I mean, really - is anything in Canada a true target? My understanding that the "cells" in Canada were in place for attacks on targets in the US.
We've been one of the most active forces in Afghanistan, and were there from the start. And if you believe that terrorists hate freedom/the West/women without veils, then we're obviously as much of a target as the US.
Oh, and we're a member of the G7, a major resource exporter, and the only country that Osama explicitly threatened that hasn't seen related terrorist bombings.
In other words, you're overwhelmingly ignorant on the real world.
I note that some brave moderator marked this "redundant" - here's a bit of training for moderators: look at dates on posts before you declare something "redundant". A huge problem with Slashdot, as is, is the huge number of moderators that encourage everyone to just post replies to the first couple of posts, lest they get marked redundant by a clueless moderator using a threaded view.
Or perhaps they have certain applications where the light only gets turned on for brief but frequent stints, which send CFL's and their mercury content to the landfill much quicker than the advertised lifetime.
A CFL that is cycled 20 times in a day has its vastly longer lifespan (most are rated 5x run hours more than incandescents) reduced by a staggering _15%_.
How many lights do you turn on and off 20 times a day (so 40 state changes)?
Anyone that wasn't looking for a fringe defense for the largely indefensible knew exactly what I was saying. Ask 100 people to spot the incandescent bulbs, and 100 people will point to a classic lamp (not heat bulbs or spotlights). Well, 1 might point to alternatives if they're just looking to muddy the waters.
Really? Simple economics can tell you how much energy is used to make a product?
No, simple economics can make the upper limit of the amount of energy obvious. See my electricity is actually subsidized, and is largely hydro-electric: It's some of the cheapest electricity on the globe. Yet the bulb will save me 4x the cost of bulb itself. Actually, that were the numbers back when the bulbs were much more expensive, so the ratio is greatly increasing.
Yeah, simple economics tell me that the standard diversionary ruse of "Oh but they use more energy to make than they save!" is nonsensical.
Can you please point me to where I can buy replacement CF bulbs for my outdoor security spotlights? Or 500W CF heat-lamps for my bathroom in mid-winter? Thanks.
A CF as a heat-lamp would be a little counter productive. In essence you've quoted two tiny, largely irrelevant edge conditions, when clearly I'm talking about light bulbs you have in a bedside lamp (see the other inane headlights/whatever comments for the same sort of nonsense).
Also tell me, how much energy goes into producing each of those CF bulbs, as opposed to evacuated glass bulbs with a bit of tungsten and a plug? Did you take that into account when buying them?
Simple economics tell me that it's far less energy that what each unit saves.
I don't think you know what that word means. They don't "start instantly." Every time I turn one on in a darkened room I have time to wonder if it is burned out before it begins to produce light.
I suppose we're down to a war of anecdotes, but every CFL that I've purchased in the past two years starts virtually instantly -- easily as fast as a incandescent, and in some cases I would say even faster.
If you perceive a lag, then you're using old or defective units.
Now the original ones I bought, which I've relegated to non-essential uses, have a hella-annoying lag, and even still take a minute to get to full brightness. Thankfully that's a thing of the past.
So your 'modern' CFs (save the two whole bulbs you've replaced thus far) are half a decade old
I didn't suddenly fill a garbage bag full of every incandescent -- as they died, I replaced them with CFs. I'm now at a point where my entire house is CFs.
or d) doesn't like feeling institutionalized at home and is willing to pay the premium for it.
This is becoming the standard anti-CF meme, and I have to think that it's either people with a no experience with CFs, or very dated experience, or some sort of paid astroturfing by the incandescent lobby.
Modern CFs don't flicker at all, they have virtually any colour temperature you want to buy, they start instantly. There is no real downside, unless maybe you sit in a quiet room with a bulb beside your ear and detect some humming.
I agree with everything you said, but as has been noted, CFL have mercury in them.
This will definitely be an issue, though I'm sure soon enough household waste pickup will have a separate category for the various toxic items that fill our lives. For instance batteries are appearing everywhere -- just finished a box of Rice Crispies to find a little watch/projection light thing in the bottom, already with battery, and this is only the latest of dozens of these sorts of things.
Of course there should be skepticism, because it sounds like GE pulled some amazing innovation of out their subsidiaryhole just in time to fend off legislation.
Of course any legislation that talks journey rather than destination is misguided -- it is efficiency and other measurable metrics (e.g. amount of waste per unit, for instance) that matters, not how you get there. Putting specifics into the wording sounds more like some lobbyists got their money's worth.
Having said all of that, anyone who walks into a store and buys an incandescent is either a) stupid, b) very stupid, or c) they live in an apartment with unmetered electricity. I have a house full of CFs, and have had them for half a decade now, and not only is the colour pleasing with the modern ones, and there is zero flicker or start-up lag, but in the entire time I've owned CFs I've changed two whole bulbs, one being used outside in -25C temperature when it was only rated for indoor use.
...but as a programmer I have difficulty believing that the images are "accidentally" appearing
Agreed - the likelihood of this being a "bug" seems monumentally remote. How could a "draw screen" routine keep accidentally writing a screen that it is least likely of every drawing? Did they optimize by doing a call to displayJackpot() on every screen flip just in case it's that one in a billion or so times that it actually needs to?
To state the obvious, the reason for this screen is starting in the poor gambler's face -- the whole point of the drawn out process of a slot machines (versus just saying "Nope...nope...nope...nope....") is to give the feeling of being "close".
"DAMN! I almost won. Just have to feed it a few more as this one is getting lucky."
Flashing the grand prize for brief moments obviously compels that feeling. And when you're talking about problem gamblers who are already addicted, it is nothing like trying to get people in a theater to buy coke.
Don't let facts get in your way. Nevermind that they'll use hardened versions
It doesn't matter -- they're still using a general operating system in an entirely inappropriate way. This is exactly the sort of task that ultra-stable and modular operating systems like QNX are built for. Windows was never engineered for anything remotely like this (which is why it is so feature rich -- it was designed for the desktop / non-critical server world, and it does that job admirably).
They have the liability of millions of lines of code that have no purpose or use for them, but to present new and interesting ways to fail.
Nevermind that Windows 2k as a server OS without all the other crap people typically put on it is extremely stable.
Here's your core problem: You're ignoring context in your defense. See I like Windows -- I'm running XP on my desktop, and Server 2003 R2 64-bit edition on my servers -- because for me it works well in these roles. I wouldn't dream of putting this on a piece of military hardware even remotely associated with nuclear weapons, however.
Seriously, understand how QNX differs from Windows, and why something like the former makes a world more sense. The "developer skill" ruse is pure bullshit, because 99% of what the developers will be facing is completely unlike any other Windows development.
MS is boosting Postgre because they don't want people buying Oracle or IBM's database offerings.
100% correct.
If you're developing for the Windows platform, the default choice is virtually always SQL Server (the development tools are geared for it, the developer documentation is all geared for it, the frameworks are engineered for it). If you are one of the brave souls that decides to go with Windows but considers alternate RDBMSs, Microsoft wants to try to their competitors of a sale.
Race is a social construction. The term race is itself "racist"...
There are different cultures, obviously, and also different skin colours and other superficial appearances.
Are you for real?
Humans migrated across the globe in an era when separating meant limited or no contact (or breeding) with groups elsewhere. Specialization to the environment -- basic evolution-in-the-small --, and traits being exaggerated through group inbreeding, measurably changed each group in ways much greater than skin color. Some races (look up the term "racist", btw) are taller, or darker, or with larger or smaller noses. Some races are allergic to milk while others are not. Some are susceptible to conditions like MS, while others are not. Some have diseases that only their race contract.
Some races, in a general sense, are better at some things than other races (while it's okay to say, for instance, that one race is dominant at physical sports, don't dare mention race in the context of intelligence).
While global travel/movement means that eventually, far in the future, we'll all re-merge into one race, simply brushing it under the rug under some PC nonsense doesn't help anyone.
you/. people really trip me out. All that software doesn't run correctly because it wasn't written correctly. How do you want it?
Oh my gosh, you're right! Now that you've pointed this out, I think I'm going to cry into a pillow over the unfairness of it all.
Poor, poor Microsoft! I mean sure - they've made tens of billions (closing on $100 billion) in profit over the past decade, all while committing business mistakes that would have killed any normal company 100x over, but still: Poor Microsoft.
Of course Microsoft software is, and has always been, some of the worst offenders. Microsoft made it impossible to do simple tasks like looking at the calendar in the taskbar (yeah, believe the lie that it's because it was meant to set the date, but any monkey doing usability testing would have told you that everyone uses it to look at a calendar), and partitioned their binary and documents structure, through several changes, in such a way that the most benign of tasks requires admin and elevated privileges when it shouldn't.
This is all entirely Microsoft's fault. I feel no sympathy for them.
Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 is not currently considered compatible with Vista. There is a different patch called "SP1 for Vista" that is in beta, exactly as the GP stated several times.
Microsoft has a number of products that have issues on Vista, so the whole "Get their shit together" thing seems a little ridiculous.
Windows NT was designed to run on i386, MIPS, PPC and Alpha. Over the years, Microsoft discontinued support for the various platforms
At the time Microsoft was hedging their bets as everyone ranted about the next generation of RISC chips storming the market. Endlessly we'd hear about how the x86 line was dead, and the only improvements would be to move to the next generation (Intel themselves was heavily focusing on RISC as well -- think of the i860).
We never did because those alternatives never delivered on their promise. Ever since 680x0 processors, the highest performance per dollar crown has been held, with only a couple of very short term or niche exceptions, by the x86 line. When given the option of running software on a variety of platforms, customers always ended up buying the x86.
Look at Linux -- so many platforms supported, yet on the desktop and up level, overwhelmingly it's run on x86. This has been the cast over its history.
What's far worse is bloggers who don't disclose the fact they got the gift in any related blog posts.
Like the one blogger who claimed that he'd, uh, "traded in" for the new laptop, only announcing that he got a freebie from Microsoft when called on it. There goes his credibility.
Bloggers have a long and deeply ingrained communal morality? You've got to be shitting me.
Not "bloggers", but rather people. Most people have communal rules beaten into them at every turn, one of which is that you must return all favors. That's why charity drives send you free "gifts" and then ask for a donation, and salespeople really ply the low-level acquisition representative from organizations with goodies and free dinners.
If it was "no strings attached", why would Microsoft have bothered in the first place? Seriously -- just felt a pressing desire to spend tens of thousands for the fun of it?
Microsoft knows that these bloggers have a long and deeply ingrained communal morality of "returning the favor" (it permeates all elements of our society), and no matter how much they might try to convince themselves that it won't affect their perception, it will intrinsically obligate them to be more inclined to see things from Microsoft's position, etc.
This is a long and well proven psychological impulse. Read the great book Power and Persuasion. Really fascinating stuff.
Having said all of that, if a Microsoft box arrived in the mail I certainly wouldn't refuse it.
Read the article, he got the same story from a Best Buy employee.
Maybe the blogger invented the whole thing to get some hits? He seems to have a bit of a beef with the PS3 given his rather sad attempts to profit off of an unopened unit in his closet.
Wasn't there an attempt to force a label on every appliance saying "this device will cost you $x.xx per month if it's kept running" or some such? Can't remember. That would definitely make a lot of sense.
Yes, but they're still working out kinks with the measurements. For instance I bought a dishwasher that was world's better than the competitors on the energuide/energy star scale. Turns out that my dishwasher has a sensor that measures how dirty the water is, automatically (and significantly) shortening the cycle for small/null loads. Turned out that the energy test the government ran did a cycle with nothing in it at all, making a best case.
While the sensor will definitely help, it certainly won't to the degree demonstrated in the artificial benchmark.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been one of the most active forces in Afghanistan, and were there from the start. And if you believe that terrorists hate freedom/the West/women without veils, then we're obviously as much of a target as the US.
Oh, and we're a member of the G7, a major resource exporter, and the only country that Osama explicitly threatened that hasn't seen related terrorist bombings.
In other words, you're overwhelmingly ignorant on the real world.
I note that some brave moderator marked this "redundant" - here's a bit of training for moderators: look at dates on posts before you declare something "redundant". A huge problem with Slashdot, as is, is the huge number of moderators that encourage everyone to just post replies to the first couple of posts, lest they get marked redundant by a clueless moderator using a threaded view.
Does he un-hack things? Every search result for this term only points to the same story appearing on every meme site.
Because if he's an offensive hacker -- e.g. one of "ours" to attack the enemy -- that doesn't make it "reverse" hacking.
A CFL that is cycled 20 times in a day has its vastly longer lifespan (most are rated 5x run hours more than incandescents) reduced by a staggering _15%_.
How many lights do you turn on and off 20 times a day (so 40 state changes)?
Anyone that wasn't looking for a fringe defense for the largely indefensible knew exactly what I was saying. Ask 100 people to spot the incandescent bulbs, and 100 people will point to a classic lamp (not heat bulbs or spotlights). Well, 1 might point to alternatives if they're just looking to muddy the waters.
No, simple economics can make the upper limit of the amount of energy obvious. See my electricity is actually subsidized, and is largely hydro-electric: It's some of the cheapest electricity on the globe. Yet the bulb will save me 4x the cost of bulb itself. Actually, that were the numbers back when the bulbs were much more expensive, so the ratio is greatly increasing.
Yeah, simple economics tell me that the standard diversionary ruse of "Oh but they use more energy to make than they save!" is nonsensical.
A CF as a heat-lamp would be a little counter productive. In essence you've quoted two tiny, largely irrelevant edge conditions, when clearly I'm talking about light bulbs you have in a bedside lamp (see the other inane headlights/whatever comments for the same sort of nonsense).
Simple economics tell me that it's far less energy that what each unit saves.
I suppose we're down to a war of anecdotes, but every CFL that I've purchased in the past two years starts virtually instantly -- easily as fast as a incandescent, and in some cases I would say even faster.
If you perceive a lag, then you're using old or defective units.
Now the original ones I bought, which I've relegated to non-essential uses, have a hella-annoying lag, and even still take a minute to get to full brightness. Thankfully that's a thing of the past.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up your post, which is why I couldn't bear to go more than a sentence or two past this.
I didn't suddenly fill a garbage bag full of every incandescent -- as they died, I replaced them with CFs. I'm now at a point where my entire house is CFs.
This is becoming the standard anti-CF meme, and I have to think that it's either people with a no experience with CFs, or very dated experience, or some sort of paid astroturfing by the incandescent lobby.
Modern CFs don't flicker at all, they have virtually any colour temperature you want to buy, they start instantly. There is no real downside, unless maybe you sit in a quiet room with a bulb beside your ear and detect some humming.
This will definitely be an issue, though I'm sure soon enough household waste pickup will have a separate category for the various toxic items that fill our lives. For instance batteries are appearing everywhere -- just finished a box of Rice Crispies to find a little watch/projection light thing in the bottom, already with battery, and this is only the latest of dozens of these sorts of things.
Didn't know this before now, but a CF has 1/5 the amount of mercury that's in a common watch battery.
Of course there should be skepticism, because it sounds like GE pulled some amazing innovation of out their subsidiaryhole just in time to fend off legislation.
Of course any legislation that talks journey rather than destination is misguided -- it is efficiency and other measurable metrics (e.g. amount of waste per unit, for instance) that matters, not how you get there. Putting specifics into the wording sounds more like some lobbyists got their money's worth.
Having said all of that, anyone who walks into a store and buys an incandescent is either a) stupid, b) very stupid, or c) they live in an apartment with unmetered electricity. I have a house full of CFs, and have had them for half a decade now, and not only is the colour pleasing with the modern ones, and there is zero flicker or start-up lag, but in the entire time I've owned CFs I've changed two whole bulbs, one being used outside in -25C temperature when it was only rated for indoor use.
Agreed - the likelihood of this being a "bug" seems monumentally remote. How could a "draw screen" routine keep accidentally writing a screen that it is least likely of every drawing? Did they optimize by doing a call to displayJackpot() on every screen flip just in case it's that one in a billion or so times that it actually needs to?
To state the obvious, the reason for this screen is starting in the poor gambler's face -- the whole point of the drawn out process of a slot machines (versus just saying "Nope...nope...nope...nope....") is to give the feeling of being "close".
"DAMN! I almost won. Just have to feed it a few more as this one is getting lucky."
Flashing the grand prize for brief moments obviously compels that feeling. And when you're talking about problem gamblers who are already addicted, it is nothing like trying to get people in a theater to buy coke.
It doesn't matter -- they're still using a general operating system in an entirely inappropriate way. This is exactly the sort of task that ultra-stable and modular operating systems like QNX are built for. Windows was never engineered for anything remotely like this (which is why it is so feature rich -- it was designed for the desktop / non-critical server world, and it does that job admirably).
They have the liability of millions of lines of code that have no purpose or use for them, but to present new and interesting ways to fail.
Here's your core problem: You're ignoring context in your defense. See I like Windows -- I'm running XP on my desktop, and Server 2003 R2 64-bit edition on my servers -- because for me it works well in these roles. I wouldn't dream of putting this on a piece of military hardware even remotely associated with nuclear weapons, however.
Seriously, understand how QNX differs from Windows, and why something like the former makes a world more sense. The "developer skill" ruse is pure bullshit, because 99% of what the developers will be facing is completely unlike any other Windows development.
100% correct.
If you're developing for the Windows platform, the default choice is virtually always SQL Server (the development tools are geared for it, the developer documentation is all geared for it, the frameworks are engineered for it). If you are one of the brave souls that decides to go with Windows but considers alternate RDBMSs, Microsoft wants to try to their competitors of a sale.
Are you for real?
Humans migrated across the globe in an era when separating meant limited or no contact (or breeding) with groups elsewhere. Specialization to the environment -- basic evolution-in-the-small --, and traits being exaggerated through group inbreeding, measurably changed each group in ways much greater than skin color. Some races (look up the term "racist", btw) are taller, or darker, or with larger or smaller noses. Some races are allergic to milk while others are not. Some are susceptible to conditions like MS, while others are not. Some have diseases that only their race contract.
Some races, in a general sense, are better at some things than other races (while it's okay to say, for instance, that one race is dominant at physical sports, don't dare mention race in the context of intelligence).
While global travel/movement means that eventually, far in the future, we'll all re-merge into one race, simply brushing it under the rug under some PC nonsense doesn't help anyone.
Do you think they have to water cool those?
Seriously, though, here's a great article on power consumption, though in this case in the home. This was linked from another recent slashdot article on power consumption.
Of course, I am biased.
Oh my gosh, you're right! Now that you've pointed this out, I think I'm going to cry into a pillow over the unfairness of it all.
Poor, poor Microsoft! I mean sure - they've made tens of billions (closing on $100 billion) in profit over the past decade, all while committing business mistakes that would have killed any normal company 100x over, but still: Poor Microsoft.
Of course Microsoft software is, and has always been, some of the worst offenders. Microsoft made it impossible to do simple tasks like looking at the calendar in the taskbar (yeah, believe the lie that it's because it was meant to set the date, but any monkey doing usability testing would have told you that everyone uses it to look at a calendar), and partitioned their binary and documents structure, through several changes, in such a way that the most benign of tasks requires admin and elevated privileges when it shouldn't.
This is all entirely Microsoft's fault. I feel no sympathy for them.
Are you intentionally being dense?
Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 is not currently considered compatible with Vista. There is a different patch called "SP1 for Vista" that is in beta, exactly as the GP stated several times.
Microsoft has a number of products that have issues on Vista, so the whole "Get their shit together" thing seems a little ridiculous.
At the time Microsoft was hedging their bets as everyone ranted about the next generation of RISC chips storming the market. Endlessly we'd hear about how the x86 line was dead, and the only improvements would be to move to the next generation (Intel themselves was heavily focusing on RISC as well -- think of the i860).
We never did because those alternatives never delivered on their promise. Ever since 680x0 processors, the highest performance per dollar crown has been held, with only a couple of very short term or niche exceptions, by the x86 line. When given the option of running software on a variety of platforms, customers always ended up buying the x86.
Look at Linux -- so many platforms supported, yet on the desktop and up level, overwhelmingly it's run on x86. This has been the cast over its history.
Like the one blogger who claimed that he'd, uh, "traded in" for the new laptop, only announcing that he got a freebie from Microsoft when called on it. There goes his credibility.
Not "bloggers", but rather people. Most people have communal rules beaten into them at every turn, one of which is that you must return all favors. That's why charity drives send you free "gifts" and then ask for a donation, and salespeople really ply the low-level acquisition representative from organizations with goodies and free dinners.
If it was "no strings attached", why would Microsoft have bothered in the first place? Seriously -- just felt a pressing desire to spend tens of thousands for the fun of it?
Microsoft knows that these bloggers have a long and deeply ingrained communal morality of "returning the favor" (it permeates all elements of our society), and no matter how much they might try to convince themselves that it won't affect their perception, it will intrinsically obligate them to be more inclined to see things from Microsoft's position, etc.
This is a long and well proven psychological impulse. Read the great book Power and Persuasion. Really fascinating stuff.
Having said all of that, if a Microsoft box arrived in the mail I certainly wouldn't refuse it.
Maybe the blogger invented the whole thing to get some hits? He seems to have a bit of a beef with the PS3 given his rather sad attempts to profit off of an unopened unit in his closet.
Yes, but they're still working out kinks with the measurements. For instance I bought a dishwasher that was world's better than the competitors on the energuide/energy star scale. Turns out that my dishwasher has a sensor that measures how dirty the water is, automatically (and significantly) shortening the cycle for small/null loads. Turned out that the energy test the government ran did a cycle with nothing in it at all, making a best case.
While the sensor will definitely help, it certainly won't to the degree demonstrated in the artificial benchmark.