Made me think of the Mitch Hedburg one-liner. "I used to do drugs. I *still* do, but I used to, too." Windows Blue. It *still* blows, but it blue, too.
I don't mind the ribbon much one way or the other - but I still find myself getting more use out of an extensively customized Quick Access Toolbar than out of the ribbon itself.
Word could be improved for some hardcore uses by getting rid of every last vestige of non-Unicode compliant font usage propagated in the name of backward-compatibility. And make all codepoint usage uniformly hexadecimal and accommodate double-byte codepoints in VBA, and stop trating Symbol font so weirdly. Harumph.
If LibreOffice gave me the power and flexibility to deal with Unicode properly, I'd jump on it for at home. At work,... always gonna be stuck with Word.
I work at a very large global company (a big pharma), and we're still ninety-some % on XP SP3 for workstations, to the degree that, for one system I support, the vendor came to me with the problem of not having been able to purchase a workstation with anything but Win7 on it, and no longer being able to legally purchase any kind of XP license even to do a downgrade (not sure of all the details, or if this was really an absolute), but needing to get an instance of the system up and running. We ended up having our IT do the XP install with our volume license, on a vendor-supplied, yet-another-third-party-vendor workstation, to support the first vendor's software and interfaced hardware. It's getting a little contorted out here, and yes, in this case it is because this FDA-regulated company steers like a cow. Technically, we could install Win7, but corporately, we haven't approved a version of our chosen antivirus package yet to run on 7, and so we'd have to either break our corporate guidance and just use Win7's AV, or find another way around the issue. When this particular vendor starts supplying hardware that flat-out won't support an XP install (and this system uses 64-bit), then we'll have a slightly more severe problem.
I came to this discussion fully expecting to see some mention of Wil Wheaton, and am a bit surprised that there apparently hasn't been one so far. Not that I have much of a feeling one way or the other as to whether he'd be valid to play the role.
Absolutely true. I'm in IT at a Big Pharma, and I've seen plenty of those exact kinds of issues during regression testing - patches "breaking" little loopholes in Windows behavior that we'd unwisely come to depend on in some obscure cases. That XP SP2-to-SP3 upgrade buggers up DCOM, for example.
I was thinking about that myself; I imagine ID10-T as the whole class of errors, and the PICNIC, PEBKAC and all others as specific examples (though so many of them are redundant).
My company would find it worth the money (if I and a few others could convince them to, and if the affected users could actually be corralled to install and use it consistently, and nevermind the internal stresses between the graphic designers vs. marketing vs. regulatory agencies vs. the ridiculous turnover in parties responsible for copy) to buy a couple fonts that include every damn Unicode codepage that we'd reasonably need to use. Right now, the only one I've found easily available (and I'm not a deep expert in this, but am learning) is Microsoft's Arial Unicode MS, which is sans serif, and we'd kinda like a serif'd one, too. There are a few other nice ones that include a fair selection of codepages, but it seems that they still manage to leave out one or more that we actually find critical, so we can't pull all locations in line.
(The application here is packaging materials for pharma, and I support this department and these processes in an organization with printing needs in at least 30-some countries.)
(Also, could care less about eliminating Comic Sans, but Microsoft's Symbol font can go jump off a bridge; it's buried so deeply, treated so weirdly, and is so thoroughly Unicode non-compliant that it manages to sneak in and bugger up documents at almost every stage in our development processes. I'd like to slap the person responsible.)
I work at a Big Pharma, and I was going to make the same comment as the one to which you're replying. $750M to $1000M is much more realistic a range for the cost to bring a NEW API to market. (API = active pharmaceutical ingredient)
This cost is the end result of high, demanding standards for quality, safety, documentation and a zillion other details governed by the FDA. If you want to know why FDA-approved drugs cost so much more than "dietary supplements" and all the other alterna-crap, it's because the producers of those things aren't required to prove:
that they work;
that they have a consistent strength/dosage across production lots;
that they aren't adulterated with uncontrolled substances not related to the API;
that they are safe.
FDA-governed pharmas are required to show all those things, and to a degree far past the diminishing returns of effort that you'd find if we were required to meet *only* a 99% consistent result, and that's only at the point where real production is underway.
Final-phase clinical trials are expensive enough, requiring as they do statistically significant cohort sizes, medical professionals to run them, teams of doctors and statisticians to understand and interpret the results and a huge infrastructure to supply the API in the relatively tiny CT quantities, built despite the significant risk that it could all amount to nothing even having gotten through all the earlier stages of development.
Earlier phase testing isn't qualitatively much different, though there are some interesting expenses that most lay-trolls don't know about, like animals used for various types of studies. Since you have to study under laboratory conditions, you have to buy animals bred explicitly for the purpose. A single monkey can cost $50,000 just to purchase, and again, you need a statistically significant number of them to run a study.
But it's so much easier to dismiss the complexity and difficulty of the effort and to presume that no one involved in the process is doing any sort of earnest job and just say it's all bullshit and greed.
I work at a large pharmaceutical research and manufacturing company, and have supported areas that do toxicology and various quality testing in late-stage development and production stages (not necessarily early, primary research). I've known first-hand of rabbits, rats (possibly also mice), monkeys (not sure what kind), beagles, cows and some kind of freshwater fish (not sure what kind) being used in those areas. I'm sure there are others I don't remember or never knew about, but I'm pretty sure none of them were bugs, birds or reptiles.
The animals we use are treated extremely carefully, for several reasons.
Partially, because the people who work directly with them respect them and have no wish to be cruel.
Partly because we have to comply fully with federal guidelines on housing laboratory animals (the mandated conditions as far as temperature, humidity and cleaning/watering schedules are part of what I had to ensure were built into some environmental control systems,...).
But even MORE because: Animals bred for laboratory use are #*&$%&^%#$ expensive. The purchase price of the monkeys we use is on the order of $50,000 (US) each, and tox studies don't use only one at a time. Add to that the fact that it's very easy to invalidate an ongoing study and have to replace the whole cohort and start over - sometimes something as seemingly innocuous as audible noise, detectable vibration from outside the animal area or the animals being exposed to light during "night" hours can trash a study on psychoactive APIs if the observed variables include stress reactions - and you realize why animal testing is just not done frivolously.
So, yes, I'm with you on the perspective being a bit skewed in terms of commentary on animal treatment in scientific research.
I wish I knew. I think it's very inefficient, using more city water than the amount of ground water it displaces, but I'm not sure. It's also not very fast. Really, though, the only times it's gone off (that I know of, anyway) have been a few times when I've purposely set it off for a bit while fiddling around with the floaty switch for the main pump.
The whole reason I went for such an exotic backup is that I got stung twice in rapid succession by a combination of 1) *old* gummed up main pump seizing up + 2) marine backup battery exhausting itself + 3) *bad* newly-installed floaty switch. The circumstances were even weirder in that the first flooding incident wasn't even ground water coming up - it was water-heater water going down into my basement after the heater's thermostat, being old and encrusted, reported falsely low, causing the heater to overheat, causing the pressure release valve to give way; unfortunately, its associated outlet pipe wasn't man enough for the deluge, so the water found another way to make gravity happy and went around and out into the basement. The bad floaty switch and dead backup battery came a few weeks later, and I was so paranoid about batteries after that, I felt better plunking down the several hundred dollars for the non-battery option.
In my case, 'sewer' = 'hose heading downhill to pond in backyard,' so there's not much risk there. In general, yes, there are situations where this kind of backup pump is recommended, and situations where it isn't. My main point was that there are options qualitatively different from 'yet another different kind of battery-reliant system with basically the same shortcomings as the rest of 'em.'
Been there, done sorta that with the sump pump backup battery. You may want to consider something even more different. I have a city-water siphon pump backup. No battery needed. As long as my water supply is working, I have sump pump backup. Sure, it's not terrifically efficient, and wastes city water if it gets used - but that's cheap compared to the cleanup effort and property loss potential if my basement flooded again.
Har! Actually, when I first read the headline, I pictured in my mind a *human* tooth growing in the mouse's mouth, rather than a normal mouse tooth, and imagined one mouse-lip snarled up over this huge, outsized growth. Unfortunately, today I'm not clever enough to come up with the perfect Far Side-like caption for that picture.
I'm currently reading the excruciatingly detailed "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design" edited by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross,...
Dembski continually misrepresents what the general scientific consensus is on the details of evolutionary theory, emphasizes trivialities and irrelevant ideas in order to attempt to discredit parts of the current theory, and never deals with the idea that his philosophical arguments have come nowhere close to beating David Hume's rationale establishing the needlessness of a creator. It's no surprise that he takes advantage of a ready-made little army of propagandists to help him in his intellectually dishonest quest.
That's nowhere near 2000 words, so you'll have to copy and paste it 15 times or so in order to qualify for full credit,... but since I'm not teaching a class and you're not my students, you'll have to do it just for kicks.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. DLNA is what I want; a Roku equipped with that would be pretty much the last piece of media hardware I'd need to buy.
Made me think of the Mitch Hedburg one-liner. "I used to do drugs. I *still* do, but I used to, too."
Windows Blue. It *still* blows, but it blue, too.
I like your ideas, AC, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don't mind the ribbon much one way or the other - but I still find myself getting more use out of an extensively customized Quick Access Toolbar than out of the ribbon itself.
Word could be improved for some hardcore uses by getting rid of every last vestige of non-Unicode compliant font usage propagated in the name of backward-compatibility. And make all codepoint usage uniformly hexadecimal and accommodate double-byte codepoints in VBA, and stop trating Symbol font so weirdly. Harumph.
If LibreOffice gave me the power and flexibility to deal with Unicode properly, I'd jump on it for at home. At work,... always gonna be stuck with Word.
I work at a very large global company (a big pharma), and we're still ninety-some % on XP SP3 for workstations, to the degree that, for one system I support, the vendor came to me with the problem of not having been able to purchase a workstation with anything but Win7 on it, and no longer being able to legally purchase any kind of XP license even to do a downgrade (not sure of all the details, or if this was really an absolute), but needing to get an instance of the system up and running. We ended up having our IT do the XP install with our volume license, on a vendor-supplied, yet-another-third-party-vendor workstation, to support the first vendor's software and interfaced hardware.
It's getting a little contorted out here, and yes, in this case it is because this FDA-regulated company steers like a cow. Technically, we could install Win7, but corporately, we haven't approved a version of our chosen antivirus package yet to run on 7, and so we'd have to either break our corporate guidance and just use Win7's AV, or find another way around the issue. When this particular vendor starts supplying hardware that flat-out won't support an XP install (and this system uses 64-bit), then we'll have a slightly more severe problem.
I came to this discussion fully expecting to see some mention of Wil Wheaton, and am a bit surprised that there apparently hasn't been one so far. Not that I have much of a feeling one way or the other as to whether he'd be valid to play the role.
/read the Turing bio
//haven't seen Wheaton in many things
Came to make sure someone said, leaving satisfied.
Absolutely true. I'm in IT at a Big Pharma, and I've seen plenty of those exact kinds of issues during regression testing - patches "breaking" little loopholes in Windows behavior that we'd unwisely come to depend on in some obscure cases. That XP SP2-to-SP3 upgrade buggers up DCOM, for example.
Came for the inevitable pr0n/"I'm thinking Arby's!" post, leaving somewhat satisfied and somewhat,... distracted.
Came here for the "did they also grow some miniature fava beans and miniature chiantis?" question,.... leaving happy.
I heard Toyota and Chevrolet had partnered on an attempt to achieve this same design. They were gonna call it the Toyolet.
To improve mileage, all you needed to do was put a brick in the tank.
The first prototypes were kinda cheap, though - the seats had two positions: up and down.
Agreeing with the Model M comment.
Also: obligatory one-handed typing joke, taken as read.
Also, less facetiously, I wonder how well it accommodates switching scripts/Unicode ranges or special typing for codepoints. (Haven't yet rtfa.)
I was thinking about that myself; I imagine ID10-T as the whole class of errors, and the PICNIC, PEBKAC and all others as specific examples (though so many of them are redundant).
Proposing a new lUser acronym:
PIDSNIT - Problem In Driver's Seat, Not In Throttle.
My company would find it worth the money (if I and a few others could convince them to, and if the affected users could actually be corralled to install and use it consistently, and nevermind the internal stresses between the graphic designers vs. marketing vs. regulatory agencies vs. the ridiculous turnover in parties responsible for copy) to buy a couple fonts that include every damn Unicode codepage that we'd reasonably need to use. Right now, the only one I've found easily available (and I'm not a deep expert in this, but am learning) is Microsoft's Arial Unicode MS, which is sans serif, and we'd kinda like a serif'd one, too. There are a few other nice ones that include a fair selection of codepages, but it seems that they still manage to leave out one or more that we actually find critical, so we can't pull all locations in line.
(The application here is packaging materials for pharma, and I support this department and these processes in an organization with printing needs in at least 30-some countries.)
(Also, could care less about eliminating Comic Sans, but Microsoft's Symbol font can go jump off a bridge; it's buried so deeply, treated so weirdly, and is so thoroughly Unicode non-compliant that it manages to sneak in and bugger up documents at almost every stage in our development processes. I'd like to slap the person responsible.)
Unicode-compliant font and codepoint 0x00E6. FTW. (Maybe pasted in from Word or something,...)
I work at a Big Pharma, and I was going to make the same comment as the one to which you're replying. $750M to $1000M is much more realistic a range for the cost to bring a NEW API to market. (API = active pharmaceutical ingredient)
This cost is the end result of high, demanding standards for quality, safety, documentation and a zillion other details governed by the FDA. If you want to know why FDA-approved drugs cost so much more than "dietary supplements" and all the other alterna-crap, it's because the producers of those things aren't required to prove:
that they work;
that they have a consistent strength/dosage across production lots;
that they aren't adulterated with uncontrolled substances not related to the API;
that they are safe.
FDA-governed pharmas are required to show all those things, and to a degree far past the diminishing returns of effort that you'd find if we were required to meet *only* a 99% consistent result, and that's only at the point where real production is underway.
Final-phase clinical trials are expensive enough, requiring as they do statistically significant cohort sizes, medical professionals to run them, teams of doctors and statisticians to understand and interpret the results and a huge infrastructure to supply the API in the relatively tiny CT quantities, built despite the significant risk that it could all amount to nothing even having gotten through all the earlier stages of development.
Earlier phase testing isn't qualitatively much different, though there are some interesting expenses that most lay-trolls don't know about, like animals used for various types of studies. Since you have to study under laboratory conditions, you have to buy animals bred explicitly for the purpose. A single monkey can cost $50,000 just to purchase, and again, you need a statistically significant number of them to run a study.
But it's so much easier to dismiss the complexity and difficulty of the effort and to presume that no one involved in the process is doing any sort of earnest job and just say it's all bullshit and greed.
I work at a large pharmaceutical research and manufacturing company, and have supported areas that do toxicology and various quality testing in late-stage development and production stages (not necessarily early, primary research). I've known first-hand of rabbits, rats (possibly also mice), monkeys (not sure what kind), beagles, cows and some kind of freshwater fish (not sure what kind) being used in those areas. I'm sure there are others I don't remember or never knew about, but I'm pretty sure none of them were bugs, birds or reptiles.
The animals we use are treated extremely carefully, for several reasons.
Partially, because the people who work directly with them respect them and have no wish to be cruel.
Partly because we have to comply fully with federal guidelines on housing laboratory animals (the mandated conditions as far as temperature, humidity and cleaning/watering schedules are part of what I had to ensure were built into some environmental control systems,...).
But even MORE because: Animals bred for laboratory use are #*&$%&^%#$ expensive. The purchase price of the monkeys we use is on the order of $50,000 (US) each, and tox studies don't use only one at a time. Add to that the fact that it's very easy to invalidate an ongoing study and have to replace the whole cohort and start over - sometimes something as seemingly innocuous as audible noise, detectable vibration from outside the animal area or the animals being exposed to light during "night" hours can trash a study on psychoactive APIs if the observed variables include stress reactions - and you realize why animal testing is just not done frivolously.
So, yes, I'm with you on the perspective being a bit skewed in terms of commentary on animal treatment in scientific research.
I wish I knew. I think it's very inefficient, using more city water than the amount of ground water it displaces, but I'm not sure. It's also not very fast. Really, though, the only times it's gone off (that I know of, anyway) have been a few times when I've purposely set it off for a bit while fiddling around with the floaty switch for the main pump.
The whole reason I went for such an exotic backup is that I got stung twice in rapid succession by a combination of 1) *old* gummed up main pump seizing up + 2) marine backup battery exhausting itself + 3) *bad* newly-installed floaty switch. The circumstances were even weirder in that the first flooding incident wasn't even ground water coming up - it was water-heater water going down into my basement after the heater's thermostat, being old and encrusted, reported falsely low, causing the heater to overheat, causing the pressure release valve to give way; unfortunately, its associated outlet pipe wasn't man enough for the deluge, so the water found another way to make gravity happy and went around and out into the basement. The bad floaty switch and dead backup battery came a few weeks later, and I was so paranoid about batteries after that, I felt better plunking down the several hundred dollars for the non-battery option.
In my case, 'sewer' = 'hose heading downhill to pond in backyard,' so there's not much risk there. In general, yes, there are situations where this kind of backup pump is recommended, and situations where it isn't. My main point was that there are options qualitatively different from 'yet another different kind of battery-reliant system with basically the same shortcomings as the rest of 'em.'
Been there, done sorta that with the sump pump backup battery. You may want to consider something even more different. I have a city-water siphon pump backup. No battery needed. As long as my water supply is working, I have sump pump backup. Sure, it's not terrifically efficient, and wastes city water if it gets used - but that's cheap compared to the cleanup effort and property loss potential if my basement flooded again.
Bingo! On reading the phrase "synthetic stone DVD" I immediately pictured a Flintstone-esque bird with a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very sharp beak, carefully etching tiny pits into a disc on a Flintstone-esque lathe or machine assembly.
Har! Actually, when I first read the headline, I pictured in my mind a *human* tooth growing in the mouse's mouth, rather than a normal mouse tooth, and imagined one mouse-lip snarled up over this huge, outsized growth. Unfortunately, today I'm not clever enough to come up with the perfect Far Side-like caption for that picture.
I'm currently reading the excruciatingly detailed "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design" edited by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross,...
Dembski continually misrepresents what the general scientific consensus is on the details of evolutionary theory, emphasizes trivialities and irrelevant ideas in order to attempt to discredit parts of the current theory, and never deals with the idea that his philosophical arguments have come nowhere close to beating David Hume's rationale establishing the needlessness of a creator. It's no surprise that he takes advantage of a ready-made little army of propagandists to help him in his intellectually dishonest quest.
That's nowhere near 2000 words, so you'll have to copy and paste it 15 times or so in order to qualify for full credit,... but since I'm not teaching a class and you're not my students, you'll have to do it just for kicks.