests you can run to check compatibility between your implementation of the 1.6 JDK and the standard. Microsoft certainly does not.
2. BEA and IBM have successfully written their own implementations of the JDK 1.6 that do pass said tests. Wine is at version 1.0 and is an unbelievable accomplishment considering how small the development team is versus the monstrous resources Microsoft used to create Windows. But Wine 1.0 still has major and minor compatibility problems with hundreds of programs. You can't just slap the Office 2007 or Crysis installer DVD into your drive and have everything run on Wine.
On the other hand, as complicated as Java is, I would definitely consider a working implementation of the Windows API a much harder task to tackle, even if Microsoft did make it easy.
Aren't you talking about a social problem, not a language problem?
Use the class libraries you like, build your own replacements for the ones you don't in Java itself or in C, and then (and here's the tricky part) convince the people you work with to only use your stuff.
Rewriting all of the class libraries to be more syntax consistent and intuitive would be fantastic - but you break so much backwards compatibility you might as well give up and adopt Groovy or Scala.
I haven't driven a Vanagon, so I can't compare directly. We own a 2007 Honda Odyssey minivan, which we selected because it has the most total leg room in the class and near top crash ratings.
The turning radius is less than 37 feet, which makes it even with many modern midsize sedans and also makes it child's play to park. The handling is surprisingly good around curves and with quick lane changes, because the center of gravity is low.
The room behind the third row is not exceptional, but the third row seats are split-folding. If you are not carrying eight people, you can fold down one or two seats in the last row, and then your cargo capacity is pretty respectable.
And electronic stability control works wonders for emergency handling and rollover resistance, probably more than offsetting any inherent advantage your Vanagon possessed. (A Vanagon with stability control would undoubtedly be even better, of course.)
When something goes wrong with FOSS that you advocated for, more often then not it's your ass.
In addition to all of the previous excellent replies to this comment, I'd like to add one more: you can get commercial support for your FOSS software, and if you don't like the performance of your support company you can switch vendors.
That's all of the advantages of proprietary software plus more support flexibility on top of the ability to fix problems yourself.
Outstanding.
I don't know that I agree about other drugs, but I agree marijuana should be legalized for the reasons you mentioned.
No, actually, your Vanagon only offers more interior room by being one foot taller than most modern minivans. If not for that, it would offer less cabin space. And since the newer minivans are almost 2 feet longer, they offer more leg room, not to mention dramatically improved crash safety with a longer crumple area.
If you want to haul more than the 3500 pounds a minivan can handle, why not bite the bullet and get a truck?
Good point. Repairs need to get seriously expensive before they cost as much as a car payment.
Ah. That makes more sense, thanks. I withdraw my criticism.