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Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Released
gdsotirov writes "Today on the IE blog the availability of two new beta tests - Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 - was announced. These tests are mainly targeted to developers and IT professionals. Thus the betas are only available to MSDN subscribers. Tom's Hardware has details as well." From the article: "While the code also includes an early look at the new user-interface design, the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2. In addition to these fundamentals, Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform. The technical Beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2 also is available today." Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?
Nothing to see here, please move along.
So they're trying this again are they?
HELO
MAIL FROM: aspammer@zombiesareus.biz
RCPT TO: billg@microsoft.com
DATA
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I'm sure not..
Anyways, both these betas are already available everywhere.
The Vista Beta comes with a WPA bypasser.
IE7 beta requires online activation.
Just curious. I would not do anything illegal like making use of one.
"Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?"
Do those actually read Slashdot?
For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak.
pcmag
"Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business."
"The new OS is getting zero buzz. Zero. now the name Vista, along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse. Could anything be less exciting?"
"THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP COMPUTING: Apple. Vista will open the door to what I believe will be a radical change in the computing landscape. The trends are clear. Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated..."
"Right now, and as much as x86 users do not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. I see too many smart people with Mac laptops nowadays."
"...it is always possible that Apple doesn't understand the power play position it's in and might actually believe that it's better off somehow keeping its OS in a small niche rather than the big market. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Apple didn't put together what many consider the finest in-house industrial design teams in the world to fool around with piddly sales and more redesigns of the iPod."
"That said, how much more of Steve Jobs can we handle? Do we really want to hear him say "I told you so?" If it gets some excitement back into desktop computing, yes, we do. I think we can take it."
The privacy statement for Internet Explorer 7.0 beta lists a "phishing filter," which is said to be capable of warning users about the possibility that the Web site currently being visited is impersonating a trusted Web site. This feature is turned off by default
Why bother creating a feature like this and having it turned off by default. The people most likely to be taken in by a phishing scam seem to me to be the same people who won't know enough about a computer to turn this feature on to protect themselves. The more tech and internet savvy people could turn this off if it annoys them.
but in order for it to be used properly, the Web site's address and other information about the user's computer, are sent to Microsoft for automatic evaluation.
Then again it does scare me a little that MS would be taking a peek at my browsing habits. Hopefully it just asks a big database full of bad websites whether or not this one is good. I'd like to think that MS wouldn't be keeping tabs on my online activity. Makes me wonder if this is why that bought Gator... I mean Claria.
Finally I will be able to shut the mouth of my Mac OS 9.1 using neighbour !
There is so much missing from this beta it seems pointless, to an extent. There is certainly much that's missing or isn't finalised which makes it next to useless for interested application developers, I would think.
I guess it's more a case of MS letting the code into the wild to see if it's as robust as they hope.
Call it a Aleta. Or maybe Belpha sounds better...
A Slashdotter agreeing with John C. Dvorak, who is saying nice things about Apple?
Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
from TFA "Improved design to make everyday tasks easier and faster, with better navigation through tabbed browsing; inline search right from the toolbar; shrink-to-fit Web page printing; and a streamlined, redesigned user interface (currently in its early stages in Beta 1)."
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
First of all, I'm not an MSDN subscriber, but I have done several betas.
The iso for workstation is about 2.5 GB. I had a couple of failed installs due to a faulty dvd-rom drive and am now almost finished installing it. It looks pretty good so far, from the installer anyways.
There's a torrent here: http://www.mininova.org/tor/80599
Use the magnet links in Azureus (Ctrl+L) to save mininova bandwidth.
It's also available seperately (IE7) so I'd imagine it's just included but not integral so neatly avoiding any new anti-trust issues...
In other news Secunia has announced details of two new secuirty exploits going by the names "Vista" and "IE7".
Has anyone tried to run IE 7 with WINE on Linux?
Tabbed browsing is in IE7 standalone, and works nicely (is doing as we speak).
Also includes some kind of "phishing site checker", RSS support (picks them out from page and can display from a single button), pop-up blocking, easy history deletion.
Seems pretty stable and not too memory hungry... so far
Protected Mode. Available in the Windows Vista beta 2 release and beyond, Internet Explorer Protected Mode will provide new levels of security and data protection for Windows users. Designed to defend against "elevation of privilege" attacks, Internet Explorer Protected Mode provides the safety of a robust Internet browsing experience while helping prevent hackers from taking over the browser and executing code through the use of administrator rights. In this mode, Internet Explorer 7 is completely unable modify user or system files and settings. All communications occur via a broker process that mediates between the Internet Explorer browser and the operating system. The broker process is only initiated when the user clicks on the Internet Explorer menus and screens. The highly restrictive broker process prohibits workarounds from bypassing the Protected Mode. Any scripted actions or automatic processes will be prevented from downloading data or affecting the system. Specifically, Component Object Model objects will only be self-aware and have no reference information by which to identify and attack other applications or the operating system. Internet Explorer Protected Mode helps protect users from malicious downloads by restricting the ability to write to any local machine zone resources other than temporary Internet files. Attempting to write to the Windows Registry or other locations will require the broker process to provide the necessary elevated permissions.
http://static.thepiratebay.org/downloadtorrent/336 2112.torrent/Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Codename.Long horn.Beta.1.32Bit.DVD.READ..3362112.TPB.torrent
Here.
"...the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2"
So in other words, beta 1 is just XP with RSS? They already yanked everything else out of the system as is. The reason they call it Vista is because that's all that's left of the OS; a view.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Do you mind being just a bit more descriptive?
If you're not being sarcastic that is. It's hard to tell.
Not true it's in the subscriber downloads section.
Err, why saying mostly the same thing twice (#13184583, #13184649) ?
- Glass and new Window animation. The Windows Vista desktop experience will deliver a new visual identity -- translucent glass with more animation. Because it is visually intuitive, the glass helps users focus on the task at hand, whether reading a document, viewing a Web page or editing a photo.
Apparently the best way to develop a "visually intuitive" user interface is glass and more animation!
Navigation through tabbed browsing - Opera or CrazyBrowser (IE mod)
Inline search right from the toolbar - Opera
Shrink-to-fit Web page printing - Similar tech to Opera's Small Screen Rendering and Medium Screen Rendering
MSDN subscription starts at $99 a year... I didn't realize $99 was lots of money, but you know, whatever man.
evil adrian
Thanks, I was just about to post that myself! mod that idiot questioning me down, FELLAS!
One very simple question. Why? Why is it so much better? Why should I pay X amount of hard earned money to get this upgrade?
I assume there is an NDA but you can tell us something....
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
"...the beta is available to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants."
4 .aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/27/44400
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
>>Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform
Wouldn't this fly in the face of the US DOJ ruling that they had to separate it from the OS?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Yes I'm an MSDN subscriber through work. No, I won't be downloading the betas. I personally don't have the time to fiddle around with such things any more. It's far easier to wait for others to find the gotchas. When the final version is released, it'll still be months until we deploy it at work.
Feel free to call me lazy. I just know I have interfaces to write and queries to improve. Those things can't wait.
http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3362236
Very simple. You will eventually have to upgrade if you want to keep using new software and services to their full extent.
As new versions of Windows are released, rarely will a software company go out of their way to fully support older versions, especially new startups. If I were still running Windows 98 I'd be cut off from quite a few of my favorite programs.
This is not to say you can't keep using Windows XP - but there was a reason I eventually had to upgrade. It just gets to be too much of a hassle to deal with gradually diminishing support and software.
Paul Thurrott has a fairly comprehensive (and probably quite rose-tinted) review of the Vista beta over at his SuperSite for Windows.
It goes through the vast majority of new features, although doesn't go into a great deal of depth at this early stage. Seems there are no great surprises here - Vista is still very much watered down from initial promises - but apparently things are at least moving along noticably now.
-----------
www.markwheeler.net
www.markwheeler.net
For a website that has bill dressed in a Borg outfit there are sure a lot of press releases^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H articles about Microsoft products...
.net, VB, ...]
As my boss often says "it is what it is". Let's just wait for the actual RELEASE of the product instead of talking about it with devote admiration and desire.
Personally I don't see any changes that would make me switch from Gentoo Linux on my AMDX2 to it... let's see
1. Incompetent shell. check.
2. Single desktop desktop. check.
3. High price for "complete" copy. check.
4. Activation. check.
5. Poorly documented closed source kernel. check.
6. Feeding generations of inept developers. check. [re: C#, anything
7. Resource intense OS. check.
I mean I do a lot of development and even I could get by with 256MB of ram [albeit with swapping to disk here and there]. If I didn't compile things of substantial size I could easily run the rest of my desktop applications within 128M, heck even 64M.
The fact that the "newest windows" requires 512M of ram and a gigamahurts processor is a sign things aren't actually improving they're just getting more wasteful.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What about CSS compliance?
Heh, with the exception of "Dynamic security protection", that just reads like Firefox's feature list. Tabbed browsing, 'inline' search from address bar, support for RSS feeds, transparent PNG support... revolutionary!
If I feel brave enough (and our webmasters think they can survive a potential Slashdotting ;-) ) I'll put up some blog entries about my experiences over the next few days.
Thus the betas are only available to MSDN subscribers.
And to anyone with a P2P client, probably...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
For those, who don't know Hölle is German for Hell.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Brief overview and comments here.
When will it be available on Freshmeat.net?
I am NOT putting my signature in this stupid little box! How do I know you won't steal my identity???
Tested it on a few sites where i'm currently working and they all still work. That's a good start if it didn't break anything.
It fails the Acid2 Test pretty spectacularly - but then what doesn't!
No I don't believe CSS is compliant with MS yet, though I'm sure one day they'll catch up with the Redmond standards.
Just because someone charges a lot for something doesn't mean that they are price-gouging.
Just because you can't afford it doesn't mean you are entitled to a copy of it.
evil adrian
Here's the current weather in Hell.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
okay, not often can you actually use that abbreviation, but this time it's okay
"Aero, Windows Vistas new design approach, includes a set of APIs that help developers create highly usable applications that generate a positive and lasting emotional connection with users."
EMOTIONAL CONNECTION?!
god bless this new operating system!
Thank you Windows Vista!
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
I definitely recommend reading through ALL of this: Review
It clarified a lot I didn't know about Vista, and it's *gasp* even a critical review, but still not one written by an anti-Microsoft zealot, but trying to keep a pretty open mind about it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
How about transparent PNG support?
If you can't afford a $99 MSDN subscription then you either aren't a programmer by trade, or you have no idea how to properly manage your income.
evil adrian
"... features which may or may not collect personal information from users."
.NET aware.
Maybe it's a browser that may or may not be completely useless, like I really need a browser that lists the games on my computer.
Can anyone think why we needed IE6? Oh yes, it supported printer stylesheets.
Can anyone think why we need IE7? Let me guess, it's
It would be better if the browser engine was cleaned up and leave the actual browser GUI to a team who remembers how to write small fast code.
For example, the pluggable protocol interface could use a lot of work (and documenation).
According to my research here it works a treat.
Yay!
I've Found a heap of great screenshots over at news!
==
+5 predictable.
Does anyone have screenshots of this? /. before
Or is it the same as we've seen on
I'm going to call on you to back up your statement with facts:
Please explain how Microsoft charging for an MSDN subscription is an example of price-gouging, and if they are in fact charging too much money, what is a more appropriate price?
evil adrian
This is what they've done to improve CSS support in Beta 1:
Source
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
BSOD creates the "lasting emotional connection with users" referred to a couple of posts North of here... Anger, Frustration, Hate - all are emotions...
Except they do have competition, come on this is slashdot, you can't just conviently ignore apple and the 50 or so popular linux distros.
Either mac osx and linux are viable desktop os's or they aren't but you can't pretend they are half the time and then pretend ms has no competition the rest of the time.
They never learn, do they? When will they realize that many security weakness's in Windows is due to the integrated nature of IE. Seperating the browser from the OS is an integral part in securing Windows. But MS once again choose not to. Is it the new RSS features that deny this needed change?
Oh well, innovation at it's greatest. Evolution and all that jazz at work. Oh wait...Scratch that.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
So rather than implement a sandbox in the browser, they run the whole browser in a sandbox. This means that hostile scripts and ActiveX components can still be used to attack other systems, compromise the user's personal information on other web sites, steal passwords and credit card numbers, and take part in zombie networks.
On a lighter note, I'm not sure that having self-aware COM objects is a good idea. Apart from this being a dubious application of strong AI technology, won't this make shutting down your computer equivalent to murder?
But can it lie down?
No sig for me - too lazy to fill one in...
Can anyone provide a SS of IE7 viewing the acid2 test?
It is kind of slow in rendering pages compared to Firefox, Phisihing checker does not work all the time,as many websites are yet to support the feature.
I'd love to give my thoughts, but MSDN download doesn't seem to work from XP SP2. Nice one microsoft - I have to upgrade to Vista to download Vista.
that one's in
./R My blog
It's just the _end-user_ features that are out. There's still plenty of changes under the skin that need to be tested to see if the break anything.
If you're an application developer and want to make sure your code will still work on the next version of Windows then you'll be grabbing this and using it as a test-bed.
If you're just wanting to see the next version of Windows so you can gaze at the prettiness then it's not aimed at you...
My Journal
No, but it falls over quite often.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I'm writing this post in IE7.
To tell the truth, the only "improvement" I've noticed is the tabs, but tabs have been available as extensions for quite some time.
I was hoping for some CSS improvements. When I first installed it, I immediately went to a few of the more difficult CSS sites, to see if they'd render correctly. Nope - no such luck. See http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/ for example.
The toolbar has been moved around. In my copy of it, at least, the URL bar is just below the titlebar, then there are the tabs, then another bar with text buttons on the left, and some icons on the right for home, favourites, history, rss, and print.
A search bar has been integrated into the same bar as the URL entry box. I expected it to use MSN by default, but it's set to Google. Or maybe that's just on mine?
As a web developer, I was hoping for better CSS support and better debugging tools.
According to their documentation, they've addressed at least two CSS bugs. I haven't seen any improvements at all yet. I will be using Dean Edwards' script for some time yet, it seems...
On the JavaScript end, there does not seem to have been any work done on the debug tools there at all - still the old crappy "error on line X" (of what file? a bit more detail please?).
The RSS doesn't seem as good as Firefox's.
In Firefox, an icon appears on the bottom of the page you're on. You click the icon, then add the feed with another click. Immediately, you have Live Feeds, where you can open your bookmarks, scroll to the feed you want, and a list of the article headlines is immediately available.
In IE7, however, an icon highlights on the top of the page. You click the icon, which opens up the RSS and renders it (nyeh - whatever). Then you click add to favourites. Then you click to confirm that. Now, when you want to view the feeds, you open your favourites from the text toolbar, scroll down and click on the feed.
The main difference is that in IE7, you must click each feed that you want to view, whereas in Firefox, you get a preview of the new items.
Overall, I am not impressed in the slightest. Nothing innovative at all, and their CSS is still nowhere near as good as Firefox, Opera, KDE or Safari's (I know the latter two are basically the same engine...).
It's not $99 for the subscription level you're talking about but $199. $99 is just the UPGRADE price. Also, that level of subscription doesn't get you access to any OS products.
The cheapest version that does that is $700.
$700 per year is nothing to sneeze at. Even a corporation would not take such a subscription lightly.
Um, no. Gamers already have a vested interest in maintaining high levels of hardware, and by 2k7, 2GB of RAM will be ordinary. If Windows Vista requires 512MB RAM, the minimum desirable level will be around 1GB (compare XP's minimum 256MB and effective 512MB requirements). And Half-Life 2 plays decently under Windows with 512MB RAM.
I believe that GDI goes into a low-memory, null-CPU usage state when games are being played full-screen. Or at least, that would be a damn good idea. But I wonder if X can have a dual-layer mode with one hibernating layer.
On Vista being slow--first MS wants something that does what it's supposed to; then they optimize. That way they can use regression testing to determine what levels of optimization are unstable.
This is even without considering the R.E.V.O.L.U.R.I.O.N.A.R.Y theme for the buttons ripped^H^H^H^H^H^H inspired on KDE Crystal theme...
e w=2&id=8341&file1=8341-1.jpg&file2=8341-2.jpg&file 3=8341-3.jpg&name=Crystal+SVG&PHPSESSID=b09161c27e 4dc69f957fca2b9ef44a81
= 213
Take a close look to the back and forward arrows in Longhorn, that are EXACTLY the same as the KDE Crystal (take a look on the comparison)
KDE Crystal SVG look :
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?previ
Also the replicant Plastikfox for firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/themes/moreinfo.php?id
and finally, the Longhorn long awaited innovative arrows:
http://www.jcxp.net/lh_5203_shots/shots/lh11.jpg
Will MS release their skin under some OS license???
From Paul's article: Because Microsoft built a search box into the Start menu, you can no longer use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around. To launch the Control Panel in XP, for example, you simply hit the Windows key and then the "C" key and, voila, the Control Panel opens. In Windows Vista, however, when you hit the "C" key, the system assumes you're searching for an application (Figure). Sigh.
For me, the user interface of Windows peaked with Windows 3.11 and NT 3.51. In these systems, virtually every control in every program could be easily navigated to using only the keyboard, with consistent shortcuts everywhere. This was a significantly better environment than Apple has managed to provide even now, and probably the best feature of the Windows UI. In 95/NT4 the Start Menu and Task Bar required new shortcuts. Then companies started shipping keyboards with extra keys (making the spacebar shorter and a harder target to hit, and not really solving the problem for people who have to work on multiple computers with a variety of keyboards). Newer versions of Office applications removed the ability to keyboard-navigate through toolbars (with or without he new keyboards). What's next?
Is it just me, or does this idea of Virtual Folders sound awfully familiar? Anyone know how this compares in functionality and purpose to Apple's Smart Folders?
To quote Tom's Hardware Guide: "While the code also includes an early look at the new user-interface design, the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2."
So it's not even feature-complete, and this is a wide beta? Beta's are supposed to be feature and code complete and frozen; the purpose of beta being to find last minute interaction with customer setups.
It would be more honest to call it "preview" or something.
The Micro$oft pages have a "Was this information useful?" button at the bottom of the page. :D
I voted no. Then it asked me WHY the information wasn't useful, and I voted "Not what I am looking for" That sums up IE pretty nicely, no?
What I really am interested in knowing is how much DRM "technology" is active, and why beta-testers would inflict that on themselves.
... I'm glad I moved to mac. I liked Windows 2000, liked XP for a bit, and went back to 2k. I started looking at the mac platform when Mac OS X first came out, and switched when I bought my Mac Mini. I'm never going back, I see the future of both platforms, and I can't say I see much that I like in the Windows world. Everything looks cubersome, bloated, and ugly. Everyone I know that runs windows is always complaining about slowness, etc, and it's all from viruses/malware. I'm excited to see what this does to the Windows world, if anything. Everyone in the PC market is looking for a good deal at Walmart. I'd like to see Microsoft taken off the throne, and replaced with apple.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I've often noticed on my laptop (which only has 512 MB RAM) that when I exit a full screen game I've been playing for a bit, XP practically has to start up again, and it takes a bit for everything to come back on-line. My desktop (1.5 GB RAM, but slower processor) doesn't do this. So I think perhaps you're right about the null-CPU state.
How can a milionaire enterprise as MS, can't change desktop icons and start menu ...
I don't know why but, many of things that i have seen in screenshot i saw long time in Linux and in Mac ...
There are one problem, the 90% of joe user don't know that. And they will absorve all MS marketing. For me longhorn it's a crap, maybe a windows 2003 for joe user, but horrible in design.
Linux dune 2.6.9-gentoo-r3 #4 SMP Thu Nov 11 15:52:41 UTC 2004 x86_64 4 GNU/Linux
Where have you been??
This is slashdot, that exactly what we do here...
He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security
More Info
4 .aspxa milyId=718E9B3A-64FE-4A4C-9DDF-57AF0472EAD2&displa ylang=en
a boo.html and http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/guill otine.html. The final release of Internet Explorer 7 will focus on improving the developer experience by reducing the time needed for developing and testing on different browsers."
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/27/44400
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
"CSS improvements. CSS is a widely used standard for creating Web pages. Internet Explorer 7 is prioritizing compliance to CSS standards by first implementing the features that developers have said are most important to them. As a result, in Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 Microsoft has addressed some of the major inconsistencies that can cause Web developers problems producing rich, interactive Web pages. The work Microsoft has done includes fixing some positioning and layout issues related to the way Internet Explorer 6 handles tags. (More information about these bugs can be found online at http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/peek
What a Mac OS rip off!! not to mention tabbed browsing which has been part of Mozilla for years. What sucks is that Microsoft now gets credit for creating tabbed browsing (by the less technical).
I'm sure all the linux devotees will have something to say about your 'no competition' comment.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
OK, I was lazy and didn't start downloading from MSDN until this morning. Right now MSDN downloads are running slower than I've seen in several years.
Mac OS X!
Seriously, I read Paul Thurott's review (linked in other comments, so I'm not bothering) and looked at the screenshots and images showing certain features-- it's frankly ridiculous exactly how much of Vista has been lifted directly from Mac OS X.
Hey, Microsoft: Back when Tiger was demoed and Apple had banners in the exhibit hall that said, "Redmond, start your photocopiers," that was NOT an invitation, it was really more a wry commentary on your "innovation"-- I think you may have missed that.
"along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse." I spent all night in mspaint designing that logo!! graaargh!!!
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
The cost of an MSDN subscription is far, far less than the cost of all the products available.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Hail to the brand new slashdot meme/troll/in soviet russia... !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Visual Studio for Linux was just released, you should give it a look.
One very simple question. Why?
He's just a troll. Longhorn cum Vista was just plopped on MSDN last night, so there is little of value that our friendly troll could have derived from it in that short of a period of time.
I assume there is an NDA but you can tell us something....
There is no NDA, and it's hardly a secret beta - there are some 500,000 MSDN subscribers. I'm one and am installing it in a VirtualPC session right now. I doubt I'm going to be back in 20 minutes calling it the greatest thing I've ever seen.
Oooo, I'm so excited.. about IE7 that is. It basically decides a large part of the future of my web development career and how much cutting edge trickery I get to play with. Windows Vista is a joke though, it will take more than that to pull me back away from OSX Tiger.
Gadgetoid.com - Gadgets & Games Journalism
I click on the Slashdot homepage link (the Slashdot logo), and it won't even navigtate there... wtf? I have to hit my home button to get back! Nice freaking beta!
I am not impressed with this at all. The toolbards will reset themselves unless you drag them by resizing them first and then moving them to the correct location. Otherwise, they forget where they are supposed to be.
Also, the Links bar is kinda screwed up. Every folder and link has a set width, and there are now links that used to be there that aren't now.
There is a difference between Linux being a viable desktop OS and it being true competition for Microsoft Windows.
Actually phishing databases aren't new. The browser Deepnet Explorer http://www.deepnetexplorer.com/ [www.deepnetexplorer.com] already has a phishing database, which is quite effective.
Isn't this just a fancy way to say playlist? I fail to see the usefullness of adding yet another layer of confusion to getting to a users files. Not to mention, this ought to make user migration a joy for enterprise users.
--WooooHoooo--
... this just seems like common microsoft sludge hammer ware. They take some ideas from a few places, package all the new software together, and take some ideas from third party applications, and you smash it together with a sludehammer. Nothing looks new, exciting, or even the least bit cool. It looks like Microsoft trying to play catchup (just now getting RSS and tabbed browsing), and in the process moving some things around. In most of the reviews, all I hear is speak about menus and stuff being moved around, and dialogs being layed out differntly. Why do people envy this crap?
Sig: I stole this sig.
You're not paying for the idea. You're paying for the fact that they put a lot of work into implementing that idea, especially if that resulting implementation is more valuable to you than its free competition.
Just to show how it is all the same stuff with a sticker placed over it, check this out:
I mean look at this
Been the same since '95
Sig: I stole this sig.
Eh?
That would work if the developer/writer/creative person knocked it up in precisely zero seconds. Otherwise how can it have no value, since somebody took some of their time to "create" it?
I think the value of information/services/software surely has to be relative to the amount of effort you would have to undertake to reproduce it yourself.
If you can't do it/find it/work it out and want it badly enough, then pay for it. Seems fair to me.
By your argument, if you want a decorator to paint your house you'll expect him (or her) to come round, paint your walls and just bill you for the paint! If you find a decorator who'll do that, can I get his number...
Well, if it costs nothing to make the operating system, why not develop your own?
Perhaps I should have rephrased my question better, i.e. why should I upgrade in the near future?
I know eventually I'll have to upgrade, I'm just holding out for a product worth upgrading for...
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
I am glad I'm not the only one disapointed in Vista.
Thousands upon thousands of hours of work go into the production of information and software for MSDN subscribers. Do you think that all of the content and software on MSDN just *magically appeared* one day, and Microsoft just decided to put a gate around it and charge a ton of money?
Get a clue!
Your logic is severely, SEVERELY flawed.
evil adrian
The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing, since the costs of reproducing what is basically an abstract representation of information is nearly zero.
I can understand an idea being free. As in I thought of this doesn't it sound cool. Now let me spend 5000 hours of my time implementing my idea and just because the efforts of my work happen to be a piece of software it should be free also?
Think of it this way, if you took your car into the shop to get it fixed and the mechanic flipped a switch in a hidden compartment and then charged you $500 to fix it
Software is more like it taking the mechanic many hours to find and flip the switch the first time. Now hopefully he can duplicate his same effort in less time the next time. Being a bright mechanic he charges you less than it actually costs assuming he'll be able to charge the next person for the same action and take less time doing it.
Now if you want to argue that a piece of software should eventually become free after a company recoups it's development costs and some profit I could understand. Saying that software is intangible and it should be free from the start isn't keeping in mind the costs of creating it to begin with.
I'd like to see a selective install that (like Linux installs) actually lets you strip out all the cruft. No Outlook, MSN, Move Maker, photo stuff, games, etc. Even allow you to choose a Win-2000 style interface at install time.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Nice.
How do they work with mucky old day to day css kludges? And were they written to deliberately pass the Acid Test i wonder?
Bah I should've have picked that up myself....
I blame 5:00 am wake up call and no coffee....
It would be nice to get some honest/objective review of it. All that exist now is it alot of hot air...
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing, since the costs of reproducing what is basically an abstract representation of information is nearly zero.
My guess is you work in IT. By your logic, your work is worth nothing and you should be paid accordingly.
Seriously. I don't think you can even convince RMS with this faulty logic.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I think the value of information/services/software surely has to be relative to the amount of effort you would have to undertake to reproduce it yourself.
I agree.
By your argument, if you want a decorator to paint your house you'll expect him (or her) to come round, paint your walls and just bill you for the paint!
Not at all. I'm contracting for a service and the painter is rendering that service, so he deserves to be paid for labor and materials.
I have realized that after re-reading my post I did not make it clear what I really meant. I meant that I would not pay for the information contained in the software, but I would gladly pay the developer for his work. In the analogy, I would refuse to pay for "parts", but would gladly pay for labor (which I alluded to regarding donations to developers). It is a very nuanced position that probably has no real world meaning, but I am very strict in that respect.
GUI. Graphical User Interface. It's an art and a science all it's own. In the past, I did GUI programming for 4 years. It's an entire world when done right, with things like GUI standards, best practices, things called "deferred-create" and other cute names for ways to organize things on the screen.
I am shocked that a company like Microsoft can actually fuck up every GUI best practice rule out there.
IMO they spent a ton of time trying to rip of OS X and Aqua, but then change it enough so it has a look and feel as if it had Win XP roots. But it's a total mess. Scroll bars do not look like scroll bars, and are extremely faded. THERE IS DEAD SPACE EVERYWHERE!!! Six inch by one inch desk space areas just to show a word or two off text. Some buttons look like buttons, others look like internet links that are underlined, others only have an underline when you roll-over! I could go on and on, but I am seriously shocked. I know it's beta, but the UI will not change much, you are pretty much looking at the final product from a UI standpoint.
This is bad enough to make me leave the last Windows machine I have, and deal with windows just within a virtual environment on OS X. I "HAVE" to leave now, it's that bad a GUI. Shameful.
After much research, I found a way to have perfect CRM and financials for the small businesses out there that need to leave but can't because of those two reasons, those two kind of apps that DO run well on Windows.
Look at Salesforce.com, it works great in Safari (HTML and JavaScript, nothing else) and it misses nothing. And look at QuickBooks PRO for Mac OS X. You can only get Pro, not Premium for the Mac, but the few differences there will not be missed by most other than advanced accountants. And go with Apples Pages and Keynote or go with Open Office for the office work. Even MS Office for Mac if you need to, it's actually ok. That Salesforce.com + QuickBooks for Mac is what will help me live without Windows.
Bill G deserves a bitch smack for pushing such a counter-productive OS onto the world for the next several years. he will be wasting many decades worth of man hours for doing so. Criminal.
It looks like they finally built a good, intuitive UI.n g
http://www.brastensager.com/images/WindowsVista.p
They don't have to provide new features, improved security or a sturdy OS. They have 10 Billion dollars to make sure Windows Vista succeeds. As long as it's not a total flaming piece of crap, it'll sell and it'll sell well...
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
Opera doesn't fail 'spectacularly'. In fact it's almost there.
yea
1/ lots of developers and software add value to the M$ platform.
2/ good things like msdn attract devlopers to ms platform along with Vstudio++.net.whocares.
3/ they have lready paid for the priveldge of developing for MS product. licence fees for the OS and IDE [the ide at least adds value to their investment.]
ergo its a little cheeky for MS to charge money for the privelege of being part of their dev community. but oh wait they're the only game in town. so you shuld be grateful they are hepling you develop for their popular OS with all teh potential cutomers using it. despite their braindead platform bad buggy API.
also: alot of the collated info comes from MSDN subscribers. a not so open collaboration. big reports etc. tips and tricks, etc.
so yeah we are the lucky ones.
no no no. MS has it all backwards. the devs are gold:
"DEVLEOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
familiar?
after all who uses MS PAINT or notepad or ms movie editor or wmplayer to play their dvds ot of the box? answer: no-one.
so they need apps. devleopers. a stcok fresh install xp box is worthless. doenst do anything.
oh wiat its got IE6.
wooohoo!
MS have subverted the entire concepts of IT.,
anything they say. do or wnat you to do. thuink of the opposite and it makes sense. emperor has no clothes and night is actually day. just take off the blindfold.
now apple who gets no love from me probably are worse as you prbably get less from them for the same sort of dev subscription.
It feels like a slightly more mature IE6. ... etc" bar to the very top where all normal applications to date have been.
Built in MSN search is kind of annoying, although I'd imagine there'll be either an option or a hack to make this into a google search (still a step behind FireFox's ability to choose from a plethora of search engines).
I was a bit distressed that the first time I visited my personal website and blog, a "Phishing" warning came up, telling me that I should be aware of sites that want to scam me. :S
It lacks the little animated icon that all web browsers have had in the top right corner of the screen showing if IE is still "working" or not. That's been changed to a tiny icon on the tab (IE 7 has tabs).
I'm annoyed that you can move the "File, Edit, View
Overall, thus far (its only been about an hour of use), I'd say IE7 is just IE6 with some shit moved around, added ActiveX protection, tabs support and a new icon.
Browser of choice is still FireFox, but MS seems to have made a step in the right direction.
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
So a guy calls up a mechanic, because his car is acting all funny, running like crap, belching blue smoke, the works.
The mechanic looks at the car for a few seconds, rummages around in his tool box, pulls out a nut and a washer, crawls under the car with a wrench, and comes out a minute later without the nut and washer.
Then he leans in and starts the car, which runs perfectly.
Then he goes into his office and returns with a bill for 500 dollars. The customer goes nuts, screams rants yells, "You just put on ONE nut! And you're going to charge me 500 dollars for ONE NUT?"
The mechanic shrugs, goes back into his office, and returns with a new bill.
It reads:
Nut: 50 cents.
Knowing where to put the nut: 499.50
Total: 500.00
There are many things that you can't hold in your hand that have intrinsic value, moron.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If IE used another engine, then we could finally stop writing multiple CSS hacks and fretting over lack of PNG support to make up for Trident's next-to-worthless implementation of both.
Yeah, right.
Paying for information is simply not something many people are ready to do.
;-) Be it bribing a memeber of a waring tribe for information, paying for a college education, or simply getting online. Information is MUCH more valuable than most "tangible" items like a house or a car. Unless you can aquire valuable information, you won't be able to even think about being able to aquire such "tangible" items as those.
Does this explain the state of the American education system? Or the "bad" information that lead us to war?
Seriously though basically EVERYONE pays for information everyday! In fact in one way, shape, or form you are paying right now to be getting the information (slashdot post) you are replying to. Paying for internet access is a very simple example of people paying for information. Cost of your access may go to support tangible items (ISP infrastructure and profit), but presumably you don't really care about some wire runs to your house except for the information it provides you. The ISP much charge you to support thier infrastructure and profit, but you just want the information. Similarly, MS (or any other software company) also needs to support thier infrastructure and profit. Some like MS get this money to support these items from charging fees to end users. Others like Google get this money to support these items by being paid to show advertisements to the end-users. Still others like many OSS projects get this money to support these items (sometime less the corporate profit) from corporate sponsorship. The underlieing principles are the same.
Saying people aren't ready to pay for information is CRAZY! People have been paying for information for as long as thier was money
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
I've been using linux for 4 years on every computer in my house, I use it for games, multimedia, programming, documents (college student), and everything you use windows for. Plus I get a nifty package manager to simplify installtions, so if anything, I'd say that Linux is easier to use than Windows, its free (in both ways), and the only reason Windows is keeping Linux at bay is because of fragmentation between distros, they have a huge user base that is scared of change, and they have all of the game makers in their pocket (less I.D., they are great) So competition? It isn't a competition, Windows is a hack, linux/bsd/hurd(eventually) is a real OS.
Hows about calling it PCMCIA "Protection Compromised-- Microsoft Can't Improve Anything"
I don't think that'll work, as People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.
Thanks. All I need now is a bunch of proprietory hardware and I'm away!
Either mac osx and linux are viable desktop os's or they aren't but you can't pretend they are half the time and then pretend ms has no competition the rest of the time.
Home run! You just summed up all that is Slashdot in one sentence.
Look at the size of icons! They're freaking huge! They've got their own weather system. Icons! Pants! Now!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'd guess most computer professionals' work is "not a tangible object". Apparently you are a student at Wright State University. After you graduate with your CS major, what exactly are you planning on doing? Selling hot dogs? Hopefully you don't plan on being a software engineer, systems admin, database admin, or well almost anything else that a typical CS major would be interested in.
The cheapest option to get OSes betas with MSDN subscriptions seems to be MSDN Professional, at $699.
Or so it seems according to this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/subscribers/
$99 bucks now, huh?
I may get me one of those.
The last time I had an MSDN subscription was 1996/97.
I was working as an indepedent contractor, on Windows drivers.
The subscription ran me 3 or 4 large a year (but did include 10 float licenses for all MS OSs, and full international versions of same - call it 200 CDs a year. Give or take).
Now, I assume (please correct me), that $99 doesn't get you all the CDs; that you have to download material you are interested in (so it would be useless to internationalization efforts, stuff like that).
But it provides access to all those OSs and versions?
The reason I question this, is that the retail XP goes for 1 to 2 hundred around here. 10 licenses (floatable to different hardware) would then be 2 large, and having access to 20 or 30 (whatever) variants...
It would make MSDN a better deal than buying the OS!
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
They ARE viable desktop platforms for SOME people, but not others.
but you can't pretend they are half the time and then pretend ms has no competition the rest of the time.
Who's pretending?
SOME of us use linux as our primary desktop platforms. MANY OTHERS do not. It's as simple as that, right here, right now. All three platforms are changing with time (mostly improvements). The ratios of "market share" may change going forward, but for the forseeable future, it's quite likely SOME people will use linux, some will using macos, some will use microsoft windows, and even a few others may using other systems.
Instead, consider that perhaps YOU may ask if you're trying to pretend that for an operating system to be "desktop viable" it needs to work for ALL people.
I can and IS the case that linux is a viable desktop for some people, but not others.
In fact, it could easily be said that microsoft windows is a viable desktop platform for some people, but many others can't use it (often they can't manage to utilize any current platforms and prefer to simply avoid using computers).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'd be interested to see how something like Valve's Steam would show up in the game window. Would it show up as just Steam, or would it show the various Steam-based games?
I personally have noticed no speed difference, but I have a fast machine.
My dad has a WinXP (no service pack 2) and i think his processor is less than 1 GHz. His drivers are the generic vga drivers. Firefox DOES crawl in this configuration. My sister tried to browse the web in firefox, but it was awfully slow. She switched to IE and it was much faster.
The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing, since the costs of reproducing what is basically an abstract representation of information is nearly zero.
In Soviet Russia, your idea actually appeals to someone. In the real world it is unbelievable naive and idiotic.
An MSDN subscription is actually remarkably inexpensive given the value one derives from it. If you don't like it, then don't buy it. Go and live in your land of everything non-physical being free.
A tecnnical overview for a web browser in ".doc" format. Oh, Microsoft, will ye never change? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=718E9B3A-64FE-4A4C-9DDF-57AF0472EAD2&displa ylang=en
I suspect that some folks with mod points may attack early posts simply to discourage early posts. Without digressing too far OT (God forbid) about the merits of modding styles, I have seen a fair bit of instant TROLL modding for reasons I don't understand. Or do understand and don't agree with.
But I'm not going to "explain" the joke. I'm confident that whoever modded me down simply likes MS and got offended that I poked a little fun at the latest in a long line of on-schedule*, stable*, secure*, enjoyable*, standards-compliant*, affordable*, innovative*, configurable*, intuitive* offerings from the good folks in Redmond.
* Not Necessarily true.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Well... that was a whole lot of fuss about nothing. I truly don't know what I expected from Microsoft.
..system wide RSS integration and a whole-bunch-of-features-stolen-from-OSX branded with a Microsoft logo to make sure we all know it's high grade proprietary worthless crap that was actually and surprisingly developed by intelligent human beings and not just cobbled together by monkeys who arranged the shredded strands of 500 billion pages of printed source-code by sneezing at them.
Improved CSS support? Yeah. Right.
This is IE6 with tabs and a "phishing filter". Nothing new here. The RSS reader is abysmal, not even comparing to that of Safari 2.0.. not to mention I couldn't find a visible button to access the feeds on a website and had to dig in the tools menu for it.
CSS support has some minor improvements, but nothing groundbreaking. IE7 fails the Acid2 test miserably, which is tough luck because we're probably not going to see IE8 for 5 years now.
Microsoft have the future of SVG and CSS3 in the palms of their hands and they are content to toss it aside so they can implement a couple of silly superficial features to keep the monkey-brained masses happy and try to pass us developers off with "immproved CSS support" and a PNG transparent support which is nice, but frankly I'm having none of it. Microsoft have officially torn the final straw from my clutches and chewed it into a pulp before my very eyes.
As for Windows Vista.. whoopety-fucking-doo
And to think... how long has IE7 been in the works before it took them to come out with this shitty beta? In 10 minutes they could have handed the Mozilla group seven figures to use Gecko in their commercial crap-pile which would have made everyone happy. But nooooo, they can't even do the sensible thing.
Money grubbing idiots.
Gadgetoid.com - Gadgets & Games Journalism
As explained in another part of this thread, I deserve to be paid for my labor, but not for the idea of the program.
As far as my career goals are concerned, the job market in this area isn't looking well unless you're willing to work for the DoD, so I might end up selling hot dogs. In a pefect world, my interests in computer graphics and borderline OCPD would hopefully get me a job writing drivers (I enjoy working with lower level languages) for graphics cards, etc.
So the mechanic is charging 26970 dollars an hour because of his knowledge of cars? Just because you can make an analogy to a car mechanic doesn't mean that analogy makes any sense. And I doubt such a mechanic would ever get a repeat customer.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
Consider how we treat animals, I doubt we'll bat an eyelash
Most people seem to avoid considering animals as being self-aware in the sense that humans are. Whether that's true or not, if you had some kind of formal proof that a software component was self-aware in that sense... would that make a difference.
The increase in file size is because of using an imaged based set up...o yment.mspx
Read all about it...
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/basics/depl
~www.devnull.co.uk
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
Forgetting about the huge costs of education, be that University fees, exam fees or even just books or Internet access, is not the time spent learning worth anything? If I spent 5 years of my life learning how to fix your problem, is that nearly zero effort? I think you are getting confused with the copyright infridgement isn't stealing diatribe!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Look, if you think MS is truely M$, and that they make crap software, why do you use? There are plenty of jobs in the Linux, BSD, Unix, and Mac arena. The MS field is already flooded with all sort of ppl, which lowers your opportunities and pay.
And if you are making money with MS and need to stay updated, then you really should just pay them. They are in business to make money the same as you or me. Why not just pay them, avoid the possible legal hassles, and know that you are better than MS, rather than being like them?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can tell you for sure that M$ developers spent a lot of time studying features in FireFox. I can hardly see anything which is not already available in FireFox
In all fairness, the first time that you try to go to a page different from the default, it opens up a security window that explains the filter, and offers to turn it on. So even though it is off by default, the first time using the browser it will offer to turn it on for you.
Knowledge is taken into account when determining how much the mechanic charges for labor.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
Have you considered a career in academia?
The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing.
We better get rid of the FSCKing stock market too, then. Not a lot of TANGIBLE stuff gets traded there. Maybe all the STOCKs should be free too.
You'd expect the price of the service to be proportional to how much work it takes to render the service.
Uh, hundreds of programmers * several years == a lot of work. When you buy software, you are paying just a small part of the total cost of producing the software. THE COST OF PRODUCING THE SOFTWARE IS MUCH GREATER THAN THE COST OF COPYING THE CD. YOU ARE PAYING PART OF THE AMORTIZED COST OF THE ENTIRE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.
Stop making pathetic excuses for your behavior. If you're going to steal, say, "I'm stealing." If not, then don't, but don't try to delude yourself and especially the rest of us into thinking that you have some kind of moral justification for what you are doing.
Assertions like yours just make me ill.
I'm currently waiting for the 2.4G download to finish! :-)
I'm only really interested to see if my driver (WDM) still works
return 0; }
While i agree that you shouldn't be entitled to the new one, People PAYED for Win98,Winme(shudder),And the wonderful Win2k.Now they are being "forced" to jump to Winxp(stinky poo,And next year Vista(resource piggy) if they want the HUGE security holes "fixed".No one makes me get rid of my 96 nissan just to get the brakes to work.If Microsoft won't or can't give the older ones the newest features then at least fix the leaking holes(you know,the ones that were there WHILE they were still under service that Microsoft never bothered to get around to). If they refuse to do the work themselves at least share enough of the underpinnings to let other people fix it.My mechanic doesn't have to be a certified nissan mechanic just to make my truck safe to drive.I know that Win2k is part of Winxp,But at least share some of Win9x if they are just going to toss it in the dump.And if Vista isn't WinNT based they should share enough WinNT so that whitehats can at least plug some of the numerous holes they left behind. The having to toss good machines because you can't get Microsoft to plug the leaks in their previous products is stupid and one of the reasons I'm glad I'll be learning Linux in school this fall.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You mean the same way there's a difference between KC Cola being a viable soda and it being true competition for Coca-cola? The difference is that Coke is soooo much better that soooo many more people buy it and KC Cola is almost never even mentioned.
I'm not saying necessarily that this is the state of things between Linux and Windows. But the above example is the only difference I can think of between being a viable product and true competition (that is, quality).
I seem to recall hearing this story before, except that "a guy" was actually General Electric, and the "mechanic" was Charles Steinmetz, and it was a thousand dollars.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
He never claims that Linux isn't a viable desktop os. He just says that you can't claim that MS doesn't have competition if you also claim that Linux (or Mac) is viable.
So, in the end, your response doesn't even address his comment.
As explained in another part of this thread, I deserve to be paid for my labor, but not for the idea of the program.
;-).
;-)!
OK, then what is your "labor"? Your labor, would be using your fingers to tap some plastic keys right? What do you expect to get paid for that???? You can EASILY train a monkey to do that or even cheaper just fill a room with keyboards and let loose a bunch of chickens, or whatever. They are VERY cheap will tap the keys as they walk around and you can even eat them if you get hungry (try doing that with a human employee and see what happens
Nobody is going to pay you squat for your "labor" of pressing some keys on a keyboard. However, they WILL pay you well if you happen to have the information to allow you to know the proper combination of keys in the proper order (chickens are notorious for not looking for things like buffer overflows
If you work in IT (or a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant, etc, etc, etc) you don't deserve squat for your "labor", but your knowledge (information) can be quite valuable.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Sounds like there's no upgrade from XP option as of yet? Can anyone confirm this? I guess that will definitely keep in the hands of developers or other power users who know all about dual-booting (or can dedicate a machine to it.) Probably harder to discover software compatibility bugs, like the many that plagued XP SP2. I was thinking about installing it at home, but have a strong suspicion that it won't work with my old Belkin PCI wireless card, thus making it not worth the effort of dual booting that machine.
Blue Smoke Of Death!
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
I can only conclude that you have almost zero education, because I seem to remember that my degree took significantly more effort than "nearly zero" to obtain.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Knowing where to put the nut: $0
Knowledge is power. They teach this even in first grade. In my school, they taught it in kindergarten.
Your comments show why you are not a mechanic. Its actually a simple idea. If the mechanic "price gouges" you on your car, you simply do it back when he walks in to get his computer fixed.
I feel appalled at how much I get paid for doing things that seem simple, like changing a registry key, and etc. That kind of work *doesn't even involve changing a nut and washer*, but do I think I should be compensated for it? Certainly!
$500 is a bit excessive for knowledge and labor, but if a mechanic charged me a hundred for fixing one thing with a simple nut and explained what to watch out for in the future so it didn't happen again, I'd gladly hand it over to him and thank him for not dragging out the work over the next two days.
I threw together some quick tests for a few of my most hated IE issues to see if there has been anything fixed.
t ml
t ml
All are still just as broken as in IE6. It looks like VERY little effort has been put into the rendering engine so far. Absolutely pathetic.
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/divhover.html
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/selectheight.h
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/selectzindex.h
Even in Soviet Russia people charged for goods and services. Honestly you're as bad as the GP poster.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Interestingly enough, the IE7 search field defaults to Google (but supports MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Ask Jeeves.
That is exactly why the world isn't ready to migrate to Linux/*BSD.
If you are paying for the work that went into the idea, then how come a licence always costs the same no matter how many copies they sell? At some point the copies sold should compensate for the work, after that they are just making money for nothing.
Even in Soviet Russia people charged for goods and services. Honestly you're as bad as the GP poster.
High, dumbshit, we are talking about items with zero reproduction costs, not goods and services (which obviously have reproduction costs).
I don't know about you, but I don't want to give $300 to a criminal company that funds terrorism Excuse me? I would be interested in some PROOF for such an allegation. While I am no Microsoft lover, I find irrational statements against any company or person just so the stupidity of the writer. Seeing as you posted Anonymously it further shows your lack of courage. Your stupid US laws Ah, here is where you really give yourself away... why don't you just leave our STUPID American software on the shelf and go about your bottom feeder life.
According to this site http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/subscribers MSDN-Operating Systems Level is $699. To me, yes, that is lots of money.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Following things are broken for me on XP SP2
1. Windows update keeps spinning(for the last one hour)
2. Missing icons for Stop loading page and Refresh page(not in customizable list of icons too)
3. Trillian's msn connection is broken.
4. The Home,etc., icons disappear some times.
I can't believe that they could screw up interface so much. IE7 breaks Microsofts own GUI guidelines.
They apparently wanted to make it simple (only 2 buttons, like a browser for monkeys), but by making all toolbars upside down they've made it look more confusing and chaotic than Netscape 8.
And you're talking about a political system where people were still allowed to charge for things. BTW just because something has zero reproductions costs doesn't mean it can't be classified as either goods or services.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I did the same. The first thing I tried to do was download a document that described IE7 and, surprise, the browser crashed. The tabs are ugly. they have that little blank holder button at the end which looks awful The address bar and tas are one element instead of each being a toobar. You can't put the tabs right above the window.
The anti-phishing stuff looks possibly promising, at the cost of having your browser report your browsing activity to MS. hanven't tried CSS stuff yet or printing (they can rink a page to fit??).
You mean like paying for school, encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, Internet access, website subscriptions, libraries, credit reports....people pay for information all the time.
That's so dumb.
Lets turn it around. Say the mechanic doesn't know where to put the nut, and it takes him 20 hours to figure that out, which isn't unreasonable if experience and knowledge count for nothing.
Hell, the mechanic is probably a former fry cook who thought, "What the hell, I'll be a mechanic from now on" and the guy who owns the auto shop also thought that was a good idea, because, like you, he doesn't value knowledge or experience.
So, in that case, at 50.00 an hour, which seems to be the figure you're using, that mechanic would give a bill for 1000.00.
Down the street, the first mechanic, the skilled one, would be billing people a dollar to fix problems the guy up the street is charging a thousand dollars to fix. He would have to fix one...thousand...cars...to make the same as the unskilled mechanic made fixing one car.
Take an example shamelessly cribbed from a book I'm sure a lot of people here have read...
Take the raw materials for an apple pie. Flour eggs, apples, butter, sugar, etc. These things are intrinsically valuable. No one would disagree with that.
Now a skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a short time, produce a superiour pie.
A less skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a longer time, produce an acceptable pie.
An unskilled chef, could take those ingredients, and, in a still longer time, make an inedible mess.
By your standards, the last chef would be the one that produced the most valuable product, because he put the most immediate work into it, followed by the second chef, with the skilled chef coming in last.
The problem is clear; the value of the object produced is not dependent on the amount of work put into producing it. The unskilled chef produced something of value zero, or even negative value because he destroyed something of intrinsic value to make something of no value. Conversely, the skilled chef produced something of higher value, because, with his skill, he produced a superior product.
That is why, here in the real world, people are rewarded based on their skill, and not based on their effort. Life is not a gimpy little league game where everybody gets a trophy, and out here, if you don't get results, you don't get paid. But if you get more and better results than someone else who is doing the same thing you get paid more than they do, even if it took you less time.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's simple actually, the dollar figures don't matter. If you can do it in 10 minutes, and it takes a normal person an hour, then you charge 6 times as much as a normal person, or more if you want to bill extra for doing it faster than anyone else.
The free market will take care of it. If the same guy had taken the same car to a different garage and it had taken them hours and many diagnostics to figure out the problem, and they'd ended up charging as much or more, then you'd have been far better off taking your car to the first guy's garage.
On the other hand, if they charged less for the same results, you'd be better off steering clear of the one nut wonder.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Here they are.
As explained in another part of this thread, I deserve to be paid for my labor, but not for the idea of the program.
<Manager> Hey great new idea! How much will it cost BigCorp to have you it up? Oh, that much? Can you do it for a quarter of that? No? Well, sorry, I'm going to get a bunch of guys in India to code it up for $1.50/hour. Got anything else of actual value, or should I just lay you off now?</Manager>
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
There are many things that you can't hold in your hand that have intrinsic value, moron.
I was about to suggest that it's possible to hold a mechanic in your hand, but it'd just sound dirty, so I wont.
Then you're a hypocrite. The only difference between the two is that in software, the time, materials, dollars, and other resources that went into the creation of the end product happened up front.
The fact that distribution costs are low has nothing to do with the fact that the creation costs are high... and that both sets of costs need to be recouped.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I did about 30 min of testing, going around all the quirks and compliance sites. The rendering engine has either not been worked on yet or maybe they are pushing that "feature" out to IE8.
Got some more details on my blog, case yer interested. (No ads, don't worry.)
I don't know about you, but I don't want to give $300 to a criminal company that funds terrorism.
Wow. Hiding behind anonymity to commit libel... you are a worthless human being.
evil adrian
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
I can only conclude that you have almost zero education, because I seem to remember that my degree took significantly more effort than "nearly zero" to obtain.
I can only conclude that you scored very low on reading comprehension tests. His point was that professionals performing a service should charge based on the service they provide instead of just saying, "pay me $XXXXX because I'm really knowledgable." Some services, such as medical or legal services are more expensive than others, like, say, lawn mowing. A mechanic charging $500 for a quick fix like that, especially since he didn't give an estimate first, is definately an instance of price gouging.
You seem to think that people can expect to be paid whatever they want for their services, regardless of what the market value is. You wouldn't be a consultant, would you?
I suppose I should be more calm, but essentially what he's saying is that he is free to take *my* work and pay nothing for it. He is saying that all the time *I* spent (or some sde brother-in-spirit of mine) is his to take . . . for nothing!
Well, it's obvious that you haven't been paying close enough attention to your inbox. I get several letters a day telling me how I can get any degree I want without any effort what so ever.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
For anyone who doesn't know, "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" was said by Steve Ballmer (works with MS).
But I've gotta give it to you, I think in some respects they have lost sight of that mission.
Exactly :-)
How does paying a positive amount of cash for an item with negative value equate to a 'remarkably inexpensive' transaction. The MSDN only seems to have positive value because you are operating in an environment where Microsoft's illegal monopoly forces you to use inferior tools to develop for inferior platforms. I guess paying protection money to a gangster looks 'remarkably inexpensive' when the alternative is having your business torched.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Like it or not, most of us have a built-in fairness meter. When someone says that a drug company sells a pill for $45 that costs them $0.27 cents to manufacture, the outrage is automatic. Then comes the reasonable explanation that research costs have to be re-couped, and the anger subsides (people can be surprisingly reasonable by default). Then, when you find out that Pfizer spent $7billion on research last year, and netted a profit of $48billion, the research argument tends to go out the window. We know what price gouging looks like when we see it.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
I'd be glad to pay him upwards of $50/hr for labor and a good margin for the cost of materials.
Sorry, you get to dictate what you'll pay, not what someone charges. If the only mechanic in town is charging $51/hour, then buy a bike. Too bad.
What's most disgusting is your blatent hypocrisy. You admit the software has a high value you to you... "but (I) want to stay up-to-date on the latest software and know whats out there, so I can deal with it in the future", but you're not willing to pay for it. I'm going to assume you're an IT drone who wants to stay up to date to keep their salary. You're willing to make thousands of dollars a year in salary to support the software, but only so long as you don't have to pay for it.
You're a hypocritical, petty thief who steals from corporations and then sells services based on that theft to other corporations. You try to convince yourself and others that you're on some kind of higher moral plane for it, but you're not Robin Hood. You're just a hood.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
>anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing
:)
Using that logic, then you shouldn't be paid for any job you ever do - after all, it's just time on your part, right? Time spent exercising skills, knowledge, experience... but none of those are tangible things either, right? The cost to reproduce those on demand, are nil - so why should you get paid?
>You'd expect the price of the service to be proportional to how much work it takes to render the service.
Actually, I don't, and I suspect that many others (most?) don't either. I expect the price to be proportional to the type of service rendered, the skill(s), knowledge and experience necessary to render it, and the amount of time needed to do so.
>Paying for information is simply not something many people are ready to do.
The flaw in this statement, of course, is that software isn't "information" in any generally accepted sense. I'm sure you'd like to think so, to make it fall within the whole "information wants to be free" "thing". But, your desires notwithstanding, it isn't so, nor should it be.
So, to be accurate, and honest with yourself and the world, you should rephrase it: "Paying for software is simply not something I want to do, and I'd like to think that many others feel the same". There, that's better
>The idea that an idea has monetary value is not something I agree with.
You're confused. Actually, I initially thought you were a troll, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Here's an exercise: Let's consider an idea, for a program that allows someone to capture words, sentences, etc., in electronic form. Let's call this idea a "word processor". Got it? Great!
Congratulations, you're now in possession of an idea for which you paid nothing.
The specific manifestation of that idea in software, however, is owned by the person or company that created it. This is called "copyright", perhaps you've heard of it? In addition, the terms under which that is released is also owned by them, as copyright holders.
You are free to not accept those terms, which also means that you're not entitled to benefit from the items so protected.
Simple, no?
Can you tell me what development tool is superior to visual studio? Certainly not KDevelop. Anjunta? I haven't used it so I guess I wouldn't know. I've used more than ten different development environments in my (admittedly short) two years of programming, and I've never encountered any better than VS. It has it's flaws and there are things I would love to see improved, but to say that it's the worst is unbelievable. Saying that MSDN adds negative value is crap, too. It provides good knowledge about something that YOU arrogantly look down upon, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge isn't useful to MOST people with minds that are slightly more open than the vacuum sealed container yours must be living in.
What, it's not working. You should probably inform the people who are trying to get it to work. Maybe they can fix your problems.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
seriously, IE6 with tabs and anti-phishing?
it's the 21st century, not 1999.
I can see why they renamed it from Longhorn, but if this is supposed to open up Windows to new Vistas, it's going to be severely disappointing to a lot of people.
better name would be Windows Barely Adequate
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Can anyone tell if IE 7 does any better than IE 6 at all? Then renderings look nearly identical to me. So much for improved standards support in IE 7, as if anyone thought that would actually happen
The main prob is that noone really cares about ACID, it's just another acronym that no browser supports.
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I have this great button that just says "Windows '95 = Macintosh '89".
I think my Dad picked it up a local Mac shop in 95. I wore it on my backpack for the remainder of highschool (yes, I was lame).
I suppose now we'll have to mint one that says "Windows Vista = OS X 10.0.0"
With the first link, the chain is forged.
So you mean that Safari, Konqueror, and iCab aren't browsers, and soon Firefox and Opera won't be, either? Weird.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
She said it sounded to her like a sexually transmitted disease!
And, by the way, what phrase is Acid an acronym for?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Setup has been MUCH improved. Far easier to follow. Installation took about an hour and 10 minutes. (1.6GHz Pentium-M and 1GB of RAM)
How long for all the security patches and updates afterwards? That took me a day at DSL 640Mbps speeds alone when I got a new XP laptop. Plus the silly verification thing - mandatory on my PC.
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Knowing where to put the nut: 499.50
Having exclusive knowledge: Priceless.
Sorry, I just couldn't help myself; kinda like hearing the first 5 notes of "Shave and a Haircut".
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I think it might be in opera, but not firefox. Up in the group of tabs there is a small mini tab on the far right, if you click it, a new tab is created. This is preffered to hitting "alt+t" or file "new tab". Unfortunately microsoft doesn't integrate a nice feature with it's intellimouse explorer, where by if you push the wheel to the right or left your switch tabs. I just found this out in firefox, and love the hell out of it.
depends, are you saying they're fully Acid2 compliant, including extensions?
you may have me on Safari - never heard of the other two, and I have Firefox and Opera on my home laptop and Firefox on my work PC.
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Except they do have competition
No, they don't. We are talking about an MSDN subscription. What competition is there to that? Who else, besides Microsoft, offers you the opportunity to test in upcoming Microsoft software - something that is an absolute necessity for many organisations?
As far as I am aware, Microsoft has absolutely no competition whatsoever when it comes to MSDN. The existence of competition to Microsoft in other markets does not change this fact in any way.
Still work? Huh?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The MSDN only seems to have positive value because you are operating in an environment where Microsoft's illegal monopoly forces you to use inferior tools to develop for inferior platforms.
.NET/SQL Server platform to be preferrable over J2EE/Oracle, or LAMP, or any of the other very viable competitors.
I develop primarily on the server and web services side, and choose Microsoft tools despite them being in the minority of deployed servers in that realm. I simply believe the
The monopoly nonsense is astoundingly naive in that case, and it's the case for many of the people who buy MSDN subscriptions to develop on the server side, for embedded devices (where MS is a small contender), and so on. You need to update your tired zealot rhetoric for the modern era.
The latest CVS version of Safari renders it properly. The latest beta of iCab renders it properly. And, IIRC, the version of Konqueror in Subversion renders it properly too.
There's no such thing as "Acid2 compliant", browsers don't support it, it's not an acronym, and there aren't any extensions to it. It's a web page. The way you talk, you seem to be under the impression that it's some sort of file format or protocol.
Given that you don't seem to know what Acid2 is and haven't heard of many web browsers, are you really qualified to tell people what browsers do and don't support?
Simple. The net value of a single auto repair is whatever one consumer will pay for it - I mean, I like my friends and all, but I'm not paying for their tune-up, let alone some random guy. Therefore, the value of that tune-up, to the mechanic, is limited to what I'll pay for it. As such, if I'm not willing to pay him what he thinks it's worth, he won't do it.
Software, however, does not decrease in value as more people use it - in fact, one could argue that it actually increases in value. The developers obviously anticipated this when developing it, and are able to offer it at a price that reflects its value to you, rather than its value to them. If the software weren't sold in this manner, then the first purchaser would be required to pay for the entire cost of development, including the opportunity cost of not investing in a more profitable venture. Unless one of you is willing to pick up the multi-million-dollar tab, then this isn't going to be a viable business model.
By your logic, Ford should update all Model Ts with three-point seatbelts, ABS breaks, SRS airbags and GPS, cause by golly, you could hurt yourself or get lost without them.
Ok, I'll take the bait...
I'll agree with you. Many things that I can't hold in my hand have intrinsic value. Knowlege is one of them. It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
Oh, right... So the 5 years I spend at the university to gain the knowledge about one specific subject doesn't count. Only the time/effort it takes to reproduce it after I've gotten my master.
You are free to fix your car yourself if you want to, so don't bitch about a trained mechanic charging you money for his services.
Likewise, you are free to write your own OS...
"Live free or don't."
I've worked both (several actually) sides of the street: vb (3,4,5), vc++ (2,6), LAMP, LAPP, C++ (win32, linux, solaris), python, etc. Unix as an OS and development environment was created by programmers, for programmers. As a result, it is a fantastic development platform. Windows was created by marketers for grandmothers.
Even today, with .Net, M$ is still beating the old "non-developers can create programs" drum (no BS, I had a M$ trainer come to my company and explain how our business analysts (not software analysts) would be using Visual Studio .Net to create SOA-components). M$ strives to allow non-programmers to create crap, bad programmers to create near-crap, and really good programmers? We arent't their target market.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Umm.. sorry, no. No released version of Safari renders Acid2. I would also doubt that any released version of Konq does either. I don't know about iCab though.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I was just pointing out there are in fact browsers that do render Acid2 properly. Whether they're publicly released versions doesn't matter -- there do exist three separate browsers that pass the test.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I am quite disappointed. While the install is much simpler, I found the actual useability to be pretty awful. I'm running it on a 3.0 GHz system with hyperthreading and 1 Gb of memory and SATA hard drives.
I found the new shell very akward and clinky. Navigation was HARD, which shouldn't be the case. I can't see the other computers in the workgroup I set the system to be part of, although I can enter a UNC name of a share and see it. The virtual folders were hard to figure out. Just can't see a non-technical user figuring this out. The new start menu was OK and perhaps cleaner than the old style.
IE7 is just too little. The tabs are pathetic. Given the many examples out there, it is amazing that MS did such a poor job.
I've used a lot of MS beta 1 stuff since the Windows 3.1 days and while this one appears a bit more stable than most, given the hype, I was underwhelmed.
You must be new here. People mod down stuff they don't agree with.
Not a big deal. I can take the karma hit for days.
gouging is only when you do that for things that the gougee *needs* not when you do if for something the customer *wants* there's an important distinction there.
.doc files, and then raising the price and closing the spec, etc. but not this.
If I make/do something that no one else does, or even wants, to do, I am entitled to charge everything the market will bear.* watching "the Magic Christian" is another good place to look. especially the bit about the parking ticket.
on the other hand if you corner a commodity, especially one that has become a necessity, (water, phone, electricity) and start raising the rates, That's gouging. the line where M$ crosses that line is getting every one dependent on, say,
It's curious how this discussion both parallels and contrasts the one about charging for CDs of music... (hmmm... am I breaking some corrolary to Godwin's law by referencing the Evil RIAA?)
*for a good example, look up "oops poops" in Oregon, and think just how much you'd rather pay someone else for that job.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
I've installed Vista on a Tablet PC tc4200, for all those that were wondering, it seems no tablet functionaliy is in this build of Vista, but it runs fine on the tablet. I'm not sure if MS plans on keeping 2 versions of the OS- one for 'standard' PC's and another for tablets. You can see some screenshots and comments I have about Vista Beta 1 on my blog. I'll keep it updated as I explore. http://mtavel.blogspot.com/
That isnt what the parent is saying. What the parent is saying is that if a old(ish) car has breaks that fail when you hit them 3 times with a 1.2 second delay between each push then the company that made it should fix it. What we are upset about Microsoft not fixing 98,ME,etc isnt a firewall, NTFS fs, proper user logins, etc. It is that we still want a computers that doesnt have gaping holes that should never have existed.
Lima India November Uniform X-ray
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
XHTML with the application/xhtml+xml content type is unfortunately still broken in the very same way.
IE 7 seems to be essentially nothing more than IE 6 with a fancier user interface - the two big issues of proper CSS support and this regarding XHTML are still in an as poor condition as ever.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
It's not. Read Tom Wolfe.
observe.
This is the result of the acid2 test, a test designed to rate the CSS compliance of a browser. At the moment, afaik Safari is the only fully compliant browser, with Firefox and Opera following closely behind.
This a great shame - I had naively hoped that Microsoft would fix their broken browser, and surprise us all by conforming to the standards. They had a great opportunity to really put IE back on the right track, and it looks like they've blown it.
Good job Microsoft - you're completely out of touch with what the web development community actualy wants.
You're raving about Apple building the equivalent of DirectX?
Right.
It used to be much worse...
.NET stuff, MS product announcements. It's actually becoming a site for real geeks rather than just linux nerds.
It's honestly getting better... we're seeing book reviews now for
Interesting. According to your blog you are a university student... apparently in about your junior year of Computer Engineering.
Yet you think knowledge holds no value?
What are you going to do for a job when you get out of school, since being paid to do engineering work is against your religion?
Maybe you could live with your parents?
I have 3 linux installations including FC4, SuSE93 and MDK2005LE,
why the hell should I beta Windows Vista?
If I want little desktop effects, I'll turn on X compositing with gcompmgr and use gDesklets.
Over the last dozen or so years my various mega-corp employers have paid me a total of $1.5M+, (not including inflation), to use thier subscriptions. If I had paid for the subscription myself, I would still be laughing.
Cue the "sold my soul to the devil" replies from the teens in thier basements who can only use one O/S.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But if you get more and better results than someone else who is doing the same thing you get paid more than they do, even if it took you less time.
Not only that, but often if you get the same results you get paid more than the other person because you took less time.
Knowledge is power, and speed is money.
Sure, I agree. I was just dealing with the GGPs assertion that time on task was all that mattered. Nearly everything is a volume business.
Unfortunately, right now, for me, being able to do volume just means they don't hire people to give me a hand.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'd bet that you still use it though, right?
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
While it may take zero effort to reproduce, it DOES take a lot of effort to create in the first place. How will that creation effort be repaid?
Once again, I wasn't clear and it lead to most people taking what I said the wrong way.
You've pretty much got my position down. Everyone who is flaming me needs to re-read a very important part of the post:
I refuse to pay for software for this reason (though, this does not mean I will not donate money to a developer of a favorite app)
I'm making a very subtle (and probably meaningless) distinction between the software itself and the work put into making the software. In my opinion, the software has zero worth because the software can be reproduced with near zero cost. The work put in to the software has much worth because someone had to take time out of their day and peform work. In other words:
I will not pay for software, but I will pay a developer to develop software. I will not pay for an idea, but I will pay for the labor involved in the implementation of that idea.
As I said, it is a very nuanced position, but it is my own.
All in all, it just shows how the existing model of treating software and such as if they were physical goods is fundamentally flawed.
...has anybody put the Vista Beta on one of the Intel-based Mac's?
This sig rocks the casbah.
If anything, stock market is a good example of how people can make money while producing nothing useful.
Whatever arrogant attitude you want to take, none of what you see in this world today would have happened without some kind of market where you can buy and sell shares of companies.
If it worked that way, then only the first N copies of the software should be sold for a price (just enough to cover the expense and then give the authors some money for their time). After a certain point, selling copies becomes just that - selling air.
Um. No. So you pay for the cost of producing the software, then the remainder is profit for those who invested. What, suppose you are buying medicine. Do you think that the cost of medicine drops down to the cost to manufacture after the R&D investment has been recouped? No, the risk requires some kind of reward if it will be taken again, so those who invested money and time and love into a project will need some kind of payment. Their payment is proportional to the quality of what they made (I.e. if more people buy it, the better their investment pays back. This is all very basic really, I don't know why I have to explain it over and over to people who probably won't even listen.).
All in all, it just shows how the existing model of treating software and such as if they were physical goods is fundamentally flawed.
There is ample reason in my and other posts to show why software must be treated like any other value-adding good. If you still disagree, an intro macroeconomics course is in order. If you still disagree after that, you just have your eyes closed and are in denial of the obvious truth. All of our science and observation and understanding of the economy and human psychology points toward the necessity of interpreting even non-physical goods with the same kind of respect as we give to physical ones.
I agree completely. You can't get around it. I will buy the excuse that you wouldn't have purchased it anyway, most people who just want to play with, say Maya, aren't costing Alias any money since they aren't really potential customers. But the fact is the theft is still happening, there is no moral ground to stand on, but there is a sort of dingy you can sit in and be ignored.
Thank you,And thanks to the slightly overboard grammer defender.(BTW,I'll be taking English Comp so I'm hoping my public school punctuation will improve) We didn't let ford say "yeah the pinto sux,But we'll give the living owners 50 bucks off a taurus!".There are MANY documented holes in the Win9X design that were found BEFORE End of Life(tm).If my vcr breaks under warranty they can't just blow me off until the warranty expires which is EXACTLY what they did to 9x and what they keep doing until enough people have a fit that they actually fix their broken product. And Yes,I am glad I'm learning Linux.I think that Vista is going to be a BIG lame duck and will stink for business and I'm hoping that my Linux and Windows training will help me to steer the company that hires me away from a very buggy and poorly supported product. I'll have my Associate of Applied Science in Computer Network Systems in '07 which at the rate they are going Vista will be getting its first app breaking service pack.Heloo,Profit!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Wrong again. People aren't rewarded based on their skill, or even the amount of money it costs to produce something, but rather how much people are willing to pay. This is the basis of a free market society.
That's why Xboxs are (or at least were) sold at a loss; because $199 is all people are willing to pay.
The same arguement can be made for wages. I have more schooling and training then my buddies that program computers, yet I will probably never make more money. That pretty much blows your arguement out of the water.
In a competitive market the price is always going to settle on what people are willing to pay, given a host of other factors. That's why car mechanic would never charge $500 to change one blot, cause in a competitve market he would lose customers, and be forced to lower his prices to a level that people are willing to pay.
If you look at this in terms of software then you see a problem:
Firstly, market driven prices (what people are willing to pay) are determined by supply and demand. Less supply, higher prices, more demand, higher prices, so on. This works fine when we're talking about tangable items, such as cars, or some skilled service, but not very well for software.
This is because when your supply approaches infinity, your product value drops to nothing because someone, ie linux or bitorrent, can always offer comparable software for less money, ie, free.
This isn't a moral standpoint, I'm not condoning pirating, it's just the reality.
All MS has going for them is percieved market value for their product, and a healthy dose of compelling hardware vendors to preload MS and only MS.
As a side note to some extent life *is* a gimpy little league game where everyone gets a trophy, because as long as you offer something of percieved value, people will pay. Skill / cost to produce / rarity doesn't necessarilly figure into the cost equation because more skill, more expensive materials, etc, doesn't necessarily equate to a product with a greater percieved value.
One thing I would agree with, though... within capitalistic economy, it is the only viable way to treat non-physical goods, there you are right. The thing is that capitalism is not proven by anyone to be the final, or, for that matter, the most efficient way of handling things.
Combine that with the basic MSDN and you have a good foundation to work from if you have to deal with MS stuff (okay, crap for the /. crowd) on a daily basis before you come home to a rational universe.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
One thing I would agree with, though... within capitalistic economy, it is the only viable way to treat non-physical goods, there you are right. The thing is that capitalism is not proven by anyone to be the final, or, for that matter, the most efficient way of handling things.
I suppose it's fine if you say it that way. It's like saying that the speed of light is not proven to be the fastest way that a thing can travel around the universe. While technically true (you can't really prove anything), it's also a statement without a lot of usefulness. All the alternatives we can think of have been tried, and none of them have worked nearly so well as capitalism. Yours sounds like some limited form of socialism where profit is capped . . . and we've all seen how well socialism works).
What is it Winston Churchill said? "Capitalism is the worst economic system out there, except for all the other ones," or something like that?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. I only have one Windows partition left (and that's on a dual-boot system) that I use for games. And that may soon disappear as well - I tried the latest version of Cedega last night and the few games I tried all worked (nearly) perfectly.
My point was that while Linux is a completely viable OS and better than Windows in almost every way, it's not true competition for Windows. For desktop systems, Linux has an even smaller market share than Apple (I think). What's worse is that very few people, at least that I know, even realize that there is an OS called Linux (of the people that even know what an OS is). Until that changes, I don't think Linux can be said to be true competition for Windows.
Well...no.
Xboxes were sold at a loss for the same reasons PS2s and nintendos and every other game console back to the beginning were sold at a loss...Because once you've got the console you have to buy games for it, and they add extra liscensing fees to the games, which is why they cost so much. No one would produce them if they made zero money. They certainly wouldn't have made an Xbox 2.
Supply and demand absolutely DO drive what people are willing to pay, but you seem to be missing a lot of points. Just because you have more education doesn't mean you automatically ought to get paid more...that has nothing to do with having a marketable skill. The proof of that is, for example, Brittney Spears, who is arguably lacking in both education AND skill, and yet makes more than probably everyone who posted in this thread combined.
The reason for that is that while we might deride her for being skill-less, a good potion of the world doesn't seem to agree, and they desire to pay her for what she does. But since there is only one of her, and since she only produces a limited quantity of original music (I would say zero), limited supply and high demand make her rich.
There is, in short, no difference between "percieved" market value and actual market value if what is selling in the market is selling for the "percieved" price. Windows costs what it costs, and people seem to be okay with that. We may think it's stupid, but we don't decide those things. It's not as if Microsoft is losing money here.
And the reason life isn't like a gimpy little league game is: there is no one out there who is going to give you a free ride if your product sucks. Just because you offer something for sale, doesn't mean a single person is going to buy it.
The same thing applies to people, if you're less skilled than another person, or if you do a job that anyone could do, no one's goign to pay you well to do what you do. But if you're skilled, and no one else can do what you can do, the people who need that thing done will pay you whatever it takes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm well aware that console companies turn a profit (eventually) from licensing games. You're still sort of sidesteping the point however. It doesn't change the fact that people expect to pay $199 for a console, regardless of the cost to produce it.
It's the same with milk. No grocery store turns a profit on milk, but you have sell it for the same price as the guy down the street or you'll lose customers.
I guess I didn't make it clear that my point is that it's fair to accuse MS of cheating, and manipulating the market and fostering a monopoly, which prevents their product from selling at a fair price. Which, to be quite honest, I don't even care if they are or not, or if people feel they are doing the morally right thing by buying microsoft products.
Really what I'm (and you) are talking about, escpecially when you talk about Britney Spears is what kind of perception in pop culture you can drum up about a certain product. People buy hype. It's not rational or logical, but they do. They buy crappy products and services from incompetent and ill-trained people all the time, for way too much money.
You can make money on a crappy product. People will buy it if it's marketed the right way.
An idiot can get a good job if he says the right things, or has the right credentials. Escpecially in the tech world, we all know it's about the hype, the buzz words and the latest craze.
Microsoft can (and will) ape Mac OSX all they want over the next couple years. They'll repackage the hype, put out a crappier product, and people will buy it.
As for Churchill - he actually said it about democracy. Then again I'm not a democrat either =)
I suppose if you accept the premise that competent people exist and can be found, your system might work. I'm sure you can guess from my tone what I think about the odds of that being the case. =P It was nice debating this with you. We should do it again sometime.
you know, you're free to not buy the subscription, and to hire a developer to re-implement everything in it.
I have a feeling I know which would be cheaper.
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Illegal copying.
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5 years? And you think people "infridge" on a copyright? Somehow I have my doubts as to the quality of that education...
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