I've been on Vista for 3 months now. When I bought my new Thinkpad I made the leap, thinking that it would be better to be slightly ahead of the curve than to have to upgrade my OS at a later point. Big mistake. Don't do it. Below is a quick summary of the hassles I have endured since day one, and continue to endure. Anyone else see this shit?
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I h
Hi Dave. I see what you're saying. But by pointing out the timeframes, I think you are proving that what we're seeing now is highly unusual.
Scientists can read ice core samples much the way we can read tree rings. Through this method, they can determine a few things.
First, the layers of ice show that the ice has been there for a very long time: from tens to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the location. Suddenly, much of this ice has melted in a matter of decades. Clearly if this melting was part of regularly occuring "spikes" in temperature, then we wouldn't have historical ice core samples that go back beyond the last spike, because the ice would have melted and wouldn't be there to core.
Second, by analyzing the gasses trapped in the bubbles of each ice layer, scientists can see the composition of the atmosphere each, along with estimated average annual temperatures. From this they can see that in the past when the Earth has warmed and cooled, it has done so at a rate that would seem very gradual to humans. For example, at the end of the last ice age (about 10 to 20 thousand years ago) the earth warmed at a rate of approximately 1 degree Celcius every 1000 years. Today, depending on estimates, we're looking at a warming of between 3 and 7 degrees celcius in less than 100 years.
So yes, the temperature of the Earth has indeed been "much warmer and much colder" than it is now. The difference is that the rate of warming we've seen in the last century is about 30 times faster than it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
My point about photographs is exactly as you suggested -- they only go back just over a century. Yet, in that century, the changes we're seeing are stunning when placed against a timeline of tens of thousands of years.
To me, this shows that something historically very unusual is happening. On a historical scale, the recent warming of the Earth has been nearly instantaneous. That this incredible statistical abberation happens to coincide *exactly* with the rise of human industrial society, and that the atmospheric temperature increase parallels exactly that of the build-up of C02 in the atmosphere seems rather too likely to be a coincidence.
Basically, what you are suggesting is the "we don't have enough evidence to be sure, let's wait a few hundred thousand years and see" argument. With the stakes being what they are, I'm not convinced this is gamble we want to make.
After years as a lurker, this write-up has finally compelled me to register at slashdot (well, that and the death of Plastic).
It is a fact that an overwhelming marjority of scientists in the world agree that climate change is real, it is happening now, and it is being caused mainly by humans. Only in the United States does there remain a "debate" and it remains only because a certain number of scientists have been paid off by large corporations to lobby the US government on their behalf. The expressed aim of these lobbyists is to muddy otherwise very clear science to make sure the general public at large is confused and doubtful about the existence of climate change. This effort is clearly working, and it is to the detriment of all of us.
Al Gore's film, and many other well-respected books (including the highly recommended "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery) outline in great detail the overwhelming evidence from peer-reviewed journals that is accepted by the world scientific community at large.
The short list of accepted facts, which have been derived by scientific observation and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals:
- The average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere is rising, and has spiked sharply in recent years, far beyond any of the "normal natural trends" that take place over thousands or millions of years, not mere decades.
- The average temperatures of the oceans are also rising.
- Historical photo evidence clearly shows the polar ice caps have melted dramatically in recent years. This is decreasing the amount of white snow that reflects sunlight and replacing it with dark water that absorbs sunlight, creating an ever-accelerating negative feedback loop. For the first time there are observations of polar bears are drowning in the north pole because they cannot swim between icebergs. Entire towns and cities in the north that were built on permafrost (so called because it was always considered permanent) are now sinking as the permafrost melts for the first time ever in human record.
- Historical photo evidence clearly shows that many glaciers around the world that are known to have have existed for millenia have suddenly and dramatically melted in recent decades.
- Scientific evidence shows that the number of species becoming extinct because they cannot survive in warmer climates and cannot migrate to cooler places due to human development is rising sharply.
- The number and intensity of hurricanes and severe storms have increased sharply over recent years, in direct parallel to the measured rise in air and ocean temperatures during that same time.
When I see a clear counter-argument for climate change that addresses the data behind all the above observations, perhaps I'll listen. So far, the arguments I've seen against climate change seem to consist of either 1) nitpicks at tiny holes in a vast complicated body of data, 2) the mistaking of small annual or geographical variations in an overall warming trend as "proof" that the trend is false, 3) insane unsubstantiated accusations that the vast majority of the world's scientists are involved in some sort of conspiracy, or are so inept at what they do that they must engineer a vast lie just to "get funding".
The rest of the world is on board. Only in the US (and since our last election, to some extent Canada) has climate change become caught up in pathetic left vs right politics, with conservatives adamently denying climate change by default as an invention of whiney liberals. It's a damn shame, because this is a serious issue, and the future of all humans depends on us waking up and doing something about this NOW.
How many droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, rising oceans, missing ice caps, and extinct animals will we need to have shoved in our faces before we admit that we've made a huge mistake, and that we need to stop bickering and get on with solutions?
The views in this original post exhibit wishful thinking, not reality. Accusations of "junk science" by climate change doubters is extremely ironic, to say the least.
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I've been on Vista for 3 months now. When I bought my new Thinkpad I made the leap, thinking that it would be better to be slightly ahead of the curve than to have to upgrade my OS at a later point. Big mistake. Don't do it. Below is a quick summary of the hassles I have endured since day one, and continue to endure. Anyone else see this shit?
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I h
Hi Dave. I see what you're saying. But by pointing out the timeframes, I think you are proving that what we're seeing now is highly unusual.
Scientists can read ice core samples much the way we can read tree rings. Through this method, they can determine a few things.
First, the layers of ice show that the ice has been there for a very long time: from tens to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the location. Suddenly, much of this ice has melted in a matter of decades. Clearly if this melting was part of regularly occuring "spikes" in temperature, then we wouldn't have historical ice core samples that go back beyond the last spike, because the ice would have melted and wouldn't be there to core.
Second, by analyzing the gasses trapped in the bubbles of each ice layer, scientists can see the composition of the atmosphere each, along with estimated average annual temperatures. From this they can see that in the past when the Earth has warmed and cooled, it has done so at a rate that would seem very gradual to humans. For example, at the end of the last ice age (about 10 to 20 thousand years ago) the earth warmed at a rate of approximately 1 degree Celcius every 1000 years. Today, depending on estimates, we're looking at a warming of between 3 and 7 degrees celcius in less than 100 years.
So yes, the temperature of the Earth has indeed been "much warmer and much colder" than it is now. The difference is that the rate of warming we've seen in the last century is about 30 times faster than it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
My point about photographs is exactly as you suggested -- they only go back just over a century. Yet, in that century, the changes we're seeing are stunning when placed against a timeline of tens of thousands of years.
To me, this shows that something historically very unusual is happening. On a historical scale, the recent warming of the Earth has been nearly instantaneous. That this incredible statistical abberation happens to coincide *exactly* with the rise of human industrial society, and that the atmospheric temperature increase parallels exactly that of the build-up of C02 in the atmosphere seems rather too likely to be a coincidence.
Basically, what you are suggesting is the "we don't have enough evidence to be sure, let's wait a few hundred thousand years and see" argument. With the stakes being what they are, I'm not convinced this is gamble we want to make.
After years as a lurker, this write-up has finally compelled me to register at slashdot (well, that and the death of Plastic).
It is a fact that an overwhelming marjority of scientists in the world agree that climate change is real, it is happening now, and it is being caused mainly by humans. Only in the United States does there remain a "debate" and it remains only because a certain number of scientists have been paid off by large corporations to lobby the US government on their behalf. The expressed aim of these lobbyists is to muddy otherwise very clear science to make sure the general public at large is confused and doubtful about the existence of climate change. This effort is clearly working, and it is to the detriment of all of us.
Al Gore's film, and many other well-respected books (including the highly recommended "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery) outline in great detail the overwhelming evidence from peer-reviewed journals that is accepted by the world scientific community at large.
The short list of accepted facts, which have been derived by scientific observation and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals:
- The average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere is rising, and has spiked sharply in recent years, far beyond any of the "normal natural trends" that take place over thousands or millions of years, not mere decades.
- The average temperatures of the oceans are also rising.
- Historical photo evidence clearly shows the polar ice caps have melted dramatically in recent years. This is decreasing the amount of white snow that reflects sunlight and replacing it with dark water that absorbs sunlight, creating an ever-accelerating negative feedback loop. For the first time there are observations of polar bears are drowning in the north pole because they cannot swim between icebergs. Entire towns and cities in the north that were built on permafrost (so called because it was always considered permanent) are now sinking as the permafrost melts for the first time ever in human record.
- Historical photo evidence clearly shows that many glaciers around the world that are known to have have existed for millenia have suddenly and dramatically melted in recent decades.
- Scientific evidence shows that the number of species becoming extinct because they cannot survive in warmer climates and cannot migrate to cooler places due to human development is rising sharply.
- The number and intensity of hurricanes and severe storms have increased sharply over recent years, in direct parallel to the measured rise in air and ocean temperatures during that same time.
When I see a clear counter-argument for climate change that addresses the data behind all the above observations, perhaps I'll listen. So far, the arguments I've seen against climate change seem to consist of either 1) nitpicks at tiny holes in a vast complicated body of data, 2) the mistaking of small annual or geographical variations in an overall warming trend as "proof" that the trend is false, 3) insane unsubstantiated accusations that the vast majority of the world's scientists are involved in some sort of conspiracy, or are so inept at what they do that they must engineer a vast lie just to "get funding".
The rest of the world is on board. Only in the US (and since our last election, to some extent Canada) has climate change become caught up in pathetic left vs right politics, with conservatives adamently denying climate change by default as an invention of whiney liberals. It's a damn shame, because this is a serious issue, and the future of all humans depends on us waking up and doing something about this NOW.
How many droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, rising oceans, missing ice caps, and extinct animals will we need to have shoved in our faces before we admit that we've made a huge mistake, and that we need to stop bickering and get on with solutions?
The views in this original post exhibit wishful thinking, not reality. Accusations of "junk science" by climate change doubters is extremely ironic, to say the least.