You might be a parent in Real Life, but that right there already tells me you're no prude. A prude would object to the fact that the books contain sex scenes and deal with sexuality at all.
We could assess my bona fides but if you assume I am insincere then I don't imagine any evidence will suffice.
How about we consider the phrasing and the context for a moment? "Moronic prude" is much like "religious nut-job" in that it is inherently pejorative. It is a label useful only for dismissing the opinions of others. (How could they possibly have values in perspective? After all, they are prudes?)
So, when I read Lumpy's post, I tried to look beyond the label to the context: "the sex scenes and outright violence in some of the books would have the moronic prude parents today suing everyone in sight for every reason." Ok, now I think I know who he is referring to. Beyond the occasional talk radio I listen to, I've lived in the Bible belt and even spent a few years in Utah so I've been exposed to the, er, militantly religious. But taken in that context, his point seemed... hyperbolic -- i.e. oooh, the religious right taking legal action against teachers who have their students read Starship Troopers or Ringworld or the Lensman for the rampent sex scenes. Surely there are men with less straw in them. Does he really think religious conservatives are so prudish or did a better example (e.g. Ian Banks, Guy Gavriel Kay, Tannith Lee or other authors of the grimly dark or erotic) just not spring to mind?
Basically, we met after school, exchanged books, played dungeons and dragons, talked about video games.... This lasted for 3 months, until the parent of one of the members got wind that we were going to be playing dungeons and dragons, and decided to get the club shut down due to "satanic activity"
I've been in a similar situation. In fact, I've seen this recently arise with one my children. The interesting thing is that the parent I'm thinking of who objects strongly to D&D has no problem with his son playing any number of violent or fantastic video games -- just something about D&D sets them off. But then from other conversations I know he can be very rational on other issues (and possible even rational on the topic of D&D as well, since we haven't discussed it in detail.) In any case, the Vocal Yokels aren't always as prudish, crazy, or even as facile as they may first appear.
So I don't think you're a prude or religious nutjob for taking an interest in your daughters' education. I think that makes you a good parent. Doesn't mean that the real prudes and nutjobs don't exist.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I find that how people are judged often depends on the order of presented evidence. Were I to have led off my response by talking about (e.g.) the type of language, media, activities I allow in my house... well, I wonder if you'd say the same.
But yes, I know a few people who, in my own judgment, are exceptionally prudish -- non-thinkers who march to the strident beat of their preferred demagogue, and some unstable enough to also qualify as nutjobs. These people are not that common, in my opinion. More common by far are the close-minded sorts on both sides who casually toss labels, and refuse to take a deep breath and engage with some measure of patience.
Oh well. I guess my point, assuming I have one, is that once you apply a pejorative label to a person, they become varelse and it becomes impossible to grok them.
(Weak attempt to drag this back in a SciFi direction, but it's the best I have at the moment.)
Problem is most parents freak out. I was in an advanced Lit class and was introduced to Heinlein, Vonnegut, niven, EE Smith, and Ben Bova as writers and the sex scenes and outright violence in some of the books would have the moronic prude parents today suing everyone in sight for every reason.
You have me scratching my head here. I'll play the prude parent here for a moment (because I am one in Real Life), but if you are reading these authors for their sex scenes then you missed the boat. Heinlein (e.g.) keeps coming back to sexual topics, but if you are reading from his most influential works you aren't going to find much that is explicit. And Doc Smith? Maybe I just read the wrong books...
Violence of course is another thing, but the Christian Conservatives I assume you are alluding to do not get worked up over violence the way they do about explicit sex. (If they did, their Bibles would be significantly shorter.)
Hell reading a clockwork orange today in a high school would get most teachers fired.
I really feel bad for teachers today. They have to basically give high school kids nursery rhymes instead of exposing them to real writers gritty stories that make the kids want to read with a passion.
Hah, Nursery rhymes would hardly cut it. I can just see a teacher trying to read "Ding, Dong, Bell" to a class and try to get around the tittering.
Anyway, taking a shot at "moronic prudes" puts you in fine company on slashdot, but I can't help but be amused from my vantage point. Yes, prudes do get worked up over class room material, but the reasons why they complain are seldom simple. E.g., when I complained about my high school daughter watching Scrubs and Casino Royal in school, it wasn't about the material per se but because she was watching them in English (no subtitles, nothing) in Spanish class. You see, they took two weeks off because the teacher couldn't bring herself to put together a lesson plan. I'm sure I'll go down in the school history as just another local religious nut job though.
Or, another example: I just finished reading to my youngest son. The language was occasionally vulgar so I balderized as I read. The book:A Night in the Lonesome October, one of my halloween favorites by Zelazny.
Anyway, pigeon-hole us as you will, but the prudes hardly have a monopoly on idiocy and closed-mindedness. Just something to bear in mind as you wind back to huck that stone. You may be guilty of, if nothing else, unintentional irony.
That's true of students who have affluent parents like you or I who can afford (and consider it a personal imperative) to insure that their children are highly intelligent.
This is not about us. This is about students who end up out wandering the streets on the summers....
I may be missing your point, but I don't see how affluence negates what I wrote. If anything, the fact that I was raised with somewhat limited opportunities as a child (neither parent had a college education, only attended public schools, etc, lower economic status, etc.) would lead me to expect that my children, who are definitely raised under affluent circumstances, should fare batter. But despite the fact that we spend more on their education, and they spend longer days in school and more days a year in school than I ever did, the quality of education seems roughly the same.
In any case, your main point seems to be that pitching this proposal as a "quality of education" concern is something of a pretext and what really is at stake here is adequate babysitting for the underprivileged. Fine. I think that's the obvious conclusion, myself. Let's just not pretend that this is about improving the quality of education then, ok?
I can accept the principle about cognitive spacing, but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant.
My experience (and I acknowledge this is purely anecdotal) is that schools nowadays have mastered the art of wasting time. I've raised kids in three states, both coasts, varying ages, with two of them now in college. My conclusion is that US schools do not teach kids that their time matters, and having reviewed the curriculum for various programs and compared with my own elementary education I'm convinced that we are accomplishing, if not less, then certainly no more than we accomplished back when I was in elementary ed.
Mind, I didn't go to great schools. My high school was the typically crowded urban mess -- police officers and metal detectors added the year after I graduated, but I was able to take two languages including Latin, 5 years of math, and computer programming courses through assembly language. However, both my school year and day were significantly shorter than any children have experienced so far (high school ended at 1:20 p.m. for us, early enough for us to work afternoons).
I have now cycled my high school age children through all of the public schools available in my area, with little qualitative difference among them. Much of the material is the purest pap, and any advanced coursework they've taken has come through university online courses. Basically, my kids go to public school, waste away their time, then come home and we get started.
The notion of given the public schools more of their day turns my stomach.
What are the other reasons? Maybe you could enlighten the rest of us, because I've never been able to figure it out.
Not sure if this is a serious question or rhetorical, but I'll assume the former in my reply (yes, I know this is slashdot).
First, it's not uncommon for an employee who has little or no managerial experience to "not get" what managers do so in my jobs where I've had a significant managerial role (e.g. dept head or VP), I try to make some specific information available for staff. For example, if you reported into me at any level and you came to me with this this question, I would pull out your job description and the one for your manager (assuming you had the same job family) and I would review them side by side with you and answer any questions you had.
But speaking generally (I've had everything from IT to Medical Affairs report into me at various times), some of the things I expect from first line managers (different from their direct reports) are as follows:
Managers are expected to perform at a "role model" level in their specific technical area. As such, they can perform QC/QA activities as needed (especially for junior or recently promoted staff) and are themselves accountable for technical screw ups.
Managers are expected to model business competencies for their group. For example, I expect them to be able to communicate well with customers and colleagues, which I don't necessarily expect from an individual contributor, depending on role.
Managers are personally financially accountable for the success of projects their staff support, and they are "graded" not just on their personal contributions but those of their staff (usually I weight this more to group contribution as a team grows). As such, I instruct new managers that they are not expected to do the job of (e.g.) three people, but to make sure that three people can get their jobs done. This does not mean that they get to use a stick often to whip their employees into longer hours or crazy commitments, because that sort of management is counter productive long-term, but it does mean that managers have to identify and solve problems that limit productivity. I.e., they must continually think "one step ahead"...
Managers are responsible for hiring, training, remediating, and terminating their employees. All of these are time consuming when approached correctly. If you've never been involved in remediation efforts, then I will simply note that that they can take anywhere from 3 months to a year to go through a full process of performance evaluation and documentation, depending on the procedural rules of your organization. Termination for performance is and should be relatively rare, and a manager that decides to go this route better know that their own competency as a manager is called into question. What I've unfortunately had to call upon my own line managers for this year is down-sizing support. And it's really easy to be cavalier about this sort of activity if you haven't been through it before, but it can be a soul sucking experience to have to dismiss your employees for whatever reason. (I don't have or keep managers who don't care about their staff.)
Managers support the company. I'm not saying that you can't like your employees or fight for them (you better if for no other reason than it's your job to retain them), but when something like a strategic business decision is made, you either get behind it or you find a new job.
Granted, there are radically different philosophies about management so ask someone else and you may get a very different answer. That said, I don't think there is anything in my response above that is novel or uncommon.
I always found it very weird, that a manager with a specific competence level gets more than a specialist of the same level in any other job. They just assume to deserve more. "For the responsibility." While in reality, you're the one who is going to get blamed and dumped, as soon as something goes wrong. While he gets a raise for dumping you!
In the US, pay in companies is pretty much determined by pay reference points (PRP) -- i.e. "average" salary statistics for job families and positions in the same locale, industry, company size, etc. These numbers are obtained by HR departments from different companies sharing amongst themselves. While you can reconstruct rules from surveying PRP (e.g. first line managers in my company typically average 4-5k over their direct reports), the pay values are not actually based on any parametric model (such as the one you describe).
As for small group managers and their salaries, I couldn't disagree more. Their average day may not differ much from that of their direct reports, but they get the salary bump for other reasons, which you will figure out if you are in one of these positions for long. And FWIW if I have a manager fire a staff member it pretty much reflects back on them. Hiring staff, retaining good employees, and remediating the less productive ones is all part of what they are "graded" on.
Do you honestly think that the company (any company, not just Apple) would charge you less if people did not do this? The difference is going to boost their profit margin, and since people already have no problems overpaying for a product, they will see no need to lower the price at all.
Are you suggesting that a company will not decrease their profit margin even when it allows them to maximize profit (by increasing sales)?
if the majority of business users don't reject it... it's a change for the better.
Most people in business who use Office 2007 use it because the decision was imposed from above, and there were a lot of reasons for the change beyond the "improvements" in the interface. That it wasn't rejected just tells you that it doesn't suck abysmally.
Is the ribbon better? For a new user, sure. For those of us who knew Word inside and out before, I can't think of a benefit.
Even MS doesn't claim that all hotkeys and key combos work the same as for Office 2003 (because they don't).
But as per a previous poster, it's not about the advanced users (those of us who have had to put up with the various incarnations of Office for 15+ years), because they weren't going to lose us anyway. It's about the new crowd and getting them onboard.
Personally, I hate the ribbon. It's a waste of screen real estate (although MS has never been reluctant to consume as much of my screen as they could get), and after using it now for more than a year I find that I am still not as proficient as I was with Office 2003.
I keep it minimized and try to ignore it.
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Understood, and I'm partial to using of Emacs as an IDE (and for statistical analyses using ESS, and LaTeX). I'm not questioning Emacs utility. I am, however, constantly surprised by Emacs advocates and their inability to see the world from any other perspective. I mean, for heaven's sake, three posts back I have someone responding by citing their own use of emacs for graphics editing. Ok, yes of course you can do that, and yes that may even make sense from time to time, but is Emacs really the best tool you can think of for all of your graphics needs (from a time or ease-of-use perspective)?
Of course, I don't care personally what you or anyone else use -- hey, if it makes you happy, great -- but I am bemused by the logic I'm seeing in this thread (i.e. "Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text..."). For heaven's sake, everything either consists of text or can be represented by text. Follow that logic very far and the only tool you ever need is Emacs.
Anyway, I can tell from your post that you don't just use Emacs, but I swear I think some Emacs users went back for one too many cups of the Kool-aid.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
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Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform?
No one?
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
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Actually, it might.
But usually it does not.
FWIW, I use emacs and prefer to work in a text environment for many tasks. That said, I recognize that there are some tasks better performed outside of a text editor.
Out of curiosity, can anyone else replying concede that point, or is it just emacs all the way down for y'all?
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And of course one could represent an image in straight text (e.g. rgb code) and edited it in a text editor.
Does that make a text editor the best tool for the job?
Also, I'm having a hard time understanding your statistics/psychology analogy. Are you suggesting one or both of these are not sciences?
He's just saying that significant points of convergence (or overlap) isn't the same thing as identity. I.e. that mathematics isn't science just because of the overlap or reliance of upper-level physics (whatever that is) with mathematics. Differences matter too.
The conditions under which the goods we buy are prepared... is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals who are purchasing those goods.
I've never been comfortable with this imputation of moral burden entirely to the buyer. Corporations are complex and no one, least of all your average buyer, has a clue as to all of the financial and commercial entanglements that ultimately deliver a buy-able product.
Also, trying to choose amongst companies is similarly non-trivial, and as their size increases I suspect the more similar they become, if for no other reason than simple stochastics. Or do you really think that large corporations can be pidgeon-holed into "good" and "bad" categories?
Testing is difficult. Having a well-understood tool with a wide body of reference material is important. Intentionally screwing up an important test by publishing the details about that test is unethical.
You assume motive (the purpose of publishing is to screw up the test), but even if we allow motive, it doesn't necessarily follow that the motive is unethical -- e.g. perhaps the publisher believes the test is invalid or harmful and wishes to obsolete it, or perhaps the publisher has considered pros and cons and even though they acknowledge possible harm still considers it overall beneficial to publish
Aside, criticisms of publishing the test seem most sensible if we treat the Rorschach test as irreplaceable. But then I wonder, if it is truly irreplaceable, how does one analyze a psychiatrist or psychologist who has already been exposed to the test?
On several levels -- it's difficult to be both concise and accurate. But, while I'd agree about the importance of thermal maintenance on overall caloric needs, I don't think how calories are burned is at issue in obesity so much as the simple fact of caloric imbalance. I mean, you could be lean whatever your physical activity is, so long as your caloric intake is sufficiently low, and you could be obese with a very broad range of physical activity, so long as consumption is in excess of total caloric needs. (This is not to equate leanness with health, btw.)
I'm currently testing this theory by deliberately dressing a bit cooler than I normally would, and seeing if I lose weight faster
Yes, your caloric burn will go up. However, this typically stimulates increased appetite and consumption. So, to do this correctly you'd need to measure calorie intake before and hold constant, however hunger you are, throughout the experiment. Or, if you don't mind being hungry to lose weight, you could just stay warm and reduce your intake -- i.e. diet:)
Of course this is not a constant model for human weight because of complicating factors like digestion efficiency and metabolic rate.
Digestion efficiency and metabolic rate have very little to do with weight variation in humans. It would take me a few minutes to dig up the numbers, but most human are close enough that I wouldn't consider these to be terribly important factors.
You're claiming that I'm attempting to establish truth as based on my own personal experiences.
Given that you started out by agreeing that you were generalizing from personal experience, I'm not sure why you choose to disagree here. Indeed, in this most recent post you invoke statistical data only to substantiate your claim of normalcy and presumably to bolster the weight of your personal opinion.
When you look at the numbers though, just how intellectually honest are you being?
I'm being a bit lazy in not bothering to cite references, but I'm not being intentionally dishonest. Please understand I am (among other things) a scientific researcher who spent roughly a decade studying the genetics of metabolism in mice and humans in both an academic and industry biotech setting. If I'm cutting corners in this conversation, it's mainly because this is slashdot and not a scientific forum.
Perhaps it's not so unreasonable for me to conclude that I am an average American in this context?
Unreasonable, no. But useful in the context of this discussion? I don't see how. You seem to be simply arguing that "most people are not obese, and I'm not obese, ergo I'm like most people metabolically; and if I'm right, then you must be wrong, etc.
To the extent that this is your intended argument, then you are still arguing from personal experience, only you are more elaborately using data not to support your claim but your personal authority. I hope you understand that this isn't how science operates.
But even if we were to allow argument from personal experience in a scientific discussion, bear in mind that we are talking about the role of appetite/satiety on obesity, and the most relevant comparison would be whether or not you have an appetite comparable to that of obese people. You may believe this to be the case, and that may even be true, but I don't see any basis for the claim.
The only thing I'm selling is personal responsibility.
My criticism is not in what you are selling but about how you are selling it. In fact, you are selling a product (personal responsibility) that I believe in -- you just use the fallacious methods (e.g. personal testimonial) to peddle it.
I'm not special and have a metabolism similar to most Americans. I was that 200lb guy that had his wake-up call.
and
Hard? Hardly. It does take a bit of effort though."
So basically, you are generalizing from your own experience in assuming your metabolism and appetite are typical, and that obese people are much the same but they just make poor choices. Briefly, I disagree not just with your conclusions but with your inferential process. You've wandered into epistemological territory where truth is established by personal testimonial. Snake oil of all varieties is sold by almost exactly the same logic.
Which is one of the principle ways that people fool themselves about their diet -- e.g. what I'm eating now won't matter because I'll do X later (where "X" is to explicitly exercise, eat less, or some other routine change). [And, aside, if you burned just 350-400 calories once per week via exercise this would be sufficient to address the caloric excess I described in my hypothetical earlier. That's how little of an excess we're talking about here.]
Anyway, the "I'll do X later" is an effective self-deception because at the heart lies the kernel of truth: It really isn't the "candy bar" per se that you eat at 11 a.m. that gets you, it's the caloric excess overall when you total across a larger interval. So, yes, you really can go ahead and have that candy bar, or that Ben & Jerry's pint, or whatever so long as you compensate appropriately later, either by increasing caloric burn (exercise) or decreased consumption.
If I can come clean on the topic, I'm actually on the side of the "get off your fat butt and make changes to your life" camp. However, one of the things I find fascinating is that the side I am most in agreement with is nevertheless largely ignorant about the biology of obesity and curiously resistant to fact. People who take strong positions against obesity I think have their hearts in the right place, but not much else. For example? For most mammals about 80% of observed variation in weight (by various measures) is heritable -- i.e. genetic, in some form. There is almost no trait easier to breed up or down in animals. And guess what: Humans are no different.
But people don't like hearing this, perhaps because it smacks of biological determinism. Well, it's not -- deterministic, that is. Fat people from fat families manage to lose and retain weight loss all the time. It's just pretty damnably tough, and failures outweigh (heh) successes by a large margin. Think less than 1 in 10 if you want to talk about long term success, and this with outside support, such as a physician or a weight loss group.
Speaking as someone who has studied metabolic disorders for about a decade, the two things that I would really like lean people to understand are these:
1) Most fat people do not (as per the original poster) have an eating problem in the way that is immediately obvious (e.g. consuming multiple hamburgers, orders of fries, shakes at every meal). This is important for lean people to know not just because of the potential ignorant and harmful stereotypes they might buy into and perpetuate otherwise, but because many fat people start out lean at a younger age. And young lean people need to know that personally using "absence of gluttony" as an indicator that they are eating right can get them into serious trouble. It simply does not take much of a caloric imbalance to lead to long term accumulation and, eventually, middle age obesity. Better by far to track your weight and adjust your diet and exercise accordingly
2) Obesity is not, however much we would like it to be, a simple matter of choosing a desired outcome or of spot decision making every now and then. People who are fat do not typically look at themselves in the mirror and go, "oh yeah baby, on me these rolls look good" nor do they look at a pile of food and say, "you know, screw this diet; I'm thinking about 10 lbs of lard sounds really tasty about now." It's about longer term trends, and making the right choices in spite of continuous pressure from one's appetite to make unhelpful decisions. Bear in mind that the neurological processes linking appetite and satiety are very closely coupled with processes involved in addictions (which, aside, is one of the reasons it is so tough to pharmacologically alter appetite without causing additional problems). But, unfortunately, unlike most harmful addictions, an obese individual does not have the option of going "cold turkey." They have to keep eating, every day, and they have to keep dealing with a body that is sending them unhelpful signal
No, fat people are fat because they choose to be (with the possible exception of some sort of disorder but even then, there is likely a solution available).
I don't see where I said that choice wasn't involved. I agree that eating that extra candy bar or drinking that coke involves choice. In any case, I might as well reply to your point even though it is misdirected:
Yes, people make a conscious choice when they consume. However, individuals do not have much control over their appetite, despite what you might have hear from diet advertisers. And people who's bodies tell them they are hungry constantly find it difficult to just, you know, ignore the biological signals. As for eating disorders and solutions, unfortunately this is not the case. Without reviewing pharmacologic history and alternatives (such as counseling), I'll just say that effective appetite suppressants are typically illegal in the US due to highly addictive qualities and side effects. Those that are FDA approved generally focus on minimizing caloric uptake (as opposed to altering appetite) and have minimal efficacy (e.g. Orlistat I believe offers something like a 5-10 lbs sustained weight loss after a year of consistent usage). This area has been a holy grail for pharmaceutical researchers for several decades now. I see no indication (and I've worked in the field) that any solutions are pending. Surgical interventions are available and currently represent probably the most effectivity, but these are costly and come with their own risks.
For most people, once they reach ~200lbs (well, for men), it's quite obvious to them and everyone else that they are overweight. Why is that not a wake-up call that forces them to re-evaluate the necessity of those fast food meals and just how big of an inconvenience it is for them to spend 1% of their week exercising (which can be quite fun, even).
You ask a fair question, but the problem is that you have to not eat those hypothetical two candy bars every week for the rest of your adult life. Do you have any notion how difficult it is to regulate your caloric balance to that degree especially when your body, every day and most every hour, tells you you are hungry? When hunger becomes a distraction of work or entertainment? We learn at an early age to trust our bodies. When they say we are tired, we sleep. When they tell us our hand burns, we take it out of the fire. When they tell us we are hungry... well, you get the picture.
Anyway, I congratulate you on your well-balanced metabolism. Not every one has one. But yes, eating is a choice, and yes being obese represents some exercise of choice. Let's just be clear about what: It is not about stuffing your face with hamburgers and a large milk shake every time you go to McD's. While currently an acceptable belief (and vehicle for bigotry) it nevertheless lacks the virtue of truth.
Embarrassment is a powerful motivator. If you know a bunch of people are going to see your naked body everyday, you are going to think twice when you go to mcdonalds for lunch ordering a handful of cheeseburgers, 2 large frys, and a large chocolate shake.
So fat people are fat because they eat obscene amounts of food?
Let's do some math: What does it take to turn a healthy 20 year old into a 40 year old who is 100 lbs over weight? At (approximate numbers follow) 4000 calories per pound, 100 lbs is 400,000 calories, which divided by roughly 50 weeks per year times 20 years (1000 weeks) is about 400 calories per week. That's less than two candy bars per week excess.
So, to get fat, all you need is a modest caloric excess plus time. [Of course, occasional gorging -- e.g. at holidays -- doesn't hurt either.]
In many companies, you would be darn near shot for asking if you can access your PC from home. Besides, what do you need off your PC? Your data should not be on the pc, it should be sitting on a server, where it can be properly secured. That's what VPN's and terminal servers are for..
/shrug. Data on server, yes; application on PC server, generally no. And it's funny, really. I've worked in a research environment where PCs were used as analytical instruments and, yes, we had users VPN'ing into the network and remote accessing their PCs to check on jobs at night to make sure they were still executing, and I had to deal with IT about this and single PC policies, etc. and after getting a bunch of push-back, I said, no problemo -- let me describe the needs of my department and you tell me how you want to solve them. And I worked with a couple of nice IT reps and they devised a server with various VM environments where we could run our long computationally intensive jobs, and I helped build the business case, etc. and at the end of the day, hey, it turned out they didn't have the budget and they decided to leave things the way they were.
Which is fine. My position is simply that IT shouldn't whine about atypical user behavior patterns unless/until they are ready to address their underlying business needs . . . which, frankly, IT is often ignorant of or indifferent towards.
Updates should NOT be run at night, because then the machines never get rebooted to actually activate the updates (unless you tell them to reboot even if the user is logged in, which ruins the "running a simulation all night" thing)
Yeah, I love policies like this. I'll be setting in some seminar and in the middle of the speaker's presentation there will be a forced reboot after a background install. Lovely. Convenient for IT, yes. Inconvenient for the audience of 100+ who get to wait through a 5 minute restart. Or, hah, I'll turn on my PC at the beginning of the day and run through the ungodly boot times imposed by who knows how much crap that's been layered on by IT, followed by the obligatory virus scan, installs, reboots etc. Some days, it's 30 minutes to an hour before I can get to work. Of course IT doesn't mind about stuff like this because opportunity cost is unmeasured and in any case doesn't hit their books. For all the processes I had to deal with in a large corporate environment, I never saw a full requirements analysis run before IT rolled out a policy, or an impact analysis afterwords. Lesson learned: IT cares about IT and not much else.
But life is good. I'm in a smaller company now, the IT people actually care if projects and work are getting done, and the users try not to make life miserable for IT (and sometimes succeed) -- so much more comfortable than having to fight IT day by day just to do the work I was hired to do.
Even MS doesn't claim that all of the old key combos carry over from 2003, and with a little web browsing you can find a number (most obscure) that do not. They only matter, of course, if you use key combos routinely. I do. MS 2007 mostly works for me but I still run into the occasional stumbling block.
" If you wilfully insist on doing things inefficiently"
You think key combos are inefficient? Do you not know how to type without looking at a keyboard?
"They did their best. It even lights up the first time you launch an Office 2007 app, in a desperate attempt to draw your attention to it."
Many people who run Office 2007 still run it on Windows XP (e.g. those forced to run Word 2007 for document compatibility, but on the enterprise XP standard). I for one didn't pay any attention to the "help" that Word 2007 provided when it first launched because I've been conditioned by MS to ignore their generally useless help and hint system (remember Clippy?). So for me also it was a surprise to discover the button, and it took me a while to figure out what functionality it replaced from MS 2003. I've been using 2007 now for about 6 months and I don't hate it or anything, but I'm not going to give the MS dev team any kudos for helping users make the transition. The new system doesn't strike me as superior -- now that I use it, I don't find myself able to do old things faster or many new things. Looks to me like your typical empty product change so you can slap a "new and improved" label on it for witless consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be a parent in Real Life, but that right there already tells me you're no prude. A prude would object to the fact that the books contain sex scenes and deal with sexuality at all.
We could assess my bona fides but if you assume I am insincere then I don't imagine any evidence will suffice.
How about we consider the phrasing and the context for a moment? "Moronic prude" is much like "religious nut-job" in that it is inherently pejorative. It is a label useful only for dismissing the opinions of others. (How could they possibly have values in perspective? After all, they are prudes?)
So, when I read Lumpy's post, I tried to look beyond the label to the context: "the sex scenes and outright violence in some of the books would have the moronic prude parents today suing everyone in sight for every reason." Ok, now I think I know who he is referring to. Beyond the occasional talk radio I listen to, I've lived in the Bible belt and even spent a few years in Utah so I've been exposed to the, er, militantly religious. But taken in that context, his point seemed ... hyperbolic -- i.e. oooh, the religious right taking legal action against teachers who have their students read Starship Troopers or Ringworld or the Lensman for the rampent sex scenes. Surely there are men with less straw in them. Does he really think religious conservatives are so prudish or did a better example (e.g. Ian Banks, Guy Gavriel Kay, Tannith Lee or other authors of the grimly dark or erotic) just not spring to mind?
Basically, we met after school, exchanged books, played dungeons and dragons, talked about video games. ... This lasted for 3 months, until the parent of one of the members got wind that we were going to be playing dungeons and dragons, and decided to get the club shut down due to "satanic activity"
I've been in a similar situation. In fact, I've seen this recently arise with one my children. The interesting thing is that the parent I'm thinking of who objects strongly to D&D has no problem with his son playing any number of violent or fantastic video games -- just something about D&D sets them off. But then from other conversations I know he can be very rational on other issues (and possible even rational on the topic of D&D as well, since we haven't discussed it in detail.) In any case, the Vocal Yokels aren't always as prudish, crazy, or even as facile as they may first appear.
So I don't think you're a prude or religious nutjob for taking an interest in your daughters' education. I think that makes you a good parent. Doesn't mean that the real prudes and nutjobs don't exist.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I find that how people are judged often depends on the order of presented evidence. Were I to have led off my response by talking about (e.g.) the type of language, media, activities I allow in my house ... well, I wonder if you'd say the same.
But yes, I know a few people who, in my own judgment, are exceptionally prudish -- non-thinkers who march to the strident beat of their preferred demagogue, and some unstable enough to also qualify as nutjobs. These people are not that common, in my opinion. More common by far are the close-minded sorts on both sides who casually toss labels, and refuse to take a deep breath and engage with some measure of patience.
Oh well. I guess my point, assuming I have one, is that once you apply a pejorative label to a person, they become varelse and it becomes impossible to grok them.
(Weak attempt to drag this back in a SciFi direction, but it's the best I have at the moment.)
Problem is most parents freak out. I was in an advanced Lit class and was introduced to Heinlein, Vonnegut, niven, EE Smith, and Ben Bova as writers and the sex scenes and outright violence in some of the books would have the moronic prude parents today suing everyone in sight for every reason.
You have me scratching my head here. I'll play the prude parent here for a moment (because I am one in Real Life), but if you are reading these authors for their sex scenes then you missed the boat. Heinlein (e.g.) keeps coming back to sexual topics, but if you are reading from his most influential works you aren't going to find much that is explicit. And Doc Smith? Maybe I just read the wrong books ...
Violence of course is another thing, but the Christian Conservatives I assume you are alluding to do not get worked up over violence the way they do about explicit sex. (If they did, their Bibles would be significantly shorter.)
Hell reading a clockwork orange today in a high school would get most teachers fired.
I really feel bad for teachers today. They have to basically give high school kids nursery rhymes instead of exposing them to real writers gritty stories that make the kids want to read with a passion.
Hah, Nursery rhymes would hardly cut it. I can just see a teacher trying to read "Ding, Dong, Bell" to a class and try to get around the tittering.
Anyway, taking a shot at "moronic prudes" puts you in fine company on slashdot, but I can't help but be amused from my vantage point. Yes, prudes do get worked up over class room material, but the reasons why they complain are seldom simple. E.g., when I complained about my high school daughter watching Scrubs and Casino Royal in school, it wasn't about the material per se but because she was watching them in English (no subtitles, nothing) in Spanish class. You see, they took two weeks off because the teacher couldn't bring herself to put together a lesson plan. I'm sure I'll go down in the school history as just another local religious nut job though.
Or, another example: I just finished reading to my youngest son. The language was occasionally vulgar so I balderized as I read. The book:A Night in the Lonesome October, one of my halloween favorites by Zelazny.
Anyway, pigeon-hole us as you will, but the prudes hardly have a monopoly on idiocy and closed-mindedness. Just something to bear in mind as you wind back to huck that stone. You may be guilty of, if nothing else, unintentional irony.
That's true of students who have affluent parents like you or I who can afford (and consider it a personal imperative) to insure that their children are highly intelligent.
This is not about us. This is about students who end up out wandering the streets on the summers. ...
I may be missing your point, but I don't see how affluence negates what I wrote. If anything, the fact that I was raised with somewhat limited opportunities as a child (neither parent had a college education, only attended public schools, etc, lower economic status, etc.) would lead me to expect that my children, who are definitely raised under affluent circumstances, should fare batter. But despite the fact that we spend more on their education, and they spend longer days in school and more days a year in school than I ever did, the quality of education seems roughly the same.
In any case, your main point seems to be that pitching this proposal as a "quality of education" concern is something of a pretext and what really is at stake here is adequate babysitting for the underprivileged. Fine. I think that's the obvious conclusion, myself. Let's just not pretend that this is about improving the quality of education then, ok?
My experience (and I acknowledge this is purely anecdotal) is that schools nowadays have mastered the art of wasting time. I've raised kids in three states, both coasts, varying ages, with two of them now in college. My conclusion is that US schools do not teach kids that their time matters, and having reviewed the curriculum for various programs and compared with my own elementary education I'm convinced that we are accomplishing, if not less, then certainly no more than we accomplished back when I was in elementary ed.
Mind, I didn't go to great schools. My high school was the typically crowded urban mess -- police officers and metal detectors added the year after I graduated, but I was able to take two languages including Latin, 5 years of math, and computer programming courses through assembly language. However, both my school year and day were significantly shorter than any children have experienced so far (high school ended at 1:20 p.m. for us, early enough for us to work afternoons).
I have now cycled my high school age children through all of the public schools available in my area, with little qualitative difference among them. Much of the material is the purest pap, and any advanced coursework they've taken has come through university online courses. Basically, my kids go to public school, waste away their time, then come home and we get started.
The notion of given the public schools more of their day turns my stomach.
What are the other reasons? Maybe you could enlighten the rest of us, because I've never been able to figure it out.
Not sure if this is a serious question or rhetorical, but I'll assume the former in my reply (yes, I know this is slashdot).
First, it's not uncommon for an employee who has little or no managerial experience to "not get" what managers do so in my jobs where I've had a significant managerial role (e.g. dept head or VP), I try to make some specific information available for staff. For example, if you reported into me at any level and you came to me with this this question, I would pull out your job description and the one for your manager (assuming you had the same job family) and I would review them side by side with you and answer any questions you had.
But speaking generally (I've had everything from IT to Medical Affairs report into me at various times), some of the things I expect from first line managers (different from their direct reports) are as follows:
Granted, there are radically different philosophies about management so ask someone else and you may get a very different answer. That said, I don't think there is anything in my response above that is novel or uncommon.
I always found it very weird, that a manager with a specific competence level gets more than a specialist of the same level in any other job. They just assume to deserve more. "For the responsibility." While in reality, you're the one who is going to get blamed and dumped, as soon as something goes wrong. While he gets a raise for dumping you!
In the US, pay in companies is pretty much determined by pay reference points (PRP) -- i.e. "average" salary statistics for job families and positions in the same locale, industry, company size, etc. These numbers are obtained by HR departments from different companies sharing amongst themselves. While you can reconstruct rules from surveying PRP (e.g. first line managers in my company typically average 4-5k over their direct reports), the pay values are not actually based on any parametric model (such as the one you describe).
As for small group managers and their salaries, I couldn't disagree more. Their average day may not differ much from that of their direct reports, but they get the salary bump for other reasons, which you will figure out if you are in one of these positions for long. And FWIW if I have a manager fire a staff member it pretty much reflects back on them. Hiring staff, retaining good employees, and remediating the less productive ones is all part of what they are "graded" on.
Do you honestly think that the company (any company, not just Apple) would charge you less if people did not do this? The difference is going to boost their profit margin, and since people already have no problems overpaying for a product, they will see no need to lower the price at all.
Are you suggesting that a company will not decrease their profit margin even when it allows them to maximize profit (by increasing sales)?
if the majority of business users don't reject it ... it's a change for the better.
Most people in business who use Office 2007 use it because the decision was imposed from above, and there were a lot of reasons for the change beyond the "improvements" in the interface. That it wasn't rejected just tells you that it doesn't suck abysmally.
Is the ribbon better? For a new user, sure. For those of us who knew Word inside and out before, I can't think of a benefit.
But as per a previous poster, it's not about the advanced users (those of us who have had to put up with the various incarnations of Office for 15+ years), because they weren't going to lose us anyway. It's about the new crowd and getting them onboard.
Personally, I hate the ribbon. It's a waste of screen real estate (although MS has never been reluctant to consume as much of my screen as they could get), and after using it now for more than a year I find that I am still not as proficient as I was with Office 2003.
I keep it minimized and try to ignore it.
Of course, I don't care personally what you or anyone else use -- hey, if it makes you happy, great -- but I am bemused by the logic I'm seeing in this thread (i.e. "Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text ..."). For heaven's sake, everything either consists of text or can be represented by text. Follow that logic very far and the only tool you ever need is Emacs.
Anyway, I can tell from your post that you don't just use Emacs, but I swear I think some Emacs users went back for one too many cups of the Kool-aid.
Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform?
No one?
Actually, it might.
But usually it does not.
FWIW, I use emacs and prefer to work in a text environment for many tasks. That said, I recognize that there are some tasks better performed outside of a text editor.
Out of curiosity, can anyone else replying concede that point, or is it just emacs all the way down for y'all?
Does that make a text editor the best tool for the job?
Also, I'm having a hard time understanding your statistics/psychology analogy. Are you suggesting one or both of these are not sciences?
He's just saying that significant points of convergence (or overlap) isn't the same thing as identity. I.e. that mathematics isn't science just because of the overlap or reliance of upper-level physics (whatever that is) with mathematics. Differences matter too.
Assuming that light sensitivity and light emission are independently normally distributed in the population, it's entirely possible that ...
Ah yes, the ole' assume the spherical cow ...
The conditions under which the goods we buy are prepared ... is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals who are purchasing those goods.
I've never been comfortable with this imputation of moral burden entirely to the buyer. Corporations are complex and no one, least of all your average buyer, has a clue as to all of the financial and commercial entanglements that ultimately deliver a buy-able product.
Also, trying to choose amongst companies is similarly non-trivial, and as their size increases I suspect the more similar they become, if for no other reason than simple stochastics. Or do you really think that large corporations can be pidgeon-holed into "good" and "bad" categories?
Testing is difficult. Having a well-understood tool with a wide body of reference material is important. Intentionally screwing up an important test by publishing the details about that test is unethical.
You assume motive (the purpose of publishing is to screw up the test), but even if we allow motive, it doesn't necessarily follow that the motive is unethical -- e.g. perhaps the publisher believes the test is invalid or harmful and wishes to obsolete it, or perhaps the publisher has considered pros and cons and even though they acknowledge possible harm still considers it overall beneficial to publish
Aside, criticisms of publishing the test seem most sensible if we treat the Rorschach test as irreplaceable. But then I wonder, if it is truly irreplaceable, how does one analyze a psychiatrist or psychologist who has already been exposed to the test?
Your analysis is somewhat misleading.
On several levels -- it's difficult to be both concise and accurate. But, while I'd agree about the importance of thermal maintenance on overall caloric needs, I don't think how calories are burned is at issue in obesity so much as the simple fact of caloric imbalance. I mean, you could be lean whatever your physical activity is, so long as your caloric intake is sufficiently low, and you could be obese with a very broad range of physical activity, so long as consumption is in excess of total caloric needs. (This is not to equate leanness with health, btw.)
I'm currently testing this theory by deliberately dressing a bit cooler than I normally would, and seeing if I lose weight faster
Yes, your caloric burn will go up. However, this typically stimulates increased appetite and consumption. So, to do this correctly you'd need to measure calorie intake before and hold constant, however hunger you are, throughout the experiment. Or, if you don't mind being hungry to lose weight, you could just stay warm and reduce your intake -- i.e. diet :)
Of course this is not a constant model for human weight because of complicating factors like digestion efficiency and metabolic rate.
Digestion efficiency and metabolic rate have very little to do with weight variation in humans. It would take me a few minutes to dig up the numbers, but most human are close enough that I wouldn't consider these to be terribly important factors.
You're claiming that I'm attempting to establish truth as based on my own personal experiences.
Given that you started out by agreeing that you were generalizing from personal experience, I'm not sure why you choose to disagree here. Indeed, in this most recent post you invoke statistical data only to substantiate your claim of normalcy and presumably to bolster the weight of your personal opinion.
When you look at the numbers though, just how intellectually honest are you being?
I'm being a bit lazy in not bothering to cite references, but I'm not being intentionally dishonest. Please understand I am (among other things) a scientific researcher who spent roughly a decade studying the genetics of metabolism in mice and humans in both an academic and industry biotech setting. If I'm cutting corners in this conversation, it's mainly because this is slashdot and not a scientific forum.
Perhaps it's not so unreasonable for me to conclude that I am an average American in this context?
Unreasonable, no. But useful in the context of this discussion? I don't see how. You seem to be simply arguing that "most people are not obese, and I'm not obese, ergo I'm like most people metabolically; and if I'm right, then you must be wrong, etc.
To the extent that this is your intended argument, then you are still arguing from personal experience, only you are more elaborately using data not to support your claim but your personal authority. I hope you understand that this isn't how science operates.
But even if we were to allow argument from personal experience in a scientific discussion, bear in mind that we are talking about the role of appetite/satiety on obesity, and the most relevant comparison would be whether or not you have an appetite comparable to that of obese people. You may believe this to be the case, and that may even be true, but I don't see any basis for the claim.
The only thing I'm selling is personal responsibility.
My criticism is not in what you are selling but about how you are selling it. In fact, you are selling a product (personal responsibility) that I believe in -- you just use the fallacious methods (e.g. personal testimonial) to peddle it.
I'm not special and have a metabolism similar to most Americans. I was that 200lb guy that had his wake-up call.
and
Hard? Hardly. It does take a bit of effort though."
So basically, you are generalizing from your own experience in assuming your metabolism and appetite are typical, and that obese people are much the same but they just make poor choices. Briefly, I disagree not just with your conclusions but with your inferential process. You've wandered into epistemological territory where truth is established by personal testimonial. Snake oil of all varieties is sold by almost exactly the same logic.
Anyway, the "I'll do X later" is an effective self-deception because at the heart lies the kernel of truth: It really isn't the "candy bar" per se that you eat at 11 a.m. that gets you, it's the caloric excess overall when you total across a larger interval. So, yes, you really can go ahead and have that candy bar, or that Ben & Jerry's pint, or whatever so long as you compensate appropriately later, either by increasing caloric burn (exercise) or decreased consumption.
If I can come clean on the topic, I'm actually on the side of the "get off your fat butt and make changes to your life" camp. However, one of the things I find fascinating is that the side I am most in agreement with is nevertheless largely ignorant about the biology of obesity and curiously resistant to fact. People who take strong positions against obesity I think have their hearts in the right place, but not much else. For example? For most mammals about 80% of observed variation in weight (by various measures) is heritable -- i.e. genetic, in some form. There is almost no trait easier to breed up or down in animals. And guess what: Humans are no different.
But people don't like hearing this, perhaps because it smacks of biological determinism. Well, it's not -- deterministic, that is. Fat people from fat families manage to lose and retain weight loss all the time. It's just pretty damnably tough, and failures outweigh (heh) successes by a large margin. Think less than 1 in 10 if you want to talk about long term success, and this with outside support, such as a physician or a weight loss group.
Speaking as someone who has studied metabolic disorders for about a decade, the two things that I would really like lean people to understand are these:
1) Most fat people do not (as per the original poster) have an eating problem in the way that is immediately obvious (e.g. consuming multiple hamburgers, orders of fries, shakes at every meal). This is important for lean people to know not just because of the potential ignorant and harmful stereotypes they might buy into and perpetuate otherwise, but because many fat people start out lean at a younger age. And young lean people need to know that personally using "absence of gluttony" as an indicator that they are eating right can get them into serious trouble. It simply does not take much of a caloric imbalance to lead to long term accumulation and, eventually, middle age obesity. Better by far to track your weight and adjust your diet and exercise accordingly
2) Obesity is not, however much we would like it to be, a simple matter of choosing a desired outcome or of spot decision making every now and then. People who are fat do not typically look at themselves in the mirror and go, "oh yeah baby, on me these rolls look good" nor do they look at a pile of food and say, "you know, screw this diet; I'm thinking about 10 lbs of lard sounds really tasty about now." It's about longer term trends, and making the right choices in spite of continuous pressure from one's appetite to make unhelpful decisions. Bear in mind that the neurological processes linking appetite and satiety are very closely coupled with processes involved in addictions (which, aside, is one of the reasons it is so tough to pharmacologically alter appetite without causing additional problems). But, unfortunately, unlike most harmful addictions, an obese individual does not have the option of going "cold turkey." They have to keep eating, every day, and they have to keep dealing with a body that is sending them unhelpful signal
No, fat people are fat because they choose to be (with the possible exception of some sort of disorder but even then, there is likely a solution available).
I don't see where I said that choice wasn't involved. I agree that eating that extra candy bar or drinking that coke involves choice. In any case, I might as well reply to your point even though it is misdirected:
Yes, people make a conscious choice when they consume. However, individuals do not have much control over their appetite, despite what you might have hear from diet advertisers. And people who's bodies tell them they are hungry constantly find it difficult to just, you know, ignore the biological signals. As for eating disorders and solutions, unfortunately this is not the case. Without reviewing pharmacologic history and alternatives (such as counseling), I'll just say that effective appetite suppressants are typically illegal in the US due to highly addictive qualities and side effects. Those that are FDA approved generally focus on minimizing caloric uptake (as opposed to altering appetite) and have minimal efficacy (e.g. Orlistat I believe offers something like a 5-10 lbs sustained weight loss after a year of consistent usage). This area has been a holy grail for pharmaceutical researchers for several decades now. I see no indication (and I've worked in the field) that any solutions are pending. Surgical interventions are available and currently represent probably the most effectivity, but these are costly and come with their own risks.
For most people, once they reach ~200lbs (well, for men), it's quite obvious to them and everyone else that they are overweight. Why is that not a wake-up call that forces them to re-evaluate the necessity of those fast food meals and just how big of an inconvenience it is for them to spend 1% of their week exercising (which can be quite fun, even).
You ask a fair question, but the problem is that you have to not eat those hypothetical two candy bars every week for the rest of your adult life. Do you have any notion how difficult it is to regulate your caloric balance to that degree especially when your body, every day and most every hour, tells you you are hungry? When hunger becomes a distraction of work or entertainment? We learn at an early age to trust our bodies. When they say we are tired, we sleep. When they tell us our hand burns, we take it out of the fire. When they tell us we are hungry ... well, you get the picture.
Anyway, I congratulate you on your well-balanced metabolism. Not every one has one. But yes, eating is a choice, and yes being obese represents some exercise of choice. Let's just be clear about what: It is not about stuffing your face with hamburgers and a large milk shake every time you go to McD's. While currently an acceptable belief (and vehicle for bigotry) it nevertheless lacks the virtue of truth.
Embarrassment is a powerful motivator. If you know a bunch of people are going to see your naked body everyday, you are going to think twice when you go to mcdonalds for lunch ordering a handful of cheeseburgers, 2 large frys, and a large chocolate shake.
So fat people are fat because they eat obscene amounts of food?
Let's do some math: What does it take to turn a healthy 20 year old into a 40 year old who is 100 lbs over weight? At (approximate numbers follow) 4000 calories per pound, 100 lbs is 400,000 calories, which divided by roughly 50 weeks per year times 20 years (1000 weeks) is about 400 calories per week. That's less than two candy bars per week excess.
So, to get fat, all you need is a modest caloric excess plus time. [Of course, occasional gorging -- e.g. at holidays -- doesn't hurt either.]
In many companies, you would be darn near shot for asking if you can access your PC from home. Besides, what do you need off your PC? Your data should not be on the pc, it should be sitting on a server, where it can be properly secured. That's what VPN's and terminal servers are for..
Which is fine. My position is simply that IT shouldn't whine about atypical user behavior patterns unless/until they are ready to address their underlying business needs . . . which, frankly, IT is often ignorant of or indifferent towards.
Updates should NOT be run at night, because then the machines never get rebooted to actually activate the updates (unless you tell them to reboot even if the user is logged in, which ruins the "running a simulation all night" thing)
Yeah, I love policies like this. I'll be setting in some seminar and in the middle of the speaker's presentation there will be a forced reboot after a background install. Lovely. Convenient for IT, yes. Inconvenient for the audience of 100+ who get to wait through a 5 minute restart. Or, hah, I'll turn on my PC at the beginning of the day and run through the ungodly boot times imposed by who knows how much crap that's been layered on by IT, followed by the obligatory virus scan, installs, reboots etc. Some days, it's 30 minutes to an hour before I can get to work. Of course IT doesn't mind about stuff like this because opportunity cost is unmeasured and in any case doesn't hit their books. For all the processes I had to deal with in a large corporate environment, I never saw a full requirements analysis run before IT rolled out a policy, or an impact analysis afterwords. Lesson learned: IT cares about IT and not much else.
But life is good. I'm in a smaller company now, the IT people actually care if projects and work are getting done, and the users try not to make life miserable for IT (and sometimes succeed) -- so much more comfortable than having to fight IT day by day just to do the work I was hired to do.
"All the old keybindings still work."
Even MS doesn't claim that all of the old key combos carry over from 2003, and with a little web browsing you can find a number (most obscure) that do not. They only matter, of course, if you use key combos routinely. I do. MS 2007 mostly works for me but I still run into the occasional stumbling block.
" If you wilfully insist on doing things inefficiently"
You think key combos are inefficient? Do you not know how to type without looking at a keyboard?
"They did their best. It even lights up the first time you launch an Office 2007 app, in a desperate attempt to draw your attention to it."
Many people who run Office 2007 still run it on Windows XP (e.g. those forced to run Word 2007 for document compatibility, but on the enterprise XP standard). I for one didn't pay any attention to the "help" that Word 2007 provided when it first launched because I've been conditioned by MS to ignore their generally useless help and hint system (remember Clippy?). So for me also it was a surprise to discover the button, and it took me a while to figure out what functionality it replaced from MS 2003. I've been using 2007 now for about 6 months and I don't hate it or anything, but I'm not going to give the MS dev team any kudos for helping users make the transition. The new system doesn't strike me as superior -- now that I use it, I don't find myself able to do old things faster or many new things. Looks to me like your typical empty product change so you can slap a "new and improved" label on it for witless consumers.