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Labels: gun rights Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: homosexuality Labels: fake hate crimes, homosexuality Police say a man allegedly intent on harming a woman inside the home became the victim instead. The shooting took place on Nottingham Drive where a l7-year-old girl riding in a car was shot the night before. Police say two armed men, one armed with an AK-47, tried to gain entry into the woman's home. Police say they were told that both men wore handkerchiefs over their faces and that when the woman saw them coming, she ran out the back door for help. That's when the tables were turned. Police say one of the intruders suffered a gun shot to the thigh. 9News was also told that he also suffered severe head trauma from being beaten. Labels: humor
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Gun Laws Don't Work
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Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Lt. Smash is Again Citizen Smash
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
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Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
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What A Girl Wants (2003)
I goofed off this evening, and watched this movie. It's rather a cross between The Parent Trap (the remake) and The Princess Diaries--not quite as funny as either, not quite as touching as The Parent Trap--but keep making sappy romantic comedies like this, and I'll keep watching them. There's no off-color dialog; there's no nudity; there's no profanity--it's a film that your kids could watch without any concerns.
Yes, some of the British upper crust characters are stereotyped--but I notice that the movie is based on the 1958 play "The Reluctant Debutante" by the British playwright William Douglas-Home--brother of the Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home--perhaps he knows something of what the upper crust was like back then.
It is predictable--I guess you won't have too much trouble figuring out who ends up back together at the end--but I'll take an unrealistic film that affirms the best in human decency over say, Saw 3.
"Community Activist": What a Nice Label!
That the guy is a liberal political activist isn't what's news; it is how light a sentence he got for this:ASHEVILLE — A community activist and actor pleaded guilty to 16 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after using the Internet to collect and share graphic child pornography.
Reed had lots of friends, and World Net Daily makes a point of reminding you what sort of crowd he hung with--and suggesting that this had something to do with the light sentence:
A judge sentenced Andrew Douglas Reed, 53, to a minimum of 10 months and a maximum of 12 months in prison, District Attorney Ron Moore said Thursday.
Reed was arrested on June 10, 2005, during a statewide operation conducted by the State Bureau of Investigation.
According to a warrant authorizing a search of his Dogwood Road home, SBI agents determined Reed used an e-mail account to post 169 images and three movies containing child pornography on file-sharing networks from Jan. 13, 2004, to May 9. Most depicted children as young as 6 engaged in sex acts with adults or other children.
Reed was a regular community guest columnist for the Citizen-Times and involved in multiple community efforts including the Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Asheville-Buncombe County and the League of Women Voters.
In 2005, the Martin Luther King Jr. Association awarded him with their Community Humanitarian Award.
Association President Oralene Graves Simmons said Reed had resigned from the organization after his arrest.
“The Andy Reed I knew was a person that was very active in the community and tried to help others wherever he could,” she said. “I pray for him and his safety.”However, instead of the 967 months in jail – nearly 81 years – for which he was liable, Judge Robert Lewis, another Democrat, gave him, in a plea bargain with the office of District Attorney Ron Moore, who was elected as a Democrat, a 10-12 month sentence.
Oh yeah, remember that the connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is just nasty stereotyping:
And even that seemed regrettable, according to a number of letters of recommendation offered by other Democrat leaders of the community to the court on his behalf.
"It has been my pleasure to share Andy's commitment to ensuring that compassion and democracy are at work across our community," wrote Beth Lazer, a Democrat who shared Unitarian Universalist church theologies with Reed and serves as the head of the local public access television, URTV.
She said in her letter of reference she first worked with Reed "when we both served on the board of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters."
"What an invaluable board member he was," she said.
"I also worked with Andy on several projects at our church, most significantly our becoming a welcoming congregation," she said.
Steve Hagerman, the executive director of the Asheville Symphony, wrote on symphony letterhead that, "Reed has been a long-time supporter of the arts in Western North Carolina and has been involved in many worthwhile causes in our community."
And Oralene Graves-Simmons, a Democrat who leads the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Association of Asheville, wrote a page and a half extolling Reed's virtues.
"When the decision was made in 2001 to incorporate the Association as an independent non-profit organization, Andy was instrumental in making it happen. He wrote the new organization's by-laws, revised and edited its incorporation papers, and, with me, determined the makeup of its founding board of directors," Graves-Simmons wrote.
"It was for his ten years of dedicated service that last January the MLK Association honored Andy with the 2005 Community Humanitarian Award," she wrote.
She noted he's also served on governing or advisory boards to the Montford Park Players, a theater company that operates each summer.
"Andy has spent all the years that I've known him bringing people together regardless of race, creed, color, or other differences, gladly working with anyone and everyone, and doing whatever needs to be done, to accomplish our mutual goals," she wrote. Reed, who also worked as a columnist for the Asheville Citizen Times, often wrote in support of the "gay" agenda in the region.
Thanks to Stop the ACLU for alerting me to this story.
Minimum Wage
Economics Professor John Wixted discusses the raising of the minimum wage question here. The short version is:
1. The minimum wage is so far below market wages for the vast majority of workers that an increase is unlikely to make any real difference.
2. It makes liberals feel good, even if it doesn't make a difference.
3. If a minimum wage increase were large enough to make a difference, it would be a disaster for the least skilled workers.
They Were on the Right Path--Until Freud Came Along
Gerald N. Grob's The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally Ill (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 58, has a powerful statement about what mid-nineteenth century psychiatrists thought mental illness was:Disease represented an imbalance that followed the violation of certain divine natural laws that governed human behavior. Insanity occurred when false impressions were conveyed to the mind because the brain or other sensory organ had been impaired. Mental illnesses were perceived to be somatic and to involve lesions of the brain, the organ of the mind.
After a long period where psychiatry, following Freud's errors, was focused on the causes of mental problems as being related to Oedipus Complex, too early toilet training, bad upbringing, we are beginning to get back to where the psychiatrists of the 1830s had it right. Schizophrenia, for example, was claimed by the Freudians to be caused by unresolved homosexuality, or by "smothering mothering." Now we know that there is a genetic component to it, and almost certainly related to how the nervous system fails to operate correctly.
The assumptions about the causes of mental illness were clearly on the right path--so why did we waste most of a century following the dead end of Sigmund Freud? Attempts to establish a connection between brain pathology and mental illness were a dead end in the nineteenth century, because there were almost never any gross structural differences that could be identified at autopsy. Today we know that the differences are vastly more subtle--differences not in the shape of a brain, but in the shapes of neurotransmitter chemicals.
So much time, energy, and money wasted on Freud's now thoroughly debunked theories of mental illess.
How Providing A State Service Affects Demand
I guess that this shouldn't be any great surprise, but it still bears repeating. Gerald N. Grob's The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally Ill (New York: The Free Press, 1994), discusses how the development of state mental hospitals in the first half of the nineteenth century transformed family care of the mentally ill. In the Colonial period, most mentally ill people were cared for by family members, unless they were violent. Even then, Grob gives several examples of colonial governments subsidizing the building of what effectively an asylum for one, where family members would confine and care for someone who had a history of violence.
One of the defining characteristics of the early nineteenth century is the building of public mental hospitals. Up to this point, many colonies and states housed the mentally ill in poorhouses or prisons. It wasn't good for the sane inmates of the poorhouses, and the prisons weren't good places for the mentally ill. One side effect of the public mental hospital building programs, however, was that demand for beds in them rose faster than supply.
There are some reasons to believe that the increased demand reflected an increase in insanity, as Irish immigrants, often without families, suffered higher rates than native-born Americans. But it also appears that many families that had formerly cared for mentally ill family members at home took advantage of the opportunity to institutionalize relatives instead.
There's no great surprise to this. Depending on the nature of the mental illness, caring for a family member can be an enormous emotional burden. Of course, if the patient is unable to work, there were significant costs that the family found itself bearing as well. While doubtless a great advantage for families of the insane, it was probably a net loss for the patients, since many of the hospitals of the time were primarily custodial in nature, with no realistic prospects for cure. It is very easy to see how, for at least some forms of mental illness, a custodial mental hospital might have done more harm than leaving the patient in the community.
"The Inmates Are in Charge of the Asylum"
You may recognize this picturesque expression as a way of indicating that an institution or organization is being run in a rather crazy way. Sometimes, it appears to have been quite literally true. I'm reading Gerald N. Grob's The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally Ill (New York: The Free Press, 1994). On p. 48:Even in the South a commitment to institutions was characteristic, although hospitals in this region had lower levels of funding and were plagued by more severe internal problems. In Georgia, for example, the Milledgeville asylum cared for idiotic and epileptic patients as well as the insane. Dr. David Cooper, its first superintendent, was highly eccentric, and, indeed, perhaps insane. Upon reading Cooper's bizarre and barely comprehensible first Annual Report, the editor of the new American Journal of Insanity questioned its very authenticity. Dix wrote to one correspondent that she had been informed that Cooper "is really insane, but being harmless, the Trustees consent to his remaining in charge of the Institution."
Fun & Games With Video Connectors
It was beginning to look a bit like a computer store in my home office: a Linux desktop; a Windows 98 desktop; usually, my notebook from work (running Windows XP Pro). Each of them had its own keyboard, mouse, and monitor, occupying lots of desk space. Every monitor, even in powersave mode, consumes a little bit of power. It was about to get a bit worse, when the new personal notebook arrives. I was going to keep the Windows 98 box running to do nightly backups of the important files from my new notebook and from my wife's desktop.
So I bought a KVM (Keyboard, Video, Monitor) switch that lets me share one keyboard, one, and monitor across all the different boxes. I have a very nice ViewSonic VP2030 flat panel display that belongs to my employer--but I found a very irritating problem when I started setting all this up: the newest and most powerful computer of the bunch--my employer's notebook--would not go above 1024x768 resolution on this beautiful 20" flat panel monitor. All the other computers--even this antique eMachines desktop running Windows 98 had no problem going up to 1600x1200 through the KVM switch.
Why? It turns out that the HP nc6000 notebook that I use for the job that pays the bills has two external monitor connectors on the back of the docking station: a 15-pin VGA style connector, and a truly strange item that I now understand is a DVI connector. If you want to know what all the different forms of DVI connector are, what they do, and what they look like, click here.
It turns out that while the same video adapter supposedly feeds either connector, in practice, it will only run the VGA connector upto 1024x768 resolution. The DVI connector will run all the way up into the heady worlds of resolution where you wish you had a 25" display on your desk! I've actually run the right cable directly from the DVI connector on the docking station to the DVI connector on the flat panel display, and it works great!
The problem is that the KVM switch that I bought uses VGA connectors. So I need an adapter that lets me plug into a female DVI port on one end, and a female VGA plug on the other end. Fortunately, that's not expensive--but I don't expect to find it on the shelf anywhere in Horseshoe Bend.
The Evolution of the Razor
Slowly, gradually, rising from the primordial slime...Well, actually not. The following picture shows the evolutionary model of the modern razor, with many of the intermediate steps categorized here as "missing links."
Click here to enlarge
The razor on the left belonged to my father. I'm not sure how far back it goes, but I suspect it is 1950s or so vintage. This is the kind that uses a single cutting surface, injected from the side, and held in position by the tension of spring steel.
The razor in the middle I bought several years ago--perhaps a late twentieth century artifact! It uses three cutting surfaces, which is one of the innovations. Supposedly, the advantage of multiple blades is that the first blade cuts the whisker, and the second blade hits the whisker before it has a chance to fully retract, and ditto for the third blade. I am skeptical that the additional blades makes such an enormous difference in performance--the antique on the left actually worked pretty darn well.
The other giant leap forward (and not from a blind, random process of mutation) is that the blade assembly pivots. Unlike the multiple blade capability, whose advantages were less than overwhelmingly obvious, the pivot really does make a difference, adjusting its angle to the shape of the face. I could immediately see that the pivoting head reduced cuts, and allowed me to more rapidly shave without having to staunch the flow of blood.
The razor on the right arrived in my mailbox, unbidden, a few days ago. This is called the Gillette Fusion. Its claim to fame is that it has five cutting surfaces. Do two extra blades make a better shave? Not on my face. However: the two extra blades mean that the cutting area is now substantially wider than the three blade razor, and the one blade razor. This means that you can't get into the places where you might need to remove a very small section of whiskers--for example, just below one's lower lip. Therefore, the Fusion has a single blade trimmer at the rear of the multiblade assembly. It works well--but really, no better (at least for my face) than the three blade pivoting model.
So, if the advantages are so small, why all these new innovations?
Razors work on an interesting business model: give away the razor; sell the blades. (Laser and inkjet printers work on the same model.) Because these marginally valuable innovations are patented, the blade assembly isn't going to be made by anyone but Gillette. If they can persuade you to start using a Gillette Fusion, you will be buying these somewhat more complex and probably somewhat more expensive replacement blade heads until they can persuade you that you need seven blades, or nine blades, or something microprocessor-controlled that varies the number of blades in play based on phase of the Moon and how many days since you last shaved. I suspect that the new model game here is partly driven by patent duration.
They gave me a razor, and they gave me one blade. Once this blade has reached the end of its service life, I will almost certainly go back to the three blade pivoting head in the middle. It works just fine!
UPDATE: A reader tells me that others have looked at this evolution, and share my concern. This article from The Economist, depending on the curve-fitting model used, suggests that an infinite number of blades are coming, and coming soon!
More About The HP Photosmart E427 Camera
I often haven't had great experiences trying to capture an image off a television screen with a digital camera before, but this one came out rather well. (Remember that I have reduced the picture down quite a bit from the original six megapixel size.)
Click to enlarge
A Lovely Thanksgiving
Our daughter and her husband, and our son. My wife and I spent the morning cleaning the house--a need somewhat aggravated by a minor plumbing emergency last night--and started cooking around noon.
We talked about a variety of subjects while waiting for the turkey to cook. My daughter is writing papers for her class along the same general theme as my next book, and her husband is writing a paper about the social welfare effects of the Spanish Flu Pandemic (a subject of great interest to both my wife and me). After dinner, we played Scattergories for a while.
I try to imagine how differently this holiday would be if my wife and me had divorced when the kids were young (as, it seems, most of our peers did)--and there is nothing down that parallel universe but hurt.
I think about the families that have been rent asunder by divorce, and it just makes me want to cry. I know, I know, trying to keep families together where Mom and Dad no longer love each other doesn't work--but the current situation where our society is making choices and decisions that turn divorce into the norm just infuriates me. I may return to this subject in a day or two.
Oh yes, the plumbing problem. The kitchen sink refused to drain. So I went and bought some Drano. No luck. Hmmm. Maybe I can use a snake--but I can't get the tip of the snake down the drain, so I'll have to take the trap out.
Okay, there's some water in the sink and trap--but not that much--I'll just put a trashcan under the trap as I remove it. Oh my, that's a lot of slimy, lye-filled water! Everywhere!
When the trap was finally free, I could see that the ground beef fat had congealed into a solid plugin in the trap. My wife had apparently never learned that you have to run hot water down the drain if you are going to drain animal fat into the sink.
My Wife Is Grading Papers
The house is a bit small to watch TV without the noise distracting her, so I'm blogging up a storm. We bought a 13 pound turkey this year, so it is a bit early to get started on that task. I went to pick up my wife at the airport after her weekend teaching gig in Portland. At the Boise Airport, TSA has a display of things that you are not allowed to carry, on your person, or in carry-on luggage. Please, someone tell me that these were in the carry-on luggage by accident. The alternative is that people are too stupid to breathe without assistance:
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Now, I am a little mystified by the brass knuckles, now that we no longer have Hare Krishnas stuffing flowers into our lapels and "suggesting" a donation at the airport, but I'm really confused by the trailer hitch ball. Were you planning to tow the airplane all by your lonesome self?
Now, I'm a little confused why you would bring a potato pealer on board an aircraft. I hope someone had a lot of potatoes in the same bag. But why is this a prohibited item? Is it fear that the threat, "Give me control of the aircraft, or I will turn you into French Fries," will cause the flight crew to be so convulsed with laughter that the bad guys will slip into the cockpit?
Snow
This isn't the first snow of the season, but I'm looking for an excuse to use this Photosmart E427. These are full 6 megapixel images (if you click on the thumbnails).
Out the back door:
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Looking out the living room windows towards Bogus Basin ski resort:
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Looking out the living room windows up the hill to our neighbors with the airstrip:
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Interesting News From the Human Genome Project
I wasn't going to blog today, but I woke up way too early to disturb my wife, and I ran out of energy working on my next book Personal Tragedies. Then I saw this interesting news story--the claim that our genetic code is 99% identical to chimpanzees is being revised--and that's only one of many fascinating discoveries being reported: Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.
Another startling aspect of this is the breadth of different races of mankind that were studied (a total of 270 individuals)--and the widespread claim that race is entirely a social construct collapses:
The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome - the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual " letters" of the genome.
It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.
Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or "book of life", is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.
The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought - which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.
The studies published today have found that instead of having just two copies of each gene - one from each parent - people can carry many copies, but just how many can vary between one person and the next.
The studies suggest variations in the number of copies of genes is normal and healthy. But the scientists also believe many diseases may be triggered by an abnormal loss or gain in the copies of some key genes.
Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies. Instead of being 99 per cent similar, we are more likely to be about 96 per cent similar.
The findings, published simultaneously in three leading science journals by scientists from 13 different research centres in Britain and America, were described as ground-breaking by leading scientists.
"I believe this research will change for ever the field of human genetics," said Professor James Lupski, a world authority on medical genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.The scientists looked at people from three broad racial groups - African, Asian and European. Although there was an underlying similarity in terms of how common it was for genes to be copied, there were enough racial differences to assign every person bar one to their correct ethnic origin. This might help forensic scientists wishing to know more about the race of a suspect.
Origins of Stuffing
We don't really know a great deal about the first Thanksgiving's menu. We know from Edward Winslow's letter of December 11, 1621, that "our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors." The Indian chief Massoit and his men "killed five deer which they brought to the plantation...." William Bradford's account (to my knowledge, the only only account of the first Thanksgiving) describes it as besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.[William Bradford, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed.Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 90, 90 n. 8]
Did they have stuffing? I like to think that my ancestors who were present for it, George & Mary Soule, enjoyed stuffing as much as I do.
Click to enlarge
But it seems likely that the cornbread stuffing we enjoy today wasn't present on that first Thanksgiving. Bradford's account tells us, Some English seed they sowed, as wheat and pease, but it came not to good, either by the badness of the speed or lateness of the season or both, or some other defect. [Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, p. 85]
Would the Pilgrims have used stuffing? Some dear friends of ours gave us one of those coffee table books that has no footnotes, but seems to be carefully researched by Sophie Jackson, The Medieval Christmas:To accompany the meat there was stuffing. Originally known as forcemeat, the term stuffing was first recorded in English in 1538. The medieval mixture different a little from the modern variety. While there is a possibility that the antiseptic properties of sage, marjoram and thyme migth have been helpful in offsetting the ill-effects of eating badly cooked or unwholesome poultry, there are other, better attested reasons for stuffing the bird. Trials in the Hampton Court kitchens show that filling the carcass with stuffing helps the bird stay on the long iron spit that rotated it over the fire. It was also a useful way of making the meat go further and fill up the diners, and helped the bird retain its shape during cooking. [pp. 30-31]
I'm hoping that most of you will be too busy with family and friends on Thanksgiving to come and check my blog; I know that I will be too busy with my family to blog here!
Not A Good Example
Instapundit links to this item about outgoing Senator George Allen's bill to legalize carry of concealed weapons in national parks. While I think this is a commendable proposal, the example given is of a woman and her daughter who were murdered while hiking in "Washington’s Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest."
There are no general federal restrictions on carrying guns in national forests (although there might be some restrictions in particular forests or campgrounds). Since these two murders took place in Washington State--which was the first state to adopt non-discretionary issuance of concealed weapon permits, in 1961--there was no real reason why the laws prevented these two women from being armed for self-defense.
The arguments for legalizing carry of firearms in national parks are these:
1. There is not a great deal of law enforcement in most national parks.
2. While there is sometimes a problem with predators in national parks (such as the murders by Cary Stayner in Yosemite several years ago), the reason that I would like to be armed when wandering through a national park is that there is sometimes wildlife in those parks that is dangerous. Most of the time, true, wild animals in national parks will run the other way when it sees people--but there are times that it is a good idea to be able to defend yourself, especially in parks such as Yellowstone.
3. There is a very serious Constitutional question about this. A national park is under the legal jurisdiction of the federal government--not the states. All the arguments about whether the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment are simply irrelevant in a federal jurisdiction. The current ban on loaded firearms in national parks bans not only concealed carry, but also open carry. If this doesn't count as "infringement," nothing does.
4. The argument that national parks don't allow hunting is a non sequitur. There is no Constitutional problem with prohibiting hunting in national parks; the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee a right to hunt, but it certainly does guarantee a right to "keep and bear arms." The purpose of allowing loaded firearms in national parks is self-defense.
5. The argument that allowing loaded firearms in national parks might encourage unlawful hunting makes no sense. The national parks do not prohibit possession of firearms and ammunition in your vehicle while passing through--the gun just can't be loaded. If someone is going to be tempted to pull out a loaded gun to kill an animal in a national park, then they would be just as tempted to load an unloaded gun to kill that animal.
Ubuntu Linux Users Who Want to Install JRE 1.5.0
I needed to install the Java Runtime Environment 1.5.0 on my Ubuntu Linux box, and I found lots of somewhat different sets of instructions on how to do so--and none of them would work for me, with various error messages and complaints about missing packages.
Eventually, after enough stumbling and searching, I found that the instructions here from Javasoft (just imagine!) that go with the download on this page, for the "Linux (self-extracting file)" do the job.
Unix Geek Again
I decided to set up the Linux workstation that I have been using as my test mule to do automatic backups of my wife's Windows XP PC, and my Windows 98 PC (and soon, the laptop that I have on order). Of course, to do that, I had to figure out how to set up smbmount to make the Windows file systems visible at the shell level. This wasn't so difficult.
There were tools that I wrote in C, long, long ago, to do a relatively sensible update--only copying over the files that had actually changed. I spent a bit of time modifying the Makefile for these tools from Microsoft's old format to GNU format, and then correcting some of the older Microsoft non-standard C library differences. I felt young again, writing in C!
And then, of course, it occurred to me that the Linux cp command probably has a way to do what I want, without writing everything new:cp -v -R -u
That does a recursive search for files that need to be updated, copying over only those that are newer. Then setting up cron jobs to run these updates in the wee hours of the morning every day.
Yes, Windows will do it as well. But I like Unix. I like a shell interface (at least for some tasks). Primitive, yes, but powerful!
Why The First Couple Chapters of a Book Need To Be Crisply Written
I've read a lot of scholarly works over the years--and I can honestly say that most of them were actually pretty well-written. Still, there is a significant body of scholarly writing that isn't gibberish--it has meaning--but the work required to extract that meaning can be discouraging.
Here's an example: Michael J. Dear and Jennifer R. Wolch, Landscapes of Despair: From Deinstitutionalization to Homelessness (Princeton University Press, 1987). There is quite a bit of interesting and useful material that I found while researching my next book. If I had been reading this book for pleasure, however, I never would have found it, because the first few chapters are written in a style of pretentious jargon that I associate with deconstructionism--and of course, by page 10, they are citing the high priest of deconstructionism, Michael Foucault. Let me give you an example from pp. 9-10:The wider logic of the social construction of the service-dependent ghetto lies in the dual notions of society and space and structure and agency. The service-dependent ghetto has been created by skilled and knowledgeable actors (or agents) operating within a social context (or structure), which boths limits and enables their actions. It is impossible to predict the exact geographical outcome of the interaction between structure and agency. The reason for this is that while individual activities are framed within a particular structural context, they can also transform the context itself. Any narrative about landscapes, regions, or locales is necessarily an account of the reciprocal relationship between relatively long-term structural forces and the shorter-term routine practices of individual human agents. Economic, political and social history is therefore time-specific, in the sense that these relationships evolve at different temporal rates; it is also place-specific, in that these relationships unfold in recognizable 'locales' according to some precise logic spatial diffusion. So geographical patterns, such as the ghetto, are evolving manifestations of a complex social process. As society evolves, so does its spatial expression; but by the same token, the geographical form will have repercussion on the social forces themselves.
I thought of trying to translate it into something clear and less full of itself, but it was too painful to consider. Am I just stupid, or is someone a little too in love with complicated jargon to explain what I suspect is a pretty simple set of concepts?
Now, somewhere about 50 pages in, Foucault turned off the mind control rays, and Dear & Wolch started to write in clear, reasonably jargon-free sentences. While I disagree with their conclusions about deinstitutionalization, at least I could clearly understand the information and proposals that they were making. I was no longer having to sit and parse each sentence to try and guess what they were trying to say.
I Guess We Aren't The Most Puritanical Country in the World
It is an article of faith in some circles that there are few countries as narrow-minded and puritanical as the U.S. about pornography. As near as I can tell, there are few areas where U.S. law is more strict about pornography than any European country. Of course, when you get to other parts of the world, it reminds you that the U.S. is actually very liberal:BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese court sentenced the founder of the country's largest pornography Web site to life imprisonment on Wednesday and jailed another eight of the site's organizers, state media reported.
There's no discussion of what sort of materials appeared on this website, but I would be surprised if it is anything more extreme than you can receive on your cable TV service.
The Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court handed down the sentence to Chen Hui, 28, and ordered the confiscation of 100,000 yuan ($12,500), Xinhua news agency said. The other eight were jailed for terms ranging from 13 months to 10 years.
Chen founded "Pornographic Summer" in 2004 and went on to start three more pornography Web sites, making money by charging registration fees of $25 to $33 to some of the 600,000 members they attracted.
This is Startling: A Newspaper Taking The Long View on Gun Self-Defense
It isn't the first time that I have seen a newspaper cover not just an individual defensive gun use, but enough incidents to look for a pattern, but it is still welcome. In this case, the Cincinnati Enquirer:Cincinnati police say as many as nine of the city's 75 homicides this year could be cases of self-defense. Prosecutors have cleared several people of wrongdoing.
They list the details on a number of such cases in the article.
Jan. 28: Logan Matthew, 13, of Avondale, shot and found dead inside a car in the 2600 block of Kipling Avenue in Mount Airy. Cincinnati police said he was trying to rob Antonio Robinson, who wrestled the gun away from the boy and shot him. Robinson, 30, was charged with murder and is expected in court Dec. 4.
Feb 5: Abdullah Walker, 18, shot in the 2900 block of West McMicken Avenue in Clifton Heights. Police said Walker broke into the home and was robbing people at gunpoint when he began firing. Sean Gray got a gun and shot Walker to death. A grand jury declined to charge Gray.
Corporations Are Capable of Learning
First Rupert Murdoch decides to scrap If I Did It, now Wal-Mart decides that insulting their customer base is a bad idea:Respect for the individual is one of the core values that have made us into the company we are today. We take pride in the fact that we treat every customer, every supplier and every member of our individual communities fairly and equally.
Now, if only Ford could learn.
We are working hard to make our corporate contributions reflect the values of our customers, communities, and associates. As Sam Walton said, “Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.
Wal-Mart will not make corporate contributions to support or oppose highly controversial issues unless they directly relate to our ability to serve our customers.
Wal-Mart does not have a position on same sex marriage and we do not give preference to gay or lesbian suppliers. Wal-Mart does have a strong commitment to diversity among our associates and against discrimination everywhere.
It would be nice if every corporation agreed with my values, and spent money accordingly. There being almost no chance of that (corporations are generally run by liberals), I would settle for them concentrating on the business of making customers happy. Now, if they could only turn off the screaming baby machine that they hook up to the PA system every time my wife enters a Wal-Mart!
The Weather in Western Pennsylvania Must Be Really Nasty
Otherwise, I can't explain why there are 4 bedroom, 2 bath houses available there cheap enough for me to charge them on my Discover Card. Like this one in Arnold, Penn. for $24,900. I searched for houses that were at least 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, in the counties around Pittsburgh, and there were 67 matches. Now, some of the homes don't look great--and the real estate listing describes their age as "999 years," which obviously means that the age is unknown or not entered. (None of them are teepees or bark lodges.) Still, it is a reminder that even people with limited means, when it comes time to retire, have some options other than moving in with their kids.
If Reality Is Inconvenient, Liberal Idaho Just Ignores It
I mentioned yesterday that the supposed gay-bashing of a Boise State student turned out to be...done by himself. ("This just shows you how oppressively homophobic our society is! Why, homosexuals so internalize the hatred that they even bash themselves!")
Liberal Idaho, of course, made a big deal about the initial report, as evidence of what happens when a state passes a marriage definition:When the public passes laws deeming some citizens note [sic] as equal as other citizens this is bound to happen:
Unlike other Idaho liberals, such as Red State Rebel, who believed the initial report but reported the correction, Liberal Idaho just can't get around to reporting that his overheated rhetoric was based on a lie. Not a mistake; not an overzealous reading of intelligence reports; but by the admission of the victim, a lie. And yet Liberal Idaho is so intent on keeping his hate-filled rhetoric going, that he can't admit it.
One of the commenters over at Red State Rebel expresses amazement that anyone would fake something like this:So many hate crimes, and someone feels the need to fabricate one?! That's insane....
So many hate crimes? Not against homosexuals. You know, the FBI gathers statistics on hate crimes based on sexual orientation. While I agree that not every hate crime gets reported, I think it is a good bet, because of the zealous concern that homosexual activists have for publicizing their victimization, that most hate crimes against homosexuals get reported to the police, who pass them to the FBI. As I mentioned here, the 2004 report showed a total of 1,406 offenses reported where the bias was based on sexual orientation--and some of those (about 2.5%) were hate crimes based on the victim being straight.
Remember: a lot of these aren't even violent crimes against a person--they include incidents such as one I saw reported on the local news over in tolerant, liberal Oregon when I was there about ten days ago, where someone has spray-painted "lesbos" on a lesbian couple's garage. Don't get me wrong when I point this out: I am not saying that this is okay, or nothing to be concerned about. These are a form of intimidation, just like burning a cross on a black person's lawn, because there is a clear implication that violence could follow. But in a nation of 300,000,000 people (and about nine million homosexuals or bisexuals), 1,406 incidents is actually surprisingly low.
On the other hand, there's no shortage of frauds like the one mentioned here, and this one. There are many others that have happened over the last few years, as a shortage of real hate crimes against homosexuals has created so much demand that homosexual activists have to fake them.
Whatever Happened to Fair & Balanced Reporting?
Try not to laugh when I ask that. Here's an item that a reader forwarded to me from WCPO channel 9 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The news item itself is a nice piece of good news--two guys, one with an AK-47, tried to force entry, and obviously came inadequately prepared--but look at the curious use of the word "vigilante" and then the detailed description of what happened to the bad guys but not who happened to the bad guys: A suspect was shot after breaking into a Tri-state home in what could be the latest case of vigilante justice.
Decline & Fall Of Iran
Power and Control, which has pointers to so many interesting articles that I can only suggest that you read it more often, mentions this recent article by someone named Spengler who writes for Asia Times, about how the combination of Iran exporting so many of its women as prostitutes--and the decline in birth rates there--portend a bleak future for that nation. Hence the current obsession to exercise control--before Iran starts to shrink away.
The failure of societies and subcultures to reproduce has ominous consequences. In the closing decades before World War I, the willingness and ability of French women to reduce their number of children put France at an enormous disadvantage relative to the Germans--whose fertility did not decline until a generation had passed. Then, the enormous losses of the French during World War I played a part in preventing another generation of French soldiers was being born, making France's defeat in World War II even more inevitable.
The decline of native European fertility rates has played a major part in the increasing political importance of Muslims, and the rapid neutralization of many European countries in the coming battle for world dominance.
The decline of fertility rates in America among liberals over the last thirty years has played some part in the decline of liberalism as a dominant political force, since children tend to largely follow their parents' political leanings (although they may have to get out graduate school and start paying taxes before they come to their senses).
An Iran that is in decline means that they may only be dangerous for a short period--a couple of decades. The trick then is to find some way to contain their aggression by proxy until the decline in numbers starts to fell the power of the ayatollahs internally.
These are scary times coming.
Humor (I Think)
My wife received this video explaining a school's policy requiring shirts to be tucked in as a public safety measure. If it makes you think of the scene where the police arrest the title character in The Mask ("I have a permit for that")--well, that's why I suspect this is a gag.
It's worksafe (unless you work for one of the gun control groups), but if you are a dialup, it's a bit more than 1 MB long.
Patent Application Sent Off This Morning!
This is a big deal for me--in some ways, comparable to when I first started sending out query letters to publishers for my first book. I was convinced that somewhere I would find a publisher for By the Dim and Flaring Lamps: The Civil War Diary of Samuel McIlvaine, and I did. Getting that first book published made it easier to get the second book published.
I don't know if I will be able to get this patent issued without paying a patent lawyer, but at least it is a start. If issued, I doubt that the patent will make me thousands of dollars--but so far, I'm only out $500 for the application fee, $14.40 for Express Mail, and quite a few hours. The next invention, however, is a mass market hand tool--and that might be something that will be worth hiring a patent attorney, just to make sure that there are no loopholes to cause me grief down the road.
More Faked Gay-Bashing
I've mentioned the many such incidents over the last few years where hate crimes against homosexuals have turned out to be frauds--and here's another example, close to home--and that supposedly took place two days after the voters of Idaho added a "one man, one woman" definition of marriage to the state constitution:The Boise Police Department reported Friday the Boise State University student leader who claimed to be attacked on the Greenbelt last week because of his sexual orientation confessed to detectives he fabricated the report.
Is there homophobia out there? Without question. Are there people who are attacked simply because of their homosexuality (or perhaps because someone was mistakenly perceived to be homosexual)? Without question. But I find it fascinating how many of these incidents over the years have turned out to be frauds created by homosexual activists to create sympathy for their cause. When will the lying stop?
According to BPD, the student admitted to using a stick and his fists to self-inflict his injuries and that other evidence connected to his initial report had also been fabricated. The student’s confession of a false report is consistent with evidence uncovered by detectives during their investigation.
The student claimed last week a white male struck him from behind with an object while using anti-gay expletives and proceeded to hit him in the face several times causing him to lose consciousness. The student said the incident occurred somewhere between Taylor Hall and Friendship Bridge.
According to Associated Students of Boise State University officials, at some point the student made his way to the Student Union Building where an ambulance was called. The student was then transported to the emergency room.
The reported attack quickly prompted student and administrative organizations around Boise State to sponsor the “No Oppression Tolerated, Not On Our Campus,” rally last Tuesday and a candlelight service Wednesday night in the Quad. The statement made to police affected hundreds of students on the BSU campus. Hundreds attended the rallies.
Happiness & Material Possessions
I'm not sure how seriously to take a survey commissioned by MTV, but since it conforms to my own prejudices, it must be right!LONDON (Reuters) - Young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts, a survey says.
This is no surprise. My experience from living in repulsively affluent Sonoma County, California--and from watching what is happening in Ada County, Idaho, which is beginning to suffer this same problem--is that wealth allows both adults and their kids to find their moral limitations. In the short term, there's a lot of gratification of the senses with hopped cars, alcohol, drugs, casual sex, and ostentatious displays of wealth. In the long term, all of these material desires and sensual pleasures become ashes in the mouth.
Indians are the happiest overall and Japanese the most miserable.
According to an MTV Networks International (MTVNI) global survey that covered more than 5,400 young people in 14 countries, only 43 percent of the world's 16- to 34-year-olds say they are happy with their lives.
MTVNI said this figure was dragged down by young people in the developed world, including those in the United States and Britain where fewer than 30 percent of young people said they were happy with the way things were.
Only eight percent in Japan said they were happy.
Reasons for unhappiness across the developed world included a lack of optimism, concern over jobs and pressure to succeed.
In developing countries a majority in the same age group expected their lives to be more enjoyable in the future, led by China with 84 percent.
"The happier young people of the developing world are also the most religious," the survey said.
My wife saw a bumper sticker over in Portland this last weekend which really captures this short-term gratification and moral emptiness so well. It was the "No One Died When Clinton Lied" bumper sticker on a Hummer.
Well, actually, people did die: on the USS Cole, and at the East African embassy bombings, because Clinton was more interested in making people happy than in telling them the unpleasant truth that Osama bin Laden had declared war on the U.S.--and that we needed to do something serious about it. But because Clinton's perjured testimony concerned adulterous sex, liberals refused to see how there could be anything wrong with that perjury.
Such a bumper sticker on a Hummer also doesn't surprise me. The Hummer is one of the ultimate expressions of conspicuous consumption. There may be 50 people in the whole country that need the off-road capabilities of a Hummer. I certainly wouldn't require you to prove that you have a need for one--but this sort of self-righteousness from the left while driving a Hummer is roughly the equivalent of a pastor putting a Mustang Ranch bumper sticker on his car.
I'm Sure The Democrats Will Take Credit For This
From the Christian Science Monitor:American paychecks are rising again at a pace not seen since the 1990s.
Isn't it odd that this wasn't making news before the elections?
The pay increase amounts to 4 percent on average over the past 12 months, and it comes at a very helpful time for millions of households.
For three years, pay increases haven't kept pace with the rising cost of living. Then came this year's housing slowdown, which has further squeezed family finances.
Those setbacks, however, are now being offset by rising income. Four percent may not sound like much, but you have to look back to 1997 to find a calendar year with a gain that big.
Equally significant, tamer energy prices mean that the "real" wage gains, after inflation, are above 3 percent for the past 12 months. That, too, hasn't happened since the 1990s, even though the economy has been expanding over the past five years.
"The striking feature of this expansion has been that ... real wages for the typical worker haven't risen that much," says Richard Berner, US economist at the investment bank Morgan Stanley in New York. But with real incomes rising, he says, "you get a picture of an economy that can weather this housing storm."
The risk of recession hasn't disappeared, he and other economists say. But with a fairly tight job market and low unemployment, many expect that paychecks will keep rising solidly in 2007.
Refusing to Grow Up
Stanley Crouch has a powerful column about the refusal to grow up--a problem in our whole society, but especially notable in black America today (well worth reading in full):Last week, I was in a studio in midtown where a popular program for black youths was being filmed. I found myself surrounded by black men, ages 18 to 35, and I was appalled.
I have been thinking for several days about the violence associated (in some parts of the country) with the queues to buy the very first Sony Playstation 3. I can remember the anticipation that my son had for the Playstation 2--of course, my son was 13 or 14 at the time.
As a father with a daughter nearly 30 years old who has never been close to marrying anyone, I was once more struck by what my offspring describes as "a lack of suitable men." She has complained often about the adolescent tendencies of young black men, as will just about any young black woman when the subject comes up.
Those who believe that America is perpetually adolescent will point at the dominance of frat-boy attitudes among successful white men and will say of the black hip-hop generation, "So what? How could they not be adolescent? They are not surrounded by examples of celebrated maturity. The society worships movie stars, wealthy athletes and talk show hosts. These are not the wisest and most mature of people."
There is more than a little bit right about that. Our culture has been overwhelmed by the adolescent cult of rebellion that emerges in a particularly stunted way from the world of rock 'n' roll. That simpleminded sense of rebelling against authority descended even further when hip hop fell upon us from the bottom of the cultural slop bucket in which punk rock curdled.
When I look at the crowd lined up in sleeping bags at Wal-Mart and Target here in Boise to be the very first buyers--I scratch my head. These are young men--not teenagers. I can understand not wanting to wait a year for the hot new gaming console--but is it really necessary to have it the very first day, enough so that you spend the night in nearly freezing weather? This is not what I would consider a terribly mature attitude. My son is 18 now, and you won't find him out there waiting to be among the very first buyers--he has matured enough that he knows that waiting a week or two isn't a big problem.
Stanley Crouch ends his column by pointing to this phenomenon, and I agree--while the problem may be most apparent among young black men in America, it is a serious problem among young white men in America, too. My wife's opinion is that a whole generation that was growing up when 9/11 happened have been terrified into staying children as long as they can--just because the responsibilities of adulthood are getting more and more frightening.
UPDATE: Several readers tell me that some of what is motivating this is the desire to resell them immediately on eBay for as much as $4000. This may turn the queue-waiters into clever entrepreneurs, but it does not say much for people in such a hurry to get these PS3 systems that they will pay those kind of prices.
How Often Do You Have To Reboot Windows?
One of my regular readers works for Microsoft, and is a bit peeved at my characterization of the reliability of Windows, since I am running Windows 98--which is, I agree, a dinosaur.
First, a rant about Windows, and then a question for my readers.
If my only recent experience with Windows was Windows 98, I wouldn't be so hostile to Windows. Windows 98 is not spectacularly reliable on this antique that I use most of the time for word processing and email, but I don't know how much is hardware and how much is Windows 98 or some of the applications that I run. I do know that since I replaced Microsoft Outlook Express with Thunderbird, and Internet Explorer with Mozilla Firefox, reliability has improved a bit. I still find myself having to reboot Windows (either because of performance problems, or hangs) every two to three days, on average.
My wife's desktop runs Windows XP Home--and someone, somewhere, is gobbling up some resource and not letting it go. My first guess is heap, but there could well be some other resource in short supply. When I got this desktop for her, it had 256MB of RAM, which I admit is a little light to run Windows (snicker--I remember when Windows 3.1 ran acceptably in 16 MB of RAM), but even running a single application for more than a day would cause it to start getting slower, and slower, and slower. From the behavior, it appeared that it was beginning to swap madly to the disk, because it had run out (or thought it had run out) of physical RAM in which to work. Now that I have added another gigabyte of RAM, she can go several days at a time before the slows start to become noticeable, and we have to reboot.
Ditto for Windows XP Professional on my office laptop. It gets rebooted frequently now as I move it between office and home, but when I was working entirely in the office, it would hang often enough that I seldom went more than two weeks without a reboot. Now, this is a box where I am not installing random programs; we have a very controlled environment at HP, and I don't install any program on it that hasn't been approved for HP internal use. Nor are my applications particularly unusual; word processing; spreadsheets; PowerPoint; Outlook.
One of my co-workers, when researching a paper about security issues, said that he found material about why Microsoft Windows has so many problems. What he told me is that to improve performance, Windows (at least in some versions) had places where it allowed some applications to run in kernel mode, not application mode. I can see the temptation to do this; a very strict implementation of structured design in AT&T's Number 5 ESS meant that in alpha releases, you could literally pick up the phone and wait many seconds for a dial tone. To get adequate performance, they had to go in and do crimes that Yourdon, the guru of structured design, would probably have them burned at the stake for.
I've got three desktops in the house. One is running Ubuntu Linux 6.06. I just ran uptime; it has been 44 days since it rebooted. The only way that my wife's desktop could be up that long would be if she never touched it. Some applications crash, of course, but they manage to avoid crashing Linux.
I used to be a big defender of Microsoft from the open source crowd. There is a certain level of cultism involved with the hostility towards Microsoft, without question. It is also true that being an open hardware platform means that Windows has to be able to deal with a much wider ranger of possible configurations--and of course, if there is anything that makes software unreliable, it is when you have a m by n matrix of possible combinations of hardware that you have to consider.
Here's a question for my readers. How many of you run Microsoft Windows, and can use it every day without having to reboot it every week? Every month? When I say "having to reboot" I mean that Windows either reboots itself, or hangs, and you have to give it the three finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del), or it starts to run so slowly or unreliably that you have to reboot it? Obviously, if you shut your computer down every evening, or you have a notebook computer, you really don't know how long it runs before hanging or getting the slows.
I would especially like to hear from those of you who use Windows several days a week, and have had it up for more than a month. My guess is that there are very, very few people in this situation.
When I wrote firmware for telecommunications equipment, long, long ago, reliability mattered--a lot. Any product we developed as unreliable as Windows XP in terms of frequency of reboot would have been completely unacceptable.
UPDATE: I'm already getting responses from other victims. I'll add a representative sample as I receive them. First response:I have an IBM G41 Thinkpad which came with XP Pro bundled. One day after an update, it started bluescreening on boot. I have not figured out how to stop this, and it will require several trips into safe mode and restoring back to an earlier date to fix it.
Second:
The solution is to reboot as little as possible. As time passes, Windows gets slower and slower and more and more flaky. Eventually I have to shut down and reboot, fighting the blue screen battle I'll someday lose for good.
Bottom line, about every 2 to 3 weeks I need to reboot. I am a heavy user, with many IE sessions, Mulberry IMAP, notepad and other things running. Nothing really odd though.
I have linux servers in my business with uptimes exceeding a year and no problems. They run Java apps, BIND, Apache, Squid, Exim4, Cyrus and so on. No problems.
XP is certainly better than Windoze 98 was, but it has a way to go. I just wish I could boot reliably. I'm a high school English teacher. Of course, all of the computers I use at school are Windows systems, and as with your experience, they are terribly unreliable, cranky, slow, and require--in my experience--at lest one restart each day and sometimes more.
Third:
This may sound pretty bad until you understand that for 90% of my work with computers, I use my own Macs, which I also keep in my classroom. I have my own personal machine, and five iMacs which are a bit long in the tooth, for a mini-computer lab. I use the school machine only for keeping grades, inter-school e-mail and taking attendance. I can only shudder at how badly and frequently the machine would crash if I had to do all of my computer work on it.
The Windows machines are constantly having network and software problems (including losing valuable data) that require a full IT staff working far more than full time hours to keep them at a barely functional level of operation. I, on the other hand, maintain my own little network of six machines and two printers in pristine condition with very occasional and absolutely little time consuming maintenance. Yes, Mac operating systems prior to OSX had their little quirks and did crash, but never with the frequency and finality of Windows systems, and I was always--always--able to restore full function with little time or effort. With the advent of OSX, crashes are virtually a thing of the past. When a program fails, only the program fails; the system remains unaffected and continues to operate.
May I suggest that if you're truly interested in having a machine that simply works, first time, every time, and that can be restored to health by its owner in minutes on those very rare occasions when it does fail, you simply need a Mac, particularly as even the slowest models are now gosh-awful fast. And until you've done any graphics work on a Mac, such as making your own movies, you'll not realize what prehistoric beasts you've been flogging. Did I mention that Macs are, in comparison with Windows, nearly virus proof?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fanatic who believes that anything other than a Mac is garbage. I simply have nearly two decades of experience working daily, side by side, with both operating systems. It's been my experience that when Windows folks switch to Macs, they are, for a short time, overwhelmed, but not because it's more difficult. They tend to be expecting the daily difficulties they faced doing the most simple tasks and actually try to make the Mac work much harder than necessary to accomplish any task. At home I'm running a dual-boot system (Windows 98se, WinXP Home) on an
Fourth:
older, HP Pavilion Pentium III 600MHz processor. I've got a 30G and a 40G hard
drive, with 254M SDRam. Slow as molasses running uphill in winter, compared to
some of the new systems today, but I haven't seen a need yet to update the
processor.
I also use Mozilla Firefox as my default browser, and Pegasus as my mail handler.
I'm at the keyboard daily, usually for at least an hour. The computer is left on 24/7 unless I'm out of town, which happens maybe once a year.
I used to have the problem you mentioned with needing to reboot regularly (or with
the system deciding on its own to do so, usually at a magnificently inconvenient
time). However, for the last couple years I've been running FreeMem Pro
(www.3bsoftware.com). While it doesn't completely solve the rebooting issue, it
does minimize it by monitoring memory use, and automatically freeing up "reserved" memory that's not currently needed by the reserving application. (I'm not a techie - I hope that made sense). It runs in the background and most of the time I forget it's even there.
No, it's not freeware, but it is pretty cheap - and no, I'm not associated with 3B or
subsidized by them in any way. It's just one of those inexpensive programs (about
$20) that I think is worth a good bit more than what I paid for it. I think they also still
have a limited "trial" version available for free download.
YMMV, but it allows my old "dinosaur" to run XP.Item: I have a Windows 3.1 machine that gets used nowadays for a few,
And someone who says that XP works well:
very few, writing tasks, and mainly as a platform for "Civilization II" to run on. With only CivII up, it can be left alone for days and days, but eventually the screen saver will kill it, if nothing else by somehow causing a general protection fault (possibly by getting into OS address space).
Item: The Windows 98 SE box, on an Athlon, was the cause of my buying an eMac. I do research that requires me to look at pdf's, sometimes a lot of them, and sooner or later I'd open one pdf too many & Netscape would be terminated abruptly. At that point rebooting the machine was simply prudent. It was obvious a case of poor management of physical memory.
Item: Windows 2000 and XP boxes in a lab environment with student access tend to be fairly stable, some of them stay up for days on end but really are only being used a few hours/day. The apps on them are limited, and lab instructors ensure all users are logged out at the end of each lab session. This doesn't really compare with your situation.
Item: Student general purpose lab computers, running Office suite, circuit simulators, usual XP stuff, other tools. These machines tend to get rebooted daily.
I agree that Windoze likely is still not good with resources. I will go further and observe that Word for sure had some native execution in it long ago, and Office likely has it hidden away. Outlook sure has it, which accounts for some of the script kiddy games. Rumor was back in the 98/98SE days that some of the application/programmer interface (API) routes available for developers were not at all the same as what Microsoft used...and thus Micro$oft apps were more likely to have access to kernal via the API.
The reason Linux, and OS X, are more stable is simple: all apps are treated THE SAME, leading to more efficient resource management and no sudden nasty events disturbing the OS because a web browser had access to protected mode, or some similar stupidity.
And that's the real reason for the myriad of security holes in Windoze; by giving kernal, Administrator-level access to certain non-OS apps, Micro$oft makes it possible for bad people to do bad things. It's as if I built a housing development, sold houses to a lot of people but kept passkeys to the houses for maintenance... I write videogames at work on an XP box. That's some pretty serious
Another:
levels of system stressing -- we're building games (~15-20 minute compile time for a full rebuild), assembling assets for the game world (up to 8 hours to rebuild all assets, consuming about 4-10GB of disk space in the process), and running the game. A lot. And watching the game crash, a lot, as we have a team of about 70 people all pulling in slightly different directions. In short, we're heavy users of our boxes day and night. I'm hardly a fan of Windows-- I prefer FreeBSD for my fileserver at home-- but I have to say this: XP's pretty darn stable at work for me. Typically, I reboot only once a month, and that's the mandatory "Microsoft just released patches, and MIS is installing them for you and rebooting" one. We do have some pretty nice Dell boxes, either high-end desktop or low-end workstation models; I forget the model number. Years ago, I was rebooting Win98 up to 15 times a day developing games on it. I can honestly say that XP is better for me than older OSs.I had a Windows ME (very similar to '98) machine that I used on and off for a year or two. It would run days to weeks before needing to be rebooted. I then no longer needed it, and it was off for a year or so. I then needed a [Linux] Fedora Core 3 server, so I installed that, and ran it 24x7 for almost a year and a half without incident. There was a power failure, and when the power came back on, a surge knocked out the power supply, so there it sits until I get a new power supply. Yes, I typed "uptime" a while back, and it said "439 days..."
More:We have about 700 PCs (desktop and laptop) [here], plus 44 Windows servers and 3 RS/6000s running AIX. As an old VM, Unix and big iron hardware guy (17 years with Big Blue) I'm fond of AIX, hate Windows. Unfortunately, most apps today have to run in Windows, even on the servers.
And a reasonably happy user--although the install quirk is...interesting:
About 2 years ago we had to run Win98 on 14 cashier machines in [a certain division] because the credit card hardware we were using didn't have drivers for anything later (the agency PC OS standard at the time was Win2K). If they weren't rebooted daily the memory leaks would bring the PC to a halt within 2-3 days. We even jumped the RAM to 512MB from 256. No difference. We wound up writing a script to reboot them daily at 4AM.
We ask our users to leave their PCs running but logged off when they're not there - mostly at night - so we can push updates out across the network. Usually, those updates (from MS, and we bundle them ourselves) auto-reboot the box, so there's no way to tell how long a PC runs without a reboot. Probably no longer than a week, especially since the Help Desk guys usually resort to a reboot as the first step in resolving a user problem.
I've noticed my laptop auto-reboots after a Windows update - I'll be working from home, VPN'd into our network, and the $#@% thing will start loading a Windows update, usually in the wee hours, ask if I want to reboot, then reboot itself anyway. And, that's from MS, not one of our "forced" updates; we have the servers and laptops on the "don't auto update list."
I'm used to being able to stop applications and processes, make a change and restart (3090s, 9000s, System 7s, RS/6000s running AIX). If I had a dollar for every time I had to reboot one of our Windows servers to implement a change I could retire.
Some of our servers do run for weeks at a time without rebooting (Win 2003 Server, Win 2K Advanced server), but that OS isn't really suitable for desktops.
Before we start in on Tehran with nukes, maybe we should consider Redmond first..... I switched to Win XP as soon as it came out for my old Dell: 1.3 ghz
From a professor in a department that I've never heard of, but that sounds like he may speaking in his area of specialization:
Pentium 4 with 512 megs of DRAM. Performance under Win 98 was just unacceptable. I often run several programs at once: Palm Desktop, a database, my billing software (which does odd things; it is not well written), and most importantly, Dragon Naturally Speaking Pro. (Voice macros are, as the kids say, da bomb.) I never shut this machine off. It has run for years.
With Win XP, I rarely get a hang-up. At worst, in general, I have to close a program and then start it again. This does not happen often. I have gone months at times between rebooting. The prime offender in requiring a reboot seems to be my billing software, which sometimes locks up and can best be dealt with at that time by a reboot, although it can be closed from the Task Manager.
One thing about XP many people do not know, and which I discovered by fluke: all installs are not equal. Since I regularly format the hard drive and re-install everything, to keep things in tip-top shape (for instance, removed programs never quite completely uninstall and the only answer to this is a complete wipe/install), I have found that sometimes Win XP seems to run more slowly, or has developed a cranky
attitude. Re-doing the whole process the next day or so -- I do it while cooking or some other activity, and just come to check on things every so often -- will result in a good installation. This may be the problem on your wife's machine. It is certainly the problem for the guy who gets the blue screen upon rebooting.There is a program called "bugtoaster" (which used to own the bugtoaster.com website, but no longer) that was popular a few years ago. Users installed it, and it would report failures back to the central website. In this way, it was determined that the mean time between system failures on Windows 2000 and Windows XP was 188 hours. SOURCE: "Business Information Technology: Foundations, Infrastructure and Culture" page 178. Author= Paul Murphy, self-published (This datum is at least three years old.)
Another reader thinks that Windows's notorious reliability reputation is partly a matter of bad hardware:
A websearch for "bugtoaster microsoft windows" will turn up a few PC magazine articles about the software.From this chip jockey's viewpoint, much of XP's stability problems comes from poorer hardware selection. Now, to give you a bit of background, I've been on the 'net and doing *nix since the early 80s, so I've been doing this a while. And my biases are strongly towards *nix systems. But my view of this situation is that IF you have good enough hardware and are very attentive to what you put on the system
Another person with really good experience with XP:
XP is reasonably stable. W2K is almost ok, XP is better, but anything before that stinks.
If you get good hardware XP can be pretty stable. That not the case with lower end the stuff you usually get from companies like Dell and HP (a pet peeve of mine, sorry, but I'll never buy another HP after my last experience with them). If you get a good power supply (rare in most manufactured systems), good motherboard, good memory, and any standard processor you should be in good shape with rare reboots. On
my custom built systems the only reboots we have are the "we're MS and we don't know how to write software so you have to reboot to change a single file" stuff.
When I've cut corners and bought cheap stuff I have problems with stability, but when I don't, it works. This is one area in which Linux actually helps. With the exception of the memory subsystem, which Linux uses far more effectively and intensively than XP, Linux is far more efficient with resources and tends to stress components and their timings far less. In particular, companies tend to really scrimp on the power supplies and you typically get what you pay for. So when you have XP making more demands on the power supply you tend to get more instability.
All this said, I've had a couple of very nice upper end Dell portables at work running XP and I've never blue screened on either box and I use them very intensely. My two custom XP/Linux dual boot machines never have XP problems, but the one I built for the kids using cheaper components hangs after a week or so, typically.
I reboot my XP machines at least monthly simply because I've had enough problems with XP's memory management in the past that I don't trust it not to leak like a sieve. But I am very conservative on what I put on the machines and very wary of security issues, spyware, and the like.
All in all, XP is the first MS operating system I can say is tolerable. I still prefer *nix systems, but XP isn't the computing equivalent of a root canal, at least if you've got good hardware. I'm typing this from my XP-Pro box at Yahoo (with only 512 MB). I've rebooted it four times in two years, and two of those were when I moved cubes. (It's a tower system and doesn't have battery backup, so I have to reboot it to move it.) The third reboot was due to a virus and the fourth was when I installed a new keyboard.
And another reasonably happy customer:
I have an XP-Home system at home (with 768MB). I'm remodeling and PG&E isn't all that reliable, so it has rebooted due to power outages 3-5 times in last year. It hasn't crashed at all other than that in the last several years.I have an XP installation I use at home. The biggest annoyance it gives me is deciding to reboot when I'm not there, in spite of having checked the box in the configuration that says it should ask first. It's fairly stable, especially compared with earlier versions of Windows.
Yes, the printers are pretty solid. I heard from a customer, "At the end of the Earth, all that will be left will be cockroaches and HP LaserJets."
However, there is a tendency for badly-written applications to suck up memory and never let it go. I use Nvu a lot for HTML composition and I have to kill it now and then to get it to let go of memory. That's partly a problem with Nvu, but the point is that Windows should not be letting it do it. Unused memory should be paged out and forgotten, but the system behavior says that isn't happening.
My wife has an emachine running XP that she seems pretty happy with. However, it replaces a Pavilion that the kids now use ... when they are patient enough. Real troopers, my kids. The machine takes *forever* to boot up, and then you have to resist the urge to touch it while the antivirus software sloooooowly kicks in. If you touch it before then, it grinds to a halt. Again, that's partly McAfee's fault, but Windows has to be contributing to the problem in some way. It's just amazing
how slow this machine is. I've had bad experiences with Compaq machines (and tech support) before and I'm determined never again to buy anything with HP on it that isn't a printer. (Or an RPN calculator -- apparently these are still manufactured but not much advertised for some reason.)
And this maybe the must interesting and instructive comment of all, because it suggests that what services you have turned on may be the factor in whether XP works well or not: I've got three separate boxes. One runs a stripped-down version of Fedora Linux and serves as a hardware firewall and webserver. It stays up indefinitely. The only times it's gone down have been when there's been a power outage or I've brought it down for maintenance or safety during a thunderstorm. I've also got a Windows box that serves as a local file server. It runs Windows XP Professional and is *horribly* unstable, to the point where I'm wondering if there's a hardware problem, since I run next to
no applications on it.
My main system also runs Windows XP Professional, but I've done some very extensive tweaking to it. I've disabled about half the services that run by default, changed around a lot of the settings, etc. Because of all the fixes I've done to it, it runs stably for months at a time with all sorts of applications, games, and whatnot being installed, run, and uninstalled.
In short, Windows can be a stable operating system, but it's not right out of the box. To get it running well, I had to mess around with services, set up some complex firewall stuff to block any hacking attempts, and other things that most users just aren't going to be doing.
