My wife and I were talking about what lamps we had that were LED vs fluorescent vs incandescent; one of the bulbs that we have that is of the latter is in our closet, and has been there since before we bought the house in 2002 (the house was built in 1973).
18 years now, maybe longer, but it still turns on and has yet to burn out. Of course, we don't use it much, and it's only something like 30 watts (clear bulb).
> This would also solve the problem that e.g. NASA has with each President reversing course. No wonder that the last Moon visit was decades ago when the priorities get completely turned over every 4-8 years.
This is also one of the arguments against promoters of so-called "term limits" for congressmen and others; imagine this kind of churn in priorities occurring with major and minor public works projects!
We don't have to wonder too much - we can already see it at the state level with governorships changing; one recent large change of this kind is with California's high-speed rail system. For all of it's "boondoggle-ry" and problems, I don't think the way it's been "axed" lately will be of help to completing it. In fact, it might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy for its opponents.
That's only one example; I'm sure others in other states could be easily found as well if one were to look. Ultimately, that kind of thing would only get worse with term limits on representatives to Congress, because federal funding for such large scale projects is needed - and that would end up likely in flux, and ultimately scuttle projects that depend on steady funding to be completed.
One could argue that individual state projects should only be funded by the state itself, but that notion of state self-sufficiency went out with the end of the Civil War. I also tend to wonder if - under a term-limited system - such a thing as the interstate highway system could have ever been built. It doesn't seem likely.
I'm worried that the (fairly) recent change to the DSM to lump the various forms of autism under the terminology of "autism spectrum disorder" will ultimately lead to more confusion by people as to what autism can be about.
Which is why in the article it was mentioned that many who are "high functioning individuals with autism" hang on to the term "Asperger's" (despite some trolls re-renderings of it) - as it was and is a label that, perhaps incorrectly, has been applied to that particular subset of autism spectrum disorders.
At the same time, we don't want to say that those in that sub-group only have issues with social skills and cues; the issues that such people face are much broader than just that particular area.
Also, we don't want the term "autism" applied only to those who are in that set either.
That is perhaps what the terminology change was about - the idea that by inserting the word "spectrum" into the diagnosis, and removing the individual terms, that people would see it more as a continuum diagnosis, much like Asperger saw it. However, people will likely tend to focus on the first word "Autism" and come to a different conclusion - maybe. Which is again why, I suspect, people have hung on to the "Asperger's" label for their particular subset.
Maybe there's not a good answer or solution for the definition(s)...
I've never been formerly diagnosed, but I'm pretty certain I'm on it somewhere. A decade or so ago, one person, who was a coworker of my wife's, and whom I had met and conversed with - without any prompting or explanation from my wife - gave her a copy of "Mozart and the Whale" to give to me.
I have yet to watch it.
But I've always had certain obsessions: one is things moving in circles - windmills, gears, whatever - all fascinate me; interestingly, even abstract things likes loops and recursion, such as in programming, are easy for me to understand and utilize. Mazes are another thing (which is almost opposite of a loop). Fractals, too.
Recently I sat for a couple of hours coding a bookmarklet to remove extraneous portions of instructables so they could be saved to a PDF or otherwise, without including all the "cruft". It just kinda "sucked me in" after I was trying to clean up one I had just browsed to; at the end, I had to sit for a bit to figure out "now what did I just make this thing for - ah, yes - this tab over here".
My mother (RIP), who was of a different generation (I can't explain it easily - number one, I was adopted, rather late by my parents, who were in the 40s at the time - but technically they fell into an "in-between" generation somewhere between "the greatest generation" and "baby boomers" - much like how GenX is today - of which I am a part), always described me as looking, or being, "sour". It wasn't until my adult years that she likely meant I had a particular RBF, maybe a blank or poor affect that resulted in my countenance being "non-agreeable".
Even today, my wife will sometimes ask me if I am mad at her, because I look or seem angry - when I'm not. It's just the way I look. I have this look of seriousness or something. My current employer/boss has noted the same thing about me; he has often said that he doesn't know how I will react or respond to certain things, and that sometimes I'm surprising in that regard.
Something you may have noticed here - or elsewhere if you've seen my other postings - is my manner of writing, and likely speaking; a coworker of mine once told me that I speak like how Lisp is written (what he meant was that I typically talk parenthetically, nesting explanations and anecdotes within each other down a chain, but that everything was related, and I would eventually "pop things off the stack" and come back up the chain to the original discussion).
All of this underscores why I've never been good in social situations, among other things, but my wife has been very helpful and understanding in that regard (yet, she still has problems with my countenance at times).
As far as your experience with other programmers - well, I admit that at times I can be "that guy"; arrogance and other mal-traits do surface at times. That said, I'm also the first to apologize when I know I am or have been in the wrong. I also make sure not to let whatever led to that situation happen again. Most of the time, though (except when hubris, arrogance, or stupidity attacks me), I have learned that the best way to avoid issues is to not say anything at all - I am often known as "the quiet one" because of that (I then will often play the a-hole and remind them of what neighbors always say about serial killers and mass murderers)...
My brother-in-law went through that with a piece of property he bought in California; it was a house on top of a "hill" (or small mountain?).
Two "neighbors" colluded to shut off all easements to the property, hoping that in 7 years (or whatever) they'd get the right to the property and could fix it and resell it. It was originally owned by investors, who wanted to offload it because they were fighting the same fight, and one of them had a heart attack and was dying, and they just wanted out. Along comes my BIL and he gets it for a song.
And the issues to boot.
The neighbors - one was a known "a-hole" in the neighborhood who would sue anyone and everyone; indeed, if you looked up his name in California, he had a record of using the courts almost as if it were his job. The other guy, he owned a large avocado orchard which bordered the property; he had fenced over one of the plat map easements. The other easement was a road which led to the property, which the first guy lived next to, just down below from the house. He blocked it off with a metal gate. He also owned another house he used as a rental, which was just immediately below the house. So he'd leave the gate open sometimes, and would give a key to the renters, but otherwise it was closed off. He'd also let people in for maintenance and inspection of a water tank which served for water in the neighborhood.
The story is wild and long - they didn't count on the tenacity of the family I married into. They didn't count on my brother-in-law, who works construction - being willing to run his dump truck for 48 hours straight with little-to-no sleep to make money in any way possible so he could pay his lawyer bill every single month (which ran to insane levels). He didn't count on my sister-in-law being willing to live in the house, to establish residency, while her husband worked a state away.
We had to hike up to the house one, using machetes to cut thru the undergrowth. My brother-in-law later ran a bulldozer to cut a path up the side of it, to get past the gate (he came from the avocado side - which the sheriff allowed him to cut past the fence, because of the plat map, and thus had to fight that neighbor in court too) - they then used 4wd vehicles to get up the side to the house.
He never counted on any of this and more. My brother-in-law flew a pirate flag from the flagpole, just to give the other guy the finger during all this.
Eventually, after several years, my brother-in-law won the lawsuit, and got access to the road. The gate was removed. The entire neighborhood rejoiced, and my BIL became the "hero" of their area, because they had long suffered various indignities by that guy.
A few months after my BIL won the case, the guy ended up having a heart attack, and died. The other guy lived a few years longer, but also ended up dying of natural causes.
My brother-in-law's house, now that it has access, instantly shot up in value several times over. He and his wife are now thinking of selling it, and moving on to other things.
> I long for the Linux prairies of old, but I've grown fat and lazy on OSX. Linux is a youngster's game.
45 years old here and still rocking Linux (does that qualify as "old" - probably - sigh). Started playing with it in 1995 (MonkeyLinux on DOS!); haven't stopped.
Stuff's gotten dirt-simple compared to what I remember having to do in the past. Certainly no kernel recompiles needed any longer (but if you really wanted to, you can do them).
Have I gotten "fat and lazy"? Yep - just on Linux. I can't see that changing in the future, either...
I recently updated my Linux desktop at home; I tried a variety of live distros - I don't recall if Elementary was one of them - it might have been in there.
The one I ended up using had the Budgie desktop, which I found to be the most "Mac-like" of all the experiences. The distro I used was Ubuntu Budgie, because I wanted the Debian and Ubuntu software ecosystem, but Budgie is a part of the Solus Linux project (which I enjoyed when I tried it, but I didn't like the package system).
So give Solus and/or Ubuntu Budgie a try on a live USB thumbdrive sometime; you might enjoy it, if you are looking for a "more Mac-like" experience...
I fell "in love" with the Budgie desktop experience, which is a project of Solus Linux. However, I didn't like the Solus Linux package system; I wanted the Debian plethora of packages. So I "found" Budgie Ubuntu. Best of both worlds, IMHO. It's the closest I've gotten to a Mac on Linux. It still has some rough edges, but nothing that really sticks out for day-to-day work and play.
I can't say I've played around with it, but the above seems to indicate that such support is available - but that you might have issues with apps not supporting it (or reporting their DPI properly). There also might be problems with other layers above raw X (?) - but it seems like X itself does support it in some manner?
I once had X supporting two mice on dual monitors (this was a while back - I had a couple of CRT monitors at the time); seeing that made me think X could do almost anything I asked of it (depending on how I "asked").
> Your experience running Linux on a laptop is highly dependent on how well it supports the hardware that happens to be in your device.
My second mainline Linux install was a copy of RedHat on a laptop.
Mind you, this was RedHat 5.1 on an old 486 laptop with 8 meg of RAM, PCMCIA, etc. Sometime in 1995 or 96, I forget.
Several re-compiles later, I had that entire system working - all drivers for all the hardware, including the built-in modem (plus sound and PCMCIA ethernet).
I just recently (a couple months ago) updated my Linux desktop experience at home. I had been running an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install, that was getting long-in-the-tooth, as well as being unstable.
Part of the instability had to do with various hacks and patches I had put in place, including a big one where I updated gcc to the latest version to support C11; this broke my update process horribly - so much so that when I went to update the NVidia drivers, my system became ultra-b0rked. I had been meaning to do an upgrade - now I was forced to.
What saved me a great amount of trouble was the fact that I had partitioned my system; that is, when I had installed Ubuntu, I had put it on an SSD (/tmp and a few others were on a RAM disk), and /home was on a separate drive. So all I had to do was pull the SSD, drop in a new one, and re-install something else.
Actually, I also used a different drive for my /home directory, because my old drive was getting old - plus my /home directory itself had a lot of old baggage. To that end, I migrated it to a new drive, created a new user with the new OS install, then migrated the files I needed across (moving from Chrome to Chromium wasn't as easy as it should have been, but it was doable). For the most part, it was painless.
I ended up sticking with Ubuntu - but this time I went with Ubuntu Budgie. What I had done was check several other live distros first (regular Ubuntu, BunsenLabs, Solus, Mint, and a few others) to see what was out there again. See, my old system I had built from 14.04 LTS - but I had started with "minimal" and built it up to look and work almost identical to CrunchBang (#!), because I liked it so much (and #! had died, but its descendents hadn't been in a finished state - which is why I looked at BunsenLabs).
I ultimately wanted something like the MBP setup I used for work; I thought I had found it with Solus. It seemed almost perfect - except for its package manager. While it had a lot of offerings, I worried about the ease of whether I could install third-party stuff. One thing I had "vowed" to never again do was to "compile and install from source" (that was part of what got my into this mess); if I ever needed to do that, it would be better for me to run it in a container, on a VM, or in some other manner - just not mangled into my main system with no "accountability" as to what was done and where.
Solus' package management was a custom system, that leaned heavily on app images; I liked that, it was something I had recently looked into (like a week before all this happened), so I wanted that option. But their library wasn't as extensive as the Ubuntu ecosystem, and I also wasn't sure what to do about third-party .deb files and the like - how would I install those. So I looked around for a viable alternative.
I found it with Ubuntu Budgie. I could be on the latest version of Ubuntu (I actually chose stability over latest - so I went with 18.04 LTS), but still have the Budgie desktop (with Plank and other goodness). I've found the best of both worlds, and I have a system now that I believe is as close to my MBP (well, OSX) as I can get with Linux; honestly, I consider it a bit superior.
I've decided, as alluded before, not to install anything from source, as tempting as it may be, and instead only stick within the confines of what is available via apt and (trusted) third-party PPAs. Otherwise, I'll consider using one of the various app image systems, a VirtualBox VM, or something similar - or look for something else. I just don't want to end up in the same boat down the line.
Is it perfect? No. But it certainly beats the pants off of what I had to do with Linux 10 years before, or 10 years before that.
I've been using Linux in one form or another since 1995 (my first "install" was MonkeyLinux, which runs on a DOS filesystem; my first "real" Linux distro was TurboLinux 2.0); back then it was a "nightmare" - a fun nightmare, to be honest. Nothing like recompiling your kernel to get the latest PCMCIA drivers working, among other things. But I'm pretty past that kind of thing today.
Not completely, of course, as b0rking my system with a custom manglement to get gcc/C11 working (took me a while to get all the dependencies just right, but I had it up and running - but the update system for 14.04 LTS did not like it at all).
Is "speed wobble" anything like the Jeep "death wobble" (actually can happen on any 4wd vehicle, but Jeeps seem to have the problem more as steering and suspension components wear)?
18 years now, maybe longer, but it still turns on and has yet to burn out. Of course, we don't use it much, and it's only something like 30 watts (clear bulb).
Someday, maybe, it'll get replaced.