I have a simpler explanation: people are used to calling a local program that accesses a shared resource a "client". You see this in other loose uses of the word "client" (such as "thin clients" that are actually terminals and don't even begin to follow the client-server model) and in other common applications of technical terms such as "broadband". When technical language. gets applied to ordinary life, ordinary people feel no obligation to preserve the technical subtleties.
Santa Cruz Operation ( Not the current SCO Group )
Incorporation wise, it's not the same company, but productwise it is. Caldera didn't just buy the name, they bought all the Unix technology. (Yes, they litigate over it instead of developing it, but still.) The original SCO renamed itself Tarantella and abandoned the OS business. Eventually Sun bought them for their "thin client" ("fat terminal" is more accurate) technology.
Goodie for you. The nodes on my own home network also have creative names. (Not as creative as yours.) But what's obvious and amusing on a network used by maybe a half dozen people is a PITA on a network used by hundreds.
So just because MS decided to "fix" some API calls to be more secure, remove old calls that should have been removed, and modernize their OS (for better or worse) you're saying that breaking backwards compatibility for some apps wasn't worth it?
Depends. Removing or changing APIs that make it too easy for malware to infiltrate the system is one thing. But MS seems to have taken the approach that even basic filesystem semantics needed an overhaul. I think that was a really bad call. Sort of like those weird self-buckling seat belts that were briefly mandatory on cars sold in the U.S.
Even though MS told everyone they were doing it a year or more in advance and those companies didn't fix their software.
You're assuming they didn't try. Among those who seem to have tried and failed is Microsoft itself. I have more trouble with Microsoft's own apps (including those bundled with Vista!) than with any other vendor's.
I share your disdain for compulsive MS bashing. If you Google "fm6 slashdot" you'll find a lot of posts that try to debunk simple-minded attacks on MS. But the fact remains that Vista is a disaster. If I had the time, I'd install W7 now, just on the hope that it fixes some of the issues I have to deal with.
The reason applications have problems with Vista is they break rules or are just plain coded badly, thus not working anymore now that Microsoft clamps down security.
Perhaps you're right, but if so the blame still goes back to MS. Their APIs suck. They're inconsistently designed, excessively complicated, and poorly documented. It's hard to obey the rules when they're hard to figure out and hard to stick with even if you do.
As for the security features in Vista: they're useless. They have no granularity (that's apparently being fixed in Windows 7) so you have a choice between it constantly interfering with your work and turning it off completely.
Except that there seems to be subtle changes in the filesystem semantics that I don't know how to turn off. And guess which vendors applications have the most trouble with these semantics? Microsoft! Not just value-added stuff like Office, but even core apps like Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. (And, weirdly enough, the volume control app, which drives me crazy.) They crash, they lock up, they fail to open files they themselves created.
This OS is a disaster. This is one of the most widely accepted facts. And yet, just as W still has his defenders, so does Vista. Humanity is perverse.
You're right about the support issue. For that matter, it's really the primary reason there aren't more mainstream Linux apps. Yes, it costs money to port an app to Linux, but not as much as it costs to support it once it's out in the wild.
Perhaps the popularity of netbooks will change this, since they mostly run Linux. On the other hand, netbook users seem to regard them as prepackaged appliances, not upgradable general-purpose systems.
OK, I stand corrected on uTorrent. (I'm probably the only Slashdotter who doesn't do P2P.) But I have to wonder why anybody would go to the extra hassle of running a Windows torrent client on Linux when there are so many native Linux clients.
My technical writer semantic inconsistency monitor just cut in: "P2P client" is a contradiction in terms. But "client" is the word everybody uses. I guess "torrent peer" sounds like place you go fishing for salmon.
The only programs I've been unable to run on Vista without paying for an updated version (a free patch is fine with me, especially if the compatibility checker directs me to the right place automatically, which happens on occasion) used kernel-mode drivers, and often weird ones. Even then, some such programs run fine.
I'm sorry, kernel mode drivers? You're full of it. I've had problems with office apps, games, simple utilities, etc.
From the sound of it, you've not even tried Vista (not in any serious way, certainly).
I don't know about the other poster, but I use Vista every day — and encounter these kinds of problems every day. If I didn't have a tablet, and if Vista weren't the only version of Windows (or any other leading OS) that had a decent handwriting recognition engine, I'd downgrade in a heartbeat.
I think my point (the post wasn't long enough to have a thesis) was pretty clear. If you're having trouble figuring it out, you could ask me what I mean by this or that. If you prefer to rest on the assumption that I'm FOS, well, that's your privilege, but you should know that it make you look like a jerk.
Where did I say you can't name things? In the case of servers, printers, etc., you have to name things.
But coming up with names is only hard if you insist that the names be interesting. If you don't mind boring names like p12-3 (printer on the third floor of building 12) it's no big deal. Yeah, it's uncreative, but unnecessary creativity can be a pain in the ass. Save it for stuff that matters.
What does the number of users have to do with it? He's talking about Windows apps that run on WINE but not on Vista. And there are a lot of those, if you count apps that with features that are broken under Vista, and don't count apps that will run on Vista if you upgrade to the latest and greatest version.
Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.
That said, I'm less then impressed by the list of "works on WINE" apps. The link is to a forum that mentions precisely two of them. That motivated somebody to start a wiki page with a list. There are maybe 20 very obscure apps on this page, and I'd be surprised if they don't all have Linux native alternatives.
When a major software vendor starts talking about WINE support, then we have a real trend. Not before.
You're quite right, and not just about servers. I've been at companies where every printer had its own cute name. And these weren't small companies with a couple of printers, we're talking dozens of them. A real nuisance when your regular printer is broken and you can't remember the name of one of the alternates.
I came back to work at one of these companies, and now all the printers have boring names based on where they are. Makes life much easier.
Although it may be healthy to project personalities onto things (I'm a little skeptical, though I could maybe be persuaded by somebody who doesn't go around making sweeping psychiatric diagnoses of people he's never met) that hardly justifies encoding those projections into names. I'm not saying you should never do it (in fact, I do it a lot) but when you do it, be practical. Others may not share your projections. They may find your names confusing, misleading, or even offensive.
Where I work, there are two products that are very similar, but not quite. Somebody in engineering decided that their internal code names should be after a comic book hero and his evil twin. Those of us who don't follow comic books don't find these names very mnemonic, and often get them confused.
You're wondering why I don't tell you these two comic book characters. Can't, because they're for internal use only. If it became widely known that these products had these code names, somebody with a similar product with a similar name could sue us for trademark infringement. (The official product names combine trademarks we've already established with meaningless strings of letters and numbers.) That's another problem with these cute names: get careless and you get sued. Apple actually spends a lot of money paying off people with claims against the names they use for all their OS updates. Possibly worth it, since it contributes to their main marketing asset: their coolness factor. But not worth it for most companies.
And then there are names that just carry the cute reference bit too far. I mean, come on, whose idea was it to name a Linux distro "Yggdrasil"?
In other words, people like cute names. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes not so much.
There used to be a building in Cupertino where most of the development work on Java was done. All the conference rooms were named after places where coffee is grown. Moderately cute.
Another building, also at Sun, had conference rooms named after DisneyLand/World attraction. Knowing that I hate all things Disney, God chose to punish me by giving me an office in that building. I particularly hated the main conference room, which was Mickey's Toontown. The attraction is, of course, named after a locale in Who Framed Roger Rabbit which in turn is based on a fetid slum in the very sordid book Who Censored Roger Rabbit. (In the book, Roger is the victim, "censored" being a toon euphemism for "killed".) So every time I went to a meeting I was reminded about Disney's ability to take dark and nasty things and turn them into cutsy inoffensive — and meaningless — "family entertainment." Bippity boppity boo!
The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them.
Dude, the shareholders are as pissed off as anybody. The interlocking nature of corporate governance makes it impossible for them to have a real say in this.
Anyway, we're all a little tired of this libertarian ideological lockstep. This idea that private agreements are private business only seems to apply when it's to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. I'm willing to go along with it most of the time — entrepreneurs needs a lot of freedom to do their thing — but it can't be the last word in all arguments. Right now we're reaching the point where all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, and the economy is expected to function solely for their benefit. That's actually a kind of socialism. Not any kind Karl Marx would recognize, but it resembles all the old socialist states where the economies existed solely to benefit a small ruling elite while the economy at large stagnated. The only difference here is that the elite is a collection of private individuals, not some political cadre that waves a red flag. Though, ironically enough, the American right now also waves a red flag.
Besides which, do recall that many of the companies that pay themselves these huge bonuses are begging for government help!
As I've already indicated in another post. I disagree with The End Of Days on this issue. But he's making a serious contribution to the discussion: his opinion is honest and shows some thought. On the other hand, the moderators who labelled this post "Troll" and "Flamebait" are assholes.
...but I have an easier time accepting it from people who have actually done something towards earning it.
And what, precisely, do all these overpaid corporate suits do? Besides grind their companies into the ground, then leave with huge golden parachutes when they finally get canned. There's simply no link here between performance and reward. If you have a certain kind of job, you're entitled to big bucks, even if you're totally incompetent.
I agree that an excessive sense of entitlement is a problem all across the board. You may find the ESOE typified by $50 TV upgrade certificates more irksome than $50 million dollar executive bonuses. But the issue here isn't what pisses you off more. The issue is what does more damage.
Those $50 dollar certificates aren't that big a line item, and arguably will even serve to stimulate the economy. All those overpaid executives who sweep in the rewards regardless of what they do is not only a huge line item (one-third of Merril Lynch's final year red ink was bonuses) it is destructive of the very marketplace that creates all our wealth. It's a kind of corporate socialism. I assume you're against socialism?
Building backbone networking and central data centers is a lot cheaper than laying "last mile" cable. I mean a lot cheaper. It would be very strange if they dug up every street in South Korea to string cable, and then neglected the relatively small expense you're concerned about.
They'll get them anyway. U.S. corporate executives get bonuses when their companies are making money (reward for doing well), when they're losing money (it could have been worse), when their market share grows (keep up the good work!), when it shrinks (somebody has to make the hard choices) and most of all when they fire people or make them take lower pay (somebody has to watch the bottom line).
The problem here is not that corporations have too much money. I mean, Merrill Lynch paid out billions in bonuses as the company was facing a fatal tide of red ink. They even paid them early so they'd go through before the company was taken over by BofA.
The problem is a corporate ruling class with an extreme sense of entitlement.
Sociopaths should really identify themselves as such before engaging in ethical arguments. In this case it would have saved me parsing all your silly nitpicking.
Sounds like a good laptop. But it's a tablet, which adds something like $1K to the cost of the thing. That money is pretty much wasted if you can't use the stylus in the environment the "tablet" was supposed to be designed for.
You keep coming up with analogies to ordinary accidents, and I keep trying to explain that the destruction of the planet is not an ordinary accident. Not gonna try again.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a simpler explanation: people are used to calling a local program that accesses a shared resource a "client". You see this in other loose uses of the word "client" (such as "thin clients" that are actually terminals and don't even begin to follow the client-server model) and in other common applications of technical terms such as "broadband". When technical language. gets applied to ordinary life, ordinary people feel no obligation to preserve the technical subtleties.
Santa Cruz Operation ( Not the current SCO Group )
Incorporation wise, it's not the same company, but productwise it is. Caldera didn't just buy the name, they bought all the Unix technology. (Yes, they litigate over it instead of developing it, but still.) The original SCO renamed itself Tarantella and abandoned the OS business. Eventually Sun bought them for their "thin client" ("fat terminal" is more accurate) technology.
Nobody better ask me to name conference rooms. I'd choose Buffy villains.
Goodie for you. The nodes on my own home network also have creative names. (Not as creative as yours.) But what's obvious and amusing on a network used by maybe a half dozen people is a PITA on a network used by hundreds.
I never said that functional names were bad. My point is that functionality and creativity can be at odds.
So just because MS decided to "fix" some API calls to be more secure, remove old calls that should have been removed, and modernize their OS (for better or worse) you're saying that breaking backwards compatibility for some apps wasn't worth it?
Depends. Removing or changing APIs that make it too easy for malware to infiltrate the system is one thing. But MS seems to have taken the approach that even basic filesystem semantics needed an overhaul. I think that was a really bad call. Sort of like those weird self-buckling seat belts that were briefly mandatory on cars sold in the U.S.
Even though MS told everyone they were doing it a year or more in advance and those companies didn't fix their software.
You're assuming they didn't try. Among those who seem to have tried and failed is Microsoft itself. I have more trouble with Microsoft's own apps (including those bundled with Vista!) than with any other vendor's.
I share your disdain for compulsive MS bashing. If you Google "fm6 slashdot" you'll find a lot of posts that try to debunk simple-minded attacks on MS. But the fact remains that Vista is a disaster. If I had the time, I'd install W7 now, just on the hope that it fixes some of the issues I have to deal with.
The reason applications have problems with Vista is they break rules or are just plain coded badly, thus not working anymore now that Microsoft clamps down security.
Perhaps you're right, but if so the blame still goes back to MS. Their APIs suck. They're inconsistently designed, excessively complicated, and poorly documented. It's hard to obey the rules when they're hard to figure out and hard to stick with even if you do.
As for the security features in Vista: they're useless. They have no granularity (that's apparently being fixed in Windows 7) so you have a choice between it constantly interfering with your work and turning it off completely.
Except that there seems to be subtle changes in the filesystem semantics that I don't know how to turn off. And guess which vendors applications have the most trouble with these semantics? Microsoft! Not just value-added stuff like Office, but even core apps like Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. (And, weirdly enough, the volume control app, which drives me crazy.) They crash, they lock up, they fail to open files they themselves created.
This OS is a disaster. This is one of the most widely accepted facts. And yet, just as W still has his defenders, so does Vista. Humanity is perverse.
You're right about the support issue. For that matter, it's really the primary reason there aren't more mainstream Linux apps. Yes, it costs money to port an app to Linux, but not as much as it costs to support it once it's out in the wild.
Perhaps the popularity of netbooks will change this, since they mostly run Linux. On the other hand, netbook users seem to regard them as prepackaged appliances, not upgradable general-purpose systems.
OK, I stand corrected on uTorrent. (I'm probably the only Slashdotter who doesn't do P2P.) But I have to wonder why anybody would go to the extra hassle of running a Windows torrent client on Linux when there are so many native Linux clients.
My technical writer semantic inconsistency monitor just cut in: "P2P client" is a contradiction in terms. But "client" is the word everybody uses. I guess "torrent peer" sounds like place you go fishing for salmon.
I'm sorry, kernel mode drivers? You're full of it. I've had problems with office apps, games, simple utilities, etc.
From the sound of it, you've not even tried Vista (not in any serious way, certainly).
I don't know about the other poster, but I use Vista every day — and encounter these kinds of problems every day. If I didn't have a tablet, and if Vista weren't the only version of Windows (or any other leading OS) that had a decent handwriting recognition engine, I'd downgrade in a heartbeat.
I think my point (the post wasn't long enough to have a thesis) was pretty clear. If you're having trouble figuring it out, you could ask me what I mean by this or that. If you prefer to rest on the assumption that I'm FOS, well, that's your privilege, but you should know that it make you look like a jerk.
Where did I say you can't name things? In the case of servers, printers, etc., you have to name things.
But coming up with names is only hard if you insist that the names be interesting. If you don't mind boring names like p12-3 (printer on the third floor of building 12) it's no big deal. Yeah, it's uncreative, but unnecessary creativity can be a pain in the ass. Save it for stuff that matters.
What does the number of users have to do with it? He's talking about Windows apps that run on WINE but not on Vista. And there are a lot of those, if you count apps that with features that are broken under Vista, and don't count apps that will run on Vista if you upgrade to the latest and greatest version.
Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.
That said, I'm less then impressed by the list of "works on WINE" apps. The link is to a forum that mentions precisely two of them. That motivated somebody to start a wiki page with a list. There are maybe 20 very obscure apps on this page, and I'd be surprised if they don't all have Linux native alternatives.
When a major software vendor starts talking about WINE support, then we have a real trend. Not before.
You're quite right, and not just about servers. I've been at companies where every printer had its own cute name. And these weren't small companies with a couple of printers, we're talking dozens of them. A real nuisance when your regular printer is broken and you can't remember the name of one of the alternates.
I came back to work at one of these companies, and now all the printers have boring names based on where they are. Makes life much easier.
God save us from armchair psychologists!
Although it may be healthy to project personalities onto things (I'm a little skeptical, though I could maybe be persuaded by somebody who doesn't go around making sweeping psychiatric diagnoses of people he's never met) that hardly justifies encoding those projections into names. I'm not saying you should never do it (in fact, I do it a lot) but when you do it, be practical. Others may not share your projections. They may find your names confusing, misleading, or even offensive.
Where I work, there are two products that are very similar, but not quite. Somebody in engineering decided that their internal code names should be after a comic book hero and his evil twin. Those of us who don't follow comic books don't find these names very mnemonic, and often get them confused.
You're wondering why I don't tell you these two comic book characters. Can't, because they're for internal use only. If it became widely known that these products had these code names, somebody with a similar product with a similar name could sue us for trademark infringement. (The official product names combine trademarks we've already established with meaningless strings of letters and numbers.) That's another problem with these cute names: get careless and you get sued. Apple actually spends a lot of money paying off people with claims against the names they use for all their OS updates. Possibly worth it, since it contributes to their main marketing asset: their coolness factor. But not worth it for most companies.
And then there are names that just carry the cute reference bit too far. I mean, come on, whose idea was it to name a Linux distro "Yggdrasil"?
In other words, people like cute names. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes not so much.
There used to be a building in Cupertino where most of the development work on Java was done. All the conference rooms were named after places where coffee is grown. Moderately cute.
Another building, also at Sun, had conference rooms named after DisneyLand/World attraction. Knowing that I hate all things Disney, God chose to punish me by giving me an office in that building. I particularly hated the main conference room, which was Mickey's Toontown. The attraction is, of course, named after a locale in Who Framed Roger Rabbit which in turn is based on a fetid slum in the very sordid book Who Censored Roger Rabbit. (In the book, Roger is the victim, "censored" being a toon euphemism for "killed".) So every time I went to a meeting I was reminded about Disney's ability to take dark and nasty things and turn them into cutsy inoffensive — and meaningless — "family entertainment." Bippity boppity boo!
The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them.
Dude, the shareholders are as pissed off as anybody. The interlocking nature of corporate governance makes it impossible for them to have a real say in this.
Anyway, we're all a little tired of this libertarian ideological lockstep. This idea that private agreements are private business only seems to apply when it's to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. I'm willing to go along with it most of the time — entrepreneurs needs a lot of freedom to do their thing — but it can't be the last word in all arguments. Right now we're reaching the point where all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, and the economy is expected to function solely for their benefit. That's actually a kind of socialism. Not any kind Karl Marx would recognize, but it resembles all the old socialist states where the economies existed solely to benefit a small ruling elite while the economy at large stagnated. The only difference here is that the elite is a collection of private individuals, not some political cadre that waves a red flag. Though, ironically enough, the American right now also waves a red flag.
Besides which, do recall that many of the companies that pay themselves these huge bonuses are begging for government help!
As I've already indicated in another post. I disagree with The End Of Days on this issue. But he's making a serious contribution to the discussion: his opinion is honest and shows some thought. On the other hand, the moderators who labelled this post "Troll" and "Flamebait" are assholes.
...but I have an easier time accepting it from people who have actually done something towards earning it.
And what, precisely, do all these overpaid corporate suits do? Besides grind their companies into the ground, then leave with huge golden parachutes when they finally get canned. There's simply no link here between performance and reward. If you have a certain kind of job, you're entitled to big bucks, even if you're totally incompetent.
I agree that an excessive sense of entitlement is a problem all across the board. You may find the ESOE typified by $50 TV upgrade certificates more irksome than $50 million dollar executive bonuses. But the issue here isn't what pisses you off more. The issue is what does more damage.
Those $50 dollar certificates aren't that big a line item, and arguably will even serve to stimulate the economy. All those overpaid executives who sweep in the rewards regardless of what they do is not only a huge line item (one-third of Merril Lynch's final year red ink was bonuses) it is destructive of the very marketplace that creates all our wealth. It's a kind of corporate socialism. I assume you're against socialism?
Building backbone networking and central data centers is a lot cheaper than laying "last mile" cable. I mean a lot cheaper. It would be very strange if they dug up every street in South Korea to string cable, and then neglected the relatively small expense you're concerned about.
They'll get them anyway. U.S. corporate executives get bonuses when their companies are making money (reward for doing well), when they're losing money (it could have been worse), when their market share grows (keep up the good work!), when it shrinks (somebody has to make the hard choices) and most of all when they fire people or make them take lower pay (somebody has to watch the bottom line).
The problem here is not that corporations have too much money. I mean, Merrill Lynch paid out billions in bonuses as the company was facing a fatal tide of red ink. They even paid them early so they'd go through before the company was taken over by BofA.
The problem is a corporate ruling class with an extreme sense of entitlement.
Sociopaths should really identify themselves as such before engaging in ethical arguments. In this case it would have saved me parsing all your silly nitpicking.
Oh, never mind!
Sounds like a good laptop. But it's a tablet, which adds something like $1K to the cost of the thing. That money is pretty much wasted if you can't use the stylus in the environment the "tablet" was supposed to be designed for.
You keep coming up with analogies to ordinary accidents, and I keep trying to explain that the destruction of the planet is not an ordinary accident. Not gonna try again.