And it Nailed Word too. Ha Ha Ha. Why don't people run Word in a jail? They do, the best way to run Windoze is in a virtual machine, better still not at all.
Check your facts. Cue Cat can easily read EAN, i know, because i'm using one in germany with local barcodes.
Does it spit them out backward or do whatever silly thing it does to them too?
It would be funny if the free readers available for that cheap plastic junk were already modified but big expensive Enterprise grade equipment was not.
perhaps you could familiarize me with some other reasons you use Konqueror? i admit i am not yet too familiar with all its little features, but im sure there are some nice ones.
The nicest features have to do with file management. sftp, ftp and other protocols work seemlessly and with split screen views, so you can drag and drop files anywhere you have permission to write. It also has very good previews for most image files, including pdf. Configurations can be saved as "profiles" which can be switched on the fly. As a browser, it renders well but lacks Mozilla's precision and ease of right click advert and image blocking.
If they get this stuff working again in Longhorn, I'll be first in line to buy it when its released.
Four years from now, if they can keep their own time line, you might be the only person in line. By then, I expect Windows to be about as legacy as OS/2. You see it and marvel, "that thing still works? Wowwwwwwwwwwwww."
This story reported a 1% loss in browser share for IE and a 26% increase in Mozilla use. The links are all there and the methods used. Lots of people track that kind of thing constantly.
This is a major undertaking for most users. I'll admit to using Konqueror now because it was set as the default browser for KDE applications. It also has features I love, like spell checking. I considered the effort to move to change those defaults not worth what I might gain. Sure, I still have and use Mozilla on occasion, but it's mostly when forced. The corresponding effort on Windoze is much greater, especially when exchange email servers are used. Of course, as the above article points out, the reasons for doing so are also much greater.
I recommend that people dump M$ all together but that's a different story.
To the best of my knowledge, I don't know anyone that works with strictly 12-digit codes on any mass level. Perhaps it's just the mom&pop shops with their possibly custom software that runs with 12-digits only.
Dude, what about my Cue Cat? How's it going to be any better than the 20 year old IBM scanners that are so common? IBM and others might have a service to upgrade their machines but could easily abuse the situation. If there's a Microsoft system out there, the answer is going to be "buy another system" like any other piece of the upgrade train.
I expect that custom software owners will be in much better shape. It's not as good as free software, but people who are in touch with the software's writer will get fixes quickly and at reasonable cost.
... In a properly functioning system, judges don't make the law; they interpret it. The wiretap law targets intercepted transmissions. Email sitting on a server isn't being transmitted. A bizarre loophole? Yes. Clearly outside the general conception of surveilliance? Sure. But a bad ruling? No.
It's an awful ruling that uses a particular phrase to violate the whole spirit of the law. Email is in transit until it displays on a screen I'm looking at. Saying it can be violated on the way because it is not moving makes about as much sense as saying that my mail can be violated because the postman didn't see me do it. The judge who made that ruling is corrupt or incompetent.
The dire consequence is that email will not be a trusted means of communication and will remain effectively worthless for business purposes.
Now no respectable nerd will buy StorageTek products again (just tell the bosses it will cost more money to fix).
Just try to avoid it. It might not be as easy as you think.
Suppose, by bogus patents, StorageTek had the only program that does what you need? Then what do you do? Make one yourself? Maybe, but don't tell anyone else or you will get sued for ten times what StorageTek arbitrarily demands in the first place.
Say you work for StorageTek. I hope you have a taste for Indian food.
Is it yet clear how IP protectionism gives companies the power to screw everyone over? StorageTek, if it used the whole power of US IP laws, can prevent new entrants to their field and use that monopoly power however they like. It's no surprise then that IP heavy companies like GE, M$, and Westinghouse feel free to shop their work out to the lowest bidder and charge as much as it would cost each customer to build one themselves without help from anyone else and without critical improvements that no one else can use. This issue is much larger than software.
Is this really the fault of the browser/OS, or the fact that users aren't educated enough to know that you don't click on the flashing ad banners or open attachments on "I LOVE YOU" messages and so on?
Those things should not be harmful and are not on my systems. Why do people like you continue to blame the user for Microsoft's poor design?
Windows automatically updates itself. The virus scanner automatically updates itself.
It's not that easy and you know it. Windoze updating and service packs that must be manually applied both break applications on your machine, so the user has to be very careful about applying each. Also, the user must manually click through a forest of tabs to turn off all sorts of junk that the update itself turns on. Everytime there's an exploit, some M$ apologist comes along and says that all you have to do is turn of X in configuration Y to stop the problem. Sometimes you get to hear about that setting before you get broken into, but this forces the user to slavishly follow the Wintel rags looking for every bit of such advice and having to decide which pieces of contradictory nonsense to use. Anti-virus software is just another patch for bad design. It works better than most M$ junk, but it costs money and the updates don't last forever. The upgrade train for most antivirus software is extreemly painful and the companies usually recomend that you buy a new PC! M$ users who go through all of that get nailed by something planted on their banks web site that has no fix anyway. That's a huge waste of time.
You can contrast this to the months of uptime the typical free software user gets without much effort at all. I've never had a Linux system violated or crash due to spyware or malware. It's time to move to Linux.
If you can't see the blatant hypocrisy of complaining about shipping jobs overseas while hailing Open Source then that's your problem.
That you don't get it is my problem, so I'll try to explain how IP protectionism is bad again. When other people can fairly compete with me, I don't have a problem. When government intervention, through bogus IP laws prevent me from competing, I have a problem. It is only my inability to compete that makes it possible for big dumb companies to shop around for the cheapest labor possible. When that's due to my inability, I don't care. When it's protectionism run amuck, I have a problem. When people don't understand that link the protectionism gets worse and so does my problem.
every time a story comes up about India "stealing" jobs. Or when companies hire lots of young adults out of College.
No, this is about freedom. I'm as happy to big dumb companies hire Indian as I am about code from India being in free software. What I'm not happy about is big dumb companies that get bogus patents so that others, including free software writers, CAN NOT compete. Idiots like Bill Gates think they should "own" the IP behind software so that you and I have to pay him everytime we want to use any computer. He'd be just as happy to give "ownership" of the common screw to some big dumb company. Slavery of ideas means slavery of everything else and not being able to compete, regardless of price or technical merit.
Got it yet? Read it again if you have to.
Good. Now you might understand why people consider posts like yours flamebait.
BlenderCAD looks promissing. Better will come along and so will all the proprietary stuff. You think Autodesk or the makers of ProEngineer or Solidworks will cling to a legacy platform and die with it? Get real.
Right now, you stick to your CADing as you have, but you will want to pull your network card. You are better off sneaker netting your real work on and off a Windoze box than you are using IE and M$'s other pathetic networking tools. That will preserve your uptime and protect you from arbitrary breakage and file loss caused by malware and spyware. Realy, what serious work should be trusted to M$?
With IBM converting their own desktops, financial institutions, multiple city and state governments tilting the same way, we will see at least OS/2 penetration. We will see more too.
Why is free software any different than OS/2, you might ask? Easy, the technical differences are even more pronounced and it costs less. Microsoft can continue to give software away to Universities and other "decision makers" but it won't work. People who have figured things out will just download their favorite distribution. It makes M$'s CD dumps look stone age. Linux owns developer mindshare and that is leading to user mindshare in a way no other commercial software can.
With more users, M$'s primary weapon, FUD, will go away. Free software continues to evolve and improve at a rate no commercial company can keep up with. Anyone who's bothered to use a free desktop for any real work will find Windows cramped, featureless and ugly. It will be impossible for Bill Gates and Company to continue saying Linux is unusable, unprofitable, communist and all that other nonsense. IBM, HP and others are making big money off free software. Any one who does as much as spins up a Knoppix CD, knows M$ is beat. With a little bit of free software use, no one will bother to load M$ again.
This may or may not be the year that Linux takes 90% of the market, but it will be a year that Microsoft loses and every year will be worse for them.
That is, if someone wanted to make the impacts sound like bells, or cow moos or dog barks, those would be equally as valid representations as the "hail" sounding impacts.
That might give you a better impresion of what your space ship would sound like as you passed the rings if you used dogs or cows for your hull.
When I imagine the puffs of plasma translating into vibrations that might be heard by a traveler, I get something more like what was presented.
It's like you're wearing blinders. With a little common sense, Windows can be very secure and very usable. You just have to do things like running a decent firewall, don't idiotically open strange attachments from anybody, run a decent virus scanner, keep reasonably up to date with the latest patches, etc.
I'm not wearing blinders, all of that is a pain in the ass. I've seen people try to do all of that. It eats up all of their time and fails anyway. I've got better things to do.
I have personally been using Windows and following such practices from 3.1 up to XP Pro, and have never been infected with any form of system-disabling virus, or for that matter, any viruses at all that were not immediately detected and quarantined.
Your experience is not typical. The hundreds of broken machines I've seen in retail repair are.
At seven cents a kilowatt-hour, that's some green power. Dollar bill green, that is. Nuclear still puts out power at under three cents a kilowatt hour and it does so 24-7. You would think it's cheaper to run a water wheel.
It could be not a gain in Mozilla, but a drop in the number of IE machines that still function. IE lets so much adware/spyware in that a lot of machines will cease to function at all.
Nah, that's been going on for at least a year. Last summer, as more people picked up broadband, things really started to get ugly. I saw hundreds of broken windoze PCs brought into the retail shop where I worked. The answer was to adaware and spybot them if they booted ($40), rebuild them if they did not($75 if they had their original software). That answer would last a few months and they would be broken the same way. Non broadband users were not spared either, hackers were getting to them and they got porn dialers. So that kind of thing has been in the statistics for a while.
What's new is:
Fewer people are first time computer owners. They have been on the upgrade train before and things are only getting worse.
M$ does not have an "upgrade" that "fixes" things. They can't try that route even if they wanted to. XP gets nailed just as or more often than any other M$ junk.
Free software is now vastly superior. It's not just Mozilla, but Mozilla is a nice introduction.
Mozilla is the thin wedge. Platform exploits will continue underneath it and people are going to start moving to free software.
No, for most "normal" home users, and even some geek types, it is not. I don't know why this has to keep being said over and over, but not everyone is using only easily swappable web browsing, office, development, or email applications with their systems.
Yeah, but everyone does that more than they do other things and should be using free software for it. Microsoft should not be used for anything that touches the web and should be run virtualized of firewalled heavily if not blinded to your network.
Dual booting solves the game problem and more often than not, the games are moving to Linux anyway. Dual booting is a pain and best done with bios or swapable hard drives unless Winblows requires a rebuild. At the same time, Windows gaming, with all of it's Direct X dll hell has always been a pain under winblows, so gamers should not have a big problem with your proposition.
Until it is possible to run practically any Windows software under Linux with no problems, the most you are going out of the majority of home users is a dual-boot, if that. Certainly not complete swap-outs.
Bah. I've been swapped out for years now. There's enough "good enough" free software for everything. Let me tell you, it all runs much more practically and easier than Windoze junk ever did.
A nice little program called Bosch can solve the rest of the world's windoze problems. Check out these screenshots for yourself:
It may be slow and hurt, but it's way easier to do that than it is to keep a real windoze machine going with email, web browsing and all of those other things Windoze is not good at.
...one percentage point is simply not statistically significant.
Of course it's statistically significant or they would not have reported it. It's the first time in five years they have notice such a decline. It might be because corporate users have been scared off the internet for a while or it might be due to the noted 25% rise in Mozilla usage, but it's real either way.
It's also socially significant either way. Both ways demonstrate that people no longer trust Microsoft junk when it counts. Adoption of Mozilla on a Windoze platform is even more significant. It shows that people are willing to go out of their way to get more trusted code and that they trust a free program more than they trust M$. It's very bad news for Microsoft.
It might also portend larger shift. It's about as easy to replace your whole M$ system as it is to swap out the browser. As people use Mozilla and realize just how much better it is, they will be tempted to try out distributions like Xandros, Mepis, Suse or Fedora. As more "normal" users make that swap and report how much better things are, we will see a much larger shift in statistics.
The net leads to a decline in reading? What is there to do on the net but read? Oh yeah, we also write and sharpen those skills as well.
the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
Emphatically, yes but the details are not what matters.
When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people.... The meme hasn't propagated. I can explain the experience of reading the book to others, but most of the time they really don't care because I'm unable to convey enough to start discussion. With a movie that millions have seen, or a webpage with a quick read that I could blog about or send the link around in email, the memetic aspects are much greater.
That's sad and the root of the problem is the passive thing you desire. I generally grok the concepts in a book better than I do in a film about the same. It's also easier for me to have a real discussion with someone about those concepts when they have not read the same book and easier still if they have not seen the movie. Someone with a fresh perspective is always more interesting to talk to than someone who has exactly the same set of memes as I do. It may be years before I find someone who might be interested in the concepts presented by a particular story, but it's worth the wait. At the same time, I've done enough stupid stuff on my own and read so many different kinds of writing, that there are few people I meet that I can't regale with something.
The only problem I have with books is having the time to find new authors that merit reading. Anthologies help, as do book reviews, but I typically have to go out of my way to get them if they are not on the web. It takes time, then I have to trudge down to the used book store or the library and get my hands on one.
One of the best things to happen to me in the last three years was a friend moving to Canada. I miss the friend, but he had an excellent collection of science fiction. Included were classics by Nieven, Clark and other more recent authors as well as a few anthologies that have pointed the way to more. It's been since high school that I've seen such a carefull collection. I'm just now exhausting the three or four cases of books I got. The breadth of new concepts I found in them was astounding.
Slashdot Mirror
No. According to "A Hard Days Night," most people still wish they had not won.
Does it spit them out backward or do whatever silly thing it does to them too?
It would be funny if the free readers available for that cheap plastic junk were already modified but big expensive Enterprise grade equipment was not.
It's easy to ignore one or two nonsense words, like the names of most Microsoft programs that are not common words.
The nicest features have to do with file management. sftp, ftp and other protocols work seemlessly and with split screen views, so you can drag and drop files anywhere you have permission to write. It also has very good previews for most image files, including pdf. Configurations can be saved as "profiles" which can be switched on the fly. As a browser, it renders well but lacks Mozilla's precision and ease of right click advert and image blocking.
Four years from now, if they can keep their own time line, you might be the only person in line. By then, I expect Windows to be about as legacy as OS/2. You see it and marvel, "that thing still works? Wowwwwwwwwwwwww."
This is a major undertaking for most users. I'll admit to using Konqueror now because it was set as the default browser for KDE applications. It also has features I love, like spell checking. I considered the effort to move to change those defaults not worth what I might gain. Sure, I still have and use Mozilla on occasion, but it's mostly when forced. The corresponding effort on Windoze is much greater, especially when exchange email servers are used. Of course, as the above article points out, the reasons for doing so are also much greater.
I recommend that people dump M$ all together but that's a different story.
Dude, what about my Cue Cat? How's it going to be any better than the 20 year old IBM scanners that are so common? IBM and others might have a service to upgrade their machines but could easily abuse the situation. If there's a Microsoft system out there, the answer is going to be "buy another system" like any other piece of the upgrade train.
I expect that custom software owners will be in much better shape. It's not as good as free software, but people who are in touch with the software's writer will get fixes quickly and at reasonable cost.
It's an awful ruling that uses a particular phrase to violate the whole spirit of the law. Email is in transit until it displays on a screen I'm looking at. Saying it can be violated on the way because it is not moving makes about as much sense as saying that my mail can be violated because the postman didn't see me do it. The judge who made that ruling is corrupt or incompetent.
The dire consequence is that email will not be a trusted means of communication and will remain effectively worthless for business purposes.
Just try to avoid it. It might not be as easy as you think.
Suppose, by bogus patents, StorageTek had the only program that does what you need? Then what do you do? Make one yourself? Maybe, but don't tell anyone else or you will get sued for ten times what StorageTek arbitrarily demands in the first place.
Say you work for StorageTek. I hope you have a taste for Indian food.
Is it yet clear how IP protectionism gives companies the power to screw everyone over? StorageTek, if it used the whole power of US IP laws, can prevent new entrants to their field and use that monopoly power however they like. It's no surprise then that IP heavy companies like GE, M$, and Westinghouse feel free to shop their work out to the lowest bidder and charge as much as it would cost each customer to build one themselves without help from anyone else and without critical improvements that no one else can use. This issue is much larger than software.
Those things should not be harmful and are not on my systems. Why do people like you continue to blame the user for Microsoft's poor design?
Windows automatically updates itself. The virus scanner automatically updates itself.
It's not that easy and you know it. Windoze updating and service packs that must be manually applied both break applications on your machine, so the user has to be very careful about applying each. Also, the user must manually click through a forest of tabs to turn off all sorts of junk that the update itself turns on. Everytime there's an exploit, some M$ apologist comes along and says that all you have to do is turn of X in configuration Y to stop the problem. Sometimes you get to hear about that setting before you get broken into, but this forces the user to slavishly follow the Wintel rags looking for every bit of such advice and having to decide which pieces of contradictory nonsense to use. Anti-virus software is just another patch for bad design. It works better than most M$ junk, but it costs money and the updates don't last forever. The upgrade train for most antivirus software is extreemly painful and the companies usually recomend that you buy a new PC! M$ users who go through all of that get nailed by something planted on their banks web site that has no fix anyway. That's a huge waste of time.
You can contrast this to the months of uptime the typical free software user gets without much effort at all. I've never had a Linux system violated or crash due to spyware or malware. It's time to move to Linux.
That you don't get it is my problem, so I'll try to explain how IP protectionism is bad again. When other people can fairly compete with me, I don't have a problem. When government intervention, through bogus IP laws prevent me from competing, I have a problem. It is only my inability to compete that makes it possible for big dumb companies to shop around for the cheapest labor possible. When that's due to my inability, I don't care. When it's protectionism run amuck, I have a problem. When people don't understand that link the protectionism gets worse and so does my problem.
As you have posted this nasty little flame about Indian labor more than once here, I'll go ahead and link my answer.
No, this is about freedom. I'm as happy to big dumb companies hire Indian as I am about code from India being in free software. What I'm not happy about is big dumb companies that get bogus patents so that others, including free software writers, CAN NOT compete. Idiots like Bill Gates think they should "own" the IP behind software so that you and I have to pay him everytime we want to use any computer. He'd be just as happy to give "ownership" of the common screw to some big dumb company. Slavery of ideas means slavery of everything else and not being able to compete, regardless of price or technical merit.
Got it yet? Read it again if you have to.
Good. Now you might understand why people consider posts like yours flamebait.
BlenderCAD looks promissing. Better will come along and so will all the proprietary stuff. You think Autodesk or the makers of ProEngineer or Solidworks will cling to a legacy platform and die with it? Get real.
Right now, you stick to your CADing as you have, but you will want to pull your network card. You are better off sneaker netting your real work on and off a Windoze box than you are using IE and M$'s other pathetic networking tools. That will preserve your uptime and protect you from arbitrary breakage and file loss caused by malware and spyware. Realy, what serious work should be trusted to M$?
Why is free software any different than OS/2, you might ask? Easy, the technical differences are even more pronounced and it costs less. Microsoft can continue to give software away to Universities and other "decision makers" but it won't work. People who have figured things out will just download their favorite distribution. It makes M$'s CD dumps look stone age. Linux owns developer mindshare and that is leading to user mindshare in a way no other commercial software can.
With more users, M$'s primary weapon, FUD, will go away. Free software continues to evolve and improve at a rate no commercial company can keep up with. Anyone who's bothered to use a free desktop for any real work will find Windows cramped, featureless and ugly. It will be impossible for Bill Gates and Company to continue saying Linux is unusable, unprofitable, communist and all that other nonsense. IBM, HP and others are making big money off free software. Any one who does as much as spins up a Knoppix CD, knows M$ is beat. With a little bit of free software use, no one will bother to load M$ again.
This may or may not be the year that Linux takes 90% of the market, but it will be a year that Microsoft loses and every year will be worse for them.
That might give you a better impresion of what your space ship would sound like as you passed the rings if you used dogs or cows for your hull.
When I imagine the puffs of plasma translating into vibrations that might be heard by a traveler, I get something more like what was presented.
I'm not wearing blinders, all of that is a pain in the ass. I've seen people try to do all of that. It eats up all of their time and fails anyway. I've got better things to do.
I have personally been using Windows and following such practices from 3.1 up to XP Pro, and have never been infected with any form of system-disabling virus, or for that matter, any viruses at all that were not immediately detected and quarantined.
Your experience is not typical. The hundreds of broken machines I've seen in retail repair are.
Nah, that's been going on for at least a year. Last summer, as more people picked up broadband, things really started to get ugly. I saw hundreds of broken windoze PCs brought into the retail shop where I worked. The answer was to adaware and spybot them if they booted ($40), rebuild them if they did not($75 if they had their original software). That answer would last a few months and they would be broken the same way. Non broadband users were not spared either, hackers were getting to them and they got porn dialers. So that kind of thing has been in the statistics for a while.
What's new is:
Mozilla is the thin wedge. Platform exploits will continue underneath it and people are going to start moving to free software.
Yeah, but everyone does that more than they do other things and should be using free software for it. Microsoft should not be used for anything that touches the web and should be run virtualized of firewalled heavily if not blinded to your network.
Dual booting solves the game problem and more often than not, the games are moving to Linux anyway. Dual booting is a pain and best done with bios or swapable hard drives unless Winblows requires a rebuild. At the same time, Windows gaming, with all of it's Direct X dll hell has always been a pain under winblows, so gamers should not have a big problem with your proposition.
Until it is possible to run practically any Windows software under Linux with no problems, the most you are going out of the majority of home users is a dual-boot, if that. Certainly not complete swap-outs.
Bah. I've been swapped out for years now. There's enough "good enough" free software for everything. Let me tell you, it all runs much more practically and easier than Windoze junk ever did.
A nice little program called Bosch can solve the rest of the world's windoze problems. Check out these screenshots for yourself:
Official shots
XP running in Bosch under Linux
It may be slow and hurt, but it's way easier to do that than it is to keep a real windoze machine going with email, web browsing and all of those other things Windoze is not good at.
Of course it's statistically significant or they would not have reported it. It's the first time in five years they have notice such a decline. It might be because corporate users have been scared off the internet for a while or it might be due to the noted 25% rise in Mozilla usage, but it's real either way.
It's also socially significant either way. Both ways demonstrate that people no longer trust Microsoft junk when it counts. Adoption of Mozilla on a Windoze platform is even more significant. It shows that people are willing to go out of their way to get more trusted code and that they trust a free program more than they trust M$. It's very bad news for Microsoft.
It might also portend larger shift. It's about as easy to replace your whole M$ system as it is to swap out the browser. As people use Mozilla and realize just how much better it is, they will be tempted to try out distributions like Xandros, Mepis, Suse or Fedora. As more "normal" users make that swap and report how much better things are, we will see a much larger shift in statistics.
Everything is in place.
the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
Emphatically, yes but the details are not what matters.
When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people. ... The meme hasn't propagated. I can explain the experience of reading the book to others, but most of the time they really don't care because I'm unable to convey enough to start discussion. With a movie that millions have seen, or a webpage with a quick read that I could blog about or send the link around in email, the memetic aspects are much greater.
That's sad and the root of the problem is the passive thing you desire. I generally grok the concepts in a book better than I do in a film about the same. It's also easier for me to have a real discussion with someone about those concepts when they have not read the same book and easier still if they have not seen the movie. Someone with a fresh perspective is always more interesting to talk to than someone who has exactly the same set of memes as I do. It may be years before I find someone who might be interested in the concepts presented by a particular story, but it's worth the wait. At the same time, I've done enough stupid stuff on my own and read so many different kinds of writing, that there are few people I meet that I can't regale with something.
The only problem I have with books is having the time to find new authors that merit reading. Anthologies help, as do book reviews, but I typically have to go out of my way to get them if they are not on the web. It takes time, then I have to trudge down to the used book store or the library and get my hands on one.
One of the best things to happen to me in the last three years was a friend moving to Canada. I miss the friend, but he had an excellent collection of science fiction. Included were classics by Nieven, Clark and other more recent authors as well as a few anthologies that have pointed the way to more. It's been since high school that I've seen such a carefull collection. I'm just now exhausting the three or four cases of books I got. The breadth of new concepts I found in them was astounding.