I wish I could take credit for that, but there's simply nothing about Microsoft search that makes me remember it exists. Google is not the be-all end-all of everything but Microsoft is always years behind them.
I would bet you lunch it's because 99% of those old XP machines have been replaced, not upgraded.
Of course XP is dying very fast. You haven't been able to buy a new XP machine in about 4 years, except for netbooks, and that's been over 2 years. XP is only disappearing because you can't get it any more. I would bet very few machines have been upgraded from XP.
I would also bet that 95% of users would still be perfectly served by XP. I think Windows 7 is fine, but there's definitely nothing significant about it I prefer to XP.
If you don't use IE, like any sane person, and you don't care about DirectX 11, which counts everyone who doesn't play leading-edge games, the only advantages of Windows 7, for home users at least, are the latest security fixes and support for newer hardware. Microsoft's biggest problem was that XP was really quite good, and they've simply got nothing else to offer. The best we can ever hope for is incremental improvements, mostly driven by advances in the hardware technology.
Windows support is only ever free if your time has no value.
And assuming there's an actual answer to your question. I would imagine the only support issues MS can actually solve are those that can be easily answered with a Google search or two... at least based on my experience.
Well, that was one thing MS got right... about 10 years too late... but right nonetheless.
Of course, Vista shipped with such moronic security features such having to ask permission multiple times to rename an icon on the desktop, but they managed to get it right with Windows 7.
I'm sure there are a lot of Fortune 500 companies still running XP. The biggest reason to upgrade by far, as has always been true for Windows, is for newer hardware support, or when security patches stop. Actually, I'm sure almost no one actually upgraded even to Windows 7, they just bought a new computer with it.
Ditto wonkey_monkey's comment. Maybe Google realizes the same people who would buy into astrology would buy into psychic stuff and would also not discriminate either from astronomy. It's pretty cynical, but there's probably something to it.
Your argument should be entirely semantic. It really has nothing to do with the nature of math itself. I think your comparison to biology is much more apt than the problematic assertion that "There is only one math."
The parent is right for the wrong reason. "Mathematics" is a singular word when it refers to a singular subject, the subject of mathematics, e.g., "Mathematics is a hard subject". It has nothing to do with what math itself is.
Regarding your response to me: If linguistic meaning is based on what we put into it then words can have no objective meaning and no one can communicate. The whole point of language is that we have to have a common, agreed upon rules for how it should be used and what words mean. In the context of grammar "should of" simply makes no logical sense. "Of" is being used as a verb. Yes, I understand how idioms develop, but there's no point in trying to justify people misusing the language through ignorance, and the informality of the discussion does not make the misuse of language any less the culpability of ignorance. If there is any merit to this usage, then let's show it to a bunch of people who are learning English and see what they think of it.
If your use of language is so imprecise that we have to assume your meaning based on context, then you will never be capable of communicating anything with any accuracy or precision. This might be fine for a/. discussion, but when you start writing a newspaper article, a history book, a science paper or a law with this kind of lazy attitude towards language you're asking for trouble, and we see all the time how much trouble it causes. Rigorous language use is integral to very foundations of civilization, and it is no coincidence that one of the most powerful tools of Orwell's totalitarian state in "1984" was its deliberate devolution of language.
Am I jerk for complaining that someone who says "should of" is ignorant? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean I wrong.
So let's just let the language devolve into incoherent grunting and be done with it.
Accepting illogical misspelling as somehow being "right" because everyone makes a mistake will just lead to no one being able to understand anyone.... which is kind of where/. is heading anyway.
If Linux kernel followed the same release mentality of Mozilla, we'd have Linux 10.3 already.
So? Is that any less arbitrary than when they decided to bump the version to 3.0?
The version number is nothing but a name. Numbers make it easier to know in what order the releases came out. Using the numbers to denote Major/Minor/Revision provides more information, but again, it's all relative. Major is bigger than minor, but how much? It's fine if you decide that the major number will be bumped only if the ABI changes or something like that, but that doesn't always apply to an end-user app. Does it really change anything Firefox is up to version 11, vs. version 4.6? In either case, the important piece of information is whether you're running the latest version.
I find http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/">this to be a pretty good analysis of just how bad the writing is. My wife is a librarian at a middle school here in Virginia, and she makes a point to keep up with popular fiction for middle-schoolers. She said that while the writing is awful, some of it was actually really good, but most of it was just padding.
We watched the first 3 movies together... well, at least sat in front of them while surfing on our laptops. I couldn't even get through the first one _with_ Rifftrax. The second and third were a little better; there was at least some decent action to break it up. But I just cannot understand being excited about a story where the main character's motivations are so illogical the only reasonable conclusion is that she's mentally ill... but the way it's portrayed I don't even think the author sees it that way. Plus Kristin Stewart is pretty, but she always looks like she's strong out on Quaaludes or something. She seems to only have two emotions: dull petulance and vacant infatuation. Sparkly boy is just pasty and creepy. At least Jacob had some redeeming qualities and doesn't look like someone who would sit around drinking absinthe and quoting Shelly purely for effect.
Meh. If I'm going to watch girl stuff, I'll stick with Jane Austen adaptations. The "Pride and Prejudice" with Colin Perth is really good. Superb production, acting, and music. My wife watches it about once every couple months or so. I mean, yeah, I'd rather be watching something like "Burn Notice", but I can appreciate stuff based on "real" literature. "Twilight" will be nothing but a historical footnote in a few decades while people will still be making new adaptations of Austen.
I remember. The problem was that Microsoft did their victory lap and didn't do anything new with IE for 10 years. IE4 was the best at the time, but by version 6 it was just extremely buggy and incompatible and generally horrible, and stayed that way for a long time. Their monopoly really had nothing to do with it.
The real truth is that Microsoft's monopoly advantage was well-established and well-abused long before IE existed.
That logic is ludicrous. Urban myths happen all the time and can easily reach a critical mass where they take on their lives despite being completely false. I wouldn't rule out Gates having said because he's said a lot of really stupid things over the years, but it's certainly not "just as likely".
Yeah, but he also more or less expressed that the web itself was a passing fad too. He had to update "The Road Ahead" to correct for that when it became apparent how wrong he was. Microsoft also got a late start on the web because of it as well.
Of course, Gates wasn't the only one saying that. It was still a not uncommon view until about 1996 or so, even though I can't imagine why anyone would have believed it.
I'm sure they are still coasting along on the residuals from "Let's Pretend: The Magic Sneakers" and the other pharmacology-fueled shorts they were producing in the late 60s and early 70s.
At least he or she didn't call the President "Shrub". That was the go-to word for people with room-temperature IQs who thought it made them sound clever.
And "LordLimecat" is an awesome handle. I assume you are rarely amused.
Well, I didn't say I "cling" to XP over 7, but neither do I find 7 a compelling reason to upgrade. I wouldn't upgrade my netbook to Windows 7 if it were free, but I have no problems using new hardware that comes with it. I recently bought a quad-core laptop that came with Windows 7 and I have no intentions of going back to XP with it because overall it works fine. Actually, if it weren't that I share this laptop with my kids and that I also use it for games, I would put Linux on it. I'm in the process of getting ready to change my netbook to Linux and I use Linux on my desktop. But Windows 7 is decent, and I don't resent having to use it at home or at work.
My experience with using Explorer on network shares, wireless networking simply not working until a reboot and other features make me frustrated with it. In the grand scheme of things these are pretty small bugs, but I expect better from the most powerful and richest software company in the world. I mean if you use Explorer, you need to expect bad results. It's consistently been the buggiest piece of mainstream software since it was introduced almost 20 years ago and has barely improved in functionality since then. Linux has had file managers that were more advanced and worked better than today's Explorer many years ago. Now it has several.
But regardless of how stable Windows has been in the past decade or so, and the NT branch of Windows was always a very stable OS going back to 3.51, nothing excuses the ripe slice of pure FAIL that is Office. I have not seen a wider variety of bugs, instability and general bizarreness in any piece of commercial application software than the applications in Microsoft Office. I have never seen applications that are so aggressive (by necessity) against their own bugs than Office. I'm periodically being asked to restore documents that haven't existed on the computer in 6 months or more, with apparently no way to make it stop asking. I will frequently e-mail an Excel spreadsheet to a co-worker, only to have that co-worker report she cannot open it because Excel is behaving strangely. Sometimes resending the same document fixes it. When that fails a reboot on her side usually fixes it. I have never saved a file in any other application and immediately reopened it only to have the application report that the file is corrupted and needs to be repaired. I stopped using Word except for viewing when in 2006 Word on the Mac crashed, losing my unsaved work, which is pretty poor for a modern app but isn't so bad, except that it also corrupted the saved document as well, requiring me to start over from scratch. I can't remember anything like that happening since the days of DOS. Oh, after the fact, a coworker suggested using OpenOffice to open the document, since it could often open documents the Microsoft apps could not. When I have to write something from scratch, I use reStructured Text.
Then there was the time in 2003 where I decided to upgrade to Outlook after having used Outlook Express for many years. I figured if OE was good, and it was, how much better would Outlook be? My wife had bought the student edition of Office XP, which comes with licenses for 3 computers. I happily installed Outlook and started importing all my e-mail archives, only to find when I was finished that the resulting e-mail store was corrupted and missing stuff I knew should be there. Later, I heard from multiple sources, as if it were common knowledge, that Outlook stores get corrupted once they hit 1.5GB or so in size. How does a company like Microsoft allow this kind of fundamental flaw remain in one of its core products? On top of that, Outlook was an order of magnitude slower than OE at accessing e-mails in large folders. Yes, the UI for creating filtering rules was really nice, but who needs that kind of poor and buggy performance. It wasn't long afterwards that I switched to Thunderbird and never looked back. To this day at work, Outlook frequently fails to remind me of events in my calendar and occasionally r
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I wish I could take credit for that, but there's simply nothing about Microsoft search that makes me remember it exists. Google is not the be-all end-all of everything but Microsoft is always years behind them.
I would bet you lunch it's because 99% of those old XP machines have been replaced, not upgraded.
Of course XP is dying very fast. You haven't been able to buy a new XP machine in about 4 years, except for netbooks, and that's been over 2 years. XP is only disappearing because you can't get it any more. I would bet very few machines have been upgraded from XP.
I would also bet that 95% of users would still be perfectly served by XP. I think Windows 7 is fine, but there's definitely nothing significant about it I prefer to XP.
If you don't use IE, like any sane person, and you don't care about DirectX 11, which counts everyone who doesn't play leading-edge games, the only advantages of Windows 7, for home users at least, are the latest security fixes and support for newer hardware. Microsoft's biggest problem was that XP was really quite good, and they've simply got nothing else to offer. The best we can ever hope for is incremental improvements, mostly driven by advances in the hardware technology.
Windows support is only ever free if your time has no value.
And assuming there's an actual answer to your question. I would imagine the only support issues MS can actually solve are those that can be easily answered with a Google search or two... at least based on my experience.
...and yet it's still perfectly fine for 95% of users.
Well, that was one thing MS got right... about 10 years too late... but right nonetheless.
Of course, Vista shipped with such moronic security features such having to ask permission multiple times to rename an icon on the desktop, but they managed to get it right with Windows 7.
I'm sure there are a lot of Fortune 500 companies still running XP. The biggest reason to upgrade by far, as has always been true for Windows, is for newer hardware support, or when security patches stop. Actually, I'm sure almost no one actually upgraded even to Windows 7, they just bought a new computer with it.
Ditto wonkey_monkey's comment. Maybe Google realizes the same people who would buy into astrology would buy into psychic stuff and would also not discriminate either from astronomy. It's pretty cynical, but there's probably something to it.
There is a huge difference between being open-minded and being completely uncritical. People used to understand that.
Your argument should be entirely semantic. It really has nothing to do with the nature of math itself. I think your comparison to biology is much more apt than the problematic assertion that "There is only one math."
The parent is right for the wrong reason. "Mathematics" is a singular word when it refers to a singular subject, the subject of mathematics, e.g., "Mathematics is a hard subject". It has nothing to do with what math itself is.
Regarding your response to me: If linguistic meaning is based on what we put into it then words can have no objective meaning and no one can communicate. The whole point of language is that we have to have a common, agreed upon rules for how it should be used and what words mean. In the context of grammar "should of" simply makes no logical sense. "Of" is being used as a verb. Yes, I understand how idioms develop, but there's no point in trying to justify people misusing the language through ignorance, and the informality of the discussion does not make the misuse of language any less the culpability of ignorance. If there is any merit to this usage, then let's show it to a bunch of people who are learning English and see what they think of it.
If your use of language is so imprecise that we have to assume your meaning based on context, then you will never be capable of communicating anything with any accuracy or precision. This might be fine for a /. discussion, but when you start writing a newspaper article, a history book, a science paper or a law with this kind of lazy attitude towards language you're asking for trouble, and we see all the time how much trouble it causes. Rigorous language use is integral to very foundations of civilization, and it is no coincidence that one of the most powerful tools of Orwell's totalitarian state in "1984" was its deliberate devolution of language.
Am I jerk for complaining that someone who says "should of" is ignorant? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean I wrong.
So let's just let the language devolve into incoherent grunting and be done with it.
Accepting illogical misspelling as somehow being "right" because everyone makes a mistake will just lead to no one being able to understand anyone.... which is kind of where /. is heading anyway.
This is nonsense. People contract "should have" to "should've" and ignorant people spell it "should of" instead of "should have".
It's simply wrong.
"Perth"?! I must have had Australia on my mind. Yeah, that's what I was talking about.
They're just jealous of my IQ.
If Linux kernel followed the same release mentality of Mozilla, we'd have Linux 10.3 already.
So? Is that any less arbitrary than when they decided to bump the version to 3.0?
The version number is nothing but a name. Numbers make it easier to know in what order the releases came out. Using the numbers to denote Major/Minor/Revision provides more information, but again, it's all relative. Major is bigger than minor, but how much? It's fine if you decide that the major number will be bumped only if the ABI changes or something like that, but that doesn't always apply to an end-user app. Does it really change anything Firefox is up to version 11, vs. version 4.6? In either case, the important piece of information is whether you're running the latest version.
less is up to version 436!
I use a highlighter. Amazon can't track that, but I go through Kindles like socks.
I find http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/">this to be a pretty good analysis of just how bad the writing is. My wife is a librarian at a middle school here in Virginia, and she makes a point to keep up with popular fiction for middle-schoolers. She said that while the writing is awful, some of it was actually really good, but most of it was just padding.
We watched the first 3 movies together... well, at least sat in front of them while surfing on our laptops. I couldn't even get through the first one _with_ Rifftrax. The second and third were a little better; there was at least some decent action to break it up. But I just cannot understand being excited about a story where the main character's motivations are so illogical the only reasonable conclusion is that she's mentally ill... but the way it's portrayed I don't even think the author sees it that way. Plus Kristin Stewart is pretty, but she always looks like she's strong out on Quaaludes or something. She seems to only have two emotions: dull petulance and vacant infatuation. Sparkly boy is just pasty and creepy. At least Jacob had some redeeming qualities and doesn't look like someone who would sit around drinking absinthe and quoting Shelly purely for effect.
Meh. If I'm going to watch girl stuff, I'll stick with Jane Austen adaptations. The "Pride and Prejudice" with Colin Perth is really good. Superb production, acting, and music. My wife watches it about once every couple months or so. I mean, yeah, I'd rather be watching something like "Burn Notice", but I can appreciate stuff based on "real" literature. "Twilight" will be nothing but a historical footnote in a few decades while people will still be making new adaptations of Austen.
I remember. The problem was that Microsoft did their victory lap and didn't do anything new with IE for 10 years. IE4 was the best at the time, but by version 6 it was just extremely buggy and incompatible and generally horrible, and stayed that way for a long time. Their monopoly really had nothing to do with it.
The real truth is that Microsoft's monopoly advantage was well-established and well-abused long before IE existed.
That logic is ludicrous. Urban myths happen all the time and can easily reach a critical mass where they take on their lives despite being completely false. I wouldn't rule out Gates having said because he's said a lot of really stupid things over the years, but it's certainly not "just as likely".
Yeah, but he also more or less expressed that the web itself was a passing fad too. He had to update "The Road Ahead" to correct for that when it became apparent how wrong he was. Microsoft also got a late start on the web because of it as well.
Of course, Gates wasn't the only one saying that. It was still a not uncommon view until about 1996 or so, even though I can't imagine why anyone would have believed it.
I'm sure they are still coasting along on the residuals from "Let's Pretend: The Magic Sneakers" and the other pharmacology-fueled shorts they were producing in the late 60s and early 70s.
At least he or she didn't call the President "Shrub". That was the go-to word for people with room-temperature IQs who thought it made them sound clever.
And "LordLimecat" is an awesome handle. I assume you are rarely amused.
No, it's an appeal for the "do one thing but do it well" principle that is the exact opposite of everything Microsoft does.
The most important criticisms of Exchange have nothing to do with what services it does or does not provide, but whether or not it provides them well.
Well, I didn't say I "cling" to XP over 7, but neither do I find 7 a compelling reason to upgrade. I wouldn't upgrade my netbook to Windows 7 if it were free, but I have no problems using new hardware that comes with it. I recently bought a quad-core laptop that came with Windows 7 and I have no intentions of going back to XP with it because overall it works fine. Actually, if it weren't that I share this laptop with my kids and that I also use it for games, I would put Linux on it. I'm in the process of getting ready to change my netbook to Linux and I use Linux on my desktop. But Windows 7 is decent, and I don't resent having to use it at home or at work.
My experience with using Explorer on network shares, wireless networking simply not working until a reboot and other features make me frustrated with it. In the grand scheme of things these are pretty small bugs, but I expect better from the most powerful and richest software company in the world. I mean if you use Explorer, you need to expect bad results. It's consistently been the buggiest piece of mainstream software since it was introduced almost 20 years ago and has barely improved in functionality since then. Linux has had file managers that were more advanced and worked better than today's Explorer many years ago. Now it has several.
But regardless of how stable Windows has been in the past decade or so, and the NT branch of Windows was always a very stable OS going back to 3.51, nothing excuses the ripe slice of pure FAIL that is Office. I have not seen a wider variety of bugs, instability and general bizarreness in any piece of commercial application software than the applications in Microsoft Office. I have never seen applications that are so aggressive (by necessity) against their own bugs than Office. I'm periodically being asked to restore documents that haven't existed on the computer in 6 months or more, with apparently no way to make it stop asking. I will frequently e-mail an Excel spreadsheet to a co-worker, only to have that co-worker report she cannot open it because Excel is behaving strangely. Sometimes resending the same document fixes it. When that fails a reboot on her side usually fixes it. I have never saved a file in any other application and immediately reopened it only to have the application report that the file is corrupted and needs to be repaired. I stopped using Word except for viewing when in 2006 Word on the Mac crashed, losing my unsaved work, which is pretty poor for a modern app but isn't so bad, except that it also corrupted the saved document as well, requiring me to start over from scratch. I can't remember anything like that happening since the days of DOS. Oh, after the fact, a coworker suggested using OpenOffice to open the document, since it could often open documents the Microsoft apps could not. When I have to write something from scratch, I use reStructured Text.
Then there was the time in 2003 where I decided to upgrade to Outlook after having used Outlook Express for many years. I figured if OE was good, and it was, how much better would Outlook be? My wife had bought the student edition of Office XP, which comes with licenses for 3 computers. I happily installed Outlook and started importing all my e-mail archives, only to find when I was finished that the resulting e-mail store was corrupted and missing stuff I knew should be there. Later, I heard from multiple sources, as if it were common knowledge, that Outlook stores get corrupted once they hit 1.5GB or so in size. How does a company like Microsoft allow this kind of fundamental flaw remain in one of its core products? On top of that, Outlook was an order of magnitude slower than OE at accessing e-mails in large folders. Yes, the UI for creating filtering rules was really nice, but who needs that kind of poor and buggy performance. It wasn't long afterwards that I switched to Thunderbird and never looked back. To this day at work, Outlook frequently fails to remind me of events in my calendar and occasionally r