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]

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.