To be honest, in a programming language discussion, bashing bash would be more appropriate. However, I will bash Java.
Bashing Bush off-topic is just an excuse for people who don't have anything to say, which includes most Bush-bashing as well. I'm no fan, but from what I've been people who go out of their way to bash Bush usually seem to be idiots. BDS is a nasty disease.
Karma's kind of a joke. I maxed out after a couple months... 8 years ago.
I've got a long way to go before my karma is "bad", but thanks for the support. I thought the moderation was unfair too. I mean, if I can't bash Microsoft (in the middle of several paragraphs of legitimate complaints) on/., where can I?
Oh, well, there's always my blog where I can go full-bore Grouchy Old Crank and no one can do anything about it!:-)
I never used VLC on Windows but it's my player of choice for Linux.
Good for them, recommending something that works. The players from the big boys are all horrible. They have no interest in supporting each other's formats, and none of them work very well and they all look horrible. It's gotten almost as bad as it was before ActiveMovie came along.
The people behind VLC and MPC understand people just want to watch the damn videos. They don't need some stupid "environment" forcing advertising or links to irrelevant and stupid content that you "might" be interested in. And most important (Yes, I'm talking to you Microsoft) they understand that the UI is there to allow you use the software and should be as full-featured and unobtrusive as possible. Throwing out decades of UI standards and behavior for reasons of style was stupid when it began in the late 90's and now it's just embarrassingly inexcusable. But once again, it's a matter of seeing the tools you provide as tools to do things (in this case watch movies) or as a means to force your audience into certain kinds of behavior and somehow "entertain" them in and of themselves.
In so many ways, software is getting worse, not better.
So what's the excuse for selling a product that is unusable as packaged? Especially when the machines in question run perfectly fine with Ubuntu or XP. I know, I bought one. It was literally the slowest computer I ever used in over 20 years... and I never even booted with a half gig of RAM, I put in an extra gig of RAM before I even started it the first time.
The machine (a low-end Gateway) took minutes and minutes to boot. You would double-click to launch Firefox and it would take 30 seconds before you even saw an hourglass... and another 30 seconds before the app would come up. The machine would frequently freeze for several seconds at a time and appear totally locked up. It was unusable by any standard. Given the fact that I told my wife the cheapest machine I could buy would blow her old laptop, which had finally died of old age after some 6 years, out of the water, this was particularly ironic. Of course, the machine runs perfectly fine with Ubuntu, but she eventually asked for XP because of stupid Microsoft requirements for school work, however XP runs perfectly fine too.
Gateway is either insanely stupid or has been cowed by Microsoft to the point where they don't even care about their customers. In any event, the machine is quite nice without that boat-anchor turd of an operating system rendering it completely useless.
Fortunately I had an extra XP license for her, so it wouldn't cost 25% of the machine just to put something on it that actually worked. Microsoft literally has nothing useful to offer. Steve Ballmer could compete better in a Mr. Universe contest or a Shakespearean Acting contest better than Microsoft can compete in the software business. (Of course, in MS fashion, Mr. Ballmer would simply have his competitors arms and legs broken in the first case and faces shot full of novocaine for the second.)
I've seen lots of feedback good and bad, but the best thing I've heard is that it's more stable than XP. In other words, it works as well as the OS that's 7 years old was supposed to. Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for nothing.
the dummies around here tested it on crappy old hardware for 5 seconds when it works perfectly fine on modern hardware made in the last 2-3 years.
Would that be the dummies that sold me a brand new low-end Gateway in 2007 that, because it was saddled with Vista, was literally the slowest personal computer I've ever used and that counts my floppy-based Amiga 500? Ironically, when I bought the machine I bought an extra gig of RAM, so I never even tried it with the meager half gig of RAM it came with. If you are calling Gateway a dummy, then I would have to agree. It is absolutely insane that they would saddle a perfectly nice sub-$500 machine with a really bright display (but a somewhat cheap-feeling keyboard) with the Vista boat anchor. I pity the poor people who don't realize there's nothing wrong with the product, just the abominable choice of software. Gateway foolishly caved in to the Evil Empire and made, by any objective standards, an insanely stupid business decision. They are dummies indeed.
However, the real dummy here is Microsoft. The fact of the matter is that Vista offers absolutely nothing for the insane amount of resources it consumes. An OS is a means, not an end, and when I have to upgrade my hardware for a new OS that doesn't do anything fundamentally new, something is very, very wrong. By your standards, finding this situation ridiculous is the fault of the user? Vista, in demanding almost an order of magnitude more power than would adequately run XP offers what? Eye candy? Meh. It's not half as nice looking what Compiz was doing a couple years ago. More security? I got hit by a virus once... in 1989. No problems since then... and you still need anti-virus software and a hardware firewall for the best protection. A new snazzy filesystem? No wait, that got cut. Support for new peripherals and media hardware? OK, that's the only significant thing Vista has to offer (don't forget the DRM performance penalty!), but that's not applicable to people upgrading their hardware... and consider yourself lucky if drivers exist in Vista for what you already have. Oh, and be prepared to upgrade a lot of your applications because a lot of big name, mainstream Windows apps from before 2007 don't work in Vista.
By the way, that Gateway laptop, which my wife uses, is perfectly usable and snappy running either Ubuntu or XP, and with those OSes, it can do everything that it can do with Vista, more really because it was literally not usable with Vista. For instance, I could double-click to launch Firefox, and 30 seconds would pass, not before the app would launch, but before I would even see an hourglass. This was on "modern hardware" not from the last 2-3 years but less than a year old.
It's funny. I've been using Linux on and off for almost 10 years, and in the last couple years, more on than off, and in the past couple months, exclusively. There are hot 'n' fancy new Linux distros showing up almost weekly, and yet every one of them will run adequately on a machine that is not 2 or 3 years old but 8 or 10 years old. You see Linux is modular enough that you can turn off the parts you don't need or can't use. If you can't run KDE or Gnome then there are a dozen or more windows managers that will get the job done, even on a 486. In fact, Linux runs on practically anything that has a processor. Windows, in its latest incarnation, being the great big monolithic loaf that it is, needs what would have been a supercomputer only a few years ago just to boot up. For what? So you can browse the Web, read your e-mail and write a letter? That's what 95% of people use Windows for... something I did perfectly well on a 486 back in the early 90's, and you could still do (minus things like Flash) today. XP was big and bloated compared to Windows 2000, and there was a performance hit, but it was nowhere near the quantum leap between XP and Vista.
I started using computers with Microsoft operating systems with DOS 1.1 out and I've used every non-server version
I thought MS was determined to kill XP, so what point are they trying to make showing how well it can run on the XO?
They were. Then they realized that Linux would eat their lunch on the OLPC and they knew that Vista boot times on an OLPC would be geologic... if it could run on the machine at all.
Basically, Microsoft got caught with their crappy product being wholly incapable of supporting a new market that was emerging. XP would get a reprieve from this death sentence only to prevent Microsoft from (rightly) looking incapable of supporting low-end hardware. Basically, the cold hard reality of Vista's bloat is too big for even Microsoft to ignore.
Hopefully more and more people will realize that Microsoft hasn't done anything useful since XP was released, except for fixes to XP.
If you, like me, use Windows, go here to get Quicktime.
Quicktime is horrible. I recommend QuickTime Alternative using the superb Media Player Classic. Just goes to show that Microsoft and Apple haven't done one good thing to media player UI in the last 10 years.
BTW, I resent image retouching being referred to as "photoshopping". I've done some really cool retouching with Paint Shop Pro (version 9 before Corel acquired it and totally ruined it).
Of course, it could be worse... it could be called "Gimping"...
Boy do I feel old, having actually used DOS 1. I still have a couple single-density flippies somewhere... hey, that's an extra 180k... nothing to sneeze at!
My music stores may go offline. It'd be a shame, but it's no hair off of my teeth as far as the music I already have. eMusic.com and Mindawn.com. They believe in providing value and not screwing customers for stupid business reasons... which is itself a _good_ business decision. The labels that provide material for these companies get it, and I like patronizing them. I've bought tons of stuff from both stores (some 300 albums from eMusic and about 20 from Mindawn) and am a very satisfied customer, and I pay less. Oh, and Mindawn provides FLAC, and I _still_ pay less.
I have bought a few odd tracks from Napster after determining I could remove the DRM with reasonable convenience, but with the stores I use, all I have to worry about is backing up my stuff.
Oh, and CDs, I still buy plenty CDs because it's often the only way to get a lot of what I want, and I still pick up new releases from my favorite groups on CD, both to support them (at least in theory), and because I want the best quality I can get my hands on.
iTunes? Pffft. Their selection is still pathetic, IMO. If I'm going to go the route of a company that carries the big labels, I expect to find _anything_ I am interested in, or at least something. They are hardly better than Best Buy for selection and their software is lame.
The VAT is what 15-20% or something? I've never seen sales tax over 8%. You pay, multiple times, one way or another. The government taxes your money multiple times and does everything it can to hide the enormous cut it's taking, whether you're in Europe or the slightly less punative U.S.
AdBlock Plus, NoScript and FlashBlock. Don't leave your homepage without them. Well, that and the fact that IE7 is horrible compared to Firefox even if it's better than IE6.
Indeed. There are Lego bricks in my kids' collection that are 40 years old from when I was but a tyke. The bricks that old seem to be a little more brittle than they are now, but otherwise are perfectly durable and compatible with the current Lego. It's cool to occasionally see the old logo on the studs.
Lego is very expensive, but it's worth it. They've been through many changes, including some that I thought moved away from the core of what Lego is all about, but they still make a great product, and I still buy plenty for my kids.
Face it, JCR, you're arguing with dogma. That reaction's the best you can hope for, at least the person isn't foaming at the mouth which is the usual reaction to skepticism. Pot? Meet kettle.
Then why aren't we building nukes?! Well, I know that there's been approval in Virginia for another plant or two in the next few years, but yet another nail in the coffin of that shyster Al Gore is that he doesn't promote the obvious non-carbon-polluting energy source we already have which is nuclear power. If his Chicken Little attitude were sincere then he would be more than willing to make the compromise, even in his fundamentalist, flat-Earth, enviro-extremist world, of trading the serious problems of nuclear power for the allegedly world-threatening problems of global warming.
But no, we need put all our eggs in the basket of unfinished, unproven technologies. FAIL, thy name is Al Gore.
I had the same thought about solar power. I hope you were joking just a little bit about finding a place to build: it takes 12 hours to drive across Texas, 98% of the state is the "middle of nowhere". It's hard to get an appreciation of just how big that place is even when driving across it, and I have driven across it.
I personally believe that nanotechnological manufacturing processes with create a breakthrough in solar panels in the next decade or two, and then we'll see some real progress. But until all these "alternate" energy sources reach feasibility, scalability and capacity, as well as the new infrastructure and manufacturing capacities that many of them will require, we are suicidally stupid not to be pursuing fossil fuels with all vigor.
I refuse to accept any U.S. energy plan as even remotely sound that does not plan on doing everything possible to guarantee fossil fuel access at roughly the current levels until 2050. Otherwise we will endanger our economy, and possibly the world economy, and the fallout of that could be very severe.
Here's the one thing I'm sick of hearing: How much gas and oil we use as an indictment in and of itself. I'm not saying you are doing this, but no one ever wants to mention that the U.S. is also the most productive nation in the world, by far. California, IIRC, is something like the 8th largest economy in the world, and it's less than 10% of U.S. by population.
Sure, we need to conserve, and we need to seek alternative energy, and all that, but so many people want to make the U.S. out to be nothing but greedy wastrels, which is not true. Sure, we can be greedy, and we can be wasteful, but we also have a lot to show for what we use.
Who is more wasteful of resources: the person who uses 1 unit of fuel and creates 1 unit of product, or the person who uses 10 units of fuel but creates 20 units of product?
Upon further reflection, I have to you props for trying to set the record straight in such a hostile environment. I would never work for Microsoft, but since you do I have to give you credit for braving the lion den.
My experience with Microsoft engineers I've met is that they truly are sharp people who want to do, and can do, good stuff... it's your management which is incompetent and evil.
Fair enough, but I find it hard to argue this cannot be attributed to happening "via WMP". Nevertheless, it is a perversely impressive execution. I pity non-expert Windows users.
I hope Microsoft continues to get a clue on security because that will prevent much pain, misery and expense, but it's too late for me. I've finally switched my last machine to Ubuntu, although my kids still run Windows because of all their games. My wife liked Ubuntu fine on her laptop (which came with Vista which made it literally the slowest computer I've ever used, and I've been around a while) for several months, but since her classes stupidly required so much MS-specific stuff (Office, etc), she asked to go back to Windows. Fortunately I had an XP license she could use.
Speaking of Silverlight, I was curious to try it, and I thought it supported Firefox, but all I could ever get it to was ask to be installed, even after it was installed. Perhaps I was wrong.
So WMP 10 didn't ignore the script commands by default? Sounds like a bad decision, but at least it's been corrected.
It's sad that Microsoft's policy of making every document a vector for code execution, which may have seemed to be a good idea in the early 90's, hasn't been thoroughly and consistently demolished. There are so many better ways to make these things happen (and the codec update service, which you pointed out that I mistakenly conflated with this problem, assuming it ever worked, is a better idea).
I know there will always be security issues with any software, but how long will we have to wait before Microsoft stops doing _obviously stupid_ things?
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, in a programming language discussion, bashing bash would be more appropriate. However, I will bash Java.
Bashing Bush off-topic is just an excuse for people who don't have anything to say, which includes most Bush-bashing as well. I'm no fan, but from what I've been people who go out of their way to bash Bush usually seem to be idiots. BDS is a nasty disease.
And eventually this network will take on sentience and we will be subject to conquest by...
Talky Toaster!
"Hi! Would you like some toast?"
Frankly, Skynet would be a walk in the park in comparison.
Karma's kind of a joke. I maxed out after a couple months... 8 years ago.
I've got a long way to go before my karma is "bad", but thanks for the support. I thought the moderation was unfair too. I mean, if I can't bash Microsoft (in the middle of several paragraphs of legitimate complaints) on /., where can I?
Oh, well, there's always my blog where I can go full-bore Grouchy Old Crank and no one can do anything about it! :-)
I never used VLC on Windows but it's my player of choice for Linux.
Good for them, recommending something that works. The players from the big boys are all horrible. They have no interest in supporting each other's formats, and none of them work very well and they all look horrible. It's gotten almost as bad as it was before ActiveMovie came along.
The people behind VLC and MPC understand people just want to watch the damn videos. They don't need some stupid "environment" forcing advertising or links to irrelevant and stupid content that you "might" be interested in. And most important (Yes, I'm talking to you Microsoft) they understand that the UI is there to allow you use the software and should be as full-featured and unobtrusive as possible. Throwing out decades of UI standards and behavior for reasons of style was stupid when it began in the late 90's and now it's just embarrassingly inexcusable. But once again, it's a matter of seeing the tools you provide as tools to do things (in this case watch movies) or as a means to force your audience into certain kinds of behavior and somehow "entertain" them in and of themselves.
In so many ways, software is getting worse, not better.
So what's the excuse for selling a product that is unusable as packaged? Especially when the machines in question run perfectly fine with Ubuntu or XP. I know, I bought one. It was literally the slowest computer I ever used in over 20 years... and I never even booted with a half gig of RAM, I put in an extra gig of RAM before I even started it the first time.
The machine (a low-end Gateway) took minutes and minutes to boot. You would double-click to launch Firefox and it would take 30 seconds before you even saw an hourglass... and another 30 seconds before the app would come up. The machine would frequently freeze for several seconds at a time and appear totally locked up. It was unusable by any standard. Given the fact that I told my wife the cheapest machine I could buy would blow her old laptop, which had finally died of old age after some 6 years, out of the water, this was particularly ironic. Of course, the machine runs perfectly fine with Ubuntu, but she eventually asked for XP because of stupid Microsoft requirements for school work, however XP runs perfectly fine too.
Gateway is either insanely stupid or has been cowed by Microsoft to the point where they don't even care about their customers. In any event, the machine is quite nice without that boat-anchor turd of an operating system rendering it completely useless.
Fortunately I had an extra XP license for her, so it wouldn't cost 25% of the machine just to put something on it that actually worked. Microsoft literally has nothing useful to offer. Steve Ballmer could compete better in a Mr. Universe contest or a Shakespearean Acting contest better than Microsoft can compete in the software business. (Of course, in MS fashion, Mr. Ballmer would simply have his competitors arms and legs broken in the first case and faces shot full of novocaine for the second.)
I've seen lots of feedback good and bad, but the best thing I've heard is that it's more stable than XP. In other words, it works as well as the OS that's 7 years old was supposed to. Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for nothing.
the dummies around here tested it on crappy old hardware for 5 seconds when it works perfectly fine on modern hardware made in the last 2-3 years.
Would that be the dummies that sold me a brand new low-end Gateway in 2007 that, because it was saddled with Vista, was literally the slowest personal computer I've ever used and that counts my floppy-based Amiga 500? Ironically, when I bought the machine I bought an extra gig of RAM, so I never even tried it with the meager half gig of RAM it came with. If you are calling Gateway a dummy, then I would have to agree. It is absolutely insane that they would saddle a perfectly nice sub-$500 machine with a really bright display (but a somewhat cheap-feeling keyboard) with the Vista boat anchor. I pity the poor people who don't realize there's nothing wrong with the product, just the abominable choice of software. Gateway foolishly caved in to the Evil Empire and made, by any objective standards, an insanely stupid business decision. They are dummies indeed.
However, the real dummy here is Microsoft. The fact of the matter is that Vista offers absolutely nothing for the insane amount of resources it consumes. An OS is a means, not an end, and when I have to upgrade my hardware for a new OS that doesn't do anything fundamentally new, something is very, very wrong. By your standards, finding this situation ridiculous is the fault of the user? Vista, in demanding almost an order of magnitude more power than would adequately run XP offers what? Eye candy? Meh. It's not half as nice looking what Compiz was doing a couple years ago. More security? I got hit by a virus once... in 1989. No problems since then... and you still need anti-virus software and a hardware firewall for the best protection. A new snazzy filesystem? No wait, that got cut. Support for new peripherals and media hardware? OK, that's the only significant thing Vista has to offer (don't forget the DRM performance penalty!), but that's not applicable to people upgrading their hardware... and consider yourself lucky if drivers exist in Vista for what you already have. Oh, and be prepared to upgrade a lot of your applications because a lot of big name, mainstream Windows apps from before 2007 don't work in Vista.
By the way, that Gateway laptop, which my wife uses, is perfectly usable and snappy running either Ubuntu or XP, and with those OSes, it can do everything that it can do with Vista, more really because it was literally not usable with Vista. For instance, I could double-click to launch Firefox, and 30 seconds would pass, not before the app would launch, but before I would even see an hourglass. This was on "modern hardware" not from the last 2-3 years but less than a year old.
It's funny. I've been using Linux on and off for almost 10 years, and in the last couple years, more on than off, and in the past couple months, exclusively. There are hot 'n' fancy new Linux distros showing up almost weekly, and yet every one of them will run adequately on a machine that is not 2 or 3 years old but 8 or 10 years old. You see Linux is modular enough that you can turn off the parts you don't need or can't use. If you can't run KDE or Gnome then there are a dozen or more windows managers that will get the job done, even on a 486. In fact, Linux runs on practically anything that has a processor. Windows, in its latest incarnation, being the great big monolithic loaf that it is, needs what would have been a supercomputer only a few years ago just to boot up. For what? So you can browse the Web, read your e-mail and write a letter? That's what 95% of people use Windows for... something I did perfectly well on a 486 back in the early 90's, and you could still do (minus things like Flash) today. XP was big and bloated compared to Windows 2000, and there was a performance hit, but it was nowhere near the quantum leap between XP and Vista.
I started using computers with Microsoft operating systems with DOS 1.1 out and I've used every non-server version
I thought MS was determined to kill XP, so what point are they trying to make showing how well it can run on the XO?
They were. Then they realized that Linux would eat their lunch on the OLPC and they knew that Vista boot times on an OLPC would be geologic... if it could run on the machine at all.
Basically, Microsoft got caught with their crappy product being wholly incapable of supporting a new market that was emerging. XP would get a reprieve from this death sentence only to prevent Microsoft from (rightly) looking incapable of supporting low-end hardware. Basically, the cold hard reality of Vista's bloat is too big for even Microsoft to ignore.
Hopefully more and more people will realize that Microsoft hasn't done anything useful since XP was released, except for fixes to XP.
If you, like me, use Windows, go here to get Quicktime.
Quicktime is horrible. I recommend QuickTime Alternative using the superb Media Player Classic. Just goes to show that Microsoft and Apple haven't done one good thing to media player UI in the last 10 years.
I bet you could tell by the pixels.
BTW, I resent image retouching being referred to as "photoshopping". I've done some really cool retouching with Paint Shop Pro (version 9 before Corel acquired it and totally ruined it).
Of course, it could be worse... it could be called "Gimping"...
Boy do I feel old, having actually used DOS 1. I still have a couple single-density flippies somewhere... hey, that's an extra 180k... nothing to sneeze at!
My music stores may go offline. It'd be a shame, but it's no hair off of my teeth as far as the music I already have. eMusic.com and Mindawn.com. They believe in providing value and not screwing customers for stupid business reasons... which is itself a _good_ business decision. The labels that provide material for these companies get it, and I like patronizing them. I've bought tons of stuff from both stores (some 300 albums from eMusic and about 20 from Mindawn) and am a very satisfied customer, and I pay less. Oh, and Mindawn provides FLAC, and I _still_ pay less.
I have bought a few odd tracks from Napster after determining I could remove the DRM with reasonable convenience, but with the stores I use, all I have to worry about is backing up my stuff.
Oh, and CDs, I still buy plenty CDs because it's often the only way to get a lot of what I want, and I still pick up new releases from my favorite groups on CD, both to support them (at least in theory), and because I want the best quality I can get my hands on.
iTunes? Pffft. Their selection is still pathetic, IMO. If I'm going to go the route of a company that carries the big labels, I expect to find _anything_ I am interested in, or at least something. They are hardly better than Best Buy for selection and their software is lame.
It's funny that you complained about all the "mistakes" in a post that was clearly a spoof and missed complaining about the spelling error.
No, wait, not funny: sad. It's sad.
The VAT is what 15-20% or something? I've never seen sales tax over 8%. You pay, multiple times, one way or another. The government taxes your money multiple times and does everything it can to hide the enormous cut it's taking, whether you're in Europe or the slightly less punative U.S.
If there were animated ads in a newspaper, yes I would.
AdBlock Plus, NoScript and FlashBlock. Don't leave your homepage without them. Well, that and the fact that IE7 is horrible compared to Firefox even if it's better than IE6.
Indeed. There are Lego bricks in my kids' collection that are 40 years old from when I was but a tyke. The bricks that old seem to be a little more brittle than they are now, but otherwise are perfectly durable and compatible with the current Lego. It's cool to occasionally see the old logo on the studs.
Lego is very expensive, but it's worth it. They've been through many changes, including some that I thought moved away from the core of what Lego is all about, but they still make a great product, and I still buy plenty for my kids.
Face it, JCR, you're arguing with dogma. That reaction's the best you can hope for, at least the person isn't foaming at the mouth which is the usual reaction to skepticism. Pot? Meet kettle.
Haven't you heard? The debate is over. They're setting up the stakes and gathering kindling as we speak.
Then why aren't we building nukes?! Well, I know that there's been approval in Virginia for another plant or two in the next few years, but yet another nail in the coffin of that shyster Al Gore is that he doesn't promote the obvious non-carbon-polluting energy source we already have which is nuclear power. If his Chicken Little attitude were sincere then he would be more than willing to make the compromise, even in his fundamentalist, flat-Earth, enviro-extremist world, of trading the serious problems of nuclear power for the allegedly world-threatening problems of global warming.
But no, we need put all our eggs in the basket of unfinished, unproven technologies. FAIL, thy name is Al Gore.
I had the same thought about solar power. I hope you were joking just a little bit about finding a place to build: it takes 12 hours to drive across Texas, 98% of the state is the "middle of nowhere". It's hard to get an appreciation of just how big that place is even when driving across it, and I have driven across it.
I personally believe that nanotechnological manufacturing processes with create a breakthrough in solar panels in the next decade or two, and then we'll see some real progress. But until all these "alternate" energy sources reach feasibility, scalability and capacity, as well as the new infrastructure and manufacturing capacities that many of them will require, we are suicidally stupid not to be pursuing fossil fuels with all vigor.
I refuse to accept any U.S. energy plan as even remotely sound that does not plan on doing everything possible to guarantee fossil fuel access at roughly the current levels until 2050. Otherwise we will endanger our economy, and possibly the world economy, and the fallout of that could be very severe.
Here's the one thing I'm sick of hearing: How much gas and oil we use as an indictment in and of itself. I'm not saying you are doing this, but no one ever wants to mention that the U.S. is also the most productive nation in the world, by far. California, IIRC, is something like the 8th largest economy in the world, and it's less than 10% of U.S. by population.
Sure, we need to conserve, and we need to seek alternative energy, and all that, but so many people want to make the U.S. out to be nothing but greedy wastrels, which is not true. Sure, we can be greedy, and we can be wasteful, but we also have a lot to show for what we use.
Who is more wasteful of resources: the person who uses 1 unit of fuel and creates 1 unit of product, or the person who uses 10 units of fuel but creates 20 units of product?
Maybe they meant "25,000 nearly experienced police officers"
It also didn't say what they could hire them for...
Upon further reflection, I have to you props for trying to set the record straight in such a hostile environment. I would never work for Microsoft, but since you do I have to give you credit for braving the lion den.
My experience with Microsoft engineers I've met is that they truly are sharp people who want to do, and can do, good stuff... it's your management which is incompetent and evil.
Fair enough, but I find it hard to argue this cannot be attributed to happening "via WMP". Nevertheless, it is a perversely impressive execution. I pity non-expert Windows users.
I hope Microsoft continues to get a clue on security because that will prevent much pain, misery and expense, but it's too late for me. I've finally switched my last machine to Ubuntu, although my kids still run Windows because of all their games. My wife liked Ubuntu fine on her laptop (which came with Vista which made it literally the slowest computer I've ever used, and I've been around a while) for several months, but since her classes stupidly required so much MS-specific stuff (Office, etc), she asked to go back to Windows. Fortunately I had an XP license she could use.
Speaking of Silverlight, I was curious to try it, and I thought it supported Firefox, but all I could ever get it to was ask to be installed, even after it was installed. Perhaps I was wrong.
So WMP 10 didn't ignore the script commands by default? Sounds like a bad decision, but at least it's been corrected.
It's sad that Microsoft's policy of making every document a vector for code execution, which may have seemed to be a good idea in the early 90's, hasn't been thoroughly and consistently demolished. There are so many better ways to make these things happen (and the codec update service, which you pointed out that I mistakenly conflated with this problem, assuming it ever worked, is a better idea).
I know there will always be security issues with any software, but how long will we have to wait before Microsoft stops doing _obviously stupid_ things?