Interesting Links for 22-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising
  (tags: funny advertising marketing)
• Does email address obfuscation actually work? (with graph!)
  (tags: email spam html obfuscation)
• Apple putting tamper-proof screws on iPhone to stop you changing your own battery.
  (tags: iphone apple OhForFucksSake)
• Meteorologists identify cause of cold and warm periods during winter (like the recent cold snap)
  (tags: weather meteorology stratosphere winter)
• Daily Mail lying about a politician's expenses, to make them look bad. Can you guess which party?
  (tags: labour DailyMail uk)
• The quest for a reliable lie detector test
  (tags: brains psychology lying)
• ID cards to be scrapped at midnight tonight
  (tags: identity government uk)
• First impressions are general, further impressions are contextual
  (tags: psychology social relationships)

Comments

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

"stable Operating Systems are pretty much the norm"

As someone who has to use Red Hat at work, I'd just like to say:

Ha


Ha


Ha

[andrewducker]

I seriously don't remember the last time my home or work machines hung on me.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

My home machine (Debian) only has problems when I run hugely CPU-intensive stuff that's also labelled "super-unstable never use under any circumstances ever testing software" or some such. My work laptop (Fedora) sometimes refuses to come back after sleeping overnight and has to be hard-rebooted. My work desktop (Red Hat) has to be rebooted approximately every month or so, and has an unstable version of GNOME that crashes losing my session info every couple of weeks. It also makes Firefox crash literally every half an hour, but that seems a machine-specific issue.

BTW with the 'guess which party' thing - Bercow is non-partisan now, and before becoming speaker was a Tory (albeit a left-leaning one, with a right-wing Labour wife).

[andrewducker]

Which goes to show how much attention I was paying...

My laptop wakes up every time. My work desktop runs happily for as long as the company will let me (they force intermittent reboots, for reasons that escape me), and FF just works on it. My home desktop has been sleeping or hibernating at night for (probably) over a month now without problems without being rebooted. Windows 7 seems to be utterly stable for me.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I think the problems I see are Red Hat/Fedora specific (haven't used Windows 7, and only used Vista for two days when my wife got a new laptop before we could install Ubuntu on it). All the other OSes I use regularly (Debian, Ubuntu, AIX, Solaris) are fine...

[andrewducker]

So, stability is a _mostly_ solved problem, except for Red Hat, who suck for some reason :->

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

For me (aka, "anecdote") I'd say XP was stable after SP2 came out, save for one or two exotic issues on my first-generation UMPC that were ironed out in SP3.

Windows 7 has always been rock-stable on my desktop, impressively so given that it's home built by a hack-amateur like me.

Win7 does flake out on my third(?)-generation UMPC but that's likely because the hardware was built around XP and then modified to run Win7 by a third party. It'd be much more stable if the OEM would release a proper Win7 driver for the touchscreen... but they don't seem to have much incentive to do so.

-- Steve can see how "roll-your-own" OSes will retain stability issues long after others have solved the problem; so much more variability in hardware and OS configurations to take into account, it's a much more complex problem.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - crashes nowadays largely seem to be driver-related. I'm most impressed that Windows can nowadays replace a graphics driver while it's running without the machine falling in a big heap.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I managed to make Windows 7 BSOD. I was proud.