That's an implementation detail. It's just a way of implementing a plugin as far as (a) cross-platform portability, (b) performance, and (c) security is concerned. It means that it doesn't depend on Microsoft's ghastly security backdoor (ActiveX), and so long as that's true anything else is just icing.
Fair enough, I should have been clearer that I was referring to the actual UI changes (though I did write IE7 brings with it all the dubious "improvements" to the user interface that Microsoft came up with for Vista.).
Vista can be configured to look pretty much like XP.
Superficially, yes. But in practice not even as much as XP can be made to work like 2000 (and there you can't get rid of some of the wizards and go back to control panel preference sheets for everything). Note that even in your image of the "classic theme", two of the windows do not have menu bars but instead have ribbons.
I used the "classic theme" in Vista, and set the task bar and start menu to classic mode, and spent about half an hour googling for ways to remove the ribbon and get menus back everywhere, and it just can't be done.
So, Mister Bones, tell me... how do you do the rest of the job?
Aside from when MS thought it was a great idea to lock you out of IE7 unless you had genuine Windows, I can't understand why people don't update.
Two big reasons that have nothing to do with laziness:
1. Because updates carry a bigger perceived risk than not updating. 2. Because updates are used to force changes they don't want on them.
There are good arguments you can use to convince people they're mistaken about #1, but there's not much you can do about #2 if you're not Microsoft. And I guess Microsoft sees the risk from people not updating is less than the risk that people won't get won over to Vista by hook or by crook. And for them it probably is.
No, I'm not making a joke. IE7 brings with it all the dubious "improvements" to the user interface that Microsoft came up with for Vista.
And that's the low-hanging fruit. That's the browser that most needs to be updated. The rest are almost lost in the noise, because thanks to ActiveX and browser integration and "(in)security zones" you're better off with a three year old version of any other browser than even the latest version of Internet Explorer.
The best thing that Microsoft could do to get people to update would be to roll back the "Vista Theme", or make it optional. In Vista, too, for that matter.
You can't compare a country to a state as you are doing comparing Texas to Australia.
Take it up with the grandparent. He brought it up.
But consider this: there's more people living in Houston than in all of Western Australia. There's considerably more people living in Texas than all of Australia. In terms of energy, Texas and Australia are pretty comparable.
And 80% of the population of Australia lives on the eastern seaboard.
The capital city of Perth (capital of Western Australia with approx 1.5 Million) is hotter than either Dallas or Houston.
Phoenix has a higher average temperature than Houston, but Houston has a much higher per capita use of air conditioning... in Phoenix you'll find quite nice houses with no air conditioning at all. that doesn't happen in Houston. Why? because Phoenix has low humidity... it's a very dry city, like Perth. Houston, well, Houston is anything but dry.
I switched from FreeBSD to Mac on my desktop... at the cost of a significant cut in performance (and several hundred dollars in cash). I didn't need a new computer, my Mac mini was less powerful than the Wintel box I already had, and I already had legal Windows 2000.
The main cost of free UNIX (and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris here) is that when you want to get software you can almost always get what you need on Windows (not always, there are some areas where Windows falls short, but 99% of the time you can just google it and it's there), and you can do the same thing for Mac nearly as often (heck, I tend to have better luck finding good Mac versions than Windows versions of what I want, buy I'm not a gamer). Finding the Mac or Windows software you want isn't rocket science. But for Linux... well, even for me it can be tough. And I'm supposed to BE a "rocket scientist" in this area.
Like I said, I switched from FreeBSD to Mac on the desktop because I was tired of dual booting. Oh, I didn't have to all THAT often, not even every day, but now and then I was still having to reboot to Windows... maybe a couple of times a week, never as often as daily but never less than three or four times a month. Servers? UNIX has Windows totally beat. But on the desktop? It's like a persistent hangnail.
So when my daughter trashed her Wintel box for the third time in 18 months, I reinstalled Windows for her... and bought her a Mac. She insisted on keeping the Windows box and I got her a KVM switch... but after a month she hadn't switched back to Windows even once. I'm sure she couldn't have managed that if I'd installed Linux for her. I know from my own experience that I couldn't.
That's where the big deal is.
That's why "free" Windows is cheaper than free Linux. Because you need Windows as well.
That's why expensive Mac OS X is cheaper than free Linux. Because you don't need Windows as well.
It's nothing to do with drivers. It's all about applications. Because applications, after all, are why people buy computers, and Linux doesn't have 'em. If you want to be able to give everyone a Linux CD you need to find a way over that hump. I don't know what it is. I am pretty sure that cloning the windows environment on Linux so that you can run Windows software isn't it... if Windows wasn't "free" it would be, but without that I reckon the lesson of OS/2 is still sound.
So I don't have answers. I know that distro repositories are part of the solution, but they won't get the commercial[1] software developers to release software for Linux. Getting more libraries on Linux to use LGPL instead of GPL would help. Maybe there's an argument here that switching to Linux is a sign that you're less likely to be a pirate... because you didn't take the soft route of pirating "free" Windows?
[1] Don't give me a hard time about the terminology, you know what I mean, and I know you know what I mean, and you know that just because I'm not using a politically correct derogatory term doesn't change that.
The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: 'It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.'
I keep telling people that when they pirate Windows or Office they're not taking a poke at Microsoft, they're taking a poke at potential competitors for Microsoft. This isn't news, this is not something Bill Gates just realized, Microsoft USED this when Office was getting established, in all kinds of ways, even allowing business users to use the same licensed software at home, rather than using something else because they couldn't get a second license through their office.
At least, Texas in the summer is way way hotter than the parts of Australia where most people live. Most of the Australian population is between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Dividing Range. Most of the population of Texas is out of reach of coastal winds. Houston is a few degrees closer to the equator than Sydney, where I grew up, but Dallas is about the same latitude as Sydney and not any cooler... the distance from the coast and the lack of mountains to keep the continental heat at bay makes all the difference.
Yeh, I've talked to some of the people who wrote that book. You know that bit I wrote about having to understand how a database engine works to open a text file? That's exactly the kind of thing they're unhappy about losing. Oh yeh, lots of misplaced nostalgia about the DECsystem, which I used and found at best lesser evil than IBM... it was still full of the same kinds of needless complexity and internal incompatibility.
Oh yeh, look at the way speculation has driven up the price of a barrel of dark fiber. And I really hate having to drive around from one AT&T office to another to get the best price... you know, cellphone service was $3.87 a gallon at one AT&T office, and then one exit down the tollway the same gallon from another AT&T office cost $4.19! And besides "Een analogie is als oploskoffie" always applies!
That should be called "the lesson of UNIX". UNIX provided an amazing simplification that provided almost everything users and developers needed with fewer than 40 system calls (maybe half a dozen frequently used) and a single way of talking to all the objects in the computer system. People who haven't used older operating systems can't really appreciate this, but just opening and reading files used to require understanding something the size of the X11 documentation, you typically had umpteen kinds of files with half a dozen access methods each, with different calls to read blocks, fixed-size records, variable-sized records, padded and unpadded records, three varieties of carriage control, and if you wanted to read or write to a terminal or printer or card reader you had completely separate sets of calls for each. And to simplify this you had record management systems which had their own walls of documentation. And you had to understand this if all you wanted to do was to read a report from a program, because of course every programmer had learned their own bits of this and used them... so even if you didn't care about block-padded variant numbered record files with Fortran carriage control, you had to be able to deal with it. When I ported a Forth interpreter to one system, I had the whole interpreter called from a Fortran main because that let me push the whole problem off on the Fortran runtime instead of figuring it out myself.
This was worse than the line ending differences between UNIX and Windows, which are bad enough.
It's like *every* file, even plain text files, was in its own OOXML format.
Even if you only dealt with one computer and one OS.
UNIX didn't do any of that. It just made everything into a stream of bytes. For the cases where that wasn't enough, you got the whole records-oriented stuff back... in libraries. And when you used those libraries you had to deal with all the old complexity, but you only had to deal with it when you actually needed to. And lots of old timers insisted that this was backwards, that the OS was the best place to do that, so all the programs worked the same way... but the fact was that all the programs didn't work the same way, because (just as for text files) they all handled their own files and didn't handle anyone else's, and you still had to have utilities to convert data from one format to another. And you had to do it for everything.
When you're designing an API, look for simple metaphors. Look for a model where most of the time you don't need to specify any complex parameters or callbacks or helper routines. Leave a way to hook extensions in, sure, but for most software you should be able to do 80% of the things you want without having to turn to the second page of the documentation.
There's nothing and nobody missing this time round. A control freak who takes the BOFH stories too seriously is way more likely than someone setting up a time bomb in the network.
The author of the article was either confused or isn't explaining things well, because he writes that corrugations reduce the surface area... when the opposite is true... corrugations increase the surface area rather than reduce it. ANyone know whether that was just a typo or he's referring to something subtle that I'm too thick to understand.
This kind of thing is why I eventually included WMP among the software I banned back in the late '90s. When I realized the danger of Microsoft's HTML control I banned everything that I could find that used the HTML control on untrusted content. This wasn't really an issue for early versions, but most later versions of Window Media Player were tied into the HTML virus distribution ecosystem. Well, Outlook and Internet Explorer soon proved me right in doing so, but up to now Windows Media seemed to have pretty much dodged the bullet.
Apple sells to the top of the market. Their machines are 'overpriced', meaning competitively priced for features and build quality with the other high end machines out there.
Apart from the Mac Pro, Apple's systems are not "competitively priced", and the build quality is hardly exceptional. Even without IBM behind them, I'll take a Thinkpad over my Macbook Pro for build quality any day, and a Thinkpad's got them beat on features, and I would have saved at least $500 on a Thinkpad even if I loaded it up with everything the Macbook Pro had that I wasn't actually looking for.
As for my Mac mini: that is *definitely* a "bargain quality" machine. It looks pretty, but it's just a cheap laptop without a screen inside.
Apple sells OS X. They don't need to make their hardware competitive as long as they have that software advantage. Which is why I accepted the $500 "Mac Tax" and the shonky keyboard to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an implementation detail. It's just a way of implementing a plugin as far as (a) cross-platform portability, (b) performance, and (c) security is concerned. It means that it doesn't depend on Microsoft's ghastly security backdoor (ActiveX), and so long as that's true anything else is just icing.
Well, that fits into the "... or a plugin" part. :) I hope it's not ACtiveX. ActiveX Delenda Est.
There's no way they're doing real time 3d in flash or javascript, so they're almost certainly using ActiveX or a plugin.
Themes are just visual effects, though...
Fair enough, I should have been clearer that I was referring to the actual UI changes (though I did write IE7 brings with it all the dubious "improvements" to the user interface that Microsoft came up with for Vista.).
Vista can be configured to look pretty much like XP.
Superficially, yes. But in practice not even as much as XP can be made to work like 2000 (and there you can't get rid of some of the wizards and go back to control panel preference sheets for everything). Note that even in your image of the "classic theme", two of the windows do not have menu bars but instead have ribbons.
I used the "classic theme" in Vista, and set the task bar and start menu to classic mode, and spent about half an hour googling for ways to remove the ribbon and get menus back everywhere, and it just can't be done.
So, Mister Bones, tell me... how do you do the rest of the job?
So your network performance was poor for 7 months or it became poor after 7 months or what?
So that means its okay for me and everyone else to pirate?
No, it means that the people who justify their piracy by claiming they're "sticking it" to Microsoft and Adobe are wrong.
It means the people who piracy hurts most aren't the market leaders, it's the competitors of those market leaders.
Piracy is not just illegal, it undermines the market forces that would otherwise work against the monopolists.
Aside from when MS thought it was a great idea to lock you out of IE7 unless you had genuine Windows, I can't understand why people don't update.
Two big reasons that have nothing to do with laziness:
1. Because updates carry a bigger perceived risk than not updating.
2. Because updates are used to force changes they don't want on them.
There are good arguments you can use to convince people they're mistaken about #1, but there's not much you can do about #2 if you're not Microsoft. And I guess Microsoft sees the risk from people not updating is less than the risk that people won't get won over to Vista by hook or by crook. And for them it probably is.
There's a reason people stick to IE6.
It's called IE7.
No, I'm not making a joke. IE7 brings with it all the dubious "improvements" to the user interface that Microsoft came up with for Vista.
And that's the low-hanging fruit. That's the browser that most needs to be updated. The rest are almost lost in the noise, because thanks to ActiveX and browser integration and "(in)security zones" you're better off with a three year old version of any other browser than even the latest version of Internet Explorer.
The best thing that Microsoft could do to get people to update would be to roll back the "Vista Theme", or make it optional. In Vista, too, for that matter.
You can't compare a country to a state as you are doing comparing Texas to Australia.
Take it up with the grandparent. He brought it up.
But consider this: there's more people living in Houston than in all of Western Australia. There's considerably more people living in Texas than all of Australia. In terms of energy, Texas and Australia are pretty comparable.
And 80% of the population of Australia lives on the eastern seaboard.
The capital city of Perth (capital of Western Australia with approx 1.5 Million) is hotter than either Dallas or Houston.
Phoenix has a higher average temperature than Houston, but Houston has a much higher per capita use of air conditioning... in Phoenix you'll find quite nice houses with no air conditioning at all. that doesn't happen in Houston. Why? because Phoenix has low humidity... it's a very dry city, like Perth. Houston, well, Houston is anything but dry.
I switched from FreeBSD to Mac on my desktop... at the cost of a significant cut in performance (and several hundred dollars in cash). I didn't need a new computer, my Mac mini was less powerful than the Wintel box I already had, and I already had legal Windows 2000.
The main cost of free UNIX (and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris here) is that when you want to get software you can almost always get what you need on Windows (not always, there are some areas where Windows falls short, but 99% of the time you can just google it and it's there), and you can do the same thing for Mac nearly as often (heck, I tend to have better luck finding good Mac versions than Windows versions of what I want, buy I'm not a gamer). Finding the Mac or Windows software you want isn't rocket science. But for Linux... well, even for me it can be tough. And I'm supposed to BE a "rocket scientist" in this area.
Like I said, I switched from FreeBSD to Mac on the desktop because I was tired of dual booting. Oh, I didn't have to all THAT often, not even every day, but now and then I was still having to reboot to Windows... maybe a couple of times a week, never as often as daily but never less than three or four times a month. Servers? UNIX has Windows totally beat. But on the desktop? It's like a persistent hangnail.
So when my daughter trashed her Wintel box for the third time in 18 months, I reinstalled Windows for her... and bought her a Mac. She insisted on keeping the Windows box and I got her a KVM switch... but after a month she hadn't switched back to Windows even once. I'm sure she couldn't have managed that if I'd installed Linux for her. I know from my own experience that I couldn't.
That's where the big deal is.
That's why "free" Windows is cheaper than free Linux. Because you need Windows as well.
That's why expensive Mac OS X is cheaper than free Linux. Because you don't need Windows as well.
It's nothing to do with drivers. It's all about applications. Because applications, after all, are why people buy computers, and Linux doesn't have 'em. If you want to be able to give everyone a Linux CD you need to find a way over that hump. I don't know what it is. I am pretty sure that cloning the windows environment on Linux so that you can run Windows software isn't it... if Windows wasn't "free" it would be, but without that I reckon the lesson of OS/2 is still sound.
So I don't have answers. I know that distro repositories are part of the solution, but they won't get the commercial[1] software developers to release software for Linux. Getting more libraries on Linux to use LGPL instead of GPL would help. Maybe there's an argument here that switching to Linux is a sign that you're less likely to be a pirate... because you didn't take the soft route of pirating "free" Windows?
[1] Don't give me a hard time about the terminology, you know what I mean, and I know you know what I mean, and you know that just because I'm not using a politically correct derogatory term doesn't change that.
Then I guess you might have been better off with FreeBSD, or Fedora, or ... I mean, it's not like you don't have plenty of choices.
I keep telling people that when they pirate Windows or Office they're not taking a poke at Microsoft, they're taking a poke at potential competitors for Microsoft. This isn't news, this is not something Bill Gates just realized, Microsoft USED this when Office was getting established, in all kinds of ways, even allowing business users to use the same licensed software at home, rather than using something else because they couldn't get a second license through their office.
But unlimited power corrupts... wait a second...
At least, Texas in the summer is way way hotter than the parts of Australia where most people live. Most of the Australian population is between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Dividing Range. Most of the population of Texas is out of reach of coastal winds. Houston is a few degrees closer to the equator than Sydney, where I grew up, but Dallas is about the same latitude as Sydney and not any cooler... the distance from the coast and the lack of mountains to keep the continental heat at bay makes all the difference.
Yeh, I've talked to some of the people who wrote that book. You know that bit I wrote about having to understand how a database engine works to open a text file? That's exactly the kind of thing they're unhappy about losing. Oh yeh, lots of misplaced nostalgia about the DECsystem, which I used and found at best lesser evil than IBM... it was still full of the same kinds of needless complexity and internal incompatibility.
Oh yeh, look at the way speculation has driven up the price of a barrel of dark fiber. And I really hate having to drive around from one AT&T office to another to get the best price... you know, cellphone service was $3.87 a gallon at one AT&T office, and then one exit down the tollway the same gallon from another AT&T office cost $4.19! And besides "Een analogie is als oploskoffie" always applies!
What happens when $person meets with "the general" on his plane, and they get admitted to a shabby office?
What "office"? This is a bleeding seat on an airplane. His office is on the ground, on a military base, at the other end of the journey.
That should be called "the lesson of UNIX". UNIX provided an amazing simplification that provided almost everything users and developers needed with fewer than 40 system calls (maybe half a dozen frequently used) and a single way of talking to all the objects in the computer system. People who haven't used older operating systems can't really appreciate this, but just opening and reading files used to require understanding something the size of the X11 documentation, you typically had umpteen kinds of files with half a dozen access methods each, with different calls to read blocks, fixed-size records, variable-sized records, padded and unpadded records, three varieties of carriage control, and if you wanted to read or write to a terminal or printer or card reader you had completely separate sets of calls for each. And to simplify this you had record management systems which had their own walls of documentation. And you had to understand this if all you wanted to do was to read a report from a program, because of course every programmer had learned their own bits of this and used them... so even if you didn't care about block-padded variant numbered record files with Fortran carriage control, you had to be able to deal with it. When I ported a Forth interpreter to one system, I had the whole interpreter called from a Fortran main because that let me push the whole problem off on the Fortran runtime instead of figuring it out myself.
This was worse than the line ending differences between UNIX and Windows, which are bad enough.
It's like *every* file, even plain text files, was in its own OOXML format.
Even if you only dealt with one computer and one OS.
UNIX didn't do any of that. It just made everything into a stream of bytes. For the cases where that wasn't enough, you got the whole records-oriented stuff back... in libraries. And when you used those libraries you had to deal with all the old complexity, but you only had to deal with it when you actually needed to. And lots of old timers insisted that this was backwards, that the OS was the best place to do that, so all the programs worked the same way... but the fact was that all the programs didn't work the same way, because (just as for text files) they all handled their own files and didn't handle anyone else's, and you still had to have utilities to convert data from one format to another. And you had to do it for everything.
When you're designing an API, look for simple metaphors. Look for a model where most of the time you don't need to specify any complex parameters or callbacks or helper routines. Leave a way to hook extensions in, sure, but for most software you should be able to do 80% of the things you want without having to turn to the second page of the documentation.
There's nothing and nobody missing this time round. A control freak who takes the BOFH stories too seriously is way more likely than someone setting up a time bomb in the network.
It's not an assumption, it's experience. The only reason I have a Macbook Pro instead of a new Thinkpad is because of OS X.
Ah, and the amount of reduction of force, then, would be effected to the relative orientation of the corrugations.
The author of the article was either confused or isn't explaining things well, because he writes that corrugations reduce the surface area... when the opposite is true... corrugations increase the surface area rather than reduce it. ANyone know whether that was just a typo or he's referring to something subtle that I'm too thick to understand.
This kind of thing is why I eventually included WMP among the software I banned back in the late '90s. When I realized the danger of Microsoft's HTML control I banned everything that I could find that used the HTML control on untrusted content. This wasn't really an issue for early versions, but most later versions of Window Media Player were tied into the HTML virus distribution ecosystem. Well, Outlook and Internet Explorer soon proved me right in doing so, but up to now Windows Media seemed to have pretty much dodged the bullet.
Apple sells to the top of the market. Their machines are 'overpriced', meaning competitively priced for features and build quality with the other high end machines out there.
Apart from the Mac Pro, Apple's systems are not "competitively priced", and the build quality is hardly exceptional. Even without IBM behind them, I'll take a Thinkpad over my Macbook Pro for build quality any day, and a Thinkpad's got them beat on features, and I would have saved at least $500 on a Thinkpad even if I loaded it up with everything the Macbook Pro had that I wasn't actually looking for.
As for my Mac mini: that is *definitely* a "bargain quality" machine. It looks pretty, but it's just a cheap laptop without a screen inside.
Apple sells OS X. They don't need to make their hardware competitive as long as they have that software advantage. Which is why I accepted the $500 "Mac Tax" and the shonky keyboard to get it.