All the problems MS has don't matter, although they are real enough. But their huge monopoly position means it has no effect on their survival. Apple, Sun, and Linux put together amount to a rounding error on MS's sales figures. IBM are in the same league cash-flow-wise (IBM's consulting division takes as much as the whole of MS, but the margins are slimmer) but they're not actually challenging for control of the market. Because they can't and they know it. The grip on the market is too strong.
Microsoft could sit still for maybe five years or more and release NOTHING and they still would be able to come back. Universities support MS with courses based on their "ecosystem". Employers support MS by requiring applicants to be able to work with their systems (and how many more typists and accountants are there than server admins?). Governments support MS by mandating electronic document standards which are only really Office formats. Gamers and game companies support MS by buying or releasing PC games that require Windows. OEMs support MS by pre-installing their OS and packages on new machines. These people all have good reasons to do these things but it amounts to a huge life-support system for Microsoft and they can afford to screw up for years and years because all these factors mean that most users (and I mean well over 90% of all computer-based work and leisure hours logged at a desktop or laptop) have no choice but to use Windows.
No choice. That's what monopolies are all about, which is why in a capitalist system the government's role (probably the government's only legitimate role in a truly capitalistic society) is to break up monopolies and ensure the market is open to entrepreneurs.
Basically, Gates should be told that he has enough money and has therefore won the game and forced to retire (from MS anyway) and have MS broken up and auctioned off. In the long term we as users would benefit just as a forest benefits from the occasional fire.
But that's not going to happen now. I don't think that Microsoft will be shifted from their position in my lifetime; unless a law was passed (everywhere) which required all machines sold to be "naked". Even then, compatibility would still give MS a very strong hand. Also not going to happen.
The best any of us can realistically hope for is that at least no one will manage to force all computers to have Windows pre-installed and that motherboards will not have DRM installed which locks out non-MS operating systems. Even this could realistically happen; certainly Apple is showing every sign of being happy to support such things as long as it results in a duopoly (hello, BootCamp).
It was; I was thinking of when I run my laptop as a terminal to my main machine's xdm process. As I understand it, the server is running on the main machine (the server) and my laptop is simply displaying the...er.... Actually, what the hell is going on? Is the laptop a client or is it a server talking to another server or what? X can drive you nuts sometimes.
After all the expenses that go into making a record, and all the people that get paid out of that share, i doubt the record label profit is much higher than 4 cents.
The savings in packaging and distribution costs (after bandwidth) for the record companies - which they pocketed rather than pass to the customer or the artist - amount to more than 4c on their own. That was the purpose of DRM: to allow the labels control to fix the prices when a free market would have forced them down as the savings of the model allowed room for competition at the retail end.
I believe suicide rates, traffic accidents, workplace incidents and so on are not part of this comparison; this is a comparison of health and disease, not injuries.
To say that workloads in Japan are high but health is good is to bring the issue of mental health into the conversation on Slashdot ragardless of whether it was part of the original comparison. If you want to take that approach, I could just as easily have said "Japan was not part of the comparison so you're off-topic".
The OP has a point - people here are pretty healthy.
People who want to kill themselves are not healthy. They are ill, which is why they receive medical treatment just as they would for cancer or a broken leg.
That's interesting; I wasn't aware that triple-booting was working well on the Intel Macs. Certainly it would be an attraction to have the option to dip into Windows/Mac when required; although I suspect I'd find rebooting a pain after all these years.
Do you write code for OS X or administer them in your job?
Bit of both.
ALL of my peers have either switched to Macs or are currently lusting after an Intel Mac.
Well, perhaps they have/are, but as I said, I can see no reason to use a Mac today, especially since they ditched the PPC in favour of Intel instead of AMD.
I've used Linux as my desktop for coming on seven years now and there just isn't anything on the Mac that would make me bother changing. There are programs such as Photoshop, which I need to use occasionally, but I just run them under VMWare. But for general document production, web-based photo and image generation, email, and just general day-to-day usage the Mac only offers a difference, not an advantage.
Gentoo keeps my machine up to date software wise and when a new kernel comes out I just do "make oldconfig" and stick the result in/boot/. Not a lot of hassle.
I can see what a non-programmer/newbie sees in OS/X but it is so limiting once you get beyond the stage of everything you want to do being expressible by pointing at little pictures that I can't imagine a serious computer programmer wanting to be tied down by its child-friendly front end.
Christ, that sounds patronising! But it genuinely is how I feel when I think of having to use a Mac as my desktop machine. Ugh!
Most of the hardcore Unix/Linux guys I know and have worked with over the last 20 years or so have switched to Apple gear in the last 5 years.
I find that hard to believe. Certainly, as a Linux user and programmer, OS/X has nothing for me at all. I work with Macs due to my job and I hate them. They're overpriced, flaky, and the GUI is terrible and ugly. The keyboards are crap, the mice next to useless with their one button, and the internal hardware is murder to get fixed when it breaks down. Expansion is something that happens to other people, and support is non-existant. Retail outlets are almost mythical and when you can find one are staffed entirely by wankers who religiously object to the possibility that anything wrong with a Mac could be caused by anything other than the user's semi-malicious incompetence.
I wasn't twisting your words, I was merely pointing out that the correct answer to the question was "Yes. Happens all the time". Note that the question did not directly ask about this particular mechanism for covering up illegal activities.
Governments all over the world, including the US, declare illegal activities state secrets daily. We know, for example, that the CIA commits roughly 100000 such acts annually, some of them "serious". We know it because they admit to it and it's a matter of record in various Senate committees which oversee its activities and budget. However, those same committees are "in on it" and are happy to go along with the system which keeps those illegal activities secret in order to protect the ill-defined and self-serving concept of "national security".
Murder, arson, drug trafficking, personal graft, degenerate sexual exploits, racial and sexual abuse. These are all things which the rich and powerful get up to as much as any section of the population. If you think that they don't sometimes get stamped with a "national security" classification of one kind or another and hidden away from view, then you need to stop voting.
While it might say it supports DVB-T , without full native support for digital cable, any kind of DIY PVR or MCE PC is just a gimmick.
Speaking as someone who receives all his television via DVB-T in the UK, I can say that I have zero interest in digital cable.
Looking through an interactive guide for up to a weeks worth of programming and then picking and choosing the content I want recorded, and then forgetting about it.
Well, I suppose I could ask my MythTV box to cut back to only one week's programming but otherwise, that's what I do.
will hold of on wasting any money on concepts like MythTV
My copy of MythTV was free. Sounds like you've been ripped-off.
The Myth is that is can record television,
I appear to have 198GB of mythology on my hard drive, then!
which means that analogue PVR's like this won't work, period.
DVB-T is digital.
Until I can sit back and fire up a PC that displays the same interactive guide data I am currently getting in a proprietary cable box, I don't think these things will find any success.
If you think that a security ANNOUNCEMENT is the same thing as a security PATCH, you are beyond salvation.
When I have an app the size of Apache installed and the downloads required to fix a security hole total 10K, THAT is a patch. I don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about or why you think there are no patches in Gentoo. Almost all the large apps regularly patch under Gentoo, particularly GNU ones like Emacs.
You have some sort of emotional problem that I'm not qualified to treat so perhaps you should go and find someone who is.
That's really strange; sysstat took a grand total of 22 seconds to install for me, including the download, on a 2.26GHz Celeron. Perhaps your portage directory had been damaged in some way?
It is not. It is fluent per definition (it is defined as a "rolling distribution").
By who and what, if anything, does that buzzword mean?
It is not in any sense. Gentoo has no security patches AT ALL.
I don't know which distro you are thinking of, but it isn't Gentoo.
No system whose behaviour can change from day to day is easy to maintain.
Gentoo changes when you ask it to; if it's changing every day it's because you are changing it every day. Normally, I chanage it after previewing what is new and looking at the list of security fixes.
I think that's enough time wasted on an AC who knows nothing.
Admittedly, it is virtually impossible to make either a good or fun game with it
I disagree; I had a great time with it making 3d adventure games. That ran like consumptive dogs. I suspect they would run somewhat more quickly today.
Gentoo is great in a production environment: it's stable (unless you ask for non-stable branches) and very, very easy to maintain as well as very fast with security patches.
The downside is that it can be conservative in what it judges to be the "stable release" of packages, so you can trail behind the cutting edge sometimes if you absolutely refuse to have "testing" versions of some packages. But that's a reasonably good thing in a production environment.
One account that I have has over 650 SPAM messages recieved in just three weeks.
650 a week! Pah! I self-host and I'm currently getting more than one spam attempt per second, 24/7. I have about 1 per month geting through, but recently my girlfiend's account has started to leak spam at the rate of 1 per day. I've not worked out why these ones are getting through yet.
Wait a minute, you're saying that France getting a "paltry" $3 billion in oil had nothing to do with its refusal to support any action against Iraq
No, I never said that. In fact I never said that oil had nothing to do with why France did not support the invasion of Iraq, although 3billion over 7 years is, as you say, paltry. Basically, you just made that up to avoid dealing with what I did say.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft could sit still for maybe five years or more and release NOTHING and they still would be able to come back. Universities support MS with courses based on their "ecosystem". Employers support MS by requiring applicants to be able to work with their systems (and how many more typists and accountants are there than server admins?). Governments support MS by mandating electronic document standards which are only really Office formats. Gamers and game companies support MS by buying or releasing PC games that require Windows. OEMs support MS by pre-installing their OS and packages on new machines. These people all have good reasons to do these things but it amounts to a huge life-support system for Microsoft and they can afford to screw up for years and years because all these factors mean that most users (and I mean well over 90% of all computer-based work and leisure hours logged at a desktop or laptop) have no choice but to use Windows.
No choice. That's what monopolies are all about, which is why in a capitalist system the government's role (probably the government's only legitimate role in a truly capitalistic society) is to break up monopolies and ensure the market is open to entrepreneurs.
Basically, Gates should be told that he has enough money and has therefore won the game and forced to retire (from MS anyway) and have MS broken up and auctioned off. In the long term we as users would benefit just as a forest benefits from the occasional fire.
But that's not going to happen now. I don't think that Microsoft will be shifted from their position in my lifetime; unless a law was passed (everywhere) which required all machines sold to be "naked". Even then, compatibility would still give MS a very strong hand. Also not going to happen.
The best any of us can realistically hope for is that at least no one will manage to force all computers to have Windows pre-installed and that motherboards will not have DRM installed which locks out non-MS operating systems. Even this could realistically happen; certainly Apple is showing every sign of being happy to support such things as long as it results in a duopoly (hello, BootCamp).
TWW
It was; I was thinking of when I run my laptop as a terminal to my main machine's xdm process. As I understand it, the server is running on the main machine (the server) and my laptop is simply displaying the...er.... Actually, what the hell is going on? Is the laptop a client or is it a server talking to another server or what? X can drive you nuts sometimes.
On the other hand, it works.
TWW
Ha ha. Look at the funny man.
TWW
The savings in packaging and distribution costs (after bandwidth) for the record companies - which they pocketed rather than pass to the customer or the artist - amount to more than 4c on their own. That was the purpose of DRM: to allow the labels control to fix the prices when a free market would have forced them down as the savings of the model allowed room for competition at the retail end.
TWW
To say that workloads in Japan are high but health is good is to bring the issue of mental health into the conversation on Slashdot ragardless of whether it was part of the original comparison. If you want to take that approach, I could just as easily have said "Japan was not part of the comparison so you're off-topic".
The OP has a point - people here are pretty healthy.
People who want to kill themselves are not healthy. They are ill, which is why they receive medical treatment just as they would for cancer or a broken leg.
TWW
I would think that the Mainland-European Brits would probably all fit into a single 747. What do you mean by this phrase?
TWW
Wanna talk suicide rates?
TWW
"Who put this chimney in this plane, huh? I'm trying to sleep and there's smoke everywhere. Goddamnit, I've had enough; I'm taking this plane DOWN!"
TWW
That's gonna ruin someone's LTS system.
TWW
TWW
Bit of both.
ALL of my peers have either switched to Macs or are currently lusting after an Intel Mac.
Well, perhaps they have/are, but as I said, I can see no reason to use a Mac today, especially since they ditched the PPC in favour of Intel instead of AMD.
I've used Linux as my desktop for coming on seven years now and there just isn't anything on the Mac that would make me bother changing. There are programs such as Photoshop, which I need to use occasionally, but I just run them under VMWare. But for general document production, web-based photo and image generation, email, and just general day-to-day usage the Mac only offers a difference, not an advantage.
Gentoo keeps my machine up to date software wise and when a new kernel comes out I just do "make oldconfig" and stick the result in /boot/. Not a lot of hassle.
I can see what a non-programmer/newbie sees in OS/X but it is so limiting once you get beyond the stage of everything you want to do being expressible by pointing at little pictures that I can't imagine a serious computer programmer wanting to be tied down by its child-friendly front end.
Christ, that sounds patronising! But it genuinely is how I feel when I think of having to use a Mac as my desktop machine. Ugh!
TWW
I find that hard to believe. Certainly, as a Linux user and programmer, OS/X has nothing for me at all. I work with Macs due to my job and I hate them. They're overpriced, flaky, and the GUI is terrible and ugly. The keyboards are crap, the mice next to useless with their one button, and the internal hardware is murder to get fixed when it breaks down. Expansion is something that happens to other people, and support is non-existant. Retail outlets are almost mythical and when you can find one are staffed entirely by wankers who religiously object to the possibility that anything wrong with a Mac could be caused by anything other than the user's semi-malicious incompetence.
It's beyond me why anyone would use OS/X.
TWW
I wasn't twisting your words, I was merely pointing out that the correct answer to the question was "Yes. Happens all the time". Note that the question did not directly ask about this particular mechanism for covering up illegal activities.
Governments all over the world, including the US, declare illegal activities state secrets daily. We know, for example, that the CIA commits roughly 100000 such acts annually, some of them "serious". We know it because they admit to it and it's a matter of record in various Senate committees which oversee its activities and budget. However, those same committees are "in on it" and are happy to go along with the system which keeps those illegal activities secret in order to protect the ill-defined and self-serving concept of "national security".
Murder, arson, drug trafficking, personal graft, degenerate sexual exploits, racial and sexual abuse. These are all things which the rich and powerful get up to as much as any section of the population. If you think that they don't sometimes get stamped with a "national security" classification of one kind or another and hidden away from view, then you need to stop voting.
TWW
TWW
Speaking as someone who receives all his television via DVB-T in the UK, I can say that I have zero interest in digital cable.
Looking through an interactive guide for up to a weeks worth of programming and then picking and choosing the content I want recorded, and then forgetting about it.
Well, I suppose I could ask my MythTV box to cut back to only one week's programming but otherwise, that's what I do.
will hold of on wasting any money on concepts like MythTV
My copy of MythTV was free. Sounds like you've been ripped-off.
The Myth is that is can record television,
I appear to have 198GB of mythology on my hard drive, then!
which means that analogue PVR's like this won't work, period.
DVB-T is digital.
Until I can sit back and fire up a PC that displays the same interactive guide data I am currently getting in a proprietary cable box, I don't think these things will find any success.
Good news! You already can!
TWW
When I have an app the size of Apache installed and the downloads required to fix a security hole total 10K, THAT is a patch. I don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about or why you think there are no patches in Gentoo. Almost all the large apps regularly patch under Gentoo, particularly GNU ones like Emacs.
You have some sort of emotional problem that I'm not qualified to treat so perhaps you should go and find someone who is.
TWW
That's really strange; sysstat took a grand total of 22 seconds to install for me, including the download, on a 2.26GHz Celeron. Perhaps your portage directory had been damaged in some way?
TWW
Didn't work for me.
TWW
What was the software?
TWW
By who and what, if anything, does that buzzword mean?
It is not in any sense. Gentoo has no security patches AT ALL.
I don't know which distro you are thinking of, but it isn't Gentoo.
No system whose behaviour can change from day to day is easy to maintain.
Gentoo changes when you ask it to; if it's changing every day it's because you are changing it every day. Normally, I chanage it after previewing what is new and looking at the list of security fixes.
I think that's enough time wasted on an AC who knows nothing.
TWW
I disagree; I had a great time with it making 3d adventure games. That ran like consumptive dogs. I suspect they would run somewhat more quickly today.
TWW
Gentoo is great in a production environment: it's stable (unless you ask for non-stable branches) and very, very easy to maintain as well as very fast with security patches.
The downside is that it can be conservative in what it judges to be the "stable release" of packages, so you can trail behind the cutting edge sometimes if you absolutely refuse to have "testing" versions of some packages. But that's a reasonably good thing in a production environment.
TWW
650 a week! Pah! I self-host and I'm currently getting more than one spam attempt per second, 24/7. I have about 1 per month geting through, but recently my girlfiend's account has started to leak spam at the rate of 1 per day. I've not worked out why these ones are getting through yet.
TWW
Naturally...
TWW
No, I never said that. In fact I never said that oil had nothing to do with why France did not support the invasion of Iraq, although 3billion over 7 years is, as you say, paltry. Basically, you just made that up to avoid dealing with what I did say.
TWW