Modern carpet has anti-static material already built in. It is actually
difficult to find carpet without anti-static material now, I was told in a
survey of carpet sellers. To have static, it is necessary to have something
that generates it. Carpet was, in the past, the biggest generator.
I think it is possible to develop a useful feel for this kind of thing. The
issue is this, I think. If you don't have any condition in which you can make
sparks jump from your fingers after vigorously trying, you are (probably)
okay. To have static electricity, it is necessary that the air be dry. My
understanding is that, above 40% humidity, there is no static buildup under
normal conditions of generation. In Portland, Oregon, if I can slide across my
car seat without generating static electricity, then I don't generate any in
buildings with good carpet.
Semiconductor devices usually have excellent input overload protection (diodes
on the inputs and outputs). There is an issue of putting voltage directly into
an internal device that might not be protected. However, if you pick up a
board by its grounded metal flange, or by an exposed ground trace on the
perimeter, there then can be no differential, and thus there can be no spark
to internal devices, because the electrons in your body quickly bring the
board to the same voltage.
Someone has provided links to other software that (apparently) does what Proxomitron does. However, it is closed source also; so you have no way of assuring yourself that you are truly secure.
If you have to choose between closed source programs, let me say that my experience with Proxomitron has been excellent. Proxomitron's author is a truly smart guy. Don't be put off by the weird colors and Proxomitron's reporting your browser as "Space Bison"; you can change those things during configuration.
Remember that there is often more than one way to do things. When you use Proxomitron to filter, be sure that you aren't giving away the information you are trying to keep private through another route, such as Javascript, for example. Make sure that your Proxomitron filters are thorough.
I like Proxomitron, but I would feel much better if it were open source. There is a big, big need for an open source program like Proxomitron.
There is a MAJOR issue here. Our writing tools are of very poor quality. MS
Word is worthless to me; it is too quirky; it can take 3 hours to fix small
problems that arise when trying to do something simple. I haven't tried
Framemaker. I haven't tried Adobe InDesign.
I still use Ventura Publisher version 5 because it can use editable ASCII text
files for content and markup. I need to be able to hand edit the thousands of
words of text. After version 5 of Ventura the ASCII files are no longer
hand-editable. When I complained to Corel about this, I got a know-nothing
reply. I own Ventura 8 and WP 8, but don't use them.
Most people who make decisions about the design of writing tools are not
content producers. Sure, they are writers; they write email messages to their
mom. When I look at the design of major content producer programs, I see a lot
of features designed by people who are not content producers. It's "Oh, this
should be good enough".
I support your idea of having keystroke combinations to do everything in OO. I
suggest having configurable combinations. I'd like the WordStar/Borland
control-key commands. That saves 15% from my editing time, and I do a lot of
editing.
Somewhere I think I've seen something like "export every page to a separate
PDF". (You could do this with a macro.) Then you could use the thumbnail
folder function of Windows XP. It is possible that ThumbsPlus can display PDF
files; or maybe there are other Thumbnail viewers that can.
Definitely you are asking for something that would be useful for everyone who
works on long documents, even if they don't realize it yet.
There is a function in Adobe Acrobat called "Extract Pages". Obviously the
Help is written by a technical writer, however, since the Help says nothing
about the purpose of doing that, or how it works. It does not seem to extract
anything.
Notice that the thumbnail function of Acrobat supplies thumbnails in a
re-sizable window. You can have the rows and columns that you want; but I see
no way to change the size of the thumbnails to something of more reasonable
size; it's another example of thoughtless design by people who have never
produced a long document, I'm guessing (not Adobe itself, the designers).
A friend told me that he had an important MS Word file that he could not open in MS Word. He opened it in Open Office, saved it as an MS Word file, and then he was able to open it is MS Word. OO can repair Word file that are too corrupted for Word! It's that stunning MS software quality again; it stuns you; you are immobile and can't get anything done.
I had a Word document that could not be edited so that it would look right. Things kept jumping around for no apparent reason. After a few frustrating minutes, I opened it in Open Office. There was no quirkiness, I could do what I wanted.
My experience: Mozilla 1.0.1 cured the spell check crashes. That was the latest version until the release of 1.1.
Serious question
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Note to moderators: This is a serious question. You may disagree with what is
said, but your disagreement does not make this question one that should be
ignored. Please don't think that Larry Wall is fragile and needs to be
shielded from confrontive questions. Note also that this question needs to be
phrased in several ways to make its breadth fully clear.
Larry, now that you have seen what Perl has become after all the excellent
work and all the years of effort, was Perl a good idea? Did we need another
language? Would it have been better to have added features to an existing
language, and to have made a more capable C++ interpreter, an advanced CInt, for example?
Now that Perl is a mature, full-featured language, do you think it is a
properly designed language? When you first worked on Perl, did you imagine
what it would eventually become? It was an easy language to learn then, and
that was one of its advantages. Has Perl, now that it is mature, become
just another language, with the exception that it is an interpreter? Are
there any features of Perl that could not be added to C or C++? Are there
features of Perl that were designed to make it easy, like implicit variables,
that are not a good idea for a mature language? What are the features of Perl
that make it a necessary addition to the numerous languages?
A moderator called the parent post a troll. That's wrong. "Troll" means someone who is saying something he doesn't believe, merely to cause trouble.
Researching more efficient ways to kill people.
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 1, Troll
The U.S. government spends more money to research more efficient ways to kill people and gain forceful control over them than any other area.
The least socially sophisticated way of resolving problems with other people is killing them. Yet there is a lot of enthusiasm for killing among U.S. citizens.
I pulled together some links and explanation about this in the article What should be the Response to Violence?. The article is needs updating, but there is a lot of support for the idea that the enthusiasm for violence is due to a social breakdown in the United States.
The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries, directly killing about 3,000,000 people in the last 33 years.
Win XP doesn't crash. However, it does begin getting quirky. Sometimes, with many windows open, it will take 5 seconds to respond to a keystroke. Sometimes, it will stop responding to mouse clicks, or be very slow. It doesn't exactly crash, but it is necessary to reboot to get full functionality back again.
Mac OS 10 is showing us how a good operating system is designed. That's useful so that Windows users can compare and understand better what they are getting.
In practice, manufacturer's technical support representatives often say that their devices will not work with a cable longer than 2 meters (6 feet), and they supply a cable of that length. In many office situations, a cable that short is useless. But they are right, a longer cable doesn't work, and a hub doesn't work.
Ethernet and FireWire are examples of properly designed computer communication interfaces. They are trouble free.
USB 1.0 is an example of a poorly designed and poorly implemented interface. USB often interferes with computer hibernation, to give another example.
Don't you see? In that equation, men are of less value than women. She doesn't care about the diamond at all. Why would she; as you say diamonds cannot be sold. Her interest is that you establish yourself as of lesser value in the relationship; in that kind of relationship she will have control.
If you truly understand what's happening here you need to do two things: 1) Either call off the marriage or investigate the true nature of your relationship, and 2) Definitely avoid any action which indicates you are an inferior, such as buying a diamond.
If you have a wedding, will she wear white, the color of an angel? And will you wear black, the color of a villain?
Don't get into anything important that you can't or don't understand.
"... escaping the present malaise permeating most tech companies."
I'd like to see stories about the sociology of technical companies. Billions of dollars were lost in the dot com failures, and there seemed to be very little discussion about why. How could such supposedly smart people make such big mistakes?
Incidentally, I recommend the book, "Dot.Bomb", about the failure of Value America.
I think the registry could be a series of files that are merged into a
database at application load time. That would prevent the present problems.
But, this technically superior method would not allow Microsoft to use the
registry as copy protection. The present design of the registry assumes that
we are all pirates, so that some pirates can be stopped.
Note that, even if you back up the registry, you will still have the problems
mentioned in the article, which explains this carefully (but maybe I could
improve the explanation).
I've used Regmon.exe. Regmon clearly shows that Windows XP uses the registry
constantly for its data. To me, it does not seem like a good idea to mix
OS-dependent information with application information. Applications can have
any number of errors, and Windows XP makes the entire OS subject to those
errors.
You say, "The registry was NOT made to store large amounts of data."
The registry on one machine I checked was more than 20 megabytes. That's scary
for a file on which the entire OS is dependent.
I hope you continue to work on the Sincere Choice material. We really need a comprehensive source of information about this. It's great when I can simply give someone a URL.
Microsoft says, "Microsoft does not support making functional complete backups under Windows XP."
Would Microsoft say that if it were not true?
The problem is not with the SID. The problem occurs because Microsoft puts all the configuration parameters in one file (called SOFTWARE) in the registry. This is a fundamental design flaw in Windows.
The problem occurs when using backups, not with cloning onto identical machines. The problem occurs when using backups, not when making them. The backup you make may not actually be useful for restoring a working copy. That's what Microsoft "does not support". Microsoft apparently doesn't support this because they don't want people making copies and installing them on dissimilar machines.
Several people have had trouble with this, so I suppose I have not written it well enough. I will try again, but probably not until Monday night.
... "closed" software adds costs and creates security risks...
Exactly. If you work with Microsoft Windows XP every day, and you consider it
thoroughly, you find that the situation is worse than people commonly say.
If you haven't seen this article about Windows XP problems before, it may
interest you. I wrote it to try to show the aggressiveness behind Windows: Windows XP shows the
Direction Microsoft is Going.
If you have seen the article before, and you view it again, reload your
browser, because the article was recently updated.
It's wonderful that government agencies are beginning the realize the
liability of using a closed, proprietary, software product from a company that
seems to care more about control than about making money.
I can see definitely that some parts of the article need to be re-written. However, nothing you have said convinces me that there is a technical error.
Is it possible that you were not reading the latest version? Did you reload your browser?
The registry has the problems that I mentioned. We are not talking about problems you had. We are talking about problems that I have had and that are commonly known. It is very easy to back up the registry. It is impossible under some conditions to make use of a backup. Those conditions are explained in the article.
You said, "I've never run into that ALT+TAB bug either." A reader sent me an explanation of how it works. The problem only occurs after you have more than 21 programs running at the same time. After that, it starts acting oddly, to say the least.
I can't answer more fully now, but I will have a careful look at everything you said.
The article references a Microsoft article that discusses backup limitations. They say that disk cloning is "not supported" under some conditions. I agree with that. The problems have nothing to do with the SID.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern carpet has anti-static material already built in. It is actually difficult to find carpet without anti-static material now, I was told in a survey of carpet sellers. To have static, it is necessary to have something that generates it. Carpet was, in the past, the biggest generator.
I think it is possible to develop a useful feel for this kind of thing. The issue is this, I think. If you don't have any condition in which you can make sparks jump from your fingers after vigorously trying, you are (probably) okay. To have static electricity, it is necessary that the air be dry. My understanding is that, above 40% humidity, there is no static buildup under normal conditions of generation. In Portland, Oregon, if I can slide across my car seat without generating static electricity, then I don't generate any in buildings with good carpet.
Semiconductor devices usually have excellent input overload protection (diodes on the inputs and outputs). There is an issue of putting voltage directly into an internal device that might not be protected. However, if you pick up a board by its grounded metal flange, or by an exposed ground trace on the perimeter, there then can be no differential, and thus there can be no spark to internal devices, because the electrons in your body quickly bring the board to the same voltage.
I agree. One thing I love about Mozilla is its absolutely perfect way of handling ActiveX. *grin*
Someone has provided links to other software that (apparently) does what Proxomitron does. However, it is closed source also; so you have no way of assuring yourself that you are truly secure.
If you have to choose between closed source programs, let me say that my experience with Proxomitron has been excellent. Proxomitron's author is a truly smart guy. Don't be put off by the weird colors and Proxomitron's reporting your browser as "Space Bison"; you can change those things during configuration.
Remember that there is often more than one way to do things. When you use Proxomitron to filter, be sure that you aren't giving away the information you are trying to keep private through another route, such as Javascript, for example. Make sure that your Proxomitron filters are thorough.
I like Proxomitron, but I would feel much better if it were open source. There is a big, big need for an open source program like Proxomitron.
There is a MAJOR issue here. Our writing tools are of very poor quality. MS Word is worthless to me; it is too quirky; it can take 3 hours to fix small problems that arise when trying to do something simple. I haven't tried Framemaker. I haven't tried Adobe InDesign.
I still use Ventura Publisher version 5 because it can use editable ASCII text files for content and markup. I need to be able to hand edit the thousands of words of text. After version 5 of Ventura the ASCII files are no longer hand-editable. When I complained to Corel about this, I got a know-nothing reply. I own Ventura 8 and WP 8, but don't use them.
Most people who make decisions about the design of writing tools are not content producers. Sure, they are writers; they write email messages to their mom. When I look at the design of major content producer programs, I see a lot of features designed by people who are not content producers. It's "Oh, this should be good enough".
I support your idea of having keystroke combinations to do everything in OO. I suggest having configurable combinations. I'd like the WordStar/Borland control-key commands. That saves 15% from my editing time, and I do a lot of editing.
Somewhere I think I've seen something like "export every page to a separate PDF". (You could do this with a macro.) Then you could use the thumbnail folder function of Windows XP. It is possible that ThumbsPlus can display PDF files; or maybe there are other Thumbnail viewers that can.
Definitely you are asking for something that would be useful for everyone who works on long documents, even if they don't realize it yet.
There is a function in Adobe Acrobat called "Extract Pages". Obviously the Help is written by a technical writer, however, since the Help says nothing about the purpose of doing that, or how it works. It does not seem to extract anything.
Notice that the thumbnail function of Acrobat supplies thumbnails in a re-sizable window. You can have the rows and columns that you want; but I see no way to change the size of the thumbnails to something of more reasonable size; it's another example of thoughtless design by people who have never produced a long document, I'm guessing (not Adobe itself, the designers).
That's nothing. I couldn't afford an abacus. I had to use my fingers and toes.
A friend told me that he had an important MS Word file that he could not open in MS Word. He opened it in Open Office, saved it as an MS Word file, and then he was able to open it is MS Word. OO can repair Word file that are too corrupted for Word! It's that stunning MS software quality again; it stuns you; you are immobile and can't get anything done.
I had a Word document that could not be edited so that it would look right. Things kept jumping around for no apparent reason. After a few frustrating minutes, I opened it in Open Office. There was no quirkiness, I could do what I wanted.
Export to a PDF file with page thumbnails, using Adobe Acrobat.
My experience: Mozilla 1.0.1 cured the spell check crashes. That was the latest version until the release of 1.1.
Note to moderators: This is a serious question. You may disagree with what is said, but your disagreement does not make this question one that should be ignored. Please don't think that Larry Wall is fragile and needs to be shielded from confrontive questions. Note also that this question needs to be phrased in several ways to make its breadth fully clear.
Larry, now that you have seen what Perl has become after all the excellent work and all the years of effort, was Perl a good idea? Did we need another language? Would it have been better to have added features to an existing language, and to have made a more capable C++ interpreter, an advanced CInt, for example?
Now that Perl is a mature, full-featured language, do you think it is a properly designed language? When you first worked on Perl, did you imagine what it would eventually become? It was an easy language to learn then, and that was one of its advantages. Has Perl, now that it is mature, become just another language, with the exception that it is an interpreter? Are there any features of Perl that could not be added to C or C++? Are there features of Perl that were designed to make it easy, like implicit variables, that are not a good idea for a mature language? What are the features of Perl that make it a necessary addition to the numerous languages?
Moderation Mistake!!
A moderator called the parent post a troll. That's wrong. "Troll" means someone who is saying something he doesn't believe, merely to cause trouble.
The U.S. government spends more money to research more efficient ways to kill people and gain forceful control over them than any other area.
The least socially sophisticated way of resolving problems with other people is killing them. Yet there is a lot of enthusiasm for killing among U.S. citizens.
I pulled together some links and explanation about this in the article What should be the Response to Violence?. The article is needs updating, but there is a lot of support for the idea that the enthusiasm for violence is due to a social breakdown in the United States.
The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries, directly killing about 3,000,000 people in the last 33 years.
Win XP doesn't crash. However, it does begin getting quirky. Sometimes, with many windows open, it will take 5 seconds to respond to a keystroke. Sometimes, it will stop responding to mouse clicks, or be very slow. It doesn't exactly crash, but it is necessary to reboot to get full functionality back again.
Mac OS 10 is showing us how a good operating system is designed. That's useful so that Windows users can compare and understand better what they are getting.
Few people realize that Slashdot has only ten users. Each of them has 55,000 accounts.
"For a low speed device the limit is 3 meters (9 feet 10 inches)."
From USB.ORG's USB Info: Frequently Asked Questions
In practice, manufacturer's technical support representatives often say that their devices will not work with a cable longer than 2 meters (6 feet), and they supply a cable of that length. In many office situations, a cable that short is useless. But they are right, a longer cable doesn't work, and a hub doesn't work.
Ethernet and FireWire are examples of properly designed computer communication interfaces. They are trouble free.
USB 1.0 is an example of a poorly designed and poorly implemented interface. USB often interferes with computer hibernation, to give another example.
Man + Money (Diamonds) = Woman
Don't you see? In that equation, men are of less value than women. She doesn't care about the diamond at all. Why would she; as you say diamonds cannot be sold. Her interest is that you establish yourself as of lesser value in the relationship; in that kind of relationship she will have control.
If you truly understand what's happening here you need to do two things: 1) Either call off the marriage or investigate the true nature of your relationship, and 2) Definitely avoid any action which indicates you are an inferior, such as buying a diamond.
If you have a wedding, will she wear white, the color of an angel? And will you wear black, the color of a villain?
Don't get into anything important that you can't or don't understand.
Thanks for your comment. It was useful to me.
"... escaping the present malaise permeating most tech companies."
I'd like to see stories about the sociology of technical companies. Billions of dollars were lost in the dot com failures, and there seemed to be very little discussion about why. How could such supposedly smart people make such big mistakes?
Incidentally, I recommend the book, "Dot.Bomb", about the failure of Value America.
Thanks for your well-considered reply.
I think the registry could be a series of files that are merged into a database at application load time. That would prevent the present problems. But, this technically superior method would not allow Microsoft to use the registry as copy protection. The present design of the registry assumes that we are all pirates, so that some pirates can be stopped.
Note that, even if you back up the registry, you will still have the problems mentioned in the article, which explains this carefully (but maybe I could improve the explanation).
I've used Regmon.exe. Regmon clearly shows that Windows XP uses the registry constantly for its data. To me, it does not seem like a good idea to mix OS-dependent information with application information. Applications can have any number of errors, and Windows XP makes the entire OS subject to those errors.
You say, "The registry was NOT made to store large amounts of data." The registry on one machine I checked was more than 20 megabytes. That's scary for a file on which the entire OS is dependent.
Bruce: Your web site for Sincere Choice is excellent.
There seems to be a page missing, however. The page The Initiative for Software Choice Decomposed is, as I write this, empty.
I hope you continue to work on the Sincere Choice material. We really need a comprehensive source of information about this. It's great when I can simply give someone a URL.
Excellent explanation. Mod parent up!!!!
Microsoft says, "Microsoft does not support making functional complete backups under Windows XP."
Would Microsoft say that if it were not true?
The problem is not with the SID. The problem occurs because Microsoft puts all the configuration parameters in one file (called SOFTWARE) in the registry. This is a fundamental design flaw in Windows.
The problem occurs when using backups, not with cloning onto identical machines. The problem occurs when using backups, not when making them. The backup you make may not actually be useful for restoring a working copy. That's what Microsoft "does not support". Microsoft apparently doesn't support this because they don't want people making copies and installing them on dissimilar machines.
Several people have had trouble with this, so I suppose I have not written it well enough. I will try again, but probably not until Monday night.
Exactly. If you work with Microsoft Windows XP every day, and you consider it thoroughly, you find that the situation is worse than people commonly say.
If you haven't seen this article about Windows XP problems before, it may interest you. I wrote it to try to show the aggressiveness behind Windows: Windows XP shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
If you have seen the article before, and you view it again, reload your browser, because the article was recently updated.
It's wonderful that government agencies are beginning the realize the liability of using a closed, proprietary, software product from a company that seems to care more about control than about making money.
I can see definitely that some parts of the article need to be re-written. However, nothing you have said convinces me that there is a technical error.
Is it possible that you were not reading the latest version? Did you reload your browser?
The registry has the problems that I mentioned. We are not talking about problems you had. We are talking about problems that I have had and that are commonly known. It is very easy to back up the registry. It is impossible under some conditions to make use of a backup. Those conditions are explained in the article.
You said, "I've never run into that ALT+TAB bug either." A reader sent me an explanation of how it works. The problem only occurs after you have more than 21 programs running at the same time. After that, it starts acting oddly, to say the least.
I can't answer more fully now, but I will have a careful look at everything you said.
The article references a Microsoft article that discusses backup limitations. They say that disk cloning is "not supported" under some conditions. I agree with that. The problems have nothing to do with the SID.