I got myself a new PC several weeks ago, with a NVidia 8600 GT mostly because I was not so convinced with ATI's Linux drivers in the past.
Considering my future purchases, there are good news and bad news for ATI. Good: I might reconsider if they actually release good Linux drivers, especially if those are Open Source. Bad : As I'm quite happy with the performance of my current PC, the next upgrade might be 5 years in the future;-)
1) What kind of warranty do you actually get from Microsoft?
2) Why do you need a warranty for a software product that you have successfully used for a few years? I'd assume that you are familiar with its strengths and flaws by then, and nasty surprises from further use are unlikely.
What printer actually *has* drivers for XP-64? Although I see the advantages of going w/ 64-bit OSes, the hardware/software support just isn't there yet - although it should be. And it is not MS's fault.
It depends... the Open Source community is quite willing to make its own drivers if the hardware specs are available. Can't we expect the same from Microsoft? At least for the "big brands"?
Besides, if Microsoft says "give us the specs or your hardware stays unsupported", I guess most hardware vendors will comply a lot faster than when the Linux community says the same;-)
Well... my sample is a bit smaller, as only two people I know have used Vista in the first place. But both of them were not so happy.
One is the owner of a small electronics company, and his experience (relayed to me through a colleague) was that he encountered several problems. OK, it's hearsay and not very accurate...
The other one is a software tester from a consulting company we work with. He told me in person that they "set up one laptop for evaluation, and ended up deciding not to switch to Vista". I know the guys from that company as competent testers and reasonably knowledgeable about Windows. If they have trouble getting it to work right, I conclude that the average user should avoid Vista;-)
Part of being a good manager is that you directly manage only stuff you understand.
So if the owner of the company you work for has hired a competent CIO and lets him do his job, that is perfectly OK. In my experience, those who are halfway tech-savvy and start micromanaging things cause a lot more problems.
The company I work for has released a system with wireless networking that originally relied on cheap D-Link WLAN routers. Lots of breakdowns in the field. The D-Link has subsequently been replaced with a cheap Linksys. As far as I know, the Linksys routers are far more reliable.
Borland - Inprise - Borland - Code Gear (for the development stuff).
But they did one (slightly OT) good thing between all the namechanging: they released a version of Interbase as Open Source, which has grown into the Firebird RDBMS. See http://www.firebirdsql.org/
To some country with more relaxed online laws, maybe including startup of a new company;-) Like Slysoft, which distributes some programs that were originally developed by a German/Swiss company but are no longer legal to sell in the EU(CD/DVD copy programs including CSS decryption).
Where monopolies do harm the market is where the system is abused. The obvious solution to that is a system which isn't terribly open to abuse. Many of today's patent laws were put together at a time when nobody imagined that a company might patent a genetically modified seed and then sue farmers for saving some from last years' crop for this year, or that a huge economy around software (which changes far faster than many other fields of innovation, and is thus not well served by 15-20 year monopolies) would develop.
Unfortunately, in recent years the system was terribly open to abuse.
The main problem being the low standards on non-obviousness and degree of innovation (the recent Supreme Court ruling in KSR Int'l Co v Teleflex Inc may help there, see for instance http://www.iam-magazine.com/reports/detail.aspx?g= d0a66180-e4ae-479d-a067-615dd8c3d4f3). Also, it seems possible in the US to get a patent on a vague idea without presenting a working implementation. Read, you patent the Star Trek transporter as a "method and device for instantaneous transportation", and once somebody actually does the hard work of creating a useful transporter, you can sue him.
All of the above encourage excessive broad patent claims and outright patent trolling. If these shortcomings of the patent system cannot be fixed, it might be the best move to abolish the patent system altogether.
Secondly, the amount of energy necessary to take out a RAM is pretty low... on the order of tens of kilojoules. These facts I know from my research. What sort of projectile did you assume? A thin-skinned missile that will blow up when you get through the hull? Or an artillery shell with thicker walls and rotation that will distribute the heat over its surface?
Re:The sad state of Slashdot editorial line nowada
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
This is sad because Slashdot used to be a place where, when a new version of software were posted, the discussion were directed to the changelog and the new features, fixed bugs, and this particular article didn't even mentioned that. It was a cheap shot at GPLv3, a license that seems to have lots of people that dislikes it, people that aren't even affected by it in the first place. GPL doesn't cover use, only distribution.
This article is not about technical issues. As far as I know, there is no significant dissatisfaction in the community about the technical quality of GCC. But asking questions about the legal future of the project is also legitimate. The article may exaggerate, and you might disregard it as idle speculation;-) But what will happen with the GCC license is still a valid question.
And ultimately, if this leads to a fork it may affect end users as well (compatibility problems between official GCC and the fork?).
I hate to say it, but GCC under GPLv3 is coming, and no amount of whining will change that. No doubt about that. As seen with the XFree86 project, it takes considerable disgruntlement to create a serious fork. And even if it happens, the original project may stay alive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86#Release_histo ry shows that XFree86 still exists, even if X.Org is the dominant X-Server these days. So I'm sure there will be an official GCC version under GPLv3.
It is, however, possible that a well-maintained fork under GPL V2 will also exist.
On top of that, this rule is new. So I guess it was not in any of the TOS that have been signed so far. Even assuming the new rules are legal, I suspect (IANAL) that they cannot be retroactively applied to existing service contracts. So the university would have to cancel the existing contracts and probably refund or wait out any pre-paid access times.
In the late 90s, Valve pulled it off for a limited number of players on a small map. Half-Life 1 and its mods had low enough lag for fast action and at least halfway decent physics.
Since that time, computers have grown a lot more powerful. I think it is time for some company to pull off an action MMORPG on the same level of speed and realism. Auto Assault had it to some extent, at least the driving had a passable degree of simulation in it (it could have been better, but that seemed to be sloppy modelling rather than network limitations).
Maybe someone can comment on Planetside? I have not tried it yet, but it is supposed to be a MMORPG-FPS. I wonder how well these guys have handled the task of creating a fast-paced game for lots of players.
I've tried OpenOffice at my workplace too because I was annoyed with Word's sometimes capricious behaviour. With Word documents that had a lot of tables and some graphics, but no macros. The results were mostly OK, but a few formattings tend to get lost when transferring the documents from Word to ODF.
My impression is that a one time switch to OpenOffice would be OK, the effort to rework the formatting would be less annoying than putting up with Word in the long run. But if you have to maintain both formats in parallel, the compatibility problems will make it worse than just using Word.
So if you go OpenOffice, be prepared to do it all the way.
That's why people should consider getting off the Microsoft upgrade train.
Start with browser and office suite, the new applications should be cross-platform. Once these are migrated, you may be able to migrate the operating system too (depending on how many Windows-only applications you have). My personal favorites are OpenOffice and Firefox BTW.
Wow!!! It's shocking to read the comments above. There is no sympathy whatsoever for the average user, who has little technical knowledge, or for companies with IT departments that get caught in the abuse.
I can symphatize with individual users who happen not to be IT experts. Even smaller companies who cannot afford a bunch of specialists to manage their computers.
But if a company is large enough to have an IT department, that department should have enough collective knowledge to avoid the problem of forced upgrades. And management should trust their own IT department more than the friendly salesman from Microsoft.
If said large company still gets caught by Microsoft abuse more than once, they had it coming;-)
And I 'should' have a pony. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work on 'should.' The fact is, Dell does get a lot of revenue from pre-loaded crapware, cost savings by making essentially identical Windows computers in volume, etc. The best you have to hope for is the Linux version doesn't cost *more*, and I do agree $225 is excessive. However, the wipe/reinstall option is always available.
If the Windows version is actually cheaper (and this is not just a temporary glitch in Dell's weird pricing system), by all means buy the Windows version and wipe/reinstall. Of course you might want to check alternatives from other vendors...
If Dell chooses to eat the cost of paying for Windows OEM where they could get the same price for hardware with Ubuntu, their problem. If the makers of pre-loaded crapware pay the bill, that's also fine. Eventually, some vendor will find the combination that is most profitable for pushing hardware (Linux and crapware pre-loaded?) and we can still wipe/reinstall;-)
-Which version of MS Office (including level of Service pack)? -And who guarantees that the "reference implementation" is still available 5 years from now? (hint: Microsoft tends to discontinue sale of its products after a few years).
By default, the calculator in Windows 2000 uses degrees. Enter "30", press "sin" and you get 0.5. To be fair, at least it displays the argument format via a set of radio buttons (where it can be altered as well). From this, I infer that it is not always assumed at Microsoft that trig functions take arguments in radians. So if the same corporation presents a "standards" document where the argument format is undefined, I'd also ask for clarification;-)
Assuming Rob Weir is right, I certainly hope that ISO insists on fixing OOXML, and rejects it as ISO standard if it is not fixed.
But that remains to be seem, maybe Microsoft has enough clout to get it approved anyway. It seems that ECMA did not care much about quality when accepting OOXML, lets hope ISO does better.
LOL. Actually I've tried it recently to troubleshoot a friend's PC (where normal safe mode failed BTW). It has more than five commands but appears unable to run programs from the command line .
Thus we could not use any of the recovery tools we counted on. We ended up putting the harddisk into another computer, saving the most important data to an external drive and reinstalling XP.
Slashdot Mirror
Why use something as far removed from real life as WOW?
;-)
Try
-Counterstrike
-any multiplayer WW2 shooter like Day Of Defeat, Call Of Duty...
-America's Army (get your training sponsored by your enemy
Much better choices for terrorist training (and I'd still consider them inadequate unless you throw in some real life practice with guns)
I got myself a new PC several weeks ago, with a NVidia 8600 GT mostly because I was not so convinced with ATI's Linux drivers in the past.
;-)
Considering my future purchases, there are good news and bad news for ATI.
Good: I might reconsider if they actually release good Linux drivers, especially if those are Open Source.
Bad : As I'm quite happy with the performance of my current PC, the next upgrade might be 5 years in the future
1) What kind of warranty do you actually get from Microsoft?
2) Why do you need a warranty for a software product that you have successfully used for a few years? I'd assume that you are familiar with its strengths and flaws by then, and nasty surprises from further use are unlikely.
It depends... the Open Source community is quite willing to make its own drivers if the hardware specs are available. Can't we expect the same from Microsoft? At least for the "big brands"?
Besides, if Microsoft says "give us the specs or your hardware stays unsupported", I guess most hardware vendors will comply a lot faster than when the Linux community says the same
Well... my sample is a bit smaller, as only two people I know have used Vista in the first place. But both of them were not so happy.
;-)
One is the owner of a small electronics company, and his experience (relayed to me through a colleague) was that he encountered several problems. OK, it's hearsay and not very accurate...
The other one is a software tester from a consulting company we work with. He told me in person that they "set up one laptop for evaluation, and ended up deciding not to switch to Vista". I know the guys from that company as competent testers and reasonably knowledgeable about Windows. If they have trouble getting it to work right, I conclude that the average user should avoid Vista
Part of being a good manager is that you directly manage only stuff you understand.
So if the owner of the company you work for has hired a competent CIO and lets him do his job, that is perfectly OK. In my experience, those who are halfway tech-savvy and start micromanaging things cause a lot more problems.
Then he still has to officially distance himself from the project.
Running the official KisMAC website is a big no-no in that context.
The company I work for has released a system with wireless networking that originally relied on cheap D-Link WLAN routers. Lots of breakdowns in the field.
The D-Link has subsequently been replaced with a cheap Linksys. As far as I know, the Linksys routers are far more reliable.
Borland - Inprise - Borland - Code Gear (for the development stuff).
But they did one (slightly OT) good thing between all the namechanging:
they released a version of Interbase as Open Source, which has grown into the Firebird RDBMS. See
http://www.firebirdsql.org/
To some country with more relaxed online laws, maybe including startup of a new company ;-)
Like Slysoft, which distributes some programs that were originally developed by a German/Swiss company but are no longer legal to sell in the EU(CD/DVD copy programs including CSS decryption).
Unfortunately, in recent years the system was terribly open to abuse.
The main problem being the low standards on non-obviousness and degree of innovation (the recent Supreme Court ruling in KSR Int'l Co v Teleflex Inc may help there, see for instance http://www.iam-magazine.com/reports/detail.aspx?g
All of the above encourage excessive broad patent claims and outright patent trolling. If these shortcomings of the patent system cannot be fixed, it might be the best move to abolish the patent system altogether.
Secondly, the amount of energy necessary to take out a RAM is pretty low... on the order of tens of kilojoules. These facts I know from my research.
What sort of projectile did you assume?
A thin-skinned missile that will blow up when you get through the hull? Or an artillery shell with thicker walls and rotation that will distribute the heat over its surface?
This article is not about technical issues. As far as I know, there is no significant dissatisfaction in the community about the technical quality of GCC. But asking questions about the legal future of the project is also legitimate.
The article may exaggerate, and you might disregard it as idle speculation
And ultimately, if this leads to a fork it may affect end users as well (compatibility problems between official GCC and the fork?).
I hate to say it, but GCC under GPLv3 is coming, and no amount of whining will change that.o ry shows that XFree86 still exists, even if X.Org is the dominant X-Server these days. So I'm sure there will be an official GCC version under GPLv3.
No doubt about that.
As seen with the XFree86 project, it takes considerable disgruntlement to create a serious fork. And even if it happens, the original project may stay alive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86#Release_hist
It is, however, possible that a well-maintained fork under GPL V2 will also exist.
On top of that, this rule is new. So I guess it was not in any of the TOS that have been signed so far.
Even assuming the new rules are legal, I suspect (IANAL) that they cannot be retroactively applied to existing service contracts. So the university would have to cancel the existing contracts and probably refund or wait out any pre-paid access times.
In the late 90s, Valve pulled it off for a limited number of players on a small map. Half-Life 1 and its mods had low enough lag for fast action and at least halfway decent physics.
Since that time, computers have grown a lot more powerful. I think it is time for some company to pull off an action MMORPG on the same level of speed and realism. Auto Assault had it to some extent, at least the driving had a passable degree of simulation in it (it could have been better, but that seemed to be sloppy modelling rather than network limitations).
Maybe someone can comment on Planetside? I have not tried it yet, but it is supposed to be a MMORPG-FPS. I wonder how well these guys have handled the task of creating a fast-paced game for lots of players.
I've tried OpenOffice at my workplace too because I was annoyed with Word's sometimes capricious behaviour. With Word documents that had a lot of tables and some graphics, but no macros. The results were mostly OK, but a few formattings tend to get lost when transferring the documents from Word to ODF.
My impression is that a one time switch to OpenOffice would be OK, the effort to rework the formatting would be less annoying than putting up with Word in the long run. But if you have to maintain both formats in parallel, the compatibility problems will make it worse than just using Word.
So if you go OpenOffice, be prepared to do it all the way.
That's why people should consider getting off the Microsoft upgrade train.
Start with browser and office suite, the new applications should be cross-platform. Once these are migrated, you may be able to migrate the operating system too (depending on how many Windows-only applications you have). My personal favorites are OpenOffice and Firefox BTW.
Wow!!! It's shocking to read the comments above. There is no sympathy whatsoever for the average user, who has little technical knowledge, or for companies with IT departments that get caught in the abuse.
;-)
I can symphatize with individual users who happen not to be IT experts. Even smaller companies who cannot afford a bunch of specialists to manage their computers.
But if a company is large enough to have an IT department, that department should have enough collective knowledge to avoid the problem of forced upgrades. And management should trust their own IT department more than the friendly salesman from Microsoft.
If said large company still gets caught by Microsoft abuse more than once, they had it coming
If the Windows version is actually cheaper (and this is not just a temporary glitch in Dell's weird pricing system), by all means buy the Windows version and wipe/reinstall. Of course you might want to check alternatives from other vendors...
If Dell chooses to eat the cost of paying for Windows OEM where they could get the same price for hardware with Ubuntu, their problem. If the makers of pre-loaded crapware pay the bill, that's also fine. Eventually, some vendor will find the combination that is most profitable for pushing hardware (Linux and crapware pre-loaded?) and we can still wipe/reinstall
-Which version of MS Office (including level of Service pack)?
-And who guarantees that the "reference implementation" is still available 5 years from now? (hint: Microsoft tends to discontinue sale of its products after a few years).
By default, the calculator in Windows 2000 uses degrees. Enter "30", press "sin" and you get 0.5. To be fair, at least it displays the argument format via a set of radio buttons (where it can be altered as well). ;-)
From this, I infer that it is not always assumed at Microsoft that trig functions take arguments in radians. So if the same corporation presents a "standards" document where the argument format is undefined, I'd also ask for clarification
Assuming Rob Weir is right, I certainly hope that ISO insists on fixing OOXML, and rejects it as ISO standard if it is not fixed.
But that remains to be seem, maybe Microsoft has enough clout to get it approved anyway. It seems that ECMA did not care much about quality when accepting OOXML, lets hope ISO does better.
Get the latest 2.x version you can find. Really lightweight and supports a lot of audio formats.
Later versions suck by comparison.
LOL.
Actually I've tried it recently to troubleshoot a friend's PC (where normal safe mode failed BTW). It has more than five commands but appears unable to run programs from the command line .
Thus we could not use any of the recovery tools we counted on. We ended up putting the harddisk into another computer, saving the most important data to an external drive and reinstalling XP.