's a good point. Some managers here have banned laptops and tablets from meetings as they are too much of a distraction. I usually only take my laptop when I have to give a presentation.
Agreed, which is why I stipulated "and can be reasonably manipulated". I do certain things on a laptop that can't yet be done conveniently on a tablet. I suspect that there *is* a way to do it, conveniently on a touch only interface. I'm holding off on buying a tablet until it can reasonably meet my needs in this regard.
I agree, if you're carrying bits and pieces along with your tablet everywhere you go, you picked the wrong device. But if you only dock it in the office and perhaps at home, and use it sans keyboard and mouse everywhere else, you're using it as a tablet, not just as a laptop in four or five separate pieces.
I work a lot with photographs, and it *is* more convenient and intuitive to do some kinds of photo manipulation on a tablet VS a standard KVM PC, with no mouse and no keyboard. The apps aren't quite there yet, but there is a potential to be able to work on a tablet *more* easily than a laptop for certain kinds of work. That's what I'm holding out for.
True regarding Pratchett. Night Watch and Thud, for example, were dangerously close to Literature. And "The Fifth Elephant" is the best werewolf story I've read to date. Pratchett's Discworld pokes fun at Tolkien repeatedly, but has managed to build up its own lore, rich backstory, and languages. (T'dr'duzk b'hazg t't.) But he doesn't beat you over the head with it, and even when he's writing a serious story, still writes with a sense of humor.
Enh, that's a bit of an exaggeration. I get what you're saying (to my knowledge the elves never danced in the stories; didn't do much of anything except brood, look wistful, and shoot arrows really fast) but there is a compelling story in the books if you have a little patience. I read LOTR the first time in the seventies, and probably have read it a dozen times since, including the appendicies. (There are stories in there also, including a story fragment that's a run-up to the events in The Hobbit.) But I admit to just skimming the songs and I'm glad they weren't included in the movies.
I don't consider myself a Tolkien fanatic. Test by: I didn't hate the movies, and I don't think Peter Jackson strangles kittens for fun. But the novels are a good read if you stick with it.
However, I will opine that just because a work of fiction is long, obtuse, and includes a whole crapload of intricate backstory details, doesn't in and of itself make it Nobel-worthy.
Contrary to what others have written, I personally didn't like the childishness of The Hobbit, and am deeply disappointed that Tolkien never completed the more serious rewrite he had begun, to better fit the tone and story elements of LOTR.
If you want to see how fast your brain will turn to mush, try reading The Silmarillion. I keep a copy handy for when I can't get to sleep.
I suspect there are writers who create more impenetrable prose than Tolkien who did get the prize.
As soon as the apps I need are available and can be reasonably manipulated on a tablet, the laptop will be dead to me. Moreover, a tablet with sufficient resources could easily take the place of my PC, with *at most* a docking station.
Michael will continue to be right for awhile, but inevitably at some point he will be wrong. Hopefully (in my opinion) soon.
Electronics engineering was my vocation. Computers was a hobby. I switched to computers as a vocation at the leading edge of the dot com boom. Life was good, until the bust. Point is, I have background in computer admin, hardware and software development for military and commercial applications, and various types of communications and ECM. And there are people here who regularly participate that have experience I couldn't touch. There are a lot of morons (most seem to post under Anonymous) but a lot of knowledgeable people as well, in a surprising number of fields. As with any collection of people, of course, the trick is to filter those that know from those that don't.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. "A tool or a piece of a tool designed to clean out the fuel line was left in the line" would have made a lot more sense.
Well yes, but if I'm still awake when the wheel me in (which I was) and I have one leg uncovered with a big old message in sharpie that says "THIS KNEE!", it's hard to imagine that they'd take out a kidney instead. At least, it makes it less likely...
I have assembled zero satellites. But back in my military contracting days, I did the electronics for several military applications and was present when satellites were built. The boosters on those things are fairly small, and the fuel lines tend not to be big enough to stuff into what we think of as a rag. Maybe a cleaning tool or some other implement. I think whomever wrote that was either lazy or didn't fully understand what they were writing about.
> Why has Slashdot suddenly fallen into the trap of "I've never seen one so it can't possibly exist"?
Have we so soon forgotten that us slashdotters come from a variety of backgrounds? For instance, legal articles are often responded to by actual lawyers in this group. There are actual astronomers, actual physicists, actual biologists, and I'm certain, actual rocket scientists, who read and participate in Slashdot. We're not all gamers living in our parent's basement. Although there are some.
> It reminds me of those surgery horror stories where the surgeon or staff leaves behind clamps and sponges inside the persons body.
Funny you should mention that. I had emergency surgery last year for severe traumatic internal bleeding (won't bore you with the details -- or maybe I already have) and things happened so quickly that they did not have enough time for an instrument inventory. (Apparently it's someone's job to keep track of how many tools get used and then count them before final suture.) So after they got me stable they ran me back through x-ray to look for stuff. Didn't find anything, fortunately.
But really -- it's not that much of a horror story, they just have to open you back up at some point to retrieve the objects. It's not something you want to have happen, but it's a fairly well known procedure. Horror stories to me are things like taking off the wrong limb [1] or prescribing catastrophically wrong medication.
[1] Before I went in for knee surgery, the doctor gave me a sharpie and had me mark the correct knee. Just in case.
Except that most wrenches won't fit in most cylinders, which I think was the original question. You can gum up the works by dropping a screw or some other small object, but not an entire wrench. Similarly, it's difficult to imagine a rag large enough to be useful but small enough to be left in a fuel line. I think someone got something wrong.
So yeah, your analogy was spot on -- it illustrated exactly why the stated diagnosis was not believable.
...it starts. Welcome to the world of cell phone carriers.
I'm not a Windows 7 user, but I wonder; can you buy Windows 7 phones unlocked and download updates directly from Microsoft? That might provide some relief.
> If by "mediocre-to-bad" you mean 35-45 MPG (for something like a Prius), then I suppose that is true,
I've heard that number, but I suspect it's from press releases. It doesn't appear to match what prius owners are actually seeing. There are four just in my circle of friends (six figure geeks who can afford trendy things) and they're all getting in the twenties on the freeway. Gas engine economy cars can meet or beat that. It's only logical. Take any machine designed for a particular environment (in this case, typical city traffic) and put it in a different environment, and it will perform differently.
> but it is still generally much better than most other vehicles on the road
...for certain values of "most". If you include every vehicle on the road no matter what age, then sure. But by the same criteria, the 2011 Explorer has less emissions than most vehicles on the road.
I looked into the technology when hybrids were first becoming popular. I was concerned that starting and stopping the gas engine would result in heavy losses. Turns out not to be true. The type of engine used is very efficient at a constant RPM (which is where much of the gain is made) and doesn't appear to have a lot of starting cost.
The Prius arrangement (constant rpm engine charging batteries which provide variable speed and acceleration) works really efficiently in stop-and-go traffic. Where it falls down is constant high speeds over long periods of time. So for a commuter car in crosstown traffic, it excels. For a touring car, not so much. I think this might be the heart of many owners' complaints. Even with careful throttle usage, mileage drops like a dead bird on that 700 mile trip to grandma's
To owners of regular gas cars, hybrids are counterintuitive. My truck gets 17 to 19 MPG in town [1], 25 or better on the freeway if I don't change speed a lot and there aren't too many hills. A hybrid will tend to get its best mileage in town and mediocre-to-bad mileage on long freeway trips. This isn't a defect, it's how the technology works. You have to use the right tool for the job, and if the job is to spend the great majority of your time at freeway speeds, you need to pick a technology that works well under those conditions.
[1] The purpose of the truck is to haul large amounts of heavy or bulky stuff. My transportation of choice is motorcycle, which gets a little better gas mileage than a Prius. And is more fun. But won't carry four adults, unless they're really good at holding on.
(I don't care that you miss-spelled square.) Um, I'm not an iphone user. I've never read mail on an iphone, never did much except wiffle the icons back and forth and tried to play a youtube video. It sounds like the mail application isn't very nice. I understand what you're saying now, and am willing to take your word for it. I wasn't specifically talking about the mail application, but the entire look and feel, but that's good to know.
Now I want an iphone even less...
I'm using Touchdown on Android, works ok with a couple minor caveats. (Built-in Android enterprise mail still sucks. Maybe next version...) Previously, used the Blackberry built-in email, which I really liked.
> Depending if you need to get some work done and you are unable to do it with legacy software. Browser testing, CG, 64bit software development, Video Processing are examples where your 10-12 year model wouldn't work not only because of legacy software issues. You NEED a 64bit OS to run more and more things.
For some things, perhaps. You've either ignored or missed that I have one machine running Win 7 64 bit, for the sole reason that an application requires more the 4 GB memory. That's the one on which I do photo editing and video production. In other words, there was a business case for the upgrade. For the others it hasn't mattered. When it does, I'll let you know.
As far as Macbooks at work go, my impression is that the users are pretty much on their own on support, but they ask for them anyway. Shrug. I'm not an Apple guy; some things I observe without understanding.
> Depending if you need to get some work done and you are unable to do it with legacy software
If the software worked in 2008, why wouldn't it now? For instance, I'm still using Adobe CS3, because it works fine and I don't need the features of the newer versions. What, is CS3 suddenly going to stop working on XP merely because XP got older?
There are similar security features on my current corporate Android phone; it requires a PIN to unlock the phone, and a different PIN to get into email (which is irritating) but it never asks for a PIN to become operational (which is I think what you're saying) and will allow you to answer (but not originate) a call without first putting in the PIN.
I've never heard of a Blackberry requiring a PIN in order to receive a call. I wonder if your BES is misconfigured.
> iOS is basically the Lotus Notes 1.0 UI with prettier graphics.
What, really? iOS came from a expanding hierarchy with the look and feel of a file browser with tiny plus signs that you had to hit precisely, requiring fine hand-eye coordination just to read your mail? I didn't know that...
Seriously, I don't think prettier graphics was the problem with Lotus Notes.
I've never seen this. My Bold had other issues (mechanical problems -- the catch for the back failed, replaced phone, catch failed again, replaced phone, finally replaced it with a Tour) but I'd never missed a call. I remember a couple of spontaneous reboots but the phone always came back into a usable state. That was one of the advantages -- it would never fail in a way that required human intervention to correct, unlike the Windows Mobile phone which required manual power cycling after a hang or driver failure. I don't recall ever having to put in a pin with the Blackberry at any time, even when I first got it. Not sure I believe that part.
The cost of reboot on a Blackberry is high, because it takes longer than most phones to return to a usable state, but this was balanced by needing reboot so seldom. It's still the most stable smartphone I ever possessed.
My daughter went through two Curve 8300 series, by virtue of wearing out the keyboard (she's a manic texter) and then spent a year with an 8900 with no problems. Then she switched to a Galaxy and that was a nightmare. Failed GPS, failed position sensor, failed screen, going through phone after phone.
I dropped Blackberry due to the company's inability after outsourcing to keep BES up. Didn't have anything to do with the phone itself.
> This is the same company that, had they purchased Macromedia instead of allowing Adobe to do it, would have completely and utterly destroyed Dreamweaver within 2 versions by trying to make it work the same way as Microsoft Office
Microsoft used to have something called Frontpage. It was a gooey web making tool that produced the worst HTML code I've ever seen in my entire life. I shouldn't complain too much, because I made a fairly good living in '04 and '05 fixing sites created with Frontpage. Hint: AWK is your friend. That doesn't invalidate your point -- far from it. I expect they'd make Dreamweaver work like, say, Word, and then discontinue it when nobody used it.
So what is it with kids these days? What happened to, you know, working for for a living? It seems like an entire generation wants ipods handed to them for nuthin.
Slashdot Mirror
's a good point. Some managers here have banned laptops and tablets from meetings as they are too much of a distraction. I usually only take my laptop when I have to give a presentation.
Agreed, which is why I stipulated "and can be reasonably manipulated". I do certain things on a laptop that can't yet be done conveniently on a tablet. I suspect that there *is* a way to do it, conveniently on a touch only interface. I'm holding off on buying a tablet until it can reasonably meet my needs in this regard.
I agree, if you're carrying bits and pieces along with your tablet everywhere you go, you picked the wrong device. But if you only dock it in the office and perhaps at home, and use it sans keyboard and mouse everywhere else, you're using it as a tablet, not just as a laptop in four or five separate pieces.
I work a lot with photographs, and it *is* more convenient and intuitive to do some kinds of photo manipulation on a tablet VS a standard KVM PC, with no mouse and no keyboard. The apps aren't quite there yet, but there is a potential to be able to work on a tablet *more* easily than a laptop for certain kinds of work. That's what I'm holding out for.
True regarding Pratchett. Night Watch and Thud, for example, were dangerously close to Literature. And "The Fifth Elephant" is the best werewolf story I've read to date. Pratchett's Discworld pokes fun at Tolkien repeatedly, but has managed to build up its own lore, rich backstory, and languages. (T'dr'duzk b'hazg t't.) But he doesn't beat you over the head with it, and even when he's writing a serious story, still writes with a sense of humor.
I would add Roger Zelazny.
Enh, that's a bit of an exaggeration. I get what you're saying (to my knowledge the elves never danced in the stories; didn't do much of anything except brood, look wistful, and shoot arrows really fast) but there is a compelling story in the books if you have a little patience. I read LOTR the first time in the seventies, and probably have read it a dozen times since, including the appendicies. (There are stories in there also, including a story fragment that's a run-up to the events in The Hobbit.) But I admit to just skimming the songs and I'm glad they weren't included in the movies.
I don't consider myself a Tolkien fanatic. Test by: I didn't hate the movies, and I don't think Peter Jackson strangles kittens for fun. But the novels are a good read if you stick with it.
However, I will opine that just because a work of fiction is long, obtuse, and includes a whole crapload of intricate backstory details, doesn't in and of itself make it Nobel-worthy.
Contrary to what others have written, I personally didn't like the childishness of The Hobbit, and am deeply disappointed that Tolkien never completed the more serious rewrite he had begun, to better fit the tone and story elements of LOTR.
If you want to see how fast your brain will turn to mush, try reading The Silmarillion. I keep a copy handy for when I can't get to sleep.
I suspect there are writers who create more impenetrable prose than Tolkien who did get the prize.
As soon as the apps I need are available and can be reasonably manipulated on a tablet, the laptop will be dead to me. Moreover, a tablet with sufficient resources could easily take the place of my PC, with *at most* a docking station.
Michael will continue to be right for awhile, but inevitably at some point he will be wrong. Hopefully (in my opinion) soon.
I think "baggage thrower" is my new favorite term.
Thanks very much.
When I was in recovery, the ER surgeon visited me. He got really close to me and growled "YOU were a LOT of TROUBLE." It was like a scene from House.
Electronics engineering was my vocation. Computers was a hobby. I switched to computers as a vocation at the leading edge of the dot com boom. Life was good, until the bust. Point is, I have background in computer admin, hardware and software development for military and commercial applications, and various types of communications and ECM. And there are people here who regularly participate that have experience I couldn't touch. There are a lot of morons (most seem to post under Anonymous) but a lot of knowledgeable people as well, in a surprising number of fields. As with any collection of people, of course, the trick is to filter those that know from those that don't.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. "A tool or a piece of a tool designed to clean out the fuel line was left in the line" would have made a lot more sense.
Well yes, but if I'm still awake when the wheel me in (which I was) and I have one leg uncovered with a big old message in sharpie that says "THIS KNEE!", it's hard to imagine that they'd take out a kidney instead. At least, it makes it less likely...
I have assembled zero satellites. But back in my military contracting days, I did the electronics for several military applications and was present when satellites were built. The boosters on those things are fairly small, and the fuel lines tend not to be big enough to stuff into what we think of as a rag. Maybe a cleaning tool or some other implement. I think whomever wrote that was either lazy or didn't fully understand what they were writing about.
> Why has Slashdot suddenly fallen into the trap of "I've never seen one so it can't possibly exist"?
Have we so soon forgotten that us slashdotters come from a variety of backgrounds? For instance, legal articles are often responded to by actual lawyers in this group. There are actual astronomers, actual physicists, actual biologists, and I'm certain, actual rocket scientists, who read and participate in Slashdot. We're not all gamers living in our parent's basement. Although there are some.
> It reminds me of those surgery horror stories where the surgeon or staff leaves behind clamps and sponges inside the persons body.
Funny you should mention that. I had emergency surgery last year for severe traumatic internal bleeding (won't bore you with the details -- or maybe I already have) and things happened so quickly that they did not have enough time for an instrument inventory. (Apparently it's someone's job to keep track of how many tools get used and then count them before final suture.) So after they got me stable they ran me back through x-ray to look for stuff. Didn't find anything, fortunately.
But really -- it's not that much of a horror story, they just have to open you back up at some point to retrieve the objects. It's not something you want to have happen, but it's a fairly well known procedure. Horror stories to me are things like taking off the wrong limb [1] or prescribing catastrophically wrong medication.
[1] Before I went in for knee surgery, the doctor gave me a sharpie and had me mark the correct knee. Just in case.
Except that most wrenches won't fit in most cylinders, which I think was the original question. You can gum up the works by dropping a screw or some other small object, but not an entire wrench. Similarly, it's difficult to imagine a rag large enough to be useful but small enough to be left in a fuel line. I think someone got something wrong.
So yeah, your analogy was spot on -- it illustrated exactly why the stated diagnosis was not believable.
I'm not a Windows 7 user, but I wonder; can you buy Windows 7 phones unlocked and download updates directly from Microsoft? That might provide some relief.
> If by "mediocre-to-bad" you mean 35-45 MPG (for something like a Prius), then I suppose that is true,
I've heard that number, but I suspect it's from press releases. It doesn't appear to match what prius owners are actually seeing. There are four just in my circle of friends (six figure geeks who can afford trendy things) and they're all getting in the twenties on the freeway. Gas engine economy cars can meet or beat that. It's only logical. Take any machine designed for a particular environment (in this case, typical city traffic) and put it in a different environment, and it will perform differently.
> but it is still generally much better than most other vehicles on the road
I looked into the technology when hybrids were first becoming popular. I was concerned that starting and stopping the gas engine would result in heavy losses. Turns out not to be true. The type of engine used is very efficient at a constant RPM (which is where much of the gain is made) and doesn't appear to have a lot of starting cost.
The Prius arrangement (constant rpm engine charging batteries which provide variable speed and acceleration) works really efficiently in stop-and-go traffic. Where it falls down is constant high speeds over long periods of time. So for a commuter car in crosstown traffic, it excels. For a touring car, not so much. I think this might be the heart of many owners' complaints. Even with careful throttle usage, mileage drops like a dead bird on that 700 mile trip to grandma's
To owners of regular gas cars, hybrids are counterintuitive. My truck gets 17 to 19 MPG in town [1], 25 or better on the freeway if I don't change speed a lot and there aren't too many hills. A hybrid will tend to get its best mileage in town and mediocre-to-bad mileage on long freeway trips. This isn't a defect, it's how the technology works. You have to use the right tool for the job, and if the job is to spend the great majority of your time at freeway speeds, you need to pick a technology that works well under those conditions.
[1] The purpose of the truck is to haul large amounts of heavy or bulky stuff. My transportation of choice is motorcycle, which gets a little better gas mileage than a Prius. And is more fun. But won't carry four adults, unless they're really good at holding on.
(I don't care that you miss-spelled square.) Um, I'm not an iphone user. I've never read mail on an iphone, never did much except wiffle the icons back and forth and tried to play a youtube video. It sounds like the mail application isn't very nice. I understand what you're saying now, and am willing to take your word for it. I wasn't specifically talking about the mail application, but the entire look and feel, but that's good to know.
Now I want an iphone even less...
I'm using Touchdown on Android, works ok with a couple minor caveats. (Built-in Android enterprise mail still sucks. Maybe next version...) Previously, used the Blackberry built-in email, which I really liked.
> Depending if you need to get some work done and you are unable to do it with legacy software. Browser testing, CG, 64bit software development, Video Processing are examples where your 10-12 year model wouldn't work not only because of legacy software issues. You NEED a 64bit OS to run more and more things.
For some things, perhaps. You've either ignored or missed that I have one machine running Win 7 64 bit, for the sole reason that an application requires more the 4 GB memory. That's the one on which I do photo editing and video production. In other words, there was a business case for the upgrade. For the others it hasn't mattered. When it does, I'll let you know.
As far as Macbooks at work go, my impression is that the users are pretty much on their own on support, but they ask for them anyway. Shrug. I'm not an Apple guy; some things I observe without understanding.
> Depending if you need to get some work done and you are unable to do it with legacy software
If the software worked in 2008, why wouldn't it now? For instance, I'm still using Adobe CS3, because it works fine and I don't need the features of the newer versions. What, is CS3 suddenly going to stop working on XP merely because XP got older?
There are similar security features on my current corporate Android phone; it requires a PIN to unlock the phone, and a different PIN to get into email (which is irritating) but it never asks for a PIN to become operational (which is I think what you're saying) and will allow you to answer (but not originate) a call without first putting in the PIN.
I've never heard of a Blackberry requiring a PIN in order to receive a call. I wonder if your BES is misconfigured.
> iOS is basically the Lotus Notes 1.0 UI with prettier graphics.
What, really? iOS came from a expanding hierarchy with the look and feel of a file browser with tiny plus signs that you had to hit precisely, requiring fine hand-eye coordination just to read your mail? I didn't know that...
Seriously, I don't think prettier graphics was the problem with Lotus Notes.
I've never seen this. My Bold had other issues (mechanical problems -- the catch for the back failed, replaced phone, catch failed again, replaced phone, finally replaced it with a Tour) but I'd never missed a call. I remember a couple of spontaneous reboots but the phone always came back into a usable state. That was one of the advantages -- it would never fail in a way that required human intervention to correct, unlike the Windows Mobile phone which required manual power cycling after a hang or driver failure. I don't recall ever having to put in a pin with the Blackberry at any time, even when I first got it. Not sure I believe that part.
The cost of reboot on a Blackberry is high, because it takes longer than most phones to return to a usable state, but this was balanced by needing reboot so seldom. It's still the most stable smartphone I ever possessed.
My daughter went through two Curve 8300 series, by virtue of wearing out the keyboard (she's a manic texter) and then spent a year with an 8900 with no problems. Then she switched to a Galaxy and that was a nightmare. Failed GPS, failed position sensor, failed screen, going through phone after phone.
I dropped Blackberry due to the company's inability after outsourcing to keep BES up. Didn't have anything to do with the phone itself.
> This is the same company that, had they purchased Macromedia instead of allowing Adobe to do it, would have completely and utterly destroyed Dreamweaver within 2 versions by trying to make it work the same way as Microsoft Office
Microsoft used to have something called Frontpage. It was a gooey web making tool that produced the worst HTML code I've ever seen in my entire life. I shouldn't complain too much, because I made a fairly good living in '04 and '05 fixing sites created with Frontpage. Hint: AWK is your friend. That doesn't invalidate your point -- far from it. I expect they'd make Dreamweaver work like, say, Word, and then discontinue it when nobody used it.
Yep, that's it, pretty much exactly.
So what is it with kids these days? What happened to, you know, working for for a living? It seems like an entire generation wants ipods handed to them for nuthin.