...then you have to believe that God has been intelligently designing diseases to be more resistant to antibiotics. Maybe to keep the threat of plague on the table?
There may be some question as to whether man evolved from apes (although the evidence is pretty overwhelming), but we can see evolution in other organisms occur literally before our eyes.
Some might argue that an evil bastard that provides education, food, and health care to the entire population is better than one who sells out to foreign business interests and does nothing for the people. Castro is far from being a saint, but if I had to choose to be a peasant under Castro or Batista's regime, I know which one I'd pick.
I was having breakfast in a Portland hotel once and a couple Intel patent lawyers settled into the next booth with a couple from a rival chipmaker--maybe AMD, who knows? Halfway through breakfast the f-yous started flying and one of the Intel guys was trying to get one of the opposition to step outside for some fisticuffs. And the Intel guy had be pushing 70!
I hope the Wisconsin boys know what they're getting into.
"For most users, this means where to find Shut Down." Yeah, that took me about 10 minutes to figure out. Multiply that 10 minutes by the umpteen settings and configurations that I'll need to tweak when I make the transition on my office PC, and you're looking at hours of lost productivity(said the man browsing Slashdot). I actually liked Aero once I used it a little, but I don't want to commit the time it will take to get a new OS working.
When I look at some of the changes in Vista, it seems like they weren't done to improve usability but to justify the developers' paychecks. "Hey, look, we made a new shutdown menu!."
It's encouraging to hear that it's working for you once you got over the transition hump, just seems like they made the hump bigger than it needs to be.
I agree the Facebook bit isn't a big deal, but he's spot on about the random changes they've made to the interface. "Hey, we've had File, Edit, and View menus for a couple decades now, let's shake things up and get rid of them! Why, you ask? Because we can!"
Seriously, do these guys do any usability testing? Focus groups? Windows has an installed base of what, billions of people, and most of them aren't IT professionals, they're Circuit City shoppers. And they don't want to spend time relearning in Vista what they already know how to do in XP. Yeah, we'll all get there eventually, but it seems like MS has gone out of their way to make the transition difficult.
Bush has been bad but previous administrations have done their part to hack the FDA to the bone. In 1973, the F.D.A. undertook 34,919 food inspections; in 2006, that number had dropped to 7,783 according to the NY Times . And the number of inspectors has dropped by 1300 in the last 14 years.
Funny that we can spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, but can't afford to make sure the food and drugs we put in our bodies are safe.
"7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention."
Yeah, but XP came out less than 2 years after 2000. MS spent over 5 years on Vista and what did they come up with? A pretty interface and DRM. Vista is a giant blinking neon sign announcing that MS' devleopment process is broken--don't believe me? Read this.
Hey, I don't hate Vista. If I have to look at a monitor all day, I'd just as soon have a pretty OS to look at. But it's obvious that huge amounts of time and money were wasted, and maybe if enough of their customers rip on them MS will take the steps necessary (cue the rolling heads!) to do better next time.
I enjoyed your NWN modules, glad to see you're still at it. But I only got about halfway through Demon when I got stuck, still would like to finish it. Is there a walk through or hints somewhere? And please don't tell me you have to win at the Magic-style card game in the demon city. I really suck at it!
Oh, and as someone who played a bit of AD&D(1st edition) in my youth, I can recommend PIPBoy's Dreamcatcher and Shadowlord modules. Demon is a bit less...traditional, but quite intriguing.
"Lucas blamed the Polish researchers for not being more explicit about their fossil-examination rules, but he did apologize for what he called "a misunderstanding".
Yeah, I guess he didn't understand that visiting colleagues and publishing about their discoveries before the people who actually discovered them had a chance to is bad form.
I take back my bonehead comment, that's a compliment to a paleontologist. "Tool" seems to fit the bill.
The world's biggest software company devotes years and several delays to roll out a new flagship OS and lays an egg. That's either the beginning of the end or a wake up call for some major restructuring. And it doesn't sound like they're waking up, so yes, it may well be the beginning of the end. I agree that all is not lost (yet), but Vista's foibles demonstrate that MS's development process is in serious trouble.
People compare it to ME, but ME was just supposed to be a bandaid to keep consumers on board until XP was released. Vista, on the other hand, was developed for the enterprise. And the enterprise ain't impressed.
I was just talking to a buddy of mine this morning, who's been doing multimedia stuff on Macs for decades. Apple has really been out to lunch with their software lately. Look at the latest iMovie. They cripple it and remove a ton of features so that users actually prefer the previous version. It won't even run on my buddy's Mac because he has some MPEG2 files. iMovie tries to index his hard drive on startup (WTF?), it finds the MPEG2s and pukes. It's ridiculous.
It seems like in shifting it's focus to consumer electronics Apple has really been dropping the ball on its software development. Although the incompatibility problems between Quicktime versions goes back to day 1 (or day 2, I suppose).
You might be right, obviously my perspective is skewed by my experience. But I don't believe that geeks are the only ones who can benefit from the internet. I'm remodeling my house, and I've got a ton of great advice from online forums.
You want clean water for your village? Go online and find out how other villages are improving their water supply. Maybe it can't happen now, but in a year or two, who knows? The exciting thing about information is that it's viral, it spreads exponentially given the proper vector, and OLPC could be the vector.
Let's face it, the western world is not going to solve the developing world's problems. We've been sending volunteers and aid for decades and have barely made a dent. OLPC might be the answer, might not, but it's a new approach.
"Access to potable water is more important than access to information. Access to food is more important (although as many posters have pointed out, it is not the biggest problem). Access to electricity is more important. Access to transportation is more important. And, of course, security and health are more important. But does that mean that access to information is unimportant? Of course not."
Access to information is the lever that makes all those other goals attainable. How much less effective would we be at our jobs without the internet? I don't know if the OLPC experiment will pan out, but given the potential upside it's worth a shot.
"I still pay a substantial premium to buy power from it over dirty coal
Which proves that your power company can charge you more for it, not that it costs more. I realize coal is cheap, but if the externalities (environmental destruction from mining it, pollution and health issues caused by burning it) weren't born by society but were charged to industry, it wouldn't be so cheap.
Coal infrastructure is already in place, wind is just being built out so it's not surprising it costs more now.
I keep hearing this "Environmental groups hate wind turbines" meme but I've seen nothing to back it up. Here's a quote from one of your linked articles:
"The wind turbines now being installed have much lower rates of avian mortality associated with them than those built 25 or more years ago". Hardly the ranting of anti-wind fanatics.
The Cape Cod wind farm fiasco is primarily Ted Kenndey and some other NIMBY "liberals" who don't want their ocean views marred by windmills on the horizon. Yes, Ted and co. sometimes support environmental issues, that doesn't make it a concerted resistance by environmental organizations.
Good post, but I still feel that until the waste issue is resolved we're foolish to invest more in nuclear. Just curious, what does the Navy do with their spent fuel?
I have a lot of family living near the Hanford uranium processing plant, so I hear a lot of horror stories about the ongoing clean up there. I'm sure 40 years ago the government scientists were telling everyone how safe things were, so I tend to be very skeptical about industry safety claims. As our fearless leader once said..."fool me twice...you can't get fooled again!"
Yes, and the decades and billions of dollars spent to develop the very flawed Yucca Mountain repository are strong evidence that humans are not capable of dealing with the problem, at least not as our society is currently structured. Yucca Mountain was chosen for a variety of scientific and political reasons, and while compromise is essential for politics it makes for really bad science. Oklo is a very interesting natural phenomenon but to my knowledge has never been successfully duplicated by humans for waste storage.
I can't see why nuclear supporters get so riled up when opponents insist that the disposal issue be solved before we invest more in powerplants. If the solution is so trivial, then implement it already. If it's not, then it's foolish to invest more resources in a nuclear solution.
Thanks for that link, interesting blog. I still don't see why we're auctioning off this spectrum and hoping that the winner will do the right thing, when the FCC could KEEP the spectrum, LEASE it to the network providers, and MANDATE that they keep it open. I guess I should be grateful they didn't just hand it to Haliburton for Xmas.
I still use PS7 at home, and I don't notice a lot of difference between it and the CS2 and 3 releases. I've tried the Gimp a few times, and while I admire the effort I'd stick with PS. It's the standard, and if kids learn on version 7 they can easily transition to the latest version. Gimp uses different terms for many tools, menu structure(although that can be a moving target among PS versions). Not saying it's bad, but it's different enough to make moving to PS a challenge.
"What does this have to do with the ISS? Not much "
Like the astronauts, Knievel put his life on the line in the pursuit of.....what? Fame and glory certainly, but when you come right down to it going to the moon, or building a condo in orbit, makes about as much sense as jumping over the fountains at Cesar's. There's no concrete benefit(yeah, I know, comsats, etc. but you don't need manned space travel for those), but it's cool to know that we did it.
Slashdot Mirror
...then you have to believe that God has been intelligently designing diseases to be more resistant to antibiotics. Maybe to keep the threat of plague on the table?
There may be some question as to whether man evolved from apes (although the evidence is pretty overwhelming), but we can see evolution in other organisms occur literally before our eyes.
Sorry, guess i should have said "The government over which he presides provides". Didn't mean to confuse you.
Some might argue that an evil bastard that provides education, food, and health care to the entire population is better than one who sells out to foreign business interests and does nothing for the people. Castro is far from being a saint, but if I had to choose to be a peasant under Castro or Batista's regime, I know which one I'd pick.
Nice, thanks for the link!
" but they've changed a lot and are starting differently with the next gen OS."
Can you back that up? I'm not disagreeing, it's just the first time I've heard that. As for the rest of your post, I think you nailed it.
I was having breakfast in a Portland hotel once and a couple Intel patent lawyers settled into the next booth with a couple from a rival chipmaker--maybe AMD, who knows? Halfway through breakfast the f-yous started flying and one of the Intel guys was trying to get one of the opposition to step outside for some fisticuffs. And the Intel guy had be pushing 70!
I hope the Wisconsin boys know what they're getting into.
"For most users, this means where to find Shut Down." Yeah, that took me about 10 minutes to figure out. Multiply that 10 minutes by the umpteen settings and configurations that I'll need to tweak when I make the transition on my office PC, and you're looking at hours of lost productivity(said the man browsing Slashdot). I actually liked Aero once I used it a little, but I don't want to commit the time it will take to get a new OS working.
When I look at some of the changes in Vista, it seems like they weren't done to improve usability but to justify the developers' paychecks. "Hey, look, we made a new shutdown menu!."
It's encouraging to hear that it's working for you once you got over the transition hump, just seems like they made the hump bigger than it needs to be.
I agree the Facebook bit isn't a big deal, but he's spot on about the random changes they've made to the interface. "Hey, we've had File, Edit, and View menus for a couple decades now, let's shake things up and get rid of them! Why, you ask? Because we can!"
Seriously, do these guys do any usability testing? Focus groups? Windows has an installed base of what, billions of people, and most of them aren't IT professionals, they're Circuit City shoppers. And they don't want to spend time relearning in Vista what they already know how to do in XP. Yeah, we'll all get there eventually, but it seems like MS has gone out of their way to make the transition difficult.
Bush has been bad but previous administrations have done their part to hack the FDA to the bone. In 1973, the F.D.A. undertook 34,919 food inspections; in 2006, that number had dropped to 7,783 according to the NY Times . And the number of inspectors has dropped by 1300 in the last 14 years.
Funny that we can spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, but can't afford to make sure the food and drugs we put in our bodies are safe.
"7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention."
Yeah, but XP came out less than 2 years after 2000. MS spent over 5 years on Vista and what did they come up with? A pretty interface and DRM. Vista is a giant blinking neon sign announcing that MS' devleopment process is broken--don't believe me? Read this.
Hey, I don't hate Vista. If I have to look at a monitor all day, I'd just as soon have a pretty OS to look at. But it's obvious that huge amounts of time and money were wasted, and maybe if enough of their customers rip on them MS will take the steps necessary (cue the rolling heads!) to do better next time.
I enjoyed your NWN modules, glad to see you're still at it. But I only got about halfway through Demon when I got stuck, still would like to finish it. Is there a walk through or hints somewhere? And please don't tell me you have to win at the Magic-style card game in the demon city. I really suck at it!
Oh, and as someone who played a bit of AD&D(1st edition) in my youth, I can recommend PIPBoy's Dreamcatcher and Shadowlord modules. Demon is a bit less...traditional, but quite intriguing.
"Lucas blamed the Polish researchers for not being more explicit about their fossil-examination rules, but he did apologize for what he called "a misunderstanding".
Yeah, I guess he didn't understand that visiting colleagues and publishing about their discoveries before the people who actually discovered them had a chance to is bad form. I take back my bonehead comment, that's a compliment to a paleontologist. "Tool" seems to fit the bill.
The world's biggest software company devotes years and several delays to roll out a new flagship OS and lays an egg. That's either the beginning of the end or a wake up call for some major restructuring. And it doesn't sound like they're waking up, so yes, it may well be the beginning of the end. I agree that all is not lost (yet), but Vista's foibles demonstrate that MS's development process is in serious trouble.
People compare it to ME, but ME was just supposed to be a bandaid to keep consumers on board until XP was released. Vista, on the other hand, was developed for the enterprise. And the enterprise ain't impressed.
I was just talking to a buddy of mine this morning, who's been doing multimedia stuff on Macs for decades. Apple has really been out to lunch with their software lately. Look at the latest iMovie. They cripple it and remove a ton of features so that users actually prefer the previous version. It won't even run on my buddy's Mac because he has some MPEG2 files. iMovie tries to index his hard drive on startup (WTF?), it finds the MPEG2s and pukes. It's ridiculous.
It seems like in shifting it's focus to consumer electronics Apple has really been dropping the ball on its software development. Although the incompatibility problems between Quicktime versions goes back to day 1 (or day 2, I suppose).
Thanks for that. The video on snotr was pretty...snotty.
You might be right, obviously my perspective is skewed by my experience. But I don't believe that geeks are the only ones who can benefit from the internet. I'm remodeling my house, and I've got a ton of great advice from online forums.
You want clean water for your village? Go online and find out how other villages are improving their water supply. Maybe it can't happen now, but in a year or two, who knows? The exciting thing about information is that it's viral, it spreads exponentially given the proper vector, and OLPC could be the vector.
Let's face it, the western world is not going to solve the developing world's problems. We've been sending volunteers and aid for decades and have barely made a dent. OLPC might be the answer, might not, but it's a new approach.
"Access to potable water is more important than access to information. Access to food is more important (although as many posters have pointed out, it is not the biggest problem). Access to electricity is more important. Access to transportation is more important. And, of course, security and health are more important. But does that mean that access to information is unimportant? Of course not." Access to information is the lever that makes all those other goals attainable. How much less effective would we be at our jobs without the internet? I don't know if the OLPC experiment will pan out, but given the potential upside it's worth a shot.
"I still pay a substantial premium to buy power from it over dirty coal
Which proves that your power company can charge you more for it, not that it costs more. I realize coal is cheap, but if the externalities (environmental destruction from mining it, pollution and health issues caused by burning it) weren't born by society but were charged to industry, it wouldn't be so cheap.
Coal infrastructure is already in place, wind is just being built out so it's not surprising it costs more now.
I keep hearing this "Environmental groups hate wind turbines" meme but I've seen nothing to back it up. Here's a quote from one of your linked articles: "The wind turbines now being installed have much lower rates of avian mortality associated with them than those built 25 or more years ago". Hardly the ranting of anti-wind fanatics.
The Cape Cod wind farm fiasco is primarily Ted Kenndey and some other NIMBY "liberals" who don't want their ocean views marred by windmills on the horizon. Yes, Ted and co. sometimes support environmental issues, that doesn't make it a concerted resistance by environmental organizations.
Good post, but I still feel that until the waste issue is resolved we're foolish to invest more in nuclear. Just curious, what does the Navy do with their spent fuel? I have a lot of family living near the Hanford uranium processing plant, so I hear a lot of horror stories about the ongoing clean up there. I'm sure 40 years ago the government scientists were telling everyone how safe things were, so I tend to be very skeptical about industry safety claims. As our fearless leader once said..."fool me twice...you can't get fooled again!"
Yes, and the decades and billions of dollars spent to develop the very flawed Yucca Mountain repository are strong evidence that humans are not capable of dealing with the problem, at least not as our society is currently structured. Yucca Mountain was chosen for a variety of scientific and political reasons, and while compromise is essential for politics it makes for really bad science. Oklo is a very interesting natural phenomenon but to my knowledge has never been successfully duplicated by humans for waste storage.
I can't see why nuclear supporters get so riled up when opponents insist that the disposal issue be solved before we invest more in powerplants. If the solution is so trivial, then implement it already. If it's not, then it's foolish to invest more resources in a nuclear solution.
Thanks for that link, interesting blog. I still don't see why we're auctioning off this spectrum and hoping that the winner will do the right thing, when the FCC could KEEP the spectrum, LEASE it to the network providers, and MANDATE that they keep it open. I guess I should be grateful they didn't just hand it to Haliburton for Xmas.
I still use PS7 at home, and I don't notice a lot of difference between it and the CS2 and 3 releases. I've tried the Gimp a few times, and while I admire the effort I'd stick with PS. It's the standard, and if kids learn on version 7 they can easily transition to the latest version. Gimp uses different terms for many tools, menu structure(although that can be a moving target among PS versions). Not saying it's bad, but it's different enough to make moving to PS a challenge.
Once the air level drops below the hole, they'll fix it no problem.
"What does this have to do with the ISS? Not much "
Like the astronauts, Knievel put his life on the line in the pursuit of.....what? Fame and glory certainly, but when you come right down to it going to the moon, or building a condo in orbit, makes about as much sense as jumping over the fountains at Cesar's. There's no concrete benefit(yeah, I know, comsats, etc. but you don't need manned space travel for those), but it's cool to know that we did it.