Overall this guys seems completely confused. He complains about a lack flexibility then complains that there are four ways to add/remove packages (then proceeds to only list three ways). He spends half the article complaining that Ubuntu doesn't allow flexibility: it doesn't allow me to partition my disk in the installer, or display the GRUB menu by default! OK... if you enough of a power user to need that you can probably find fdisk and grub.conf post install... Then the other half complaining that all anyone really needs is apt-get, or wondering why Ubuntu doesn't babysit it's users to the point of requiring users to log in as root to install a printer. Pick one dammit, is it to flexible? Not flexible enough? Does it need to assume that users are smart (and allow them to partition their own drives, or use apt-get exclusively), or assume they're stupid (and can't edit a fricken grub.conf or use sudo).
His article essentially seems to say: "This Distro is pretty nice, but it's not exactly the way I would have done it, so it needs improvement."
Yeah, SCO was terrible. If you look through old Samba TNG mailing lists you can actually find where I tried to get help compiling on SCO back in 2000 and Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, the lead developer, replied:
"i tried compiling on sco, too, and libtool went "urgh, sco!""
Which you carry around in a laptop bag and hook up before class? The subject is using laptops for notes... A model M would probably outweigh any reasonably new laptop you hooked it up to:-)
Of course one could sue Comcast for false advertising based on the fact that these numbers are, by current standards, quite reasonable. The "pictures" are where they screw themselves. Most current digital cameras take 7-10 MP pics. 2-3 MB a shot. It's hard to argue that this isn't "normal" since every camera in Best Buy has these specs.
Yeah, the first Gulf War, which was sold to the American people by the Bush administration (the first one, remember? Junior's Daddy?). It was a much better sell job (though arguably a much easier sell job). It was, I personally think, a much more justified war than the current one, but still had some significant spin involved in selling it.
"A mortgaged house you live in, in economist terms, is a liability and not an asset even though the poor have been taught to think this way."
Not true, or at least true only in a circumstance where real estate values are static or declining, or a person is continuously borrowing against their equity. Assuming a static real estate market, my home has a value in real terms of however much I have paid against the principle of my loan. if I bought the house last month, and made my first payment, in theory my home has a real value to me of $100 or whatever the principle portion of my payment was. If real estate values go up (as they continue to do, albeit slower than they have been), I have real value of whatever portion of my principle I have paid plus the increase in value. As a rule (and certainly this could change) real estate prices increase faster than the combination of interest and inflation. This means that in real terms, I am usually making money. If I get smart or lucky, and come into an area on cusp of regentrification in a city, I can make a lot of money.
Friends of mine bought a house in such an area for around 75K, and sold it (with a 15-20K of renovation) for over 200K only 4 years later. My wife and bought an already remodeled house in the same area a year after them, and paid nearly twice a much. We still made large profit after only three years.
I might (might) have been able to make more money in the same amount of time with the same initial investment in some other markets, but I would not have been able to live in my stocks, bonds or commodities while I waited for the investment to mature.
Audible.com files are not DRM free, but they have a DRM agent for Mac. I've used their services and can verify that their content works on Mac exactly the same way as it works in Windows. I don't know about FOSS operating systems; I seriously doubt it works with them.
No offense, but if you can't hear "no" or "I can't do that", then I don't want to work for you. Granted, these words should be followed up with a good reason why, but if you tell me you need something impossible or on an impossible time line, you sometimes have to hear "I cant do that".
Personally I try to play more towards "I can do that, but I'll need two more weeks" or "that solution won't work, but may let me look into something that might," but one one or two occasions I've been asked for stuff that was just so impossible I couldn't do it. Personally, If I was he manager (and I have been) I'd rather hear an honest "I can't do that" than come back two weeks later to an incomplete project that I already told my boss should be ready.
Having done both dev and support jobs, I can think of two answers to your question. The first is that IT policies are written for users, not developers. Developers are a subset of users. Let's say I am writing policy for a 700 person organization, and 12 of those people are developers. My boss wants a policy that he can give to his boss (probably the CEO, president, or owner given the imagined size of this company and my imagined level of responsibility). Ideally my boss wants a policy that everyone has to follow, even his own boss. So he tells his boss, quite reasonably, "well JD, the reason you and everyone else has to go through this procedure to get software installed is so my smart boys can make sure you're not accidentally getting any viruses or anything, and you know how Baker is about anyone buying anything unless his people know about it."
Do you want to be the one that tells JD about the twelve guys over in development who don't have to follow this procedure that everyone else, even JD (or so the CIO really hopes) follows? Of course not. They're users like everyone else.
The second reason is even simpler. I've done dev and admin. I've worked in big places and small places. I've traveled around and worked in a big place one day and a small place the next. In my experience out of every ten devs there will be four who are willing and able to admin their own machines and will do so responsibly. There will be two who may or may not be able to admin their own machines but will be unwilling to do so because it's beneath them. There will be three who are willing and seem able, but have some gapping holes in their knowledge and will eventually do something stupid. Then there will be one who is absolutely bat shit nuts and will destroy machines weekly. He'll install this patch and registry hack that his friend wrote to let Windows use ReiserFS as its root partition then call IT because his system is unstable and he can't figure out why. After a week of work he'll admit that maybe he might have made a small hack... (no, that never actually happened, but I've seen some developers do some insane things with root/admin access)
Good devs aren't always good admins and let's face it, not all devs are even good devs. (Not to say that all admins are good admins either). Policies are written for people in general, not for one person in particular. You personally may be the best developer and admin in the company and you see no reason why you can tweak your workstation into the lean mean coding machine you need it to be, but policy has to be written to take into account the guy who works next to you and keeps confusing "while... do" with "do... while" and forgetting that C arrays begin their identifiers with 0 and not 1.
The Marines are not a branch of the Armed Services, they are a department of the Naval Branch. I'm not saying that to be an asshole, it's the legal truth. Whether they should be or not is an entirely different question, but the fact remain that they are not. Technically the Coast Guard is not a branch either UNLESS they are called to be in a state of emergency. So while the Marines are not a branch of service, the Coast Guard can be under certain circumstances.
No, it's his job to determine whether the laws meets the requirements of higher law. The Constitution instituted a hierarchy of law, with itself at the top. No law may violate the scriptures of the Constitution as it is the source from which all authority to make law flows. Constitution > treaties > legislated law > bureaucratic agency devised rules. All the judge is doing is saying that no part of the PATRIOT act can violate the Constitution because the Constitution is a higher law.
In those cases the executives in question committed criminal acts and were charged with crimes. There's a difference between being punished because you did something wrong, and being punished because some goon five level down from you on the corporate chain made a dumb mistake. The OP mentions that as a professional engineer he is responsible for the action of his company, despite the fact that it is a corporation. Of course all professional engineering companies are REQUIRED to have at least one supervising professional engineer. Same with architecture firms, law firms, and lots of other "professional" companies. This is because at some point some one decided that there need to be a licensed professional personally in charge of licensed professional activities. If the board of the OP's company has members who are NOT professional engineers (unlikely and probably not legal though that is), they are NOT personally responsible if the bridge the company is building falls down (Which is why many industries ban non-professionals from even serving on the boards of professional companies.)
If the argument is that perhaps IT should be made a legal "profession", with a certifying board to establish competency, requirements that a professional services IT company have a board certified IT professional who is responsible for the company's actions, and an expectation that large non-IT specific companies also have a board certified IT professional to manage company practices (like the legal or medical departments have certified doctors and lawyers), you might have a good idea. As it is you're asking that the members of a board of directors, who probably have no IT knowledge at all, personally pay for the actions of some guy several levels below them, who did something they probably wouldn't have even understood was bad at the time had they known he did it.
Professional engineers are held responsible for the actions of their firms because by definition they understand and usually have to sign off on the actions of their underlings. If Bobo the rookie engineer makes some huge material strength error in his latest plans, it's OK (well not for Bobo probably, but for the company), because Bobo is by law supervised by at least one board certified professional engineer who should catch the mistake before s/he signs the plans. If the supervisor fails to catch the mistake, or if Bob the board certified engineer who works for himself makes the same mistake and signs his own plans, there is liability to the person who signed the plans. Since IT lacks any sort of professional organization to say "Sue is a certified IT professional", Sue's liability is limited to where she can be proved to have been negligent. Did she know that Bobo the rookie It guy made a mistake? who knows? Did she report it to her boss (who doesn't even have to know anything about IT to be her boss)? Who knows. Can she be sued? Maybe. Can her Boss? That pushing it. Can Bobo? Probably, but he makes 35K a year and owes 10 of it his credit card company. Not going to help you much I'm afraid.
Now if it can be proven that one of the board ordered the firewall to be taken down, or that they knew it was down and took no action despite the realization that it would cause huge problems for their customers, then they might be personally liable. This would be a criminal action on par with what Enron's executives did. This would be willful misconduct. As it is, they probably didn't even realize the problem existed until it was so late that all they could do was jump ship.
I suspect the GP is misunderstanding Parallels ability to run individual applications in the guest OS and make it look like it's running on the host OS. Essentially I can open I.E. 7 on my Mac and it has a nice Darwin looking windows frame and no Windows desktop behind it. It's still running on a full Windows VM, and the entire operating system is still eating system resources the same way it would be if I had the whole Windows Desktop sitting there, but it LOOKS like I'm just natively running I.E. 7 on my OS X desktop.
OK, I don't want to be down on your wife here, but dude!. She clearly has an addictive personality. She was addicted to TV, then she was addicted to WOW. TV is non-interactive so she can do other things while she watches, that doesn't make her any less addicted to it. if she is still your wife (it's not clear based on the "Throw away her marriage" bit) she needs to look at professional help. She'll find a new "hardcore" addiction eventually, maybe a worse one.
I have to say.. this is stupid shit. Seriously. I play WOW. It's fun, it's an escape, blah blah blah. I keep my house clean, I keep my yard up, I maintain a regular job, and in some of my spare time (when I'm not reading or maybe running, or watching the occasional TV), I play WOW. I am willing to bet that the VAST majority of adults who play WOW are in the same situation. If someone is addicted to something that is not addicting, there is an underlying problem. Blaming a form of entertainment because an addictive personality got addicted to it is silly. WOW addicts, sex addicts, TV addicts, etc. They are all people that are addicted to something that 99% of the population can enjoy without any problems. We need to look at why they have this problem, not remove the "addiction". They'll just find another.
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material?
You lose a lot of quality if you film the screen or record the speakers, but until DRM is end to end (i.e. not decoded until it hits the actual screen or speakers) it will be possible to make near perfect recordings off of the analog wires. If I run a short, high quality, cable from the speaker out on my high quality sound card, and another from the S-video port on my high quality video card and send both into a high quality digital recording device how much have I seriously lost? The signal was analog for two feet of good A/V cable, do you really think a non-professional is even going to notice? Do you really think that even a pros is going to care when the content is available for "free samples"?
If they decide to do DRM from end to end it could be a problem, but that's years down the line. Everybody just bought brand new HDTVs (at no small cost), do you think all those people are going to be willing to run out and buy another new TV? Especially since the only way to justify this idea to the consumer would be to give them another quantum leap in quality? Look how long the "HD Revolution" is taking to filter down the non-early adopters... You think they'll buy ANOTHER new TV so they can see even MORE pimples on the anchorman's face? Until very recently we still had NETWORK hold outs on HD technology in this market. They basically switched at midnight on the day they had to by law.
S-video is 576i, the same quality as "normal" broadcast TV. As people get spoiled by HD and Blueray, they MIGHT decide that isn't good enough (though for backups or "piracy" it's not bad), but how long before there are HD out and in cards to allow new computers to get HD cable signals? It's a tad more complicated than just playing your Blueray disk on your computer and recording it, but the quality loss is minimal.
Re:Well tested?
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Pimp Your XP
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That includes OEM licenses. Like the one I'm not using because I downgraded my new Laptop to XP after it wouldn't run my stuff in Vista. Of course, not everyone has done this but many have.
"Did the game work magically better when you installed XP?"
Well.. Yes. It works perfect with XP installed.
The laptop was purchased with video in mind. It has a fairly recent Nvidia Gforce chipset, though it does use shared memory. The P4 was also a laptop and did use a crappy Intel integrated GFX card.
It uses shared video memory, but the card is one of the more recent Nvidia gForce Go's. The game plays fine on the same box with XP. I ssupect it was a video driver issue, but at least at the time that I did the update I used the most recent drivers. I haven't played with it since, Xp runs just fine and plays the game as I'd expect.
I certainly don't know all the details of the grandparent's situation, but I suspect it's not as easy as all that. There are a number of very strict and specific laws about health care software. While I don't think any of those laws say "you must run this software on Windows", that doesn't mean switching is easy. If there are three companies that make software tool "x" and all of them only support Windows and you are required by law to have tool "x", you pretty much have to have Windows. You can bitch, but the companies are all going to say, "we're not going to devote the resources to a port unless someone else does, it's not like you have a choice". Plus even if the companies decide that they want to do a port, they have to get said port through the red tape laden approval process that allows it to be certified as a tool "x".
Health care is one of those industries where Linux is likely to make it's slowest inroads. Unless someone finds the capital to do a start up that makes a Linux based tool "x" and get it through the approval process, it ain't likely to happen soon. Even if Windows dramatically lost market share the companies that make medical software could safely ignore that for quite a while. It's not like MS is going to go out of business, even if they lost half their market share they'd be profitable. Companies that make software required by laws are very conservative about such things.
Well maybe some people are judging without trying... I am not. We went and bought my wife a brand new laptop three weeks ago. It was a pretty nice desktop replacement spec system: Athlon X2 dual core, 1 GB of RAM, mid-level Nvidia Gforce Go, High def sound and built in Altec Lansing speakers. It used shared video memory, but she wasn't planning on running Unreal Tournament on it so ces la vive. I even sprung for an extra gig of RAM (brought it to 1.5 GB, I didn't think both slots would be populated).
Based on stuff like your comment, I decided to leave Vista on it. It's easy to use! It's pretty! Sure it uses a lot of resources, but it's pretty and it's easy to use! "OK", says I, "we try this pretty, easy to use OS." I was concerned when it seemed to be using like 30% of the RAM resources at idle, but at least the computer had lots of RAM. Then I loaded WOW.
World of Warcraft is 2 years old. It wasn't exactly Quake4 when it was released. I played it quite happily on a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a crappy Intel video chipset. It was unplayable on my wife's new laptop. When I tried max resolution with all the video pretties turned on that I usually use on my Macbook Pro (almost a year old) you could literally watch the frames draw. When I turned the resolution down and turned off most of the video tricks, it was choppy and gave one a headache. I tried everything I could think of. Upgraded the video drivers and sound drivers (Oh, did I mention that sound was stuttering and broken too?) tweaked setting in the game, etc. Nothing yielded more than marginal improvement.
I put XP on that sucker. Now everything runs fine. Should I have chucked the whole OS for one app? Well, she LIKES that app. It's her FAVORITE app. Besides, if a brand new, decently speced computer couldn't handle a two year old mass market game, what could I expect from Photoshop? This was a computer built from the ground up and factory installed with Vista, I feel sorry for some poor sucker trying to upgrade.
Are they not planning to release DX10 for XP? I find it hard to believe they are going to EOL the OS only a few months after the replacement came out. Anyway, my Warcrack runs fine on DX9:-)
I bought my wife a new lap top a few weeks ago pre-installed with Vista. Pretty nice desktop replacement system that I upgraded to 1.5 gig of RAM immediately. It still wouldn't play WOW for shit. 2 year old game that ran fine on my old P4 w/512 mb RAM. I played with it for a couple of days and reformated to put XP on it.
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Overall this guys seems completely confused. He complains about a lack flexibility then complains that there are four ways to add/remove packages (then proceeds to only list three ways). He spends half the article complaining that Ubuntu doesn't allow flexibility: it doesn't allow me to partition my disk in the installer, or display the GRUB menu by default! OK... if you enough of a power user to need that you can probably find fdisk and grub.conf post install... Then the other half complaining that all anyone really needs is apt-get, or wondering why Ubuntu doesn't babysit it's users to the point of requiring users to log in as root to install a printer. Pick one dammit, is it to flexible? Not flexible enough? Does it need to assume that users are smart (and allow them to partition their own drives, or use apt-get exclusively), or assume they're stupid (and can't edit a fricken grub.conf or use sudo).
His article essentially seems to say: "This Distro is pretty nice, but it's not exactly the way I would have done it, so it needs improvement."
Yeah, SCO was terrible. If you look through old Samba TNG mailing lists you can actually find where I tried to get help compiling on SCO back in 2000 and Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, the lead developer, replied:
"i tried compiling on sco, too, and libtool went "urgh, sco!""
I think that sums everything up.
Which you carry around in a laptop bag and hook up before class? The subject is using laptops for notes... A model M would probably outweigh any reasonably new laptop you hooked it up to :-)
Of course one could sue Comcast for false advertising based on the fact that these numbers are, by current standards, quite reasonable. The "pictures" are where they screw themselves. Most current digital cameras take 7-10 MP pics. 2-3 MB a shot. It's hard to argue that this isn't "normal" since every camera in Best Buy has these specs.
Yeah, the first Gulf War, which was sold to the American people by the Bush administration (the first one, remember? Junior's Daddy?). It was a much better sell job (though arguably a much easier sell job). It was, I personally think, a much more justified war than the current one, but still had some significant spin involved in selling it.
How fucking stupid are you?
"A mortgaged house you live in, in economist terms, is a liability and not an asset even though the poor have been taught to think this way."
Not true, or at least true only in a circumstance where real estate values are static or declining, or a person is continuously borrowing against their equity. Assuming a static real estate market, my home has a value in real terms of however much I have paid against the principle of my loan. if I bought the house last month, and made my first payment, in theory my home has a real value to me of $100 or whatever the principle portion of my payment was. If real estate values go up (as they continue to do, albeit slower than they have been), I have real value of whatever portion of my principle I have paid plus the increase in value. As a rule (and certainly this could change) real estate prices increase faster than the combination of interest and inflation. This means that in real terms, I am usually making money. If I get smart or lucky, and come into an area on cusp of regentrification in a city, I can make a lot of money.
Friends of mine bought a house in such an area for around 75K, and sold it (with a 15-20K of renovation) for over 200K only 4 years later. My wife and bought an already remodeled house in the same area a year after them, and paid nearly twice a much. We still made large profit after only three years.
I might (might) have been able to make more money in the same amount of time with the same initial investment in some other markets, but I would not have been able to live in my stocks, bonds or commodities while I waited for the investment to mature.
Audible.com files are not DRM free, but they have a DRM agent for Mac. I've used their services and can verify that their content works on Mac exactly the same way as it works in Windows. I don't know about FOSS operating systems; I seriously doubt it works with them.
No offense, but if you can't hear "no" or "I can't do that", then I don't want to work for you. Granted, these words should be followed up with a good reason why, but if you tell me you need something impossible or on an impossible time line, you sometimes have to hear "I cant do that".
Personally I try to play more towards "I can do that, but I'll need two more weeks" or "that solution won't work, but may let me look into something that might," but one one or two occasions I've been asked for stuff that was just so impossible I couldn't do it. Personally, If I was he manager (and I have been) I'd rather hear an honest "I can't do that" than come back two weeks later to an incomplete project that I already told my boss should be ready.
Having done both dev and support jobs, I can think of two answers to your question. The first is that IT policies are written for users, not developers. Developers are a subset of users. Let's say I am writing policy for a 700 person organization, and 12 of those people are developers. My boss wants a policy that he can give to his boss (probably the CEO, president, or owner given the imagined size of this company and my imagined level of responsibility). Ideally my boss wants a policy that everyone has to follow, even his own boss. So he tells his boss, quite reasonably, "well JD, the reason you and everyone else has to go through this procedure to get software installed is so my smart boys can make sure you're not accidentally getting any viruses or anything, and you know how Baker is about anyone buying anything unless his people know about it."
Do you want to be the one that tells JD about the twelve guys over in development who don't have to follow this procedure that everyone else, even JD (or so the CIO really hopes) follows? Of course not. They're users like everyone else.
The second reason is even simpler. I've done dev and admin. I've worked in big places and small places. I've traveled around and worked in a big place one day and a small place the next. In my experience out of every ten devs there will be four who are willing and able to admin their own machines and will do so responsibly. There will be two who may or may not be able to admin their own machines but will be unwilling to do so because it's beneath them. There will be three who are willing and seem able, but have some gapping holes in their knowledge and will eventually do something stupid. Then there will be one who is absolutely bat shit nuts and will destroy machines weekly. He'll install this patch and registry hack that his friend wrote to let Windows use ReiserFS as its root partition then call IT because his system is unstable and he can't figure out why. After a week of work he'll admit that maybe he might have made a small hack... (no, that never actually happened, but I've seen some developers do some insane things with root/admin access)
Good devs aren't always good admins and let's face it, not all devs are even good devs. (Not to say that all admins are good admins either). Policies are written for people in general, not for one person in particular. You personally may be the best developer and admin in the company and you see no reason why you can tweak your workstation into the lean mean coding machine you need it to be, but policy has to be written to take into account the guy who works next to you and keeps confusing "while... do" with "do... while" and forgetting that C arrays begin their identifiers with 0 and not 1.
The Marines are not a branch of the Armed Services, they are a department of the Naval Branch. I'm not saying that to be an asshole, it's the legal truth. Whether they should be or not is an entirely different question, but the fact remain that they are not. Technically the Coast Guard is not a branch either UNLESS they are called to be in a state of emergency. So while the Marines are not a branch of service, the Coast Guard can be under certain circumstances.
No, it's his job to determine whether the laws meets the requirements of higher law. The Constitution instituted a hierarchy of law, with itself at the top. No law may violate the scriptures of the Constitution as it is the source from which all authority to make law flows. Constitution > treaties > legislated law > bureaucratic agency devised rules. All the judge is doing is saying that no part of the PATRIOT act can violate the Constitution because the Constitution is a higher law.
In those cases the executives in question committed criminal acts and were charged with crimes. There's a difference between being punished because you did something wrong, and being punished because some goon five level down from you on the corporate chain made a dumb mistake. The OP mentions that as a professional engineer he is responsible for the action of his company, despite the fact that it is a corporation. Of course all professional engineering companies are REQUIRED to have at least one supervising professional engineer. Same with architecture firms, law firms, and lots of other "professional" companies. This is because at some point some one decided that there need to be a licensed professional personally in charge of licensed professional activities. If the board of the OP's company has members who are NOT professional engineers (unlikely and probably not legal though that is), they are NOT personally responsible if the bridge the company is building falls down (Which is why many industries ban non-professionals from even serving on the boards of professional companies.)
If the argument is that perhaps IT should be made a legal "profession", with a certifying board to establish competency, requirements that a professional services IT company have a board certified IT professional who is responsible for the company's actions, and an expectation that large non-IT specific companies also have a board certified IT professional to manage company practices (like the legal or medical departments have certified doctors and lawyers), you might have a good idea. As it is you're asking that the members of a board of directors, who probably have no IT knowledge at all, personally pay for the actions of some guy several levels below them, who did something they probably wouldn't have even understood was bad at the time had they known he did it.
Professional engineers are held responsible for the actions of their firms because by definition they understand and usually have to sign off on the actions of their underlings. If Bobo the rookie engineer makes some huge material strength error in his latest plans, it's OK (well not for Bobo probably, but for the company), because Bobo is by law supervised by at least one board certified professional engineer who should catch the mistake before s/he signs the plans. If the supervisor fails to catch the mistake, or if Bob the board certified engineer who works for himself makes the same mistake and signs his own plans, there is liability to the person who signed the plans. Since IT lacks any sort of professional organization to say "Sue is a certified IT professional", Sue's liability is limited to where she can be proved to have been negligent. Did she know that Bobo the rookie It guy made a mistake? who knows? Did she report it to her boss (who doesn't even have to know anything about IT to be her boss)? Who knows. Can she be sued? Maybe. Can her Boss? That pushing it. Can Bobo? Probably, but he makes 35K a year and owes 10 of it his credit card company. Not going to help you much I'm afraid.
Now if it can be proven that one of the board ordered the firewall to be taken down, or that they knew it was down and took no action despite the realization that it would cause huge problems for their customers, then they might be personally liable. This would be a criminal action on par with what Enron's executives did. This would be willful misconduct. As it is, they probably didn't even realize the problem existed until it was so late that all they could do was jump ship.
I suspect the GP is misunderstanding Parallels ability to run individual applications in the guest OS and make it look like it's running on the host OS. Essentially I can open I.E. 7 on my Mac and it has a nice Darwin looking windows frame and no Windows desktop behind it. It's still running on a full Windows VM, and the entire operating system is still eating system resources the same way it would be if I had the whole Windows Desktop sitting there, but it LOOKS like I'm just natively running I.E. 7 on my OS X desktop.
OK, I don't want to be down on your wife here, but dude!. She clearly has an addictive personality. She was addicted to TV, then she was addicted to WOW. TV is non-interactive so she can do other things while she watches, that doesn't make her any less addicted to it. if she is still your wife (it's not clear based on the "Throw away her marriage" bit) she needs to look at professional help. She'll find a new "hardcore" addiction eventually, maybe a worse one.
I have to say.. this is stupid shit. Seriously. I play WOW. It's fun, it's an escape, blah blah blah. I keep my house clean, I keep my yard up, I maintain a regular job, and in some of my spare time (when I'm not reading or maybe running, or watching the occasional TV), I play WOW. I am willing to bet that the VAST majority of adults who play WOW are in the same situation. If someone is addicted to something that is not addicting, there is an underlying problem. Blaming a form of entertainment because an addictive personality got addicted to it is silly. WOW addicts, sex addicts, TV addicts, etc. They are all people that are addicted to something that 99% of the population can enjoy without any problems. We need to look at why they have this problem, not remove the "addiction". They'll just find another.
Of course, you're perfect, right? That's why you failed to capitalize "Slashdot"? Which is clearly a proper noun in the context of your post?
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material?
You lose a lot of quality if you film the screen or record the speakers, but until DRM is end to end (i.e. not decoded until it hits the actual screen or speakers) it will be possible to make near perfect recordings off of the analog wires. If I run a short, high quality, cable from the speaker out on my high quality sound card, and another from the S-video port on my high quality video card and send both into a high quality digital recording device how much have I seriously lost? The signal was analog for two feet of good A/V cable, do you really think a non-professional is even going to notice? Do you really think that even a pros is going to care when the content is available for "free samples"?
If they decide to do DRM from end to end it could be a problem, but that's years down the line. Everybody just bought brand new HDTVs (at no small cost), do you think all those people are going to be willing to run out and buy another new TV? Especially since the only way to justify this idea to the consumer would be to give them another quantum leap in quality? Look how long the "HD Revolution" is taking to filter down the non-early adopters... You think they'll buy ANOTHER new TV so they can see even MORE pimples on the anchorman's face? Until very recently we still had NETWORK hold outs on HD technology in this market. They basically switched at midnight on the day they had to by law.
S-video is 576i, the same quality as "normal" broadcast TV. As people get spoiled by HD and Blueray, they MIGHT decide that isn't good enough (though for backups or "piracy" it's not bad), but how long before there are HD out and in cards to allow new computers to get HD cable signals? It's a tad more complicated than just playing your Blueray disk on your computer and recording it, but the quality loss is minimal.
That includes OEM licenses. Like the one I'm not using because I downgraded my new Laptop to XP after it wouldn't run my stuff in Vista. Of course, not everyone has done this but many have.
"Did the game work magically better when you installed XP?"
Well.. Yes. It works perfect with XP installed.
The laptop was purchased with video in mind. It has a fairly recent Nvidia Gforce chipset, though it does use shared memory. The P4 was also a laptop and did use a crappy Intel integrated GFX card.
It uses shared video memory, but the card is one of the more recent Nvidia gForce Go's. The game plays fine on the same box with XP. I ssupect it was a video driver issue, but at least at the time that I did the update I used the most recent drivers. I haven't played with it since, Xp runs just fine and plays the game as I'd expect.
I certainly don't know all the details of the grandparent's situation, but I suspect it's not as easy as all that. There are a number of very strict and specific laws about health care software. While I don't think any of those laws say "you must run this software on Windows", that doesn't mean switching is easy. If there are three companies that make software tool "x" and all of them only support Windows and you are required by law to have tool "x", you pretty much have to have Windows. You can bitch, but the companies are all going to say, "we're not going to devote the resources to a port unless someone else does, it's not like you have a choice". Plus even if the companies decide that they want to do a port, they have to get said port through the red tape laden approval process that allows it to be certified as a tool "x".
Health care is one of those industries where Linux is likely to make it's slowest inroads. Unless someone finds the capital to do a start up that makes a Linux based tool "x" and get it through the approval process, it ain't likely to happen soon. Even if Windows dramatically lost market share the companies that make medical software could safely ignore that for quite a while. It's not like MS is going to go out of business, even if they lost half their market share they'd be profitable. Companies that make software required by laws are very conservative about such things.
I believe that was part of his point. He said he hadn't enjoyed Windows since the 2K release.
Well maybe some people are judging without trying... I am not. We went and bought my wife a brand new laptop three weeks ago. It was a pretty nice desktop replacement spec system: Athlon X2 dual core, 1 GB of RAM, mid-level Nvidia Gforce Go, High def sound and built in Altec Lansing speakers. It used shared video memory, but she wasn't planning on running Unreal Tournament on it so ces la vive. I even sprung for an extra gig of RAM (brought it to 1.5 GB, I didn't think both slots would be populated).
Based on stuff like your comment, I decided to leave Vista on it. It's easy to use! It's pretty! Sure it uses a lot of resources, but it's pretty and it's easy to use! "OK", says I, "we try this pretty, easy to use OS." I was concerned when it seemed to be using like 30% of the RAM resources at idle, but at least the computer had lots of RAM. Then I loaded WOW.
World of Warcraft is 2 years old. It wasn't exactly Quake4 when it was released. I played it quite happily on a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a crappy Intel video chipset. It was unplayable on my wife's new laptop. When I tried max resolution with all the video pretties turned on that I usually use on my Macbook Pro (almost a year old) you could literally watch the frames draw. When I turned the resolution down and turned off most of the video tricks, it was choppy and gave one a headache. I tried everything I could think of. Upgraded the video drivers and sound drivers (Oh, did I mention that sound was stuttering and broken too?) tweaked setting in the game, etc. Nothing yielded more than marginal improvement.
I put XP on that sucker. Now everything runs fine. Should I have chucked the whole OS for one app? Well, she LIKES that app. It's her FAVORITE app. Besides, if a brand new, decently speced computer couldn't handle a two year old mass market game, what could I expect from Photoshop? This was a computer built from the ground up and factory installed with Vista, I feel sorry for some poor sucker trying to upgrade.
Are they not planning to release DX10 for XP? I find it hard to believe they are going to EOL the OS only a few months after the replacement came out. Anyway, my Warcrack runs fine on DX9 :-)
I bought my wife a new lap top a few weeks ago pre-installed with Vista. Pretty nice desktop replacement system that I upgraded to 1.5 gig of RAM immediately. It still wouldn't play WOW for shit. 2 year old game that ran fine on my old P4 w/512 mb RAM. I played with it for a couple of days and reformated to put XP on it.