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Now if only they had set the cpuID bis to 'Genuine Intel' http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/atom-nano-review.ars/6 they probably could have reached 70k!

but instead, a bunch of shitty songs from St. Anger and Death Magnetic.

As for the second pedal, I liked Ars' take on this: "[...] and you'll be able to hook up a second pedal to your drums in order to barely keep up with the rest of the band. Just like Lars!"

Yes, they are trying to use some of Apple's "coolness"...and they wish they could transfer some of the RDF that is surround them to their customers...

Microsofts other new foray into music:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090123-microsoft-misses-memo-launches-drm-laden-mobile-music-store.html

If I hadn't looked at the URL, I would have thought I was reading an Onion article.

Crazy.

Considering the brand new music "service" they are just rolling out, it's no wonder their music-related project's are dying.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090123-microsoft-misses-memo-launches-drm-laden-mobile-music-store.html

If the MS manager did actually have those responses (which seem to be, we came up with this idea ourselves, years ago, but we finally could launch it now, we'll fix it later, and no, we haven't done any consumer studies after the initial one we did 4 years ago when the project began), I would have to believe his name went on the MS layoff list...

Knol is Google's child and it sucks badly.

That leads me to the conclusion that, while Wikipedia isn't perfect, it is better than everything else we have, including "serious" encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica.

I haven't written yet about program look-and-feel; I'll do that soon. But I have noticed that MS Office acts differently from Notepad, from Media Player, and from the Windows local file browser.

Ars Technica mentioned this a while ago, about every windows application looks different from one another. There's an excellent screenshot here:

Windows Theme Confusion

Showing about 10 different applications from Windows Explorer and IE through Visual Studio, Word, and Notepad and their inconsistant themes.

Linus is promoting the best option available at the time, without bias. Which is perfectly sane, and valid.

In all fairness, "best" is one of those things that is in the eye of the beholder. When KDE 3.5 was the latest, GNOME was still "the best" for many people.

Basically, KDE has great tech. BUT core developers seem to have some sort of arrogance about listening to the community

Please elaborate, without using mailing list threads where these core developers get flamed endlessly because people don't like something in KDE 4. On the other hand we are always interested in receiving reports of what we could do better (although reasons of "KDE 3.5 did it this way" does not exactly prove the point...)

and some sort of project-deathwish which manifests in a horrible release process,

Horrible?... How so? I ask because the release process is mostly unchanged since KDE 3.5, where apparently it worked well. What do you think has regressed since then?

minor versions that don't work until x.4 or so,

So you're saying that you've had issues for both 4.0 and 4.1 not working until 4.x.4? 4.1 would have been much the same as 4.0.4, with the exception of extra features. I personally did not notice tons of trouble from 4.1 on (although obviously I'm biased ;)

and poor support for non-core developers.

No offense but this is a troll unless you have something in particular that you're talking about. The same mailing lists, API documentation, and support tools are available now as were available for KDE 3.5. In addition we now have a Wiki available instead of the crusty old KDE 2.x material, KDE TechBase, and the number of developers has only been increasing.

For instance, the latest KDE Commit Digest shows commits by 249 developers, up from 231 a year before. If we go back to the last Commit Digest from Derek Kite in October 2005 there were 195 developers. Argue about seasonal effects or whatever all you want but the data doesn't support your argument.

Moreover they've alienated some of the very groups they tried to encourage early in the KDE 4 brainstorming process.

Well there are definitely "alienated groups" but who are you talking about specifically?

Finally, they generally seem to suffer from lack of manpower, which they have never really tried to solve.

Well not only is that not true as I already mentioned, but your latter point is also not true. I know it's easy to blame the shift of focus that we employed in KDE 4 on everything, but the fact of the matter is that it actually brought in quite a few developers as well... We have people working on the art, basic desktop and games, areas which were mostly unmaintained in KDE 3. Things like the KDE TechBase I already mentioned were created as part of making it easy to develop for KDE. Again though, if you have something specifically that you have in mind then say so as developer support is a very high priority for KDE.

If you believed the hype the core devs were spouting, KDE 4 was going well, and no help was needed, until the product actually appeared as a release and everyone saw the real situation.

Here's the announcement about the Development platform release where the library API was declared stable. "With a lot of issues facing KDE hackers before 4.0 is a usable desktop, all work on new features and UI is stopped, and efforts focus on fixing the inevitable, long list of bugs." Where's the hype?

Here's the Plas

The Mac was nice for 1984 but had that *tiny* screen and was a stunningly boring monochrome. Only a short year later the Amiga beamed in like a super-advanced visitor from the future, demonstrating what a technicolour, multimedia, multitasking world we'd end up living in. Next to the Amiga, the Macs of the 1980s behaved like overfed, pedigreed, retarded puppies. Early on, ironically, the only PC that could give the Amiga a run for the money was the Apple II GS, which Apple seemed to have hated with a passion.

I guess the thing that really tickled me about the Amiga was also its chameleon-like ability to perfectly emulate a Macintosh in a pinch. I recall in the late-80s/early90s actually buying an Amiga desktop publishing rig *and* a Mac hardware emulator dongle because together it was still cheaper than the equivalent Apple rig by around 50%. We met the design requirements, and got to play Populous as well...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the 1985-07-24 anniversary, and remembering how one of the great tech advancement opportunities of recent history was so comprehensively fucked up.

I'm glad you brought that up, because if you want to speak of a computer which "demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,' the Commodore 64 certainly qualifies at 30 million units sold. For every Mac sold, Commodore sold ~20 units of the C64.

See bottom of page: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/5

One could also argue Atari's VCS/2600 did its fair share to make a "machine to be used by millions and millions of people". It sold around 40 million units, and introduced them to the idea of videogaming - which eventually led to computer gaming (the main reason people bought C64s).

Interesting opinions from the ArsTechnica editors: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/25-years-of-macintosh.ars

If you live in the what used to be a BellSouth territory, AT&T has to offer "naked" DSL as a requirement for the FCC letting them merge back with Bell. The phone monkeys may give you the run around about it but be firm & keep asking for managers if you get a moron.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/01/02/naked-dsl-from-att-now-available/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070618-att-launches-10-dsl-it-hopes-no-one-signs-up-for.html

There was a comparison between Atom and Nano a while back, and the conclusion was while the Nano does draw a bit more power overall, it does more work per watt. This is even taking into consideration the Atom chip had HyperThreading.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTUzNSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/757/1/

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/atom-nano-review.ars

That took a whole 10 seconds of searching on Google.

With regards to the discussion, which would be this open source tablet thingy, I think the Nano is the better choice.

i'm not disagreeing that he used to be a huge MS fanboy - his posting history in the ars forums proves that, but he has undergone a bit of a 'conversion' recently.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-III.ars

"So where does that leave me? I want to write nice applications. I want to be able to concentrate on my own code rather than fighting the API the whole time. I want my applications to fit in with the OS and work in a way that's consistent with first-party applications and even other third-party programs. I want this because I think it leads to better software; it means I can spend my time creating innovative and useful software that people enjoy using. I really want to do this, but you know what? On Windows it's just too damn hard."

i'm not disagreeing that he used to be a huge MS fanboy - his posting history in the ars forums proves that, but he has undergone a bit of a 'conversion' recently.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-III.ars

"So where does that leave me? I want to write nice applications. I want to be able to concentrate on my own code rather than fighting the API the whole time. I want my applications to fit in with the OS and work in a way that's consistent with first-party applications and even other third-party programs. I want this because I think it leads to better software; it means I can spend my time creating innovative and useful software that people enjoy using. I really want to do this, but you know what? On Windows it's just too damn hard."

i'm not disagreeing that he used to be a huge MS fanboy - his posting history in the ars forums proves that, but he has undergone a bit of a 'conversion' recently.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-III.ars

"So where does that leave me? I want to write nice applications. I want to be able to concentrate on my own code rather than fighting the API the whole time. I want my applications to fit in with the OS and work in a way that's consistent with first-party applications and even other third-party programs. I want this because I think it leads to better software; it means I can spend my time creating innovative and useful software that people enjoy using. I really want to do this, but you know what? On Windows it's just too damn hard."

Why throw JavaScript in there? The rest are server-side languages, while JavaScript is client-side.

Two reasons I can think of:

1) An increasing amount of number of applications are being delivered via the web browser
2) JavaScript increasingly lives a number of other places besides the browser. See Rhino, JScript.NET, Seed, and probably a few other places I'm not thinking of right now.

It actually seemed to me more like he was saddled with this dog of a project and is hoping it dies quickly so he can move on to something that might actually have wings. It seemed he knew they were years behind their competitors and that they didn't really have a viable plan, but that his hands were tied and that it was probably some pet project of a higher-up, or some commitment that Microsoft had made years ago that they were bringing to market for no other reason than they had contractual obligations with "a partner" that it was cheaper to crash and burn the service than break the contract.

He knows full well that it won't garner any interest from consumers - with all of the other DRM laden services that have closed their doors (including a Microsoft one! - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080422-drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys.html) in the past year or so, he can't possibly believe that such a sub par service will "get some interest from consumers", and that they'll languish until somebody finally decided to pull the plug sometime next year.

Now, there may be trickery involved. "The ONLY music service for your Windows Mobile phone" seems like a dirty tactic MS could use to sucker people into using it, and if they do that, the service might just stay afloat for an extra year or two until people start catching on.

They have ... my notes (Google notebook)

Well, actually, it seems they weren't that interested in your notes...

As far as I know, none of the boxes currently available for near $40 will give you HD, they'll only give you SD.

And, of course, the program is out of money so if you don't have your coupon, you're out of luck.

And the coupons expire any way.

Ars Technica's Don't Delay the DTV Transition article makes some very good points about how Congres messed up the DTV converter program though a horrible compromise.

There is a lot of discussion lately about what they do and don't let on the platform... http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090120-apple-and-app-store-censorship-where-to-draw-the-line.html

IE to be standards compliant by default

If someone is taking a dump on your front lawn, do you call them a hero when they stop? IE should have been standards compliant from the start. So all MS have done is undone some crap; they've not done anything good at all.

I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes).
I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV.

It's been done -- "ReplayTV" hit the market around the time Tivo did, but they a had commercial skipping feature Tivo didn't. They got sued out of existence.

That's why you won't see many commercial products. WP notes that there are some non-commercial software projects out there that do commercial skipping though: "DVRMSToolbox" and Comskip

Microsoft donates to Apache
Microsoft donates to moonlight
Microsoft supports ODF
IE to be standards compliant by default
Microsoft assist SAMBA team with interop ...and of course, the "Windows 7 might actually be rather good" article in TFA.

Maybe; just maybe, Microsoft isn't the evil machine some slashdotters make out.

Ars recently posted a short write-up on using C# and Mono to develop for the iPhone.

Ok replying to my own parent but I just saw this today, so apaprently some in the legal field agree with me:
 
  20090119-judge-17000-illegal-downloads-dont-equal-17000-lost-sales

-Everyone- wants to do it for free. It just happens that there are a lot of people too lazy or too ethical to pirate.

O rly

Why does MS need to provide options? Nothing today prevents OEMs from say, installing FF, and hiding the IE icons from the desktop and quick launch toolbar.

Actually, several things do ... ... ... All of these are concerns for OEMs.

All the costs you point out are valid costs. They are not valid reasons for moving the burden of bundling browsers on MS. MS will have those same costs -- why should MS bear these costs for products that aren't theirs? Note, MS already does compatibility testing to ensure new windows versions don't break existing apps -- they also invite ISVs to use their facilities for testing their apps (example thereof). This still doesn't mean that MS should take responsibility for the quality of other companies' products, and it certainly doesn't mean these costs should be forced on them. That would increase the cost of windows for all users -- when most users are happy with just one browser. Also note -- Opera themselves could approach OEMs and convince them to offer such a choice -- and offer to supply test suites etc. -- basically work with them to get the deal done..

Again - why does MS need to provide options? Nothing today prevents OEMs from offering choice of browsers on first boot.

Because legally, that isn't good enough. MS broke the law and the market is trashed. Claiming that now, a decade later OEMs should have to put in additional effort and expense and that will somehow make the market a level playing field is simply absurd.

Online applications are a fundamental part of computer use today (email, photo sharing, banking, much more). This means, the web browser is required to 'run' common apps these days. This means, the browser is an integral part of the OS today -- the classical computer science definition cannot be applied to the market. i.e. MS is absolutely within its rights to bundle a browser with it's OS -- without that, it's OS is incomplete. So MS broke no law.

Also note -- I didn't say OEMs should put in the effort/costs to offer choices. I merely pointed out that they have always had the option. The decision of taking the costs will depend on whether they think it will win them more customers. So far, OEMs don't think it will, or they have not been innovative enough to try it, or customers have not been clamoring for it, or some combination thereof. None of this is in MS's control, nor is it their responsibility. They are not standing in the way, and that's all that matters. FF did a great job of realizing the reality of it's position as an 'aftermarket' add-on, and figuring out a business model. Opera did not.

A browser a fundamental end user requirement - MS has to ship one with their OS.

No they don't. They can ship one or they can obey the law and let OEMs pick one and install it. Why can't they let OEMs install whichever one they choose? Is that too onerous? It wouldn't be if MS weren't using it as a way to stifle competition.

Like I said -- the OEMs have always been/and still are free to install a different browser. MS is still well within it's rights to ship a browser in their OS -- it's a fundamental requirement of any consumer OS because of online apps such as webmail, social networking, banking, photo sharing etc. I don't understand your question about it being too onerous -- they want to ship a complete solution -- it's unfair to them, to force them to remove such a key feature.

And then why did the US charge and convict MS of the same crime?

The US DOJ actually accepted the bundling of IE. Do you know of any windows version for sale in the US that is stripped of IE?

SCO is dead. They'll convert to liquidation any day now. At least one would hope so. Nobody knows how long that zombie has to shamble.

there's no such thing as no lawsuit exposure.

That is true enough but to accept that as a premise is to refuse to do business. There is some middle ground where businesses can still operate in where the risk is acceptible. Limiting your exposure by avoiding licensing agreements that include the right to sue you if you overdeploy seems wise, and licensing agreements that include the right to audit you more so. Especially when there are options available that include terms like "use all you want for free".

(i'd like to see documented example of it)

Meet Ernie Ball. But wait... that wasn't Microsoft... that was their representatives, the Business Software Alliance! Same same. Evil by proxy is still evil.

I'm sorry dude, but you are wrong. What was wrong with Vista? Well there were some hardware incompatibility issues that were resolved within the first four months, and for the most part that was strictly NVIDIA, who behaved like a child and got a few other vendors to tell MS "NO! We're NOT going to correct our drivers for the changes you made!" Granted, it was bullshit that MS made those kinds of changes that late in development, but really all they did was boost Intel and ATI sales slightly since OEMs needed "Vista Capable" hardware to go with the new OS they had to use.

Which brings us to the biggest issues with Vista: the hardware requirements. Oh no, it requires a whole 2G of RAM to XP's 1G. Given the price of RAM, this is REALLY a non-issue for people who build their own systems. All it did was irritate OEMs, and you just know it was a marketing guy at MS not one of the engineers who told the OEMs to use the 512 and it'll all be fine. I'll let the class action lawsuit settle that dispute. It was a non issue for myself and the people I know that built a Vista system were gamers, and for the most part the benchmarks for games while using Vista Ultimate x64 and XP SP2 were the pretty much the same.

What's wrong with vista ? Just a story : I laid my hands on a vista sp1 computer just yesterday. Actually, it's my mother's new computer, freshly setup at home by a professionnal (the one doing setups for my father's business). The machine is a core2 2600 Mhz something with 4Gb Ram, NVidia 9xxx video, sh*tloads of disk space, etc. ad nauseam, blue ray reader included (while I'm still faithful to my athlon 900 Mhz, 512 Mb Ram, running adequatly Fedora 9 with all bells and whistles).

Before even trying the computer, I notice in the big cardboard box where the old dell has been dumped the scanner. So I ask, what's wrong with it ? Answer : not vista compatible. A silly, USB, scanner, not compatible ? Oh, better still : it's a HP scanner and the new computer is, well HP. And what's that tiny thing at the bottom ? Oh. The usb webcam. Not compatible ; I should have guessed. I know, those are not expensive when compared to the price of the whole thing. Still, it tastes sour.

Let's try the beast. Well, okay, it's adequate ; nothing really surprising for a compiz user, until you realise you do it with a computer 1/6 the processing power (when only using the bogus MHz metric to compare cpus), and 1/8 the ram.

But, hey, what's that ? Oh, UAE, I heard about you nice to meet you ! ... 500th UAE moment : right, now I'm pissed. Why does that thing blows in my face ? Can't it signal himself only in the taskbar by a "!" icon ? Interrupting my job is silly. Especially when what I'm doing has nothing to see with the application requesting the privileges. MS had it totally backward on this one. Why can't they do a su / sudo copy, that works perfectly since day 1 ?

UAE had me so pissed I decided to shutdown the thing after an half hour. Should be easy, no ? Well, the shutdown process hanged and left me watching the desktop background for minutes. I couldn't believe the thing broke ! It's new, there's nothing but office on it ! I left it while having supper, hoping for the process to somehow recover. Nope. When I came back, 1 hr later, the silly thing was still hanged.

Vista, it's as bad as it's been depicted. Maybe worse.

I'm sorry dude, but you are wrong. What was wrong with Vista? Well there were some hardware incompatibility issues that were resolved within the first four months, and for the most part that was strictly NVIDIA, who behaved like a child and got a few other vendors to tell MS "NO! We're NOT going to correct our drivers for the changes you made!" Granted, it was bullshit that MS made those kinds of changes that late in development, but really all they did was boost Intel and ATI sales slightly since OEMs needed "Vista Capable" hardware to go with the new OS they had to use.

Which brings us to the biggest issues with Vista: the hardware requirements. Oh no, it requires a whole 2G of RAM to XP's 1G. Given the price of RAM, this is REALLY a non-issue for people who build their own systems. All it did was irritate OEMs, and you just know it was a marketing guy at MS not one of the engineers who told the OEMs to use the 512 and it'll all be fine. I'll let the class action lawsuit settle that dispute. It was a non issue for myself and the people I know that built a Vista system were gamers, and for the most part the benchmarks for games while using Vista Ultimate x64 and XP SP2 were the pretty much the same.

What's wrong with vista ? Just a story : I laid my hands on a vista sp1 computer just yesterday. Actually, it's my mother's new computer, freshly setup at home by a professionnal (the one doing setups for my father's business). The machine is a core2 2600 Mhz something with 4Gb Ram, NVidia 9xxx video, sh*tloads of disk space, etc. ad nauseam, blue ray reader included (while I'm still faithful to my athlon 900 Mhz, 512 Mb Ram, running adequatly Fedora 9 with all bells and whistles).

Before even trying the computer, I notice in the big cardboard box where the old dell has been dumped the scanner. So I ask, what's wrong with it ? Answer : not vista compatible. A silly, USB, scanner, not compatible ? Oh, better still : it's a HP scanner and the new computer is, well HP. And what's that tiny thing at the bottom ? Oh. The usb webcam. Not compatible ; I should have guessed. I know, those are not expensive when compared to the price of the whole thing. Still, it tastes sour.

Let's try the beast. Well, okay, it's adequate ; nothing really surprising for a compiz user, until you realise you do it with a computer 1/6 the processing power (when only using the bogus MHz metric to compare cpus), and 1/8 the ram.

But, hey, what's that ? Oh, UAE, I heard about you nice to meet you ! ... 500th UAE moment : right, now I'm pissed. Why does that thing blows in my face ? Can't it signal himself only in the taskbar by a "!" icon ? Interrupting my job is silly. Especially when what I'm doing has nothing to see with the application requesting the privileges. MS had it totally backward on this one. Why can't they do a su / sudo copy, that works perfectly since day 1 ?

UAE had me so pissed I decided to shutdown the thing after an half hour. Should be easy, no ? Well, the shutdown process hanged and left me watching the desktop background for minutes. I couldn't believe the thing broke ! It's new, there's nothing but office on it ! I left it while having supper, hoping for the process to somehow recover. Nope. When I came back, 1 hr later, the silly thing was still hanged.

Vista, it's as bad as it's been depicted. Maybe worse.

In the past Microsoft has used the threat of forcing OEMs to pay for the retail version of Windows to prevent them from selling dual-boot systems.

I know. It also all but forces customers to do something illegal or, frankly, weird, like having to buy a cable or an FDD with the OS to validate the purchase, unless you want to pay twice the cost for the same piece of software. I had to buy a 5-user Windows CAL once so that I could qualify for a certain level of discount. Having to jump through hoops like this before you even install the software starts your relationship with Microsoft in the manner it is likely to continue as a user.

Okay, glad to see that stuff like UI layout is being modded up. It only is a matter of personal taste but whatever. I personally hate the Office Ribbon, but haven't had to use Office 2007 much so I can't be sure if its bad or not. I have used Vista and played with Windows 7 and I personally like the new UI for Windows Explorer. I think its oodles better than the flat gray color used in Windows XP, 2000, and 95/98.

But who cares about the way the UI looks. That's really a minor thing compared to the issues that were amplified. The first poster here gets modded +5 Insightful for saying "Ars Technia is Wrong" without providing any evidence of the fact.

I'm sorry dude, but you are wrong. What was wrong with Vista? Well there were some hardware incompatibility issues that were resolved within the first four months, and for the most part that was strictly NVIDIA, who behaved like a child and got a few other vendors to tell MS "NO! We're NOT going to correct our drivers for the changes you made!" Granted, it was bullshit that MS made those kinds of changes that late in development, but really all they did was boost Intel and ATI sales slightly since OEMs needed "Vista Capable" hardware to go with the new OS they had to use.

Which brings us to the biggest issues with Vista: the hardware requirements. Oh no, it requires a whole 2G of RAM to XP's 1G. Given the price of RAM, this is REALLY a non-issue for people who build their own systems. All it did was irritate OEMs, and you just know it was a marketing guy at MS not one of the engineers who told the OEMs to use the 512 and it'll all be fine. I'll let the class action lawsuit settle that dispute. It was a non issue for myself and the people I know that built a Vista system were gamers, and for the most part the benchmarks for games while using Vista Ultimate x64 and XP SP2 were the pretty much the same.

The software incompatibilities were only to be expected. For the most part Vista's built in backwards compatibility modes work awesome and now that people have been needing to develop on 64 bit OS its a non issue. From the start this was a given for an architecture change and personally I don't count it against Vista since it was going to happen eventually anyways, but I'll count it against it anyways since everyone else seems to too.

The only other major issue I can think of was the file transfer times. Before SP1, I personally never noticed this issue. Not sure what I was doing different, other than most people seemed to be referencing Windows Server 2003 so these people were using Vista most likely around the office rather than at home. Given how many people that rag on Vista that aren't network admins and mention the transfer times I'm sort of interested to know if it was THAT widespread for home users but couldn't find any quick references. Either way, once SP1 came out I stopped hearing of this issue. Given its MS it was pretty obvious the OS would be flakey until the first SP. I'm not sure why people freaked out over this when XP had a few more issues along similar lines but whatever.

So mod on you MS bashers! I just love how a supposedly intelligent site like Slashdot has this rabid fanaticism about OS choices. The flaming of Apple's OS and the various Linux distros (not to mention the BSD based ones) never ceases to amaze. I guess humans just need something to cling to. With apologies to Terry Pratchett: "Give them a slogan and a uniform, and their hearts and minds will follow."

Okay, glad to see that stuff like UI layout is being modded up. It only is a matter of personal taste but whatever. I personally hate the Office Ribbon, but haven't had to use Office 2007 much so I can't be sure if its bad or not. I have used Vista and played with Windows 7 and I personally like the new UI for Windows Explorer. I think its oodles better than the flat gray color used in Windows XP, 2000, and 95/98.

But who cares about the way the UI looks. That's really a minor thing compared to the issues that were amplified. The first poster here gets modded +5 Insightful for saying "Ars Technia is Wrong" without providing any evidence of the fact.

I'm sorry dude, but you are wrong. What was wrong with Vista? Well there were some hardware incompatibility issues that were resolved within the first four months, and for the most part that was strictly NVIDIA, who behaved like a child and got a few other vendors to tell MS "NO! We're NOT going to correct our drivers for the changes you made!" Granted, it was bullshit that MS made those kinds of changes that late in development, but really all they did was boost Intel and ATI sales slightly since OEMs needed "Vista Capable" hardware to go with the new OS they had to use.

Which brings us to the biggest issues with Vista: the hardware requirements. Oh no, it requires a whole 2G of RAM to XP's 1G. Given the price of RAM, this is REALLY a non-issue for people who build their own systems. All it did was irritate OEMs, and you just know it was a marketing guy at MS not one of the engineers who told the OEMs to use the 512 and it'll all be fine. I'll let the class action lawsuit settle that dispute. It was a non issue for myself and the people I know that built a Vista system were gamers, and for the most part the benchmarks for games while using Vista Ultimate x64 and XP SP2 were the pretty much the same.

The software incompatibilities were only to be expected. For the most part Vista's built in backwards compatibility modes work awesome and now that people have been needing to develop on 64 bit OS its a non issue. From the start this was a given for an architecture change and personally I don't count it against Vista since it was going to happen eventually anyways, but I'll count it against it anyways since everyone else seems to too.

The only other major issue I can think of was the file transfer times. Before SP1, I personally never noticed this issue. Not sure what I was doing different, other than most people seemed to be referencing Windows Server 2003 so these people were using Vista most likely around the office rather than at home. Given how many people that rag on Vista that aren't network admins and mention the transfer times I'm sort of interested to know if it was THAT widespread for home users but couldn't find any quick references. Either way, once SP1 came out I stopped hearing of this issue. Given its MS it was pretty obvious the OS would be flakey until the first SP. I'm not sure why people freaked out over this when XP had a few more issues along similar lines but whatever.

So mod on you MS bashers! I just love how a supposedly intelligent site like Slashdot has this rabid fanaticism about OS choices. The flaming of Apple's OS and the various Linux distros (not to mention the BSD based ones) never ceases to amaze. I guess humans just need something to cling to. With apologies to Terry Pratchett: "Give them a slogan and a uniform, and their hearts and minds will follow."

There are free-as-in-beer email servers, even for very high volumes of mail, that any competent IT staff could maintain with minimal effort and better reliability than GMail. How much money do you think GMail would save? Is that amount of money actually worth the hassle of dealing with GMail?

According to a Forester report, they estimate that it costs on average $25.18 per month per user to provide email services in-house, compared to $8.47 for Gmail.

Interestingly, most people couldn't actually guess what the real cost of providing email services in-house was, many guessing $2-11 per user.

The upshot of Forester's analysis was that up to around 15,000 users, it could be substantially cheaper to outsource email as an infrastructure service.

Admittedly, there can be a lot more to the calculations though. Depending on your business needs or industry, you could have regulatory or compliance requirements that might interfere with an outsourced solution if the vendor can't meet those requirements.

The Forester report: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,46302,00.html

Arstechnica report on the report: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090108-report-gmail-about-one-third-as-expensive-as-hosted-e-mail.html

Well there's an interesting debate on EMR, including some physicians.

Msft pulled the same stunt for the Democratic National Convention:

http://ixnotes.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/democratic-national-convention-against-gnulinux-or-bought-by-microsoft/

And for the Olympics.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080623-nbc-olympics-on-the-go-download-service-is-vista-only.html

Must be nice to able to buy so much influence.

That PDFs more or less print the same any time is more due to luck than because it's such a good spec.

Yeah, it's totally not because they set out to make a document description language (based off Postscript which was also a document description language). Nope, complete accident. :)

There are still elements in PDF (look at the recent GIMP review at Arstechnica for example), which are rendered differently in different viewers.

I think you're referring to http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/gimp-2-6-review.ars/10

This one wasn't flawless though--you can see the image gets knocked out at the top right of the image below the drop shadow. But Pantone spot plates and drop shadows are still death for modern RIPs. Kodak's own production-level RIP software can't even get it right most of the time, so I can't complain much about GIMP's slightly imperfect rendering.

A bug where it's "slightly imperfect" (and treated as a bug) is a far cry from printing the same document across multiple versions of Word and getting completely different results - which is what we were originally discussing: why use PDF instead of DOC for distributing a static (not meant to be edited) document.

I have written a tool which modified existing PDFs. Let me tell you that PDF is a worthless specification.

So worthless that you wrote a tool for it? :)

If you're used to the simplicity of SGML, you'll find the PDF spec about as friendly as the jungle by night

I've been to the jungle (South America) but not at night, so I don't know how scary that's actually supposed to be. :) Hot and sweaty for sure.

However..

If you're used to the simplicity of *thing you know well*, you'll find the *thing you don't know well* spec about as friendly as the jungle by night.

Did you have previous Postscript knowledge? If not, of course PDF was confusing. Postscript/PDF is indeed crazy, but saying "it took me a few weeks to go from zero to a working product" is not exactly a serious condemnation of something.

Apple is getting hammered, actually. Now, Apple has the advantage in that they are rather more likely to hold onto the most valuable customers, who are worth considerably more per unit sold; but their volume numbers are suffering. Cheap and cheerful seems to be in at the moment. I suspect that this is part economy, part maturation of PC hardware.

The NSA wiretap program involves nothing more than a signal splitter. This device duplicates ALL communications going over the wire. Not just the ones going overseas. What gives them the power to record domestic communications?

Russian-based ElcomSoft has just released ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor 1.0...

"Just" released? Like, a month ago? Or was that just the announcement?
I think the key point with all this, though, is just don't use dictionary words in your passwords... for anything... ever. The same company makes software for all kinds of password systems, so just don't do it.

without dictionary words being involved, cracking is still quite intensive: perhaps three months to crack a lowercase-only random eight-character password using a PC with two Nvidia GTX 280 video cards.

Sure, there haven't been any video problem on Windows recently.

Because TOS violations are federal crimes now.

XMAS comes early, my friend.

To further reduce the barrier to participation, Nokia plans to accept code from contributors without requiring copyright assignment.

If they do what this article suggests they will, this is a big step towards better code and community involvement. Go Qt, go!

Ars Technica has a good report on this development: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html

Kinda http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=174096756&m=9770920395&r=9770920395

there are exceptions

"(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."

if you don't consider NES machines on ebay "reasonably available" then those carts are obsolete and you can circumvent copyright protections. which could be construed as "i have this NES cart but no hardware i am circumventing that via emulation" however this is all DMCA, copyright law should still prohibit getting games you don't own.

in the end its all very grey and that's why it persists

The opposite effect, LOL Video Games in Jail

GPS is actually really trick for cameras. Ars Technica has an interesting piece on the subject.

Punchline is, GPS doesn't work well in devices that need to be turned on and off a lot, and most of the hacks used to make it work better are more suitable for cellphones than for cameras.

Hope they never decide to pull the plug on your DRM'd music you love so much.

DRM is a fancy way of saying "renting". You are at the mercy of the company providing you access, and therefore you don't actually own anything. The music industry feels confident in the DRM because it knows it can turn off your access any time for any reason. If you're comfortable paying for the privilege of being the industry's bitch, good for you. But don't pretend that it's freedom or a good thing in any way.

It runs on Linux? So what else? This doesn't mean it will be a good camera. If my previous experiences with Linux are any indication, it sounds to me like it will be slow as molasses, taking eight full seconds from "power on" to "ready to snap". Arstechnica has a better article with far less fanboy hype.