Trolltech's a great idea. They probably won't be able to get their hands on Java (owned by Sun, getting freeer by the minute), but Qt could be just the already adopted and beloved-by-many technology Microsoft would want to more easily get into new (Linux software) and dominate older (Cell phones where Qt can be seen as catching on) markets more efficiently. Second that guess.
AFAIK ActiveState's main field of business is still their (nice) series of IDEs. Microsoft seems to be going rather strong with their Visual Studio, too, so I wouldn't expect MSFT to be too interested.
The beautiful thing about the GPL and similar licenses is that you cannot Shut Them Down. Imagine, just for once, that all the code in the whole Linux kernel belonged to Linus (i.e. all contributers would've signed over their copyright or, where not permitted by law, an exclusive license). Now imagine Linus would suddenly decide he doesn't like Linux anymore and change the kernel's license to Microsoft's Windows 95 EULA after running an s/microsoft/linus torvalds/g over it.
Would it change a thing? A bit. Linux couldn't be called Linux anymore, cause Linus would own that trademark. Linus may not continue being the benvolent dictator. Fin. The existing community would fork Linux version (change to new license - 1), call it LOLix and continue as before. It would fork. It would change it's name, but as long as somebody's interested, it would never ever die.
Heh. If you're using Office 2007 (especially Outlook), you might be screwed a bit. I think you can turn off the "Desktop search instead of normal folder search" somewhere, but luckily (:)) haven't got an XP box handy here. If you aren't using the Desktop search, uninstall it. You're reading Slashdot, so you ought to know how to uninstall a normal piece of software.
Then there's this fucking Dog. Opening a Search Dialog, clicking "Change Preferences" and "Disable Dog" (aka "Without an Animated Screen Character") will help with that.
(what's your salary at Microsoft, btw?)
As far as I know most Microsofties are forced to use Vista machines. So I ain't gonna work there;) (and by "work" I mean "be hired by", so no, I don't collect any MSFT paychecks, salaries or discounts)
Correct. I used this (grossly overestimated) number because I assume at least 99% of the world's population make less, so the conclusion of Ubuntu being a cheaper solution than Mac OS X when only considering mp3 playback wouldn't change. Had I taken a estimated salary of $10/hr, this might not be the case. Still, you might criticize this example because it doesn't include the aforementioned 100th percentile of income. I didn't consider these, because I think they are either perfectly able to figure out if they want to use Ubuntu or OS X themselves, hire people to do this for them or don't care about a such measly amounts anyways.
If you earn north of $300/hr, aren't able to figure out if you like OS X or Ubuntu better, care about a $124 difference and haven't hired somebody to ask about the advantages and disadvantages of those systems, you can always hire me (for =$300/hr:))
Godwin's law proven in the third post of a thread? Not bad.
Anyways, you may have misunderstood my extremely straightforward yet probably quite impractical suggestion. Here's what I meant, written down a bit more comprehensible:
Health system continues as before with one exception: If a given lifeform (be it human or animal) is diagnosed with a bacterial infection that requires antibiotical treatment, it is then quarantained while receiving the same kind of treatment as it is now. If it's infection is known to be spread only by transfer of bodily fluids, it may (of course) be visited by relatives, if an infection is more probable, appropriate security measures to securely contain said infection in the quarantained lifeforms are taken.
That way, a culture of bacteria could still evolve and develop immunities against common treatments as it does now but would not be able to endanger the health of more hosts.
Instead it is going to be a never-ending battle [...]
Simple solution: Quarantaine infected lifeforms until their infection ends by either dying or outliving it. Relatives and the like must be isolated enough to not be exposed to said infection.
It is evolutionary in that an mutation (edit of a lemma) takes place and either lives on to be mutated until perfection is reached or is judged to be inferior to the unmutated revision by a natural predator of his (who, in the limited environment of the 'pedia are usually informed people and/or moderators (and whomever else is lurking up there in their organizational charts, no idea about their particular organisation)).
Of course you could also look at the creator, moderators, editors and whomever takes any influence on the article's contents as Intelligent Designers, but is a system with a virtually unlimited number of such Intelligent Designers who usually only perform small changes to their creations still to be considered a system of the insanity Intelligent Design is? You're not asking me, but I answer "no" anyways.
That would mean two entirely different code bases. Since the No Bullshit Legacy Crap Home Edition would, as the name suggests, be targeted at personal and the Crufty Old Apps Business Edition at business users, the Windows line would split back up into 9x and NT style product lines. In the long run this would very probably mean worse hardware support ("Why should a high end graphics accelerator work in Windows Business? Why would you want a professional-grade RAID controller in your Home Edition?"), a security and management-wise impared product line ("You ain't running an Active Directory at home and logging in with passwords and stuff really seems too businessy") and similar problems.
Microsoft's usual product lifespan is something in the region of 5 years. Even if you're on a secure network, you don't want to be running an OS that's been unpatched for the past eleven years. Paying MSFT to continue providing updates to you is an option, but I am quite sure that rewriting or at least fixing the Apps incompatibilities would be cheaper. A lot.
Right. It's more work to support one physical computer, one installed app (VMware) and a few files (VMs) per person than it's to support three computers running wholly different OS versions of which at least some won't participate in your network. Right.
Viri tend to be rather stable, fast and actually working. If you are claiming ME provided any of these criteria, you must be new here (or in Soviet Russia where Windows crashes you).
Actually, the Product lines were merged. XP was clearly marketed as a consumer and professional/business type OS and did incorporate lots of Multimedia-related features that weren't too readily available on what were it's predecessors in the NT line. The code base of 9x, however, was largely if not completely dumped in favor of NT/2000's.
1: "Core features dropped. Ends up as polish on the existing Windows XP: Windows Vista." Would you mind telling me exactly which Core features we're talking about? I recall WinFS being quoted rather often as a dropped feature, but if you actually understand what WinFS would've been all about (indexing, SQL-style add-on to NTFS in order to quicken up searching), you might have noticed Windows Desktop Search doing kindof everything that WinFS promised.
2: What is this lack of features in Windows XP you're talking about? IIRC it's considered to be (one of) the most enterprise-friendly and (if configured acceptably) rock solid OS. It was no 180 turn from anything before, but it did most everything right and introduced a lot of possibilities to Active Directory admins.
3: Reading and/or citing RoughlyDrafted does not make your post appear informed or unbiased in any way. Daniel Eran Dilger, the person responsible for that blog is one of the most well-known, fanatic Apple-fanboys out there. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find a single post which isn't either glorifying Apple or attacking Microsoft (most posts actually are both).
Installing the additional software takes a minute at worst and you are automatically led through the process the first time you attempt to play an unsupported file using Ubuntu's standard media player.
Now let's see...
Copy of Ubuntu: $0 A minute of time to install mp3 support: $5 (awesome, huh?) Total cost to listen to mp3s with Ubuntu: $5.
Copy of OS X: $129 mp3 support out-of-the-box: $0 Total cost to listen to mp3s with OS X: $129.
Even if it took you fifteen minutes to read some three lines of text and click two buttons, you'd still be saving many, many dollars. And be getting support for most every other major encoding and container format out there in the process (which, to my limited knowledge, would be quite a bit more tiresome using OS X).
You imagine wrongly, then. Most remotely current games rely on the availability of one or more high-performance GPUs which to my knowledge no virtualisation Environment can provide on Linux. VMWare should do rather nicely on Intel-Apple boxes, but that's about it. Even running old games on a Win98 VM in VMWare/XP is a terrible drag if it works at all.
I've been looking *forever* for CLI RSS torrent grabber.
It's not exactly natively CLI, but what about one with a Webinterface?
Their website is defunct as of now, but the -b4rt branch seems to be under active development. As far as I recall, both vanilla and -b4rt do support RSS grabbing, so help yourself:)
There is no way for anybody _including_ Microsoft to implement to OOXML 'standard'.
Perfect. If MSFT actually pushed OOXML all the way through to an ISO standard, governments and large organizations (which are, to my knowledge, the main cause for Microsofts wish to go ISO) would probably base their choice of an office suite on said ISO certification*. Microsoft would definately push Office as ISO-x compliant, so Office's market share would probably stay around where it is now (everywhere, despite improving competition from the likes of OOo).
Now assuming you were right (which I am pretty sure isn't the case, but let's not debate about opinions), Office's implementation of OOXML would be buggy in a way that would make it not support said ISO standard. Wouldn't that be an anti-Microsoft fanbois wet dream? Imagine you could sue Microsoft to whatever representation of afterlife you believe in and back. Imagine not only you, but lots and lots of governments would. All possible thanks to Microsoft spending (probably) billions of Dollars to create a standard which they wouldn't be able to support. Sounds pretty funny, but do you seriously think a company of Microsofts size would risk their biggest source of income in such an extremely stupid fashion? I hope you don't.
*: Of course many acquisitions would still be based on not wanting to "learn" how to use an alternative, admin lazyness and profitable business lunches, but instead of finding justifiable reasons, all could (and very probably would - I worked for a gov't, I know the climate) be based upon ISO-x support and all the nice advantages resulting thereof.
Dieter Nuhr, a german comedian once said something that would fit your post perfectly. It was
"Wenn man keine Ahnung hat, einfach mal die Fresse halten!"
Translated to English, this would be along the lines of "If you haven't got a clue, just shut up". Outlook does have a spam filter. Most providers have server-side spam filters. Thunderbird is not better than anything else just because you don't know anything else. Okay?
I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.
In my experience it's the other way round. XP would use the least energy with Vista and Ubuntu eating up quite a bit more (Ubuntu usually being worse than Vista).
I am fairly sure standby was available in 7.04 and (a bit less sure) in 6.06. In 7.10 (scheduled to be released this week), standby and hibernate are both available and working almost flawlessy on my X61t (almost as in "I had to add a few lines in a config file"), so you should be fine.
By the way this box came with Vista, which (as far as I recall) was a bit less power-hungry than Ubuntu, but I still get around 5 hours with compiz and trackerd running (80~120 wakeups/s, around 95% C2 and 98+% lowest cpufreq according to PowerTop).
Someone with a Pentium 4 will probably not even/have/ a PSU capable of delivering 500 watts. Afaik the worst P4 consumed 120
Most current desktops do have power-saving features, so I'd guess an office box would consume about a hundred watts on average, while really bad gaming rigs with two or more GPUs, a PPU and a dual- or quadcore processor should come in at around 300 average and up to 600 peak.
Slashdot Mirror
Trolltech's a great idea. They probably won't be able to get their hands on Java (owned by Sun, getting freeer by the minute), but Qt could be just the already adopted and beloved-by-many technology Microsoft would want to more easily get into new (Linux software) and dominate older (Cell phones where Qt can be seen as catching on) markets more efficiently. Second that guess.
AFAIK ActiveState's main field of business is still their (nice) series of IDEs. Microsoft seems to be going rather strong with their Visual Studio, too, so I wouldn't expect MSFT to be too interested.
The beautiful thing about the GPL and similar licenses is that you cannot Shut Them Down. Imagine, just for once, that all the code in the whole Linux kernel belonged to Linus (i.e. all contributers would've signed over their copyright or, where not permitted by law, an exclusive license). Now imagine Linus would suddenly decide he doesn't like Linux anymore and change the kernel's license to Microsoft's Windows 95 EULA after running an s/microsoft/linus torvalds/g over it.
Would it change a thing? A bit. Linux couldn't be called Linux anymore, cause Linus would own that trademark. Linus may not continue being the benvolent dictator. Fin. The existing community would fork Linux version (change to new license - 1), call it LOLix and continue as before. It would fork. It would change it's name, but as long as somebody's interested, it would never ever die.
Then there's this fucking Dog. Opening a Search Dialog, clicking "Change Preferences" and "Disable Dog" (aka "Without an Animated Screen Character") will help with that.
As far as I know most Microsofties are forced to use Vista machines. So I ain't gonna work there
Correct. I used this (grossly overestimated) number because I assume at least 99% of the world's population make less, so the conclusion of Ubuntu being a cheaper solution than Mac OS X when only considering mp3 playback wouldn't change. Had I taken a estimated salary of $10/hr, this might not be the case. Still, you might criticize this example because it doesn't include the aforementioned 100th percentile of income. I didn't consider these, because I think they are either perfectly able to figure out if they want to use Ubuntu or OS X themselves, hire people to do this for them or don't care about a such measly amounts anyways.
:))
If you earn north of $300/hr, aren't able to figure out if you like OS X or Ubuntu better, care about a $124 difference and haven't hired somebody to ask about the advantages and disadvantages of those systems, you can always hire me (for =$300/hr
Godwin's law proven in the third post of a thread? Not bad.
Anyways, you may have misunderstood my extremely straightforward yet probably quite impractical suggestion. Here's what I meant, written down a bit more comprehensible:
Health system continues as before with one exception: If a given lifeform (be it human or animal) is diagnosed with a bacterial infection that requires antibiotical treatment, it is then quarantained while receiving the same kind of treatment as it is now. If it's infection is known to be spread only by transfer of bodily fluids, it may (of course) be visited by relatives, if an infection is more probable, appropriate security measures to securely contain said infection in the quarantained lifeforms are taken.
That way, a culture of bacteria could still evolve and develop immunities against common treatments as it does now but would not be able to endanger the health of more hosts.
It is evolutionary in that an mutation (edit of a lemma) takes place and either lives on to be mutated until perfection is reached or is judged to be inferior to the unmutated revision by a natural predator of his (who, in the limited environment of the 'pedia are usually informed people and/or moderators (and whomever else is lurking up there in their organizational charts, no idea about their particular organisation)).
Of course you could also look at the creator, moderators, editors and whomever takes any influence on the article's contents as Intelligent Designers, but is a system with a virtually unlimited number of such Intelligent Designers who usually only perform small changes to their creations still to be considered a system of the insanity Intelligent Design is? You're not asking me, but I answer "no" anyways.
That would mean two entirely different code bases. Since the No Bullshit Legacy Crap Home Edition would, as the name suggests, be targeted at personal and the Crufty Old Apps Business Edition at business users, the Windows line would split back up into 9x and NT style product lines. In the long run this would very probably mean worse hardware support ("Why should a high end graphics accelerator work in Windows Business? Why would you want a professional-grade RAID controller in your Home Edition?"), a security and management-wise impared product line ("You ain't running an Active Directory at home and logging in with passwords and stuff really seems too businessy") and similar problems.
Microsoft's usual product lifespan is something in the region of 5 years. Even if you're on a secure network, you don't want to be running an OS that's been unpatched for the past eleven years. Paying MSFT to continue providing updates to you is an option, but I am quite sure that rewriting or at least fixing the Apps incompatibilities would be cheaper. A lot.
Right. It's more work to support one physical computer, one installed app (VMware) and a few files (VMs) per person than it's to support three computers running wholly different OS versions of which at least some won't participate in your network. Right.
Viri tend to be rather stable, fast and actually working. If you are claiming ME provided any of these criteria, you must be new here (or in Soviet Russia where Windows crashes you).
Actually, the Product lines were merged. XP was clearly marketed as a consumer and professional/business type OS and did incorporate lots of Multimedia-related features that weren't too readily available on what were it's predecessors in the NT line. The code base of 9x, however, was largely if not completely dumped in favor of NT/2000's.
1: "Core features dropped. Ends up as polish on the existing Windows XP: Windows Vista." Would you mind telling me exactly which Core features we're talking about? I recall WinFS being quoted rather often as a dropped feature, but if you actually understand what WinFS would've been all about (indexing, SQL-style add-on to NTFS in order to quicken up searching), you might have noticed Windows Desktop Search doing kindof everything that WinFS promised. 2: What is this lack of features in Windows XP you're talking about? IIRC it's considered to be (one of) the most enterprise-friendly and (if configured acceptably) rock solid OS. It was no 180 turn from anything before, but it did most everything right and introduced a lot of possibilities to Active Directory admins. 3: Reading and/or citing RoughlyDrafted does not make your post appear informed or unbiased in any way. Daniel Eran Dilger, the person responsible for that blog is one of the most well-known, fanatic Apple-fanboys out there. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find a single post which isn't either glorifying Apple or attacking Microsoft (most posts actually are both).
Installing the additional software takes a minute at worst and you are automatically led through the process the first time you attempt to play an unsupported file using Ubuntu's standard media player.
Now let's see...
Copy of Ubuntu: $0
A minute of time to install mp3 support: $5 (awesome, huh?)
Total cost to listen to mp3s with Ubuntu: $5.
Copy of OS X: $129
mp3 support out-of-the-box: $0
Total cost to listen to mp3s with OS X: $129.
Even if it took you fifteen minutes to read some three lines of text and click two buttons, you'd still be saving many, many dollars. And be getting support for most every other major encoding and container format out there in the process (which, to my limited knowledge, would be quite a bit more tiresome using OS X).
Their website is defunct as of now, but the -b4rt branch seems to be under active development. As far as I recall, both vanilla and -b4rt do support RSS grabbing, so help yourself
If MSFT actually pushed OOXML all the way through to an ISO standard, governments and large organizations (which are, to my knowledge, the main cause for Microsofts wish to go ISO) would probably base their choice of an office suite on said ISO certification*. Microsoft would definately push Office as ISO-x compliant, so Office's market share would probably stay around where it is now (everywhere, despite improving competition from the likes of OOo).
Now assuming you were right (which I am pretty sure isn't the case, but let's not debate about opinions), Office's implementation of OOXML would be buggy in a way that would make it not support said ISO standard. Wouldn't that be an anti-Microsoft fanbois wet dream? Imagine you could sue Microsoft to whatever representation of afterlife you believe in and back. Imagine not only you, but lots and lots of governments would. All possible thanks to Microsoft spending (probably) billions of Dollars to create a standard which they wouldn't be able to support. Sounds pretty funny, but do you seriously think a company of Microsofts size would risk their biggest source of income in such an extremely stupid fashion? I hope you don't.
*: Of course many acquisitions would still be based on not wanting to "learn" how to use an alternative, admin lazyness and profitable business lunches, but instead of finding justifiable reasons, all could (and very probably would - I worked for a gov't, I know the climate) be based upon ISO-x support and all the nice advantages resulting thereof.
I AM the singularity. I also am filling the interwebs with Led Zepplin directly from another dimension (or so they say).
By the way this box came with Vista, which (as far as I recall) was a bit less power-hungry than Ubuntu, but I still get around 5 hours with compiz and trackerd running (80~120 wakeups/s, around 95% C2 and 98+% lowest cpufreq according to PowerTop).
Someone with a Pentium 4 will probably not even /have/ a PSU capable of delivering 500 watts. Afaik the worst P4 consumed 120
Most current desktops do have power-saving features, so I'd guess an office box would consume about a hundred watts on average, while really bad gaming rigs with two or more GPUs, a PPU and a dual- or quadcore processor should come in at around 300 average and up to 600 peak.
... SOLID STATE DISKS FOR EVERYONE!
Maye also 3.5" floppies, but that's just wishful thinking, eh?
To where? Your (inexistent 'cause you're using a router) usb/serial modem? Your dog's lower back? No network -> no updates, period.