If they offered an OEM Windows machine with no AV preinstalled, it would become hopelessly infected before any AV could be installed, and require an OS reinstall.
Stability(!): Haven't had an OS stability issue on my Fedora laptop. Granted, I haven't tried Suse since I didn't like the 10.0 live CD. I haven't had any real staibility problems on any OS since MS Windows 98. I have had plenty of app stability problems on both MS Windows and Linux. Beryl sometimes had window decoration issues, but I can live without Beryl, and lately just clicking on the Beryl manager automatically fixes them. At work, Windows Explorer locks up alot, but that seems to be more of a network problem.
Drivers: You're right. This is partly a chicken and the egg sort of issue. Still all my hardware except the Broadcom wireless works flawlessly under Linux.
Conrol Panel: This is a problem for me in all of the OS's I've used (haven't tries MS Vista yet), but your main points seem to be related to the "Names" issue you bring up.
Fonts!: Sorry dude, fonts look better to me on my dual boot laptop under Linux than they do under XP, and also better than they look at work on my XP desktop. I did make the mistake of installing a true-type package under Fedora, which screwed up my defaults and made things look worse. However, I've managed to correct most of that, and everything looks good again, ant-aliasing and all. (The exception being emacs)
Names: You're right about non-intuitive names in Linux. But most of that is due to the pre-conditioned familiarity of the Windows names (otherwise, how would I know that "Outlook" is for email) and the improper trademarking of common language words like "Word" and pre-existing computer specific words like "Windows".
"I seem to recall that oil wells are only found far away from fault lines"
Oil wells are found wherever someone drills them. But if you drill one near a fault, the oil will be long gone Oil's a liquid, it will flow out along the cracks. Oil and gas is usually found under layer of impervious rock shaped like an upside down bowl. That's what they look for in the seismographs.
We encountered a pretty stupid configuration issue where I work once. A guy who was going on vacation set up an out-of-office reply, but set it up to reply to "all employees". "Reply only once" was not set, and apparently automatically replying to the group "all employees" includes sending a reply to the sender who then receives the reply and sends a response to everyone, including himself. So the system entered an infinite loop. I got into the office early and could actually still log in; I had about 100 e-mail messages at the time. Within 5 minutes the email system bogged down completely, so it was shut down manually. After an hour or so of figuring out what had happened, the offending account was modified, the mail boxes were wiped clean, and the previous night's backup was restored.
Admittedly, it's been a while since it happened, and I don't recall it popping back up in MS Office 2003. But it did happen to me on numerous occasions in older versions. I wouldn't doubt that there was another way to permanently disable it that I wasn't able to find, but I both followed directions and experimented myself, and it kept happening. As far as deselecting components during installation, I don't have that option at work, and I haven't used MS Office at home in years.
The real issues are:
Stupid politicians buying the idea that it's easier to reset a billion clocks than to just get up an hour earlier.
Stupid politicians deciding that the stupid time changes can be improved enough by changing the dates they happen on that it will pay for the cost of changing.
Arizona has it right in refusing to do DST. (they have another good reason: who the hell wants more daylight when it's 110F out in the shade?)
"That's why there is Options-Help-Don't use office asistent[sic]." I think you missed the point. I turned off the office assistant numerous times. It always managed to pop back up eventually. If someone could have changed a couple of lines of code and compiled it for me so the assistant would stay off, I would have appreciated it.
Although I do have a problem with SBC now ATT DSL (it seems to disconnect every once and a while for anywhere from a minute to almost a half hour) Comcast Cable was (perhaps not surprisingly, part owned by ATT for some of that time) terrible for me.
First, I moved into a house and asked for the cable to be activated. They insisted it already was, which didn't make sense, especially since we weren't getting any picture. After a few rounds of that, and about 10 days later, my son found a cable amplifier in the crawlspace that was unplugged. He plugged it in and we did have cable. We told them about it, and they insisted we couldn't possibly have an amplifier, because it would cause problems and they could detect it. We kept it plugged in and never had a problem. A few days later, a bill got delivered to our house but addressed to the previous homeowner. Turns out Comcast was still billing the old homeowner for our service. She had canceled at the beginning of November, but was getting billed for November, anyway. Worse than that, she was getting billed for December, too, even though we had moved in December 10. Well, it took her a while to get it straightened out. So of course, Comcast sent us a bill including Novemeber - we weren't even living in the house, then. After several clueless help calls, they sent us an itemized "bill" that was just a screenshot of their DOSy looking billing program. We solved the issue, basically, by paying them for what we owed, and telling them they weren't getting anything for the time we didn't have the use of cable. The last straw was a couple of years later, when cable failed for us. They tested things, and said it was a problem with the cable on our side of the service box, so they would have to run a new one, and we would have to pay for it. We asked him how they would get under the asphalt driveway between their service and our house. They said they would go around the garage. That would be about 200 feet of new underground cable, with no guarantees it would solve the problem. And, since our driveway abuts the property line, much of it would be run in our neighbor's property. We told him to go away, and we ordered satellite, which has been marginally better.
"and most people utilize Excel as a database rather than a spreadsheet . .."
In the engineering company I work in, most people use Excel only as a way of formatting. It drives me nuts when I see someone tapping away at their calculator, only to type the result into a cell Excel!
Well, we actually use cardboard slide rules at work all the time.
Most of all, the famous Trane Ductulator for sizing ductwork, with a rotating "slide" on an 8-1/2"x11" piece of cardboard that reads out friction loss, air velocities, and equivalent rectangular sizes for circular duct sizes and flow quantities of standard air.
We also use gas company-issued cardboard slide rule for sizing and calculating pressure drops of gas piping.
Significant digits in those cases can be less than two, e.g the difference between 12" dia and 14" dia duct (no one uses 13" dia) or the choice between 1-1/2" or 2" pipe.
I've seen electronic calculators with the required functions, and they're much clumsier than the cardboard slides.
Only recently, since I've developed macro functions in spreadsheets that can easily account for different materials (and if I ever need to finish extending it, different fluids), have I mostly quit using the cardboard calculators. And I really only use the spreadsheet because it means automatically having a record of the calculations.
It took eons to learn how to survive in the wild, and only 100 to 150 years to forget how. Don't think that you'd automatically be able to relearn those lost arts before you starved or you died from an infection.
But don't forget, during the times that mankind could carve out a life in the wilderness without modern amenities, most people died before reaching puberty, and very few reached old age.
In my opinion, Scientific American took a nose dive a few years ago when it decided to dumb itself down, maybe to compete with Popular Science and Discover magazines. It seems to be very easy to read now, but short on information. I used to read it all the time, and learned a lot, but it seems more of a waste of time now. Sure, some of the articles used to be hard to read, but that's the price you sometimes need to pay in order to convey novel (to the reader) information.
You seem to go back 10 years farther than I, so I can't comment on your summer of love sequence. But I agree that there is currently a lack of good science writing in the mainstream press. I was especially disturbed when Scientific American decided to compete with "pop" magazines, rather than keeping its' focus on explaining the science to the non-scientist. Nowadays, I get most of my science from the web (hopefully, I can separate the chaff from the wheat) and from trade magazines (the trade magazines are more engineering than science, though). I also agree with a previous poster about Science News being good, although it is more of a headline feed than an explanation of the science.
You're right that the mean can be pretty distorted, but there may not be a useful mode for salaries. Mediani s probably a pretty good idea of typical, though you would look at all of them if you're really intersted.
Although average has some looseness to it's meaning in some contexts (e.g. "she was average looking"), in other contexts, it does mean mean. Ask any elementary school student; or type a formula in a spreadsheet, it's gonna be "average" not "mean".
"I was saying $115k average across ALL attorneys," Actually, you said median, which is a better indicator than average, anyway: "The median salary of a lawyer in my state is about $115,000 . . . "
Regardless of want you want, the available nore or less cheap satellite internet (at least here in the US) is from DirecTV or Dish Satellite Network, which do indeed use geosynchronous orbits. (they used to be download only, at least they no longer require a simultaneous dial-up for the upload) Tracking a low-earth orbit stellite would be a pain also, unless you had much stronger signals allowing omnidirectional receivers. With geosynchronous, you just aim the receiving dish once, and you're set (until it rains hard).
Slashdot Mirror
Tickmaster sucks the life out of venues and acts.
If they offered an OEM Windows machine with no AV preinstalled, it would become hopelessly infected before any AV could be installed, and require an OS reinstall.
Stability(!): Haven't had an OS stability issue on my Fedora laptop. Granted, I haven't tried Suse since I didn't like the 10.0 live CD. I haven't had any real staibility problems on any OS since MS Windows 98. I have had plenty of app stability problems on both MS Windows and Linux. Beryl sometimes had window decoration issues, but I can live without Beryl, and lately just clicking on the Beryl manager automatically fixes them. At work, Windows Explorer locks up alot, but that seems to be more of a network problem.
Drivers: You're right. This is partly a chicken and the egg sort of issue. Still all my hardware except the Broadcom wireless works flawlessly under Linux.
Conrol Panel: This is a problem for me in all of the OS's I've used (haven't tries MS Vista yet), but your main points seem to be related to the "Names" issue you bring up.
Fonts!: Sorry dude, fonts look better to me on my dual boot laptop under Linux than they do under XP, and also better than they look at work on my XP desktop. I did make the mistake of installing a true-type package under Fedora, which screwed up my defaults and made things look worse. However, I've managed to correct most of that, and everything looks good again, ant-aliasing and all. (The exception being emacs)
Names: You're right about non-intuitive names in Linux. But most of that is due to the pre-conditioned familiarity of the Windows names (otherwise, how would I know that "Outlook" is for email) and the improper trademarking of common language words like "Word" and pre-existing computer specific words like "Windows".
"I seem to recall that oil wells are only found far away from fault lines"
Oil wells are found wherever someone drills them.
But if you drill one near a fault, the oil will be long gone
Oil's a liquid, it will flow out along the cracks.
Oil and gas is usually found under layer of impervious rock shaped like an upside down bowl.
That's what they look for in the seismographs.
We encountered a pretty stupid configuration issue where I work once.
A guy who was going on vacation set up an out-of-office reply, but set it up to reply to "all employees".
"Reply only once" was not set, and apparently automatically replying to the group "all employees" includes sending a reply to the sender who then receives the reply and sends a response to everyone, including himself. So the system entered an infinite loop.
I got into the office early and could actually still log in; I had about 100 e-mail messages at the time. Within 5 minutes the email system bogged down completely, so it was shut down manually. After an hour or so of figuring out what had happened, the offending account was modified, the mail boxes were wiped clean, and the previous night's backup was restored.
At work I don't have the option to re-install or to set installation options.
Admittedly, it's been a while since it happened, and I don't recall it popping back up in MS Office 2003. But it did happen to me on numerous occasions in older versions.
I wouldn't doubt that there was another way to permanently disable it that I wasn't able to find, but I both followed directions and experimented myself, and it kept happening.
As far as deselecting components during installation, I don't have that option at work, and I haven't used MS Office at home in years.
The real issues are:
Stupid politicians buying the idea that it's easier to reset a billion clocks than to just get up an hour earlier.
Stupid politicians deciding that the stupid time changes can be improved enough by changing the dates they happen on that it will pay for the cost of changing.
Arizona has it right in refusing to do DST. (they have another good reason: who the hell wants more daylight when it's 110F out in the shade?)
Mod parent up
I turned it off several times.
It always managed to eventually pop back up.
"That's why there is Options-Help-Don't use office asistent[sic]."
I think you missed the point.
I turned off the office assistant numerous times.
It always managed to pop back up eventually.
If someone could have changed a couple of lines of code and compiled it for me so the assistant would stay off, I would have appreciated it.
Specifically, what you can patent is a business Process.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
you're correct,
That's known as the critical point, the temperature and pressure above which there is no distinct transition between liquid and gas.
Although I do have a problem with SBC now ATT DSL (it seems to disconnect every once and a while for anywhere from a minute to almost a half hour) Comcast Cable was (perhaps not surprisingly, part owned by ATT for some of that time) terrible for me.
First, I moved into a house and asked for the cable to be activated. They insisted it already was, which didn't make sense, especially since we weren't getting any picture. After a few rounds of that, and about 10 days later, my son found a cable amplifier in the crawlspace that was unplugged. He plugged it in and we did have cable. We told them about it, and they insisted we couldn't possibly have an amplifier, because it would cause problems and they could detect it. We kept it plugged in and never had a problem.
A few days later, a bill got delivered to our house but addressed to the previous homeowner. Turns out Comcast was still billing the old homeowner for our service. She had canceled at the beginning of November, but was getting billed for November, anyway. Worse than that, she was getting billed for December, too, even though we had moved in December 10.
Well, it took her a while to get it straightened out. So of course, Comcast sent us a bill including Novemeber - we weren't even living in the house, then. After several clueless help calls, they sent us an itemized "bill" that was just a screenshot of their DOSy looking billing program. We solved the issue, basically, by paying them for what we owed, and telling them they weren't getting anything for the time we didn't have the use of cable.
The last straw was a couple of years later, when cable failed for us. They tested things, and said it was a problem with the cable on our side of the service box, so they would have to run a new one, and we would have to pay for it. We asked him how they would get under the asphalt driveway between their service and our house. They said they would go around the garage. That would be about 200 feet of new underground cable, with no guarantees it would solve the problem. And, since our driveway abuts the property line, much of it would be run in our neighbor's property. We told him to go away, and we ordered satellite, which has been marginally better.
"and most people utilize Excel as a database rather than a spreadsheet . . ."
In the engineering company I work in, most people use Excel only as a way of formatting.
It drives me nuts when I see someone tapping away at their calculator, only to type the result into a cell Excel!
Well, we actually use cardboard slide rules at work all the time.
Most of all, the famous Trane Ductulator for sizing ductwork, with a rotating "slide" on an 8-1/2"x11" piece of cardboard that reads out friction loss, air velocities, and equivalent rectangular sizes for circular duct sizes and flow quantities of standard air.
We also use gas company-issued cardboard slide rule for sizing and calculating pressure drops of gas piping.
Significant digits in those cases can be less than two, e.g the difference between 12" dia and 14" dia duct (no one uses 13" dia) or the choice between 1-1/2" or 2" pipe.
I've seen electronic calculators with the required functions, and they're much clumsier than the cardboard slides.
Only recently, since I've developed macro functions in spreadsheets that can easily account for different materials (and if I ever need to finish extending it, different fluids), have I mostly quit using the cardboard calculators. And I really only use the spreadsheet because it means automatically having a record of the calculations.
It took eons to learn how to survive in the wild, and only 100 to 150 years to forget how. Don't think that you'd automatically be able to relearn those lost arts before you starved or you died from an infection.
But don't forget, during the times that mankind could carve out a life in the wilderness without modern amenities, most people died before reaching puberty, and very few reached old age.
In my opinion, Scientific American took a nose dive a few years ago when it decided to dumb itself down, maybe to compete with Popular Science and Discover magazines. It seems to be very easy to read now, but short on information. I used to read it all the time, and learned a lot, but it seems more of a waste of time now. Sure, some of the articles used to be hard to read, but that's the price you sometimes need to pay in order to convey novel (to the reader) information.
You seem to go back 10 years farther than I, so I can't comment on your summer of love sequence.
But I agree that there is currently a lack of good science writing in the mainstream press. I was especially disturbed when Scientific American decided to compete with "pop" magazines, rather than keeping its' focus on explaining the science to the non-scientist. Nowadays, I get most of my science from the web (hopefully, I can separate the chaff from the wheat) and from trade magazines (the trade magazines are more engineering than science, though).
I also agree with a previous poster about Science News being good, although it is more of a headline feed than an explanation of the science.
The number you quote seems to be closer to the extraterrestial solar flux of between 1.3 and 1.4 kW/square meter.
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brooksdr/DRB_web_page/papers/UsingTheSun/using.htm/
According to ASHRAE, a horizontal surface on the earth will get around 256 btuh/sq ft peak at noon on a clear, sunny day. By my calcs, that's about 800 Watts/sq meter.
For yesterday's data on actual insolation at the surface in the Western US, see this:
http://www.soils.wisc.edu/wimnext/insol/westinsol.html/
Here's a little more on the subject:
http://www.solar4power.com/solar-power-insolation-window.html/
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas//
FCC
/http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/fcc-sdr-whitepaper.html/
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18623835-FCC-says-freeopen-source-software-radio-drivers-are-OK/
You're right that the mean can be pretty distorted, but there may not be a useful mode for salaries. Mediani s probably a pretty good idea of typical, though you would look at all of them if you're really intersted.
Although average has some looseness to it's meaning in some contexts (e.g. "she was average looking"), in other contexts, it does mean mean. Ask any elementary school student; or type a formula in a spreadsheet, it's gonna be "average" not "mean".
"I was saying $115k average across ALL attorneys,"
Actually, you said median, which is a better indicator than average, anyway:
"The median salary of a lawyer in my state is about $115,000 . . . "
Regardless of want you want, the available nore or less cheap satellite internet (at least here in the US) is from DirecTV or Dish Satellite Network, which do indeed use geosynchronous orbits. (they used to be download only, at least they no longer require a simultaneous dial-up for the upload)
Tracking a low-earth orbit stellite would be a pain also, unless you had much stronger signals allowing omnidirectional receivers. With geosynchronous, you just aim the receiving dish once, and you're set (until it rains hard).
"New environmental implementations on coal plants make these units very environmentally friendly."
Haven't seen the effects of strip mining lately, have you?