The companies that make up the enterprise market for Windows are dragging their feet about upgrading
Why is this noteworthy? The same could be said about every other version of Windows out there. I can't count the times I've had a Win2k, 98 or NT4 box dropped at my feet in the last five years alone.
I've noticed a lot of things running old versions of Windows over the past few years: ATMs, coin-counters, the big screens at the airport...never would have known if they weren't in the middle of a kernel panic.
Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films,
So work hard and write book reports/throw together papers about zombie films. Just because you're getting cheap 'A's doesn't mean you aren't learning things on the side.
Or what about Half-Life 2: what if you could issue commands for your forces, like "medic!" "cover me!" or "attack that strider!" and your squad would actually do something useful, instead of just complain and get shot (which is about the limits of their current capabilities)? And how much easier would it be to control your units in StarCraft, if you could just say "[unit name], [action]", for instance, "Wraiths, cloak", "tanks, seige mode", or "marines, attack carrier"?
After being subjected to games like Hey You Pikachu and Seaman, I am fully convinced that the unit would 'misunderstand' you and shoot you in the face.
PC games tend to push systems to the point of heavy framedropping, while console games are generally quite frugal. If you built a mid-range computer in 2002 without paying for hardware upgrades later, you'd be hard-pressed to find any relatively new games that would run well on it; with a console from 2002, you'd have a ton of games to pick from because they would be built around the system. They wouldn't be as shiny as current PC games by any means, but they'd still be entertaining. At the very least, PC games should become more shiny (demanding) at a predictable pace, just as console games do. On the developer side, piracy is less practical for the big, crowd of people who are intimidated by firing up a soldering iron, and they know the exact hardware everyone playing the game will have.
It may be vendor lock-in, but I'm still rather pleased with the results.
Just because use of this massive network is widespread, entertaining, and even necessary to a lot of people, does not mean it is addictive, it just means that it's better in some aspects. On the Internet, you can play online games and fight against monsters that don't exist and would kick your ass if they did, and you can keep up with current events much better than if you were staring at CNN and listening to their hours/days-late reports on the things they (as opposed to you) decide to report on.
Most importantly, you can speak with someone in real-time for years without even showing your face or giving a name, which helps quite a bit for the less social among us. I've known people who could barely bring themselves to get a few words out when only a few feet away from me, but could throw out walls of text by just being behind a keyboard. I, for one, am absolutely terrified of speaking in front of crowds, or even writing, when I know that people I know is going to read it, but I'm suddenly able to practically put dents in this keyboard when it's reduced to a probability that people near me will be reading it. And even then, I'm just 'Nullav' now. Rather than labeling above-average Internet usage as an 'addiction' because people spend less time outside or pull a few all-nighters, it should be looked at positively for allowing the more reclusive people to have a voice and even contribute in ways they could not without the Internet.
Even if you disagree with every line above, do you really think someone who spends 15 hours a day hitting F5 on Slashdot would have been very social in the first place? Correlation != causation.
Sure, staring down at this big blue rock while floating around in microgravity sounds fun, but what else is there? There's no 'space culture' to observe, no funny hats and clay statues to buy, and actually leaving the ship (in a big, bulky suit) would likely be deemed a safety (lawsuit) hazard. If we're going to have tourists up there, more comfortable, flexible space suits, as well as something like a lunar 'hotel' would help a lot. Also, judging by the number of 'shifting stars' I can see at night, I'm assuming there's a hell of an eyesore floating up there.
My main reason for using Linux is that I don't need it to be shiny if I don't want it to. It may seem a bit strange, but sometimes I like to be able to just sit back and stare at the white text, rather than spend an hour making a new style for XFCE, or looking through my images for the perfect background. More important than that, with a GUI, it's hard to display (verbose) information without someone crying 'bloat'; in a CLI, it's only going to push some old text up which you can request again at any time.
Close behind this (but probably more important than my freakish love of text) is the ability to share a single machine among multiple users at the same time, without even having to be near the machine, thus (potentially) getting much more use out of that single machine. Oh, and logfiles for when one of these multiple users screws something up, or when I just want to know if anyone's still using the OpenArena server. Speaking of maximizing use, there are plenty of tools for setting up a cluster of Linux boxes to handle anything from rendering a short film to compiling in record time.
tl;dr - I'm crazy for minimalist interfaces, want to keep my machines loaded down when in use, I want to know when and how everything screws up, and I want my strange side-projects to be over quickly.
The concept (another pre-built 'gaming rig', as TFA goes out of its way to state many times over) is lame and the design just sucks. I'd sooner buy a full rack and just wheel it into a corner than have that glowing, plastic robot dog if I wanted a 'supercomputer'.
Sounds useful for private conversations. Just imagine two people sitting at a bench in a park, with the only clue that they're speaking being a set of wires between them. Another use would be phones, especially those annoying Bluetooth headsets which people are so fond of. It wouldn't help much in the way of privacy, but it's so irritating when I'm talking to someone with a headset hidden under their hair (who then goes straight into a call without telling me).
Before going near such a device, I want to know how likely I am to slip up and say what I'm thinking instead of just what I want to say. With my actual vocal cords, I still need to open my mouth to stick my foot in it.
It's called 'spare time' for a reason. By the way, I would kill for a job that landed $400 for 2-3 days of work. Perhaps I'm just looking at it wrong, but unless I'm taking time off work, my time has no monetary value.
You might have a point if the login credentials weren't in the subject line. Just take a look at a well-used email account some time; you'll find all kinds of shit if the owner isn't particularly careful. And with the obscene amount of space Google gives people, it's not too unlikely that some will just let everything sit there without bothering to delete anything. You might find conformation emails from various services which contain login credentials for those, a lot of services also email you your password if you forget. Oh, and don't forget that PayPal sends transaction notices, which shows that you have one. Wow! Just a few lines in and you've already lost access to your account every forum you've joined and probably a bit of money. Don't forget that you can transfer funds from your bank account using PayPal. Now you're up to your nose in paperwork, you have to contact people to close your accounts at various places, you might be broke for a few weeks, and you may not even be able to fix some of these problems because you just lost your email account.
Also, while I'm at it, even if the owner of that address were as honest as a saint and that really was a mistake, well...you've seen how easily one person managed to get a glimpse at all of those usernames and passwords. What do you think could have happened if it were someone less honest? While it's far from smart to give an email account this much power, it's not too hard to understand people feeling that private information will stay private. I mean, that's what a password's for, isn't it?
I'm assuming they're referring to how tape degrades over time with 'loss of reliability'. However, I am a bit confused as to how solid-state storage is much better in this situation, since torn tape can still be played while it would be somewhat difficult to recover from a trashed flash chip. (Though I'm sure this could be solved quite easily by recording to several SSDs at once.)
Yeah, logging; logging the usernames and passwords of every single user. Perfectly legitimate!
If something is collecting my login information (and thus access to every conversation made using that address), I expect a damn good reason and I expect it before someone else exposes it and potentially gains access to my account and countless others. For that matter, I expect it before the money leaves my hands.
"For example, every time you drink a glass of water you are imbibing at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell"
Forget drinking water; you're made of exhausted stars and a whole slew of leftovers from dead organisms of billions of years prior and that glass of water has been through much the same. (Now would you rather say you're drinking the remnants of a star or some dead guy's urine?)
Musings aside...
Every time you drink a glass of water, you are imbibing at least one medication that passed through the bladder of your neighbors.
I'd like to think that some work goes into filtering the water supply between the toilet and tap. At least enough that I'm only imbibing the product of some opium addict on the other side of the planet. (I like to keep those things impersonal.)
Gutmann'd! That is, by far, the worst thing to link in a Vista discussion. (By the way, the first link also cites the Gutmann paper as its primary source.) Vista is a horribly bloated OS, but it has much more to do with the unnecessary shiny than anything else. Aside from that stupid 'using the network while playing an MP3' problem, that paper is:
Even individuals states in the USA can have their own armies, called "State Defense Forces". Although only half (25) of the states have such an army, they do exist, and all state legislatures have authorized the creation and maintenance of such forces.
No point in going that far, it's not like all the military bases are in DC. By the time people get pissed enough to split off, I doubt the people stationed in (and possibly from) $STATE will be all that thrilled, either.
Vista and Word 2007 to do word processing vs. something like Windows 95 and Word 6.0 - even though you're using the two packages for the same purpose.
How about Windows XP/2k and Word 2000? Not much difference there, save for resources and a few superfluous features hanging off of 2k7. I've rarely needed more than a 700MHz P3 for 'everyday work'. If those chips are anywhere near that in performance, I'm sure it'll find a niche in cheap school/office computers.
Doesn't the lawyer signing the DMCA takedown notice have to swear under the threat of perjury that their information is accurate to the best of their knowledge?
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed a lot of things running old versions of Windows over the past few years: ATMs, coin-counters, the big screens at the airport...never would have known if they weren't in the middle of a kernel panic.
Damnit, nobody ever thinks of the plants. :(
(...Damn yellow rat never did open those chests.)
PC games tend to push systems to the point of heavy framedropping, while console games are generally quite frugal. If you built a mid-range computer in 2002 without paying for hardware upgrades later, you'd be hard-pressed to find any relatively new games that would run well on it; with a console from 2002, you'd have a ton of games to pick from because they would be built around the system. They wouldn't be as shiny as current PC games by any means, but they'd still be entertaining. At the very least, PC games should become more shiny (demanding) at a predictable pace, just as console games do.
On the developer side, piracy is less practical for the big, crowd of people who are intimidated by firing up a soldering iron, and they know the exact hardware everyone playing the game will have.
It may be vendor lock-in, but I'm still rather pleased with the results.
So you're the one flooding hapless neighborhoods and honest businesses with toilets!
You might want to take Solaris off that list. It's only as closed as MySQL Enterprise.
Just because use of this massive network is widespread, entertaining, and even necessary to a lot of people, does not mean it is addictive, it just means that it's better in some aspects. On the Internet, you can play online games and fight against monsters that don't exist and would kick your ass if they did, and you can keep up with current events much better than if you were staring at CNN and listening to their hours/days-late reports on the things they (as opposed to you) decide to report on.
Most importantly, you can speak with someone in real-time for years without even showing your face or giving a name, which helps quite a bit for the less social among us. I've known people who could barely bring themselves to get a few words out when only a few feet away from me, but could throw out walls of text by just being behind a keyboard. I, for one, am absolutely terrified of speaking in front of crowds, or even writing, when I know that people I know is going to read it, but I'm suddenly able to practically put dents in this keyboard when it's reduced to a probability that people near me will be reading it. And even then, I'm just 'Nullav' now.
Rather than labeling above-average Internet usage as an 'addiction' because people spend less time outside or pull a few all-nighters, it should be looked at positively for allowing the more reclusive people to have a voice and even contribute in ways they could not without the Internet.
Even if you disagree with every line above, do you really think someone who spends 15 hours a day hitting F5 on Slashdot would have been very social in the first place? Correlation != causation.
Sure, staring down at this big blue rock while floating around in microgravity sounds fun, but what else is there? There's no 'space culture' to observe, no funny hats and clay statues to buy, and actually leaving the ship (in a big, bulky suit) would likely be deemed a safety (lawsuit) hazard. If we're going to have tourists up there, more comfortable, flexible space suits, as well as something like a lunar 'hotel' would help a lot. Also, judging by the number of 'shifting stars' I can see at night, I'm assuming there's a hell of an eyesore floating up there.
My main reason for using Linux is that I don't need it to be shiny if I don't want it to. It may seem a bit strange, but sometimes I like to be able to just sit back and stare at the white text, rather than spend an hour making a new style for XFCE, or looking through my images for the perfect background. More important than that, with a GUI, it's hard to display (verbose) information without someone crying 'bloat'; in a CLI, it's only going to push some old text up which you can request again at any time.
Close behind this (but probably more important than my freakish love of text) is the ability to share a single machine among multiple users at the same time, without even having to be near the machine, thus (potentially) getting much more use out of that single machine. Oh, and logfiles for when one of these multiple users screws something up, or when I just want to know if anyone's still using the OpenArena server.
Speaking of maximizing use, there are plenty of tools for setting up a cluster of Linux boxes to handle anything from rendering a short film to compiling in record time.
tl;dr - I'm crazy for minimalist interfaces, want to keep my machines loaded down when in use, I want to know when and how everything screws up, and I want my strange side-projects to be over quickly.
The concept (another pre-built 'gaming rig', as TFA goes out of its way to state many times over) is lame and the design just sucks. I'd sooner buy a full rack and just wheel it into a corner than have that glowing, plastic robot dog if I wanted a 'supercomputer'.
With those results, I'm going to assume VMWare isn't made for testing transfer protocols. You know, unless anti-routers exist.
Sounds useful for private conversations. Just imagine two people sitting at a bench in a park, with the only clue that they're speaking being a set of wires between them.
Another use would be phones, especially those annoying Bluetooth headsets which people are so fond of. It wouldn't help much in the way of privacy, but it's so irritating when I'm talking to someone with a headset hidden under their hair (who then goes straight into a call without telling me).
Before going near such a device, I want to know how likely I am to slip up and say what I'm thinking instead of just what I want to say. With my actual vocal cords, I still need to open my mouth to stick my foot in it.
It's called 'spare time' for a reason. By the way, I would kill for a job that landed $400 for 2-3 days of work. Perhaps I'm just looking at it wrong, but unless I'm taking time off work, my time has no monetary value.
You might have a point if the login credentials weren't in the subject line. Just take a look at a well-used email account some time; you'll find all kinds of shit if the owner isn't particularly careful. And with the obscene amount of space Google gives people, it's not too unlikely that some will just let everything sit there without bothering to delete anything.
You might find conformation emails from various services which contain login credentials for those, a lot of services also email you your password if you forget. Oh, and don't forget that PayPal sends transaction notices, which shows that you have one. Wow! Just a few lines in and you've already lost access to your account every forum you've joined and probably a bit of money. Don't forget that you can transfer funds from your bank account using PayPal.
Now you're up to your nose in paperwork, you have to contact people to close your accounts at various places, you might be broke for a few weeks, and you may not even be able to fix some of these problems because you just lost your email account.
Also, while I'm at it, even if the owner of that address were as honest as a saint and that really was a mistake, well...you've seen how easily one person managed to get a glimpse at all of those usernames and passwords. What do you think could have happened if it were someone less honest?
While it's far from smart to give an email account this much power, it's not too hard to understand people feeling that private information will stay private. I mean, that's what a password's for, isn't it?
I'm assuming they're referring to how tape degrades over time with 'loss of reliability'. However, I am a bit confused as to how solid-state storage is much better in this situation, since torn tape can still be played while it would be somewhat difficult to recover from a trashed flash chip. (Though I'm sure this could be solved quite easily by recording to several SSDs at once.)
Yeah, logging; logging the usernames and passwords of every single user. Perfectly legitimate!
If something is collecting my login information (and thus access to every conversation made using that address), I expect a damn good reason and I expect it before someone else exposes it and potentially gains access to my account and countless others. For that matter, I expect it before the money leaves my hands.
Musings aside...I'd like to think that some work goes into filtering the water supply between the toilet and tap. At least enough that I'm only imbibing the product of some opium addict on the other side of the planet. (I like to keep those things impersonal.)
That is, by far, the worst thing to link in a Vista discussion. (By the way, the first link also cites the Gutmann paper as its primary source.) Vista is a horribly bloated OS, but it has much more to do with the unnecessary shiny than anything else. Aside from that stupid 'using the network while playing an MP3' problem, that paper is: