The point being, it is not up to MS to grow the balls to not support HDCP/ICT, and not play Blu-Ray or HD-DVD even if the user so chooses. It's up to the users to get incensed at the right people (the MPAA) and not buy any products with the ICT bit enabled, 2012 onwards, as a mark of protest.
I agree, but it is also up to the users to boycott any products that waste system ressources on supporting HDCP/ICT. Vista is one of these products.
Also, Vista has its own DRM with potentially negative impact: Product activation, which needs a periodic refresh in Vista. What if the activation servers become inaccessible some day?
I think the former is an obvious disadvantage, but the latter absolutely disqualifies Vista for use on my PC. Still running Windows 2000 and now and then giving Linux a try (right now it's Kubuntu).
Yes, it is obvious that Massachusetts did cave in by including Microsoft's OOXML, which is in theory an open format but in practice quite flawed. But it is still an example for government agencies starting to recognize problems with vendor-lock in.
Also, I disagree on one point: I think the Massachusetts Information Technology Divisionand and its (then) boss Peter Quinn were serious about switching to ODF, rather than just trying to get concessions from Microsoft. Hence I would not use the term "milking".
Lately, governments tend to notice the problem of "lock-in" formats and demand open standards for government use (remember the Massachussets affair?). Once that attitude becomes mandatory policy, Microsoft has to do one of the following:
-support ODF or another standard not controlled by them -drop out of government business -or have their own format promoted to a standard
I've been involved in a good half-dozen attempts to move an all windows shop to an all Linux environment, and it always comes down to the same stuff. You may pry them off windows, but you won't pry them off their windows software, so either you have to put your trust in WINE (pause for laughter) or you have to invest heavily in windows terminal services so that you can run all the windows apps they need in a terminal session on their linux machines.
I agree that the applications might cause the bigger resistance, and I'd try changing those first. As in Winword => Open Office IE => Firebird and so on...
If that fails: tough luck but you still have those Word licenses...reinstall those
if it is accepted: Fine, you have moved your users to applications that are also available under Linux. The next step (Windows => Linux) should be easier.
According to the DMCA, people are supposed to be able to make backup copies of media for personal use. But then, distributing tools to allow circumvention of encryption and copy protection measures is not allowed. Wouldn't it be rather... obvious that the distribution of these tools should be legal, since they are required for consumers to exercise their privilege to make personal copies?
It seems that Congress has neglected to consider all consequences of their legislation, presumably helped along by some lobbying from RIAA and similar groups. But there is something we can do against it:
Boycott copy-protected media. And a significant part of the customers seems to do it. In recent months, there have been some news that music industry execs consider dropping DRM so there must be some pressure from lack of sales. Note that the CSS encryption on DVD is an exception here. It is both well established and thoroughly cracked (with DVD rippers containing decryption available from offshore companies like Slysoft), so it will probably stay around without really annoying most people anymore.
Hell, I'm still on Windows 2000, works fine for me! Me too. Works mostly fine. Experimenting a bit with Linux now and then;-)
And the only reason Vista nags so much, is because people (presumably Mac users) slagged off XP so much for not asking you, and said how OS X was better because you had to enter your password to do such things. Ubuntu Linux has a similar feature, and it seems they got it right where Microsoft overdid it and pestered the user way too often. At least, Ubuntu has never asked me for a password when simply running an application (when installing additional stuff, it asks and that is when it should ask).
Thanks for the link. But that particular application was (and still is) an old-fashioned Delphi 6 application..NET doesn't have anything to do with it.
Maybe.NET would have been better in that situation, but the company I work for had its own problems in the past with.NET 1.1 (mostly installation issues in the field).
I'd rather optimize some more routines for sparing use of memory allocation than try to find the reason for intermittent installation failures of a.NET environment. After all, we have the source code for our own stuff so we can debug it:-)
It's not Windows doing the memory allocation, it's the Delphi MM. Partly true, the Delphi MM gets memory in relative large blocks from Windows and does its own suballocation. Quote from an article about Delphi 2006 (http://dn.codegear.com/article/33416#27ImplementationDetails):
The medium block manager obtains memory from the OS in 1.25MB chunks. These chunks are called "medium block pools" and are subdivided into medium blocks as the application requests them.
Our application was in Delphi 6 BTW. Anyway, I don't think Borland would have bothered using their own MM if it wasn't better than going to the WinAPI for everything. Thus I presume memory allocation through the Windows API would have been even slower;-)
Only a moron would allocate and deallocate the same sized buffer on every mouse move triggered paint Sure, and we did change it once we noticed. Who the original moron that wrote that piece of code was is no longer known.
On top of that, memory allocation/deallocation is not the fastest operation under Windows in my experience (Delphi application in Windows 2000). That application had one window in which a cross-section though a two-dimensional map was displayed, and the angle of that cross-section could be rotated with the mouse. Well, people were complaining that it was slow and choppy. Indeed, it would update on a Pentium 4/1.7 GHz with maybe 10 FPS. Further investigation showed that for each painting of the cross-section, a buffer of a few hundred kByte was allocated and subsequently freed.
After modifying the application to "allocate once when showing the window, then re-use that buffer", rotating the angle of the cross-section was MUCH faster. While I did not take exact measurements, I estimate that the memory allocate/deallocate took at least half of the processor time in the original version. That would be 50 milliseconds or more.
I also make (at least) a second partition for my own computers. Let's call it D:\ and the first one C:\. Windows and application installation go to C:\ as per default. Data go onto D:\. Simple reason:
If Windows is hosed beyond repair, you can format C:\ and reinstall without losing your data on D:\. The only exception would be a malicious virus that damages files systemwide.
so I cannot tell you if the license clause would be enforcable.
But one thing should be obvious: A potential employer who hears about this clause might decline to hire you because he does not want to share your work results with your old employer. In the worst case, it will make you unemployable until the 6 months are up.
So I'd refuse to sign unless you get 6 months of wages as a guaranteed severance package.
That would make sense, and I have indeed wondered to whom Sony and Microsoft want to sell the HD resolution of their current consoles.
HDTVs are not that commonplace yet among the people I know (in Germany). Heck, one of them has brought me his defective CRT TV in the hope that I find the problem and can fix it cheaply, because he finds it difficult to spare the money for a similar TV.
In the "Guristas Treasure Hold" in Friggi the older of my two PCs (P4 2.4 GHz, Radeon 9600 Pro, 1 GByte RAM) has significant lag. Entering the same complex with my newer PC shows better performance on a slower DSL line. So it is obviously not a network problem but a client side performance problem.
Any well programmed FPS game has better graphics performance;-)
The same can be achieved under Windows using old-fashioned.ini files, placed into a directory of your choice (I don't recommend dumping the files into the Windows directory as many older applications do).
Depending on programming environment, this can be quite easy. Delphi for instance has pretty good support for using.ini files in user-specified places. Of course it goes somewhat against Microsofts recommendations that we all use the registry;-)
What's the easiest way to cut down a mighty oak tree? When you can pinch the life out of it between two fingers. In other words, just after it's sprouted. But we seem to like the idea of planting the tree in the first place, letting it get plenty of sun and rain, wait until it's grown into an imposing presence, then we get to whip out the chainsaws and dynamite. If Shel Silverstein ever wrote about this, he'd have to call it "the Stupid Tree."
I guess the tree is a metaphor for the internet in this case?
Then the "easy" way would have been be to kill it off back in the 80s.
But that would require the politicos to recognize technological trends early and predict their impact correctly. Which is difficult enough for people who really know the stuff, like the engineers who invented it and the early adopters. The typical politician is more likely to recognize a "problem" once it makes waves in society. Which happened with the internet in the late 90s in western societies, and arguably now in Russia;-)
On Windows it can get somewhat more complicated, because
1) the registry entries may be spread over various sections of the registry. Offhand, I can recall -HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE -HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software -HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (have fun searching through that)
2) fishing out the DLLS may require an extra tool like Dependency Walker (URL:http://www.dependencywalker.com/). Easy enough if you know such a tool, but it may be somewhat beyond a newbie.
So far, so good, but the EULA bit about data collection is still annoying enough that I will ignore this game. Besides, it is supposed to have too much instancing for my taste;-)
I'm a dick that likes to slow down the business process and make others install redundant software (if they are even allowed to) that both costs time and money, but I don't care because it makes me feel important.
Umm... point taken on time, but you know that Open Office is free to download?
I think having to download Open Office is a lot more reasonable than having to buy MS Office because the dick on the other end refuses to use anything except.doc.;-)
Now that was somewhat exaggerated because Open office can -mostly- import.doc, but when 100% accurate import is necessary, the above becomes true as Open Office's.doc import filter still has a few flaws.
I haven't MS Office at home either, and I really prefer an open format like ODF. Which means anything I create for myself tends to be ODF. Or sometimes.rtf out of Wordpad, which is good enough for basic formatting (with much clearer and smaller encoding than MS Word's output). But certainly not.doc;-)
Given the amount of money Microsoft earns with Windows, I'd expect they can afford "fast and good". It would even be a good business strategy not to try and save a few dollars here. But obviously, "fast and good" is not happening.
Which leaves me with two possible explanations: 1) They are overly stingy at the expense of damaging their reputation. 2) (more likely) Over the years, the Windows codebase has grown so convoluted that it is nearly impossible to handle, even with the manpower of Microsoft.
In this case he believed he had the scaling laws down. With power proportional to the seventh power of the radius and energy gain proportional to the fifth power, you were only talking about building a device maybe 10 times the radius of the lab device. That's TINY as fusion experiments go, and also compared to fission plants. And the thing is basically a slightly gassy vacuum tube with some magnets in it, i.e. mostly empty space, very little material.
If there are any gotchas you'd have to scale it up about that much to find them. So why go halfway and then build a full-size one when, if it turns out there AREN'T any gotchas you've got an operating power plant on the next step?
His plan was to do two more small prototypes, to get some more solid data than his three-neutron final run...
Three neutrons is indeed very thin, and from the WB-6 photos on Wikipedia, the coils look like they are about two feet in diameter. That leaves some room for scaling up without moving into a special building. So I'd recommend to scale it up to something whose parts fit through the door of a normal room, then assemble it in place. Maybe twice the diameter of WB-6, that should leave enough room around the coils to build the vacuum chamber and still be quite affordable. If Bussard was right about power proportional to the seventh power of the radius, that should give a few hundred (2^7*3 = 384) neutrons where WB-6 gave three. That is something you can derive useful statistics from.
Translation: "We realized that the whole thing was a steaming pile of crap, and needed to be seriously re-engineered." "...and we know it will be completely unplayable during re-engineering, so we shut down Beta for a while". I guess this is the most likely explanation.
Really? Sorry, but that's just not true. In fact, the famous Geek Squad usually fixes all Windows problems by re-imaging your box (which may solve the problem, but also wipes all your data, which is not cool at all, and not REALLY a true fix.) It would be like hiring someone to fix a leak in your roof and you come home and find that the roof was replaced, but now all your personal possessions in your house are gone.
To really fix windows problems requires a fairly significant amount of skill / knowledge that MOST end users (and Geek Squad employees) simply DO NOT HAVE. If this guy's mom runs into problems on Windows, she will call him anyway.
Well, there is the intermediate solution:
Back up the user data (requires some knowledge about the places Windows usually puts user's files). Then re-image the box and restore the data afterwards. That is what I'd do, being a software developer and occasional help desk replacement, but not specialized in Windows support.
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But do you still call that car a great car? And would recommend the model as a good buy to others?
Also, Vista has its own DRM with potentially negative impact:
Product activation, which needs a periodic refresh in Vista. What if the activation servers become inaccessible some day?
I think the former is an obvious disadvantage, but the latter absolutely disqualifies Vista for use on my PC. Still running Windows 2000 and now and then giving Linux a try (right now it's Kubuntu).
Yes, it is obvious that Massachusetts did cave in by including Microsoft's OOXML, which is in theory an open format but in practice quite flawed. But it is still an example for government agencies starting to recognize problems with vendor-lock in.
Also, I disagree on one point:
I think the Massachusetts Information Technology Divisionand and its (then) boss Peter Quinn were serious about switching to ODF, rather than just trying to get concessions from Microsoft. Hence I would not use the term "milking".
Lately, governments tend to notice the problem of "lock-in" formats and demand open standards for government use (remember the Massachussets affair?). Once that attitude becomes mandatory policy, Microsoft has to do one of the following:
;-)
-support ODF or another standard not controlled by them
-drop out of government business
-or have their own format promoted to a standard
Guess what they are trying now?
I agree that the applications might cause the bigger resistance, and I'd try changing those first. As in
Winword => Open Office
IE => Firebird
and so on...
If that fails:
tough luck but you still have those Word licenses...reinstall those
if it is accepted:
Fine, you have moved your users to applications that are also available under Linux. The next step (Windows => Linux) should be easier.
It seems that Congress has neglected to consider all consequences of their legislation, presumably helped along by some lobbying from RIAA and similar groups. But there is something we can do against it:
Boycott copy-protected media. And a significant part of the customers seems to do it. In recent months, there have been some news that music industry execs consider dropping DRM so there must be some pressure from lack of sales.
Note that the CSS encryption on DVD is an exception here. It is both well established and thoroughly cracked (with DVD rippers containing decryption available from offshore companies like Slysoft), so it will probably stay around without really annoying most people anymore.
Hell, I'm still on Windows 2000, works fine for me! ;-)
Me too. Works mostly fine. Experimenting a bit with Linux now and then
And the only reason Vista nags so much, is because people (presumably Mac users) slagged off XP so much for not asking you, and said how OS X was better because you had to enter your password to do such things.
Ubuntu Linux has a similar feature, and it seems they got it right where Microsoft overdid it and pestered the user way too often. At least, Ubuntu has never asked me for a password when simply running an application (when installing additional stuff, it asks and that is when it should ask).
Thanks for the link. But that particular application was (and still is) an old-fashioned Delphi 6 application. .NET doesn't have anything to do with it.
.NET would have been better in that situation, but the company I work for had its own problems in the past with .NET 1.1 (mostly installation issues in the field).
.NET environment. After all, we have the source code for our own stuff so we can debug it :-)
Maybe
I'd rather optimize some more routines for sparing use of memory allocation than try to find the reason for intermittent installation failures of a
Partly true, the Delphi MM gets memory in relative large blocks from Windows and does its own suballocation. Quote from an article about Delphi 2006 (http://dn.codegear.com/article/33416#27ImplementationDetails): Our application was in Delphi 6 BTW. Anyway, I don't think Borland would have bothered using their own MM if it wasn't better than going to the WinAPI for everything. Thus I presume memory allocation through the Windows API would have been even slower
Only a moron would allocate and deallocate the same sized buffer on every mouse move triggered paint
Sure, and we did change it once we noticed. Who the original moron that wrote that piece of code was is no longer known.
On top of that, memory allocation/deallocation is not the fastest operation under Windows in my experience (Delphi application in Windows 2000). That application had one window in which a cross-section though a two-dimensional map was displayed, and the angle of that cross-section could be rotated with the mouse.
Well, people were complaining that it was slow and choppy. Indeed, it would update on a Pentium 4/1.7 GHz with maybe 10 FPS. Further investigation showed that for each painting of the cross-section, a buffer of a few hundred kByte was allocated and subsequently freed.
After modifying the application to "allocate once when showing the window, then re-use that buffer", rotating the angle of the cross-section was MUCH faster. While I did not take exact measurements, I estimate that the memory allocate/deallocate took at least half of the processor time in the original version. That would be 50 milliseconds or more.
I also make (at least) a second partition for my own computers. Let's call it D:\ and the first one C:\. Windows and application installation go to C:\ as per default. Data go onto D:\. Simple reason:
If Windows is hosed beyond repair, you can format C:\ and reinstall without losing your data on D:\. The only exception would be a malicious virus that damages files systemwide.
IANAL,
so I cannot tell you if the license clause would be enforcable.
But one thing should be obvious:
A potential employer who hears about this clause might decline to hire you because he does not want to share your work results with your old employer. In the worst case, it will make you unemployable until the 6 months are up.
So I'd refuse to sign unless you get 6 months of wages as a guaranteed severance package.
That would make sense, and I have indeed wondered to whom Sony and Microsoft want to sell the HD resolution of their current consoles.
HDTVs are not that commonplace yet among the people I know (in Germany). Heck, one of them has brought me his defective CRT TV in the hope that I find the problem and can fix it cheaply, because he finds it difficult to spare the money for a similar TV.
The EVE client is slow even under Windows.
;-)
In the "Guristas Treasure Hold" in Friggi the older of my two PCs (P4 2.4 GHz, Radeon 9600 Pro, 1 GByte RAM) has significant lag. Entering the same complex with my newer PC shows better performance on a slower DSL line. So it is obviously not a network problem but a client side performance problem.
Any well programmed FPS game has better graphics performance
The same can be achieved under Windows using old-fashioned .ini files, placed into a directory of your choice (I don't recommend dumping the files into the Windows directory as many older applications do).
.ini files in user-specified places. Of course it goes somewhat against Microsofts recommendations that we all use the registry ;-)
Depending on programming environment, this can be quite easy. Delphi for instance has pretty good support for using
I guess the tree is a metaphor for the internet in this case?
Then the "easy" way would have been be to kill it off back in the 80s.
But that would require the politicos to recognize technological trends early and predict their impact correctly. Which is difficult enough for people who really know the stuff, like the engineers who invented it and the early adopters.
The typical politician is more likely to recognize a "problem" once it makes waves in society. Which happened with the internet in the late 90s in western societies, and arguably now in Russia
On Windows it can get somewhat more complicated, because
1) the registry entries may be spread over various sections of the registry. Offhand, I can recall
-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE
-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software
-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (have fun searching through that)
2) fishing out the DLLS may require an extra tool like Dependency Walker (URL:http://www.dependencywalker.com/). Easy enough if you know such a tool, but it may be somewhat beyond a newbie.
So far, so good, but the EULA bit about data collection is still annoying enough that I will ignore this game. ;-)
Besides, it is supposed to have too much instancing for my taste
I'm a dick that likes to slow down the business process and make others install redundant software (if they are even allowed to) that both costs time and money, but I don't care because it makes me feel important.
.doc. ;-)
.doc, but when 100% accurate import is necessary, the above becomes true as Open Office's .doc import filter still has a few flaws.
Umm... point taken on time, but you know that Open Office is free to download?
I think having to download Open Office is a lot more reasonable than having to buy MS Office because the dick on the other end refuses to use anything except
Now that was somewhat exaggerated because Open office can -mostly- import
I haven't MS Office at home either, and I really prefer an open format like ODF. Which means anything I create for myself tends to be ODF. .rtf out of Wordpad, which is good enough for basic formatting (with much clearer and smaller encoding than MS Word's output). But certainly not .doc ;-)
Or sometimes
In that case, it would make sense to appeal and hope for a miracle. Because sometimes courts do the unexpected ;-)
Given the amount of money Microsoft earns with Windows, I'd expect they can afford "fast and good". It would even be a good business strategy not to try and save a few dollars here. But obviously, "fast and good" is not happening.
Which leaves me with two possible explanations:
1) They are overly stingy at the expense of damaging their reputation.
2) (more likely) Over the years, the Windows codebase has grown so convoluted that it is nearly impossible to handle, even with the manpower of Microsoft.
Quote from GP:
Three neutrons is indeed very thin, and from the WB-6 photos on Wikipedia, the coils look like they are about two feet in diameter. That leaves some room for scaling up without moving into a special building.
So I'd recommend to scale it up to something whose parts fit through the door of a normal room, then assemble it in place. Maybe twice the diameter of WB-6, that should leave enough room around the coils to build the vacuum chamber and still be quite affordable.
If Bussard was right about power proportional to the seventh power of the radius, that should give a few hundred (2^7*3 = 384) neutrons where WB-6 gave three. That is something you can derive useful statistics from.
Translation: "We realized that the whole thing was a steaming pile of crap, and needed to be seriously re-engineered."
"...and we know it will be completely unplayable during re-engineering, so we shut down Beta for a while".
I guess this is the most likely explanation.
Well, there is the intermediate solution:
Back up the user data (requires some knowledge about the places Windows usually puts user's files). Then re-image the box and restore the data afterwards. That is what I'd do, being a software developer and occasional help desk replacement, but not specialized in Windows support.