Let us not forget that the cars that Germans drive didn't used to be, and probably still are not exactly the cars sold under the same nameplate in the US. And the differences are not all because the Teutonic version is better. Further, I remember visiting Germany on business trips in the 1980s and trying to deal with what appeared to be basically a third world phone system -- not up to the levels of even GTE's then awful service in Southern California and certainly not up to the levels of phone service in most of the US and in Japan.
That doesn't mean that the Germans (and the French also incidentally) can't do terrific engineering. But not everything they do is outstanding... or even good.
***In my experience, users are confused by ANY change. And not just IT***
Well, of course. Unfortunately what 98% of IT people have learned from this that constant change is inevitable and users are going to complain no matter what. So they pay little or no attention to user complaints.
There IS an alternative -- getting things right up front then not changing them. But that's ever so much work....
Right. And your car got 113mpg running on water until the dealer got ahold of it and did something that makes it work like everyone else's.
If fluorescents actually work as poorly as you claim, why would you buy more than two of them -- one to discover that they are junk and a second to prove that the first wasn't just a fluke? Are you daft? (They do make "daylight" incandescent bulbs y'know).
I think you are probably either nuts or clueless. But giving the benefit of the doubt, what sort of incandescent bulbs are you using? There are "long-life" incandescent bulbs designed to be used in inaccessible places. Problem is that they are expensive and even less efficient than regular incandescents. Surely, you'd know if you were using them instead of the grocery store bulbs most of us use(d)?
The other possibility is that there is something seriously wrong with your power. Assuming that you live in the US (or Canada?) and use mains power about the only thing that comes to mind is a not terribly uncommon condition called "open neutral" where the "ground (neutral)" side of one or more circuits has come loose. See http://www.thecircuitdetective.com/mnpn.htm and follow some of the links from there. I don't know what will happen to fluorescents exposed to the erratic operating voltages of an "open neutral" situation, but it might not be good. I do know that incandescent bulbs in that situation don't last as long as they should and will sometimes will blow out serially. Hardware stores sell a cheap, plug in circuit tester that will detect open neutral and other house wiring errors. Fixing the problem if there is one may be something you'd prefer to leave to a professional, but plugging the tester in and making sure that the proper lights come on is something anyone can do. And I would fix the problem if I had it. It can cause more serious and expensive difficulties than just going through too many light bulbs.
I imagine that your electric bills show how many KW hours you are being billed for. If you keep some old bills, you should be able to see if your usage is changing. Caveat: My power company only reads the meter six times a year -- in even numbered months. Bills for odd numbered months are based on their estimate of my usage.
I'm reminded of the breeders who purportedly tried to create a more sweet natured camel by incorporating lama genes in the camel genotype. The story is that they ended up with a vile tempered lama. Of course nothing like that could possibly cause my neighbor's attempt to produce vegetarian pit-bull to create a man-eating rabbit. Of course not.
***If "legit" pharmaceuticals were so great, They'd learn what "standard deviation" means and stop using stats that fall within standard deviation as "proof" of efficacy.***
They don't actually do that -- at least not that I've encountered. But they approach it by using an absurdly low standard of proof (p=0.05) then designing seriously flawed experiments that increase the chances of meeting that low standard. And then repeating the flawed experiments with minor variations until they get the answer they want. There are people seriously studying all this. Google John P. A. Ioannidis, a Greek researcher who has published several widely distributed papers on the low quality of research.
The kids will be familiar with outlining, so the whitespace thing will probably look OK to them. They'll most likely end up wondering why any language designer would use brackets instead and maybe develop a lifelong habit of occasionally forgetting to use them. I'd worry more about Python's unimpressive and sometimes idiosyncratic error detection.
It's not really clear how "obvious" this is. Human bodies are, to a great extent, machines for turning stuff into the sugar glucose. Unlike ruminants, we can't handle cellulose, but most everything else that enters digestive track gets turned into glucose reasonably efficiently and is extracted into the blood stream in order to fuel the body. (OK, fats are handled a bit differently if you want to get picky)
There is a probably a valid issue with some chemicals and compounds like salt and caffiene that get into the blood. But despite the determined efforts of highly trained professionals to blame the stuff for a panapoly of serious problems, the evidence against them is thin (sodium) to nonexistent (caffiene).
If you ever plan a diet for a week in the wilderness -- lots of calories, sufficient vitamins and minerals, low mass (you are not going to be carrying 18 sweet potatoes, 6 heads of brocolli, etc on your back. At least not more than once.) -- you'll find that it is not that different from the stuff in the candy machine. Lots of chocolate, fats, proteins, dried fruits, nuts.
In short. We have not the slightest idea what a healthy or unhealthy diet is. I've gone through about five different eras of listening to people pontificate on what they think others should be eating -- starting with lots of red meat and dairy products and going on to see just about everything edible elevated and deprecated at one point or another. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as an optimum diet. Just that we have no clue what it is.
So, is it obvious that the crap in the candy machine is unhealthy? Well, if I were going to fund a life insurance policy with me as beneficiary, I'd certainly pick the candy addict over the dude who is living on salads, fish, and fresh fruit. But I wouldn't be all that surprised if the health food nut was floored by a heart attack at age 47 and the candy abuser attended the funerals of all the doctors that lectured him on his weight and diet when they died of old age.
It's quite simple. You/They/We can define a very simple interface that displays some stuff and allows a few simple user inputs and maybe after a few years of debugging we might have a reliable browser suitable for basic stuff -- including financial data transfers and buying and selling stuff.
Or we can continue to try to do everything in the world in our browsers and then act really surprised when our PC starts relaying 20 thousand spam messages a day or our money and/or data and/or identity ends up in Lichtenstein, Haute Volta, or Inner Mongolia.
It's quite clear to me that we -- all of us -- are going to go with the second option. That's fine. Now can we quit pretending that web insecurity is someone else's fault?
There's hardly anyplace in the lower 48 where you can't get some sort of signal from NPR.
MSNBC says that you can download some sort of widget for viewing their election night results at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27227813 -- no idea what it is, if it is windows only, or how well it will work.
***Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress.***
Progress is motion toward a goal. Remove the goal and what is left is just motion. A lot of people confuse motion with progress. What goal do you perceive Ubuntu to be moving toward? Why isn't faster operation/lower overhead part of the goal?
Let me second this. I'm no fan of Microsoft and I believe that Windows NT is a mediocre OS for Personal computers (as opposed to servers). I think that the Vista debacle is exactly what Microsoft deserved for putting their interests (single code base) above those of the users. But if XP does what you need, it's far less painful to play around and remove stuff that is unnecessary and resource hungry and perhaps find some Open Source software alternatives for specific tasks (e.g. foxit rather than acrobat reader) than to try to get everything you need running under some other OS.
***Why does every HP come with 30 preinstalled programs in the startup?***
Because they get a kickback from the vendors for preinstalling garbage like Norton Antivirus? The fact that HP isn't the build_it_well_and_price_it_accordingly test equipment manufacturer that it was decades ago probably helps. Some of the software they ship with some of their product lines is just plain appallingly bad and I can well imagine that they have never figured out that all that crap makes their PCs slow to boot.
It's been over a decade since I actually understood much about BIOSes and booting, but back then, I'd have told you to check your BIOS settings to see if a full memory test of some sort is enabled. Memory access time is not improving at anywhere near the rate that memory capacity is, and I'll bet that even the most basic test of 8 (US) billion bytes is going to take a while no matter how fast the CPU runs. OTOH, you might want to test memory no matter how long it takes.
***E-voting done well is far superior to paper voting done well. The costs are far less, it's more convenient, and more environmentally friendly***
Sounds like utter and complete hogwash to me. E-voting is a complicated solution to an simple problem. The US uses all sorts of moderately complex and expensive mechanical voting aids that invariably lead to complaints of fraud, malfeasance, or failure to register votes (because they are busted).
Canada uses paper ballots and counts them in a few hours.
The paper ballot system is not broken. We should quit trying to fix it until we get a LOT smarter.
You're right. They had to do a lot of engineering to build an airplane that can back up, has proper brake lights, etc, etc, etc... and keep it light enough to fly. FYI, the maximum takeoff weight of a fully loaded Cessna 172 is 1043kg. A Chevrolet Aveo -- an extremely small and light car -- weighs in at 1066kg with no payload whatsoever including driver, fuel, or fuzzy dice.
***Kids don't need overly restrictive blocks in place to prevent them getting access to porn, bomb making instructions***
The bomb making thing actually is kind of concerning. Many parents are fond of their kitchens and will miss them, not to mention the potential impact on neighbors in multiple unit buildings.
But there is another concern. Not only will legitimate web sites inevitably be accidentally blocked by false positives from the filters, but the kids will still find ways to access porn and other "undesirable"sites via false negatives. One might think that only the very clever or very bored will be able to master that. But in fact, kids talk to one another. The URL of any porn site that is not blocked will probably be known by 50% of the 13 year old males (and 20% of the 13 year old females) on your continent within 3.4 days of its discovery by any one of them.
Filters are a really dubious idea. They are expensive to buy, expensive to administer, and don't work very well. The concept probably is not fixable although the volume of available material could be cut substantially and cheaply by things like.xxx domains.
***Or for ipv4: would you buy cheap routers now if they lacked ipv6?***
Well I certainly would. If my network is small enough to work with 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x-172.32.x.x, or 192.168.x.x addressing, why would I want anything on my network to be directly addressable by every hacker in the world. If there are any tunnels into my network, I definitely want to know about them. Others may feel differently of course.
I'm not sure that I like Network Address Translation, but I sure as hell don't see anything very appealing about the alternative of no NAT.
When "they" get internet security straightened out, (and good luck on that) then come talk to me about using Ip6v locally.
I'm not sure that running with no swap space at all is a good idea. But if you run with a very small swap space -- say 20mB -- what will happen if you run out of memory is that the machine will slow to a crawl. A very slow crawl. A really, really, slow, very slow crawl. But it will continue to run (probably) and you will eventually be able to kill a task or two and restore usability. If it never slows, you don't need swap space. If it does start swapping, you'll be able to look at what you were running and make a more informed guess about how much swap space you need.
At least that's the way it has worked for me the couple of times I've missized a swap partition.
***They threw in enough fixes till it roughly worked on Windows and then it was considered good enough to ship.***
Yep, that's the zen of USB. In the 1990s there was a competing school of thought that said you ship after three months whether it works on Windows or not.
Before I signed on to something like that, I'd spend some time meditating about Internet security. It's dubious at best and seems, if anything, to be slowly deteriorating. Is your situation such that you can deal with all your data being captured? How about it being altered? What future security constraints could shut you down for days, or weeks, or permanently? If you are OK on those things, then maybe.
***Bullshit. He failed to co-operate for a decade. Hence all of the sanctions during the time between the two iraq wars.***
He did fail to cooperate up until late 2002. But he permitted inspectors relatively free access during late 2002 and early 2003. UNMOVIC inspected over 400 sites of their choice with no significant access delays and with nary a sign of Chemical, Biological or Nuclear weapons or weapon development. The Iraqis did continue to impede access to Iraqi scientists so it's possible that there might have been some stuff hidden. Hell, it might still be hidden. But it seems unlikely there is a significant amount.
May I suggest that you either cultivate some tact or do a little research before starting up with that Bullshit crap. It keeps the taste of foot out of ones mouth.
And then there is the minor point that despite scouring the country for WMDs after the invasion, US troops found only one small bunch of elderly artillery shells and encountered one IED that apparently had a nervegas charge instead of the (presumably) expected explosive.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a limit of two (2) per household.
Let us not forget that the cars that Germans drive didn't used to be, and probably still are not exactly the cars sold under the same nameplate in the US. And the differences are not all because the Teutonic version is better. Further, I remember visiting Germany on business trips in the 1980s and trying to deal with what appeared to be basically a third world phone system -- not up to the levels of even GTE's then awful service in Southern California and certainly not up to the levels of phone service in most of the US and in Japan.
That doesn't mean that the Germans (and the French also incidentally) can't do terrific engineering. But not everything they do is outstanding ... or even good.
***In my experience, users are confused by ANY change. And not just IT***
Well, of course. Unfortunately what 98% of IT people have learned from this that constant change is inevitable and users are going to complain no matter what. So they pay little or no attention to user complaints.
There IS an alternative -- getting things right up front then not changing them. But that's ever so much work ....
Right. And your car got 113mpg running on water until the dealer got ahold of it and did something that makes it work like everyone else's.
If fluorescents actually work as poorly as you claim, why would you buy more than two of them -- one to discover that they are junk and a second to prove that the first wasn't just a fluke? Are you daft? (They do make "daylight" incandescent bulbs y'know).
I think you are probably either nuts or clueless. But giving the benefit of the doubt, what sort of incandescent bulbs are you using? There are "long-life" incandescent bulbs designed to be used in inaccessible places. Problem is that they are expensive and even less efficient than regular incandescents. Surely, you'd know if you were using them instead of the grocery store bulbs most of us use(d)?
The other possibility is that there is something seriously wrong with your power. Assuming that you live in the US (or Canada?) and use mains power about the only thing that comes to mind is a not terribly uncommon condition called "open neutral" where the "ground (neutral)" side of one or more circuits has come loose. See http://www.thecircuitdetective.com/mnpn.htm and follow some of the links from there. I don't know what will happen to fluorescents exposed to the erratic operating voltages of an "open neutral" situation, but it might not be good. I do know that incandescent bulbs in that situation don't last as long as they should and will sometimes will blow out serially. Hardware stores sell a cheap, plug in circuit tester that will detect open neutral and other house wiring errors. Fixing the problem if there is one may be something you'd prefer to leave to a professional, but plugging the tester in and making sure that the proper lights come on is something anyone can do. And I would fix the problem if I had it. It can cause more serious and expensive difficulties than just going through too many light bulbs.
I imagine that your electric bills show how many KW hours you are being billed for. If you keep some old bills, you should be able to see if your usage is changing. Caveat: My power company only reads the meter six times a year -- in even numbered months. Bills for odd numbered months are based on their estimate of my usage.
I'm reminded of the breeders who purportedly tried to create a more sweet natured camel by incorporating lama genes in the camel genotype. The story is that they ended up with a vile tempered lama. Of course nothing like that could possibly cause my neighbor's attempt to produce vegetarian pit-bull to create a man-eating rabbit. Of course not.
***If "legit" pharmaceuticals were so great, They'd learn what "standard deviation" means and stop using stats that fall within standard deviation as "proof" of efficacy.***
They don't actually do that -- at least not that I've encountered. But they approach it by using an absurdly low standard of proof (p=0.05) then designing seriously flawed experiments that increase the chances of meeting that low standard. And then repeating the flawed experiments with minor variations until they get the answer they want. There are people seriously studying all this. Google John P. A. Ioannidis, a Greek researcher who has published several widely distributed papers on the low quality of research.
The kids will be familiar with outlining, so the whitespace thing will probably look OK to them. They'll most likely end up wondering why any language designer would use brackets instead and maybe develop a lifelong habit of occasionally forgetting to use them. I'd worry more about Python's unimpressive and sometimes idiosyncratic error detection.
It's not really clear how "obvious" this is. Human bodies are, to a great extent, machines for turning stuff into the sugar glucose. Unlike ruminants, we can't handle cellulose, but most everything else that enters digestive track gets turned into glucose reasonably efficiently and is extracted into the blood stream in order to fuel the body. (OK, fats are handled a bit differently if you want to get picky)
There is a probably a valid issue with some chemicals and compounds like salt and caffiene that get into the blood. But despite the determined efforts of highly trained professionals to blame the stuff for a panapoly of serious problems, the evidence against them is thin (sodium) to nonexistent (caffiene).
If you ever plan a diet for a week in the wilderness -- lots of calories, sufficient vitamins and minerals, low mass (you are not going to be carrying 18 sweet potatoes, 6 heads of brocolli, etc on your back. At least not more than once.) -- you'll find that it is not that different from the stuff in the candy machine. Lots of chocolate, fats, proteins, dried fruits, nuts.
In short. We have not the slightest idea what a healthy or unhealthy diet is. I've gone through about five different eras of listening to people pontificate on what they think others should be eating -- starting with lots of red meat and dairy products and going on to see just about everything edible elevated and deprecated at one point or another. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as an optimum diet. Just that we have no clue what it is.
So, is it obvious that the crap in the candy machine is unhealthy? Well, if I were going to fund a life insurance policy with me as beneficiary, I'd certainly pick the candy addict over the dude who is living on salads, fish, and fresh fruit. But I wouldn't be all that surprised if the health food nut was floored by a heart attack at age 47 and the candy abuser attended the funerals of all the doctors that lectured him on his weight and diet when they died of old age.
Sounds like absolute hogwash to me. Now I have to head for the candy machine and get me one of those ... you know ... what are they called? ... things.
It's quite simple. You/They/We can define a very simple interface that displays some stuff and allows a few simple user inputs and maybe after a few years of debugging we might have a reliable browser suitable for basic stuff -- including financial data transfers and buying and selling stuff.
Or we can continue to try to do everything in the world in our browsers and then act really surprised when our PC starts relaying 20 thousand spam messages a day or our money and/or data and/or identity ends up in Lichtenstein, Haute Volta, or Inner Mongolia.
It's quite clear to me that we -- all of us -- are going to go with the second option. That's fine. Now can we quit pretending that web insecurity is someone else's fault?
There's hardly anyplace in the lower 48 where you can't get some sort of signal from NPR.
MSNBC says that you can download some sort of widget for viewing their election night results at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27227813 -- no idea what it is, if it is windows only, or how well it will work.
***Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress.***
Progress is motion toward a goal. Remove the goal and what is left is just motion. A lot of people confuse motion with progress. What goal do you perceive Ubuntu to be moving toward? Why isn't faster operation/lower overhead part of the goal?
Let me second this. I'm no fan of Microsoft and I believe that Windows NT is a mediocre OS for Personal computers (as opposed to servers). I think that the Vista debacle is exactly what Microsoft deserved for putting their interests (single code base) above those of the users. But if XP does what you need, it's far less painful to play around and remove stuff that is unnecessary and resource hungry and perhaps find some Open Source software alternatives for specific tasks (e.g. foxit rather than acrobat reader) than to try to get everything you need running under some other OS.
***Why does every HP come with 30 preinstalled programs in the startup?***
Because they get a kickback from the vendors for preinstalling garbage like Norton Antivirus? The fact that HP isn't the build_it_well_and_price_it_accordingly test equipment manufacturer that it was decades ago probably helps. Some of the software they ship with some of their product lines is just plain appallingly bad and I can well imagine that they have never figured out that all that crap makes their PCs slow to boot.
It's been over a decade since I actually understood much about BIOSes and booting, but back then, I'd have told you to check your BIOS settings to see if a full memory test of some sort is enabled. Memory access time is not improving at anywhere near the rate that memory capacity is, and I'll bet that even the most basic test of 8 (US) billion bytes is going to take a while no matter how fast the CPU runs. OTOH, you might want to test memory no matter how long it takes.
***E-voting done well is far superior to paper voting done well. The costs are far less, it's more convenient, and more environmentally friendly*** Sounds like utter and complete hogwash to me. E-voting is a complicated solution to an simple problem. The US uses all sorts of moderately complex and expensive mechanical voting aids that invariably lead to complaints of fraud, malfeasance, or failure to register votes (because they are busted). Canada uses paper ballots and counts them in a few hours. The paper ballot system is not broken. We should quit trying to fix it until we get a LOT smarter.
You're right. They had to do a lot of engineering to build an airplane that can back up, has proper brake lights, etc, etc, etc ... and keep it light enough to fly. FYI, the maximum takeoff weight of a fully loaded Cessna 172 is 1043kg. A Chevrolet Aveo -- an extremely small and light car -- weighs in at 1066kg with no payload whatsoever including driver, fuel, or fuzzy dice.
You got it. OK aircraft quite possibly. Awful car probably. That's about the best that looks to be doable. Better than walking.
This is not everyman's flying car for flying to the grocery store. It's not supposed to be.
***Kids don't need overly restrictive blocks in place to prevent them getting access to porn, bomb making instructions***
The bomb making thing actually is kind of concerning. Many parents are fond of their kitchens and will miss them, not to mention the potential impact on neighbors in multiple unit buildings.
But there is another concern. Not only will legitimate web sites inevitably be accidentally blocked by false positives from the filters, but the kids will still find ways to access porn and other "undesirable"sites via false negatives. One might think that only the very clever or very bored will be able to master that. But in fact, kids talk to one another. The URL of any porn site that is not blocked will probably be known by 50% of the 13 year old males (and 20% of the 13 year old females) on your continent within 3.4 days of its discovery by any one of them.
Filters are a really dubious idea. They are expensive to buy, expensive to administer, and don't work very well. The concept probably is not fixable although the volume of available material could be cut substantially and cheaply by things like .xxx domains.
***Or for ipv4: would you buy cheap routers now if they lacked ipv6?***
Well I certainly would. If my network is small enough to work with 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x-172.32.x.x, or 192.168.x.x addressing, why would I want anything on my network to be directly addressable by every hacker in the world. If there are any tunnels into my network, I definitely want to know about them. Others may feel differently of course.
I'm not sure that I like Network Address Translation, but I sure as hell don't see anything very appealing about the alternative of no NAT.
When "they" get internet security straightened out, (and good luck on that) then come talk to me about using Ip6v locally.
*** Obama will castrate our military and destroy our nuclear deterrent. ... etc,etc,etc for thousands of tiresome words. ***
Sounds good to me. I reckon I'll vote for him.
I'm not sure that running with no swap space at all is a good idea. But if you run with a very small swap space -- say 20mB -- what will happen if you run out of memory is that the machine will slow to a crawl. A very slow crawl. A really, really, slow, very slow crawl. But it will continue to run (probably) and you will eventually be able to kill a task or two and restore usability. If it never slows, you don't need swap space. If it does start swapping, you'll be able to look at what you were running and make a more informed guess about how much swap space you need. At least that's the way it has worked for me the couple of times I've missized a swap partition.
***They threw in enough fixes till it roughly worked on Windows and then it was considered good enough to ship.***
Yep, that's the zen of USB. In the 1990s there was a competing school of thought that said you ship after three months whether it works on Windows or not.
Before I signed on to something like that, I'd spend some time meditating about Internet security. It's dubious at best and seems, if anything, to be slowly deteriorating. Is your situation such that you can deal with all your data being captured? How about it being altered? What future security constraints could shut you down for days, or weeks, or permanently? If you are OK on those things, then maybe.
***Bullshit. He failed to co-operate for a decade. Hence all of the sanctions during the time between the two iraq wars.***
He did fail to cooperate up until late 2002. But he permitted inspectors relatively free access during late 2002 and early 2003. UNMOVIC inspected over 400 sites of their choice with no significant access delays and with nary a sign of Chemical, Biological or Nuclear weapons or weapon development. The Iraqis did continue to impede access to Iraqi scientists so it's possible that there might have been some stuff hidden. Hell, it might still be hidden. But it seems unlikely there is a significant amount.
May I suggest that you either cultivate some tact or do a little research before starting up with that Bullshit crap. It keeps the taste of foot out of ones mouth.
In point of fact, the US apparently knew perfectly well that many/most Iraqi WMDs were destroyed by the Iraqis in the late 1990s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
And then there is the minor point that despite scouring the country for WMDs after the invasion, US troops found only one small bunch of elderly artillery shells and encountered one IED that apparently had a nervegas charge instead of the (presumably) expected explosive.