Even with NT6.1 (Microsoft Windows 7) you still could get constant reboots and BSODs (first hand experience).
Really? What were they caused by? Surely if they truly were constant you would investigate. BSODs are almost exclusively triggered by problem drivers (and often an issue with the underlying hardware) much like kernel panics on unix-like systems. The most common offender on Windows is graphics drivers (it's easy to identify with the information on the screen) and the most common on Linux that I have found is power management drivers taking down the system. If you are using faulty drivers or hardware you are going to have problems no matter what OS you use.
Easy. Gmail is ad supported and data mined so they can better target you with ads. Drive is just storage (AFAICT).
No it's the same thing, both are ad supported and both data mine the same data because Gmail and Drive share the same block of storage.
So yes, they should make you pay more if you want to access storage through Drive vs Gmail, assuming you are not abusing gmail as a drive (which has been done for ages, but is not commonly done by users and likely violates the TOS).
By that logic you should be paying extra for email attachments too. But that's irrelevant anyway because Gmail and Drive are the same storage supported by the same ad network.
Yes it could potentially be difficult and yes when this sort of information is archived it should be archived in something like HTML or PDF but it's not that big a deal to think ahead and make sure you have a copy of the software going forward. If they can't figure out the file types then they are just as likely to have issues with lost passwords and encryption keys too.
Using free service to drive the competition out of business is illegal in some cases. People like free, but if it's below cost to harm competitors that would be lllegal.
But it isn't free, they don't charge you, they charge advertisers and they make money by scanning your stuff then advertising to you. The fact that most people prefer that model to an upfront cost model doesn't make it illegal.
Would be a shame to see it get destroyed through aggressive anti-competitive practices.
Google Drive makes money not just with the subscription price but with advertising revenue, does DropBox do the same thing? You can hardly say it is anti-competitive just because Google monetizes the same service in a different way.
Using profits from one sector to support selling at a loss in another sector in order to drive competition out of business is ACTUALLY THE DEFINITION OF ANTI-COMPETITIVE.
How are you separating gmail and drive profits? They are both just methods of accessing the same block of storage. Should they be making you pay more if you want to access that same storage in a different manner?
Software is everywhere, and can do so much good, but it can also do a lot of evil. Without having the source code to know what the software is doing (especially after the NSA's activities were detailed by Snowden's leaks), you don't truly know what it's doing.
Like I said, how is that different to any other system? Do you have the schematics for the telephone and all the hardware used in the telephone networks? Or traffic light systems? Traffic cameras? etc... ? Pushing this at the software level is obviously silly, start at the bottom and get the hardware all open first.
Governments and the people should always be aware of what the software is doing, and no one should be beholden to a specific company.
Nobody is, you don't have to use any specific company.
They're not sets of instructions and don't have the same implications that software has, but I still think that being blindly ignorant of everything is bad.
And from that perspective open software is utterly pointless unless it is running on open hardware (and that the hardware it is running on can be audited).
The government needs to promote the common good, and education, sharing, and knowledge are definitely good.
No, the people need to do that. "The government" isn't a static thing, governments change all the time and it's the people that put them there.
The data was collected at great expense and put on laserdisk (being the only medium big enough) by a propriatory data system which is now defunct, making the information collected unreadable.
So the hardware failed? Surely they could load up the software in a VM in the worst case but there's nothing you can do if the hardware is broken.
If stored in a closed format, and the format drops out of use, what do you do?
Has that even happened ever? You can open ancient MS Word documents in LibreOffice, every now and then you come across a formatting bug but that's hardly a big deal.
Failing to convert formats means you lose valuable data
No it means theoretically there is the possibility that some day you could lose valuable data, but it's actually highly unlikely because in reality you can still load up a copy of Word for Windows on Windows 3.1 in a VM. If you're suggesting they may be able to somehow scrub the internet of all software that can read those documents I'd say that's pretty ridiculous.
But even then that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, the topic is about the software, not the format. You can use pretty much any software you want and when you archive your documents you can do it to PDF or HTML if you want.
But you can never really achieve that until you have won the battle on mandating open hardware. Even if you do manage to get them to use FOSS that will still almost certainly be using closed drivers somewhere along the line, even if you could get all fully open drivers it's still going to be interfacing with closed hardware.
How is that different (bearing in mind an acceptable response is that "it isn't any different") from anything else? Whether that's physical goods, food, hardware, engineering documents for construction projects, etc... ? Do you know what goes into the concrete in the bridges and roads you drive on? In the food you eat? Or even how the hardware in the various computers you use works? If this indeed is an "ethical issue" then it is a lot wider spread than software and was around long before governments were buying and using software.
Who kowtowed to any lobbyist, regardless of which one it happens to be.
Precisely! But when is this actually going to happen though? Clearly these politicians are corrupt and you can pay them to pass whatever laws you want. Going to every lobbyist and telling them not to offer bribes to politicians because the politicians will take them achieves nothing, the people of these countries need to stand up to corrupt politicians! If they weren't corrupt in the first place then lobbyists would have no power anyway.
Sure if you like watching grass grow, clearly you haven't been following long enough to have seen the debacles before Windows 8. Notably there was Window ME and Windows Vista and neither of those did anything to harm Microsoft's share of the desktop market. Microsoft can and have screwed up monumentally in both recent memory and distant past yet that didn't help Linux one iota.
I like my Linux desktop the way it is, thankyou, and I do not want it "innovated".
And that's ok, nobody is going to take it away from you. But the topic isn't about you, it's about Linus wanting to take over the desktop market and in that context what I said stands.
Surely you aren't claiming that Metro was an attempt to "appeal to end users."
No I'm not, but their applications run just the same so a new UI (particularly one that doesn't replace the old one) is of little consequence whether it is good or not, Microsoft doesn't need to appeal to the market, they already own it. Microsoft has stumbled many times, notably Windows Vista and Windows 8 but users could use XP until 7 fixed Vista and it looks like they'll be able to use 7 until 9 fixes 8, therefore what Microsoft does matters little. Like I said, you won't disrupt an established market without disruptive innovation and provably the market can withstand Microsoft's foibles.
Fair point, yes I believe OS X apps are mostly reliant on proprietary frameworks but that said Darwin is certainly a viable alternative - kernel-wise - to Linux and has a stable ABI.
People who purport to know about computers need to stop asking stupid questions like "When will Linux be ready for the desktop ?", and start asking intelligent questions like "When will the general populace get a clue ?"
No, no they don't. What they need to ask is "Why do Linux desktop distros not appeal to end users?". The answer has always been clear, it is that they don't offer any significant advantage over the incumbents, they are not disruptive and thus will not disrupt the market.
Look at iOS and Android, they stole the smartphone - and much of the wider cell phone - market from the incumbents by being innovative and disruptive, users didn't care that they were different or incompatible because they offered features that were better! Desktop Linux distros do not do this, they are me-too products scrambling to do whatever OS X and Windows do and thus people don't want to abandon familiarity and compatibility for dubious benefit.
You can provide all the anecdotes you want about your hardships with OS X or Windows and I'm sure they'll be matched with anecdotes about people's hardships with Linux so that gets you nowhere. You can blame Microsoft or blame the user (which is what you're doing) but that doesn't make desktop Linux distros any more disruptive or innovative and thus no more appealing to users.
Offer real, tangible, innovation that is disruptive to the market and the ISVs and OEMs will be climbing over eachother to support it just as they did with Android.
"support our OS on our schedule exactly how we say we'll fucking destroy your market and feed you to your competitors".
Actually it's more just basic economics, if you want to sell hardware to people who run Windows then not supporting Windows isn't going to be a good choice now is it?
Linux device drivers come from begging, pleading, and sometimes reverse engineering and all volunteer efforts of the open source community.
Obviously, since Linux has like 3% of the market. Again basic economics dictates that you wouldn't put anywhere near as much support into it, not to mention one of the biggest selling points of Linux is that you can use it to repurpose old hardware. Did you know very few hardware vendors support Minix? Or Hurd? Or Amoeba? Or Mach? And nor should they, there's no reason to put resources into doing it.
My hope is that some day Linux will get to wield that gun...
So it isn't the attitude that you have a problem with, it's the just the one with the power is the one you don't like.
So what you're saying is that the question of "will it run another OS" is unanswerable because of the possibility - however remote - that somebody might prevent that through implementing the parts of the secureboot feature of UEFI that require only signed operating systems while failing to implement the part for adding keys or turning the feature off?
The overwhelming evidence points to it being able to run another OS because all HP's existing x86 systems allow this and Microsoft certification requires it, the evidence to the contrary is non-existent, it's pure conjecture and absolutely nothing more than that.
My IE threads are each running about 130-150MB ea
My Chrome threads are running 70-170MB ea
Threads? Threads are a completely different thing to Tabs, the terms aren't interchangeable. Most of the chrome tabs I have open have 10 threads each and the tab processes use anywhere from 35 to 200mb of RAM.
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Even with NT6.1 (Microsoft Windows 7) you still could get constant reboots and BSODs (first hand experience).
Really? What were they caused by? Surely if they truly were constant you would investigate. BSODs are almost exclusively triggered by problem drivers (and often an issue with the underlying hardware) much like kernel panics on unix-like systems. The most common offender on Windows is graphics drivers (it's easy to identify with the information on the screen) and the most common on Linux that I have found is power management drivers taking down the system. If you are using faulty drivers or hardware you are going to have problems no matter what OS you use.
Easy. Gmail is ad supported and data mined so they can better target you with ads. Drive is just storage (AFAICT).
No it's the same thing, both are ad supported and both data mine the same data because Gmail and Drive share the same block of storage.
So yes, they should make you pay more if you want to access storage through Drive vs Gmail, assuming you are not abusing gmail as a drive (which has been done for ages, but is not commonly done by users and likely violates the TOS).
By that logic you should be paying extra for email attachments too. But that's irrelevant anyway because Gmail and Drive are the same storage supported by the same ad network.
Yes it could potentially be difficult and yes when this sort of information is archived it should be archived in something like HTML or PDF but it's not that big a deal to think ahead and make sure you have a copy of the software going forward. If they can't figure out the file types then they are just as likely to have issues with lost passwords and encryption keys too.
The files can pretty easily be recovered with virtual machines, the real issue is the storage medium.
they are competing with Google Drive and MS OneDrive, both of whom are pushing the price down hard, and willing to lose money.
Really? I haven't seen any evidence that they are losing money, they may offer a lower price but that doesn't mean they are losing money.
Using free service to drive the competition out of business is illegal in some cases. People like free, but if it's below cost to harm competitors that would be lllegal.
But it isn't free, they don't charge you, they charge advertisers and they make money by scanning your stuff then advertising to you. The fact that most people prefer that model to an upfront cost model doesn't make it illegal.
Would be a shame to see it get destroyed through aggressive anti-competitive practices.
Google Drive makes money not just with the subscription price but with advertising revenue, does DropBox do the same thing? You can hardly say it is anti-competitive just because Google monetizes the same service in a different way.
Using profits from one sector to support selling at a loss in another sector in order to drive competition out of business is ACTUALLY THE DEFINITION OF ANTI-COMPETITIVE.
How are you separating gmail and drive profits? They are both just methods of accessing the same block of storage. Should they be making you pay more if you want to access that same storage in a different manner?
Software is everywhere, and can do so much good, but it can also do a lot of evil. Without having the source code to know what the software is doing (especially after the NSA's activities were detailed by Snowden's leaks), you don't truly know what it's doing.
Like I said, how is that different to any other system? Do you have the schematics for the telephone and all the hardware used in the telephone networks? Or traffic light systems? Traffic cameras? etc... ? Pushing this at the software level is obviously silly, start at the bottom and get the hardware all open first.
Governments and the people should always be aware of what the software is doing, and no one should be beholden to a specific company.
Nobody is, you don't have to use any specific company.
They're not sets of instructions and don't have the same implications that software has, but I still think that being blindly ignorant of everything is bad.
And from that perspective open software is utterly pointless unless it is running on open hardware (and that the hardware it is running on can be audited).
The government needs to promote the common good, and education, sharing, and knowledge are definitely good.
No, the people need to do that. "The government" isn't a static thing, governments change all the time and it's the people that put them there.
The data was collected at great expense and put on laserdisk (being the only medium big enough) by a propriatory data system which is now defunct, making the information collected unreadable.
So the hardware failed? Surely they could load up the software in a VM in the worst case but there's nothing you can do if the hardware is broken.
Have you got a citation for that? I'm interested but couldn't find anything.
If stored in a closed format, and the format drops out of use, what do you do?
Has that even happened ever? You can open ancient MS Word documents in LibreOffice, every now and then you come across a formatting bug but that's hardly a big deal.
Failing to convert formats means you lose valuable data
No it means theoretically there is the possibility that some day you could lose valuable data, but it's actually highly unlikely because in reality you can still load up a copy of Word for Windows on Windows 3.1 in a VM. If you're suggesting they may be able to somehow scrub the internet of all software that can read those documents I'd say that's pretty ridiculous.
But even then that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, the topic is about the software, not the format. You can use pretty much any software you want and when you archive your documents you can do it to PDF or HTML if you want.
Pretty much every word processor can save to HTML or PDF so archive it as that.
But you can never really achieve that until you have won the battle on mandating open hardware. Even if you do manage to get them to use FOSS that will still almost certainly be using closed drivers somewhere along the line, even if you could get all fully open drivers it's still going to be interfacing with closed hardware.
How is that different (bearing in mind an acceptable response is that "it isn't any different") from anything else? Whether that's physical goods, food, hardware, engineering documents for construction projects, etc ... ? Do you know what goes into the concrete in the bridges and roads you drive on? In the food you eat? Or even how the hardware in the various computers you use works? If this indeed is an "ethical issue" then it is a lot wider spread than software and was around long before governments were buying and using software.
Who kowtowed to any lobbyist, regardless of which one it happens to be.
Precisely! But when is this actually going to happen though? Clearly these politicians are corrupt and you can pay them to pass whatever laws you want. Going to every lobbyist and telling them not to offer bribes to politicians because the politicians will take them achieves nothing, the people of these countries need to stand up to corrupt politicians! If they weren't corrupt in the first place then lobbyists would have no power anyway.
Sure if you like watching grass grow, clearly you haven't been following long enough to have seen the debacles before Windows 8. Notably there was Window ME and Windows Vista and neither of those did anything to harm Microsoft's share of the desktop market. Microsoft can and have screwed up monumentally in both recent memory and distant past yet that didn't help Linux one iota.
I like my Linux desktop the way it is, thankyou, and I do not want it "innovated".
And that's ok, nobody is going to take it away from you. But the topic isn't about you, it's about Linus wanting to take over the desktop market and in that context what I said stands.
We will crush Microsoft some other way.
ok
Surely you aren't claiming that Metro was an attempt to "appeal to end users."
No I'm not, but their applications run just the same so a new UI (particularly one that doesn't replace the old one) is of little consequence whether it is good or not, Microsoft doesn't need to appeal to the market, they already own it. Microsoft has stumbled many times, notably Windows Vista and Windows 8 but users could use XP until 7 fixed Vista and it looks like they'll be able to use 7 until 9 fixes 8, therefore what Microsoft does matters little. Like I said, you won't disrupt an established market without disruptive innovation and provably the market can withstand Microsoft's foibles.
Fair point, yes I believe OS X apps are mostly reliant on proprietary frameworks but that said Darwin is certainly a viable alternative - kernel-wise - to Linux and has a stable ABI.
Um, OS X is free. Yes, as in Beer.
Also the kernel is libre so there's nothing to stop you building a userland (or re-purposing an existing one) to run atop Darwin.
People who purport to know about computers need to stop asking stupid questions like "When will Linux be ready for the desktop ?", and start asking intelligent questions like "When will the general populace get a clue ?"
No, no they don't. What they need to ask is "Why do Linux desktop distros not appeal to end users?". The answer has always been clear, it is that they don't offer any significant advantage over the incumbents, they are not disruptive and thus will not disrupt the market.
Look at iOS and Android, they stole the smartphone - and much of the wider cell phone - market from the incumbents by being innovative and disruptive, users didn't care that they were different or incompatible because they offered features that were better! Desktop Linux distros do not do this, they are me-too products scrambling to do whatever OS X and Windows do and thus people don't want to abandon familiarity and compatibility for dubious benefit.
You can provide all the anecdotes you want about your hardships with OS X or Windows and I'm sure they'll be matched with anecdotes about people's hardships with Linux so that gets you nowhere. You can blame Microsoft or blame the user (which is what you're doing) but that doesn't make desktop Linux distros any more disruptive or innovative and thus no more appealing to users.
Offer real, tangible, innovation that is disruptive to the market and the ISVs and OEMs will be climbing over eachother to support it just as they did with Android.
"support our OS on our schedule exactly how we say we'll fucking destroy your market and feed you to your competitors".
Actually it's more just basic economics, if you want to sell hardware to people who run Windows then not supporting Windows isn't going to be a good choice now is it?
Linux device drivers come from begging, pleading, and sometimes reverse engineering and all volunteer efforts of the open source community.
Obviously, since Linux has like 3% of the market. Again basic economics dictates that you wouldn't put anywhere near as much support into it, not to mention one of the biggest selling points of Linux is that you can use it to repurpose old hardware. Did you know very few hardware vendors support Minix? Or Hurd? Or Amoeba? Or Mach? And nor should they, there's no reason to put resources into doing it.
My hope is that some day Linux will get to wield that gun...
So it isn't the attitude that you have a problem with, it's the just the one with the power is the one you don't like.
So what you're saying is that the question of "will it run another OS" is unanswerable because of the possibility - however remote - that somebody might prevent that through implementing the parts of the secureboot feature of UEFI that require only signed operating systems while failing to implement the part for adding keys or turning the feature off?
The overwhelming evidence points to it being able to run another OS because all HP's existing x86 systems allow this and Microsoft certification requires it, the evidence to the contrary is non-existent, it's pure conjecture and absolutely nothing more than that.
My IE threads are each running about 130-150MB ea My Chrome threads are running 70-170MB ea
Threads? Threads are a completely different thing to Tabs, the terms aren't interchangeable. Most of the chrome tabs I have open have 10 threads each and the tab processes use anywhere from 35 to 200mb of RAM.