But what's the purpose of this? You seem to think that recording everything will require the truth and I think it will inspire lies. I mean, look at our IT field, post-SOX, and what has happened? Half of the IT managers out there have meetings to decide what they will write in an email, in effect , coordinating the "story", or, lies, if you will. All this stuff that SOX has us capturing is full of lies now too, and, as a result, all of these communications tools are useless for communicating, making us much less productive as a society.
So, seeing that a requirement to record everything has made people more dishonest, you somehow think that the President would be any different? I would much rather have honest communications in government taking place, than no communications at all.
We're letting Richard Nixon and World Comm turn us into the Soviet Union, and the problem of an occasional bad President and bad company is not worth destroying all Presidents and all companies.
If your computer isn't occasionally doing something like it has a mind of its own, you are not doing your job as a geek. I view computers, from hardware on up through software, as something to be driven into the ground. Any computer can be taught sentience, with enough 2am scripts that you cron up or schedule and then forget about, like that time you installed every open source database server one night and sorta forgot about it...and enough weird processes that you've let go on and on.... as long as you can write code with it, keep launching, scripting, databasing, whatever, until your computer must be abandoned, all your intermediate work discarded with it, and you begin your struggle, and your life, anew, with a brand new PC.
Righties could try and get it out there now, but it might be better to wait with the giant protests once Obama fires his own Attorney Generals. I mean, if he lets Fitzpatrick go...then we can say, oh, change means that Bush wasn't corrupt enough to make Democrats happy!
The tax cheat is getting the pass because he's the only guy in the Federal Reserve that correctly forecast the financial meltdown BEFORE it took place. In another time, there's no way he gets the nomination, but, since the whole economy is melting down, being the smartest guy in the room actually matters more than paying your taxes on time.
After all, 'best birthday wishes' might be code for 'buy Haliburton; we's invadin' another o'l country!' and 'best wishes on your birthday' might be code for 'sell Microsoft; we're sending Gates to Guantanamo tomorrow!'
MY big thing is, if Bill Clinton was, in the mid 1990s, sitting there trying to decide accountability when deciding not to give the order to fire the missile that takes out Bin Laden, then there is no 9/11 and consequently this country avoids two wars. That to me says that all of this "Presidential accountability" is crap. As secret as Bush was, he was still held accountable through the election of someone who is completely opposed to him. All of these laws about Presidential accountability and what not came about in the wake of Watergate, and the thing is, Nixon was caught fine without them.
I think the cure is worse than the problem. Its not practical or wise to place the President under such a bubble that he or she cannot get anything done. Government needs to have some secrecy in its dealings, just as much as we do. If it turns out everything is a hailstorm of lies, so be it. But its not like we've never had our own agendas or our own deals that we make in private in our careers and those deals tend to be good for everyone. At some point, you have live and let live a bit, trust that your rulers will be somewhat honest, judge them by peacetime and your pocketbook, and move on. Forcing everyone to be public with everything creates probably more lies and more damage than just letting people be honest in secret, and there's at least 10,000 dead Americans over the last decade that proves it.
The separation of powers defined in the Constitution do not make for an *equal* separation of powers. Congress has much more authority than the other two branches of federal government.
Hamilton would disagree with you. If anything, he says that the President should be MORE powerful than the Congress, the role of the Congress to be a check on him, not the other way around.
My point is that, as soon as you allow the President to have a means of making "private" communications, then don't you think he or she would use that to keep his or her own deliberations secret? Your guys are chasing after Bush on a presumption of guilt of something, and you demand a right to all of his communications because they exist and prove your point. If Obama were to fall under the same accusations, there's no way that those communications could ever even exist, and therefor, it makes it impossible to even bother trying to go after him. He's got a relatively blank check now, that Bush never had. That's my point.
My other point is, I think its good that the President have something of a blank check because the last 16 years of Clinton/Bush subpoenas and evidence gathering did little more than to undermine the power of the Presidency relative to the Congress, and right now, the Congress is completely out of control. The job of the Congress is to manage legislation and the federal purse and its failed at both. Meanwhile, it blames its own failures on the Presidency and thus , its not only wrecking itself, it wants to drag another branch of government down with it.
The bottom line is, Dick Cheney is right. The Presidency needs to be more powerful relative to the Congress, and that is why Obama should get to keep his Blackberry, and -gasp-, even a cell phone, if he could get a secure one.
So goes our karma into off topic land. I think it should be in slashdot that any technical post is NEVER off topic!
I'll bite. No. Which shell can?
Powershell for Windows does. It can do this because in Powershell the operating principal of piping is not a text stream but rather collections of objects. In the case of my signature statement,
ls |where {$_.Length -gt 2000}|format-table Name, Length
Powershell returns a list of file objects, then, applies the filter function where to it, and the notation $_ is obviously ripped off from Perl, and -gt, well, is to avoid ambiguity I guess with the redirection operator (cheesy parser, anyone?), and then, that gets you a list of filtered file objects. That list then is pumped through the format-table operator, which, uses the name and length arguments to project the given list into a table of just name and length columns.
It's a pretty big advancement in shell technology, for sure, but its not so fancy or capital intensive that a bright person could not make a better FOSS version for Linux.
It turns out, that, after trashing Bush and Cheney for eight years for not making all of their communications public, the first thing the new Democratic President does is get for himself a means of making private communications based on his word that it will be for personal use only.
Frankly, I don't dispute the right of any President to have secret communications. He needs to be judged by his work product and not be constantly subject to the Congress. It was wrong for Republicans to harrass Clinton during his Presidency and it was wrong for Bush to be harrassed as well. IT's not because, ideally, the President is above the law, but it is because, he (or she!), is not subjugated to the Congress. They are equal branches of government.
Let's see, so far, computer models *can* predict the weather and are probably *right* about climate
The reason I made the crack about the Climate was because the reason some of the long since resolved Mann controversy was because he used code that he also used for banking and thus couldn't share it. I don't remember the exact deal or even if it was true, but the thought inspired me to a joke, if it were true.
So, if you can put aside your feelings about gw for a second, given that the left has so much riding on it, there's a pretty funny geek joke... the same buggy program destroyed capitalism first, and then liberalism second, and in a year from now all of our stock will be worth pennies on the dollar, unemployment will be 25%, and the Thames and Delaware will be both frozen solid, all because of a missing semicolon.
Let's see, so far, computer models have failed to accurately manage loan portfolios to higher risk buyers, failed to manage risk books for hedge funds, could not capture currency trading, can't predict the weather and are probably wrong about climate. Sure, let's have them predict nobel prize winners while we are at it!
The trick, of course, is to dehydrate that water before it leaves Mars. Your liter of water turns into a small packet of dust which your customers simply need to reconstitute before use
You pay about $50 a month to use their O/S. And then you pay an extra $10 a month for Word, or get the Premium package with Word, Excel, and Access for $20.
If Windows + Office + Visual Studio were around $50 a month, I don't think Linux would even have a shot, so long as you got a couple of games along with the ride.
I prefer to own, not rent my application
You don't own any application you use, unless you wrote it. Even under the GPL, you are permitted to modify and copy it, but the original copyright belongs to the author of that product. If you just -owned- the software you got, but could copy it freely, that would essentially be public domain and RMS himself has already written quite a bit on why public domain is bad for software. To some extent, RMS was motivated by companies in the early unix world essentially stealing software by commercializing something in the public domain and then restricting other people's right to do what they did.
Actually, with Vista and Visual Studio 2008 and Windows 7 will seal the deal. I've railed on about how Microsoft has abandoned native code developers, and that's tuned me into Linux quite a bit... but...
Visual Studio 2008's C++ compiler is pretty darned good. Everyone rips MFC, and deservedly, in some ways, but, all of sudden, everyone else's "slim" C++ framework is suddenly pretty darned fat. I mean, doc/view in wxwidgets? And you surely gest if you think Qt is thin. And, MFC, for all of its ugliness, comes now with those fancy Office ribbon bars that I just love. I know it sounds crazy, but I see those ribbon bars popping out of the default MFC application, and I'm like, yeah, I know its a fatter framework than WTL and everyone in the Unix world will laugh at my giant download... but look at those ribbon bars, minitabs, and all the other widgets that other frameworks simply do not have.
Microsoft does have to watch out though, because my foundness for the MFC facelift in no way diminishes the excellent work under way with the tools for wxWidgets. There's some forms editor tools for wxWidgets that have no native C++ answer in Visual Studio and that's something Microsoft really ought to worry about.
And, in Windows 7, those fancy ribbon bars are going to be shipping as part of Windows.
But all in all, compared to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, I really like Vista as a desktop. I really do. That's not to say that Vista is better than Hardy in every regard - Hardy trumps for working with ISOs and command line dvd burning is a hoot, but... the way that the task bar works, the folder search works, the file open dialogs work, and, its pretty darned stable, and feels faster than Hardy does, I must say.
The one thing that does suck about Windows 7, though, is that I think the Outlook Express -> Windows Mail in Vista is a mail client that I think Microsoft finally got right for casual pop mail, and that's going away evidently.
First off, as a loyal Mozilla user since the days of Mosaic, I strongly disagree that IE was "better" in 1996. Penn State installed IE on all its machine, and I hated it.
What was good about NN? IE4 was flat out better. You had a fully programmable DOM in JavaScript, and NN had layer tags, partial scripting capability, and then document.write to redo the whole document for everything else. I mean, how many years went by where Netscape could not do reflow content around hidden elements? I remember a lot of web developers that wanted Netscape to win, didn't like Microsoft, but wound up being impressed with what they did with IE 4. I remember sitting back popping a cold one with a big Netscape fan, screwing around with IE 4 Javascript, and we both looked at each like, it's all over for Netscape if they don't respond.
And they didn't. And it's not like they didn't have the money. At the time, Netscape had billions in venture capital and they blew it on turning a browser into this whole computing platform, except that it sucked to program it.
The fact of the matter is, sometimes yeah, giving something away works, but, if it you do that, it has to be good. IE was given away for a long time when NN was being charged for, and went nowhere. Everyone had IE 2 and the W95 plus pack, and it sucked. But people went and bought NN.
If -anyone- killed NN by giving a product away for free, too, it is the Apache Foundation and the FOSS community. Let's not forget that the whole point of Netscape's business was an end to end internet with the big money coming out of the enterprise and that there was a Netscape Enterprise Web Server. Netscape was expected to make big money off of their server business, much more so than their browser business, and their efforts to monetize the web server business were shouted out and drowned out by FOSS advocates, who went with Apache.
I know what YouTube is talking about. It's this practice where people take their favorite song and make it the background music for whatever cheesy video they have cobbled together. Guess what? i t s n o t y o u r s o n g a n d y o u c a n t d o t h a t.
Oh well. If anything, the more Youtube is cleansed of videos of Thomas the Tank Engine set to bad Journey songs, (as if there are good ones?), well, I'm all in favor of it.
?This is like kicking a man with no legs. Compare windows to OS X for a fair fight.
OS/X has a lot of good stuff in there, I will give you that. Apple has done a good job and they have definitely pushed Microsoft to make a new OS after XP, and even better, a new one after Vista.
Lets not forget that IE became dominant through the illegal leveraging of Windows. Yes it was better then the competition, but because they cheated.
That's not true AT all. IE became dominant because IE 4.x was much, much better than NN was as IE had a fully programmable object model and NN was stuck with a partially programmable one. Remember document.write?
I absolutely cannot stand IE as it is today, and so, I'm typing this post using Google Chrome on Windows Vista.
How does Opera even make an anti-trust argument when FireFox is gobbling up IE market share? For an increasing percentage of Windows users, IE is the thing you use to download some other browser.
From a consumer perspective, that a Linux distribution comes with Firefox is not really any different than a Windows distribution coming with IE. In both cases, I can go and get and use the browser that I want to use. Really, in that sense, Opera's problem is not so much Microsoft as it is Google. FireFox and Chrome are both better than Opera is too, and that's really what Opera's problem is.
I would think the argument that Microsoft swindles its customers is foolish. There is stuff that Ubuntu does that I think Microsoft is remiss in not doing, certainly. Ubuntu's out of the box DVD burning and ISO viewing capabilities are certainly better than what Windows offers, but, to say that Linux is better is silly. To say that Microsoft rips its customers off, is just ignorant.
Really, the only real weak link in the Microsoft stack is actually IE. But IE was better than everyone else for almost 7 years, and, the only reason its lagging is arguably because Google is writing 50M checks a year to Mozilla and is also probably spending as much on Chrome. Similarly, Apache enjoys its success against IIS because Apache is well funded by the consortium of ISPs that use it.
Beyond that, there are some noticable gaps between Linux and Windows.
Right now, my Vista desktop is in a lot of ways far more polished and more attractive than the Linux desktop is. The Windows 95 desktop of Start Bar and multiview folders is a design that has proven so successful that even Apple's dockbar is closer to it than the original Mac Finder (it's even at the bottom now!), and of course, that 9x bar is ripped off completely by KDE and Gnome, but with "other stuff". Sure KDE 4.x struggles along with its search in the start bar trick, but it works swimmingly well on my Vista right now.
Internally, a brief scan of Vista shows an operating system where Linux lacks and in some rather strong ways. Right off the wheel, Windows desktop tends to get the balance of thread priorities between services and user interface right. There is no answer to WAML on Linux. There is no answer to DirectX 10.
Everyone rips the Windows SDK but it has fonts native to the drawing API. Honestly, not having fonts with X might be hyped as a good architectural support but honestly its a copout because X lets you draw everything else. But if anything vindicates Microsoft's GDI model it is that Remote Desktop is proven and solid and excellent with Windows, and Linux doesn't even really use X's remoting capabilities for its remote desktop. So there, you have a Linux operating system that robbed its gui developers of something as basic as fonts in order to achieve a network transparency that you don't even use for your own remote desktops, eschewing a simpler bitmaps based api instead. How foolish is that!
No Linux widget set has the flexibility of the the much maligned USER and COMMON CONTROL widget library that bundles with Windows. The File Open dialogs in Linux are weak compared to Windows XP and offer simply no comparison to that in Windows Vista. ListViews in GTK are ok but they don't have the report view that was added for XP and they certainly don't have all the other fancy stuff that came out with Vista, and finally, yes, even the dated Windows MENU objects are going to be joined by the swank new Office 2007 menu bars. That's right, Office 2007 menus are going to be NATIVE TO WINDOWS 7. Please, desktop Linux? Desktop Windows is simply better, and not just better, but amazingly better and in a lot of ways.
The desktops for Linux are not as universally extensible as those for Windows and largely that's a function of Linux being unable to agree on a single object model whereas COM is now well entrenched, well understood, and at least for inprocess objects, works rather well. Where's IDispatch for Linux?
If we go back up to the desktop, we can have a look at Windows control panel and just perhaps enumerate a few quick things still missing or incomplete in Ubuntu. Accessibility. Speech. Color Profiles.
Then of course we look at system snapshots that Windows let you roll back system versions if you want to.
I'm still waiting for a Linux development product with an integrated forms editor, the same way that has been out since VB and then Visual C++, since, well, 1993, besides Java. KDevelop can't do it. Linux development in some ways is stuck in a world that Microsoft left almost 20 years ago,
That's just silly. Do you really want developers all installing versions of the browser core all over the OS with their applications? Besides, WININET has been replaced by something better anyway.
I have an idea. Let's go and sue Linux distributions for bundling free and open source browsers with it, because it wrecks the market for my $40 closed source browser!
Opera's antitrust case is stupid. Every operating system comes with a browser. Linux comes with a browser. OS/X comes with a browser. iPhone comes with a browser.
So, if Microsoft is screwed by this obvious example of European protectionism, I would hope they leave the pieces of IE but in a developer friendly way.
I would just break out all the windows that comprise IE, and let every developer on the planet use all the pieces of IE to make their own IE and sell it. Then Microsoft could make its own IE available for download, and Opera would still be as screwed as it deserves for putting lawyers into the marketplace.
Uhhhh...what? Tenacious D is 2 chubby white guys. I dont care if you are racist and like the word nigge
I think it is only racist to say that only black people can be niggers. Don't be pinning your racism on me.
You celebrate people that use offensive language, and yet, you cannot stand offensive language that other people use. That's my point. You aren't advocating free speech, just, your speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Is he still the President? Record everything
But what's the purpose of this? You seem to think that recording everything will require the truth and I think it will inspire lies. I mean, look at our IT field, post-SOX, and what has happened? Half of the IT managers out there have meetings to decide what they will write in an email, in effect , coordinating the "story", or, lies, if you will. All this stuff that SOX has us capturing is full of lies now too, and, as a result, all of these communications tools are useless for communicating, making us much less productive as a society.
So, seeing that a requirement to record everything has made people more dishonest, you somehow think that the President would be any different? I would much rather have honest communications in government taking place, than no communications at all.
We're letting Richard Nixon and World Comm turn us into the Soviet Union, and the problem of an occasional bad President and bad company is not worth destroying all Presidents and all companies.
Without secrecy, there is no honesty.
If your computer isn't occasionally doing something like it has a mind of its own, you are not doing your job as a geek. I view computers, from hardware on up through software, as something to be driven into the ground. Any computer can be taught sentience, with enough 2am scripts that you cron up or schedule and then forget about, like that time you installed every open source database server one night and sorta forgot about it...and enough weird processes that you've let go on and on.... as long as you can write code with it, keep launching, scripting, databasing, whatever, until your computer must be abandoned, all your intermediate work discarded with it, and you begin your struggle, and your life, anew, with a brand new PC.
Righties could try and get it out there now, but it might be better to wait with the giant protests once Obama fires his own Attorney Generals. I mean, if he lets Fitzpatrick go...then we can say, oh, change means that Bush wasn't corrupt enough to make Democrats happy!
The tax cheat is getting the pass because he's the only guy in the Federal Reserve that correctly forecast the financial meltdown BEFORE it took place. In another time, there's no way he gets the nomination, but, since the whole economy is melting down, being the smartest guy in the room actually matters more than paying your taxes on time.
After all, 'best birthday wishes' might be code for 'buy Haliburton; we's invadin' another o'l country!' and 'best wishes on your birthday' might be code for 'sell Microsoft; we're sending Gates to Guantanamo tomorrow!'
MY big thing is, if Bill Clinton was, in the mid 1990s, sitting there trying to decide accountability when deciding not to give the order to fire the missile that takes out Bin Laden, then there is no 9/11 and consequently this country avoids two wars. That to me says that all of this "Presidential accountability" is crap. As secret as Bush was, he was still held accountable through the election of someone who is completely opposed to him. All of these laws about Presidential accountability and what not came about in the wake
of Watergate, and the thing is, Nixon was caught fine without them.
I think the cure is worse than the problem.
Its not practical or wise to place the President under such a bubble that he or she cannot get anything done. Government needs to have some secrecy in its dealings, just as much as we do. If it turns out everything is a hailstorm of lies, so be it. But its not like we've never had our own agendas or our own deals that we make in private in our careers and those deals tend to be good for everyone. At some point, you have live and let live a bit, trust that your rulers will be somewhat honest, judge them by peacetime and your pocketbook, and move on. Forcing everyone to be public with everything creates probably more lies and more damage than just letting people be honest in secret, and there's at least 10,000 dead Americans over the last decade that proves it.
The separation of powers defined in the Constitution do not make for an *equal* separation of powers. Congress has much more authority than the other two branches of federal government.
Hamilton would disagree with you. If anything, he says that the President should be MORE powerful than the Congress, the role of the Congress to be a check on him, not the other way around.
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa70.htm
My point is that, as soon as you allow the President to have a means of making "private" communications, then don't you think he or she would use that to keep his or her own deliberations secret? Your guys are chasing after Bush on a presumption of guilt of something, and you demand a right to all of his communications because they exist and prove your point. If Obama were to fall under the same accusations, there's no way that those communications could ever even exist, and therefor, it makes it impossible to even bother trying to go after him. He's got a relatively blank check now, that Bush never had. That's my point.
My other point is, I think its good that the President have something of a blank check because the last 16 years of Clinton/Bush subpoenas and evidence gathering did little more than to undermine the power of the Presidency relative to the Congress, and right now, the Congress is completely out of control. The job of the Congress is to manage legislation and the federal purse and its failed at both. Meanwhile, it blames its own failures on the Presidency and thus , its not only wrecking itself, it wants to drag another branch of government down with it.
The bottom line is, Dick Cheney is right. The Presidency needs to be more powerful relative to the Congress, and that is why Obama should get to keep his Blackberry, and -gasp-, even a cell phone, if he could get a secure one.
So goes our karma into off topic land. I think it should be in slashdot that any technical post is NEVER off topic!
I'll bite. No. Which shell can?
Powershell for Windows does. It can do this because in Powershell the operating principal of piping is not a text stream but rather collections of objects. In the case of my signature statement,
ls |where {$_.Length -gt 2000}|format-table Name, Length
Powershell returns a list of file objects, then, applies the filter function where to it, and the notation $_ is obviously ripped off from Perl, and -gt, well, is to avoid ambiguity I guess with the redirection operator (cheesy parser, anyone?), and then, that gets you a list of filtered file objects. That list then is pumped through the format-table operator, which, uses the name and length arguments to project the given list into a table of just name and length columns.
It's a pretty big advancement in shell technology, for sure, but its not so fancy or capital intensive that a bright person could not make a better FOSS version for Linux.
It turns out, that, after trashing Bush and Cheney for eight years for not making all of their communications public, the first thing the new Democratic President does is get for himself a means of making private communications based on his word that it will be for personal use only.
Frankly, I don't dispute the right of any President to have secret communications. He needs to be judged by his work product and not be constantly subject to the Congress. It was wrong for Republicans to harrass Clinton during his Presidency and it was wrong for Bush to be harrassed as well. IT's not because, ideally, the President is above the law, but it is because, he (or she!), is not subjugated to the Congress. They are equal branches of government.
Let's see, so far, computer models *can* predict the weather and are probably *right* about climate
The reason I made the crack about the Climate was because the reason some of the long since resolved Mann controversy was because he used code that he also used for banking and thus couldn't share it. I don't remember the exact deal or even if it was true, but the thought inspired me to a joke, if it were true.
So, if you can put aside your feelings about gw for a second, given that the left has so much riding on it, there's a pretty funny geek joke... the same buggy program destroyed capitalism first, and then liberalism second, and in a year from now all of our stock will be worth pennies on the dollar, unemployment will be 25%, and the Thames and Delaware will be both frozen solid, all because of a missing semicolon.
So hardly you can call it as any important part of windows 7.
Yeah, but that means that they will be in \windows\system32, and that, I can use them.
Let's see, so far, computer models have failed to accurately manage loan portfolios to higher risk buyers, failed to manage risk books for hedge funds, could not capture currency trading, can't predict the weather and are probably wrong about climate. Sure, let's have them predict nobel prize winners while we are at it!
The trick, of course, is to dehydrate that water before it leaves Mars. Your liter of water turns into a small packet of dust which your customers simply need to reconstitute before use
I guess you would call that Marsani?
You pay about $50 a month to use their O/S. And then you pay an extra $10 a month for Word, or get the Premium package with Word, Excel, and Access for $20.
If Windows + Office + Visual Studio were around $50 a month, I don't think Linux would even have a shot, so long as you got a couple of games along with the ride.
I prefer to own, not rent my application
You don't own any application you use, unless you wrote it. Even under the GPL, you are permitted to modify and copy it, but the original copyright belongs to the author of that product. If you just -owned- the software you got, but could copy it freely, that would essentially be public domain and RMS himself has already written quite a bit on why public domain is bad for software. To some extent, RMS was motivated by companies in the early unix world essentially stealing software by commercializing something in the public domain and then restricting other people's right to do what they did.
Actually, with Vista and Visual Studio 2008 and Windows 7 will seal the deal. I've railed on about how Microsoft has abandoned native code developers, and that's tuned me into Linux quite a bit... but...
Visual Studio 2008's C++ compiler is pretty darned good. Everyone rips MFC, and deservedly, in some ways, but, all of sudden, everyone else's "slim" C++ framework is suddenly pretty darned fat. I mean, doc/view in wxwidgets? And you surely gest if you think Qt is thin. And, MFC, for all of its ugliness, comes now with those fancy Office ribbon bars that I just love. I know it sounds crazy, but I see those ribbon bars popping out of the default MFC application, and I'm like, yeah, I know its a fatter framework than WTL and everyone in the Unix world will laugh at my giant download... but look at those ribbon bars, minitabs, and all the other widgets that other frameworks simply do not have.
Microsoft does have to watch out though, because my foundness for the MFC facelift in no way diminishes the excellent work under way with the tools for wxWidgets. There's some forms editor tools for wxWidgets that have no native C++ answer in Visual Studio and that's something Microsoft really ought to worry about.
And, in Windows 7, those fancy ribbon bars are going to be shipping as part of Windows.
But all in all, compared to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, I really like Vista as a desktop. I really do. That's not to say that Vista is better than Hardy in every regard - Hardy trumps for working with ISOs and command line dvd burning is a hoot, but... the way that the task bar works, the folder search works, the file open dialogs work, and, its pretty darned stable, and feels faster than Hardy does, I must say.
The one thing that does suck about Windows 7, though, is that I think the Outlook Express -> Windows Mail in Vista is a mail client that I think Microsoft finally got right for casual pop mail, and that's going away evidently.
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First off, as a loyal Mozilla user since the days of Mosaic, I strongly disagree that IE was "better" in 1996. Penn State installed IE on all its machine, and I hated it.
What was good about NN? IE4 was flat out better. You had a fully programmable DOM in JavaScript, and NN had layer tags, partial scripting capability, and then document.write to redo the whole document for everything else. I mean, how many years went by where Netscape could not do reflow content around hidden elements? I remember a lot of web developers that wanted Netscape to win, didn't like Microsoft, but wound up being impressed with what they did with IE 4. I remember sitting back popping a cold one with a big Netscape fan, screwing around with IE 4 Javascript, and we both looked at each like, it's all over for Netscape if they don't respond.
And they didn't. And it's not like they didn't have the money. At the time, Netscape had billions in venture capital and they blew it on turning a browser into this whole computing platform, except that it sucked to program it.
The fact of the matter is, sometimes yeah, giving something away works, but, if it you do that, it has to be good. IE was given away for a long time when NN was being charged for, and went nowhere. Everyone had IE 2 and the W95 plus pack, and it sucked. But people went and bought NN.
If -anyone- killed NN by giving a product away for free, too, it is the Apache Foundation and the FOSS community. Let's not forget that the whole point of Netscape's business was an end to end internet with the big money coming out of the enterprise and that there was a Netscape Enterprise Web Server. Netscape was expected to make big money off of their server business, much more so than their browser business, and their efforts to monetize the web server business were shouted out and drowned out by FOSS advocates, who went with Apache.
I know what YouTube is talking about. It's this practice where people take their favorite song and make it the background music for whatever cheesy video they have cobbled together. Guess what? i t s n o t y o u r s o n g a n d y o u c a n t d o t h a t.
Oh well. If anything, the more Youtube is cleansed of videos of Thomas the Tank Engine set to bad Journey songs, (as if there are good ones?), well, I'm all in favor of it.
?This is like kicking a man with no legs. Compare windows to OS X for a fair fight.
OS/X has a lot of good stuff in there, I will give you that. Apple has done a good job and they have definitely pushed Microsoft to make a new OS after XP, and even better, a new one after Vista.
Lets not forget that IE became dominant through the illegal leveraging of Windows. Yes it was better then the competition, but because they cheated.
That's not true AT all. IE became dominant because IE 4.x was much, much better than NN was as IE had a fully programmable object model and NN was stuck with a partially programmable one. Remember document.write?
I absolutely cannot stand IE as it is today, and so, I'm typing this post using Google Chrome on Windows Vista.
How does Opera even make an anti-trust argument when FireFox is gobbling up IE market share? For an increasing percentage of Windows users, IE is the thing you use to download some other browser.
From a consumer perspective, that a Linux distribution comes with Firefox is not really any different than a Windows distribution coming with IE. In both cases, I can go and get and use the browser that I want to use. Really, in that sense, Opera's problem is not so much Microsoft as it is Google. FireFox and Chrome are both better than Opera is too, and that's really what Opera's problem is.
I would think the argument that Microsoft swindles its customers is foolish. There is stuff that Ubuntu does that I think Microsoft is remiss in not doing, certainly. Ubuntu's out of the box DVD burning and ISO viewing capabilities are certainly better than what Windows offers, but, to say that Linux is better is silly. To say that Microsoft rips its customers off, is just ignorant.
Really, the only real weak link in the Microsoft stack is actually IE. But IE was better than everyone else for almost 7 years, and, the only reason its lagging is arguably because Google is writing 50M checks a year to Mozilla and is also probably spending as much on Chrome. Similarly, Apache enjoys its success against IIS because Apache is well funded by the consortium of ISPs that use it.
Beyond that, there are some noticable gaps between Linux and Windows.
Right now, my Vista desktop is in a lot of ways far more polished and more attractive than the Linux desktop is. The Windows 95 desktop of Start Bar and multiview folders is a design that has proven so successful that even Apple's dockbar is closer to it than the original Mac Finder (it's even at the bottom now!), and of course, that 9x bar is ripped off completely by KDE and Gnome, but with "other stuff". Sure KDE 4.x struggles along with its search in the start bar trick, but it works swimmingly well on my Vista right now.
Internally, a brief scan of Vista shows an operating system where Linux lacks and in some rather strong ways. Right off the wheel, Windows desktop tends to get the balance of thread priorities between services and user interface right. There is no answer to WAML on Linux. There is no answer to DirectX 10.
Everyone rips the Windows SDK but it has fonts native to the drawing API. Honestly, not having fonts with X might be hyped as a good architectural support but honestly its a copout because X lets you draw everything else. But if anything vindicates Microsoft's GDI model it is that Remote Desktop is proven and solid and excellent with Windows, and Linux doesn't even really use X's remoting capabilities for its remote desktop. So there, you have a Linux operating system that robbed its gui developers of something as basic as fonts in order to achieve a network transparency that you don't even use for your own remote desktops, eschewing a simpler bitmaps based api instead. How foolish is that!
No Linux widget set has the flexibility of the the much maligned USER and COMMON CONTROL widget library that bundles with Windows. The File Open dialogs in Linux are weak compared to Windows XP and offer simply no comparison to that in Windows Vista. ListViews in GTK are ok but they don't have the report view that was added for XP and they certainly don't have all the other fancy stuff that came out with Vista, and finally, yes, even the dated Windows MENU objects are going to be joined by the swank new Office 2007 menu bars. That's right, Office 2007 menus are going to be NATIVE TO WINDOWS 7. Please, desktop Linux? Desktop Windows is simply better, and not just better, but amazingly better and in a lot of ways.
The desktops for Linux are not as universally extensible as those for Windows and largely that's a function of Linux being unable to agree on a single object model whereas COM is now well entrenched, well understood, and at least for inprocess objects, works rather well. Where's IDispatch for Linux?
If we go back up to the desktop, we can have a look at Windows control panel and just perhaps enumerate a few quick things still missing or incomplete in Ubuntu. Accessibility. Speech. Color Profiles.
Then of course we look at system snapshots that Windows let you roll back system versions if you want to.
I'm still waiting for a Linux development product with an integrated forms editor, the same way that has been out since VB and then Visual C++, since, well, 1993, besides Java. KDevelop can't do it. Linux development in some ways is stuck in a world that Microsoft left almost 20 years ago,
That's just silly. Do you really want developers all installing versions of the browser core all over the OS with their applications? Besides, WININET has been replaced by something better anyway.
I have an idea. Let's go and sue Linux distributions for bundling free and open source browsers with it, because it wrecks the market for my $40 closed source browser!
Opera's antitrust case is stupid. Every operating system comes with a browser. Linux comes with a browser. OS/X comes with a browser. iPhone comes with a browser.
So, if Microsoft is screwed by this obvious example of European protectionism, I would hope they leave the pieces of IE but in a developer friendly way.
I would just break out all the windows that comprise IE, and let every developer on the planet use all the pieces of IE to make their own IE and sell it. Then Microsoft could make its own IE available for download, and Opera would still be as screwed as it deserves for putting lawyers into the marketplace.
Uhhhh...what? Tenacious D is 2 chubby white guys. I dont care if you are racist and like the word nigge
I think it is only racist to say that only black people can be niggers. Don't be pinning your racism on me.
You celebrate people that use offensive language, and yet, you cannot stand offensive language that other people use. That's my point. You aren't advocating free speech, just, your speech.
MY grandfather drank coffee every day, and in his last years he got alzheimers. So, I wouldn't go around expecting drinking coffee to make you immune.