You Can't even run Windows Vista on a Single Core and 1 Gig of Ram Let alone another Virtual Machine on top of that. I call Shens!
Sorry I wasn't more clear. The Virtual PC instance that runs Win 2008 RC0 only uses one core and only has 1GB of RAM asigned to it. The host Vista machine is a dual core with 4GB of RAM.
Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS.
Yup. I run Win 2008 RC0 for development and it's great. As an aside, I dunno what was wrong with their setup to cause a "sluggish" UI. My setup only has 1GB and a single core. It is running in Virtual PC which is hosted on Windows Vista. Not exactly a setup for speed, but it's very snappy.
To be honest, for several versions, Windows had little to offer over DOS.
Agreed. Until Windows 95 I ran a hacked up version of Mini Linux and DOS. DOS was pretty much for gaming and linux was for the rest (PPP, Telnet, FTP, irc ii, etc.).
The stakes of online gambling is simply too high, and it's far easy to cheat. Do you have evidence of this? This is only the second major case of cheating that I know of, and in both cases players are having the money confiscated. Sure, you can't prove that cheating isn't happening, but I know many people (outside the US, of course, unfortunately we can't play anymore) who play online and make a killing at it. There simply isn't evidence that people are getting cheated out of their money with any kind of meaningful frequency.
Poker is a game of information, and knowing even 2 more cards compared to others give you a huge advantage. This is a common myth. There is plenty written about this issue and having the knowledge of two dead cards simply does not give you that big of an advantage.
Over time, this gives them a huge systematic advantage.
With just two people? Not usually. The forms of collusion which have a meaningful impact usually involve having over half the table in on it. Software can detect betting patterns, IP addresses, and other heuristics to catch most of this. Alert players can also smell a rat, online or in real life.
...gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S.
You're right, many are subject to far more effective regulatory agencies as well as shareholders on the London Stock Exchange. What arrogance to think that the US federal or state governments are the only regulatory agencies that can effectively regulate gambling. Next they'll be protecting us from those "dangerous offshore European stock markets" by making it illegal to invest in them.
Comparing the cost of Software to Hardware is fundamentally flawed. They are two distinct components of a product. Each component holds their own value irrespective of another. For example, Adobe CS3 could easily cost 300% of the hardware that you bought to run it on, but that doesn't take away from the value of Adove CS3. The same goes for Windows. The only reasonable argument that the author makes is that you can "get the same functionality from Linux for free". At least this argument makes sense logically, although it has yet to be proven by any stretch of the imagination.
Office validation should be concerned about office & not anything else. It shouldn't be SPYING on anything else.
I'm not defending this bad user experience, however, it IS a part of Office: Microsoft Office Visio. It's not spying, rather, it's recognizing an unactivated component. This is just a bug in the Office updater that'll hopefully be fixed soon.
Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
The simple point you're making: Hardware is for us to USE, not "NOT USE". Sure, we don't want our applications to be completely wasteful. But if software developers can focus more on useful features and code with less bugs, I'd rather they do that than save a few megs of RAM.
This recent article discusses an interesting paradox India is in: It will have high unemployment among the educated, but only because those educated are not skilled enough to perform the required jobs (including, but not limited to, IT). The point is that India will not be able to come close to meeting the demand of an estimated workforce shortage of 40 million by 2012.
For a start, why don't you come up with a less biased source then GREENPEACE.ORG. Ad hominem at it's finest. "This fallacy is often introduced by phrases such as: "Of course, that's what you'd expect him to say."
It's okay for percieved bias to cause suspicion, but then you have to follow up with that by investigating the source's information. Bias does not make their information wrong. You have to show how their information is wrong or how they're misrepresenting the facts. The rest of your post goes on about how there could be a problem but you offer little more than speculation. This doesn't counter their findings which is based on research with real world data.
It's not a language issue. I'm sure that unqualified folks will figure out how to cause all sorts of new vulnerabilities in "safe" languages.
It's not an either/or issue. Good developers on safer (managed/GC'd) languages will develop much more secure software than good developers on languages like C/C++.
What most people do in computer programming is like carpentry...
Consider that a carpenter performs the same task over and over (e.g. building the frame of a house). In software development you ideally should *never* be performing the exact same task twice. I'll be the first to admit that software developers generally suck at resuse. However, this doesn't mean that we sit there repeating the same of very similar things from day to day. Good software design is all about not repeating yourself. Sure, the language constructs are the same (loops, method calls, etc.), but this is the nature of expressing something in a finite language. Shakespere may use the same "methods" (i.e. words) but his works are not compared to that of a scribe.
A both OSes have home versions which allow restore of backuped Data... For Vista you need Ultimate or Business to get restore functionality;-)
All SKU's support automatic file backup and restore. There is additional functionality in Ultimate and Business for making an image of your entire system.
I think this is the first thread on/. where A) the term Free Software is used interchangebly with OSS and B) there aren't dozens of people correcting this. I've read a lot from Bill and seen him speak before, and from what I see he is *very* passionate about OSS.
but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation.
I'm failing to see the "pressure-situation" in your story. It sounds more like your friend is reactionary which is a *very* dangerous trait for someone who's driving on a motorway even at posted speeds let alone 100mph.
You must not be a software developer or one that's had to work with a standard as complicated as W3C's. While I've never worked directly with the W3C standards, I have tried to work with otherstandards in my career and I can tell you that I fully empathize with the IE team. Sometimes standards are a lower priority simply because they're a bear to work with, or they don't allow for innovation because they're too restrictive or poorly designed. It's "design by committee" at it's worst. That all being said, I think that IE is a case where things like DOM and CSS should be fully W3C compliant because it's a good standard *and* it's demanded by our customers. Firefox can do it, so should we. In general though, standards are not always a good thing for the customer. When they are they're a pain to work with. I imagine that a lot of the IE troubles are due to backwards compatibility with non-standards compliant code. So yeah, we should have been building on standards since IE2. Live and learn.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion which does not necessarily reflect that of my employers.
Slashdot Mirror
You Can't even run Windows Vista on a Single Core and 1 Gig of Ram Let alone another Virtual Machine on top of that. I call Shens!
Sorry I wasn't more clear. The Virtual PC instance that runs Win 2008 RC0 only uses one core and only has 1GB of RAM asigned to it. The host Vista machine is a dual core with 4GB of RAM.
Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS.
Yup. I run Win 2008 RC0 for development and it's great. As an aside, I dunno what was wrong with their setup to cause a "sluggish" UI. My setup only has 1GB and a single core. It is running in Virtual PC which is hosted on Windows Vista. Not exactly a setup for speed, but it's very snappy.
Business users should be headed for the exits.
Or, they can centrally manage what updates are sent to their machines like many businesses do today with WSUS.
To be honest, for several versions, Windows had little to offer over DOS.
Agreed. Until Windows 95 I ran a hacked up version of Mini Linux and DOS. DOS was pretty much for gaming and linux was for the rest (PPP, Telnet, FTP, irc ii, etc.).
The stakes of online gambling is simply too high, and it's far easy to cheat.
Do you have evidence of this? This is only the second major case of cheating that I know of, and in both cases players are having the money confiscated. Sure, you can't prove that cheating isn't happening, but I know many people (outside the US, of course, unfortunately we can't play anymore) who play online and make a killing at it. There simply isn't evidence that people are getting cheated out of their money with any kind of meaningful frequency.
Poker is a game of information, and knowing even 2 more cards compared to others give you a huge advantage.
This is a common myth. There is plenty written about this issue and having the knowledge of two dead cards simply does not give you that big of an advantage.
Over time, this gives them a huge systematic advantage.
With just two people? Not usually. The forms of collusion which have a meaningful impact usually involve having over half the table in on it. Software can detect betting patterns, IP addresses, and other heuristics to catch most of this. Alert players can also smell a rat, online or in real life.
...gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S.
You're right, many are subject to far more effective regulatory agencies as well as shareholders on the London Stock Exchange. What arrogance to think that the US federal or state governments are the only regulatory agencies that can effectively regulate gambling. Next they'll be protecting us from those "dangerous offshore European stock markets" by making it illegal to invest in them.
Comparing the cost of Software to Hardware is fundamentally flawed. They are two distinct components of a product. Each component holds their own value irrespective of another. For example, Adobe CS3 could easily cost 300% of the hardware that you bought to run it on, but that doesn't take away from the value of Adove CS3. The same goes for Windows. The only reasonable argument that the author makes is that you can "get the same functionality from Linux for free". At least this argument makes sense logically, although it has yet to be proven by any stretch of the imagination.
Office validation should be concerned about office & not anything else. It shouldn't
be SPYING on anything else.
I'm not defending this bad user experience, however, it IS a part of Office: Microsoft Office Visio. It's not spying, rather, it's recognizing an unactivated component. This is just a bug in the Office updater that'll hopefully be fixed soon.
Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
The simple point you're making: Hardware is for us to USE, not "NOT USE". Sure, we don't want our applications to be completely wasteful. But if software developers can focus more on useful features and code with less bugs, I'd rather they do that than save a few megs of RAM.
This recent article discusses an interesting paradox India is in: It will have high unemployment among the educated, but only because those educated are not skilled enough to perform the required jobs (including, but not limited to, IT). The point is that India will not be able to come close to meeting the demand of an estimated workforce shortage of 40 million by 2012.
For a start, why don't you come up with a less biased source then GREENPEACE.ORG.
Ad hominem at it's finest. "This fallacy is often introduced by phrases such as: "Of course, that's what you'd expect him to say."
It's okay for percieved bias to cause suspicion, but then you have to follow up with that by investigating the source's information. Bias does not make their information wrong. You have to show how their information is wrong or how they're misrepresenting the facts. The rest of your post goes on about how there could be a problem but you offer little more than speculation. This doesn't counter their findings which is based on research with real world data.
Isn't that for a judge and jury to decide?
We're in a sad state when we feel the need for a judge and jury for matters which require simple discretion.
It's not a language issue. I'm sure that unqualified folks will figure out how to cause all sorts of new vulnerabilities in "safe" languages.
It's not an either/or issue. Good developers on safer (managed/GC'd) languages will develop much more secure software than good developers on languages like C/C++.
What most people do in computer programming is like carpentry...
Consider that a carpenter performs the same task over and over (e.g. building the frame of a house). In software development you ideally should *never* be performing the exact same task twice. I'll be the first to admit that software developers generally suck at resuse. However, this doesn't mean that we sit there repeating the same of very similar things from day to day. Good software design is all about not repeating yourself. Sure, the language constructs are the same (loops, method calls, etc.), but this is the nature of expressing something in a finite language. Shakespere may use the same "methods" (i.e. words) but his works are not compared to that of a scribe.
I have some URL validating code that has this same issue. This is a historic moment: "Reading /. helps me find bugs in our code". :)
My current assignment is with a server consolidation team.
Windows Vista is not a server operating system so this won't affect you. What you're looking for is Windows Server 2008.
A both OSes have home versions which allow restore of backuped Data... ;-)
For Vista you need Ultimate or Business to get restore functionality
All SKU's support automatic file backup and restore. There is additional functionality in Ultimate and Business for making an image of your entire system.
See: Windows Backup and Restore Center
If MSFT is not competing in the applications arena and sells only the OS...
An OS is simply a type of application. Also, from a consumer product point of view, the definition of what an OS includes is very subjective.
Oh Cripes, throw me a technology idea that no one else has thought of first.
Exactly. Everyone should go read The Myths Of Innovation (O'Reilly) before making comments about innovation.
I think this is the first thread on /. where A) the term Free Software is used interchangebly with OSS and B) there aren't dozens of people correcting this. I've read a lot from Bill and seen him speak before, and from what I see he is *very* passionate about OSS.
Hummer driving, like driving V12 Benzes and BWMs 200kph on the autobahn, is conspicuous consumption.
At least the latter do so in style.
but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation.
I'm failing to see the "pressure-situation" in your story. It sounds more like your friend is reactionary which is a *very* dangerous trait for someone who's driving on a motorway even at posted speeds let alone 100mph.
why is it so damn hard to follow standards
You must not be a software developer or one that's had to work with a standard as complicated as W3C's. While I've never worked directly with the W3C standards, I have tried to work with other standards in my career and I can tell you that I fully empathize with the IE team. Sometimes standards are a lower priority simply because they're a bear to work with, or they don't allow for innovation because they're too restrictive or poorly designed. It's "design by committee" at it's worst. That all being said, I think that IE is a case where things like DOM and CSS should be fully W3C compliant because it's a good standard *and* it's demanded by our customers. Firefox can do it, so should we. In general though, standards are not always a good thing for the customer. When they are they're a pain to work with. I imagine that a lot of the IE troubles are due to backwards compatibility with non-standards compliant code. So yeah, we should have been building on standards since IE2. Live and learn.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion which does not necessarily reflect that of my employers.
But the "cost correlation" is irrelevant. Computers could cost $10 and it wouldn't change the value of software.