Giving a preview of something that won't be out for several years is questionable. Are we to assume that they'll only be doing QA for the next few years (which would be great), so there won't be any changes? What the heck is the point of showing something that's so far from release?
MIght as well say "here are the headers we'll use in the Linux 3.0 kernel; make sure your code compiles ASAP". WTF?
Microsoft seriously has to give up their crazy "one big release every 3-4 years" plan.
Aw whatever. More replies just mean that the topic impinged upon an existing religious war./. stories are really just substrates for tired old usenet flame wars to make their way into the new age of forums and weblogs.
OK, I gather now that you must have intended your previous prediction as sarcasm... it's hard to be sure given the unbelievable quantity and intensity of Apple-worshipping zealots (the same people who believe in all benchmarks that favor Apple, and instantly disregard all benchmarks that don't).
OpenDoc was supposed to work like this, remember? You'd have an editor part and a viewer part, and the viewer part would presumably be made freely available by the vendor, while the editor part was where the money was made.
I think Microsoft tried to get this going with OLE as well; you can embed all sorts of strangeness into a Word doc and then edit it *if* you have the right app installed. If not, you get a bitmap (sometimes).
There's a reason that PDF exists. Hate it for its pagination, but love it for its precise formatting. The alternative is "only viewable in ______" or documents where form is unknowable (which is OK in some applications, but not OK for things like complex diagrams).
The trick is that everybody wants just one more feature, but not everybody agrees on what that one more feature should be.
If you add the most frequently requested features... "OH MY GOD IT'S BLOATWARE! The preferences are so confusing! It takes so much disk space / memory / time to load!"
If you leave anything out... "WHAT? I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY SHIPPED THIS PIECE OF CRAP WITHOUT IT! They must either be retards, or they think I'm too stupid to want it, or they think they're smarter than me!"
Even if you try to find a balance, there's gonna be some guy who is pissed off that you omitted his pet feature and kept a bunch of crap he doesn't want.
Nor does a 12" G4 PB. IMHO the 12" iBook and 12" PB G4 are pretty similar, though I guess if you add up all the little differences they are worth a few hundred bucks.
Maybe once we get to see some iBook vs. PB benchmarks, the differences will become clearer.
They *just* released an upgraded line of PowerBooks, and the G5 desktops just started shipping. What the hell makes you think that Apple would then turn around and ship a G5 laptop three weeks later?
Oh, I know... so that they can hide them inside the Big Mac cluster to get >100% efficiency and reach #1 on the Top 500 list!
Failover situations and planned upgrade situations differ. You can gradually repoint people to a new server and eventually get them off the old one, then reboot the old one, then migrate people back. It may take a while but you don't have to migrate everybody, just the ones who need mega uptime. I would guess that most folks could tolerate being told they will be kicked off of the system momentarily & will have to reconnect (to the other server). Every situation is different but chances are that ultra availability doesn't mean one specific server needs to have sessions that run for weeks, but that the cluster needs to be available at all times.
Also, you named some problematic protocols. NFS is one of those "why hasn't something replaced this yet" sort of protocols. I don't know enough about how to cluster it to speak about it but as I said, chances are that if you tell people that there will be an outage and you make sure that when they reconnect, a server is there for them, pulling a switcheroo wouldn't be too hard to do. Telnet has been replaced and I'm surprised/dubious that anyone has a need for 24x7 year-round Telnet service. Oracle availability is clearly different, but in the event that there's a *pressing need* to patch the Oracle server, I would think that a few minutes of planned downtime wouldn't be out of the question. (Or, put another way, if downtime is such a horrible thing, then maybe you don't really need to patch & reboot the Oracle server today after all.)
Testing patches is good, but sometimes you have to remind customers/end users that in many cases it would be better to have a server down due to a botched patch than it would be to have sensitive information leaked because a known exploit wasn't patched before somebody used it to break in. Lately it seems like exploits are just being used for denial of service attacks or worms but does the CEO really want to read his/her mail so badly that it's worth risking someone else reading all their mail as well? Sometimes that isn't the case but it's something to keep in mind... it's a matter of balancing risks.
Exactly. This is Microsoft we're talking about... they implement one tremendously buggy, insecure-by-design service and then built everything else on top of it. Patch that, and if anything goes wrong, the box can very easily be hosed. On many occasions, the patches they release will happily downgrade DLLs installed by other patches, leaving systems in a less secure or potentially unusable state afterwards.
If you trust Microsoft to regression test their OS for every possible installation scenario before releasing a patch, you're (a) naive and (b) clearly not a subscriber to NTBUGTRAQ.
I think you missed the point, which is not "my goodness it's hard to restart sshd successfully" but "what happens if the new sshd is hosed and I can't get back in because SSH is the only way to get into that box".
You should be. Have you figured out that it's a bunch of gibberish yet?
Wow, that scene with the crowd of Agent Smiths was so realistic! I guess I missed the part where Neo took off his coat and put on the rubber Batman suit and pulled a stocking on over his head. That's the only explanation I could come up with for the "stop motion action figures" look of that scene. Either that, or the Wachowski bros blew their wad on the freeway scene, and could only afford to do the pointless Neo vs. Smith & Co. fight scene as claymation.
Oh yes, I agree, Persephone, it's sooo obvious that Neo and Trinity are in love. Or maybe they're constipated. Or have lockjaw.
Re:Dispelling the Myth of Wireless Security
on
Wireless Hacks
·
· Score: 1
This is not an interesting problem, it's a configuration mistake on your part. Tell your laptop to pick a specific AP, not "best signal".
Then set up a second laptop as a warez server using your neighbor's unsecured network as free bandwidth.
It doesn't mean that the book could sell for $2 everywhere. Bear in mind that the cost of creating the first copy has to be recouped. Maybe if the market were really efficient it would cost $15 everywhere because they'd have to charge that much to make up the money they lost by not charging $80 or whatever in the US?
This is where economics can get tricky. Yeah, maybe it's annoying that you can't play a DVD from another region, but if US sales pay for a movie to be made, and then it can be sold at a much lower price elsewhere, the studio can make more money and customers can buy the DVD. But if it's available everywhere at the same price, yes the US customers get it cheaper, but perhaps people with a lower standard of living wouldn't be able to afford it at all. Theoretically, decent governments and lots of free trade will eventually even out the imbalance of standard of living, but in the short term, there are DVDs to sell, and poking holes in the locks of a canal (metaphorically speaking) isn't helpful.
(BTW note that quite often, those championing free trade and laissez-faire capitalism are really just trying to cover up very lopsided trade agreements. Don't automatically assume free trade is evil just because so much evil has been perpetrated in the guise of free trade.)
It's posts like this that make me wonder if there are a lot of extremist holdouts out there who insist on laserdiscs instead of DVDs.
Remember when vinyl and audiocassette were the only options? People would make mix tapes and multi-generational analog copies and just deal with the crappy audio quality. (High Speed Dubbing wasn't exactly kind to audio quality either.) CDs came along, and of course they're better, but now that MP3s have become popular, there's this audiophile backlash (see parent) that is based on the idea that somehow MP3s are unacceptable unless they are gotten for free. I'm not sure I believe that there are people out there who rip all their CDs to WAV or SHN format and listen to that. I suspect that this is a straw man - "if I pay I must have full CD quality!"... even though day to day listening happens at a lower quality. Why bother? Is it Just In Case you need to re-encode? My own testing with an AAC file that I bought from the iTunes Music Store suggests that burning to Audio CD and then ripping back to 128Kbps MP3 results in no audible degradation. Conventional wisdom says that the results should be - terrible, just awful, dreadful, oh no!! - but I actually tried it and that's a bunch of speculative bullshit. It sounds fine. Not crystalline fantastic perfect, not orgasmically massaging my eardrums... but the AAC file didn't sound like that to begin with. (It did sound really good, though.) It sounds just as good burned and ripped back to MP3 as the AAC did. I didn't buy tons and tons of songs, so there may be exceptions, but generally, it was fine - not the drastic reduction in quality we've been led to believe would result from 2 stages of lossy compression.
As an analogy, I ask those of you who are reading this and who are indignant at the thought of ever paying for a slightly reduced quality digital work... do you own any DVDs? Or do you insist on laserdisc exclusively? I can tell you right now, DVDs have DRM and I can certainly see the compression artifacts, and the menus and mandatory FBI warnings are lame. And yet, geeks buy DVDs like crazy. Can you say "double standard"? Oh, wait, there's the alternative: download murky screeners with plain old stereo sound, which are far lower quality than DVDs.. but don't pay for them.
Are we seeing the point yet, folks? On one extreme we have high quality expensive media. On the other extreme we have crappy media that people share (mostly illegally) for free. But any time that someone comes along and tries to put something in the middle, folks scream that there can only be two choices, and that any compromise is totally unacceptable. ("What we need is to force Best Buy to carry 70mm film cannisters! Consumers have the right to see the film in its maximum quality rendering!!!")
Guess what: people buy DVDs anyway. You are probably one of those people. Deal with the compromise because the RIAA is never going to just put WAVs online for free, so you'll have to compromise on DRM or price or quality, or some combination of all three... or you can take your toys and go home, and the rest of the world will buy lower quality DRMd media at a lower cost. The only remaining question is, which compromise will be acceptable (not ideal) for all parties?
Ha ha, but seriously, when Apple signs deals with labels I imagine that they get pretty much the whole catalog, or at least the top sellers. Remember, people do actually buy Britney Spears records, and go to her concerts. I doubt Apple had to go far out of its way to add Britney along with all the other artists on the same label, and what would be the point of blackballing her?
>you don't have to have money just to browse around the store
This is a good point and reminds me of another angle of ITMS that's good: it acts as a more convenient surrogate for the listening booths in record stores. I like to own CDs, but I don't like to pay $17 for ones that suck. ITMS does have some large gaps in its catalog, but there are quite a few artists who have been on my "find out what they sound like" list for a while, which ITMS will let me preview at my own pace on my own schedule without giving me a "if I open this CD for you to listen to are you gonna finally buy one?" dirty look.:) So, it's useful even if you never buy the music from Apple.
>Key of course is getting a good set of admins and then letting them goto work.
CIO to-do list: Step 1: replace old expensive Unix servers with new Wintel hardware, because a white box clone costs less than a Sun server. Insist on using Windows because Linux is all complicated 'n stuff, and Windows has a GUI, and you can sue Microsoft if something goes wrong. (Note to self: remember to make a list of companies which have taken Microsoft to court in the past & won.) Step 2: replace grumbling, expensive Unix admins with snappily dressed MCSEs. Remember, that Gartner article we got for free said that people cost way more than licenses or hardware, so let's go as cheap on people as possible! Step 3: watch costs spiral out of control as more MCSEs and more hardware are required. WTF happened? Blame subordinates, blame the vendor. Step 4: ask MCSEs for a recommendation.
Shocking! The MCSEs recommend further investment in the products they already know! Why are we buying Exchange, NetMeeting, and SharePoint instead of competing products? Was there a TCO study, a trial of multiple products, maybe some application-specific consultant brought in? Nope. they just recommended the MS solution, and the CIO signed the P.O. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!"
>And I, for one, am much more fed up about people who >complain about things instead of working to make things better.
Exactly! They should spend their time moderating stories... oh wait./. doesn't let you moderate stories.
Any old crap gets posted, but there's no way to moderate the crappy stories and give the editors the finger when they post a crappy story without reading the article / a spoiler from hell / a "breaking news" story that's a duplicate of an article that was posted 2 months ago ON SLASHDOT. All we can do is complain, or run away. I guess you would prefer that we just slink away quietly and leave the reading of crappy duplicate stories to ACs like you?
>To my recollection, MS Office has always cost lots more than its competitors
You recollect incorrect[ly].:)
When Microsoft Office was the underdog, it cost less than the market leader (WordPerfect Office). Only now that Word is the de facto standard, and inertia is on Microsoft's side, have they started to jack up their prices, and of course their competitors have to price their products lower in order to have a hope of getting anyone's attention. (Would you buy a word processor that costs more than Word, but lacked its functionality and wasn't compatible with the file format?)
You can walk into the Sony Style store at the Sony Metreon mall in SF (and probably the NYC store also) and buy MiniDisc products. As another poster has mentioned, there are other retailers which sell MD products. The problem is, who cares? Even now that the ATRAC format has been improved to the point where the reported audio glitches are gone, people have adopted MP3, and if they really care that much about audio quality, they can just rip at a higher bit rate. The question becomes "why bother with MD instead of an MP3 player?"
I've used a portable MD recorder for live music recording, and it's pretty cool for that (smaller than a laptop, and better quality than an analog 4-track deck), but surprise surprise, no digital output to get it into a PC for mixing. What's that you say - buy another MD deck for copying the recording to the PC? Now it's not compelling anymore.
It shows mini versions of every window, which the Windows Taskbar doesn't do. It shows every window, which the Mac OS X dock doesn't do.
I prefer the Windows alt-tab style of window switching to the "click on an icon" option most of the time, probably because I'm a developer and I spend most of my time with both hands on the keyboard and switching between 2-3 out of manyn many windows (so alt-tab or alt-tab, tab is usually all that's needed). Expose seems like it'd be better than tabbing through a large list of windows, or trying to figure out what all the taskbar tabs are. BTW, ever notice that after you open about 25 windows in Windows, the alt-tab popup window can't hold any more icons and some icons are hidden? I wonder what Expose's limit is, or if it'll just make every window super teeny...
Slashdot Mirror
Giving a preview of something that won't be out for several years is questionable. Are we to assume that they'll only be doing QA for the next few years (which would be great), so there won't be any changes? What the heck is the point of showing something that's so far from release?
MIght as well say "here are the headers we'll use in the Linux 3.0 kernel; make sure your code compiles ASAP". WTF?
Microsoft seriously has to give up their crazy "one big release every 3-4 years" plan.
Aw whatever. More replies just mean that the topic impinged upon an existing religious war. /. stories are really just substrates for tired old usenet flame wars to make their way into the new age of forums and weblogs.
OK, I gather now that you must have intended your previous prediction as sarcasm... it's hard to be sure given the unbelievable quantity and intensity of Apple-worshipping zealots (the same people who believe in all benchmarks that favor Apple, and instantly disregard all benchmarks that don't).
OpenDoc was supposed to work like this, remember? You'd have an editor part and a viewer part, and the viewer part would presumably be made freely available by the vendor, while the editor part was where the money was made.
I think Microsoft tried to get this going with OLE as well; you can embed all sorts of strangeness into a Word doc and then edit it *if* you have the right app installed. If not, you get a bitmap (sometimes).
There's a reason that PDF exists. Hate it for its pagination, but love it for its precise formatting. The alternative is "only viewable in ______" or documents where form is unknowable (which is OK in some applications, but not OK for things like complex diagrams).
Well then you may be guilty of API bloat / over-simplicity arguments. Ask Sun how people bitch about Java APIs... :)
Well, it'll have to be a 32-bit quantity until late-2004... :)
4 3111,00.asp
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,13
The trick is that everybody wants just one more feature, but not everybody agrees on what that one more feature should be.
If you add the most frequently requested features... "OH MY GOD IT'S BLOATWARE! The preferences are so confusing! It takes so much disk space / memory / time to load!"
If you leave anything out... "WHAT? I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY SHIPPED THIS PIECE OF CRAP WITHOUT IT! They must either be retards, or they think I'm too stupid to want it, or they think they're smarter than me!"
Even if you try to find a balance, there's gonna be some guy who is pissed off that you omitted his pet feature and kept a bunch of crap he doesn't want.
Nor does a 12" G4 PB. IMHO the 12" iBook and 12" PB G4 are pretty similar, though I guess if you add up all the little differences they are worth a few hundred bucks.
Maybe once we get to see some iBook vs. PB benchmarks, the differences will become clearer.
They *just* released an upgraded line of PowerBooks, and the G5 desktops just started shipping. What the hell makes you think that Apple would then turn around and ship a G5 laptop three weeks later?
Oh, I know... so that they can hide them inside the Big Mac cluster to get >100% efficiency and reach #1 on the Top 500 list!
Failover situations and planned upgrade situations differ. You can gradually repoint people to a new server and eventually get them off the old one, then reboot the old one, then migrate people back. It may take a while but you don't have to migrate everybody, just the ones who need mega uptime. I would guess that most folks could tolerate being told they will be kicked off of the system momentarily & will have to reconnect (to the other server). Every situation is different but chances are that ultra availability doesn't mean one specific server needs to have sessions that run for weeks, but that the cluster needs to be available at all times.
Also, you named some problematic protocols. NFS is one of those "why hasn't something replaced this yet" sort of protocols. I don't know enough about how to cluster it to speak about it but as I said, chances are that if you tell people that there will be an outage and you make sure that when they reconnect, a server is there for them, pulling a switcheroo wouldn't be too hard to do. Telnet has been replaced and I'm surprised/dubious that anyone has a need for 24x7 year-round Telnet service. Oracle availability is clearly different, but in the event that there's a *pressing need* to patch the Oracle server, I would think that a few minutes of planned downtime wouldn't be out of the question. (Or, put another way, if downtime is such a horrible thing, then maybe you don't really need to patch & reboot the Oracle server today after all.)
Testing patches is good, but sometimes you have to remind customers/end users that in many cases it would be better to have a server down due to a botched patch than it would be to have sensitive information leaked because a known exploit wasn't patched before somebody used it to break in. Lately it seems like exploits are just being used for denial of service attacks or worms but does the CEO really want to read his/her mail so badly that it's worth risking someone else reading all their mail as well? Sometimes that isn't the case but it's something to keep in mind... it's a matter of balancing risks.
Exactly. This is Microsoft we're talking about... they implement one tremendously buggy, insecure-by-design service and then built everything else on top of it. Patch that, and if anything goes wrong, the box can very easily be hosed. On many occasions, the patches they release will happily downgrade DLLs installed by other patches, leaving systems in a less secure or potentially unusable state afterwards.
If you trust Microsoft to regression test their OS for every possible installation scenario before releasing a patch, you're (a) naive and (b) clearly not a subscriber to NTBUGTRAQ.
I think you missed the point, which is not "my goodness it's hard to restart sshd successfully" but "what happens if the new sshd is hosed and I can't get back in because SSH is the only way to get into that box".
>Sorry, I saw Reloaded again last night...
You should be. Have you figured out that it's a bunch of gibberish yet?
Wow, that scene with the crowd of Agent Smiths was so realistic! I guess I missed the part where Neo took off his coat and put on the rubber Batman suit and pulled a stocking on over his head. That's the only explanation I could come up with for the "stop motion action figures" look of that scene. Either that, or the Wachowski bros blew their wad on the freeway scene, and could only afford to do the pointless Neo vs. Smith & Co. fight scene as claymation.
Oh yes, I agree, Persephone, it's sooo obvious that Neo and Trinity are in love. Or maybe they're constipated. Or have lockjaw.
This is not an interesting problem, it's a configuration mistake on your part. Tell your laptop to pick a specific AP, not "best signal".
Then set up a second laptop as a warez server using your neighbor's unsecured network as free bandwidth.
It doesn't mean that the book could sell for $2 everywhere. Bear in mind that the cost of creating the first copy has to be recouped. Maybe if the market were really efficient it would cost $15 everywhere because they'd have to charge that much to make up the money they lost by not charging $80 or whatever in the US?
This is where economics can get tricky. Yeah, maybe it's annoying that you can't play a DVD from another region, but if US sales pay for a movie to be made, and then it can be sold at a much lower price elsewhere, the studio can make more money and customers can buy the DVD. But if it's available everywhere at the same price, yes the US customers get it cheaper, but perhaps people with a lower standard of living wouldn't be able to afford it at all. Theoretically, decent governments and lots of free trade will eventually even out the imbalance of standard of living, but in the short term, there are DVDs to sell, and poking holes in the locks of a canal (metaphorically speaking) isn't helpful.
(BTW note that quite often, those championing free trade and laissez-faire capitalism are really just trying to cover up very lopsided trade agreements. Don't automatically assume free trade is evil just because so much evil has been perpetrated in the guise of free trade.)
It's posts like this that make me wonder if there are a lot of extremist holdouts out there who insist on laserdiscs instead of DVDs.
Remember when vinyl and audiocassette were the only options? People would make mix tapes and multi-generational analog copies and just deal with the crappy audio quality. (High Speed Dubbing wasn't exactly kind to audio quality either.) CDs came along, and of course they're better, but now that MP3s have become popular, there's this audiophile backlash (see parent) that is based on the idea that somehow MP3s are unacceptable unless they are gotten for free. I'm not sure I believe that there are people out there who rip all their CDs to WAV or SHN format and listen to that. I suspect that this is a straw man - "if I pay I must have full CD quality!"... even though day to day listening happens at a lower quality. Why bother? Is it Just In Case you need to re-encode? My own testing with an AAC file that I bought from the iTunes Music Store suggests that burning to Audio CD and then ripping back to 128Kbps MP3 results in no audible degradation. Conventional wisdom says that the results should be - terrible, just awful, dreadful, oh no!! - but I actually tried it and that's a bunch of speculative bullshit. It sounds fine. Not crystalline fantastic perfect, not orgasmically massaging my eardrums... but the AAC file didn't sound like that to begin with. (It did sound really good, though.) It sounds just as good burned and ripped back to MP3 as the AAC did. I didn't buy tons and tons of songs, so there may be exceptions, but generally, it was fine - not the drastic reduction in quality we've been led to believe would result from 2 stages of lossy compression.
As an analogy, I ask those of you who are reading this and who are indignant at the thought of ever paying for a slightly reduced quality digital work... do you own any DVDs? Or do you insist on laserdisc exclusively? I can tell you right now, DVDs have DRM and I can certainly see the compression artifacts, and the menus and mandatory FBI warnings are lame. And yet, geeks buy DVDs like crazy. Can you say "double standard"? Oh, wait, there's the alternative: download murky screeners with plain old stereo sound, which are far lower quality than DVDs.. but don't pay for them.
Are we seeing the point yet, folks? On one extreme we have high quality expensive media. On the other extreme we have crappy media that people share (mostly illegally) for free. But any time that someone comes along and tries to put something in the middle, folks scream that there can only be two choices, and that any compromise is totally unacceptable. ("What we need is to force Best Buy to carry 70mm film cannisters! Consumers have the right to see the film in its maximum quality rendering!!!")
Guess what: people buy DVDs anyway. You are probably one of those people. Deal with the compromise because the RIAA is never going to just put WAVs online for free, so you'll have to compromise on DRM or price or quality, or some combination of all three... or you can take your toys and go home, and the rest of the world will buy lower quality DRMd media at a lower cost. The only remaining question is, which compromise will be acceptable (not ideal) for all parties?
Ha ha, but seriously, when Apple signs deals with labels I imagine that they get pretty much the whole catalog, or at least the top sellers. Remember, people do actually buy Britney Spears records, and go to her concerts. I doubt Apple had to go far out of its way to add Britney along with all the other artists on the same label, and what would be the point of blackballing her?
>you don't have to have money just to browse around the store
:) So, it's useful even if you never buy the music from Apple.
This is a good point and reminds me of another angle of ITMS that's good: it acts as a more convenient surrogate for the listening booths in record stores. I like to own CDs, but I don't like to pay $17 for ones that suck. ITMS does have some large gaps in its catalog, but there are quite a few artists who have been on my "find out what they sound like" list for a while, which ITMS will let me preview at my own pace on my own schedule without giving me a "if I open this CD for you to listen to are you gonna finally buy one?" dirty look.
>a $700+(CND) device smaller than my palm pilot is hard to swallow
:P
Either wait for it to get smaller, or try some duck sauce.
Seriously - if it were the size of a laptop would that make it worth more?
>Key of course is getting a good set of admins and then letting them goto work.
CIO to-do list:
Step 1: replace old expensive Unix servers with new Wintel hardware, because a white box clone costs less than a Sun server. Insist on using Windows because Linux is all complicated 'n stuff, and Windows has a GUI, and you can sue Microsoft if something goes wrong. (Note to self: remember to make a list of companies which have taken Microsoft to court in the past & won.)
Step 2: replace grumbling, expensive Unix admins with snappily dressed MCSEs. Remember, that Gartner article we got for free said that people cost way more than licenses or hardware, so let's go as cheap on people as possible!
Step 3: watch costs spiral out of control as more MCSEs and more hardware are required. WTF happened? Blame subordinates, blame the vendor.
Step 4: ask MCSEs for a recommendation.
Shocking! The MCSEs recommend further investment in the products they already know! Why are we buying Exchange, NetMeeting, and SharePoint instead of competing products? Was there a TCO study, a trial of multiple products, maybe some application-specific consultant brought in? Nope. they just recommended the MS solution, and the CIO signed the P.O. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!"
>And I, for one, am much more fed up about people who
/. doesn't let you moderate stories.
>complain about things instead of working to make things better.
Exactly! They should spend their time moderating stories... oh wait.
Any old crap gets posted, but there's no way to moderate the crappy stories and give the editors the finger when they post a crappy story without reading the article / a spoiler from hell / a "breaking news" story that's a duplicate of an article that was posted 2 months ago ON SLASHDOT. All we can do is complain, or run away. I guess you would prefer that we just slink away quietly and leave the reading of crappy duplicate stories to ACs like you?
>To my recollection, MS Office has always cost lots more than its competitors
:)
You recollect incorrect[ly].
When Microsoft Office was the underdog, it cost less than the market leader (WordPerfect Office). Only now that Word is the de facto standard, and inertia is on Microsoft's side, have they started to jack up their prices, and of course their competitors have to price their products lower in order to have a hope of getting anyone's attention. (Would you buy a word processor that costs more than Word, but lacked its functionality and wasn't compatible with the file format?)
You can walk into the Sony Style store at the Sony Metreon mall in SF (and probably the NYC store also) and buy MiniDisc products. As another poster has mentioned, there are other retailers which sell MD products. The problem is, who cares? Even now that the ATRAC format has been improved to the point where the reported audio glitches are gone, people have adopted MP3, and if they really care that much about audio quality, they can just rip at a higher bit rate. The question becomes "why bother with MD instead of an MP3 player?"
I've used a portable MD recorder for live music recording, and it's pretty cool for that (smaller than a laptop, and better quality than an analog 4-track deck), but surprise surprise, no digital output to get it into a PC for mixing. What's that you say - buy another MD deck for copying the recording to the PC? Now it's not compelling anymore.
It shows mini versions of every window, which the Windows Taskbar doesn't do. It shows every window, which the Mac OS X dock doesn't do.
I prefer the Windows alt-tab style of window switching to the "click on an icon" option most of the time, probably because I'm a developer and I spend most of my time with both hands on the keyboard and switching between 2-3 out of manyn many windows (so alt-tab or alt-tab, tab is usually all that's needed). Expose seems like it'd be better than tabbing through a large list of windows, or trying to figure out what all the taskbar tabs are. BTW, ever notice that after you open about 25 windows in Windows, the alt-tab popup window can't hold any more icons and some icons are hidden? I wonder what Expose's limit is, or if it'll just make every window super teeny...