Ramblings of a Prophet

In this modern world many people believe that our government is corrupt, unfair, or sluggish.  I concur, with the addition of, it tries, but there is so much “fat”, or unnecessary crap.  The subject of many jokes center around our governments inability to respond to anything in a timely manner.  This is true, but there has to many laws that have been voted in, that were good in theory, but in reality hurt the US more than helped.  For example, a law was proposed in California would have this special chemical added to gas that would supposedly help reduce the hydrocarbons released into the air.  sounds good right, but as it turned out, after it became a law, it was discovered that the additives didn’t have any affect.  So I’m not sure if this law is still in effect, i believe it is, but its laws like this that muck up the system.  Another law that recently passed in the Congress was regarding a simple matter, it ended up being 700 pages, and someone had tacked on a small law that significantly benefited a certain group.  Also the paperwork for bankruptcy is sent, in full, to every person who owes that company money, even if its only one thing.  The bankruptcy paperwork can be over 1000 pages for just a small business, imagine that getting sent to 500 people, one reem of paper, to 500 people.

I don’t know how you feel about this, but this is outrageous to me, so what should we do about this you say?  My idea, the Bureau of Logic, a government agency dedicated to injecting common sense and logic into the government.  They would not be allowed to receive “gifts” or “bonuses” from any group for any reason, a fixed salary.  They would be spread around in every city, and have different specialties, some would be engineers, some would be financial experts, and so on.  The point of having different specialties would be so that a desk jockey or pencil pusher wouldn’t be telling a high-rise engineer how to lay out the floors or a car designer how to place the fire extinguisher.  Another requirement is that they have some practical, real world experience, like a 30 year veteran car mechanic Will have a practice, down to earth way of fixing something, whereas a mechanic will have the superior method, but it will cost many more man hours and much more expensive.  I’m sure every one of you know how that is, someone who has no practical knowledge of how something is done telling you how to build something without breaking the bank.

There are too many building codes to even comprehend, but there is one, regarding emergency doors that could use some common sense.  The code requires there be a door every X feet, which is a good idea, but one building in my area, due to its size, ended up with 2 exit doors at one corner of the building, 2 feet apart, no divided, exactly same outside, but the building code required it.  In this case a BOL inspector would say “OK, so there is one there, we don’t need another”, and possibly save the construction some money.

Another just random rant/idea is I believe that all laws proposed should have a maximum page limit, perhaps 2-4 pages, I mean hell, the Constitution was less than 10 pages, and it set up an entire government, laws now days are just ridiculous.

I would like to know what you think about this, so please, if you agree, disagree, think im full of it, or whatever, throw up a comment.

In 2007 Microsoft released Windows Vista, and as people installed it on computers designed to run XP, they were starting to find out that it takes up an incredible amount of system resources, compared to XP.  The main thing people complained about was the demand from the system memory, which could be as much as 1GB just for the OS, which is massive amount, and when it was released most computers were being released with usually 1-2 GBs of ram.  2 more less significant requirements was the graphics card and processor, if you have the ultimat version, all the fancy shiny things Vista does, the blurred screen, the shrinking boxes, and so on, those all take more graphics power than you might think.  Some people reluctant to buy new hardware would use old, out of date video cards, but now that is basically a moot point because almost every modern card and computer can handle the requirement.  As far as processors go, when vista was released, the mainstream use of duel-core processors wasn’t very common, and Vista, to run smoothly, should have a duel-core, or a higher end single-core processor.

Now, at first glance, Vista looks like a black version of XP, and it is, on the face.  Microsoft has struck a good design of the GUI (graphic user interface), or the clicky stuff you see and use. If you dive into the settings of the control panel it will, on the surface, appear to be the same, but once you get to slightly more advanced settings, much of the things have been rearranged, which is irritating to the people  who have used XP extensively.  Vista was designed to be more accessible to the normal user who isn’t supper tech savvy, but also be not too dumped down for the advanced users.  As far as security for Vista, they completely redesigned the security system and protocol, one immediate and semi effective solution is that box that that pops up whenever you try to do anything, which is, to be truthful, annoying, but it is a good idea, perhaps it could have been worked on a little more.

As far as the performance of Vista goes, the fist, and most effective thing I would recommend is to buy more ram if you have less than 2 GBs, as that is the mostly the problem.  There are many different types of RAM, the newest standard is 240 pin DDR2 667 MHz, but what i would recommended is the 800 MHz RAM, you wont notice too much of a difference, but it will improve multi-tasking significantly.  If you are doing high quality photo editing, or video editing, or even 3D modeling, i would recommend 4 or more Gigs of ram, but if you just brows the Internet then 2 should be fine.  As far as processors go, if you are just browning the Internet then a mid-range duel-core should be atiquit, but of you are using it for, again, photo editing, video rendering, or gaming, then a higher end duel-core, or a lower end quad-core.

For those of you who don’t want to shell out some cash for upgrades, there is still hope.  When you get a non-optimized version of Vista it comes with a bunch of random junk you may not need.  First, go through your list of installed programs, if you haven’t used it in more then 3-4 months, you should uninstall it, especially programs that have background “assistants” or other active features.  Also, if you go to control panel, programs and features, and click on turn windows features on and off.  It will take a minuet to load, but it has things like tablet computer drivers, PC to PC sync, and fax components, you can turn these off if you don’t use these features.

For those users who are like me, and have 40+ Internet tabs open, and are surprised that their computer is slow, try closing your browser once a day, and that should improve overall computer performance.

One more thing that plagues many computers is small viruses, so make sure to keep your anti-virus programs up to date.