No, she wasn't, but... That quote was from Atlas Shrugged and by the point in the book where that quote occurred the bad guys had pretty much looted everything, so there wasn't any need for subtlety. Something like page 950 of a thousand page novel. You have to wind up even a long novel somehow. The scene with John Galt being pushed at gun point to announce the John Galt Recovery Plan - "Get the hell out of my way!" was even less subtle, for what it's worth.
Quotes from Atlas Shrugged seem most appropriate for how the DMCA (and other laws) are being used.
I used to feel that way about networking built into *nix when you had to use a 3rd party WinSock with Win3.1, but now I've come to appreciate anything and everything built in. I've done networking code on Unix and networking code on VMS with a 3rd party TCP add on (I forget the name now) and I think binding networking into the O/S is the proper thing to do.
I better qualify that as networking over LAN. Networking over WAN doesn't seem to work as well, probably because it's still (relatively) new technology on the mass market level. It's probably better to come up with two different interfaces for the two because something that makes sense on a local trusted LAN is generally stupid over a WAN. Microsoft made that mistake with ActiveX. Stupidity has few limitations, Apple OS X seems going down the same road. If it had as large of an install base as Microsoft Windows, it would have a similar number of problems.
Even a model as simple as trust LAN don't trust WAN breaks down when you're wireless and accessing a public "hot spot". Much, much more design is needed in this area.
My primary criteria for selecting apps tends to be what's the most like whatever I use in Windows. Not the best criteria, but a useful place to start. Well yes, I consider that axiomatic. My own personal hostility towards the Microsoft Windows UI would be reduced a lot if there were a magical menu item to select that would give me both global emacs keybindings and change the big key to the left of the "a" key to be "control".
Not completely though. Microsoft Word is terminally brain dead. Framemaker was much, much easier to use, more powerful and understood emacs key bindings. Of course, Microsoft Word is just an application not the O/S.
I spent extensive off-time doing Microsoft Windows appreciation exercises. Ack, sounds like a painful training class by someone who isn't exactly a "power user". All I can suggest for enduring Windows is a: go through EVERYTHING under control panel, tweaking away b: tweak the start bar c: tweak tools - options in a regular explorer window d: download TweakUI and play some more "Hold on right there cowboy", installing 3rd party stuff is taboo.
Yeah, I did most of that (except for the downloading part, as that was strongly discouraged).
But no, the exercises weren't anything to do with formal classes. It was just me trying to grok an alien interface. I'm neither married to a single computer language, nor married to a specific O/S and I'm always willing to look different ones (even though I've worked most of my adult life to help make a Free Unix-alike system). I tried to find something I liked about Microsoft Windows XP, spent over half a year at it and finally gave up installing a corporate RHEL on the desktop machine I was using as a foot rest and on the notebook they gave me.
You obviously are no relation to the Greased Weasel that Linus seems to like so much (laugh, it's funny), but you are also obviously intelligent. I've enjoyed this discussion. btw, My former advisor in college was James Kajiya, a most brilliant man who taught me many, many important things that continue to bias me to this very day. I heard he was working for Microsoft at one point, but I don't know what he's doing now.
The only purpose of an O/S is for managing resources - disks, network connections, process scheduling, etc. Agreed, but apart from phoning home (which I can't say I care for) how does Windows break this? I wrote that as a digression and to show my own biases. Microsoft Windows doesn't exactly break it, per se, but binding a web browser as part of an O/S is stretching the limits, IMO. It's not clear to me that Microsoft ever bound Explorer as tight as DCL was bound to VMS (when DEC SHELL became available I managed to bring down the local cluster twice in a few minutes with ill-timed keyboard interrupts, so they banned it and forced me back to DCL:-), so I'm not pointing fingers at any particular thing.
User shells whether they be command line interpreters or web browsers should be considered as part of the user environment not O/S environment, but that was a Unix innovation and in my own college O/S design class the shell I had to write as part of my O/S project was considered part of the O/S (though that's certainly not how I coded it!)
At work, XP can be slow with network access. Which even Solaris has trouble with sometimes. My comments were aimed at a network performance critical app, like WoW. It's much more playable under Mac OS X than Microsoft Windows XP on a wireless notebook. (It's a game, I'm not going to experiment with various varieties of desktop machines to get it right. It either works and is fun or it isn't).
Then again, I'm a programmer, so I need to be on the same platform as the people I'm developing for. I suppose that's always going to be the case. Cross platform development has always sucked and it works out better for vendor lock-in that it stays that way.
Although probably slower and less powerful than Perl, The four letter p-word. Who needs Perl when you have `xemacs -batch'?
I won't argue that Windows is better than *nix on technical merits, I really don't think it is, but it's not unusable either. This goes back to a post I made previously, perhaps. For me, it's like walking barefooted over broken glass. The current manager I work for is someone I totally respect. I'm in a group that primarily does all its work cross-platform on Microsoft Windows XP and targeted at Solaris/Linux using engineers. I was granted an exception initially to do my work on Solaris. In the meantime, I spent extensive off-time doing Microsoft Windows appreciation exercises. Executive summary - I hate using it. Solaris/CDE (an environment I despise with a passion) works better for me. As much as I hate it, I can still get my work done. I wish I could use Solaris & KDE but that is not an option. Perhaps that is the same feeling many people have towards Microsoft Windows. Computers are tools. If they don't help you get your job done, they are worse than useless.
I read all of your message and thank you for your response.
You still have the old UI (95ish) which I think looks ok. Is that the one with greyish stuff? I think they call it "classic" style? I would agree with that.
The only purpose of an O/S is for managing resources - disks, network connections, process scheduling, etc.
The only purpose of a GUI is for facilitating user access to a computer. I do not care for "flashy" GUIs, they only tend to get in the way of getting a job done. I do not care for GUIs (or any computer program) that think they are smarter than the human behind the keyboard/mouse. They are not.
Two or one button mice are suboptimal. Xerox/PARC spent a lot of money doing research into human/computer interfaces and settled on a 3 button mouse. There was a good reason for that.
I also think putting a completely useless BIG key like CAPS LOCK (does any idiotic software rely on that now-a-days?) to the left of the "a" key without giving the user a chance to fix it is stupid.
But I digress, let's go on...
I haven't used a Mac in a while. The default interface isn't all that much different than Microsoft's except that it's prettier by default (but, see below). But, without knowing anything about Mac OS X, I was able to fix the CAPS LOCK key problem in seconds just by browsing a few menus. It has other issues that make it most unfriendly for me to deal with. The mouse cursor has a tendency to become invisible and it can take a long time (> 5 seconds) to figure out where it is and move it. At least Microsoft Windows XP doesn't have that problem.
I never had speed problems on XP. Again, this depends upon what you compare it to. I don't like the screen freezing and/or the mouse cursor freezing. Nor do I like clicking on things and having Nothing Happens for long (> 5 seconds) periods of time. RHEL 5 -vs- Microsoft Windows XP on the same hardware doesn't have those issues and everything seems to run faster. The hardware was a Lenovo Notebook T60 and the software was Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 corporate edition (and said image inside a big company like the one I'm working at has far, far more users than a lot of entries in distrowatch).
If you want more convenient power There's a real command line shell, like is available in all Unix descendents.
If Microsoft Windows works for you, go for it. More power to you. I prefer something different and more flexible and something that is under my control (Mac OS X comes close, but this machine is definitely going to my wife when I get it configured and locked down).
I'm referring either to production kernels in the case of Linux, or production/vendor systems. And yes, my ancient 3b1 never crashed except on the occasion when I tried to make it crash. That is fact.
It is true that I haven't had much experience with Mac OS X, so strike that from the list if you wish. At any rate it hasn't crashed for me so far and by this point Microsoft Windows XP had already crashed a couple of times, so I don't think I'm too far off in assuming OS X is more stable.
Google me. I've made no secret of my usage of those systems throughout the years.
To be fair, XP rarely crashed for me. I suppose it depends on how you define "rarely". I saw several BSODs, but usually it was just the machine locking up and requiring a power cycle. I think the machine may have stayed up as long as week once, but I'm not sure. It was certainly flakey about suspending and waking up. Whatever. RHEL on the same box never crashes and that works for me.
And to be fair, the AT&T Unix PC I had in the mid-80's was much, much more stable. It crashed once when I was trying to make it crash, but other than that, it was 24x7 for as long I had electricity.
And also to be fair, the Mac Powerbook Pro I now have feels like a tank in comparison.
Ugly UI, walking-barefooted-on-broken-glass feel, and dead slow - that's my opinion of Microsoft Windows XP. I had no idea how fast that machine was until I upgraded it to RHEL.
The command line is getting steadily more powerful, although it probably could use a redesign. ? It looked pretty much unchanged to me from DOS 2.0, but I won't accept anything less powerful than zsh for a command line so even if I missed something, it still looks like a toy interface.
The best job I ever had was in the 1980's when I was evaluating hardware and software (O/S + Ada Compilers) internally for TRW. I had all kinds of cool stuff dropped on my desk (we were looking hard for a cheap Intel/Unix solution) that I made work, so it's not like I'm afraid of or inexperienced with different environments. It's only with Microsoft Windows XP that it was like Vini, vidi, vomiti -- I came, I saw, I got sick to my stomach.
remember, if parent isn't lying, he's been maintaining xemacs for 10+ years, so perhaps he knows more about the subject than your reactionary holier-than-noob noobness. My email address is out in the open. I have nothing to hide on/., I was maintainer of XEmacs for 5 years (the current one is a different Steve) and I'm exposing my real name.
Just for the record. (Sad to think that I was once a Cypherpunk).
I gathered that. How sad. I loved Framemaker and approved it once for corporate purchase in a previous life. Only a zillion times easier to use than today's Microsoft Word (which didn't run on our target platform anyway) cheaper than all its competitors though still overpriced.
Priced at $50-100 today and available on MAC OS X or Linux, I'd buy it and use it, XEmacs guy or no.
I'm actually an OS X fanboi. I'm not, but I'm typing this on OS X, fyi. Punch Mac OS X in the face, I mean really hard... what happens? It doesn't crash. Get drunk downloading pr0n, fall asleep and let your Mac Powerbook Pro fall to the floor... it falls to the floor but it doesn't crash. Play WoW and get into a pitched battle on your Microsoft Windows XP machine? It shifts to another screen and while the system slowly lets you go back to WoW you die! Good job Microsoft! What an excellent gaming platform. (I've never experienced that same effect on my Mac).
Microsoft is decades behind decent O/S designers. I'm not at all a fan of the Macintrash, but I have to admit that what it has signed up to do, it does it with style and speed. Good going Apple! (and maybe someday I'll learn how to spell macintosh correctly)
When you don't really load much software on it, or use it for web surfing or e-mail, XP is stable. Oh god! I have seen the light! I will dump my two Linux machines for 40 Microsoft Windows XP boxes so they have light enough load not to crash! Allahu-akbar!
(This is flamebait not flaimbait or flaimbate so please make sure you spell it correctly when you moderate this down Microsoft Fan Boys. Thank you!)
I use XP as workhorse OS to do media production including multitrack audio and video editing. It's rock solid for me I'm happy for you, what color is the sky on the planet you live on?
Microsoft Windows XP, from a site-licensed, corporate installed image crashed for me every couple of days or so. A very old RHEL does not on the same hardware - a Lenovo T60 notebook.
You guys change the rules so much, what is it now? The preinstalls are filled with crapplets - so buy another license and install the base OEM version, the preinstalls suck so I installed a version from work,...
What does "rock solid" mean to you? Do you have > 1 year of uptime? No! But if you were running Linux or Solaris or something else like that, you would. A computer should never have to be rebooted. Ever. Anything else is inferior software.
Oh wait, Microsoft Windows is only stable if you never install any other software on it (you didn't write that, but plenty of other/. Microsoft fan boys have). Great! Go for it!
Even if MS released software under GPLv3, I wouldn't touch it. I'm sorry but I do not care to use anything MS. I would say that's really a rotten reason, but you don't have a reason there.
I use software because it either does what I want it to do, or I can fix it to make it do what I want it to do. I took over maintaining and fixing XEmacs a decade ago for this very reason.
I despise KDE defaults, but I can configure it to do what I want and look how I want. But most important, it has the features I most want (multiple desktops and internationalization) already working fine.
I cannot do any of the above with Microsoft Windows XP which crashed all the time for me, had a really, really stupid UI, and was slow when it didn't crash. Even if it were open source, I wouldn't bother to try to fix it because it doesn't do what I want and there are better alternatives available that already work right.
Even a stupid interface like the one in Mac OS X lets me fix the big key to left of the "a" key to be control.
So whatever, I hope you enjoy your hatred of Microsoft, but count me out. I just want software that works right. For me, if Microsoft puts out code open source or not that isn't crap and is what I want to use, I would use it. Still waiting, but maybe some day...
(Microsoft Word is pure unadulterated crap no matter what O/S you run it under. Where did quality programs like Framemaker go?)
I am not saying Linux is bad, it's just not ready for primetime. Begone, troll. If enough of you Microsoft fan boys repeat that often enough, maybe it will be true some day.
I'm not saying Microsoft Windows is bad, just that it's not ready for prime time. Maybe Microsoft will catch up to other O/S vendors in another 10 or 20 years. It's fortunate for them that they're a protected monopoly and they'll probably have that time.
As bad as Windows is, it works. Sorry Dave, I can't do that.
The problem is that Microsoft Windows doesn't work like a real O/S. Real O/S's never crash. Not several times a week like Microsoft Windows XP, never. I haven't seen instability like Microsoft Windows XP ever.
My AT&T Unix PC never crashed. Apple OS X doesn't crash. Linux doesn't crash (since the 1.3 days). Solaris doesn't crash. My DEC Alpha running Turbolinux 7 never crashed (but that's bragging, I did the Turbolinux 7 port to DEC Alpha).
If you take that as hostility, fine, whatever. My computers don't crash (now that my work notebook has been upgraded to RHEL from Microsoft Windows XP).
"If you see any suspicious activity, please call the... Oh, I've seen plenty of that. About the same amount as I saw in the Philippines so I guess it went under my radar. It's still not the same as stopping the bus and forcing all the males on board out while military dudes toting machine guns go on board.
Now maybe some real measures will be done about the rampaging problem of ID theft. You must be new here.
The problems were first described and warned about over a decade ago and the policies pursued since then deliberately welcome ID theft. Read old cypherpunks mailing list archives or Tim May's cyphernomicon.
That's one of the annoyances with the States -- you feel like an unruly little child all the time on public transport. I haven't noticed that on short runs, like city buses and commuter trains. I have heard they do that for Greyhound and Amtrak. Be serious! Are would-be terrorists going to torture themselves for their final days on a bus or a train, or travel in style in a rental car (a hotwired stolen car would work as well) a la a Jack Clancy novel?
If I'm riding a bus in Mindanao, I don't mind security stops. I've heard too many 1st person stories about captured buses and kidnapped people. I don't know what the AFP guys are checking for when we're stopped, but O.K. Maybe that's not O.K., what *are* they checking for? I haven't a clue and I've been in a stopped bus dozens of times.
Terror in the US is waaay overrated and maybe you need to spend some time in the 3rd world to understand just how much freedom is being taken away from you.
I hope you're not really a bosozoku. I've been woken up from sleep too many times by bosozoku and seen too many incidents to not consider them terrorists of a sort - it is not reasonable to surround a car and shout obscenities at the driver, ever. If you are, you are the kind of person these people should be picking out. Kawaiiso.
Yeah, well the only place I'm flying to right now (to/from Manila) it's impossible not to sweat a little. And if I'm a little bit tense in line, it's because I hate no-smoking airports and no-smoking flights across the Pacific. The horror... the horror.
I don't mind the security at NAIA - there really are troubled people who like to blow up airports and stuff there, but the security and the ominous color alert messages over the loud speaker at SFO are just annoying and a joke.
How many bombs have ever been exploded at SFO? There was at least one at NAIA in the last 4 years (and something like 3 in Davao City -- I'm really glad there's a lot of security there now).
You might be able to screw up the layout so badly that user's have to turn off Adblock in order to be able to use the page at all. Perhaps, but that wouldn't bother me and only make the web page author look stupid.
It's a perfectly sound method of testing the validity of an argument, closely related to Reductio Ad Absurdum or RAA. That's exactly what I was doing. Thank you.
Americans need not apply. Let's not go there. But, no I would not trust today's people who count American votes with anything sharper than a butter knife, let alone a nuke.
Of all the problems we face today, this is the dumbest.
At this point I am desperate enough to vote for a flat world believing President so long as he promises never to use nukes preemptively. Please, nukes as a deterrent, OK - the cat is out of the bag; nukes as a preemptive strike = genocide.
Get your priorities straight, please? Can we please stop killing people our leaders say must be killed?
Since the US military has in the past flat out REFUSED to be deployed on US soil, Because it's forbidden by law! The Decider has weakened that law in recent days, but it still doesn't make it right or something the military would automatically follow him into.
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No, she wasn't, but ... That quote was from Atlas Shrugged and by the point in the book where that quote occurred the bad guys had pretty much looted everything, so there wasn't any need for subtlety. Something like page 950 of a thousand page novel. You have to wind up even a long novel somehow. The scene with John Galt being pushed at gun point to announce the John Galt Recovery Plan - "Get the hell out of my way!" was even less subtle, for what it's worth.
Quotes from Atlas Shrugged seem most appropriate for how the DMCA (and other laws) are being used.
I better qualify that as networking over LAN. Networking over WAN doesn't seem to work as well, probably because it's still (relatively) new technology on the mass market level. It's probably better to come up with two different interfaces for the two because something that makes sense on a local trusted LAN is generally stupid over a WAN. Microsoft made that mistake with ActiveX. Stupidity has few limitations, Apple OS X seems going down the same road. If it had as large of an install base as Microsoft Windows, it would have a similar number of problems.
Even a model as simple as trust LAN don't trust WAN breaks down when you're wireless and accessing a public "hot spot". Much, much more design is needed in this area. My primary criteria for selecting apps tends to be what's the most like whatever I use in Windows. Not the best criteria, but a useful place to start. Well yes, I consider that axiomatic. My own personal hostility towards the Microsoft Windows UI would be reduced a lot if there were a magical menu item to select that would give me both global emacs keybindings and change the big key to the left of the "a" key to be "control".
Not completely though. Microsoft Word is terminally brain dead. Framemaker was much, much easier to use, more powerful and understood emacs key bindings. Of course, Microsoft Word is just an application not the O/S. I spent extensive off-time doing Microsoft Windows appreciation exercises. Ack, sounds like a painful training class by someone who isn't exactly a "power user". All I can suggest for enduring Windows is
a: go through EVERYTHING under control panel, tweaking away
b: tweak the start bar
c: tweak tools - options in a regular explorer window
d: download TweakUI and play some more "Hold on right there cowboy", installing 3rd party stuff is taboo.
Yeah, I did most of that (except for the downloading part, as that was strongly discouraged).
But no, the exercises weren't anything to do with formal classes. It was just me trying to grok an alien interface. I'm neither married to a single computer language, nor married to a specific O/S and I'm always willing to look different ones (even though I've worked most of my adult life to help make a Free Unix-alike system). I tried to find something I liked about Microsoft Windows XP, spent over half a year at it and finally gave up installing a corporate RHEL on the desktop machine I was using as a foot rest and on the notebook they gave me.
You obviously are no relation to the Greased Weasel that Linus seems to like so much (laugh, it's funny), but you are also obviously intelligent. I've enjoyed this discussion. btw, My former advisor in college was James Kajiya, a most brilliant man who taught me many, many important things that continue to bias me to this very day. I heard he was working for Microsoft at one point, but I don't know what he's doing now.
-sb
User shells whether they be command line interpreters or web browsers should be considered as part of the user environment not O/S environment, but that was a Unix innovation and in my own college O/S design class the shell I had to write as part of my O/S project was considered part of the O/S (though that's certainly not how I coded it!) At work, XP can be slow with network access. Which even Solaris has trouble with sometimes. My comments were aimed at a network performance critical app, like WoW. It's much more playable under Mac OS X than Microsoft Windows XP on a wireless notebook. (It's a game, I'm not going to experiment with various varieties of desktop machines to get it right. It either works and is fun or it isn't). Then again, I'm a programmer, so I need to be on the same platform as the people I'm developing for. I suppose that's always going to be the case. Cross platform development has always sucked and it works out better for vendor lock-in that it stays that way. Although probably slower and less powerful than Perl, The four letter p-word. Who needs Perl when you have `xemacs -batch'? I won't argue that Windows is better than *nix on technical merits, I really don't think it is, but it's not unusable either. This goes back to a post I made previously, perhaps. For me, it's like walking barefooted over broken glass. The current manager I work for is someone I totally respect. I'm in a group that primarily does all its work cross-platform on Microsoft Windows XP and targeted at Solaris/Linux using engineers. I was granted an exception initially to do my work on Solaris. In the meantime, I spent extensive off-time doing Microsoft Windows appreciation exercises. Executive summary - I hate using it. Solaris/CDE (an environment I despise with a passion) works better for me. As much as I hate it, I can still get my work done. I wish I could use Solaris & KDE but that is not an option. Perhaps that is the same feeling many people have towards Microsoft Windows. Computers are tools. If they don't help you get your job done, they are worse than useless.
The only purpose of an O/S is for managing resources - disks, network connections, process scheduling, etc.
The only purpose of a GUI is for facilitating user access to a computer. I do not care for "flashy" GUIs, they only tend to get in the way of getting a job done. I do not care for GUIs (or any computer program) that think they are smarter than the human behind the keyboard/mouse. They are not.
Two or one button mice are suboptimal. Xerox/PARC spent a lot of money doing research into human/computer interfaces and settled on a 3 button mouse. There was a good reason for that.
I also think putting a completely useless BIG key like CAPS LOCK (does any idiotic software rely on that now-a-days?) to the left of the "a" key without giving the user a chance to fix it is stupid.
But I digress, let's go on
If Microsoft Windows works for you, go for it. More power to you. I prefer something different and more flexible and something that is under my control (Mac OS X comes close, but this machine is definitely going to my wife when I get it configured and locked down).
I'll keep that in mind, thanks for the correction.
I'm referring either to production kernels in the case of Linux, or production/vendor systems. And yes, my ancient 3b1 never crashed except on the occasion when I tried to make it crash. That is fact.
It is true that I haven't had much experience with Mac OS X, so strike that from the list if you wish. At any rate it hasn't crashed for me so far and by this point Microsoft Windows XP had already crashed a couple of times, so I don't think I'm too far off in assuming OS X is more stable.
Google me. I've made no secret of my usage of those systems throughout the years.
And to be fair, the AT&T Unix PC I had in the mid-80's was much, much more stable. It crashed once when I was trying to make it crash, but other than that, it was 24x7 for as long I had electricity.
And also to be fair, the Mac Powerbook Pro I now have feels like a tank in comparison.
Ugly UI, walking-barefooted-on-broken-glass feel, and dead slow - that's my opinion of Microsoft Windows XP. I had no idea how fast that machine was until I upgraded it to RHEL. The command line is getting steadily more powerful, although it probably could use a redesign. ? It looked pretty much unchanged to me from DOS 2.0, but I won't accept anything less powerful than zsh for a command line so even if I missed something, it still looks like a toy interface.
The best job I ever had was in the 1980's when I was evaluating hardware and software (O/S + Ada Compilers) internally for TRW. I had all kinds of cool stuff dropped on my desk (we were looking hard for a cheap Intel/Unix solution) that I made work, so it's not like I'm afraid of or inexperienced with different environments. It's only with Microsoft Windows XP that it was like Vini, vidi, vomiti -- I came, I saw, I got sick to my stomach.
so perhaps he knows more about the subject than your
reactionary holier-than-noob noobness. My email address is out in the open. I have nothing to hide on
Just for the record. (Sad to think that I was once a Cypherpunk).
I gathered that. How sad. I loved Framemaker and approved it once for corporate purchase in a previous life. Only a zillion times easier to use than today's Microsoft Word (which didn't run on our target platform anyway) cheaper than all its competitors though still overpriced.
Priced at $50-100 today and available on MAC OS X or Linux, I'd buy it and use it, XEmacs guy or no.
Microsoft is decades behind decent O/S designers. I'm not at all a fan of the Macintrash, but I have to admit that what it has signed up to do, it does it with style and speed. Good going Apple! (and maybe someday I'll learn how to spell macintosh correctly) When you don't really load much software on it, or use it for web surfing or e-mail, XP is stable. Oh god! I have seen the light! I will dump my two Linux machines for 40 Microsoft Windows XP boxes so they have light enough load not to crash! Allahu-akbar!
(This is flamebait not flaimbait or flaimbate so please make sure you spell it correctly when you moderate this down Microsoft Fan Boys. Thank you!)
Let us all know when you get to the 1990's or something else more modern.
Microsoft Windows XP, from a site-licensed, corporate installed image crashed for me every couple of days or so. A very old RHEL does not on the same hardware - a Lenovo T60 notebook.
You guys change the rules so much, what is it now? The preinstalls are filled with crapplets - so buy another license and install the base OEM version, the preinstalls suck so I installed a version from work,
What does "rock solid" mean to you? Do you have > 1 year of uptime? No! But if you were running Linux or Solaris or something else like that, you would. A computer should never have to be rebooted. Ever. Anything else is inferior software.
Oh wait, Microsoft Windows is only stable if you never install any other software on it (you didn't write that, but plenty of other
I use software because it either does what I want it to do, or I can fix it to make it do what I want it to do. I took over maintaining and fixing XEmacs a decade ago for this very reason.
I despise KDE defaults, but I can configure it to do what I want and look how I want. But most important, it has the features I most want (multiple desktops and internationalization) already working fine.
I cannot do any of the above with Microsoft Windows XP which crashed all the time for me, had a really, really stupid UI, and was slow when it didn't crash. Even if it were open source, I wouldn't bother to try to fix it because it doesn't do what I want and there are better alternatives available that already work right.
Even a stupid interface like the one in Mac OS X lets me fix the big key to left of the "a" key to be control.
So whatever, I hope you enjoy your hatred of Microsoft, but count me out. I just want software that works right. For me, if Microsoft puts out code open source or not that isn't crap and is what I want to use, I would use it. Still waiting, but maybe some day...
(Microsoft Word is pure unadulterated crap no matter what O/S you run it under. Where did quality programs like Framemaker go?)
Wait, now I'm confused. I have to fly east to get to New York, but west to get to the far east, my head is going to explode!
Whew, good thing I didn't read that in the PAL waiting area at SFO.
I'm not saying Microsoft Windows is bad, just that it's not ready for prime time. Maybe Microsoft will catch up to other O/S vendors in another 10 or 20 years. It's fortunate for them that they're a protected monopoly and they'll probably have that time.
The problem is that Microsoft Windows doesn't work like a real O/S. Real O/S's never crash. Not several times a week like Microsoft Windows XP, never. I haven't seen instability like Microsoft Windows XP ever.
My AT&T Unix PC never crashed. Apple OS X doesn't crash. Linux doesn't crash (since the 1.3 days). Solaris doesn't crash. My DEC Alpha running Turbolinux 7 never crashed (but that's bragging, I did the Turbolinux 7 port to DEC Alpha).
If you take that as hostility, fine, whatever. My computers don't crash (now that my work notebook has been upgraded to RHEL from Microsoft Windows XP).
The problems were first described and warned about over a decade ago and the policies pursued since then deliberately welcome ID theft. Read old cypherpunks mailing list archives or Tim May's cyphernomicon.
If I'm riding a bus in Mindanao, I don't mind security stops. I've heard too many 1st person stories about captured buses and kidnapped people. I don't know what the AFP guys are checking for when we're stopped, but O.K. Maybe that's not O.K., what *are* they checking for? I haven't a clue and I've been in a stopped bus dozens of times.
Terror in the US is waaay overrated and maybe you need to spend some time in the 3rd world to understand just how much freedom is being taken away from you.
I hope you're not really a bosozoku. I've been woken up from sleep too many times by bosozoku and seen too many incidents to not consider them terrorists of a sort - it is not reasonable to surround a car and shout obscenities at the driver, ever. If you are, you are the kind of person these people should be picking out. Kawaiiso.
... the horror.
Yeah, well the only place I'm flying to right now (to/from Manila) it's impossible not to sweat a little. And if I'm a little bit tense in line, it's because I hate no-smoking airports and no-smoking flights across the Pacific. The horror
I don't mind the security at NAIA - there really are troubled people who like to blow up airports and stuff there, but the security and the ominous color alert messages over the loud speaker at SFO are just annoying and a joke.
How many bombs have ever been exploded at SFO? There was at least one at NAIA in the last 4 years (and something like 3 in Davao City -- I'm really glad there's a lot of security there now).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
Of all the problems we face today, this is the dumbest.
At this point I am desperate enough to vote for a flat world believing President so long as he promises never to use nukes preemptively. Please, nukes as a deterrent, OK - the cat is out of the bag; nukes as a preemptive strike = genocide.
Get your priorities straight, please? Can we please stop killing people our leaders say must be killed?