The whole reason Silverlight exists is because flash is not Microsoft. Break every browser flash game by going Silverlight only? Microsoft is not that stupid, if they owned flash then they'd be all over it. Same with most other of Adobe's apps, pretty much everything in their Creative Suite has much higher brand recognition than Microsoft's products.
There's waste in every sector, a lot of people would recognize parts of "Dilbert" is their job in the private sector. What you're feeling is the "stockholder's itch", if you owned stock in a company you'd feel exactly the same after they pissed away $100m on a failed IT project. That is your money they're pissing away, not somebody else's.
Is cutting taxes going to fix that? Nah. It's a never ending excuse you can use to cut taxes, there's always too much waste in government. And the result will always be the same, a reduction in services instead. But not because taxes were cut, because they did not reduce waste.
Just stand for the practical consequences the way the world works, not some theoretical ideological world where something else happens. Worst are the purists, who think that if the world reacts differently than their ideology it's because they haven't followed it blindly enough.
A good example is socialized health care, we pay less per person because it's less waste than in the US system. But since per ideology the free market is always best, the market can not be free enough. Oh well...
I'd highly recommend a HP ZR24w. It will set you back $400 but it's 1920x1200 (16:10) and S-IPS panel, which is actually very good value for the money. It's just so incredibly much better than the cheap TN panel I had before, side by side it's like night and day. "Cheap" 16:10 monitors are horribly priced, either go with 16:9 or be prepared to spend a bit on a quality 16:10 panel.
Well, if it ends up like some claim with you being indefinitely held in contempt or repeatedly convicted until you provide the key then it might still be better. After all the key is gone, so nobody can claim you continue to disobey the court.
Have you actually done a count of the number of addressable devices IPv6 provides. There may well be a time when IPv6 needs to be NATed, but that is well into the future when systems will be ready for a 256bit network address. At this point IPv6 provides just what we need for the next century, and possibly more.
I really doubt that, 32 bits is just slightly too little. There's about 2^33 people in the world today and having one IP for home and work and cabin and some for portable gadgets it would still fit in 36 bits or so. Even if you take just the high 64 bits of an IPv6 address that is about a billion IP addresses per person. And each of those can have 2^64 devices hooked up with different MACs. 128 bits really does ought to be enough for everyone...
Norway has that insanity beat by far, here porn where the girl appears underage is illegal regardless if there is full documentation that the actors are 18+. I remember reading about one such conviction and there was enough details to find it was a "Tiny Tove" movie, she never produced anything before she was 18, they managed to produce the age records and still by the fucked up laws here he was still convicted.
To be honest I don't really care whether they can pay or not if the damages are proportional to the harm caused. Even if you're dead broke you can cause great grief to other people, same with people that serve a dozen consecutive life sentences. It's worth making the point even if there's nothing to be gained from it. But though I find spammers to be the scum of the earth, I got to admit there are worse people. It doesn't help taking the damage figures in US courts seriously either, it's like taken out of an Austin Powers movie...
Personally, I'd be willing to wager a pretty good bet that the first probe we send won't be coming home. In fact, it probably won't brake at all it'll just speed past like a bullet, record as much data as possible and transmit it to earth. And that's only after we've exhausted all other options to point huge telescopes and radio arrays and whatever else at it. Personally I figure even if we find Earth II we'll spend at least 100 years trying to observe it better from here and 1000 years waiting for that probe. If we're to see it there better be some breakthroughs in immortality first.
I just have to think -- when was the last time a large corporation was fined $1 billion for anything? This has to be just because he had a crappy lawyer or something.
If my lawyer had come and said "Great news, I got your fine reduced from $1 billion to $10 million" I'd say "Great, that's like reduing my 20000 year sentence to a 200 year sentence." Corporations try their best to avoid a billion dollar fine because they might just have the money to pay it. If my lawyer wasted his time doing the same, he would be a crappy lawyer.
Given how long it's taken Firefox to reach its current market share, it seems either remarkable or implausible that Chrome could reach 11% in about two years just on the basis of word-of-mouth. This figure only makes sense if it's a reflection of other trends in the industry like the rise of mobiles.
They track both OS and Browser, and that's not it. Chrome jumpstarted at a level far past what Firefox was, it launched with 1% market share almost instantly. It has huge name recognition as being Google's browser, and they can pick any ad space they want for it. Also it's much easier to gain market share now in the market where IE has 60% than when Firefox was trying to break Microsoft's 80-90% stranglehold. It's happening, the good news is like the story says that it seems to be eating into IEs marketshare, not just taking them from Firefox. I'm guessing Chrome is a hit with all the people that want a big serious company *rollseyes* behind their product like Microsoft or Google, the Mozilla Foundation just doesn't have the same impact.
I'm guessing bragging, which is why they're giving him the full tar and feathering. It doesn't really get better than your name, picture and location in the paper saying you were arrested by police "tackling child sexual exploitation" so that absolutely everybody gets the message what the police think is on that computer. Could you possibly be any more publicly brandished without any actual conviction to that fact?
United States vs. Boucher was a very weird case though:
Boucher accessed the Z drive of his laptop at the ICE agent's request. The ICE agent viewed the contents of some of the Z drive's files, and ascertained that they may consist of images or videos of child pornography. The Government thus knows of the existence and location of the Z drive and its files. Again providing access to the unencrypted Z drive "adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government's information" about the existence and location of files that may contain incriminating information.
That is a one in a million case. In all the others, they will have no knowledge of what is on the encrypted drive. So until there's a more mainstream case where this case is used as precedent, I'll consider this a freak exception. Oh and if you read the other case, you will see that the girl testified to him taking photographs of her. The existance of the encryption software was used as a reasonable explanation for why they could not find those pictures, it was marginally relevant to the case itself.
Short answer: No. Through some creative legal thinking producing your encryption password is now considered equal to handing over the key to your safe, not to compel information from your mind. It's bullshit but Britain takes 1984 as a role model, not a warning.
Well it's fantasy so take your pick: 1. It was guarded by the Nazgul. Only after the destruction of the ring are the eagles able to reach the mountain. 2. Their half-animal minds lack the strength of character and will to subdue the ring. 3. If the eagles could not resist using the ring near Sauron then he would sense it and send his minions.
If you look at the other members of the fellowship, they're pretty much all driven by some sort of ambition. It might be that Frodo isn't *that* special, but none of the other are really suited to the task, it would have to be another "nobody" that does not desire power. Or it might be Hobbit society, which you can see is far less war-torn than Elves or Men or Dwarfs and so instills a natural goodness in hobbits that the others don't have.
For one Peter Jackson is not George Lucas, also I doubt he's had any deciding power in the DVD/BluRay release schedule which is an insult to all the fans. He had to fight hard enough to get his own money. If you're going to stay true to the book then I'd say one movie leading up to and ending in the climax of Smaug's defeat is a good first movie. Making that a little "middle climax" and the battle of five armies the final climax doesn't do it justice at all. Remember that the LotR movies were much, much longer than normal cinema movies so there's plenty material for two movies. I think it can be good, certainly much better than fellowship of the ring and that really did end in the middle of nowhere, and that wasn't a bad film at all.
License yes, legal construction... well, I don't know it really applies but the whole construction that practically all copyrighted software is licensed, unlike a copyrighted book that is sold is probably the single most important legal clusterfuck ever. If your car manufacturer told you what roads you can drive on, what gas stations to tank at, where to get it serviced while forbidding you to use other spare parts, welding the hood down, refusing to let you sell it and has a kill switch there'd be arevolution. But the software industry pulled it off, you now constantly click on EULAs that say "all your base are belong to us". Sorry RMS, but that really dwarfs all the FSF has managed to do.
Also, once a machine downloaded and installed the patch it could then announce back to the tracker that it can be a seed as it is no longer vulnerable. So, the tracker would only show seeds, and the downloading system would only announce that it was a seed AFTER it installed the patch.
Anyone downloading the patch from an untrusted seed - who can be a small botnet with 100 seeds, not just one machine - is revealing themselves as vunerable to that seed. And if it tries downloading in a torrent-like way then it exposes itself to many seeds. That would be stupid.
It just doesn't work, at best you get a torrent of official sites. But since they're few and static and actually care what international pipes they use, it's probably better if you just use the local mirror.
As long as enough colleges don't have a problem with it, it's not a problem to anyone. Compared to most college students' torrent habits it's probably just line noise on the bandwidth usage.
It'd make more sense to finally get delta debs functioning, done right they could cut down on downloads for slow users which is a much bigger issue globally. It would mean the server carring lots of extra delta files between versions but it'd cut the 20 MB download every time they decide to bump the kernel version 0.0.0.0-lucid+1 steps.
If I ran a business I wouldn't be upgrading my PCs all the time either. I'd upgrade them as often as serves a business purpose. If a shiny new PC will make me more productive I'd buy it that afternoon. If it won't, then the money goes into the bank for when I need to replace it. I'd anticipate failures and plan for them.
Somehow, I suspect many of the people you are defending here to be on the wrong side of that line. These things get far more visible when you're billing for it, as a consultant I was amazed at how little many companies want to invest in hardware or software that'd make me finish faster and bill less but rather let me sit there fiddling with it at $200/hour even after I've told them. Simple things like say arranging a training session for half a dozen people became a huge undertaking with meetings and back and forth with IT because there was only two network jacks and nobody could simply go and buy a damn 8-port network hub at the nearest computer store. Somewhere around 2007 I was stuck on a Windows NT machine that I spent ages going back and forth about software and when I finally found the way to use it I spent half my time waiting for it to respond.
These people here obviously had smaller shops so hopefully bureaucracy wasn't the problem, but most people don't value time properly. If you're spending too much time fiddling with something that you might possibly fix but know that for $x dollars you can get something that almost certainly works, go buy it. It's not a failing of your geek-fu. That is also why most companies reimage computers rather than try saving them. Not because you couldn't, but because it's not worth the time. Most likely they could have gotten rid of some of these time thieves with faster computers, better software with more bug fixes, compatibility with everything people send you, all sorts of little things that add up on you. Hard to measure, but very often using your 1990s box costs you too many such one minute here and one minute there.
I think the worst case I had was a box that kept on crashing even though I had run almost any test and measured everything that could be measured. After trying to replace several parts - each was its own round of taking it apart and putting it together only to use it for some hours and have it crash and take down everything I was doing again I just said "screw this" and bought a completely new computer even though the one I had was powerful enough and let the old live out its days as a light Linux server - which apparently didn't trigger the crashes. Waste of good money? Maybe. But it had certainly been a solid waste of good time and I wasn't about to throw more time into it. At least some things you could constantly save in anticipation of a crash but trying to play Guild Wars online was hopeless. Twenty minutes into a raid, poof goes the healer as his machine bluescreened. It's a wonder than computer wasn't thrown out the window and beat to death with a sledgehammer.
Avoid products and file formats that are not forward and backward compatible between versions.
Well good luck on that one, there's plenty open source software too that only have an import filter for old versions. From time to time features get added that the old software can't handle and can't reasonably ignore and saving in the old format does not really make sense and will take a bunch of current-to-legacy conversion code. I'm sure you can find examples of software that can read everything back to 1.0 but I got plenty examples where you can't.
I agree that virtualization is mostly the way to go, unless you're tied to special hardware. I'm guessing that unsupported hardware won't be virtualized either, and in most of the cases here I imagine there is. Like the audio guy, I'm sure there was some pro audio gear hooked up to that even if it wasn't mentioned.
There are millions of Germans who believe they are VICTIMS... yeah, it is not like Germany did anything to deserve its treatments post WW2.
Germany did plenty. But there are millions of Germans that never supported the Nazi regime or launching a world war or genocide or anything of the sorts. And on top of that they ended up behind the iron curtain, divided from the rest of their people and under the reign of the Soviet Union which was furious about the bloodbath German troops had caused. I'm not trying to defend anything of what Nazi Germany did, but in any war there will be many people on all sides that feel they didn't deserve it. Any of it.
By the way, the witch hunt for those that wanted to escape to the west was insane. I did see a documentary on it and the first who tried were families torn apart, couples in love who suddenly found themselves on different sides, that sort of thing. All because they were afraid half the country would run off because of somewhat better conditions in the west. If they had made a peaceful way for 0.01% to leave it wouldn't have gotten to nearly those proportions.
How is a bomb threat anything like a knife? It's more like threating to find a knife and slice you up, which is and definitively should be a crime. If you call in a bomb threat, it might be obvious to you that it's a prank call, but it's not obvious to anyone else. If you pretend to be pointing a gun at someone through your jacket, don't be surprised if you get shot as if you did have a gun. Call in a bomb threat and I'm all for a SWAT team taking down your door so you don't get to set off any explosives. It's not a joke and it's not funny.
No, what I reacting to was the part that said "everybody who uses Ubuntu is happy". So it's working out great for YOU, fantastic. But not for a lot of other people, users or ex-users. People are dissatisfied and leaving. I'm considering leaving. And yes, I mean everything I said because both the post you replied to and mine are all like "How DARE you say it's not good?! You whiner!" I'm sorry if that bursts your bubble. I'm sorry that you can't handle negative opinions contrary to your own. I tried backing that up with figures to show that no, it's not just me but you want to make it a personal assault so I call you for what you are. And yeah, try pinning the "contributes nothing but whining" on me to make yourself feel good - attack is the best defense right? Save your pathetic "shut up and like it" tactics for the n00bs.
Then you realize this is the main reason for having a government-run public school system.
Sometimes I wonder how this trash gets modded up. Pretty much all modern countries have public schools because otherwise kids wouldn't get any school at all. See the whole third world as an example, lack of education is a huge blocker for prosperity. The reason we have teacher's degrees and curriculum is because otherwise we'd have no quality control and no assurances that kids would get out of school knowing even the minimum about the world they ought to. Why is creationism so prevalent in the US as opposed to everywhere else? Because you can pull your kids out of school and teach them whatever you like. And not how reproduction works and what a condom is for. Can homeschooling or private schools be better than public schools? Yes. Can they be worse? Absolutely. At a minimum, you have to deal with a lot of other kids that aren't like you and don't think like you. By far the most narrow-minded and with the most twisted world views I've met have been American and home schooled. Granted, so have some of the brightest but it seems to bring out both kinds of extremes.
So your whole argument boils down to "LALALALALA I can't hear you we're happy here in fairytale land, I'm happy, everybody happy". Canonical is still losing money, you better check your facts. The last time we got a definitive answer on that (it's a private company so no public books) was in March 2010 when the new CEO took over. "We're not profitable now.". Linux is losing users which I backed up with statistics while you just throw insults, but hey great that you're trying your best to get rid to someone who has used Linux as my primary desktop now for three years (I dual boot for the games). You're a fucking retard. It's sad that the Linux community has to put up with pathetic pricks like you.
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The whole reason Silverlight exists is because flash is not Microsoft. Break every browser flash game by going Silverlight only? Microsoft is not that stupid, if they owned flash then they'd be all over it. Same with most other of Adobe's apps, pretty much everything in their Creative Suite has much higher brand recognition than Microsoft's products.
There's waste in every sector, a lot of people would recognize parts of "Dilbert" is their job in the private sector. What you're feeling is the "stockholder's itch", if you owned stock in a company you'd feel exactly the same after they pissed away $100m on a failed IT project. That is your money they're pissing away, not somebody else's.
Is cutting taxes going to fix that? Nah. It's a never ending excuse you can use to cut taxes, there's always too much waste in government. And the result will always be the same, a reduction in services instead. But not because taxes were cut, because they did not reduce waste.
Just stand for the practical consequences the way the world works, not some theoretical ideological world where something else happens. Worst are the purists, who think that if the world reacts differently than their ideology it's because they haven't followed it blindly enough.
A good example is socialized health care, we pay less per person because it's less waste than in the US system. But since per ideology the free market is always best, the market can not be free enough. Oh well...
I'd highly recommend a HP ZR24w. It will set you back $400 but it's 1920x1200 (16:10) and S-IPS panel, which is actually very good value for the money. It's just so incredibly much better than the cheap TN panel I had before, side by side it's like night and day. "Cheap" 16:10 monitors are horribly priced, either go with 16:9 or be prepared to spend a bit on a quality 16:10 panel.
Well, if it ends up like some claim with you being indefinitely held in contempt or repeatedly convicted until you provide the key then it might still be better. After all the key is gone, so nobody can claim you continue to disobey the court.
Have you actually done a count of the number of addressable devices IPv6 provides. There may well be a time when IPv6 needs to be NATed, but that is well into the future when systems will be ready for a 256bit network address. At this point IPv6 provides just what we need for the next century, and possibly more.
I really doubt that, 32 bits is just slightly too little. There's about 2^33 people in the world today and having one IP for home and work and cabin and some for portable gadgets it would still fit in 36 bits or so. Even if you take just the high 64 bits of an IPv6 address that is about a billion IP addresses per person. And each of those can have 2^64 devices hooked up with different MACs. 128 bits really does ought to be enough for everyone...
Norway has that insanity beat by far, here porn where the girl appears underage is illegal regardless if there is full documentation that the actors are 18+. I remember reading about one such conviction and there was enough details to find it was a "Tiny Tove" movie, she never produced anything before she was 18, they managed to produce the age records and still by the fucked up laws here he was still convicted.
To be honest I don't really care whether they can pay or not if the damages are proportional to the harm caused. Even if you're dead broke you can cause great grief to other people, same with people that serve a dozen consecutive life sentences. It's worth making the point even if there's nothing to be gained from it. But though I find spammers to be the scum of the earth, I got to admit there are worse people. It doesn't help taking the damage figures in US courts seriously either, it's like taken out of an Austin Powers movie...
Personally, I'd be willing to wager a pretty good bet that the first probe we send won't be coming home. In fact, it probably won't brake at all it'll just speed past like a bullet, record as much data as possible and transmit it to earth. And that's only after we've exhausted all other options to point huge telescopes and radio arrays and whatever else at it. Personally I figure even if we find Earth II we'll spend at least 100 years trying to observe it better from here and 1000 years waiting for that probe. If we're to see it there better be some breakthroughs in immortality first.
I just have to think -- when was the last time a large corporation was fined $1 billion for anything? This has to be just because he had a crappy lawyer or something.
If my lawyer had come and said "Great news, I got your fine reduced from $1 billion to $10 million" I'd say "Great, that's like reduing my 20000 year sentence to a 200 year sentence." Corporations try their best to avoid a billion dollar fine because they might just have the money to pay it. If my lawyer wasted his time doing the same, he would be a crappy lawyer.
Given how long it's taken Firefox to reach its current market share, it seems either remarkable or implausible that Chrome could reach 11% in about two years just on the basis of word-of-mouth. This figure only makes sense if it's a reflection of other trends in the industry like the rise of mobiles.
They track both OS and Browser, and that's not it. Chrome jumpstarted at a level far past what Firefox was, it launched with 1% market share almost instantly. It has huge name recognition as being Google's browser, and they can pick any ad space they want for it. Also it's much easier to gain market share now in the market where IE has 60% than when Firefox was trying to break Microsoft's 80-90% stranglehold. It's happening, the good news is like the story says that it seems to be eating into IEs marketshare, not just taking them from Firefox. I'm guessing Chrome is a hit with all the people that want a big serious company *rollseyes* behind their product like Microsoft or Google, the Mozilla Foundation just doesn't have the same impact.
I'm guessing bragging, which is why they're giving him the full tar and feathering. It doesn't really get better than your name, picture and location in the paper saying you were arrested by police "tackling child sexual exploitation" so that absolutely everybody gets the message what the police think is on that computer. Could you possibly be any more publicly brandished without any actual conviction to that fact?
United States vs. Boucher was a very weird case though:
Boucher accessed the Z drive of his laptop at the ICE agent's request. The ICE agent viewed the contents of some of the Z drive's files, and ascertained that they may consist of images or videos of child pornography. The Government thus knows of the existence and location of the Z drive and its files. Again providing access to the unencrypted Z drive "adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government's information" about the existence and location of files that may contain incriminating information.
That is a one in a million case. In all the others, they will have no knowledge of what is on the encrypted drive. So until there's a more mainstream case where this case is used as precedent, I'll consider this a freak exception. Oh and if you read the other case, you will see that the girl testified to him taking photographs of her. The existance of the encryption software was used as a reasonable explanation for why they could not find those pictures, it was marginally relevant to the case itself.
Short answer: No. Through some creative legal thinking producing your encryption password is now considered equal to handing over the key to your safe, not to compel information from your mind. It's bullshit but Britain takes 1984 as a role model, not a warning.
Well it's fantasy so take your pick:
1. It was guarded by the Nazgul. Only after the destruction of the ring are the eagles able to reach the mountain.
2. Their half-animal minds lack the strength of character and will to subdue the ring.
3. If the eagles could not resist using the ring near Sauron then he would sense it and send his minions.
If you look at the other members of the fellowship, they're pretty much all driven by some sort of ambition. It might be that Frodo isn't *that* special, but none of the other are really suited to the task, it would have to be another "nobody" that does not desire power. Or it might be Hobbit society, which you can see is far less war-torn than Elves or Men or Dwarfs and so instills a natural goodness in hobbits that the others don't have.
For one Peter Jackson is not George Lucas, also I doubt he's had any deciding power in the DVD/BluRay release schedule which is an insult to all the fans. He had to fight hard enough to get his own money. If you're going to stay true to the book then I'd say one movie leading up to and ending in the climax of Smaug's defeat is a good first movie. Making that a little "middle climax" and the battle of five armies the final climax doesn't do it justice at all. Remember that the LotR movies were much, much longer than normal cinema movies so there's plenty material for two movies. I think it can be good, certainly much better than fellowship of the ring and that really did end in the middle of nowhere, and that wasn't a bad film at all.
License yes, legal construction... well, I don't know it really applies but the whole construction that practically all copyrighted software is licensed, unlike a copyrighted book that is sold is probably the single most important legal clusterfuck ever. If your car manufacturer told you what roads you can drive on, what gas stations to tank at, where to get it serviced while forbidding you to use other spare parts, welding the hood down, refusing to let you sell it and has a kill switch there'd be arevolution. But the software industry pulled it off, you now constantly click on EULAs that say "all your base are belong to us". Sorry RMS, but that really dwarfs all the FSF has managed to do.
Also, once a machine downloaded and installed the patch it could then announce back to the tracker that it can be a seed as it is no longer vulnerable. So, the tracker would only show seeds, and the downloading system would only announce that it was a seed AFTER it installed the patch.
Anyone downloading the patch from an untrusted seed - who can be a small botnet with 100 seeds, not just one machine - is revealing themselves as vunerable to that seed. And if it tries downloading in a torrent-like way then it exposes itself to many seeds. That would be stupid.
It just doesn't work, at best you get a torrent of official sites. But since they're few and static and actually care what international pipes they use, it's probably better if you just use the local mirror.
As long as enough colleges don't have a problem with it, it's not a problem to anyone. Compared to most college students' torrent habits it's probably just line noise on the bandwidth usage.
It'd make more sense to finally get delta debs functioning, done right they could cut down on downloads for slow users which is a much bigger issue globally. It would mean the server carring lots of extra delta files between versions but it'd cut the 20 MB download every time they decide to bump the kernel version 0.0.0.0-lucid+1 steps.
If I ran a business I wouldn't be upgrading my PCs all the time either. I'd upgrade them as often as serves a business purpose. If a shiny new PC will make me more productive I'd buy it that afternoon. If it won't, then the money goes into the bank for when I need to replace it. I'd anticipate failures and plan for them.
Somehow, I suspect many of the people you are defending here to be on the wrong side of that line. These things get far more visible when you're billing for it, as a consultant I was amazed at how little many companies want to invest in hardware or software that'd make me finish faster and bill less but rather let me sit there fiddling with it at $200/hour even after I've told them. Simple things like say arranging a training session for half a dozen people became a huge undertaking with meetings and back and forth with IT because there was only two network jacks and nobody could simply go and buy a damn 8-port network hub at the nearest computer store. Somewhere around 2007 I was stuck on a Windows NT machine that I spent ages going back and forth about software and when I finally found the way to use it I spent half my time waiting for it to respond.
These people here obviously had smaller shops so hopefully bureaucracy wasn't the problem, but most people don't value time properly. If you're spending too much time fiddling with something that you might possibly fix but know that for $x dollars you can get something that almost certainly works, go buy it. It's not a failing of your geek-fu. That is also why most companies reimage computers rather than try saving them. Not because you couldn't, but because it's not worth the time. Most likely they could have gotten rid of some of these time thieves with faster computers, better software with more bug fixes, compatibility with everything people send you, all sorts of little things that add up on you. Hard to measure, but very often using your 1990s box costs you too many such one minute here and one minute there.
I think the worst case I had was a box that kept on crashing even though I had run almost any test and measured everything that could be measured. After trying to replace several parts - each was its own round of taking it apart and putting it together only to use it for some hours and have it crash and take down everything I was doing again I just said "screw this" and bought a completely new computer even though the one I had was powerful enough and let the old live out its days as a light Linux server - which apparently didn't trigger the crashes. Waste of good money? Maybe. But it had certainly been a solid waste of good time and I wasn't about to throw more time into it. At least some things you could constantly save in anticipation of a crash but trying to play Guild Wars online was hopeless. Twenty minutes into a raid, poof goes the healer as his machine bluescreened. It's a wonder than computer wasn't thrown out the window and beat to death with a sledgehammer.
Avoid products and file formats that are not forward and backward compatible between versions.
Well good luck on that one, there's plenty open source software too that only have an import filter for old versions. From time to time features get added that the old software can't handle and can't reasonably ignore and saving in the old format does not really make sense and will take a bunch of current-to-legacy conversion code. I'm sure you can find examples of software that can read everything back to 1.0 but I got plenty examples where you can't.
I agree that virtualization is mostly the way to go, unless you're tied to special hardware. I'm guessing that unsupported hardware won't be virtualized either, and in most of the cases here I imagine there is. Like the audio guy, I'm sure there was some pro audio gear hooked up to that even if it wasn't mentioned.
There are millions of Germans who believe they are VICTIMS... yeah, it is not like Germany did anything to deserve its treatments post WW2.
Germany did plenty. But there are millions of Germans that never supported the Nazi regime or launching a world war or genocide or anything of the sorts. And on top of that they ended up behind the iron curtain, divided from the rest of their people and under the reign of the Soviet Union which was furious about the bloodbath German troops had caused. I'm not trying to defend anything of what Nazi Germany did, but in any war there will be many people on all sides that feel they didn't deserve it. Any of it.
By the way, the witch hunt for those that wanted to escape to the west was insane. I did see a documentary on it and the first who tried were families torn apart, couples in love who suddenly found themselves on different sides, that sort of thing. All because they were afraid half the country would run off because of somewhat better conditions in the west. If they had made a peaceful way for 0.01% to leave it wouldn't have gotten to nearly those proportions.
How is a bomb threat anything like a knife? It's more like threating to find a knife and slice you up, which is and definitively should be a crime. If you call in a bomb threat, it might be obvious to you that it's a prank call, but it's not obvious to anyone else. If you pretend to be pointing a gun at someone through your jacket, don't be surprised if you get shot as if you did have a gun. Call in a bomb threat and I'm all for a SWAT team taking down your door so you don't get to set off any explosives. It's not a joke and it's not funny.
No, what I reacting to was the part that said "everybody who uses Ubuntu is happy". So it's working out great for YOU, fantastic. But not for a lot of other people, users or ex-users. People are dissatisfied and leaving. I'm considering leaving. And yes, I mean everything I said because both the post you replied to and mine are all like "How DARE you say it's not good?! You whiner!" I'm sorry if that bursts your bubble. I'm sorry that you can't handle negative opinions contrary to your own. I tried backing that up with figures to show that no, it's not just me but you want to make it a personal assault so I call you for what you are. And yeah, try pinning the "contributes nothing but whining" on me to make yourself feel good - attack is the best defense right? Save your pathetic "shut up and like it" tactics for the n00bs.
Then you realize this is the main reason for having a government-run public school system.
Sometimes I wonder how this trash gets modded up. Pretty much all modern countries have public schools because otherwise kids wouldn't get any school at all. See the whole third world as an example, lack of education is a huge blocker for prosperity. The reason we have teacher's degrees and curriculum is because otherwise we'd have no quality control and no assurances that kids would get out of school knowing even the minimum about the world they ought to. Why is creationism so prevalent in the US as opposed to everywhere else? Because you can pull your kids out of school and teach them whatever you like. And not how reproduction works and what a condom is for. Can homeschooling or private schools be better than public schools? Yes. Can they be worse? Absolutely. At a minimum, you have to deal with a lot of other kids that aren't like you and don't think like you. By far the most narrow-minded and with the most twisted world views I've met have been American and home schooled. Granted, so have some of the brightest but it seems to bring out both kinds of extremes.
So your whole argument boils down to "LALALALALA I can't hear you we're happy here in fairytale land, I'm happy, everybody happy". Canonical is still losing money, you better check your facts. The last time we got a definitive answer on that (it's a private company so no public books) was in March 2010 when the new CEO took over. "We're not profitable now.". Linux is losing users which I backed up with statistics while you just throw insults, but hey great that you're trying your best to get rid to someone who has used Linux as my primary desktop now for three years (I dual boot for the games). You're a fucking retard. It's sad that the Linux community has to put up with pathetic pricks like you.