I don't 100% get the reference, as I find that show more insipid than Everyone Hates Raymond, but up north here we already have caffeinated beer.
Personally, I always thought that getting tired from excess alcohol consumption was the body's way of saying ENOUGH!, but it's hugely popular with ravers who can't get their E/meth fix in.
The difference is that with toys (Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and the originator of this nonsense, Cabbage Patch Kids), there's usually a lot to go around, FOR YOUR AVERAGE TOY. There were a lot scarcer toys at those times. The problem is, DEMAND is driven into a frenzy for these few toys due to media exposure.
Game companies operate a little differently. You'll never see parents rioting over a $600 game console, and manufacturers know this. Hence, planned "shortages" in the SUPPLY.
Many older consoles (Nintendo, I'm looking at you) use tamper-proof screws for this supposed reason. Of course, any half-serious "hacker" will find a way in, usually because these screws aren't that hard to find bits for, thanks to the Internet. A lot of the original reasoning, which I can sort of understand), was to keep casual users from opening them up and messing with them.
Unfortunately, as our Zelda cartridges age, the built-in batteries (CR2032, for anyone who cares - one of the most common "watch" batteries out there) are mostly all dead. In order to use these games anymore, you have to open them up and replace the battery.
Tamper-proof screws make this VERY difficult.
Put labels all you want, if it's warranty you're worried about. But please, understand that these things do need repair from time to time, especially after they're out of their expected lifetime. ESPECIALLY with moving parts inside (Sony, I'm looking at you!). There's nothing worse than having to wreck the casing just to get in and fix a few loose wires:(
Most of the past 15 years of Windows software has been SHAREware, not FREEware. Like I said, this is rapidly changing, and for the better IMHO. But what most people traditionally thought of as "free" software for Windows has been anything but - mIRC, Winzip, etc. All shareware. Thankfully apps like CDEX, Media Player Classic (to mention 2 of my favourties) are changing this.
As for including the source *with* a program? When did I ever mention this? I will point out that there is a lot of free software on Windows that is NOT open source, which is a shame - however being open sourced is ALWAYS better, even if the average user won't be changing the source themselves. I'd personally love to tinker with a few non-OSS but yet free Windows apps, and so would other developers - thus benefitting the end-user in the long run.
And software being written for Windows only? More power to 'em. Like I said, CHOICE is good. Especially if they're open-sourced, because we can always work on porting them to Linux:)
Cache isn't some magical thing. It's simply RAM. SRAM, usually, which is why it's so fast (don't have to waste power/time refreshing your contents). At the end of the day, it's just some very fast RAM. It sits between your CPU and the rest of your RAM, and uses its increased speed to "trick" the CPU into performing as if your main RAM is much faster than it is.
In my computer arch course a while back, someone asked why, if cache is so fast, we don't just build computers 100% SRAM memory. Our professor did some back-of-the-napkin calculations for fun. Major $. Have to include the extra space and cooling requirements, of course:)
The other thing, of course, is the good old law of diminishing returns. Cache actually solves the problem VERY nicely. For most people/computers/applications, cache misses aren't that great of a problem, because most computer code lends itself to cache hits (a phenomenon called "locality"). Locality is WHY we have cache in the first place. In general most computing works very well with a tiny amount of very fast cache and a small amount of fast cache. Adding more eventually gets you to the point where you're not seeing much if any improvement. On most modern systems, we're at that point - at least as far as the market will bear.
Oh, and outside of the HPC world, there's no NEED for programmers to worry about memory caching issues. This isn't where most bottlenecks show up, and again, most general-purpose code lends itself very nicely to small amounts of cache. Compilers often help here, too. Most of your average programmers would get better use of their time analyzing the data structures and algorithms they use.
Who cares about quantity of programs?... How the hell does a billion variations on a text editor help me when I want xyz?
I care. I care a lot. When you want xyz, but the only available text editors do xy, or yz, or xz, life sucks. When you have the option to download any of those, plus xyz, plus abcxyz, plus [a...z][a...z]...[a...z], you can have pretty much exactly what you want.
It's funny, too. Lately I find myself doing a lot less coding, because odds are anything I could possibly want a software application to do has been done by one of the 6 million available OSS apps out there.
Maybe I'm just really picky. Maybe I just have very bizarre usage habits. But I go through easily 5-10 different apps just to find one that really suits me for any given task. A lot of my move from Windows was the lack of choice in these apps. Of course, this is reversing itself as more and more OSS is being ported to Windows.
Interesting times we live in, but PLEASE always give me a whole lot of choice!
Heh. Disney is actively evil on so many levels they make Microsoft look like Buddha.
I remember an ad campaign for one of their extremely old (ie: should long since have been out of copyright) movies back around 1995-99. Might have been Fantasia. Anyway, the entire ad campaign was "THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO OWN $MOVIE THIS MILLENIUM".
Um, yeah, really?
I believe $MOVIE was re-released on DVD by 2001 or 2002. They may have even advertised it as "available for the first time this millenium". Hilarity always ensues with these folks.
tv, which by law, must be on 24 hours a day in every household.. (I think there was even allusion to requirements that the volume be above 0 a certain number of hours per day
It's been a few years since I've read Running Man, but I can tell you this is from 1984. If King (Bachman:) used this concept, it was a very obvious "homage".
Although in 1984, the volume could NEVER be turned entirely off, unless you were a Party member of high privledge.
I gotta tell you, NOTHING is quite as satisfying as being dragged to a comic/toy show by my g/f. She's heavily into toys (especially hockey figures, but also a lot of other things like LOTR, X-Men, etc). I'm a recovering Star Wars/comic geek, so I enjoy the shows and occasionally buy a few things. However, it's simply wonderful to see her get involved in heavy geek-level conversations with vendors.
She ain't Hillary Duff (and is proud of it), but she ain't the stereotypical she-geek, either. It's not been a common occurence that I could walk around in public with a "trophy" on my arm, but at conventions, people positively stare at her. Pure heaven.
It was even more fun to have her suggest our third viewing of Serenity, and our recent purchase of Sliders on DVD.
We're finally destroying the geek stereotype, and it sure is nice!
It just so happens that the software IT HAD TO RUN was DOS/Windows. Pure luck in your version of history. It's the result of hard work and vision in my view.
Not at all. I didn't say, or at least mean to imply, that it was pure luck. Microsoft fought hard and long to ensure they were the only game in town. I won't dispute that, and in fact I have a lot of respect for them making it to the top of an otherwise fragmented market.
However, the fact remains: they did not produce today's market of commodity computer equipment. It would have existed regardless of their presence. Having a clear market leader helped in the enforcement of standardization, sure. Otherwise we might have ended up with a far more fragmented market. But the cheap PC market was inevitable once Compaq came into town.
Your original point that I disagreed with was that we have Microsoft to thank for cheap consumer-level hardware. That happened independently of their existence. The fact that they exerted (and continue to exert) such domniance in their part of this market is due to hard work, perseverence, and yes, a small bit of luck (most people would call this good timing). But they in no way created the market.
By the time NT 4.0 was out, hardware vendor was an irrelevant question. Because Microsoft was leading the way. Novell was moving towards a footnote by this point because they just didn't see this.
Pretty interesting way of looking at history. You seem to forget that computer hardware used to sell for only a few hundred dollars, long before Microsoft had any significant presence in the OS industry. IBM managed to raise these prices substantially only because their main competitors were complete idiots: Commodore and Atari with their poor marketing, and Apple for remaining far too expensive. If either had tried to seriously compete with IBM, the PC clone industry might never have happened, and Microsoft would be merely a footnote from the early days of computing.
Alternatively, if IBM had retained full control over the OS used on PCs, Linux would just have happened years earlier. Linux itself is proof that a competing, binary-compatible OS is not only possible, but inevitable. The fact that the BIOS was reverse engineered, and susequently cloned, is WHY Microsoft was able to make an OS that ran on everything. No BIOS, no clones, no MSDOS. Apple clones briefly existed, and failed for this very reason.
Microsoft didn't make an OS which caused cheap, ubiquitous hardware, it's exactly the other way around.
One of your quotes really stuck with me:
by insisting on binary compatibility, MS has fostered this cheap hardware revolution all the way to today. Intel/AMD were forced to keep binary compatibility, which again led to much competition in the processor world, which led to amazing performance at ever cheaper prices.
See, um, Microsoft survived on the coattails of PC-compatibles for YEARS before ANYONE competed with Intel. AMD hardly existed as a market force before the 386. AMD was forced to be binary compatible with Intel BECAUSE IT HAD TO RUN THE SAME SOFTWARE AS AN INTEL MACHINE. The software could have been anything. In fact, it often was (you do realize there were many companies selling DOS competitors, right?).
You really have a skewed way of looking at things. Believe me, for those of us around at the time, no one was sitting around thinking "thank god for Microsoft helping keep these hardware prices down!". Because they weren't.
The U.S., and pretty much every country, has always been like this. I've never met anyone who can honestly claim that an overwhelming majority of their country/culture is scientifically literate.
The difference is, Bush and his cronies are trying to pass laws to enforce this belief.
We have just as many people in Canada who believe the Adam and Eve story, or any of a hundred creation myths, but no one in power is trying to force us to have Christian mythology in our courts, schools, money, etc. The only ones who even think about this are the extreme fundamentalist "right-wing" (damn, that term is meaningless these days) parties, and they haven't held power in a LONG time. Pretty much since any of their members started spouting this nonsense, coincidentally.
It's a side benefit of mass immigration from every region of the globe, one I'm VERY happy for.
Politicians in the U.S. get CHEERED by the masses if they push their religion onto others. In Canada, they lose every election they run in. Yeah, the people are ultimately responsible, but there's a hell of a lot more willingness to push personal agendas in the U.S.
You do realize that commoditized, cheap computer hardware owes itself to the fact that the original IBM PC BIOS was cloned, and Compaq et al were the ones who brought on today's market, right?
I'd toyed with Linux many times, and dealt with the usual gripes: missing h/w support, disto overload, lack of app replacements, etc. I had no great love of Windows, but it worked for me. Linux was a lot of fun to play with, but there was no real outstanding feature to drag me over, once Win2000 was stable enough to run for weeks at a time.
I'll freely admit, I pirated as much software as anyone (and I've never met any long-term computer user who hasn't), but it started to bug me after a while. First, on a practical level, trying to find a crack/serial for the latest version of something was a pain. But mostly, I just started to realize this is NOT something that I wanted to do. Especially as I was moving more and more towards an IT-heavy career. I went on a personal crusade, only to use free software if at all possible, and buy what I needed otherwise. School gave me the free student copies of Windows/Office, and the free software movement was rapidly filling in the holes. I could set up many machines entirely guilt-free, and importantly, HASSLE free. Eventually, I assumed that OEM copies of Windows and/or more income would provide the replacements for free Windows CDs.
Then, Product Activation happened. It initially annoyed the hell out of me on principle, but I did it. After all, it's just an extra step in an install. Then I started reading the horror stories. Calls to Microsoft when you've changed more than 2 pieces of hardware. Begging to be "allowed" to re-install your OS. Booting up a second computer built from spare parts and not being allowed to put an OS on it. Granted, in 2001 you wouldn't exactly use a 5 year old PC to run XP, but the writing was on the wall. I looked to the future and realized I most definitely did NOT want to be trapped this way. So early in 2003, I switched.
What was funny was, most of my complaints/issues with Linux had gone away by about RH8. Installs were a breeze, apps aplenty, it seemed like Linux had matured enough for me. So I spent the next 2 years always trying the latest and greatest, and every time it's been amazing what "just works".
Meanwhile, every few months I get asked to work on someone's Windows box. And every time it just feels older and older. XP has had no significant updates in 4 years now, that I'd notice when actually using it. Half the hardware you have to download drivers for. It can take hours to patch, reboot, patch again (because the first patch had to be installed separately), reboot, etc, etc, etc just to get a working system. Yes, you can spend the time building your own slipstreamed discs - or you can just download the latest Linux distro, all up to date. And updates happen ALL AT ONCE. For all software.
The last straw was the other day. For fun, I tried to get 2000 back on a spare box. Fully legal disc.
Windows Update wouldn't work unless I installed their "genuine Windows advantage" software. Sure, I can manually download dozens of patches and apply them manually. Or, I can take the chance that Microsoft might think I'm a criminal, and then have to beg my way to forgiveness.
Screw it. Linux is far easier to use for me. That's why I switched, and stay switched.
god help you if you want to add captions to your figures, or use "styles", or insert an equation, or do just about anything a good word processor should let you do
You know you're old when you parse a statement like this and the first thing that comes to mind is "figures? a good word processor should process words".
It still amazes me that we're using word processors to do desktop publishing. And get off my lawn!
You will almost never hear (either because its un-newsworthy or because it could jeopardize other investigations) about the patriot act doing good things, like catching terrorists before they strike...
Believe me, and I say this with utmost confidence, if there EVER was a terrorist plot against the USA that was broken up because of the patriot act, you'd hear about it. For weeks. On every channel. Complete with presidential address.
Why?
Because the past 4 years have to be justified somehow, and having a dog and pony show to demonstrate just how effective it is would be the *ultimate* PR story. Hell, if the neocons were able to even remotely show that they're stopping terrorists, I'd be impressed. You'd think with the "thousands and thousands" of "highly trained" terrorists out there, we'd either be seeing attacks daily, or foiled plots daily.
Instead, we see the very occasional attack where a few people die. A whole bunch of people are arrested, but really, we never do find out what for. I've yet to hear of anything 1/10th as bad as 9/11 either happening or being prevented. Mostly because I suspect that "Al Queda" is actually just a bunch of scattered, disorganized groups with few resources and no real agenda. In other words, a bogeyman created for the sole purpose of scaring the living daylights out of people.
Besides, the media would jump all over the chance to break the "9/11 part 2 STOPPED!!!" story. Fear sells papers and eyeballs, and *anything* to scare people would be beaten to death for weeks on end.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't 100% get the reference, as I find that show more insipid than Everyone Hates Raymond, but up north here we already have caffeinated beer.
Personally, I always thought that getting tired from excess alcohol consumption was the body's way of saying ENOUGH!, but it's hugely popular with ravers who can't get their E/meth fix in.
The difference is that with toys (Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and the originator of this nonsense, Cabbage Patch Kids), there's usually a lot to go around, FOR YOUR AVERAGE TOY. There were a lot scarcer toys at those times. The problem is, DEMAND is driven into a frenzy for these few toys due to media exposure.
Game companies operate a little differently. You'll never see parents rioting over a $600 game console, and manufacturers know this. Hence, planned "shortages" in the SUPPLY.
PSP, anyone?
Man, I hate when game companies do this.
:(
Many older consoles (Nintendo, I'm looking at you) use tamper-proof screws for this supposed reason. Of course, any half-serious "hacker" will find a way in, usually because these screws aren't that hard to find bits for, thanks to the Internet. A lot of the original reasoning, which I can sort of understand), was to keep casual users from opening them up and messing with them.
Unfortunately, as our Zelda cartridges age, the built-in batteries (CR2032, for anyone who cares - one of the most common "watch" batteries out there) are mostly all dead. In order to use these games anymore, you have to open them up and replace the battery.
Tamper-proof screws make this VERY difficult.
Put labels all you want, if it's warranty you're worried about. But please, understand that these things do need repair from time to time, especially after they're out of their expected lifetime. ESPECIALLY with moving parts inside (Sony, I'm looking at you!). There's nothing worse than having to wreck the casing just to get in and fix a few loose wires
Laugh all you want, but when it comes to large, expensive projects, don't forget Poland!
I just listened to these, too, except my elephant woke up and ripped half the wall away trying to get out :(
Fortunately with oil and natural gas prices, everyone living where there is snow will soon have to declare bankrupcy and move south.
:)
We just woke up to a couple of inches of snow on the ground here in Calgary.
Don't worry, none of us will be declaring bankruptcy any time soon
Hey! Up here we get to school by swimming through the atmosphere upstream! Both ways!
Most of the past 15 years of Windows software has been SHAREware, not FREEware. Like I said, this is rapidly changing, and for the better IMHO. But what most people traditionally thought of as "free" software for Windows has been anything but - mIRC, Winzip, etc. All shareware. Thankfully apps like CDEX, Media Player Classic (to mention 2 of my favourties) are changing this.
:)
As for including the source *with* a program? When did I ever mention this? I will point out that there is a lot of free software on Windows that is NOT open source, which is a shame - however being open sourced is ALWAYS better, even if the average user won't be changing the source themselves. I'd personally love to tinker with a few non-OSS but yet free Windows apps, and so would other developers - thus benefitting the end-user in the long run.
And software being written for Windows only? More power to 'em. Like I said, CHOICE is good. Especially if they're open-sourced, because we can always work on porting them to Linux
By not buying it.
Price. Well, price and size, but mostly price.
:)
Cache isn't some magical thing. It's simply RAM. SRAM, usually, which is why it's so fast (don't have to waste power/time refreshing your contents). At the end of the day, it's just some very fast RAM. It sits between your CPU and the rest of your RAM, and uses its increased speed to "trick" the CPU into performing as if your main RAM is much faster than it is.
In my computer arch course a while back, someone asked why, if cache is so fast, we don't just build computers 100% SRAM memory. Our professor did some back-of-the-napkin calculations for fun. Major $. Have to include the extra space and cooling requirements, of course
The other thing, of course, is the good old law of diminishing returns. Cache actually solves the problem VERY nicely. For most people/computers/applications, cache misses aren't that great of a problem, because most computer code lends itself to cache hits (a phenomenon called "locality"). Locality is WHY we have cache in the first place. In general most computing works very well with a tiny amount of very fast cache and a small amount of fast cache. Adding more eventually gets you to the point where you're not seeing much if any improvement. On most modern systems, we're at that point - at least as far as the market will bear.
Oh, and outside of the HPC world, there's no NEED for programmers to worry about memory caching issues. This isn't where most bottlenecks show up, and again, most general-purpose code lends itself very nicely to small amounts of cache. Compilers often help here, too. Most of your average programmers would get better use of their time analyzing the data structures and algorithms they use.
Who cares about quantity of programs? ... How the hell does a billion variations on a text editor help me when I want xyz?
I care. I care a lot. When you want xyz, but the only available text editors do xy, or yz, or xz, life sucks. When you have the option to download any of those, plus xyz, plus abcxyz, plus [a...z][a...z]...[a...z], you can have pretty much exactly what you want.
It's funny, too. Lately I find myself doing a lot less coding, because odds are anything I could possibly want a software application to do has been done by one of the 6 million available OSS apps out there.
Maybe I'm just really picky. Maybe I just have very bizarre usage habits. But I go through easily 5-10 different apps just to find one that really suits me for any given task. A lot of my move from Windows was the lack of choice in these apps. Of course, this is reversing itself as more and more OSS is being ported to Windows.
Interesting times we live in, but PLEASE always give me a whole lot of choice!
Heh. Disney is actively evil on so many levels they make Microsoft look like Buddha.
I remember an ad campaign for one of their extremely old (ie: should long since have been out of copyright) movies back around 1995-99. Might have been Fantasia. Anyway, the entire ad campaign was "THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO OWN $MOVIE THIS MILLENIUM".
Um, yeah, really?
I believe $MOVIE was re-released on DVD by 2001 or 2002. They may have even advertised it as "available for the first time this millenium". Hilarity always ensues with these folks.
tv, which by law, must be on 24 hours a day in every household..
:) used this concept, it was a very obvious "homage".
(I think there was even allusion to requirements that the volume be above 0 a certain number of hours per day
It's been a few years since I've read Running Man, but I can tell you this is from 1984. If King (Bachman
Although in 1984, the volume could NEVER be turned entirely off, unless you were a Party member of high privledge.
Hear, hear!
I gotta tell you, NOTHING is quite as satisfying as being dragged to a comic/toy show by my g/f. She's heavily into toys (especially hockey figures, but also a lot of other things like LOTR, X-Men, etc). I'm a recovering Star Wars/comic geek, so I enjoy the shows and occasionally buy a few things. However, it's simply wonderful to see her get involved in heavy geek-level conversations with vendors.
She ain't Hillary Duff (and is proud of it), but she ain't the stereotypical she-geek, either. It's not been a common occurence that I could walk around in public with a "trophy" on my arm, but at conventions, people positively stare at her. Pure heaven.
It was even more fun to have her suggest our third viewing of Serenity, and our recent purchase of Sliders on DVD.
We're finally destroying the geek stereotype, and it sure is nice!
It just so happens that the software IT HAD TO RUN was DOS/Windows. Pure luck in your version of history. It's the result of hard work and vision in my view.
Not at all. I didn't say, or at least mean to imply, that it was pure luck. Microsoft fought hard and long to ensure they were the only game in town. I won't dispute that, and in fact I have a lot of respect for them making it to the top of an otherwise fragmented market.
However, the fact remains: they did not produce today's market of commodity computer equipment. It would have existed regardless of their presence. Having a clear market leader helped in the enforcement of standardization, sure. Otherwise we might have ended up with a far more fragmented market. But the cheap PC market was inevitable once Compaq came into town.
Your original point that I disagreed with was that we have Microsoft to thank for cheap consumer-level hardware. That happened independently of their existence. The fact that they exerted (and continue to exert) such domniance in their part of this market is due to hard work, perseverence, and yes, a small bit of luck (most people would call this good timing). But they in no way created the market.
By the time NT 4.0 was out, hardware vendor was an irrelevant question. Because Microsoft was leading the way. Novell was moving towards a footnote by this point because they just didn't see this.
Pretty interesting way of looking at history. You seem to forget that computer hardware used to sell for only a few hundred dollars, long before Microsoft had any significant presence in the OS industry. IBM managed to raise these prices substantially only because their main competitors were complete idiots: Commodore and Atari with their poor marketing, and Apple for remaining far too expensive. If either had tried to seriously compete with IBM, the PC clone industry might never have happened, and Microsoft would be merely a footnote from the early days of computing.
Alternatively, if IBM had retained full control over the OS used on PCs, Linux would just have happened years earlier. Linux itself is proof that a competing, binary-compatible OS is not only possible, but inevitable. The fact that the BIOS was reverse engineered, and susequently cloned, is WHY Microsoft was able to make an OS that ran on everything. No BIOS, no clones, no MSDOS. Apple clones briefly existed, and failed for this very reason.
Microsoft didn't make an OS which caused cheap, ubiquitous hardware, it's exactly the other way around.
One of your quotes really stuck with me:
by insisting on binary compatibility, MS has fostered this cheap hardware revolution all the way to today. Intel/AMD were forced to keep binary compatibility, which again led to much competition in the processor world, which led to amazing performance at ever cheaper prices.
See, um, Microsoft survived on the coattails of PC-compatibles for YEARS before ANYONE competed with Intel. AMD hardly existed as a market force before the 386. AMD was forced to be binary compatible with Intel BECAUSE IT HAD TO RUN THE SAME SOFTWARE AS AN INTEL MACHINE. The software could have been anything. In fact, it often was (you do realize there were many companies selling DOS competitors, right?).
You really have a skewed way of looking at things. Believe me, for those of us around at the time, no one was sitting around thinking "thank god for Microsoft helping keep these hardware prices down!". Because they weren't.
The U.S., and pretty much every country, has always been like this. I've never met anyone who can honestly claim that an overwhelming majority of their country/culture is scientifically literate.
The difference is, Bush and his cronies are trying to pass laws to enforce this belief.
We have just as many people in Canada who believe the Adam and Eve story, or any of a hundred creation myths, but no one in power is trying to force us to have Christian mythology in our courts, schools, money, etc. The only ones who even think about this are the extreme fundamentalist "right-wing" (damn, that term is meaningless these days) parties, and they haven't held power in a LONG time. Pretty much since any of their members started spouting this nonsense, coincidentally.
It's a side benefit of mass immigration from every region of the globe, one I'm VERY happy for.
Politicians in the U.S. get CHEERED by the masses if they push their religion onto others. In Canada, they lose every election they run in. Yeah, the people are ultimately responsible, but there's a hell of a lot more willingness to push personal agendas in the U.S.
You do realize that commoditized, cheap computer hardware owes itself to the fact that the original IBM PC BIOS was cloned, and Compaq et al were the ones who brought on today's market, right?
Microsoft hitched a ride.
Yeah. Just tried it the other night.
Sadly, it runs somewhat slower in Wine on my XP1800+/768MB ram than it did on my p200/32MB ram. Also, there are some annoying issues with the map.
I'd hate to play a fast-paced multiplayer game, or a 5 computer players vs me seigematch, but otherwise it plays perfectly.
Anyone know why it would be so slow for me? It shouldn't be a 3D issue for this particular game (I'm using the OSS ATI drivers for my Radeon 9000).
They really don't have many choices.
I know it's old-fashioned of me, but I think they could try to manage their business legally and ethically.
Silly thought...
the hardware is cheap (thank you Microsoft)
I really didn't understand this comment.
I'd toyed with Linux many times, and dealt with the usual gripes: missing h/w support, disto overload, lack of app replacements, etc. I had no great love of Windows, but it worked for me. Linux was a lot of fun to play with, but there was no real outstanding feature to drag me over, once Win2000 was stable enough to run for weeks at a time.
I'll freely admit, I pirated as much software as anyone (and I've never met any long-term computer user who hasn't), but it started to bug me after a while. First, on a practical level, trying to find a crack/serial for the latest version of something was a pain. But mostly, I just started to realize this is NOT something that I wanted to do. Especially as I was moving more and more towards an IT-heavy career. I went on a personal crusade, only to use free software if at all possible, and buy what I needed otherwise. School gave me the free student copies of Windows/Office, and the free software movement was rapidly filling in the holes. I could set up many machines entirely guilt-free, and importantly, HASSLE free. Eventually, I assumed that OEM copies of Windows and/or more income would provide the replacements for free Windows CDs.
Then, Product Activation happened. It initially annoyed the hell out of me on principle, but I did it. After all, it's just an extra step in an install. Then I started reading the horror stories. Calls to Microsoft when you've changed more than 2 pieces of hardware. Begging to be "allowed" to re-install your OS. Booting up a second computer built from spare parts and not being allowed to put an OS on it. Granted, in 2001 you wouldn't exactly use a 5 year old PC to run XP, but the writing was on the wall. I looked to the future and realized I most definitely did NOT want to be trapped this way. So early in 2003, I switched.
What was funny was, most of my complaints/issues with Linux had gone away by about RH8. Installs were a breeze, apps aplenty, it seemed like Linux had matured enough for me. So I spent the next 2 years always trying the latest and greatest, and every time it's been amazing what "just works".
Meanwhile, every few months I get asked to work on someone's Windows box. And every time it just feels older and older. XP has had no significant updates in 4 years now, that I'd notice when actually using it. Half the hardware you have to download drivers for. It can take hours to patch, reboot, patch again (because the first patch had to be installed separately), reboot, etc, etc, etc just to get a working system. Yes, you can spend the time building your own slipstreamed discs - or you can just download the latest Linux distro, all up to date. And updates happen ALL AT ONCE. For all software.
The last straw was the other day. For fun, I tried to get 2000 back on a spare box. Fully legal disc.
Windows Update wouldn't work unless I installed their "genuine Windows advantage" software. Sure, I can manually download dozens of patches and apply them manually. Or, I can take the chance that Microsoft might think I'm a criminal, and then have to beg my way to forgiveness.
Screw it. Linux is far easier to use for me. That's why I switched, and stay switched.
Both games have bland graphics? :)
god help you if you want to add captions to your figures, or use "styles", or insert an equation, or do just about anything a good word processor should let you do
You know you're old when you parse a statement like this and the first thing that comes to mind is "figures? a good word processor should process words".
It still amazes me that we're using word processors to do desktop publishing. And get off my lawn!
You will almost never hear (either because its un-newsworthy or because it could jeopardize other investigations) about the patriot act doing good things, like catching terrorists before they strike...
Believe me, and I say this with utmost confidence, if there EVER was a terrorist plot against the USA that was broken up because of the patriot act, you'd hear about it. For weeks. On every channel. Complete with presidential address.
Why?
Because the past 4 years have to be justified somehow, and having a dog and pony show to demonstrate just how effective it is would be the *ultimate* PR story. Hell, if the neocons were able to even remotely show that they're stopping terrorists, I'd be impressed. You'd think with the "thousands and thousands" of "highly trained" terrorists out there, we'd either be seeing attacks daily, or foiled plots daily.
Instead, we see the very occasional attack where a few people die. A whole bunch of people are arrested, but really, we never do find out what for. I've yet to hear of anything 1/10th as bad as 9/11 either happening or being prevented. Mostly because I suspect that "Al Queda" is actually just a bunch of scattered, disorganized groups with few resources and no real agenda. In other words, a bogeyman created for the sole purpose of scaring the living daylights out of people.
Besides, the media would jump all over the chance to break the "9/11 part 2 STOPPED!!!" story. Fear sells papers and eyeballs, and *anything* to scare people would be beaten to death for weeks on end.