"Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, "
Snort. If it's so successful, why have I still not seen a singer copy at work? None of my friends have it. And the hospital the SO works at isn't using it either. (All Hail Meditech!)
I'm not even sure it exits anymore. Maybe it was all a dream like that season on Dallas long ago....
"What would you really want to use those PCIe slots for that you couldn't find reasonably equivalent functionality via USB or Firewire? Bonus points if there are mac drivers available."
Future-proofing. Case in point, USB 3. Any slotless-Mac you buy right now will obsolete once the first USB 3 only peripheral ships.
Which means you have to buy a new computer, which is good for Apple, but not for the owner of the Mac with no slot.
And note that I'm responding on 2002 G4 Quicksilver, which came with USB 1, and would have been in the dumpster years ago except for the USB 2 card sitting in the expansion slot.
And there is a SATA card in one of the other slots as well. And I upgraded the video card along the way too.
"top 2% of the population posessing 50% of all the wealth"
Wealth is not equal to income. Ask any farmer or fisherman, who can easily have a million dollars tied up in land or a boat, and not enough money to buy the fuel to get the next increment of income.
Yes I am the son of a farmer. And yes, I do something else that pays better.
"That's not libertarian, that's good old-fashioned left-liberal."
The liberals I'm familiar with believe that, through no fault of your own, you are incapable of running your own life without massive government intervention to prevent you from choosing unwisely. After all, you might choose to buy a gun and not an airbag, so government must "guide" you into making the socially responsible choice, as determined by the government.
The thought of letting people make their own choices greatly offends both the liberal left and the religious right.
"MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work."
Office 2007 makes it hard for EVERYONE to write the documents they need to create for work. It's very egalitarian in that way.
Everything except 'paste values' in Excel is one extra click away from where-ever you are than was the case in Excel 2003, because you have to click on the menu to get the correct ribbon, then drill down into the tiny little arrow to get the dialog that has what you want.
I actually do most of my word processing in Wordpad, as it lets me write without helpfully formatting everything the Ballmer Way. Then paste the text into the official company memo template, resave, and done.
Fortunately I have no need to use Powerpoint. For this boon I hold my employer in great regard.
" if you get rid of an old 15 mpg car and buy a new 16 mpg car, you get very little incentive. If you sell a 39 mpg car and buy a new 40 mpg car, you get a much higher incentive."
That's backwards. the change from 15 to 16 is a bigger improvement on the gallons/100,000 miles scale, so should get the bigger improvement.
I sent this off to my Senator a while back, and I still like it better that the above proposal:
Plan for Detroit
This plan would encourage the replacement of old, less fuel efficient, more polluting vehicles with new cars, stimulating the auto industry. The plan would take the form of a government-financed trade-in.
1) Bring your old vehicle to the dealer. 2) Pick out a new vehicle that gets at least 5 mpg more than the old vehicle. 3) The government buys the old vehicle for 1/2 of the cost of the new vehicle, up to a maximum of $10,000. This money can only be used to buy a new car (no cash rebates) 4) The customer has to put up the balance of the purchase price.
As for the old vehicle, there are three options. A) If it is 10 or more years old, it gets scrapped. B) if it gets less than 25 mpg, it gets scrapped. C) If it is less than 10 years old AND it gets more than 25 mpg, then the dealer can resell it for no more than $2000.
Option C will put a decent number of still good cars on the second-hand market for those who can't afford the other half of a new car. (The local market in economy cars is pretty dismal due to lack of supply) which will help get even more old clunkers off the road. The dealer keeps this money as compensation for doing full service, tune up, and general clean up on the vehicle. Any vehicle traded in for an Option C vehicle gets scrapped.
By the way, by scrapped I mean usable components are allowed to be salvaged, but the car has to be rendered non-roadworthy. The point is to get rid of the smoking gas hogs.
One other effect should not be ignored. The old clunkers have worse emissions than anything newer. So you would be cleaning up the air a bit too. Quite a bit if the new car gets better mileage AND has lower emissions beyond that.
Not to mention I'll have to dodge fewer mufflers that finally rust off during the winter.
From another sense too, Part 1 of this was they turned off all the rural translators back in 2004. We had to get satellite service.
And the wondrous digital signals have about half the useful range of analog, so they will never get out here. And since they have half the range, the population you could reach with a local transmitter still isn't enough to support the station.
With over the internet TV coming on so well, I suspect the overpriced satellite service will go away in less than a year. Maybe the end of the school year. How many shows are worth watching? $40/month for the satellite, and $2 per episode over i tunes, for 4 episodes a month, and break even is 5 shows. I don't watch 5 shows regularly. Just have to wean the daughter off of Hannah.
to take your points in order; 1) SCO's cases are moot if they do not own the copyrights. They don't have standing to sue. The cases are dead. Even SCO has admitted as much. Since no new evidence can be submitted on appeals, and SCO has no, none, zero, zip written evidence to support their claim that they got the copyrights, and Novell has reams of evidence that copyrights were deliberately excluded from the sale, SCO is wasting everyone's time. Speculation has it they are delaying long enough for (mis)-management to make their getaway with whatever boodle they can sneak off with, then the last one there will file to convert to chapter 7, or complete liquidation.
2) Novell has a contract with IBM. A non-terminable contract. If they were to renege, IBM's lawyers would roll over them like a tide. Furthermore, Novell has already granted IBM a waiver for any code IBM may have inadvertently released. Evil Novell obliterated it's ability to contest anything IBM may have done from that point on out. As for the rest of Unix, the terms of the BSD settlement are now public. Unix is free, with the sole exception of code written by old SCO/caldera/new SCO after Novell sold the Unix business (but not the copyrights). Even is that code were to become available, no-one will ever read it.
3) That point is valid. Very valid. Having failed to kill Linux with copyright, Microsoft will now try to do it with patents. Ballmer has explicitly said so. So Groklaw is not going away, just going into watchful waiting mode while cleaning out the electronic garage and doing some filing.
I didn't realize until reading this thread, but I still have not actually seen this Vista thingy on a real operating PC.
Work is all XP, the WOW computer is XP even though it was just bought this summer as a Dell FreeDos box, and I'm posting from a Mac running Tiger. (It's too old to benefit from Leopard.)
How long has Vista been out? I guess it's non-existence anywhere around me is just another indication of how foobar it really is.
Take your hydrogen and make methanol. You can even get the carbon from CO2 in the air if you like. Then use the usual liquid fuel transport system, although you will have to change out some gaskets and hoses.
If you don't like methanol, use that as the feed stock to make ethanol or butanol.
By the way, the chemical you need to extract CO2 from the air is monoethanolamine. Very old technology.
The limiting factor is all the renewable energy you will need to run the electrolysis cells, CO2 scrubbers, and reformers to basically reverse the combustion reaction. If we had decent batteries it would not be worth it, but it's hard to beat a liquid hydrocarbon fuel for energy density.
I work with hydrogen at chemical plant. It's not fun. It requires continuous painstaking maintenance, and it still gets loose. Put it into a million cars racing around the highways? Forget it.
"The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded. Anything one software can do, another software can do (see Knuth, et seq)."
From the copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" (copyright 1981) that happens to be on my shelf, page B1;"It seems reasonable at this time to say that it is impossible to to protect a disk in such a way that it can't be broken. This is, in large part, due to the fact the diskette must be bootable; i.e. that it must contain at least one sector which can be read by the program in the PROM on the disk controller card. This means it is possible to trace the boot process by disassembling the normal sector or sectors that that must be on the disk."
So they have been flogging this dead horse for 27 years. High marks for persistence, low marks for, well, everything else.
That should do nicely. If you want multiple entries per line, put a comma at the end of line 20, and add lines 22, 24, 26, etc, that are the same as the line 20. Control-C will stop it when you have had enough.
Remember not to exceed 40 characters total, unless you have a line 5 PRINT CHR$(4)"PR#3".
Bonus points if you recognize the CPU this runs on.
Where? Here in Eastern WA, work is 7:30 to 4. Most Stores are 7 or 8 to 6. Wally-world never closes.
When I was in CA last, the hours were 11 AM to 9 or 10 PM. I assume it started that way to miss the morning fog. Oppositely, in Nevada, work was 7 to 3:30, and the stores were 6 or 7 AM to 5 or 6.
So the volcanos on the Lomonosov and Gakkel ridges shut down. Less steam heating of the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, less ice melts at the top of the ocean.
Normal planning exercise. There was a minor scandal several years ago when it leaked that the Pentagon had a plan to invade England. Their counterparts overseas revealed they had a plan to retake the Colonies.
It's the more cerebral version of a war game. Where would I go first, what would we need, how do we handle logistics. If nothing else, it's a good training exercise. Where do you think Rumsfeld picked up his "unknown unknowns" speech?
It's not odd that the civilian government also has plans in the filing cabinet. FEMA did not have the right plans in the drawer, and look what happened to them when Katrina hit.
"It is established FACT that Hydrogen is very difficult to contain. It leaks through the tightest seals like they were swiss cheese, and once free it races into the atmosphere and escapes into space."
Your satire is not completely off base. I work in a chemical plant that uses hydrogen. It does indeed leak through the tightest seals like they were swiss cheese. And then it escapes to space.
Eventually, an unrestricted hydrogen economy will have a noticeable effect on the Earths water supply. It might not be for a million years, but it has to happen. When Greenpeace figures this out, they will instantly be against the hydrogen economy.
On the other hand, this might hold off rising sea levels for awhile. So it wouldn't be all bad. Well, except for the part abou the oxygen not escaping to space, so the forest fires when we have 30% oxygen in the air would be most impressive.
"If you were an oil trader and knew that if we started drilling today and that oil wouldn't get used for another 10 years, why in God's name would that affect your bidding on contracts for September delivery?"
Economics is the flip side of politics, and politics is mostly psychology. So yes, perception of the future is often as important as facts.
"I remember hearing stories about labs handling thallium where only women were allowed."
True. While I was at the U of I my chemistry professor was trying to stick thallium atoms to a cyclopentadiene molecules for some odd reason. The students working on it were all girls.
Why are they leasing the land instead of selling it? Put suitable parcels out for bids. Sell it, put the money into the treasury (ideally into the Social Security Trust Fund) and sign over a deed.
Then the local county and state would get some tax revenue, and the people can start developing the rest of the West. We have too much "Crown Land" as it is. And given the rate they are ripping up what few roads are there, the public is being kept out of more all the time.
Besides that, we keep tearing up good farmland to build because the rocky wastes were never claimed when the land was still open for settlement, and now that we have found a use rocky wasteland, the government won't sell it. So, we tear up the farmland because it's privately held, and thus can be sold.
It's time the Federal Government started selling land again. Over 70% Federal land ownership is too much (ID, UT, NV) and 1% is probably too little (NY), somewhere between is the right level.
"I dunno why people always think a fear of firearms is irrational"
Because a firearm is a machine or a tool? It has no free will. It has no malice, no hate, no grudges, and no agenda. It simply is.
Do you also fear chainsaws? Tablesaws? D-8 cats? Dump trucks? Your car? A bicycle? Hoes? Shovels? Candlesticks?
Personally, I find all the above much less frightening than dogs, who do have free will, malice and an agenda.
However, even dogs lack the second requirement for evil, the knowledge that their actions are evil. So if they are not evil, then certainly a piece of wood and iron can't be evil. So again, why fear it?
That's basically the conclusion I came to. For recreational reading, I don't want the bother of ebook. Paperbacks, or even a hardback is much more convenient.
However, a tech manual is a different matter. A good search function would be an improvement over the usual index. And if you were, say, an appliance repairman, who needed dozens of tech manuals available, then a Kindle-type gadget starts to make a lot of sense. A touch screen reader would be a bad idea though. Just leave regular buttons on it with a good backlight for those behind the refrigerator minutes, and it should be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, "
Snort. If it's so successful, why have I still not seen a singer copy at work? None of my friends have it. And the hospital the SO works at isn't using it either. (All Hail Meditech!)
I'm not even sure it exits anymore. Maybe it was all a dream like that season on Dallas long ago....
"What would you really want to use those PCIe slots for that you couldn't find reasonably equivalent functionality via USB or Firewire? Bonus points if there are mac drivers available."
Future-proofing. Case in point, USB 3. Any slotless-Mac you buy right now will obsolete once the first USB 3 only peripheral ships.
Which means you have to buy a new computer, which is good for Apple, but not for the owner of the Mac with no slot.
And note that I'm responding on 2002 G4 Quicksilver, which came with USB 1, and would have been in the dumpster years ago except for the USB 2 card sitting in the expansion slot.
And there is a SATA card in one of the other slots as well. And I upgraded the video card along the way too.
"When a tax is levied on a corporation, it is paid by one of two groups of individuals: its shareholders, or its customers."
Three groups, you left out labor in the form of lower wages. But that doesn't change the overall point.
"top 2% of the population posessing 50% of all the wealth"
Wealth is not equal to income. Ask any farmer or fisherman, who can easily have a million dollars tied up in land or a boat, and not enough money to buy the fuel to get the next increment of income.
Yes I am the son of a farmer. And yes, I do something else that pays better.
"That's not libertarian, that's good old-fashioned left-liberal."
The liberals I'm familiar with believe that, through no fault of your own, you are incapable of running your own life without massive government intervention to prevent you from choosing unwisely. After all, you might choose to buy a gun and not an airbag, so government must "guide" you into making the socially responsible choice, as determined by the government.
The thought of letting people make their own choices greatly offends both the liberal left and the religious right.
"MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work."
Office 2007 makes it hard for EVERYONE to write the documents they need to create for work. It's very egalitarian in that way.
Everything except 'paste values' in Excel is one extra click away from where-ever you are than was the case in Excel 2003, because you have to click on the menu to get the correct ribbon, then drill down into the tiny little arrow to get the dialog that has what you want.
I actually do most of my word processing in Wordpad, as it lets me write without helpfully formatting everything the Ballmer Way. Then paste the text into the official company memo template, resave, and done.
Fortunately I have no need to use Powerpoint. For this boon I hold my employer in great regard.
" if you get rid of an old 15 mpg car and buy a new 16 mpg car, you get very little incentive. If you sell a 39 mpg car and buy a new 40 mpg car, you get a much higher incentive."
That's backwards. the change from 15 to 16 is a bigger improvement on the gallons/100,000 miles scale, so should get the bigger improvement.
I sent this off to my Senator a while back, and I still like it better that the above proposal:
Plan for Detroit
This plan would encourage the replacement of old, less fuel efficient, more polluting vehicles with new cars, stimulating the auto industry. The plan would take the form of a government-financed trade-in.
1) Bring your old vehicle to the dealer.
2) Pick out a new vehicle that gets at least 5 mpg more than the old vehicle.
3) The government buys the old vehicle for 1/2 of the cost of the new vehicle, up to a maximum of $10,000. This money can only be used to buy a new car (no cash rebates)
4) The customer has to put up the balance of the purchase price.
As for the old vehicle, there are three options.
A) If it is 10 or more years old, it gets scrapped.
B) if it gets less than 25 mpg, it gets scrapped.
C) If it is less than 10 years old AND it gets more than 25 mpg, then the dealer can resell it for no more than $2000.
Option C will put a decent number of still good cars on the second-hand market for those who can't afford the other half of a new car. (The local market in economy cars is pretty dismal due to lack of supply) which will help get even more old clunkers off the road. The dealer keeps this money as compensation for doing full service, tune up, and general clean up on the vehicle. Any vehicle traded in for an Option C vehicle gets scrapped.
By the way, by scrapped I mean usable components are allowed to be salvaged, but the car has to be rendered non-roadworthy. The point is to get rid of the smoking gas hogs.
One other effect should not be ignored. The old clunkers have worse emissions than anything newer. So you would be cleaning up the air a bit too. Quite a bit if the new car gets better mileage AND has lower emissions beyond that.
Not to mention I'll have to dodge fewer mufflers that finally rust off during the winter.
From another sense too, Part 1 of this was they turned off all the rural translators back in 2004. We had to get satellite service.
And the wondrous digital signals have about half the useful range of analog, so they will never get out here. And since they have half the range, the population you could reach with a local transmitter still isn't enough to support the station.
With over the internet TV coming on so well, I suspect the overpriced satellite service will go away in less than a year. Maybe the end of the school year. How many shows are worth watching? $40/month for the satellite, and $2 per episode over i tunes, for 4 episodes a month, and break even is 5 shows. I don't watch 5 shows regularly. Just have to wean the daughter off of Hannah.
to take your points in order;
1) SCO's cases are moot if they do not own the copyrights. They don't have standing to sue. The cases are dead. Even SCO has admitted as much. Since no new evidence can be submitted on appeals, and SCO has no, none, zero, zip written evidence to support their claim that they got the copyrights, and Novell has reams of evidence that copyrights were deliberately excluded from the sale, SCO is wasting everyone's time. Speculation has it they are delaying long enough for (mis)-management to make their getaway with whatever boodle they can sneak off with, then the last one there will file to convert to chapter 7, or complete liquidation.
2) Novell has a contract with IBM. A non-terminable contract. If they were to renege, IBM's lawyers would roll over them like a tide. Furthermore, Novell has already granted IBM a waiver for any code IBM may have inadvertently released. Evil Novell obliterated it's ability to contest anything IBM may have done from that point on out. As for the rest of Unix, the terms of the BSD settlement are now public. Unix is free, with the sole exception of code written by old SCO/caldera/new SCO after Novell sold the Unix business (but not the copyrights). Even is that code were to become available, no-one will ever read it.
3) That point is valid. Very valid. Having failed to kill Linux with copyright, Microsoft will now try to do it with patents. Ballmer has explicitly said so. So Groklaw is not going away, just going into watchful waiting mode while cleaning out the electronic garage and doing some filing.
I didn't realize until reading this thread, but I still have not actually seen this Vista thingy on a real operating PC.
Work is all XP, the WOW computer is XP even though it was just bought this summer as a Dell FreeDos box, and I'm posting from a Mac running Tiger. (It's too old to benefit from Leopard.)
How long has Vista been out? I guess it's non-existence anywhere around me is just another indication of how foobar it really is.
methanol.
Take your hydrogen and make methanol. You can even get the carbon from CO2 in the air if you like. Then use the usual liquid fuel transport system, although you will have to change out some gaskets and hoses.
If you don't like methanol, use that as the feed stock to make ethanol or butanol.
By the way, the chemical you need to extract CO2 from the air is monoethanolamine. Very old technology.
The limiting factor is all the renewable energy you will need to run the electrolysis cells, CO2 scrubbers, and reformers to basically reverse the combustion reaction. If we had decent batteries it would not be worth it, but it's hard to beat a liquid hydrocarbon fuel for energy density.
I work with hydrogen at chemical plant. It's not fun. It requires continuous painstaking maintenance, and it still gets loose. Put it into a million cars racing around the highways? Forget it.
"The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded. Anything one software can do, another software can do (see Knuth, et seq)."
From the copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" (copyright 1981) that happens to be on my shelf, page B1;"It seems reasonable at this time to say that it is impossible to to protect a disk in such a way that it can't be broken. This is, in large part, due to the fact the diskette must be bootable; i.e. that it must contain at least one sector which can be read by the program in the PROM on the disk controller card. This means it is possible to trace the boot process by disassembling the normal sector or sectors that that must be on the disk."
So they have been flogging this dead horse for 27 years. High marks for persistence, low marks for, well, everything else.
10 FLASH
20 PRINT "12:00"
30 PRINT
40 GOTO 20
That should do nicely. If you want multiple entries per line, put a comma at the end of line 20, and add lines 22, 24, 26, etc, that are the same as the line 20. Control-C will stop it when you have had enough.
Remember not to exceed 40 characters total, unless you have a line 5 PRINT CHR$(4)"PR#3".
Bonus points if you recognize the CPU this runs on.
""9-5" business hours is a convention"
Where? Here in Eastern WA, work is 7:30 to 4. Most Stores are 7 or 8 to 6. Wally-world never closes.
When I was in CA last, the hours were 11 AM to 9 or 10 PM. I assume it started that way to miss the morning fog. Oppositely, in Nevada, work was 7 to 3:30, and the stores were 6 or 7 AM to 5 or 6.
The obvious question is why Google didn't specify Mil-Spec chips if they wanted ones rated for more heat? Or does Intel not make them anymore?
So the volcanos on the Lomonosov and Gakkel ridges shut down. Less steam heating of the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, less ice melts at the top of the ocean.
And this boggles peoples minds because....?
Normal planning exercise. There was a minor scandal several years ago when it leaked that the Pentagon had a plan to invade England. Their counterparts overseas revealed they had a plan to retake the Colonies.
It's the more cerebral version of a war game. Where would I go first, what would we need, how do we handle logistics. If nothing else, it's a good training exercise. Where do you think Rumsfeld picked up his "unknown unknowns" speech?
It's not odd that the civilian government also has plans in the filing cabinet. FEMA did not have the right plans in the drawer, and look what happened to them when Katrina hit.
"It is established FACT that Hydrogen is very difficult to contain. It leaks through the tightest seals like they were swiss cheese, and once free it races into the atmosphere and escapes into space."
Your satire is not completely off base. I work in a chemical plant that uses hydrogen. It does indeed leak through the tightest seals like they were swiss cheese. And then it escapes to space.
Eventually, an unrestricted hydrogen economy will have a noticeable effect on the Earths water supply. It might not be for a million years, but it has to happen. When Greenpeace figures this out, they will instantly be against the hydrogen economy.
On the other hand, this might hold off rising sea levels for awhile. So it wouldn't be all bad. Well, except for the part abou the oxygen not escaping to space, so the forest fires when we have 30% oxygen in the air would be most impressive.
"If you were an oil trader and knew that if we started drilling today and that oil wouldn't get used for another 10 years, why in God's name would that affect your bidding on contracts for September delivery?"
Economics is the flip side of politics, and politics is mostly psychology. So yes, perception of the future is often as important as facts.
See also; self-fulfilling prophecy.
"I remember hearing stories about labs handling thallium where only women were allowed."
True. While I was at the U of I my chemistry professor was trying to stick thallium atoms to a cyclopentadiene molecules for some odd reason. The students working on it were all girls.
Why are they leasing the land instead of selling it? Put suitable parcels out for bids. Sell it, put the money into the treasury (ideally into the Social Security Trust Fund) and sign over a deed.
Then the local county and state would get some tax revenue, and the people can start developing the rest of the West. We have too much "Crown Land" as it is. And given the rate they are ripping up what few roads are there, the public is being kept out of more all the time.
Besides that, we keep tearing up good farmland to build because the rocky wastes were never claimed when the land was still open for settlement, and now that we have found a use rocky wasteland, the government won't sell it. So, we tear up the farmland because it's privately held, and thus can be sold.
It's time the Federal Government started selling land again. Over 70% Federal land ownership is too much (ID, UT, NV) and 1% is probably too little (NY), somewhere between is the right level.
"I dunno why people always think a fear of firearms is irrational"
Because a firearm is a machine or a tool? It has no free will. It has no malice, no hate, no grudges, and no agenda. It simply is.
Do you also fear chainsaws? Tablesaws? D-8 cats? Dump trucks? Your car? A bicycle? Hoes? Shovels? Candlesticks?
Personally, I find all the above much less frightening than dogs, who do have free will, malice and an agenda.
However, even dogs lack the second requirement for evil, the knowledge that their actions are evil. So if they are not evil, then certainly a piece of wood and iron can't be evil. So again, why fear it?
"People are nervous enough flying without getting onto a plane with a "kill switch" installed. "
Except those who ride motorcycles. Every one I've had has a big red button next to the throttle.
Of course you don't want anyone but the pilot able to press it...
That's basically the conclusion I came to. For recreational reading, I don't want the bother of ebook. Paperbacks, or even a hardback is much more convenient.
However, a tech manual is a different matter. A good search function would be an improvement over the usual index. And if you were, say, an appliance repairman, who needed dozens of tech manuals available, then a Kindle-type gadget starts to make a lot of sense. A touch screen reader would be a bad idea though. Just leave regular buttons on it with a good backlight for those behind the refrigerator minutes, and it should be fine.