Just because it has users doesn't mean that you have to support it.
A publicly traded company has an obligation to its shareholders such that if the Cost to support IE6 is less than the Revenue such support will bring in, and they have the hard numbers to back this up, then they must (in theory) do so.
Now, most companies do get away with strategies that they know to be sub-optimal, but that doesnt make it moral or legal.
If you dont want your browser telling websites what features you support, how about choosing a browser which doesnt do that by default? Firefox does that by default. Firefox has always done that by default. Its considered a Good Thing(tm)
If anything here is spyware, its Firefox.
ClickOnce is a good technology, providing a standardized installation methodology for sandboxed.NET applications. All windows-based browsers should embrace it. I'm sure it isnt your belief that such sandboxing isnt a beneficial feature by-and-large. Other OS's should create their own alternatives, because its a good thing to have.
Netscape didnt die because Microsoft worked to remove it from OEM's.
Netscape died because its developers were morons. Complete and utter morons. Not only was 4.0 a complete turd, but 6.0 was the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.
You anti-microsoft zealots sure like to rewrite history.
There are plenty of papers published that do not deal with experimental science, and use data subsets and methodologies which are held in secret.
Exhibit A: Climate Science
What the peer review process needs is to actualy enforce its own rules and procedures. Most publications have the stated requirements that the data must be made available, but stating that it is required and actualy requiring it are two different things.
Remember that Journals have their own motivations. Because of this, there needs to be an Open Data revolution in the journal industry. If you used data, you need to supply it. If you used custom processing software, you need to supply that too. If you cant or wont supply one or the other then why should we, the public, believe your work?
Man I totally agree. They should have jumped right up to PCI-E 3.0 1GB/sec single-lane rates. After all, if even the inexpensive new motherboards are already being equiped with external buses like this, this should neither be expensive nor technically complex.
Its at least a year old now, but look up the "Battleship MTRON" guy who tried to mount like 8 SSD's in RAID0. This was before OCZ and Intel changed the dynamics of the SSD market, and even then he was very near 1GB/sec sustained transfer rates once he found the right RAID controller.
SATAx isnt a RAID controller. While people without good solid RAID controllers can get away with decent RAID0 performance, the serious people never rely on a single SATAx controller for RAID0 since that is not its purpose.
You missed the part where flash endurance exceeded mechanical drives.
The write limits on modern SSD's is very large. 100,000 cycles and more even on low quality drives. Lets suppose you've got yourself a small 32GB SSD. Thats 32,000,000,000 bytes of capacity, capable of writing at most 3,200,000,000,000,000 bytes.
We can attack this from several angles in order to falsify the notion that this is a hell of a lot of lifetime, but in the end there is simply an upper limit on the number of bytes that can be written per second.
The best SSD's can write about 150,000,000 bytes/sec. Thats 21,333,333 seconds of constant full blast writing. I am quite certain that NO mechanical drive can withstand 247 days of full blast writing. The largest real-world mega-write scenario is probably the daily backup scenario, but SSD's can actualy survive for 100,000 days 9their cycle limit) since you wont be doing more than a full write per day.
For larger SSD's, it looks better and better. A 128GB SSD with a 100,000 cycle limit at 150MB/sec write speed will last for 1000 days of constant writing.
Keep in mind also that 100,000 cycles is on the low end these days.
On TOP of this, SSD's will fail gracefully. You can't write anymore, but you can still read. When a mechanical drive fails, good luck with that.
The modern SSD is hands-down superior to mechanical drives in every way but price and capacity. The mechanicals are now up into the multi-TB range for capacity at only pennies per GB (about 10 cents per GB if you go bargain hunting)
Which part of 'fresh install' are you too stiupid to understand?
I didnt download and run an installer for nvidia drivers and I didn't choose where that installer will be dropped. Windows Update made those choices for me using its default settings (which are to automatically download and install critical updates, such as critical changes to nvidia drivers.)
You need to get your facts straight.
Malware tells user to update nvidia drivers. User heads off to windows update... which drops setup.exe in c:/nvidia/, malware instantly (thanks microsoft for providing file creation events) replaces it... windows update then executes infected setup.exe.
(you should have read what I said)
..and THIS is just a variation on a theme. Many programs are available, and even HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, which DO NOT include installers but instead just come as ZIP files. The default location for downloads is C:/users/account/downloads/* which has the same permissions as before. The default location for the extraction of said archive is C:/users/account/downloads/archivename/* which has the same permissions as before.
Now let me repeat: You need to get your facts straight, you FUCKING idiot.
Calling yourself a Windows programmer, let me correct you. You're an idiot.
Ah, you have an intelligent logical arguement there. Hard to refute such logic.
you can't change or affect program files.
As if everything ever installed is under the directories you list...
Just looking at my fresh install of windows 7 RC, I see that NVIDIA was kind enough to create an/NVIDIA/ directory right off of the root directory... and Authenticated Users have Modify, Read & Execute, Read, and Write permissions. Gee, I wonder what I could do when my malware asks them to update their video card drivers.. just about fucking anything, right?
Now its time to one-up you. You are a FUCKING idiot.
I am a Windows programmer. C/C++, ASM, and even VB.
None of these languages inherently produces binaries which trigger UAC prompts. Not a single one.
One of your mistakes is the presumption that the concept of an installation procedure, known as the "installer," is something mandatory.
That in fact, none of these languages inherently produce installers, that the production of an installer is an additional development step that a programmer goes through. He does this when it is advantageous to do so, and that is only when his program has many dependencies, letting the installer navigate the minefield known as "DLL HELL" for him.
Walware does not have DLL HELL style dependencies, instead leveraging only what is considered the standard WIN32 API. You can drop an executable file in a folder (such as My Documents) and execute it, and as long as that executable does not do anything above the privileges of the user running it there will be absolutely no UAC prompt period and end of story.
As a point of fact, Windows now prevents the standard API's from being deleted/overwritten, so a malware author can now depend on them being there.
UAC protects the system from some malware, expecialy rootkits, but as the poster rightly pointed out.. malware authors will adapt and simply (it really is!) avoid triggering UAC prompts. That UAC is actualy determintal to the do-it-yourselfers who would go to great lengths to protect their own system, by protecting standard API's, is just more mud on the face of your arguement.
When "someone" on the intarwebs "repackages the game" manually and throws it up on a torrent he bypasses the entire QA process that any competent business would undertake.
This is the sort of thinking that sinks corporations. They begin with an idea that is "good," and then later on they blindly accept that it is _always_ "good."
This company needs to hire a man who specializes in making customer-recovery decisions, because it seems like they have _nobody_ with the skillset necessary.
It is most definately the drive for higher resolutions that has pushed the video card market over the past 2 years. If you have a regular old budget 5:4 or 4:3 range LCD display (1.5 megapixels or less), the 512MB 8800GT is still most definately good enough for any game that has come out since its release (This includes Crysis, L4D, DeadSpace, Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, etc..).. thats with all options on the highest allowed setting.
(normally I turn texture resolution down in order to minimize load time between levels unless it really makes a big difference)
Um, the difference is Office 2007 formats aren't a standard.
They arent?
Some standards (the good ones) are set by an un-stated popularity contest, and only THEN codified into a specification, which was the word you meant. The problem with all of these open document formats is that they were not refined in this manner, leading to what we have today: specifications that aren't even sufficient for something trivial and obvious like encoding formula in spread-sheets.
It's like they didn't even imagine what the format was going to be used for! When I first heard about this my first thought was 'you gotta be shitting me' but god damn... they really did define a spread-sheet format that doesn't encode formula
Leave the document formats to the people in the business of storing real documents with real software for real people.
(and ISO should be ashamed of themselves for publishing a 'standard in progress')
Or when the printer that was working perfectly fine under 98,2k,XP doesn't work anymore with their shiny new computer? Whos fault is that? I bet you don't blame Microsoft do you? I bet you don't say it's MICROSOFTS FAULT that there's no drivers for Vista for that printer!
So what are they going to be making cars out of to make this happen?
Plastic?
Balsa Wood?
I was recently in an auto accident in my 1996 Buick Century. This car is made out of steel. Collision speed was probably about 25 MPH
My bumper was bent in a little-bit. Total cost of repairs: $0 (why repair it? its just bent in a little)
The other guys car was DEMOLISHED because his car was fiberglass and plastic. Yeah, those crumple zones worked to save him.. but they also meant that his car sustained severe very clostly damage.
Reviewers who do performance evaluations of operating systems are (A) retarded and believe in it, (B) pitching their review to retarded people who believe in it, or (C) both.
You are proving that the "reviewers" that you have read are in group (B) or (C), and that makes you retarded.
Mod me down, I don't give a fuck. The poster I am replying to is stupid and reaching for anything anti-microsoft no matter how irrational that thing is. Performance evaluation of an OS indeed.. you modded up a flaminmg retard and that makes the modders flaming retards TOO.
I was doing some back-of-the-envelope, and they are sorting 17.7GB/second, which at a minimum would require 177 HD's if each drive can write 100MB/sec.
If its not written to disk, then there is no achievement here (you don't perform 1 minute+ sorts and then throw the result away in real-world scenarios)
In my experience the trouble begins when the AGW-Believers over-state their case, but are then left without actual evidence which they can cite for it. They will try to point those questioning them at evidence which does not support their case, but instead support only a much more general idea such as that "its waming."
When their horseshit citations don't work for them, in my experience, they call in the logical fallacies such as labeling the questioners as "deniers", "fanatics", or "shills."
Slashdot Mirror
Just because it has users doesn't mean that you have to support it.
A publicly traded company has an obligation to its shareholders such that if the Cost to support IE6 is less than the Revenue such support will bring in, and they have the hard numbers to back this up, then they must (in theory) do so.
Now, most companies do get away with strategies that they know to be sub-optimal, but that doesnt make it moral or legal.
Slavery gets shit done.
My karma is still excellent.
This is all explained in the previous slashdot posting of this issue. ClickOnce = Good, PlugIn = Harmless, Zealots = Stupid and Harmfull.
You want your parents downloading programs that arent ClickOnce, be my guest. You can fix their machine after they trash it.
ClickOnce *is* related to "deployment and execution of applications"
Its not spyware. You made it up.
.NET applications. All windows-based browsers should embrace it. I'm sure it isnt your belief that such sandboxing isnt a beneficial feature by-and-large. Other OS's should create their own alternatives, because its a good thing to have.
If you dont want your browser telling websites what features you support, how about choosing a browser which doesnt do that by default? Firefox does that by default. Firefox has always done that by default. Its considered a Good Thing(tm)
If anything here is spyware, its Firefox.
ClickOnce is a good technology, providing a standardized installation methodology for sandboxed
Netscape didnt die because Microsoft worked to remove it from OEM's.
Netscape died because its developers were morons. Complete and utter morons. Not only was 4.0 a complete turd, but 6.0 was the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.
You anti-microsoft zealots sure like to rewrite history.
There are plenty of papers published that do not deal with experimental science, and use data subsets and methodologies which are held in secret.
Exhibit A: Climate Science
What the peer review process needs is to actualy enforce its own rules and procedures. Most publications have the stated requirements that the data must be made available, but stating that it is required and actualy requiring it are two different things.
Remember that Journals have their own motivations. Because of this, there needs to be an Open Data revolution in the journal industry. If you used data, you need to supply it. If you used custom processing software, you need to supply that too. If you cant or wont supply one or the other then why should we, the public, believe your work?
Who said that?
Man I totally agree. They should have jumped right up to PCI-E 3.0 1GB/sec single-lane rates. After all, if even the inexpensive new motherboards are already being equiped with external buses like this, this should neither be expensive nor technically complex.
Its at least a year old now, but look up the "Battleship MTRON" guy who tried to mount like 8 SSD's in RAID0. This was before OCZ and Intel changed the dynamics of the SSD market, and even then he was very near 1GB/sec sustained transfer rates once he found the right RAID controller.
SATAx isnt a RAID controller. While people without good solid RAID controllers can get away with decent RAID0 performance, the serious people never rely on a single SATAx controller for RAID0 since that is not its purpose.
You missed the part where flash endurance exceeded mechanical drives.
The write limits on modern SSD's is very large. 100,000 cycles and more even on low quality drives. Lets suppose you've got yourself a small 32GB SSD. Thats 32,000,000,000 bytes of capacity, capable of writing at most 3,200,000,000,000,000 bytes.
We can attack this from several angles in order to falsify the notion that this is a hell of a lot of lifetime, but in the end there is simply an upper limit on the number of bytes that can be written per second.
The best SSD's can write about 150,000,000 bytes/sec. Thats 21,333,333 seconds of constant full blast writing. I am quite certain that NO mechanical drive can withstand 247 days of full blast writing. The largest real-world mega-write scenario is probably the daily backup scenario, but SSD's can actualy survive for 100,000 days 9their cycle limit) since you wont be doing more than a full write per day.
For larger SSD's, it looks better and better. A 128GB SSD with a 100,000 cycle limit at 150MB/sec write speed will last for 1000 days of constant writing.
Keep in mind also that 100,000 cycles is on the low end these days.
On TOP of this, SSD's will fail gracefully. You can't write anymore, but you can still read. When a mechanical drive fails, good luck with that.
The modern SSD is hands-down superior to mechanical drives in every way but price and capacity. The mechanicals are now up into the multi-TB range for capacity at only pennies per GB (about 10 cents per GB if you go bargain hunting)
Which part of 'fresh install' are you too stiupid to understand?
..and THIS is just a variation on a theme. Many programs are available, and even HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, which DO NOT include installers but instead just come as ZIP files. The default location for downloads is C:/users/account/downloads/* which has the same permissions as before. The default location for the extraction of said archive is C:/users/account/downloads/archivename/* which has the same permissions as before.
I didnt download and run an installer for nvidia drivers and I didn't choose where that installer will be dropped. Windows Update made those choices for me using its default settings (which are to automatically download and install critical updates, such as critical changes to nvidia drivers.)
You need to get your facts straight.
Malware tells user to update nvidia drivers. User heads off to windows update... which drops setup.exe in c:/nvidia/, malware instantly (thanks microsoft for providing file creation events) replaces it... windows update then executes infected setup.exe.
(you should have read what I said)
Now let me repeat: You need to get your facts straight, you FUCKING idiot.
Calling yourself a Windows programmer, let me correct you. You're an idiot.
Ah, you have an intelligent logical arguement there. Hard to refute such logic.
you can't change or affect program files.
As if everything ever installed is under the directories you list...
/NVIDIA/ directory right off of the root directory... and Authenticated Users have Modify, Read & Execute, Read, and Write permissions. Gee, I wonder what I could do when my malware asks them to update their video card drivers.. just about fucking anything, right?
Just looking at my fresh install of windows 7 RC, I see that NVIDIA was kind enough to create an
Now its time to one-up you. You are a FUCKING idiot.
I am a Windows programmer. C/C++, ASM, and even VB.
None of these languages inherently produces binaries which trigger UAC prompts. Not a single one.
One of your mistakes is the presumption that the concept of an installation procedure, known as the "installer," is something mandatory.
That in fact, none of these languages inherently produce installers, that the production of an installer is an additional development step that a programmer goes through. He does this when it is advantageous to do so, and that is only when his program has many dependencies, letting the installer navigate the minefield known as "DLL HELL" for him.
Walware does not have DLL HELL style dependencies, instead leveraging only what is considered the standard WIN32 API. You can drop an executable file in a folder (such as My Documents) and execute it, and as long as that executable does not do anything above the privileges of the user running it there will be absolutely no UAC prompt period and end of story.
As a point of fact, Windows now prevents the standard API's from being deleted/overwritten, so a malware author can now depend on them being there.
UAC protects the system from some malware, expecialy rootkits, but as the poster rightly pointed out.. malware authors will adapt and simply (it really is!) avoid triggering UAC prompts. That UAC is actualy determintal to the do-it-yourselfers who would go to great lengths to protect their own system, by protecting standard API's, is just more mud on the face of your arguement.
When "someone" on the intarwebs "repackages the game" manually and throws it up on a torrent he bypasses the entire QA process that any competent business would undertake.
This is the sort of thinking that sinks corporations. They begin with an idea that is "good," and then later on they blindly accept that it is _always_ "good."
This company needs to hire a man who specializes in making customer-recovery decisions, because it seems like they have _nobody_ with the skillset necessary.
It is most definately the drive for higher resolutions that has pushed the video card market over the past 2 years. If you have a regular old budget 5:4 or 4:3 range LCD display (1.5 megapixels or less), the 512MB 8800GT is still most definately good enough for any game that has come out since its release (This includes Crysis, L4D, DeadSpace, Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, etc..) .. thats with all options on the highest allowed setting.
(normally I turn texture resolution down in order to minimize load time between levels unless it really makes a big difference)
Um, the difference is Office 2007 formats aren't a standard.
They arent?
Some standards (the good ones) are set by an un-stated popularity contest, and only THEN codified into a specification, which was the word you meant. The problem with all of these open document formats is that they were not refined in this manner, leading to what we have today: specifications that aren't even sufficient for something trivial and obvious like encoding formula in spread-sheets.
It's like they didn't even imagine what the format was going to be used for! When I first heard about this my first thought was 'you gotta be shitting me' but god damn... they really did define a spread-sheet format that doesn't encode formula
Leave the document formats to the people in the business of storing real documents with real software for real people.
(and ISO should be ashamed of themselves for publishing a 'standard in progress')
Those crumple zones werent needed for the guy in the steel car.
Or when the printer that was working perfectly fine under 98,2k,XP doesn't work anymore with their shiny new computer? Whos fault is that? I bet you don't blame Microsoft do you? I bet you don't say it's MICROSOFTS FAULT that there's no drivers for Vista for that printer!
You failed to see his point.
Joe Public does not care whos fault it is.
Joe Public just wants his shit to work.
So what are they going to be making cars out of to make this happen?
Plastic?
Balsa Wood?
I was recently in an auto accident in my 1996 Buick Century. This car is made out of steel. Collision speed was probably about 25 MPH
My bumper was bent in a little-bit. Total cost of repairs: $0 (why repair it? its just bent in a little)
The other guys car was DEMOLISHED because his car was fiberglass and plastic. Yeah, those crumple zones worked to save him.. but they also meant that his car sustained severe very clostly damage.
When the folks at Opera solve this "problem", I'm sure everyone else will adopt it about a decade later.
Reviewers who do performance evaluations of operating systems are (A) retarded and believe in it, (B) pitching their review to retarded people who believe in it, or (C) both.
You are proving that the "reviewers" that you have read are in group (B) or (C), and that makes you retarded.
Mod me down, I don't give a fuck. The poster I am replying to is stupid and reaching for anything anti-microsoft no matter how irrational that thing is. Performance evaluation of an OS indeed.. you modded up a flaminmg retard and that makes the modders flaming retards TOO.
Bobby, being a tactician and swindler, would have lost badly to the modern chess engine.
I was doing some back-of-the-envelope, and they are sorting 17.7GB/second, which at a minimum would require 177 HD's if each drive can write 100MB/sec.
If its not written to disk, then there is no achievement here (you don't perform 1 minute+ sorts and then throw the result away in real-world scenarios)
In my experience the trouble begins when the AGW-Believers over-state their case, but are then left without actual evidence which they can cite for it. They will try to point those questioning them at evidence which does not support their case, but instead support only a much more general idea such as that "its waming."
When their horseshit citations don't work for them, in my experience, they call in the logical fallacies such as labeling the questioners as "deniers", "fanatics", or "shills."