I would be surprised if MS actually did do this, but it would be nice to have a 'clean break' from legacy and a fresh start. I don't mind mickysoft as a software platform, it just bugs me that you have to deal with so much legacy with it.
Would it really be hard for them to create a sandbox for Win9x or even older XP shit to run in, but leaving the rest of the OS uncluttered.
It seems like we almost got that when MS moved from win98 -> Win2k, but who knows.
I've tried to like Vista but ended up restoring my old XP system on my dell from the rescue DVD. Maybe in 2 years they'll have Vista where XP is at now, but I don't know how they are going to catch up to XP with Vista and still put out a next gen OS product in 3-4 years without getting another 'Vista'.
"OK I have to call BS here. If you bothered to look at the drivers they are labled as BETA drivers. SLI is not supported under Vista even in the new April driver release. I have a GeForce 8800 GTX and have been testflying Vista as a dual boot. Vista so far has been running great for me. Granted I have 4 gigs ram, a powerful graphics card, Overclocked 3.4 Ghz dual core CPU, and gobs of hard drive space but I haven't seen any of these stability issues people are screaming about. Based on your post you sound like someone who jumped in blind and was expecting too much. Think about that. Vista is still basicly a beta OS. The driver support still isn't there and there are still no Vista apps out there. There is no reason to run Vista yet. At this point it's a toy."
I'm curious as to what your saying is bullshit? My computer isn't what I say or that Vista doesn't work for me? I have 4 gigs of ram, 2 8800 GTX boards, quad core extreme CPU, etc.
I didn't dual boot, I worked on vista clean install with no dual boot. I was committed to give it a try and I ate the dog food buddy, when you want to run your computer with vista for a few months lets talk. Until then you cry bullshit, I cry ignorance:)
I have no axe to grind with MS or Vista, I'm happily waiting for it to work well on my hardware. I'm sure over time they will sort out the issues, but I guess it's unfair for me to post MY experience using it? I have a dell restore CD that I was able to put XP back on, keep my docs on an external drive anyway.. so no biggie. I'll wait for SP1 to give it another try.
I have 2 fast disks striped w/hardware raid and things like file copies felt sluggish and slow. (Moving files around the hard disk).
Using the windows explorer was numbingly frustrating.
The Video driver would crash frequently, even after disabling SLI (I know, it's nVidia's problem, not MS's...) But, the driver would recover and then it would go into a chain of driver crash warnings.
The BSOD's would occur not hourly, but seemingly about 1-2x per week.
The AERO didn't seem to make the system sluggish, but I'm running the fastest video cards on the market..
I'm sure if your running a simple system, integrated graphics card and AC97 audio, your disk configuration isn't complex, or has good drivers.. you might be ok, but some of the subtle problems of vista don't show up until after a month or two of using it. (I've been using since Beta 2 off and on, including RTM and bought a copy at launch).
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800), and I put a copy of vista on that machine and it works fine, but all she does on her computer is open the web browser and play solitaire. She has FAR from high end hardware, and she runs it in the high graphics desktop mode without a hickup. the issues I've described on my machine doesn't bother her, she doesn't do things like open the file explorer or copy large files around.
We ordered a batch of dell low end desktop for customer-service reps here at our office, they are running Vista. They have integrated video cards (probably Intel) and it seems to be fine with Aero running, 1 gig of ram. But the only app they use is Mozilla.
I personally regret not buying a Mac Pro after spending 3 or so months fighting with Vista on my new machine, I've concluded that XP will have to work until it's EOL'd and I can feel I didn't completely waste my money on that Dell and buy another Mac to replace it.
"No one will use a product at home that is not used in business without good reason. "
That statement is just dumb. I'm not going to even bother to respond to it.
"People forget that one of the biggest buyers of systems in the government, and we are always swapping hardware and shuffling systems around. At home I run a dual core 64 bit laptop, and it's barely up to par, but it's better then my friends MACBook Pro."
That's funny you feel that way. Not sure where you work, but where i am developers are jumping over each other to get Mac laptops or pro stations and a few have even paid for them out of their pocket.
It's funny you bag on Mac hardware (which is fine) but at the end by this statement I can see why you say that: "I run Linux at home and it's a headache going between XP and Ubuntu, but it's worth it because it's free and stable." I don't think you know elegance and design if it walked up to you and gave you a donkey-punch.
"It's just not feasible to use Java to do something when I know it will be slower and require more overhead then C++, Pearl, or.NET."
As far as Java and slow, nobody in their right mind would say that Java on Desktop is great, but there is nothing wrong with running it on the server. Web pages will run just as fast w/Java as they do with C# and if your writing web apps in C++ I question the credibility of your opinion. You made comment of your development starting to move web based, our development has been web based since 98 and we have worked with Perl/PHP then moved onto Java about 6 years ago.
Now we're making the same transition again from Java to Ruby on Rails. We've launched our second large scale RoR based project, the productivity of our programmers has more than doubled moving from Java to RoR with the only expense being slightly slower runtime (which for our application and requirements isn't a big deal, we're not Yahoo or Google). Anyone who's actually making decisions based on $ will see really quickly that the real expense is the dumb-ass programmer that's being paid $100k to write web applications in C++ when they can be done in 1/20th the amount of time with the right tools.
As a matter of fact, as a business the level of rapid deployment we can do now having improved our framework has given us new oppurtunity for growth into services we in the past had to leave alone due to lack of developer resources.
I can buy 4 dell 850 rack (XEON's with 2 gigs ram) servers for the LESS than the cost of 4 weeks of one of our engineers, a productive software stack for development so far outweighs the cost of hardware I can't imagine that anyone even brings it up anymore for run of the mill business-solution web-based applications.
Your question seems sincere (unlike most of the 'wtf why would you buy this' trolls).
I believe there is a psychology behind people who like to 'Early Adopt'. They are risk takers, and people who understand perfectly that the technology won't perform exactly as expected or hoped. These people are more apt to take chances than maybe what other people could be comfortable with. Just because you might have a miserable experience playing with untested and unrefined software, other people get a thrill of being the first to adapt and enjoy the self education of trying something new.
Here is an interesting article on the 'psychology of desire'.
It is actually exciting to live in a time where we have a CEO like Jobs. He's the only example of a true living Willy Wonka in my lifetime.
I can't think of one more individual like Steve that inspires me to not only pull out my wallet and hand over thousands of dollars, but do it with a smile.
"Back few years ago, it's an american spy plane which literally hit down a Chinese fight jet just few koilmeters away from China's coast."
You really believe that a prop-based spy plan intentionally HIT a fighter-jet out of the sky?? Give me a break. Your pilot got reckless in trying to coarse them away from your air-space. I'm not saying that spy plane should of been there to begin with, but I find it mildly amusing, and more than disturbing, that you buy into your ministry of informations claims that the evil Americans knocked their fighter jet out of the sky.
Out of respect to the dead, I won't rant on how terrible of a pilot of the Chinese fighter pilot must of been if that truly was the case.
You deleted it off your system, but I am sure you use other popular web applications that are built on java.
CNet, Ebay, Amazon, Salesforce.com, Dilberts comic website.. the list goes on and on.
I'd venture to say you can't do much on the internet without using Java. I use JEdit daily, also I do all of our companies CRM in Java.
Java has taken care of me, I never regret having spent the last 10 years investing myself into it.
I am honestly curious what your skeptical about w/Java. Thats like saying you skeptical about roads or cars... you might not have a car in your garage, but the rest of the world is using one.
I estimate that I'll be able to use a copy of Windows Vista and actually use the software for 2 years, before I either upgrade my machine and don't have any more installs left.
I compare it with other stuff I buy and use daily, and break things down to a per-day cost.
Per Day charge:
Vista (Pro equiv, $299 2 years) : $.41 per day Tiger ($129, 2 years till next os upgrade) : $0.17 per day XP Pro (Used 1 copy since launch - 5 years paid for OEM, apro $150): $.08 per day Ubuntu : $0.0 per day , maybe a fraction of a penny considering the cost of media to burn the disk (though I use rewriteables for Linux)
Other things I pay for:
Cable TV: $1.00 per day Verizon Service w/Blackberry: $8.30 Daily World of Warcraft Account: $.49 per day
Basically, the cost of using Visa is pretty close to any MMO that charges $15 a month for usage.
If the re-install issues get sorted out and I can get 4 years of use out of the product (which is unlikely due to the frequency I replace my windows (gaming) machine hardware through upgrades, the cost per use is closer to what Tiger costs. Of course this doesn't take into account the costs of maintenance (headache medicine), etc. There is a strong premium for using Vista, and using XP Pro as long as I can only makes that investment better value. (Though, I have had to re-install Vista probably 10 times over the years due to various issues such as bit-rot, malware, virus, etc, major hardware upgrades)
I was a HUGE fan of DAoC, played it religiously for almost 4 years. Unfortunately during the major duration of that time I had 2 accounts active to compete in what I considered a very enjoyable PvP experience. What I would consider the biggest problem with DAoC next to game balance was the issues of botting.
Is botting going to be acceptable in the Warhammer Online world, or is the development team taking steps from a design phase to prevent botting (and creating the requirement to have one) to compete in PvP? Is there 'buffing' classes, or are the buffs spread out more evenly across ALL of the classes to prevent a single botting class. Will crafting/alchemy be used to help remedy the problem (if perceived as such)?
As a player of DAoC thats the #1 reason I left DaoC to play WoW. I was tired of paying for multiple accounts, and I didn't want to go back through the leveling grind/ToA on a classic server where the ranged buffs where implemented.
Your joking right.. In my humble opinion, wine is a piece of shit.
Computers aren't many thousands of dollars anymore, buy a $300 emachine, and run windows on your office computer if you need to. Come on, get real.. who can't afford to buy windows that needs to be running it?
I can go down to Walmart and BUY a computer with windows and be just fine. If I need to run Peachtree. I have a small business myself (Am a partner), we have about 6 Linux servers.. 1 is running PGSQL, one is running Resin/Java... the rest are running Asterisk. We put them into a 1/2 rack that we pay $400 a month for. We have a office full of windows workstations for our Customer Service, though all of them are using Windows & Xten phones for SIP taking incoming calls on Asterisk from a phone provider who has a sip gateway. Yes , we are windows friendly... but shit.. come on!
We have an accountant that keeps our books in order, taxes in line.. she uses Peach-tree. if someone thinks a -real- business is going to have a hard time paying $375 for a low end dell, with windows.. to do NOTHING but run Peach-tree... they have their head on backwards. You will spend more than that in man hours trying to get some linux goon trying to get whatever wacky-ass hack-accounting package to work.
Windows is a commodity, cost of doing business. Running Linux or Mac is nothing more than a luxury, being a linux/java programmer myself.. I don't see any savings at all, I find nothing more than comfort in working in my own familiar environment (My Mac doing Java programming and voiceapp work on Asterisk for Linux servers).. but that's just as expensive as a MSDN membership and paying for windows licenses on servers...
Was 16/17sh in high school, met a woman who was 10 years older than me (25/26sh). (.. and yes, I know she had committed statutory rape but she was hot as hell, and I was the one that instigated it). I remember the huge parties we would have with a bunch of my friends , we would get together.. work on setting up a new BBS using one of our phone lines, or a old 80x86 that my grandma gave me from her small office after she had upgraded...).
I remember when I tried to get a MFM drive through the Security Screening in Las Vegas airport flying home my grandma again gave me, which we used as the storage device for our 28k dialup dos based BBS. 8BBS (Shamelessly stolen from another BBS name that I read in a book which I have long forgotten the source) was our BBS.. I even remember getting pulled into the Principals office for having the "Mad Rudabegas Bomb Handbook". Shit, I would of been sent to Juvi for years for doing that now I am sure.
After years of parties, drinking and even dabbling in drugs, we all seemed to make it through the 1989-1993 BBS years reasonbly unharmed and most of us now live surprisingly productive lives. Eventually my days of BBSing where brought down by wide-spread Internet access.. most of us migrated to ISCABBS when we where able to get low cost Internet dial-up. I attribute 100% of the experience I had in the BBS days to lead me into a great career doing software development.
Right away, Microsoft's revolutionary new revision of the Windows operating system was a hit with home and business users. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern computing world as we know it, the innovations of bittorrent, the deep and involving fun of World of Warcraft, the wide ranging social networks of Myspace and Facebook, none of these would have been possible without Windows XP.
Huh? Every one of those things I can do just fine on my mac without having to even think about XP.
Besides that, I assure you that they would of ALL been possible had we never had XP.
It's been running great for me. I installed it onto a separate IDE drive, thinking I would be right back over to XP after a couple days like I was with Beta 2, but thus far I am quite impressed with what I am seeing.
Note: I did disable the user access control. I don't have to see the annoying popups flashing my screen like I did before, also I am running on modern hardware. (Athlon 4400+ X2, 2 gigs ram, ATI 1600XT). I downloaded the ATI Vista RC1 drivers and they seem to work fine.
The performance doesn't feel degraded like Beta 2 felt, from XP. I have all the graphics options cranked up and it feels snappy and responsive.
Programs that I use frequently work great. I spend a lot of time doing Java dev on Linux server, so I have Putty open w/20 browser windows. My email client is GMail and I use IM clients from most of the networks. Office 03 runs fine, haven't had a glitch yet with that. On my free time I do play World of Warcraft, and once I disabled the UAC and installed the ATI drivers, it works great. I can tab out without any problems, and I have fewer problems tabbing in and out of the game than before. I don't know if it's my imagination , but the game actually feels faster and I have less stutters when tabbing in from another program. (I think the process affinity would attach to the second core.. not sure what exactly was causing it in XP, but I haven't yet run into that problem).
I disabled the Sleep functionality over time, the monitor will turn off after an hour.. but when I leave the 'sleep after x-time' , it has a problem waking up. It's likely drivers or something on my hardware that's causing problems.
I know this post will probably get modded down, as it's not a 'I hate Microsoft Ubuntu4tehwin!!11' , but I would go so far to say that I will likely just keep using RC1 until Vista ships, and I don't think I will have a problem going out and buying the OS once it hits the shelves. (OEM of course!):) I am a early adopter, I love trying new things.. so even though I am having a great experience with RC1 thus far, I am sure it's not for everyone. Maybe I have been lucky to have hardware that it runs well on and I am not experiencing the problems others are having.
If I can give one word of advice, is to disable the UAC until programs your running frequently have had time to test their own QC against running in a more protected environment.
BTW, I grabbed a copy of RC1 off a Torrent and installed it with my Beta2 key without any problems.;-) Give RC1 a shot, my guess is it will pleasantly surprise you.
"Seriously why does a friggin beta need so much coverage here."
Hmm, lets think about this Einstein. Maybe because the Windows franchise is the most widely used consumer desktop OS on the planet?
Quit being such a fuck-tart, you don't have to click and read the story if you don't like it. Filter the MS related news if you don't want to read it. Based on the number of responses this story gets, I imagine that a number of people are genuinely interested in what progress is being made on a OS that will be shoved down all our throats over the next 5-10 years.
I picked up a xbox360 shortly after launch, of which I was excited about the aspects of XBox Live. I signed up for the free 30 day trial, which converted into a full account after the 30 days if it's not canceled.
I plugged in my credit card and my xbox live gold account was activated. About 2 months later I started getting errors on my login when I would turn on my xbox360. I remembered my wife having lost her debit card, the bank re-issued new cards to us and that the information on the card was changed and I need to go back and re-activate my account with my new card. I tried through the xbox360 interface and kept getting an error message, but I was told by a friend that I would probably need to just do it from online.
So I went to xbox-live and signed in, and added in my new credit card and immediately (without asking), I was charged $15 for 2 months of service that was missed (Fair enough), my balance was $0 though and I still couldn't login to my xbox-live account. If I used a service, I don't have a problem paying for it. This wasn't Microsoft's fault my debit card was reported stolen.
It took a lot of searching, but eventually I found the 800 number and called customer service. I was promptly in touch with a live person after a few menu choices, with almost no wait. Now at this point, I was starting to get a little annoyed as the whole thing seemed like a strange run-around for what I would perceive as a common problem. The person on the phone immediately told me that my account was cancelled due to non-payment, and even after explaining the situation he told me that though my account is in good standing that they where not able to re-activate my account and if I wanted to have an xbox-live account I would need to create a brand new account. I had started to get frustrated at the situation and articulated to the customer service rep how I felt about the policy of perma-locking an account after a default on payment. Despite the non-malitious nature of the situation, I was shocked that they would refuse to re-activate the account. The person on the phone kept repeating "Sir, you have to see this from Microsofts point of view.. you missed 2 paymenhts", which only upset me more.
This was INCREDIBLY frustrating as anyone who has a xbox-live account would understand that there is a potentially large time investment and how frustrating this situation would be. I have many friends that have my old xbox live account added, all my 'accomplishments and gamerpoints' (the way xbox tracks your success as a gamer) would be gone. It would be similar to having a World of Warcraft account that after a lapsed payment is locked or deleted, never letting you back in unless you bought a new account and gave up all your progress in the game.
After this experience, I refuse to pay for xbox-gold membership (Silver is free, and this would of never happened had I started with a silver membership). And I would STRONGLY warn anyone who is considering either upgrading to a gold account, or buying a new xbox 360 and getting a new xbox live account to consider that it's very possible and likely that you will have your account locked and be forced to start over with a new xbox membership.
This is how these markets are supposed to work. Let the smartest/best company with the best product find success and enjoy the fiscal rewards.
If MSN can out-do Google, I'd move my search traffic there in a heartbeat. Of course Google won't let that happen, WE THE -CONSUMER- WINS! This isn't communism, no reason that a company should have to give their competition their work if they put the effort into solving a problem/finding a solution.
I have been a PC gamer for years and it has been the primary reason that a Mac usually sits to the side of my windows machine, and not in front of it. As I have gotten older and my free time is more and more sparse, I tend to enjoy less and less video games and more and more console games as I can jump on and off and enjoy.
The only game I have played on a computer in the last year is World of Warcraft, which now plays nicely on my MacBook Pro.
The rest of my entertainment from video games consists of an occasional round of Fight Night 3 on my xbox 360 or some hack'n'slash with Oblivion (again on the 360) or Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (again on the 360).
My gaming career was on the PC, never gave the consoles much credit as I could build a PC to do much better graphics and seemed to have more fun online playing games.
But , other than my occasional WoW binges, who wants to be cramped in a corner of the house huddled behind a PC when you can spend that time hanging with your kids playing fun games behind a 65" high-def TV with graphics that match what I am seeing on my PC, without any compromise of playing online with other people (via. xbox live for example).
To get to the point of my rant, that's the biggest reason my Mac is now a viable computer for me.. not the interoperability, but more the fact I don't really game on my PC any longer.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had a point I'd mod you up.
I would be surprised if MS actually did do this, but it would be nice to have a 'clean break' from legacy and a fresh start. I don't mind mickysoft as a software platform, it just bugs me that you have to deal with so much legacy with it.
Would it really be hard for them to create a sandbox for Win9x or even older XP shit to run in, but leaving the rest of the OS uncluttered.
It seems like we almost got that when MS moved from win98 -> Win2k, but who knows.
I've tried to like Vista but ended up restoring my old XP system on my dell from the rescue DVD. Maybe in 2 years they'll have Vista where XP is at now, but I don't know how they are going to catch up to XP with Vista and still put out a next gen OS product in 3-4 years without getting another 'Vista'.
"OK I have to call BS here. If you bothered to look at the drivers they are labled as BETA drivers. SLI is not supported under Vista even in the new April driver release. I have a GeForce 8800 GTX and have been testflying Vista as a dual boot. Vista so far has been running great for me. Granted I have 4 gigs ram, a powerful graphics card, Overclocked 3.4 Ghz dual core CPU, and gobs of hard drive space but I haven't seen any of these stability issues people are screaming about. Based on your post you sound like someone who jumped in blind and was expecting too much. Think about that. Vista is still basicly a beta OS. The driver support still isn't there and there are still no Vista apps out there. There is no reason to run Vista yet. At this point it's a toy."
:)
:P
I'm curious as to what your saying is bullshit? My computer isn't what I say or that Vista doesn't work for me? I have 4 gigs of ram, 2 8800 GTX boards, quad core extreme CPU, etc.
I didn't dual boot, I worked on vista clean install with no dual boot. I was committed to give it a try and I ate the dog food buddy, when you want to run your computer with vista for a few months lets talk. Until then you cry bullshit, I cry ignorance
I have no axe to grind with MS or Vista, I'm happily waiting for it to work well on my hardware. I'm sure over time they will sort out the issues, but I guess it's unfair for me to post MY experience using it? I have a dell restore CD that I was able to put XP back on, keep my docs on an external drive anyway.. so no biggie. I'll wait for SP1 to give it another try.
Talk about shooting the fucking messenger
I use the XPS rig for gaming, also linux dev testing while at home. (I run VMWare server with sometimes 2 or 3 instances of Linux going).
My wife uses her Vista system for only surfing and solitaire, she doesn't doesn't have a complex or high end system, and she loves vista.
I kind of went along with that too, but have now re-installed XP out of frustration.
I'm using a Dual 8800 GTX video card (the Dell XPS H2C system: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetai
I have 2 fast disks striped w/hardware raid and things like file copies felt sluggish and slow. (Moving files around the hard disk).
Using the windows explorer was numbingly frustrating.
The Video driver would crash frequently, even after disabling SLI (I know, it's nVidia's problem, not MS's...) But, the driver would recover and then it would go into a chain of driver crash warnings.
The BSOD's would occur not hourly, but seemingly about 1-2x per week.
The AERO didn't seem to make the system sluggish, but I'm running the fastest video cards on the market..
I'm sure if your running a simple system, integrated graphics card and AC97 audio, your disk configuration isn't complex, or has good drivers.. you might be ok, but some of the subtle problems of vista don't show up until after a month or two of using it. (I've been using since Beta 2 off and on, including RTM and bought a copy at launch).
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800), and I put a copy of vista on that machine and it works fine, but all she does on her computer is open the web browser and play solitaire. She has FAR from high end hardware, and she runs it in the high graphics desktop mode without a hickup. the issues I've described on my machine doesn't bother her, she doesn't do things like open the file explorer or copy large files around.
We ordered a batch of dell low end desktop for customer-service reps here at our office, they are running Vista. They have integrated video cards (probably Intel) and it seems to be fine with Aero running, 1 gig of ram. But the only app they use is Mozilla.
I personally regret not buying a Mac Pro after spending 3 or so months fighting with Vista on my new machine, I've concluded that XP will have to work until it's EOL'd and I can feel I didn't completely waste my money on that Dell and buy another Mac to replace it.
I was in the area effected, and I was using SMS without any issues.
"No one will use a product at home that is not used in business without good reason. "
That statement is just dumb. I'm not going to even bother to respond to it.
"People forget that one of the biggest buyers of systems in the government, and we are always swapping hardware and shuffling systems around. At home I run a dual core 64 bit laptop, and it's barely up to par, but it's better then my friends MACBook Pro."
That's funny you feel that way. Not sure where you work, but where i am developers are jumping over each other to get Mac laptops or pro stations and a few have even paid for them out of their pocket.
It's funny you bag on Mac hardware (which is fine) but at the end by this statement I can see why you say that: "I run Linux at home and it's a headache going between XP and Ubuntu, but it's worth it because it's free and stable." I don't think you know elegance and design if it walked up to you and gave you a donkey-punch.
"It's just not feasible to use Java to do something when I know it will be slower and require more overhead then C++, Pearl, or
As far as Java and slow, nobody in their right mind would say that Java on Desktop is great, but there is nothing wrong with running it on the server. Web pages will run just as fast w/Java as they do with C# and if your writing web apps in C++ I question the credibility of your opinion. You made comment of your development starting to move web based, our development has been web based since 98 and we have worked with Perl/PHP then moved onto Java about 6 years ago.
Now we're making the same transition again from Java to Ruby on Rails. We've launched our second large scale RoR based project, the productivity of our programmers has more than doubled moving from Java to RoR with the only expense being slightly slower runtime (which for our application and requirements isn't a big deal, we're not Yahoo or Google). Anyone who's actually making decisions based on $ will see really quickly that the real expense is the dumb-ass programmer that's being paid $100k to write web applications in C++ when they can be done in 1/20th the amount of time with the right tools.
As a matter of fact, as a business the level of rapid deployment we can do now having improved our framework has given us new oppurtunity for growth into services we in the past had to leave alone due to lack of developer resources.
I can buy 4 dell 850 rack (XEON's with 2 gigs ram) servers for the LESS than the cost of 4 weeks of one of our engineers, a productive software stack for development so far outweighs the cost of hardware I can't imagine that anyone even brings it up anymore for run of the mill business-solution web-based applications.
Enjoy your C++ web development
Your question seems sincere (unlike most of the 'wtf why would you buy this' trolls).
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I believe there is a psychology behind people who like to 'Early Adopt'. They are risk takers, and people who understand perfectly that the technology won't perform exactly as expected or hoped. These people are more apt to take chances than maybe what other people could be comfortable with. Just because you might have a miserable experience playing with untested and unrefined software, other people get a thrill of being the first to adapt and enjoy the self education of trying something new.
Here is an interesting article on the 'psychology of desire'.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=
It is actually exciting to live in a time where we have a CEO like Jobs. He's the only example of a true living Willy Wonka in my lifetime.
I can't think of one more individual like Steve that inspires me to not only pull out my wallet and hand over thousands of dollars, but do it with a smile.
Nice comments, but you didn't list a reason why one might prefer BSD over Linux, or what BSD does 'better'.
Again, no flame.. I'm curious myself, it's been many years since I have touched BSD (OSX aside)
"Back few years ago, it's an american spy plane which literally hit down a Chinese fight jet just few koilmeters away from China's coast."
You really believe that a prop-based spy plan intentionally HIT a fighter-jet out of the sky?? Give me a break. Your pilot got reckless in trying to coarse them away from your air-space. I'm not saying that spy plane should of been there to begin with, but I find it mildly amusing, and more than disturbing, that you buy into your ministry of informations claims that the evil Americans knocked their fighter jet out of the sky.
Out of respect to the dead, I won't rant on how terrible of a pilot of the Chinese fighter pilot must of been if that truly was the case.
You deleted it off your system, but I am sure you use other popular web applications that are built on java.
CNet, Ebay, Amazon, Salesforce.com, Dilberts comic website.. the list goes on and on.
I'd venture to say you can't do much on the internet without using Java. I use JEdit daily, also I do all of our companies CRM in Java.
Java has taken care of me, I never regret having spent the last 10 years investing myself into it.
I am honestly curious what your skeptical about w/Java. Thats like saying you skeptical about roads or cars... you might not have a car in your garage, but the rest of the world is using one.
I estimate that I'll be able to use a copy of Windows Vista and actually use the software for 2 years, before I either upgrade my machine and don't have any more installs left.
I compare it with other stuff I buy and use daily, and break things down to a per-day cost.
Per Day charge:
Vista (Pro equiv, $299 2 years) : $.41 per day
Tiger ($129, 2 years till next os upgrade) : $0.17 per day
XP Pro (Used 1 copy since launch - 5 years paid for OEM, apro $150): $.08 per day
Ubuntu : $0.0 per day , maybe a fraction of a penny considering the cost of media to burn the disk (though I use rewriteables for Linux)
Other things I pay for:
Cable TV: $1.00 per day
Verizon Service w/Blackberry: $8.30 Daily
World of Warcraft Account: $.49 per day
Basically, the cost of using Visa is pretty close to any MMO that charges $15 a month for usage.
If the re-install issues get sorted out and I can get 4 years of use out of the product (which is unlikely due to the frequency I replace my windows (gaming) machine hardware through upgrades, the cost per use is closer to what Tiger costs. Of course this doesn't take into account the costs of maintenance (headache medicine), etc. There is a strong premium for using Vista, and using XP Pro as long as I can only makes that investment better value. (Though, I have had to re-install Vista probably 10 times over the years due to various issues such as bit-rot, malware, virus, etc, major hardware upgrades)
I was a HUGE fan of DAoC, played it religiously for almost 4 years. Unfortunately during the major duration of that time I had 2 accounts active to compete in what I considered a very enjoyable PvP experience. What I would consider the biggest problem with DAoC next to game balance was the issues of botting.
Is botting going to be acceptable in the Warhammer Online world, or is the development team taking steps from a design phase to prevent botting (and creating the requirement to have one) to compete in PvP? Is there 'buffing' classes, or are the buffs spread out more evenly across ALL of the classes to prevent a single botting class. Will crafting/alchemy be used to help remedy the problem (if perceived as such)?
As a player of DAoC thats the #1 reason I left DaoC to play WoW. I was tired of paying for multiple accounts, and I didn't want to go back through the leveling grind/ToA on a classic server where the ranged buffs where implemented.
Thanks for considering this question.
Some???
Your joking right.. In my humble opinion, wine is a piece of shit.
Computers aren't many thousands of dollars anymore, buy a $300 emachine, and run windows on your office computer if you need to. Come on, get real.. who can't afford to buy windows that needs to be running it?
I can go down to Walmart and BUY a computer with windows and be just fine. If I need to run Peachtree. I have a small business myself (Am a partner), we have about 6 Linux servers.. 1 is running PGSQL, one is running Resin/Java... the rest are running Asterisk. We put them into a 1/2 rack that we pay $400 a month for. We have a office full of windows workstations for our Customer Service, though all of them are using Windows & Xten phones for SIP taking incoming calls on Asterisk from a phone provider who has a sip gateway. Yes , we are windows friendly... but shit.. come on!
We have an accountant that keeps our books in order, taxes in line.. she uses Peach-tree. if someone thinks a -real- business is going to have a hard time paying $375 for a low end dell, with windows.. to do NOTHING but run Peach-tree... they have their head on backwards. You will spend more than that in man hours trying to get some linux goon trying to get whatever wacky-ass hack-accounting package to work.
Windows is a commodity, cost of doing business. Running Linux or Mac is nothing more than a luxury, being a linux/java programmer myself.. I don't see any savings at all, I find nothing more than comfort in working in my own familiar environment (My Mac doing Java programming and voiceapp work on Asterisk for Linux servers).. but that's just as expensive as a MSDN membership and paying for windows licenses on servers...
No shit.
Was 16/17sh in high school, met a woman who was 10 years older than me (25/26sh). (.. and yes, I know she had committed statutory rape but she was hot as hell, and I was the one that instigated it). I remember the huge parties we would have with a bunch of my friends , we would get together.. work on setting up a new BBS using one of our phone lines, or a old 80x86 that my grandma gave me from her small office after she had upgraded...).
I remember when I tried to get a MFM drive through the Security Screening in Las Vegas airport flying home my grandma again gave me, which we used as the storage device for our 28k dialup dos based BBS. 8BBS (Shamelessly stolen from another BBS name that I read in a book which I have long forgotten the source) was our BBS.. I even remember getting pulled into the Principals office for having the "Mad Rudabegas Bomb Handbook". Shit, I would of been sent to Juvi for years for doing that now I am sure.
After years of parties, drinking and even dabbling in drugs, we all seemed to make it through the 1989-1993 BBS years reasonbly unharmed and most of us now live surprisingly productive lives. Eventually my days of BBSing where brought down by wide-spread Internet access.. most of us migrated to ISCABBS when we where able to get low cost Internet dial-up. I attribute 100% of the experience I had in the BBS days to lead me into a great career doing software development.
It's been running great for me. I installed it onto a separate IDE drive, thinking I would be right back over to XP after a couple days like I was with Beta 2, but thus far I am quite impressed with what I am seeing.
Note: I did disable the user access control. I don't have to see the annoying popups flashing my screen like I did before, also I am running on modern hardware. (Athlon 4400+ X2, 2 gigs ram, ATI 1600XT). I downloaded the ATI Vista RC1 drivers and they seem to work fine.
The performance doesn't feel degraded like Beta 2 felt, from XP. I have all the graphics options cranked up and it feels snappy and responsive.
Programs that I use frequently work great. I spend a lot of time doing Java dev on Linux server, so I have Putty open w/20 browser windows. My email client is GMail and I use IM clients from most of the networks. Office 03 runs fine, haven't had a glitch yet with that. On my free time I do play World of Warcraft, and once I disabled the UAC and installed the ATI drivers, it works great. I can tab out without any problems, and I have fewer problems tabbing in and out of the game than before. I don't know if it's my imagination , but the game actually feels faster and I have less stutters when tabbing in from another program. (I think the process affinity would attach to the second core.. not sure what exactly was causing it in XP, but I haven't yet run into that problem).
I disabled the Sleep functionality over time, the monitor will turn off after an hour.. but when I leave the 'sleep after x-time' , it has a problem waking up. It's likely drivers or something on my hardware that's causing problems.
I know this post will probably get modded down, as it's not a 'I hate Microsoft Ubuntu4tehwin!!11' , but I would go so far to say that I will likely just keep using RC1 until Vista ships, and I don't think I will have a problem going out and buying the OS once it hits the shelves. (OEM of course!)
If I can give one word of advice, is to disable the UAC until programs your running frequently have had time to test their own QC against running in a more protected environment.
BTW, I grabbed a copy of RC1 off a Torrent and installed it with my Beta2 key without any problems.
"Seriously why does a friggin beta need so much coverage here."
Hmm, lets think about this Einstein. Maybe because the Windows franchise is the most widely used consumer desktop OS on the planet?
Quit being such a fuck-tart, you don't have to click and read the story if you don't like it. Filter the MS related news if you don't want to read it. Based on the number of responses this story gets, I imagine that a number of people are genuinely interested in what progress is being made on a OS that will be shoved down all our throats over the next 5-10 years.
I picked up a xbox360 shortly after launch, of which I was excited about the aspects of XBox Live. I signed up for the free 30 day trial, which converted into a full account after the 30 days if it's not canceled.
I plugged in my credit card and my xbox live gold account was activated. About 2 months later I started getting errors on my login when I would turn on my xbox360. I remembered my wife having lost her debit card, the bank re-issued new cards to us and that the information on the card was changed and I need to go back and re-activate my account with my new card. I tried through the xbox360 interface and kept getting an error message, but I was told by a friend that I would probably need to just do it from online.
So I went to xbox-live and signed in, and added in my new credit card and immediately (without asking), I was charged $15 for 2 months of service that was missed (Fair enough), my balance was $0 though and I still couldn't login to my xbox-live account. If I used a service, I don't have a problem paying for it. This wasn't Microsoft's fault my debit card was reported stolen.
It took a lot of searching, but eventually I found the 800 number and called customer service. I was promptly in touch with a live person after a few menu choices, with almost no wait. Now at this point, I was starting to get a little annoyed as the whole thing seemed like a strange run-around for what I would perceive as a common problem. The person on the phone immediately told me that my account was cancelled due to non-payment, and even after explaining the situation he told me that though my account is in good standing that they where not able to re-activate my account and if I wanted to have an xbox-live account I would need to create a brand new account. I had started to get frustrated at the situation and articulated to the customer service rep how I felt about the policy of perma-locking an account after a default on payment. Despite the non-malitious nature of the situation, I was shocked that they would refuse to re-activate the account. The person on the phone kept repeating "Sir, you have to see this from Microsofts point of view.. you missed 2 paymenhts", which only upset me more.
This was INCREDIBLY frustrating as anyone who has a xbox-live account would understand that there is a potentially large time investment and how frustrating this situation would be. I have many friends that have my old xbox live account added, all my 'accomplishments and gamerpoints' (the way xbox tracks your success as a gamer) would be gone. It would be similar to having a World of Warcraft account that after a lapsed payment is locked or deleted, never letting you back in unless you bought a new account and gave up all your progress in the game.
After this experience, I refuse to pay for xbox-gold membership (Silver is free, and this would of never happened had I started with a silver membership). And I would STRONGLY warn anyone who is considering either upgrading to a gold account, or buying a new xbox 360 and getting a new xbox live account to consider that it's very possible and likely that you will have your account locked and be forced to start over with a new xbox membership.
BUYER BEWARE
Long Live Competition!
This is how these markets are supposed to work. Let the smartest/best company with the best product find success and enjoy the fiscal rewards.
If MSN can out-do Google, I'd move my search traffic there in a heartbeat. Of course Google won't let that happen, WE THE -CONSUMER- WINS! This isn't communism, no reason that a company should have to give their competition their work if they put the effort into solving a problem/finding a solution.
Maybe things have changed over the years, but since when did Slashdot users start reading the articles?
I bet you have a hard time understanding how something as sexy as a mullet could go out of style too.
Sport it with PRIDE!
I have been a PC gamer for years and it has been the primary reason that a Mac usually sits to the side of my windows machine, and not in front of it. As I have gotten older and my free time is more and more sparse, I tend to enjoy less and less video games and more and more console games as I can jump on and off and enjoy.
The only game I have played on a computer in the last year is World of Warcraft, which now plays nicely on my MacBook Pro.
The rest of my entertainment from video games consists of an occasional round of Fight Night 3 on my xbox 360 or some hack'n'slash with Oblivion (again on the 360) or Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (again on the 360).
My gaming career was on the PC, never gave the consoles much credit as I could build a PC to do much better graphics and seemed to have more fun online playing games.
But , other than my occasional WoW binges, who wants to be cramped in a corner of the house huddled behind a PC when you can spend that time hanging with your kids playing fun games behind a 65" high-def TV with graphics that match what I am seeing on my PC, without any compromise of playing online with other people (via. xbox live for example).
To get to the point of my rant, that's the biggest reason my Mac is now a viable computer for me.. not the interoperability, but more the fact I don't really game on my PC any longer.
I really like how Peters site looks/feels. I love the plastic look and clean feel.
Kudo's to all the designers, they all look better than original.
Learn Java or C#
They are probably a little harder to learn the basic concepts, but there is countless materials for learning it.
I would also consider learning Python or Ruby if I was to put myself through a crash-course in programming with Hindsight.