Go ahead and demean them, they did this for your protection. By not letting Americans search they are keeping logs from being generated for the FBI et. al.
Sadly, they are looking out for you, unlike anyone else. It does ease my fears actually. I looked there for a movie I own and lost to letting someone borrow it; while doing this I had slashdot headlines dancing in my head saying that they were once asked for IP addresses of Americans who use the service. I did go ahead and grab the movie (soylent green), but then found it at the supermarket for $10 the next day.
Maybe you should go click on a few of their ads since they made a move to keep you out of trouble - when you might have deserved it.
Hey, my first "PC" was a TI-99/4A. It didn't have a hard drive and the floppy drive was bigger than the PC itself.
That was a hand-me-down after a few years (it was at my grandparents place, they got it free when they bought carpet) when they finally got a TRS/Tandy, until my brother smashed it with a hammer. But having that first machine to play with changed my life. Later I would make my mom buy a Pentium I, 90Mhz, instead of buying me a car.
I'll never forget being in the store and he saying to me: "Now, if I buy this computer I won't be able to get you a car when you turn 16." It took 3 seconds of thinking to say "I just want this PC"
I didn't get my drivers license until I was almost 18.
The fact there are commercials on all of these cable channels makes me irritated that I even have to pay extra for them. Even if you wanted basic cable in my city (USA, MTV, Comedy Central, SCI-FI, etc) you have to pay > $50 because they have a contract with the city that demands it. Essentially the city has given them this monopoly that provides this service (broadcast) that provides commercial subsidized programing. Isn't that wrong?
Does it even make sense to pay for what should be free TV? Over the internet TV might save us all from monopoly cable and sub-standard satellite services (sorry, but I live an area that gets a lot of rain and I don't like being locked into the box). It makes sense to sell episodes of channels to people on iTMS and on your own, without commercials, but why not just move your model to internet TV. Keep the same commercials, and structure, and cut out the middle man. You lose revenue from cable companies, I'm sure, but you have a more accurate way of tracking viewership for sure also. You know the exact times that people tuned in for, you can even tell your advertisers everything (not just a statistical extrapolation). Simple broadcast streams, let the client timeshift, whatever on their machine, just send out the stream. If you are an HBO or Starz, who already does this, then charge a small fee and don't let people timeshift (but please don't use some platform specific delivery).
The whole problem is none of these problems are going to be solved. The American taste for entertainment and violence, sex, drama, comedy, music, and apparently 7 channels of God, is getting greater everyday. The media companies own some existing delivery systems and are buying more all of the time. The cable and satellite companies are doing more lobbying everyday. The device companies have agreements with and are vested in cable technologies, some are owned by content owner-deliverers. DRM, Rootkits, DMCA, hurrah! You aren't going to get cheaper or freer for a long time.
The "ads" are going to be overlays, not commercials. YouTube/Google knows that commercials don't work. Pre-rolls make people look elsewhere. From what I've read the ads seem to non-intrusive and can be closed by clicking an "x".
Does it suck that we are stuck with ads: not really if you want to keep seeing videos on YouTube (that aren't produced in Hollywood).
You are correct, it doesn't make sense. I've used this feature before, but Vista doesn't like it. Maybe I didn't hibernate long enough on other systems to test it. Two days of hibernation made the PC unstable - it took forever to load as well. The state hasn't changed but all software parameters that look at the date and time of the system are updated at some point, and I guess this is what fscks it up.
Too bad I've already spilled my 2 cents all over this story because this comment deserves a mod point (if it isn't already done somewhere, could get repetitive real fast).
I likely did pay for Vista, but I did intend to use it. I expected a machine that was XP+ because Microsoft failed in giving us a 110% new OS. I know there were massive re-writes and so forth, but I also know that many features were dropped because they weren't going to be ready in time. That's fine, I have no problem with that, but it hardly *feels* like an upgrade.
I do have a desire to get Windows Vista running, maybe on a desktop. It killed my laptop battery, so I'm hesitant about just upgrading RAM and trying to solve the problem that way. Ubuntu just pulls less power, IDK what is the explanation, you can try to give any. I get anywhere from 15-20 extra minutes of battery life depending on if it's WoW or just WWW. This discussion makes me want to boot it a little bit. But even more, it makes me want to get my XP powerhouse up again. I've already ordered another powersupply.
Funny, I find myself doing almost the opposite. I switched to Ubuntu on my laptop (a massive hardware failure/power surge makes it my exclusive PC until the insurance sends a check) and at work (Windows XP) when I want to see the desktop I am hitting ALT+CTRL+D as opposed to SUPER/WINDOWS+D. Odd since I've been trained to do the latter for years now. For whatever reason WIN+D has become the keyboard short cut that I'm using the most. I surprised this has taken over that quickly since there are only 4 icons on my Ubuntu desktop compared to the 15-20 I've had on other PC's here at home and the gargantuan amount of icons on my work desktop (I've five folders that point to reports I have to complete each week, each folder holding about ten links to reports, plus all of the AS/400 connectivity icons I have like Spyview, IBM's terminal emulator and such).
If nih would like to join he would have to send ImaLamer an e-mail.
(Sorry, it's hard for me to think straight and not rant. My younger, baby, brother committed suicide just a few days ago. You'd think 'why be on slashdot', but would you want to think of only that for every minute of your day? I tried to play WoW, but couldn't get past the welcome screen - I couldn't figure out what I needed to do to log in. Basically I can only rant, ddrink, do drugs and stare at porn. That last one sounds callous, but anything and everything is needed at this point.)
Fuck Verizon. Not that I've ever had them but they just suck. My buddy and I were in the store for some adapter for him and I said "iPhone". OOPS!
The sales people swarmed on me saying that the reason they didn't have it is because Apple wanted them to do this and that; when the real issue was that Verizon is in the market to sell music at twice the price of iTunes. They didn't want this thing on their network because it would cut their music profits in half. Even more, it let you get video from YouTube and other sources while Verizon has their own. Then they told us that they were bigger than AT&T, in all aspects, and that the food at their brainwashing center was par excellence.
Actually, fuck them all. T-mobile to Verizon, to AT&T to Sprint. They all cripple our phones, then subsidise the phone to lock you in. Sure, my Samsung T509 may cost $300 brand new, but you took out the features that make it worth that. It should now cost about 35 bucks.
And WTF happened to PCS services? The first non-cellular provider I knew of was GTE Wireless. They were going to revolutionize the industry with these sweet Qualcomm phones. And they did for a bit. The phones were yours, no contract. The minutes were around 10 cents or less depending on your plan. At a time when cellular services were finally getting that low (for a huge monthly plan) they were leaving the gates with it. The sound was crystal clear and the reception was everywhere. I could even send e-mail from that phone for no additional costs. Text messaging was possible too! No extra cost! Then the cellular players started getting into the game, and with help from fuck faces like Motorola and Nokia we got these restricted phones that cost ten times more than they should. I only know of one provider today that doesn't make you sign a contract for month to month billing - but who wants to pay top dollar for a phone that they've restricted? Since they all do it, there is no competition to not do it. There seem to be these niche phones, iPhone, Sidekick, Helio, etc, but monthly fees attached that make me wince (data services cost as much as DSL, but don't carry a tenth of the traffic, WTF??!?!?! AT&T's data plans are nuts compared to the Sidekick monthly IMHO.). So again, fuck sprint and ameritech, cellular one, and verizon for buying up GTE.
I want to prank call their CEO's, but I can't afford the minutes.
Windows defender scans on startup, Norton has always done this and isn't effective if it doesn't. UAC and such was supposed to stop these virus problems, now the anti-virus is doing more damage. To be fair though, I've never had a problem with these programs on their own. People say they drop Norton all the time here, where I've never had it slow down a PC until now. I scaled back all the settings (no heuristics, which means no protection...) but to no avail. Vista has too much overhead. Your system is fine (which I really doubt) because you have 2 gigs of RAM. 2 freaking gigs of RAM! XP can run (slowly) on 64MB, Vista needs 2Gigs to live? I know why, I know that we need to push the envelope, but 2 gigs for a stable, usable system is overblown. Besides, you gotta add another 2 for the system to run software besides the OS (and then Vista has problems with 4gigs of RAM, so good luck).
Hibernate & suspend: Work, but are almost useless. They don't save boot time - and this shouldn't be the answer to boot times anyways. Media Center: Never got it to play files from my library, but didn't really try. This app is no good without a tuner. No problems, just no use - it's just Windows Media Player (who I have a new found faith it. I let it scan my music library and started burning things at random, a built in feature, for a road trip. Nothing has worked so well in randomizing a set of 37 audio CD's from MP3's. Then again, I don't of any other app that even does this. iTunes might, but I don't have an iPod so iTunes has about 3 minutes of 'that's cool' before I close it) Streaming to the 360: I could never get them to finalize the connection. The laptop saw the 360 and prompted me to set it up, no problem there. Then the 360 went into setup and failed. (The 360 is another story. Love the machine and games, but has problems still. I'm on my second box, the first had a faulty optical drive, and it's in their repair center. Well, it might be. They don't have record of it. It was freezing on startup and they said they would take it back, fix it, and pay for the whole thing. After 15 days the shipping box didn't arrive so we called back. They had no record of the call (which they found after I explained their own offices inner workings, long story) and said that since the $450 machine was no longer under warranty that I would have to pay the repair costs. HUH!!?!? I can pay this much for something, and pay per month to play it, and it can up and break without you caring one bit? Sure, profit margins and all, but don't you want my monthly Live payments, we do have two accounts? They finally agree to repair it at their cost, yet their website and on the phone I'm told they don't show a machine registered to my name - yet they have drafted the payment for this month's Live, even though we were told it would be free. Now I think I'm looking at calling the Attorney General; you drafted on my checking when you should have stopped the payment: very illegal; also my state imposes a warranty that you can't avoid. Funny thing, at the UPS store, for the drop off, every other person there said they've had red rings of death and other problems lately!) Wireless Networking: I was surprised how hard it was to get this working. My setup isn't typical, I know: ad-hoc. But for god's sake it is part of the standard, and maybe that is the problem. Simply I had a XP machine doing ICS, everything else could connect through that no problem. DHCP didn't work, no big deal since I HAVE A NETWORKING DEGREE I could assign the IP and such on my own (I did this on the 360 for example to speed up boot times, also Halo 2 won't get the address on its own if you don't get it on boot). I tried that, and I was connected to the network (that it didn't even fucking see! I'm sorry but this part really pissed me off-too many settings are spread out or over-simplified making setup a 5 minute process, one that should take maybe 30 seconds) - but couldn't connect to the Internet. Vista wouldn't even do DNS lookups. Being a free sp
I ordered a nice dual core laptop that had Vista loaded, and I was excited. I have to admit, one of the draws was Vista - I wouldn't have to pay for it (outright) and it was already installed, and most problems would be covered by HP support. It's good to know that other 'average joe' users would be working on the same system so HP had to work hard to make everything work: and it worked fine. Of course that wasn't the end.
I had loaded the beta/RC on a PC I had just finished building at that time and while it was on there it worked really well - I even thought of putting on there once the OS was finally released, but I couldn't afford a new Vista box so I waited. Vista Ultimate would have been the greatest thing to meet this PC; it's an HDTV-PVR, I've got an Xbox 360 to stream to, soon I could have had the ultimate home pc-tv setup... I would have only needed a Zune (joking!).
Then I order this laptop. (My first, I'm a poor geek) Vista was kinda sweet, all that GUIness! But then I found that I wasn't really using the laptop. Why? Because it took too long to get it into a usable state. The security issues with Windows made me load three pieces of software to keep my machine protected, fine. But they had to scan on start-up each time. The machine easily took a minute to get to the welcome screen and after logging in you thought that you could click icons and start programs but they wouldn't show up for minutes (!). I know the strategy is to hibernate or suspend the laptop between uses, but that also made for long load times, and if the laptop was hibernating for more than a day it needed a restart just to get it usable again. Frankly, I didn't want to mess with it. For a top of the line machine, this shouldn't be happening. For $1000+ laptop you shouldn't be waiting this long to browse the web. Granted, I've *only ONE GIGABYTE of RAM* and not TWO - but should the OS need that much?
Frankly I was sick of it. Maybe it would work on the PVR, but I don't think I'll ever find out. You see, I'm a huge XP and 2000 fan. They are solid kernels and good operating systems, and IMHO, I've not needed to re-install either one of these once placed onto a machine. I had a webserver running Apache on XP that had multi-month uptimes. My PVR never went down, even while I played WoW, recorded a TV show while scanning another to remove the commercials. I've had a XP install running since it was first loaded in *2004*. As I've said here before, over and over, XP and 2000 don't crash if you know what you are doing. (Any problems I've had were faulty or just poor hardware/drivers, ATI this means you! Sure, it could lock up or need a reboot to drop some of my sins, but I find that every OS does on occasion. The trick is patience, a trick I refuse to learn.)
Alas, I oversaw the wedding of Ubuntu 7 and my HP laptop. A few drivers needed to be wrangled, but there is so much help documentation available online I'm convinced a child could overcome the problems I did (Ubuntu forums... god I love you). Frankly, they won't part until death. The only thing that doesn't work is hibernate and suspend, and I'm not surprised, but they aren't needed. Gnome saves my session, although I never leave anything open, and the boot time is just under one minute. And that is a cold start to a Gnome desktop. Vista couldn't run with a dual core CPU and a gig of RAM, yet Ubuntu seems to barely touch half of the RAM. Compiz, you kill Vista's Aero anyways. I have World of Warcraft working, full speed with the settings basically maxed out while Windows Vista (the OS/API family the game was written for more or less) couldn't run the game over 3fps (I would do a spell while the casting bar was still filling up).
What a huge rant to say: Switch to linux. Your PC will thank you.
About the author: ImaLamer is a huge open source zealot who was turned onto the beauty of the Windows 2000 family (2000, XP) while at school. Frankly he hates Microsoft, and is afraid of them more than his own government, but knows that 2000 and XP just plain work
I think what you meant to say is that you were not ready for its use. You meant to say is that you don't have 2+ gigs of RAM in each PC, and that they are all not fitted with SATA-III drives, and that they have DirectX 10.0 video cards that are to become obsolete with Vista SP1.
I think that is what you meant.
I'm sure the software is ready, there just isn't a PC that can handle it. Bloat or features, I don't care; there is no reason this OS shouldn't be able to run smoothly on a computer built for 3D games like Doom3 (on extreme settings). I hate having this hatred towards Vista, and maybe someday I'll convert, but I just love XP and 2000 for their solid performance.
You may think that last comment was a joke, but I'll say it again: If you don't have 2000/XP running smoothly, then you aren't doing something right.
Thank you, I was going to add the comment that Shuttleworth's statements are driving a wedge (or pushing it deeper). It isn't the whole statement, it's the one tagged on after the summary.
And it pains me to type this at an Ubuntu laptop.
P.S. Maybe SUSE thinks that they will survive when the lawsuits come and others won't, so there are two sides to this issue.
Access does use SQL, but it's interpreted in part by the Windows software component: Microsoft Jet.
Programming Visual Basic over Access is first year Windows programming. I took this class, and I just wanted a networking education - worked out however since my current employer is married to SQL Server with Access front-ends for its OLTP (and their costly proprietary vendor is married to this idea too; $400 to edit some Visual Basic code, 10 lines max). Not very open, but we are managing to hack it daily. I'm sure this isn't allowed, per the license, but I'm already off on a tangent.
No, I'd say the TI-99 holds the title for landmark; essentially the same type of machine being introduced today, but ahead of the C-64 by a few years. I wish I could get it out for nostalgia's sake, but my brother took a hammer to it years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
5. ???
6. Profit
(oh wait)
Duh, it's a joke.
Go ahead and demean them, they did this for your protection. By not letting Americans search they are keeping logs from being generated for the FBI et. al.
Sadly, they are looking out for you, unlike anyone else. It does ease my fears actually. I looked there for a movie I own and lost to letting someone borrow it; while doing this I had slashdot headlines dancing in my head saying that they were once asked for IP addresses of Americans who use the service. I did go ahead and grab the movie (soylent green), but then found it at the supermarket for $10 the next day.
Maybe you should go click on a few of their ads since they made a move to keep you out of trouble - when you might have deserved it.
Hey, don't blame me, I don't vote. It's you assholes who keep electing them.
Hey, my first "PC" was a TI-99/4A. It didn't have a hard drive and the floppy drive was bigger than the PC itself.
That was a hand-me-down after a few years (it was at my grandparents place, they got it free when they bought carpet) when they finally got a TRS/Tandy, until my brother smashed it with a hammer. But having that first machine to play with changed my life. Later I would make my mom buy a Pentium I, 90Mhz, instead of buying me a car.
I'll never forget being in the store and he saying to me: "Now, if I buy this computer I won't be able to get you a car when you turn 16." It took 3 seconds of thinking to say "I just want this PC"
I didn't get my drivers license until I was almost 18.
The fact there are commercials on all of these cable channels makes me irritated that I even have to pay extra for them. Even if you wanted basic cable in my city (USA, MTV, Comedy Central, SCI-FI, etc) you have to pay > $50 because they have a contract with the city that demands it. Essentially the city has given them this monopoly that provides this service (broadcast) that provides commercial subsidized programing. Isn't that wrong?
Does it even make sense to pay for what should be free TV? Over the internet TV might save us all from monopoly cable and sub-standard satellite services (sorry, but I live an area that gets a lot of rain and I don't like being locked into the box). It makes sense to sell episodes of channels to people on iTMS and on your own, without commercials, but why not just move your model to internet TV. Keep the same commercials, and structure, and cut out the middle man. You lose revenue from cable companies, I'm sure, but you have a more accurate way of tracking viewership for sure also. You know the exact times that people tuned in for, you can even tell your advertisers everything (not just a statistical extrapolation). Simple broadcast streams, let the client timeshift, whatever on their machine, just send out the stream. If you are an HBO or Starz, who already does this, then charge a small fee and don't let people timeshift (but please don't use some platform specific delivery).
The whole problem is none of these problems are going to be solved. The American taste for entertainment and violence, sex, drama, comedy, music, and apparently 7 channels of God, is getting greater everyday. The media companies own some existing delivery systems and are buying more all of the time. The cable and satellite companies are doing more lobbying everyday. The device companies have agreements with and are vested in cable technologies, some are owned by content owner-deliverers. DRM, Rootkits, DMCA, hurrah! You aren't going to get cheaper or freer for a long time.
Windows key + F9... makes raindrops on the desktop with Compiz!
The "ads" are going to be overlays, not commercials. YouTube/Google knows that commercials don't work. Pre-rolls make people look elsewhere. From what I've read the ads seem to non-intrusive and can be closed by clicking an "x".
Does it suck that we are stuck with ads: not really if you want to keep seeing videos on YouTube (that aren't produced in Hollywood).
You are correct, it doesn't make sense. I've used this feature before, but Vista doesn't like it. Maybe I didn't hibernate long enough on other systems to test it. Two days of hibernation made the PC unstable - it took forever to load as well. The state hasn't changed but all software parameters that look at the date and time of the system are updated at some point, and I guess this is what fscks it up.
Too bad I've already spilled my 2 cents all over this story because this comment deserves a mod point (if it isn't already done somewhere, could get repetitive real fast).
I likely did pay for Vista, but I did intend to use it. I expected a machine that was XP+ because Microsoft failed in giving us a 110% new OS. I know there were massive re-writes and so forth, but I also know that many features were dropped because they weren't going to be ready in time. That's fine, I have no problem with that, but it hardly *feels* like an upgrade.
I do have a desire to get Windows Vista running, maybe on a desktop. It killed my laptop battery, so I'm hesitant about just upgrading RAM and trying to solve the problem that way. Ubuntu just pulls less power, IDK what is the explanation, you can try to give any. I get anywhere from 15-20 extra minutes of battery life depending on if it's WoW or just WWW. This discussion makes me want to boot it a little bit. But even more, it makes me want to get my XP powerhouse up again. I've already ordered another powersupply.
Funny, I find myself doing almost the opposite. I switched to Ubuntu on my laptop (a massive hardware failure/power surge makes it my exclusive PC until the insurance sends a check) and at work (Windows XP) when I want to see the desktop I am hitting ALT+CTRL+D as opposed to SUPER/WINDOWS+D. Odd since I've been trained to do the latter for years now. For whatever reason WIN+D has become the keyboard short cut that I'm using the most. I surprised this has taken over that quickly since there are only 4 icons on my Ubuntu desktop compared to the 15-20 I've had on other PC's here at home and the gargantuan amount of icons on my work desktop (I've five folders that point to reports I have to complete each week, each folder holding about ten links to reports, plus all of the AS/400 connectivity icons I have like Spyview, IBM's terminal emulator and such).
If nih would like to join he would have to send ImaLamer an e-mail.
(Sorry, it's hard for me to think straight and not rant. My younger, baby, brother committed suicide just a few days ago. You'd think 'why be on slashdot', but would you want to think of only that for every minute of your day? I tried to play WoW, but couldn't get past the welcome screen - I couldn't figure out what I needed to do to log in. Basically I can only rant, ddrink, do drugs and stare at porn. That last one sounds callous, but anything and everything is needed at this point.)
Fuck Verizon. Not that I've ever had them but they just suck. My buddy and I were in the store for some adapter for him and I said "iPhone". OOPS!
The sales people swarmed on me saying that the reason they didn't have it is because Apple wanted them to do this and that; when the real issue was that Verizon is in the market to sell music at twice the price of iTunes. They didn't want this thing on their network because it would cut their music profits in half. Even more, it let you get video from YouTube and other sources while Verizon has their own. Then they told us that they were bigger than AT&T, in all aspects, and that the food at their brainwashing center was par excellence.
Actually, fuck them all. T-mobile to Verizon, to AT&T to Sprint. They all cripple our phones, then subsidise the phone to lock you in. Sure, my Samsung T509 may cost $300 brand new, but you took out the features that make it worth that. It should now cost about 35 bucks.
And WTF happened to PCS services? The first non-cellular provider I knew of was GTE Wireless. They were going to revolutionize the industry with these sweet Qualcomm phones. And they did for a bit. The phones were yours, no contract. The minutes were around 10 cents or less depending on your plan. At a time when cellular services were finally getting that low (for a huge monthly plan) they were leaving the gates with it. The sound was crystal clear and the reception was everywhere. I could even send e-mail from that phone for no additional costs. Text messaging was possible too! No extra cost! Then the cellular players started getting into the game, and with help from fuck faces like Motorola and Nokia we got these restricted phones that cost ten times more than they should. I only know of one provider today that doesn't make you sign a contract for month to month billing - but who wants to pay top dollar for a phone that they've restricted? Since they all do it, there is no competition to not do it. There seem to be these niche phones, iPhone, Sidekick, Helio, etc, but monthly fees attached that make me wince (data services cost as much as DSL, but don't carry a tenth of the traffic, WTF??!?!?! AT&T's data plans are nuts compared to the Sidekick monthly IMHO.). So again, fuck sprint and ameritech, cellular one, and verizon for buying up GTE.
I want to prank call their CEO's, but I can't afford the minutes.
Windows defender scans on startup, Norton has always done this and isn't effective if it doesn't. UAC and such was supposed to stop these virus problems, now the anti-virus is doing more damage. To be fair though, I've never had a problem with these programs on their own. People say they drop Norton all the time here, where I've never had it slow down a PC until now. I scaled back all the settings (no heuristics, which means no protection...) but to no avail. Vista has too much overhead. Your system is fine (which I really doubt) because you have 2 gigs of RAM. 2 freaking gigs of RAM! XP can run (slowly) on 64MB, Vista needs 2Gigs to live? I know why, I know that we need to push the envelope, but 2 gigs for a stable, usable system is overblown. Besides, you gotta add another 2 for the system to run software besides the OS (and then Vista has problems with 4gigs of RAM, so good luck).
Hibernate & suspend: Work, but are almost useless. They don't save boot time - and this shouldn't be the answer to boot times anyways.
Media Center: Never got it to play files from my library, but didn't really try. This app is no good without a tuner. No problems, just no use - it's just Windows Media Player (who I have a new found faith it. I let it scan my music library and started burning things at random, a built in feature, for a road trip. Nothing has worked so well in randomizing a set of 37 audio CD's from MP3's. Then again, I don't of any other app that even does this. iTunes might, but I don't have an iPod so iTunes has about 3 minutes of 'that's cool' before I close it)
Streaming to the 360: I could never get them to finalize the connection. The laptop saw the 360 and prompted me to set it up, no problem there. Then the 360 went into setup and failed. (The 360 is another story. Love the machine and games, but has problems still. I'm on my second box, the first had a faulty optical drive, and it's in their repair center. Well, it might be. They don't have record of it. It was freezing on startup and they said they would take it back, fix it, and pay for the whole thing. After 15 days the shipping box didn't arrive so we called back. They had no record of the call (which they found after I explained their own offices inner workings, long story) and said that since the $450 machine was no longer under warranty that I would have to pay the repair costs. HUH!!?!? I can pay this much for something, and pay per month to play it, and it can up and break without you caring one bit? Sure, profit margins and all, but don't you want my monthly Live payments, we do have two accounts? They finally agree to repair it at their cost, yet their website and on the phone I'm told they don't show a machine registered to my name - yet they have drafted the payment for this month's Live, even though we were told it would be free. Now I think I'm looking at calling the Attorney General; you drafted on my checking when you should have stopped the payment: very illegal; also my state imposes a warranty that you can't avoid. Funny thing, at the UPS store, for the drop off, every other person there said they've had red rings of death and other problems lately!)
Wireless Networking: I was surprised how hard it was to get this working. My setup isn't typical, I know: ad-hoc. But for god's sake it is part of the standard, and maybe that is the problem. Simply I had a XP machine doing ICS, everything else could connect through that no problem. DHCP didn't work, no big deal since I HAVE A NETWORKING DEGREE I could assign the IP and such on my own (I did this on the 360 for example to speed up boot times, also Halo 2 won't get the address on its own if you don't get it on boot). I tried that, and I was connected to the network (that it didn't even fucking see! I'm sorry but this part really pissed me off-too many settings are spread out or over-simplified making setup a 5 minute process, one that should take maybe 30 seconds) - but couldn't connect to the Internet. Vista wouldn't even do DNS lookups. Being a free sp
I ordered a nice dual core laptop that had Vista loaded, and I was excited. I have to admit, one of the draws was Vista - I wouldn't have to pay for it (outright) and it was already installed, and most problems would be covered by HP support. It's good to know that other 'average joe' users would be working on the same system so HP had to work hard to make everything work: and it worked fine. Of course that wasn't the end.
I had loaded the beta/RC on a PC I had just finished building at that time and while it was on there it worked really well - I even thought of putting on there once the OS was finally released, but I couldn't afford a new Vista box so I waited. Vista Ultimate would have been the greatest thing to meet this PC; it's an HDTV-PVR, I've got an Xbox 360 to stream to, soon I could have had the ultimate home pc-tv setup... I would have only needed a Zune (joking!).
Then I order this laptop. (My first, I'm a poor geek) Vista was kinda sweet, all that GUIness! But then I found that I wasn't really using the laptop. Why? Because it took too long to get it into a usable state. The security issues with Windows made me load three pieces of software to keep my machine protected, fine. But they had to scan on start-up each time. The machine easily took a minute to get to the welcome screen and after logging in you thought that you could click icons and start programs but they wouldn't show up for minutes (!). I know the strategy is to hibernate or suspend the laptop between uses, but that also made for long load times, and if the laptop was hibernating for more than a day it needed a restart just to get it usable again. Frankly, I didn't want to mess with it. For a top of the line machine, this shouldn't be happening. For $1000+ laptop you shouldn't be waiting this long to browse the web. Granted, I've *only ONE GIGABYTE of RAM* and not TWO - but should the OS need that much?
Frankly I was sick of it. Maybe it would work on the PVR, but I don't think I'll ever find out. You see, I'm a huge XP and 2000 fan. They are solid kernels and good operating systems, and IMHO, I've not needed to re-install either one of these once placed onto a machine. I had a webserver running Apache on XP that had multi-month uptimes. My PVR never went down, even while I played WoW, recorded a TV show while scanning another to remove the commercials. I've had a XP install running since it was first loaded in *2004*. As I've said here before, over and over, XP and 2000 don't crash if you know what you are doing. (Any problems I've had were faulty or just poor hardware/drivers, ATI this means you! Sure, it could lock up or need a reboot to drop some of my sins, but I find that every OS does on occasion. The trick is patience, a trick I refuse to learn.)
Alas, I oversaw the wedding of Ubuntu 7 and my HP laptop. A few drivers needed to be wrangled, but there is so much help documentation available online I'm convinced a child could overcome the problems I did (Ubuntu forums... god I love you). Frankly, they won't part until death. The only thing that doesn't work is hibernate and suspend, and I'm not surprised, but they aren't needed. Gnome saves my session, although I never leave anything open, and the boot time is just under one minute. And that is a cold start to a Gnome desktop. Vista couldn't run with a dual core CPU and a gig of RAM, yet Ubuntu seems to barely touch half of the RAM. Compiz, you kill Vista's Aero anyways. I have World of Warcraft working, full speed with the settings basically maxed out while Windows Vista (the OS/API family the game was written for more or less) couldn't run the game over 3fps (I would do a spell while the casting bar was still filling up).
What a huge rant to say: Switch to linux. Your PC will thank you.
About the author: ImaLamer is a huge open source zealot who was turned onto the beauty of the Windows 2000 family (2000, XP) while at school. Frankly he hates Microsoft, and is afraid of them more than his own government, but knows that 2000 and XP just plain work
I'd say Novell is the only ones doing anything to bring Linux to the enterprise desktop.
We don't even have 'open' elections anymore. No matter what the deal is with machines, punch ballots and the like the ballots will just be destroyed after a judge says not to.
Welcome back to the USSA!
I think what you meant to say is that you were not ready for its use. You meant to say is that you don't have 2+ gigs of RAM in each PC, and that they are all not fitted with SATA-III drives, and that they have DirectX 10.0 video cards that are to become obsolete with Vista SP1.
I think that is what you meant.
I'm sure the software is ready, there just isn't a PC that can handle it. Bloat or features, I don't care; there is no reason this OS shouldn't be able to run smoothly on a computer built for 3D games like Doom3 (on extreme settings). I hate having this hatred towards Vista, and maybe someday I'll convert, but I just love XP and 2000 for their solid performance.
You may think that last comment was a joke, but I'll say it again: If you don't have 2000/XP running smoothly, then you aren't doing something right.
You forgot to mention it was the top selling consumer electronics device of all time (my favourite GameBoy tidbit).
(And no I'm not British, favourite, Firefox just thinks I am during spell checks. And btw: Firefox isn't a word based on their dictionary)
Thank you, I was going to add the comment that Shuttleworth's statements are driving a wedge (or pushing it deeper). It isn't the whole statement, it's the one tagged on after the summary.
And it pains me to type this at an Ubuntu laptop.
P.S. Maybe SUSE thinks that they will survive when the lawsuits come and others won't, so there are two sides to this issue.
Frankly, I'm a vegetarian - not because I love animals - but because I hate vegetables.
You really are an Ancient_Hacker. Get with the times, the whore du jure is Paris or Lindsey.
Access does use SQL, but it's interpreted in part by the Windows software component: Microsoft Jet.
Programming Visual Basic over Access is first year Windows programming. I took this class, and I just wanted a networking education - worked out however since my current employer is married to SQL Server with Access front-ends for its OLTP (and their costly proprietary vendor is married to this idea too; $400 to edit some Visual Basic code, 10 lines max). Not very open, but we are managing to hack it daily. I'm sure this isn't allowed, per the license, but I'm already off on a tangent.
Point is, I hate working there.
Thank you, thank you. Besides, paedophiles are after children under 6! Not 15 year old girls. (Google it losers!)
Any type of witch hunt scares me, this seems to be the latest. We didn't seem to have these "predators" 10 years ago. Will you be labeled next?
No, I'd say the TI-99 holds the title for landmark; essentially the same type of machine being introduced today, but ahead of the C-64 by a few years. I wish I could get it out for nostalgia's sake, but my brother took a hammer to it years ago.