You've posted on average about 4 times a day on this site since you registered... You're already on the [no life] list by default.
Big Sigh. I do wish I could be independently wealthy, like your boss Bill Gates, but I'm afraid that I have to work for a living. As long as I have a job or have to use a computer to look for one, the posts you love so much will be around. By the way, when did I register? You people are so much better at tracking that kind of unimportant thing than I am. Would you also be so kind as to post my M$ file one day? The way you people think makes me laugh.
Actually, it's neither paranoid or counterproductive.... if you're working for a defense contractor, the government, or the military directly.
Any company that discourages curiosity and hard work will end up with stupid and lazy employees, the kind that would think those kinds of rules should be applied to Universities.... oh shit. Scratch that, there's nothing stupid or lazy about the FBI, I swear, I didn't mean it. Please don't put me on a no fly, no work, no rent, no life list.
Does the Windoze clipboard work or not?
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when I have something negative to say about Linux - which is not often - at least I speak out of personal knowledge. Might want to try that instead of "last time I asked someone". Makes you look less stupid.
It's not so much that he did not give enough, as it is that the community was not willing to fund his vision of a school. This is typical of charter schools and Bill's schools in particular. They provide a small portion of the money needed and expect the rest to be provided by the state, but it's all spent under Bill's rules. In charter schools and public libraries blessed by his patranage, the software must all be M$. You can see how this can be used to create a cash flow and charter schools stand accused of schools supply cronyism. Those selling stand to make a killing. This is just a small part of the short circuits community oversite built into most public funding, especially for schools. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it's bad. Ultimately, it's better to have functional communities than it is to have McSchool franchises.
Maybe the fact that a sponsor with deep pockets was in the mix is also the reason the school failed. Just like a liberal welfare program, unless your own money is on the line, there's no incentive to do better.
Perhaps we can transmute the "learn by doing" into child labor. Why give culture and ideas to people when you could just teach them good slave labor skills? Exposing people to anything but broadcast media facts might make them uppity.
No, I don't believe in child labor and can make a case for real public education. Well educated people are a business asset that provides more back to society than their education costs. They are also better defenders of freedom, which also makes everyone wealthier. Expecting the schools themselves to turn a profit is suicidally short sited.
Traditional lectures are abysmal teaching methods.
What a load. People have been teaching and learning forever. A good course will have a combination of all the things in the Pyramid you link to and any display technology will do. Let's review.
Method (average retention rate)
"Traditional:"
Lecture (5%)
Reading (10%)
Audiovisual (20%)
Demonstration (30%)
"Teaming:"
Discussion (50%)
Practice by Doing (75%)
Teaching Others, Immediate Use. (90%)
A reasonable course must have a combination of all of these things. A lecture must be used to introduce the students to new material. If the students already know it, you are wasting their time. The students should be reading up on things and should be encouraged to ask questions, this is also known as homework and discussion. "Practice by doing" is what homework is for and good classes will have good examples to follow. Teaching Others is what happens when students get together to help each other with homework. It's not as good as being forced to lecture, but there's not always time for that when there's lots of ground to cover as there is in every class up to graduate school and research. Where there's too much material for the student to learn, they don't have time to teach.
These things can all be accomplished with any teaching aids, all the way back to scratching in sand. Movies and other image projections are a real improvement and should be used on occasion to show the student exactly what they are learning about. Tablets, white boards, and chalk boards are all substitutes for sand. Any magic they offer comes entirely from the person drawing on them. I still prefer chalk to white board and think tablets are too expensive for what they provide.
I'm trying desperately to get our small hospital off of XP.
Then we both agree with Halamka that Windoze is suitable for neither critical systems nor desktops in a hospital. That was my point, so you might want to work on your own reading comprehension skills, coldwetdog
I'll go a step further and say that Windoze is an accident waiting to happen, however you use it. It's surprising how annoying a botnet can be on your network and how such non critical systems, like the door opener to surgery, can be painful when the network is congested by it.
I'll also point you here where I note that GE's new CT uses Red Hat. It's not the average PC under the hood because it's very fast at what it does, but that's not so far fetched.
Too bad Hovispan forgot to read the judgment from the MS monopoly trial and pay attention to ever other poor bastard that thought they could dance with the devil.
He does not really think M$ is co-operating with Novel and is close to fed up with Outlook/Exchange:
Halamka notes that the problem he encountered with Evolution isnt due to any inherent flaws in the e-mail application; Evolution just doesnt work well as a front end to Exchange, he says. The fact that a Microsoft product doesnt play nicely with an open-source product shouldnt come as a surprise given the Redmond, Wash.-based companys historically vitriolic stance toward open source. However, you might think in light of the partnership Microsoft and Novell struck last year that the two applications would (eventually) work well together. That is, of course, if it is indeed a real partnershipsomething that many skeptical members of the open-source community question.
.... when it came time to [the exchange problem], Halamka found an alternate way to maximize his time: He simply accessed his e-mail over the Web.
I think he's catching on very well for a big dog. Most of us would be very happy with a boss this open and clued.
Do you think this will help the image of Novell after drinking Microsoft's Kool Aid? No, only when pigs fly.
If your boss offered you the chance to migrate from the Beast to Novel, you would be crazy to say no. The more free software people use, the better. I'd rather everyone used nothing but free software and I don't like that Novel endorsed M$, but let's not get carried away. When the alternatives are to stick with seven year old software and slowly migrate to Vista or migrate to Suse, Suse is the clear winner.
He's not running a nuclear reactor -- He's just doing email and typical business person stuff. Nobody lets a CIO do potentially dangerous or important things.
Oh, I just hate to quote the fine article but:
That summer, Halamka had embarked on a quest to find a viable alternative to the Microsoft desktopfed up as he was with Windows instability.
The X60 running Novell SUSE is the first Linux laptop I have used that is good enough to be my only computing device,
That is astounding after only one month of use. Most users take years to shake bad old M$ habits and almost as long to learn which of the dozens of free packages is their favorite for any given task. Most people want their Windoze safety blanket for a year or so. This kind of endorsement is ringing - he's saying that he could do without Windoze tomorrow, forever. He's right but has not had time to develop real confidence in his opinion, which is reasonable given the billion dollars a month M$ spends on marketing and lock on major vendors.
To be fair, you should have quoted his worry. What's keeping him from recommending widespread deployment? Well, this:
"I dont know enough about the remote management tools and capabilities for it"
OMFG! and,
"For your average administrator or manager who is very comfortable with Windows 95, 98 and XP, it might be a little bit of a leap"
Free software absolutely kills Windoze for remote control and management. The fact that thousands of computers have been corralled into clusters for decades should tell anyone that remote configuration has been mastered long ago in the free software world. It's amazing how much easier things are when you don't have integrated licensing and copy protection built into the product itself. On top of that, Novel offers it's own set of tools to manage mixed environments which are widely admired. This is a slam dunk for free software and Suse.
The other concern is a bit condescending. Even fanboys, given proper support and encouragement, soon learn how much better free software is. It's true that the deeper you are into M$, the harder it is for you to see anything else, but those who escape become the biggest M$ haters. They, more than anyone else, bear the brunt of M$'s intentional waste. It makes them angry but they accept it without knowing any better. Eventually, the lies melt away and all the talk about software freedom sinks in. Liberate them for just a while and it's all over.
uname -a on one of GE's latest generation of CT scanners reports a version of Red Hat. Diagnosing cancer may not be as life critical as an EKG, but it's not something you want to have crash or degrade over time or have some kind of file quirk that screws up images.
Re:Yes, like the clipboard.
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And this is different to Windows how?
I don't know, you are the big Windoze fan. Why don't you tell me the difference other than the $200/machine cost of software before you can do anything useful. Last time I asked someone, the clipboard did not work at all though various Windoze remote desktops. It may now, it may not. Why should I care when I have one that works without cost?
And what environmental factors could possible cause that on the moon, which has no atmosphere or tectonic activity?
The haze and other problems caused by moon dust is well known. One of the principle causes is solar ionization. Without an atmosphere to disperse charges, the dust ends up floating around like your hair while touching a van de graph generator. The irradiation is intense enough to be part of the weathering process that created the dust in the first place. Micrometorites are another cause. Because the dust is charged, it sticks to everything it comes in contact with. Dealing with dust is a design problem for lunar landers. I'm not sure how they will keep it out of the works of any telescope. Any tent you make will have to be cleaned too but that might be easier than cleaning a spinning liquid.
It's too bad Nature is a non free publication. They probably deal with the issue or point to other non free articles. Because government money funds this kind of work, you would hope the public would enjoy the best presentation of the ideas without having to pay $30/article.
It's too bad this article and all the references are published in non free magazines. The $18 to $30 cost per article is steep. When you consider that all of the actual research is government funded, the cost of the information itself should be zero.
Speed advantages of Free Software.
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Wherever I go, there's M$ defender dedazo. Every hour of the day, seven days a week. What a drag. The only thing worse, of course, would be if I actually was dedazo. This time, he wants to compare X to Vista and declare Vista more efficient, wowzer.
What "DRM" is that again? I seem to be able to play all my media without any trouble at all.
This is a different issue, but it is part of the user experience so I'll deal with it. Most audiophiles would disagree with you when they find out that Vista disables their spdif outputs. What I was really talking about though, was the waste of resources the checking of "trip bits" represents. There's a lot of stuff like that in Vista that will never hamper free software. You can also add anti-virus, file indexing, poor memory management, driver that can't share code and other bloat to the list of performance robbing junk on Windoze. Once again, these are different issues and should not be confused with the interface.
I find a fully loaded KDE desktop that sort of begins to mimic OS X or Vista (and frankly not that well) to be very computationally intensive. Do you contend otherwise? Of course XFCE and other options make that better, but then of course it's up to you what you want to give up for the "pretty" experience.
Yes, I'll say otherwise. I've run a "fully loaded" KDE interface on a 233 MHz PII. It was a little slow for my taste, so I run E16 instead, which is prettier, has transparency, multiple desktops, excellent pagers and very good speed even on modest hardware. Yeah, it did movies and all that. I also run the parts of KDE I like, such as the kicker, universal sidebar, konqueror, kate, kontact and other bits and pieces where KDE is really the best available. My fastest machine is still a six year old 1.2 GHz Athlon. I do movie editing on it, but my wife does most of that for us on an 800 MHz PIII. One day, I might upgrade because the newer processors are that much better at number crunching, but I think I'll wait until some piece of hardware actually dies.
The only advantage Vista has is accelerated drivers, which are a must for gamers. This drives them to Intel, or non free nvidia and ATI drivers.
My subjective view of the overall Vista experience comes from a visit I made to CompUSA today. There, against the back wall was a line of M$'s finest display. Even to someone bound in the 1995esque eXPerience, the display was a dissapointment. First off, it was jerky. It's just a movie and should have flown smoothly but it jerked every second or so. The flying toaster people did better fifteen years ago. Second, what it showed looked like a dud. There was limited transparency, a bazillion flying windows, dual desktops, and video conferencing. E16 has better transparency and E17 offers animated desktops. The flying windows looks about as good a way to organize your data as throwing our papers into the air and I far prefer the multiple desktops of X which are best done by E16. Dual displays are something that KDE and others have mastered that I will occasionally yearn for, but never enough to actually install a second or third or fourth PCI card. Video conferencing is the most interesting thing, not because it's hard to do, but because they might finally deliver on what they have been unable to do well for the last seven years of NetMeeting. XP users may finally reap some of the rewards of the M$ monopoly and the ass pain M$ has made of USB cameras, when they move to Vista. It won't last long because ATT and other greed heads are busy setting up their networks to block anything but their own pay per byte VOIP but XP users don't know it. Otherwise, I saw absolutely nothing that would tempt the average XP user. The performance hit, hardware costs and cost of replacing software and other stuff broken by Vista add up to one very large negative. That might explain why I was the only person in the store looking at computers.
Yes, like the clipboard.
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Smooth and unified like the clipboard?
What do you mean? My clipboard not only works between applications of all sorts, it works across the network as if the application was running locally.
When there's no transparency, there's no accounting or truth. This could be ongoing damage control from the break in to end all break ins or that could have been fake too. One thing is sure, the truth is actually worse. You can not tell what's true when people are lying to you and you will never know how screwed you are.
The thing to do is to quantify and reduce the secret budget, which is hard to justify since the fall of the Soviet Union anyway. The less money spooks have, the less harm they can do. This is easiest to do when there's a new release that causes outrage and a sense of betrayal.
Free. Re:Cost?
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Not to mention, this is a hell of alot of software, I mean, he's talking about installing several toys that will run 24/7 and of course this is gonna sap your processing power, and its not integrated, so it'll probably end up using more resources than vista.
Vista is running all sorts of DRM on top of it's not very efficient or thrilling UI. The cost of adding a few skins is going to be less than that. Yahoo widgets along give the user a clock, weather and that kind of thing, without any performance hit.
But really, the further you get away from M$ the better your computing gets. The real upgrades are free. Most of the visual elements have been available in the nix world for decades. The performance gain of moving to GNU/Linux is incredible and it can be had for less than 2GB of system files that auto configure and run live off a 650MB boot CD. Why buy car tweaks or a new car when you could just download a space ship for free?
I agree with most of that.
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why don't you just pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead of a bunch of disjoint shareware utilities?
In the free software world there are no "disjoint" utilities because everyone can share their libraries and common routines in ways no two commercial applications ever can. "Smooth" and "unified" begin with freedom.
what free, open source video format allows you the same DRM protection that is built in to WMP? I really hope you can answer this question, because you can bet that in the production of their content the BBC has entered in to some agreements that will require some form of DRM for redistribution online.
Yet another poster has pointed out that the DRM protection built into the system is perfect, they can't watch anything at all. I really hope the person who recommended this broken technology is ready to apologize and work to fix things because you can bet that working content was part of their agreements.
Finally, we both know that digital restrictions are snake oil, especially for something that's broadcast. If the "official" broken format video is not liberated and redistributed, many other coppies of the same content taken from the air by DVRs will quickly circumvent the problems created by WMV. These solutions will be inconvenient to the taxpaying user, but they will at least work. The BBC would be better off declaring DRM a sham and nullifying all previous commitments. Governments can do that kind of thing, because they are the ultimate keepers of copyright and the public interest to begin with. When the law violates public interests, as it so obviously does here, the law is out of whack and needs to be fixed.
The best solution is to just release the content so it can be enjoyed and shared by the people who paid for it and own it. They could, if they wanted to, release a free software player. They have been working on that for a while and might as well throw patent concerns back across the Atlantic because they don't serve the BBC or their audience.
if there had never been patents perhaps there would have been minimal economic motivation to create the technology that requires the format.
You might as well say there's no motivation to solve math problems. The economic motivation to create moving picture formats is as blindingly obvious as the billions of dollars people spend on TV and movies every year. The "technology" to provide those things digitally is the hardware, software simply tells it how to act and is more like math or business methods than anything else. There's more than one effort to create patent free movie formats, but it's not easy because many obvious methods have been stolen. If it were not for patents, other methods to watch the patented formats would already be available. In fact, they are available in places that don't have insane patent laws. Software patents are parasitic and the BBC's dilemma exposes that fact nicely.
Of course therein lies your problem. If "most people" are like that then they're really no better than you. If they're not, then you're screwed because your FUD is exposed. Sucks either way.
If they read further in they run into posts by others complaining of the complexity of ACPI and how it's just another M$ "extensible" non standard. Between that and Bill Gate's little memo, the reasons for ACPI to suck are obvious. As he stated himself, he did not want Linux to work.
Governments, funded by the PUBLIC should put their stuff in PUBLIC format.
and when software patents get in the way, the PUBLIC should demand that law serve the PUBLIC interest. Software patents are bogus and they are the only reason there's a format problem in the first place.
You linking to that post is hilarious. You figure no one will notice this reply
I'm not afraid of that BS. People can read as much or as little of that troll infested thread as they like. Most people won't bother to read past the memo written by Bill Gates himself, as the intent is obvious. No one will tell you that ACPI is rationally designed and anyone who's read the memo knows why. Ultimately, the crap flood that follows me is just another sign of how desperately afraid of the truth and popular opinion M$ is. It's too bad they don't just fix their broken junk instead of pretending it's fixed while screwing over their competition in ways that waste everyone's time.
Slashdot Mirror
A humorless AC Troll taunts:
You've posted on average about 4 times a day on this site since you registered ... You're already on the [no life] list by default.
Big Sigh. I do wish I could be independently wealthy, like your boss Bill Gates, but I'm afraid that I have to work for a living. As long as I have a job or have to use a computer to look for one, the posts you love so much will be around. By the way, when did I register? You people are so much better at tracking that kind of unimportant thing than I am. Would you also be so kind as to post my M$ file one day? The way you people think makes me laugh.
Actually, it's neither paranoid or counterproductive .... if you're working for a defense contractor, the government, or the military directly.
Any company that discourages curiosity and hard work will end up with stupid and lazy employees, the kind that would think those kinds of rules should be applied to Universities .... oh shit. Scratch that, there's nothing stupid or lazy about the FBI, I swear, I didn't mean it. Please don't put me on a no fly, no work, no rent, no life list.
when I have something negative to say about Linux - which is not often - at least I speak out of personal knowledge. Might want to try that instead of "last time I asked someone". Makes you look less stupid.
Great.
Now, I've told you from personal experience that clipboards work great locally and through the network by secure shell forwarding. Can you tell me anything at all about the Windoze clipboard?
If not, I might have to conclude you are here to do nothing but harass people
It's not so much that he did not give enough, as it is that the community was not willing to fund his vision of a school. This is typical of charter schools and Bill's schools in particular. They provide a small portion of the money needed and expect the rest to be provided by the state, but it's all spent under Bill's rules. In charter schools and public libraries blessed by his patranage, the software must all be M$. You can see how this can be used to create a cash flow and charter schools stand accused of schools supply cronyism. Those selling stand to make a killing. This is just a small part of the short circuits community oversite built into most public funding, especially for schools. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it's bad. Ultimately, it's better to have functional communities than it is to have McSchool franchises.
Maybe the fact that a sponsor with deep pockets was in the mix is also the reason the school failed. Just like a liberal welfare program, unless your own money is on the line, there's no incentive to do better.
Perhaps we can transmute the "learn by doing" into child labor. Why give culture and ideas to people when you could just teach them good slave labor skills? Exposing people to anything but broadcast media facts might make them uppity.
No, I don't believe in child labor and can make a case for real public education. Well educated people are a business asset that provides more back to society than their education costs. They are also better defenders of freedom, which also makes everyone wealthier. Expecting the schools themselves to turn a profit is suicidally short sited.
Traditional lectures are abysmal teaching methods.
What a load. People have been teaching and learning forever. A good course will have a combination of all the things in the Pyramid you link to and any display technology will do. Let's review.
Method (average retention rate)
"Traditional:"
"Teaming:"
A reasonable course must have a combination of all of these things. A lecture must be used to introduce the students to new material. If the students already know it, you are wasting their time. The students should be reading up on things and should be encouraged to ask questions, this is also known as homework and discussion. "Practice by doing" is what homework is for and good classes will have good examples to follow. Teaching Others is what happens when students get together to help each other with homework. It's not as good as being forced to lecture, but there's not always time for that when there's lots of ground to cover as there is in every class up to graduate school and research. Where there's too much material for the student to learn, they don't have time to teach.
These things can all be accomplished with any teaching aids, all the way back to scratching in sand. Movies and other image projections are a real improvement and should be used on occasion to show the student exactly what they are learning about. Tablets, white boards, and chalk boards are all substitutes for sand. Any magic they offer comes entirely from the person drawing on them. I still prefer chalk to white board and think tablets are too expensive for what they provide.
I'm trying desperately to get our small hospital off of XP.
Then we both agree with Halamka that Windoze is suitable for neither critical systems nor desktops in a hospital. That was my point, so you might want to work on your own reading comprehension skills, coldwetdog
I'll go a step further and say that Windoze is an accident waiting to happen, however you use it. It's surprising how annoying a botnet can be on your network and how such non critical systems, like the door opener to surgery, can be painful when the network is congested by it.
I'll also point you here where I note that GE's new CT uses Red Hat. It's not the average PC under the hood because it's very fast at what it does, but that's not so far fetched.
Too bad Hovispan forgot to read the judgment from the MS monopoly trial and pay attention to ever other poor bastard that thought they could dance with the devil.
He does not really think M$ is co-operating with Novel and is close to fed up with Outlook/Exchange:
I think he's catching on very well for a big dog. Most of us would be very happy with a boss this open and clued.
Do you think this will help the image of Novell after drinking Microsoft's Kool Aid? No, only when pigs fly.
If your boss offered you the chance to migrate from the Beast to Novel, you would be crazy to say no. The more free software people use, the better. I'd rather everyone used nothing but free software and I don't like that Novel endorsed M$, but let's not get carried away. When the alternatives are to stick with seven year old software and slowly migrate to Vista or migrate to Suse, Suse is the clear winner.
He's not running a nuclear reactor -- He's just doing email and typical business person stuff. Nobody lets a CIO do potentially dangerous or important things.
Oh, I just hate to quote the fine article but:
It's kind of like ... unsafe at any speed.
His real opinion is this:
The X60 running Novell SUSE is the first Linux laptop I have used that is good enough to be my only computing device,
That is astounding after only one month of use. Most users take years to shake bad old M$ habits and almost as long to learn which of the dozens of free packages is their favorite for any given task. Most people want their Windoze safety blanket for a year or so. This kind of endorsement is ringing - he's saying that he could do without Windoze tomorrow, forever. He's right but has not had time to develop real confidence in his opinion, which is reasonable given the billion dollars a month M$ spends on marketing and lock on major vendors.
To be fair, you should have quoted his worry. What's keeping him from recommending widespread deployment? Well, this:
"I dont know enough about the remote management tools and capabilities for it"
OMFG! and,
"For your average administrator or manager who is very comfortable with Windows 95, 98 and XP, it might be a little bit of a leap"
Free software absolutely kills Windoze for remote control and management. The fact that thousands of computers have been corralled into clusters for decades should tell anyone that remote configuration has been mastered long ago in the free software world. It's amazing how much easier things are when you don't have integrated licensing and copy protection built into the product itself. On top of that, Novel offers it's own set of tools to manage mixed environments which are widely admired. This is a slam dunk for free software and Suse.
The other concern is a bit condescending. Even fanboys, given proper support and encouragement, soon learn how much better free software is. It's true that the deeper you are into M$, the harder it is for you to see anything else, but those who escape become the biggest M$ haters. They, more than anyone else, bear the brunt of M$'s intentional waste. It makes them angry but they accept it without knowing any better. Eventually, the lies melt away and all the talk about software freedom sinks in. Liberate them for just a while and it's all over.
uname -a on one of GE's latest generation of CT scanners reports a version of Red Hat. Diagnosing cancer may not be as life critical as an EKG, but it's not something you want to have crash or degrade over time or have some kind of file quirk that screws up images.
And this is different to Windows how?
I don't know, you are the big Windoze fan. Why don't you tell me the difference other than the $200/machine cost of software before you can do anything useful. Last time I asked someone, the clipboard did not work at all though various Windoze remote desktops. It may now, it may not. Why should I care when I have one that works without cost?
And what environmental factors could possible cause that on the moon, which has no atmosphere or tectonic activity?
The haze and other problems caused by moon dust is well known. One of the principle causes is solar ionization. Without an atmosphere to disperse charges, the dust ends up floating around like your hair while touching a van de graph generator. The irradiation is intense enough to be part of the weathering process that created the dust in the first place. Micrometorites are another cause. Because the dust is charged, it sticks to everything it comes in contact with. Dealing with dust is a design problem for lunar landers. I'm not sure how they will keep it out of the works of any telescope. Any tent you make will have to be cleaned too but that might be easier than cleaning a spinning liquid.
It's too bad Nature is a non free publication. They probably deal with the issue or point to other non free articles. Because government money funds this kind of work, you would hope the public would enjoy the best presentation of the ideas without having to pay $30/article.
Apparently, the serious engineering has been done and you can have ripple free liquid mirrors. There's a picture of both a huge mirror and an image obtained from it.
It's too bad this article and all the references are published in non free magazines. The $18 to $30 cost per article is steep. When you consider that all of the actual research is government funded, the cost of the information itself should be zero.
Wherever I go, there's M$ defender dedazo. Every hour of the day, seven days a week. What a drag. The only thing worse, of course, would be if I actually was dedazo. This time, he wants to compare X to Vista and declare Vista more efficient, wowzer.
What "DRM" is that again? I seem to be able to play all my media without any trouble at all.
This is a different issue, but it is part of the user experience so I'll deal with it. Most audiophiles would disagree with you when they find out that Vista disables their spdif outputs. What I was really talking about though, was the waste of resources the checking of "trip bits" represents. There's a lot of stuff like that in Vista that will never hamper free software. You can also add anti-virus, file indexing, poor memory management, driver that can't share code and other bloat to the list of performance robbing junk on Windoze. Once again, these are different issues and should not be confused with the interface.
I find a fully loaded KDE desktop that sort of begins to mimic OS X or Vista (and frankly not that well) to be very computationally intensive. Do you contend otherwise? Of course XFCE and other options make that better, but then of course it's up to you what you want to give up for the "pretty" experience.
Yes, I'll say otherwise. I've run a "fully loaded" KDE interface on a 233 MHz PII. It was a little slow for my taste, so I run E16 instead, which is prettier, has transparency, multiple desktops, excellent pagers and very good speed even on modest hardware. Yeah, it did movies and all that. I also run the parts of KDE I like, such as the kicker, universal sidebar, konqueror, kate, kontact and other bits and pieces where KDE is really the best available. My fastest machine is still a six year old 1.2 GHz Athlon. I do movie editing on it, but my wife does most of that for us on an 800 MHz PIII. One day, I might upgrade because the newer processors are that much better at number crunching, but I think I'll wait until some piece of hardware actually dies.
The only advantage Vista has is accelerated drivers, which are a must for gamers. This drives them to Intel, or non free nvidia and ATI drivers.
My subjective view of the overall Vista experience comes from a visit I made to CompUSA today. There, against the back wall was a line of M$'s finest display. Even to someone bound in the 1995esque eXPerience, the display was a dissapointment. First off, it was jerky. It's just a movie and should have flown smoothly but it jerked every second or so. The flying toaster people did better fifteen years ago. Second, what it showed looked like a dud. There was limited transparency, a bazillion flying windows, dual desktops, and video conferencing. E16 has better transparency and E17 offers animated desktops. The flying windows looks about as good a way to organize your data as throwing our papers into the air and I far prefer the multiple desktops of X which are best done by E16. Dual displays are something that KDE and others have mastered that I will occasionally yearn for, but never enough to actually install a second or third or fourth PCI card. Video conferencing is the most interesting thing, not because it's hard to do, but because they might finally deliver on what they have been unable to do well for the last seven years of NetMeeting. XP users may finally reap some of the rewards of the M$ monopoly and the ass pain M$ has made of USB cameras, when they move to Vista. It won't last long because ATT and other greed heads are busy setting up their networks to block anything but their own pay per byte VOIP but XP users don't know it. Otherwise, I saw absolutely nothing that would tempt the average XP user. The performance hit, hardware costs and cost of replacing software and other stuff broken by Vista add up to one very large negative. That might explain why I was the only person in the store looking at computers.
Smooth and unified like the clipboard?
What do you mean? My clipboard not only works between applications of all sorts, it works across the network as if the application was running locally.
When there's no transparency, there's no accounting or truth. This could be ongoing damage control from the break in to end all break ins or that could have been fake too. One thing is sure, the truth is actually worse. You can not tell what's true when people are lying to you and you will never know how screwed you are.
The thing to do is to quantify and reduce the secret budget, which is hard to justify since the fall of the Soviet Union anyway. The less money spooks have, the less harm they can do. This is easiest to do when there's a new release that causes outrage and a sense of betrayal.
Not to mention, this is a hell of alot of software, I mean, he's talking about installing several toys that will run 24/7 and of course this is gonna sap your processing power, and its not integrated, so it'll probably end up using more resources than vista.
Vista is running all sorts of DRM on top of it's not very efficient or thrilling UI. The cost of adding a few skins is going to be less than that. Yahoo widgets along give the user a clock, weather and that kind of thing, without any performance hit.
But really, the further you get away from M$ the better your computing gets. The real upgrades are free. Most of the visual elements have been available in the nix world for decades. The performance gain of moving to GNU/Linux is incredible and it can be had for less than 2GB of system files that auto configure and run live off a 650MB boot CD. Why buy car tweaks or a new car when you could just download a space ship for free?
why don't you just pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead of a bunch of disjoint shareware utilities?
Because the well tested upgrades cost nothing:
In the free software world there are no "disjoint" utilities because everyone can share their libraries and common routines in ways no two commercial applications ever can. "Smooth" and "unified" begin with freedom.
Another poster has already pointed out that WMV is the worst of all available formats, so I'll leave that alone.
what free, open source video format allows you the same DRM protection that is built in to WMP? I really hope you can answer this question, because you can bet that in the production of their content the BBC has entered in to some agreements that will require some form of DRM for redistribution online.
Yet another poster has pointed out that the DRM protection built into the system is perfect, they can't watch anything at all. I really hope the person who recommended this broken technology is ready to apologize and work to fix things because you can bet that working content was part of their agreements.
Finally, we both know that digital restrictions are snake oil, especially for something that's broadcast. If the "official" broken format video is not liberated and redistributed, many other coppies of the same content taken from the air by DVRs will quickly circumvent the problems created by WMV. These solutions will be inconvenient to the taxpaying user, but they will at least work. The BBC would be better off declaring DRM a sham and nullifying all previous commitments. Governments can do that kind of thing, because they are the ultimate keepers of copyright and the public interest to begin with. When the law violates public interests, as it so obviously does here, the law is out of whack and needs to be fixed.
The best solution is to just release the content so it can be enjoyed and shared by the people who paid for it and own it. They could, if they wanted to, release a free software player. They have been working on that for a while and might as well throw patent concerns back across the Atlantic because they don't serve the BBC or their audience.
Someone posting AC with good reason speculates:
if there had never been patents perhaps there would have been minimal economic motivation to create the technology that requires the format.
You might as well say there's no motivation to solve math problems. The economic motivation to create moving picture formats is as blindingly obvious as the billions of dollars people spend on TV and movies every year. The "technology" to provide those things digitally is the hardware, software simply tells it how to act and is more like math or business methods than anything else. There's more than one effort to create patent free movie formats, but it's not easy because many obvious methods have been stolen. If it were not for patents, other methods to watch the patented formats would already be available. In fact, they are available in places that don't have insane patent laws. Software patents are parasitic and the BBC's dilemma exposes that fact nicely.
full time M$ defender and attack bot dedazo insists on arguing that Bill Gates has nothing to do with ACPI being a piece of shit that does not work well for anyone:
Of course therein lies your problem. If "most people" are like that then they're really no better than you. If they're not, then you're screwed because your FUD is exposed. Sucks either way.
If they read further in they run into posts by others complaining of the complexity of ACPI and how it's just another M$ "extensible" non standard. Between that and Bill Gate's little memo, the reasons for ACPI to suck are obvious. As he stated himself, he did not want Linux to work.
Governments, funded by the PUBLIC should put their stuff in PUBLIC format.
and when software patents get in the way, the PUBLIC should demand that law serve the PUBLIC interest. Software patents are bogus and they are the only reason there's a format problem in the first place.
You linking to that post is hilarious. You figure no one will notice this reply
I'm not afraid of that BS. People can read as much or as little of that troll infested thread as they like. Most people won't bother to read past the memo written by Bill Gates himself, as the intent is obvious. No one will tell you that ACPI is rationally designed and anyone who's read the memo knows why. Ultimately, the crap flood that follows me is just another sign of how desperately afraid of the truth and popular opinion M$ is. It's too bad they don't just fix their broken junk instead of pretending it's fixed while screwing over their competition in ways that waste everyone's time.