Yeah, I really don't know why Microsoft and Apple don't come up with a good package manager that would allow you do add repositories and do automated updates from a central OS app instead of having each app run their own little auto-update thingy.
No. apt-get is more efficient. Going to a website, downloading the program, and double clicking to install isn't harder, its just time consuming.
Except that most modern Linux distros will just pop up with something that says, "You have updates, do you want me to install them?" and you hit "Ok" (or "yes" or whatever), and that's it. That's easier and more efficient then going to lots of different sites, downloading programs, and installing each of them. Plus, it's actually safer, because it's coming from a known repository.
Especially when I see contestants on Deal or No Deal who turn-down $50,000 "banker payoffs" and end-up with only $100 or less in their cases.
Well this is going off on a tangent, but the Deal or No Deal problem isn't really about what's in *your* case. If it was just an issue of taking the sure money (banker payoff) then everyone could take the first payoff and be done.
The real calculation is in the briefcase they pick in each round. What are the chances that taking that case out of play will cause my total to go up rather than go down? From the beginning, there's a good chance that the payoff will go above the original payoff at some point.
If you take in more calories than you consume, you will gain weight. Period.
No. It's really not that simple. Our bodies are capable of deciding (basically), "I have enough calories from this food, so I'm just going to poop the rest out." There actually isn't much dispute about this. Your body does this.
Some people's bodies are quicker to do that than others, but we don't really know why. There seem to be a variety of factors, but we still don't really understand it all that well.
Now it's true, on the other hand, that you can't maintain weight if you're consistently taking in fewer calories than you expend. However, that's called starvation. Cutting back calories until you lose weight isn't necessarily the healthiest thing; it can cause your metabolism to slow, and it may mean that you aren't getting enough of the right nutrients. For example, you can have a diet of potato chips, and only eat enough potato chips to be a little less than the calories you're burning, and that's not going to be good for you.
The trick is to have a good, healthy diet. There's all the reason in the world to believe that a healthy diet and some exercise can help restore your body to proper functioning, which will in turn allow it to regulate itself. But it's not about eating less, it's about eating better. Eat green vegetables. In fact, eat as many calories of green vegetables as you want. Along with everything else, when your body and mind are in good working condition, your appetite will regulate itself.
Apple's client software supports Exchange, but they're also working on the server side of things to offer a replacement for Exchange that their client software will also support.
Actually more correct: [number of calories in food eaten] - [number of calories expended in exercise] > [number of calories stored as fat]. It cannot be "", but it also isn't "=". How much is stored as fat varies from person to person, which is part of the point I'm trying to make.
Sorry, but really, you're wrong. I'd love to believe you, because then we could all just drop Exchange and everything would be good. What you're saying may contribute to Exchange's place in the corporate world, but it's not the complete answer.
But show me another email package that provides all the same things. Integrated email, contacts, calendar, the ability to send/receive meeting invites, role delegation, public folders, support for mobile devices (w/push and remote wipe), single sign-on, advanced AJAX web client as well as desktop client... I'm missing some things. Those are just the major features off the top of my head.
Oh, right, you're going to tell me about Zimbra and Scalix, except those don't seem to work as well as FOSS people claim, and besides not all of the components are FOSS. Or you're going to post something about some package that no one has ever heard of, but you'll swear it's great. When I investigate, it'll turn out to be some not-really FOSS package that doesn't work at all and has only been in development for 2 months. Or you'll tell me, "I don't care about your features," in which case, great, that's why you can use a FOSS alternative and the rest of us can't.
Sorry, I need a trustworthy and functioning alternative from a major vendor (who I can safely assume will exist in 2 years). Maybe Apple will be a contender once Snow Leopard comes out, but your IMAP/POP3 server isn't really in the same class of product.
Well part of my point is, neither "eat less" nor "exercise more" is *necessarily* the healthiest advice. Depending on the situation, an overweight person might be eating a perfectly fine amount of food, but they're eating the wrong food and not exercising well enough. Or they may be spending lots of time exercising but not doing very well at it, as well as eating the wrong foods in the wrong proportion. Sticking an obese person on a treadmill and saying "keep running until your thin" might not be the healthiest approach either.
So though I would absolutely say that diet and exercise play an important role in being healthy, sometimes it isn't "eat less and exercise more", but instead "eat better and exercise better". But then beyond that, there may be people who are eating a relatively healthy diet and exercising a fair amount, who are still overweight. So there are other factors to consider.
Part of the problem is that we still don't know all the factors that contribute to weight gain, what other effects those factors have, or how to control them. There may be genetic factors, environmental factors, psychological factors, or factors related to the bacteria mentioned. Those aren't excuses merely because we don't know how to do anything about them right now. Give it a few years, and there may be solutions so that someone who is eating well enough and exercising well enough can be thinner.
By the way, I'm pretty thin, so it's not like I'm trying to make any excuses for myself. I've just known enough people who aren't very thin, in spite of eating relatively healthy diets and running marathons. Clearly something else is going on.
My biggest problem with the formula is that it doesn't account for the thousands of calories that we flush down the toilet every day.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I said, "a third person might seem to just shed those calories completely". Some calories aren't very easily digested by humans, and some people will digest a given good more or less than others. It's possible that if you and I eat dish A, I might take in more calories than you, but that if we both ate dish B, you would take in more calories than me.
This isn't "hating on the fatties". If you let people incorrectly believe that "my genes made me fat", while it may make some folks feel less guilty, it also undermines their confidence in their own ability to get healthy.
For some people, it is about "hating on the fatties". And... well, first, regardless of what you want to tell overweight people to encourage them to get healthy, what I'm talking about right now is the truth. It seems to be against the current scientific consensus as well as my own anecdotal experience that being overweight is caused by a variety of factors. If you really want people to feel encouraged to improve it might be worth acknowledging that it's not entirely their own fault (since depression and stress make the problem worse) and try to attack many the many factors, instead of just implying that these people are lazy and gluttonous. Getting more sleep helps. Being happy helps. Learning to deal with stress helps. Maybe someday soon, something can be done to re-balance the bacteria in the person's gut.
the fact that if your total intake is X calories and you burn X+1 calories then you will lose weight.
Sure, and by natural extension, if we all worked very hard while eating nothing, we would all lose weight-- but that's not necessarily more healthy. Also, eating less can actually slow your metabolism, making you more likely to gain weight while eating less food.
Of course we should all eat healthily and get exercise. We should also get a good night's sleep, plenty of sunshine, and... well... you could give lots of generic advice on how to be more healthy. But it's not so clear that the solution to weight problems is quite as simple as "eat less".
Wow, it's kind of hard to believe, but there's actually something in this update that sounds like it'd be helpful. I think it's the first update to a Microsoft product in... I don't know... about 8-9 years where the update actually offers me something new that would actually be useful for me.
For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application. The only problem is that it has only ever really supported IE, and if you use any other browser, it reverted to a crappy version which was... ok. Not really very good, but yes, it worked.
Anyway, it's possible that I may consider buying an upgrade someday!
The general idea is older than that. I don't remember when it was first proposed or by whom, but shortly after we discovered that we were made up of cells, someone asked the question, "What if cells are the 'real' life form, and each of us is more properly thought of as a civilization of these cells?"
Right. Frankly, I'm tired of people clinging to the old wives tale that it's a simple equation of [number of calories in food eaten] - [number of calories expended in exercise] = [number of calories stored as fat]. It sounds nice, and gives you all the reason you want to hate on the fatties, but it flies in the face of lots of good science.
Just to stay really basic, we know that some food takes more work to digest than others. But even ignoring that, it's been shown pretty conclusively (and you'll notice if you just look around) that two different people on the same diet and exercise regiment can have different body mass indexes. Two people can just process food differently. Given a diet of X calories, one person's body might naturally produce more muscle, while another produces fat, and a third person might seem to just shed those calories completely. There has been some research that suggests that it's possible for your body to basically choose not to hold on to excess calories.
It's even pretty clear that the same person's body can react differently to essentially the same diet and exercise. High stress levels and sleep deprivation can cause your body to respond differently to the same intake. Hormone levels can make a big difference. And yes, I've read about a few different studies that suggest that the bacteria in your gut that helps you digest the food can have an impact.
Of course having a good diet and exercising regularly has an impact on your weight and overall health. However, there's a lot more involved.
I mean, obviously if software vendors are going to discontinue support, that's a decent enough reason. But you understand it's kind of circular reasoning to argue that developers are right to drop support because people shouldn't be using it, because developers are dropping support?
In general, I don't buy new stuff just because it's newer than what I have. I'm not particularly outraged that Win2k support is being dropped, though. It is old, and if your old system is working fine with all the old software and drivers, then keep using it with Firefox v3 or v3.5. That's fine.
Still, if your computer is 6 years old and still working for you, I say stick with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just try to keep it secure, since you won't be seeing new security patches.
And if it's not, then I suppose you'll claim it's evidence that this site is biased... as opposed to the site the article is on, which is completely fair and balanced?
Sounds like the logic of a programmer who makes some real eyesore web pages.
I'd agree that there's such a thing as overdoing it. I hate Flash. I don't like excessive AJAX stuff that adds a bunch of bling for no purpose. Still, making a web page that's extremely functional and pleasing to the eye isn't all that easy.
Take Slashdot, for example. I find the new discussion system to be very useful-- except for the fact that I've had tons of problems lately where it simply doesn't work. Sometimes it's been a cross-browser problem (worked in Firefox, not in Safari), and sometimes the javascript just seems to have been broken. I've gone looking for a way to submit something like a bug report, in case the people running this site weren't aware of the problems, but I haven't had any luck finding a web form or email address to submit anything. This is a pretty major site, but I'd say it definitely has its problems with design.
But I don't think that the dynamic discussion system is just needless bling. I find it actually makes it easier to read through discussions and post responses quickly-- when it's working.
Beyond that, Slashdot is pretty ugly. Not horribly ugly, and it's catering to geeks so "ugly" kind of works. But still, yeah, it's ugly.
House wives with spare time between cooking and putting the kids to bed make geocities pages with HTML. My advice is to not rely on something like that for your livelihood.
Housewives may do it, but someone who's untrained and unskilled won't do a very good job at it. I mean, yeah, it's easy enough to make a page say "Hello World!" and then change the font and size for that text, but you've always been able to do that with Dreamweaver or Frontpage. Making functional and beautiful page that renders properly across all major browsers is still something that takes a fair bit of knowledge and skill. I know plenty of good programmers who can't really do it.
Whether or not being gay is genetic shouldn't matter in the context of any policy whatsoever.
I agree. I think putting so much stress on the genetic issue doesn't have the effect that people think it does. Lots of people who make a big issue of saying it's genetic seem to think that they're proving that it's normal and natural, and therefore morally equivalent to heterosexuality. On the other hand, genetics isn't really the direct basis for morality. If I have a genetic disposition toward violence, that doesn't make it morally acceptable for me to murder people. So even if you assume that homosexuality is entirely genetic, that doesn't give you much insight into whether it's moral.
In fact, if you already believe that there's something wrong with homosexuality, then being convinced that it's genetic is just as likely to make you think it's a genetic disorder. That might garner some sympathy, but it could also lead to people looking for a "cure". I don't think that's what gays and lesbians are really looking for.
So, awesome, I can go for a Sunday drive in a fun car and feel good about it. Except that I only have a few hours for this drive (if I'm driving cautiously), and once I'm done, I'm done for the day. So it's one step forward, but two steps back.
Maybe. Or maybe that means we should put more money into battery-swapping stations.
It doesn't seem to me that a problem like that should cause you to say, "Oh, whoops, I guess we can't use these cars because the battery runs out after driving for a few hours straight. Sinking any more money into this would be a waste." You run out of gasoline after driving for a few hours straight, and we developed a system where our country is littered with "gas stations" to help us refuel.
This is nothing new, so why is this news? Most businesses are not early adopters of technology and usually wait until SP1 comes out.
Not only that, but most business IT departments (the well run ones, anyway) don't just upgrade whenever something new comes out. Even if it's free, they're going to want to figure out what the impact of upgrading will be. Does it create any compatibility issues? Do the features change in such a way that will cause us to make other changes in our workflow? Does the interface change in a way such that we'll have to retrain employees? Add in any actual costs per license, any costs for upgrading hardware to support the new software.
Once that's done look at the benefits. What has actually been upgraded? Do the new features work as advertised? Could we make use of the new features? More importantly: can we make use of the new features in such a way that it will save us money?
Now, is the money we save from the upgrades and new features more or less than the money we spend on licensing, hardware, retraining, and support costs, including the time spent to do the actual upgrade? Even if it does, will it save us enough money to make the whole endeavor worth the trouble?
Even if all the answers fully support the upgrade, you still have to wait for the software to be released before you can answer those questions. And then it takes some time to do that analysis. And then it takes some time to plan, push the purchases through the company bureaucracy, prepare for rollout, and then some more time to actually roll it out.
It's not just that everyone is sitting around waiting for SP1. They're taking time to evaluate the situation, weigh their options, and create a plan. And then they're also waiting for a reason. Why should I upgrade? That a new version is available isn't a good enough reason.
I live in NYC (not a native) and it's true that New Yorkers are friendly-- I think in part due to the fact that so many of us aren't natives. I know that I'm inclined to be helpful when I see someone who needs directions and things because I know how tough it can be to get around when you aren't familiar with the city. Also, I think that so many people living in a relatively small area leaves you with the pretty distinct sense that, "We have to find a way to get along, or this is really going to suck for all of us."
Also, we're used to weirdos. Having a little cardboard robot come and ask for help wouldn't even be close to the strangest thing to happen in Washington Sq Park.
Slashdot Mirror
And then there is keeping all of that up to date.
Yeah, I really don't know why Microsoft and Apple don't come up with a good package manager that would allow you do add repositories and do automated updates from a central OS app instead of having each app run their own little auto-update thingy.
No. apt-get is more efficient. Going to a website, downloading the program, and double clicking to install isn't harder, its just time consuming.
Except that most modern Linux distros will just pop up with something that says, "You have updates, do you want me to install them?" and you hit "Ok" (or "yes" or whatever), and that's it. That's easier and more efficient then going to lots of different sites, downloading programs, and installing each of them. Plus, it's actually safer, because it's coming from a known repository.
Especially when I see contestants on Deal or No Deal who turn-down $50,000 "banker payoffs" and end-up with only $100 or less in their cases.
Well this is going off on a tangent, but the Deal or No Deal problem isn't really about what's in *your* case. If it was just an issue of taking the sure money (banker payoff) then everyone could take the first payoff and be done.
The real calculation is in the briefcase they pick in each round. What are the chances that taking that case out of play will cause my total to go up rather than go down? From the beginning, there's a good chance that the payoff will go above the original payoff at some point.
Of course, that just changes the problem. Now the cat is both dead and a zombie cat at the same time.
If you take in more calories than you consume, you will gain weight. Period.
No. It's really not that simple. Our bodies are capable of deciding (basically), "I have enough calories from this food, so I'm just going to poop the rest out." There actually isn't much dispute about this. Your body does this.
Some people's bodies are quicker to do that than others, but we don't really know why. There seem to be a variety of factors, but we still don't really understand it all that well.
Now it's true, on the other hand, that you can't maintain weight if you're consistently taking in fewer calories than you expend. However, that's called starvation. Cutting back calories until you lose weight isn't necessarily the healthiest thing; it can cause your metabolism to slow, and it may mean that you aren't getting enough of the right nutrients. For example, you can have a diet of potato chips, and only eat enough potato chips to be a little less than the calories you're burning, and that's not going to be good for you.
The trick is to have a good, healthy diet. There's all the reason in the world to believe that a healthy diet and some exercise can help restore your body to proper functioning, which will in turn allow it to regulate itself. But it's not about eating less, it's about eating better. Eat green vegetables. In fact, eat as many calories of green vegetables as you want. Along with everything else, when your body and mind are in good working condition, your appetite will regulate itself.
Apple's client software supports Exchange, but they're also working on the server side of things to offer a replacement for Exchange that their client software will also support.
Actually more correct: [number of calories in food eaten] - [number of calories expended in exercise] > [number of calories stored as fat]. It cannot be "", but it also isn't "=". How much is stored as fat varies from person to person, which is part of the point I'm trying to make.
Sorry, but really, you're wrong. I'd love to believe you, because then we could all just drop Exchange and everything would be good. What you're saying may contribute to Exchange's place in the corporate world, but it's not the complete answer.
But show me another email package that provides all the same things. Integrated email, contacts, calendar, the ability to send/receive meeting invites, role delegation, public folders, support for mobile devices (w/push and remote wipe), single sign-on, advanced AJAX web client as well as desktop client... I'm missing some things. Those are just the major features off the top of my head.
Oh, right, you're going to tell me about Zimbra and Scalix, except those don't seem to work as well as FOSS people claim, and besides not all of the components are FOSS. Or you're going to post something about some package that no one has ever heard of, but you'll swear it's great. When I investigate, it'll turn out to be some not-really FOSS package that doesn't work at all and has only been in development for 2 months. Or you'll tell me, "I don't care about your features," in which case, great, that's why you can use a FOSS alternative and the rest of us can't.
Sorry, I need a trustworthy and functioning alternative from a major vendor (who I can safely assume will exist in 2 years). Maybe Apple will be a contender once Snow Leopard comes out, but your IMAP/POP3 server isn't really in the same class of product.
So though I would absolutely say that diet and exercise play an important role in being healthy, sometimes it isn't "eat less and exercise more", but instead "eat better and exercise better". But then beyond that, there may be people who are eating a relatively healthy diet and exercising a fair amount, who are still overweight. So there are other factors to consider.
Part of the problem is that we still don't know all the factors that contribute to weight gain, what other effects those factors have, or how to control them. There may be genetic factors, environmental factors, psychological factors, or factors related to the bacteria mentioned. Those aren't excuses merely because we don't know how to do anything about them right now. Give it a few years, and there may be solutions so that someone who is eating well enough and exercising well enough can be thinner.
By the way, I'm pretty thin, so it's not like I'm trying to make any excuses for myself. I've just known enough people who aren't very thin, in spite of eating relatively healthy diets and running marathons. Clearly something else is going on.
My biggest problem with the formula is that it doesn't account for the thousands of calories that we flush down the toilet every day.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I said, "a third person might seem to just shed those calories completely". Some calories aren't very easily digested by humans, and some people will digest a given good more or less than others. It's possible that if you and I eat dish A, I might take in more calories than you, but that if we both ate dish B, you would take in more calories than me.
I believe that's true, but I wasn't sure, so I just said "one of the early web applications".
This isn't "hating on the fatties". If you let people incorrectly believe that "my genes made me fat", while it may make some folks feel less guilty, it also undermines their confidence in their own ability to get healthy.
For some people, it is about "hating on the fatties". And... well, first, regardless of what you want to tell overweight people to encourage them to get healthy, what I'm talking about right now is the truth. It seems to be against the current scientific consensus as well as my own anecdotal experience that being overweight is caused by a variety of factors. If you really want people to feel encouraged to improve it might be worth acknowledging that it's not entirely their own fault (since depression and stress make the problem worse) and try to attack many the many factors, instead of just implying that these people are lazy and gluttonous. Getting more sleep helps. Being happy helps. Learning to deal with stress helps. Maybe someday soon, something can be done to re-balance the bacteria in the person's gut.
the fact that if your total intake is X calories and you burn X+1 calories then you will lose weight.
Sure, and by natural extension, if we all worked very hard while eating nothing, we would all lose weight-- but that's not necessarily more healthy. Also, eating less can actually slow your metabolism, making you more likely to gain weight while eating less food.
Of course we should all eat healthily and get exercise. We should also get a good night's sleep, plenty of sunshine, and... well... you could give lots of generic advice on how to be more healthy. But it's not so clear that the solution to weight problems is quite as simple as "eat less".
Wow, it's kind of hard to believe, but there's actually something in this update that sounds like it'd be helpful. I think it's the first update to a Microsoft product in... I don't know... about 8-9 years where the update actually offers me something new that would actually be useful for me.
For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application. The only problem is that it has only ever really supported IE, and if you use any other browser, it reverted to a crappy version which was... ok. Not really very good, but yes, it worked.
Anyway, it's possible that I may consider buying an upgrade someday!
The general idea is older than that. I don't remember when it was first proposed or by whom, but shortly after we discovered that we were made up of cells, someone asked the question, "What if cells are the 'real' life form, and each of us is more properly thought of as a civilization of these cells?"
Kind of an interesting question, but not new.
Right. Frankly, I'm tired of people clinging to the old wives tale that it's a simple equation of [number of calories in food eaten] - [number of calories expended in exercise] = [number of calories stored as fat]. It sounds nice, and gives you all the reason you want to hate on the fatties, but it flies in the face of lots of good science.
Just to stay really basic, we know that some food takes more work to digest than others. But even ignoring that, it's been shown pretty conclusively (and you'll notice if you just look around) that two different people on the same diet and exercise regiment can have different body mass indexes. Two people can just process food differently. Given a diet of X calories, one person's body might naturally produce more muscle, while another produces fat, and a third person might seem to just shed those calories completely. There has been some research that suggests that it's possible for your body to basically choose not to hold on to excess calories.
It's even pretty clear that the same person's body can react differently to essentially the same diet and exercise. High stress levels and sleep deprivation can cause your body to respond differently to the same intake. Hormone levels can make a big difference. And yes, I've read about a few different studies that suggest that the bacteria in your gut that helps you digest the food can have an impact.
Of course having a good diet and exercising regularly has an impact on your weight and overall health. However, there's a lot more involved.
Why?
I mean, obviously if software vendors are going to discontinue support, that's a decent enough reason. But you understand it's kind of circular reasoning to argue that developers are right to drop support because people shouldn't be using it, because developers are dropping support?
In general, I don't buy new stuff just because it's newer than what I have. I'm not particularly outraged that Win2k support is being dropped, though. It is old, and if your old system is working fine with all the old software and drivers, then keep using it with Firefox v3 or v3.5. That's fine.
Still, if your computer is 6 years old and still working for you, I say stick with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just try to keep it secure, since you won't be seeing new security patches.
And if it's not, then I suppose you'll claim it's evidence that this site is biased... as opposed to the site the article is on, which is completely fair and balanced?
Sounds like the logic of a programmer who makes some real eyesore web pages.
I'd agree that there's such a thing as overdoing it. I hate Flash. I don't like excessive AJAX stuff that adds a bunch of bling for no purpose. Still, making a web page that's extremely functional and pleasing to the eye isn't all that easy.
Take Slashdot, for example. I find the new discussion system to be very useful-- except for the fact that I've had tons of problems lately where it simply doesn't work. Sometimes it's been a cross-browser problem (worked in Firefox, not in Safari), and sometimes the javascript just seems to have been broken. I've gone looking for a way to submit something like a bug report, in case the people running this site weren't aware of the problems, but I haven't had any luck finding a web form or email address to submit anything. This is a pretty major site, but I'd say it definitely has its problems with design.
But I don't think that the dynamic discussion system is just needless bling. I find it actually makes it easier to read through discussions and post responses quickly-- when it's working.
Beyond that, Slashdot is pretty ugly. Not horribly ugly, and it's catering to geeks so "ugly" kind of works. But still, yeah, it's ugly.
House wives with spare time between cooking and putting the kids to bed make geocities pages with HTML. My advice is to not rely on something like that for your livelihood.
Housewives may do it, but someone who's untrained and unskilled won't do a very good job at it. I mean, yeah, it's easy enough to make a page say "Hello World!" and then change the font and size for that text, but you've always been able to do that with Dreamweaver or Frontpage. Making functional and beautiful page that renders properly across all major browsers is still something that takes a fair bit of knowledge and skill. I know plenty of good programmers who can't really do it.
Whether or not being gay is genetic shouldn't matter in the context of any policy whatsoever.
I agree. I think putting so much stress on the genetic issue doesn't have the effect that people think it does. Lots of people who make a big issue of saying it's genetic seem to think that they're proving that it's normal and natural, and therefore morally equivalent to heterosexuality. On the other hand, genetics isn't really the direct basis for morality. If I have a genetic disposition toward violence, that doesn't make it morally acceptable for me to murder people. So even if you assume that homosexuality is entirely genetic, that doesn't give you much insight into whether it's moral.
In fact, if you already believe that there's something wrong with homosexuality, then being convinced that it's genetic is just as likely to make you think it's a genetic disorder. That might garner some sympathy, but it could also lead to people looking for a "cure". I don't think that's what gays and lesbians are really looking for.
So, awesome, I can go for a Sunday drive in a fun car and feel good about it. Except that I only have a few hours for this drive (if I'm driving cautiously), and once I'm done, I'm done for the day. So it's one step forward, but two steps back.
Maybe. Or maybe that means we should put more money into battery-swapping stations.
It doesn't seem to me that a problem like that should cause you to say, "Oh, whoops, I guess we can't use these cars because the battery runs out after driving for a few hours straight. Sinking any more money into this would be a waste." You run out of gasoline after driving for a few hours straight, and we developed a system where our country is littered with "gas stations" to help us refuel.
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released?
Your point being that Vista was a rousing success?
This is nothing new, so why is this news? Most businesses are not early adopters of technology and usually wait until SP1 comes out.
Not only that, but most business IT departments (the well run ones, anyway) don't just upgrade whenever something new comes out. Even if it's free, they're going to want to figure out what the impact of upgrading will be. Does it create any compatibility issues? Do the features change in such a way that will cause us to make other changes in our workflow? Does the interface change in a way such that we'll have to retrain employees? Add in any actual costs per license, any costs for upgrading hardware to support the new software.
Once that's done look at the benefits. What has actually been upgraded? Do the new features work as advertised? Could we make use of the new features? More importantly: can we make use of the new features in such a way that it will save us money?
Now, is the money we save from the upgrades and new features more or less than the money we spend on licensing, hardware, retraining, and support costs, including the time spent to do the actual upgrade? Even if it does, will it save us enough money to make the whole endeavor worth the trouble?
Even if all the answers fully support the upgrade, you still have to wait for the software to be released before you can answer those questions. And then it takes some time to do that analysis. And then it takes some time to plan, push the purchases through the company bureaucracy, prepare for rollout, and then some more time to actually roll it out.
It's not just that everyone is sitting around waiting for SP1. They're taking time to evaluate the situation, weigh their options, and create a plan. And then they're also waiting for a reason. Why should I upgrade? That a new version is available isn't a good enough reason.
I live in NYC (not a native) and it's true that New Yorkers are friendly-- I think in part due to the fact that so many of us aren't natives. I know that I'm inclined to be helpful when I see someone who needs directions and things because I know how tough it can be to get around when you aren't familiar with the city. Also, I think that so many people living in a relatively small area leaves you with the pretty distinct sense that, "We have to find a way to get along, or this is really going to suck for all of us."
Also, we're used to weirdos. Having a little cardboard robot come and ask for help wouldn't even be close to the strangest thing to happen in Washington Sq Park.