You're confusing up the intended audience of a product. The ads show "This is vista" with Aero. OEMs say "Buy this, it runs that new Vista you've seen." At no point does anyone say, directly to the average consumer, "Some computers won't look like the Vista that was advertised." There's the problem, because the advertising led people to believe something that's not true.
The Crysis defining features you mention are largely just more detail, while the Aero interface is supposed to be an entirely new way of doing things. The 'minimum specs' printed on a game box have been around for long enough that people who buy games know to look for them, while Vista is a brand new product. In the past, if Microsoft said this is what the OS looks like, you either get it out of the box or with a few seconds of tweaking. There shouldn't be any gotcha requirements. Saying a computer comes with that AOL you've seen, while not shipping with a modem or ethernet port, is more like what happened. Yes it is capable of running AOL, but it won't do anything that you've seen, just set some options.
You bought a workstation, you said so yourself, it should not be used as a server, and people buying servers would know that. Windows 2000 was also a business class OS, not marketed to home users. People buying Vista are everyday users who know that it turns on and responds when it clicks.
Finally, you're missing the point of class action suits. They typically involve a lot of work and time, and if you lose you get nothing. So someone has to come forward and decide there is enough of a chance to win and take a risk. Then they have to do a lot of work to prove the case deserves to be class action.
Think about the recent RIAA defeats - they sailed for how many years before someone decided to stand up and win that first decision? Now everyone has a history of legal decisions which make it easier to defend themselves. Regardless of whether it's class action or individual, if the company loses they can probably be sued by someone else for the same thing, so it makes more sense to stop whatever it was they were doing. Someone decides it's worth it, and fights on behalf of everyone to make it stop. I'd buy that person a beer, and if it comes down to every person affected by that ruling buying the guy a beer (a prize worh hundreds or millions of dollars) it's worth it to me. Remember, if they do win it means they were being harmed (had standing) and the company was doing something wrong. Someone invents asbestos and gets rich selling it, deserves to pay part of that to cover health costs, and the first person to prove it is the hero.
Remember the McDonald's hot coffee lady? She really was very badly burned, and honestly I cannot make a cup of coffee that hot at home because the bag and the mug cool down boiling water quickly. Insulated paper cups don't transfer heat until you touch them, so there is no reason to think she would have second guessed how hot the coffee was. Since there is no commonly in use beverage temperature gauge other than your lips and tongue, it makes sense to ask McDonald's to pay for care and also change the way they brew and serve coffee.
I remember wondering how Winzip knew what commands to send to pkz204g, and especially how it knew what the progress bar should show.
I actually ended up writing several tools to manipulate ZIP files at the byte level without the overhead of (un)zipping, before I learned the secret of redirecting standard handles.
Cars have been around a while, very few people alive did not grow up with cars.
Anyone older than 25 has a good chance of having no computer around growing up and definitely no buying experience, and no advice being handed down from Dad. If they did buy a computer, it did what they wanted it to do. It loaded web pages and sent e-mail and ran AOL 5.0.
Now this flashy thing comes out and it says this flashy UI is what you're going to get. Vista Capable means it's going to work.
Of all of this, can you point to anything that would indicate that average consumers have any experience buying something and it not working? We've had that maybe with a printer not being compatible, or needing a different USB cable, or serial instead of parallel, but that's an add-on. The core OS, which is the interface of the computer, does not do what both Microsoft and the OEM together claimed, and there is no expectation that the consumer should have known better.
Under normal usage with a single application, multiple threads still play a big part. When you hit WIN+R to open the Run dialog, and a number of other places, Explorer (the shell functions of Explorer anyway) starts a new thread to run the dialog, so that the shell doesn't stop responding. Threading 101 I know.
With Windows XP at least, it uses QueueUserWorkItem to start the thread, instead of a CreateThread/Ex call. QueueUserWorkItem uses thread pools, so I often get stuck with my work notebook (not my home one) where I hit WIN+R and nothing happens, hit it again 30 seconds later, and again, and finally 3 windows show up at the same time. I assume it's because the thread pool is full, otherwise my post doesn't make sense. Anyway, these are the types of user productivity things that probably will seem "snappier" due to multithreading, since it can get this type of thread out of the way quickly.
There are a lot of single-use threads created, such as the file Open/Save windows. Open Notepad and check the number of threads open - it should be 1. Do file/Save as, and Process Explorer now shows 5 threads. UltraEdit went from 3 to 6 using File/Open. that's all in the common control library, not the application. (These might be pooled, might not, I haven't looked at it).
My point is, the UI itself can seem snappier if these utility threads are scheduled on different cores, as long as they don't block of course. they are not always running at the same time, but the moment they have to you'll notice.
It's a lot easier to fix IE than to ditch IE and shoehorn Gecko/Webkit into the IE programming model. If developers miss their COM objects, there will be riots in the street. When I say easier, I mean for a company that would have to throw away a huge investment as well as have many people around who know so much about a product that doesn't behave like that any more. Plus, not invented here.
If you are using dictation software, please let me know which one because mine doesn't get the number of "m"s accurate, and completely skips ellipses.
Otherwise, you may not be familiar with this intartubes thingy, but you can actually stop to think about what you're typing so you don't have all of the "um", "uh", and other filler words that people use to give themselves time to think. Take all the time you want. And yes, I swear to your chosen deity I will punch the next person who says "umm, hello?", just like I punched the last one. If I had mod points I'd mod you up just because you didn't add a rhetorical "hello?" after it, but it still has the stink of "I'm asking a rhetorical question to prove a point." Actually I do have mod points, that's a silly reason to moderate.
Anyway, the *intent* of the player is a one-time hack. From the MS blog "The only significant limitation is that the SL1 player can only do the 500 Kbps stream - lacking managed code, making a manifest XML parser in JavaScript didn't seem like something we should start testing only nine hours before the event goes live." Sure you can probably figure out how to reuse it, but you're not going to get much use out of it based on the description. It's a temporary patch, and hopefully the rest of Silverlight will catch up so that next time it's ready to go. Until that happens, people with different needs will be left out in the cold.
I'm just guessing here, but there was something about interoperability in, what was it, oh, every monopoly-related judgment they ever lost. Otherwise they wouldn't be helping.
How can this be off topic? I don't see how California's laws affect the hiring ability of Google.
In theory, a gay couple might refuse to work at Google on principal, but likewise in theory Google could open an office in a gay-friendly state. And in theory allowing gay marriage might attract gays there to work (some of whom might be smarter than their hetero peers, giving google a benefit over hiring straight employees), and likewise they could be dumber.
Cayenne8, I have read your recent posting history. You seem libertarian to a fault, and very much for personal responsibility, but your salary has made you seem insensitive to other people. If you could soften your delivery I'm sure it would be easier to digest a good point. Or maybe you genuinely don't care, in which case you continue to be moderated appropriately. You see, I believe that caring about the future of a country involves caring about the future of her people.
I too would like to know how Google really means to make this make sense.
Bed Bath and Bendover? Goddammit, that sounds good. What are you doing tonight? Posting on/.? We should hook up.
As an aside, I have a gift cert to BB&B but I always find stuff cheaper elsewhere. Especially at Linens and Shit cos they're kinda going out of business. So I haven't used it yet.
My left nut hangs lower than my right nut, so when I get kicked in the balls I feel sick and immobile on the left half of my body, then almost instantly on my right.
This was only tested a few times, and I don't feel the need to do a controlled experiment nor a double-blind trial to confirm it, but it might be interesting to someone. I do concede nerds would not find so much interest, so I didn't submit my blog (ball-kicking log for those technology neophytes) to the firehose.
I pass 99+% of the code I have to review, because people know not to bring me crap code. I will find it, I will reject it, and I will make fun of you. So now they do their homework and life is good for everyone, but on paper I look very lenient.
Isn't she paying this college to educate her? Not disagreeing with you, just refining.
She failed numerous attempts to seek help, but if she's having problems with online classes she should ask whomever is providing those classes. I'm sure someone there could have helped her more than a reporter could.
I had to go with SW Bell DSL, and refused to run their install CD. I called tech support and explained that, they said they understood, and if I would just go to this web page I could do it online. I went there, and it didn't do anything, because Firefox doesn't run ActiveX components very well.
I sucked it up and ran it, then listed all of the file and registry changes and asked for an explanation of why those are required simply to set up a password. I have not been able to get my point across in 6 months, but I keep trying. I keep explaining that I can't trust AT&T, and they don't understand.
I know every state in the United States has laws that should probably be better defined or come off the books all together. I would think that if you are going to add to a bill, you would update that bill at the same time. That way prostitution wouldn't carry a fine of 200 dollars and thirty days in jail but profanity would carry a fine of up to five thousand dollars and up to five years in jail.
They frown on fucking for money, but as long as you don't talk about fucking for money, no one knows you are doing it. So your suggestion actually makes more sense, were I pro-censorship that is. Free speech has always been very dangerous for the ruling party(/-ies).
You're trying to make a point, and I understand what you mean, but you're really arguing something that's irrelevant. You are also making people focus on the wrong thing, dragging what point you were trying to make off into the weeds. When someone says "pirating is not stealing", they are not talking about what you're talking about when you say "pirating is stealing".
If you would drop the semantics and make your point without using the words "pirate" or "steal" and instead use "copyright infringement" you would start to see how your arguments actually aren't that different from the ones you're arguing against.
Copyright infringement is not stealing, because they have different legal definitions, and there is nothing you can do about that.
That doesn't change the fact that copyright infringement can be described as "getting something you didn't pay for", and in that sense it is like stealing, but it is not the same.
That does not change whether copyright infringement is good, moral, legal, or should be done/not done on principal. There are different arguments for this, and that seems to be the point you are trying to make, but are distracting people from discussing.
Also, note that US copyright law considers the financial impact of any potential infringement, among other things.
The purpose and character (if you are benefiting financially)
The nature of the work
The amount copied
The effect on market value of the work
"Piracy" has generally been when someone copies something and sells it, like the Chinese DVDs or Windows for a dollar. Clearly you are reducing the market value, if people no longer have to pay full price. More recently, "piracy" is being used in the sense of simple copying for personal use, for situations like downloading music that you already own so you don't have to convert it to FLAC/MP3/AAC. This could be considered fair use because there is no financial benefit to you and no financial loss to the vendor (ignoring the uploading part, since those parts would be available regardless of whether you were uploading them because you got them from somewhere, so your actions are not materially contributing). So even talking about "piracy" is a muddy conversation if you don't clearly define what you're talking about.
And if anyone wants to copy this the next time someone like this pops up, i release any copyright claim on this comment and it is public domain. Copy, paste, improve.
It's very difficult to switch. Every process document has:
Step 1: Open Word
or
Save as a word document
Also, when you click on that giant blue W, they will use whatever comes up. They would need to be retrained. I know it doesn't seem like that much work, or that it would be needed, but if you don't tell the business analysts how to do everything they can't function.
I read the patents, the first one (5,412,717) basically functions as a whitelist to protect users from a computer virus. It includes hashes and specific actions a program can or cannot do. chmod functionality protects data from users, while this invention protects users against viruses. It includes a description of a certification authority system much like SSL certificates, which authenticate the contents of the whitelist explicitly or implicitly.
5,311,591 seems to include something to monitor this activity inside an operating system.
In both cases, emphasis is on the trust hierarchy to provide authority for trusting that such a list is valid.
Time is money, so any time you fight against a corporation doing idiotic things, it is going to cost someone. The only shame here is that someone didn't fight back earlier with this defense. If you are concerned about money being spent, you will cheer this dismissal. Consider it an investment, because those settlement letters are losing their effectiveness every time RIAA gets their crappy legal theories shot down. And that costs the people less money overall.
Justice is not a waste of money, it's all of the passive settling that people did. They gave up a little money, collectively, to avoid being personally hit for a bunch of money. And basically, that's what you're complaining about - the taxpayers collectively giving up a little money so they don't get individually hit with this silly prosecution idea. Only this way, the prosecution's ideas get thrown out (yes, slowly) until they come up with something valid.
Whether the RIAA will stop going after individuals is still being debated, but they at least made the announcement, meaning they know it's not effective, or it's not based on sound legal theory.
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing up the intended audience of a product. The ads show "This is vista" with Aero. OEMs say "Buy this, it runs that new Vista you've seen." At no point does anyone say, directly to the average consumer, "Some computers won't look like the Vista that was advertised." There's the problem, because the advertising led people to believe something that's not true.
The Crysis defining features you mention are largely just more detail, while the Aero interface is supposed to be an entirely new way of doing things. The 'minimum specs' printed on a game box have been around for long enough that people who buy games know to look for them, while Vista is a brand new product. In the past, if Microsoft said this is what the OS looks like, you either get it out of the box or with a few seconds of tweaking. There shouldn't be any gotcha requirements. Saying a computer comes with that AOL you've seen, while not shipping with a modem or ethernet port, is more like what happened. Yes it is capable of running AOL, but it won't do anything that you've seen, just set some options.
You bought a workstation, you said so yourself, it should not be used as a server, and people buying servers would know that. Windows 2000 was also a business class OS, not marketed to home users. People buying Vista are everyday users who know that it turns on and responds when it clicks.
Finally, you're missing the point of class action suits. They typically involve a lot of work and time, and if you lose you get nothing. So someone has to come forward and decide there is enough of a chance to win and take a risk. Then they have to do a lot of work to prove the case deserves to be class action.
Think about the recent RIAA defeats - they sailed for how many years before someone decided to stand up and win that first decision? Now everyone has a history of legal decisions which make it easier to defend themselves. Regardless of whether it's class action or individual, if the company loses they can probably be sued by someone else for the same thing, so it makes more sense to stop whatever it was they were doing. Someone decides it's worth it, and fights on behalf of everyone to make it stop. I'd buy that person a beer, and if it comes down to every person affected by that ruling buying the guy a beer (a prize worh hundreds or millions of dollars) it's worth it to me. Remember, if they do win it means they were being harmed (had standing) and the company was doing something wrong. Someone invents asbestos and gets rich selling it, deserves to pay part of that to cover health costs, and the first person to prove it is the hero.
Remember the McDonald's hot coffee lady? She really was very badly burned, and honestly I cannot make a cup of coffee that hot at home because the bag and the mug cool down boiling water quickly. Insulated paper cups don't transfer heat until you touch them, so there is no reason to think she would have second guessed how hot the coffee was. Since there is no commonly in use beverage temperature gauge other than your lips and tongue, it makes sense to ask McDonald's to pay for care and also change the way they brew and serve coffee.
I remember wondering how Winzip knew what commands to send to pkz204g, and especially how it knew what the progress bar should show.
I actually ended up writing several tools to manipulate ZIP files at the byte level without the overhead of (un)zipping, before I learned the secret of redirecting standard handles.
Cars have been around a while, very few people alive did not grow up with cars.
Anyone older than 25 has a good chance of having no computer around growing up and definitely no buying experience, and no advice being handed down from Dad. If they did buy a computer, it did what they wanted it to do. It loaded web pages and sent e-mail and ran AOL 5.0.
Now this flashy thing comes out and it says this flashy UI is what you're going to get. Vista Capable means it's going to work.
Of all of this, can you point to anything that would indicate that average consumers have any experience buying something and it not working? We've had that maybe with a printer not being compatible, or needing a different USB cable, or serial instead of parallel, but that's an add-on. The core OS, which is the interface of the computer, does not do what both Microsoft and the OEM together claimed, and there is no expectation that the consumer should have known better.
Under normal usage with a single application, multiple threads still play a big part. When you hit WIN+R to open the Run dialog, and a number of other places, Explorer (the shell functions of Explorer anyway) starts a new thread to run the dialog, so that the shell doesn't stop responding. Threading 101 I know.
With Windows XP at least, it uses QueueUserWorkItem to start the thread, instead of a CreateThread/Ex call. QueueUserWorkItem uses thread pools, so I often get stuck with my work notebook (not my home one) where I hit WIN+R and nothing happens, hit it again 30 seconds later, and again, and finally 3 windows show up at the same time. I assume it's because the thread pool is full, otherwise my post doesn't make sense. Anyway, these are the types of user productivity things that probably will seem "snappier" due to multithreading, since it can get this type of thread out of the way quickly.
There are a lot of single-use threads created, such as the file Open/Save windows. Open Notepad and check the number of threads open - it should be 1. Do file/Save as, and Process Explorer now shows 5 threads. UltraEdit went from 3 to 6 using File/Open. that's all in the common control library, not the application. (These might be pooled, might not, I haven't looked at it).
My point is, the UI itself can seem snappier if these utility threads are scheduled on different cores, as long as they don't block of course. they are not always running at the same time, but the moment they have to you'll notice.
It's a lot easier to fix IE than to ditch IE and shoehorn Gecko/Webkit into the IE programming model. If developers miss their COM objects, there will be riots in the street. When I say easier, I mean for a company that would have to throw away a huge investment as well as have many people around who know so much about a product that doesn't behave like that any more. Plus, not invented here.
If small changes are incremental, what are big changes called?
If you are using dictation software, please let me know which one because mine doesn't get the number of "m"s accurate, and completely skips ellipses.
Otherwise, you may not be familiar with this intartubes thingy, but you can actually stop to think about what you're typing so you don't have all of the "um", "uh", and other filler words that people use to give themselves time to think. Take all the time you want. And yes, I swear to your chosen deity I will punch the next person who says "umm, hello?", just like I punched the last one. If I had mod points I'd mod you up just because you didn't add a rhetorical "hello?" after it, but it still has the stink of "I'm asking a rhetorical question to prove a point." Actually I do have mod points, that's a silly reason to moderate.
Anyway, the *intent* of the player is a one-time hack. From the MS blog "The only significant limitation is that the SL1 player can only do the 500 Kbps stream - lacking managed code, making a manifest XML parser in JavaScript didn't seem like something we should start testing only nine hours before the event goes live." Sure you can probably figure out how to reuse it, but you're not going to get much use out of it based on the description. It's a temporary patch, and hopefully the rest of Silverlight will catch up so that next time it's ready to go. Until that happens, people with different needs will be left out in the cold.
Yes I feel better, thanks.
I'm just guessing here, but there was something about interoperability in, what was it, oh, every monopoly-related judgment they ever lost. Otherwise they wouldn't be helping.
New? I don't think so. *winks* Ever heard of Greek?
How can this be off topic? I don't see how California's laws affect the hiring ability of Google.
In theory, a gay couple might refuse to work at Google on principal, but likewise in theory Google could open an office in a gay-friendly state. And in theory allowing gay marriage might attract gays there to work (some of whom might be smarter than their hetero peers, giving google a benefit over hiring straight employees), and likewise they could be dumber.
Cayenne8, I have read your recent posting history. You seem libertarian to a fault, and very much for personal responsibility, but your salary has made you seem insensitive to other people. If you could soften your delivery I'm sure it would be easier to digest a good point. Or maybe you genuinely don't care, in which case you continue to be moderated appropriately. You see, I believe that caring about the future of a country involves caring about the future of her people.
I too would like to know how Google really means to make this make sense.
Bed Bath and Bendover? Goddammit, that sounds good. What are you doing tonight? Posting on /.? We should hook up.
As an aside, I have a gift cert to BB&B but I always find stuff cheaper elsewhere. Especially at Linens and Shit cos they're kinda going out of business. So I haven't used it yet.
I don't go to BB or CC. I go directly to AA. Can't find what I'm looking for there, but I end up solving some problems that I didn't know I had.
Because the guy with the lopsided nuts got his submission in 34 minutes ahead of you.
That's 8 minutes longer than it takes to get to the gym!
My left nut hangs lower than my right nut, so when I get kicked in the balls I feel sick and immobile on the left half of my body, then almost instantly on my right.
This was only tested a few times, and I don't feel the need to do a controlled experiment nor a double-blind trial to confirm it, but it might be interesting to someone. I do concede nerds would not find so much interest, so I didn't submit my blog (ball-kicking log for those technology neophytes) to the firehose.
I pass 99+% of the code I have to review, because people know not to bring me crap code. I will find it, I will reject it, and I will make fun of you. So now they do their homework and life is good for everyone, but on paper I look very lenient.
Isn't she paying this college to educate her? Not disagreeing with you, just refining.
She failed numerous attempts to seek help, but if she's having problems with online classes she should ask whomever is providing those classes. I'm sure someone there could have helped her more than a reporter could.
I had to go with SW Bell DSL, and refused to run their install CD. I called tech support and explained that, they said they understood, and if I would just go to this web page I could do it online. I went there, and it didn't do anything, because Firefox doesn't run ActiveX components very well.
I sucked it up and ran it, then listed all of the file and registry changes and asked for an explanation of why those are required simply to set up a password. I have not been able to get my point across in 6 months, but I keep trying. I keep explaining that I can't trust AT&T, and they don't understand.
They frown on fucking for money, but as long as you don't talk about fucking for money, no one knows you are doing it. So your suggestion actually makes more sense, were I pro-censorship that is. Free speech has always been very dangerous for the ruling party(/-ies).
You're trying to make a point, and I understand what you mean, but you're really arguing something that's irrelevant. You are also making people focus on the wrong thing, dragging what point you were trying to make off into the weeds. When someone says "pirating is not stealing", they are not talking about what you're talking about when you say "pirating is stealing".
If you would drop the semantics and make your point without using the words "pirate" or "steal" and instead use "copyright infringement" you would start to see how your arguments actually aren't that different from the ones you're arguing against.
Also, note that US copyright law considers the financial impact of any potential infringement, among other things.
"Piracy" has generally been when someone copies something and sells it, like the Chinese DVDs or Windows for a dollar. Clearly you are reducing the market value, if people no longer have to pay full price. More recently, "piracy" is being used in the sense of simple copying for personal use, for situations like downloading music that you already own so you don't have to convert it to FLAC/MP3/AAC. This could be considered fair use because there is no financial benefit to you and no financial loss to the vendor (ignoring the uploading part, since those parts would be available regardless of whether you were uploading them because you got them from somewhere, so your actions are not materially contributing). So even talking about "piracy" is a muddy conversation if you don't clearly define what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Comparison_to_theft
http://www.copyright.com/Services/copyrightoncampus/basics/fairuse_rules.html
And if anyone wants to copy this the next time someone like this pops up, i release any copyright claim on this comment and it is public domain. Copy, paste, improve.
I guess it was different when I wasn't salary.
It's very difficult to switch. Every process document has :
Step 1: Open Word
or
Save as a word document
Also, when you click on that giant blue W, they will use whatever comes up. They would need to be retrained. I know it doesn't seem like that much work, or that it would be needed, but if you don't tell the business analysts how to do everything they can't function.
Don't expect the C&D.
I read the patents, the first one (5,412,717) basically functions as a whitelist to protect users from a computer virus. It includes hashes and specific actions a program can or cannot do. chmod functionality protects data from users, while this invention protects users against viruses. It includes a description of a certification authority system much like SSL certificates, which authenticate the contents of the whitelist explicitly or implicitly.
5,311,591 seems to include something to monitor this activity inside an operating system.
In both cases, emphasis is on the trust hierarchy to provide authority for trusting that such a list is valid.
DNS-and-BIND (461968) wrote:
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line annoying?
Did someone already hack you before you got this patch installed?
Time is money, so any time you fight against a corporation doing idiotic things, it is going to cost someone. The only shame here is that someone didn't fight back earlier with this defense. If you are concerned about money being spent, you will cheer this dismissal. Consider it an investment, because those settlement letters are losing their effectiveness every time RIAA gets their crappy legal theories shot down. And that costs the people less money overall.
Justice is not a waste of money, it's all of the passive settling that people did. They gave up a little money, collectively, to avoid being personally hit for a bunch of money. And basically, that's what you're complaining about - the taxpayers collectively giving up a little money so they don't get individually hit with this silly prosecution idea. Only this way, the prosecution's ideas get thrown out (yes, slowly) until they come up with something valid.
Whether the RIAA will stop going after individuals is still being debated, but they at least made the announcement, meaning they know it's not effective, or it's not based on sound legal theory.
Did you just reply to an effectively content-free post just to get placed higher, so people would have a better chance at reading/modding you?
That appears to be the case, and that is my assumption when I suggest you sodomize yourself with a retractable baton, FOAD, STFU, and tits or GTFO.
Really?
This are why we can't have nice things.