I don't care. I *suspect* that I'm not alone in skipping the even Windows releases, but we'll see. By the way, I'd like to thank you for being an unpaid QA person, and I'm sure you'll be one of the reasons Windows 9 will be usable.
Wow, that's not what he said at all. He said it's an amazing technology that unfortunately doesn't work the way people want to work. And I believe he's right.
I currently have 29 windows open. Seriously -- I just counted them. That's not counting browser tabs, and it counts each remote session as one window, not counting the windows I have open on those other machines. It's how I work. I see the Windows 8 demos with their, what is it nine? windows open simultaneously, and I wonder how that's going to work in the real world.
But it doesn't make any difference because I'm going to leave the early adoption to someone else. Good luck with that. At work we're just now starting our Windows 7 pilot program. Most of us are still on XP. We skipped Vista entirely, and we will probably skip Windows 8 entirely.
At home, I have two machines running 7 (64 bit, for specialized, large-memory applications) and the rest are still on XP.
Touch? Had a Windows 7 tablet, hated it, had a Mobile 5 phone, hated it, had a Mobile 6 phone, hated it, played with a Mobile 7 phone, decided on Android instead. I can't make myself believe that Microsoft suddenly understands touch interfaces. It's my money; it's not worth the risk. Let someone else find out.
I'm really not looking for a new OS experience. I just want to get my work done. Why can't they understand that?
So, perhaps you're right, maybe Metro will bomb. Or maybe it's the bee's knees. Whatever it is, it will be someone else who finds out. I buy devices to run apps, not operating systems.
> 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future.... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'
But... we're already doing that. Just not with Windows.
There is a legend that in modern times (the end of last century I believe) four men broke into a home. The owner, an Iaido practitioner, was home alone at the time. As I recall, all the attackers survived, although all needed major surgery and one was in a wheelchair for awhile. (Hamstrung.) The only comment from the police: "Haven't seen sword cuts in a long time."
... in 30 seconds this tiny little rocket manages to output almost the same amount of pollutants as a 40 ton truck produces in an hour? And you think thats clean??
I don't think he called it clean, (what is clean?) he said it didn't matter. The guy's not firing a rocket every thirty seconds. I suspect there is significant time, days or months, between firings. Contrast this with a fleet of buses idling overnight in the winter because they didn't want the diesel to congeal from the cold. There are a lot of things that are trivially more pollutant by orders of magnitude.
>What's the return on investment on a used rocket?
Let's see. Two guys apply for a high paying engineering job. One has a degree. The other is a world class rocket builder. Who get the job?
Two guys date the same hot girl. One has a nice house. The other is a world class rocket builder with high paying engineering job. Who gets the girl?
In a just world, the other would in both cases. But this isn't a just world.
Perhaps if the hiring manager was an engineer himself and could see the value in practical experience instead of "playing it by the numbers", and perhaps if the girl was a geek herself, things would work out the way you describe. And if that's how it worked out for you, bravo!
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
on
Apple Unveils New iPad
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· Score: 1
> You may be more likely to have your e-reader (iPad) on hand than your non-working phone.
Why would your phone be non-working? Are you stipulating that you go to take a photo with your 4s, and oops, the phone is busted? Or, I don't have an iPhone, so it could be that this escapes me, but are you saying that the iPhone will not take pictures unless it has service? And the iPad will?
I still don't see the scenario where this would make sense.
I understand, but defending yourself and facing a jury afterwards seems preferable to huddling on the floor waiting to die. I could be alone in this...
Oh come on, even here in the UK you're allowed to kill people in self defence. It's just that the courts tend not to look on ambushing unarmed burglars with a shotgun as self defence.
I'll have to take your word for it. I remember reading or hearing somewhere that in urban parts of the UK, even having a cricket bat by your bed is "looking for trouble", the implication being that if someone robs you, you should just give them your stuff and hope they don't hurt you. But like here, it may depend on the area. No country is homogeneous. (Besides, beating an armed burglar to death with a cricket bat, while perhaps technically legal, seems a bit, I dunno, uncivilized.) In areas of the US without a "castle rule", you may be required to attempt to escape your home during an invasion rather than defend yourself and your family.
The problem with burglars, especially at night, is that it's damned difficult to tell whether they're armed or not. In areas in the US that allow defense of home, one can generally consider a stranger breaking into a home as a life-threatening act, (the "reasonable person would be in fear of his life" rule) and use appropriate force to end the threat.
My impression from reading actual cases in the US is that no matter what the circumstances, no matter how righteous the shoot, there is still a chance (a good chance, in some areas) that you will appear in court. (Criminal, or civil, or both.) My point was that this should not dissuade one from protecting their family and themselves. But that's just my opinion.
He makes some mistakes regarding firearms that grated on me,
Yes, because obviously the eleven year old narrator would know all about firearms. (You've already said it is supposed to be her diary.) There is such a thing as an unreliable narrator.
That's glib, but it's not like that at all.
The following could be considered mild spoilers for Emergence.
In Emergence, it is established that she has had extensive unarmed combat training which she is forced to use a few times in the course of the story. In Tracking, she receives extensive training in armed combat, and when she decides to go on a mission (where and why would be spoilers) she chooses her arms carefully: A sidearm in.40 S&W, a.30 carbine rifle, both equipped with suppressors ("silencers" in Hollywood vernacular) and a 50 caliber Barrett. (Think Gummer in the Tremors movies and series.)
She describes her suppressed.30 carbine rifle as "no louder than a hamster's cough", an important plot point several times during the mission. I'm sorry, but that's not possible from a ballistics standpoint, and shows a basic misunderstanding of what suppressors do.
Now, she chooses the.30 carbine because it's a short light weapon that is easy for a small person to shoot, which it is. (I own two, a WWII GI model and a model made after the war.) However, the.30 carbine round is a supersonic round, and there's no practical way to make it subsonic and still be effective. The round is kinda punky and only marginally effective to start with, and the whole *point* of rifles is to accelerate the slug to higher velocities than you could in the short barrel of a pistol. The best a suppressor could do is reduce the sound of the muzzle blast, which is still valuable, but nothing like described. A suppressor could do nothing about the supersonic CRACK as the slug exited the barrel. In broad terms, you could probably get the rifle down to something a bit louder than an unsuppressed.22 rifle, which could still be heard hundreds of yards away and is by no means as silent as "a hamster's cough". This renders some key scenes highly unlikely to impossible. She would have been better served to have packed a second sidearm and left the rifle at home.
Hollywood misrepresents this all the time. Sarah's suppressed M16 in Terminator 2? It was a cool scene, but it wouldn't work quite like that. (The film "The American" (2010) did much better in this area.)
Pistols are another matter. Some (the.45 ACP) are typically subsonic to start with, making it an excellent candidate for suppression, and subsonic rounds are available for other common calibers. Typically subsonic rounds are heavier, as for the same energy heavier == slower.
(There's a whole 'nother argument about the effectiveness of light fast projectiles vs slow heavy projectiles, with proponents on both sides, which typically goes on for a long time, so I won't start it here.)
Now commenting once that the rifle is that silent might be hyperbole (not unreasonable in someone so young) but she uses the term at several points ("the hamster coughed a few more times") and in some circumstances it would *need* to be that silent or the tactics don't work. The point being not that the narrator chooses a weapon based on the mistaken belief that it will do something it doesn't, but that she *observes* it doing something that it can't. It is not her mistake, but the author's.
It is "carried", but I try to speak in my own words rather than recite bumper stickers. (A general behavior of the Facebook community that I loathe.)
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
on
Apple Unveils New iPad
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· Score: 1
> The iPhone camera is good enough to completely replace my point-and-shoot, though. It's worse quality, but not much, and there's great convenience in only having to carry the one device.
"It's worse quality" is a good enough reasons to carry a dedicated camera, as is being able to point and click a dedicated button rather than change apps, wait for the app to load, and then visually target a virtual shutter button. But I have a use case that no phone camera has been able to match so far.
That would be ok, as long as it was truly a netbook with a trackpoint, not a tablet. I already have Windows 7 on a tablet, and it sucketh mightily. Absolutely unusable without optional keyboard and mouse. Which makes it a rather clunky netbook.
I'm not an Apple fanboi, but I'm happy to concede that you can do useful things on iOS with just a touchscreen, something you'd never get away with using Win7.
I understand, but defending yourself and facing a jury afterwards seems preferable to huddling on the floor waiting to die. I could be alone in this...
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
on
Apple Unveils New iPad
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· Score: 2
if you have one you're going to take it places like family functions and vacations so that it will probable be in your hands unlike your phone which may be useless outside the US.
so you will use the ipad like a camera/camcorder
Um, what? I'm sorry I can't parse that.
So if you go to family functions in a foreign country, you will be able to take pictures with your ipad 3 but not your phone? And you wouldn't just take a small dedicated camera, which takes better photos/video than either and isn't nearly as clunky to use as an ipad for taking pictures? Like that?
I can't say precisely where things went wrong, but it does look like the system goes after the "easy" cases rather than dig into the ones where children are genuinely in danger. Now we have parents who are trying to do the right thing being routinely badgered by the powers that be (not necessarily the police, who are only the arms of the bureaucrats) while we continually read of kids who were killed or severely traumatized in situations where authorities were aware of the situation but did not pursue it. It really seems like they tend to pursue the easy things. Is this to push up statistics?
When my daughter was young (single digits, don't remember exactly) she got a rug burn at daycare that became infected. I took her to the doctor, who sent me across the street for x-rays. When I came back, there were police waiting. After much hilarity and trauma, they decided they didn't have enough evidence to arrest me and let us go.
So, what do I do the next time she gets injured while playing? Not take her to the doctor?
It's not necessarily the officers. They are generally nice and helpful in my area too. I've met some real assholes downtown, but I think those are just another example of how your environment changes you.
The point is, it's not the officers who made the decision to separate him from his daughter. That was made by a bureaucrat somewhere, probably in child protective services. The officers carry out the order because it is their job to do so and they aren't in a position to make up the law as they go along.
That doesn't change what he said, though. Regardless of whom makes the decision, trying not to put yourself in a position where the state can screw you seems like good advice.
Yes, exactly. Thank you. Moreover, in the spots where others take up the story, the style reverts to something closer to conversational English. Just as Manuel, the narrator of TMIAHM records other people's dialog the way they speak it, which allows the dialog to occasionally revert to what we would consider normal.
Good luck in your journey. I hope you find it, and would be interested in what you thought of it. Be warned though, that Tracking is obviously intended to be the second novel of a trilogy. Although it's a complete story, several things are foreshadowed that were obviously intended for a third novel. Palmer is (according to wiki) still alive, and wrote Tracking in 2008, which isn't that long ago as works of fiction go. If he was working on the third book it should be about ready now.
Part of the problem appears to be that his publisher went out of business. But publishers are relatively easy to come by. Hell, he could self-publish at lulu.com and make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
> Could it be that MS doesn't care what you want?
I don't care. I *suspect* that I'm not alone in skipping the even Windows releases, but we'll see. By the way, I'd like to thank you for being an unpaid QA person, and I'm sure you'll be one of the reasons Windows 9 will be usable.
Shrug.
Wow, that's not what he said at all. He said it's an amazing technology that unfortunately doesn't work the way people want to work. And I believe he's right.
I currently have 29 windows open. Seriously -- I just counted them. That's not counting browser tabs, and it counts each remote session as one window, not counting the windows I have open on those other machines. It's how I work. I see the Windows 8 demos with their, what is it nine? windows open simultaneously, and I wonder how that's going to work in the real world.
But it doesn't make any difference because I'm going to leave the early adoption to someone else. Good luck with that. At work we're just now starting our Windows 7 pilot program. Most of us are still on XP. We skipped Vista entirely, and we will probably skip Windows 8 entirely.
At home, I have two machines running 7 (64 bit, for specialized, large-memory applications) and the rest are still on XP.
Touch? Had a Windows 7 tablet, hated it, had a Mobile 5 phone, hated it, had a Mobile 6 phone, hated it, played with a Mobile 7 phone, decided on Android instead. I can't make myself believe that Microsoft suddenly understands touch interfaces. It's my money; it's not worth the risk. Let someone else find out.
I'm really not looking for a new OS experience. I just want to get my work done. Why can't they understand that?
So, perhaps you're right, maybe Metro will bomb. Or maybe it's the bee's knees. Whatever it is, it will be someone else who finds out. I buy devices to run apps, not operating systems.
> 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future. ... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'
But... we're already doing that. Just not with Windows.
There is a legend that in modern times (the end of last century I believe) four men broke into a home. The owner, an Iaido practitioner, was home alone at the time. As I recall, all the attackers survived, although all needed major surgery and one was in a wheelchair for awhile. (Hamstrung.) The only comment from the police: "Haven't seen sword cuts in a long time."
That'll teach him, spending time with his kids. Rat-bastard!
Yeah!! ...Wait, what?
... in 30 seconds this tiny little rocket manages to output almost the same amount of pollutants as a 40 ton truck produces in an hour? And you think thats clean??
I don't think he called it clean, (what is clean?) he said it didn't matter. The guy's not firing a rocket every thirty seconds. I suspect there is significant time, days or months, between firings. Contrast this with a fleet of buses idling overnight in the winter because they didn't want the diesel to congeal from the cold. There are a lot of things that are trivially more pollutant by orders of magnitude.
What's the return on investment on a used rocket?
>What's the return on investment on a used rocket?
Let's see. Two guys apply for a high paying engineering job. One has a degree. The other is a world class rocket builder. Who get the job?
Two guys date the same hot girl. One has a nice house. The other is a world class rocket builder with high paying engineering job. Who gets the girl?
In a just world, the other would in both cases. But this isn't a just world.
Perhaps if the hiring manager was an engineer himself and could see the value in practical experience instead of "playing it by the numbers", and perhaps if the girl was a geek herself, things would work out the way you describe. And if that's how it worked out for you, bravo!
> You may be more likely to have your e-reader (iPad) on hand than your non-working phone.
Why would your phone be non-working? Are you stipulating that you go to take a photo with your 4s, and oops, the phone is busted? Or, I don't have an iPhone, so it could be that this escapes me, but are you saying that the iPhone will not take pictures unless it has service? And the iPad will?
I still don't see the scenario where this would make sense.
I understand, but defending yourself and facing a jury afterwards seems preferable to huddling on the floor waiting to die. I could be alone in this...
Oh come on, even here in the UK you're allowed to kill people in self defence. It's just that the courts tend not to look on ambushing unarmed burglars with a shotgun as self defence.
I'll have to take your word for it. I remember reading or hearing somewhere that in urban parts of the UK, even having a cricket bat by your bed is "looking for trouble", the implication being that if someone robs you, you should just give them your stuff and hope they don't hurt you. But like here, it may depend on the area. No country is homogeneous. (Besides, beating an armed burglar to death with a cricket bat, while perhaps technically legal, seems a bit, I dunno, uncivilized.) In areas of the US without a "castle rule", you may be required to attempt to escape your home during an invasion rather than defend yourself and your family.
The problem with burglars, especially at night, is that it's damned difficult to tell whether they're armed or not. In areas in the US that allow defense of home, one can generally consider a stranger breaking into a home as a life-threatening act, (the "reasonable person would be in fear of his life" rule) and use appropriate force to end the threat.
My impression from reading actual cases in the US is that no matter what the circumstances, no matter how righteous the shoot, there is still a chance (a good chance, in some areas) that you will appear in court. (Criminal, or civil, or both.) My point was that this should not dissuade one from protecting their family and themselves. But that's just my opinion.
He makes some mistakes regarding firearms that grated on me,
Yes, because obviously the eleven year old narrator would know all about firearms. (You've already said it is supposed to be her diary.) There is such a thing as an unreliable narrator.
That's glib, but it's not like that at all.
The following could be considered mild spoilers for Emergence.
In Emergence, it is established that she has had extensive unarmed combat training which she is forced to use a few times in the course of the story. In Tracking, she receives extensive training in armed combat, and when she decides to go on a mission (where and why would be spoilers) she chooses her arms carefully: A sidearm in .40 S&W, a .30 carbine rifle, both equipped with suppressors ("silencers" in Hollywood vernacular) and a 50 caliber Barrett. (Think Gummer in the Tremors movies and series.)
She describes her suppressed .30 carbine rifle as "no louder than a hamster's cough", an important plot point several times during the mission. I'm sorry, but that's not possible from a ballistics standpoint, and shows a basic misunderstanding of what suppressors do.
Now, she chooses the .30 carbine because it's a short light weapon that is easy for a small person to shoot, which it is. (I own two, a WWII GI model and a model made after the war.) However, the .30 carbine round is a supersonic round, and there's no practical way to make it subsonic and still be effective. The round is kinda punky and only marginally effective to start with, and the whole *point* of rifles is to accelerate the slug to higher velocities than you could in the short barrel of a pistol. The best a suppressor could do is reduce the sound of the muzzle blast, which is still valuable, but nothing like described. A suppressor could do nothing about the supersonic CRACK as the slug exited the barrel. In broad terms, you could probably get the rifle down to something a bit louder than an unsuppressed .22 rifle, which could still be heard hundreds of yards away and is by no means as silent as "a hamster's cough". This renders some key scenes highly unlikely to impossible. She would have been better served to have packed a second sidearm and left the rifle at home.
Hollywood misrepresents this all the time. Sarah's suppressed M16 in Terminator 2? It was a cool scene, but it wouldn't work quite like that. (The film "The American" (2010) did much better in this area.)
Pistols are another matter. Some (the .45 ACP) are typically subsonic to start with, making it an excellent candidate for suppression, and subsonic rounds are available for other common calibers. Typically subsonic rounds are heavier, as for the same energy heavier == slower.
(There's a whole 'nother argument about the effectiveness of light fast projectiles vs slow heavy projectiles, with proponents on both sides, which typically goes on for a long time, so I won't start it here.)
Now commenting once that the rifle is that silent might be hyperbole (not unreasonable in someone so young) but she uses the term at several points ("the hamster coughed a few more times") and in some circumstances it would *need* to be that silent or the tactics don't work. The point being not that the narrator chooses a weapon based on the mistaken belief that it will do something it doesn't, but that she *observes* it doing something that it can't. It is not her mistake, but the author's.
It is "carried", but I try to speak in my own words rather than recite bumper stickers. (A general behavior of the Facebook community that I loathe.)
> The iPhone camera is good enough to completely replace my point-and-shoot, though. It's worse quality, but not much, and there's great convenience in only having to carry the one device.
"It's worse quality" is a good enough reasons to carry a dedicated camera, as is being able to point and click a dedicated button rather than change apps, wait for the app to load, and then visually target a virtual shutter button. But I have a use case that no phone camera has been able to match so far.
Waterproof.
That would be ok, as long as it was truly a netbook with a trackpoint, not a tablet. I already have Windows 7 on a tablet, and it sucketh mightily. Absolutely unusable without optional keyboard and mouse. Which makes it a rather clunky netbook.
I'm not an Apple fanboi, but I'm happy to concede that you can do useful things on iOS with just a touchscreen, something you'd never get away with using Win7.
I understand, but defending yourself and facing a jury afterwards seems preferable to huddling on the floor waiting to die. I could be alone in this...
Ouch. So I'd say, at least wait until she's stopped crying...
It's almost like you have to coach your kids on what to say before you take them to the hospital, in your own and your family's defense.
Tell your friends about it, apparently, if interaction with iPad owners around here is any indication.
Running Windows 8!
Just kidding.
if you have one you're going to take it places like family functions and vacations so that it will probable be in your hands unlike your phone which may be useless outside the US.
so you will use the ipad like a camera/camcorder
Um, what? I'm sorry I can't parse that.
So if you go to family functions in a foreign country, you will be able to take pictures with your ipad 3 but not your phone? And you wouldn't just take a small dedicated camera, which takes better photos/video than either and isn't nearly as clunky to use as an ipad for taking pictures? Like that?
Does this happen a lot?
I can't say precisely where things went wrong, but it does look like the system goes after the "easy" cases rather than dig into the ones where children are genuinely in danger. Now we have parents who are trying to do the right thing being routinely badgered by the powers that be (not necessarily the police, who are only the arms of the bureaucrats) while we continually read of kids who were killed or severely traumatized in situations where authorities were aware of the situation but did not pursue it. It really seems like they tend to pursue the easy things. Is this to push up statistics?
When my daughter was young (single digits, don't remember exactly) she got a rug burn at daycare that became infected. I took her to the doctor, who sent me across the street for x-rays. When I came back, there were police waiting. After much hilarity and trauma, they decided they didn't have enough evidence to arrest me and let us go.
So, what do I do the next time she gets injured while playing? Not take her to the doctor?
Yes, but we're geeks. What do regular people do? They're defenseless.
It's not necessarily the officers. They are generally nice and helpful in my area too. I've met some real assholes downtown, but I think those are just another example of how your environment changes you.
The point is, it's not the officers who made the decision to separate him from his daughter. That was made by a bureaucrat somewhere, probably in child protective services. The officers carry out the order because it is their job to do so and they aren't in a position to make up the law as they go along.
That doesn't change what he said, though. Regardless of whom makes the decision, trying not to put yourself in a position where the state can screw you seems like good advice.
I'd say never contact them no matter what. Better to die.
Or, defend yourself.
Yes, exactly. Thank you. Moreover, in the spots where others take up the story, the style reverts to something closer to conversational English. Just as Manuel, the narrator of TMIAHM records other people's dialog the way they speak it, which allows the dialog to occasionally revert to what we would consider normal.
Good luck in your journey. I hope you find it, and would be interested in what you thought of it. Be warned though, that Tracking is obviously intended to be the second novel of a trilogy. Although it's a complete story, several things are foreshadowed that were obviously intended for a third novel. Palmer is (according to wiki) still alive, and wrote Tracking in 2008, which isn't that long ago as works of fiction go. If he was working on the third book it should be about ready now.
Part of the problem appears to be that his publisher went out of business. But publishers are relatively easy to come by. Hell, he could self-publish at lulu.com and make a profit.
David, where are you??