I have a creative nomad that was upgraded to 30gig of space (I only use about 20gig of that). Basically I don't want to haul around ANY cd's. Its nice to grab the player and headphones and have everything you need to listen.
Get rid of thier default (and automatically installed and hard to get rid of for normal people) software. And fix thier internal content. Do you realize that if you search for Microsoft in the AOL search engine provided with the default software you are sent to an AOL page that describes MS as a software company that makes windows and has NO links to the Microsoft official site?
I submit to you that if we never added a new new feature or new hardware support to a software product, it would be approaching perfect by now after about 6 complete code rewrites with incremental bug fixes on the codebase.
Unfortunately people want thier new mega-cool camera-soundcard-back scratcher to work and have a billion uber apps to use it.
The fact that software companies are in the business of making new features is half of why we have bugs. The other half is because people expect that for the next eternity that their old broken software will run right next to new fancy at the same time. I think windows would drop 75% of its security holes and 80% of its crash bugs if it dropped all legacy support.
Actually they are shown to almost never upgrade. Until AOL sends them a notice they won't be able to connect any more most of them sit there happy in thier little walled garden seeing only what the content nazi's at AOL want them to see/pay for.
Yes but the OSS community wants thier software to be a REAL product that REAL people use to do REAL work and yet they want to be able to fall back on the excuse that "it was just for fun in my spare time" as an excuse to duck liability. You can't have it both ways, either you have a real product and take real responsibility for it or you have a toy that you take no responsibility for. If its just a bunch of toys then don't whine when corporations decide to go with commercial software. I for one would like the OSS community as a whole step up and release real products with real support at the developer level and not as service provided by some third party.
So you would be fine with MS writing "We think this product works but noone can be sure..." and being free of liability restrictions? Either the rule applies to everyone or it fails from either not being enforcable or applicabable, or because its anti-competative destroying one part of the market and not touching another.
If you buy the US English version of the product you can be well assured that it came out of MS directly. The internationalized versions are often run through a third party for translations because face it, MS knows how to make software, not how to write in korean.
Yeah but what made the clones viable in the market is that they ran exactly the same OS and exactly the same software in exactly the same way as the IBM PC.
Lindows is enough different from Windows that I think the people that I see buying computers at walmart will end up confused and displeased when thier favorite games won't play. (does lindows support all the fancy DirectX graphics stuff yet?)
Still I'm interested enough at this point to download the iso and check out the distribution.
I'm not going to argue which method of development is faster here. I'm rather preturbed that this is being presented as an argument that open source is faster at fixing bugs.
It makes no sense to compare fix time on a bug that requires adding a limit to font size (probably affects a few thousand lines of code that can be fixed by search and replace at worst) to a security exploit that needs to be fixed without killing the functionality for those that need it (because if that was ok the exploit was ALREADY fixed by the lockdown tool turning off the feature).
In the end the comparison is like comparing changing the tires to changing the ignition lock and saying one mechanic is faster than the other. If you are going to try to argue that open source reacts faster (which it doesn't necessarily by any means) at least use a valid argument please.
Hmmmmm too bad I sold my ipaq, thats kind of a nifty idea:P Though what I really wanted to use my ipaq and GPS for was to make maps of trips I had taken. Never got the energy to do that though and having back the $400 was nice.
I wouldn't have a problem if #1 there was more than 1 or 2 tracks on an album worth listening to, #2 I didn't know that the cost to make an distribute a cd is more like $2 than $20, and that the artist got a resonable chunk of the proceeds (unless the artist is amazing or owns the record company its amazing if they get a per record royalty at all).
That coupled with the fact that I know if albums were $5 on the shelf I'd buy 2 or 3 a week because it would be junk money in my pocket where at $15 I have to pull out a check and that makes me think twice.
That said I think stealing music is wrong and thats why I support sites where artists can use alternative distribution methods. MP3.com is not the best example of this but you can sort of see what I mean.
I don't know what update you can write that fixes the fact that you can't do decryption between ram and processor. Unless I read the article wrong they "stole" the keys right off the bus between the memory and the processor which HAS to be decrypted.
Two or Three hours at any tech support I've seen costs more than $84 to diagnose. IT staff is high payed (even though tech support people are relitively low paid in the industry) and the phone time is limited. If there are LOTS of tech support phone calls the phone bank for support is much larger and more expensive.
I don't think thats really the reason though. I think (along with another poster in this thread) that there was a price reduction in modem lease costs and a price increase in service costs. People with a modem don't have to think about it becuase the cost balanced perfectly, people without the modem only see the increase in cost of service. I don't what really happened but this seems like a better explanation than "ATT likes to screw people who own thier own stuff".
If you are really curious about the price change give your service representative a call and ask about the strange price changes, if the answer sounds too much like bogus marketing speak ask for thier manager. Someone will give you a straight answer and then you will know.
One final thought I had is that ATT may have noticed a corallation between bandwidth (or service time) used and whether or not the user owns a modem or not. I don't have any stats to look at but it would make sense to me that users who own their own modem are in the "power user" category and could very well be using TONS of bandwidth which would cost ATT more to provide. Of course if this is the case then don't want to actually put bandwidth caps on the service because then they couldn't advertise it as unlimited, so they found a different price divider to base the increase on.
The scarey truth (and I'm sure the parent realizes this) is that the way to guarantee that noone posts anything libelous (or wrong in any other way) is to prevent posting anything at all. Why the hell can't these people go after the people DOING the illegal activity instead of the people that unknowingly facilitate the activity by providing a valid and extremely valuable service to valid and perfectly legal posters. Watch out, next MS will be suing/. for all the unsupported MS bashing that is scattered all over the forum.
Heh it seems that the biggest complaints against the ergo keyboards are that they "don't click" which my MS natural (the new one, not the original which was decidely mushy) does just fine (in fact loud enough to annoy my roomates when I type at night), and then secondly that they can't type which is thier own problem, not the ergo keyboard problems. If they think the clicky IBM keyboard adds 10wpm to thier score, learning to type properly on a QWERTY keyboard will probably add another 30wpm. Typing "properly" is also a great step to less stress on your hands as you use more efficient (and more alternating) movements to type.
The ultimate step toward ergo typing style though is to make the jump into Davorak. I had a friend who switched and he swears by it, seems that your motions are incredibly efficient once you learn to type it by touch.
I do have to say that the fact that an ergo keyboard keeps your wrists straight (on a standard keyboard you have you bend them unless you hold your elbows in funny or something or are very skinny). It totally stopped the pain in my wrists from typing and I wouldn't go back.
Re:DeCSS Should be Free to Distribute.
on
DeCSS' Continuing Saga
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The funny part about this (as I understand it) is that its entirely unecessary to have DeCSS to copy a DVD. DeCSS was only to play the dvd.
If removing the OS from a PC does not change the price there are two ways of looking at it (though it doesn't change anything either way you look at it). One is to say you are getting ripped off because they are charging you for windows. The other is to realize that when you buy a computer at $699 or $1299 or whatever the cool looking price is that the computer companies are going to charge that no matter what comes on the actual computer. Its like buying a car and not wanting the stereo, most places won't remove it for you, but if you find one that will you probably won't save any money by doing it.
Realize that the computer companies consider windows to be a "free" add-on for customer benifit and quit complaining when you get refunded the $0 that they consider you to be paying. It actually SAVES the company money to put the same OS on all machines because they can streamline the assembly line. My personal preference would be to streamline it even more and not put any OS on but there are too many lusers in the world that can't figure out how to install an OS. I always end up reinstalling windows when I get the machine anyways to rid myself of all the OEM crap that bogs down my machine.
When was the last time an MS employee put a gun to your head and made you lay out cash to buy windows?
If anything forces you to buy an MS product its the extreme value of having a single ubiquitous computing solution that is fairly easy for anyone to use. MS has hit the nail on the head in a number of ways. The software does the job, is available everywhere, and you can bet that if you want to get something done an MS tool will do it.
I don't know if this is a good world or a bad one but I am tired of saying that you are "forced" to use an MS product. You could take the plunge if you wanted (and many have) and leave the world of MS. Unfortunately you are going to have more trouble convincing other people to do the same until all of the same benifits of using MS products manifest themselves. The hard one to reach is market saturation but I wish you luck. I frankly don't care who writes "the OS" so long as it does what I want when I want and where I want. And I don't want to have to learn 30 billion different variations, I want one solution that is everywhere. Windows more or less solves that problem for me and every time I look at it, its not really that expensive (hell you buy a computer and they give it to you). When MS products fail to do the job I need done I'll drop them like a hot potato, but until then they work. Its MY choice though, and I'm not forced in any way though I am compelled to use it which is a different story all together.
Yeah but those estimates are more than a year old. I am sure prices have changed by now on the components. MS probably has a $100 loss figured in to the price and decided that at $200 they are still only losing the original $100 so they can swing it without changing predictions. And sales should go up so thats a good thing.
I'll grant you that they are pricy, but not more pricy than a sexy super micro computer like in the article bundled with a LCD flat screen. My laptop was $1400 and I haven't found a "new high end game" that doesn't run well on it. Heck I even run dungeon siege (the newest hog of a game I know of) on it with no problems.
Its not super 1337 to use but I've found that newer laptops with either the ATI Radeon 7500 mobility or the NvidiaGo chipsets and 1+ghz procs run all the games played at the lan parties I go to with plenty of speed. Toss in an external mouse and keyboard and you are set.
I would like to know how many people use ONLY the linux kernel with minimal hardware support built in (keyboard, hard drive, basic video) and no applications (including no GCC)? Now how many of you use a complete distro such as red hat or debian? The first is the linux equivalent of Embedded XP and the second is the equivalent of Desktop Windows.
Now on to the important part of my argument, because what I've noted at the top proves that windows "could be" modular. The real question is would a modular windows support the level of service for developers (not users) that Desktop Windows offers? NO IT WOULD NOT!
I am happy that things like mshtml and httprequest exist and are included on EVERY installation of the OS. It allows me to write my software much more quickly and I don't have to think of wierd security issues with html or stuff every time I write a new app. It is done once when the module is created and is updated for nearly everyone at the same time with a patch from MS. We all nearly all agree that code and module reuse is a good thing but when MS wants to provide all of these modules on every copy of windows we scream. Noone says you HAVE to use them but please god let them exist for those of us that want to use them. Again I'm not speaking from a users standpoint but instead from the standpoint of a developer. Granted I could use the fancy libraries and include them in my installation but why force people to download all of the extra crap every single time they install when MS is kind enough to offer it bundled with the OS.
Granted it means that MS gains its competative advantage, but hell they wrote an integrated system that works and if people decide they WANT to use that instead of spending time downloading another application then so be it, thats free market for you. If you want to use mozilla use it its all good. Your complaint that other parts of the OS use IE so its "always loaded" is rather stupid though because if the IE code wasn't doing the work you would have some other thing loaded up to do it and those resources would be lost anyways.
Nope, the original poster is 100% correct. Shut the ports down tight. Allow whatever is necessary (probably only port 80 in all actuality, maybe the port that POP clients use if you allow mail to be recieved at work) and shut down the rest. Present it as "locking down the network to prevent attack" and the facilty is going to have a very hard time arguing against it.
On a 2nd front go directly to the school counsil and work with them to develop a "technology directive" for the school that outlines the vision for technology in the school. This vision will be used directly in order to form policy that allows techology to enhance the school experience for the students while avoiding some of the pitfalls. It took my high school about 1 week after getting its first internet connect to pen out this vision (and it was actually good, I was was suprised) and develope the first policies toward the use of that technology in the school. This vision statement also helped them solicit technology help from the community and corporations because the purpose was clear. It was less than 1 year later and the school had all of its hardware and internet 100% provided on grant with upgrades of 1/3 of the hardware each year and all that good sort of stuff.
I think (based on examining what is on my system and the dependancy links) what is being argued is that if you remove any of these pieces that people want to remove many other apps will fail as a result. For instance remove the html rendering object and over half the programs I have open right now will fail because they use it to render a part of thier UI or to display some web content in some nifty "browser window".
Its not an argument of not being able to remove the content but one of if you do remove it you won't like the result.
As far as embedded XP goes if you want an OS that does NOTHING go for it. Unless you go through major pains and develop lots of different parts there really isn't much to the OS. I don't even think it includes the hardware access layer so you can't even talk to it. Again you are presented with a "you can do it but you don't really want to" argument.
In the end I sort of agree with the person that started this thread, the answer is to make the file formats more public. I know this won't change anything in the world though because the issue isn't that people haven't figured out how to open a word document, the issue is that they haven't been able to figure out how to render it properly to give the same look as in office. Lets look at another "fully open" standard for rendering documents, HTML. Ok now that you have thought about it, has having a completely open standard solved the problem of mis-rendering in browsers other than the one it was originally developed for? Some may say "mostly it has yeah" but I counter with the fact that the formatting options in word are FAR more complex because you are allowed to embed objects from other applications in the document itself. What do you do when you hit the "excel" object in the middle of your word doc? Well in word you just fire up the excel renderer and bam out comes the content exactly the way you expect. What happens on the "linwerd" word processor? Well you get a blank box or maybe if you are really lucky some halfway rendered version of the data that doesn't at all look like what it did in office. The problem isn't whether the protocol is open (its mostly documented in MSDN as far as I know) its the fact that rendering the files is HARD. MS has spent billions to get office to do what it does, and now you blame MS for the fact that other companies who haven't spent those resources on the project can't achieve the same results.
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I have a creative nomad that was upgraded to 30gig of space (I only use about 20gig of that). Basically I don't want to haul around ANY cd's. Its nice to grab the player and headphones and have everything you need to listen.
Get rid of thier default (and automatically installed and hard to get rid of for normal people) software. And fix thier internal content. Do you realize that if you search for Microsoft in the AOL search engine provided with the default software you are sent to an AOL page that describes MS as a software company that makes windows and has NO links to the Microsoft official site?
Unfortunately people want thier new mega-cool camera-soundcard-back scratcher to work and have a billion uber apps to use it.
The fact that software companies are in the business of making new features is half of why we have bugs. The other half is because people expect that for the next eternity that their old broken software will run right next to new fancy at the same time. I think windows would drop 75% of its security holes and 80% of its crash bugs if it dropped all legacy support.
Actually they are shown to almost never upgrade. Until AOL sends them a notice they won't be able to connect any more most of them sit there happy in thier little walled garden seeing only what the content nazi's at AOL want them to see/pay for.
Yes but the OSS community wants thier software to be a REAL product that REAL people use to do REAL work and yet they want to be able to fall back on the excuse that "it was just for fun in my spare time" as an excuse to duck liability. You can't have it both ways, either you have a real product and take real responsibility for it or you have a toy that you take no responsibility for. If its just a bunch of toys then don't whine when corporations decide to go with commercial software. I for one would like the OSS community as a whole step up and release real products with real support at the developer level and not as service provided by some third party.
So you would be fine with MS writing "We think this product works but noone can be sure..." and being free of liability restrictions? Either the rule applies to everyone or it fails from either not being enforcable or applicabable, or because its anti-competative destroying one part of the market and not touching another.
If you buy the US English version of the product you can be well assured that it came out of MS directly. The internationalized versions are often run through a third party for translations because face it, MS knows how to make software, not how to write in korean.
Lindows is enough different from Windows that I think the people that I see buying computers at walmart will end up confused and displeased when thier favorite games won't play. (does lindows support all the fancy DirectX graphics stuff yet?)
Still I'm interested enough at this point to download the iso and check out the distribution.
It makes no sense to compare fix time on a bug that requires adding a limit to font size (probably affects a few thousand lines of code that can be fixed by search and replace at worst) to a security exploit that needs to be fixed without killing the functionality for those that need it (because if that was ok the exploit was ALREADY fixed by the lockdown tool turning off the feature).
In the end the comparison is like comparing changing the tires to changing the ignition lock and saying one mechanic is faster than the other. If you are going to try to argue that open source reacts faster (which it doesn't necessarily by any means) at least use a valid argument please.
They seem critical at the time but everything I've seen shows that its cheaper to rebuild the stuff someone like this wrote than to maintain it.
Hmmmmm too bad I sold my ipaq, thats kind of a nifty idea :P Though what I really wanted to use my ipaq and GPS for was to make maps of trips I had taken. Never got the energy to do that though and having back the $400 was nice.
That coupled with the fact that I know if albums were $5 on the shelf I'd buy 2 or 3 a week because it would be junk money in my pocket where at $15 I have to pull out a check and that makes me think twice.
That said I think stealing music is wrong and thats why I support sites where artists can use alternative distribution methods. MP3.com is not the best example of this but you can sort of see what I mean.
I don't know what update you can write that fixes the fact that you can't do decryption between ram and processor. Unless I read the article wrong they "stole" the keys right off the bus between the memory and the processor which HAS to be decrypted.
I don't think thats really the reason though. I think (along with another poster in this thread) that there was a price reduction in modem lease costs and a price increase in service costs. People with a modem don't have to think about it becuase the cost balanced perfectly, people without the modem only see the increase in cost of service. I don't what really happened but this seems like a better explanation than "ATT likes to screw people who own thier own stuff".
If you are really curious about the price change give your service representative a call and ask about the strange price changes, if the answer sounds too much like bogus marketing speak ask for thier manager. Someone will give you a straight answer and then you will know.
One final thought I had is that ATT may have noticed a corallation between bandwidth (or service time) used and whether or not the user owns a modem or not. I don't have any stats to look at but it would make sense to me that users who own their own modem are in the "power user" category and could very well be using TONS of bandwidth which would cost ATT more to provide. Of course if this is the case then don't want to actually put bandwidth caps on the service because then they couldn't advertise it as unlimited, so they found a different price divider to base the increase on.
The scarey truth (and I'm sure the parent realizes this) is that the way to guarantee that noone posts anything libelous (or wrong in any other way) is to prevent posting anything at all. Why the hell can't these people go after the people DOING the illegal activity instead of the people that unknowingly facilitate the activity by providing a valid and extremely valuable service to valid and perfectly legal posters. Watch out, next MS will be suing /. for all the unsupported MS bashing that is scattered all over the forum.
The ultimate step toward ergo typing style though is to make the jump into Davorak. I had a friend who switched and he swears by it, seems that your motions are incredibly efficient once you learn to type it by touch.
I do have to say that the fact that an ergo keyboard keeps your wrists straight (on a standard keyboard you have you bend them unless you hold your elbows in funny or something or are very skinny). It totally stopped the pain in my wrists from typing and I wouldn't go back.
The funny part about this (as I understand it) is that its entirely unecessary to have DeCSS to copy a DVD. DeCSS was only to play the dvd.
Realize that the computer companies consider windows to be a "free" add-on for customer benifit and quit complaining when you get refunded the $0 that they consider you to be paying. It actually SAVES the company money to put the same OS on all machines because they can streamline the assembly line. My personal preference would be to streamline it even more and not put any OS on but there are too many lusers in the world that can't figure out how to install an OS. I always end up reinstalling windows when I get the machine anyways to rid myself of all the OEM crap that bogs down my machine.
If anything forces you to buy an MS product its the extreme value of having a single ubiquitous computing solution that is fairly easy for anyone to use. MS has hit the nail on the head in a number of ways. The software does the job, is available everywhere, and you can bet that if you want to get something done an MS tool will do it.
I don't know if this is a good world or a bad one but I am tired of saying that you are "forced" to use an MS product. You could take the plunge if you wanted (and many have) and leave the world of MS. Unfortunately you are going to have more trouble convincing other people to do the same until all of the same benifits of using MS products manifest themselves. The hard one to reach is market saturation but I wish you luck. I frankly don't care who writes "the OS" so long as it does what I want when I want and where I want. And I don't want to have to learn 30 billion different variations, I want one solution that is everywhere. Windows more or less solves that problem for me and every time I look at it, its not really that expensive (hell you buy a computer and they give it to you). When MS products fail to do the job I need done I'll drop them like a hot potato, but until then they work. Its MY choice though, and I'm not forced in any way though I am compelled to use it which is a different story all together.
Yeah but those estimates are more than a year old. I am sure prices have changed by now on the components. MS probably has a $100 loss figured in to the price and decided that at $200 they are still only losing the original $100 so they can swing it without changing predictions. And sales should go up so thats a good thing.
I'll grant you that they are pricy, but not more pricy than a sexy super micro computer like in the article bundled with a LCD flat screen. My laptop was $1400 and I haven't found a "new high end game" that doesn't run well on it. Heck I even run dungeon siege (the newest hog of a game I know of) on it with no problems.
Its not super 1337 to use but I've found that newer laptops with either the ATI Radeon 7500 mobility or the NvidiaGo chipsets and 1+ghz procs run all the games played at the lan parties I go to with plenty of speed. Toss in an external mouse and keyboard and you are set.
Now on to the important part of my argument, because what I've noted at the top proves that windows "could be" modular. The real question is would a modular windows support the level of service for developers (not users) that Desktop Windows offers? NO IT WOULD NOT!
I am happy that things like mshtml and httprequest exist and are included on EVERY installation of the OS. It allows me to write my software much more quickly and I don't have to think of wierd security issues with html or stuff every time I write a new app. It is done once when the module is created and is updated for nearly everyone at the same time with a patch from MS. We all nearly all agree that code and module reuse is a good thing but when MS wants to provide all of these modules on every copy of windows we scream. Noone says you HAVE to use them but please god let them exist for those of us that want to use them. Again I'm not speaking from a users standpoint but instead from the standpoint of a developer. Granted I could use the fancy libraries and include them in my installation but why force people to download all of the extra crap every single time they install when MS is kind enough to offer it bundled with the OS.
Granted it means that MS gains its competative advantage, but hell they wrote an integrated system that works and if people decide they WANT to use that instead of spending time downloading another application then so be it, thats free market for you. If you want to use mozilla use it its all good. Your complaint that other parts of the OS use IE so its "always loaded" is rather stupid though because if the IE code wasn't doing the work you would have some other thing loaded up to do it and those resources would be lost anyways.
On a 2nd front go directly to the school counsil and work with them to develop a "technology directive" for the school that outlines the vision for technology in the school. This vision will be used directly in order to form policy that allows techology to enhance the school experience for the students while avoiding some of the pitfalls. It took my high school about 1 week after getting its first internet connect to pen out this vision (and it was actually good, I was was suprised) and develope the first policies toward the use of that technology in the school. This vision statement also helped them solicit technology help from the community and corporations because the purpose was clear. It was less than 1 year later and the school had all of its hardware and internet 100% provided on grant with upgrades of 1/3 of the hardware each year and all that good sort of stuff.
Its not an argument of not being able to remove the content but one of if you do remove it you won't like the result.
As far as embedded XP goes if you want an OS that does NOTHING go for it. Unless you go through major pains and develop lots of different parts there really isn't much to the OS. I don't even think it includes the hardware access layer so you can't even talk to it. Again you are presented with a "you can do it but you don't really want to" argument.
In the end I sort of agree with the person that started this thread, the answer is to make the file formats more public. I know this won't change anything in the world though because the issue isn't that people haven't figured out how to open a word document, the issue is that they haven't been able to figure out how to render it properly to give the same look as in office. Lets look at another "fully open" standard for rendering documents, HTML. Ok now that you have thought about it, has having a completely open standard solved the problem of mis-rendering in browsers other than the one it was originally developed for? Some may say "mostly it has yeah" but I counter with the fact that the formatting options in word are FAR more complex because you are allowed to embed objects from other applications in the document itself. What do you do when you hit the "excel" object in the middle of your word doc? Well in word you just fire up the excel renderer and bam out comes the content exactly the way you expect. What happens on the "linwerd" word processor? Well you get a blank box or maybe if you are really lucky some halfway rendered version of the data that doesn't at all look like what it did in office. The problem isn't whether the protocol is open (its mostly documented in MSDN as far as I know) its the fact that rendering the files is HARD. MS has spent billions to get office to do what it does, and now you blame MS for the fact that other companies who haven't spent those resources on the project can't achieve the same results.