The jury didn't think it was scant evidence. This might come as a surprise to you, but the legal system does not revolve around your personal opinion about what is sufficient legal proof and what is not, unless you're actually on the jury.
In other words, just because you think he was convicted on scant evidence doesn't mean the entire system is broken.
I built two systems from scratch last week with brand new factory-default eVGA 750i motherboards. I didn't have to change any settings to get Windows to install.
If the BIOS switch is set to something Windows-install-friendly by default, then there's not an issue (aside from performance). Yes, there might be a random edge case where it's set wrong, but we're not talking about random edge cases, we're talking about general cases.
It's not that there aren't alternatives, it's the support contracts that very large companies have with Microsoft. They depend on Microsoft for their day-to-day operations. That's probably not a good thing, but if Microsoft disappeared overnight these large companies would have very big problems the moment anything went wrong.
You mean a RAID driver? Yes, if you have a RAID setup on an older machine you might need a RAID driver on a floppy. But I'd say 95% of end-users don't have RAID. You don't need separate drivers for the vast majority of IDE or SATA setups.
As for the rest of the drivers, you just need a thumb drive. As I said before, even XP pre-SP1 supports most thumb drives.
Next you are going to need video drivers. You are not getting these in 10min of downloading either, they probably weigh in around 160M, yep 160M for a video driver....well that and all sorts of useless OEM widgets that come with it.
Yes, you need video drivers to use Windows. But 160MB? What kind of crappy video card vendor do you use? nVidia's official drivers weigh in at 37.9 MB. Dell's nVidia drivers weigh in at 47 MB. ATI's drivers are 35.9 MB. Dell's ATI drivers are 40 MB.
So while Dell's drivers are larger than the video card's manufacturer's official drivers, they're not nearly as huge as you claim they are.
Now you need network drivers These might be easy to hunt down if you are on a popular chipset platform or have a popular discrete controller.
... or if you just do what I originally said and go to the vendor's website. For Dell, for example:
support.dell.com Get Drivers Laptops Inspiron Laptops 6400
Click the little + next to Network. The only wired network driver in the list is the correct one.
You'll note that the example I've used here is a laptop - which you claim is a "nightmare" without the OEM CD. If you were correct, then I'd be screwed - Dell shipped me the wrong driver CD with my laptop - TWICE. Yes, twice. For the same laptop. Fortunately for me, and for everyone else, you're wrong, and it's quite trivial to do a fresh install of Windows using a generic non-OEM Windows CD on my Dell laptop.
I do these in a different order than you indicate, though. Usually the only driver I install via thumb drive is the network driver. After that I can download everything from the new installation.
Note even if you have a fast connection the manufactures FTP site will be painfully slow.
Dell's site is plenty fast. nVidia's site is plenty fast. eVGA's site is plenty fast. I'd bet ATI's site is plenty fast. Maybe you're stuck on dialup?
Sounds like you're the one not being honest - unelss you're just clueless.
If MS were to do it right - run the legacy apps in a VM integrated with the host OS - the way Parallels puts your Windows apps side-by-side with your OSX apps, then they *could* drag-and-drop. It would be transparent to users.
Disclaimer: I do not own a Mac, and I've never actually used Parallels.
I agree. It'd be far cheaper for them - no need to pay people for new designs, no need to pay to refit factories, cheaper parts by buying in (larger) bulk, etc. Seems like it'd be better for everyone.
You're assuming there *are* newer applications to replace the legacy ones. Usually the legacy apps that keep people back were developed in-house back when COBOL (or whatever) was king, and the source doesn't even exist anymore, and the machine that *did* have the source at one point was dropped down a very deep hole by accident, etc.
Only if MS did make legacy apps run transparently would it work - but that's almost like shipping (and supporting) two OS's in one. MS wouldn't want to do that.
A generic Windows install CD works fine if you're willing to go to the manufacturer's site on another machine and put the drivers on a thumb drive. Usually manufacturers group the needed drivers by model number (e.g. support.dell.com, click Drivers, Laptops -> Inspiron -> 6400 -> grab all the ones you need) so they're easy to find.
You just have to be careful - if your video card is a special Dell model, the official nVidia drivers probably won't work right - you need the hopelessly outdated Dell version of the nVidia drivers. Often the official nVidia ones will refuse to install on OEM-customized video cards.
So I disagree - it's not a pain in the butt without the OEM Windows CD, if you're willing to do ten minutes of downloading on another machine (or the same machine pre-reformat). XP pre-SP1 reads most any thumb drive.
The company I work at used to be a Civil Engineering lab at the local university. Their computers are all named after trees (oak, palm, etc) but now that we're replacing the old computers we've ended up naming the computers after the people that use them. So we get hblademaster.company.local for my computer. I've just set up an internal Linux web server appropriately named "[company]web", but our file server is named "[company]1"... As soon as I can push the right buttons I'll get that changed...... Sometimes I hate being the IT guy.
It's only bleeding edge if you unmask everything and if you're willing to deal with all of the Gentoo team's patches which may be unstable. I'm considering switching to an unmasked vanilla-sources instead of gentoo-sources just so I'll always have the newest version of the Linux kernel and have it be exactly what Linus and friends intended to distribute.
You'll only get minimal speedups compared to a binary *optimized* for core2, yes - but you'll likely get fairly good speedups if you're willing to let gcc use processor-specific instructions and whatnot (meaning you can't move the binary to another x86 unless it's the same as yours).
In other words, generic binaries are compiled with -mtune=generic (or -mtune=core2 or whatever) so they'll work on basically any x86. If you want every possible speedup, you'll need to use -march=cputype where cputype is your cpu - and if you're compiling gentoo from source, that's likely what you'll be using.
I had DD-WRT on my WRT54G sharing with several neighbors (a six-apartment building). One neighbor in particular enjoyed bittorrenting from two computers over wireless... DD-WRT choked to death quite thoroughly once in a while.
After I stopped sharing with neighbors, I tried switching to 128-bit WEP (couldn't get WPA to work at all), but DD-WRT froze up after several minutes unless I stayed with 64-bit WEP.
After installing Tomato I haven't had many issues. Once every other month or so the wireless stops responding, but a quick reboot fixes that.
I'd switch to WPA but I don't think my wife's laptop's wireless card supports it.
I use it heavily as well. Keep in mind, though, that my current installation of Steam under Wine has no tweaks whatsoever; there may be a (simple?) way to get the overlay to work by tweaking some setting or using the native version of some DLL. WineHQ's AppDB might be of some help in that regard. It's worth a shot, at any rate.
Gentoo pays me quite well in this respect, but only because I must be a masochist.
When I recommend Linux to clueless end-users, I recommend Ubuntu or Fedora, precisely because they *don't* have to dig around in the internals (generally speaking), and if some edge case does come up that's what they have me for (and they use me for Windows support anyway).
I got Steam working in Wine 1.0 the other day (first try). CS:Source has a hard time starting (it takes multiple attempts sometimes), and I get ~20 fps lower than I do in Windows, but the original CS works beautifully (especially in OpenGL rendering mode). Deus Ex appears to work well. Little games like Peggle and Uplink don't seem to have issues, either.
The only Steam feature that doesn't work for me in Wine is the in-game Steam Community overlay.
Very true. Like I said to ulash just a moment ago, I don't think gamers will care whether things are ray-traced or rasterized, but I think that ray-tracing has the potential to look nicer if the hardware can do it.
I'll agree with that. Gamers largely won't care whether things are ray-traced or rasterized; they'll just care whether it looks nice. I think ray-tracing has the potential to look nicer, if the hardware can do it in real-time... I guess we'll see.
Noone would want ray-trace-quality graphics in their games? How many gamers do you know?
I'm a gamer, and I would love ray-traced games. Half-Life 2 looked good in its day, as did Half-Life several years before it, but we're getting to the point where if we want things to look more realistic (and believe me, gamers do), we're going to need to switch to ray tracing.
The IRC channels and *nix support forums only mock these people with a stony silence... I've seen this problem in #linux on various IRC servers. Most of the time when I ask a question, I get 10 "rtfm"s, 10 "giyf"s, 10 "shut up, n00b"s, and if I'm lucky one person will point me in a vaguely useful direction; it doesn't matter whether I mention that I've already spent a decent amount of time researching the issue or not, I get the same reactions. It wasn't any better in #gentoo (on freenode, anyway).
The difference is that not purchasing from a company affects the company's bottom line, but not voting does not affect whether someone gets voted in, and in fact it can tip the scales one way or another.
In other words, if you don't buy, the company could go out of business (by not meeting their costs), but if not they can't really affect you. If you don't vote, someone still gets voted in, and it might be someone whose policies are quite opposed to how you might run things yourself, which might affect you directly through new laws.
So, you're wrong; "not voting" is not even close to the same as "boycotting a company".
The solution to "I hate the two-party system" is to vote for a third party. If that's not enough for you (and it probably won't be successful at first) you'll have to campaign for a third-party candidate and rally support. If I recall correctly, you can even write in whatever name you want for your vote.
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The jury didn't think it was scant evidence. This might come as a surprise to you, but the legal system does not revolve around your personal opinion about what is sufficient legal proof and what is not, unless you're actually on the jury.
In other words, just because you think he was convicted on scant evidence doesn't mean the entire system is broken.
If you keep getting falsely accused of just about everything imaginable, you should stop lending your car to Jim.
I built two systems from scratch last week with brand new factory-default eVGA 750i motherboards. I didn't have to change any settings to get Windows to install.
If the BIOS switch is set to something Windows-install-friendly by default, then there's not an issue (aside from performance). Yes, there might be a random edge case where it's set wrong, but we're not talking about random edge cases, we're talking about general cases.
It's not that there aren't alternatives, it's the support contracts that very large companies have with Microsoft. They depend on Microsoft for their day-to-day operations. That's probably not a good thing, but if Microsoft disappeared overnight these large companies would have very big problems the moment anything went wrong.
First you are going to need storage drivers.
You mean a RAID driver? Yes, if you have a RAID setup on an older machine you might need a RAID driver on a floppy. But I'd say 95% of end-users don't have RAID. You don't need separate drivers for the vast majority of IDE or SATA setups.
As for the rest of the drivers, you just need a thumb drive. As I said before, even XP pre-SP1 supports most thumb drives.
Next you are going to need video drivers. You are not getting these in 10min of downloading either, they probably weigh in around 160M, yep 160M for a video driver....well that and all sorts of useless OEM widgets that come with it.
Yes, you need video drivers to use Windows. But 160MB? What kind of crappy video card vendor do you use? nVidia's official drivers weigh in at 37.9 MB. Dell's nVidia drivers weigh in at 47 MB. ATI's drivers are 35.9 MB. Dell's ATI drivers are 40 MB.
So while Dell's drivers are larger than the video card's manufacturer's official drivers, they're not nearly as huge as you claim they are.
Now you need network drivers These might be easy to hunt down if you are on a popular chipset platform or have a popular discrete controller.
... or if you just do what I originally said and go to the vendor's website. For Dell, for example:
support.dell.com
Get Drivers
Laptops
Inspiron Laptops
6400
Click the little + next to Network. The only wired network driver in the list is the correct one.
You'll note that the example I've used here is a laptop - which you claim is a "nightmare" without the OEM CD. If you were correct, then I'd be screwed - Dell shipped me the wrong driver CD with my laptop - TWICE. Yes, twice. For the same laptop. Fortunately for me, and for everyone else, you're wrong, and it's quite trivial to do a fresh install of Windows using a generic non-OEM Windows CD on my Dell laptop.
I do these in a different order than you indicate, though. Usually the only driver I install via thumb drive is the network driver. After that I can download everything from the new installation.
Note even if you have a fast connection the manufactures FTP site will be painfully slow.
Dell's site is plenty fast. nVidia's site is plenty fast. eVGA's site is plenty fast. I'd bet ATI's site is plenty fast. Maybe you're stuck on dialup?
Sounds like you're the one not being honest - unelss you're just clueless.
If MS were to do it right - run the legacy apps in a VM integrated with the host OS - the way Parallels puts your Windows apps side-by-side with your OSX apps, then they *could* drag-and-drop. It would be transparent to users.
Disclaimer: I do not own a Mac, and I've never actually used Parallels.
I agree. It'd be far cheaper for them - no need to pay people for new designs, no need to pay to refit factories, cheaper parts by buying in (larger) bulk, etc. Seems like it'd be better for everyone.
You're assuming there *are* newer applications to replace the legacy ones. Usually the legacy apps that keep people back were developed in-house back when COBOL (or whatever) was king, and the source doesn't even exist anymore, and the machine that *did* have the source at one point was dropped down a very deep hole by accident, etc.
Only if MS did make legacy apps run transparently would it work - but that's almost like shipping (and supporting) two OS's in one. MS wouldn't want to do that.
A generic Windows install CD works fine if you're willing to go to the manufacturer's site on another machine and put the drivers on a thumb drive. Usually manufacturers group the needed drivers by model number (e.g. support.dell.com, click Drivers, Laptops -> Inspiron -> 6400 -> grab all the ones you need) so they're easy to find.
You just have to be careful - if your video card is a special Dell model, the official nVidia drivers probably won't work right - you need the hopelessly outdated Dell version of the nVidia drivers. Often the official nVidia ones will refuse to install on OEM-customized video cards.
So I disagree - it's not a pain in the butt without the OEM Windows CD, if you're willing to do ten minutes of downloading on another machine (or the same machine pre-reformat). XP pre-SP1 reads most any thumb drive.
The company I work at used to be a Civil Engineering lab at the local university. Their computers are all named after trees (oak, palm, etc) but now that we're replacing the old computers we've ended up naming the computers after the people that use them. So we get hblademaster.company.local for my computer. I've just set up an internal Linux web server appropriately named "[company]web", but our file server is named "[company]1"... As soon as I can push the right buttons I'll get that changed... ... Sometimes I hate being the IT guy.
It's only bleeding edge if you unmask everything and if you're willing to deal with all of the Gentoo team's patches which may be unstable. I'm considering switching to an unmasked vanilla-sources instead of gentoo-sources just so I'll always have the newest version of the Linux kernel and have it be exactly what Linus and friends intended to distribute.
You'll only get minimal speedups compared to a binary *optimized* for core2, yes - but you'll likely get fairly good speedups if you're willing to let gcc use processor-specific instructions and whatnot (meaning you can't move the binary to another x86 unless it's the same as yours).
In other words, generic binaries are compiled with -mtune=generic (or -mtune=core2 or whatever) so they'll work on basically any x86. If you want every possible speedup, you'll need to use -march=cputype where cputype is your cpu - and if you're compiling gentoo from source, that's likely what you'll be using.
I had DD-WRT on my WRT54G sharing with several neighbors (a six-apartment building). One neighbor in particular enjoyed bittorrenting from two computers over wireless... DD-WRT choked to death quite thoroughly once in a while.
After I stopped sharing with neighbors, I tried switching to 128-bit WEP (couldn't get WPA to work at all), but DD-WRT froze up after several minutes unless I stayed with 64-bit WEP.
After installing Tomato I haven't had many issues. Once every other month or so the wireless stops responding, but a quick reboot fixes that.
I'd switch to WPA but I don't think my wife's laptop's wireless card supports it.
I use it heavily as well. Keep in mind, though, that my current installation of Steam under Wine has no tweaks whatsoever; there may be a (simple?) way to get the overlay to work by tweaking some setting or using the native version of some DLL. WineHQ's AppDB might be of some help in that regard. It's worth a shot, at any rate.
Gentoo pays me quite well in this respect, but only because I must be a masochist.
When I recommend Linux to clueless end-users, I recommend Ubuntu or Fedora, precisely because they *don't* have to dig around in the internals (generally speaking), and if some edge case does come up that's what they have me for (and they use me for Windows support anyway).
I got Steam working in Wine 1.0 the other day (first try). CS:Source has a hard time starting (it takes multiple attempts sometimes), and I get ~20 fps lower than I do in Windows, but the original CS works beautifully (especially in OpenGL rendering mode). Deus Ex appears to work well. Little games like Peggle and Uplink don't seem to have issues, either.
The only Steam feature that doesn't work for me in Wine is the in-game Steam Community overlay.
ROFL! +1 Funny in spirit :)
I'm suddenly very sad that I didn't start reading slashdot until 2005...
Very true. Like I said to ulash just a moment ago, I don't think gamers will care whether things are ray-traced or rasterized, but I think that ray-tracing has the potential to look nicer if the hardware can do it.
I'll agree with that. Gamers largely won't care whether things are ray-traced or rasterized; they'll just care whether it looks nice. I think ray-tracing has the potential to look nicer, if the hardware can do it in real-time... I guess we'll see.
Noone would want ray-trace-quality graphics in their games? How many gamers do you know?
I'm a gamer, and I would love ray-traced games. Half-Life 2 looked good in its day, as did Half-Life several years before it, but we're getting to the point where if we want things to look more realistic (and believe me, gamers do), we're going to need to switch to ray tracing.
The difference is that not purchasing from a company affects the company's bottom line, but not voting does not affect whether someone gets voted in, and in fact it can tip the scales one way or another.
In other words, if you don't buy, the company could go out of business (by not meeting their costs), but if not they can't really affect you. If you don't vote, someone still gets voted in, and it might be someone whose policies are quite opposed to how you might run things yourself, which might affect you directly through new laws.
So, you're wrong; "not voting" is not even close to the same as "boycotting a company".
The solution to "I hate the two-party system" is to vote for a third party. If that's not enough for you (and it probably won't be successful at first) you'll have to campaign for a third-party candidate and rally support. If I recall correctly, you can even write in whatever name you want for your vote.
Elvis has a Bacon number of 2, and Erdos has a Bacon number of 4.
It doesn't work though, since the Erdos number is based on academic co-authorship, and the Bacon number is based on actors' appearances.
In other words, the Erdos number and the Bacon number are not interchangeable, as kingturkey points out.
The Erdos number page. FTFY.