My Senators are the Honorable Mr. Elizabeth Taylor Warner, who involved with committees relating to defense, but is otherwise a RINO, and the Honorable Jim Webb, who started off his tenure showing a complete lack of professionalism by utterly dissing the President. My Representative is Frank Wolf, who actually seems to be not too bad, but he's in the House, which unlike the Senate isn't 100% corrupt... yet.
The irony is that in all these years, I don't think I've ever seen WMP successfully find and install a codec it was missing. I just end up with a message saying it couldn't find the codec that doesn't even tell me which codec it was looking for. Then it turns out this all just another malware attack vector.
In 2000, this problem would have "more of the same" but the fact that this still exists in 2008 is insane. I mean Microsoft publicly admitted their security is awful in 2000, took four years to make a decent attempt to correct things, and yet here we are four years after that...
Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks a lot. You give new meaning to word FAIL on a daily basis.
The Vista reaction has been much worse than XP, and hasn't diminished the way it did with XP. I only got XP when I bought a new computer with it, and very shortly I was able to set up an environment that I was comfortable with, looked good (e.g., I immediately turned off that ass-ugly default theme) and allowed me to work the way I wanted to. I tried with Vista and finally just gave up. It was way too much work to try to use it the way I wanted to and the performance hits and other nonsense weren't a reasonable trade-off for... nothing.
You know, I don't know what's worse, the fact that Congress has single-digit approval ratings, or that they obviously don't care because they are wasting their time and our money on this twaddle. You know, everyone is down on President Bush, but it's these idiots, sellouts and whores who have allowed him to do all the things he's done, and have promised to fix the problems and only made them worse.
These days, the best you can literally hope for is when they get involved they don't make things worse... and that almost never happens.
If it weren't for unintended consequences, Congress would be of no consequence at all.
And once they perfect this "safe mode for games" throw out everything that's turned off and release it as "Windows 7". I guarantee it will be the best selling OS in history.
The idea that you need a mode in Windows where it relinquishes enough resources to allow you to do what you want is completely insane. Windows is a means, not an end, and it needs to stop acting like it is the sole reason you have and use the computer. Microsoft needs to stop believing they own your computer, and that they can and should micromanage your use of that, but that will never happen. Unless they radically change their entire code base, their endevelopment process, their flagrantly deceptive marketing and arrogant and intolerant style of management, plus their all-consuming contempt for customers, Windows 7 or any other product Microsoft dares to foist upon an unwelcoming world is doomed to fail.
Google "robocopy". It's been around forever and is possibly the best piece of software Microsoft has ever written. I have no idea why it's so obscure and hard to find.
I've read some of Rudy Rucker's stuff, but don't recall if I've read that one. I'll have to look it up. I just discovered "Dimensions", the movie made by some French mathematicians with POV-Ray, which I've used since the early 90's. The movie is really cool and talks about geometry, particularly in regards to 4-space, and of course is very visual (we're talking eye candy). The coolest part was that my kids loved it. They sat with rapt attention while this movie is demonstrating geometry proofs and showing 3-D projections of rotating hypercubes and stuff.
I'm sorry, I misread the comment. I thought it was referring to Microsoft... not the customers.
In other words, I thought it said if security mattered Microsoft would have moved away (i.e., fixed or replaced) XP. Silly me.
Of course people are staying with XP. It does what they want, more or less. More importantly, Vista has no compelling reason to upgrade and tons and tons of reasons not to.
While Vista might be somewhat advantageous to a naive user who is likely to open every e-mail attachment or download those "free" screensavers... and of course has more hardware than he knows what to do with because Vista requires what would have been a supercomputer just a few years ago... then I suppose it could be good.
However, the last time I got hit by a virus or other malware was 1989. Security isn't an issue for me because I know what I need to do to remain secure. There is nothing Vista offers that I want or need. In fact, I ditched XP and went to Ubuntu, which I prefer.
What could Ballmer do? Office essentially had everything anyone could want 10 years ago, and when Windows 2000 came out, Microsoft Got It Right. Their biggest competition for many years has always been... and probably always will be... their older products.
The only way to keep XP from eating Vista's lunch was to kill it. If you ask me, WordPad has 80% of what 95% of people need in a word processor. The only thing they can do is invent reasons to force people into upgrading because what else could Word possibly do (if you don't assume it is the most horrible piece of software on the planet, which is what I think of it) that more than a fraction of a percentage of people would ever want or need?
What has Microsoft offered in the way of operating systems since Windows 2000 that didn't essentially amount to support for newer hardware or fixing problems? Eye candy? They can't even do that right because Linux had better eye candy years ago. And if certain hardware vendors didn't shut out open source driver developers, Linux would have a clear advantage in hardware support too. And fixes? Linux doesn't suffer from the huge architectural and legacy problems that Microsoft has had and always will have. People always talk about whether it's the "Year of Linux on the Desktop"... and maybe it isn't yet (it's been for me for a while), but there is no doubt that Linux is catching up. It's chasing a target that's barely moving, so it's inevitable. If Vista is the best Microsoft can do in 5 years or however long it took, then relying on their monopoly is all they have left... and it seems they think so too, because that's been their primary strategy for many years.
MS _has_ to branch into new areas... they've achieved Gates' dream of a computer on every desktop... and you can only force so many unneeded upgrades on people before they give up in frustration and wonder why they aren't getting anything of value for their money.
At this point, it might be better off for MS _and_ its customers if it moved to a subscription basis. That way they could focus on making what they have better instead coming up with increasingly arbitrary and capricious means to force you to buy more stuff.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that backwards compatibility is worth more to their customer base than out of the box security (or they would have moved away from (especially early) XP asap...).
This is Microsoft we're talking about. They _did_ move away from early XP ASAP.
Actually I'm really enjoying the new innovations that don't have to do with color. Every year at the fireworks display at Ida Lee Park in Leesburg, VA near where I live they usually show a new concept. One year was the rocket that bursts in a ring. Then they made a smiley face using two blue dots for eyes and several pink dots for a mouth inside the circle. Then they came up with a circle with a heart in it and last night they had rockets that burst in a star pattern. The star pattern wasn't as well-defined as the smiley and the heart, but it was still really cool.
My 12-year-old joked that soon we'd start hearing reports about how fireworks contribute to global warming. I'm all for environmental considerations, and the idea of eliminating heavy metals and perchlorates is really great, but I am so sick of the uninformed hysteria that usually accompanies the topic.
I think you have an important point. I support OSS and use it as much as possible (which is most of the time), and agree with the FSF says and stands for, and even agree with much of what Stallman says, and I find him incredibly off-putting. He does the wild-eyed zealot thing way too well and comes across as angry and bitter... and let's face it, when it comes to Microsoft a lot of us are angry or bitter based on how they've directly affected our lives, but if you're going to be the spokesperson for a movement that needs to be taken seriously, you can't do the "raving loony" thing.
Maybe you could, but it's never happened to me... even before NoScript came along.
That's the irony about the Web. It started out as a document display technology and eventually morphed into an application platform, taking about 15 years too long and going down too many dead ends on the way. I read somewhere that someone suggested the Web should have simply been X from the start. It surely would have saved them reinventing the wheel a dozen times in the last 20 years, that's for sure.
We've almost come full circle. The browser is _almost_ the OS which runs your applications. In fact, Microsoft's biggest problem was that they hooked the browser directly into the OS (in fact, their problem has always been that they hook everything directly into the OS). ActiveX was just a shortcut to run native code via the Web, and it suffered all the obvious problems from being so. "Hello, world,, run anything you want on my computer. I trust you." Java was better, but it's just too darn bureaucratic. I can't imagine having to actually develop in Java... from everything I've seen it's worse than dealing with the government and insurance companies combined.
So where will it all end up? Starting around 1991, we reverted back some 15 years in UI development and had to go through the 80's again, but in browsers. I figure in another couple years Web apps and native apps will essentially be indistinguishable, especially from the non-techie's point of view. That's not bad except all the good UI standards and conventions developed by Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Apple backed with decades of research have been almost completely abandoned. I can't even imagine what the average computer experience will be like in 10 years, but if the past 20 is an example, some things will advance more than I could have ever guessed and others will barely change, and it will still take an expert to solve all but the most basic problems.
The term "bleeding edge" was a play on the term "leading edge" but at the rate things change, there is no more "leading edge" any more. With Vista and recent releases of OSX, the "bleeding edge" is the mainstream, and we've come to not only not be surprised that systems aren't even remotely complete when shipped, in fact, we expect a "dot oh" product to be essentially a late alpha. I don't recall what product it was, but it was a "release candidate" and at the same time the release notes said in effect, "but we haven't documented all the features yet because we don't have a firm list of what will be included". That's not a "release candidate" by any definition... not even Microsoft's. That's an alpha release, by the original definitions. But these days (and Google is a perfect example, even though many of their products are very good), most software never really gets out of "beta" any more. There are Google products that were literally labelled "beta" for years. It's always possible there was some legal reason for this, but the idea of a "test version" vs. a "release version" barely exists any more. Often the only distinction is the size of the group of users who have access to it. Microsoft does this, even though they still pretend to adhere to the gigantic monolithic release after years of development apparently because that's the only way they can justify charging people for the same old crap, but shinier and slower. I think the Ubuntu concept works well. They seem to have an attitude of "We'll take what we've got and make sure it installs and works together" every six months. Each release isn't always a huge change, that depends on the state of things like Gnome, KDE or the Linux kernel or who knows what, but this "evolutionary release cycle", where each subsequent upgrade is relatively small, seems to work a whole lot better than Microsoft's "revolutionary release cycle" where it's a major IT undertaking that is so massive most companies these days would rather not bother.
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My Senators are the Honorable Mr. Elizabeth Taylor Warner, who involved with committees relating to defense, but is otherwise a RINO, and the Honorable Jim Webb, who started off his tenure showing a complete lack of professionalism by utterly dissing the President. My Representative is Frank Wolf, who actually seems to be not too bad, but he's in the House, which unlike the Senate isn't 100% corrupt... yet.
I didn't have to look them up either.
The irony is that in all these years, I don't think I've ever seen WMP successfully find and install a codec it was missing. I just end up with a message saying it couldn't find the codec that doesn't even tell me which codec it was looking for. Then it turns out this all just another malware attack vector.
In 2000, this problem would have "more of the same" but the fact that this still exists in 2008 is insane. I mean Microsoft publicly admitted their security is awful in 2000, took four years to make a decent attempt to correct things, and yet here we are four years after that...
Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks a lot. You give new meaning to word FAIL on a daily basis.
The Vista reaction has been much worse than XP, and hasn't diminished the way it did with XP. I only got XP when I bought a new computer with it, and very shortly I was able to set up an environment that I was comfortable with, looked good (e.g., I immediately turned off that ass-ugly default theme) and allowed me to work the way I wanted to. I tried with Vista and finally just gave up. It was way too much work to try to use it the way I wanted to and the performance hits and other nonsense weren't a reasonable trade-off for... nothing.
I finally just switched to Ubuntu.
Wait, there are Senators people don't hate?
I hear they've made offers to acquire Borland and Ashton-Tate.
You know, I don't know what's worse, the fact that Congress has single-digit approval ratings, or that they obviously don't care because they are wasting their time and our money on this twaddle. You know, everyone is down on President Bush, but it's these idiots, sellouts and whores who have allowed him to do all the things he's done, and have promised to fix the problems and only made them worse.
These days, the best you can literally hope for is when they get involved they don't make things worse... and that almost never happens.
If it weren't for unintended consequences, Congress would be of no consequence at all.
And once they perfect this "safe mode for games" throw out everything that's turned off and release it as "Windows 7". I guarantee it will be the best selling OS in history.
The idea that you need a mode in Windows where it relinquishes enough resources to allow you to do what you want is completely insane. Windows is a means, not an end, and it needs to stop acting like it is the sole reason you have and use the computer. Microsoft needs to stop believing they own your computer, and that they can and should micromanage your use of that, but that will never happen. Unless they radically change their entire code base, their endevelopment process, their flagrantly deceptive marketing and arrogant and intolerant style of management, plus their all-consuming contempt for customers, Windows 7 or any other product Microsoft dares to foist upon an unwelcoming world is doomed to fail.
Google "robocopy". It's been around forever and is possibly the best piece of software Microsoft has ever written. I have no idea why it's so obscure and hard to find.
I'm sorry, if I were your boss I wouldn't expense a ticket for a movie when you can't even get the spelling of the main actor and star's name correct.
But that's just me.
I was about to say that CDs don't fragment, but then I remembered you can't run Windows off of a CD.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and hazard to guess that changing a file system in a desktop OS ain't that easy.
Only if you never learned how to write modular software. After 30 years, I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly discover that either.
Yes, and when that happens backwards compatibility won't be an issue any more either. Maybe that will happen in time for time_t to roll over.
Hey, I've still got a monochrome card somewhere... it'd be nice to use it again.
TANJ! There Ain't No Justice
The open-source justice mob couldn't talk to each other to coordinate a meeting because they didn't have the necessary Broadcom wireless drivers.
Meanwhile, every time someone pluralizes with an apostrophe, a small part of all us dies inside.
It will never happen because a bunch of rich companies paid off those whores in Congress to buy an effectively perpetual copyright.
Thanks for the correction. I should have remembered that.
I've read some of Rudy Rucker's stuff, but don't recall if I've read that one. I'll have to look it up. I just discovered "Dimensions", the movie made by some French mathematicians with POV-Ray, which I've used since the early 90's. The movie is really cool and talks about geometry, particularly in regards to 4-space, and of course is very visual (we're talking eye candy). The coolest part was that my kids loved it. They sat with rapt attention while this movie is demonstrating geometry proofs and showing 3-D projections of rotating hypercubes and stuff.
http://www.dimensions-math.org/
I've read a fair bit on the topic, but frankly, the visualization part eludes me still. ;-)
I'm sorry, I misread the comment. I thought it was referring to Microsoft... not the customers.
In other words, I thought it said if security mattered Microsoft would have moved away (i.e., fixed or replaced) XP. Silly me.
Of course people are staying with XP. It does what they want, more or less. More importantly, Vista has no compelling reason to upgrade and tons and tons of reasons not to.
While Vista might be somewhat advantageous to a naive user who is likely to open every e-mail attachment or download those "free" screensavers... and of course has more hardware than he knows what to do with because Vista requires what would have been a supercomputer just a few years ago... then I suppose it could be good.
However, the last time I got hit by a virus or other malware was 1989. Security isn't an issue for me because I know what I need to do to remain secure. There is nothing Vista offers that I want or need. In fact, I ditched XP and went to Ubuntu, which I prefer.
What could Ballmer do? Office essentially had everything anyone could want 10 years ago, and when Windows 2000 came out, Microsoft Got It Right. Their biggest competition for many years has always been... and probably always will be... their older products.
The only way to keep XP from eating Vista's lunch was to kill it. If you ask me, WordPad has 80% of what 95% of people need in a word processor. The only thing they can do is invent reasons to force people into upgrading because what else could Word possibly do (if you don't assume it is the most horrible piece of software on the planet, which is what I think of it) that more than a fraction of a percentage of people would ever want or need?
What has Microsoft offered in the way of operating systems since Windows 2000 that didn't essentially amount to support for newer hardware or fixing problems? Eye candy? They can't even do that right because Linux had better eye candy years ago. And if certain hardware vendors didn't shut out open source driver developers, Linux would have a clear advantage in hardware support too. And fixes? Linux doesn't suffer from the huge architectural and legacy problems that Microsoft has had and always will have. People always talk about whether it's the "Year of Linux on the Desktop"... and maybe it isn't yet (it's been for me for a while), but there is no doubt that Linux is catching up. It's chasing a target that's barely moving, so it's inevitable. If Vista is the best Microsoft can do in 5 years or however long it took, then relying on their monopoly is all they have left... and it seems they think so too, because that's been their primary strategy for many years.
MS _has_ to branch into new areas... they've achieved Gates' dream of a computer on every desktop... and you can only force so many unneeded upgrades on people before they give up in frustration and wonder why they aren't getting anything of value for their money.
At this point, it might be better off for MS _and_ its customers if it moved to a subscription basis. That way they could focus on making what they have better instead coming up with increasingly arbitrary and capricious means to force you to buy more stuff.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that backwards compatibility is worth more to their customer base than out of the box security (or they would have moved away from (especially early) XP asap...).
This is Microsoft we're talking about. They _did_ move away from early XP ASAP.
Exactly. That's what I would have written, although it's much more effective if you write "HAW HAW!"
But green's my favorite color!
Actually I'm really enjoying the new innovations that don't have to do with color. Every year at the fireworks display at Ida Lee Park in Leesburg, VA near where I live they usually show a new concept. One year was the rocket that bursts in a ring. Then they made a smiley face using two blue dots for eyes and several pink dots for a mouth inside the circle. Then they came up with a circle with a heart in it and last night they had rockets that burst in a star pattern. The star pattern wasn't as well-defined as the smiley and the heart, but it was still really cool.
My 12-year-old joked that soon we'd start hearing reports about how fireworks contribute to global warming. I'm all for environmental considerations, and the idea of eliminating heavy metals and perchlorates is really great, but I am so sick of the uninformed hysteria that usually accompanies the topic.
I think you have an important point. I support OSS and use it as much as possible (which is most of the time), and agree with the FSF says and stands for, and even agree with much of what Stallman says, and I find him incredibly off-putting. He does the wild-eyed zealot thing way too well and comes across as angry and bitter... and let's face it, when it comes to Microsoft a lot of us are angry or bitter based on how they've directly affected our lives, but if you're going to be the spokesperson for a movement that needs to be taken seriously, you can't do the "raving loony" thing.
IANAM, but I love to read about it. Maybe you can answer this for me, since you are a knot expert. ;-)
I've read that you can't have knots in 4-space, so how do 4-dimensional beings tie their shoes?
Maybe you could, but it's never happened to me... even before NoScript came along.
That's the irony about the Web. It started out as a document display technology and eventually morphed into an application platform, taking about 15 years too long and going down too many dead ends on the way. I read somewhere that someone suggested the Web should have simply been X from the start. It surely would have saved them reinventing the wheel a dozen times in the last 20 years, that's for sure.
We've almost come full circle. The browser is _almost_ the OS which runs your applications. In fact, Microsoft's biggest problem was that they hooked the browser directly into the OS (in fact, their problem has always been that they hook everything directly into the OS). ActiveX was just a shortcut to run native code via the Web, and it suffered all the obvious problems from being so. "Hello, world,, run anything you want on my computer. I trust you." Java was better, but it's just too darn bureaucratic. I can't imagine having to actually develop in Java... from everything I've seen it's worse than dealing with the government and insurance companies combined.
So where will it all end up? Starting around 1991, we reverted back some 15 years in UI development and had to go through the 80's again, but in browsers. I figure in another couple years Web apps and native apps will essentially be indistinguishable, especially from the non-techie's point of view. That's not bad except all the good UI standards and conventions developed by Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Apple backed with decades of research have been almost completely abandoned. I can't even imagine what the average computer experience will be like in 10 years, but if the past 20 is an example, some things will advance more than I could have ever guessed and others will barely change, and it will still take an expert to solve all but the most basic problems.
The term "bleeding edge" was a play on the term "leading edge" but at the rate things change, there is no more "leading edge" any more. With Vista and recent releases of OSX, the "bleeding edge" is the mainstream, and we've come to not only not be surprised that systems aren't even remotely complete when shipped, in fact, we expect a "dot oh" product to be essentially a late alpha. I don't recall what product it was, but it was a "release candidate" and at the same time the release notes said in effect, "but we haven't documented all the features yet because we don't have a firm list of what will be included". That's not a "release candidate" by any definition... not even Microsoft's. That's an alpha release, by the original definitions. But these days (and Google is a perfect example, even though many of their products are very good), most software never really gets out of "beta" any more. There are Google products that were literally labelled "beta" for years. It's always possible there was some legal reason for this, but the idea of a "test version" vs. a "release version" barely exists any more. Often the only distinction is the size of the group of users who have access to it. Microsoft does this, even though they still pretend to adhere to the gigantic monolithic release after years of development apparently because that's the only way they can justify charging people for the same old crap, but shinier and slower. I think the Ubuntu concept works well. They seem to have an attitude of "We'll take what we've got and make sure it installs and works together" every six months. Each release isn't always a huge change, that depends on the state of things like Gnome, KDE or the Linux kernel or who knows what, but this "evolutionary release cycle", where each subsequent upgrade is relatively small, seems to work a whole lot better than Microsoft's "revolutionary release cycle" where it's a major IT undertaking that is so massive most companies these days would rather not bother.
Hmmm... I seem that have digressed a bit.