Getting a bit off topic, but I don't see the conflict between Federal law and state law.
By not providing the codes (including decryption codes for encrypted onboard electronics) the auto manufactures would be violating state law. Instead of trying to crack the encryption, auto mechanics could sue them. No DMCA violation necessary there.
So, if something's illegal, and people are still widely disobeying the law 20+ years later, then it really shouldn't be illegal. In a properly functioning democracy, it wouldn't be, because eventually the people would elect new politicians who promise to overturn the unpopular law. The problem we have now is that our government isn't functioning properly at all, since it's a fascist government and doesn't represent the people at all.
In Europe, such a change is starting to happen with the rise of the Pirate Party. One of their agendas is legalizing file sharing. The resoning behind it is that prohibition does not work anyway and the side effects are a burden on society.
One major difference to the US is the election system: Many European countries have proportional representation, which allows even smaller parties to gain some seats in parliament. In the US system, the Pirate Party would still be far from gaining enough seats to be a measurable influence.
AMD provides specifications and a small developer team that actually works on open source drivers. Intel provides open source drivers.
NVIDIA makes good binary drivers, but those have problems when a new kernel version comes out with changed interfaces: Only NVIDIA can adapt them, and until they get around to it, NVIDIA may not work with the latest kernel version.
Sure, Microsoft will survive on the desktop and on "classic" laptops. Windows 7 is good enough to keep them in business for those types of device, even if Windows 9 takes another five years to produce. Windows 7 will just become the new XP.
But for touchscreen devices, Windows 7 is not fun to use as it is. Neither are most existing Windows applications. So Windows 8 (RT) starts from a difficult position and I could imagine the pricing as described is the final nail in its coffin. Which would give iOS and Android time until Windows 9 to get even more entrenched on smartphones and tablets. That cannot be good for Microsoft.
But it also looks a lot like one of the tactics that got them into trouble for of anti-competitive behavior before. Namely contracts with OEMs that were designed to block or at least hamper the sale of PCs with other operating systems. For instance, see http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110.
I wonder what the EU Commission has to say about that;-)
Games can always use a more pixels, as the rendering will scale. Also, working with multiple documents on a computer is easier with lots of screen area. I'm currently using a 2-screen setup at work (2x1920x1080), and sometimes I could use even more...
Right now, you have two choices in AMD/ATI drivers on Linux: -Catalyst (closed source, fast, but has the aforementioned problems with the changing kernel interfaces and a general reputation for crappiness) -and the open source driver (much less complaints from users, but much weaker performace).
I'm following the Linux graphics driver development via Phoronix.com, where Michael Larabel frequently publishes benchmarks of the latest open source driver versions. And progress is definitely there, but so far it is mostly in the "correctness" department: Up to maybe a year ago, many benchmark results were incomplete because the open source driver would crash on some games. Or significant parts of the graphics were missing. Today, such gaps in the results are rare. But progress on the performance front is slow and when a new optimization comes in, it is usually like "great, instead of 25% of Catalyst performance we have now 30%"
First, thanks for the link. Ingo Molnar is certainly someone who knows the Linux kernel. But even so, I'm not sure if right now is the best time for an ABI regarding graphics. Linux graphics are currently in a transition from old Mesa code to Gallium 3D, which raises the question what exactly should go in the ABI. Mesa? Gallium 3D? A mix of both? Once Gallium 3D is reasonably feature-complete, I'd agree with freezing its interface in an ABI and keeping that stable. Stable as in "will stay around until a big rework becomes necessary". That would make driver compatibility more like Windows, where things are stable for a few years until the next change in architecture comes around.
As for AMD/ATI, it works for me too, but part of that is because I still run my games on Windows, and I don't have other graphics-intensive software to run. So I just run the open source drivers on Linux and the weak performance compared to Catalyst does not bother me.
... as long as you add "just make sure not to update your kernal" to the end.
AFAIK that goes for all closed source Linux drivers. Because the internal interfaces in the kernel change from time to time, and then the drivers need to adapt. For open source drivers, there is usually a kernel maintainer who does this. With closed source drivers, you have to wait for the company who made them to do it.
I guess Microsoft's approach could be viewed as a form of "exclusive dealing" as defined by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing), because it excludes other operating systems from being used with Windows-certified tablets.
That looks pretty anti-competitive to me, and I hope the EU jumps on them for this. Aaron Williamson (see softwarefreedom.org link above) thinks it won't happen in the US, but the European Commission seems to have a somewhat wider concept of what is unacceptable. They also are not afraid of stepping on some corporate toes. Which includes European corporations, as the auto industry found out the hard way;-)
Performance wise, the HD 6670 is not exactly a high end GPU. I have one myself and it is OK for most games, but then I don't expect to run my games at maximum graphics settings. If you expect high quality graphics with decent FPS, a 6850 would be the minimum. Or maybe a HD 7770.
Second, I can confirm some funny artifacts under Windows (windows switched to the background are not fully overwritten). This happens both with the HD 6670 @home and the HD 5770 @work, so I suspect a driver problem that is common to the 5xxx and the 6xxx series.
This begs the question: what is a good stable video card that can give modern games under Windows an enjoyable experience and also provides a solid experience under Linux with preferably an open source driver?
Right now, there is no perfect solution, only tradeoffs: - If you have plenty of money and are willing to live with a closed source (but having a good rep) driver under Linux, the Nvidia GTX 670 looks good. But their midrange Kepler stuff is not released yet. The older Fermi "Thermi" models get clobbered on performance per watt by AMD. - If you insist on open source drivers under Linux, you are stuck with AMD for serious graphics cards. But the open source AMD drivers under Linux suck at performance. - For those who don't have big GPU performance expectations, Intel is becoming interesting with the HD 4000 integrated graphics. But it still gets clobbered by the HD 5570, see http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review. So even Intel's best integrated GPU still loses to a discrete lowish-end card;-)
Three versions under the same model number, and with significant differences in power consumption and performance. Good luck getting the one you wanted with your OEM PC. I guess the catalog will just say "Nvidia GT 640" and you'll get whatever the assembly guys have lying around at the moment;-)
So I guess that's a reason not to buy OEM with a Nvidia GT 640 aboard.
Not the drivers, the security patches. If you go online without installing them first, it may become a race between malware infections and Autoupdate. A firewall might help, but installing the patches before you connect to the internet is even better.
This said, reinstalling the drivers and applications is something that WSUS Offline Update will not do for you. Using a recovery DVD from the OEM might just put the crapware back. So I think that part is the time-consuming part that justifies the $65 plus tax.
I think you have some good points, but there is more to it. It seems that some outsourcers have an attitude of "get the contract by bidding low, do the minimum work to fulfill the spec, then bill the customer extra for anything that was not spelled out".
A nice example is the following anecdote I heard from a semi-reliable source: 1) Company orders a custom application from an outsourcer. Specification says "must have a print button". 2) Application is delivered. Print button is there, but does nothing. 3) Reviewing the spec reveals it only says there must be a print button. There is no specification about what should be printed.
The tale as I heard it ended with 3), but does anyone bet against 4) Outsourcer makes a follow-up offer for actual printing???
Option 2. is about to collapse for some EU countries right now (Greece in the first place, but Spain and Italy might not be too far behind). Because at some point it becomes obvious that you can't pay them back, and no one will want to loan you money anymore.
Now I have no idea where China stands in that regard, as I don't follow the news about their economy much (if the numbers are public in the first place). But it is something to keep in mind when borrowing lots of money...
If you're doing something complex, you're going to want to stop, break it up, and explain it exceptionally well. Otherwise, you're virtually garaunteed to lose money.
Good point, and the "break it up, and explain it exceptionally well" translates to detailed and clear specifications.
In my experience, not every organization is able to create those. Actually, my experience as a developer is more along the lines of being given a vague goal, producing a prototype, and then people would play with said prototype and start producing change requests. Which tends to developing the project piecemeal and with plenty of feature creep.
If your company is capable of writing good specifications, outsourcing may work for you. If it is of the "vague goal" persuation as described above, stay far, far away from outsourcing;-)
While I've not tried it myself, it is widely reported that Vista SP1 is, in fact, much better that Vista at first release. There are your patches. BTW, the "new kernel" seems to be a minor upgrade, unless Microsoft has wildly exotic ideas about version numbering:
Windows Vista pre-SP1 is Windows version 6.0 build 6000 (6.0.6000) whereas Windows Vista SP1 RTM is version 6.0 build 6001 (6.0.6001) â" the same as Server 2008.
In my world, going from version 6.0 build 6000 to version 6.0 build 6001 might be a bugfix release, but major changes would get at least a version 6.1.
And under the hood, Windows 7 differs very little from Vista. One could say it is Vista SP3 with a new look and slighly relaxed UAC. I tend to believe this is true and the release of Windows 7 was mostly a clever marketing ploy to get rid of the tainted name "Vista".
By the way, this is not meant as an apology for Microsoft. While I don't buy every rumour about collusion with big entertainment, you might have noticed that I do think they are guilty of sloppy software engineering. One particular embarrassing example: In Vista pre-SP1, various sources reported much diminished network throughput while playing back multimedia. See Mark Russinovich's blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx. To me, that does not smell of conspiracies, but of incompetence in project management. Obviously, Microsoft with all its ressources was not able to develop a mature new OS within the six years between XP and Vista. It took another year until SP 1 appeared and fixed the worst bugs. In other words, Vista was both "long overdue" and still rushed in terms of being not mature at release.
No parent will ever send his child to school to study software development or any once-copyrightable craft, as the career return-on-investment for such courses of study also plummets. Development becomes a hobbyist's pursuit, liking novel-writing and animation.
Wrong for two reasons:
1) Your latest version would still be worth more $$$ than the five year old one which can be freely copied => not all profit is lost. This said, I concede that 5 years are a bit too short. Maybe ten years from public release?
2) In many hardware projects, there is a need for specialized software that is
a) delivered in five months, not copied from elsewhere 5 years from now when it becomes legal.
b) may not exist elsewhere at all in the form that is needed. This leaves a pretty large field in which software developers could still earn money.
The protections/limitations (depending upon your point of view) of GPL would disappear too.
5 years after release of the version in question, like with all Closed Source IP. And I think it would hurt GPL'ed software a lot less than Closed Source. Because unless the original project has stagnated badly, you could get a much more advanced version from the usual sources, usually for free. An example:
Assume that forking some five years old Linux version and selling it as Closed Source was allowed. Try doing that. Good luck competing with the latest version of Ubuntu;-)
Sources? I've googled for that "kernel level encryption" or any difference in DRM from Vista to Windows 7. Did not find anything that looked loke a reliable report.
BTW, my point was that Vista was just released before it was ready, with some stupid hacks in place that killed performance. Not because of DRM, but because the release was rushed.
Does anyone remember Vista? Do we remember why it sucked so badly? I do. It had quite a bit to do with Microsoft trying to appease the demands of the music and movie industries. It resulted in a ridiculously slow and bloated OS that couldn't even run on the newest hardware.
Sorry, I doubt that. AFAIK Microsoft has not removed any "appeasements to the music and movie industries" in Windows 7, yet it works fine. Even Vista SP1 is said to be much better than Vista on release (I hav not tried it myself).
I guess the truth is much simpler: Vista was released too early, at a point where it had at best beta quality and with some stupid design errors. Low quality plain and simple, no conspiracy needed;-)
everything is verified in a torrent download, so once a peer has lied to you X amount of times then you ban them from your client and share that info with the swarm.
Interesting. If this is true, an auto - ban for bad clients should not be difficult to implement:-)
And my boys were too young to remember floppies but that doesn't mean they don't know what the floppy icon means, they just don't call it a floppy but a "save icon". Just because the symbol BEHIND the icon doesn't mean anything to the younger generations does not mean the icon itself is bad.
Good point. Keeping the old icons is often better than replacing them with arbitrary new ones. An example:
In MS Word 2010, the status of tracking changes is indicated by a stylized document in the menu. When tracking changes is active, it is highlighted in yellow. But there is no hint what the highlighting means, and it is easily overlooked too (yellow vs. white = not a big difference). Why, oh why, couldn't they stick to the good old checkbox?
You do understand that just because government has certain policies, that it doesn't mean it's what America "stands for".
You do realize that any given nearly any policy you can name, about half (at minimum) of the country is against, right?
Or is it hard for you to keep these competing ideas in your head?
Do you think that we stood for McCarthyism years ago? Reganomics? Slavery?
If the vast majority of the people just accepts the policies, with very little complaint, then yes I think the country as a whole stands for those policies. Under this definition, the US have stood for a lot of nasty stuff over the last 200 years. I can't remember all that much protest against the excesses in the "War On Terror" (a few civil rights groups, that was all), and what I've read about the McCarthyism era does not mention much resistance either.
But I have one good thing to say about the people of the United States: From time to time, they get off their asses and undertake a massive effort to right a wrong. Like fighting a civil war to abolish slavery.
Short version: After WW2, there was a gradual relaxing until after 1956, when gun ownership was fairly liberal (and depending on state).
Since 1972, several changes have been made, all of them making the law more restrictive. Today, a license is required for owning all firearms, and there are a lot of stupid restrictions on other things (like many types of knives).
Slashdot Mirror
Getting a bit off topic, but I don't see the conflict between Federal law and state law.
By not providing the codes (including decryption codes for encrypted onboard electronics) the auto manufactures would be violating state law. Instead of trying to crack the encryption, auto mechanics could sue them. No DMCA violation necessary there.
So, if something's illegal, and people are still widely disobeying the law 20+ years later, then it really shouldn't be illegal. In a properly functioning democracy, it wouldn't be, because eventually the people would elect new politicians who promise to overturn the unpopular law. The problem we have now is that our government isn't functioning properly at all, since it's a fascist government and doesn't represent the people at all.
In Europe, such a change is starting to happen with the rise of the Pirate Party. One of their agendas is legalizing file sharing. The resoning behind it is that prohibition does not work anyway and the side effects are a burden on society.
One major difference to the US is the election system:
Many European countries have proportional representation, which allows even smaller parties to gain some seats in parliament. In the US system, the Pirate Party would still be far from gaining enough seats to be a measurable influence.
AMD provides specifications and a small developer team that actually works on open source drivers.
Intel provides open source drivers.
NVIDIA makes good binary drivers, but those have problems when a new kernel version comes out with changed interfaces:
Only NVIDIA can adapt them, and until they get around to it, NVIDIA may not work with the latest kernel version.
Sure, Microsoft will survive on the desktop and on "classic" laptops. Windows 7 is good enough to keep them in business for those types of device, even if Windows 9 takes another five years to produce. Windows 7 will just become the new XP.
But for touchscreen devices, Windows 7 is not fun to use as it is. Neither are most existing Windows applications. So Windows 8 (RT) starts from a difficult position and I could imagine the pricing as described is the final nail in its coffin.
Which would give iOS and Android time until Windows 9 to get even more entrenched on smartphones and tablets. That cannot be good for Microsoft.
Quite possible.
But it also looks a lot like one of the tactics that got them into trouble for of anti-competitive behavior before. Namely contracts with OEMs that were designed to block or at least hamper the sale of PCs with other operating systems. For instance, see http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110.
I wonder what the EU Commission has to say about that ;-)
Games can always use a more pixels, as the rendering will scale.
Also, working with multiple documents on a computer is easier with lots of screen area. I'm currently using a 2-screen setup at work (2x1920x1080), and sometimes I could use even more...
Right now, you have two choices in AMD/ATI drivers on Linux:
-Catalyst (closed source, fast, but has the aforementioned problems with the changing kernel interfaces and a general reputation for crappiness)
-and the open source driver (much less complaints from users, but much weaker performace).
I'm following the Linux graphics driver development via Phoronix.com, where Michael Larabel frequently publishes benchmarks of the latest open source driver versions. And progress is definitely there, but so far it is mostly in the "correctness" department:
Up to maybe a year ago, many benchmark results were incomplete because the open source driver would crash on some games. Or significant parts of the graphics were missing. Today, such gaps in the results are rare. But progress on the performance front is slow and when a new optimization comes in, it is usually like "great, instead of 25% of Catalyst performance we have now 30%"
First, thanks for the link. Ingo Molnar is certainly someone who knows the Linux kernel.
But even so, I'm not sure if right now is the best time for an ABI regarding graphics. Linux graphics are currently in a transition from old Mesa code to Gallium 3D, which raises the question what exactly should go in the ABI. Mesa? Gallium 3D? A mix of both?
Once Gallium 3D is reasonably feature-complete, I'd agree with freezing its interface in an ABI and keeping that stable. Stable as in "will stay around until a big rework becomes necessary". That would make driver compatibility more like Windows, where things are stable for a few years until the next change in architecture comes around.
As for AMD/ATI, it works for me too, but part of that is because I still run my games on Windows, and I don't have other graphics-intensive software to run.
So I just run the open source drivers on Linux and the weak performance compared to Catalyst does not bother me.
... as long as you add "just make sure not to update your kernal" to the end.
AFAIK that goes for all closed source Linux drivers. Because the internal interfaces in the kernel change from time to time, and then the drivers need to adapt.
For open source drivers, there is usually a kernel maintainer who does this.
With closed source drivers, you have to wait for the company who made them to do it.
ARM is bootlocked (as are IOS and quite a few android devices). Try to keep up.
An interesting difference is that Microsoft makes bootlocking a requirement for other vendors to get their hardware certified for Windows.
See also http://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2012/jan/12/microsoft-confirms-UEFI-fears-locks-down-ARM/.
I guess Microsoft's approach could be viewed as a form of "exclusive dealing" as defined by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing), because it excludes other operating systems from being used with Windows-certified tablets.
That looks pretty anti-competitive to me, and I hope the EU jumps on them for this. Aaron Williamson (see softwarefreedom.org link above) thinks it won't happen in the US, but the European Commission seems to have a somewhat wider concept of what is unacceptable. They also are not afraid of stepping on some corporate toes. Which includes European corporations, as the auto industry found out the hard way ;-)
Performance wise, the HD 6670 is not exactly a high end GPU. I have one myself and it is OK for most games, but then I don't expect to run my games at maximum graphics settings. If you expect high quality graphics with decent FPS, a 6850 would be the minimum. Or maybe a HD 7770.
Second, I can confirm some funny artifacts under Windows (windows switched to the background are not fully overwritten). This happens both with the HD 6670 @home and the HD 5770 @work, so I suspect a driver problem that is common to the 5xxx and the 6xxx series.
This begs the question: what is a good stable video card that can give modern games under Windows an enjoyable experience and also provides a solid experience under Linux with preferably an open source driver?
Right now, there is no perfect solution, only tradeoffs: ;-)
- If you have plenty of money and are willing to live with a closed source (but having a good rep) driver under Linux, the Nvidia GTX 670 looks good. But their midrange Kepler stuff is not released yet. The older Fermi "Thermi" models get clobbered on performance per watt by AMD.
- If you insist on open source drivers under Linux, you are stuck with AMD for serious graphics cards. But the open source AMD drivers under Linux suck at performance.
- For those who don't have big GPU performance expectations, Intel is becoming interesting with the HD 4000 integrated graphics. But it still gets clobbered by the HD 5570, see http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review. So even Intel's best integrated GPU still loses to a discrete lowish-end card
As NotSoHeavy3D wrote, there is the GT640 (Desktop, OEM). See http://www.anandtech.com/show/5784/nvidia-updates-geforce-600-oem-desktop-lineup-adds-gt-645-gt-640-gt-630.
Three versions under the same model number, and with significant differences in power consumption and performance. Good luck getting the one you wanted with your OEM PC. I guess the catalog will just say "Nvidia GT 640" and you'll get whatever the assembly guys have lying around at the moment ;-)
So I guess that's a reason not to buy OEM with a Nvidia GT 640 aboard.
Not the drivers, the security patches. If you go online without installing them first, it may become a race between malware infections and Autoupdate. A firewall might help, but installing the patches before you connect to the internet is even better.
This said, reinstalling the drivers and applications is something that WSUS Offline Update will not do for you. Using a recovery DVD from the OEM might just put the crapware back. So I think that part is the time-consuming part that justifies the $65 plus tax.
I think you have some good points, but there is more to it. It seems that some outsourcers have an attitude of "get the contract by bidding low, do the minimum work to fulfill the spec, then bill the customer extra for anything that was not spelled out".
A nice example is the following anecdote I heard from a semi-reliable source:
1) Company orders a custom application from an outsourcer. Specification says "must have a print button".
2) Application is delivered. Print button is there, but does nothing.
3) Reviewing the spec reveals it only says there must be a print button. There is no specification about what should be printed.
The tale as I heard it ended with 3), but does anyone bet against
4) Outsourcer makes a follow-up offer for actual printing???
Option 2. is about to collapse for some EU countries right now (Greece in the first place, but Spain and Italy might not be too far behind). Because at some point it becomes obvious that you can't pay them back, and no one will want to loan you money anymore.
Now I have no idea where China stands in that regard, as I don't follow the news about their economy much (if the numbers are public in the first place). But it is something to keep in mind when borrowing lots of money...
If you're doing something complex, you're going to want to stop, break it up, and explain it exceptionally well. Otherwise, you're virtually garaunteed to lose money.
Good point, and the "break it up, and explain it exceptionally well" translates to detailed and clear specifications.
In my experience, not every organization is able to create those. Actually, my experience as a developer is more along the lines of being given a vague goal, producing a prototype, and then people would play with said prototype and start producing change requests. Which tends to developing the project piecemeal and with plenty of feature creep.
If your company is capable of writing good specifications, outsourcing may work for you. If it is of the "vague goal" persuation as described above, stay far, far away from outsourcing ;-)
While I've not tried it myself, it is widely reported that Vista SP1 is, in fact, much better that Vista at first release. There are your patches. BTW, the "new kernel" seems to be a minor upgrade, unless Microsoft has wildly exotic ideas about version numbering:
Windows Vista pre-SP1 is Windows version 6.0 build 6000 (6.0.6000) whereas Windows Vista SP1 RTM is version 6.0 build 6001 (6.0.6001) â" the same as Server 2008.
In my world, going from version 6.0 build 6000 to version 6.0 build 6001 might be a bugfix release, but major changes would get at least a version 6.1.
And under the hood, Windows 7 differs very little from Vista. One could say it is Vista SP3 with a new look and slighly relaxed UAC. I tend to believe this is true and the release of Windows 7 was mostly a clever marketing ploy to get rid of the tainted name "Vista".
By the way, this is not meant as an apology for Microsoft. While I don't buy every rumour about collusion with big entertainment, you might have noticed that I do think they are guilty of sloppy software engineering. One particular embarrassing example:
In Vista pre-SP1, various sources reported much diminished network throughput while playing back multimedia. See Mark Russinovich's blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx.
To me, that does not smell of conspiracies, but of incompetence in project management. Obviously, Microsoft with all its ressources was not able to develop a mature new OS within the six years between XP and Vista. It took another year until SP 1 appeared and fixed the worst bugs. In other words, Vista was both "long overdue" and still rushed in terms of being not mature at release.
No parent will ever send his child to school to study software development or any once-copyrightable craft, as the career return-on-investment for such courses of study also plummets. Development becomes a hobbyist's pursuit, liking novel-writing and animation.
Wrong for two reasons:
1) Your latest version would still be worth more $$$ than the five year old one which can be freely copied => not all profit is lost. This said, I concede that 5 years are a bit too short. Maybe ten years from public release?
2) In many hardware projects, there is a need for specialized software that is
a) delivered in five months, not copied from elsewhere 5 years from now when it becomes legal.
b) may not exist elsewhere at all in the form that is needed.
This leaves a pretty large field in which software developers could still earn money.
The protections/limitations (depending upon your point of view) of GPL would disappear too.
5 years after release of the version in question, like with all Closed Source IP. And I think it would hurt GPL'ed software a lot less than Closed Source. Because unless the original project has stagnated badly, you could get a much more advanced version from the usual sources, usually for free. An example:
Assume that forking some five years old Linux version and selling it as Closed Source was allowed. Try doing that. Good luck competing with the latest version of Ubuntu ;-)
Sources? I've googled for that "kernel level encryption" or any difference in DRM from Vista to Windows 7. Did not find anything that looked loke a reliable report.
BTW, my point was that Vista was just released before it was ready, with some stupid hacks in place that killed performance. Not because of DRM, but because the release was rushed.
Does anyone remember Vista? Do we remember why it sucked so badly? I do. It had quite a bit to do with Microsoft trying to appease the demands of the music and movie industries. It resulted in a ridiculously slow and bloated OS that couldn't even run on the newest hardware.
Sorry, I doubt that. AFAIK Microsoft has not removed any "appeasements to the music and movie industries" in Windows 7, yet it works fine. Even Vista SP1 is said to be much better than Vista on release (I hav not tried it myself).
I guess the truth is much simpler: ;-)
Vista was released too early, at a point where it had at best beta quality and with some stupid design errors. Low quality plain and simple, no conspiracy needed
everything is verified in a torrent download, so once a peer has lied to you X amount of times then you ban them from your client and share that info with the swarm.
Interesting. If this is true, an auto - ban for bad clients should not be difficult to implement :-)
And my boys were too young to remember floppies but that doesn't mean they don't know what the floppy icon means, they just don't call it a floppy but a "save icon". Just because the symbol BEHIND the icon doesn't mean anything to the younger generations does not mean the icon itself is bad.
Good point. Keeping the old icons is often better than replacing them with arbitrary new ones. An example:
In MS Word 2010, the status of tracking changes is indicated by a stylized document in the menu. When tracking changes is active, it is highlighted in yellow. But there is no hint what the highlighting means, and it is easily overlooked too (yellow vs. white = not a big difference). Why, oh why, couldn't they stick to the good old checkbox?
You do understand that just because government has certain policies, that it doesn't mean it's what America "stands for".
You do realize that any given nearly any policy you can name, about half (at minimum) of the country is against, right?
Or is it hard for you to keep these competing ideas in your head?
Do you think that we stood for McCarthyism years ago? Reganomics? Slavery?
If the vast majority of the people just accepts the policies, with very little complaint, then yes I think the country as a whole stands for those policies. Under this definition, the US have stood for a lot of nasty stuff over the last 200 years.
I can't remember all that much protest against the excesses in the "War On Terror" (a few civil rights groups, that was all), and what I've read about the McCarthyism era does not mention much resistance either.
But I have one good thing to say about the people of the United States:
From time to time, they get off their asses and undertake a massive effort to right a wrong. Like fighting a civil war to abolish slavery.
It varied over the years. For details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany
Short version:
After WW2, there was a gradual relaxing until after 1956, when gun ownership was fairly liberal (and depending on state).
Since 1972, several changes have been made, all of them making the law more restrictive.
Today, a license is required for owning all firearms, and there are a lot of stupid restrictions on other things (like many types of knives).