Re: Atheists: America's most distrusted minority

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006 19:00:34 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:p9moa25apdphumpj2mcug0b452eao41l69@xxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 18:25:51 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


"Dennis (Icarus)" & "Josh Hill" wrote:

That being said, if anyone cares to send me a check for $100,000,000,
I'll gladly create jobs with it. :-)

Come up with a business plan, then start talking to venture capitalists.
:-)


"I am opposed to millionaires... but it would be dangerous to offer me the
position."
-- Mark Twain

Dude, I insist on at /least/ a billion, and a computer that doesn't
reboot by itself.


Even with a billion...after taxes you'd end up with enough for a pizza (2
toppings only) ;)

What DO you do to yor PC? Between work, my own, & my kids machine I have a
number of machines and I can't remember the last time I had to reboot (other
than because of an "upgrade"). On most of them I do a lot of development,
and debug both my own and others' code. I have beta software from MS and
others too. I never have the kinds of problems you seem to.

Yap on Usenet, run a pretty broad spectrum of programs -- the usual
stuff plus Avant Browser, Agent, Photoshop, Power DVD, Directory Opus,
Skype, Active Sync (for my Axim), the usual assortment of codecs and
little utilities, etc. Gigabit network with two or three other
computers, have a USB headset, triple-boot with Vista and OS X, run
Kubuntu under VMware, have Emule and Azareus . . .

Mostly, it seems, I fix them. The reboot/mouse jumping problem seems
to have been a loose connection on the rear panel -- been OK all day
and I have my fingers crossed. Still have to figure out why that
network card downstairs is only going at 100 Mbits/sec -- it was a
gigabit card when I installed it (sigh).

Before that, it was a nasty driver conflict -- AVG antivirus
interacting with a longstanding semi-documented design flaw in
Windows. Before that, and still in progress, reinstalling XP on
another machine because a known bug in one of the updates meant that I
could only see some of its files over the network, and it seems that
MS said "We feel your pain, but we have no plans to issue a fix" --
and you can't uninstall the updates out of order.

Then there's the hibernation issue -- it doesn't work on most of the
machines here because of a longstanding known bug having to do with
memory fragmentation. Again, no fix, or rather a partial one that
didn't solve the problem, and that's a problem because the UPS's can't
shut the computers down properly during the occasional outage.

And the hidden always-on-top toolbar problem -- the toolbar tends to
get "stuck" because apparently the API is confusing and programmers
screw up -- Winamp is a big offender, and so is Microsoft's own Remote
Desktop. And the desktop bug -- add a desktop toolbar and Explorer
screws up several times a day and has to be restarted. Again, a known
bug.

And when I moved my favorites folder yesterday, wham -- Internet
Explorer and Avant Browser lost it, and even after I edited the
registry settings by hand they still couldn't find it, so I had to
move it back and do a system restore.

And before that there was the Great System Restore Crash -- put in a
program that uses the shadow copy service (an add-on for Genie
backup), then had to do a system restore to the earlier state. Blue
screen city.

I find I have to reboot constantly, not because XP crashes or freezes
all that often (although it does grow sluggish if heavily taxed and
needs a reboot to get happy again), but because of updates, service
fixes, and new installs. And then there's the eSATA design flaw -- it
didn't occur to them that eSATA drives were, well, e, and so you can't
unplug them without turning the computer off (no way to flush the
cache) and System Restore activates itself each time you install,
meaning it has to be turned off because it doesn't like restoring if
it can't find one of its restore points . . . so, so typical, I saw a
post in which a member of the group that wrote it at MS explained that
they just wanted to get it out the door. (Looks like they finally
wised up in Vista -- by default, System Restore is active only on the
boot partition.)

I think I do drive my own computer a bit hard, in that I change a few
defaults (location of the favorites folder, forex, and aforementioned
toolbars) and run some heavy metal hardware (e.g., dual SATA RAID
arrays) with the consequent possibility of driver problems. In
general, I've found that MS software isn't very tolerant of
non-standard configurations or complexity: it's happiest doing word
processing in a very basic configuration. But looking over the above
list, I'd say that all the problems listed are know bugs that they
haven't bothered fixing (typically through multiple version of NT) or
poorly-thought-out design, e.g., their failure to properly accommodate
eSATA drives . . .

--
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Invalid Procedure Call or Argument
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