I see no reasons to do so. What I use now is free and legal plus the neat separation of user and system files just makes managing it so easier. Add in central software management and no hunt for device drivers and such. Just much cleaner. And, I won't trust an OS that needs 20GB space for installation.
This said, I don't hold any grudge against Windows, I just don't care any more:)
Ubuntu is not representative of the GNU/Linux based desktop OSes.
Why don't you get an extra HDD that you can use to try out a couple of distros while double booting, also checking if your hardware (vendors) play right with Linux?
With some effort to climb a learning curve (even better, ask a friend with experience!) you'd be surprised. My example : the last Windows I used was Win2K, around 2003 and I could not be happier.
I fully agree that Flash dying out will be a nice thing. Too bad it is not necessarily replaced by HTML5 / h264 but Silverlight on sites I watch.
Before anyone suggests the Novell Moonlight : it works fine on bubblemark, yes, but the DRM and other crap included when watching online TV usually just makes it crash under linux.
I participated in this crap when I arrived to the US because I believed this will decrease my huge premium : $100 / month for a 10-year old Corolla, driver's age : 30 but "no driving record" so I must be a terrible driver?!
It did not : they compare your driving to an arbitrary average that one could not beat, hence no decrease in insurance premium. I drove ~2000 miles in six months, never going over speed limit, keeping ample following distance so I don't have to beak suddenly, etc. No change in premium for the second half of the year (ok, $15 decrease over six month premium). After a year I switched car insurance and will never go with such crap.
Again, just don't go anywhere near Progressive. They'll rip you off.
If you come in from abroad, it might take you a month to get a driver's license...
Personally, I did not force exploring what alternatives I have. It was simple enough to understand this is how things work and after having lived in three different countries as an adult, this is definitely a case to which the proverb applies :
"Taking a leak with the wind in your face is not a good idea."
Because you want their services bad enough to be willing to give that information away, perhaps?
It's grey, not black and white.
I want their services because I must use their services. Two examples : it would be pretty difficult to book a flight nowadays w/o credit card (Credit Card). I also need electricity (PEPCO).
And I don't have a choice: we have one provider for electricity and that's it. So it's either hand over SSN or bust. Having arrived from abroad, the local credit union gave me a real credit card - I was actually lucky, with other banks the likely scenario would have been : hand over SSN, you have you account + prepaid credit card...
If you know an insurance company, bank, ISP that provides service at a reasonable price and does not require the client to hand over his/her SSN, please let me know!
... we all depend on companies every day and trust them with our personal info. There really isn't an alternative.
I wonder why?
When I arrived to the US and received my SSN, I tried to take the message that was next to it seriously : "Keep this number safe and secret" / not word by word citation/.
Then I went to get bank account, set up account for gas / electricity, driver's licence, cell phone contract, everywhere I was asked for my SSN. Seriously, why can PEPCO, GEICO, WASHGAS, AT&T oblige me to reveal this information?
My guess is that people in the US have been slowly but surely trained to surrender sensitive personal information to third parties.
Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
Portability : I never walked around with textbooks. Used them at the library or rented out for a few weeks and used it at home. Durability : some 84 copies of the original Guttenberg Bibles still exist. They printed ~150 in the 1450s. I think that settles the question of durability, especially in the light of my experience with home-burned CDs and DVDs. Accessibility: I guess those e-books will be free to copy, ehm... For books we have a nice, tried and true system, libraries. Also, you can give it to someone / keep it the family. Consistent quality : just check reviews on Amazon plus if the authors are respectable academics in their fields. Interactivity : WTF? Yes, you can take notes on margin. You can underline. You don't need animations popping up dozen times per page. Searchability : Index, Contents. Works like charm. Not environmentally friendly : see durability point above. Make it once, teach people to respect the knowledge in there and it will last for centuries. 10-50 trees can grow full size during the period. Compare that to landfills with outdated appliances.
As of present, printing is still the best way to preserve information. I don't care for bills and similar crap but knowledge in textbooks is valuable, we should not just dump all that into the "cloud".
How much did accident rates drop when cellphone bans were imposed?
Not necessarily a good control.
Example : cellphone use while driving is banned in VA; however, you can't be pulled over just for this. So there is a "ban" but not really, it won't discourage anybody. As a consequence, looking at accident statistics in VA before/after the ban is not suitable to estimate the efficacy of _really_ imposing a ban on cellphone use for drivers.
According to Tesla, their well-to-wheel efficiency is 0.39 kWh/mi.
Pure energy expenditure of riding a bicycle with 40lbs of load over 13 miles in an hour gives you 0.0000894kWh/mi. (got numbers using this and this site). Let's multiply this by ten to account for the 20% efficiency of human muscles and for the fact that food has to get from producers to markets. Result : 0.000894 kWh/mile.
Thats ~436-fold less energy used for a 13 mile trip, including 40 pounds of "cargo".
Thanks for this bit of info! This is what I wanted to find out, what it was like close to the epicenter. It definitely did not feel like 5.9 in DC Metro area, as CNN headline said .
Helping your species / population / society to survive by spreading ideas and propagating your genes is the best possibility, true. Being the last survivor does not change anything, so making sure that the others make it, too, makes sense.
Just spreading ideas but failing to reproduce : still a failure, you are out of the game. Not that it matters on the long run, you just have to choose a long enough time-scale.
If you are 100% pragmatic and atheist at the same time, it is easy to reach the conclusion that the only thing you can really accomplish in life is raising your progeny. You might speak of social acclaim, success, wealth - all this crap does not count. Only survival.
as TFA does not contain much. Just some extremely vague, general text. I understand it is for "the masses" but I'd prefer information that some might have trouble understanding instead of the no information that is easy to understand...
It's fine arguing that the population is spread out but the population of Montana is negligible compared to the entire US population and should not pull down the average too much.
Real broadband penetration is crappy because it is expensive. I would understand paying $30/month for 1.5Mbit/s access in the heart of Montana but I sure don't understand why it costs so much 15 miles from the White House, right in the middle of the Washington DC metro area?
Btw, saying that Russia is barely above the US justifies your theory does not hold route :
Russia/capita GDP : ~$16K, area : ~17million km2, population: ~171million US/capita GDP: ~$46K, area: ~~10million km2, population: ~308million
So : 1.8 times more people on 1.7 seven times smaller territory = US is roughly ~3.0x more densely populated than Russia and even though people living the US earn ~2.8 times more on average than their Russian counterparts, they are slightly ahead in broadband penetration.
Just get an issue of Science, Nature or PNAS - two column format, not really aimed at 7th grade level masses. 4 inch long lines might slow down reading slightly but they make easier following consecutive lines. This might explain why this format is popular with scientific journals, f.e.
This does not explain why go widescreen for work. At reading distance those 80-90 degrees cover lines that are only 2-3 inches long, hence the multi-column layout of newspapers and articles that became standard over the last 100 years. Btw, newpapers are also just the opposite of widescreen...
Personally I hate reading even pdfs on a screen - by the time I zoom in enough to read effortlessly, two-column pages of text are already too wide.
On the contrary, there was no reasoning on your part to disprove. You made the accusation that "they have never used the Gimp" with no evidence to back it up.
We start from here:
For over ten years now, whenever GIMP is compared to Photoshop somewhere on the net, invariably someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that GIMP lacks "certain professional features". Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be. What is it that "professionals" do or need that the GIMP can not do or provide?
I have never gotten an answer. Not once.
Since it is evident to anyone who used image editing software at least at an intermediate level that handy features like - as you said - CMYK handling are missing from the Gimp, anyone who complains about missing features in general but fails to point this out is either:
- a knowledgeable user who, if ever tried to use the Gimp, would have noticed the lack of these features right away; since he/she did not, it is safe to assume that they never ever tried to software == they don't know what are they speaking of
- a user who never heard of CMYK handling / 12bit grayscale / etc definitely does not belong among professional users and thus does not know what the he/she is talking about
This reasoning can be found in a compact form in one of my previous comments:
For me this means that _most_ people who complain about those missing features have actually never used them and/or they have never used the Gimp = they don't know what they are speaking about.
Reading it after the text cited from Iron Condor's post should make my reasoning quite clear. I might not have put every single damn word there but hey, I suppose people are capable of thinking on their own.
It doesn't mean that the person pointing it out is one of them- I can tell you why someone may require an articulated lorry instead of a car, even if I'd be fine with a car myself.
You should still be able to point out why someone might need the articulated lorry instead of the car. Apparently most people who bash the Gimp are not able to do so.
Baseless speculation.
Please make a real effort to prove that my reasoning is incorrect. If this is all you can do, there's no need to take you seriously.
............ For over ten years now, whenever GIMP is compared to Photoshop somewhere on the net, invariably someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that GIMP lacks "certain professional features". Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be. What is it that "professionals" do or need that the GIMP can not do or provide?
I have never gotten an answer. Not once.
..........
For me this means that _most_ people who complain about those missing features have actually never used them and/or they have never used the Gimp = they don't know what they are speaking about.
Good to know there are at least half a dozen users among the whole/. crowd who can fully exploit what Photoshop has to offer;)
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I see no reasons to do so.
What I use now is free and legal plus the neat separation of user and system files just makes managing it so easier. Add in central software management and no hunt for device drivers and such. Just much cleaner.
And, I won't trust an OS that needs 20GB space for installation.
This said, I don't hold any grudge against Windows, I just don't care any more :)
Ubuntu is not representative of the GNU/Linux based desktop OSes.
Why don't you get an extra HDD that you can use to try out a couple of distros while double booting, also checking if your hardware (vendors) play right with Linux?
With some effort to climb a learning curve (even better, ask a friend with experience!) you'd be surprised. My example : the last Windows I used was Win2K, around 2003 and I could not be happier.
Why? Almost no one would use the feature so there's no point to build it in.
If there was such an utter lack of demand, then nobody would have asked which one of the third party virtual desktop solutions is the best.
I fully agree that Flash dying out will be a nice thing. Too bad it is not necessarily replaced by HTML5 / h264 but Silverlight on sites I watch.
Before anyone suggests the Novell Moonlight : it works fine on bubblemark, yes, but the DRM and other crap included when watching online TV usually just makes it crash under linux.
I participated in this crap when I arrived to the US because I believed this will decrease my huge premium : $100 / month for a 10-year old Corolla, driver's age : 30 but "no driving record" so I must be a terrible driver?!
It did not : they compare your driving to an arbitrary average that one could not beat, hence no decrease in insurance premium. I drove ~2000 miles in six months, never going over speed limit, keeping ample following distance so I don't have to beak suddenly, etc. No change in premium for the second half of the year (ok, $15 decrease over six month premium). After a year I switched car insurance and will never go with such crap.
Again, just don't go anywhere near Progressive. They'll rip you off.
If you come in from abroad, it might take you a month to get a driver's license...
Personally, I did not force exploring what alternatives I have. It was simple enough to understand this is how things work and after having lived in three different countries as an adult, this is definitely a case to which the proverb applies :
"Taking a leak with the wind in your face is not a good idea."
Or call it path of least resistance :/
Because you want their services bad enough to be willing to give that information away, perhaps?
It's grey, not black and white.
I want their services because I must use their services. Two examples : it would be pretty difficult to book a flight nowadays w/o credit card (Credit Card). I also need electricity (PEPCO).
And I don't have a choice: we have one provider for electricity and that's it. So it's either hand over SSN or bust. Having arrived from abroad, the local credit union gave me a real credit card - I was actually lucky, with other banks the likely scenario would have been : hand over SSN, you have you account + prepaid credit card...
If you know an insurance company, bank, ISP that provides service at a reasonable price and does not require the client to hand over his/her SSN, please let me know!
... we all depend on companies every day and trust them with our personal info. There really isn't an alternative.
I wonder why?
When I arrived to the US and received my SSN, I tried to take the message that was next to it seriously : "Keep this number safe and secret" / not word by word citation/.
Then I went to get bank account, set up account for gas / electricity, driver's licence, cell phone contract, everywhere I was asked for my SSN. Seriously, why can PEPCO, GEICO, WASHGAS, AT&T oblige me to reveal this information?
My guess is that people in the US have been slowly but surely trained to surrender sensitive personal information to third parties.
Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
Portability : I never walked around with textbooks. Used them at the library or rented out for a few weeks and used it at home.
Durability : some 84 copies of the original Guttenberg Bibles still exist. They printed ~150 in the 1450s. I think that settles the question of durability, especially in the light of my experience with home-burned CDs and DVDs.
Accessibility: I guess those e-books will be free to copy, ehm... For books we have a nice, tried and true system, libraries. Also, you can give it to someone / keep it the family.
Consistent quality : just check reviews on Amazon plus if the authors are respectable academics in their fields.
Interactivity : WTF? Yes, you can take notes on margin. You can underline. You don't need animations popping up dozen times per page.
Searchability : Index, Contents. Works like charm.
Not environmentally friendly : see durability point above. Make it once, teach people to respect the knowledge in there and it will last for centuries. 10-50 trees can grow full size during the period. Compare that to landfills with outdated appliances.
As of present, printing is still the best way to preserve information. I don't care for bills and similar crap but knowledge in textbooks is valuable, we should not just dump all that into the "cloud".
This from "Do the math" kind of answers your question, although not in Joules but in years :)
How much did accident rates drop when cellphone bans were imposed?
Not necessarily a good control.
Example : cellphone use while driving is banned in VA; however, you can't be pulled over just for this. So there is a "ban" but not really, it won't discourage anybody.
As a consequence, looking at accident statistics in VA before/after the ban is not suitable to estimate the efficacy of _really_ imposing a ban on cellphone use for drivers.
Or use less energy.
According to Tesla, their well-to-wheel efficiency is 0.39 kWh/mi.
Pure energy expenditure of riding a bicycle with 40lbs of load over 13 miles in an hour gives you 0.0000894kWh/mi. (got numbers using this and this site). Let's multiply this by ten to account for the 20% efficiency of human muscles and for the fact that food has to get from producers to markets. Result : 0.000894 kWh/mile.
Thats ~436-fold less energy used for a 13 mile trip, including 40 pounds of "cargo".
25USD/h does not seem that bad compared to the $36/h average wage for UAW auto workers
Thanks for this bit of info! This is what I wanted to find out, what it was like close to the epicenter. It definitely did not feel like 5.9 in DC Metro area, as CNN headline said .
Apparently it was felt stronger around the Capitol in DC than 15 miles north of it at the NIH, in Bethesda.
Just curious : do you happen to be close to Richmond, Va? It was perceptible but nothing more here in Bethesda, MD.
Helping your species / population / society to survive by spreading ideas and propagating your genes is the best possibility, true. Being the last survivor does not change anything, so making sure that the others make it, too, makes sense.
Just spreading ideas but failing to reproduce : still a failure, you are out of the game. Not that it matters on the long run, you just have to choose a long enough time-scale.
If you are 100% pragmatic and atheist at the same time, it is easy to reach the conclusion that the only thing you can really accomplish in life is raising your progeny.
You might speak of social acclaim, success, wealth - all this crap does not count. Only survival.
Now go make one. Or two.
as TFA does not contain much. Just some extremely vague, general text. I understand it is for "the masses" but I'd prefer information that some might have trouble understanding instead of the no information that is easy to understand...
It's fine arguing that the population is spread out but the population of Montana is negligible compared to the entire US population and should not pull down the average too much.
Real broadband penetration is crappy because it is expensive. I would understand paying $30/month for 1.5Mbit/s access in the heart of Montana but I sure don't understand why it costs so much 15 miles from the White House, right in the middle of the Washington DC metro area?
Btw, saying that Russia is barely above the US justifies your theory does not hold route :
Russia /capita GDP : ~$16K, area : ~17million km2, population: ~171million /capita GDP: ~$46K, area: ~~10million km2, population: ~308million
US
So : 1.8 times more people on 1.7 seven times smaller territory = US is roughly ~3.0x more densely populated than Russia and even though people living the US earn ~2.8 times more on average than their Russian counterparts, they are slightly ahead in broadband penetration.
You still think all is fine?
Just get an issue of Science, Nature or PNAS - two column format, not really aimed at 7th grade level masses.
4 inch long lines might slow down reading slightly but they make easier following consecutive lines. This might explain why this format is popular with scientific journals, f.e.
This does not explain why go widescreen for work. At reading distance those 80-90 degrees cover lines that are only 2-3 inches long, hence the multi-column layout of newspapers and articles that became standard over the last 100 years. Btw, newpapers are also just the opposite of widescreen...
Personally I hate reading even pdfs on a screen - by the time I zoom in enough to read effortlessly, two-column pages of text are already too wide.
On the contrary, there was no reasoning on your part to disprove. You made the accusation that "they have never used the Gimp" with no evidence to back it up.
We start from here:
For over ten years now, whenever GIMP is compared to Photoshop somewhere on the net, invariably someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that GIMP lacks "certain professional features". Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be. What is it that "professionals" do or need that the GIMP can not do or provide?
I have never gotten an answer. Not once.
Since it is evident to anyone who used image editing software at least at an intermediate level that handy features like - as you said - CMYK handling are missing from the Gimp, anyone who complains about missing features in general but fails to point this out is either:
- a knowledgeable user who, if ever tried to use the Gimp, would have noticed the lack of these features right away; since he/she did not, it is safe to assume that they never ever tried to software == they don't know what are they speaking of
- a user who never heard of CMYK handling / 12bit grayscale / etc definitely does not belong among professional users and thus does not know what the he/she is talking about
This reasoning can be found in a compact form in one of my previous comments:
For me this means that _most_ people who complain about those missing features have actually never used them and/or they have never used the Gimp = they don't know what they are speaking about.
Reading it after the text cited from Iron Condor's post should make my reasoning quite clear. I might not have put every single damn word there but hey, I suppose people are capable of thinking on their own.
It doesn't mean that the person pointing it out is one of them- I can tell you why someone may require an articulated lorry instead of a car, even if I'd be fine with a car myself.
You should still be able to point out why someone might need the articulated lorry instead of the car. Apparently most people who bash the Gimp are not able to do so.
Baseless speculation.
Please make a real effort to prove that my reasoning is incorrect. If this is all you can do, there's no need to take you seriously.
from Iron Condor's post:
For over ten years now, whenever GIMP is compared to Photoshop somewhere on the net, invariably someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that GIMP lacks "certain professional features". Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be. What is it that "professionals" do or need that the GIMP can not do or provide?
I have never gotten an answer. Not once.
For me this means that _most_ people who complain about those missing features have actually never used them and/or they have never used the Gimp = they don't know what they are speaking about.
Good to know there are at least half a dozen users among the whole /. crowd who can fully exploit what Photoshop has to offer ;)