I was impressed at how quickly Win7 booted the first time I installed it. That was one of the biggest improvements over XP (I skipped Vista). If Win7 was my daily driver, I would invest the time and effort necessary to track down whatever is causing this nonsense--maybe it is just one rogue service that scans my hard drive on every boot, who knows, but at present I'd rather spend the time gaming and just boot into Linux for productivity (an ancillary benefit of Linux is that it sucks for gaming, so I have no distractions).
I'm also pretty sure that there is something about my usage pattern because this has been happening to me forever. I run WinXP in a virtual machine at work to control some instruments and it remains peppy as the day it was installed. Ditto for the native Win7 machines that are only used as controllers. It seems that as soon as I start using a Windows installation for personal use it slowly self destructs. My theory is that Windows hates me. But I'm also a relentless cracker; I have purchased all my software and games (and Windows) since becoming a gainfully employed adult (I'll admit it: I pirated TIE Fighter) but I crack everything that punishes me with DRM or repeated product activations (particularly if the alternative is to interact with "customer service") which certainly makes me more vulnerable to malware.
BTW I love how seriously everyone around here takes their OS (myself included). This thread reminds me of the "old"/.
I did check the resource monitor and it says that the "System" process is responsible for 99% of the I/O activity during the boot process. I have Steam set not to autolaunch for exactly that reason--it has a tendency to "update" the same game over and over on launch, which takes forever, so I wait until the HD light settles before launching it. I've disabled all of the services that I know I can disable (random crapware and services for network printers I will never use, etc.)
I don't think it is a failed drive because I'm on hard drive number two for this installation, but I've had enough drives fail in my life that a part of me does expect a BSoD followed by a SMART failure on reboot.
Thanks for the advice, BTW, I didn't expect so much hate just for preferring Linux on my home PC.
It is only powered up long enough to play games and I watch my network traffic pretty closely at the gateway (pfsense) so I'm not too worried about being part of a botnet. Wouldn't my AV program catch those? I honestly have very little experience with AV programs--I just installed one of the free ones recommended by MS when I first installed Windows (and I do keep the definitions up to date and let it do a full scan once in a while). I purchase all of the games that I play, but I also crack any of them punish me with DRM nonsense, so there is certainly a potential delivery vector for malware.
My win machine has an ssd for the os drive. From button to ready to go is about 35 seconds, including me typing my password. I have the docs and all that moved to a spinning disk. Took less than an hour of customization after the install to move the stuff that was going to take space. If windows is "thrashing" an ssd for 20 minutes, you have malware. If it is thrashing the spinning disk when you installed windows on the ssd, you have malware, or you are doing it wrong. If you installed windows on a spinning disk and have an ssd, you are doing it really wrong.
That was true of my installation when it was fresh, but the installation is now about a year old (last time I upgraded the mobo/CPU) and it is slow, slow, slow. But I honestly don't really care--I power it up and then go pour a beer--my Win7 installation is just for gaming. By the time the head on my beer settles I can launch a game, which runs fine once the initial thrashing ends; and if I put Win7 to sleep, I circumvent all the thrashing on resume (as opposed to a cold boot). If Win7 was my daily driver, then I would put time into fixing it; but for me, Linux has consistently offered speed with minimal tweaking, no bloat, no slow-down over time, trivial backup/restore, easy configuration, and set-it-and-forget-it background updating so that is what I use when I need to be productive.
I didn't mean it that way... just pointing to my own personal experience. The days of manually editing X11 configurations and broken power management are long gone for me. I had xbmcubuntu up and running flawlessly within 20 minutes of seating the CPU on my last build. Windows 7 x64, on the other hand, seems to go out of its way to slow me down. Your mileage may vary.
What are you starting up? 1000 different malware? Vendor crapware?
FWIW on Windows XP if you don't install any antivirus and you want faster boot+login times you have to configure XP to not check for existing AV. Otherwise seems it will spend time and resources checking and then warn you if it can't find any. Not sure if that's true for Win7 (I've never had win 7 boot time probs).
I have no idea why it is slow. I know that reinstalling Win7 from scratch will speed things up at least temporarily, but that it will always end up slow again. I run one of the basic free AV programs (I forget which one) and a shitload of games, mostly through Steam. I literally only boot into it to flash my phone or play games, yet it gets slower and slower. This is my personal experience and nothing will change that fact. Windows simply eats my time. It grinds on the hard drive, constantly installs updates, and seems to get slower and slower even though all I do is install/play games. If someone knows of a method for installing clean Win7 with all my programs and settings preserved like I can do with Linux, I'm all ears. But I'm not willing to waste a weekend reinstalling Windows just to play games.
Not only does my Linux installation boot in under 30 seconds (SSD drives are great for that)
So, you compare Linux on an SSD to Windows on a mechanical drive -- seriously?
I should have just voted you down for spouting something so stupid, but you touched on something interesting without realizing it:
Most of the programs I use in Linux have functional Windows equivalents, but using Windows feels like trying to run in a dream.
This is more meaningful, but not for the reason you think.
Your problem, like all Linux users who try Windows, is that you don't follow the rule that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".
Almost certainly, you tried some replica of your Linux toolchain: Cygwin, Bash, Perl, Python, PHP, or whatever, and you were "not surprised" that "Windows was slow" running software... designed for Linux. Meanwhile, Windows runs just fine running software designed for its architecture, but you probably never gave any of that a serious try. Visual Studio starts in a fraction of a second for me, complies practically instantly, and I've seen IIS put out 1100 dynamic web pages per second on my laptop, so I don't think it's all that slow. I've heard people complain that MS Word is "bloated", but it takes 200ms of CPU time to start. Bloated? I think not.
There are many subtle architectural reasons for this. Things like: "new process" is cheap on Linux, and used for what most programmers would call "threading", but on Windows it is a heavyweight activity that's not intended to be fast. Instead, "new thread" is the fast operation. Software has to be written to start few processes and many threads to perform well on Windows. It's only very recently that Linux got good support for high performance threads, so practically no Linux software is written like this. Every damned thing starts a new process for everything. Linux scripts treat "new process" as if it was lightweight enough to replace "call procedure". Meanwhile, Windows PowerShell starts a single process which calls functions directly from dynamically linked DLLs. That's because it's designed for Windows, unlike Bash.
Please, just shut up, and try Windows 7 x64 on a real machine with an SSD, run software on it designed for it, and only then come back and tell me that's it is slow.
See, it's a jump to conclusions mat... there's a mat with conclusion on it that you can jump to.
Both OSes on SSDs, the home (Users) partition on a mechanical drive or both OSes on mechanical drives; it makes no difference. Win7 x64 pegs the HD light on for several minutes during which I am helpless. The longest phase of the Linux boot is the POST process.
I have never used Cygwin, Bash, Perl, or PHP on Windows. When I say "functional equivalents" I mean, for example, Corel Aftershot which is a cross-platform RAW workflow suite. On Linux, it batch processes RAW files seamlessly in the background and adjustments/filters update in real-time. Everything happens slower on Windows. It doesn't matter what programs I use... RAW and video workflows are slower on my computer in Win7 x64 than Linux x64. I don't use Visual Studio or MS Word on any platform.
I'm really sorry that I have apparently deeply offended you. But on my computer regardless of what type of drive I boot to or what programs I use, video and RAW workflows are sluggish in Win7 compared to Linux. Web browsers take longer to launch. Even shutting down takes longer in Win7.
Sports are an easy, reliable way to gain a group of people who - even if you're not really friends - will get your back. Alas, too often overlooked by the geek. You don't even have to play - while the "managers" as we called them weren't part of the core football team, they too would be protected, because these were the guys who came running with the cold water during time-outs. Being friends with the football team is useful.
I played baseball from T-ball to my sophomore year in high school. And I sucked. When I got up to bat with two outs and a runner on second, the team was already putting on their gloves in anticipation of my inevitable pop up, but they never ever told me I sucked--they acted ambivalent at worst and seemed genuinely concerned when I was knocked unconscious by a pitch to the head. I went on to injure my shoulder badly and had to quit, but even after playing only one year of sports and sucking badly at it, I was in some sort of special club that exempted me from bullying from the jocks (the maladjusted rednecks and sociopaths were a different story). The coaches even said hi to me in the halls for the next three years.
Then you were lucky. I was terrorized at private school. Once I switched to public school, the bullying didn't actually stop, but it got down to a level I could deal with and eventually learn to defend myself against. As someone further up the thread noted, it's a whole lot harder to get the administration to deal with problem students when their parents are writing the checks. There's a class issue at work here too--my parents were sending me to schools they really couldn't afford in the (mistaken) belief that I'd get a better education that way, and being a middle-class nerd surrounded by rich juvenile delinquents is really a special kind of hell.
For whatever reason, I was never really bullied in school. Sure, people said nasty things once in a while or made fun of me--but nothing like the systematic bullying that some kids got. Maybe it was because I played sports in addition to being a D&D playing, BBS-operating nerd. Ironically, the worst bullying that I ever experienced was when I spent a summer at a fancy baseball camp; some of those kids were just pure concentrated dochebag.
I feel for you though, of all the things to get bullied for the social status of your parents is among the worse. Even at my crummy public school, the poor kids were picked on just for being poor. One kid was living in a crappy hotel with his mom and sister which, when it was found out, elicited daily pummeling with snowballs. I grew up poor too, but was fortunate enough to get new clothes from my grandparents frequently enough that I didn't look poor.
I can't even imagine the devastation that mean-spirited kids can cause with social media... fortunately my own kid isn't old enough to worry about that stuff quite yet, but I have no idea what I will do if it becomes a problem.
You could also flip the question around and ask what Linux stuff is keeping you from using Windows?
Speed. Most of the programs I use in Linux have functional Windows equivalents, but using Windows feels like trying to run in a dream. When I boot into my Win7 installation I have to wait about 10 minutes for the hard drive to stop thrashing before I can do so much as click on an icon. And that is without waiting a few minutes for "update 100 of 3012" to install before even trying to show me the desktop. I have all of the indexing services switched off and the I/O monitors say that "System" is thrashing the drives. Numerous Google searches turn up the same tried-and-true solution: re-install Windows
and all your programs and games one-by-one, then finding every little setting that you forgot about and then deal with re-activating it... ugh Windows product activation--new mobo? new graphics card? new moon? Re-activate! It's like Windows was designed to waste my time (that's what./ is for!)
Not only does my Linux installation boot in under 30 seconds (SSD drives are great for that), but resource hogs like Aftershot (a cross-platform Lightroom-type program) are fast and responsive, even when running other background tasks. If I do run into a huge problem in Linux, I can just re-install it, keeping the same/home partition and a tarball of a few files in/etc; I'm up and running with a smooth-as-butter OS in about 30 minutes. I'm pretty sure some of my settings files are ten years and at least five computers old.
Oh, and the command line--I can't live without that. Not just for scripting and remote access; sometimes typing commands is orders of magnitude faster than clicking on stuff. Come to think of it, the only reason I ever boot into Windows is for low-level flashes of my phone (no drivers for Linux) and gaming because literally everything else is better and faster on Linux.
There is a place like that in Ashland, OR too (DJ's). They have been around since the mid 80's and, while Blockbuster and all the rest went under, they have expanded. Part of it is the natural tendency of Ashlanders to shun franchises (e.g., boycotting Starbucks), and part is the rural surroundings and hippies, but most of it seems to be having a friendly knowledgeable staff that can provide recommendations and being "part of the community."
I stumbled across an indie artist from Uruguay on a late-night radio show and wanted to throw a couple of bucks his way. I went to his band's website and followed the link to a legitimate online retailer for indie artists in Uruguay. The next thing I knew, weird charges started showing up on my credit card--e.g., someone in France started a WoW account, someone in the Ukraine started making a bunch of in-game purchases for online games, etc. Even though it was a "legit" site linked to by the artist with the proceeds going to the artist, either it was a front for stealing credit card numbers or had terrible security. Either way it was a PITA and not at all worth the album.
"The agency attributed the decline to a combination of three factors: a mild winter, reduced demand for gasoline and, most significant, a drop in coal-fired electricity generation because of historically low natural gas prices. Whether emissions will continue to drop or begin to rise again, however, remains to be seen, experts said Friday."
So a confluence of three factors, the most significant of which is amove away from coal to natural gas for electricity production lead to a reduction in total CO2 output. Point taken; burning more energy-dense fuels for electricity can, along with other factors, reduce the total output of CO2. But that doesn't do anything to curb long-term emissions as energy consumption grows (the rate of growth per capita is declining, but the absolute amount is still growing) nor does it have anything to do with drilling for shale oil.
The quote in TFA was suggesting that there is an idea that switching to CH4 will prevent us from "blowing past every safe target for emissions" and that that notion should be put to rest. I am questioning whether or not that idea actually exists; are there really people so stupid that they have convinced themselves that switching to CH4 will curb emissions vis-a-vis "safe" targets for emissions; i.e., that it is some sort of energy panacea that absolves us from the responsibility of developing green energy?
The problem with nuclear is that we have to invest a boatload of energy into building the plants and mining/refining the fuel, for which we will burn fossil fules. And you cannot build them fast enough to cope with increasing energy demands. I'm not an irrational optimist when it comes to green energy, but as far back as the 70's, when scientists were yelling loudly about global warming, Jimmy Carter created a "solar energy bank." Maybe his numbers were optimistic, but Cater said "I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000."
Now it's 2012 and we're utterly convinced that green power is a no-go and that it isn't even worth putting as much money/effort/tax-incentives into as oil and natural gas. Again, am I missing something? Did technology regress over the last 35 years? You can buy a solar panel for you roof, right now, for €0.40 per Watt peak. Germany is building massive photovoltaic plants and is exporting power at a profit. The added capacity from green energy sources over the last decade in the EU dwarfs coal. Nuclear is negative. The only thing that comes close is natural gas, and it is still less than 50% that of solar/wind. Even China is trying to move away from dirty energy (albeit much more slowly.)
What is so different in the US that we have an urgent need to open up new land for exploration and try to squeeze oil out of shale when, apparently, even industry experts think it isn't economically viable? What does Europe have that the US doesn't? What am I missing?
Uh-huh, so the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase at a slightly slower rate. How exactly does that do anything to curb emissions? It just slows (and not by much) our progress towards the point of no return.
'The report confirms that, given the current policies, we will blow past every safe target for emissions,' says Levi. 'This should put to rest the idea that the boom in natural gas will save us from that.'
Wait, what? There is an idea that natural gas will curb CO2 emissions? Natural gas may burn "cleaner" and it may have a slighter higher energy density, but that doesn't change the equation: CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O. Are we really so bereft of a basic grasp of chemistry to think that the CO2 released from natural gas doesn't count?
The link in TFA to The Oil Drum questions the whether shale oil can be competitive because of the costs associated with extraction; basically that the oil is too spread out in the shale. Those costs certainly aren't stopping them from trying. Why not put those resources into carbon-neutral energy generation? Fracking? Sure, let's give it a go, I'm like 85% sure it won't contaminate aquifers or cause earthquakes. Deep-water drilling? Sure, I like a good challenge and there's no chance that we'll wreck an entire ecosystem. Shale oil? There's only one way to find out if it's profitable! Solarthermal, biomass, photovoltaic, wind, tidal energy, geothermal? I don't know... sounds risky... and kinda hard... I'm not so sure I can make money with any of those... and I already picked out the paint for my new horizontal drilling rig.
The agency's report was generally 'good news' for the United States says Michael A. Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, because it highlights the nation's new sources of energy but Levi cautions that being self-sufficient does not mean that the country will be insulated from seesawing energy prices, since those oil prices are set by global markets
Why exactly do we need to ramp up oil and gas production when the prices are set by an international cartel? We start pumping fossil fuels into the market and Saudi Arabia and Russia just turn down the facet; prices rise and they're making the same money as before by producing less. Yay, it was worth raping the environment to have no impact on energy prices because we're "self-sufficient" now!
This headline reads to me like "US Would Become World's Top Phone Booth Producer by 2017." Are we all going to act surprised when that hippie fantasy we call a "green economy" becomes a reality for the EU or China? You know, like we were all shocked that Romney performed exactly as the polls predicted.
Let Texas secede, withdraw all the national defense instruments we have in the region, and let them hold off the violent Mexican gangs. They will soon remember the Alamo, and not in a good way.
Texas is also America's oil refinery. I think it would be an interesting experiment to let the Gulf states split off into America Jr, with Texas as their economic engine, selling refined oil and access to the Gulf to America Sr in exchange for protection. They could have their own super-conservative banana republic and the Texas board of education could stop setting textbook standards for America Sr.
I don't know about the rest, but Oregon has been griping about being Oregon for as long as I can remember. Along the Oregon/California border you will see big signs saying "State of Jefferson" which would split off Southern Oregon and Northern California (possibly including the Bay Area) into their own state. Parts of Eastern Oregon simply want to secede and become a libertarian paradise. I suspect that this petition is mostly a reflection of this long standing movement which is driven, at least in part, by the feeling that rural/conservative votes are drown out by liberal/(sub)urban votes, which is not uncommon in the West Coast or in many big states where the population centers drive politics, but where most of the land is farms/reservations.
I wish I had mod points... spot-on. The TFA is framing the question as if pot, unlike every other psychoactive substance, affects people uniformly. It perpetuates the nonsensical notion that it is somehow a special drug that needs special treatment. Some people don't drink alcohol, others become intolerable dickheads when drunk, while still others just have fun while drinking. Likewise, some people become paranoid to the point of having a panic attack at the slightest whiff of pot smoke, while others can puff away on a joint while performing delicate tasks. Some drink a beer to unwind at the end of the day, others might have a high ball, while still others prefer a vaporizer or a joint. The only distinction between alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and marijuana is that the latter is labeled as a "recreational drug" because it, despite being the only one of the four that is non-addictive, is illegal in 48 states.
Just to be clear, by "on drugs" do you mean someone who, at any point during the week consumes a drug, or someone who is actually stoned off their ass at work? Because I would imagine that you would have no problem whatsoever hiring someone that enjoys a frosty pint at the end of the day, but not someone whose breath smells of bourbon at 9AM.
In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.
Only in the 50's could there people with names as awesome as Remington Rand, Sig Mickelson and Univac.
Sure, Manning violated military law/protocol (I don't know what the proper term is) and yes that makes him guilty. However he has not been tried and found guilty by due process. No matter how guilty he seems, he has only been accused at this point and yet he has been locked in solitary confinement and forced to take drugs for years while he awaits his trial. So who is violating the rules here? Is the military above accountability? Should only the lone solider or citizen have to follow the rules while the military or government can do whatever it wants and hide whatever it wants?
Wikileaks, among other things, exposed the murder of two journalists by a helicopter gunship. Not only did this lead to an investigation--and I'm certain that the person that pulled the trigger in that video isn't in solitary confinement being force-fed drugs--but it raised awareness of the fact that crimes are being committed and covered up. No one is suggesting trying to monitor every part of the government or any form of perfect transparency--we have collectively acknowledged the necessity that certain information be kept from public knowledge until it is no longer sensitive. But a completely opaque government that rubber-stamps embarrassments or evidence of criminal acts as "classified" is tyranny.
However, I do not agree that Obama's duplicity on this issue makes him a bad person
It's not the duplicity. He is currently presiding over a government that imprisons harmless people. He is doing this willingly, and could free them today. He chooses to let these good people languish in jail. He's a tyrant.
He presides over the US government, but he is not a dictator. If Obama pardoned every, single drug offender in jail today, he would be immediately impeached for failing to discharge his duties as president, i.e., letting people out of jail who violated laws that are still on the books. Thus I call him duplicitous because he pays lip service to the issue, but does not take a stand in pressuring Congress to repeal the ridiculous drug prohibition laws. He could just as easily use presidential prerogative to stop enforcing the particularly egregious parts of existing law, but he is complicit by inaction.
It is easy to look back now and say that they are both good people with the best interests of the country in mind, and that is probably true.
Nonsense. If they were good people with the best interests of the country in mind they would have engaged in a discussion of drug reform. You might be possible for a prohibitionist to be a good person. But nobody who refuses to even have a conversation on this very serious issue can possibly be a good person.
Obama promised to address all petitions on his website that got over 25,000 signitures. Over 70,000 people asked him why Cannabis couldn't be regulated like alcohol. His response didn't mention alcohol once.
How can you see something like that and consider Obama a good person? If he were actually a good person, he would have answered the question we asked.
but lies are lies and we shouldn't be afraid to call Obama out on them and hold his administration accountable when they will inevitably start oozing from the White House.
Exactly, you know with complete certainty that Obama will repeatedly lie to us, and yet you still allow that he's a good person. WTF? Explain yourself.
I was deeply disappointed to see my beloved state of Oregon miss the opportunity to gown down in history as one of the three states that first pushed back against the insanity of cannabis prohibition. Obama openly admits to smoking (tons of) pot in high school (but don't worry kids he quit once he got "serious") and he looked right at us and said that he considered it a state issue and wouldn't prosecute people who were not violating state law. From what I've heard that has largely been the case in Colorado, where the feds are only going after dispensaries that violate state law (e.g., by being too close to a school), but in California they are using Eric Holder as an excuse to crack down on perfectly legal, legitimate, state-sanctioned businesses.
However, I do not agree that Obama's duplicity on this issue makes him a bad person. I hate myself for saying this, but I think he made a political calculation, Clinton-style, to appeal to the 18-29 crowed and to social progressives and libertarians. But those were demographics that "everyone" was calling a fluke in 2008, so he simultaneously tried to appeal to the brainwashed masses that think pot is bad, mmmkay, and who always turn out to vote. It turns out that the 18-29 vote was higher in 2012 than in 2008, so I think you will see a collective lightbulb flash above the heads of democrats who realize that putting legalization (and gay rights) on the ballot turns out young people.
The lying, however, I cannot stand. Obama does a very good job of keeping it at arms length, and letting his surrogates do most of the outright lying, which keeps him above the fray and makes him harder to dislike. It sucks, but politicians get judged relative to each other, and Obama is not as deceitful as most politicians, in my opinion. I do feel that, if he weren't in politics, that if he and Michelle were just a couple down the street, he'd be a good person; a nice guy. Like one of those stuffy people that seemed like they used to be a lot cooler before Harvard jammed a stick up their butt. I'm probably buying into the image that was spun by his handlers, but unfortunately perception is reality in politics. Romney, on the other hand, is like a cross between Thurston Howell, III and Sheldon Levine; the type of guy that smiles and shakes your hands, but then leans in and whispers something mean in your ear.
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I was impressed at how quickly Win7 booted the first time I installed it. That was one of the biggest improvements over XP (I skipped Vista). If Win7 was my daily driver, I would invest the time and effort necessary to track down whatever is causing this nonsense--maybe it is just one rogue service that scans my hard drive on every boot, who knows, but at present I'd rather spend the time gaming and just boot into Linux for productivity (an ancillary benefit of Linux is that it sucks for gaming, so I have no distractions).
I'm also pretty sure that there is something about my usage pattern because this has been happening to me forever. I run WinXP in a virtual machine at work to control some instruments and it remains peppy as the day it was installed. Ditto for the native Win7 machines that are only used as controllers. It seems that as soon as I start using a Windows installation for personal use it slowly self destructs. My theory is that Windows hates me. But I'm also a relentless cracker; I have purchased all my software and games (and Windows) since becoming a gainfully employed adult (I'll admit it: I pirated TIE Fighter) but I crack everything that punishes me with DRM or repeated product activations (particularly if the alternative is to interact with "customer service") which certainly makes me more vulnerable to malware.
BTW I love how seriously everyone around here takes their OS (myself included). This thread reminds me of the "old" /.
Thanks for the tip. It sounds easy--I'll give it a try.
I did check the resource monitor and it says that the "System" process is responsible for 99% of the I/O activity during the boot process. I have Steam set not to autolaunch for exactly that reason--it has a tendency to "update" the same game over and over on launch, which takes forever, so I wait until the HD light settles before launching it. I've disabled all of the services that I know I can disable (random crapware and services for network printers I will never use, etc.)
I don't think it is a failed drive because I'm on hard drive number two for this installation, but I've had enough drives fail in my life that a part of me does expect a BSoD followed by a SMART failure on reboot.
Thanks for the advice, BTW, I didn't expect so much hate just for preferring Linux on my home PC.
It is only powered up long enough to play games and I watch my network traffic pretty closely at the gateway (pfsense) so I'm not too worried about being part of a botnet. Wouldn't my AV program catch those? I honestly have very little experience with AV programs--I just installed one of the free ones recommended by MS when I first installed Windows (and I do keep the definitions up to date and let it do a full scan once in a while). I purchase all of the games that I play, but I also crack any of them punish me with DRM nonsense, so there is certainly a potential delivery vector for malware.
My win machine has an ssd for the os drive. From button to ready to go is about 35 seconds, including me typing my password. I have the docs and all that moved to a spinning disk. Took less than an hour of customization after the install to move the stuff that was going to take space. If windows is "thrashing" an ssd for 20 minutes, you have malware. If it is thrashing the spinning disk when you installed windows on the ssd, you have malware, or you are doing it wrong. If you installed windows on a spinning disk and have an ssd, you are doing it really wrong.
That was true of my installation when it was fresh, but the installation is now about a year old (last time I upgraded the mobo/CPU) and it is slow, slow, slow. But I honestly don't really care--I power it up and then go pour a beer--my Win7 installation is just for gaming. By the time the head on my beer settles I can launch a game, which runs fine once the initial thrashing ends; and if I put Win7 to sleep, I circumvent all the thrashing on resume (as opposed to a cold boot). If Win7 was my daily driver, then I would put time into fixing it; but for me, Linux has consistently offered speed with minimal tweaking, no bloat, no slow-down over time, trivial backup/restore, easy configuration, and set-it-and-forget-it background updating so that is what I use when I need to be productive.
Nice troll
I didn't mean it that way... just pointing to my own personal experience. The days of manually editing X11 configurations and broken power management are long gone for me. I had xbmcubuntu up and running flawlessly within 20 minutes of seating the CPU on my last build. Windows 7 x64, on the other hand, seems to go out of its way to slow me down. Your mileage may vary.
What are you starting up? 1000 different malware? Vendor crapware?
FWIW on Windows XP if you don't install any antivirus and you want faster boot+login times you have to configure XP to not check for existing AV. Otherwise seems it will spend time and resources checking and then warn you if it can't find any. Not sure if that's true for Win7 (I've never had win 7 boot time probs).
I have no idea why it is slow. I know that reinstalling Win7 from scratch will speed things up at least temporarily, but that it will always end up slow again. I run one of the basic free AV programs (I forget which one) and a shitload of games, mostly through Steam. I literally only boot into it to flash my phone or play games, yet it gets slower and slower. This is my personal experience and nothing will change that fact. Windows simply eats my time. It grinds on the hard drive, constantly installs updates, and seems to get slower and slower even though all I do is install/play games. If someone knows of a method for installing clean Win7 with all my programs and settings preserved like I can do with Linux, I'm all ears. But I'm not willing to waste a weekend reinstalling Windows just to play games.
Not only does my Linux installation boot in under 30 seconds (SSD drives are great for that)
So, you compare Linux on an SSD to Windows on a mechanical drive -- seriously?
I should have just voted you down for spouting something so stupid, but you touched on something interesting without realizing it:
Most of the programs I use in Linux have functional Windows equivalents, but using Windows feels like trying to run in a dream.
This is more meaningful, but not for the reason you think.
Your problem, like all Linux users who try Windows, is that you don't follow the rule that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".
Almost certainly, you tried some replica of your Linux toolchain: Cygwin, Bash, Perl, Python, PHP, or whatever, and you were "not surprised" that "Windows was slow" running software... designed for Linux. Meanwhile, Windows runs just fine running software designed for its architecture, but you probably never gave any of that a serious try. Visual Studio starts in a fraction of a second for me, complies practically instantly, and I've seen IIS put out 1100 dynamic web pages per second on my laptop, so I don't think it's all that slow. I've heard people complain that MS Word is "bloated", but it takes 200ms of CPU time to start. Bloated? I think not.
There are many subtle architectural reasons for this. Things like: "new process" is cheap on Linux, and used for what most programmers would call "threading", but on Windows it is a heavyweight activity that's not intended to be fast. Instead, "new thread" is the fast operation. Software has to be written to start few processes and many threads to perform well on Windows. It's only very recently that Linux got good support for high performance threads, so practically no Linux software is written like this. Every damned thing starts a new process for everything. Linux scripts treat "new process" as if it was lightweight enough to replace "call procedure". Meanwhile, Windows PowerShell starts a single process which calls functions directly from dynamically linked DLLs. That's because it's designed for Windows, unlike Bash.
Please, just shut up, and try Windows 7 x64 on a real machine with an SSD, run software on it designed for it, and only then come back and tell me that's it is slow.
See, it's a jump to conclusions mat... there's a mat with conclusion on it that you can jump to.
Both OSes on SSDs, the home (Users) partition on a mechanical drive or both OSes on mechanical drives; it makes no difference. Win7 x64 pegs the HD light on for several minutes during which I am helpless. The longest phase of the Linux boot is the POST process.
I have never used Cygwin, Bash, Perl, or PHP on Windows. When I say "functional equivalents" I mean, for example, Corel Aftershot which is a cross-platform RAW workflow suite. On Linux, it batch processes RAW files seamlessly in the background and adjustments/filters update in real-time. Everything happens slower on Windows. It doesn't matter what programs I use... RAW and video workflows are slower on my computer in Win7 x64 than Linux x64. I don't use Visual Studio or MS Word on any platform.
I'm really sorry that I have apparently deeply offended you. But on my computer regardless of what type of drive I boot to or what programs I use, video and RAW workflows are sluggish in Win7 compared to Linux. Web browsers take longer to launch. Even shutting down takes longer in Win7.
Sports are an easy, reliable way to gain a group of people who - even if you're not really friends - will get your back. Alas, too often overlooked by the geek. You don't even have to play - while the "managers" as we called them weren't part of the core football team, they too would be protected, because these were the guys who came running with the cold water during time-outs. Being friends with the football team is useful.
I played baseball from T-ball to my sophomore year in high school. And I sucked. When I got up to bat with two outs and a runner on second, the team was already putting on their gloves in anticipation of my inevitable pop up, but they never ever told me I sucked--they acted ambivalent at worst and seemed genuinely concerned when I was knocked unconscious by a pitch to the head. I went on to injure my shoulder badly and had to quit, but even after playing only one year of sports and sucking badly at it, I was in some sort of special club that exempted me from bullying from the jocks (the maladjusted rednecks and sociopaths were a different story). The coaches even said hi to me in the halls for the next three years.
Then you were lucky. I was terrorized at private school. Once I switched to public school, the bullying didn't actually stop, but it got down to a level I could deal with and eventually learn to defend myself against. As someone further up the thread noted, it's a whole lot harder to get the administration to deal with problem students when their parents are writing the checks. There's a class issue at work here too--my parents were sending me to schools they really couldn't afford in the (mistaken) belief that I'd get a better education that way, and being a middle-class nerd surrounded by rich juvenile delinquents is really a special kind of hell.
For whatever reason, I was never really bullied in school. Sure, people said nasty things once in a while or made fun of me--but nothing like the systematic bullying that some kids got. Maybe it was because I played sports in addition to being a D&D playing, BBS-operating nerd. Ironically, the worst bullying that I ever experienced was when I spent a summer at a fancy baseball camp; some of those kids were just pure concentrated dochebag.
I feel for you though, of all the things to get bullied for the social status of your parents is among the worse. Even at my crummy public school, the poor kids were picked on just for being poor. One kid was living in a crappy hotel with his mom and sister which, when it was found out, elicited daily pummeling with snowballs. I grew up poor too, but was fortunate enough to get new clothes from my grandparents frequently enough that I didn't look poor.
I can't even imagine the devastation that mean-spirited kids can cause with social media... fortunately my own kid isn't old enough to worry about that stuff quite yet, but I have no idea what I will do if it becomes a problem.
You could also flip the question around and ask what Linux stuff is keeping you from using Windows?
Speed. Most of the programs I use in Linux have functional Windows equivalents, but using Windows feels like trying to run in a dream. When I boot into my Win7 installation I have to wait about 10 minutes for the hard drive to stop thrashing before I can do so much as click on an icon. And that is without waiting a few minutes for "update 100 of 3012" to install before even trying to show me the desktop. I have all of the indexing services switched off and the I/O monitors say that "System" is thrashing the drives. Numerous Google searches turn up the same tried-and-true solution: re-install Windows and all your programs and games one-by-one, then finding every little setting that you forgot about and then deal with re-activating it... ugh Windows product activation--new mobo? new graphics card? new moon? Re-activate! It's like Windows was designed to waste my time (that's what ./ is for!)
Not only does my Linux installation boot in under 30 seconds (SSD drives are great for that), but resource hogs like Aftershot (a cross-platform Lightroom-type program) are fast and responsive, even when running other background tasks. If I do run into a huge problem in Linux, I can just re-install it, keeping the same /home partition and a tarball of a few files in /etc; I'm up and running with a smooth-as-butter OS in about 30 minutes. I'm pretty sure some of my settings files are ten years and at least five computers old.
Oh, and the command line--I can't live without that. Not just for scripting and remote access; sometimes typing commands is orders of magnitude faster than clicking on stuff. Come to think of it, the only reason I ever boot into Windows is for low-level flashes of my phone (no drivers for Linux) and gaming because literally everything else is better and faster on Linux.
There is a place like that in Ashland, OR too (DJ's). They have been around since the mid 80's and, while Blockbuster and all the rest went under, they have expanded. Part of it is the natural tendency of Ashlanders to shun franchises (e.g., boycotting Starbucks), and part is the rural surroundings and hippies, but most of it seems to be having a friendly knowledgeable staff that can provide recommendations and being "part of the community."
I stumbled across an indie artist from Uruguay on a late-night radio show and wanted to throw a couple of bucks his way. I went to his band's website and followed the link to a legitimate online retailer for indie artists in Uruguay. The next thing I knew, weird charges started showing up on my credit card--e.g., someone in France started a WoW account, someone in the Ukraine started making a bunch of in-game purchases for online games, etc. Even though it was a "legit" site linked to by the artist with the proceeds going to the artist, either it was a front for stealing credit card numbers or had terrible security. Either way it was a PITA and not at all worth the album.
"The agency attributed the decline to a combination of three factors: a mild winter, reduced demand for gasoline and, most significant, a drop in coal-fired electricity generation because of historically low natural gas prices. Whether emissions will continue to drop or begin to rise again, however, remains to be seen, experts said Friday."
So a confluence of three factors, the most significant of which is amove away from coal to natural gas for electricity production lead to a reduction in total CO2 output. Point taken; burning more energy-dense fuels for electricity can, along with other factors, reduce the total output of CO2. But that doesn't do anything to curb long-term emissions as energy consumption grows (the rate of growth per capita is declining, but the absolute amount is still growing) nor does it have anything to do with drilling for shale oil.
The quote in TFA was suggesting that there is an idea that switching to CH4 will prevent us from "blowing past every safe target for emissions" and that that notion should be put to rest. I am questioning whether or not that idea actually exists; are there really people so stupid that they have convinced themselves that switching to CH4 will curb emissions vis-a-vis "safe" targets for emissions; i.e., that it is some sort of energy panacea that absolves us from the responsibility of developing green energy?
The problem with nuclear is that we have to invest a boatload of energy into building the plants and mining/refining the fuel, for which we will burn fossil fules. And you cannot build them fast enough to cope with increasing energy demands. I'm not an irrational optimist when it comes to green energy, but as far back as the 70's, when scientists were yelling loudly about global warming, Jimmy Carter created a "solar energy bank." Maybe his numbers were optimistic, but Cater said "I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000."
Now it's 2012 and we're utterly convinced that green power is a no-go and that it isn't even worth putting as much money/effort/tax-incentives into as oil and natural gas. Again, am I missing something? Did technology regress over the last 35 years? You can buy a solar panel for you roof, right now, for €0.40 per Watt peak. Germany is building massive photovoltaic plants and is exporting power at a profit. The added capacity from green energy sources over the last decade in the EU dwarfs coal. Nuclear is negative. The only thing that comes close is natural gas, and it is still less than 50% that of solar/wind. Even China is trying to move away from dirty energy (albeit much more slowly.)
What is so different in the US that we have an urgent need to open up new land for exploration and try to squeeze oil out of shale when, apparently, even industry experts think it isn't economically viable? What does Europe have that the US doesn't? What am I missing?
Uh-huh, so the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase at a slightly slower rate. How exactly does that do anything to curb emissions? It just slows (and not by much) our progress towards the point of no return.
'The report confirms that, given the current policies, we will blow past every safe target for emissions,' says Levi. 'This should put to rest the idea that the boom in natural gas will save us from that.'
Wait, what? There is an idea that natural gas will curb CO2 emissions? Natural gas may burn "cleaner" and it may have a slighter higher energy density, but that doesn't change the equation: CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O. Are we really so bereft of a basic grasp of chemistry to think that the CO2 released from natural gas doesn't count?
The link in TFA to The Oil Drum questions the whether shale oil can be competitive because of the costs associated with extraction; basically that the oil is too spread out in the shale. Those costs certainly aren't stopping them from trying. Why not put those resources into carbon-neutral energy generation? Fracking? Sure, let's give it a go, I'm like 85% sure it won't contaminate aquifers or cause earthquakes. Deep-water drilling? Sure, I like a good challenge and there's no chance that we'll wreck an entire ecosystem. Shale oil? There's only one way to find out if it's profitable! Solarthermal, biomass, photovoltaic, wind, tidal energy, geothermal? I don't know... sounds risky... and kinda hard... I'm not so sure I can make money with any of those... and I already picked out the paint for my new horizontal drilling rig.
The agency's report was generally 'good news' for the United States says Michael A. Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, because it highlights the nation's new sources of energy but Levi cautions that being self-sufficient does not mean that the country will be insulated from seesawing energy prices, since those oil prices are set by global markets
Why exactly do we need to ramp up oil and gas production when the prices are set by an international cartel? We start pumping fossil fuels into the market and Saudi Arabia and Russia just turn down the facet; prices rise and they're making the same money as before by producing less. Yay, it was worth raping the environment to have no impact on energy prices because we're "self-sufficient" now!
This headline reads to me like "US Would Become World's Top Phone Booth Producer by 2017." Are we all going to act surprised when that hippie fantasy we call a "green economy" becomes a reality for the EU or China? You know, like we were all shocked that Romney performed exactly as the polls predicted.
Am I missing something here?
Let Texas secede, withdraw all the national defense instruments we have in the region, and let them hold off the violent Mexican gangs. They will soon remember the Alamo, and not in a good way.
Texas is also America's oil refinery. I think it would be an interesting experiment to let the Gulf states split off into America Jr, with Texas as their economic engine, selling refined oil and access to the Gulf to America Sr in exchange for protection. They could have their own super-conservative banana republic and the Texas board of education could stop setting textbook standards for America Sr.
I don't know about the rest, but Oregon has been griping about being Oregon for as long as I can remember. Along the Oregon/California border you will see big signs saying "State of Jefferson" which would split off Southern Oregon and Northern California (possibly including the Bay Area) into their own state. Parts of Eastern Oregon simply want to secede and become a libertarian paradise. I suspect that this petition is mostly a reflection of this long standing movement which is driven, at least in part, by the feeling that rural/conservative votes are drown out by liberal/(sub)urban votes, which is not uncommon in the West Coast or in many big states where the population centers drive politics, but where most of the land is farms/reservations.
I wish I had mod points... spot-on. The TFA is framing the question as if pot, unlike every other psychoactive substance, affects people uniformly. It perpetuates the nonsensical notion that it is somehow a special drug that needs special treatment. Some people don't drink alcohol, others become intolerable dickheads when drunk, while still others just have fun while drinking. Likewise, some people become paranoid to the point of having a panic attack at the slightest whiff of pot smoke, while others can puff away on a joint while performing delicate tasks. Some drink a beer to unwind at the end of the day, others might have a high ball, while still others prefer a vaporizer or a joint. The only distinction between alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and marijuana is that the latter is labeled as a "recreational drug" because it, despite being the only one of the four that is non-addictive, is illegal in 48 states.
Just to be clear, by "on drugs" do you mean someone who, at any point during the week consumes a drug, or someone who is actually stoned off their ass at work? Because I would imagine that you would have no problem whatsoever hiring someone that enjoys a frosty pint at the end of the day, but not someone whose breath smells of bourbon at 9AM.
In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.
Only in the 50's could there people with names as awesome as Remington Rand, Sig Mickelson and Univac.
Sure, Manning violated military law/protocol (I don't know what the proper term is) and yes that makes him guilty. However he has not been tried and found guilty by due process. No matter how guilty he seems, he has only been accused at this point and yet he has been locked in solitary confinement and forced to take drugs for years while he awaits his trial. So who is violating the rules here? Is the military above accountability? Should only the lone solider or citizen have to follow the rules while the military or government can do whatever it wants and hide whatever it wants?
Wikileaks, among other things, exposed the murder of two journalists by a helicopter gunship. Not only did this lead to an investigation--and I'm certain that the person that pulled the trigger in that video isn't in solitary confinement being force-fed drugs--but it raised awareness of the fact that crimes are being committed and covered up. No one is suggesting trying to monitor every part of the government or any form of perfect transparency--we have collectively acknowledged the necessity that certain information be kept from public knowledge until it is no longer sensitive. But a completely opaque government that rubber-stamps embarrassments or evidence of criminal acts as "classified" is tyranny.
However, I do not agree that Obama's duplicity on this issue makes him a bad person
It's not the duplicity. He is currently presiding over a government that imprisons harmless people. He is doing this willingly, and could free them today. He chooses to let these good people languish in jail. He's a tyrant.
He presides over the US government, but he is not a dictator. If Obama pardoned every, single drug offender in jail today, he would be immediately impeached for failing to discharge his duties as president, i.e., letting people out of jail who violated laws that are still on the books. Thus I call him duplicitous because he pays lip service to the issue, but does not take a stand in pressuring Congress to repeal the ridiculous drug prohibition laws. He could just as easily use presidential prerogative to stop enforcing the particularly egregious parts of existing law, but he is complicit by inaction.
It is easy to look back now and say that they are both good people with the best interests of the country in mind, and that is probably true.
Nonsense. If they were good people with the best interests of the country in mind they would have engaged in a discussion of drug reform. You might be possible for a prohibitionist to be a good person. But nobody who refuses to even have a conversation on this very serious issue can possibly be a good person.
Obama promised to address all petitions on his website that got over 25,000 signitures. Over 70,000 people asked him why Cannabis couldn't be regulated like alcohol. His response didn't mention alcohol once.
How can you see something like that and consider Obama a good person? If he were actually a good person, he would have answered the question we asked.
but lies are lies and we shouldn't be afraid to call Obama out on them and hold his administration accountable when they will inevitably start oozing from the White House.
Exactly, you know with complete certainty that Obama will repeatedly lie to us, and yet you still allow that he's a good person. WTF? Explain yourself.
I was deeply disappointed to see my beloved state of Oregon miss the opportunity to gown down in history as one of the three states that first pushed back against the insanity of cannabis prohibition. Obama openly admits to smoking (tons of) pot in high school (but don't worry kids he quit once he got "serious") and he looked right at us and said that he considered it a state issue and wouldn't prosecute people who were not violating state law. From what I've heard that has largely been the case in Colorado, where the feds are only going after dispensaries that violate state law (e.g., by being too close to a school), but in California they are using Eric Holder as an excuse to crack down on perfectly legal, legitimate, state-sanctioned businesses.
However, I do not agree that Obama's duplicity on this issue makes him a bad person. I hate myself for saying this, but I think he made a political calculation, Clinton-style, to appeal to the 18-29 crowed and to social progressives and libertarians. But those were demographics that "everyone" was calling a fluke in 2008, so he simultaneously tried to appeal to the brainwashed masses that think pot is bad, mmmkay, and who always turn out to vote. It turns out that the 18-29 vote was higher in 2012 than in 2008, so I think you will see a collective lightbulb flash above the heads of democrats who realize that putting legalization (and gay rights) on the ballot turns out young people.
The lying, however, I cannot stand. Obama does a very good job of keeping it at arms length, and letting his surrogates do most of the outright lying, which keeps him above the fray and makes him harder to dislike. It sucks, but politicians get judged relative to each other, and Obama is not as deceitful as most politicians, in my opinion. I do feel that, if he weren't in politics, that if he and Michelle were just a couple down the street, he'd be a good person; a nice guy. Like one of those stuffy people that seemed like they used to be a lot cooler before Harvard jammed a stick up their butt. I'm probably buying into the image that was spun by his handlers, but unfortunately perception is reality in politics. Romney, on the other hand, is like a cross between Thurston Howell, III and Sheldon Levine; the type of guy that smiles and shakes your hands, but then leans in and whispers something mean in your ear.