Oh, there are, they just don't realize it's Windows they hate. They think they hate computers in general, because they've never seen a computer with any other OS and don't understand that a computer can be any other way. But they do hate their experience with computers, oh, boy, do they. They have PLENTY of complaints, if you pay attention. If you actually *listen* to the users, you'll find that the ire runs very deep. Frustration, pain, sorrow, anguish, despair, fear, loathing, and remorse *dominate* the feelings most users have toward computers.
This is a symptom of a more general problem: Windows doesn't have anything I would describe as a package manager. Okay, there's "add or remove Windows components", but quite frankly it reminds me of the early nineties, and not in a good way.
> Back-ups: Using linux I can back up/etc,/var and/home > and the package list. That's it
This much better on Windows than it used to be. These days you don't have to worry about applications storing user files and preferences in places like the root directory and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32, so really all you have to back up is the Documents and Settings folder, which you can think of as/etc and/home and/tmp all rolled into one.
(Yes, if you have to do a reinstall/restore you're going to have to manually install all your applications again, one by one. But that's another symptom of the lack of package management, which we've already covered.)
(Err, and if you're running a *server*, there are some other things to back up too. But, to be honest, if you're using Windows as a server OS it's probably because your line-of-business software requires it, and you probably have a support contract from the vendor, and you probably got ARCserve as part of the deal. If you're using Windows as a server OS *without* a vendor support contract, you're more of a masochist than I took you for. So let's confine the discussion to desktop and workstation scenarios.)
> Bluetooth: a bluetooth USB dongle "just works" in linux. I don't know anything about Bluetooth (well, okay, I know that it's a short-distance wireless communication protocol of some kind, but that's all), so I can't comment on that, except to note that normal users don't mess with it anyway.
> Software installation
Yeah, we already covered the lack of package management.
And yeah, it *is* a significant point. But you seem to have enumerated it as points 1, 2, *and* 4. That's really not fair.
I surely do appreciate the value of a good package manager, but really, if that were all Windows needed, it would be a pretty good product. I'd probably use it on my own desktop, if that were the only major thing wrong with it.
> The difference is, with Linux the majority of > users spend hours trying to get things to work, > everybody has one or two things on their system > that didn't quite work right
In other words, it's just like Windows.
In fairness, I *have* seen a Windows system without these kinds of problems. Occasionally. But it's very unusual.
> and needed some config file edited
Haha. If only Windows problems were so easy to solve as that. If only you could do a quick web search and find simple step-by-step "type this, then type that" instructions to solve almost any problem.
But that would be a different universe. Heck, even fixes that only require registry changes are the easy ones with Windows. More often than not you end up having to reinstall. Some people claim success taking the thing to an expert and paying them handsomely, but just as likely the expert will return it to you in worse condition than they found it.
> In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare.
I don't have as much experience with Mac, but on Windows these kinds of problems are about as rare as overpriced food stands in an amusement park.
Most Windows users just take it for granted that computers never really work the way you want it to.
Admittedly, I also tried Ff 3.5, found that it crashed a lot, and reverted to 3.0.x.
I assume whatever bug is causing the crashes will get fixed eventually, so at some point after a few releases I'll try upgrading again and see how it goes. One good thing about Firefox is that you can easily have multiple versions installed on the same system, so you can try out a new version without giving up the old one. That's harder to do with system-default browsers like Konqueror or IE.
> The IE team has worked to better respect web standards. The IE team even sends > open encouragement to Firefox, saying they welcome innovation and competition.
They should welcome it, because there wouldn't *be* an IE team if it weren't for Firefox. Work on IE6 had been essentially halted for a while. Microsoft put the IE7 team together more or less from scratch *because* they were afraid that Firefox was going to take over completely.
Other teams at Microsoft, such as the Office team for instance, might not care so much for competition. Microsoft makes money from selling new versions of Office and Windows, so there are going to be Office and Windows teams whether upper management thinks there's any viable competition or not.
But IE is a free download. Microsoft doesn't make money when people upgrade to the new version of it, so there's no incentive to pay programmers to work on a new version, unless there's a competing product that's going to actively draw people away. The IE team *needs* competition. Without it, they'd all be reassigned to other teams, or else they'd just be out of a job.
Let me know when the Office team starts sending the OOo people birthday cakes, or when the Windows kernel team sends one to the Linus.
You don't want to put Jobs and Stallman in a room together, trust me. Gates and Stallman would probably just give eachother the cold shoulder (what would they have to say to one another, after all?), but Jobs would probably do something to get Stallman riled. Could get messy.
"rotten" is an emotionally loaded term, but fundamentally cheese is a cultured food.
I like it anyway, though. (Well, to be honest, I really only like "hard" cheeses, i.e., the ones that are solid at room temperature: colby and cheddar and muenster and motzarella and provalone and pepperjack and so on and so forth.)
Indeed. They love anything made from grain. They're also quite fond of peanut butter. As for fruit, my dad taught me that if the mice keep taking the bait from a trap and getting away, you can take a raisin and sew it to the hole in the trigger pad. Works every time. (Incidentally, this trick of sewing the bait to the trigger pad also works with squirrels; even though squirrel traps are a different and less fatal design, getting them to tug on something that's tied to the trigger is still a good way to make sure they spring the trap.)
> Life eats anything that doesn't make it dead. Period. That's natural.
Actually, most life forms prefer to eat things that provide energy or some other nutritional benefit. Humans don't generally eat grass, for instance. It's not toxic, but it provides no significant benefit either, so we don't eat it. Cows eat it because they have the ability to digest the cellulose and get energy out of it. Dogs only eat grass when they need to throw up.
Yeah, so, when are we going to do this with people? Oh, wait...
> The technique will involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then > cooling it to its quantum-mechanical ground state in a microcavity.
Okay, maybe not.
Also, when did viruses become living things? I still remember when they changed the definition of "alive" to include plants and exclude fire, but I've *never* heard a definition that would include viruses.
> It would be interesting to actually run the numbers.
They've been run. And run again. And again. And yet, after all that, you will never hear a professional statistician claim in all seriousness that any other popular activity is as dangerous as riding in a car on public roads. Unless you count war as a popular activity, but it's mainly popular with people who haven't actually been in one, so.
> "only 1 accident per million miles" (or whatever). > I'm more interested in knowing what my odds of dying > are *per trip* which is not much better than a car.
Yeah, next time you're deciding whether to take a plane flight six blocks to the video store, let me know and maybe I'll run those probability numbers for you.
The overwhelming majority of car trips are very short, so the risk of accident per trip is fairly small. If you use those numbers to decide whether it's safer to fly or drive on a given trip (say, from Los Angeles to Chicago), you're missing something.
You're looking at it from a purely ideological standpoint, and you're missing the pragmatic side of the issue.
The fact is, nuclear power plants, today, in practice, in the real world, *can* and *do* deliver the kind of energy required to run the power grid. They can completely replace the burning of fossil fuels if necessary, and the fuel they run on is in fact VERY plentiful, particularly modern reactors that can run on U-238. This is partly because it goes so far. A pound of uranium generates a WHOLE lot more power than a pound of coal or oil. But uranium is fairly abundant anyway. There's more uranium in the earth's crust than there is tin, for instance. Enough to meet the world's power needs for *centuries* (and by then hopefully we'll have more cost-effective solar -- but I'm getting ahead of myself).
It is likely that no amount of research or investment will ever make wind and wave deliver enough power to meet the world's needs at the current power consumption rate. Falling-water power plants are very cost-effective where you have a generous amount of water at significant potential, e.g., at a dam or large waterfall, but there are relatively few such sites. We do use them where they are available, but there's a limit to how many of them we can build. We can't replace all the coal and oil plants with hoover-dam-style plants, because quite simply there just plain aren't that many large rivers.
Solar power can, in the long term, deliver the power we need, but at present it still needs decades of development to get to a point where it will be economically viable. I'm very much in favor of continuing that research, but it's not going to happen overnight. Today, the most cost-effective method we have for harnessing solar power involves using acres and acres of green plants to turn it into carbohydrates, which we can then burn as fuel. If we want to replace fossil-fuel and nuclear power generation with solar, we're going to have to do better than that. Further research and development is required.
> If the US tariffed-in rates were set at even $.38 per KWH, solar > would be a no-brainer investment for majority of homes in the US
Maybe it would be out west, where the sky is usually not overcast. I don't think solar power could ever seriously catch on over here in the midwest, where I grew up (in Northeastern Ohio) thinking of the idea that the sky is blue as a very strange cultural phenomenon, because as everybody knows the sky is actually a dull gray color in the daytime, black at night, and a weird yellow-orange color for a few minutes around sunrise and sunset. When I was in seventh grade we went to western Michigan, and the first day we were there I got out my camera and took pictures of the sky, because it actually *was* blue that day, and I wanted photographic evidence of the fact. I didn't think anyone would understand what I meant or believe me if I just told them about it.
> No, not even 30% of the subset of PCs with > this performance-monitoring software run it.
On this particular issue, their numbers happen to agree with my experience. Actually, if I'd been guessing, I'd have put the percentage rather lower. Like, in single digits.
IMO, it's not wrongness as such that creates problems, but incorrigibility. When somebody is wrong and *stubborn* about it, that's what makes them hard to work with.
Granted, if somebody is wrong *all* *the* *time*, we tend to reach a point after a while where we really no longer value or listen to their input.
But somebody like that you can just sort of ignore and go about your business. What really causes problems is somebody who won't listen to reason and keeps *insisting* on having their stupidity implemented.
Perhaps an example will help. A boss who comes to the staff meeting with an inane proposal that they read in a business magazine and thought sounded cool at first blush is one thing. A good IT guy won't want to implement the proposal (because, it's inane), but if he has any respect for the people at the meeting he'll give *reasons* why he doesn't want to implement it. And he'll expect you to listen to those reasons. If the IT guy starts trying to explain some of the problematic technical implications of the inane proposal and the dude shuts him down and insists that he get on board, that's something else entirely. At that point the IT guy will become defensive and/or subversive.
You see, it's not just ordinary plain old ignorance that geeks really hate. It's *willful* ignorance, the dangerous and stupid kind, the kind that says, "I don't care about the laws of physics, non-reinforced concrete is cheap, and we ARE going to build the bridge across the canyon out of it, and we're not going to use supports because they cost extra money". Competent IT guys can't stand that and will either leave in frustration or attempt to protect the organization from the danger, even if that puts them in the ironic position of protecting the organization from its own management.
> why isn't microsoft doing everything possible to destroy linux?
By filing lawsuits? Such actions would cause Microsoft more harm than good.
It's about public relations. Microsoft continually balances the business gains they can realize by various means versus what it will cost them in PR and customer satisfaction, and they strike a very different balance in that regard as compared to other companies (e.g., Apple, or Google). Microsoft's own customers mostly hate and/or fear them, but most of them don't hate or fear Microsoft *quite* enough to actually do something about it (like, for instance, switch to Linux). Microsoft knows that a lot of their own customers think of them as an evil empire, and they know that if they push things too far, people will jump ship. Like any business, they are at the mercy of their customers: if too many people stop buying your product, you're sunk. Consequently, every action that Microsoft takes is weighed in a balance: will this gain us more than what it costs us in lost customer satisfaction and bad public relations?
Filing anti-Linux patent lawsuits won't gain them much. In the first place, there's no guarantee they'd win. Even if they did, open source is adaptable: any specific patent infringement they could get the court to rule on in their favor would just be coded around in a matter of days, and life in the open-source world would go on much as it had been.
It wouldn't gain them much, but it *would* cost them. If Microsoft starts filing a whole bunch of patent lawsuits against free software, that's not going to go over well in public. Microsoft knows this. Microsoft wants their customers to be thinking about how great Windows 7 is going to be. They *don't* want them thinking about patents, Linux, lawsuits, how evil Microsoft is, and how you can't compete with them for fear of being sued out of existence. It's the wrong message, totally counterproductive, a recipe for disaster.
You saw how well the SCO fiasco worked out for them. That one arguably helped Linux and *hurt* Microsoft, and Microsoft wasn't even directly or obviously involved. Imagine the effect it would have had on their image if they'd participated in the lawsuit directly, as holders of the intellectual property that was in question. No, filing intellectual property lawsuits is not the way to go for Microsoft. It would be pointless and counterproductive.
Of course, they didn't sell the patents to help protect Linux. They auctioned off the patents because they didn't have any other use for them, and it was a way to get money out of them.
Incidentally, any serious money-making IT business is going to see things (approximately) this way: filing a bunch of software-patent lawsuits against the open-source community would be foolish and counterproductive, and they aren't going to do it if they have any brains.
No, if there are going to be software-patent lawsuits, they're going to come from smaller, more desperate players with less (or nothing) to lose.
> That's why PhotoShop has.psd, GIMP has.xcf, etc. Compatible formats > are meant to be compatible. If they're not, you're doing it wrong.
That's just what he was saying, though: Microsoft was doing it wrong when they chose.doc (previously the single most popular extension for 8-bit IBM Extended ASCII text files, which were VERY common prior to the misguided and short-sighted switch to ISO-8859-1 as the default codepage in Windows 95[1]) as the extension for early versions of MS Word. And it is worth pointing out that there are several mutually incompatible MS Word formats, all of which use.doc for the extension.
Now, the extension for MS Word is one of the worst cases. (Not the worst, though; that honor probably belongs to.dat or perhaps.sav.) But in general the problem is that there's no central registry of which extensions are taken and what they mean. I'm not sure there *should* be, either: that would create other kinds of problems. Nonetheless, the current situation does create some unfortunate ambiguities. Another example is.scr, the main extension used for transcript files (a text format, usually plain 7-bit ASCII), and also for Windows screensavers (executable).
So yeah, there *are* problems.
I don't think creator codes are a good solution, however. They don't really tell you what kind of file it is, which is what you need to know. They tell you only what application created the file, and that's ABSOLUTELY not the same thing, nor does it really matter. I do NOT want to go back and live in a world where every application only really fully supports its own custom file type that nothing else can read or write properly. File formats should be completely independent of the applications that read and write them, and in the modern era they mostly are, and this is good, and it makes creator codes irrelevant. Also, creator codes don't survive transfer via most internet protocols very well, on account of the fact that Unix doesn't have them.
Magic numbers (or strings, like the shebang line on Unix-style executable text files) are a significantly better solution IMO, especially when used in conjunction with filename extensions. All file formats SHOULD include a magic string or number at the beginning that clearly identifies the specific file format *and* the version of the format. Even formats that aren't intended to have later versions should have a version number, because you can never predict for certain whether you're going to need to slightly extend the format later.
--- [1] Microsoft *should* have waited just a bit longer and gone directly from Extended ASCII (as the default) straight to full-blown Unicode. It was already obvious that they would eventually need to move to Unicode, and the introduction of Latin-1 as an intermediate step caused unnecessary problems, IMO, in addition to making old documents more difficult to handle at the time. All of which is neither here nor there now.
> Whoawhoawhoa, slow down, buddy...... right-click? > You're scaring me with your crazy-talk!
Yeah, no fooling. This is slashdot. If you want to open a document in a particular application, you're supposed to grab one of the several terminal windows on your desktop and launch the app from the command line with the document path and filename as an argument. It's quicker and easier than fooling around with context menus and junk.
> Big Pharma, in particular the guys pushing psych meds, > are certainly not the most trustworthy guys around.
I think it's the people diagnosing psychological illness. At this point it's difficult to name a psychological illness that isn't diagnosed, and medication prescribed for it, several orders of magnitude more frequently today than fifty years ago. *Some* of that is because greater awareness allows more real cases to be diagnosed. But I think a *lot* of it is just so much bunk, a weird sociological phenomenon, a sort of hypochondria at the societal level.
Autism, for instance, is not even slightly difficult to recognize when there's a real case, but diagnosis is up, way up. We supposedly have several cases of it where I live, in Galion (a city of some twelve thousand people); I've met a couple of these kids: they are quite obviously not autistic at all. In fact, in one case I sincerely doubt the boy has any significant psychiatric disorder at all (beyond the usual "mom and dad never spend any time with me, so I'm going to act up and see if that gets me some attention" that plagues the entire Western world these days; this is not something a drug can cure).
Bipolar disorder, clinical depression, ADHD, you name it: if it's a psychological disorder for which the normal treatment is to prescribe medication, diagnosis is up, and in a lot of cases the medication doesn't seem to work. I'll tell you why the psych meds aren't doing anything: it's because a lot of those people don't need the meds. There's nothing chemically wrong with their brains.
Here's just one example scenario that you can actually *see* happening if you pay attention. The parents ignore the kid most of the time, plop him in front of a television and expect him to entertain himself, so he acts up. When he acts up at school, the teachers call in the shrink, and he tells the parents that the child has a problem. Nobody wants to blame the parenting, because that's a good way to incur the wrath of lawsuits. So the parents take the kid to a specialist, and he hazards a diagnosis and prescribes some pills. Yeah, maybe that'll fix the problem. Or not.
It's not just kids, either. Adults are being overdiagnosed with psychiatric issues as well.
I'm not saying there aren't people with real psychiatric problems that *can* be helped by medication. There are. There always have been. (Well, the meds weren't always around, but the conditions were.) But what I am saying is that a lot of people are being incorrectly diagnosed with these problems.
I suppose the pharma companies might bear some of the blame for this, if their advertising gives people the wrong idea, but I think there's more going on than that. I believe it's a symptom of something much deeper in our society: we have got to the point where we expect all of our issues to be solved simply and easily, and we frequently aren't willing to invest personal effort. We just want to go to a doctor and have him tell us that there's a name for our problem and a standard treatment, something easy we can do, like take a pill once a day, and then we won't have to actually struggle with our issues.
Re:Most people simply don't think about security
on
The Myths of Security
·
· Score: 1
> A security model that allows users to be their usual flaky selves
Such a security model is ipso facto highly insecure, if the users have any useful capabilities at all. If, for instance, the user has the ability to send messages to other users, then malware will be able to exploit the user's account and send spam to everyone.
Re:Most people simply don't think about security
on
The Myths of Security
·
· Score: 1
I know replying to signatures is off-topic, but in this case I can't resist (and I can afford the karma hit).
Your sig quote displays just about as much ignorance of statistics as it would be possible to pack into a single quote. The average (in technical terms, the arithmetic mean) is almost certainly NOT the same as the median value. Depending on your sample population, it is entirely possible that 90% of the individuals are smarter than the average, although I have to confess that in the population of the whole world I suspect it's more the reverse, and that the overwhelming majority are significantly dumber than average. In any event, the Carlin quote is ignorant nonsense.
Assuming the PS/2 interface still works, you can still log in locally and work blind. It's a little slower, because you have to stop and think more about what you're doing (e.g., tab completion is a good deal less useful), but if you know what you're doing you CAN make it work. Back in the days *before* convenient networking, I used to occasionally have to work blind when a monitor was out for some reason, most commonly to copy files to a floppy disk so I could take them to another computer. Like I said, you have to stop and think, but if you know the system you *can* do it. You don't need to see the output. You can mostly predict what the output is going to be, and if you *do* need to verify some command's output for some reason you can pipe it into a very short Perl script and make it beep once for yes or twice for no, or if worst comes to worst cat the output onto a floppy disk and take it to another computer to analyze.
Slashdot Mirror
> There are not that many people who hate Windows
Oh, there are, they just don't realize it's Windows they hate. They think they hate computers in general, because they've never seen a computer with any other OS and don't understand that a computer can be any other way. But they do hate their experience with computers, oh, boy, do they. They have PLENTY of complaints, if you pay attention. If you actually *listen* to the users, you'll find that the ire runs very deep. Frustration, pain, sorrow, anguish, despair, fear, loathing, and remorse *dominate* the feelings most users have toward computers.
> Updates
/etc, /var and /home
/etc and /home and /tmp all rolled into one.
This is a symptom of a more general problem: Windows doesn't have anything I would describe as a package manager. Okay, there's "add or remove Windows components", but quite frankly it reminds me of the early nineties, and not in a good way.
> Back-ups: Using linux I can back up
> and the package list. That's it
This much better on Windows than it used to be. These days you don't have to worry about applications storing user files and preferences in places like the root directory and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32, so really all you have to back up is the Documents and Settings folder, which you can think of as
(Yes, if you have to do a reinstall/restore you're going to have to manually install all your applications again, one by one. But that's another symptom of the lack of package management, which we've already covered.)
(Err, and if you're running a *server*, there are some other things to back up too. But, to be honest, if you're using Windows as a server OS it's probably because your line-of-business software requires it, and you probably have a support contract from the vendor, and you probably got ARCserve as part of the deal. If you're using Windows as a server OS *without* a vendor support contract, you're more of a masochist than I took you for. So let's confine the discussion to desktop and workstation scenarios.)
> Bluetooth: a bluetooth USB dongle "just works" in linux.
I don't know anything about Bluetooth (well, okay, I know that it's a short-distance wireless communication protocol of some kind, but that's all), so I can't comment on that, except to note that normal users don't mess with it anyway.
> Software installation
Yeah, we already covered the lack of package management.
And yeah, it *is* a significant point. But you seem to have enumerated it as points 1, 2, *and* 4. That's really not fair.
I surely do appreciate the value of a good package manager, but really, if that were all Windows needed, it would be a pretty good product. I'd probably use it on my own desktop, if that were the only major thing wrong with it.
> The difference is, with Linux the majority of
> users spend hours trying to get things to work,
> everybody has one or two things on their system
> that didn't quite work right
In other words, it's just like Windows.
In fairness, I *have* seen a Windows system without these kinds of problems. Occasionally. But it's very unusual.
> and needed some config file edited
Haha. If only Windows problems were so easy to solve as that. If only you could do a quick web search and find simple step-by-step "type this, then type that" instructions to solve almost any problem.
But that would be a different universe. Heck, even fixes that only require registry changes are the easy ones with Windows. More often than not you end up having to reinstall. Some people claim success taking the thing to an expert and paying them handsomely, but just as likely the expert will return it to you in worse condition than they found it.
> In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare.
I don't have as much experience with Mac, but on Windows these kinds of problems are about as rare as overpriced food stands in an amusement park.
Most Windows users just take it for granted that computers never really work the way you want it to.
Admittedly, I also tried Ff 3.5, found that it crashed a lot, and reverted to 3.0.x.
I assume whatever bug is causing the crashes will get fixed eventually, so at some point after a few releases I'll try upgrading again and see how it goes. One good thing about Firefox is that you can easily have multiple versions installed on the same system, so you can try out a new version without giving up the old one. That's harder to do with system-default browsers like Konqueror or IE.
> The IE team has worked to better respect web standards. The IE team even sends
> open encouragement to Firefox, saying they welcome innovation and competition.
They should welcome it, because there wouldn't *be* an IE team if it weren't for Firefox. Work on IE6 had been essentially halted for a while. Microsoft put the IE7 team together more or less from scratch *because* they were afraid that Firefox was going to take over completely.
Other teams at Microsoft, such as the Office team for instance, might not care so much for competition. Microsoft makes money from selling new versions of Office and Windows, so there are going to be Office and Windows teams whether upper management thinks there's any viable competition or not.
But IE is a free download. Microsoft doesn't make money when people upgrade to the new version of it, so there's no incentive to pay programmers to work on a new version, unless there's a competing product that's going to actively draw people away. The IE team *needs* competition. Without it, they'd all be reassigned to other teams, or else they'd just be out of a job.
Let me know when the Office team starts sending the OOo people birthday cakes, or when the Windows kernel team sends one to the Linus.
You don't want to put Jobs and Stallman in a room together, trust me. Gates and Stallman would probably just give eachother the cold shoulder (what would they have to say to one another, after all?), but Jobs would probably do something to get Stallman riled. Could get messy.
Stallman would never accept the position.
They should hire Larry Wall. Maybe then we could get a proper Perl (complete with working CPAN.pm) on Windows without Cygwin.
"rotten" is an emotionally loaded term, but fundamentally cheese is a cultured food.
I like it anyway, though. (Well, to be honest, I really only like "hard" cheeses, i.e., the ones that are solid at room temperature: colby and cheddar and muenster and motzarella and provalone and pepperjack and so on and so forth.)
Indeed. They love anything made from grain. They're also quite fond of peanut butter. As for fruit, my dad taught me that if the mice keep taking the bait from a trap and getting away, you can take a raisin and sew it to the hole in the trigger pad. Works every time. (Incidentally, this trick of sewing the bait to the trigger pad also works with squirrels; even though squirrel traps are a different and less fatal design, getting them to tug on something that's tied to the trigger is still a good way to make sure they spring the trap.)
> Life eats anything that doesn't make it dead. Period. That's natural.
Actually, most life forms prefer to eat things that provide energy or some other nutritional benefit. Humans don't generally eat grass, for instance. It's not toxic, but it provides no significant benefit either, so we don't eat it. Cows eat it because they have the ability to digest the cellulose and get energy out of it. Dogs only eat grass when they need to throw up.
> For that matter, why does anyone think it's
> normal for humans to eat cow secretions?
Maybe because they've been a major dietary staple in most human cultures throughout all of recorded history?
Yeah, so, when are we going to do this with people? Oh, wait...
> The technique will involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then
> cooling it to its quantum-mechanical ground state in a microcavity.
Okay, maybe not.
Also, when did viruses become living things? I still remember when they changed the definition of "alive" to include plants and exclude fire, but I've *never* heard a definition that would include viruses.
> It would be interesting to actually run the numbers.
They've been run. And run again. And again. And yet, after all that, you will never hear a professional statistician claim in all seriousness that any other popular activity is as dangerous as riding in a car on public roads. Unless you count war as a popular activity, but it's mainly popular with people who haven't actually been in one, so.
> "only 1 accident per million miles" (or whatever).
> I'm more interested in knowing what my odds of dying
> are *per trip* which is not much better than a car.
Yeah, next time you're deciding whether to take a plane flight six blocks to the video store, let me know and maybe I'll run those probability numbers for you.
The overwhelming majority of car trips are very short, so the risk of accident per trip is fairly small. If you use those numbers to decide whether it's safer to fly or drive on a given trip (say, from Los Angeles to Chicago), you're missing something.
You're looking at it from a purely ideological standpoint, and you're missing the pragmatic side of the issue.
The fact is, nuclear power plants, today, in practice, in the real world, *can* and *do* deliver the kind of energy required to run the power grid. They can completely replace the burning of fossil fuels if necessary, and the fuel they run on is in fact VERY plentiful, particularly modern reactors that can run on U-238. This is partly because it goes so far. A pound of uranium generates a WHOLE lot more power than a pound of coal or oil. But uranium is fairly abundant anyway. There's more uranium in the earth's crust than there is tin, for instance. Enough to meet the world's power needs for *centuries* (and by then hopefully we'll have more cost-effective solar -- but I'm getting ahead of myself).
It is likely that no amount of research or investment will ever make wind and wave deliver enough power to meet the world's needs at the current power consumption rate. Falling-water power plants are very cost-effective where you have a generous amount of water at significant potential, e.g., at a dam or large waterfall, but there are relatively few such sites. We do use them where they are available, but there's a limit to how many of them we can build. We can't replace all the coal and oil plants with hoover-dam-style plants, because quite simply there just plain aren't that many large rivers.
Solar power can, in the long term, deliver the power we need, but at present it still needs decades of development to get to a point where it will be economically viable. I'm very much in favor of continuing that research, but it's not going to happen overnight. Today, the most cost-effective method we have for harnessing solar power involves using acres and acres of green plants to turn it into carbohydrates, which we can then burn as fuel. If we want to replace fossil-fuel and nuclear power generation with solar, we're going to have to do better than that. Further research and development is required.
> If the US tariffed-in rates were set at even $.38 per KWH, solar
> would be a no-brainer investment for majority of homes in the US
Maybe it would be out west, where the sky is usually not overcast. I don't think solar power could ever seriously catch on over here in the midwest, where I grew up (in Northeastern Ohio) thinking of the idea that the sky is blue as a very strange cultural phenomenon, because as everybody knows the sky is actually a dull gray color in the daytime, black at night, and a weird yellow-orange color for a few minutes around sunrise and sunset. When I was in seventh grade we went to western Michigan, and the first day we were there I got out my camera and took pictures of the sky, because it actually *was* blue that day, and I wanted photographic evidence of the fact. I didn't think anyone would understand what I meant or believe me if I just told them about it.
> No, not even 30% of the subset of PCs with
> this performance-monitoring software run it.
On this particular issue, their numbers happen to agree with my experience. Actually, if I'd been guessing, I'd have put the percentage rather lower. Like, in single digits.
IMO, it's not wrongness as such that creates problems, but incorrigibility. When somebody is wrong and *stubborn* about it, that's what makes them hard to work with.
Granted, if somebody is wrong *all* *the* *time*, we tend to reach a point after a while where we really no longer value or listen to their input.
But somebody like that you can just sort of ignore and go about your business. What really causes problems is somebody who won't listen to reason and keeps *insisting* on having their stupidity implemented.
Perhaps an example will help. A boss who comes to the staff meeting with an inane proposal that they read in a business magazine and thought sounded cool at first blush is one thing. A good IT guy won't want to implement the proposal (because, it's inane), but if he has any respect for the people at the meeting he'll give *reasons* why he doesn't want to implement it. And he'll expect you to listen to those reasons. If the IT guy starts trying to explain some of the problematic technical implications of the inane proposal and the dude shuts him down and insists that he get on board, that's something else entirely. At that point the IT guy will become defensive and/or subversive.
You see, it's not just ordinary plain old ignorance that geeks really hate. It's *willful* ignorance, the dangerous and stupid kind, the kind that says, "I don't care about the laws of physics, non-reinforced concrete is cheap, and we ARE going to build the bridge across the canyon out of it, and we're not going to use supports because they cost extra money". Competent IT guys can't stand that and will either leave in frustration or attempt to protect the organization from the danger, even if that puts them in the ironic position of protecting the organization from its own management.
> why isn't microsoft doing everything possible to destroy linux?
By filing lawsuits? Such actions would cause Microsoft more harm than good.
It's about public relations. Microsoft continually balances the business gains they can realize by various means versus what it will cost them in PR and customer satisfaction, and they strike a very different balance in that regard as compared to other companies (e.g., Apple, or Google). Microsoft's own customers mostly hate and/or fear them, but most of them don't hate or fear Microsoft *quite* enough to actually do something about it (like, for instance, switch to Linux). Microsoft knows that a lot of their own customers think of them as an evil empire, and they know that if they push things too far, people will jump ship. Like any business, they are at the mercy of their customers: if too many people stop buying your product, you're sunk. Consequently, every action that Microsoft takes is weighed in a balance: will this gain us more than what it costs us in lost customer satisfaction and bad public relations?
Filing anti-Linux patent lawsuits won't gain them much. In the first place, there's no guarantee they'd win. Even if they did, open source is adaptable: any specific patent infringement they could get the court to rule on in their favor would just be coded around in a matter of days, and life in the open-source world would go on much as it had been.
It wouldn't gain them much, but it *would* cost them. If Microsoft starts filing a whole bunch of patent lawsuits against free software, that's not going to go over well in public. Microsoft knows this. Microsoft wants their customers to be thinking about how great Windows 7 is going to be. They *don't* want them thinking about patents, Linux, lawsuits, how evil Microsoft is, and how you can't compete with them for fear of being sued out of existence. It's the wrong message, totally counterproductive, a recipe for disaster.
You saw how well the SCO fiasco worked out for them. That one arguably helped Linux and *hurt* Microsoft, and Microsoft wasn't even directly or obviously involved. Imagine the effect it would have had on their image if they'd participated in the lawsuit directly, as holders of the intellectual property that was in question. No, filing intellectual property lawsuits is not the way to go for Microsoft. It would be pointless and counterproductive.
Of course, they didn't sell the patents to help protect Linux. They auctioned off the patents because they didn't have any other use for them, and it was a way to get money out of them.
Incidentally, any serious money-making IT business is going to see things (approximately) this way: filing a bunch of software-patent lawsuits against the open-source community would be foolish and counterproductive, and they aren't going to do it if they have any brains.
No, if there are going to be software-patent lawsuits, they're going to come from smaller, more desperate players with less (or nothing) to lose.
> That's why PhotoShop has .psd, GIMP has .xcf, etc. Compatible formats
.doc (previously the single most popular extension for 8-bit IBM Extended ASCII text files, which were VERY common prior to the misguided and short-sighted switch to ISO-8859-1 as the default codepage in Windows 95[1]) as the extension for early versions of MS Word. And it is worth pointing out that there are several mutually incompatible MS Word formats, all of which use .doc for the extension.
.dat or perhaps .sav.) But in general the problem is that there's no central registry of which extensions are taken and what they mean. I'm not sure there *should* be, either: that would create other kinds of problems. Nonetheless, the current situation does create some unfortunate ambiguities. Another example is .scr, the main extension used for transcript files (a text format, usually plain 7-bit ASCII), and also for Windows screensavers (executable).
> are meant to be compatible. If they're not, you're doing it wrong.
That's just what he was saying, though: Microsoft was doing it wrong when they chose
Now, the extension for MS Word is one of the worst cases. (Not the worst, though; that honor probably belongs to
So yeah, there *are* problems.
I don't think creator codes are a good solution, however. They don't really tell you what kind of file it is, which is what you need to know. They tell you only what application created the file, and that's ABSOLUTELY not the same thing, nor does it really matter. I do NOT want to go back and live in a world where every application only really fully supports its own custom file type that nothing else can read or write properly. File formats should be completely independent of the applications that read and write them, and in the modern era they mostly are, and this is good, and it makes creator codes irrelevant. Also, creator codes don't survive transfer via most internet protocols very well, on account of the fact that Unix doesn't have them.
Magic numbers (or strings, like the shebang line on Unix-style executable text files) are a significantly better solution IMO, especially when used in conjunction with filename extensions. All file formats SHOULD include a magic string or number at the beginning that clearly identifies the specific file format *and* the version of the format. Even formats that aren't intended to have later versions should have a version number, because you can never predict for certain whether you're going to need to slightly extend the format later.
---
[1] Microsoft *should* have waited just a bit longer and gone directly from Extended ASCII (as the default) straight to full-blown Unicode. It was already obvious that they would eventually need to move to Unicode, and the introduction of Latin-1 as an intermediate step caused unnecessary problems, IMO, in addition to making old documents more difficult to handle at the time. All of which is neither here nor there now.
> Whoawhoawhoa, slow down, buddy...... right-click?
> You're scaring me with your crazy-talk!
Yeah, no fooling. This is slashdot. If you want to open a document in a particular application, you're supposed to grab one of the several terminal windows on your desktop and launch the app from the command line with the document path and filename as an argument. It's quicker and easier than fooling around with context menus and junk.
> Big Pharma, in particular the guys pushing psych meds,
> are certainly not the most trustworthy guys around.
I think it's the people diagnosing psychological illness. At this point it's difficult to name a psychological illness that isn't diagnosed, and medication prescribed for it, several orders of magnitude more frequently today than fifty years ago. *Some* of that is because greater awareness allows more real cases to be diagnosed. But I think a *lot* of it is just so much bunk, a weird sociological phenomenon, a sort of hypochondria at the societal level.
Autism, for instance, is not even slightly difficult to recognize when there's a real case, but diagnosis is up, way up. We supposedly have several cases of it where I live, in Galion (a city of some twelve thousand people); I've met a couple of these kids: they are quite obviously not autistic at all. In fact, in one case I sincerely doubt the boy has any significant psychiatric disorder at all (beyond the usual "mom and dad never spend any time with me, so I'm going to act up and see if that gets me some attention" that plagues the entire Western world these days; this is not something a drug can cure).
Bipolar disorder, clinical depression, ADHD, you name it: if it's a psychological disorder for which the normal treatment is to prescribe medication, diagnosis is up, and in a lot of cases the medication doesn't seem to work. I'll tell you why the psych meds aren't doing anything: it's because a lot of those people don't need the meds. There's nothing chemically wrong with their brains.
Here's just one example scenario that you can actually *see* happening if you pay attention. The parents ignore the kid most of the time, plop him in front of a television and expect him to entertain himself, so he acts up. When he acts up at school, the teachers call in the shrink, and he tells the parents that the child has a problem. Nobody wants to blame the parenting, because that's a good way to incur the wrath of lawsuits. So the parents take the kid to a specialist, and he hazards a diagnosis and prescribes some pills. Yeah, maybe that'll fix the problem. Or not.
It's not just kids, either. Adults are being overdiagnosed with psychiatric issues as well.
I'm not saying there aren't people with real psychiatric problems that *can* be helped by medication. There are. There always have been. (Well, the meds weren't always around, but the conditions were.) But what I am saying is that a lot of people are being incorrectly diagnosed with these problems.
I suppose the pharma companies might bear some of the blame for this, if their advertising gives people the wrong idea, but I think there's more going on than that. I believe it's a symptom of something much deeper in our society: we have got to the point where we expect all of our issues to be solved simply and easily, and we frequently aren't willing to invest personal effort. We just want to go to a doctor and have him tell us that there's a name for our problem and a standard treatment, something easy we can do, like take a pill once a day, and then we won't have to actually struggle with our issues.
> A security model that allows users to be their usual flaky selves
Such a security model is ipso facto highly insecure, if the users have any useful capabilities at all. If, for instance, the user has the ability to send messages to other users, then malware will be able to exploit the user's account and send spam to everyone.
I know replying to signatures is off-topic, but in this case I can't resist (and I can afford the karma hit).
Your sig quote displays just about as much ignorance of statistics as it would be possible to pack into a single quote. The average (in technical terms, the arithmetic mean) is almost certainly NOT the same as the median value. Depending on your sample population, it is entirely possible that 90% of the individuals are smarter than the average, although I have to confess that in the population of the whole world I suspect it's more the reverse, and that the overwhelming majority are significantly dumber than average. In any event, the Carlin quote is ignorant nonsense.
Assuming the PS/2 interface still works, you can still log in locally and work blind. It's a little slower, because you have to stop and think more about what you're doing (e.g., tab completion is a good deal less useful), but if you know what you're doing you CAN make it work. Back in the days *before* convenient networking, I used to occasionally have to work blind when a monitor was out for some reason, most commonly to copy files to a floppy disk so I could take them to another computer. Like I said, you have to stop and think, but if you know the system you *can* do it. You don't need to see the output. You can mostly predict what the output is going to be, and if you *do* need to verify some command's output for some reason you can pipe it into a very short Perl script and make it beep once for yes or twice for no, or if worst comes to worst cat the output onto a floppy disk and take it to another computer to analyze.
HTH.HAND.