I think basically because new software is very rarely a revolution and very often an evolution. If XP became public domain for example, a large portion of Vista goes public with it by relation. It only takes a few geeks to fill in the blanks and release the patches and everyone could have a 'roll your own' Windows that would probably be better than Microsoft has to offer.
Also, there is the obvious case where thousands of geeks grep the code looking for amusing sections and potential embarrassment for the company releasing it. Didn't that happen when the Win2K code was leaked?
Finally, they would say they have invested thousands and thousands of man-hours into the code, it's theirs and nobody elses! Of course, most of us here are F/OSS developers and that idea is a bit alien to us, but that's the way they do it unfortunately.
Of course you can't make it work 100%, no non-trivial piece of software is bug free. I wasn't saying it should be.
However, there are a fair few pretty serious bugs on there that for me should halt release until they are fixed. Multiple daily crashes is something that can really put someone off your product.
The top bug on the page I linked is reported 14,000 times in 2 weeks. At 1,000 times per day, just for those who 1) have a beta/RC of FF3 and 2) actually bothered to report it, when that gets released and downloaded millions of times that can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Personally, I wouldn't be releasing it with that many bug reports per day for the handful of people who actually have a beta/RC.
I, and many others, have been experiencing multiple crashes on a daily basis in all betas and release candidates. I have filed a bug report (and I submit the problem every time it crashes) and yet they never really acknowledge it exists.
The problem is Mac OSX specific and is something to do with the native theme and Objective-C in the DrawCellWithScaling section. I'd try and fix it myself, but I don't know and don't want to know Objective-C.
It's precisely because of this that I don't activate Windows properly, even though all of my copies are completely legal (get them through my university for free)
I do a lot of development work and keep alot of VMs, which get trashed quite often and started again. If I had to properly activate each one, I'd soon run out of activation runs
This actually forces me to try to circumvent it, and drives the number of people who are willing to provide ways to circumvent it, which plays right into the pirates' hands.
Arbitrary install limits and 'CD in the drive to play' are completely ridiculous, and the evidence is all around us in a thriving 'crack' scene.
The fact that these cracks then make it immeasurably easier for pirates only goes to show that you can hurt your own sales by forcing this stuff on your paying customers. Once your average joe has seen how easy it is to circumvent this stuff, they'd feel much more confident of getting away with pirating it.
I routinely use ~250gb+ a month without a problem. The only time I got an angry phone call was when I used ~500gb.
You are the exception, not the rule, and you are also the reason that the rest of us have to suffer these 'fair usage policies'.
I welcome the definition of an actual cap, then you have some kind of comeback if they say you are using it excessively, whereas at the moment you don't. Currently, if they say it's too much, it's too much.
This also empowers the consumer by giving them the information they need to make a purchase. If 2 companies advertise 'unlimited with fair usage' how do I know which one will actually cut me off first? If they both specify an actual cap, I can pick which one I'd rather go with.
Can't believe you're seriously asking this. At the moment, ZFS is not in the Linux kernel (which you would know if you RTFA), so you can't expect the larger enterprise distros (which is what the question is all about) to adopt it.
Since the license for ZFS is not compatible with GPLv2 (again RTFA) it's also very unlikely it will be in the near future. If it is ever is though, yeah that's a great choice.
However, these questions imply that we need to change and change quickly. Why? Just because some guy helped programme a good filesystem and then killed his wife doesn't suddenly mean we should all stop using it. That's an insult to everyone else who worked on the project.
Personally, I'll continue using ReiserFS and I think it's a shame that some distros will stop using it purely for reactionary reasons. I wouldn't stop using a distro just because it defaults to Reiser and still gives me the choice to change it.
Sorry I didn't mean text editors were only for HTML and scripts, what I meant was "if you aren't using a full IDE, such as when coding HTML".
Funnily enough, I do alot of LaTeX on my widescreen also. I narrow the editing window quite alot and only use about the centre third of my screen, but use from top to bottom.
At 1680x1050 this means I get 112chars x 60lines. Do you really need a LaTex doc showing more info than can fit on 112x60? If you do, you can over double the width! Can't with a regular aspect
Widescreens are here to stay and I fully support them.
I find widescreen is actually much better for development. I'm mainly programming in Netbeans or Eclipse and having the navigator on one side and the 'outline' on the right is great. On a standard aspect monitor, this leaves the central portion for working on code really small. On widescreen (I use a 20" widescreen) this central code portion is much bigger. It's much the same in Visual Studio.
Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something, I could agree. Even then though, do I really need 100 lines on the screen at once?
I'd much rather have half the lines on the screen and be able to use the extra features of my IDE to aid in navigation and keep my concentration focused on the area that I'm working in.
Funnily enough this exact thing happened to me today. My brother's Vista laptop was really starting to go incredibly slow and he wanted a full wipe and reinstall. He backed up his stuff to an external HD and I wiped and reinstalled for him.
Whilst the install was going on he said to me 'can I not just go back to XP? I really don't like Vista'. I would have done if I had a copy of XP but I don't and I'm not willing to buy one.
I said to him 'what is it that you don't like?' and he said that he hated how they had moved everything and nothing was familiar anymore.
So I said why not move to Linux then? The only thing that was keeping him on Windows was that he knew Windows. He already uses Firefox, he doesn't need any Windows-only stuff as far as I can see. He needs iTunes, MSN Messenger, a browser, email client. All of this stuff is available or has alternatives on Ubuntu.
So what I've had him do is use Wubi for Ubuntu and get him to use Ubuntu for a few days. If he really doesn't like it, he can always go back.
Familiarity is no longer an advantage with Vista. If you don't rely on Windows-only software and you have someone to actually suggest you change there really is no need to stay with Windows for your average user. Those are two pretty big ifs though...
Typing into the address bar? That's so old school. If I have a site I visit frequently, it goes on the HTML page that I built myself locally that just contains a nicely CSS'd group of links. Set it as your homepage, use Tab Mix Plus to set every new tab to auto go to your home page and just click what you want to go to. Or, if you have only a few sites, use Speed Dial to get a little thumbnail view of each web page and just click the thumbnail.
Because like all of these 'services' nowadays there will be a deliberately vague 'fair use' statement. Nothing to stop you downloading 1000 tracks per month though (unless that's covered by the fair use) and canceling it when you have all you want.
Wait, if you need both a HD-DVD and BluRay drive to do this, why exactly do you need to bother? It isn't like your HD-DVD drive is going to stop working or anything. When you want to watch a HD-DVD, use your HD-DVD drive!
This makes total sense for people who own obvious domain names. If you don't have the ability to search for porn, you'll have to basically just guess domain names, that's one of the main reasons why obvious domain names go for so much money when up for auction.
The owner of porn.com would suddenly find himself with a lot more hits on his hands, whereas the owners of less obvious domain names would see a marked decrease. Since he's the big guy in the industry, that's exactly what he wants isn't it? Get rid of all the little competitors, reinforce his monopoly?
If you got nothing to hide, you got nothing to fear. And if you have got something to hide (as the targets of this article do), lock it up!!
You would feel safe knowing that the bank you keep all your money at just left it's vault unlocked? Or the government databases that hold all of your personal information were freely available to all?
Just because somebody wants to commit crime doesn't mean you should put absolutely no obstacles in their way and make it easier for them.
In which case, if encryption makes you more vulnerable to hackers, then surely no encryption makes you safer. By the same reasoning we should get rid of every kind of security. Why lock doors since you may lose the key? What if someone else gets your keys, breaks in and changes your locks? So we should all stop locking things away since that actually makes them less safe.
Not only do they profit directly from the devices that are apparently destroying them, they do loads of other underhand stuff as well. They are an Irish band, yet they pay next to nothing in tax in Ireland (which has a fairly high tax rate, inconveniently for them) after moving their bank accounts to Amsterdam just before their tax exemption in Ireland was removed.
I was watching Room 101 on TV yesterday (UK comedy show where people campaign to ban the things they hate) and the guest wanted to ban Bono. Bono is constantly going on about how we should we helping the less fortunate etc. Why doesn't he write them a big cheque then!?! He can afford it alot more than I can!
This is typical hypocritical pseudo-activist celebrities are their finest. Let's remove people's rights when it hurts our wallets and campaign for them when it makes us look good.
In the UK we've had public TV and radio ad's for months telling you about what you need to do when the changeover occurs, with a free number to call with questions. We don't get free coupons though.
I don't think the military should use OSS. I get the whole argument about 'more eyes to look = less bugs' but that only works if you actually upgrade to a newer version that doesnt have the bugs. If I know you're running version 1.0 after 1.1 has come out, I can look at the differences in the code and work out exploits. Surely the military has some kind of long winded process for updating software, so it's quite likely that old versions will remain.
Also what's to stop someone poisoning the source as a popular OSS project did that was recently reported on here? (I'm too lazy to look up which one)
Slashdot Mirror
I think basically because new software is very rarely a revolution and very often an evolution. If XP became public domain for example, a large portion of Vista goes public with it by relation. It only takes a few geeks to fill in the blanks and release the patches and everyone could have a 'roll your own' Windows that would probably be better than Microsoft has to offer.
Also, there is the obvious case where thousands of geeks grep the code looking for amusing sections and potential embarrassment for the company releasing it. Didn't that happen when the Win2K code was leaked?
Finally, they would say they have invested thousands and thousands of man-hours into the code, it's theirs and nobody elses! Of course, most of us here are F/OSS developers and that idea is a bit alien to us, but that's the way they do it unfortunately.
Of course you can't make it work 100%, no non-trivial piece of software is bug free. I wasn't saying it should be.
However, there are a fair few pretty serious bugs on there that for me should halt release until they are fixed. Multiple daily crashes is something that can really put someone off your product.
The top bug on the page I linked is reported 14,000 times in 2 weeks. At 1,000 times per day, just for those who 1) have a beta/RC of FF3 and 2) actually bothered to report it, when that gets released and downloaded millions of times that can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Personally, I wouldn't be releasing it with that many bug reports per day for the handful of people who actually have a beta/RC.
It's a real shame that they are releasing it with so many serious bugs remaining.
I, and many others, have been experiencing multiple crashes on a daily basis in all betas and release candidates. I have filed a bug report (and I submit the problem every time it crashes) and yet they never really acknowledge it exists.
The problem is Mac OSX specific and is something to do with the native theme and Objective-C in the DrawCellWithScaling section. I'd try and fix it myself, but I don't know and don't want to know Objective-C.
As the article states itself, why is this actually a demo of Windows 7? All of those things could be implemented in XP or Vista surely.
If they think I'm buying a whole new laptop and tiring my arms out just for that, they're badly mistaken.
Doesn't the fact that the Mac uses EFI instead of BIOS make this irrelevant? You need to mess with the BIOS to get this to work.
It's precisely because of this that I don't activate Windows properly, even though all of my copies are completely legal (get them through my university for free)
I do a lot of development work and keep alot of VMs, which get trashed quite often and started again. If I had to properly activate each one, I'd soon run out of activation runs
This actually forces me to try to circumvent it, and drives the number of people who are willing to provide ways to circumvent it, which plays right into the pirates' hands.
Arbitrary install limits and 'CD in the drive to play' are completely ridiculous, and the evidence is all around us in a thriving 'crack' scene.
The fact that these cracks then make it immeasurably easier for pirates only goes to show that you can hurt your own sales by forcing this stuff on your paying customers. Once your average joe has seen how easy it is to circumvent this stuff, they'd feel much more confident of getting away with pirating it.
You are the exception, not the rule, and you are also the reason that the rest of us have to suffer these 'fair usage policies'.
I welcome the definition of an actual cap, then you have some kind of comeback if they say you are using it excessively, whereas at the moment you don't. Currently, if they say it's too much, it's too much.
This also empowers the consumer by giving them the information they need to make a purchase. If 2 companies advertise 'unlimited with fair usage' how do I know which one will actually cut me off first? If they both specify an actual cap, I can pick which one I'd rather go with.
So, why not ZFS?
Can't believe you're seriously asking this. At the moment, ZFS is not in the Linux kernel (which you would know if you RTFA), so you can't expect the larger enterprise distros (which is what the question is all about) to adopt it.
Since the license for ZFS is not compatible with GPLv2 (again RTFA) it's also very unlikely it will be in the near future. If it is ever is though, yeah that's a great choice.
However, these questions imply that we need to change and change quickly. Why? Just because some guy helped programme a good filesystem and then killed his wife doesn't suddenly mean we should all stop using it. That's an insult to everyone else who worked on the project.
Personally, I'll continue using ReiserFS and I think it's a shame that some distros will stop using it purely for reactionary reasons. I wouldn't stop using a distro just because it defaults to Reiser and still gives me the choice to change it.
Sorry I didn't mean text editors were only for HTML and scripts, what I meant was "if you aren't using a full IDE, such as when coding HTML".
Funnily enough, I do alot of LaTeX on my widescreen also. I narrow the editing window quite alot and only use about the centre third of my screen, but use from top to bottom.
At 1680x1050 this means I get 112chars x 60lines. Do you really need a LaTex doc showing more info than can fit on 112x60? If you do, you can over double the width! Can't with a regular aspect
Widescreens are here to stay and I fully support them.
I find widescreen is actually much better for development. I'm mainly programming in Netbeans or Eclipse and having the navigator on one side and the 'outline' on the right is great. On a standard aspect monitor, this leaves the central portion for working on code really small. On widescreen (I use a 20" widescreen) this central code portion is much bigger. It's much the same in Visual Studio.
Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something, I could agree. Even then though, do I really need 100 lines on the screen at once?
I'd much rather have half the lines on the screen and be able to use the extra features of my IDE to aid in navigation and keep my concentration focused on the area that I'm working in.
Whilst the install was going on he said to me 'can I not just go back to XP? I really don't like Vista'. I would have done if I had a copy of XP but I don't and I'm not willing to buy one.
I said to him 'what is it that you don't like?' and he said that he hated how they had moved everything and nothing was familiar anymore.
So I said why not move to Linux then? The only thing that was keeping him on Windows was that he knew Windows. He already uses Firefox, he doesn't need any Windows-only stuff as far as I can see. He needs iTunes, MSN Messenger, a browser, email client. All of this stuff is available or has alternatives on Ubuntu.
So what I've had him do is use Wubi for Ubuntu and get him to use Ubuntu for a few days. If he really doesn't like it, he can always go back.
Familiarity is no longer an advantage with Vista. If you don't rely on Windows-only software and you have someone to actually suggest you change there really is no need to stay with Windows for your average user. Those are two pretty big ifs though...
They are going to develop a new OS 'from the ground up' like they said yesterday, in a year!?! Good luck!
Typing into the address bar? That's so old school. If I have a site I visit frequently, it goes on the HTML page that I built myself locally that just contains a nicely CSS'd group of links. Set it as your homepage, use Tab Mix Plus to set every new tab to auto go to your home page and just click what you want to go to. Or, if you have only a few sites, use Speed Dial to get a little thumbnail view of each web page and just click the thumbnail.
Why would you actually type in the bar any more?
Only one, I believe scientists over your typical help-desk pleb.
Because like all of these 'services' nowadays there will be a deliberately vague 'fair use' statement. Nothing to stop you downloading 1000 tracks per month though (unless that's covered by the fair use) and canceling it when you have all you want.
Chales? Wows!!
Wait, if you need both a HD-DVD and BluRay drive to do this, why exactly do you need to bother? It isn't like your HD-DVD drive is going to stop working or anything. When you want to watch a HD-DVD, use your HD-DVD drive!
This makes total sense for people who own obvious domain names. If you don't have the ability to search for porn, you'll have to basically just guess domain names, that's one of the main reasons why obvious domain names go for so much money when up for auction.
The owner of porn.com would suddenly find himself with a lot more hits on his hands, whereas the owners of less obvious domain names would see a marked decrease. Since he's the big guy in the industry, that's exactly what he wants isn't it? Get rid of all the little competitors, reinforce his monopoly?
You would feel safe knowing that the bank you keep all your money at just left it's vault unlocked? Or the government databases that hold all of your personal information were freely available to all?
Just because somebody wants to commit crime doesn't mean you should put absolutely no obstacles in their way and make it easier for them.
Those are their reasons!?!
In which case, if encryption makes you more vulnerable to hackers, then surely no encryption makes you safer. By the same reasoning we should get rid of every kind of security. Why lock doors since you may lose the key? What if someone else gets your keys, breaks in and changes your locks? So we should all stop locking things away since that actually makes them less safe.
No passwords to forget/steal/target != safe.
Mod Parent up!
Not only do they profit directly from the devices that are apparently destroying them, they do loads of other underhand stuff as well. They are an Irish band, yet they pay next to nothing in tax in Ireland (which has a fairly high tax rate, inconveniently for them) after moving their bank accounts to Amsterdam just before their tax exemption in Ireland was removed.
I was watching Room 101 on TV yesterday (UK comedy show where people campaign to ban the things they hate) and the guest wanted to ban Bono. Bono is constantly going on about how we should we helping the less fortunate etc. Why doesn't he write them a big cheque then!?! He can afford it alot more than I can!
This is typical hypocritical pseudo-activist celebrities are their finest. Let's remove people's rights when it hurts our wallets and campaign for them when it makes us look good.
I, for one, would also ban Bono.
SPARQL is both a recursive acronym and contains other acronyms! SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language.
I vote this worst acronym ever!
In the UK we've had public TV and radio ad's for months telling you about what you need to do when the changeover occurs, with a free number to call with questions. We don't get free coupons though.
I don't think the military should use OSS. I get the whole argument about 'more eyes to look = less bugs' but that only works if you actually upgrade to a newer version that doesnt have the bugs. If I know you're running version 1.0 after 1.1 has come out, I can look at the differences in the code and work out exploits. Surely the military has some kind of long winded process for updating software, so it's quite likely that old versions will remain.
Also what's to stop someone poisoning the source as a popular OSS project did that was recently reported on here? (I'm too lazy to look up which one)