Ok ok ok... I see how this works. I can do this. Um, your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries. I'm right and any direct personal proof you have is delusion. I'm supposed to insert another insult here but I can't think of one.
Hey, this is kinda fun. I can see why you like it.
Lessee... fewer competitors increases competition. Wait, I'm sure I got that wrong. Fewer ComPETitors increases COMPETition. Fewer... increases... Competitors... competition... competitors... Sorry I just can't make that work.
...and if I had been trying to protect my manhood, I certainly wouldn't have driven daughter's beetle into work today, with the clown on the antenna, the dancing cow on the dashboard and the very feminine vanity plate.
> And those two guys prevented you from getting to work, and made it necessary to pull over and stop because you couldn't maintain a safe following distance?
Um no, they caused me to tighten up the distance to the bumper in front of me so no others could pull that maneuver. Because I had been reminded yet again why trying to leave what I consider to be an adequate distance is ultimately self-defeating. And hence, here I am. Traffic must be a lot nicer, or at least more straightforward, in your world. Unfortunately, I have to live in mine.
> You did NOT just say that. Seriously, who HASN'T driven in rush hour traffic?
I did say that, just now. For one thing, it depends entirely on what you mean by "rush hour traffic". I've driven in rush hour in San Francisco Bay Area, in Newark New Jersey, Boston, and LA. Now, Boston... *they* have Rush Hour Traffic (caps are intended). The people in the SF Bay Area... they think they have rush hours. If they could spend a couple weeks in Boston they'd LONG for the day they could get back to their rush hours. Similarly, Bay Area commuters would laugh at what we call "traffic" up here in Portland.
> Computer simulations that simulated a non-real-world traffic pattern would be useless don't you think?
Yep. And if theories don't match readily observable reality, how can the simulation be simulating real-world traffic patterns? I mean, in areas where I'm likely to actually drive, next to the real-world drivers that are trying to share the freeway (and sometimes my own personal space) with me.
> And as I have pointed in this thread, this is pure bunk without a shred of scientific evidence to support it.
And again, saying that doesn't make it so. The phenomenon being described is easily observable. I proved it again on the way to work this morning, by leaving a car and a half distance in front of me and seeing a guy in the middle lane pulling into it. I slowed down and a guy two cars further back in the middle lane pulled into the gap. It happens, we've seen it happen. It happens because the lane we are in is going faster than the lane to the right of us (in the US, perhaps different in other countries), and any driver who isn't trying to exit is naturally trying to get into the faster lane. We see it happen every morning and every evening Monday through Friday, so it's somewhat of a cognitive dissonance for someone to insist that it can't possibly happen. Where do you drive, mars?
I've tried this on the motorcycle precisely because of the high personal cost of slamming into the guy in front of me and/or being sandwiched in from behind. And guess what -- it DOES NOT work. The more room you leave in front of you, the higher probability that the guy in the slower lane next to you will pull in. A single data point on a website does not make it so.
I think what these theories do not take into account is the stratification of traffic. For a given overall flow rate, the left lane (in the US) is usually the fastest. The right lane, where people merge on and off, is usually the slowest. And the middle lane, where most lane transitions take place, is somewhere in between.
During long commutes, roughly half the people in the middle lane have a ways to go before they get off, so they want to be in the left (fastest) lane. If you are in the left lane and you give them an opportunity to do so they're going to take it. This doesn't make them evil, they just want to get to work the same as the rest of us.
Since your lane is averaging faster than the lane to the right of you (again, in the US; your mileage may vary) the gap you are leaving in front of you slides past the slower lane, giving more and more people the opportunity to try to enter it. Inevitably, someone will. And then you have to slow down to maintain the gap. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, in very specialized circumstances, where traffic is going *so* slow that a safe following distance is not practically large enough for a car to fit, or if traffic is bunched up in a long area with no on/off ramps so all lanes are going closer to the same speed, the technique may work. But in real life urban rush hour traffic, no, not for any reasonable amount of time.
It's possible that people overstate cases. These are *gamers* we're talking about, after all; not the most rational bunch. If you're not emotional and quick to react, you aren't a gamer and this doesn't apply to you anyway.
The answer is: Anything worth money is worth critiquing. Never forget that. If it's not worth critiquing, how could it be worth buying? Do game manufacturers really want to go there? So yes, games are worth complaining about. QED.
> They couldn't get to you to cut in front of you (well maybe a small hand full could) because all traffic would be flowing smoothly at safe following distances,
This proves it -- you really haven't driven in rush hour traffic. Traffic flows smoothly at safe following distances in computer simulations because computer simulations behave in a rational and controlled fashion.
> So what? One more guy ahead of you. Big deal. So F'ing What if someone sneaks in between you and the next car. Did your manhood just get dissed?
I have to wear a medical bracelet now because of someone who made an abrupt lane change in front of me, in traffic that, unbeknownst to him, was rapidly coming to a stop, so I can tell you with certitude that my manhood is not in any danger of being dissed. I'm just trying to get to work in an alive and uninjured state.
So, as others have pointed out, someone squeezes in, and then you slow down some more and another squeezes in and you slow down some more and another squeezes in and you slow down some more and in a very short time you might as well pull over and stop, because people with a different idea of what a safe following distance is, will be the only ones on the road. Haven't you ever driven in rush hour? The kind of rush hour the article is talking about?
If I could work a shift that didn't require driving in rush hour, or if I could work at home on a regular basis (I'm allowed one day a week) I would certainly do that. But we can't always do that.
The problem is, if you put adequate distance between you and the car in front of you for your rate of speed, another driver sees this as an opportunity to squeeze in, which is arguably *more* dangerous. So even drivers who *know* they're following too close in rush hour don't have much choice.
You already have to do this now with Windows XP hibernation. and it does take forever. I suspect Windows 8 merely renamed a misfeature they already had.
What's really fun is if you close the lid while it's hibernating. Then in your next meeting, you open the lid, and (assuming you didn't get the dreaded "resume error" and lost everything) it resumes hibernating. What a feature! So all you have to do is to wait for it to finish resuming, and then you can do the "fast startup". Winning!!!!
At first I didn't know what you were talking about. (Until I read the body of your article.) To my knowledge, the only "fast shutdown mode" was holding down the power button. But then, of course. BSOD. How could I forget? The only problem is, it was kinda random. The computer decided you should quit working, and ping! fast shutdown. "Well, gee, Wally, I guess it's time to go home."
...that windows 95 had a "fast startup mode". ACPI has been around since 1996, and it has never worked consistently or well. M$ has to rebrand the techniques as "instant on" because everyone else in the world has "instant on" that actually works. But you know that they'll tweak it, fix some issues, introduce new issues, and Windows 8 "instant on" will sort-of work, better on some hardware than on others, will have the usual issues (loooonnnngggg hibernation times to prepare for "instant on", resume errors, etc) and perhaps some new issues, and won't be any better total experience than your suspend/resume and hibernate features are now. Because Microsoft can't resist the temptation to reuse existing code rather than redesign. They think they can achieve redesign with marketing, rebranding, and resetting customer expectation. Sadly, to a certain extent, they're right.
Ooooh, deja vu! It'll turn out that it starts up faster because it does a lot of the work during shutdown to prepare for the fast startup, just as windows does now, only (probably) worse. And so when I go to the meeting my laptop will turn on fairly quickly but at the conclusion of the meeting it'll take forever to turn off. Until I figure out where in a plethora of wizards and dialog boxes is the checkmark to turn off the feature. Just as I had to do with my current laptop. It'll be a managerial line item to say "yes we have fast turn-on just like Apple", but will be simply a rebranding of the current hibernate technique which is the reason for that embarrassing 5 or 10 minutes at the end of meetings while we all wait for our laptops to prepare for the next "instant on".
Ok, got that one. It'll be a mandatory "disable", like Superfetch in Windows 7.
> Yeah, just like they've fallen over themselves to roll out high speed fiber broadband to the boondocks.
You may be talking to the wrong person. I live in an unincorporated area (we have sheriff's deputies, not police) just two blocks from farmland and I have fiber to the house. There may be something else going on there. Despite that not being a good comparison with mail delivery which doesn't require permanently installed infrastructure.
> Oddly enough in the middle to the 20th Century another distinctly 19th Century utopian socio-economic theory arose -- Libertarianism -- which is likewise unconnected with the realities of human behavior and the complexities of the real world. Like Communism in Kibbutzes, it is likely to only workable in small groups if at all. Libertarians however so far have failed to found any such communities that I can discover.
There is truth in that.
As a Libertarian, and a former minor functionary in the local LP, I can say that Libertarianism is a journey more than it is a destination. I'm willing to concede that taking to its absolute it is no more workable nationally than communism, (or other philosophies we could both probably name) but I think it is valid to say that there is value in having fewer regulations than we do currently. Libertarians are all on a bus heading in the direction of your unworkable absolute. That guy may get off the bus before me, and I'll certainly get off the bus before that other guy, but at this moment, despite having different ideas how far to go, as a group we can agree to go further than we are now.
I think similarly, not all socialists, or even communists, are striving for the North Korean ideal. At least, I hope not.
In other words, not every Libertarian wants complete unfettered anarchy. I tend to call myself Libertarian because I tend to be liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal issues. [1] But the key word is "tend".
[1] I submit that an intellectually honest social liberal must be fiscally conservative, due to the individual's basic right to control their own discretionary income, but that's a discussion for another time.
You're absolutely correct, with the caveat that the fax machine stays in business so long that everyone who knew how to change the paper or toner have long since left the company. And some of those early fax machines were fussy to deal with.
Parenthetically, we got one of those huge collating printers that also did fax, with the idea that we could get rid of our fax machines and just use the printer. Within a month the fax machines were back. It's a comfort level thing, apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok ok ok... I see how this works. I can do this. Um, your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries. I'm right and any direct personal proof you have is delusion. I'm supposed to insert another insult here but I can't think of one.
Hey, this is kinda fun. I can see why you like it.
Agreed, and having AT&T the only GSM carrier is a frightening prospect.
Lessee... fewer competitors increases competition. Wait, I'm sure I got that wrong. Fewer ComPETitors increases COMPETition. Fewer... increases... Competitors... competition... competitors... Sorry I just can't make that work.
> And those two guys prevented you from getting to work, and made it necessary to pull over and stop because you couldn't maintain a safe following distance?
Um no, they caused me to tighten up the distance to the bumper in front of me so no others could pull that maneuver. Because I had been reminded yet again why trying to leave what I consider to be an adequate distance is ultimately self-defeating. And hence, here I am. Traffic must be a lot nicer, or at least more straightforward, in your world. Unfortunately, I have to live in mine.
> You did NOT just say that. Seriously, who HASN'T driven in rush hour traffic?
I did say that, just now. For one thing, it depends entirely on what you mean by "rush hour traffic". I've driven in rush hour in San Francisco Bay Area, in Newark New Jersey, Boston, and LA. Now, Boston... *they* have Rush Hour Traffic (caps are intended). The people in the SF Bay Area... they think they have rush hours. If they could spend a couple weeks in Boston they'd LONG for the day they could get back to their rush hours. Similarly, Bay Area commuters would laugh at what we call "traffic" up here in Portland.
> Computer simulations that simulated a non-real-world traffic pattern would be useless don't you think?
Yep. And if theories don't match readily observable reality, how can the simulation be simulating real-world traffic patterns? I mean, in areas where I'm likely to actually drive, next to the real-world drivers that are trying to share the freeway (and sometimes my own personal space) with me.
> And as I have pointed in this thread, this is pure bunk without a shred of scientific evidence to support it.
And again, saying that doesn't make it so. The phenomenon being described is easily observable. I proved it again on the way to work this morning, by leaving a car and a half distance in front of me and seeing a guy in the middle lane pulling into it. I slowed down and a guy two cars further back in the middle lane pulled into the gap. It happens, we've seen it happen. It happens because the lane we are in is going faster than the lane to the right of us (in the US, perhaps different in other countries), and any driver who isn't trying to exit is naturally trying to get into the faster lane. We see it happen every morning and every evening Monday through Friday, so it's somewhat of a cognitive dissonance for someone to insist that it can't possibly happen. Where do you drive, mars?
I've tried this on the motorcycle precisely because of the high personal cost of slamming into the guy in front of me and/or being sandwiched in from behind. And guess what -- it DOES NOT work. The more room you leave in front of you, the higher probability that the guy in the slower lane next to you will pull in. A single data point on a website does not make it so.
I think what these theories do not take into account is the stratification of traffic. For a given overall flow rate, the left lane (in the US) is usually the fastest. The right lane, where people merge on and off, is usually the slowest. And the middle lane, where most lane transitions take place, is somewhere in between.
During long commutes, roughly half the people in the middle lane have a ways to go before they get off, so they want to be in the left (fastest) lane. If you are in the left lane and you give them an opportunity to do so they're going to take it. This doesn't make them evil, they just want to get to work the same as the rest of us.
Since your lane is averaging faster than the lane to the right of you (again, in the US; your mileage may vary) the gap you are leaving in front of you slides past the slower lane, giving more and more people the opportunity to try to enter it. Inevitably, someone will. And then you have to slow down to maintain the gap. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, in very specialized circumstances, where traffic is going *so* slow that a safe following distance is not practically large enough for a car to fit, or if traffic is bunched up in a long area with no on/off ramps so all lanes are going closer to the same speed, the technique may work. But in real life urban rush hour traffic, no, not for any reasonable amount of time.
It's possible that people overstate cases. These are *gamers* we're talking about, after all; not the most rational bunch. If you're not emotional and quick to react, you aren't a gamer and this doesn't apply to you anyway.
The answer is: Anything worth money is worth critiquing. Never forget that. If it's not worth critiquing, how could it be worth buying? Do game manufacturers really want to go there? So yes, games are worth complaining about. QED.
> They couldn't get to you to cut in front of you (well maybe a small hand full could) because all traffic would be flowing smoothly at safe following distances,
This proves it -- you really haven't driven in rush hour traffic. Traffic flows smoothly at safe following distances in computer simulations because computer simulations behave in a rational and controlled fashion.
> as we mess up your language
'ang on, 'ang on, I've seen My Fair Lady, I 'ave! Rubbish 'at is!
> Its not about someone getting ahead of you, it's about *everyone* getting ahead of you.
This is my new favorite saying.
> So what? One more guy ahead of you. Big deal. So F'ing What if someone sneaks in between you and the next car. Did your manhood just get dissed?
I have to wear a medical bracelet now because of someone who made an abrupt lane change in front of me, in traffic that, unbeknownst to him, was rapidly coming to a stop, so I can tell you with certitude that my manhood is not in any danger of being dissed. I'm just trying to get to work in an alive and uninjured state.
So, as others have pointed out, someone squeezes in, and then you slow down some more and another squeezes in and you slow down some more and another squeezes in and you slow down some more and in a very short time you might as well pull over and stop, because people with a different idea of what a safe following distance is, will be the only ones on the road. Haven't you ever driven in rush hour? The kind of rush hour the article is talking about?
If I could work a shift that didn't require driving in rush hour, or if I could work at home on a regular basis (I'm allowed one day a week) I would certainly do that. But we can't always do that.
The problem is, if you put adequate distance between you and the car in front of you for your rate of speed, another driver sees this as an opportunity to squeeze in, which is arguably *more* dangerous. So even drivers who *know* they're following too close in rush hour don't have much choice.
You already have to do this now with Windows XP hibernation. and it does take forever. I suspect Windows 8 merely renamed a misfeature they already had.
What's really fun is if you close the lid while it's hibernating. Then in your next meeting, you open the lid, and (assuming you didn't get the dreaded "resume error" and lost everything) it resumes hibernating. What a feature! So all you have to do is to wait for it to finish resuming, and then you can do the "fast startup". Winning!!!!
At first I didn't know what you were talking about. (Until I read the body of your article.) To my knowledge, the only "fast shutdown mode" was holding down the power button. But then, of course. BSOD. How could I forget? The only problem is, it was kinda random. The computer decided you should quit working, and ping! fast shutdown. "Well, gee, Wally, I guess it's time to go home."
And no, rather than being a solution, "suspend" is just an invitation for the dreaded "cannot resume" error.
That's it exactly. Redesign, not reuse. Microsoft will never get it.
Ooooh, deja vu! It'll turn out that it starts up faster because it does a lot of the work during shutdown to prepare for the fast startup, just as windows does now, only (probably) worse. And so when I go to the meeting my laptop will turn on fairly quickly but at the conclusion of the meeting it'll take forever to turn off. Until I figure out where in a plethora of wizards and dialog boxes is the checkmark to turn off the feature. Just as I had to do with my current laptop. It'll be a managerial line item to say "yes we have fast turn-on just like Apple", but will be simply a rebranding of the current hibernate technique which is the reason for that embarrassing 5 or 10 minutes at the end of meetings while we all wait for our laptops to prepare for the next "instant on".
Ok, got that one. It'll be a mandatory "disable", like Superfetch in Windows 7.
> Yeah, just like they've fallen over themselves to roll out high speed fiber broadband to the boondocks.
You may be talking to the wrong person. I live in an unincorporated area (we have sheriff's deputies, not police) just two blocks from farmland and I have fiber to the house. There may be something else going on there. Despite that not being a good comparison with mail delivery which doesn't require permanently installed infrastructure.
> Oddly enough in the middle to the 20th Century another distinctly 19th Century utopian socio-economic theory arose -- Libertarianism -- which is likewise unconnected with the realities of human behavior and the complexities of the real world. Like Communism in Kibbutzes, it is likely to only workable in small groups if at all. Libertarians however so far have failed to found any such communities that I can discover.
There is truth in that.
As a Libertarian, and a former minor functionary in the local LP, I can say that Libertarianism is a journey more than it is a destination. I'm willing to concede that taking to its absolute it is no more workable nationally than communism, (or other philosophies we could both probably name) but I think it is valid to say that there is value in having fewer regulations than we do currently. Libertarians are all on a bus heading in the direction of your unworkable absolute. That guy may get off the bus before me, and I'll certainly get off the bus before that other guy, but at this moment, despite having different ideas how far to go, as a group we can agree to go further than we are now.
I think similarly, not all socialists, or even communists, are striving for the North Korean ideal. At least, I hope not.
In other words, not every Libertarian wants complete unfettered anarchy. I tend to call myself Libertarian because I tend to be liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal issues. [1] But the key word is "tend".
[1] I submit that an intellectually honest social liberal must be fiscally conservative, due to the individual's basic right to control their own discretionary income, but that's a discussion for another time.
I'd mod you up if I had points.
The problem was not with Marx's analysis, but with his conclusions.
You're absolutely correct, with the caveat that the fax machine stays in business so long that everyone who knew how to change the paper or toner have long since left the company. And some of those early fax machines were fussy to deal with.
Parenthetically, we got one of those huge collating printers that also did fax, with the idea that we could get rid of our fax machines and just use the printer. Within a month the fax machines were back. It's a comfort level thing, apparently.