The truth is that you can't use the two LEAST expensive versions for virtualization (not counting the stupid N versions). Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate all have virtualization clauses in their EULA.
Perhaps I could have been a bit more clear. Less and less funding spent on actually educating the children. Countries like Canada, the UK, Franc, Germany and Japan don't have the inane administrative overhead of US schools.
Unfortunately, pure numbers don't tell the whole story. Just because there's been an increase in spending per pupil (even adjusted for inflation) doesn't mean much. The cost of "doing business" for schools has increase, largely in the form of regulation and compliance. My understanding (though I have no data) is that compliance costs have far exceeded the increase in funding, which amounts to a decrease in money spent on actually educating the child.
Further, consider the costs involved with building new schools to house the ever increasing ranks of children. The skyrocketing costs of textbooks (far beyond inflation), etc.. Most schools these days are stuffed to over-capacity. I know my local high school has several thousand more students than the school was built to support, but it will be several years before a new school is built to accomodate that (the process has started, but for now they're having to jam more students into the same classrooms). On the bright side, teachers are still largely living below the poverty level (yes, that's sarcasm).
I agree with you about a lot of things. One of the problems is that schools don't know how to teach children that don't fit the mold. So called "advanced" classes are modeled more after harder workers than they are on fast learners. At least US schools don't beat creativity out of their students like other countries, such as Japan.
Why? Skyrocketing costs for compliance with regulations like "no child left behind" combined with growing numbers of students and less and less funding means looking for solutions that allow more money to be spent on educating the children rather than adminstration.
Have you been to a high school recently? They're little more than prisons that let their inmates go home at 3pm.
Maybe i'm confused, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. At one point you say "Yes, there may be some different way to interpret the standards, and maybe two different implementation produce slighlty different results" then down further you claim it is imperative for other office suites to create pixel perfect MS Office renderings. Why is it no big deal if ODF based office suites can't render each others documents exactly, but such an enormous deal if they can't render an Office document exactly?
I'm also not sure why you state that OOXML doesn't have an independant working group. When I looked at the ECMA OOXML working group, it consisted of about a dozen organizations, including software companies like Apple and Novell, and non-profit organizations (who I would assume have a vested interest in a working archival standard), such as the british library. Novell is an open source company now, and they are producing an open source implementation of OOXML for OOo, which seems to contradict your point as well.
Your argument seems to be ignorant (not a slam, you really don't seem to know the details and say things that are already the case have to happen), emotional, and not very well thought out, as evidenced by your contradictory positions based on what argument you wish to present at the time.
You also didn't really address my argument, which was based on the implementation argument. No two office suites will have identical feature sets, therefore, no two office suites can completely interoperate, regardless of data format. For example, what happens when you open an OOo document that has text frames in it, but the application you're using doesn't support text frames? It will either have to convert the document to something it can support, or ignore it (possibly corrupting the integrity of the document), or even just delete it. So then, you make a change, save the document and send it back to the original author and now it's completely different.
OOXML might be a direct dump of office, but frankly I don't see how that really matters. Even if Office used ODF, and ODF was capable of supporting all of Offices features (something i'm not sure about, MS claims not but ODF supports claim it can), no suite will be able to implement it either, because Office still has to implement all it's features, those same features that are in OOXML.
All i'm asking is that you look at the arguments you're using rationally. Many of them don't make sense and flip-flop.
I think you make a disingenuous argument. By definition, no office suite can fully implement any other office suites interoperability unless suite b is a complete superset of suite a's features, regardless of document type.
By way of example, let's take something like KOffice. It seems unlikely that KOffice is a complete superset of OpenOffice, therefore even if both OOo and KOffice implement ODF, KOffice can never be completely interoperable with OOo (at least OOo -> Koffice). Further, if KOffice implements any features that OOo doesn't have, then the same is true in reverse.
This argument is a red herring. No, no office suite can implement every feature of OOXML, because OOXML is, by definition, a direct map of Office functionality, but even if Office used ODF, those same features would have to be represented in ODF somehow, and those same suites would still not be able to implement them.
The problem with your theory is that Microsoft has not actually threatened anyone. You can certainly construe it as a veiled threat, but not an overt one. Even if your line of reasoning were valid (which I have doubts about) you would first have to prove an overt threat, which hasn't happened.
"I believe you owe me money" is not the same as "If you don't pay me the money you owe me, I'll sue you", even though many people might construe them to be the same. Legally they are not.
You can't even use past history as an excuse, as Microsoft has never sued anyone for a patent violation.
It's not the OS, it's the apps. People don't want to learn new apps, or face the fact that many of the apps (games) don't work on OSX, which means having to use two OS's, which is pointless.
"It's not MY fault that my artificial lung won't work for you. My lung converts Methane into oxygen, and the earth isn't compatible with this common environment found on many moons and planets, except earth, it's the earths fault."
Dude, like it or not, you gotta interoperate with the common environment, even if they don't want you to.
You do realize that it's a bit more complicated than that. Depending on where the speakers were from the microphone, any reflective surfaces that might bounce the sound back, etc... it can all fuck up a noise cancelation circuit, which is what we're basically talking about.
I've seen EXPENSIVE noise canceling speakerphones screw this up.
Vista takes that a step further. Yes, it will cache a great deal, but this doesn't get counted against your total memory commit (available memory). However, other features, like the Compositing engine, and the 3D desktop will use more memory if you have it, and that WILL get counted against your available memory, though it will reduce it's usage when memory becomes tight.
While I don't doubt you that you've experienced this, all i can say is that some of your problems were real and have already been solved, some of them are not common and you seem to be the only person i've ever heard with them, and some are definately legitimate.
I've not seen nany problems with Live Messenger since RTM. SQL Server has had a publicly available beta patch available for quite some time (along with Visual Studio). DVD and other apps have always had a lot of trouble with new versions of Windows, because the API's change (usually for the better, to provide functionality that those apps used to have to do themselves). iTunes... well, Apple has always had trouble writing decent software for Windows, so that doesn't surprise me. I don't use it. Firefox has a couple of dozen known bugs that effect Vista. I have a nVidia 6600GT that has worked well for ages under Vista. Even with the newer Forceware drivers.
As for performance, it's been pretty fast for me. Both on my P4M laptop with 512MB and on my Dual Core 2GB desktop.
As for the default view, i'm not sure if i understand. XP has worked exactly the same way for me, left to right for folders in icon view. The desktop has always been top to bottom. Or are you referring to open and save dialogs? Those work more like normal explorer now and exhibit the behavior you are talking about.
The start menu i guess is personal preference. I like it, but then I use the keyboard most of the time, and I find it easier to get around in.
That's not really a requirement. Have you ever fixed someones computer for them? Did they give you anything in exchange? Even if it's a can of coke? You just sold your services. Big deal. Microsoft doesn't really care.
Yes, it will use a gig of ram if you have a gig of ram to waste. If you don't, it won't use as many resources. Vista will scale back it's usage when memory becomes more scarce, otherwise there's no reason not to use RAM that's sitting unused.
No, I think they're saying that the requirements for content protection will result in better quality drivers.
It's like when MMU's (and OS's that supported them) were first put into use. The MMU restricted what applications could do. They couldn't just write to random memory anymore, they had to follow rules, or they would be dumped. This resulted in a higher level of quality in applications, and stability of the system.
Times change, Excel 2007 blows the doors off the old Excel limits, with a million rows and 16k columns. Calc, by the way is worse than Excel 1 with large data.
What are you talking about? I just bought an HP Laptop about 2 months ago, and while it didn't come with a restore CD, it came with an application that let me burn my own restore CD from a hard drive image.
Nice history, but largely irrelevant to my point. Proprietary computers would have never gained a foot hold. Apple may have had the largest marketshare, but there were be 10 or 20 competing products that would all be incompatible with each other. Regardless of whether or not it happened by plan or accident, the fact that the IBM PC was relatively open that could be easily reverse engineered and commoditized is what made the PC industry take off, not Apple or Commodore.
What makes you think that? By the time the IBM PC and MS-DOS were release there were a large number of 8-bit computer systems, and home computing was a rapidly growing market.
Yes, all of them proprietary. I think it's unlikely that personal computers would have become the commodity they are now if the likes of Apple and Commodore had controlled the market.
why not just argue that a glitch might destroy your hard drive while you're at it? Or blow up your computer? Or drive you insane with endless high pitch wining?
You act as if software is going to advertise the fact that it has DRMed content in it AND that DRM will be limited to discrete media like movies and songs.
Once the platform for content protection is established and accepted, there is EVERY reason to believe that DRM will be extended onto other copyrighted works--things like clipart, splash videos, GUI designs, fonts, PDF documents, and so on. And if ANY of this DRM-encumbered media is being (dis)played while non-DRM media is also being (dis)played, the quality of the non-DRMed content will be degraded as well.
Do you REALLY think the public will stand for that? No. They won't. If this is a real problem, rather than the theoretical slippery slope you are getting excited about, then it will be solved, or consumers will start lawsuits.
The key here is that the content providers and the hardware providers are promising a certain level of quality, and if that quality is impossible to get, lawsuits will fly. But again, you can avoid all this by not buying protected content. And Yes. It will be labeled. AACS, for instance, requires the AACS logo on all protected content.
Unfortunately, there may also be situations in which a driver isn't able to prove that it's got clean media and will, therefore set a 'trouble bit' to indicate that it's 'worried'. This can cause the degradation of the affected media, whether it's properly DRMed or not.
False. Completely and totally false. and FUD.
Things like "worry bits" and degradation cannot and do not happen unless you are using a protected media path that has been turned on by the media. Without DRM, there is no DRM, thus there is no degradation. Period.
Part of the problem is that secure DRM is going to essentially require that every step in the chain can prove that it's handling the data correctly
Yes, so don't use DRM'd content, and secure DRM channels will never be set up. Don't buy the content if you don't like the protection, period.
According to at least one document, issues of uncertainty are to be resolved by presuming the worst
Yes, *IF* a secure channel has been set up by the protected media, and only *IF* that is the case.
Under such uncertain conditions, loss of quality is a serious possibility -- whether the data being processed really is protected or not.
Wrong. False. FUD.
There is nowhere, in any of the documents, that any of these concerns apply to anything other than a secure DRM channel established by protected content. Stop making shit up just to spread FUD.
Why do people keep insisting that hardware-enforced DRM (like Vista's) is somehow optional, like Active Desktop or ClearType fonts? IT IS NOT.
False. It is completely optional. Simply do not purchase protected content and you will *NEVER* have DRM. That's all there is to it.
This mis-characterization of the opposition is academically dishonest in every sense of the phrase.
No, it's not. The reason is that Guttman and others ALWAYS neglect to mention that unprotected content will NEVER suffer from anything they're talking about. Why is that? Why do they neglect to mention this? It's simply, don't want DRM, don't buy protected content.
What Guttman and others also fail to mention is that protected content won't play on ANY non-DRM supported system either. So whether or not Vista supports DRM is irrelevant, since the content that would be protected wouldn't play at all otherwise.
Not even MICROSOFT is saying that. In fact, here's what they have to say about it
Now YOU are bing intellectually dishonest. You're taking comments referring to Vista's overall backwards compatibility that have *NOTHING* to do with DRM and trying to use them in your anti-DRM argument. Vista, like XP before it, and Windows 2000 before it, have minor compatibility issues (64 bit has significantly more, but that's a different story). That's the cost of progress. OS X has lost compatibility between multiple versions of it's OS's, and even Linux has deprecated some functions.
The fact that the vast majority of hardware you'll be able to buy (regardless of DRM or OS) will be more expensive, less reliable, slower, and fundamentally vulnerable to DDOS attacks is of no concern to you?
So you lost your DRM argument and you have to go off onto other, even more flimsy arguments. Vista is *NOT* more expensive, nor has it been proven to be less reliable, and most independant tests say that Vista is just as fast (sometimes faster) than XP. Finally, your "fundamentally vulnerable to DDOS attacks" claim is paranoid lunacy with nothing backing it up. Pure FUD. That's all you can come up with?
Slashdot Mirror
Big surprise, huh?
Yes, considering that's not true.
The truth is that you can't use the two LEAST expensive versions for virtualization (not counting the stupid N versions). Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate all have virtualization clauses in their EULA.
Perhaps I could have been a bit more clear. Less and less funding spent on actually educating the children. Countries like Canada, the UK, Franc, Germany and Japan don't have the inane administrative overhead of US schools.
Unfortunately, pure numbers don't tell the whole story. Just because there's been an increase in spending per pupil (even adjusted for inflation) doesn't mean much. The cost of "doing business" for schools has increase, largely in the form of regulation and compliance. My understanding (though I have no data) is that compliance costs have far exceeded the increase in funding, which amounts to a decrease in money spent on actually educating the child.
Further, consider the costs involved with building new schools to house the ever increasing ranks of children. The skyrocketing costs of textbooks (far beyond inflation), etc.. Most schools these days are stuffed to over-capacity. I know my local high school has several thousand more students than the school was built to support, but it will be several years before a new school is built to accomodate that (the process has started, but for now they're having to jam more students into the same classrooms). On the bright side, teachers are still largely living below the poverty level (yes, that's sarcasm).
I agree with you about a lot of things. One of the problems is that schools don't know how to teach children that don't fit the mold. So called "advanced" classes are modeled more after harder workers than they are on fast learners. At least US schools don't beat creativity out of their students like other countries, such as Japan.
You mean this?
Why? Skyrocketing costs for compliance with regulations like "no child left behind" combined with growing numbers of students and less and less funding means looking for solutions that allow more money to be spent on educating the children rather than adminstration.
Have you been to a high school recently? They're little more than prisons that let their inmates go home at 3pm.
Maybe i'm confused, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. At one point you say "Yes, there may be some different way to interpret the standards, and maybe two different implementation produce slighlty different results" then down further you claim it is imperative for other office suites to create pixel perfect MS Office renderings. Why is it no big deal if ODF based office suites can't render each others documents exactly, but such an enormous deal if they can't render an Office document exactly?
I'm also not sure why you state that OOXML doesn't have an independant working group. When I looked at the ECMA OOXML working group, it consisted of about a dozen organizations, including software companies like Apple and Novell, and non-profit organizations (who I would assume have a vested interest in a working archival standard), such as the british library. Novell is an open source company now, and they are producing an open source implementation of OOXML for OOo, which seems to contradict your point as well.
Your argument seems to be ignorant (not a slam, you really don't seem to know the details and say things that are already the case have to happen), emotional, and not very well thought out, as evidenced by your contradictory positions based on what argument you wish to present at the time.
You also didn't really address my argument, which was based on the implementation argument. No two office suites will have identical feature sets, therefore, no two office suites can completely interoperate, regardless of data format. For example, what happens when you open an OOo document that has text frames in it, but the application you're using doesn't support text frames? It will either have to convert the document to something it can support, or ignore it (possibly corrupting the integrity of the document), or even just delete it. So then, you make a change, save the document and send it back to the original author and now it's completely different.
OOXML might be a direct dump of office, but frankly I don't see how that really matters. Even if Office used ODF, and ODF was capable of supporting all of Offices features (something i'm not sure about, MS claims not but ODF supports claim it can), no suite will be able to implement it either, because Office still has to implement all it's features, those same features that are in OOXML.
All i'm asking is that you look at the arguments you're using rationally. Many of them don't make sense and flip-flop.
I think you make a disingenuous argument. By definition, no office suite can fully implement any other office suites interoperability unless suite b is a complete superset of suite a's features, regardless of document type.
By way of example, let's take something like KOffice. It seems unlikely that KOffice is a complete superset of OpenOffice, therefore even if both OOo and KOffice implement ODF, KOffice can never be completely interoperable with OOo (at least OOo -> Koffice). Further, if KOffice implements any features that OOo doesn't have, then the same is true in reverse.
This argument is a red herring. No, no office suite can implement every feature of OOXML, because OOXML is, by definition, a direct map of Office functionality, but even if Office used ODF, those same features would have to be represented in ODF somehow, and those same suites would still not be able to implement them.
The problem with your theory is that Microsoft has not actually threatened anyone. You can certainly construe it as a veiled threat, but not an overt one. Even if your line of reasoning were valid (which I have doubts about) you would first have to prove an overt threat, which hasn't happened.
"I believe you owe me money" is not the same as "If you don't pay me the money you owe me, I'll sue you", even though many people might construe them to be the same. Legally they are not.
You can't even use past history as an excuse, as Microsoft has never sued anyone for a patent violation.
Ummm.. who has Microsoft sued for patent infringement?
It's not the OS, it's the apps. People don't want to learn new apps, or face the fact that many of the apps (games) don't work on OSX, which means having to use two OS's, which is pointless.
"It's not MY fault that my artificial lung won't work for you. My lung converts Methane into oxygen, and the earth isn't compatible with this common environment found on many moons and planets, except earth, it's the earths fault."
Dude, like it or not, you gotta interoperate with the common environment, even if they don't want you to.
You do realize that it's a bit more complicated than that. Depending on where the speakers were from the microphone, any reflective surfaces that might bounce the sound back, etc... it can all fuck up a noise cancelation circuit, which is what we're basically talking about.
I've seen EXPENSIVE noise canceling speakerphones screw this up.
Vista takes that a step further. Yes, it will cache a great deal, but this doesn't get counted against your total memory commit (available memory). However, other features, like the Compositing engine, and the 3D desktop will use more memory if you have it, and that WILL get counted against your available memory, though it will reduce it's usage when memory becomes tight.
While I don't doubt you that you've experienced this, all i can say is that some of your problems were real and have already been solved, some of them are not common and you seem to be the only person i've ever heard with them, and some are definately legitimate.
I've not seen nany problems with Live Messenger since RTM. SQL Server has had a publicly available beta patch available for quite some time (along with Visual Studio). DVD and other apps have always had a lot of trouble with new versions of Windows, because the API's change (usually for the better, to provide functionality that those apps used to have to do themselves). iTunes... well, Apple has always had trouble writing decent software for Windows, so that doesn't surprise me. I don't use it. Firefox has a couple of dozen known bugs that effect Vista. I have a nVidia 6600GT that has worked well for ages under Vista. Even with the newer Forceware drivers.
As for performance, it's been pretty fast for me. Both on my P4M laptop with 512MB and on my Dual Core 2GB desktop.
As for the default view, i'm not sure if i understand. XP has worked exactly the same way for me, left to right for folders in icon view. The desktop has always been top to bottom. Or are you referring to open and save dialogs? Those work more like normal explorer now and exhibit the behavior you are talking about.
The start menu i guess is personal preference. I like it, but then I use the keyboard most of the time, and I find it easier to get around in.
That's not really a requirement. Have you ever fixed someones computer for them? Did they give you anything in exchange? Even if it's a can of coke? You just sold your services. Big deal. Microsoft doesn't really care.
Yes, it will use a gig of ram if you have a gig of ram to waste. If you don't, it won't use as many resources. Vista will scale back it's usage when memory becomes more scarce, otherwise there's no reason not to use RAM that's sitting unused.
No, I think they're saying that the requirements for content protection will result in better quality drivers.
It's like when MMU's (and OS's that supported them) were first put into use. The MMU restricted what applications could do. They couldn't just write to random memory anymore, they had to follow rules, or they would be dumped. This resulted in a higher level of quality in applications, and stability of the system.
Times change, Excel 2007 blows the doors off the old Excel limits, with a million rows and 16k columns. Calc, by the way is worse than Excel 1 with large data.
What are you talking about? I just bought an HP Laptop about 2 months ago, and while it didn't come with a restore CD, it came with an application that let me burn my own restore CD from a hard drive image.
Nice history, but largely irrelevant to my point. Proprietary computers would have never gained a foot hold. Apple may have had the largest marketshare, but there were be 10 or 20 competing products that would all be incompatible with each other. Regardless of whether or not it happened by plan or accident, the fact that the IBM PC was relatively open that could be easily reverse engineered and commoditized is what made the PC industry take off, not Apple or Commodore.
What makes you think that? By the time the IBM PC and MS-DOS were release there were a large number of 8-bit computer systems, and home computing was a rapidly growing market.
Yes, all of them proprietary. I think it's unlikely that personal computers would have become the commodity they are now if the likes of Apple and Commodore had controlled the market.
why not just argue that a glitch might destroy your hard drive while you're at it? Or blow up your computer? Or drive you insane with endless high pitch wining?
Sorry, but it's a stupid argument.
You act as if software is going to advertise the fact that it has DRMed content in it AND that DRM will be limited to discrete media like movies and songs.
Once the platform for content protection is established and accepted, there is EVERY reason to believe that DRM will be extended onto other copyrighted works--things like clipart, splash videos, GUI designs, fonts, PDF documents, and so on. And if ANY of this DRM-encumbered media is being (dis)played while non-DRM media is also being (dis)played, the quality of the non-DRMed content will be degraded as well.
Do you REALLY think the public will stand for that? No. They won't. If this is a real problem, rather than the theoretical slippery slope you are getting excited about, then it will be solved, or consumers will start lawsuits.
The key here is that the content providers and the hardware providers are promising a certain level of quality, and if that quality is impossible to get, lawsuits will fly. But again, you can avoid all this by not buying protected content. And Yes. It will be labeled. AACS, for instance, requires the AACS logo on all protected content.
Unfortunately, there may also be situations in which a driver isn't able to prove that it's got clean media and will, therefore set a 'trouble bit' to indicate that it's 'worried'. This can cause the degradation of the affected media, whether it's properly DRMed or not.
False. Completely and totally false. and FUD.
Things like "worry bits" and degradation cannot and do not happen unless you are using a protected media path that has been turned on by the media. Without DRM, there is no DRM, thus there is no degradation. Period.
Part of the problem is that secure DRM is going to essentially require that every step in the chain can prove that it's handling the data correctly
Yes, so don't use DRM'd content, and secure DRM channels will never be set up. Don't buy the content if you don't like the protection, period.
According to at least one document, issues of uncertainty are to be resolved by presuming the worst
Yes, *IF* a secure channel has been set up by the protected media, and only *IF* that is the case.
Under such uncertain conditions, loss of quality is a serious possibility -- whether the data being processed really is protected or not.
Wrong. False. FUD.
There is nowhere, in any of the documents, that any of these concerns apply to anything other than a secure DRM channel established by protected content. Stop making shit up just to spread FUD.
Why do people keep insisting that hardware-enforced DRM (like Vista's) is somehow optional, like Active Desktop or ClearType fonts? IT IS NOT.
False. It is completely optional. Simply do not purchase protected content and you will *NEVER* have DRM. That's all there is to it.
This mis-characterization of the opposition is academically dishonest in every sense of the phrase.
No, it's not. The reason is that Guttman and others ALWAYS neglect to mention that unprotected content will NEVER suffer from anything they're talking about. Why is that? Why do they neglect to mention this? It's simply, don't want DRM, don't buy protected content.
What Guttman and others also fail to mention is that protected content won't play on ANY non-DRM supported system either. So whether or not Vista supports DRM is irrelevant, since the content that would be protected wouldn't play at all otherwise.
Not even MICROSOFT is saying that. In fact, here's what they have to say about it
Now YOU are bing intellectually dishonest. You're taking comments referring to Vista's overall backwards compatibility that have *NOTHING* to do with DRM and trying to use them in your anti-DRM argument. Vista, like XP before it, and Windows 2000 before it, have minor compatibility issues (64 bit has significantly more, but that's a different story). That's the cost of progress. OS X has lost compatibility between multiple versions of it's OS's, and even Linux has deprecated some functions.
The fact that the vast majority of hardware you'll be able to buy (regardless of DRM or OS) will be more expensive, less reliable, slower, and fundamentally vulnerable to DDOS attacks is of no concern to you?
So you lost your DRM argument and you have to go off onto other, even more flimsy arguments. Vista is *NOT* more expensive, nor has it been proven to be less reliable, and most independant tests say that Vista is just as fast (sometimes faster) than XP. Finally, your "fundamentally vulnerable to DDOS attacks" claim is paranoid lunacy with nothing backing it up. Pure FUD. That's all you can come up with?