and we will *CONTINUE* to know a lot more about ODF, no matter what happens to the standard. The same in no way can be said about the.doc format, which has an ever increasing number of peculiarities and differences with each different version of Office. All closed and hidden.
I'm missing the part where the sense is....If MS released all patches as soon as they were ready, everyone who wanted to patch right away could. If large corporate IT depts still want to patch every 2nd tuesday, they still can! Scheduled Downtime is Scheduled Downtime is Scheduled Downtime. I see no connection between when MS releases a patch and when an IT department schedules their downtime to roll that patch out. (Well, other than the fact that the patch has to come first.;)
This whole "scheduled patching" bit really is BS. All it does is leave critical problems unpatched longer than necessary, so that managers can point to MS when bad shit happens to the network. "Well, we couldn't patch until two days after patch-day, because we needed to test the patches." works lots better than "We got fucked because I decided that it wasn't critical enough to test and deploy right away."
While I can see where it would make a lot of people more confortable to know that there is patching every third Wed or something, I just don't see the value in withholding critical patches because "they aren't scheduled yet". At the very worst, let the IT departments decide if they want to schedule additional downtime, because ultimately, they know whether it will affect their systems or not. But then again, MS knows best, all the time, doesn't it?
What are you talking about....Microsoft would have to be insane to create a bunch of different versions of Vista. I mean, it would be a nightmare trying to support the different features of each, educate customers about the difference between them, make sure your software worked on all of them, etc. And besides, when you need to program all the features for the high-end version anyway, customers would realize that you're just selling them a crippled product, and refuse to buy it.
Multiple crippled versions of an OS....that would never work...
That was the evening during which a nice scotch erased 12 hours of my life. I have no recollection of that post, nor how I got someone's cell-phone number scrawled on a post-it note next to my computer, nor how I managed to back up a massive quantity of data to two different places with appropriate file names.
I don't even know what I meant, but I thank you for your nice comments, and I accept your suggestion of species.
But for many people, it's not about entering data - it's about *transimitting* data. Data about how they are, what they like, when they will come home, what the food is like here.
I spent an hour the other day talking to a woman who had recently been in the back side of India, doing radio astronomy work. (yeah, she fucking rocked.) One of their problems was that even though the locals were still cooking on open campfires and drawing water from a comnunal well, they were doing this while chatting on cell phones, and that was causing a lot of interference on their dishes.
These people weren't worried about storing data - they were interesting in transmitting it. How they were doing, what they were doing, and how their cousin in the big city was doing. All this was data transfer, but it was voice. Imagine, needing to stay in touch with your relatives in the big city being more important than clean drinking water and a stove and refrigeration.
While the $100 laptop/tablet might be something, I'd put good money on it being an IM platform and an email client more than anything else. Because I think that we as a race, we are hooked on communication, more than anything else in the world. If it can offer a better communication ability than a cell phone, it will take off like wildfire. If not, it is doomed to failure.
This is one of those times where I really, REALLY would like a "dumbass" mod. I was about to mod you "funny", but if there was a "+1, dumbass" mod for the parent, this would have been the time to use it. And I do mean +1, since there's nothing like stamping "dumbass" on someone's forehead for the world to see.
As much as it makes me an oddball, I really don't care either. Since I was in college 6 years ago, I have watched about 1 movie a year in the theaters. I have watched about 3 movies a year rented. I've watched about 5 movies a year on satellite. And I generally picked the "best movies" and was still fairly unimpressed.
The last game I bought was $10 more for the DVD version, so I got the 5 cds. It was a pain in the ass, but I think I've installed it all of 3 times, so it's not that much of a big deal. And if a game requires a new media drive to play it, I'm not likely to buy it.
Really, why do I care? If I need to back up data, hard drives are far better and don't cost much more than write-once media. I'm fairly self entertaining, and if the media industry makes it a pain in the ass to watch movies, I'll watch even less. As will a lot of people. The easier and cheeper you make it for me to entertain myself, the more likely I am to use your form of entertainment. That's why I browse/. -easy, cheep entertainment.
I watch TV because it's easy - I gave Dish Network some info and a credit card number, and bought a $170 TV from Wallmart. (on the backs of poor enslaved children in the 3rd world) That's easy. If you make it much more difficult for me, I'm not about to spend my time and money on it. It's called "entertainment", not "budget for it, and need to think really hard about whether or not it will work".
And since I've got a great store of apathy, I don't fucking care if I get passed over by the newest form of whiz-bang ultra-uber graphics disks of entertainment magic. I'll just let all the other stupid, non-creative motherfuckers spend their money on it, and go on my merry way. Worst-case scenario is that I offer to bring the beer, and let them spend the time, money, and effort on getting it to work.
Lag is the number one problem in online video games today
Punk-ass campers, script kiddies, and bitchy n00bs are the number 1-3 problems (pick your order) in online video games today. And have been for years now. I'd have to put lag fairly low on the list.
One of my favorite stories from my time in tech-support land was when we had a Dell hard drive die on us, 6 months after purchase. We were a large-business with tens of thousands of employees spread out over the US, with (I think) level-1 support or some such. Whatever they called it, it was supposed to be the top of the food chain for support contracts.
User complained about a noisy/broken computer, we got down there to hear the hard drive grinding on power-up. Took it back to the office and cracked the case to make sure, and it was indeed the HD eating itself. We replaced the hard drive with a spare, ghosted it, and ran it for 3 hrs with no problem. Then we made the major mistake of calling Dell to try to get it replaced.
After the usual seranade of hold music for 20 minutes (yeah, even on their super-secret level-1 support line) we got someone to help us. We explained the problem, and asked for a replacement drive. And the guy wouldn't believe us. He told us that hard drives don't die like that. We explained that they do, and after swapping the drive out, it worked fine. But he needed to go through his script.
Asked us to boot the computer. We pointed out that it was running. He tried to close the ticket, because there was no problem. We pointed out that the reason that there was no problem was the we had swapped out the HD. He asked us to check that the cables were plugged in correctly. We pointed out that cables don't make metallic grinding noises and prevent the computer from booting.
It took over an hour, we had to swap the HD back in, download drive-testing software from their website, and finally got an error message from that software which showed up on his script as "drive is bad, send it in for a replacement". We even let him listen to the drive over the phone, and that didn't make a difference.
After that episode, I shudder to think what consumer-level support is like. As a top-tier large business paying for support through the nose, our support should have been quick and efficiant. It rarely was. Needless to say, after that, we got smart and tried to answer questions based on what we needed the script to get to. Once you do it a few times, you get a feel for how it goes, and you can get just about anything you want by answering questions the right way. Nothing like having to game the system to get the support you're paying for...
I don't think you really helped your cause....I look at the box on the floor next to me, and I see, in HUGE letters, GeFORCE 6600GTOC, and in slightly smaller letters BFG, as well as a little "Graphics by Nvidia" logo.
Along your logic lines, I might try going to BFG.com...that's bfgoodrich, not the maker of my card. I might try geforce.com, and that actually redirects to nvidia, but geforce6600.com and geforce6600gtoc.com are blank websites.
Assuming I make it to nvidia's website, what am I looking for? By the very virtue of knowing to "download drivers", you're already discounting 1/3 the population of computer users. And have you never run into people who download *everything* onto their desktops, because if they download it anywhere else they can't ever find it again? I think you discount your special training in "finding shit online" and "downloading it to a known location".
Regardless, once this poor user makes it to nvidia's download page, they have 6 choices of where to start - Graphics Drivers, Platform/nforce drivers, Multimedia Software, Workstation Applications, Games, Utilities and Tools, Consumer 3D stereo. Now assuming that they know that they want Graphics Drivers (not at all a given) and assuming that they can figure out if they want the "GeForce and TnT2" drivers and not the "GeForce Go 7800 GTX" drivers, they *still* have to choose between 3 versions of XP to get the right drivers. Hell, they have 8 choices which start with "Windows", and a lot of the computer users I know wouldn't be able to tell you which flavor they run.
I would much rather leave my mom with a post-it that says "type emerge nvidia-kernel" and when that's done, type "eselect opengl set nvidia" than try to walk here through picking the right drivers off the nvidia website. Hell, that's without even trying to walk her through finding the damn download once she's snagged it.
In the end, most users need to be trained on how to use a computer. It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Mac, or Linux, unless someone has the drive to learn by reading/trial and error, they need to have their hand held. And I'm really done playing the windows "find it online somewhere" game. Packages fucking rock, and with minimal training, they are far easier than doing it the MS way. Which most people can't do without at least minimal training anyway.
On Linux, however, that process is more like go to NVIDIA's site, download file, kill X...find the file you downloaded..
What? What flavor of linux are you using that doesn't have a package manager? And why would you need to kill X? Hell, I think I probably run one of the most overly complex distros, (gentoo) and all I do is:
emerge nvidia-kernel
It then churns and bubbles, and the next time I restart X (or the next day, since I do power my computer off at night to save some $$) the new drivers are running. (Ok, to get full 3-d rendering I need to also add in a "eselect opengl set nvidia" after the emerge, but still, that's far easier than even going to nvidia's website and hunting down the correct driver for your system!)
Granted, you are right in that you sometimes need to update a kernel, but even that's far easier now than it was just 2 years ago. And frankly, most new distros will have compatible kernels with the most recent nvidia drivers. Unless you're a hardcore gamer who wants the best performance possible, you'll probably just install the video driver once and be done with it. If you're ambitious enough to continually update your video drivers, you're ambitious enough to learn how to update a kernel.
It takes me far less time to fire off two commands on the command line which find, download, compile, and install video drivers than doing it the Windows way where I went to a website (couldn't even book the ever-changing url, last time I checked) tracked down the latest drivers for my system, downloaded, went to the download dir, ran the executable (full-screen, with prompts so nothing else could be done in the process) and then had to reboot, and reset all the video settings. And occasionally got to deal with the "you are rebooting now, doesn't matter what you click" prompt.
In fact, until I wrote that, I had forgotten how much of a pain it was to find and intall windows media drivers...god, I think I might have made the full crossing from windows-world to the linux mindset. Scary.
I'm sick of this anti-Gentoo bullshit attitude on slashdot. I can complile Gentoo TWICE in this much time. Enough with the lies and outright slander of a fine OS.
I'm not sure where you get your.2C per decade for three decades data, because as far as I can tell, most people (and not just on wikipedia) call it.6C over the last 100 years, with a margin of error of about.2C. Even taking this to be 1C over 100 years, that's about 0.01C per year. Compare that with the longest estimates of the Younger Dryas climate shift, (because you are right about the resolution problem) where there was a ~7C change in only 40-50 years, and you get something like a 0.14C change a year - still an order of magnitude greater than our current bit of climate change. And that's going with a 7C figure - temps then were ~15C less than they are now, and thus 7C is the lower estimate of the shift over that time. In addition, the most dramatic predictions people want to make for the next 100 years is about a 6C rise in temps - still only a.06C change per year. Most predictions are significantly less than this.
The earth, as you have pointed out, has undergone some major climates shifts throughout geologic history, and there has been a lot of landmass change because of it. My argument isn't that this doesn't happen - it is that it does happen, and we need to understand that. Screaming about global warming is like screaming about spring - it happens, it has happend, and it will happen. Over, and over again.
To me, Global Warming is sort-of like a straw-man argument - the real issue is that we're dumping boatloads of crap into the environment, and using up resources far faster than we can replenish them. Rather than wasting tons of time and money worrying about fairly (at least geologically speaking) insignificant climate shifts, we need to worry about stripping our resources bare, and polluting ourselves out of existance.
You miss the entire point - the "theory of global warming" is like the "therory of seasonal warming" (spring) - it's happened a bunch of times before (~50), and the earth has cooled back down a bunch of times before (~50). We know this. It's not some mystical, magical theory put out by crackpots - we have solid geological evidence for around 50 massive temperature swings in the last 50 million years, from really hot to really cold.
Of course our data supports global warming - for the last 50,000 years we've been coming out of an ice age - it's not like we've had the same temp for the last 50,000 years, then suddenly between 1900 and 2000 it got radically warmer - it's been steadily warming the whole time. Historically, we've seem multiple climate shifts AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE larger than the one we are in. Screaming about the current rate of temperature change is like you getting upset being charged $2.50 for a cup of coffee, when you've paid $25 for one on more than one occasion before.
which are these historical changes you speak of?
What? Oh, sorry for trying to argue with you. I guess you aren't able to read my post where I linked directly to some wikipedia articles about rapid temperature changes in geologic history. Sorry for assuming you could read.
If by "alarming rate" you mean "alarmingly slowly", yeah. There have been times in the earth's history where we can see what looks to be a 7.0C change only a few years! In the last 100 years, our "global warming" has been on the order of 0.6C. Total. Over 100 years.
While these mechanisms are different, to call a 0.6C change over 100 years "rapid" is kind of silly. We really don't know shit about global climate patterns yet. I'm all for cutting back on pollution, and managing how we use our resources a lot better - I just get fired up about "global warming", when:
A) We don't know shit about "global warming", or climate change in general.
B) What we're currently measuring is nothing compared to other changes that we can see historically.
C) Politics, the media, and related funding has more to do with "global warming" than science does.
We need to do a better job protecting our environment, and reducing our footprint, as a WORLD. I just don't think blathering on like idiots about "global warming" is helping us do that. It'd be like blathering on about how spring means that all our snow will melt away - it does, on a regular basis. Like global climate change does to the ice caps and glaciers.
The more I read, the more I am convinced that melting ice caps trigger ice ages. Large parts of northern Canada and Russia are very, very dry, because there isn't a lot of water available around the north pole. Open that water up, and suddenly there's a *lot* of water available to make snow and ice. Ala the scientific travesty that was "The Day After Tomorrow", the melting ice caps will probably kill off any warm currents running from the equator north. Open water + cooling temps could quite easily spell a lot of snow in these parts of the world.
Once there is a year-long coating of ice and snow in Canada and Russia, that will reflect a lot of sun, while the water will continue to absorb a lot of it. More water will evaporate, more snow will fall, and glaciers shouldn't be far behind.
While I can't defend the massive amount of carbon pollution that we have dumped into the air, I don't see global warming as a big deal - this has happened a bunch of times, and every time it gets really warm, an Ice Age comes along right afterwards. It's a cycle on a 100k to 1 million year scale that has happened 50 times or so. And we've been collecting data for less than 1% of one cycle. I don't understand why everyone gets so worked up about something that we know very little about.
Pollution is bad - start screaming about that - "global warming" happens like spring and summer happen - regularly, and often. Kinda like "global cooling", except that we currently don't live in a period of the earth's cycle when it's doing that. Who wants to bet that if we did, people would be screaming about global cooling?
Since becoming dead is a certainty and not a possibility...
Bzzzt...wrong!!! You actually have a 50% chance of being immortal. In the history of modern civilization, there have been about 12 billion people. 6 billion of them have never died...
If you want to find out which half you are in for sure, please list me as a benificiary. It won't make a difference if you're immortal, but it will help me out if you're not.
The difference as I see it is that if Linux starts becomming a large-enough market share that it's worth exploiting, WE'LL ALL SHARE SECURITY INFORMATION! If Ubantu sees some holes in an application, they will publish that information, and all the other flavors will a) be notified, and b) be able to make a timely fix. If Gentoo users start seeing code exploitation, they will publish that information, and everyone else will be able to make changes.
Compare that with windows, where many holes and flaws probably go unnoticed for years. And even if there *appears* to be a problem, there's usually no way to crack it open and verify that. The whole open-sharing of information will allow free OSes to do a much better job of closing off security problems than any closed OS will ever be able to.
No, no OS is free from bugs and security holes, but when everyone shares those problems openly, they will probably get fixed, and fixed fast, everywhere they need to get fixed. While we shouldn't get arrogant about security, we can at least be a little egotistic about how well we share security information. And in the long run, I think Linux flavors are far more flexiable about where they apply their man-hours. Microsoft is committed to a release-upgrade cycle. If a Linux flavor needs to put off a new version for a few months while they concentrate on patching holes, they can. If Microsoft delays for six months, their stock goes down and people scream and shout.
Good to know, although I didn't choose Gentoo because I was some rabid optimization fanboy with overly agressive USE flags. I've got a handful of sensible ones, and they don't change often, if at all. But like I said, good to know regardless. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with pulling statistics "out of thin air" - it's just that 35-40% of the people who do fail to pull reasonable sounding numbers.
and we will *CONTINUE* to know a lot more about ODF, no matter what happens to the standard. The same in no way can be said about the .doc format, which has an ever increasing number of peculiarities and differences with each different version of Office. All closed and hidden.
Yes.
I hear that Bill Gates eats babies, and kicks puppies.
I'm missing the part where the sense is....If MS released all patches as soon as they were ready, everyone who wanted to patch right away could. If large corporate IT depts still want to patch every 2nd tuesday, they still can! Scheduled Downtime is Scheduled Downtime is Scheduled Downtime. I see no connection between when MS releases a patch and when an IT department schedules their downtime to roll that patch out. (Well, other than the fact that the patch has to come first. ;)
This whole "scheduled patching" bit really is BS. All it does is leave critical problems unpatched longer than necessary, so that managers can point to MS when bad shit happens to the network. "Well, we couldn't patch until two days after patch-day, because we needed to test the patches." works lots better than "We got fucked because I decided that it wasn't critical enough to test and deploy right away."
While I can see where it would make a lot of people more confortable to know that there is patching every third Wed or something, I just don't see the value in withholding critical patches because "they aren't scheduled yet". At the very worst, let the IT departments decide if they want to schedule additional downtime, because ultimately, they know whether it will affect their systems or not. But then again, MS knows best, all the time, doesn't it?
What are you talking about....Microsoft would have to be insane to create a bunch of different versions of Vista. I mean, it would be a nightmare trying to support the different features of each, educate customers about the difference between them, make sure your software worked on all of them, etc. And besides, when you need to program all the features for the high-end version anyway, customers would realize that you're just selling them a crippled product, and refuse to buy it.
Multiple crippled versions of an OS....that would never work...
I think you mean 'species'.
That was the evening during which a nice scotch erased 12 hours of my life. I have no recollection of that post, nor how I got someone's cell-phone number scrawled on a post-it note next to my computer, nor how I managed to back up a massive quantity of data to two different places with appropriate file names.
I don't even know what I meant, but I thank you for your nice comments, and I accept your suggestion of species.
But for many people, it's not about entering data - it's about *transimitting* data. Data about how they are, what they like, when they will come home, what the food is like here.
I spent an hour the other day talking to a woman who had recently been in the back side of India, doing radio astronomy work. (yeah, she fucking rocked.) One of their problems was that even though the locals were still cooking on open campfires and drawing water from a comnunal well, they were doing this while chatting on cell phones, and that was causing a lot of interference on their dishes.
These people weren't worried about storing data - they were interesting in transmitting it. How they were doing, what they were doing, and how their cousin in the big city was doing. All this was data transfer, but it was voice. Imagine, needing to stay in touch with your relatives in the big city being more important than clean drinking water and a stove and refrigeration.
While the $100 laptop/tablet might be something, I'd put good money on it being an IM platform and an email client more than anything else. Because I think that we as a race, we are hooked on communication, more than anything else in the world. If it can offer a better communication ability than a cell phone, it will take off like wildfire. If not, it is doomed to failure.
Frankly, I'd rather be lung-butter. If only because the impact isn't as bad.
This is one of those times where I really, REALLY would like a "dumbass" mod. I was about to mod you "funny", but if there was a "+1, dumbass" mod for the parent, this would have been the time to use it. And I do mean +1, since there's nothing like stamping "dumbass" on someone's forehead for the world to see.
I only manually update...on friday nights, so I have the weekend to fix anything that breaks...
As much as it makes me an oddball, I really don't care either. Since I was in college 6 years ago, I have watched about 1 movie a year in the theaters. I have watched about 3 movies a year rented. I've watched about 5 movies a year on satellite. And I generally picked the "best movies" and was still fairly unimpressed.
/. -easy, cheep entertainment.
The last game I bought was $10 more for the DVD version, so I got the 5 cds. It was a pain in the ass, but I think I've installed it all of 3 times, so it's not that much of a big deal. And if a game requires a new media drive to play it, I'm not likely to buy it.
Really, why do I care? If I need to back up data, hard drives are far better and don't cost much more than write-once media. I'm fairly self entertaining, and if the media industry makes it a pain in the ass to watch movies, I'll watch even less. As will a lot of people. The easier and cheeper you make it for me to entertain myself, the more likely I am to use your form of entertainment. That's why I browse
I watch TV because it's easy - I gave Dish Network some info and a credit card number, and bought a $170 TV from Wallmart. (on the backs of poor enslaved children in the 3rd world) That's easy. If you make it much more difficult for me, I'm not about to spend my time and money on it. It's called "entertainment", not "budget for it, and need to think really hard about whether or not it will work".
And since I've got a great store of apathy, I don't fucking care if I get passed over by the newest form of whiz-bang ultra-uber graphics disks of entertainment magic. I'll just let all the other stupid, non-creative motherfuckers spend their money on it, and go on my merry way. Worst-case scenario is that I offer to bring the beer, and let them spend the time, money, and effort on getting it to work.
Plus they obviously have never played any games:
Lag is the number one problem in online video games today
Punk-ass campers, script kiddies, and bitchy n00bs are the number 1-3 problems (pick your order) in online video games today. And have been for years now. I'd have to put lag fairly low on the list.
One of my favorite stories from my time in tech-support land was when we had a Dell hard drive die on us, 6 months after purchase. We were a large-business with tens of thousands of employees spread out over the US, with (I think) level-1 support or some such. Whatever they called it, it was supposed to be the top of the food chain for support contracts.
User complained about a noisy/broken computer, we got down there to hear the hard drive grinding on power-up. Took it back to the office and cracked the case to make sure, and it was indeed the HD eating itself. We replaced the hard drive with a spare, ghosted it, and ran it for 3 hrs with no problem. Then we made the major mistake of calling Dell to try to get it replaced.
After the usual seranade of hold music for 20 minutes (yeah, even on their super-secret level-1 support line) we got someone to help us. We explained the problem, and asked for a replacement drive. And the guy wouldn't believe us. He told us that hard drives don't die like that. We explained that they do, and after swapping the drive out, it worked fine. But he needed to go through his script.
Asked us to boot the computer. We pointed out that it was running. He tried to close the ticket, because there was no problem. We pointed out that the reason that there was no problem was the we had swapped out the HD. He asked us to check that the cables were plugged in correctly. We pointed out that cables don't make metallic grinding noises and prevent the computer from booting.
It took over an hour, we had to swap the HD back in, download drive-testing software from their website, and finally got an error message from that software which showed up on his script as "drive is bad, send it in for a replacement". We even let him listen to the drive over the phone, and that didn't make a difference.
After that episode, I shudder to think what consumer-level support is like. As a top-tier large business paying for support through the nose, our support should have been quick and efficiant. It rarely was. Needless to say, after that, we got smart and tried to answer questions based on what we needed the script to get to. Once you do it a few times, you get a feel for how it goes, and you can get just about anything you want by answering questions the right way. Nothing like having to game the system to get the support you're paying for...
I don't think you really helped your cause....I look at the box on the floor next to me, and I see, in HUGE letters, GeFORCE 6600GTOC, and in slightly smaller letters BFG, as well as a little "Graphics by Nvidia" logo.
Along your logic lines, I might try going to BFG.com...that's bfgoodrich, not the maker of my card. I might try geforce.com, and that actually redirects to nvidia, but geforce6600.com and geforce6600gtoc.com are blank websites.
Assuming I make it to nvidia's website, what am I looking for? By the very virtue of knowing to "download drivers", you're already discounting 1/3 the population of computer users. And have you never run into people who download *everything* onto their desktops, because if they download it anywhere else they can't ever find it again? I think you discount your special training in "finding shit online" and "downloading it to a known location".
Regardless, once this poor user makes it to nvidia's download page, they have 6 choices of where to start - Graphics Drivers, Platform/nforce drivers, Multimedia Software, Workstation Applications, Games, Utilities and Tools, Consumer 3D stereo. Now assuming that they know that they want Graphics Drivers (not at all a given) and assuming that they can figure out if they want the "GeForce and TnT2" drivers and not the "GeForce Go 7800 GTX" drivers, they *still* have to choose between 3 versions of XP to get the right drivers. Hell, they have 8 choices which start with "Windows", and a lot of the computer users I know wouldn't be able to tell you which flavor they run.
I would much rather leave my mom with a post-it that says "type emerge nvidia-kernel" and when that's done, type "eselect opengl set nvidia" than try to walk here through picking the right drivers off the nvidia website. Hell, that's without even trying to walk her through finding the damn download once she's snagged it.
In the end, most users need to be trained on how to use a computer. It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Mac, or Linux, unless someone has the drive to learn by reading/trial and error, they need to have their hand held. And I'm really done playing the windows "find it online somewhere" game. Packages fucking rock, and with minimal training, they are far easier than doing it the MS way. Which most people can't do without at least minimal training anyway.
On Linux, however, that process is more like go to NVIDIA's site, download file, kill X...find the file you downloaded..
What? What flavor of linux are you using that doesn't have a package manager? And why would you need to kill X? Hell, I think I probably run one of the most overly complex distros, (gentoo) and all I do is:
emerge nvidia-kernel
It then churns and bubbles, and the next time I restart X (or the next day, since I do power my computer off at night to save some $$) the new drivers are running. (Ok, to get full 3-d rendering I need to also add in a "eselect opengl set nvidia" after the emerge, but still, that's far easier than even going to nvidia's website and hunting down the correct driver for your system!)
Granted, you are right in that you sometimes need to update a kernel, but even that's far easier now than it was just 2 years ago. And frankly, most new distros will have compatible kernels with the most recent nvidia drivers. Unless you're a hardcore gamer who wants the best performance possible, you'll probably just install the video driver once and be done with it. If you're ambitious enough to continually update your video drivers, you're ambitious enough to learn how to update a kernel.
It takes me far less time to fire off two commands on the command line which find, download, compile, and install video drivers than doing it the Windows way where I went to a website (couldn't even book the ever-changing url, last time I checked) tracked down the latest drivers for my system, downloaded, went to the download dir, ran the executable (full-screen, with prompts so nothing else could be done in the process) and then had to reboot, and reset all the video settings. And occasionally got to deal with the "you are rebooting now, doesn't matter what you click" prompt.
In fact, until I wrote that, I had forgotten how much of a pain it was to find and intall windows media drivers...god, I think I might have made the full crossing from windows-world to the linux mindset. Scary.
Naw...it's a revised front-end to the Folding@Home project.
I'm sick of this anti-Gentoo bullshit attitude on slashdot. I can complile Gentoo TWICE in this much time. Enough with the lies and outright slander of a fine OS.
I'm not sure where you get your .2C per decade for three decades data, because as far as I can tell, most people (and not just on wikipedia) call it .6C over the last 100 years, with a margin of error of about .2C. Even taking this to be 1C over 100 years, that's about 0.01C per year. Compare that with the longest estimates of the Younger Dryas climate shift, (because you are right about the resolution problem) where there was a ~7C change in only 40-50 years, and you get something like a 0.14C change a year - still an order of magnitude greater than our current bit of climate change. And that's going with a 7C figure - temps then were ~15C less than they are now, and thus 7C is the lower estimate of the shift over that time. In addition, the most dramatic predictions people want to make for the next 100 years is about a 6C rise in temps - still only a .06C change per year. Most predictions are significantly less than this.
The earth, as you have pointed out, has undergone some major climates shifts throughout geologic history, and there has been a lot of landmass change because of it. My argument isn't that this doesn't happen - it is that it does happen, and we need to understand that. Screaming about global warming is like screaming about spring - it happens, it has happend, and it will happen. Over, and over again.
To me, Global Warming is sort-of like a straw-man argument - the real issue is that we're dumping boatloads of crap into the environment, and using up resources far faster than we can replenish them. Rather than wasting tons of time and money worrying about fairly (at least geologically speaking) insignificant climate shifts, we need to worry about stripping our resources bare, and polluting ourselves out of existance.
You miss the entire point - the "theory of global warming" is like the "therory of seasonal warming" (spring) - it's happened a bunch of times before (~50), and the earth has cooled back down a bunch of times before (~50). We know this. It's not some mystical, magical theory put out by crackpots - we have solid geological evidence for around 50 massive temperature swings in the last 50 million years, from really hot to really cold.
Of course our data supports global warming - for the last 50,000 years we've been coming out of an ice age - it's not like we've had the same temp for the last 50,000 years, then suddenly between 1900 and 2000 it got radically warmer - it's been steadily warming the whole time. Historically, we've seem multiple climate shifts AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE larger than the one we are in. Screaming about the current rate of temperature change is like you getting upset being charged $2.50 for a cup of coffee, when you've paid $25 for one on more than one occasion before.
which are these historical changes you speak of?
What? Oh, sorry for trying to argue with you. I guess you aren't able to read my post where I linked directly to some wikipedia articles about rapid temperature changes in geologic history. Sorry for assuming you could read.
If by "alarming rate" you mean "alarmingly slowly", yeah. There have been times in the earth's history where we can see what looks to be a 7.0C change only a few years! In the last 100 years, our "global warming" has been on the order of 0.6C. Total. Over 100 years.
While these mechanisms are different, to call a 0.6C change over 100 years "rapid" is kind of silly. We really don't know shit about global climate patterns yet. I'm all for cutting back on pollution, and managing how we use our resources a lot better - I just get fired up about "global warming", when:
A) We don't know shit about "global warming", or climate change in general.
B) What we're currently measuring is nothing compared to other changes that we can see historically.
C) Politics, the media, and related funding has more to do with "global warming" than science does.
We need to do a better job protecting our environment, and reducing our footprint, as a WORLD. I just don't think blathering on like idiots about "global warming" is helping us do that. It'd be like blathering on about how spring means that all our snow will melt away - it does, on a regular basis. Like global climate change does to the ice caps and glaciers.
The more I read, the more I am convinced that melting ice caps trigger ice ages. Large parts of northern Canada and Russia are very, very dry, because there isn't a lot of water available around the north pole. Open that water up, and suddenly there's a *lot* of water available to make snow and ice. Ala the scientific travesty that was "The Day After Tomorrow", the melting ice caps will probably kill off any warm currents running from the equator north. Open water + cooling temps could quite easily spell a lot of snow in these parts of the world.
Once there is a year-long coating of ice and snow in Canada and Russia, that will reflect a lot of sun, while the water will continue to absorb a lot of it. More water will evaporate, more snow will fall, and glaciers shouldn't be far behind.
While I can't defend the massive amount of carbon pollution that we have dumped into the air, I don't see global warming as a big deal - this has happened a bunch of times, and every time it gets really warm, an Ice Age comes along right afterwards. It's a cycle on a 100k to 1 million year scale that has happened 50 times or so. And we've been collecting data for less than 1% of one cycle. I don't understand why everyone gets so worked up about something that we know very little about.
Pollution is bad - start screaming about that - "global warming" happens like spring and summer happen - regularly, and often. Kinda like "global cooling", except that we currently don't live in a period of the earth's cycle when it's doing that. Who wants to bet that if we did, people would be screaming about global cooling?
Since becoming dead is a certainty and not a possibility...
Bzzzt...wrong!!! You actually have a 50% chance of being immortal. In the history of modern civilization, there have been about 12 billion people. 6 billion of them have never died...
If you want to find out which half you are in for sure, please list me as a benificiary. It won't make a difference if you're immortal, but it will help me out if you're not.
The difference as I see it is that if Linux starts becomming a large-enough market share that it's worth exploiting, WE'LL ALL SHARE SECURITY INFORMATION! If Ubantu sees some holes in an application, they will publish that information, and all the other flavors will a) be notified, and b) be able to make a timely fix. If Gentoo users start seeing code exploitation, they will publish that information, and everyone else will be able to make changes.
Compare that with windows, where many holes and flaws probably go unnoticed for years. And even if there *appears* to be a problem, there's usually no way to crack it open and verify that. The whole open-sharing of information will allow free OSes to do a much better job of closing off security problems than any closed OS will ever be able to.
No, no OS is free from bugs and security holes, but when everyone shares those problems openly, they will probably get fixed, and fixed fast, everywhere they need to get fixed. While we shouldn't get arrogant about security, we can at least be a little egotistic about how well we share security information. And in the long run, I think Linux flavors are far more flexiable about where they apply their man-hours. Microsoft is committed to a release-upgrade cycle. If a Linux flavor needs to put off a new version for a few months while they concentrate on patching holes, they can. If Microsoft delays for six months, their stock goes down and people scream and shout.
Good to know, although I didn't choose Gentoo because I was some rabid optimization fanboy with overly agressive USE flags. I've got a handful of sensible ones, and they don't change often, if at all. But like I said, good to know regardless. Thanks.