You are engaging in the kind of mindless bigotry that you probably condemn when its directed elsewhere. God has many fans and many fan clubs. Some are responsible for ending the practice of slavery (at least in the west) , increasing racial and ethnic tolerance and even protection of the environment. Others justify their own evil, violence, intolerance and bigotry by invoking God's name. I have it on good authority that God doesn't approve of the latter group. I hear he is pretty sure that they aren't even real fans. He feels used.
Look, I'm totally against piracy, copyright violations or whatever you want to call it. I disagree with the copyright and patent laws as they exist today. I don't think that all casual copying hurts the creator, but I respect their right under the laws as they exist to enforce their rights and to demand payment. However, selling used games or DVDs or books whether you are a person, a store or a chain is still legal.
Game developers need to factor that into their business model and get on with it. If you can't sell enough copies of your big budget game to make a profit then you probably should decrease your budget. Frankly the fun I have playing a game never seems to correlate to the cost of creating it.
Take the movie industry. At some point people quit paying for movies and get to see them on T.V. for no extra cost. If the marketing is good enough and the movie lives up to some of the hype you whip up then you should be able to get more than enough people to pay to make a big profit. You do the math and then invest accordingly.
Consider used book stores (and libraries). Book publishers have had to work around their existence for centuries. It seems to work well enough.
It's like the old argument against piracy - but even more so.
The "even more so" is that reselling a game and buying used games is perfectly legal and violates the rights of no one. Game developers need to respect the rights of their customers and shut up.
All of Germany fits into less than 3 of our midwestern states. Germany is about 137000 sq. miles and the U.S. is about 3.79 million sq. miles (Wikipedia). That's not 4 times it's closer to 28 times the size of Germany.
The USPS is a self-supporting corporation. It' has government mandates it must fulfill, i.e. delivering "franked" mail from Congress and providing services to every corner of the U.S at a uniform price. The U.S. population densities only approach Germany's in a few places. Much of it is very sparsely populated and not all that easy to get to.
Is the Bundespost government subsidized or self supporting? I'm suspecting the former, because the 1976 rates were several times higher than the USPS rates of 1976 (I don't recall what they were.)
Also, there is competition for the USPS for all the most profitable business except first class mail. UPS and Fedex and others deliver packages - but at rates that are typically much higher and which vary based on distance and location. They can refuse to serve any locations that are unprofitable or inconvenient. The USPS cannot. The USPS still maintains far more post offices in more locations than any private corporation could justify but they do so because citizens want their post offices regardless of how small or isolated their communities are.
I paid more for a first class stamp from the Bundespost in Germany in 1976 than I pay in the U.S. today, and the service is better. The USPS is a bargain and it's better managed than people give it credit for.
Precisely and the Fed CIO and other leaders who were wise enough to support/allow the sensible decisions to use FOSS deserve some kudos if for no other reason than to encourage more of the same. The Federal bureaucracy tends to be risk adverse and in many areas have shied away from open source and free software. Their system integrators (I used to work for one) did as well. All that is changing and that's a good thing. Now that I work for a private sector company I can point to the Fed's use of FOSS as evidence that we can trust it and rely on it. Our executives still want to give sacks of cash to vendors like IBM and Microsoft, but in the current economy they've become more receptive.
If indeed he was mod'ded down then perhaps it was because he didn't contribute anything rather than it was that he criticized something Apple. Any idiot can respond to anything with "who cares?" or "WTF?" or similar, but that's just a lazy dismissal. It's even more lazy and less helpful than a good troll or flamebait. How are you supposed to even respond to that -- "I do!" - ? It's a totally useless comment.
A more insightful response might have been along the lines of, "I had no idea there was still a market for new browsers/applications for what I assumed was a dead or near dead operating system. Could someone enlighten me on the value proposition of MacOS 9 in today's world?"
Now I'd give such a response 2 mod ups for interesting or something.
We still use IE6 where I work. We have too much stuff hard wired to it. Yet we need another browser - one that is up to date and compatible - in order to use a lot of sites and to test new externally facing applications. So we have Firefox installed everywhere too. We can install and run Firefox without disturbing our corporate standard. We can't do that if we upgrade IE.
Some are also running Safari 4 on Windows and Mac OS/X and there are a few other odds and ends around as well, but the bottom line is that if your company must continue to use IE6 for its internal apps, then they pretty much have to support a non-IE browser in order to effectively use today's internet.
and make it very broad so no other company will be able to pollute texts lest they violate Amazon's patent rights. Then I can shop for e-books from anyone but Amazon knowing the other vendors can't impose this "invention" on me.
The best things about OS X and the iPhone were published in academic journals years ago; some as much as two decades ago.
Your statement is generally true for all software. Just about every important thing we do in software was thought of by 1980. There have been refinements, polish and some interesting synergies gained by combining things - innovations, but few if any important inventions. It's just a lot of these ideas were not economically viable to implement until hardware improvements, materials and costs made them so.
You should also credit Apple for excellent execution - since Jobs returned at least - in a number of key areas which left them well-positioned to implement the good ideas once they identified them. One thing neither FOSS or Microsoft can fix is difficulty in aligning hardware and software designs when both are moving targets and only one is in your control.
I wish I hadn't spent all my mod points, because I'd mod yours up.
Yahoo is supposedly the most used destination - it's portals, site and mail services - on the internet. Why is it struggling financially while Google is raking it in? If Facebook usurps Yahoo, why will it somehow be able to "defeat" Google? Google will still be raking it in, in part because it doesn't require an admission fee - your privacy. It's monetization strategy is less obtrusive - it places ads on your page based on what you are doing. If it knows who you are, it's not because they made you fill out a form. That makes it cheaper and less objectionable to more people. It means that it is less likely to have narrow, self-selected population.
Facebook has to get you within its walls under the pretense that it will help you in your social life. Trying to monetize that requires the kinds of objectionable changes to it's terms of use that Facebook keeps getting caught trying to make. Google makes it's money doing site drive bys so to speak. You hardly know they are there.
So when you read a satirical article or book you assume that certain sentences are satire and that the rest is quite serious? When you hear a long joke, do you only judge the punchline and not the set up? Have you tried parsing at a coarser grain than a single sentence?
Plenty of people blog with high ethical standards. Certainly higher than every disgraced journalist we have seen over history (and it isn't like they are always at tabloids).
There are no standards that bloggers are held to. There is no recognized profession or board or any form of regulation or governance. There is no entrance exam, qualifications or licensing. It's just an activity anyone with Internet access can do. So only the bloggers' personal standards apply and those vary greatly from one to the other. If you find one that is consistently on the mark and accurate that you can trust, great, but you need to establish that trust first and not just believe everything you read. It's also pretty much true for "journalism" as well with the exception that journalists tend to work for organizations, some of which want good reputations so they enforce some standards. That's why I asked the question at the end of my post.
I don't know why anyone believes what is written in a blog without first checking it out. They're opinions given without any standards - professional, ethical or otherwise that apply. On the other hand, people do tend to believe whatever is communicated in any medium - talk radio, television, the internet so I suppose requiring full disclosure or potential conflicts of interest is necessary. So when will the FTC require all broadcast journalists and commentators to disclose their sources of income?
I tend to agree with you, but I live in Chicago a few files from the area he's talking about. I been there a few times. Generally in our big cities and Chicago for sure, race or ethnicity can matter - more so in some neighborhoods than in others. It's a fact relevant to the story. I suppose he dwelled on it a bit to heighten the drama for his readers - playing on their own fears/prejudices. If he were a black man writing about 3 black geeks in a white or hispanic neighborhood would you have been offended?
I think the issue here is not just DRM, it's that fact that it was used to revoke access to content already purchased. I don't know of that happening with the iTunes DRM content. Jobs fought a lot with the content sellers so that iTunes customer could own their copies of the content and not pay subscription fees. Apple also provided a pretty easy way to circumvent it's own DRM (required by the content sellers) because if you burned your content to a CD and then ripped it again, the DRM would be gone.
I don't know anything about the Zune Marketplace other that I understand they work on a subscription model which to me implies that content "renters" (in this case) have a way to revoke your ability to access the content. Their latest advertisements say that they will "let you keep" 10 (or was it 15) of your downloads each month even if you end your subscription. Still to me, the word "subscription' and the threat it implies is still there. I wouldn't touch it.
Maybe we could use reverse psychology. Obama could call Ahmadinejad, congratulate him and offer his full support. Mmmmmm. It would have worked better if G.W. was President because he could also publicly ask for pointer about how to steal an election in such a decisive way.
Similar to previous alternate architecture ports of Windows (Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC, MIPS R4x00, and Alpha) Windows XP 64-Bit Edition can run lower-bit-depth (in this case standard x86 32-bit) applications through its WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64 bit) emulation layer. While the original Itanium processor contains an on-chip IA-32 decoder, it was deemed far too slow for serious use (running at about 400 MHz), so Microsoft and Intel wrote a software 32 to 64 bit translator dubbed the IA-32 Execution Layer. It allows real time translation of x86 32 bit instructions into IA-64 instructions, allowing 32 bit applications to run (albeit significantly slower than native code).
About its replacement XP Pro 64 bit edition
Known issues
There are some common issues that arise with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Driver compatibility; Only 64 bit kernel mode drivers are supported. This means that devices for which there are no 64 bit Windows XP drivers available cannot be used. This includes a lot of common hardware, but the amount of unsupported hardware is falling due to the proliferation of x64 Vista.
Any 32 bit Windows Explorer extension fails to work with 64 bit Windows Explorer. Explorer is a 64 bit program, so it cannot load a 32 bit DLL. However, Windows XP x64 Edition also ships with the 32 bit explorer.exe, which can be used as the user's default shell with a registry change.
16 bit programs will not run, the AMD64/Intel64 architecture supports this (16-bit programs on 64-bit operating systems) but Microsoft couldn't fully support this. Unfortunately some 32 bit software have 16 bit installers, so special support for some specific installers was added (ACME Setup versions 2.6, 3.0, 3.01, and 3.1 and InstallShield versions 5.x).
Command prompts will not load in full-screen. This is also true of Windows Vista in both 32 and 64 bit editions.
Does not contain a Web Extender Client component for Web Folders (WebDAV).
Some installers refuse to install to anything other than 32 bit XP, even though the product runs perfectly on x64.
You'll probably blame the developers of the packages. I blame the entire way Microsoft approaches Windows evolution and setting clear standards, guidance and direction - at least as far as the desktop market is concerned. From the first day Windows was released until now, they have let chaos reign. Their few attempts at enforcing some order, e.g. signing and certification, were undermined because they approached more as a marketing strategy than an engineering one.
When Microsoft introduced DLL's why didn't it occur to them to require that each version be identified? Did they not know that software changes and new versions are released? Why can any installer overwrite the registry entries of other products? Why are products allowed to overwrite the operating system supplied DLLs? All of these issues and their solutions were well known in the industry save Microsoft.
At least they eventually figured out that their enterprise server operating systems should no longer be compromised by consumer based decisions like when they compromised NT 4.0 by this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750820.aspx
Well the Soviets tried the pipeline thing to bring water from the north flowing rivers to the dry southlands (Kazakstan, et al) for agriculture. It was an expensive environmental disaster. Also, the States and Provinces around the Great Lakes have entered into an agreement prohibiting excessive exports of water from the region in order to stop such schemes. It's not just that they want to keep the water for themselves, it really would be a disaster for the lake area ecosystems and agriculture.
Water for agriculture is not a waste if you plan on eating. California is perhaps our most important producer of food in this country. The midwest grows grains and cattle but California grows everything. Now it's true that less water could be used with better practices, but I agree that we should start first with eliminating all those green lawns. Why grow an Ohio lawn in a desert? Don't get me started on the golf courses and water parks. Even so, if the population keeps growing eventually, the water supplies will be exhausted. There is individual consumption and the consumption of the industries that employ these people. Given our liberal immigration policies (legal and otherwise) and our birthrates, the population growth rate of the U.S. rivals the 3rd world rates. The population has almost doubled in my lifetime.
AMD came up with a model for 64 bit processing that did not degrade the performance of 32 bit applications or compromise them by forcing them into special modes on the CPU. Intel adopted it for PCs rather than its original Itanium model. Linux and Apple adopted it and have executed smooth transitions to 64-bit computing on the desktop. What did Microsoft do?. Try running 32 bit applications on Win64 and see how well that works. Some don't. Why do you even have to buy Win64 as a separate product? Poor planning or greed?
About the registry. Unix, VMS, Mac OS 8 and 9 and other O/Ss managed application installation and library dependencies just fine for years before Windows attempted it. Don't give the "very young" excuse. They could have borrowed the better ideas instead of inventing a bad one.
BTW I"ve done my research in that I've been using and programming "microcomputers" for 32 years. I used the first versions of Windows through XP as well as a multitude of other operating systems.
Remember OS-9 for the Motorola 6809 chip? That's a pre-PC OS similar to UNIX and it was far more advanced than anything MIcrosoft produced until NT 3.5. The Amiga O/S was a better operating system than the early versions of Windows. Windows wasn't even an operating system until XP - unless you count the NT branch as being Windows. There was plenty of know how in the industry about building reliable scalable operating systems. Microsoft just wasn't interested in learning.
Just to show that I'm not an anti-Microsoft bigot, I will say that they've done some great things with SQL Server and their Windows server operating systems. Performance and scalability have dramatically improved over the years. There, feel better?;)
Until people need freshwater. California and the southwest cannot sustain the water needs of their populations and industry. Fresh potable water will become the oil of the 21st century.
Apple doesn't pretend to compete for widespread enterprise use. Not wanting to be saddled with legacy responsibilities is one reason, lousy profit margins is probably the other. Except for the jump to Intel though Apple upgrades go pretty well I've found. They have fewer problems with device driver and application compatibility than Microsoft does. Maybe its because they have stricter, better documented guidelines for developers to follow. Maybe its because they begin with a more flexible and well thought out architecture. I'd like to hear from the Linux gearheads, but my guess is that upgrades go fairly smoothly in Linux community too in part because Mac OS X (BSD) and Linux share similar strengths as operating systems.
The legitimate knocks against Microsoft products relate to their poor design and architecture decisions and the fact that they, according to Gate himself, are more interested in piling on new features than they are in refactoring and fixing what they have. Why did they create the IE6 bastard? Why couldn't they have followed the standards available at the time? Why did they try to undermine Java? Why didn't they virtualize legacy compatibility? Why did they adopt a lousy 64 bit model when AMD, Intel, Apple and Linux went with the same (good) one? The registry - WTF?
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You are engaging in the kind of mindless bigotry that you probably condemn when its directed elsewhere. God has many fans and many fan clubs. Some are responsible for ending the practice of slavery (at least in the west) , increasing racial and ethnic tolerance and even protection of the environment. Others justify their own evil, violence, intolerance and bigotry by invoking God's name. I have it on good authority that God doesn't approve of the latter group. I hear he is pretty sure that they aren't even real fans. He feels used.
Look, I'm totally against piracy, copyright violations or whatever you want to call it. I disagree with the copyright and patent laws as they exist today. I don't think that all casual copying hurts the creator, but I respect their right under the laws as they exist to enforce their rights and to demand payment. However, selling used games or DVDs or books whether you are a person, a store or a chain is still legal.
Game developers need to factor that into their business model and get on with it. If you can't sell enough copies of your big budget game to make a profit then you probably should decrease your budget. Frankly the fun I have playing a game never seems to correlate to the cost of creating it.
Take the movie industry. At some point people quit paying for movies and get to see them on T.V. for no extra cost. If the marketing is good enough and the movie lives up to some of the hype you whip up then you should be able to get more than enough people to pay to make a big profit. You do the math and then invest accordingly.
Consider used book stores (and libraries). Book publishers have had to work around their existence for centuries. It seems to work well enough.
It's like the old argument against piracy - but even more so.
The "even more so" is that reselling a game and buying used games is perfectly legal and violates the rights of no one. Game developers need to respect the rights of their customers and shut up.
All of Germany fits into less than 3 of our midwestern states. Germany is about 137000 sq. miles and the U.S. is about 3.79 million sq. miles (Wikipedia). That's not 4 times it's closer to 28 times the size of Germany.
The USPS is a self-supporting corporation. It' has government mandates it must fulfill, i.e. delivering "franked" mail from Congress and providing services to every corner of the U.S at a uniform price. The U.S. population densities only approach Germany's in a few places. Much of it is very sparsely populated and not all that easy to get to.
Is the Bundespost government subsidized or self supporting? I'm suspecting the former, because the 1976 rates were several times higher than the USPS rates of 1976 (I don't recall what they were.)
Also, there is competition for the USPS for all the most profitable business except first class mail. UPS and Fedex and others deliver packages - but at rates that are typically much higher and which vary based on distance and location. They can refuse to serve any locations that are unprofitable or inconvenient. The USPS cannot. The USPS still maintains far more post offices in more locations than any private corporation could justify but they do so because citizens want their post offices regardless of how small or isolated their communities are.
I paid more for a first class stamp from the Bundespost in Germany in 1976 than I pay in the U.S. today, and the service is better. The USPS is a bargain and it's better managed than people give it credit for.
Precisely and the Fed CIO and other leaders who were wise enough to support/allow the sensible decisions to use FOSS deserve some kudos if for no other reason than to encourage more of the same. The Federal bureaucracy tends to be risk adverse and in many areas have shied away from open source and free software. Their system integrators (I used to work for one) did as well. All that is changing and that's a good thing. Now that I work for a private sector company I can point to the Fed's use of FOSS as evidence that we can trust it and rely on it. Our executives still want to give sacks of cash to vendors like IBM and Microsoft, but in the current economy they've become more receptive.
If indeed he was mod'ded down then perhaps it was because he didn't contribute anything rather than it was that he criticized something Apple. Any idiot can respond to anything with "who cares?" or "WTF?" or similar, but that's just a lazy dismissal. It's even more lazy and less helpful than a good troll or flamebait. How are you supposed to even respond to that -- "I do!" - ? It's a totally useless comment.
A more insightful response might have been along the lines of, "I had no idea there was still a market for new browsers/applications for what I assumed was a dead or near dead operating system. Could someone enlighten me on the value proposition of MacOS 9 in today's world?"
Now I'd give such a response 2 mod ups for interesting or something.
We still use IE6 where I work. We have too much stuff hard wired to it. Yet we need another browser - one that is up to date and compatible - in order to use a lot of sites and to test new externally facing applications. So we have Firefox installed everywhere too. We can install and run Firefox without disturbing our corporate standard. We can't do that if we upgrade IE.
Some are also running Safari 4 on Windows and Mac OS/X and there are a few other odds and ends around as well, but the bottom line is that if your company must continue to use IE6 for its internal apps, then they pretty much have to support a non-IE browser in order to effectively use today's internet.
and make it very broad so no other company will be able to pollute texts lest they violate Amazon's patent rights. Then I can shop for e-books from anyone but Amazon knowing the other vendors can't impose this "invention" on me.
The best things about OS X and the iPhone were published in academic journals years ago; some as much as two decades ago.
Your statement is generally true for all software. Just about every important thing we do in software was thought of by 1980. There have been refinements, polish and some interesting synergies gained by combining things - innovations, but few if any important inventions. It's just a lot of these ideas were not economically viable to implement until hardware improvements, materials and costs made them so.
You should also credit Apple for excellent execution - since Jobs returned at least - in a number of key areas which left them well-positioned to implement the good ideas once they identified them. One thing neither FOSS or Microsoft can fix is difficulty in aligning hardware and software designs when both are moving targets and only one is in your control.
I wish I hadn't spent all my mod points, because I'd mod yours up.
Yahoo is supposedly the most used destination - it's portals, site and mail services - on the internet. Why is it struggling financially while Google is raking it in? If Facebook usurps Yahoo, why will it somehow be able to "defeat" Google? Google will still be raking it in, in part because it doesn't require an admission fee - your privacy. It's monetization strategy is less obtrusive - it places ads on your page based on what you are doing. If it knows who you are, it's not because they made you fill out a form. That makes it cheaper and less objectionable to more people. It means that it is less likely to have narrow, self-selected population.
Facebook has to get you within its walls under the pretense that it will help you in your social life. Trying to monetize that requires the kinds of objectionable changes to it's terms of use that Facebook keeps getting caught trying to make. Google makes it's money doing site drive bys so to speak. You hardly know they are there.
Oh, yeah? And what system of measures does Dr. Who use?
So when you read a satirical article or book you assume that certain sentences are satire and that the rest is quite serious? When you hear a long joke, do you only judge the punchline and not the set up? Have you tried parsing at a coarser grain than a single sentence?
Plenty of people blog with high ethical standards. Certainly higher than every disgraced journalist we have seen over history (and it isn't like they are always at tabloids).
There are no standards that bloggers are held to. There is no recognized profession or board or any form of regulation or governance. There is no entrance exam, qualifications or licensing. It's just an activity anyone with Internet access can do. So only the bloggers' personal standards apply and those vary greatly from one to the other. If you find one that is consistently on the mark and accurate that you can trust, great, but you need to establish that trust first and not just believe everything you read. It's also pretty much true for "journalism" as well with the exception that journalists tend to work for organizations, some of which want good reputations so they enforce some standards. That's why I asked the question at the end of my post.
Irony is completely lost on you, isn't it?
I don't know why anyone believes what is written in a blog without first checking it out. They're opinions given without any standards - professional, ethical or otherwise that apply. On the other hand, people do tend to believe whatever is communicated in any medium - talk radio, television, the internet so I suppose requiring full disclosure or potential conflicts of interest is necessary. So when will the FTC require all broadcast journalists and commentators to disclose their sources of income?
I tend to agree with you, but I live in Chicago a few files from the area he's talking about. I been there a few times. Generally in our big cities and Chicago for sure, race or ethnicity can matter - more so in some neighborhoods than in others. It's a fact relevant to the story. I suppose he dwelled on it a bit to heighten the drama for his readers - playing on their own fears/prejudices. If he were a black man writing about 3 black geeks in a white or hispanic neighborhood would you have been offended?
I think the issue here is not just DRM, it's that fact that it was used to revoke access to content already purchased. I don't know of that happening with the iTunes DRM content. Jobs fought a lot with the content sellers so that iTunes customer could own their copies of the content and not pay subscription fees. Apple also provided a pretty easy way to circumvent it's own DRM (required by the content sellers) because if you burned your content to a CD and then ripped it again, the DRM would be gone.
I don't know anything about the Zune Marketplace other that I understand they work on a subscription model which to me implies that content "renters" (in this case) have a way to revoke your ability to access the content. Their latest advertisements say that they will "let you keep" 10 (or was it 15) of your downloads each month even if you end your subscription. Still to me, the word "subscription' and the threat it implies is still there. I wouldn't touch it.
Maybe we could use reverse psychology. Obama could call Ahmadinejad, congratulate him and offer his full support. Mmmmmm. It would have worked better if G.W. was President because he could also publicly ask for pointer about how to steal an election in such a decisive way.
Similar to previous alternate architecture ports of Windows (Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC, MIPS R4x00, and Alpha) Windows XP 64-Bit Edition can run lower-bit-depth (in this case standard x86 32-bit) applications through its WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64 bit) emulation layer. While the original Itanium processor contains an on-chip IA-32 decoder, it was deemed far too slow for serious use (running at about 400 MHz), so Microsoft and Intel wrote a software 32 to 64 bit translator dubbed the IA-32 Execution Layer. It allows real time translation of x86 32 bit instructions into IA-64 instructions, allowing 32 bit applications to run (albeit significantly slower than native code).
About its replacement XP Pro 64 bit edition
Known issues There are some common issues that arise with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Driver compatibility; Only 64 bit kernel mode drivers are supported. This means that devices for which there are no 64 bit Windows XP drivers available cannot be used. This includes a lot of common hardware, but the amount of unsupported hardware is falling due to the proliferation of x64 Vista. Any 32 bit Windows Explorer extension fails to work with 64 bit Windows Explorer. Explorer is a 64 bit program, so it cannot load a 32 bit DLL. However, Windows XP x64 Edition also ships with the 32 bit explorer.exe, which can be used as the user's default shell with a registry change. 16 bit programs will not run, the AMD64/Intel64 architecture supports this (16-bit programs on 64-bit operating systems) but Microsoft couldn't fully support this. Unfortunately some 32 bit software have 16 bit installers, so special support for some specific installers was added (ACME Setup versions 2.6, 3.0, 3.01, and 3.1 and InstallShield versions 5.x). Command prompts will not load in full-screen. This is also true of Windows Vista in both 32 and 64 bit editions. Does not contain a Web Extender Client component for Web Folders (WebDAV). Some installers refuse to install to anything other than 32 bit XP, even though the product runs perfectly on x64.
As to compatibility problems, the internet is full of articles complaining about them: http://www.astahost.com/info.php/Windows-Xp-64-Compatibility-Problems_t13042.html http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=25631 and on and on - just google it.
You'll probably blame the developers of the packages. I blame the entire way Microsoft approaches Windows evolution and setting clear standards, guidance and direction - at least as far as the desktop market is concerned. From the first day Windows was released until now, they have let chaos reign. Their few attempts at enforcing some order, e.g. signing and certification, were undermined because they approached more as a marketing strategy than an engineering one.
When Microsoft introduced DLL's why didn't it occur to them to require that each version be identified? Did they not know that software changes and new versions are released? Why can any installer overwrite the registry entries of other products? Why are products allowed to overwrite the operating system supplied DLLs? All of these issues and their solutions were well known in the industry save Microsoft.
At least they eventually figured out that their enterprise server operating systems should no longer be compromised by consumer based decisions like when they compromised NT 4.0 by this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750820.aspx
Windows 2000 is from the NT branch. It was the successor to NT 4.0. XP was a merge - successor to 2000 (client) and Windows 98.
Well the Soviets tried the pipeline thing to bring water from the north flowing rivers to the dry southlands (Kazakstan, et al) for agriculture. It was an expensive environmental disaster. Also, the States and Provinces around the Great Lakes have entered into an agreement prohibiting excessive exports of water from the region in order to stop such schemes. It's not just that they want to keep the water for themselves, it really would be a disaster for the lake area ecosystems and agriculture.
Water for agriculture is not a waste if you plan on eating. California is perhaps our most important producer of food in this country. The midwest grows grains and cattle but California grows everything. Now it's true that less water could be used with better practices, but I agree that we should start first with eliminating all those green lawns. Why grow an Ohio lawn in a desert? Don't get me started on the golf courses and water parks. Even so, if the population keeps growing eventually, the water supplies will be exhausted. There is individual consumption and the consumption of the industries that employ these people. Given our liberal immigration policies (legal and otherwise) and our birthrates, the population growth rate of the U.S. rivals the 3rd world rates. The population has almost doubled in my lifetime.
AMD came up with a model for 64 bit processing that did not degrade the performance of 32 bit applications or compromise them by forcing them into special modes on the CPU. Intel adopted it for PCs rather than its original Itanium model. Linux and Apple adopted it and have executed smooth transitions to 64-bit computing on the desktop. What did Microsoft do?. Try running 32 bit applications on Win64 and see how well that works. Some don't. Why do you even have to buy Win64 as a separate product? Poor planning or greed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
About the registry. Unix, VMS, Mac OS 8 and 9 and other O/Ss managed application installation and library dependencies just fine for years before Windows attempted it. Don't give the "very young" excuse. They could have borrowed the better ideas instead of inventing a bad one.
BTW I"ve done my research in that I've been using and programming "microcomputers" for 32 years. I used the first versions of Windows through XP as well as a multitude of other operating systems.
Remember OS-9 for the Motorola 6809 chip? That's a pre-PC OS similar to UNIX and it was far more advanced than anything MIcrosoft produced until NT 3.5. The Amiga O/S was a better operating system than the early versions of Windows. Windows wasn't even an operating system until XP - unless you count the NT branch as being Windows. There was plenty of know how in the industry about building reliable scalable operating systems. Microsoft just wasn't interested in learning.
Just to show that I'm not an anti-Microsoft bigot, I will say that they've done some great things with SQL Server and their Windows server operating systems. Performance and scalability have dramatically improved over the years. There, feel better? ;)
Until people need freshwater. California and the southwest cannot sustain the water needs of their populations and industry. Fresh potable water will become the oil of the 21st century.
Apple doesn't pretend to compete for widespread enterprise use. Not wanting to be saddled with legacy responsibilities is one reason, lousy profit margins is probably the other. Except for the jump to Intel though Apple upgrades go pretty well I've found. They have fewer problems with device driver and application compatibility than Microsoft does. Maybe its because they have stricter, better documented guidelines for developers to follow. Maybe its because they begin with a more flexible and well thought out architecture. I'd like to hear from the Linux gearheads, but my guess is that upgrades go fairly smoothly in Linux community too in part because Mac OS X (BSD) and Linux share similar strengths as operating systems.
The legitimate knocks against Microsoft products relate to their poor design and architecture decisions and the fact that they, according to Gate himself, are more interested in piling on new features than they are in refactoring and fixing what they have. Why did they create the IE6 bastard? Why couldn't they have followed the standards available at the time? Why did they try to undermine Java? Why didn't they virtualize legacy compatibility? Why did they adopt a lousy 64 bit model when AMD, Intel, Apple and Linux went with the same (good) one? The registry - WTF?