This can't be emphasized enough. Evolution isn't smart. Clever solutions are the result of time and probability: millions of permutations of similar creatures until one with a slightly better permutation survives long enough to have slightly more offspring than its peers.
If you're going to anthropomorphize evolution, call it brute-force. It's the biological equivalent of "hacking" a password by trying every permutation of letters and numbers.
Meh. My previous desktop dual-booted Win64 and Debian; my macbook dual-boots Ubuntu and OSX. My current desktop is Vista only.
I'm your pretty typical power user; I've gone back and forth between all three for about ten years. Linux is certainly easier to get into today than it was when I used Debian Woody, but it's not that great. Vista has its obnoxious quirks, but it's not that bad. OSX *should* be the best, but to tell you the truth, I feel like it peaked around Tiger, and Apple isn't putting the work they need into the real nuts-and-bolts issues (e.g. Finder still sucks, interface consistency).
TL;DR: Vista isn't that bad. Any of the Big 3 will do what you need if you don't mind putting up with their particular quirks.
OH WAIT--THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT SAVING MONEY USING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN THE 5 CITIES IN THE US WHERE IT IS ACTUALLY FEASIBLE, WHICH EVERYBODY THAT LIVES THERE KNOWS ABOUT ANYWAY
Ah! So by reading the article, you drew the conclusion that it was not relevant to everybody, everywhere! Brilliant!
The engineers at Trimble would probably take issue with that statement, since they sell high-dollar ($10~$100k) survey equipment that produces reliable >0.1' accuracy (wikipedia states 20mm as a working number). I worked with equipment in 2003 that was at least 5 yrs old then, and it was that good. The key, as other posters have mentioned, is a base station and some fancy calculations that make it possible.
I'm pretty sure that this equipment has been around since well before the Clinton administration ended the obfuscation/degradation of GPS signals; it just isn't practical for your typical consumer gear.
Exactly! I'm a bush pilot in Alaska, and I think this article is just silly! Sure, ON PAPER public transit in NYC may seem to be cheaper than my float-equipped Cessna, but they're making all sorts of false assumptions! For example, I do my own maintenance--where's THAT in their spreadsheet?
OH WAIT--THIS ARTICLE IS NOT ABOUT RURAL TRANSPORTATION, WHICH EVERYBODY KNOWS IS DIFFERENT THAN COMMUTING IN MAJOR URBAN AREAS.
All games have some bugs, and all of the people experiencing bugs are the ones who are going to post, not the ones who have zero issues.
My brother and I have probably put over 100 hrs each on the 360 version. I've had it crash several times, he's had it crash once. I've been stuck in terrain maybe 3 times, he's been stuck once. I'm pretty sure our "fail" rate is in line with most other modern video games. It sucks, but it's a fact of complexity. Your mileage may vary.
Or, you could try this: Play Fallout 3 straight through, story mode, ignoring side quests. Pick skills that look useful and interesting, but don't go online and theorycraft yourself into a god. You'll get to the end around level 12-13, and many fights will be a struggle, especially the escort missions and the Enclave battles. Just like Fallout 2, you'll end up with a couple strong skills (e.g. speech and small guns for my last guy) and a lot of weaknesses.
Now, load up Fallout 2, and spend all of your time fighting in the wasteland, ignoring the main questline. Or do just enough of the main quest to get your power armor. Go theorycraft on your skills. You can make yourself into an unstoppable juggernaut that one-shots every enemy with just a power fist.
That's 100% Fallout. You can go either way. You can be a scrappy underdog, or you can be the god of the wastes.
Regarding the parrots, it was my understanding that all parrots (worldwide) are of common ancestry. Sort of like how all elephants and mammoths were of common ancestry, even though they were essentially worldwide and of many distinct varieties.
Phoenix, AZ: Cox will sell you cable internet (alone) for ~$45/month. IIRC it's 10/2 (Down/Up), but that those numbers are also shared with your neighbors.
Where in Sam-Hell (aka Arizona) are you having trouble with arsenic?
I don't doubt there is a place (or a few places) like that in AZ, but I'm from here, have lived, worked, and visited all over the state, am pretty familiar with well water, and haven't ever come across a "normal" one that was laced with arsenic. That is, unless you've been drilling wells next to a mine tailings dump.
And while AZ may be relatively low humidity compared to some place like Georgia, our air is still wet enough (over most of the state) most of the time to put enough condensation on your AC coils to leave little puddles when your car parks, or to screw up your ceiling when the drain gets plugged. It would definitely work better in a high-humidity environment, but if they could make it a little more efficient (300 W, lol) it would be viable here too.
What part of anything in OP suggested that people shouldn't live in rural places? Or out on large plots of land? Or in small towns? Or that he wanted to herd you into a city? Stifle your knee-jerk outrage for a moment and reread the OP. If we read your little rant through the same blinders that you read his, then you must be suggesting that all cities should be bulldozed and the inhabitants run into the woods!
URBANISM would refer to larger cities. Places like Phoenix, LA, Las Vegas, etc. Cities that aren't really cities, but wastelands of suburban sprawl. Places where all the advantages of living in a city have been lost, along with all the advantages of living in a rural place, leaving you with the problems of both. You still deal with the crowds and the artificial environment, and you deal with the added cost and inefficiency of spending hours in your car attending to your day to day needs (commute, groceries, school, entertainment).
I don't know if your idea of "having room" is just having a big lot in the 'burbs, but mine is having miles. I grew up on a ranch almost an hour from "town," and that town was barely a wide spot on a long stretch of interstate. Cities were an hour west of town, or four hours east. My nearest neighbor was two miles, and the next nearest was five. I know about the advantages of living in a rural area, and about the disadvantages too. I plan on moving back when I'm done with my current career arc.
I also know about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city, and let me tell you, I HATE living in a city where none of the advantages are available. If I'm going to live in a crowded, paved over place, why should I have to commute just as far as I did in the country? Why should grocery shopping be just as big of a chore? Why can't I walk out of my building and expect to be able to get food or drinks without taking a backpack and a tent for the journey?
I accept that some people might want to live in the 'burbs, in a cookie-cutter house, with all their needs attended to in strip malls and single-storey office parks. However, the way that city planning is done, in many cases this is the ONLY option, due to restrictive zoning ordinances.
Suburban sprawl is the result, in many ways, of enforced single-use zoning which was intended to fix the problems cities faced decades ago. It isn't a choice for people building in cities, it is forced upon them by the slow-moving wheels of bureaucracy. In URBAN CENTERS, it is outdated and should be revisited--multiple use zoning should be an option for the market, don't you think? In RURAL AREAS, ya, it's probably still ok! GOD I haven't raged so hard after a slashdot post in years!!!!!!!
GM's other electric car (EV1, the one that they killed because it worked too well) had a waterproof, childproof, and in fact idiot-proof charger. It looked kind of like a ping pong paddle, except the handle was gripped parallel to the paddle instead of perpendicular. The paddle had a cord that was reeled (coiled? been a while) up on a box that was bolted to a wall, or on a free-standing pedestal in front of a parking spot. You pushed the paddle part into a slot on the nose of the car, and induction was used to pump some juice into your batteries.
There weren't many EV1's on the road, but if you lived in CA or AZ and knew where to look, you could find charging stations for them, so clearly building the infrastructure isn't THAT hard: all you do is bolt down some charger boxes and plug them in to ordinary wall sockets. Generally you'd see them in parking garages near places that engineers worked:p Anyways, the charger boxes themselves are dead simple to build; it's a friggin' transformer and some heavy gauge wire. All of the fancy charge monitoring computers are already built into the car. If GM's smart, they'd license the design for a song, and use it as a marketing coup.
AH! Well, I stand by E.R. Burrough's Martian Adventures then. If it wasn't so late, I'd try a direct reply to OP to suggest them. They were probably one of my favorite series when I was about 12-14, at about the same time that I was reading Piers Anthony and a lot of other pulp sci-fi. Funny that I was reading century-old books at the same time as contemporaries. I definitely didn't appreciate Asimov or Bradbury (never read his Martian Chronicals, but I have a few others) until I was in my late teens, early 20s.
Dude, are you kidding about the Martian Chronicles? Those are EXACTLY the kind of fluffy, fast-paced things that a 12 year old would like. Really, how many pages does John Carter go WITHOUT cutting somebody's head off? Each book is only about 150 pages, of which 100 are devoted to merciless slaughter, in great detail. I mean, if film had been around when Burroughs was writing, he would have invented the "bullet time" matrix effect for his stories--it's the way they're told.
I agree with your take on Foundation and Bradbury, but Burroughs is all about fast-paced action. I mean, if I had to come up with a metaphor end for "Foundation is to John Carter what..." I'd have to end with "NOVA is to The Fast and the Furious."
Vista probably used less than 40-50% of its current usage before MS's clusterfuck design process tacked on everything up-to-and-including a DRM'ed kitchen sink. Don't worry, once Win 7 gets the full treatment from every mouthbreathing manager, it'll be just as shitty.
You standardize with PDF when the >>presentation of the document is as vital as its content. The finer touches of presentation in word documents can get screwed up between two computers with Word!
You also standardize with PDF because it is cross platform and doesn't require purchasing any license at all; there are a million (NON-Adobe) implementations of PDF. In fact, idk about Vista, but Mac OS and any good Linux desktop will have PDF functionality in the desktop OS (as a save function or as a print function), so you don't even need to shell out for Adobe or any other "pdf software."
It's also a mature format and completely forward/backwards compatible; when you get a license for Office 2021, your PDFs will still look exactly the same. When you save a file in Office 2007, what happens when somebody opens it in Office 2000? Or vice versa? What happens if you need to send documents to a state office (ahem Massachusetts) or a foreign client that wants an open format? What happens if (when?) Microsoft decides to ditch ".doc" for OOXML?
PDF isn't going above and beyond; it's using common sense. Once you make it common sense/practice, you don't get people sending out emails with bizarre attachments (MS Publisher?) to people who don't have the same software. You don't get word.doc's that get weird line wrapping or other fuckups when different people open them. You don't get people crying about using Open Office vs. MS Office vs. desktop publishing suites vs. whatever--different people in your office have different needs. You don't get macro viruses (lol). You don't get out-of-date formats, or files saved in multiple doc formats. You get one format that ALWAYS looks right when you print it.
Where I work (public high school district), completely computer illiterate people (teachers) are required to Telnet into a VAX to input attendance and grades.
Telnet. Into a VAX.
They are shown how to do this on their first day. Their coworkers can show them how if they forget. The IT guy will come hold their hands ONE MORE TIME if they still can't handle it. And if all that fails, guess what? Find another job.
If your workplace says "save it as a PDF," your workers will learn to put it in a fucking PDF, even if they whine for the first week. The slowest and stupidest of them will eventually have the steps "save as... PDF!" on a sticky on their monitor and it will get done. It only takes one boss to get 'er done.
For your stupidest customers, guess what you can do? EMBED THE FUCKIN PDF IN A DOC, LOL!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, I recently received a contract from a residential contractor in this exact manner.
Reeally? If you build a cabin in the woods, the gov't has to come dig you a well? Something tells me you haven't looked into this local legislation as deeply as you think you have.
Where I live, if you don't live in town, you pay the electric company to plant poles to deliver the power. You pay the well digger to dig you a well. And you pay the telephone company to string some line along those electric co. poles. If you don't like the above, you sit in the dark and use an outhouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the evolution of the modern analogy. What wonders will its daughters have in store for us? =)
This can't be emphasized enough. Evolution isn't smart. Clever solutions are the result of time and probability: millions of permutations of similar creatures until one with a slightly better permutation survives long enough to have slightly more offspring than its peers.
If you're going to anthropomorphize evolution, call it brute-force. It's the biological equivalent of "hacking" a password by trying every permutation of letters and numbers.
Meh. My previous desktop dual-booted Win64 and Debian; my macbook dual-boots Ubuntu and OSX. My current desktop is Vista only.
I'm your pretty typical power user; I've gone back and forth between all three for about ten years. Linux is certainly easier to get into today than it was when I used Debian Woody, but it's not that great. Vista has its obnoxious quirks, but it's not that bad. OSX *should* be the best, but to tell you the truth, I feel like it peaked around Tiger, and Apple isn't putting the work they need into the real nuts-and-bolts issues (e.g. Finder still sucks, interface consistency).
TL;DR: Vista isn't that bad. Any of the Big 3 will do what you need if you don't mind putting up with their particular quirks.
OH WAIT--THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT SAVING MONEY USING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN THE 5 CITIES IN THE US WHERE IT IS ACTUALLY FEASIBLE, WHICH EVERYBODY THAT LIVES THERE KNOWS ABOUT ANYWAY
Ah! So by reading the article, you drew the conclusion that it was not relevant to everybody, everywhere! Brilliant!
Now, just relay that information on to the GP =)
The engineers at Trimble would probably take issue with that statement, since they sell high-dollar ($10~$100k) survey equipment that produces reliable >0.1' accuracy (wikipedia states 20mm as a working number). I worked with equipment in 2003 that was at least 5 yrs old then, and it was that good. The key, as other posters have mentioned, is a base station and some fancy calculations that make it possible.
I'm pretty sure that this equipment has been around since well before the Clinton administration ended the obfuscation/degradation of GPS signals; it just isn't practical for your typical consumer gear.
You, sir, are a Real American Hero.
Exactly! I'm a bush pilot in Alaska, and I think this article is just silly! Sure, ON PAPER public transit in NYC may seem to be cheaper than my float-equipped Cessna, but they're making all sorts of false assumptions! For example, I do my own maintenance--where's THAT in their spreadsheet?
OH WAIT--THIS ARTICLE IS NOT ABOUT RURAL TRANSPORTATION, WHICH EVERYBODY KNOWS IS DIFFERENT THAN COMMUTING IN MAJOR URBAN AREAS.
The fact that you think socialism and democracy are mutually exclusive has already completely blown any chance you have of making a coherent point.
THIS!
Hahaha, I totally forgot about that =)
All games have some bugs, and all of the people experiencing bugs are the ones who are going to post, not the ones who have zero issues.
My brother and I have probably put over 100 hrs each on the 360 version. I've had it crash several times, he's had it crash once. I've been stuck in terrain maybe 3 times, he's been stuck once. I'm pretty sure our "fail" rate is in line with most other modern video games. It sucks, but it's a fact of complexity. Your mileage may vary.
Or, you could try this: Play Fallout 3 straight through, story mode, ignoring side quests. Pick skills that look useful and interesting, but don't go online and theorycraft yourself into a god. You'll get to the end around level 12-13, and many fights will be a struggle, especially the escort missions and the Enclave battles. Just like Fallout 2, you'll end up with a couple strong skills (e.g. speech and small guns for my last guy) and a lot of weaknesses.
Now, load up Fallout 2, and spend all of your time fighting in the wasteland, ignoring the main questline. Or do just enough of the main quest to get your power armor. Go theorycraft on your skills. You can make yourself into an unstoppable juggernaut that one-shots every enemy with just a power fist.
That's 100% Fallout. You can go either way. You can be a scrappy underdog, or you can be the god of the wastes.
Regarding the parrots, it was my understanding that all parrots (worldwide) are of common ancestry. Sort of like how all elephants and mammoths were of common ancestry, even though they were essentially worldwide and of many distinct varieties.
Phoenix, AZ: Cox will sell you cable internet (alone) for ~$45/month. IIRC it's 10/2 (Down/Up), but that those numbers are also shared with your neighbors.
Where in Sam-Hell (aka Arizona) are you having trouble with arsenic?
I don't doubt there is a place (or a few places) like that in AZ, but I'm from here, have lived, worked, and visited all over the state, am pretty familiar with well water, and haven't ever come across a "normal" one that was laced with arsenic. That is, unless you've been drilling wells next to a mine tailings dump.
And while AZ may be relatively low humidity compared to some place like Georgia, our air is still wet enough (over most of the state) most of the time to put enough condensation on your AC coils to leave little puddles when your car parks, or to screw up your ceiling when the drain gets plugged. It would definitely work better in a high-humidity environment, but if they could make it a little more efficient (300 W, lol) it would be viable here too.
Are you an idiot, or do you just play one on TV?
What part of anything in OP suggested that people shouldn't live in rural places? Or out on large plots of land? Or in small towns? Or that he wanted to herd you into a city? Stifle your knee-jerk outrage for a moment and reread the OP. If we read your little rant through the same blinders that you read his, then you must be suggesting that all cities should be bulldozed and the inhabitants run into the woods!
URBANISM would refer to larger cities. Places like Phoenix, LA, Las Vegas, etc. Cities that aren't really cities, but wastelands of suburban sprawl. Places where all the advantages of living in a city have been lost, along with all the advantages of living in a rural place, leaving you with the problems of both. You still deal with the crowds and the artificial environment, and you deal with the added cost and inefficiency of spending hours in your car attending to your day to day needs (commute, groceries, school, entertainment).
I don't know if your idea of "having room" is just having a big lot in the 'burbs, but mine is having miles. I grew up on a ranch almost an hour from "town," and that town was barely a wide spot on a long stretch of interstate. Cities were an hour west of town, or four hours east. My nearest neighbor was two miles, and the next nearest was five. I know about the advantages of living in a rural area, and about the disadvantages too. I plan on moving back when I'm done with my current career arc.
I also know about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city, and let me tell you, I HATE living in a city where none of the advantages are available. If I'm going to live in a crowded, paved over place, why should I have to commute just as far as I did in the country? Why should grocery shopping be just as big of a chore? Why can't I walk out of my building and expect to be able to get food or drinks without taking a backpack and a tent for the journey?
I accept that some people might want to live in the 'burbs, in a cookie-cutter house, with all their needs attended to in strip malls and single-storey office parks. However, the way that city planning is done, in many cases this is the ONLY option, due to restrictive zoning ordinances.
Suburban sprawl is the result, in many ways, of enforced single-use zoning which was intended to fix the problems cities faced decades ago. It isn't a choice for people building in cities, it is forced upon them by the slow-moving wheels of bureaucracy. In URBAN CENTERS, it is outdated and should be revisited--multiple use zoning should be an option for the market, don't you think? In RURAL AREAS, ya, it's probably still ok! GOD I haven't raged so hard after a slashdot post in years!!!!!!!
GM's other electric car (EV1, the one that they killed because it worked too well) had a waterproof, childproof, and in fact idiot-proof charger. It looked kind of like a ping pong paddle, except the handle was gripped parallel to the paddle instead of perpendicular. The paddle had a cord that was reeled (coiled? been a while) up on a box that was bolted to a wall, or on a free-standing pedestal in front of a parking spot. You pushed the paddle part into a slot on the nose of the car, and induction was used to pump some juice into your batteries.
There weren't many EV1's on the road, but if you lived in CA or AZ and knew where to look, you could find charging stations for them, so clearly building the infrastructure isn't THAT hard: all you do is bolt down some charger boxes and plug them in to ordinary wall sockets. Generally you'd see them in parking garages near places that engineers worked :p Anyways, the charger boxes themselves are dead simple to build; it's a friggin' transformer and some heavy gauge wire. All of the fancy charge monitoring computers are already built into the car. If GM's smart, they'd license the design for a song, and use it as a marketing coup.
AH! Well, I stand by E.R. Burrough's Martian Adventures then. If it wasn't so late, I'd try a direct reply to OP to suggest them. They were probably one of my favorite series when I was about 12-14, at about the same time that I was reading Piers Anthony and a lot of other pulp sci-fi. Funny that I was reading century-old books at the same time as contemporaries. I definitely didn't appreciate Asimov or Bradbury (never read his Martian Chronicals, but I have a few others) until I was in my late teens, early 20s.
Dude, are you kidding about the Martian Chronicles? Those are EXACTLY the kind of fluffy, fast-paced things that a 12 year old would like. Really, how many pages does John Carter go WITHOUT cutting somebody's head off? Each book is only about 150 pages, of which 100 are devoted to merciless slaughter, in great detail. I mean, if film had been around when Burroughs was writing, he would have invented the "bullet time" matrix effect for his stories--it's the way they're told.
I agree with your take on Foundation and Bradbury, but Burroughs is all about fast-paced action. I mean, if I had to come up with a metaphor end for "Foundation is to John Carter what..." I'd have to end with "NOVA is to The Fast and the Furious."
Vista probably used less than 40-50% of its current usage before MS's clusterfuck design process tacked on everything up-to-and-including a DRM'ed kitchen sink. Don't worry, once Win 7 gets the full treatment from every mouthbreathing manager, it'll be just as shitty.
You standardize with PDF when the >>presentation of the document is as vital as its content. The finer touches of presentation in word documents can get screwed up between two computers with Word!
.doc's that get weird line wrapping or other fuckups when different people open them. You don't get people crying about using Open Office vs. MS Office vs. desktop publishing suites vs. whatever--different people in your office have different needs. You don't get macro viruses (lol). You don't get out-of-date formats, or files saved in multiple doc formats. You get one format that ALWAYS looks right when you print it.
You also standardize with PDF because it is cross platform and doesn't require purchasing any license at all; there are a million (NON-Adobe) implementations of PDF. In fact, idk about Vista, but Mac OS and any good Linux desktop will have PDF functionality in the desktop OS (as a save function or as a print function), so you don't even need to shell out for Adobe or any other "pdf software."
It's also a mature format and completely forward/backwards compatible; when you get a license for Office 2021, your PDFs will still look exactly the same. When you save a file in Office 2007, what happens when somebody opens it in Office 2000? Or vice versa? What happens if you need to send documents to a state office (ahem Massachusetts) or a foreign client that wants an open format? What happens if (when?) Microsoft decides to ditch ".doc" for OOXML?
PDF isn't going above and beyond; it's using common sense. Once you make it common sense/practice, you don't get people sending out emails with bizarre attachments (MS Publisher?) to people who don't have the same software. You don't get word
Where I work (public high school district), completely computer illiterate people (teachers) are required to Telnet into a VAX to input attendance and grades.
Telnet. Into a VAX.
They are shown how to do this on their first day. Their coworkers can show them how if they forget. The IT guy will come hold their hands ONE MORE TIME if they still can't handle it. And if all that fails, guess what? Find another job.
If your workplace says "save it as a PDF," your workers will learn to put it in a fucking PDF, even if they whine for the first week. The slowest and stupidest of them will eventually have the steps "save as... PDF!" on a sticky on their monitor and it will get done. It only takes one boss to get 'er done.
For your stupidest customers, guess what you can do? EMBED THE FUCKIN PDF IN A DOC, LOL!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, I recently received a contract from a residential contractor in this exact manner.
Send "presentation important" documents as PDFs. Always. Even if you're going from MS Office to MS Office.
Problem solved!
Reeally? If you build a cabin in the woods, the gov't has to come dig you a well? Something tells me you haven't looked into this local legislation as deeply as you think you have.
Where I live, if you don't live in town, you pay the electric company to plant poles to deliver the power. You pay the well digger to dig you a well. And you pay the telephone company to string some line along those electric co. poles. If you don't like the above, you sit in the dark and use an outhouse.
I came here for the scholarly analysis of 4chan's ancestry, and I am not disappointed.
I came here to read or make a news.news.com.com.com joke, and I was not disappointed.
CNet smoked some serious crack when they came up with that.