These companies obviously don't want my business as a linux or mac user, therefore they don't foresee any losses as a result of me just pirating their music now do they? After all, if I'm just listening to it on my computer, no on my home stereo or in my car, then they must not feel like they are missing out.
I agree, these people are deluding them selves. The music and media industry in general is changing and you can either play along with it or go the way of the Dinosaurs. The future is in distributing/selling music, movies, TV programs etc. over the net on a pay-for-what-I-want basis straight into the customers iPod/Laptop/Home Entertainment Center and if anything it is not Apple but rather Microsoft that missed the bus on this one, at least in so far as music is concerned. Trying to restrict the emergance of Personal Computers (and I don't care if they run Linux/OS.X/Windows) or embedded systems as the prime means for John Q Public to consume this material is plain stupid. If you see these developments as threat and not a business opportunity you are living in the wrong decade. With Apple emerging as a significant player in the online Music business and the CD/DVD as a prime content distributinon system for music and movies being marginalized as we speak this comment is almost funny. Did he miss the whole iPod phenominon? And if so where has he been the last couple of years?
I know the Pentium M systems are faster, cheaper, and (if my experiences are the rule not the exception) more reliable.
I don't think that a system becomes inherently more reliable simply by having a Pentium M in it. The PPC CPU in my PowerBook does not cause the OS to panic any more or less than the Lintel/Wintel boxen all around me. If you are referring to the general reliability of PowerBooks vs Lintel/Wintel Laptops I can only point out that I work in an environment where alot of relatively high end IBM and Dell notebooks see service. Ok.... one can can split hairs over whether those qualify as high-end brands or not but in essence the list price for these PC laptops is about the same or in case of the Laptops the PHB's use it is even greater than that of a PowerBook and there is any number of cases of these PC Machines breaking down just as much or even more than my PowerBook. One of my colleagues has gone through two motherboards and a broken CDRW drive and is now working with a PCMCIA Ethernet card having given up on getting the one built into his Thinkpad repaired. That being said I am rather looking forward to seeing the Pentium M (or what ever other Intel CPU Apple chooses to use) installed in Powerbooks but I don't think the mere installation of this Intel CPU will magically make them any more reliable. I don't use Mac because they are colossally better hardware than PCs, I use them because they ship with the best Unix desktop OS on the market and because the hardware is usually more elegantly packaged resulting in PowerBooks that are usually smaller and lighter than most PC Laptops are.
...zapping a Taliban target in Afghanistan with a Paveway II or III bomb (never mind a JDAM) dropped form an F-16 costs somewhat more than $10.000 if you factor the fuel costs, maintenance work done, aircraft losses, cost for support structure/logistics/spares etc. into the cost-per-strike the tag is pretty hight. Plus we haven't even begun to discuss intel assets involved such as the FAC bird/Drone/Satelite used to pin the target or any possible ground forces involved. Smart bombs sound very cool until you consider that this is often what it costs to knock out a few of Ghazis with Kalashnikovs, a squad machine gun and an RPG-7 or two. You can bet equpping, training and fielding that force cost alot less than even one of the air strikes needed to zap them.
I really don't think that Microsoft aspires to be the next Apple...or Google...or Linux...COMBINED.
No, perhaps not but I bet they would give anything to see Vista get the same kind of reviews in the computer press as OS.X has gotten. I'm not even going to get into the subject of how likely they are to see Windows work up the same kind of security record, any time sooon, as OS.X and Linux already have. It must be frustrating for a corporation that turns such great profits that they can't buy that kind of publicity. Of course they will still try....
... on the sucessful deployment of a well crafted stealth-troll. Judging from the response you got it didn't show up on the radars of many of the resident Linux users.
That being said I agree with you (despite the troll factor). For the average user OS.X is definetly easyer to install and use on a laptop than Linux. I know a number of Linux laptop users and I shudder to think what Joe User would do when confronted with some of the flaming hoops these guys had to jump through, for expample, to get their Wifi to work. Contrast that with my PowerBook where the Wifi... well... it just worked out of the box. You can flame me endlessly with how your Wifi card on your specific laptop running distro X also worked out of the box but for one such example there is plenty of horror stories about some piece of hardware either not working at all on a Linux laptop or only being persuaded to work after major digital surgery on the OS and those stories definetly outnumber similar stories about OS.X.
I a word? The PHB crowd demands it. Besides, even though I prefer Unix in its various flavors and use it exclusively on my desktop machine and my own servers I don't mind working with Windows. There is a number of solutions where it's use is mandatory either because there is a demand for Windows specific solutions like Frontpage or because a bigass customer demands Windows being used. Money talks bullshit walks and if the money says Windows I use Windows, I push Unix/Linux as far as I can but if the are dead set on Windows then so be it. I just think that if Microsoft wants to be taken seriously as a server OS vendor they have to include a much much bigger kit of commandline tools. Yes, I know Linux exists, and yes, I know that even on Windows I can painstakingly build my own toolkit with Perl/VB/C# etc... But I don't see why I should have to do that if every other Server OS vendor on the market provides these tools as standard? For all I care they can choose not install these tools by default to avoid confusing they "part-time-admins", just so long as they power tools are there on the Install disk for advanced users to select when we install a Windows Server OS.
If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.
I'd settle for a better IIS-FTP component, the one in IIS 6 is a bit of a joke. As for the Metabase , yes it could be more transparent but it isn't that complicated and there is an excellent programming interface for it. Most of all I'd really like to see Microsoft cough up the ability to configure absolutely every aspect of IIS (and Windows it self for that matter) from the commandline. Basically I want the option of being able to do absoloutely everything I can do with the Windows GUI admin tools but over a lousy GPRS connection via a remote text based shell. And this to the point where I don't have to see a Windows desktop for months should the need arise. Even in Windows 2003 the commandline toolkit that comes with Windows is incomplete although Microsoft does offer a bunch of administrator toolkits that help alot but I still fail to see why these have to be tracked down and downloaded seperately rather than being supplied with the OS.
Could this be a lead in to apple in the cell phone market? Or at least a partnership in that area?
If they just licensed software that could greatly cut into their profit margins and their control over the style which is one of the things that makes them so popular.
I'll say it again, the future is in some sort of hybrid between a PDA, GSM/GPRS telephone and an iPod like media player. These gizmos will probably come in several sizes like the Blackberry phones do to cater to the minnmalists as well as those who don't mind talking into a brick sized PDA. If Apple moves into the mobile phone market they will (judging from paste experience with the way they and the iPod caught the music industry with its pants down) really shake that market up which is not a bad thing since innovation in mobile phone design has stagnated in the last few years (with some notable exceptions though). Apple already has iTunes/iPod, they are really good at man/nachine interface design and they have the development muscle to write a decent mini OS for these devices and most of all they are not afraid of going into a new market and doing everything nobody else is thinks won't work.
Me to, desktop machines that's fine but I'd always buy an extended warranty or an insurance for a laptop. Furthermore I would be very hesitant to buy a laptop on Ebay, especially not over a national border, precisely because I would have no warranty except the International one which can sometimes be very hard to cash in.
I'd add laptops to that list. I have had three of them, my first was a Toshiba which developed a broked LCD display (a month before the 1 year warranty expired) and a loose power connector (After warranty expired). The next one was an IBM laptop which I had for a loooooong time that also developed a broken LCD (After standard warranty expired but this time I bought an extended one). My current machine is a Powerbook which so far has gone through two defective LCD's (Factory flaw which Apple fixed without complaint) and an improperly re-assebled CD/DVD drive that assassinated a Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac disk (Original not pirate copy, also replaced without complaint by Apple although it was not a warranty issue). So does it pay to have an extended warranty? My opinion is a big fat YES but then perhaps I am phenominally unlucky with laptops. I am actually looking forward to finding out what will break down on the Intel-Mac PowerBook I am planning to buy as soon as they become available. One thing is for sure I will buy all the extra insurance for it that I can get.
Still, wish they would have added a radio to this thing.
And a voice recording feature, there isn't one in my iPod mini. I don't suppose they have added one to this thing? Both the Mini and the Micro would make excellent dictaphones.
Maybe that's what the guy in the article who said "Email is a business tool, not a personal messaging system" meant, but that particular sentence is totally false. Email is a set of network protocols that can be used for whatever. What is acceptable usage needs to be explicitly defined in company policy.
Even it is true enough that these secreteries misused the E-Mail system. However, I get the feeling they were not fired for that. They were fired for the fact that the correspontence became public and their employer was embarrassed. I rather doubt they sent this to rival firms them selves let alone the entire city of Sydney so I still say the secretaries should have been reprimanded, severely repremanded, and the pinkslip should have been reserved for the moron who made company E-Mail coresspondence public property. I get the feeling that if this flame war had not been leaked a reprimand is all these women would have gotten.
Dinosaurs have been depicted as bird-like for at least the last 20 years. Even since the 90s, Jurassic Park (the original anyway) tapped noted palentologists to give the dinosaurs what was then a contemporary view of them - fast, warm blooded, very bird like. Many contemporary depictions of dinosaurs have them behaving in a birdlike manner or looking like birds (to the point of having rudimentary or even full fledged feathers).
True enough but the story cited in the/. report is not about the general anatomical similarities between preditory dinosaurs and birds which is well documented. It is about the debait about the extent to which predatory diosaurs were feathered which has been debated. AFAIK (In no paleontologist my knowledge of these matter comes largely from documentaries and science journals) it has until now been assumed that feathering was limited to a numer of smaller raptor species. If it is indeed true that irrefutable evidence has been found that even the largest flesh eating dinosaurs such as T.Rex, Allosaurus etc... were feathered that is indeed news. I was not aware that this has been common knowledge for the last 20 years. I for one look forward to seeing that proto-T.Rex fossil, has anybody seen images of this specimen?
... that the state of Massachusetts bottom line is not just cost. They are arguing that open file formats = democracy and closed file formats don't which makes sense to me. A citizen should not be forced to invest money in proprietary software because that is the only way he/she can read official documentation. The current situation of publishing official electronic documentation in *.doc, *.xls or some other closed file format is akin to making law books publically available for free or at worst a small nominal fee but printing them in such a way that you must buy special glasses that can only be purchased from company X in order to read them. People take it for granted that laws and other such documents are publically available to anybody at minimal cost when the medium is paper and ink, why should any citizen have to shell out several hundred dollars for a MS Office suite in order to read the exact same material on his computer?
You can have all of the computers, lounges, etc. without throwing out the books which remain one of the best methods for intense focused study.
True, for some reason I absoloutely hate to read long texts on a computer screen. It's fine for short PDF files but as soon as I am dealing with a 50+ pages I like having an oldfashioned paper book in my hands rather than sitting in front of a desktop computer or even a laptop which at least is protable. Even computer printouts are inferior to a book since the book will usually be more compact.
I wasn't aware that PDAs have much of a future. That being said, I still really want one
Actually GSM phones and PDA's seem to be slowly merging. My guess is that the winner will be some form of hybrid between GSM phone, PDA and iPod like media player... GPS functionality (complete with maps and routeplanners) wouldn't be bad either.
I wonder why MS is working on a new command line at all.
Try comparing the old CMD shell in Windows to Bash...
Do people buy Xserves so that they can use the OS X command line? Do people run linux because they love staring at those grey characters on a black screen? No one really likes the command line... plenty of people get by with it, but it's obviously the most primitive computer interface. So why is Microsoft developing it? Do they really believe that *NIX users like their OS because of the command line?
People buy Mac servers precisely because they marry Unix/Linux based commandline power with the advantages of the slicker and simpler Windows GUI interfaces. Most Unix/Linux systems have a very good commandline toolkit but the GUI toolkit often sucks, on Windows this is the other way around. Yes GUI management interfaces have their advantages just like the Command line has its advantages. Alot of computer Geeks seem to believe that GUI tools are for morons but that is crap. You have to choose your tools based on the task you have to perform and sometimes the GUI tools are just better. When you want oversigth and have to deal with alot of information GUI interfaces like the one for MS IIS are very good. The problem begins when you gets stuck with some huge project like, say... migrating 800 websites from IIS 5 (Win 2000) to IIS 6 (Win 2003) with as little downtime as possible. If you do not have a REALLY good set of commandline utilities and scripts you will go mad doing a project like this with GUI management interfaces only. Microsoft is just waking up to the fact that GUI tools nice as they are can not replace the commandline completely and it has taken them far to long to make that realization.
If aviation had stayed strictly military air travel would never have been as available as available as it is today
That is a bad example. Aviation did stay mostly military until WWII. And paradoxically it was the WWII military forces of both sides that finally enabled postware airlines to take up the thread where it was left by the pioneers like Lufthansa, Pan American etc.. before the war. Both the old airlines that survived the war and the mulitude of new ones founded by ex military pilots prospered after WWII not only because the technological advances in military aviation over the war years spilled over into the civillian sector and because of the easy availability of cheap surplus mlitary transports. Air travel is commonplace today because hundreds of thousands or even millons of soldiers on both sides during WWII had been regular passengers on miltary transports during the war and had come to regard air travel as normal mode of travel where as it was considered an exotic luxury before the war.
The typical Apple customer wants an innovatively designed system with good performance and top reliability. He or she wants computer that is ergonomically superior to the competition. You become an Apple customer because because bolting together your own PC and installing Linux on it with all the resulting annoyances due to hardware problems or having to get some software component to work gets in they way of you doing sensible work. Yes, all the annoyances you get with Linux can be solved if you just spend a few hours pouring over man pages and howto files but you simply don't want to spend your time on such things, you want something that works out of the box and keeps working and.... *** gasp *** you are willing to pay for it. There is the perception that Mac users are people who don't want to deal with the "under the hood" part of the operating system but this is crap. It is true that alot of Mac users are quite happy not knowing that the commandline even exists but I know alot of geeks/nerds/hackers (pick your favorite) who like myself use OS.X because it offers most of the advantages of Linux with none of the latters annoyances and imperfections. The whole charm of Apple products is precisely the fact that Apple computers are a tightly controlled hardware platform and that OS.X does NOT run on every random homebuilt PC or Dell box in existance. It never ceases to amaze me why that is so hard for some people to understand that.
How exactly do they check for it being a pirated copy? I mean other then checking their database of registered windows users and comparing it to the computer, how do they know the difference?
Just off hand I guess they they might check the license keys (obviously) if 10.000 plus people are using the same license key something is obviously wrong. In this case you probably woudl get som sort of nag screen stating: "Your license key has been compromised please contact your local Microsoft representative to get a new one... bla... bla... bla..." Secondly they could simply check for the digital signatures of various cracks and hacks available like a virus or spyware program does before any patch is installed. In that case you would get the "Purchase offer". It's not as if these Cracks are terribly hard to come by and I would be disappointed if Microsoft does not have a whole team of engineers and coders collecting Windows cracks off the internet and analyzing them. Whatever else they do I don't expect it to be terribly bullet proof but it will be scary enough and work well enough to persuade alot of pirate consumers to buy a Windows OS "Academic Edition" CD/DVD. In future versions of Windows one should expect them to use some far more formidable DRM technology.
Slashdot Mirror
These companies obviously don't want my business as a linux or mac user, therefore they don't foresee any losses as a result of me just pirating their music now do they? After all, if I'm just listening to it on my computer, no on my home stereo or in my car, then they must not feel like they are missing out.
I agree, these people are deluding them selves. The music and media industry in general is changing and you can either play along with it or go the way of the Dinosaurs. The future is in distributing/selling music, movies, TV programs etc. over the net on a pay-for-what-I-want basis straight into the customers iPod/Laptop/Home Entertainment Center and if anything it is not Apple but rather Microsoft that missed the bus on this one, at least in so far as music is concerned. Trying to restrict the emergance of Personal Computers (and I don't care if they run Linux/OS.X/Windows) or embedded systems as the prime means for John Q Public to consume this material is plain stupid. If you see these developments as threat and not a business opportunity you are living in the wrong decade. With Apple emerging as a significant player in the online Music business and the CD/DVD as a prime content distributinon system for music and movies being marginalized as we speak this comment is almost funny. Did he miss the whole iPod phenominon? And if so where has he been the last couple of years?
I know the Pentium M systems are faster, cheaper, and (if my experiences are the rule not the exception) more reliable.
I don't think that a system becomes inherently more reliable simply by having a Pentium M in it. The PPC CPU in my PowerBook does not cause the OS to panic any more or less than the Lintel/Wintel boxen all around me. If you are referring to the general reliability of PowerBooks vs Lintel/Wintel Laptops I can only point out that I work in an environment where alot of relatively high end IBM and Dell notebooks see service. Ok.... one can can split hairs over whether those qualify as high-end brands or not but in essence the list price for these PC laptops is about the same or in case of the Laptops the PHB's use it is even greater than that of a PowerBook and there is any number of cases of these PC Machines breaking down just as much or even more than my PowerBook. One of my colleagues has gone through two motherboards and a broken CDRW drive and is now working with a PCMCIA Ethernet card having given up on getting the one built into his Thinkpad repaired. That being said I am rather looking forward to seeing the Pentium M (or what ever other Intel CPU Apple chooses to use) installed in Powerbooks but I don't think the mere installation of this Intel CPU will magically make them any more reliable. I don't use Mac because they are colossally better hardware than PCs, I use them because they ship with the best Unix desktop OS on the market and because the hardware is usually more elegantly packaged resulting in PowerBooks that are usually smaller and lighter than most PC Laptops are.
...zapping a Taliban target in Afghanistan with a Paveway II or III bomb (never mind a JDAM) dropped form an F-16 costs somewhat more than $10.000 if you factor the fuel costs, maintenance work done, aircraft losses, cost for support structure/logistics/spares etc. into the cost-per-strike the tag is pretty hight. Plus we haven't even begun to discuss intel assets involved such as the FAC bird/Drone/Satelite used to pin the target or any possible ground forces involved. Smart bombs sound very cool until you consider that this is often what it costs to knock out a few of Ghazis with Kalashnikovs, a squad machine gun and an RPG-7 or two. You can bet equpping, training and fielding that force cost alot less than even one of the air strikes needed to zap them.
I really don't think that Microsoft aspires to be the next Apple...or Google...or Linux...COMBINED.
No, perhaps not but I bet they would give anything to see Vista get the same kind of reviews in the computer press as OS.X has gotten. I'm not even going to get into the subject of how likely they are to see Windows work up the same kind of security record, any time sooon, as OS.X and Linux already have. It must be frustrating for a corporation that turns such great profits that they can't buy that kind of publicity. Of course they will still try....
... on the sucessful deployment of a well crafted stealth-troll. Judging from the response you got it didn't show up on the radars of many of the resident Linux users.
That being said I agree with you (despite the troll factor). For the average user OS.X is definetly easyer to install and use on a laptop than Linux. I know a number of Linux laptop users and I shudder to think what Joe User would do when confronted with some of the flaming hoops these guys had to jump through, for expample, to get their Wifi to work. Contrast that with my PowerBook where the Wifi... well... it just worked out of the box. You can flame me endlessly with how your Wifi card on your specific laptop running distro X also worked out of the box but for one such example there is plenty of horror stories about some piece of hardware either not working at all on a Linux laptop or only being persuaded to work after major digital surgery on the OS and those stories definetly outnumber similar stories about OS.X.
I a word? The PHB crowd demands it. Besides, even though I prefer Unix in its various flavors and use it exclusively on my desktop machine and my own servers I don't mind working with Windows. There is a number of solutions where it's use is mandatory either because there is a demand for Windows specific solutions like Frontpage or because a bigass customer demands Windows being used. Money talks bullshit walks and if the money says Windows I use Windows, I push Unix/Linux as far as I can but if the are dead set on Windows then so be it. I just think that if Microsoft wants to be taken seriously as a server OS vendor they have to include a much much bigger kit of commandline tools. Yes, I know Linux exists, and yes, I know that even on Windows I can painstakingly build my own toolkit with Perl/VB/C# etc... But I don't see why I should have to do that if every other Server OS vendor on the market provides these tools as standard? For all I care they can choose not install these tools by default to avoid confusing they "part-time-admins", just so long as they power tools are there on the Install disk for advanced users to select when we install a Windows Server OS.
If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.
I'd settle for a better IIS-FTP component, the one in IIS 6 is a bit of a joke. As for the Metabase , yes it could be more transparent but it isn't that complicated and there is an excellent programming interface for it. Most of all I'd really like to see Microsoft cough up the ability to configure absolutely every aspect of IIS (and Windows it self for that matter) from the commandline. Basically I want the option of being able to do absoloutely everything I can do with the Windows GUI admin tools but over a lousy GPRS connection via a remote text based shell. And this to the point where I don't have to see a Windows desktop for months should the need arise. Even in Windows 2003 the commandline toolkit that comes with Windows is incomplete although Microsoft does offer a bunch of administrator toolkits that help alot but I still fail to see why these have to be tracked down and downloaded seperately rather than being supplied with the OS.
What happened to Mars by 2015?
An intravenous injection of fiscal reality?
Could this be a lead in to apple in the cell phone market? Or at least a partnership in that area?
If they just licensed software that could greatly cut into their profit margins and their control over the style which is one of the things that makes them so popular.
I'll say it again, the future is in some sort of hybrid between a PDA, GSM/GPRS telephone and an iPod like media player. These gizmos will probably come in several sizes like the Blackberry phones do to cater to the minnmalists as well as those who don't mind talking into a brick sized PDA. If Apple moves into the mobile phone market they will (judging from paste experience with the way they and the iPod caught the music industry with its pants down) really shake that market up which is not a bad thing since innovation in mobile phone design has stagnated in the last few years (with some notable exceptions though). Apple already has iTunes/iPod, they are really good at man/nachine interface design and they have the development muscle to write a decent mini OS for these devices and most of all they are not afraid of going into a new market and doing everything nobody else is thinks won't work.
...your real name is Gary Larson?
Me to, desktop machines that's fine but I'd always buy an extended warranty or an insurance for a laptop. Furthermore I would be very hesitant to buy a laptop on Ebay, especially not over a national border, precisely because I would have no warranty except the International one which can sometimes be very hard to cash in.
I'd add laptops to that list. I have had three of them, my first was a Toshiba which developed a broked LCD display (a month before the 1 year warranty expired) and a loose power connector (After warranty expired). The next one was an IBM laptop which I had for a loooooong time that also developed a broken LCD (After standard warranty expired but this time I bought an extended one). My current machine is a Powerbook which so far has gone through two defective LCD's (Factory flaw which Apple fixed without complaint) and an improperly re-assebled CD/DVD drive that assassinated a Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac disk (Original not pirate copy, also replaced without complaint by Apple although it was not a warranty issue). So does it pay to have an extended warranty? My opinion is a big fat YES but then perhaps I am phenominally unlucky with laptops. I am actually looking forward to finding out what will break down on the Intel-Mac PowerBook I am planning to buy as soon as they become available. One thing is for sure I will buy all the extra insurance for it that I can get.
Still, wish they would have added a radio to this thing.
And a voice recording feature, there isn't one in my iPod mini. I don't suppose they have added one to this thing? Both the Mini and the Micro would make excellent dictaphones.
Maybe that's what the guy in the article who said "Email is a business tool, not a personal messaging system" meant, but that particular sentence is totally false. Email is a set of network protocols that can be used for whatever. What is acceptable usage needs to be explicitly defined in company policy.
Even it is true enough that these secreteries misused the E-Mail system. However, I get the feeling they were not fired for that. They were fired for the fact that the correspontence became public and their employer was embarrassed. I rather doubt they sent this to rival firms them selves let alone the entire city of Sydney so I still say the secretaries should have been reprimanded, severely repremanded, and the pinkslip should have been reserved for the moron who made company E-Mail coresspondence public property. I get the feeling that if this flame war had not been leaked a reprimand is all these women would have gotten.
Dinosaurs have been depicted as bird-like for at least the last 20 years. Even since the 90s, Jurassic Park (the original anyway) tapped noted palentologists to give the dinosaurs what was then a contemporary view of them - fast, warm blooded, very bird like. Many contemporary depictions of dinosaurs have them behaving in a birdlike manner or looking like birds (to the point of having rudimentary or even full fledged feathers).
/. report is not about the general anatomical similarities between preditory dinosaurs and birds which is well documented. It is about the debait about the extent to which predatory diosaurs were feathered which has been debated. AFAIK (In no paleontologist my knowledge of these matter comes largely from documentaries and science journals) it has until now been assumed that feathering was limited to a numer of smaller raptor species. If it is indeed true that irrefutable evidence has been found that even the largest flesh eating dinosaurs such as T.Rex, Allosaurus etc... were feathered that is indeed news. I was not aware that this has been common knowledge for the last 20 years. I for one look forward to seeing that proto-T.Rex fossil, has anybody seen images of this specimen?
True enough but the story cited in the
... that the state of Massachusetts bottom line is not just cost. They are arguing that open file formats = democracy and closed file formats don't which makes sense to me. A citizen should not be forced to invest money in proprietary software because that is the only way he/she can read official documentation. The current situation of publishing official electronic documentation in *.doc, *.xls or some other closed file format is akin to making law books publically available for free or at worst a small nominal fee but printing them in such a way that you must buy special glasses that can only be purchased from company X in order to read them. People take it for granted that laws and other such documents are publically available to anybody at minimal cost when the medium is paper and ink, why should any citizen have to shell out several hundred dollars for a MS Office suite in order to read the exact same material on his computer?
... is certainly an important consideration but the really important question everyone here wants an answer to is:
/. moderators!?!
Will this test work on
You can have all of the computers, lounges, etc. without throwing out the books which remain one of the best methods for intense focused study.
True, for some reason I absoloutely hate to read long texts on a computer screen. It's fine for short PDF files but as soon as I am dealing with a 50+ pages I like having an oldfashioned paper book in my hands rather than sitting in front of a desktop computer or even a laptop which at least is protable. Even computer printouts are inferior to a book since the book will usually be more compact.
I wasn't aware that PDAs have much of a future. That being said, I still really want one
Actually GSM phones and PDA's seem to be slowly merging. My guess is that the winner will be some form of hybrid between GSM phone, PDA and iPod like media player... GPS functionality (complete with maps and routeplanners) wouldn't be bad either.
...if nothing else that is one cool photo, definitely worthy of a place on my desktop.
I wonder why MS is working on a new command line at all.
Try comparing the old CMD shell in Windows to Bash...
Do people buy Xserves so that they can use the OS X command line? Do people run linux because they love staring at those grey characters on a black screen? No one really likes the command line... plenty of people get by with it, but it's obviously the most primitive computer interface. So why is Microsoft developing it? Do they really believe that *NIX users like their OS because of the command line?
People buy Mac servers precisely because they marry Unix/Linux based commandline power with the advantages of the slicker and simpler Windows GUI interfaces. Most Unix/Linux systems have a very good commandline toolkit but the GUI toolkit often sucks, on Windows this is the other way around. Yes GUI management interfaces have their advantages just like the Command line has its advantages. Alot of computer Geeks seem to believe that GUI tools are for morons but that is crap. You have to choose your tools based on the task you have to perform and sometimes the GUI tools are just better. When you want oversigth and have to deal with alot of information GUI interfaces like the one for MS IIS are very good. The problem begins when you gets stuck with some huge project like, say... migrating 800 websites from IIS 5 (Win 2000) to IIS 6 (Win 2003) with as little downtime as possible. If you do not have a REALLY good set of commandline utilities and scripts you will go mad doing a project like this with GUI management interfaces only. Microsoft is just waking up to the fact that GUI tools nice as they are can not replace the commandline completely and it has taken them far to long to make that realization.
If aviation had stayed strictly military air travel would never have been as available as available as it is today
That is a bad example. Aviation did stay mostly military until WWII. And paradoxically it was the WWII military forces of both sides that finally enabled postware airlines to take up the thread where it was left by the pioneers like Lufthansa, Pan American etc.. before the war. Both the old airlines that survived the war and the mulitude of new ones founded by ex military pilots prospered after WWII not only because the technological advances in military aviation over the war years spilled over into the civillian sector and because of the easy availability of cheap surplus mlitary transports. Air travel is commonplace today because hundreds of thousands or even millons of soldiers on both sides during WWII had been regular passengers on miltary transports during the war and had come to regard air travel as normal mode of travel where as it was considered an exotic luxury before the war.
The typical Apple customer wants an innovatively designed system with good performance and top reliability. He or she wants computer that is ergonomically superior to the competition. You become an Apple customer because because bolting together your own PC and installing Linux on it with all the resulting annoyances due to hardware problems or having to get some software component to work gets in they way of you doing sensible work. Yes, all the annoyances you get with Linux can be solved if you just spend a few hours pouring over man pages and howto files but you simply don't want to spend your time on such things, you want something that works out of the box and keeps working and.... *** gasp *** you are willing to pay for it. There is the perception that Mac users are people who don't want to deal with the "under the hood" part of the operating system but this is crap. It is true that alot of Mac users are quite happy not knowing that the commandline even exists but I know alot of geeks/nerds/hackers (pick your favorite) who like myself use OS.X because it offers most of the advantages of Linux with none of the latters annoyances and imperfections. The whole charm of Apple products is precisely the fact that Apple computers are a tightly controlled hardware platform and that OS.X does NOT run on every random homebuilt PC or Dell box in existance. It never ceases to amaze me why that is so hard for some people to understand that.
How exactly do they check for it being a pirated copy? I mean other then checking their database of registered windows users and comparing it to the computer, how do they know the difference?
Just off hand I guess they they might check the license keys (obviously) if 10.000 plus people are using the same license key something is obviously wrong. In this case you probably woudl get som sort of nag screen stating: "Your license key has been compromised please contact your local Microsoft representative to get a new one... bla... bla... bla..." Secondly they could simply check for the digital signatures of various cracks and hacks available like a virus or spyware program does before any patch is installed. In that case you would get the "Purchase offer". It's not as if these Cracks are terribly hard to come by and I would be disappointed if Microsoft does not have a whole team of engineers and coders collecting Windows cracks off the internet and analyzing them. Whatever else they do I don't expect it to be terribly bullet proof but it will be scary enough and work well enough to persuade alot of pirate consumers to buy a Windows OS "Academic Edition" CD/DVD. In future versions of Windows one should expect them to use some far more formidable DRM technology.
I don't mind the noise, as long as I have speakers capable of blasting Metallica louder than the vacuum cleaner.
I pity your neighbors....