Windows 7's shell is new, and confusing at first, but if you jump in and just try to use it as intended I think you will find pretty quickly the most of the changes you hated actually make your life easier.
It's not as intuitive as I've found Macs to be, but my personal opinion is the changes are a good thing.
Clinging to the old way of doing things may be more familiar and therefore easier at first, but if you never learn the new way you'll never get to take advantage of all the improvements that have been made.
It's like a carpenter who refuses to move from hand tools to power tools. Yeah, the hand tools are smaller and easier to carry around, and the carpenter is very good with them. And yeah, power tools are big, bulky, take up a lot of space, and require a whole different set of skills to operate, which can be a painful learning experience. If he has never used power tools before then the first chair he makes with power tools is going to take him twice as long or longer than it would have taken him with hand tools. If the carpenter stops there and decides that these new power tools are clearly a waste of time and just killing his productivity, he has just made a huge mistake. Had he continued, then after building that first chair he would have started figuring out how the power tools work, and the next time around he would have been able to use them more efficiently, so that the second chair he made would have taken about as long as it used to take with the hand tools. By the third chair, he would have been building chairs in half the time or less, and with each new chair he would have gotten faster and faster. Finally the carpenter would have been making five chairs in the amount of time it used to take him to make one. What's more the cuts from properly handled powertools are cleaner and more accurate, making the finished product even nicer!
If you give up on new technologies just because they are different and confusing at first, you'll forever be stuck using lesser tools.
I can't see how that's better than typing "calc" and getting exactly what I'm looking for. I know I use it all the time and love it. A friend of mine actually just commented on how great it was a few days ago. How often does some neat feature of an OS come up in casual conversation? I know for me, the OS usually only comes up when I'm bitching about something.
And yes I've used Gnome. I lived on Ubuntu for about a year after I got royally pissed off at Vista, which came with my then-new laptop (it stopped recognizing my laptop keyboard 0.o). There was nothing in Gnome that I especially liked. Nothing I really hated, but it certainly wasn't any kind of improvement. I've always preferred XP's desktop to GNOME, and I prefer Windows 7's to XP's. I could have tried KDE, but I just never bothered. In fact the only things I really, really liked about Ubuntu were the compiz cube (I'm a sucker for eye-candy) and Synaptic.
Oh to have a Synaptic* for Windows! What a wonderful thing that would be! But on the other side of that, installing non-repository software in Ubuntu sucks monkey balls. That's why Synaptic exists at all. Windows doesn't have Synaptic because the chasm that Synaptic fills for Linux is just a pothole in Windows. It would be nice to have a browseable software clearing house for Windows, though.
* When I say "Synaptic" I'm including apt-get and the repositories it connects to. I know Synaptic is just the GUI front-end. The real point is centralized software repository and the ease of finding software, including updated versions of what you already have installed.
Otherwise go ahead install your win 7 on a 6085, 8080, or Z80. You see how stupid this argument is.
Try installing Ubuntu on any of those and let me know how that works for you.
Your arguments are asinine.
Of course you aren't going to like Windows 7 if you disable all its features in order to use your own custom systems. You need that kind of crap when you are running Linux, but honestly, the smart thing to do in 7 is just turn search indexing back on (and turn it on for the whole drive, it defaults to just documents and the OS folder, which I think is dumb).
The search indexer sits idle (i.e. not using any CPU cycles and virtually no RAM at all) until something changes on your hard drive. Starting from scratch it might spend up to a couple hours indexing everything, but after that only unused CPU cycles are allocated to the search indexer. Unless you spend all your time moving thousands of files search indexer will never slow your performance, ever.
Honestly, I don't understand your aversion to actually using your computer as intended. CPU cycles regularly go unused, why do you have a problem with allocating such unused cycles to a search indexer that will find all of your files in a few key presses?
Also don't be fooled by the RAM usage in system resources. 7 is much more proactive about memory than XP was - so it will leave a lot of things allocated even if they are not in use. If more memory is actively needed by a program than is unallocated, re-allocating from processes that aren't actively using RAM is basically free (it takes only a handful of CPU cycles - microseconds or less, which if you are physically capable of noticing you are inhumanly perceptive).
The result of this is that old hands that knew how to get the most out of XP and previous versions of Windows get freaked out by memory that appears to be running out of space. It isn't. Leave it alone. The OS is a lot smarter than you are about memory management, so if your hard drive starts thrashing it means you've really run out of ram for what you are trying to do, not that your ram is being used inefficiently. Attempting to tweak it yourself will almost certainly make things worse.
Even halting processes isn't going to help you any. Unless it is actually using CPU cycles (which you can verify with system monitor quite easily) it isn't slowing anything down, and even though it appears to taking up a chunk of ram, it really isn't.
It used to be you could do a better job of this stuff on your own, but that's not true any more. Taking 6 months to build a database out of your file system even though you can find things faster and easier with Search after just a few hours seems like an incredibly ignorant waste of time.
But you can use your machine as you like, obviously. But if you are going to criticize Windows 7 you should at least use it as it is intended.
I bought it to support my >4G RAM on my latest gaming PC build, and sure... TRIM support, but I can't even tell if it's working as I couldn't get Windows 7 to install unless I used my SSD on my RAID controller and it definitely didn't see my drive when I put it on AHCI.
Honestly that sounds like a driver/bios configuration issue. I've seen others describe the problem, but it was generally the BIOS not showing the SSD if RAID was enabled. If your configuration is such that the drive is not visible on boot, there is no way you'll get it to boot to the SSD. Most people were able to fix problems that actually had to do with Windows with the Windows repair disk. Running an SSD boot with a Raid 0 data array is a fairly advanced setup, and it's easy to screw it up between the bios, raid drivers, and OS config.
I do like the pinning so I can keep whatever game of the week is on my list, but I rarely use the search at the top of the window so I disabled it and now I can't even do a simple folder search without turning back on the indexer which I do not want!
So... you disabled the search and are now complaining that you can't search? I'm not even going to respond to that. It's just too blatantly obvious.
Another thing I can't stand is being told my windows is not legal in about 50 different places. I've registered my copy... go the hell away Microsoft. Funny thing is, it's fine after reboot, and a few hours of gaming later I return to my desktop and the little warning shows up in the corner.
Did you install to a blank drive from an upgrade disk? That's technically illegal, and Microsoft does not appreciate it and they will tell you so. The only upgrade path for XP to 7 is via Vista. The upgrade disks are meant to upgrade from Vista to 7, so if you did not do that you have violated the EULA, and thus your copy of Windows is not legitimate. You get a deep discount for upgrading from the most recent version. You should not expect to get that discount for "upgrading" an ancient OS.
Pretty much all of the problems you describe seem to have been caused by you yourself. It's the old PEBKAC problem, you know?
Wishing people dead because they've been raised to believe something foolish? Most laymen in the world have serious misconceptions about science (I'm 99.9% certain that includes you), yet just because you understand what amounts to a hill of beans more than one particularly ignorant group of people you hope they all commit mass suicide?
You are a rotten excuse for a human being, you seriously disgust me. I'd rather have 10 people who believe the earth is the center of the universe yet are capable of treating each other with decency and consideration* than a million well-informed, smug, self-centered assholes.
In other words, go fuck yourself, you smug, self-important bastard.
*I'm not trying to imply earth-centrists are capable of treating each other with decency and consideration, I'm simply pointing out what personal characteristics actually matter in real life.
No shit. It's new. Low-end hardware is, by definition, low-end and therefore not expected to run high-end software. That's why they have minimum requirements.
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware
If you only give it 1 core of a Core Duo and 256mb of ram, then no shit. Give it a core of a Xenon and 2gb of ram, however, and it ain't too shabby.
Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself.
That's only true if you don't know how to deploy a 7 image. Seriously, you have to know what you are doing first.
Still no decent backup system
Unfortunately, that seems to be a Windows trademark. It is a real shame, since their Wim images would provide a perfect foundation for a very nice backup system. Mountable, deduplicated, easily parsed, and all in one file. It's a real shame MS doesn't get into some of this stuff. On the other hand, they'd be putting a lot of people out of business if they shipped with a decent backup system, so it's not all bad.
(I can't comment on XP mode, personally)
Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
Who gives a rat's ass? I've been using computers for 20 years and I've been doing IT support for 6, and the only time I've ever needed EXT or any other Unix filesystem format support is when I was using Linux. I understand why Linux needs to support NTFS, but I see no practical need for Windows to support any Unix file system. It is such a tiny niche that the FOSS FS drivers more than cover the need.
Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
Those are called workstations, not desktops, and accepted practice is to install Windows Server if you specifically need Windows or install Linux (much of the academic software that requires these machines is built on Linux anyway). Hey it isn't the desktop, but at least you have Linux on the Workstation!
Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
TPM chips are present on just about every business desktop I have seen in the last few years. Whole disk encryption is often required thanks to various laws over the years, so TPM is extremely common among those customers who, you know, need it. They aren't found on consumer machines because consumers generally don't need or want whole disk encryption, making it an unwanted additional expense.
You still have to download a virus scanner, there is none built-in nor is the OS self-contained enough to be used without one.
I'm sure asshats like you (that's clearly an unfounded assumption, I have no idea if you are one of these people) would scream bloody murder if Microsoft shipped Windows 7 with a virus scanner. Damned if you do, damned if you don't eh? Did you know that over in Europe Microsoft isn't even permitted to ship Windows with a full version of Internet Explorer installed? Crazy European idiots.
People today don't like him because he refused to spend assloads of taxpayer money to give temporary assistance to those hardest hit by the Great Depression.
While such measures are undeniably helpful in the short term, there is great debate about whether or not they were helpful or harmful in the long term.
I believe she mistakenly felt she had made FOSS allies of Novell thanks to Groklaw's support in the SCO case.
I'm sure Novell appreciated the help, but it's clear now that if they were ever FOSS allies, it was nothing more than an alliance of convenience. The Christmas post was her "getting over it" moment.
Honestly, you should get an actual lawyer for that.
Nobody is going to give you legal advice without being your lawyer (even temporarily) because there are a whole host of liabilities that come with it. In other words, they can get into serious deep shit even though they were just trying to help you out.
Imagine you are asking a random doctor what he thinks you should do about this serious pain in your side. Know what he's going to tell you? Go see a doctor!
Now think of lawyers as "doctors" of law. If they give you bad advice without diagnosing your situation, and you hurt yourself legally, you get to sue and they can lose their license. It's even called malpractice, just like it is in the medical profession.
Perhaps not relevant to the discussion, but I have to point out that when PJ dealt with GPL v3 (many articles on Groklaw when it was being drafted), she did not say anything about her involvement in the process(and so, potential conflict of interest) until *after* the license was approved.
What conflict of interest for what? She was posting on her blog for Christ's sake!
I like a lot the investigative side of Groklaw, but I like a lot less paranoia-induced articles like this one.
Did you even read the blog? She was upset that after all the work she and the Groklaw community put in to help Novell win against SCO, the ended up selling a whole pile of Unix patents to Microsoft.
That caused her to question the purpose of Groklaw. Considering Groklaw was founded in an effort to protect Linux, that's very understandable.
Ultimately, she decided that Groklaw wasn't about helping this company or that company, but about defending FOSS and Linux each time it is threatened. So, despite the fact that she feels Novell betrayed Groklaw, the site will continue as usual, and if they end up being foes of Novell next time instead of allies, then so be it.
The impression I get from many posters to this discussion is that she simply removes the side of the debate she doesn't agree with. I'm not capable of proving that's the case. Any evidence of that would be deleted from her site.
You could always go look for yourself. If such claims are false they would be easy to disprove. If you find posts that seriously disagree with PJ then the claim that she removes the side of the debate she doesn't agree with is clearly false.
If the claim is true it would be impossible to prove, of course. Finding no posts that disagree with PJ isn't proof. However, it would certainly imply that she is removing them, as rarely in this world to large groups of people whole-heartedly agree.
Last but certainly not least, from what I can tell debate isn't the purpose of Groklaw. Preparing legal documents for the purpose of defending FOSS and specifically Linux is the purpose of Groklaw. Debate may happen, but that doesn't seem to be the intent, so even removing whole sides of an argument she disagrees with doesn't really damage PJ's purpose or credibility regarding her purpose.
Except for the fact that it is exactly the same thing. Posts below a certain threshold (it usually isn't even 0) generally don't get seen. Modding down is a common method used here of censoring an opinion you don't like.
I don't think you understand the purpose of Groklaw. It's not about discussion, it's about preparing legal exhibits for use in court in defense of FOSS and Linux.
How in the hell could censoring posts on her blog possibly discredit her? It has nothing to do with what she is doing! The blog is just for personal info and legal news she finds interesting/important.
I don't see how anything on there could discredit the legal exhibits Groklaw volunteers prepare.
A clearinghouse of rational discussion about the patent and copyright issues surrounding Linux
I don't recall Groklaw ever being portrayed as such by anyone involved with Groklaw.
Their purpose is to prepare legal documents for use in court in order to support FOSS and specifically Linux.
Where is there a clearing house of rational discussion about the patent and copyright issues surrounding Linux implied there? There isn't one.
It's PJ's blog and volunteer legal document preparation service, in a nutshell. No clearinghouse of anything (though lots of legal discussions certainly occur on the site, due to the nature of the blog and work).
The reason PJ is upset is because Groklaw volunteers put a lot of work into the documents used in the Novell case. Then Novell turns around and sells an assload of patents to Microsoft of all companies.
If the goal of your company isn't to make money, it's a non-profit. If your company is a for-profit, the goal [wikipedia.org] of the company is to make money.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day, and I can refute it with one simple example: http://www.virgance.com/
Seriously, what an idiotic notion. Because I want to make money I can't possibly want to do anything else? What narrow minded nonsense is that? What if all I care about with regard to money is having enough to live comfortably? In that case my business does not have to be focused on profit at all. In fact it would be pretty dumb for me to focus on profit if I don't care about profit that much. Instead I would focus on whatever it is I want to focus on.
I would say most privately owned businesses are more or less this way. Sure some people sat down and tried to figure out how to make the most money, but most people don't. It's pretty hard to be passionate about whatever it is your business is all about if the only thing you care about is the almighty dollar.
Your point is much more valid for public corporations, which are generally controlled by a board of directors who report to shareholders. These companies are often about profit and profit only. The more shortsighted ones are about profit this quarter only. A notable exception to this, even still, is Google. They have a clear ideology that hasn't changed since its inception in two guys' dorm room, and it's certainly not about profit. Their ideology happens to produce massive profits as a happy side effect, though, which acts as a strong incentive to not change their ideology.
There is no reason profit cannot be combined with an overall boon to society, both directly and indirectly. Going back to Google, just look at what they have done for the open hardware and software communities. For heaven's sake it's almost accepted practice to wipe your phone's OS and install your own thanks to Google. That was unheard of four years ago. You know, back when Apple was bricking jailbroken phones with mandatory updates.;)
Time to read bud, there is a ton of info on it. Since Win 7 is basically Vista+, you have to start with the difference between XP and Vista. This is where the majority of changes occurred.
Read the following to fully understand the difference between 7 and XP, or cherry pick to get a basic idea:
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree.
Windows 7's shell is new, and confusing at first, but if you jump in and just try to use it as intended I think you will find pretty quickly the most of the changes you hated actually make your life easier.
It's not as intuitive as I've found Macs to be, but my personal opinion is the changes are a good thing.
Clinging to the old way of doing things may be more familiar and therefore easier at first, but if you never learn the new way you'll never get to take advantage of all the improvements that have been made.
It's like a carpenter who refuses to move from hand tools to power tools. Yeah, the hand tools are smaller and easier to carry around, and the carpenter is very good with them. And yeah, power tools are big, bulky, take up a lot of space, and require a whole different set of skills to operate, which can be a painful learning experience. If he has never used power tools before then the first chair he makes with power tools is going to take him twice as long or longer than it would have taken him with hand tools. If the carpenter stops there and decides that these new power tools are clearly a waste of time and just killing his productivity, he has just made a huge mistake. Had he continued, then after building that first chair he would have started figuring out how the power tools work, and the next time around he would have been able to use them more efficiently, so that the second chair he made would have taken about as long as it used to take with the hand tools. By the third chair, he would have been building chairs in half the time or less, and with each new chair he would have gotten faster and faster. Finally the carpenter would have been making five chairs in the amount of time it used to take him to make one. What's more the cuts from properly handled powertools are cleaner and more accurate, making the finished product even nicer!
If you give up on new technologies just because they are different and confusing at first, you'll forever be stuck using lesser tools.
I have to use Lotus Notes et all at work.
It is, bar none, the worst office suite I have ever used.
I can't see how that's better than typing "calc" and getting exactly what I'm looking for. I know I use it all the time and love it. A friend of mine actually just commented on how great it was a few days ago. How often does some neat feature of an OS come up in casual conversation? I know for me, the OS usually only comes up when I'm bitching about something.
And yes I've used Gnome. I lived on Ubuntu for about a year after I got royally pissed off at Vista, which came with my then-new laptop (it stopped recognizing my laptop keyboard 0.o). There was nothing in Gnome that I especially liked. Nothing I really hated, but it certainly wasn't any kind of improvement. I've always preferred XP's desktop to GNOME, and I prefer Windows 7's to XP's. I could have tried KDE, but I just never bothered. In fact the only things I really, really liked about Ubuntu were the compiz cube (I'm a sucker for eye-candy) and Synaptic.
Oh to have a Synaptic* for Windows! What a wonderful thing that would be! But on the other side of that, installing non-repository software in Ubuntu sucks monkey balls. That's why Synaptic exists at all. Windows doesn't have Synaptic because the chasm that Synaptic fills for Linux is just a pothole in Windows. It would be nice to have a browseable software clearing house for Windows, though.
* When I say "Synaptic" I'm including apt-get and the repositories it connects to. I know Synaptic is just the GUI front-end. The real point is centralized software repository and the ease of finding software, including updated versions of what you already have installed.
Otherwise go ahead install your win 7 on a 6085, 8080, or Z80. You see how stupid this argument is.
Try installing Ubuntu on any of those and let me know how that works for you.
Your arguments are asinine.
Of course you aren't going to like Windows 7 if you disable all its features in order to use your own custom systems. You need that kind of crap when you are running Linux, but honestly, the smart thing to do in 7 is just turn search indexing back on (and turn it on for the whole drive, it defaults to just documents and the OS folder, which I think is dumb).
The search indexer sits idle (i.e. not using any CPU cycles and virtually no RAM at all) until something changes on your hard drive. Starting from scratch it might spend up to a couple hours indexing everything, but after that only unused CPU cycles are allocated to the search indexer. Unless you spend all your time moving thousands of files search indexer will never slow your performance, ever.
Honestly, I don't understand your aversion to actually using your computer as intended. CPU cycles regularly go unused, why do you have a problem with allocating such unused cycles to a search indexer that will find all of your files in a few key presses?
Also don't be fooled by the RAM usage in system resources. 7 is much more proactive about memory than XP was - so it will leave a lot of things allocated even if they are not in use. If more memory is actively needed by a program than is unallocated, re-allocating from processes that aren't actively using RAM is basically free (it takes only a handful of CPU cycles - microseconds or less, which if you are physically capable of noticing you are inhumanly perceptive).
The result of this is that old hands that knew how to get the most out of XP and previous versions of Windows get freaked out by memory that appears to be running out of space. It isn't. Leave it alone. The OS is a lot smarter than you are about memory management, so if your hard drive starts thrashing it means you've really run out of ram for what you are trying to do, not that your ram is being used inefficiently. Attempting to tweak it yourself will almost certainly make things worse.
Even halting processes isn't going to help you any. Unless it is actually using CPU cycles (which you can verify with system monitor quite easily) it isn't slowing anything down, and even though it appears to taking up a chunk of ram, it really isn't.
It used to be you could do a better job of this stuff on your own, but that's not true any more. Taking 6 months to build a database out of your file system even though you can find things faster and easier with Search after just a few hours seems like an incredibly ignorant waste of time.
But you can use your machine as you like, obviously. But if you are going to criticize Windows 7 you should at least use it as it is intended.
I bought it to support my >4G RAM on my latest gaming PC build, and sure... TRIM support, but I can't even tell if it's working as I couldn't get Windows 7 to install unless I used my SSD on my RAID controller and it definitely didn't see my drive when I put it on AHCI.
Honestly that sounds like a driver/bios configuration issue. I've seen others describe the problem, but it was generally the BIOS not showing the SSD if RAID was enabled. If your configuration is such that the drive is not visible on boot, there is no way you'll get it to boot to the SSD. Most people were able to fix problems that actually had to do with Windows with the Windows repair disk. Running an SSD boot with a Raid 0 data array is a fairly advanced setup, and it's easy to screw it up between the bios, raid drivers, and OS config.
I do like the pinning so I can keep whatever game of the week is on my list, but I rarely use the search at the top of the window so I disabled it and now I can't even do a simple folder search without turning back on the indexer which I do not want!
So... you disabled the search and are now complaining that you can't search? I'm not even going to respond to that. It's just too blatantly obvious.
Another thing I can't stand is being told my windows is not legal in about 50 different places. I've registered my copy... go the hell away Microsoft. Funny thing is, it's fine after reboot, and a few hours of gaming later I return to my desktop and the little warning shows up in the corner.
Did you install to a blank drive from an upgrade disk? That's technically illegal, and Microsoft does not appreciate it and they will tell you so. The only upgrade path for XP to 7 is via Vista. The upgrade disks are meant to upgrade from Vista to 7, so if you did not do that you have violated the EULA, and thus your copy of Windows is not legitimate. You get a deep discount for upgrading from the most recent version. You should not expect to get that discount for "upgrading" an ancient OS.
Pretty much all of the problems you describe seem to have been caused by you yourself. It's the old PEBKAC problem, you know?
Or you could just use the search bar and find whatever you are looking for instantly.
My god you people are disgusting.
Wishing people dead because they've been raised to believe something foolish? Most laymen in the world have serious misconceptions about science (I'm 99.9% certain that includes you), yet just because you understand what amounts to a hill of beans more than one particularly ignorant group of people you hope they all commit mass suicide?
You are a rotten excuse for a human being, you seriously disgust me. I'd rather have 10 people who believe the earth is the center of the universe yet are capable of treating each other with decency and consideration* than a million well-informed, smug, self-centered assholes.
In other words, go fuck yourself, you smug, self-important bastard.
*I'm not trying to imply earth-centrists are capable of treating each other with decency and consideration, I'm simply pointing out what personal characteristics actually matter in real life.
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware
No shit. It's new. Low-end hardware is, by definition, low-end and therefore not expected to run high-end software. That's why they have minimum requirements.
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware
If you only give it 1 core of a Core Duo and 256mb of ram, then no shit. Give it a core of a Xenon and 2gb of ram, however, and it ain't too shabby.
Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself.
That's only true if you don't know how to deploy a 7 image. Seriously, you have to know what you are doing first.
Still no decent backup system
Unfortunately, that seems to be a Windows trademark. It is a real shame, since their Wim images would provide a perfect foundation for a very nice backup system. Mountable, deduplicated, easily parsed, and all in one file. It's a real shame MS doesn't get into some of this stuff. On the other hand, they'd be putting a lot of people out of business if they shipped with a decent backup system, so it's not all bad.
(I can't comment on XP mode, personally)
Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
Who gives a rat's ass? I've been using computers for 20 years and I've been doing IT support for 6, and the only time I've ever needed EXT or any other Unix filesystem format support is when I was using Linux. I understand why Linux needs to support NTFS, but I see no practical need for Windows to support any Unix file system. It is such a tiny niche that the FOSS FS drivers more than cover the need.
Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
Those are called workstations, not desktops, and accepted practice is to install Windows Server if you specifically need Windows or install Linux (much of the academic software that requires these machines is built on Linux anyway). Hey it isn't the desktop, but at least you have Linux on the Workstation!
Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
TPM chips are present on just about every business desktop I have seen in the last few years. Whole disk encryption is often required thanks to various laws over the years, so TPM is extremely common among those customers who, you know, need it. They aren't found on consumer machines because consumers generally don't need or want whole disk encryption, making it an unwanted additional expense.
You still have to download a virus scanner, there is none built-in nor is the OS self-contained enough to be used without one.
I'm sure asshats like you (that's clearly an unfounded assumption, I have no idea if you are one of these people) would scream bloody murder if Microsoft shipped Windows 7 with a virus scanner. Damned if you do, damned if you don't eh? Did you know that over in Europe Microsoft isn't even permitted to ship Windows with a full version of Internet Explorer installed? Crazy European idiots.
People today don't like him because he refused to spend assloads of taxpayer money to give temporary assistance to those hardest hit by the Great Depression.
While such measures are undeniably helpful in the short term, there is great debate about whether or not they were helpful or harmful in the long term.
I believe she mistakenly felt she had made FOSS allies of Novell thanks to Groklaw's support in the SCO case.
I'm sure Novell appreciated the help, but it's clear now that if they were ever FOSS allies, it was nothing more than an alliance of convenience. The Christmas post was her "getting over it" moment.
Groklaw continues as usual.
I believe the word you are looking for is "projection".
She could call it "Groklaw"!
Oh wait...
but profits are not evil.
Well you just guaranteed no dirty hippie is ever going to read the rest of your post. Way to go man.
You have more than one?
Freaky.
Honestly, you should get an actual lawyer for that.
Nobody is going to give you legal advice without being your lawyer (even temporarily) because there are a whole host of liabilities that come with it. In other words, they can get into serious deep shit even though they were just trying to help you out.
Imagine you are asking a random doctor what he thinks you should do about this serious pain in your side. Know what he's going to tell you? Go see a doctor!
Now think of lawyers as "doctors" of law. If they give you bad advice without diagnosing your situation, and you hurt yourself legally, you get to sue and they can lose their license. It's even called malpractice, just like it is in the medical profession.
You do realize Groklaw is in the Library of Congress because of its historical importance, right?
Lawyers on both sides of the SCO lawsuits have used and are using research performed by Groklaw contributors, because it's high quality shit.
Perhaps not relevant to the discussion, but I have to point out that when PJ dealt with GPL v3 (many articles on Groklaw when it was being drafted), she did not say anything about her involvement in the process(and so, potential conflict of interest) until *after* the license was approved.
What conflict of interest for what? She was posting on her blog for Christ's sake!
I like a lot the investigative side of Groklaw, but I like a lot less paranoia-induced articles like this one.
Did you even read the blog? She was upset that after all the work she and the Groklaw community put in to help Novell win against SCO, the ended up selling a whole pile of Unix patents to Microsoft.
That caused her to question the purpose of Groklaw. Considering Groklaw was founded in an effort to protect Linux, that's very understandable.
Ultimately, she decided that Groklaw wasn't about helping this company or that company, but about defending FOSS and Linux each time it is threatened. So, despite the fact that she feels Novell betrayed Groklaw, the site will continue as usual, and if they end up being foes of Novell next time instead of allies, then so be it.
This, I think, is a mature position to take.
The impression I get from many posters to this discussion is that she simply removes the side of the debate she doesn't agree with. I'm not capable of proving that's the case. Any evidence of that would be deleted from her site.
You could always go look for yourself. If such claims are false they would be easy to disprove. If you find posts that seriously disagree with PJ then the claim that she removes the side of the debate she doesn't agree with is clearly false.
If the claim is true it would be impossible to prove, of course. Finding no posts that disagree with PJ isn't proof. However, it would certainly imply that she is removing them, as rarely in this world to large groups of people whole-heartedly agree.
Last but certainly not least, from what I can tell debate isn't the purpose of Groklaw. Preparing legal documents for the purpose of defending FOSS and specifically Linux is the purpose of Groklaw. Debate may happen, but that doesn't seem to be the intent, so even removing whole sides of an argument she disagrees with doesn't really damage PJ's purpose or credibility regarding her purpose.
Except for the fact that it is exactly the same thing. Posts below a certain threshold (it usually isn't even 0) generally don't get seen. Modding down is a common method used here of censoring an opinion you don't like.
Censorship by the group is still censorship.
I don't think you understand the purpose of Groklaw. It's not about discussion, it's about preparing legal exhibits for use in court in defense of FOSS and Linux.
How in the hell could censoring posts on her blog possibly discredit her? It has nothing to do with what she is doing! The blog is just for personal info and legal news she finds interesting/important.
I don't see how anything on there could discredit the legal exhibits Groklaw volunteers prepare.
A clearinghouse of rational discussion about the patent and copyright issues surrounding Linux
I don't recall Groklaw ever being portrayed as such by anyone involved with Groklaw.
Their purpose is to prepare legal documents for use in court in order to support FOSS and specifically Linux.
Where is there a clearing house of rational discussion about the patent and copyright issues surrounding Linux implied there? There isn't one.
It's PJ's blog and volunteer legal document preparation service, in a nutshell. No clearinghouse of anything (though lots of legal discussions certainly occur on the site, due to the nature of the blog and work).
The reason PJ is upset is because Groklaw volunteers put a lot of work into the documents used in the Novell case. Then Novell turns around and sells an assload of patents to Microsoft of all companies.
Worse, he doesn't understand what discrimination is, either.
Same problem. A nice, descriptive word has be politicized such that people are afraid to use correctly.
If the goal of your company isn't to make money, it's a non-profit. If your company is a for-profit, the goal [wikipedia.org] of the company is to make money.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day, and I can refute it with one simple example: http://www.virgance.com/
Seriously, what an idiotic notion. Because I want to make money I can't possibly want to do anything else? What narrow minded nonsense is that? What if all I care about with regard to money is having enough to live comfortably? In that case my business does not have to be focused on profit at all. In fact it would be pretty dumb for me to focus on profit if I don't care about profit that much. Instead I would focus on whatever it is I want to focus on.
I would say most privately owned businesses are more or less this way. Sure some people sat down and tried to figure out how to make the most money, but most people don't. It's pretty hard to be passionate about whatever it is your business is all about if the only thing you care about is the almighty dollar.
Your point is much more valid for public corporations, which are generally controlled by a board of directors who report to shareholders. These companies are often about profit and profit only. The more shortsighted ones are about profit this quarter only. A notable exception to this, even still, is Google. They have a clear ideology that hasn't changed since its inception in two guys' dorm room, and it's certainly not about profit. Their ideology happens to produce massive profits as a happy side effect, though, which acts as a strong incentive to not change their ideology.
There is no reason profit cannot be combined with an overall boon to society, both directly and indirectly. Going back to Google, just look at what they have done for the open hardware and software communities. For heaven's sake it's almost accepted practice to wipe your phone's OS and install your own thanks to Google. That was unheard of four years ago. You know, back when Apple was bricking jailbroken phones with mandatory updates. ;)
Time to read bud, there is a ton of info on it. Since Win 7 is basically Vista+, you have to start with the difference between XP and Vista. This is where the majority of changes occurred.
Read the following to fully understand the difference between 7 and XP, or cherry pick to get a basic idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista - stuff the end user will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista - stuff that actually makes it better
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista - stuff your IT guys will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_features_new_to_Windows_Vista - more stuff your IT guys will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 - stuff the end user will care about, including the features that were removed since Vista
He used two computers dude. He isn't stupid.