Posts by BenWilson
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I'm currently right on the verge of lurching into alternative therapy for my annoying condition, eczema. Traditional treatments of steroid cream have finally exhibited the long expected side effects of thin skin. The alternative posed by my doctor scares me, immunosuppressants. The main fear is their side effects are mostly cancer.
However, what stops me jumping straight into eating all sorts of weird chinese herbs is that at least the doctors can tell me what the chances of cancer are from clinical trials. And they are extremely slight. With herbal remedies, which typically are a shotgun blast at your entire metabolism, with mystical sounding explanations like liver-cleansing and toxin removal, I can't get any real information about the risks at all. Just anecdotes. And sorry, that's just not good enough for my health.
I agree with the Libertarian argument that we should be allowed to take anything we want, but I think anyone selling mass produced health treatments is under an obligation to provide real clinical information on the effects. Certainly they should not be able to lie or fabricate evidence.
Naturally I've asked the doctors about what effect dietary changes could have, and their answer has in every case been "No clear causes and effects are known". They're not saying it all doesn't work, but they certainly aren't going to recommend anything.
And this ambiguity is what the entire herbal healing world trades on. Many people read "hasn't been proved to be harmful" to be "not harmful" and "could help eczema" to "does help eczema". It's lazy thinking for a lazy industry trading on ignorance and hope, and it's a pity because many of these herbal remedies *could* be of great benefit to me.
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Craig it's so they know who all the EB are so they can be rounded up and tickled to death.
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Simon, what a bumout. The only massacre near where I live would have been on the moa, and at least that was for food. Who could say no to a drumstick that size?
Were those massacres when Wolfowitz was ambassaor to Indonesia?
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Venezuela, yawn. It's only because the US doesn't like the place that Chavez is a household name. In every other way it's a just another South American country, strongly inclined to fascism, dealing with third world problems that developed nations can barely appreciate. There are much worse fascists than Chavez who aren't on the hate lists, or are actively supported. Some of them even *are* developed nations.
Census, just do it. This is not the third Reich and they're not collecting the data so they can find all the Jews. If you object to the odd question, don't answer it.
ASBOs???? NOOOOO! There's already plenty of ways of dealing with nuisances without undermining the Bill of Rights.
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Peter, the discussion is about why MS products aren't as reliable as cars or other household appliances. That's a fact, not elitist rubbish.
It's also not elitist rubbish to call Windows an operating system rather than a computer. If you like Windows, cool, keep it. I do myself. It's horses for courses. I don't and wouldn't use it for any kind of server, nor would I want Windows as the OS for a control system in any aircraft I was in.
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Rich, that's the thinking behind being a boy racer. Wanting a lot of car for not much money and not really caring how safe it is. Clearly a Ferrari is better, but I don't want to wait until I've got that kind of money.
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I guess I'm saying, much though I hate to, that the problem of crap Microsoft products is more the fault of customers of Microsoft than themselves. If people hadn't poured billions their way as reward for shonky practices then we'd probably have stronger (and less feature rich) software today.
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Heh, Kyle, ask a standard question, get a standard response.
As a programmer myself, I'm inclined to think that the state of software these days is much more market driven than because of bad engineering.
I'm under constant pressure from sales and marketing to release stuff that just isn't ready. And sales and marketing are under pressure from customers. I'm lucky recently that I've basically been able to say to management "It'll be ready when it's ready", but most engineers simply can't, and are pressured right through the food chain to whack stuff out that's immature because customers want the features now. They're rather have something that partially works now than something that works perfectly later. This attitude has made Microsoft rich.
In other forms of engineering, eg automobile manufacturing, the whole dynamic is different. There are only a few dozen companies that make cars, and each car is the product of thousands of people's labour. My software is produced by a team of 4 programmers, 3 testers, a layer of management who wish they could manage us, and hundreds of salespeople pumping us the money and feature requests. It's not as complicated as a car, but it's a hell of a lot more original, comes out in a 20th of the time for problems people are having right now. If they endure the pain of it crashing, they also get the benefit of it working now, rather than in 5 years.
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Michael, what is it you have against Netware?
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"How would we feel if we had 1 mechanic for every 60 cars in society, and we had to phone one second day to help us get home?"
If cars were able to get me home a million times faster than they could in the 70s, could store 100 millions times as much stuff, and could fit in my pocket, could do basically everything, I think I'd probably not be too bitter on them.
The instability is a function of how much new stuff we're getting every day. It would be nice if it all came out perfect from the word go, but it would cost a lot more, and we'd be waiting a lot longer.
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