I'm with you there. It works well enough. Windows net admin isn't a pain in the butt these days. At least, not for a few racks full of servers that are built and certified to run it. That's the biggest reason I still use it - it's not painful.
I run a pretty tight AD 2008R2 environment in a lab at my job, with GPOs and redundancy and DFS and everything, and it doesn't take a lot of hacking and cursing the Samba people to make that work. I really tried to get similar functionality on Linux, I did. I can only do "unproductive" work (trying to make something new that works exactly the same as what we've already got) for so long before I have to do something that provides a noticeable return to my employer in exchange for my paycheck. I'm sure that eventually, with enough patience, luck and hard work, I could have some gleaming ideal pillar of open source goodness. The end result is that it still has to interoperate seamlessly with Windows servers running proprietary software to interface with proprietary hardware, so why even bother? Windows interoperates with Windows well enough for what we do.
TL;DR: Switching OSes for the same level of "it works well enough" is costly in terms of cash: gotta pay me for my time, and opportunity: could have done something else.
Notch probably already has that kind of money. Over four million sales, averaging what, around $20? That's $80 million, and Mojang doesn't have hundreds of staff members to pay. They don't even run the multiplayer servers - those are run by the users! They do have an authentication service in Amazon's cloud, though that probably isn't costing millions per year.
Lego could market an MMO where you were allowed to build everything you wanted, as long as they aimed it at adults. A lot of us would love to try that. Sort of a c.nerd.nu only with legos, if you will.
You're right, sometimes we need to settle for "good enough", but we also need to let corporations know that there is a strong demand for products that are produced responsibly. They won't start making products responsibly if there's insufficient demand for it. People are voting with their checkbooks: They want cheap, and don't care about the consequences. Education goes a long way.
We need to be willing to pay the appropriate cost, because it costs more to do the job right.
I used to live in the area. So let me make some comments about it.
If you go to their website, http://www.vermontvillageapplesauce.com/about_us.htm - it looks like they are following the norm for farms in the area, which is to buy from local farmers. You could email them and ask which farms are contributing to your particular variety of applesauce. Different farms will be involved for non-organic varieties, since organic farming is more expensive.
Vermont is actually a great place to farm once you get past all the rocks in the soil. There's a lot of extremely fertile topsoil and the climate is conducive to farming. Its relative size on the map doesn't mean much - it's estimated around 30,000 square kilometers. That's a lot of space and a large amount of it is farmland, which I can attest to, having lived on the border. It's a significant producer of apples and organic farms are popular in the entire New England region. (Lots of health nuts. Benefits the rest of us!) Apple trees are fairly compact, so you can grow a lot of them in a tiny space. From the UVM website: "Today, the majority of mature orchards in Vermonthave densities between 200-500 trees per acre, but many growers are switching to higher density plantings in order to maximize production and precocity." ( http://orchard.uvm.edu/uvmapple/hort/AppleHortBasics/plantingsystems.htm )
You should visit a Vermont orchard and go apple picking sometime, I think you'll be pretty satisfied =)
That's clever and might work as a stopgap solution, but it's still waaaaaay more cumbersome than the GMail interface and requires you to use a terminal in a particular breed of OS. Not to mention all the maintenance you have to do when you rename or delete a file... plus having to do this for every file you create... It could get out of hand. I'd like to see it built into something more user-friendly, and I bet someone could do it. Ubuntu might be a good place to do that. Imagine having a "we had it first" for something the common mom & pop user would like!
Too bad you're posting AC, this could have been a great conversation.
Some of the ingredients in our everyday lives are better off unknown. Take carmine for example... the red coloring used for many things, such as red velvet cake... it's made of crushed insects.
I just can't fathom a perfume or cologne using skunk smell, but I'm sure some enterprising perfume scientist (whatever they are called) has tried it at some point in history. Might as well toss some deer urine in there for good measure, I guess? Maybe that's a secret ingredient somewhere, but we'd never know. There is a website out there somewhere where scientifically-inclined people do detailed chemical analysis on perfumes and colognes. I seem to have lost the address.
It's fascinating to see how subjective these things are and indeed how many different ways one's nose can be tuned by their surroundings. I don't like skunky smells, some do. One man in a crowd might like the smell of feet or armpits or whatever, where everyone else is either ambivalent or grossed out. Some people can't smell a particular chemical in urine. Some folks (like myself) can tell you what kind of meat is cooking on a grill down the street.
On a related note, I moved from a place with no skunks to a place teeming with them. To the locals, the odour is unbearable and they have like a flight-response to it.
I have seen another distinct entry for your list of reactions. Potheads apparently love the smell. As a non-pothead who grew up in skunk country, it's pretty funny to see people who can't get enough of that vile aroma. Gross!
I recommend this book: Alan Cooper, "About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design"
And now to get onto my own soapbox:
Paying special attention to the usability of things *outside the computer* goes a long way to understanding what works for *people*. There are a lot of great ideas that can be brought into interface design from real-life objects, and you won't necessarily think of them unless you purposefully pay attention to them. What makes a good doorknob feel "right"? How about a good elevator button, or your car's console? Ever notice how some restroom / kitchen-sink faucets are a lot more sensible than others? Is it the tactile / auditory / visual feedback you get when you use it, the resistance that's been fine-tuned just right, the size that fits your hand well, the ease of using the device with precision, the way each state is so clearly defined, the intuitiveness of the way you have to manipulate it... is it any number of other things? There's a reason why these things feel more "right" than other variations of the same technology, and it could be that when you stop and think about them, you notice something and bring new inspiration to your group.
That's news to me! I'd like to repeat it, if true, with more information than "I read it on a forum"... can you recall specifically how you heard about that?
Well, here's why the EZPass system is currently a good idea: * Bypass the enormous lines at rush hour. Try going over the Tappan Zee at 5:30 PM with one, and you'll never want to give up your EZPass. * 10% discount on tolls when paid with EZPass adds up. * It has automatic credit card billing so you don't have to make sure you have change on hand for tolls. * You can put in the foil bag it comes with to prevent it being read.
If they can just keep those benefits without adding additional tracking, it would be good. I like the way it is right now.
The patent specified optional camera(s), acceleration sensors and satnav tracking... I'd like to keep it the way it is!!
I might be stirring up the hornet's nest here, but I think union reforms and perhaps some de-unionization are going to be necessary before we can do big projects like we used to. There is just so much red tape involved in getting medium sized tasks done, and the cost of getting it done is getting more and more enormous. People want their piece of the pie, and they want to be right more than they want to do the right thing.
I'm with you on this one. I dreaded showing my parents a bad grade, and my teachers were not afraid to give it out when I deserved it. My parents would get mad at ME for slacking off, not my teachers for calling me out on it.
Winning and achieving is only satisfying if you get to feel good about it. You deserve to feel like you did something the other people didn't or couldn't. If you get the same reward for first place as you would for second or third place, why would you spend the extra effort? Yeah, this means some people are going to lose. Guess what? They are good at OTHER things! You should be able to find something you're good at, right? And some people are good at helping other people find out what they're good at, so if those "career counselors" exist and are doing their jobs, there's no need to say "but then they will get left behind". If some other participant isn't cut out to run in a race, for example, that does NOT mean that the satisfaction of being good at running should be stripped away from those who have earned it.
Fairness works both ways. You have to be fair to the winners, too.
We're trending towards something that could be called intellectual communism... Everyone must be treated equally, regardless of their merits, in this new thinking.
Ah, quite right, it appears. I had to ask again to make sure I got the story straight. The warnings they received were about speeding in the EZPass lane, not between the toll booths.
I don't see how this is flamebait - it's a valid point.
If you put a picture flush onto a camera lens, that's going to be too close for the camera to focus on the image, so there will be no detail - probably one giant blur. Also, it will block any light from entering the system, so there's nothing to reflect off the photo back into the lens.
You can try it with your own eye or even your glasses, it works about the same. Look at your palm. Now put your palm right over your eye. Can't see anything, right?
However, the idea has comedic merit. Perhaps one could find a way to make this work anyway... maybe mount it in the glovebox, with one of those electronic picture frames that are oh so popular on Black Friday, and play videos of in-car footage of accidents all day.
Here in NY we have EZ-Pass (...) The only privacy issue is that the state could theoretically measure how long it takes you to get from one booth to another and try to automatically issue speeding tickets.
They actually do that.
It hasn't happened to me but it has happened to people I know.
Well, everyone can get legalistic about all this stuff, but that's how the Pharisees and Sadducees came to be. Do you suppose that there is no such thing in our modern times? I think that a lot of label-only Christians could be labeled accurately in such a manner. The majority wants to believe whatever happens to be convenient for their own image, but that doesn't make their belief true. Salvation is not a democratic process - you're not saved based upon a popularity contest.
When you read into Paul's writings in the New Testament, the point is: When you're saved, you've been redeemed, and you can't do something to condemn yourself, with the exception of denying God (like renouncing your faith). That's pretty universally agreed upon by Bible scholars. It's not something you earn by following the rules, like you guys seem to be arguing about. Even if you don't love other people the way you love yourself, even if you don't spend nearly as much time with God as you should, even if you still are imperfect and commit sins, you are still saved by grace. (See 1 Corinthians 10:23: http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/10-23.htm ) Now that doesn't excuse you, you're not SUPPOSED to live like that. So you don't earn your salvation and can't lose it by failing to do something. It's given freely based upon whether you accept it or not. That's what sets Christianity apart from other religions. God's a fair judge, though, so I wouldn't expect to get off so easy when you meet up someday if you get "saved" and then choose to live in opposition to the commandments anyway. It doesn't really make sense for someone who's truly a Christ follower to live like that, so it's questionable whether you're just applying a label to feel good if you live like that. Sad and difficult realization for some? Like maybe the rich man who couldn't get over his money and possessions because he liked them too much to trade them for eternal life with Jesus? (Mark 10:17-31 or parallel transcriptions in Matthew and Luke) We're going to see a lot of people in the situation described in Luke 13:23-27, where people try to convince God that they should be allowed into heaven because of whatever superficial label or reason they had, and he'll say "Depart from me, I never knew you." Those are quite possibly the millions or billions you're referring to and many more throughout history, unfortunately, and the rest of us aren't doing a very good job teaching new believers about this stuff. It's partly our fault for being poor teachers and poor examples.
Within Christianity, there are even different denominations based upon interpretations of the rules. Outside of Christianity, you get the same fanboy stuff. I like one sports team, someone else likes another. American league, National league, you could prefer one set of rules over the other and root for your favorite league in the World Series. Is it about who's right? No, it's about transforming lives by salvation. That's the bottom line. And we're not doing it right. We're getting too caught up splitting hairs over ALL the rules. If you follow Jesus with your entire being, you shouldn't even have to think about the rules, because you'll already be living within them. It's the fruit of the Spirit, right? Anyone who lives like that should have no problem with laws, except those which outlaw the practice of Christianity.
Slashdot Mirror
That is to say, when all you have is a hammer, you can easily shoot yourself in the foot.
That's a delightful metaphor you have there. I may have to appropriate it if you don't mind.
Mentadent does something like that with the counter-top refillable system.
I'm with you there. It works well enough. Windows net admin isn't a pain in the butt these days. At least, not for a few racks full of servers that are built and certified to run it. That's the biggest reason I still use it - it's not painful.
I run a pretty tight AD 2008R2 environment in a lab at my job, with GPOs and redundancy and DFS and everything, and it doesn't take a lot of hacking and cursing the Samba people to make that work. I really tried to get similar functionality on Linux, I did. I can only do "unproductive" work (trying to make something new that works exactly the same as what we've already got) for so long before I have to do something that provides a noticeable return to my employer in exchange for my paycheck. I'm sure that eventually, with enough patience, luck and hard work, I could have some gleaming ideal pillar of open source goodness. The end result is that it still has to interoperate seamlessly with Windows servers running proprietary software to interface with proprietary hardware, so why even bother? Windows interoperates with Windows well enough for what we do.
TL;DR: Switching OSes for the same level of "it works well enough" is costly in terms of cash: gotta pay me for my time, and opportunity: could have done something else.
Notch probably already has that kind of money. Over four million sales, averaging what, around $20? That's $80 million, and Mojang doesn't have hundreds of staff members to pay. They don't even run the multiplayer servers - those are run by the users! They do have an authentication service in Amazon's cloud, though that probably isn't costing millions per year.
Lego could market an MMO where you were allowed to build everything you wanted, as long as they aimed it at adults. A lot of us would love to try that. Sort of a c.nerd.nu only with legos, if you will.
Yikes. An obligatory XKCD for a Scott Adams article. Times have changed!
Well, the point was to have something that YOU could use, too.
You're right, sometimes we need to settle for "good enough", but we also need to let corporations know that there is a strong demand for products that are produced responsibly. They won't start making products responsibly if there's insufficient demand for it. People are voting with their checkbooks: They want cheap, and don't care about the consequences. Education goes a long way.
We need to be willing to pay the appropriate cost, because it costs more to do the job right.
I used to live in the area. So let me make some comments about it.
If you go to their website, http://www.vermontvillageapplesauce.com/about_us.htm - it looks like they are following the norm for farms in the area, which is to buy from local farmers. You could email them and ask which farms are contributing to your particular variety of applesauce. Different farms will be involved for non-organic varieties, since organic farming is more expensive.
Vermont is actually a great place to farm once you get past all the rocks in the soil. There's a lot of extremely fertile topsoil and the climate is conducive to farming. Its relative size on the map doesn't mean much - it's estimated around 30,000 square kilometers. That's a lot of space and a large amount of it is farmland, which I can attest to, having lived on the border. It's a significant producer of apples and organic farms are popular in the entire New England region. (Lots of health nuts. Benefits the rest of us!) Apple trees are fairly compact, so you can grow a lot of them in a tiny space. From the UVM website: "Today, the majority of mature orchards in Vermonthave densities between 200-500 trees per acre, but many growers are switching to higher density plantings in order to maximize production and precocity." ( http://orchard.uvm.edu/uvmapple/hort/AppleHortBasics/plantingsystems.htm )
You should visit a Vermont orchard and go apple picking sometime, I think you'll be pretty satisfied =)
That's clever and might work as a stopgap solution, but it's still waaaaaay more cumbersome than the GMail interface and requires you to use a terminal in a particular breed of OS. Not to mention all the maintenance you have to do when you rename or delete a file... plus having to do this for every file you create... It could get out of hand. I'd like to see it built into something more user-friendly, and I bet someone could do it. Ubuntu might be a good place to do that. Imagine having a "we had it first" for something the common mom & pop user would like!
Too bad you're posting AC, this could have been a great conversation.
Some of the ingredients in our everyday lives are better off unknown. Take carmine for example... the red coloring used for many things, such as red velvet cake... it's made of crushed insects.
I just can't fathom a perfume or cologne using skunk smell, but I'm sure some enterprising perfume scientist (whatever they are called) has tried it at some point in history. Might as well toss some deer urine in there for good measure, I guess? Maybe that's a secret ingredient somewhere, but we'd never know. There is a website out there somewhere where scientifically-inclined people do detailed chemical analysis on perfumes and colognes. I seem to have lost the address.
It's fascinating to see how subjective these things are and indeed how many different ways one's nose can be tuned by their surroundings. I don't like skunky smells, some do. One man in a crowd might like the smell of feet or armpits or whatever, where everyone else is either ambivalent or grossed out. Some people can't smell a particular chemical in urine. Some folks (like myself) can tell you what kind of meat is cooking on a grill down the street.
Just adding data points to his collection, that's all. I thought that would be appropriate on a site for nerds.Your contribution is also interesting.
On a related note, I moved from a place with no skunks to a place teeming with them. To the locals, the odour is unbearable and they have like a flight-response to it.
I have seen another distinct entry for your list of reactions. Potheads apparently love the smell. As a non-pothead who grew up in skunk country, it's pretty funny to see people who can't get enough of that vile aroma. Gross!
Like the Internet?
Psh. Back in my day, we used magnetized needles to edit our documents directly on the rotating drum.
Without his work, I probably would have gotten bored with BASIC and stopped learning about computers. My career is mostly thanks to this man.
Whew! I just barely had enough time to brace myself for the inevitable pun war.
I recommend this book: Alan Cooper, "About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design"
And now to get onto my own soapbox:
Paying special attention to the usability of things *outside the computer* goes a long way to understanding what works for *people*. There are a lot of great ideas that can be brought into interface design from real-life objects, and you won't necessarily think of them unless you purposefully pay attention to them. What makes a good doorknob feel "right"? How about a good elevator button, or your car's console? Ever notice how some restroom / kitchen-sink faucets are a lot more sensible than others? Is it the tactile / auditory / visual feedback you get when you use it, the resistance that's been fine-tuned just right, the size that fits your hand well, the ease of using the device with precision, the way each state is so clearly defined, the intuitiveness of the way you have to manipulate it... is it any number of other things? There's a reason why these things feel more "right" than other variations of the same technology, and it could be that when you stop and think about them, you notice something and bring new inspiration to your group.
That's news to me! I'd like to repeat it, if true, with more information than "I read it on a forum"... can you recall specifically how you heard about that?
Well, here's why the EZPass system is currently a good idea:
* Bypass the enormous lines at rush hour. Try going over the Tappan Zee at 5:30 PM with one, and you'll never want to give up your EZPass.
* 10% discount on tolls when paid with EZPass adds up.
* It has automatic credit card billing so you don't have to make sure you have change on hand for tolls.
* You can put in the foil bag it comes with to prevent it being read.
If they can just keep those benefits without adding additional tracking, it would be good. I like the way it is right now.
The patent specified optional camera(s), acceleration sensors and satnav tracking... I'd like to keep it the way it is!!
I might be stirring up the hornet's nest here, but I think union reforms and perhaps some de-unionization are going to be necessary before we can do big projects like we used to. There is just so much red tape involved in getting medium sized tasks done, and the cost of getting it done is getting more and more enormous. People want their piece of the pie, and they want to be right more than they want to do the right thing.
I'm with you on this one. I dreaded showing my parents a bad grade, and my teachers were not afraid to give it out when I deserved it. My parents would get mad at ME for slacking off, not my teachers for calling me out on it.
Winning and achieving is only satisfying if you get to feel good about it. You deserve to feel like you did something the other people didn't or couldn't. If you get the same reward for first place as you would for second or third place, why would you spend the extra effort? Yeah, this means some people are going to lose. Guess what? They are good at OTHER things! You should be able to find something you're good at, right? And some people are good at helping other people find out what they're good at, so if those "career counselors" exist and are doing their jobs, there's no need to say "but then they will get left behind". If some other participant isn't cut out to run in a race, for example, that does NOT mean that the satisfaction of being good at running should be stripped away from those who have earned it.
Fairness works both ways. You have to be fair to the winners, too.
We're trending towards something that could be called intellectual communism... Everyone must be treated equally, regardless of their merits, in this new thinking.
Ah, quite right, it appears. I had to ask again to make sure I got the story straight. The warnings they received were about speeding in the EZPass lane, not between the toll booths.
I went and looked it up... http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/ezpass.asp
And there is an image of the warning at http://www.nytrafficticket.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/17/speeding-in-the-ez-pass-lane/
Carry on.
I don't see how this is flamebait - it's a valid point.
If you put a picture flush onto a camera lens, that's going to be too close for the camera to focus on the image, so there will be no detail - probably one giant blur. Also, it will block any light from entering the system, so there's nothing to reflect off the photo back into the lens.
You can try it with your own eye or even your glasses, it works about the same. Look at your palm. Now put your palm right over your eye. Can't see anything, right?
However, the idea has comedic merit. Perhaps one could find a way to make this work anyway... maybe mount it in the glovebox, with one of those electronic picture frames that are oh so popular on Black Friday, and play videos of in-car footage of accidents all day.
Here in NY we have EZ-Pass (...) The only privacy issue is that the state could theoretically measure how long it takes you to get from one booth to another and try to automatically issue speeding tickets.
They actually do that.
It hasn't happened to me but it has happened to people I know.
Well, everyone can get legalistic about all this stuff, but that's how the Pharisees and Sadducees came to be. Do you suppose that there is no such thing in our modern times? I think that a lot of label-only Christians could be labeled accurately in such a manner. The majority wants to believe whatever happens to be convenient for their own image, but that doesn't make their belief true. Salvation is not a democratic process - you're not saved based upon a popularity contest.
When you read into Paul's writings in the New Testament, the point is: When you're saved, you've been redeemed, and you can't do something to condemn yourself, with the exception of denying God (like renouncing your faith). That's pretty universally agreed upon by Bible scholars. It's not something you earn by following the rules, like you guys seem to be arguing about. Even if you don't love other people the way you love yourself, even if you don't spend nearly as much time with God as you should, even if you still are imperfect and commit sins, you are still saved by grace. (See 1 Corinthians 10:23: http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/10-23.htm ) Now that doesn't excuse you, you're not SUPPOSED to live like that. So you don't earn your salvation and can't lose it by failing to do something. It's given freely based upon whether you accept it or not. That's what sets Christianity apart from other religions. God's a fair judge, though, so I wouldn't expect to get off so easy when you meet up someday if you get "saved" and then choose to live in opposition to the commandments anyway. It doesn't really make sense for someone who's truly a Christ follower to live like that, so it's questionable whether you're just applying a label to feel good if you live like that. Sad and difficult realization for some? Like maybe the rich man who couldn't get over his money and possessions because he liked them too much to trade them for eternal life with Jesus? (Mark 10:17-31 or parallel transcriptions in Matthew and Luke) We're going to see a lot of people in the situation described in Luke 13:23-27, where people try to convince God that they should be allowed into heaven because of whatever superficial label or reason they had, and he'll say "Depart from me, I never knew you." Those are quite possibly the millions or billions you're referring to and many more throughout history, unfortunately, and the rest of us aren't doing a very good job teaching new believers about this stuff. It's partly our fault for being poor teachers and poor examples.
Within Christianity, there are even different denominations based upon interpretations of the rules. Outside of Christianity, you get the same fanboy stuff. I like one sports team, someone else likes another. American league, National league, you could prefer one set of rules over the other and root for your favorite league in the World Series. Is it about who's right? No, it's about transforming lives by salvation. That's the bottom line. And we're not doing it right. We're getting too caught up splitting hairs over ALL the rules. If you follow Jesus with your entire being, you shouldn't even have to think about the rules, because you'll already be living within them. It's the fruit of the Spirit, right? Anyone who lives like that should have no problem with laws, except those which outlaw the practice of Christianity.