I certainly notice. I just the other day got - an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
The real question is, will the firefox use a different tube than the explorer? And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. So I think people will know if they're using the one or the other.
Everyone's always fixating on carbs. IMHO from a health standpoint you can't do worse than the Fat Binaries they're selling at the Apple Store. Pure lipids.
Absolutely true. In 2001, screaming about the bloatedness of Windows XP was entirely rational because it offered virtually nothing over 2000, aside from a superfluous, crippled Home edition and the Luna themes. Over time, however, that has changed, and XP has benefited from a couple changes. The first change was the increase in the power of hardware that you mentioned, but IMHO the second was the introduction of Service Pack 2, a security update that seriously improved XP as an OS. It's easy to forget how insecure XP (and particularly IE6) was in its initial release, but SP2 showed the business world that Microsoft was finally willing to be serious.
Many have said that the same may happen to Vista. Were it not for the release of Windows 7 I'd agree, since it looks like Windows 7 is meant to supplant Vista, thus rendering it permanenly maligned. But that future attitude shift doesn't change the fact that some of the changes in Vista were ill-conceived, despite its many improvements. The increase in bloatedness was not necessary, nor was the "market segmentation" foolishness of Vista's (and now 7's) cornucopia of editions. Microsoft has done right by improving performance in Windows 7, but these many versions sully the image of an otherwise improved OS amongst educated consumers who understand that it's a marketing gimmick and not a feature.
Probably not, but I was actually thinking that the best use of one of these display tables has nothing to do with the touch features: rather, it's to monitor the firing angle of an approaching Death Star as it gradually creeps around a large gas giant. I guess there's not much use for that during the Super Bowl. Still, a program that does that should come free with every Surface.
I should add... the experience of rolling back to KDE 3.5.x is like surfacing after being submerged for an intolerable duration. I'm still catching my breath, glad to be alive. While I'm sure to try out 4.2, 3.5 is speedy and functional, which is what I'm used to with KDE.
So why was this included in distributions? Including 4.1 in Kubuntu and other distros was a huge mistake IMO. I don't see how it could have been the users mistake though - the user didn't select 4.1.
Hear hear! I totally respect the KDE team's decision to use 4.0 as an API-stable release, but assuming that 4.1 is ready for general use was a major mistake. I installed Kubuntu Intrepid and discovered that a lot of features I took for granted didn't work. Gwenview, a wonderful image viewer, would strip all JPEG metadata if I rotated and saved an image, and had somehow lost the ability to let me rename images with F2 since the 3.5 days. That's quite crap, IMHO.
I realize it's under development, and I'm definitely not trying to knock the developers, but all this should have indicated that KDE 4.1 shouldn't have hit the distros. I used GNOME for a while, and enjoyed it, but ultimately rolled back to Hardy.
In my experience, OO.o handles damaged MS Office files far better than MS Office does. I've never known it to fail to open an MS Office 2003 or earlier file, but the formatting can be changed, and of course any VBA in the document is going to be a problem.
This is worth taking into account. I've been saved numerous times by OOo: Word files sometimes refuse to open in Word. And without constant backups, if this were to happen in a monoculture you'd be helpless. Even with backups you stand the risk of losing a revision.
Of course none of this justifies making OOo your primary office suite, just a good backup app. But IMHO, making it your main office suite is a question of how well you can tolerate occasional formatting errors, and how many hundreds of dollars it's worth to avoid them most of the time. Also, keep in mind that after a while all your docs will migrate to ODF, so those formatting errors are temporary.
"In other news, 3/4 of the staff of the FISA has been laid off. A secretary still answers the phone to schedule tours for third graders though."
This just in: in a surprise bureaucratic ruling the secretary has ruled that she does not have the authority to be a secretary, and will therefore be laid off as well. No word yet on whether her lack of authority makes her ineligible to issue such a ruling in the first place, but FISA experts smell a logical legal loop paradox brewing.
Give them a new computer, any computer, even if it's the same OS, and they're hosed.
I've always suspected the problem is deeper than a mere "they don't understand computers" issue. The gory details of where a person keeps their documents and how he or she interacts with them and deals with information sources like the Web have nothing to do with IT specifically, but rather offer a more general window into the user's thought process. When you get involved with performing major maintenance on or replacing someone's computer, you're involving yourself in how they treat information generally - how they organize their files, remember important facts, and process incoming data. And most people stink at these things.
I remember one woman I used to support who made backups of her entire directory tree by making a copy of the tree under a new directory, which she'd invaariably name with her initials - let's say they're DMC to protect her identity. So almost every time I'd visit her to fix something on her computer I'd discover that she'd be nearly out of disk space (which was often the source of the problem), and the reason was that there would be a DMC folder containing a dupe of everything... including previous backups, each in its own DMC folder, nested in a way that made me laugh, but also nearly drove me mad. I'd end up having to reconcile three or four different DMC folders in order to bring her back to a safe level of disk space.
But guess what? Her office was also a mess!
Having a computer doesn't cause this sort of problem. It just involves IT people in the fallout.
700 days' worth of email are missing. I think you'd have to work pretty hard to "accidentally lose" that. You might neglect a backup or two. To do it for two years... well, Bush can just isue himself and his staff pardons to cover it.
Indeed, you've hit upon the core point of the matter. This was either (a) an accident, or (b) a deliberate subversion of law in an attempt to avoid the public finding out what people in the executive branch (you know, our employees?) were doing. Both of these possibilities are extremely bad.
The latter possibility should have had people on both sides of the aisle calling for an independent investigation. But even if it were "merely" an accident, where was the high-level firing of IT personnel? In my company if two years' worth of e-mails were lost, a few IT people would be out the door in a heartbeat. Who got fired from the White House IT staff as a result of what most people would consider a serious calamity?
With Windows, you are always having to reboot the system due to everything from software installs to changing a network connection.
No, you aren't. This hasn't been true since Windows XP, at least. I can get uptimes of months at a time on my Windows box, the only time it comes down is for hardware changes or OS updates.
Windows XP? That sounds like a description of Windows 95/98/ME/NT to me. Decent uptime was possible on XP and 2000, IMHO. (That is, if you didn't reboot to load security patches.)
They've shaved 10 seconds off the boot time? In a typical working week that buys me 50 seconds more work time. I'll be so much more productive.
Every night I go to bed wishing I had just ten more seconds to make the day productive. Now I can get that extra time, and all I have to do is convert to a new filesystem. (And here I thought I'd have to stop posting on Slashdot or something.)
Ignore 3.0 for now. If you encounter it, there is a handy script to help update your code, though most of the language is unchanged. The biggest gotcha is that print is now a function print() rather than a statement.
and of course it is yet-another OS. is there an SDK?
Yeah, but what OS?
One thing I haven't been able to find anywhere is some set of details about this new "webOS." For years Palm had been rumored to be working on a Linux-based OS, but the only thing that's been said about webOS is that it allows you to develop using web languages. Great, but what's under the hood? Linux? Some update to the old PalmOS? Apple's Copland OS? Windows for Workgroups 3.11? I can't be the only person who hasn't accepted the company's vague statements that it just runs on "teh web."
... and I'm not just referring to the incoming students. If you want to donate and live in the northeast, try the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital. They have forms you can fill out on the site, but only if you don't plan to use your brain permanently. (Disclaimer: I used to fix their computers.)
For the humour and history impaired, a Ford Pinto is likely to burst into flames when rear ended. Which kind of makes the flamebait moderation meta-funny.
You definitely should have sued them for that fiver for your Ford F-150. I would have gone for the fiver if they'd hit my Ford Pinto.
While no one is required to find my Pinto joke funny (even though comparing the likely rear-end collision damage between an F-150 and a Pinto still strikes me as funny), Overrated would have been a much better humor judgement than Flamebait. Who was I flaming again?
The parable of the creation of man in Genesis is not an historical account, nor is it meant to be taken literally at all. It's a simple analogy about what prevents people from realizing their unity with creation, specifically that our conventional means of 'knowing' the world blinds us to our innate natural being.
I know you have a five-digit UID (and have been around here since a bit closer to 1997 than I)... but who are you to say how the opening text of Genesis is "meant to be" taken?
Genesis was written considerably before 1997, as part of the Pentateuch in the first millenium BC. It may have "meant to be" taken exactly as it was written. Considering that it was composed during a time period far more superstitious than today, and that people of the time lacked any form of geologic dating, I'd wager that most of its audience believed in the literal truth of the snake story from the start. Today audiences of the Bible often take it non-literally, and obey some commandments (No gays!) while disregarding others (No eating shellfish!). But these are modern interpretations, not what the Bible is necessarily "meant to" mean.
A great many people choose to respect this book, and chalk any inconsistencies up to matters of interpretation. But there is a rather harsh implication of the literal Bible not being compatible with observed evidence (not to mention people's lifestyles), and that is that the Bible is really is incompatible with most scientific evidence (and most modern lifestyles, even if they are religious).
Just recently, there was a show about it on the Science Channel.
Did the show explain how the new system can prevent the car behind you from rear-ending your shiny Volvo? TFA doesn't. And while it's great that these concept cars can auto-brake, the guy on your tail isn't necessarily driving another Volvo.
In heavy traffic I often balance my braking between avoidance of read-ending the car in front of me and my expectations of what the car in my rearview mirror is capable of if I slam the brakes too hard. I don't want to drive one of these Volvos unless it's capable of making that judgement at least as well as I can.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly notice. I just the other day got - an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
The real question is, will the firefox use a different tube than the explorer? And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. So I think people will know if they're using the one or the other.
Everyone's always fixating on carbs. IMHO from a health standpoint you can't do worse than the Fat Binaries they're selling at the Apple Store. Pure lipids.
Absolutely true. In 2001, screaming about the bloatedness of Windows XP was entirely rational because it offered virtually nothing over 2000, aside from a superfluous, crippled Home edition and the Luna themes. Over time, however, that has changed, and XP has benefited from a couple changes. The first change was the increase in the power of hardware that you mentioned, but IMHO the second was the introduction of Service Pack 2, a security update that seriously improved XP as an OS. It's easy to forget how insecure XP (and particularly IE6) was in its initial release, but SP2 showed the business world that Microsoft was finally willing to be serious.
Many have said that the same may happen to Vista. Were it not for the release of Windows 7 I'd agree, since it looks like Windows 7 is meant to supplant Vista, thus rendering it permanenly maligned. But that future attitude shift doesn't change the fact that some of the changes in Vista were ill-conceived, despite its many improvements. The increase in bloatedness was not necessary, nor was the "market segmentation" foolishness of Vista's (and now 7's) cornucopia of editions. Microsoft has done right by improving performance in Windows 7, but these many versions sully the image of an otherwise improved OS amongst educated consumers who understand that it's a marketing gimmick and not a feature.
I live in Soviet Russia, you insensitive clod.
In insensitive clod, Soviet Russia lives in you.
Probably not, but I was actually thinking that the best use of one of these display tables has nothing to do with the touch features: rather, it's to monitor the firing angle of an approaching Death Star as it gradually creeps around a large gas giant. I guess there's not much use for that during the Super Bowl. Still, a program that does that should come free with every Surface.
I should add ... the experience of rolling back to KDE 3.5.x is like surfacing after being submerged for an intolerable duration. I'm still catching my breath, glad to be alive. While I'm sure to try out 4.2, 3.5 is speedy and functional, which is what I'm used to with KDE.
So why was this included in distributions? Including 4.1 in Kubuntu and other distros was a huge mistake IMO. I don't see how it could have been the users mistake though - the user didn't select 4.1.
Hear hear! I totally respect the KDE team's decision to use 4.0 as an API-stable release, but assuming that 4.1 is ready for general use was a major mistake. I installed Kubuntu Intrepid and discovered that a lot of features I took for granted didn't work. Gwenview, a wonderful image viewer, would strip all JPEG metadata if I rotated and saved an image, and had somehow lost the ability to let me rename images with F2 since the 3.5 days. That's quite crap, IMHO.
I realize it's under development, and I'm definitely not trying to knock the developers, but all this should have indicated that KDE 4.1 shouldn't have hit the distros. I used GNOME for a while, and enjoyed it, but ultimately rolled back to Hardy.
17,000 dollars in 2009 currency is still a LOT of damage
Sure, but this is the US govermnent we're talking about. That $17k was probably for only one keyboard.
In my experience, OO.o handles damaged MS Office files far better than MS Office does. I've never known it to fail to open an MS Office 2003 or earlier file, but the formatting can be changed, and of course any VBA in the document is going to be a problem.
This is worth taking into account. I've been saved numerous times by OOo: Word files sometimes refuse to open in Word. And without constant backups, if this were to happen in a monoculture you'd be helpless. Even with backups you stand the risk of losing a revision.
Of course none of this justifies making OOo your primary office suite, just a good backup app. But IMHO, making it your main office suite is a question of how well you can tolerate occasional formatting errors, and how many hundreds of dollars it's worth to avoid them most of the time. Also, keep in mind that after a while all your docs will migrate to ODF, so those formatting errors are temporary.
"In other news, 3/4 of the staff of the FISA has been laid off. A secretary still answers the phone to schedule tours for third graders though."
This just in: in a surprise bureaucratic ruling the secretary has ruled that she does not have the authority to be a secretary, and will therefore be laid off as well. No word yet on whether her lack of authority makes her ineligible to issue such a ruling in the first place, but FISA experts smell a logical legal loop paradox brewing.
Give them a new computer, any computer, even if it's the same OS, and they're hosed.
I've always suspected the problem is deeper than a mere "they don't understand computers" issue. The gory details of where a person keeps their documents and how he or she interacts with them and deals with information sources like the Web have nothing to do with IT specifically, but rather offer a more general window into the user's thought process. When you get involved with performing major maintenance on or replacing someone's computer, you're involving yourself in how they treat information generally - how they organize their files, remember important facts, and process incoming data. And most people stink at these things.
I remember one woman I used to support who made backups of her entire directory tree by making a copy of the tree under a new directory, which she'd invaariably name with her initials - let's say they're DMC to protect her identity. So almost every time I'd visit her to fix something on her computer I'd discover that she'd be nearly out of disk space (which was often the source of the problem), and the reason was that there would be a DMC folder containing a dupe of everything ... including previous backups, each in its own DMC folder, nested in a way that made me laugh, but also nearly drove me mad. I'd end up having to reconcile three or four different DMC folders in order to bring her back to a safe level of disk space.
But guess what? Her office was also a mess! Having a computer doesn't cause this sort of problem. It just involves IT people in the fallout.
700 days' worth of email are missing. I think you'd have to work pretty hard to "accidentally lose" that. You might neglect a backup or two. To do it for two years ... well, Bush can just isue himself and his staff pardons to cover it.
Indeed, you've hit upon the core point of the matter. This was either (a) an accident, or (b) a deliberate subversion of law in an attempt to avoid the public finding out what people in the executive branch (you know, our employees?) were doing. Both of these possibilities are extremely bad.
The latter possibility should have had people on both sides of the aisle calling for an independent investigation. But even if it were "merely" an accident, where was the high-level firing of IT personnel? In my company if two years' worth of e-mails were lost, a few IT people would be out the door in a heartbeat. Who got fired from the White House IT staff as a result of what most people would consider a serious calamity?
With Windows, you are always having to reboot the system due to everything from software installs to changing a network connection.
No, you aren't. This hasn't been true since Windows XP, at least. I can get uptimes of months at a time on my Windows box, the only time it comes down is for hardware changes or OS updates.
Windows XP? That sounds like a description of Windows 95/98/ME/NT to me. Decent uptime was possible on XP and 2000, IMHO. (That is, if you didn't reboot to load security patches.)
They've shaved 10 seconds off the boot time? In a typical working week that buys me 50 seconds more work time. I'll be so much more productive.
Every night I go to bed wishing I had just ten more seconds to make the day productive. Now I can get that extra time, and all I have to do is convert to a new filesystem. (And here I thought I'd have to stop posting on Slashdot or something.)
Not really. Keep learning 2.x as you were. Quoth Guido:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=211200
Ignore 3.0 for now. If you encounter it, there is a handy script to help update your code, though most of the language is unchanged. The biggest gotcha is that print is now a function print() rather than a statement.
As long as he doesn't run around and desert us, he can give us up all he wants.
and of course it is yet-another OS. is there an SDK?
Yeah, but what OS?
One thing I haven't been able to find anywhere is some set of details about this new "webOS." For years Palm had been rumored to be working on a Linux-based OS, but the only thing that's been said about webOS is that it allows you to develop using web languages. Great, but what's under the hood? Linux? Some update to the old PalmOS? Apple's Copland OS? Windows for Workgroups 3.11? I can't be the only person who hasn't accepted the company's vague statements that it just runs on "teh web."
... and I'm not just referring to the incoming students. If you want to donate and live in the northeast, try the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital. They have forms you can fill out on the site, but only if you don't plan to use your brain permanently. (Disclaimer: I used to fix their computers.)
"The Universe is very big!"
You know, you might be on to something here - I'd really never looked at the universe in quite that way before. Mod parent insightful! :)
For the humour and history impaired, a Ford Pinto is likely to burst into flames when rear ended. Which kind of makes the flamebait moderation meta-funny.
Oh, so that's what the moderator meant. :)
You definitely should have sued them for that fiver for your Ford F-150. I would have gone for the fiver if they'd hit my Ford Pinto.
While no one is required to find my Pinto joke funny (even though comparing the likely rear-end collision damage between an F-150 and a Pinto still strikes me as funny), Overrated would have been a much better humor judgement than Flamebait. Who was I flaming again?
You definitely should have sued them for that fiver for your Ford F-150. I would have gone for the fiver if they'd hit my Ford Pinto.
The parable of the creation of man in Genesis is not an historical account, nor is it meant to be taken literally at all. It's a simple analogy about what prevents people from realizing their unity with creation, specifically that our conventional means of 'knowing' the world blinds us to our innate natural being.
I know you have a five-digit UID (and have been around here since a bit closer to 1997 than I) ... but who are you to say how the opening text of Genesis is "meant to be" taken?
Genesis was written considerably before 1997, as part of the Pentateuch in the first millenium BC. It may have "meant to be" taken exactly as it was written. Considering that it was composed during a time period far more superstitious than today, and that people of the time lacked any form of geologic dating, I'd wager that most of its audience believed in the literal truth of the snake story from the start. Today audiences of the Bible often take it non-literally, and obey some commandments (No gays!) while disregarding others (No eating shellfish!). But these are modern interpretations, not what the Bible is necessarily "meant to" mean.
A great many people choose to respect this book, and chalk any inconsistencies up to matters of interpretation. But there is a rather harsh implication of the literal Bible not being compatible with observed evidence (not to mention people's lifestyles), and that is that the Bible is really is incompatible with most scientific evidence (and most modern lifestyles, even if they are religious).
Just recently, there was a show about it on the Science Channel.
Did the show explain how the new system can prevent the car behind you from rear-ending your shiny Volvo? TFA doesn't. And while it's great that these concept cars can auto-brake, the guy on your tail isn't necessarily driving another Volvo.
In heavy traffic I often balance my braking between avoidance of read-ending the car in front of me and my expectations of what the car in my rearview mirror is capable of if I slam the brakes too hard. I don't want to drive one of these Volvos unless it's capable of making that judgement at least as well as I can.
Leaving off the mystery of "whodunit" until the second movie worked in Kill Bill ;)
Maybe you're being facetious, but I thought they were pretty clear in the first one that Bill dunit.
Crap, now I know Kill Bill ends with Bill having done it, and presumably getting killed for it. Ever heard of a spoiler warning?