Some kind person has posted a set of beautiful photos of Altea, whither I'm off this week:
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Ah, Windows!
One of the things about Windows that really annoys me is that it talks too much. Of course, I don't like the fact that it's big and slow, or that it isn't very good at doing some of the things it's supposed to do, or that it often doesn't seem to know what's going on. But coming back, after three years living mostly with Ubuntu, has made me realize how much Windows just blathers on. I like terseness and efficiency: I have been spoiled, I suppose.
Let's take a simple example. A couple of years ago, when I plugged in my new HP printer for the first time, Ubuntu quietly did its stuff and after a few seconds (yes, a few seconds, on a run-of-the-mill laptop) it posted a nice little message: Your printer is now ready for use. That's all. Simple, perfect. It's all you need. But Windows doesn't understand this. No, no. When it's not ignoring you completely, so you wonder what on earth is going on, it has this compulsive need to chat: it can't resist informing you about all the important stuff it's doing, like an incompetent plumber substituting witless commentary for real expertise. So this is the story: I plug the printer into my new Windows 7 laptop and wait, but nothing happens, no message, no telltale swirling of the little circle to tell me something's going on. I try to print something, but the printer isn't among the devices I can choose to print on, which I assume means Windows hasn't got it ready yet. Finally, after a couple of minutes (it's true my little laptop is a bit slow), I click on Start, then on Devices and Printers, then on the HP Printer icon (3 clicks so far). Windows tells me the device isn't working properly and needs to be troubleshot. Would I like Windows to troubleshoot the device? (That's another thing: it talks to you like a two year old: Would you like Mummy to tie your shoelaces?) I click OK and a window comes up with little messages flitting across the top: Downloading Troubleshooter. Detecting Problems. Gathering Information about your Devices. Checking for Spooler Errors (and the list goes on, and I couldn't care less; doesn't it know normal people aren't interested in these things?). Finally it tells me there's no driver for the printer. Would I like Windows to find a driver? Again this need to engage in conversation: why on earth would any normal person not want Windows to find a driver at this point? I say sure, and go back to the document I want to print, but now suddenly everything's working: the printer icon is there in the print dialogue box, it's become the default, my document prints. Awesome! In my enthusiasm, I almost forget my frustration.
This sudden resolution of the problem, apparently without any connection to the steps you are chattily being guided through, is actually quite typical of Windows. Another time, it tells me a program is preventing Windows from shutting down and that I should click on Cancel to go back and close it, then when I click on Cancel, Windows shuts down anyway. Apparently, one process was working on closing the program, but neglected to tell Windows chatterbox, the part that's responsible for talking to the client. And that's the problem: Windows has MPD, multiple process disorder. Like the different personalities in multiple personality disorder in humans, the processes in MPD function independently and don't know about each other. Some of them are pretty good at doing their stuff, others less so, but they go about their business in their own little corner and don't consult each other most of the time. In addition, the Windows chatterbox not only doesn't know about the other processes, it doesn't really understand how Windows works. It's like the technical support person you get on the phone who's been told to ask certain questions and suggest certain solutions but who doesn't really understand your computer any more than you do. When the Windows chatterbox finds a problem, it suggests a series of steps which seem plausible, and are certainly very detailed and technical, but never manage to solve anything. And you know it's not very smart because it does things like telling you a program has stopped working, asking if you want it to see what happened and then telling you, after a long pause, that the program stopped working correctly. (I'm not sure of the English, but on my Spanish Vista it said "El programa dejó de funcionar correctamente.")
Of course, Windows does a lot of cool stuff too, much of it copied from others (but hey! who's suing?) What I don't understand is how so many just silly mistakes get left in. One example among many and then I'll shut up: I connect my beautiful new red Logitech cordless mouse to my old Ubuntu computer and it works: not after a few seconds, immediately. I connect it to Windows 7 and it doesn't work. After about five seconds, there's a muffled beep and up pops a message saying a device has been connected. I wait a little more and in the end the mouse works. OK, so not too bad, just a little slow. But wait, it gets funnier. Another day, I plug the mouse (actually you plug in a little stick that talks to the mouse) into a different USB port and it doesn't work. Soon there's a muffled beep and up pops a message saying a device has been connected. Neither the Windows chatterbox nor the process that checks ports apparently knows that this was the same mouse they installed the day before, connected to a different port, so we go through the install procedure all over again. It seems to be a little quicker this time, but Windows is definitely working on something. Amused, and remembering that my computer has three USB ports, I plug it into the third one. Again there's the muffled beep and the same message. I call my son and we laugh a lot. But then the next time I plug the mouse in (you unplug it every time you shut down to save the battery), I get a different message: "A storage device was connected. If this device is a port multiplier, only port 0 of the port multiplier will be active." How can Windows not recognize my mouse, which visits it so regularly and works so well with it? How can it now see it as a vulgar storage device? It's a mouse, not a squirrel! But every day now the same message appears as soon as I plug in the mouse. I am seriously thinking of buying a port multiplier to see what Windows thinks it is.
PS. Windows now comes up with the same message about a storage device whether I plug it in or not. And it changes my keyboard from US International (so I can do accents) to standard US and then to French Canadian all within a few minutes inside the same program. And I've told it to stop indexing because it slows the computer down in Thunderbird something wicked and it assures me indexing is stopped, but when I open Thunderbird it still says "Indexing message 1 of 12", actually indexing the new spam I can't delete until it's finished indexing it...
Monday, March 22, 2010
Dreaming
I'm at home with my family watching a movie that was recommended to us but which turns out to be incredibly boring. As well, most shots seem to cut people's feet off, just at the ankle. This really annoys me. The more scenes there are with feet missing, the more frustrated I get. Andy appears and asks me if I can help him: he's giving swimming lessons to some young girls further along the beach and he needs me to hold their hands while they float and kick their legs. Will it take long? Oh, only about an hour and a half. I get up and leave with him, thinking I'm not really interested in this movie anyway.
We end up in a store where he had to buy some stuff and at the cash register I take out a package I had under my shirt and show it to the cashier, to prove it's not something I'm stealing. But it contains a furry animal sort of thing that I've apparently picked up and that costs $17. I know I have no bills, but I manage to find $17 in coins and hand them over. But of course, this is the U.S. and they don't accept toonies. I desperately search for bills or something American, while the queue behind me gets longer and the cashier moves off with me to a little bar close by in the store where he has a couple of beers. I finally ask if there's an ATM anywhere and he shows me where to go. I go down some stairs and a sort of mall and finally find the machine.
I decide for some reason to use my new Mastercard which I haven't activated yet. I know that it will activate on first use. But the machine is American and doesn't seem to want to accept it. In fact, it deactivates it so it's no longer useable. I decide to try to find another ATM (the guy said there were two) and use my Visa. I walk down corridors and then out onto streets with unattractive buildings, and almost get lost, but eventually I get back inside the mall and find the machine, but when I put my card in, instead of asking for my pin, it first of all just dispenses $20, than displays the pin of (presumably) the previous client. There seems no way to get rid of this pin, which is long and complicated (and small and blurry). The guy behind me peers over my shoulder and suggests a couple of things, but nothing works, so I remove the card, thinking that with $20 I can at least pay for the furry thing.
As I'm leaving, I realize I have removed not just my card but a large cast-iron part of the ATM machine, so I go back to replace it. There is now a queue of around fifty people snaking back from the machine. I put the cast-iron piece back and walk away.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Caring for Health
2. U.S. health insurance companies are not covered by anti-trust legislation: they are free to collude on prices and policies. (CBC)
3. The new health care bill will maintain the status quo in place since 1976 for abortions: no federal money can be used to fund them. In any case, you can't get a legal abortion in 87% of the counties in the U.S. (mostly because doctors are afraid to perfom them) and yet 20% more abortions are done in the U.S. than in France, where they are covered under universal health care; twice as many abortions in the U.S. than in Germany. (Huffington, Time)
4. The US spends $7290 per head on health care, the UK spends $2992; infant mortality is 6.7 per 1000 live births in the US, as against 4.8 in the UK (and 3.8 in France); life expectancy is one year less in the US than in the UK, and three years less than in France. (BBC)
Friday, March 19, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Steady as we go
http://climate.pembina.org/blog/71 which is a great explanation of the present situation in terms of the science and its credibility.
No, the real problem is the fact that we're using up our planet's resources faster than they can be renewed, 1.3 times faster according to one measure. The way the earth has worked for a very long time now is by maintaining an equilibrium, a steady state: if you cut down trees, or they fall down in a storm or get burnt in a fire, new trees will grow to replace them; if you take fish out of the river to eat, others will take their place because there'll be more food to go around so more fish will survive; if you take water out of the river for irrigation, it'll eventually end up back in the system and fall back down again as rain, so there's no harm done. If you drop a grape in the garden, it will decompose and the ants and the fungi will get it and its goodness will go back into the earth and enrich it.
But this only works up to a point. When you cut down not just a few trees but all the trees on Easter Island or on Haiti, they don't grow back and the resource disappears. When you take huge quantities of water out of the Aral Sea or divert them from Mono Lake in Southern California, they start to dry up and ecosystems are destroyed. When you overfish, stocks become so low that if you don't stop, the fish disappear from the face of the earth and the waters thereof. And no trees, no water and no fish is a far worse scenario than no more oil, or no more coal, or no more natural gas, because you absolutely need the trees and the water and the fish, whereas there are all sorts of other possibilities for fuel: solar, geothermal, wind, nuclear, tides...
Now look at the global economy in the wake of the latest crisis. My god, people say, it almost stopped "growing"! No more "growth". We're so used to the metaphor, economies as living beings, that anything that stops them from growing must be bad. Living things need to grow, right? Those that don't grow well are "stunted", "retarded", "the runt of the litter", "krummholz". Not growing is a bad thing. Except that it's not. Nothing grows forever: at a certain point, when we've reached a good size, we stop. So do trees and fish and ants. Things that grow disproportionately are monsters. They scare us, kill us, gobble up little children.
And our economies are beginning to look like monsters. They've grown and grown and now they're too big, and they're gobbling everything up. And yet economists, and influential journals like The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the mainstream media, and therefore society at large, want them to grow more. Three per cent this year and maybe five per cent next year would be good, and so on for the next decade and the next century and the next millenium. Everything has to get bigger: GDP, businesses, towns and cities, our salaries. Zero growth, or, god forbid, negative growth, are unthinkable, the absolute worst thing that can happen to a country. You think?
Good economists, of course, people like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, who thought carefully about the world they lived in, talked quite naturally about limits to growth. They knew that economies couldn't keep expanding forever and they didn't see zero growth as necessarily a bad thing. But we've forgotten that. All we want to do now is grow, and the only way to grow is to make sure there are plenty more people, and that these people consume more and more stuff. So the rich world, with its low fertility rates, has to make sure it has lots of immigrants to fill up the workplace (too often in ways that are exploitative, in terms of pay, dignity and rights) and make it possible to grow more, so we don't lose out to the rest of the world.
All this growth is based very largely on consumption. For things to go well in the economy, we have to consume more and more. Countries that don't consume enough are reprimanded: "Germany, like China, [said the Wall Street Journal on March 16] has come under international pressure since the 2008 financial crisis to rebalance its economy away from reliance on exports, and to contribute more to global demand." Germany and China aren't playing the game: they don't consume enough. What a disgrace!
When I was little, my family's consumption was almost exclusively food. Nearly all our furniture, our linen and our kitchenware were either inherited, or wedding presents my parents had received. From time to time we would replace a glass or a plate, but I remember we had the same two pairs of scissors, the same bowls, the same gas stove, the same table, the same beds until I was a teenager and beyond. We had the same radio for twenty-five years. We eventually bought a vacuum cleaner and a television, and I remember quite clearly replacing my father's armchair, because he'd burnt too many holes in it with his cigarettes, but these were very special cases, written down in a little book where we kept track of the important events in our lives: March 1946, Brian's broken arm; February 1949, Sandra born; September 1955, bought vacuum cleaner; June 1960, Dad's new armchair. When I was nine, I got a bicycle which I used to get around and all through high school I rode it four miles a day to school and back, rain or snow. For doing dishes we used a sort of cheesecloth the butcher gave us. There were no kleenex: we used newspaper when we had to. When I was fifteen, I worked as a delivery boy for two years so I could buy a record player, and after that I always asked for records for birthdays and Christmas. Needless to say, we lived in the same house during all this time.
This sort of life, where objects are part of your life for long periods and not replaced willy-nilly, where consumption is about food and a few necessities (now including cell phones), is of course how most of the world still lives. However, to the delight of latter-day economists, that is about to change: already, billions of people in India, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, are beginning to consume more. Their economies are growing at breakneck speeds, they are flooding the world with cheap goods, often amazingly attractive, like Ikea furniture. And all this stuff will be used, and then thrown away, to be replaced by something more modern, more fashionable, and probably less durable.
What's happening in the third world now is simply what has happened in the rich world over the last fifty years. My family, mostly after I left home, became a little more affluent and did enter the consumer society, just like everyone else around us. We started to buy things in plastic, which changed colour or cracked, so had to be replaced. We bought new crockery, an automatic washing machine, a new carpet, new sofas, several pairs of scissors that weren't very good. Now with a family of my own, we consume what I consider to be disgusting amounts of stuff, though because of the childhood I had, I insist on continuing to use items that still work: a thirty-year-old food mill, a chip pan, pressure cooker, tools and bottle openers that are older than my marriage, my mother-in-law's kitchen knife and sieves. If I were allowed, I would use socks with little holes at the toes, shirts with frayed collars, sweaters with worn-out elbows, ski-jackets with some of the puff gone out of them.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Let's be quite clear about this
The Economist, a socially liberal, economically reactionary, weekly magazine whose articles about the state of the world are invariably well-informed, comprehensive in scope, and clearly and humorously written, quite naturally prides itself on the accuracy of its information. When it makes a mistake, even a small terminological error, it apologizes and makes sure we know what's really what. So when it made a bubu in a story about India a couple of weeks ago, it didn't hesitate to set things right, even if its tongue seemed to be just itching to get into its cheek:
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