If you copy it, they remind you that you only have a license. You can't do *everything* you want to do because you don't own it, you just have a license to listen to it.
You should ask them for replacement media since you didn't purchase a physical object - your license is still valid while you have a product, unusable as it is. If they refuse, ask them if downloading a copy is permissable since you have a license to listen but no way of doing so.
You are arguing with an idealistic logic, against a comment made with practical logic. You can't do that. The judge is bound to follow what the law intended, and the law is fairly clear. You can't make a circumvention device of any sort in the US of A.
If you want to make this argument, you are simply reinforcing the correctness of the comment to which you replied. You are correct, and the original comment is correct, at the same time. Your argument should be made to a professional association of judges, because you won't get any change arguing with someone who probably believes the same thing that you do.
If someone argues with faith, you can't win the argument using science. If someone uses existing state, you can't win arguing future state. If someone argues reality, you can't win arguing idealism. Your points in all cases might be correct, but they are nonetheless irrelevant to the argument.
Contact your people in Washington, and ask them point blank: since you are tasked with writing the laws, how can we have a law which directly conflicts with fair use? You need to either outlaw fair use (which is political suicide), or rewrite the DMCA to allow people to enforce their rights.
I bet they try to outlaw fair use if you bring it to their attention, but seeing the replies posted together somewhere would be extremely enlightening.
It would be easy to defend against such a claim. Especially since every provider advertises their prices - unless you think providers shouldn't watch or read anything. You can't avoid finding out whose plans cost what, even if you try. Believe me, I try. Also, a good rebuttal to the case is this. Similar prices because the infrastructure costs about the same - either you build towers or rent bandwidth from another provider at inflated prices. There probably isn't much competition in the cell tower building business, nor the geosynchronous orbit satellite business. Price fixing means they all agreed on something, where this is simple awareness of what other companies offer and charge. You'd have to produce evidence that the companies discussed pricing, which as I've said is pretty much unnecessary.
Back to this guy's argument - I realized this long ago, and pay under $100/year for pre-paid service, no contract. Most people I know overpay for unlimited this and rollover that and they never use it. Why do you think rollover minutes are such a big deal? People don't use what they already paid for. It's another line item in the budget, they expect it, and don't give thought to how much they actually use. I don't use that much, but the general idea applies:
Do you use 1500 SMS each month? 50 every day? I don't understand your $70/mo plan with 1500 txt messages, plus $15 for 1500 SMS. Are you actually only paying $55 plus the $15? Or are you differentiating text and SMS bringing your total to 3000, or 100 every day? Who cares, my point is you're probably paying for more than you need.
At $55 for voice service (70 = 55 base + 15 messaging), that's 12 cents per minute. You can get prepaid at 10 cents/minute with no overage charges or additional fees (T-mobile is my carrier), and bonus minutes for being a loyal customer (I get 115% of the minutes I buy) and a separate messaging fee that I don't use so I don't know the details. $70 for the base plan would be over 15 cents/minute, even worse.
The underlying point here is if people look at what they need and get a plan that fits their usage, no one will be in the high-priced generic plans and they will be dropped, and customers win. The only other option is for carriers to say screw it and have a single expensive unlimited plan available and everyone will run an open OS like Android on imported unlocked phones and an app that selects VOIP when you're near hotspots or local network availability. The nuclear option, if you will.
If you search for the magic number and also add whatever context you DO know, the result should appear. If I'm doing digital signal processing, I'd look for the number and DSP, or acoustics or something like that. If it were optics, or whatever else, just add a word that applies. You would never find a magic number thrown in the middle of something and not be able to figure out what realm of knowledge it fits into. Especially something like source code - you probably know what the program does, so just add that as your search term.
What you're talking about is basically just a list of magical numbers. The speed of light, the cosmological constant, e, PI, sqrt(2) should just be in a big table, and probably already are in many textbooks. After that, if you're looking for mathematical representations like 17*sqrt(e), you're probably looking at some sort of algorithm. Financial algorithms notoriously (ab)use e, so knowing the representation as 17*sqrt(e) won't help you much. More importantly would be figuring out why they are looking for 17 of anything - and that knowledge relies on you understanding the underlying formula.
I just had this conversation (paraphrased) with my gf who professed that quadratic math is hard and illogical and doesn't make any sense. My reply was there is a formula or algorithm underlying everything, and if you can rearrange what you're looking at to fit one of the known formulae it suddenly becomes obvious how to solve it.
In summary: Knowing 17*sqrt(e) = 28.0282616 in a knowledge vacuum is unnecessary. Basically someone already did pre-calculation in order to optimize the calculation speed. Looking at how the number is used is far more useful than translating it into another context-free factoid.
I don't think he's already forked it. He has a privately held altered copy, and possibly makes the source available somewhere.
"fork it" implies you might have a different app name, hosted separately (even if "separately" just means a different zip file). In other words, not just changes the code. Forking implies becoming the new maintainer and setting up a way for users to get feedback to you instead of the original fork.
Of course, it's much easier to just get it included "upstream". If the base maintainer doesn't want people making mass changes to the code for whatever reason you got no choice.
"Looking out of the windows of the expensive Manhattan apartment..." satisfies the query results and seems like MS is deflecting results. The problem is compounded by MS using common nouns like "Windows" or "explorer" or "server" or "word" or "works" for their product names. I search for results on "sql server" and it brings up Oracle's SQL server and the Postgres SQL server and Sybase and all of the others. "Why is SQL Server expensive" could come up with any number of rival software companies simply due to this quirk of the marketing department.
I honestly don't think it's that intentional. "Why are Macs so expensive" legitimately could contain a comparison "... makes Macs more expensive than Windows". In this case, both brands are equal distance from "expensive", so the article would seem to be relevant to either result. Simply including "more expensive than Windows" makes it even more likely that an algorithm which includes distance thinks it is relevant to Windows more so than Macs.
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A pet theory of mine I'm still working on: Looks like google weights certain words, and Bing hasn't learned this yet (or gets it wrong).
For example, you want to search "Why is Windows so expensive". The top-weighted words should be the noun "Windows", followed by "expensive". You don't want one without the other.
Since you're looking for an explanation, "why" should also carry a small weight. It's more likely to answer your question if the page has "and that's why windows is..." or "A lot of people asked my why... and so here is my answer" or the rhetorical "Why is...?" or even "which is why..." So you seemingly get Bing results of "expensive" without the "windows" part.
I would expect a subtitle or heading to have more weight than text in the article, so maybe MS is not weighting H1 more than normal P or SPAN or DIV text. Overall, i think it's just a dismal failure of the algorithm due to immaturity rather than anything intentional.
We've been paying for a product and not getting it since Windows 95. The only time they admitted it was when they killed ME and tried to get everyone on XP.
Personally, I legitimately purchased one OS (W95) with a computer long ago, and I've been upgrading with all of the service packs they have released since. I am currently deciding whether to upgrade to the latest service pack nicknamed Windows 7, or to throw away my investment and switch to something I can at least fix if it misbehaves.
If they hadn't put out so much shoddy work, I would have happily paid for each version. If I had source code to some of the lesser apps so I could fix the problems myself, I definitely would have paid for it. Windows to me is like a table you buy and bring home, and one of the legs is shorter than the others. Of course you can't just fix it yourself, you have to wait. Service pack 1 is a deck of cards you're supposed to put under the short leg almost but not quite the right height, so it's still a little wobbly. SP2 is a table leg-shaped patch that sits under the leg and is the right height, but they wait till SP3 to give you the special glue to attach it. Now you have a table that works, except now there's a hole in the top you didn't notice before. Guess that's where they took the material for the peg-leg...
I paid for something long ago and never got it. Sounds like a class action suit waiting to happen - except the average person in the jury box will be swayed by the "computers just break sometimes" argument. Partly because computers are a mystery and they don't understand that software can be quite reliable, and ironically, partly because they are used to using Windows.
Vista added I/O priority settings, so you can tell which apps get to use the storage device first. It's about time too, since the first thing I noticed switching from Windows 95 to NT 4 was the OS just halted while disk activity happened, and it still hasn't been fixed in XP.
With automatic updates running, mandatory disk encryption, and on-demand antivirus, I literally watch controls being painted one by one on a 1.7 gHz processor.
Windows 7 probably has greater/finer control over this by the OS, and hopefully apps intended for use on Win7 will include this as well. It's the only reason I wanted to upgrade to 7, and I just learned last month that Vista had it. If I'd known that I'd have switched to Vista day 1.
I agree mostly, but a user-initiated shutdown gives apps a chance to say "You have unsaved work - would you like to save this?" I have accidentally started shutdown enough using ALT+4 when a window appears to be in focus but actually isn't. A single spacebar push is all it takes to confirm at that point. Wasn't happy. But my habit of using Notepad as temporary storage saved me, since Notepad asked if I wanted to save, and cancelled the shutdown. Sure a trivial app like notepad should be capable of saving and restoring, but there are lots of things I don't want serialized. If every app saves everything it's working on, shutdown will take that much longer since storage is usually the bottleneck. And you have to wait for a flush, so no burst speeds. Or what happens if you are low on drive capacity - should it discard data, silently overwrite, or ask the user?
You mentioned UPS and other automated or possibly remote shutdown operations. Those I would expect to succeed. Or maybe a "Safe shutdown" that will ask you things and a "silent shutdown" that is guaranteed to succeed.
My point is that there is a need for both silent and interactive shutdown, and you should get to choose. Maybe a default where you can easily select the non-default as a temporary measure. And of course an automated interface which always does the non-interactive shutdown (assuming the user is authenticated in some way). And if this happened to be a command-line switch instead of a GUI option, no worries. Command-line makes it easy to make a powershell or batch script as an "oh shit" button you can activate when needed, remotely if possible. And Windows does offer that - my favorite is just use Rundll and call directly into the Windows API with a batch file. Problem solved.
Why is that the question? They give OEM's a discount, to prevent them from thinking along the lines of - hey, no bulk discount for an easily copied software so I'll just under-report how many I'm selling.
The answer is No, they won't sell it to an individual for that cost. And as long as people see it as better than the previous offering (which is almost guaranteed, until they make a rock-solid OS to begin with), the next version will always cost more than (previous version + adjustment for inflation).
The real question should be - what if Windows 7 is as good as they claim, and no one ever has a reason to upgrade it?
So, maybe we aren't all rich, should I just send them a small check every time I read their story? And since they are doing a good job and the only thing I want to change is making the news free, I won't replace any current management. In fact no personnel changes are to be done, we will just give them money and they will be happy giving things to us for free.
So what if you own a CD, and a corresponding license to listen to the song (you don't own a physical product, you own a license). Then you download in mp3 format because it's easier and faster than ripping it yourself. Then you get a lawsuit becuase you allegedly downloaded something you don't have the right to copy.
This sounds like a fair use argument, and one that the courts should look at.
Using the record companies' license against them is the only way to go in this scenario. I have a right to listen to the CD, I have a right to make an MP3 of that CD. Given that mp3 is not a copy, it is a degraded and imperfect representation, I don't see how the law can say that downloading a crappy version of something you already own should have any punishment whatsoever. If you want to disagree with me, you'll have to wait until a court case comes along and see what comes of it.
No choice is right. When a user can complain that the Windows Search interface sucks, and have MS actually change it with an update, that's the day people will voluntarily go to the Microsoft Store for anything other than morbid curiosity or to try out the touch-screen toys.
Somehow I doubt there will be much in the way of support, because MS product plans are basically make an OS and then let third parties do everything else. There is nothing compelling about an OS by itself to make people want it, which is where the whole marketing paradigm falls apart. And because of that, they can't possibly support all drivers and hardware and brands of PC. At best, you'll have a lot of "let me see if we can.. nope, ok, we're going to start the system installation, from a hidden part of your drive that is locked off and you can't delete it nor make use of the space that you paid for".
But support is exactly what people are going to need if you want to sell the OS. Buy the OS without fear that it will suck, we will help you make it not suck. Otherwise it's just empty promises and platitudes and the customer will feel they are buying something and being left high and dry.
I just don't see this working, no matter how hard they try.
No no no, the is the opportunity for us to say to Microsoft, look it really isn't that bad, is it? You benefit from open source, other people benefit, and it's a model you can profit from as well.
MS is scared of open source because it has been seen as a threat. But what if at the end of all of this, MS realizes that giving people the source code, while selling a product and related support, benefits everyone? It will happen slowly, but they are coming around.
WiX was the first shot, and now they are realizing that helping others helps them. So maybe somewhere down the line, we can get for example explorer.exe source code. Or something else that they give away free - so we can customize and fix bugs instead of whining that it sucks.
If the "average open source developer" is supposed to hate microsoft, and not evaluate anything simply because it's Microsoft, we're going to have some very out of touch projects and non-interoperable software and an overall loss of quality.
Vista allows you to change IO priority. I just found this out last week. If I had known that, I would have used Vista from day 1, regardless of all of the other complaints I've had. I'm using Win7 on Aug. 6 when it's available on MSDN and I'll never look back.
Windows NT has seemed slow ever since I tried NT 4 server on my 233mHz Packard Bell. I soon learned that Disk IO brings the computer to its knees, even if the CPU usage is minimal. I remember watching controls be painted individually when copying or analyzing large data files. That still happens today on XP, while System Idle Process takes 85% or more. Lowering the CPU priority of the offending process doesn't help, because it's not maxed out.
Some days, it takes me literally 10 minutes to click something. Visual Studio hung last night doing something, and it was 30 minutes before I could switch to Process Explorer (which I always keep running) and end task. I didn't want to kill everything because I had work open in other windows. 30 minutes on a dual core 1.8 gHz processor with XP to switch to another app, with 80% CPU idle. Disk IO in the background was the culprit, and no it wasn't due to memory paging in or out either. How do I know that? I've been watching this happen since running NT4 on my 233mHz Packard Bell. I watch my memory and leave process explorer running all day every day.
Windows Update seems to be a huge IO eater, and I would love to set it to low priority. Virus scanning an entire file when you only need the first 100 bytes is a huge waste, and I'd love to set the virus scan priority to match the priority of whatever app is trying to open the file. So if it's a background process, just let me do what I'm doing and scan it when I'm done. Windows Update + Anti-virus + Whole disk encryption is just asking for pain, and it's what I get daily. Pain. Windows 7 should solve that.
You were trying to sell him on the software, he wanted to be sold on the company. Don't say there are distros. Say this one company has a product, and it supports that product like any other company would. You have benefits with open source that you don't with closed, and you can pitch that all you want. Usually when someone doesn't see something that's obvious it's because you aren't presenting it in a way they understand.
If every capitalist system eventually needs to be brought under control because of human conditions, isn't that kinda the same as capitalism never works? I mean, what you're saying is that it would work fine if people weren't involved. Capitalism is a method of humans interacting together, so if you take out the humans it isn't anything at all.
the judge's feelings are not the issue here. ticked or not, doesn't matter. contempt means you're in jail until you comply. that's the law, and I don't see people lining the streets trying to get that changed. it's not a punishment at all - it's a means to coerce results.
a guy (or girl, whatever) refuses to pay child support, a judge orders him to explain himself, the guy does nothing - if we let that person run around free while we write stern letters, nothing happens. This way, we get to let the person decide to either follow the legal process or stay in jail.
It was not applied correctly in this case - it should have been obvious a long time ago you weren't getting money. it's not that he was hiding evidence or not cooperating. He probably submitted bank account details and flat out said I can't pay, I don't have the money. that's what you should be angry at - not at the idea of contempt.
Stuff happening "as you type" is extremely useful in some circumstances. Excluding that functionality because it might not work is a terrible idea. Updates to small portions of the page instead of waiting for a page reload is a good way to make the site work better and faster.
you don't need a windows program to make it "act that way". You just need proper feature testing and graceful fallback. Unfortunately, that takes a while to test. If a browser has one feature but not another, and another browser is backwards, you could have some strange results depending on the order of feature checking.
Flash can add a lot to the usability as well, again if you have a graceful fallback. And again, different browsers or even different add-ons can change the experience. You can have NoScript blocking both scripts and Flash, or just one or the other. You don't want the website to be 100% flash with no other options - that's just stupid. I don't spend any more time on those sites. It's not the "web masters" creating this problem - it's the people who write requirements for the site (or work with the web dev). They want it to work a certain way, and pay enough to get that done - but not for additional execution paths like graceful fallback.
The web was designed to transfer data. It was not designed to make all data render on all clients. Ideally, every client should support the same feature set. But there are a lot of optional "MAY" or "SHOULD" items just in HTML, making it a vastly different experience even if written 100% to the standard. In an ideal world you'd write it once. But we all know that software has bugs, and we have to be aware that other people's bugs make us as web masters look bad.
A server-side program SHOULD care how you render data, because it can make the difference between an amateurish site and one that looks like a real business. People are more likely to spend time on a site that looks like someone took time with it, as opposed to a fly-by-night operation shoved up in a few hours.
the web was not meant for a lot of things, but it is easy to add simple features which make browsing a lot easier, more intuitive, and entertaining. Images weren't even intended in the original development efforts, but I think you would agree they can help. Especially on commercial sites. Things evolve, and it's stupid to ignore these things just because they weren't intended.
You seem to be advocating zero fonts, zero colors, zero images, zero layout - even I, who browses with scripts off and no flash plugin and uses "ImgLikeOpera" so I can quickly disable/enable images, realize that there are benefits to using all of the enhancements available.
I agree that the web should be browsable with Lynx, but I also think it should be browsable with all the extras, if they add functionality or increase ease of use.
Even with the karma bonus, +4 Insightful means that at least 2 people read the initial question, the reply, and then considered this "oops" response regarding electrical wiring of 48V DC power supply to have added something to the current conversation about an epic browser sniffing failure.
That's when you view source, save the page to your local system, and rewrite it to work without js. Don't even load their page with its adverts - load it, you can pre-fill lots of data this way, and submit. Warning: don't attempt with financial transactions, or if you do then don't come whining to me.
This should be pointed out in CS 101. You don't validate the memory manager returns a value, your code gets a security alert. You fail the assignment or the course, whichever is on the chopping block. And you can't graduate without at least one semester of a language that needs memory management.
Slashdot Mirror
If you copy it, they remind you that you only have a license. You can't do *everything* you want to do because you don't own it, you just have a license to listen to it.
You should ask them for replacement media since you didn't purchase a physical object - your license is still valid while you have a product, unusable as it is. If they refuse, ask them if downloading a copy is permissable since you have a license to listen but no way of doing so.
They can't have it both ways.
Currently it is handled as a warranty item for console gaming - as if you purchased a physical product (example uses Wii)
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wii/en_na/ts/gameDiscReplacement.jsp
You are arguing with an idealistic logic, against a comment made with practical logic. You can't do that. The judge is bound to follow what the law intended, and the law is fairly clear. You can't make a circumvention device of any sort in the US of A.
If you want to make this argument, you are simply reinforcing the correctness of the comment to which you replied. You are correct, and the original comment is correct, at the same time. Your argument should be made to a professional association of judges, because you won't get any change arguing with someone who probably believes the same thing that you do.
If someone argues with faith, you can't win the argument using science. If someone uses existing state, you can't win arguing future state. If someone argues reality, you can't win arguing idealism. Your points in all cases might be correct, but they are nonetheless irrelevant to the argument.
Contact your people in Washington, and ask them point blank: since you are tasked with writing the laws, how can we have a law which directly conflicts with fair use? You need to either outlaw fair use (which is political suicide), or rewrite the DMCA to allow people to enforce their rights.
I bet they try to outlaw fair use if you bring it to their attention, but seeing the replies posted together somewhere would be extremely enlightening.
/. has to have time to catch up. Next week's headline is actually an optimistic estimate.
It would be easy to defend against such a claim. Especially since every provider advertises their prices - unless you think providers shouldn't watch or read anything. You can't avoid finding out whose plans cost what, even if you try. Believe me, I try. Also, a good rebuttal to the case is this. Similar prices because the infrastructure costs about the same - either you build towers or rent bandwidth from another provider at inflated prices. There probably isn't much competition in the cell tower building business, nor the geosynchronous orbit satellite business. Price fixing means they all agreed on something, where this is simple awareness of what other companies offer and charge. You'd have to produce evidence that the companies discussed pricing, which as I've said is pretty much unnecessary.
Back to this guy's argument - I realized this long ago, and pay under $100/year for pre-paid service, no contract. Most people I know overpay for unlimited this and rollover that and they never use it. Why do you think rollover minutes are such a big deal? People don't use what they already paid for. It's another line item in the budget, they expect it, and don't give thought to how much they actually use. I don't use that much, but the general idea applies:
Do you use 1500 SMS each month? 50 every day? I don't understand your $70/mo plan with 1500 txt messages, plus $15 for 1500 SMS. Are you actually only paying $55 plus the $15? Or are you differentiating text and SMS bringing your total to 3000, or 100 every day? Who cares, my point is you're probably paying for more than you need.
At $55 for voice service (70 = 55 base + 15 messaging), that's 12 cents per minute. You can get prepaid at 10 cents/minute with no overage charges or additional fees (T-mobile is my carrier), and bonus minutes for being a loyal customer (I get 115% of the minutes I buy) and a separate messaging fee that I don't use so I don't know the details. $70 for the base plan would be over 15 cents/minute, even worse.
The underlying point here is if people look at what they need and get a plan that fits their usage, no one will be in the high-priced generic plans and they will be dropped, and customers win. The only other option is for carriers to say screw it and have a single expensive unlimited plan available and everyone will run an open OS like Android on imported unlocked phones and an app that selects VOIP when you're near hotspots or local network availability. The nuclear option, if you will.
Until corroborating links are supplied, I'll assume you're a Sony fan-boi. Not because I DON'T believe you, I just don't WANT to.
If you search for the magic number and also add whatever context you DO know, the result should appear. If I'm doing digital signal processing, I'd look for the number and DSP, or acoustics or something like that. If it were optics, or whatever else, just add a word that applies. You would never find a magic number thrown in the middle of something and not be able to figure out what realm of knowledge it fits into. Especially something like source code - you probably know what the program does, so just add that as your search term.
What you're talking about is basically just a list of magical numbers. The speed of light, the cosmological constant, e, PI, sqrt(2) should just be in a big table, and probably already are in many textbooks. After that, if you're looking for mathematical representations like 17*sqrt(e), you're probably looking at some sort of algorithm. Financial algorithms notoriously (ab)use e, so knowing the representation as 17*sqrt(e) won't help you much. More importantly would be figuring out why they are looking for 17 of anything - and that knowledge relies on you understanding the underlying formula.
I just had this conversation (paraphrased) with my gf who professed that quadratic math is hard and illogical and doesn't make any sense. My reply was there is a formula or algorithm underlying everything, and if you can rearrange what you're looking at to fit one of the known formulae it suddenly becomes obvious how to solve it.
In summary: Knowing 17*sqrt(e) = 28.0282616 in a knowledge vacuum is unnecessary. Basically someone already did pre-calculation in order to optimize the calculation speed. Looking at how the number is used is far more useful than translating it into another context-free factoid.
I don't think he's already forked it. He has a privately held altered copy, and possibly makes the source available somewhere.
"fork it" implies you might have a different app name, hosted separately (even if "separately" just means a different zip file). In other words, not just changes the code. Forking implies becoming the new maintainer and setting up a way for users to get feedback to you instead of the original fork.
Of course, it's much easier to just get it included "upstream". If the base maintainer doesn't want people making mass changes to the code for whatever reason you got no choice.
"Looking out of the windows of the expensive Manhattan apartment..." satisfies the query results and seems like MS is deflecting results. The problem is compounded by MS using common nouns like "Windows" or "explorer" or "server" or "word" or "works" for their product names. I search for results on "sql server" and it brings up Oracle's SQL server and the Postgres SQL server and Sybase and all of the others. "Why is SQL Server expensive" could come up with any number of rival software companies simply due to this quirk of the marketing department.
I honestly don't think it's that intentional. "Why are Macs so expensive" legitimately could contain a comparison "... makes Macs more expensive than Windows". In this case, both brands are equal distance from "expensive", so the article would seem to be relevant to either result. Simply including "more expensive than Windows" makes it even more likely that an algorithm which includes distance thinks it is relevant to Windows more so than Macs.
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A pet theory of mine I'm still working on: Looks like google weights certain words, and Bing hasn't learned this yet (or gets it wrong).
For example, you want to search "Why is Windows so expensive". The top-weighted words should be the noun "Windows", followed by "expensive". You don't want one without the other.
Since you're looking for an explanation, "why" should also carry a small weight. It's more likely to answer your question if the page has "and that's why windows is..." or "A lot of people asked my why... and so here is my answer" or the rhetorical "Why is ...?" or even "which is why..." So you seemingly get Bing results of "expensive" without the "windows" part.
I would expect a subtitle or heading to have more weight than text in the article, so maybe MS is not weighting H1 more than normal P or SPAN or DIV text. Overall, i think it's just a dismal failure of the algorithm due to immaturity rather than anything intentional.
We've been paying for a product and not getting it since Windows 95. The only time they admitted it was when they killed ME and tried to get everyone on XP.
Personally, I legitimately purchased one OS (W95) with a computer long ago, and I've been upgrading with all of the service packs they have released since. I am currently deciding whether to upgrade to the latest service pack nicknamed Windows 7, or to throw away my investment and switch to something I can at least fix if it misbehaves.
If they hadn't put out so much shoddy work, I would have happily paid for each version. If I had source code to some of the lesser apps so I could fix the problems myself, I definitely would have paid for it. Windows to me is like a table you buy and bring home, and one of the legs is shorter than the others. Of course you can't just fix it yourself, you have to wait. Service pack 1 is a deck of cards you're supposed to put under the short leg almost but not quite the right height, so it's still a little wobbly. SP2 is a table leg-shaped patch that sits under the leg and is the right height, but they wait till SP3 to give you the special glue to attach it. Now you have a table that works, except now there's a hole in the top you didn't notice before. Guess that's where they took the material for the peg-leg...
I paid for something long ago and never got it. Sounds like a class action suit waiting to happen - except the average person in the jury box will be swayed by the "computers just break sometimes" argument. Partly because computers are a mystery and they don't understand that software can be quite reliable, and ironically, partly because they are used to using Windows.
Vista added I/O priority settings, so you can tell which apps get to use the storage device first. It's about time too, since the first thing I noticed switching from Windows 95 to NT 4 was the OS just halted while disk activity happened, and it still hasn't been fixed in XP.
With automatic updates running, mandatory disk encryption, and on-demand antivirus, I literally watch controls being painted one by one on a 1.7 gHz processor.
Windows 7 probably has greater/finer control over this by the OS, and hopefully apps intended for use on Win7 will include this as well. It's the only reason I wanted to upgrade to 7, and I just learned last month that Vista had it. If I'd known that I'd have switched to Vista day 1.
I agree mostly, but a user-initiated shutdown gives apps a chance to say "You have unsaved work - would you like to save this?" I have accidentally started shutdown enough using ALT+4 when a window appears to be in focus but actually isn't. A single spacebar push is all it takes to confirm at that point. Wasn't happy. But my habit of using Notepad as temporary storage saved me, since Notepad asked if I wanted to save, and cancelled the shutdown. Sure a trivial app like notepad should be capable of saving and restoring, but there are lots of things I don't want serialized. If every app saves everything it's working on, shutdown will take that much longer since storage is usually the bottleneck. And you have to wait for a flush, so no burst speeds. Or what happens if you are low on drive capacity - should it discard data, silently overwrite, or ask the user?
You mentioned UPS and other automated or possibly remote shutdown operations. Those I would expect to succeed. Or maybe a "Safe shutdown" that will ask you things and a "silent shutdown" that is guaranteed to succeed.
My point is that there is a need for both silent and interactive shutdown, and you should get to choose. Maybe a default where you can easily select the non-default as a temporary measure. And of course an automated interface which always does the non-interactive shutdown (assuming the user is authenticated in some way). And if this happened to be a command-line switch instead of a GUI option, no worries. Command-line makes it easy to make a powershell or batch script as an "oh shit" button you can activate when needed, remotely if possible. And Windows does offer that - my favorite is just use Rundll and call directly into the Windows API with a batch file. Problem solved.
Why is that the question? They give OEM's a discount, to prevent them from thinking along the lines of - hey, no bulk discount for an easily copied software so I'll just under-report how many I'm selling.
The answer is No, they won't sell it to an individual for that cost. And as long as people see it as better than the previous offering (which is almost guaranteed, until they make a rock-solid OS to begin with), the next version will always cost more than (previous version + adjustment for inflation).
The real question should be - what if Windows 7 is as good as they claim, and no one ever has a reason to upgrade it?
So, maybe we aren't all rich, should I just send them a small check every time I read their story? And since they are doing a good job and the only thing I want to change is making the news free, I won't replace any current management. In fact no personnel changes are to be done, we will just give them money and they will be happy giving things to us for free.
Is this what you had in mind?
So what if you own a CD, and a corresponding license to listen to the song (you don't own a physical product, you own a license). Then you download in mp3 format because it's easier and faster than ripping it yourself. Then you get a lawsuit becuase you allegedly downloaded something you don't have the right to copy.
This sounds like a fair use argument, and one that the courts should look at.
Using the record companies' license against them is the only way to go in this scenario. I have a right to listen to the CD, I have a right to make an MP3 of that CD. Given that mp3 is not a copy, it is a degraded and imperfect representation, I don't see how the law can say that downloading a crappy version of something you already own should have any punishment whatsoever. If you want to disagree with me, you'll have to wait until a court case comes along and see what comes of it.
No choice is right. When a user can complain that the Windows Search interface sucks, and have MS actually change it with an update, that's the day people will voluntarily go to the Microsoft Store for anything other than morbid curiosity or to try out the touch-screen toys.
Somehow I doubt there will be much in the way of support, because MS product plans are basically make an OS and then let third parties do everything else. There is nothing compelling about an OS by itself to make people want it, which is where the whole marketing paradigm falls apart. And because of that, they can't possibly support all drivers and hardware and brands of PC. At best, you'll have a lot of "let me see if we can.. nope, ok, we're going to start the system installation, from a hidden part of your drive that is locked off and you can't delete it nor make use of the space that you paid for".
But support is exactly what people are going to need if you want to sell the OS. Buy the OS without fear that it will suck, we will help you make it not suck. Otherwise it's just empty promises and platitudes and the customer will feel they are buying something and being left high and dry.
I just don't see this working, no matter how hard they try.
No no no, the is the opportunity for us to say to Microsoft, look it really isn't that bad, is it? You benefit from open source, other people benefit, and it's a model you can profit from as well.
MS is scared of open source because it has been seen as a threat. But what if at the end of all of this, MS realizes that giving people the source code, while selling a product and related support, benefits everyone? It will happen slowly, but they are coming around.
WiX was the first shot, and now they are realizing that helping others helps them. So maybe somewhere down the line, we can get for example explorer.exe source code. Or something else that they give away free - so we can customize and fix bugs instead of whining that it sucks.
If the "average open source developer" is supposed to hate microsoft, and not evaluate anything simply because it's Microsoft, we're going to have some very out of touch projects and non-interoperable software and an overall loss of quality.
Vista allows you to change IO priority. I just found this out last week. If I had known that, I would have used Vista from day 1, regardless of all of the other complaints I've had. I'm using Win7 on Aug. 6 when it's available on MSDN and I'll never look back.
http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=12767
Windows NT has seemed slow ever since I tried NT 4 server on my 233mHz Packard Bell. I soon learned that Disk IO brings the computer to its knees, even if the CPU usage is minimal. I remember watching controls be painted individually when copying or analyzing large data files. That still happens today on XP, while System Idle Process takes 85% or more. Lowering the CPU priority of the offending process doesn't help, because it's not maxed out.
Some days, it takes me literally 10 minutes to click something. Visual Studio hung last night doing something, and it was 30 minutes before I could switch to Process Explorer (which I always keep running) and end task. I didn't want to kill everything because I had work open in other windows. 30 minutes on a dual core 1.8 gHz processor with XP to switch to another app, with 80% CPU idle. Disk IO in the background was the culprit, and no it wasn't due to memory paging in or out either. How do I know that? I've been watching this happen since running NT4 on my 233mHz Packard Bell. I watch my memory and leave process explorer running all day every day.
Windows Update seems to be a huge IO eater, and I would love to set it to low priority. Virus scanning an entire file when you only need the first 100 bytes is a huge waste, and I'd love to set the virus scan priority to match the priority of whatever app is trying to open the file. So if it's a background process, just let me do what I'm doing and scan it when I'm done. Windows Update + Anti-virus + Whole disk encryption is just asking for pain, and it's what I get daily. Pain. Windows 7 should solve that.
You were trying to sell him on the software, he wanted to be sold on the company. Don't say there are distros. Say this one company has a product, and it supports that product like any other company would. You have benefits with open source that you don't with closed, and you can pitch that all you want. Usually when someone doesn't see something that's obvious it's because you aren't presenting it in a way they understand.
If every capitalist system eventually needs to be brought under control because of human conditions, isn't that kinda the same as capitalism never works? I mean, what you're saying is that it would work fine if people weren't involved. Capitalism is a method of humans interacting together, so if you take out the humans it isn't anything at all.
the judge's feelings are not the issue here. ticked or not, doesn't matter. contempt means you're in jail until you comply. that's the law, and I don't see people lining the streets trying to get that changed. it's not a punishment at all - it's a means to coerce results.
a guy (or girl, whatever) refuses to pay child support, a judge orders him to explain himself, the guy does nothing - if we let that person run around free while we write stern letters, nothing happens. This way, we get to let the person decide to either follow the legal process or stay in jail.
It was not applied correctly in this case - it should have been obvious a long time ago you weren't getting money. it's not that he was hiding evidence or not cooperating. He probably submitted bank account details and flat out said I can't pay, I don't have the money. that's what you should be angry at - not at the idea of contempt.
So much wrong - I don't even know where to start.
Stuff happening "as you type" is extremely useful in some circumstances. Excluding that functionality because it might not work is a terrible idea. Updates to small portions of the page instead of waiting for a page reload is a good way to make the site work better and faster.
you don't need a windows program to make it "act that way". You just need proper feature testing and graceful fallback. Unfortunately, that takes a while to test. If a browser has one feature but not another, and another browser is backwards, you could have some strange results depending on the order of feature checking.
Flash can add a lot to the usability as well, again if you have a graceful fallback. And again, different browsers or even different add-ons can change the experience. You can have NoScript blocking both scripts and Flash, or just one or the other. You don't want the website to be 100% flash with no other options - that's just stupid. I don't spend any more time on those sites. It's not the "web masters" creating this problem - it's the people who write requirements for the site (or work with the web dev). They want it to work a certain way, and pay enough to get that done - but not for additional execution paths like graceful fallback.
The web was designed to transfer data. It was not designed to make all data render on all clients. Ideally, every client should support the same feature set. But there are a lot of optional "MAY" or "SHOULD" items just in HTML, making it a vastly different experience even if written 100% to the standard. In an ideal world you'd write it once. But we all know that software has bugs, and we have to be aware that other people's bugs make us as web masters look bad.
A server-side program SHOULD care how you render data, because it can make the difference between an amateurish site and one that looks like a real business. People are more likely to spend time on a site that looks like someone took time with it, as opposed to a fly-by-night operation shoved up in a few hours.
the web was not meant for a lot of things, but it is easy to add simple features which make browsing a lot easier, more intuitive, and entertaining. Images weren't even intended in the original development efforts, but I think you would agree they can help. Especially on commercial sites. Things evolve, and it's stupid to ignore these things just because they weren't intended.
You seem to be advocating zero fonts, zero colors, zero images, zero layout - even I, who browses with scripts off and no flash plugin and uses "ImgLikeOpera" so I can quickly disable/enable images, realize that there are benefits to using all of the enhancements available.
I agree that the web should be browsable with Lynx, but I also think it should be browsable with all the extras, if they add functionality or increase ease of use.
Even with the karma bonus, +4 Insightful means that at least 2 people read the initial question, the reply, and then considered this "oops" response regarding electrical wiring of 48V DC power supply to have added something to the current conversation about an epic browser sniffing failure.
Incredible.
That's when you view source, save the page to your local system, and rewrite it to work without js. Don't even load their page with its adverts - load it, you can pre-fill lots of data this way, and submit. Warning: don't attempt with financial transactions, or if you do then don't come whining to me.
This should be pointed out in CS 101. You don't validate the memory manager returns a value, your code gets a security alert. You fail the assignment or the course, whichever is on the chopping block. And you can't graduate without at least one semester of a language that needs memory management.