However I do find this conversation mildly frustrating. Largely because you seem to come to it with a preconcieved notion and are then viewing everything through that lens. No doubt you could accuse me of doing the same.
Anyway, to the point. Crime demands punishment. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler requires some sort of punishment for what he does. I steal something that is yours, I should be punished. Are we here to debate the need for punishment for justice to exist?
Free will before tasting of the fruit of knowledge? How does that work? You're free to choose, but you're not allowed to know what it is you're choosing, and you are still held accountable if you make the wrong choice.
You are assuming that man needs knowledge of both good and evil to make a choice. The bible makes pretty clear that knowledge of evil means that there is no choice: you choose to sin. Check my comment history on this article for more on this.
You are not following what I said in the previous comment. Free will and God's sovereignty go hand in hand.
I think you also need to examine this in context. Consider what God did to repair the damage. He sent his son to die on the cross. It seems a pretty expensive trap to me.
To forestall what I think you may say:
I am not sure what knowledge you have of the theology of the trinity, but at its simplest the three (Father, Son & Spirity) are one and also are 3. This is a closer relationship than we can imagine or understand. This is not the case of God picking some random person to take the fall, this is his own son, God himself. What is more, when Jesus died on the cross he took on the sins of the entire world. God and Sin are at opposite ends of the spectrum. God defines good, how can he have any part in sin? So when Jesus took on those sins, he was separated from God.
They may have known that God didn't want them to do it, but they were incapable of knowing that it was evil to do so. By God's design.
You haven't read my comment history.
[quote] I think what you should be taking away is the corrosive nature of sin. Don't forget that the tree was the tree of the knowedge of good and evil. They already knew good. I think that you are assuming that we can be objective and judge whether something is good or evil. The answer in Gen 1 is that Evil is, well, evil. There is nothing good in it. Even knowledge of it is wrong. [/quote]
Re Conquistadors: Do you really think this is the kind of behavour that Christian even condone? Do you even think that these people were Christians?
You would justify even the most horrifyingly depraved evil corruption...And who are we to question God?
What you fail to understand is that everything is defined by God, not from our perspective. He created this world. He is also the source of all jsutice and love. Not that you are particulary interested in these it seems, you are more interested in calling love hate and justice injustice.
I hope you (eventually) realize the error of your ways. The sooner Christians dump this worship of evil, the sooner the rest of us can stop wondering when the next Crusades or Inquisition or Witch Trials or Slavery or Holocaust or Trail of Tears or whatever is coming.
Whoa, that is a bit too moderate. Can't you get a little more extreme that that?
If your God were as harmless as the Easter Bunny...
What you fail to understand is that nothing you or I do can change God. You seem to believe that God is evil (which is a rather perverse perspective), and that by not believing in him he suddenly becomes good? Or that his power disappears?
God is God. God is good, just and loving. Deal with it.
I can understand someone who says there is no God and that Christians are deluded. I don't agree, but I do understand. I can't understand someone who sticks their head in the sand.
I'm not sure how much of this is actually directly related to Microsoft. You will find people who espouse views that a plain wrong in any group, largley because that is all they know. So if all you know is microsoft, then you will tend praise microsoft products over other products. The fanboys will do Microsoft's work for them. The same way the intel fanboys do.
The reverse also happens. Every now and again someone posts a comment saying that SQL Server is just Sybase. This is an area in which I have some experience and knowledge. I happen to know that, while there is an element of truth, it is flat out wrong to say that SQL Server == Sybase. Last time I posted a correction of this, I got a bunch of comments saying I had no life etc...
No doubt you now think that I am Microsoft astroturfer.
Read my comment history for this article, I have made a couple of comments relating to this.
If Adam and Eve didn't know about good and evil, they were incapable--by God's own design--of knowing that it was an evil act to eat of the fruit of that tree. Incapable of knowing that disobeying God's direct order was evil.
I think that is a concept that we might struggle with. Largely because we do know both good and evil. Anyway, God had told them not to eat from the tree. They knew it was something they should not do. Effectively this
P.S. This incident is hardly unique. Read any of the so-called ``hard passages'' of the bible and substitute ``Joshua Gord of Topeka, Kansas'' for ``God'' and decide if those actions could, by any stretch of the imagination, still be considered moral or even tolerable. Especially read about the Flood, the Plagues, and the Crucifixion. b&
This is a foolish argument. God is God and we are not. Did you create the world? No? Have you always existed? No? We are made in God's image. That does not mean we are God.
The bible holds both that God is sovereign and that man has free will. You have grasped one and not the other.
God being sovereign means that nothing happens with God knowing that it was going to happen or standing behind it. This includes things that go wrong in this world.
Man having free will means that he chooses what he wants to do.
The bible holds both of these as true and as not being in tension or opposition.
I do not understand how this works, and indeed we cannot understand how this works, at least not now. But we can see this in operation. See Romans 9 for some details. In fact Paul asks the very same question you ask: Is God unjust?
That is a good explanation of the use of the meaning of the use of death in Gen 1. It is also used in a spiritual sense.
Re Knowledge: I think you may be taking something different away from the story. I think what you should be taking away is the corrosive nature of sin. Don't forget that the tree was the tree of the knowedge of good and evil. They already knew good. I think that you are assuming that we can be objective and judge whether something is good or evil. The answer in Gen 1 is that Evil is, well, evil. There is nothing good in it. Even knowledge of it is wrong.
I was thinking about this a while ago and wondering how evil continues to survive, if there is nothing good in it at all. That is, even things like courage, organisation, intelligence are not available, how does it continue to survive? How can it not collapse under its own flaws?
The answer I arrived at was twofold. 1. It perverts good attributes (like courage) to use for evil purposes. 2. It destroys people.
Does it do it when you attempt to access the control panel, network settings, move bookmarks, access the Winnt folder, when trying to edit/move/delete files that you do not have sufficient privelages to access, Edit/Read/Write to the registry? What about when you are executing something like a game that requirs admin access?
Just providing this for an installation is only part of the solution. Maybe not all of the others are feasible (for example you don't want a window popping up while playing CS asking for the admin password), but certainly the control panel, network settings, registry (when using RegEdit/Regedt32) etc should do this.
The reason this is still a problem is that running windows as anything less than administrator is a painful experience.
This is a problem that can be laid at the feet of either Microsoft or third party app developers. Actually you can just lay this at the feet of Microsoft because they have made admin the defacto standard, and app developers have merely come to exptect it.
What windows needs is a good way of switching to administrator for a quick change. Runas is a hack that is rather user unfriendly.
What should happen is that when you do something that requires admin permissions you should get a pop up box asking for your administrator password. This might get a little interesting on desktops on a domain, but if this can be controlled by GPOs it wouldn't be a problem.
There might be some confusion relating whether this should be a domain admin login or a local admin login, but this would be a step in the right direction.
Everyone has limitations, but it's not for the teacher to judge who has them and who doesn't, because he can't. That fucker should be fired, if not put in jail. I wonder how many kids he screwed up with his smack down comments.
Then who is going to judge? Who is going to tell someone they are kidding themselves that never going to get there? Who is going to tell me that I am never going to be an olympic athlete?
Sounds to me like the teacher made a pretty realistic assessment. They are still free to prove him wrong.
I consider it is more damaging to someone to encourage them in dreaming for things that will never be realised. When they hit the ground they hit a lot harder.
I have made earlier comments on what is wrong with explorer.
Effectively, I think that Micorosft should separate out the functions of explorer. So that one handles reporting and the other to handle mounting and unmounting of stuff. One should not block the other.
I have an engineering degree in Mechatronics. This is basically a degree in robotics.
All of the people who graduated with me and are actually directly using their degree are working on Australian military projects in one form or another. I haven't spoken to some of them in a while but: - One was working on the Collins class submarine for the Navy - One was writing a simulation for a harpoon antiship missile for a consulting firm - Another was working with sonar also for a consultant firm - Another was at the defence laboritories in Adelaide
Some had also gone off to do a phd. A lot were also working in other fields (eg I work as a straight programmer, others a project manager), but the majority of the work was with military.
That is where the robotics jobs are, at least in this country.
There is a good argument for 2. If there is a vulnerability in 1, the other will now be affected. IIRC there was a recent story about a worm written to exploit a vuln on a popular firewall. Black Ice?
You have a UID over 800000. Judging by this, you are in no position to comment about how slashdot has gone to the dogs because you haven't been around long enough.
My UID is 200000 less then yours and I don't feel I have the right to comment on how bad slashdot has become.
I'm not a programmer by trade, but I just can't imagine that people actually debate about commenting code.
Why not?
This is something we do a lot of. If you are passionate about your job, and I think a lot of programmers are, then this is something you want to get right.
I think also that a lot of programmers consider that their work is creative and that they are artists.
As a programmer, you are also not the only person who is going to work on the code. Comments are one of the major ways of communicating information between different programmers.
It is also something that can be done many different ways. I guess that putting those things together and you have lots of room for discussion.
Like you, I have also had to work on code I have previously written. In fact I work on a code base that has been either originally written by me or since recoded by me. Some of the code goes back 4 years.
This is an interesting experience. First of all I am a much better programmer now than I was then. I also know the languages better now than I did them. More importantly I now know how to code legibly in the languages I use. The code base reflects all this progressions.
Anyway I digress. Others have pointed to Code Complete as containing good instructions on the use of comments. I'd like to echo these.
Comments should describe why you are doing something, not what you are doing. If your code is so convoluted that it needs explanation on what you are doing, you have other problems.
Secondly, code it is a good idea to map out sub-routines before you code them. eg// TODO: grab user list from database// begin loop through users// if user has property foo// TODO: Write user// end if// end loop
This skeleton can be used as a basis for the comments in your code.
Also every single subroutine should have a comment describing what it does.
Finally there should be a lot of subroutines. Really a lot. If you have a subroutine that is longer than 100 lines of code, you should be getting twitchy.
Above all, it is worth recognising that learning to code legibly is an iterative process. Be always looking at what you are writing and trying to find more ways to improve the way you code in that langauage. And it is important to understand that what is legible in one language might not be as legible in another.
I have noticed a marked increase in instability with the 1.0.3 release. I have sent in bug reports of a particular news website crashing firefox consistently (stuff.co.nz, try http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl?IDLink=1458241&l ocation=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stuff.co.nz%2Fstuff%2F0%2 C2106%2C3258588a10895%2C00.html), and in the web application I work on, I also get relatively frequent crashes.
In the case of the web application I work on, this is pure W3c compliant code. It does not appear to be terribly consistent, but it seems to happend while a number of frames are loading, then clicking another link that will change to load a different frameset.
It is possible that this is happening as a result of the extensions I have installed or the custom stylesheet I sue to limit ads. I haven't yet had a chance to test against a vanilla install of firefox.
Anyway it is an unwelcome surprise to have firefox crash on me regularly.
I bought a T41 as my first laptop purchase a year ago. The amount I paid for that has paid for itself several times over, not just because it is a laptop rather than a desktop.
About 6 months someone I work with picked up a top of the line dell M60 and has had a series of problems. The IR port doesn't work. Bluetooth is flakey. And recently, after it heats up a little, the mouse starts wandering (this appears to be a problem with the touch pad). Lockups when using a docking station are common.
After a year of very heavy use my only problems have been that DLA caused some issues reading CDs and they have removed the windows key.
I wish Microsoft would stop concentrating on adding features I don't want or need. Take some XP improvements for example:
1. Get rid of the freaking searching dog when searching for files, or at least make it possible to get to a real interfact without resorting to registry hacks.
2. Any time you plug in a USB drive, windows trys to "auto-play" it. What is with that? It is a drive. Mount it and move on. As someone who has disabled autoplay for CDs, I'd love it if you could also do this for anything you plug in.
3. Whiz bang jelly bean interface that I switch off so I can actually do some work. How much time did Microsoft spend developing this for me to just switch it off?
How about some real and useful changes:
1. Nothing can steal focus. NOTHING. EVER. This is a huge sore point. No application should ever be able to steal focus for any reason at any time. This includes "helpful" informative messages from the system tray. If you can't make this default behaviour (and you damn well should), provide a registry setting to do it.
2. Fix explorer & mounting CDs/DVDs. When you throw a CD into the drive it locks up explorer whil it spins up. Even if the thing has been mounted, when you open up explorer it pauses to load the CD/DVD drives. This should only happen when you actually go to open them. Sure it is nice to have the title of the CD and an icon, but load them up as they become available.
Explorer should be separated into two logical processes. One for display, and the other to mount & unmount file systems. One should not block the other.
The is the same as when you got to access a network drive that is not connected. You should be able to immediately deselect that drive and go to another drive, as this is often a mis-click. You shouldn't have to wait while it takes a couple of seconds, then tells you that the drive is not available.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you tell my religion teachers didn't like me?
Yes. I don't particularly mind you.
However I do find this conversation mildly frustrating. Largely because you seem to come to it with a preconcieved notion and are then viewing everything through that lens. No doubt you could accuse me of doing the same.
Anyway, to the point. Crime demands punishment. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler requires some sort of punishment for what he does. I steal something that is yours, I should be punished. Are we here to debate the need for punishment for justice to exist?
Free will before tasting of the fruit of knowledge? How does that work?
You're free to choose, but you're not allowed to know what it is you're choosing, and you are still held accountable if you make the wrong choice.
You are assuming that man needs knowledge of both good and evil to make a choice. The bible makes pretty clear that knowledge of evil means that there is no choice: you choose to sin. Check my comment history on this article for more on this.
You are not following what I said in the previous comment. Free will and God's sovereignty go hand in hand.
I think you also need to examine this in context. Consider what God did to repair the damage. He sent his son to die on the cross. It seems a pretty expensive trap to me.
To forestall what I think you may say:
I am not sure what knowledge you have of the theology of the trinity, but at its simplest the three (Father, Son & Spirity) are one and also are 3. This is a closer relationship than we can imagine or understand. This is not the case of God picking some random person to take the fall, this is his own son, God himself. What is more, when Jesus died on the cross he took on the sins of the entire world. God and Sin are at opposite ends of the spectrum. God defines good, how can he have any part in sin? So when Jesus took on those sins, he was separated from God.
Why would you do this?
They may have known that God didn't want them to do it, but they were incapable of knowing that it was evil to do so. By God's design.
You haven't read my comment history.
[quote]
I think what you should be taking away is the corrosive nature of sin. Don't forget that the tree was the tree of the knowedge of good and evil. They already knew good. I think that you are assuming that we can be objective and judge whether something is good or evil. The answer in Gen 1 is that Evil is, well, evil. There is nothing good in it. Even knowledge of it is wrong.
[/quote]
Re Conquistadors: Do you really think this is the kind of behavour that Christian even condone? Do you even think that these people were Christians?
You would justify even the most horrifyingly depraved evil corruption...And who are we to question God?
What you fail to understand is that everything is defined by God, not from our perspective. He created this world. He is also the source of all jsutice and love. Not that you are particulary interested in these it seems, you are more interested in calling love hate and justice injustice.
I hope you (eventually) realize the error of your ways. The sooner Christians dump this worship of evil, the sooner the rest of us can stop wondering when the next Crusades or Inquisition or Witch Trials or Slavery or Holocaust or Trail of Tears or whatever is coming.
Whoa, that is a bit too moderate. Can't you get a little more extreme that that?
If your God were as harmless as the Easter Bunny...
What you fail to understand is that nothing you or I do can change God. You seem to believe that God is evil (which is a rather perverse perspective), and that by not believing in him he suddenly becomes good? Or that his power disappears?
God is God. God is good, just and loving. Deal with it.
I can understand someone who says there is no God and that Christians are deluded. I don't agree, but I do understand. I can't understand someone who sticks their head in the sand.
I hope you realise the errors of your ways.
Disclaimer: I write code for Micorosft platforms.
I'm not sure how much of this is actually directly related to Microsoft. You will find people who espouse views that a plain wrong in any group, largley because that is all they know. So if all you know is microsoft, then you will tend praise microsoft products over other products. The fanboys will do Microsoft's work for them. The same way the intel fanboys do.
The reverse also happens. Every now and again someone posts a comment saying that SQL Server is just Sybase. This is an area in which I have some experience and knowledge. I happen to know that, while there is an element of truth, it is flat out wrong to say that SQL Server == Sybase. Last time I posted a correction of this, I got a bunch of comments saying I had no life etc...
No doubt you now think that I am Microsoft astroturfer.
Okay... Moral of the story? God acts like a selfish, egotistical little brat who had to create an entirely new way to stroke his ego?
... unless it happens to be true.
If God was a human, but God is the creator. Saying you are the most important thing in the world is ego
Read my comment history for this article, I have made a couple of comments relating to this.
If Adam and Eve didn't know about good and evil, they were incapable--by God's own design--of knowing that it was an evil act to eat of the fruit of that tree. Incapable of knowing that disobeying God's direct order was evil.
I think that is a concept that we might struggle with. Largely because we do know both good and evil. Anyway, God had told them not to eat from the tree. They knew it was something they should not do. Effectively this
P.S. This incident is hardly unique. Read any of the so-called ``hard passages'' of the bible and substitute ``Joshua Gord of Topeka, Kansas'' for ``God'' and decide if those actions could, by any stretch of the imagination, still be considered moral or even tolerable. Especially read about the Flood, the Plagues, and the Crucifixion. b&
This is a foolish argument. God is God and we are not. Did you create the world? No? Have you always existed? No? We are made in God's image. That does not mean we are God.
The bible holds both that God is sovereign and that man has free will. You have grasped one and not the other.
God being sovereign means that nothing happens with God knowing that it was going to happen or standing behind it. This includes things that go wrong in this world.
Man having free will means that he chooses what he wants to do.
The bible holds both of these as true and as not being in tension or opposition.
I do not understand how this works, and indeed we cannot understand how this works, at least not now. But we can see this in operation. See Romans 9 for some details. In fact Paul asks the very same question you ask: Is God unjust?
Disclaimer: I'm a Christian.
That is a good explanation of the use of the meaning of the use of death in Gen 1. It is also used in a spiritual sense.
Re Knowledge: I think you may be taking something different away from the story. I think what you should be taking away is the corrosive nature of sin. Don't forget that the tree was the tree of the knowedge of good and evil. They already knew good. I think that you are assuming that we can be objective and judge whether something is good or evil. The answer in Gen 1 is that Evil is, well, evil. There is nothing good in it. Even knowledge of it is wrong.
I was thinking about this a while ago and wondering how evil continues to survive, if there is nothing good in it at all. That is, even things like courage, organisation, intelligence are not available, how does it continue to survive? How can it not collapse under its own flaws?
The answer I arrived at was twofold.
1. It perverts good attributes (like courage) to use for evil purposes.
2. It destroys people.
I might have explained myself poorly.
Being omnipotent does not mean he fixes our destiny. That conflicts with free will.
God does clearly fix our destiny. Eph 1. Note the frequent use of the word predestined. God is soveriegn over our destiny also.
This is not to say that we do not have free will, merely that somehow they both work hand in hand. This is one of the great mysteries of the world.
This is GWB logic. If you aren't with me, you are a terrorist.
Not to be confused with other conditions:
1. Irrational fear of hiding and shooting things (camper)
2. Irrational fear of hiding and getting shot (inept camper)
3. Irrational fear that some of your team might survive to the next round (Team Killer).
I was not aware of that, but...
Does it do it when you attempt to access the control panel, network settings, move bookmarks, access the Winnt folder, when trying to edit/move/delete files that you do not have sufficient privelages to access, Edit/Read/Write to the registry? What about when you are executing something like a game that requirs admin access?
Just providing this for an installation is only part of the solution. Maybe not all of the others are feasible (for example you don't want a window popping up while playing CS asking for the admin password), but certainly the control panel, network settings, registry (when using RegEdit/Regedt32) etc should do this.
The reason this is still a problem is that running windows as anything less than administrator is a painful experience.
This is a problem that can be laid at the feet of either Microsoft or third party app developers. Actually you can just lay this at the feet of Microsoft because they have made admin the defacto standard, and app developers have merely come to exptect it.
What windows needs is a good way of switching to administrator for a quick change. Runas is a hack that is rather user unfriendly.
What should happen is that when you do something that requires admin permissions you should get a pop up box asking for your administrator password. This might get a little interesting on desktops on a domain, but if this can be controlled by GPOs it wouldn't be a problem.
There might be some confusion relating whether this should be a domain admin login or a local admin login, but this would be a step in the right direction.
Everyone has limitations, but it's not for the teacher to judge who has them and who doesn't, because he can't. That fucker should be fired, if not put in jail. I wonder how many kids he screwed up with his smack down comments.
Then who is going to judge? Who is going to tell someone they are kidding themselves that never going to get there? Who is going to tell me that I am never going to be an olympic athlete?
Sounds to me like the teacher made a pretty realistic assessment. They are still free to prove him wrong.
I consider it is more damaging to someone to encourage them in dreaming for things that will never be realised. When they hit the ground they hit a lot harder.
I have made earlier comments on what is wrong with explorer.
Effectively, I think that Micorosft should separate out the functions of explorer. So that one handles reporting and the other to handle mounting and unmounting of stuff. One should not block the other.
Thanks for that, I had no idea. Sweet. Downloaded, installed, tested.
I have an engineering degree in Mechatronics. This is basically a degree in robotics.
All of the people who graduated with me and are actually directly using their degree are working on Australian military projects in one form or another. I haven't spoken to some of them in a while but:
- One was working on the Collins class submarine for the Navy
- One was writing a simulation for a harpoon antiship missile for a consulting firm
- Another was working with sonar also for a consultant firm
- Another was at the defence laboritories in Adelaide
Some had also gone off to do a phd. A lot were also working in other fields (eg I work as a straight programmer, others a project manager), but the majority of the work was with military.
That is where the robotics jobs are, at least in this country.
There is a good argument for 2. If there is a vulnerability in 1, the other will now be affected. IIRC there was a recent story about a worm written to exploit a vuln on a popular firewall. Black Ice?
You have a UID over 800000. Judging by this, you are in no position to comment about how slashdot has gone to the dogs because you haven't been around long enough.
My UID is 200000 less then yours and I don't feel I have the right to comment on how bad slashdot has become.
I'm not a programmer by trade, but I just can't imagine that people actually debate about commenting code.
Why not?
This is something we do a lot of. If you are passionate about your job, and I think a lot of programmers are, then this is something you want to get right.
I think also that a lot of programmers consider that their work is creative and that they are artists.
As a programmer, you are also not the only person who is going to work on the code. Comments are one of the major ways of communicating information between different programmers.
It is also something that can be done many different ways. I guess that putting those things together and you have lots of room for discussion.
Like you, I have also had to work on code I have previously written. In fact I work on a code base that has been either originally written by me or since recoded by me. Some of the code goes back 4 years.
// TODO: grab user list from database // begin loop through users // if user has property foo // TODO: Write user // end if // end loop
This is an interesting experience. First of all I am a much better programmer now than I was then. I also know the languages better now than I did them. More importantly I now know how to code legibly in the languages I use. The code base reflects all this progressions.
Anyway I digress. Others have pointed to Code Complete as containing good instructions on the use of comments. I'd like to echo these.
Comments should describe why you are doing something, not what you are doing. If your code is so convoluted that it needs explanation on what you are doing, you have other problems.
Secondly, code it is a good idea to map out sub-routines before you code them. eg
This skeleton can be used as a basis for the comments in your code.
Also every single subroutine should have a comment describing what it does.
Finally there should be a lot of subroutines. Really a lot. If you have a subroutine that is longer than 100 lines of code, you should be getting twitchy.
Above all, it is worth recognising that learning to code legibly is an iterative process. Be always looking at what you are writing and trying to find more ways to improve the way you code in that langauage. And it is important to understand that what is legible in one language might not be as legible in another.
I have noticed a marked increase in instability with the 1.0.3 release. I have sent in bug reports of a particular news website crashing firefox consistently (stuff.co.nz, try http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl?IDLink=1458241&l ocation=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stuff.co.nz%2Fstuff%2F0%2 C2106%2C3258588a10895%2C00.html), and in the web application I work on, I also get relatively frequent crashes.
In the case of the web application I work on, this is pure W3c compliant code. It does not appear to be terribly consistent, but it seems to happend while a number of frames are loading, then clicking another link that will change to load a different frameset.
It is possible that this is happening as a result of the extensions I have installed or the custom stylesheet I sue to limit ads. I haven't yet had a chance to test against a vanilla install of firefox.
Anyway it is an unwelcome surprise to have firefox crash on me regularly.
I bought a T41 as my first laptop purchase a year ago. The amount I paid for that has paid for itself several times over, not just because it is a laptop rather than a desktop.
About 6 months someone I work with picked up a top of the line dell M60 and has had a series of problems. The IR port doesn't work. Bluetooth is flakey. And recently, after it heats up a little, the mouse starts wandering (this appears to be a problem with the touch pad). Lockups when using a docking station are common.
After a year of very heavy use my only problems have been that DLA caused some issues reading CDs and they have removed the windows key.
I wish Microsoft would stop concentrating on adding features I don't want or need. Take some XP improvements for example:
1. Get rid of the freaking searching dog when searching for files, or at least make it possible to get to a real interfact without resorting to registry hacks.
2. Any time you plug in a USB drive, windows trys to "auto-play" it. What is with that? It is a drive. Mount it and move on. As someone who has disabled autoplay for CDs, I'd love it if you could also do this for anything you plug in.
3. Whiz bang jelly bean interface that I switch off so I can actually do some work. How much time did Microsoft spend developing this for me to just switch it off?
How about some real and useful changes:
1. Nothing can steal focus. NOTHING. EVER. This is a huge sore point. No application should ever be able to steal focus for any reason at any time. This includes "helpful" informative messages from the system tray. If you can't make this default behaviour (and you damn well should), provide a registry setting to do it.
2. Fix explorer & mounting CDs/DVDs. When you throw a CD into the drive it locks up explorer whil it spins up. Even if the thing has been mounted, when you open up explorer it pauses to load the CD/DVD drives. This should only happen when you actually go to open them. Sure it is nice to have the title of the CD and an icon, but load them up as they become available.
Explorer should be separated into two logical processes. One for display, and the other to mount & unmount file systems. One should not block the other.
The is the same as when you got to access a network drive that is not connected. You should be able to immediately deselect that drive and go to another drive, as this is often a mis-click. You shouldn't have to wait while it takes a couple of seconds, then tells you that the drive is not available.