You cannot get windows xp on many prebuilt computers. If you think that, coupled with widespread vista hatred, is not making at least some marginal group of people pick up macbooks instead of dells, then you are smokin the reefer.
Why are your flamebait replies to me so irrelevant to the points I made? Is it because you lack reading comprehension, or because you're just being an asshole?
Yes, you are.
That is irrelevant. If you had bothered to read as far as the second clause of the sentence, you might have been able to understand that the point I was making was that a sizable portion of the windows using public does not like Vista, and no matter how stupid they *may* be for not liking it, the fact is that this hurts sales. The reason I made this point was to support the following (and more important) point that releasing information about Windows 7 will not hurt Vista; Vista's reputation will hurt Vista. But you just had to focus on the first three words of the sentence. You couldn't go any further. Now, I may be an idiot (I won't deny it), but your miserable failure to understand -- not two sentences strung together -- but just ONE whole sentence -- it just makes me think that you might be an even bigger idiot than I am.
They're taking Windows Mojave and renaming it "Windows 7"...
Again, you are missing the point. I know what Microsoft is doing. We all do. The information was leaked (see TFA). The point I was making was not that I want them to tell me information because I don't know it, but that I want them to openly announce their progress with 7, rather than allowing it to come out in "leak" form.
Uh yeah. When I saw the headline, the first thing I thought was, "why is every piece of information about 7 coming out as a leak?"
I wouldn't install Vista with a ten foot pole. Now, maybe I'm an idiot for buying into the "Vista: bad" hype, but, well, I bought into it already, and so did lots of other people.
MS is working on 7 *because* Vista sucks (or is widely perceived to suck). We all know this. No need to try to hide anything. Just tell us what you're doing so we can prepare for 7.
I almost don't believe that every single tidbit of info on 7 genuinely leaking out. It just has to be deliberate. Lots of mundane details are coming out as "leaks" and I think it's because "leak" sounds more interesting than "announcement".
You are assuming that different groups in a given area tend to be politically homogeneous.
Yeah a lot of the people who live there are homogeneous, and the homogeneous tend to be more liberal, but my uncle was a homogeneous and he was a republican.
Plus, remember that senator? Larry Craig? Homogeneous and a conservative.
So even if there are a lot of homogeneous developers who live in SF, they could suddenly turn conservative too.
I've not used XCode and Interface Builder. I guess I'm mainly comparing Visual Studio to the likes of Eclipse, which is buggier and (to me) seemingly bloatier. I fully agree that Visual Studio is slow as fuck to start up, but buggy? Taking into account all the functionality it has, and the fact that I have only run into a few really annoying bugs in visual studio, I'd say Visual Studio is remarkably unbuggy, especially coming from Microsoft.
For me, whether I will be using visual studio is based on the question, "will the clunkiness of this suite be outweighed by all the fancy things it does for me automatically?"
With the kind of work I have been doing lately, the answer has been no. I just need a lightweight editor that can support multiple documents, syntax highlighting, and good file system browsing. I use EditPlus.
Still, I often miss the IntelliText, object browser, and the really good skeleton code VS generates for me.
Their visual studio products are second to none in my opinion, and you can get them for free in their express products. IntelliText speeds up my development time, teaches me the framework while I'm using it, and encourages me to use better coding practices.
Say what you will about how unethically and inefficiently they run the rest of their business (if you don't, I will!), but they make some awesome products for developers.
As long as gobs of scientists are saying global warming hysteria is, at present, unfounded, I have to assume that you are full of crap. Well, unless "peer review" means pulled out of your own personal ass.
Saddam likes Cheetos and Doritos - every release of information about him was carefully controlled to discredit him as a strongman.
HA!
It's funny that you should mention it in this light, because I distinctly remember the strongest criticism of this kind of leaked information about Saddam came from the very people who wanted to demonize him.
The argument was that the left-wing press was making him look much more innocent and human by showing the human side of him.
The military wanted him dead. They can't justify killing him if nobody is focusing on the genocide and war crimes...
Personally I don't care either way. But I thought it was funny that you are making the same complaint that right-wing saddam bashers seemed to be making, but for slightly different reasons.
You don't understand. I'm not saying anything pessimistic. I'm simply stating that it's naive to think that because a person got a job in a government agency, it makes him more honest than a person who got a job in the private sector.
In general, the government answers to the voters, and corporations answer to their shareholders.
I can't believe you think it works this way. If you're LUCKY, your government officials will answer to the voters. They don't have to motherfucker. They can answer to *their* shareholders, aka special interest groups, more powerful members of their own party, people they owe favors to, etc. On the flip side. Yes, in bad companies, CEOs make decisions based on the demands of unethical, out-of-touch shareholders, but in a *good* company, the shareholders want what is best for the consumers because it means happier, more frequently returning customers.
You called me pessimistic for saying that the government won't help things. That is because you can't get it through your head that there is *NO* difference between people who work for the government and people who don't work for the government. Where a difference does come into play is when it comes to relinquishing power.
a system in place that you can vote down in two years
What are you smoking? You don't get to vote shit down in two years. Never. Did you get a chance to vote down the DHS? Will the new Administration give you a chance to vote down the President's new salary of double what it once was? The United States government ONLY grows. They don't eliminate jobs. The only way it's possible for government jobs to effectively go away is for people to retire/die, and not refill the position. But the rate at which that happens is so much lower than the rate at which new jobs are created. And you know what? Government workers are so rarely the ones doing the actual work anyway. If the government were to take control of cybersecurity, several new government jobs would be created, and then they would just contract that shit out to somebody like me, and at that point, it would be impossible to make any new, smart decisions on how to do things because it would require new regulations and votes from congress to take any kind of action that's not specifically outlined in your SOPs.
the truth of the matter is, there is a high level of incompetence in the US government right now
No. The truth of the matter is, there is a high level of incompetence in the human race at any given time. The problem with the government is not that it is filled with idiots who are less competent than the private sector. The problem with the government is that it is just as unreliable as the private sector, only once you let the government control something, they NEVER give it up.
I think that the government needs to have a hand in every industry that profits off of people's misfortunes.
How incredibly naive of you to think that government involvement keeps businesses honest. You need to understand that A) The government needs to make money too, and they will do it in unscrupulous ways just like private industry, and B) The government, like private industry is filled with PEOPLE. People make selfish decisions whether they are part of the government or not.
Instead of research scientists working for cures we have greedy corporations
Swap private sector for public, and the summary will merely change to: Instead of research scientists working for cures we have bureaucrats who can't get fired, have guaranteed raises, and will inevitably scratch the backs of contractors so that they can get a ridiculously high paying contractor job that makes use of their government contacts once they retire (much earlier than private sector workers) from the government with a taxpayer-funded pension.
My wife works for the government and I work for a government contractor.
One stereotype that leaps to my mind is drug companies funding their research into cures for horrible diseases by selling you speed for your kids' "ADHD". It's yucky, but am I wrong that drug companies do just fine advancing chemical engineering without government help?
You and your parent both bring up the point that Apple is a lesser evil in the DRM world, with Microsoft and Sony being guilty of employing much more intrusive DRM schemes.
The question in the headline, will people boycott Apple over DRM, then, appears to be the wrong one.
It's clear that people don't boycott, but they do pick the lesser evil. That means that a much better question is, "Will MS or Sony be able to come up with an iTunes alternative that is DRMless enough to win the popular vote?"
Microsoft supposedly has seen the error of its strong focus on DRM. Perhaps they'll get it though their heads that they can BEAT Apple by finding a way to just sell mp3s/mpegs to us at a reasonable price?
Venture capitalism is extremely high risk, so it stands to reason that a lot of the people willing to take such risks are dumb. And of course there are plenty of people who know about this dumbness, and exploit it. Pitch some ridiculous idea, run a few rounds of VC, build up a small business around it, take a HUGE salary, then either sell the company or abandon ship when the company fails.
It doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me that a company in the mid 90s could start a site called meat.com and make deals with tons of local grocery stores to deliver meat/groceries.
...a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access...
Sadly, I think your definition of "good," and that of your friendly neighborhood music/movie cartel are different. It is my personal feeling that Microsoft has no qualms with making the DRM schemes it pushes as intrusive and painful as possible in order to get backing from production studio, etc. We can only hope that consumers are unaccepting, or at least perceived to be unaccepting enough of intrusive and painful DRM that major media producers will move toward a nice, transparent way of doing things.
Okay. Okay. A country is... a guy who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth (sometimes) and then eats some scrambled eggs. Also he likes to look at porno on occasion. Nothing too kinky.
A person is a body of land with defined borders, an economy, a bunch of countries living in it, and probably a flag.
It seems like you need to calm down. I don't think you are fully considering the implications of turning off somebody else's television.
Secretly turning off somebody's tv is not a trivial act. Have you considered that a restaurant proprietor who knows nothing about electronics and a lot about food might ignorantly assume something is wrong with his television, and that he might spend hundreds of dollars trying to fix the problem?
Moving a chair in a restaurant isn't exactly going to trick anybody into thinking that the floor is suddenly on an incline, so it's hardly comparable. More comparable acts include walking up to the television to turn it off, or telling the proprietor to turn it off. This is what the post to which you are replying suggested.
Yeah. I think all the people here who use their universal remotes for some supposedly righteous cause are not being honest with themselves. A television that is on in a public place can be a source of mild annoyance, but the real issue here is that the ability to covertly turn off somebody's television is a nifty trick.
If you carry a remote control around with you to turn off people's televisions, you are not battling annoyance. You are playing with a toy. While I'm not sure that makes you a douche, it does show that you are childish, and you don't know it. I am childish, and I know it, so I don't pretend that I'm achieving some important goal when I'm really just entertaining myself. I mean, if you're like the Gizmodo guy at CES, who is admittedly playing a prank, that's one thing, but if you really think that by bringing a universal remote into a restaurant and hijacking their tv, you are taking the path of least resistance to less annoyance, you need to spend some time evaluating yourself.
I go to pho place with a tv, and not only do I not like to watch tv when I eat my soup, I get annoyed at my coworkers who become mesmerized by the television and rudely phase out of conversations. So, rather than blinding my coworkers with my high-powered laser pointer or covertly turning off the television with my universal remote, I tell my coworkers not to face the television because it annoys me when they get stuck watching tv. Ding! Problem solved!
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot get windows xp on many prebuilt computers. If you think that, coupled with widespread vista hatred, is not making at least some marginal group of people pick up macbooks instead of dells, then you are smokin the reefer.
Vista with a different name, or at least a system which is substantially Vista code based.
Windows 7 has lower system requirements...
Clearly, as far as marketing of software goes, you can polish a turd.
Or perhaps they are just skipping versions to save money, like many enterprises do?
Why are your flamebait replies to me so irrelevant to the points I made? Is it because you lack reading comprehension, or because you're just being an asshole?
Yes, you are.
That is irrelevant. If you had bothered to read as far as the second clause of the sentence, you might have been able to understand that the point I was making was that a sizable portion of the windows using public does not like Vista, and no matter how stupid they *may* be for not liking it, the fact is that this hurts sales. The reason I made this point was to support the following (and more important) point that releasing information about Windows 7 will not hurt Vista; Vista's reputation will hurt Vista. But you just had to focus on the first three words of the sentence. You couldn't go any further. Now, I may be an idiot (I won't deny it), but your miserable failure to understand -- not two sentences strung together -- but just ONE whole sentence -- it just makes me think that you might be an even bigger idiot than I am.
They're taking Windows Mojave and renaming it "Windows 7"...
Again, you are missing the point. I know what Microsoft is doing. We all do. The information was leaked (see TFA). The point I was making was not that I want them to tell me information because I don't know it, but that I want them to openly announce their progress with 7, rather than allowing it to come out in "leak" form.
I don't know why this is a troll. Yeah it's a jab, but it's highly valid, and also funny.
I am strongly looking forward to 7 because I want more than 4 gigs of ram on a windows machine and I don't want to mess with Vista or 64-bit XP.
But um... They come out with really critical service packs really early these days...
I have definitely considered waiting...
Uh yeah. When I saw the headline, the first thing I thought was, "why is every piece of information about 7 coming out as a leak?"
I wouldn't install Vista with a ten foot pole. Now, maybe I'm an idiot for buying into the "Vista: bad" hype, but, well, I bought into it already, and so did lots of other people.
MS is working on 7 *because* Vista sucks (or is widely perceived to suck). We all know this. No need to try to hide anything. Just tell us what you're doing so we can prepare for 7.
I almost don't believe that every single tidbit of info on 7 genuinely leaking out. It just has to be deliberate. Lots of mundane details are coming out as "leaks" and I think it's because "leak" sounds more interesting than "announcement".
You are assuming that different groups in a given area tend to be politically homogeneous.
Yeah a lot of the people who live there are homogeneous, and the homogeneous tend to be more liberal, but my uncle was a homogeneous and he was a republican.
Plus, remember that senator? Larry Craig? Homogeneous and a conservative.
So even if there are a lot of homogeneous developers who live in SF, they could suddenly turn conservative too.
I've not used XCode and Interface Builder. I guess I'm mainly comparing Visual Studio to the likes of Eclipse, which is buggier and (to me) seemingly bloatier. I fully agree that Visual Studio is slow as fuck to start up, but buggy? Taking into account all the functionality it has, and the fact that I have only run into a few really annoying bugs in visual studio, I'd say Visual Studio is remarkably unbuggy, especially coming from Microsoft.
For me, whether I will be using visual studio is based on the question, "will the clunkiness of this suite be outweighed by all the fancy things it does for me automatically?" With the kind of work I have been doing lately, the answer has been no. I just need a lightweight editor that can support multiple documents, syntax highlighting, and good file system browsing. I use EditPlus.
Still, I often miss the IntelliText, object browser, and the really good skeleton code VS generates for me.
Their visual studio products are second to none in my opinion, and you can get them for free in their express products. IntelliText speeds up my development time, teaches me the framework while I'm using it, and encourages me to use better coding practices.
Say what you will about how unethically and inefficiently they run the rest of their business (if you don't, I will!), but they make some awesome products for developers.
You and your bias. You need to keep your whole, "air breathing, water drinking" agenda out of this.
I'm sick of you liberals bashing pollution just because you want to drink clean water and breath clean air.
Try not being so selfish.
I haven't read any that got through the peer review process with out being found false.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2674E64F-802A-23AD-490B-BD9FAF4DCDB7
As long as gobs of scientists are saying global warming hysteria is, at present, unfounded, I have to assume that you are full of crap. Well, unless "peer review" means pulled out of your own personal ass.
Saddam likes Cheetos and Doritos - every release of information about him was carefully controlled to discredit him as a strongman.
HA!
It's funny that you should mention it in this light, because I distinctly remember the strongest criticism of this kind of leaked information about Saddam came from the very people who wanted to demonize him.
The argument was that the left-wing press was making him look much more innocent and human by showing the human side of him.
The military wanted him dead. They can't justify killing him if nobody is focusing on the genocide and war crimes...
Personally I don't care either way. But I thought it was funny that you are making the same complaint that right-wing saddam bashers seemed to be making, but for slightly different reasons.
Blah for pessimism.
You don't understand. I'm not saying anything pessimistic. I'm simply stating that it's naive to think that because a person got a job in a government agency, it makes him more honest than a person who got a job in the private sector.
In general, the government answers to the voters, and corporations answer to their shareholders.
I can't believe you think it works this way. If you're LUCKY, your government officials will answer to the voters. They don't have to motherfucker. They can answer to *their* shareholders, aka special interest groups, more powerful members of their own party, people they owe favors to, etc. On the flip side. Yes, in bad companies, CEOs make decisions based on the demands of unethical, out-of-touch shareholders, but in a *good* company, the shareholders want what is best for the consumers because it means happier, more frequently returning customers.
You called me pessimistic for saying that the government won't help things. That is because you can't get it through your head that there is *NO* difference between people who work for the government and people who don't work for the government. Where a difference does come into play is when it comes to relinquishing power.
a system in place that you can vote down in two years
What are you smoking? You don't get to vote shit down in two years. Never. Did you get a chance to vote down the DHS? Will the new Administration give you a chance to vote down the President's new salary of double what it once was? The United States government ONLY grows. They don't eliminate jobs. The only way it's possible for government jobs to effectively go away is for people to retire/die, and not refill the position. But the rate at which that happens is so much lower than the rate at which new jobs are created. And you know what? Government workers are so rarely the ones doing the actual work anyway. If the government were to take control of cybersecurity, several new government jobs would be created, and then they would just contract that shit out to somebody like me, and at that point, it would be impossible to make any new, smart decisions on how to do things because it would require new regulations and votes from congress to take any kind of action that's not specifically outlined in your SOPs.
the truth of the matter is, there is a high level of incompetence in the US government right now
No. The truth of the matter is, there is a high level of incompetence in the human race at any given time. The problem with the government is not that it is filled with idiots who are less competent than the private sector. The problem with the government is that it is just as unreliable as the private sector, only once you let the government control something, they NEVER give it up.
I think that the government needs to have a hand in every industry that profits off of people's misfortunes.
How incredibly naive of you to think that government involvement keeps businesses honest. You need to understand that A) The government needs to make money too, and they will do it in unscrupulous ways just like private industry, and B) The government, like private industry is filled with PEOPLE. People make selfish decisions whether they are part of the government or not.
Instead of research scientists working for cures we have greedy corporations
Swap private sector for public, and the summary will merely change to: Instead of research scientists working for cures we have bureaucrats who can't get fired, have guaranteed raises, and will inevitably scratch the backs of contractors so that they can get a ridiculously high paying contractor job that makes use of their government contacts once they retire (much earlier than private sector workers) from the government with a taxpayer-funded pension.
My wife works for the government and I work for a government contractor.
Sure there will be benefits from such technology, but everything is a two-edged sword.
except for single-edged swords
Excellent points. I was going to mod you up, but my effeminate, child-like hands couldn't push the mouse buttons down hard enough...
Well, that and I don't have any mod points...
One stereotype that leaps to my mind is drug companies funding their research into cures for horrible diseases by selling you speed for your kids' "ADHD". It's yucky, but am I wrong that drug companies do just fine advancing chemical engineering without government help?
No, they pay nothing for XP if they already have a license for it, which is what they'll have if they're buying a new computer to replace an old one.
You and your parent both bring up the point that Apple is a lesser evil in the DRM world, with Microsoft and Sony being guilty of employing much more intrusive DRM schemes.
The question in the headline, will people boycott Apple over DRM, then, appears to be the wrong one.
It's clear that people don't boycott, but they do pick the lesser evil. That means that a much better question is, "Will MS or Sony be able to come up with an iTunes alternative that is DRMless enough to win the popular vote?"
Microsoft supposedly has seen the error of its strong focus on DRM. Perhaps they'll get it though their heads that they can BEAT Apple by finding a way to just sell mp3s/mpegs to us at a reasonable price?
Venture capitalism is extremely high risk, so it stands to reason that a lot of the people willing to take such risks are dumb. And of course there are plenty of people who know about this dumbness, and exploit it. Pitch some ridiculous idea, run a few rounds of VC, build up a small business around it, take a HUGE salary, then either sell the company or abandon ship when the company fails.
But just in case you don't know:
http://www.giantfood.com/peapod/
http://shop.safeway.com/offers/swy/default6.asp?PRMX_GOOG_DELIVER_0703
It doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me that a company in the mid 90s could start a site called meat.com and make deals with tons of local grocery stores to deliver meat/groceries.
...a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access...
Sadly, I think your definition of "good," and that of your friendly neighborhood music/movie cartel are different. It is my personal feeling that Microsoft has no qualms with making the DRM schemes it pushes as intrusive and painful as possible in order to get backing from production studio, etc. We can only hope that consumers are unaccepting, or at least perceived to be unaccepting enough of intrusive and painful DRM that major media producers will move toward a nice, transparent way of doing things.
Okay. Okay. A country is... a guy who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth (sometimes) and then eats some scrambled eggs. Also he likes to look at porno on occasion. Nothing too kinky.
A person is a body of land with defined borders, an economy, a bunch of countries living in it, and probably a flag.
I'm pretty close, right?
amen
It seems like you need to calm down. I don't think you are fully considering the implications of turning off somebody else's television.
Secretly turning off somebody's tv is not a trivial act. Have you considered that a restaurant proprietor who knows nothing about electronics and a lot about food might ignorantly assume something is wrong with his television, and that he might spend hundreds of dollars trying to fix the problem?
Moving a chair in a restaurant isn't exactly going to trick anybody into thinking that the floor is suddenly on an incline, so it's hardly comparable. More comparable acts include walking up to the television to turn it off, or telling the proprietor to turn it off. This is what the post to which you are replying suggested.
Yeah. I think all the people here who use their universal remotes for some supposedly righteous cause are not being honest with themselves. A television that is on in a public place can be a source of mild annoyance, but the real issue here is that the ability to covertly turn off somebody's television is a nifty trick. If you carry a remote control around with you to turn off people's televisions, you are not battling annoyance. You are playing with a toy. While I'm not sure that makes you a douche, it does show that you are childish, and you don't know it. I am childish, and I know it, so I don't pretend that I'm achieving some important goal when I'm really just entertaining myself. I mean, if you're like the Gizmodo guy at CES, who is admittedly playing a prank, that's one thing, but if you really think that by bringing a universal remote into a restaurant and hijacking their tv, you are taking the path of least resistance to less annoyance, you need to spend some time evaluating yourself. I go to pho place with a tv, and not only do I not like to watch tv when I eat my soup, I get annoyed at my coworkers who become mesmerized by the television and rudely phase out of conversations. So, rather than blinding my coworkers with my high-powered laser pointer or covertly turning off the television with my universal remote, I tell my coworkers not to face the television because it annoys me when they get stuck watching tv. Ding! Problem solved!