Neither side is scientific.
This is true for both sides of the "Obama is a foreigner" or "Bush did 9/11" debates, too. But that doesn't change the fact that one side is consistent with reality, while the other is absurd agenda-driven fantasy.
No. It doesn't. It hasn't for years. I had a WinXP image that followed me for 8 years and never got reinstalled. It had any amount of stuff installed over it and was in constant daily use (took it to work, worked all day on it, brought it home, played games all evening on it).
It's not an inherent property of Windows that it "slows down" or any such nonsense. If you ask it to run 20 services on startup, it will be slower than if you ask it to run 10. It's a given. The trick is to make sure that NOTHING IS RUNNING unless it needs to be.
Computers DO NOT GET SLOWER WITH AGE. They are the same speed to within MILLIONTHS of a second. If you ask them to do more then, yes, they will seem slower. Don't ask them to do more - remove unwanted programs but most importantly do NOT let things run on startup or in the background unless they are vital. Hint: Almost nothing is vital. QuickTime does not need to be in your startup. Java does not need it's QuickStarter. Adobe stuff needs NOTHING running in the background. And so on.
Do that, and the computer does not slow down at all. I have an 8-year-old XP image to prove it until I stopped using it a couple of years ago (and not because it was slow - because I was managing Windows 7/8 networks).
If you manage your machine properly (and you're working in IT if you post here, I assume), it does not happen. And it's no more a burden than having to reinstall everything after a format. I have NEVER formatted a machine to clean it. I've gone back to known-good images on work machines, but those images have histories going back years too - but kept PRISTINE so they could re-image nicely.
If you format, as far as I'm concerned, that's a harder version of the "reboot will fix it" mantra. A total cop-out. I have brought machines back from the dead (five minutes to get to Windows logon, down to 45 seconds on the same hardware) by proper management of the machine and pruning only third-party services and junk on startup.
Stop making excuses and doing the "Microsoft-fix". Manage your machine properly and it's never an issue.
As a physician who was dragged screaming and kicking into having to use EPIC, I have to agree.
I never knew I could hate a company more than Microsoft. Their client is a bloated horror that nevertheless acts like the thinnest client in the world: "Oh, look, the doctor pressed the Shift key
The interface was so bad that I learned how to program in AutoHotkey and probably spent in excess of 200 hours over a year to automate things. AutoHotkey was a lifesaver: open source and powerful. (In fact, the pitiful xdotool we have for Linux doesn't even come close to AutoHotkey for windows, and even if I weren't forced to use Windows for my work, I might have ended up choosing it over Linux just because of AutoHotkey and its ecosystem of experienced developers.)
At the time I was with a large clinic chain that had about 40% of the market in our large sprawling metropolitan supercluster location. They surveyed the doctors, who said that on average they were spending an extra hour per day using Epic. And in the end, it was a lot of *data*-generation and not a lot of *information*. Our specialists complained that everything was being crammed into a template form, and they really couldn't tell what we were thinking, just checklists of what the patient did/did not have.
Having vendor lock-in, they have no incentive to improve. They can do whatever they want... if the clinic/hospital is already stuck using Epic, why would they spend money on fixing their problems instead of recruiting more clients?
Having said all that, even Epic is better than what I'm stuck using right now
OpenEMR all the way!
The earliest "gun control laws" were applied by Imperial governments to colonists, to control a growing civilian population with a remotely managed and badly outnumbered Imperial military in _every_ nation's colonies. Then there was a long gap, due to the War for Independence and the 2nd Amendment, then it started up as a US federal policy in the 1930's applied to machine guns and sawed off shotguns. It grew in the 1960's _due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King_, which illustrated the growing risk of assassination for respected leaders.
Not quite.
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
April 23, 2012 Issue
Battleground America
One nation, under the gun.
By Jill Lepore
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
Although these laws were occasionally challenged, they were rarely struck down in state courts; the state’s interest in regulating the manufacture, ownership, and storage of firearms was plain enough. Even the West was hardly wild. “Frontier towns handled guns the way a Boston restaurant today handles overcoats in winter,” Winkler writes. “New arrivals were required to turn in their guns to authorities in exchange for something like a metal token.” In Wichita, Kansas, in 1873, a sign read, “Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check.” The first thing the government of Dodge did when founding the city, in 1873, was pass a resolution that “any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the State shall be dealt with according to law.” On the road through town, a wooden billboard read, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.” The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona, Winkler explains, had to do with a gun-control law. In 1880, Tombstone’s city council passed an ordinance “to Provide against the Carrying of Deadly Weapons.” When Wyatt Earp confronted Tom McLaury on the streets of Tombstone, it was because McLaury had violated that ordinance by failing to leave his gun at the sheriff’s office.
The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously. In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.
All governments spy on each other, and they have since the invention of espionage. And they all know they all spy on each other, too. They just need to exercise the good sense to not get publicly caught. Not getting caught is getting harder in the digital age, as everyone from airports, customs, trucking, retail, and city infrastructure is beefing up their security. They may suck at it, but it makes hiding invisibly that much harder.
Guns can be _extremely effective_ at changing governments, ranging from assassination of critical leaders to armed revolt. The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria triggered World War I, which reshaped Europe and governments and economies around the world.
Then you need to review the Ninth Amendment, which spelled out that rights not explicitly mentioned by the Constitution may still exist and be recognized in a Constitutionally relevant way. There had been hesitance about stating rights in the Constitution explicitly meaning that rights _not_ spelled out would no longer be acknowledged as valid.
I've seen people harassed by the police for carrying costume swords, with no edge, at a Shakespeare performance fresh from a day at a Renaissance festival. The police tried to confiscate his sword, without any receipt. When it was clear he would not surrender it without being arrested and creating a paper trail for his confiscated property, they eventually turned him loose.
The earliest "gun control laws" were applied by Imperial governments to colonists, to control a growing civilian population with a remotely managed and badly outnumbered Imperial military in _every_ nation's colonies. Then there was a long gap, due to the War for Independence and the 2nd Amendment, then it started up as a US federal policy in the 1930's applied to machine guns and sawed off shotguns. It grew in the 1960's _due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King_, which illustrated the growing risk of assassination for respected leaders.
The weirdest mixture is how the American military uses meters for horizontal distances, but feet for vertical distances.
We use "mils" in the semiconductor industry, and they also did in the paint/coating industry when I worked in it 20 years ago. A "mil" is a thousandth of an inch... a milli-inch! This can lead to some funny mixes, like "grams per square mil" for shear force measurements.
Registry bloat is not a problem, it's clueless users who cannot maintain their system.
In other words, it's a problem. A solution that requires all users to have technical knowledge isn't a solution, it's a fantasy.
That's all pretty much a non-argument. Live tile content can be turned on or off by application, or live tiles can be completely disabled. So if a business wants to turn off live tiles for Twitter, they can send out a Group Policy Object to disable live tiles on the Twitter app. They could also add custom live tiles for the corporate share price, company newsletter, web server status, or whatever they want. Don't worry about them.
And as far as I'm concerned, live tiles have never been an issue with Windows 8. I turned off a few I didn't want, but that's only because I hate the distraction of blinky flashy things when I'm looking for something else. But tor the most part they're ignorable. As for the maligned start screen, it simply isn't much different from the Windows 7 start menu button, although it needs the tree-structure metaphor returned as that's how people group their apps.
No, the problems with Windows 8 were the "charms" and the "gestures". With a mouse or on a trackpad they are unintuitive, difficult to control, difficult to remember, difficult to discover, and almost impossible to activate. And that's coming from someone who loves his Surface Pro!
On a Surface or phone, Windows 8's UI is mostly harmless because the interface take place where the hands and fingers are already located. But they are an overflowing truckload of stinking horseshit on everything else. I'm unaware of any big corporate American business that ever installed it on their desktops (it crept in on a few Surface tablets and Windows phones, but no sysadmin was stupid enough to roll it out to the desktop.)
Microsoft learned several big lessons from the spanking they took on Windows 8, but the biggest is "listen to your corporate beta testers. If they tell you it's shit, IT'S SHIT. AND YOU DO NOT ROLL OUT SHIT."
The other day I had a 'softie tell me over lunch that "Windows 10 is our way of saying 'oh god, oh god, we're all so very very sorry about Windows 8 and we promise we'll never ever do it again.'" So from here on out, I think we can count on Microsoft to cater to the business and desktop users, as that's where a huge chunk of their money comes from.
Agreed about anecdotes. However, I can say that I have to reboot my Windows 7 PC weekly because of serious degradation in performance. I have installed a fair bit of software (the PATH can no longer be extended) but there's only about three games (Freeciv, Kerbal Space Program, Elite: Dangerous) and no apps, toolbars or junk. The rest of the software on there? MariaDB, Ingres, GRASS, QGIS (OSGEO is basically Cygwin, so I've now three incompatible Cygwin distros on Windows), HOL 4, Active Python, Active Perl, Erlang, Rust, Blender, PoVRay, BMRT - the sort of stuff you'd expect to find on any PC, nothing fancy.
And Netscape. Which is a horrible resource hog and is honestly not usable in its current form. I have abandoned all efforts to get Chrome usable. I'll probably deinstall both and switch to Amaya. Which barely does anything, but it does it tolerably.
You mean to tell me that the US doesn't even trust the other Five Eyes nations' spy agencies to be able to do this?*
*Yes, I know, to get round legal restrictions, it was very normal for the US to spy on the citizens of the other four and to exchange that data for information collected on US citizens by other members of Five Eyes. However, we now know all the agencies DO spy on their own citizens, routinely. So the US can ask GCHQ to wiretap British citizens in Britain, it doesn't need to spy on Britain itself. This behaviour suggests wheels within wheels.
You mean to tell me that the US isn't all caught up in the US-UK "Special Relationship" stuff?**
**Most Americans were unaware there even was one and get horribly confused when the British talk about it.
Linux is indeed better. Not because of Open Source (the code doesn't care) but because it has fewer bugs (about 0.1% of the bugs per kloc), non-intrusive strong security (rated EAL 5+ on conformant hardware, conforms to B2 Orange Book standards), superior multi-processor support, superior memory management and superior networking.
Graphics? Not an OS issue. That's a GUI issue. Never confuse how something gets data with what it then does with it. The GUI is not central to Windows (as demonstrated by console mode startup, but should be obvious to anyone running it as a headless server). The core OS functions are, and always have been, resource management, virtualization, security and stability. (Filesystems are virtual layers on top of physical disks, so are resource management and virtualization.)
Linux is better at the things an OS is meant to do. Windows has an adequate GUI, but the OS is abysmal. Besides sales, the only reason the game industry likes Windows is that it has useful libraries - DirectX (an alternative to the functions the GUI itself provides) and easy access to GPU functions (bypassing the OS altogether, running on bare metal).
The reason Linux doesn't have these? Look in the mirror. The face you see was quite capable of working on GGI, KGI or Linux Framebuffers, of helping in the Berlin project, of submitting patches for SDL or Avagadro, or even hacking Wine to improve support for DirectX, CUDA or other graphical features.
I'm no innocent myself, but I own up to my guilt, I don't blame the OS (which IS innocent).
"Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry" - An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11
