I'm sitting in one of the many Seattle coffee shops that have wireless and lots of power outlets (they're computer-friendly) and of course there is a large percentage of people doing something or the other on their computers. While I was sitting around, doodling on my notebook because my computer was out of juice and there was no power outlet free, I was looking around, my attention meandering as if it had a life of its own. Being a geek, the first thing I noticed were the laptops. Most of them are dell machines running XP with a few Macs thrown in.
Lets talk about the laptops running windows for a second. I noticed that a lot of people, after they were done working, shut down their computers. Hrm, I wonder why. Windows XP has this feature called hibernate. In fact, I believe hibernate has been available as a feature since Windows 2000. I wonder if people don't know about it or if they do, don't understand what it means. As a side note - this is one of features i miss most on my Powerbook. How could Apple have overlooked something quite this simple baffles me.
When you hibernate a machine, it stores all the memory state on disk and then shuts the machine down. This is an important distinction from Standby, which is still chewing your battery in order to keep your memory fresh. Hibernate is the best of both worlds - reasonable shutdown and startup times (in between the instant on of standby and the ages of completely shutting down and restarting). Hibernate does page fault tremendously once it starts up, but that's a minor annoyance compared to the advantage of saving you battery life for when you really need and more importantly saving your battery itself (every battery has a limited number of times you can charge it).
Anyways, if you're using Windows, turn on hibernate support - the only expense is the hard disk space equal to the amount of memory on the computer. Its a checkbox available at Control Panel -> Power Options -> Hibernate. You can also setup your laptop so that closing the lid or pressing the power button hibernates your computer (as opposed to standby or shutdown). This is what I do.
If you're a Mac user, any idea when Apple is going to put this highly needed feature in?
While reading Raymond Chen, I ambled on to cooking for engineers. Brilliant, I say. The entry about the shelf life of orange juice is a must-read. I especially liked comment 1 - "[pertains to 8-10 month, slightly browning orange juice in a bottle] ... C'mon taste it! Pretend you're in your third year of engineering living with a couple other guys in an apartment. You know you'd do it then. I would.". So true.
First post
Using blog.app for the Mac. I really hate using the web interface to write my blog entries. I was missing a good free (or cheap) client side thingy for the mac. I guess I got it now. Blog.app seems rather rudimentary right now - the lack of a preview is bugging. A more detailed review shall follow at some point.
Mark has been writing all over his blog and in other people's comments about his position in the upcoming elections. Mark has made some awesome points about how Kerry's policies seem to make no sense and about how Kerry's voting record seems to go directly against everything he (Kerry) stands for. Mark is also an amazing writer - he gets data to support his arguments from all over the place, thus making them very hard to rebut.
First off, I do not have the evidence (and have been too lazy to do the math) to answer Mark's questions about how Kerry is actually going to make the economics work out (he claims to be decreasing taxes for 90-some percent of the population, while rolling back tax cuts for the ultra-rich and ending up in surplus while increasing education, military and other spending by a huge amount) - this does boggle the mind. My immediate suspicion is that the amount of money gained by rolling back the top 3% tax cuts is going to be enough and that Kerry is not giving a direct income tax "cut" per se for the remainder of the population. But these are instincts and I do not have the hard proof to back it up with. If other people know, please comment. Mark's original question is here
Let me address some of the stuff that I do know about:
Gripe 1: Kerry voted YES on using force in Iraq, so why is he on Bush's case about the war?
Kerry voted YES for Bill Number H.J.RES.114. According to this Bill "Vote to pass a joint resolution that would authorize the use of force against Iraq. The administration would be required to report to Congress that diplomatic options have been exhausted before, or within 48 hours after military action has started. Every 60 days the president would also be required to submit a progress report to Congress". Note the emphasis on exhausting all diplomatic options before or within 48 hours after military action was started. Everyone knew that Saddam had not responded to threats of force before, hence the "after" clause as well. Did the Administration follow up with UN? No.
Gripe 2: Kerry voted Yes on No Child Left Behind.
The real issues surrounding NCLB are so complicated and the information about whether it works or not is so convoluted that I cannot seem to get an unbiased opinion of whether it works or doesn't. Bush's campaign says it works great, Kerry's campaign says that the general idea is right but Bush did not supply promised funds and hence the result is a dismal failure. I think it is too early to comment on whether the NCLB was successful or not - note that neither are arguing about the main clauses of the NCLB; this they agree on. They are only arguing about how successful NCLB has been and how to make it more successful (by possibly modifying some of its clauses and/or giving schools more money)
Gripe 3: Kerry voted Yes for the Patriot Act.
Indeed. I'm not sure what exactly Mark is so infuriated about with this. I mean, Bush passed the Law! But more on this later. The important thing to note here is that Kerry is proposing to put some more oversight into the whole "spying on your own citizens" process. Not great, admitedly, but definitely a step forward.
I can rationalize forever about why Kerry voted as he did for the various acts above. However, there is not much point to this rationalization. It certainly doesn't seem to be in conflict with his "core values" as the Bush campaign seems to claim. Furthurmore, it does not seem to be the case that his current position has deviated strongly from whatever he voted for. The Bush campaign's arguments about his flip-flopping on his core values seems to be complete bogus. Kerry wanted to go into Iraq as a last resort after trying all possible diplomatic solutions. Kerry still supports NCLB and he still supports USA-PATRIOT. What's important is that he admits that there are problems with USA-PATRIOT (and is trying to fix them) and blames the Bush administration for bungling the excecution of NCLB - which he also claims to attempt to fix if he is elected to office.
Now here is the part that I really do not understand: If a persion is against NCLB and USA-PATRIOT, why vote for Bush? NCLB was and is the cornerstone of Bush's education policy. USA-PATRIOT was and is the cornerstone of Bush's Homeland Security Policy. Heck, the President is trying to get Congress to extend USA-PATRIOT in all its glory, forever (provisions of this act expire rather soon). As far as Iraq goes - the Bush government refuses to accept the fact that there is a problem in Iraq. That they do not have a good exit strategy. Anti-Americanism is at a record high. Even if you do not care about the outside world (yes, it is the great America, after all), rabid anti-americanism does eventually affect the country by providing a lot of incubators for potential terrorists. So I get why people criticize Kerry for voting YES on these crucial issues (you do not support NCLB, USA-PATRIOT in general) - yet the same people would rather vote for someone who not only introduced these bills but made them law? (and then perhaps bungled the execution).
Flame away.