Firstly, because SYSTEM and Administrator have different privilege levels.
Both are equally capable of hosing the system, therefore almost as dangerous. From this point of view you're really just splitting hairs.
Secondly, because there is a vast gulf of difference between the statements "IE runs as SYSTEM" and "IE runs as the user, which is sometimes Administrator, and I think that Administrator and SYSTEM are the same". One is a (serious) architectural problem, the other is an end-user configuration problem. Trying to say they are equivalent is at best ignorance and at worst lying.
Finally, while most home systems would certainly be running users as Administrator, most managed corporate systems would not. 90% is a ridiculous over-estimate of how many XP systems only have "Administrator" users.
I've installed dozens of XP systems over the years, and every single time the default setting is to create a user account with Administrator privileges. Even computers that are preinstalled by OEMs have those same settings. As far as I'm concerned, that IS an architectural problem. You simply cannot expect end users to go beyond the default choices MS made.
The assumption that corporation systems do not run users with Administrator privileges doesn't change the situation for two reasons. First not ALL corporations manage their systems properly. Second, the vast majority of XP installs are on consumer systems. And THOSE are the ones targeted by malware, virii, etc.
And I'm not about to start now, even under an unlimited option. About a year ago I realized I have pretty much all the old(er) music I ever wanted, starting with classical and ending with happy hardcore, and all of it in mp3 or flac. At this point I actually started replacing the lower quality mp3s with flac, just for the hell of it.:) Given the slashdot audience, I'm sure there are many in my position.
And there are much better sources for new, independent music than iTunes, where the money goes straight to the artists, or at least a much higher percentage of it.
So why should I even care about the iTunes news? It's still DRM music, it still ties you to an iPod and most likely it will still be overpriced. It's actually guaranteed to be overpriced compared to torrents or other sources.
I agree that the 40Gb 5400rpm Hitachi hdd it came with is LOUD. It clicks and grinds whenever there is any disk activity. However I upgraded to a Seagate 80Gb 5400rpm Seagate drive, and it's absolutely silent. I've also had Toshiba hdds in my other laptops, and they were silent as well.
I don't completely disagree with the reviewer. Solid state drives are faster, consume less battery, etc. But they are a LOT more expensive and are not necessarily less noisy. It's just a matter of buying a decent hdd.
From the article: "Yahoo updated its popular Web e-mail service last year, but tens of millions of its customers stuck with the company's "classic" e-mail."
The real reason I HAD to stay with the "classic" interface is because although I'm running Seamonkey 1.1.7, Yahoo claims my browser is incompatible with their new interface. I even tried faking the user agent to IE and FF, and it still wouldn't work.
Bzzt. That statement makes no sense. Go read up on kWh vs kW and try again.
I apologize, I shouldn't have confused kW with kWh. As a psych major, physics and especially electricity was never my forte. I will correct my original post to "Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes an order of magnitude more energy during the same unit of time."
Have you done any reading on the status of Chernobyl lately?
Since the accident, the natural wild life has returned in full force, and the region's ecosystem is healthier than it has been for centuries. Obviously without an in depth study we cannot be certain of mutation and cancer rates in those animals. But I'll venture a guess that natural selection took its course, and the overall population is healthy, allowing it to adapt and thrive in a mildly radioactive environment.
So there goes your whole argument. Now read up on blue fin tuna that has such large quantities of mercury that even 6 pieces of sushi per week exceeds the safe limit. Read about the Exxon Valdez spill and countless others that directly destroyed entire ecosystems.
At this point nuclear energy is safer than any conventional other energy source. It is also the only economically viable energy source, at least for the time being. People who believe that solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources are the way to go obviously have NO idea how much electricity is consumed in industrial processes. Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes that much in a half hour.
First of all, most people buy low to mid-range CPUs and other goods, and while this may be enough to cover the production costs, the manufacturers' largest profits are on the high end CPUs, cars, watches, etc. Currently the increased price tag is justified to some extent by the increased quality, performance and even status given by the high end goods. But under the proposed model, there would be no physical difference between the CPUs, other than artificial limitations imposed by the manufacturer. Suddenly the increased price would be seen not as a result of a better product, but of greed.
Which brings me to the next point. If there are no physical differences, what would stop someone from removing them? Intel has a long history of shipping higher spec CPUs underclocked so not to swamp the market with fast CPUs. And yet in all cases people found ways to overclock them. The major factor that prevented many from doing so was the uncertainty of whether their CPU could handle the increased speeds or not. But when KNOWING they are identical?
And how would the manufacturer upgrade or downgrade the CPU? Yet another Windows Genuine (dis)Advantage?
That's because it is a mistake. When deciding what features to include in a product, the important question is how many of your customers want it and whether that justifies the cost on every single unit.
You make a very good point. The radio stations in my area (Toronto) are complete crap. I'm sure they cater to some sort of audience, but I can't even bring myself to listen to any of it. I'm not denying that there MAY be some good radio programs, but I'm not about to plan my life around waiting so I can listen to them on my hypothetical Zune.
You can look at it another way. Yes, the installers are automated, but in many cases the default options suck or worse ("Would you like to install this IE toolbar along with the application?"). And sometimes you want to install the apps on a different partition, etc.
The only real difference in Linux is that you'd have to download the tarball, untar it and then in the CLI type:./configure make make install
I guess people have a mental block to typing commands. Give them buttons and GUIs and they're happy. Give them a CLI, that might make the same tasks 10 times faster, and they'll run to the hills screaming.
Well, seeing how I've been modded up and down, I should have explained what happened. I loaded all my music in iTunes, and copied some of these songs onto my iPod nano. Since all iPods use ID3 tags to organise music, I had to edit them so all music from the same artist artist would be listed together. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but although all my previous MP3 players were using the directory structure to list songs, therefore "Doors" and "The Doors" being together, the iPod was listing them as separate artists.
Once I sold my nano (it's completely useless on a motorcycle, the touch buttons do not work with gloves), and uninstalled iTunes, ALL ID3 tags I had edited were gone. I tried loading up these songs in winamp, foobar, etc, and they had been stripped clean of their tags.
Maybe it was a bug, maybe I did something wrong, I don't know. The bottom line is the only thing I did differently was to use iTunes.
Now try to uninstall iTunes. EVERY SINGLE ID3 tag you edited with it will be completely wiped out. I was lucky that I had backups of all my music, otherwise I would have had to input tags for about 90Gb worth of music.
I understand you're talking about round numbers, but Linux went from 2.6% to 3.4% since Nov 2003 and Mac went from 2.8% to 4% since Jan 2005. True, they are very small increases, however a good web developer cannot simply ignore 7.4% of their market. And I think the statistics you're quoting are not very relevant, because the browser dictates how the computer interacts with a site, not the OS.
Developing technology is extremely expensive. And while there is no pressure to change, usually driven by shortages in supply (whether labour or raw materials), the status quo is maintained.
It took more than one gas crisis for the American car manufacturers to design fuel efficient engines. Because while gas was cheap, there were no incentives to invest in technology. And while labour was (and still is) cheap, robotics cannot compete. I am sure that the technology for those robots has been available for at least a decade, but it wasn't cost effective in comparison to migrant workers.
But this is the way our society SHOULD have developed. So many manufacturing processes could be automated, if not for the initial investment.
The purchaser of the software, having agreed to the conditions of the sale, breeches his/her contract when he/she copies that software and gives it away.
If I'll breach a contract, I'd try to hide it in a less conspicuous place than my pants...
This shouldn't be particularly surprising I suppose, but I mention it because I was totally shocked how quickly and ruthlessly the manufacturers were in totally abandoning a perfectly-working OS like XP, and sticking Vista as their default setup on hardware that shouldn't have been running it to begin with. It really astounded me just how useful the system was... *without* Vista
I wouldn't be that quick in blaming the manufacturers. One reason is that they need to be competitive, and shipping a 6 year old OS when everybody else is shipping Vista would be suicide. It doesn't matter that XP performs better and is more stable, or that more software works on it. When a customer walks into a store what do you think most will ask for?
But Microsoft is the main reason. Once Vista shipped, they stopped selling XP to the OEMs. So even if a manufacturer wanted to keep XP on their system, they couldn't.
With other technological advances there are reasons for the extra speed, larger storage capacity, etc. Photography however suffers from other limitations that make anything above 8-16Mpixels virtually useless.
At best computer monitors have a resolution of 1600x1200, so without significantly zooming out, you can never display the entire picture on the screen. Printing is the only area where more Mpixels are needed, but even there, at 8.5x11 8-16 Mpixel images are crisp enough. There ARE areas where extremely high resolutions are needed, but they're definitely not consumer level.
I have an 8Mpixel camera, and I am not likely to want more any time soon.
If before the war in Iraq the US would have taken even a small part of the money spent on it, the entire economy would have been well on its way to becoming hydrogen based. According to the US government itself, by 2010 $570 billion will have been spent on the "war on terror" (http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/051006/w100670.html). If one hydrogen refueling station were to cost $10 million each, each city on the continent could have at least one built by the government itself. Even adding the need for new electricity generation, it would still cost less than the "war on terror"
Then the dependence on foreign oil and its associated conflicts would have decreased significantly. And since the US is still the world's largest economy, this would have had a domino effect throughout the rest of the world, if only because of the economies of scale would be taken care of.
I know this is a naive way of looking at the issue, but it was still a missed opportunity. And it will keep happening untill there are no other alternatives. The oil companies are generating HUGE proffits due to high oil prices and our dependence on it. The domestic car manufacturers cannot afford the R&D costs associated to switching over to fuel cells. And the consumers themselves do not want change, and will continue driving V8 monsters for as long as they can afford it.
While it is true that raising the standard of living of so many people overnight is impossible, the article is not claiming that. It would take India roughly another 100 years before they achieve the same level as the western societies, given the current growth rates. However, the growth cannot continue at this pace. Energy costs are increasing, new sources of cheap labour are being created (Eastern Europe, Africa, and unbelievably enough, parts of the US), etc, are all factors that WILL slow India and China's growth.
And India does not have 100 years. They are already starting to have communist revolts in the poorest provinces, and growing dissent between urban and rural populations.
Slashdot Mirror
Both our soldiers have loaded the trebuchet. We are ready and waiting. :)
And I'm not about to start now, even under an unlimited option. About a year ago I realized I have pretty much all the old(er) music I ever wanted, starting with classical and ending with happy hardcore, and all of it in mp3 or flac. At this point I actually started replacing the lower quality mp3s with flac, just for the hell of it. :) Given the slashdot audience, I'm sure there are many in my position.
And there are much better sources for new, independent music than iTunes, where the money goes straight to the artists, or at least a much higher percentage of it.
So why should I even care about the iTunes news? It's still DRM music, it still ties you to an iPod and most likely it will still be overpriced. It's actually guaranteed to be overpriced compared to torrents or other sources.
I agree that the 40Gb 5400rpm Hitachi hdd it came with is LOUD. It clicks and grinds whenever there is any disk activity. However I upgraded to a Seagate 80Gb 5400rpm Seagate drive, and it's absolutely silent. I've also had Toshiba hdds in my other laptops, and they were silent as well.
I don't completely disagree with the reviewer. Solid state drives are faster, consume less battery, etc. But they are a LOT more expensive and are not necessarily less noisy. It's just a matter of buying a decent hdd.
From the article: "Yahoo updated its popular Web e-mail service last year, but tens of millions of its customers stuck with the company's "classic" e-mail."
The real reason I HAD to stay with the "classic" interface is because although I'm running Seamonkey 1.1.7, Yahoo claims my browser is incompatible with their new interface. I even tried faking the user agent to IE and FF, and it still wouldn't work.
I apologize, I shouldn't have confused kW with kWh. As a psych major, physics and especially electricity was never my forte. I will correct my original post to "Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes an order of magnitude more energy during the same unit of time."
Now please read up on Cherry picking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking
Have you done any reading on the status of Chernobyl lately?
Since the accident, the natural wild life has returned in full force, and the region's ecosystem is healthier than it has been for centuries. Obviously without an in depth study we cannot be certain of mutation and cancer rates in those animals. But I'll venture a guess that natural selection took its course, and the overall population is healthy, allowing it to adapt and thrive in a mildly radioactive environment.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/33784558.html
So there goes your whole argument. Now read up on blue fin tuna that has such large quantities of mercury that even 6 pieces of sushi per week exceeds the safe limit. Read about the Exxon Valdez spill and countless others that directly destroyed entire ecosystems.
At this point nuclear energy is safer than any conventional other energy source. It is also the only economically viable energy source, at least for the time being. People who believe that solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources are the way to go obviously have NO idea how much electricity is consumed in industrial processes. Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes that much in a half hour.
First of all, most people buy low to mid-range CPUs and other goods, and while this may be enough to cover the production costs, the manufacturers' largest profits are on the high end CPUs, cars, watches, etc. Currently the increased price tag is justified to some extent by the increased quality, performance and even status given by the high end goods. But under the proposed model, there would be no physical difference between the CPUs, other than artificial limitations imposed by the manufacturer. Suddenly the increased price would be seen not as a result of a better product, but of greed.
Which brings me to the next point. If there are no physical differences, what would stop someone from removing them? Intel has a long history of shipping higher spec CPUs underclocked so not to swamp the market with fast CPUs. And yet in all cases people found ways to overclock them. The major factor that prevented many from doing so was the uncertainty of whether their CPU could handle the increased speeds or not. But when KNOWING they are identical?
And how would the manufacturer upgrade or downgrade the CPU? Yet another Windows Genuine (dis)Advantage?
There are people who actually PAY for pr0n?!?
You make a very good point. The radio stations in my area (Toronto) are complete crap. I'm sure they cater to some sort of audience, but I can't even bring myself to listen to any of it. I'm not denying that there MAY be some good radio programs, but I'm not about to plan my life around waiting so I can listen to them on my hypothetical Zune.
You can look at it another way. Yes, the installers are automated, but in many cases the default options suck or worse ("Would you like to install this IE toolbar along with the application?"). And sometimes you want to install the apps on a different partition, etc.
./configure
The only real difference in Linux is that you'd have to download the tarball, untar it and then in the CLI type:
make
make install
I guess people have a mental block to typing commands. Give them buttons and GUIs and they're happy. Give them a CLI, that might make the same tasks 10 times faster, and they'll run to the hills screaming.
Well, seeing how I've been modded up and down, I should have explained what happened. I loaded all my music in iTunes, and copied some of these songs onto my iPod nano. Since all iPods use ID3 tags to organise music, I had to edit them so all music from the same artist artist would be listed together. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but although all my previous MP3 players were using the directory structure to list songs, therefore "Doors" and "The Doors" being together, the iPod was listing them as separate artists.
Once I sold my nano (it's completely useless on a motorcycle, the touch buttons do not work with gloves), and uninstalled iTunes, ALL ID3 tags I had edited were gone. I tried loading up these songs in winamp, foobar, etc, and they had been stripped clean of their tags.
Maybe it was a bug, maybe I did something wrong, I don't know. The bottom line is the only thing I did differently was to use iTunes.
Now try to uninstall iTunes. EVERY SINGLE ID3 tag you edited with it will be completely wiped out. I was lucky that I had backups of all my music, otherwise I would have had to input tags for about 90Gb worth of music.
I understand you're talking about round numbers, but Linux went from 2.6% to 3.4% since Nov 2003 and Mac went from 2.8% to 4% since Jan 2005. True, they are very small increases, however a good web developer cannot simply ignore 7.4% of their market. And I think the statistics you're quoting are not very relevant, because the browser dictates how the computer interacts with a site, not the OS.
a sp
On the same site I found these statistics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
The browser market is FAR more fragmented than the OS one, with every IE version and FF pretty much tied.
Developing technology is extremely expensive. And while there is no pressure to change, usually driven by shortages in supply (whether labour or raw materials), the status quo is maintained.
It took more than one gas crisis for the American car manufacturers to design fuel efficient engines. Because while gas was cheap, there were no incentives to invest in technology. And while labour was (and still is) cheap, robotics cannot compete. I am sure that the technology for those robots has been available for at least a decade, but it wasn't cost effective in comparison to migrant workers.
But this is the way our society SHOULD have developed. So many manufacturing processes could be automated, if not for the initial investment.
If I'll breach a contract, I'd try to hide it in a less conspicuous place than my pants...
I wouldn't be that quick in blaming the manufacturers. One reason is that they need to be competitive, and shipping a 6 year old OS when everybody else is shipping Vista would be suicide. It doesn't matter that XP performs better and is more stable, or that more software works on it. When a customer walks into a store what do you think most will ask for?
But Microsoft is the main reason. Once Vista shipped, they stopped selling XP to the OEMs. So even if a manufacturer wanted to keep XP on their system, they couldn't.
You might be on to something here...
It will definitely stop piracy, because we all know HalfLife2 simply cannot be played without a valid Steam account....
Next thing you know, they'll find them alive and well in Bolton.
Paragraphs. Use them.
... is useless without pictures.
With other technological advances there are reasons for the extra speed, larger storage capacity, etc. Photography however suffers from other limitations that make anything above 8-16Mpixels virtually useless.
At best computer monitors have a resolution of 1600x1200, so without significantly zooming out, you can never display the entire picture on the screen. Printing is the only area where more Mpixels are needed, but even there, at 8.5x11 8-16 Mpixel images are crisp enough. There ARE areas where extremely high resolutions are needed, but they're definitely not consumer level.
I have an 8Mpixel camera, and I am not likely to want more any time soon.
If before the war in Iraq the US would have taken even a small part of the money spent on it, the entire economy would have been well on its way to becoming hydrogen based. According to the US government itself, by 2010 $570 billion will have been spent on the "war on terror" (http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/051006/w100670.html). If one hydrogen refueling station were to cost $10 million each, each city on the continent could have at least one built by the government itself. Even adding the need for new electricity generation, it would still cost less than the "war on terror"
Then the dependence on foreign oil and its associated conflicts would have decreased significantly. And since the US is still the world's largest economy, this would have had a domino effect throughout the rest of the world, if only because of the economies of scale would be taken care of.
I know this is a naive way of looking at the issue, but it was still a missed opportunity. And it will keep happening untill there are no other alternatives. The oil companies are generating HUGE proffits due to high oil prices and our dependence on it. The domestic car manufacturers cannot afford the R&D costs associated to switching over to fuel cells. And the consumers themselves do not want change, and will continue driving V8 monsters for as long as they can afford it.
While it is true that raising the standard of living of so many people overnight is impossible, the article is not claiming that. It would take India roughly another 100 years before they achieve the same level as the western societies, given the current growth rates. However, the growth cannot continue at this pace. Energy costs are increasing, new sources of cheap labour are being created (Eastern Europe, Africa, and unbelievably enough, parts of the US), etc, are all factors that WILL slow India and China's growth.
And India does not have 100 years. They are already starting to have communist revolts in the poorest provinces, and growing dissent between urban and rural populations.