That said, I've never had my home gaming XP machine refuse to boot windows or have the sound not work after any upgrade (system or driver).
Actually I've had both. At the same time. Some crappy ass motherboard sound drivers managed to corrupt the windows xp kernel. This happened a couple of times until I figured out what the culprit was. I think the GP's comment still stands.
Not in Belgium either, unless you pay. All to do with the way copyright law and organizations work. (i.e. some of them probably don't even allow to run an ad supported service, regardless of whether you pay your fees or not)
Oh come on - Youtube has orders of magnitude more bandwidth than last.fm. Do we have to pay to watch youtube videos? (Let's hope not....).
Youtube is full of videos that you can't play in large parts of Europe though. Perhaps the media companies would like youtube to do something similar for this as well. Google isn't smart enough to have a sensible policy for worldwide music videos, but they are certainly smart enough not to kill youtube outright by suggesting they're going to charge for it. Last.fm, not so much.
But perhaps all of that is not because of some innate difference between men and women but rather a sort of perversion of those old role patterns, where women tend to take up more and more of the roles that used to be man-only but men are not keeping in taking up some of the roles that used to be a wife's responsibilities. There's plenty of blame to go around here, as those men you're talking about don't seem to notice their wife is having to work so much harder but those women also seem to implicitly assume anything child-related is really their domain still.
Or perhaps you're completely right. In any case, I think studies like the one in this story tend to come down more on my side, but we'll probably not now till far in the future after the dust has settled. After all, if you think about it, female emancipation really is a very new phenomenom. (in the context of our society form, I'm aware of historical precedents and such)
I still don't understand why it's so hard to combine child rearing with a career though. One of the above posters might have hit on it with his suggestion of extending paternity leave. There's, after all, plenty of young doctorate students out there with kids, so why should it be so much harder for a woman?
Children under 7 particularly need a lot of help with emotional development, and women are quite obviously superior at helping them with this. Why is this controversial?
Because when you say "women are quite obviously superior at [...] this" you are making an assumption, one that is not necessarily rooted in fact. For instance, male gay couples tend to raise kids just fine, but perhaps that's controversial to some people too.
You can't really expect the OS to be caching (much). I remember the old konqueror making this assumption, then hitting a single page could easily generate tens of dns hits for the same host, all going over the wire. Suffice it to say my cheapo home dsl router did not respond well...
Regarding the "what's up with 'apt'?" question, I've gotten gobs of responses ranging from a polite explanation to being called a "f-ing tool" repeatedly. None recognize that, details of explanation aside, it's not obvious - how the he11 am I supposed to know the command is "apt-get" if I don't know that the package is called "Aptitude"? and why should I know it all revolves around such a non-sequitor name? And that I've been deep in computing for 20+ years should (as someone did thankfully notice) indicate that maybe the problem isn't the users being ignorant, but the developers making things obtuse on the presumption that those entering the realm should deign to learn such details to the satisfaction of the High Priests (gee, wasn't that the great gripe against IBM years ago?) before being free to use the system.
If you're using ubuntu it's called add/remove programs and is right there in the applications menu. I think that's about as good as it gets for very high level descriptions. If what you're doing is trying to configure a server or trying out something a bit more complicated than checking your e-mail and surfing the web, perhaps you should take two minutes to read the manual.
You wouldn't believe how many people I've come across that ask questions like "how do I do x with command y" while the answer is "man y; scroll down; there it is". I usually have to refrain very hard from not calling them a tool. Sure there is a lot of learned behaviour I have acquired over the years, but wilful ignorance is all too common in the general population. If you're one of those people and you then go on/. of all places to whine about it, of course they'll call you a tool. Especially if you're the type that knows how half the windows registry is layed out then start ranting about how "linux" is not "intuitive".
Now that's not to say there's not some serious technical issues with, say, X.org configuration. It's gotten better over the years, but I've spent many hours mucking about with X config files and X really is about the biggest POS ever to come out of the unix world. But it's what we've got and notoriously hard to replace, so people just deal.
I think the thought of china having access to 70s era space technology makes some americans a bit uncomfortable. News flash people, there's tons of countries out there that could build manned labs in outer space, and probably would if it wasn't nearly pointless.
I dunno, but at least UK users will stop posting me youtube links that I can't watch. If only the RIAA manages to get the same thing done, then soon I won't have to worry about music vids I can't watch ever again.
@google: would it *kill* you to at least give me the title of the video I can't watch. srsly
I don't know why my government is doing this, as it sounds like the exact opposite of the changes Britain normally proposes, but I don't understand any of the UK government policies. I would say roll on the general election, but I'm not convinced that Cameron's Tory's will be much better.
I don't see their point articulated very well in the comments but I think it should be addressed anyway. The UK government's idea seems to be that providers should be allowed to try out all business models they want to and that if complete neutrality is the preferable approach then that business model will automatically drive to the top.
In short they live in a fairy tale world where the telecom industry is not ruled by a few huge multinationals who will simply make the "complete neutrality" business model impossible if left to their own devices.
I think that's exactly right. Even on a laptop that reliably goes to sleep 99% of the time it'll fail eventually. And then you don't want to use that feature because next time it happens you'll end up having to slog through all your programs, recovering data, figuring out if anything got broken etc. Basically it has an expensive failure mode and people are unwilling to risk it because lousy hardware with low engineering standards makes it into way too much wintel laptops.
I'm wondering if there's a list of shame somewhere of manufacturers that generally mess up. I guess the list of dsdt's from the acpi project could work as a good indication.
I agree with you completely on all other points but...
I suppose there are "good" wars and "bad" wars as the AC's post seems to claim, but it doesn't mean that the guys doing the fighting, killing, and dying are at fault or are evil in some way. We (humans, that is) dehumanize the enemy; everyone does. AC does this, also, by implying that either the GP is either too stupid to understand his role or to evil to care...or maybe evil enough to be complicit.
Being trained to fight and being a serviceman doesn't excuse you from your moral duties. If you fail to think about what you're doing and then afterwards get convicted for war crimes "I was just following orders" doesn't quite cut it. Maybe that was implied by you, but I thought I should point it out. Now futile wars shouldn't be something we blame the soldiers that fight them for anyway, but the governments that start them.
When I was still running firefox on an older pc (P4, decent graphics card at the time, etc) it sure did matter. Loading the js version of slashdot in particular annoyed me to no end as I could probably get 3 or 4 tabs open (I just take the digests and open links from there) then do something else for a couple of minutes as my browser locks up and starts loading the pages. This was a lot less of a problem under win xp though for fairness sake I must mention that nvidia display drivers + general X crappyness probably had something to do with rendering probs.
On the other hand if the windows version really is profile optimized and the linux version is not (as one of the comments above suggests), then the article might very well be testing the browser against the exact same profile, which might or might not correspond to actual usage.
Either way, I now have computing power to spare so to answer your question: Not me, anymore.
If you have any more bullshit complaints that make it clear that you don't understand the Windows distribution model, you might as well share them too. Perhaps you could even complain about real problems, like WGA?
It's the windows distribution model I'm complaining about. Microsoft puts all these restrictions on the way the OEMs are allowed to rebundle their software, except in the ways that really matter. They clearly care more about putting marketing stickers on every pc sold than about what their end customers get. Their end customers being us, not the OEMs.
Try finding the windows install cd for your laptop. Oh right it isn't there, and microsoft won't let you download it. So now when you find a copy of a retail cd, you install it, enter the key and what is the very next thing you need to do? That's right, call tech support in Mumbai. All this for an operating system you legally purchased. If that isn't user-hostile, I don't know what is.
I agree on Samsung for desktop hard drives. They are much like most other samsung stuff: never really top notch but always close enough. Actually I've been buying a lot of Samsung stuff lately, seems to me they have a good QA process going (though I suspect most of their hardware isn't actually designed or made in-house).
This is the same problem as when Obama mentioned pumping your tires might make a real difference in fuel efficiency during the elections, then got ridiculed for it. The truth is, if you don't care about the little things, you're not gonna make much progress solving the big things. Big things are usually composed of lots of little things.
I'm relieved that we can stop being excited about the US president and start bashing him again though. All this positive talk was making me uneasy.
Thank you for proving my point. Nowhere in the literature on user interface design, be it computers or other devices, is there even one recorded case where democracy or "crowd intelligence" came up with a good design. It's called "design", not "election" for a reason. A good designer listens to the crowd and considers the users, but he also knows enough psychology to understand that there's a difference between what people need and what they say they need.
Open source software design works by a few people getting out their computers and starting to write something the way they think it should work. They listen to their users along the way but they know that what the users want is not necessarily what they need. This is how open source design has worked since the early days, how is this different from open source graphic design?
The truth of the matter is McCain ran a lousy campaign and the media coverage reflects that. You can explain away these numbers either way, but in the end McCain would have probably won if he hadn't screwed it up so royally. I mean how bad do you have to be to have heavy hitters in your own party start endorsing the other candidate?
Slashdot Mirror
The correct smackdown comment would have been "WOOOOSSSH". You must be new here. (yeah yeah I saw the uid)
That said, I've never had my home gaming XP machine refuse to boot windows or have the sound not work after any upgrade (system or driver).
Actually I've had both. At the same time. Some crappy ass motherboard sound drivers managed to corrupt the windows xp kernel. This happened a couple of times until I figured out what the culprit was. I think the GP's comment still stands.
Not in Belgium either, unless you pay. All to do with the way copyright law and organizations work. (i.e. some of them probably don't even allow to run an ad supported service, regardless of whether you pay your fees or not)
Oh come on - Youtube has orders of magnitude more bandwidth than last.fm. Do we have to pay to watch youtube videos? (Let's hope not....).
Youtube is full of videos that you can't play in large parts of Europe though. Perhaps the media companies would like youtube to do something similar for this as well. Google isn't smart enough to have a sensible policy for worldwide music videos, but they are certainly smart enough not to kill youtube outright by suggesting they're going to charge for it. Last.fm, not so much.
Pff Belgium's got the dutchies beat on the financial crisis. We haven't even formulated a proper plan yet. Take that holland!
But perhaps all of that is not because of some innate difference between men and women but rather a sort of perversion of those old role patterns, where women tend to take up more and more of the roles that used to be man-only but men are not keeping in taking up some of the roles that used to be a wife's responsibilities. There's plenty of blame to go around here, as those men you're talking about don't seem to notice their wife is having to work so much harder but those women also seem to implicitly assume anything child-related is really their domain still.
Or perhaps you're completely right. In any case, I think studies like the one in this story tend to come down more on my side, but we'll probably not now till far in the future after the dust has settled. After all, if you think about it, female emancipation really is a very new phenomenom. (in the context of our society form, I'm aware of historical precedents and such)
I still don't understand why it's so hard to combine child rearing with a career though. One of the above posters might have hit on it with his suggestion of extending paternity leave. There's, after all, plenty of young doctorate students out there with kids, so why should it be so much harder for a woman?
Children under 7 particularly need a lot of help with emotional development, and women are quite obviously superior at helping them with this. Why is this controversial?
Because when you say "women are quite obviously superior at [...] this" you are making an assumption, one that is not necessarily rooted in fact. For instance, male gay couples tend to raise kids just fine, but perhaps that's controversial to some people too.
You can't really expect the OS to be caching (much). I remember the old konqueror making this assumption, then hitting a single page could easily generate tens of dns hits for the same host, all going over the wire. Suffice it to say my cheapo home dsl router did not respond well...
Regarding the "what's up with 'apt'?" question, I've gotten gobs of responses ranging from a polite explanation to being called a "f-ing tool" repeatedly. None recognize that, details of explanation aside, it's not obvious - how the he11 am I supposed to know the command is "apt-get" if I don't know that the package is called "Aptitude"? and why should I know it all revolves around such a non-sequitor name? And that I've been deep in computing for 20+ years should (as someone did thankfully notice) indicate that maybe the problem isn't the users being ignorant, but the developers making things obtuse on the presumption that those entering the realm should deign to learn such details to the satisfaction of the High Priests (gee, wasn't that the great gripe against IBM years ago?) before being free to use the system.
If you're using ubuntu it's called add/remove programs and is right there in the applications menu. I think that's about as good as it gets for very high level descriptions. If what you're doing is trying to configure a server or trying out something a bit more complicated than checking your e-mail and surfing the web, perhaps you should take two minutes to read the manual.
You wouldn't believe how many people I've come across that ask questions like "how do I do x with command y" while the answer is "man y; scroll down; there it is". I usually have to refrain very hard from not calling them a tool. Sure there is a lot of learned behaviour I have acquired over the years, but wilful ignorance is all too common in the general population. If you're one of those people and you then go on /. of all places to whine about it, of course they'll call you a tool. Especially if you're the type that knows how half the windows registry is layed out then start ranting about how "linux" is not "intuitive".
Now that's not to say there's not some serious technical issues with, say, X.org configuration. It's gotten better over the years, but I've spent many hours mucking about with X config files and X really is about the biggest POS ever to come out of the unix world. But it's what we've got and notoriously hard to replace, so people just deal.
I think the thought of china having access to 70s era space technology makes some americans a bit uncomfortable. News flash people, there's tons of countries out there that could build manned labs in outer space, and probably would if it wasn't nearly pointless.
I dunno, but at least UK users will stop posting me youtube links that I can't watch. If only the RIAA manages to get the same thing done, then soon I won't have to worry about music vids I can't watch ever again.
@google: would it *kill* you to at least give me the title of the video I can't watch. srsly
I don't know why my government is doing this, as it sounds like the exact opposite of the changes Britain normally proposes, but I don't understand any of the UK government policies. I would say roll on the general election, but I'm not convinced that Cameron's Tory's will be much better.
I don't see their point articulated very well in the comments but I think it should be addressed anyway. The UK government's idea seems to be that providers should be allowed to try out all business models they want to and that if complete neutrality is the preferable approach then that business model will automatically drive to the top.
In short they live in a fairy tale world where the telecom industry is not ruled by a few huge multinationals who will simply make the "complete neutrality" business model impossible if left to their own devices.
I think that's exactly right. Even on a laptop that reliably goes to sleep 99% of the time it'll fail eventually. And then you don't want to use that feature because next time it happens you'll end up having to slog through all your programs, recovering data, figuring out if anything got broken etc. Basically it has an expensive failure mode and people are unwilling to risk it because lousy hardware with low engineering standards makes it into way too much wintel laptops.
I'm wondering if there's a list of shame somewhere of manufacturers that generally mess up. I guess the list of dsdt's from the acpi project could work as a good indication.
if you can take a flight of stairs at a run without wheezing too much at the top, you're probably ok.
Anyone else reading that and thinking "oh shit"? How many floors are we talking here?
I agree with you completely on all other points but...
I suppose there are "good" wars and "bad" wars as the AC's post seems to claim, but it doesn't mean that the guys doing the fighting, killing, and dying are at fault or are evil in some way. We (humans, that is) dehumanize the enemy; everyone does. AC does this, also, by implying that either the GP is either too stupid to understand his role or to evil to care...or maybe evil enough to be complicit.
Being trained to fight and being a serviceman doesn't excuse you from your moral duties. If you fail to think about what you're doing and then afterwards get convicted for war crimes "I was just following orders" doesn't quite cut it. Maybe that was implied by you, but I thought I should point it out. Now futile wars shouldn't be something we blame the soldiers that fight them for anyway, but the governments that start them.
When I was still running firefox on an older pc (P4, decent graphics card at the time, etc) it sure did matter. Loading the js version of slashdot in particular annoyed me to no end as I could probably get 3 or 4 tabs open (I just take the digests and open links from there) then do something else for a couple of minutes as my browser locks up and starts loading the pages. This was a lot less of a problem under win xp though for fairness sake I must mention that nvidia display drivers + general X crappyness probably had something to do with rendering probs.
On the other hand if the windows version really is profile optimized and the linux version is not (as one of the comments above suggests), then the article might very well be testing the browser against the exact same profile, which might or might not correspond to actual usage.
Either way, I now have computing power to spare so to answer your question: Not me, anymore.
If you have any more bullshit complaints that make it clear that you don't understand the Windows distribution model, you might as well share them too. Perhaps you could even complain about real problems, like WGA?
It's the windows distribution model I'm complaining about. Microsoft puts all these restrictions on the way the OEMs are allowed to rebundle their software, except in the ways that really matter. They clearly care more about putting marketing stickers on every pc sold than about what their end customers get. Their end customers being us, not the OEMs.
End users are typically not using SMTP to receive their mail. You're thinking of POP3.
Try finding the windows install cd for your laptop. Oh right it isn't there, and microsoft won't let you download it. So now when you find a copy of a retail cd, you install it, enter the key and what is the very next thing you need to do? That's right, call tech support in Mumbai. All this for an operating system you legally purchased. If that isn't user-hostile, I don't know what is.
I agree on Samsung for desktop hard drives. They are much like most other samsung stuff: never really top notch but always close enough. Actually I've been buying a lot of Samsung stuff lately, seems to me they have a good QA process going (though I suspect most of their hardware isn't actually designed or made in-house).
This is the same problem as when Obama mentioned pumping your tires might make a real difference in fuel efficiency during the elections, then got ridiculed for it. The truth is, if you don't care about the little things, you're not gonna make much progress solving the big things. Big things are usually composed of lots of little things.
I'm relieved that we can stop being excited about the US president and start bashing him again though. All this positive talk was making me uneasy.
I knew there was an xkcd for this discussion. Doesn't include engineering/comp sci but you get the idea.
Thank you for proving my point. Nowhere in the literature on user interface design, be it computers or other devices, is there even one recorded case where democracy or "crowd intelligence" came up with a good design. It's called "design", not "election" for a reason. A good designer listens to the crowd and considers the users, but he also knows enough psychology to understand that there's a difference between what people need and what they say they need.
Open source software design works by a few people getting out their computers and starting to write something the way they think it should work. They listen to their users along the way but they know that what the users want is not necessarily what they need. This is how open source design has worked since the early days, how is this different from open source graphic design?
The truth of the matter is McCain ran a lousy campaign and the media coverage reflects that. You can explain away these numbers either way, but in the end McCain would have probably won if he hadn't screwed it up so royally. I mean how bad do you have to be to have heavy hitters in your own party start endorsing the other candidate?