If you have can point to some part of their argument that's flawed, then do so.
One of the more egregious examples of their FUD:
Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don't meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.
But, really, the whole article is swimming in it. Another gem:
With Windows Media Player, Microsoft works in collusion with the big media companies to build restrictions on copying and playing media into their operating system. For example, at the request of NBC, Microsoft was able to prevent Windows users from recording television shows that they have the legal right to record.
In fact, _Microsoft_ does not apply any DRM restrictions to content. They merely provide a system where the restrictions put in place by the content owners, are enforced. The only time the DRM systems in Windows do anything, is when the owner of content tells them to.
Oh, and let's not forget presenting standard software licensing practices like this:
Microsoft is up to their usual tricks again -- only this time, they're also inserting artificial restrictions into the operating system itself. While not the first time they've done this, this is the first release of Windows that can magically remove limitations instantly upon purchasing a more expensive version from Microsoft.
As if they were something pioneered by - or even unique to - Microsoft.
However, could we agree that a good chunk could use 10GB?
No. I play games and typically have >10 apps running at once (and one of those - Firefox - typically chewing up 500MB+ of RAM on its own) and 4GB is more than enough.
I'd be amazed if most users could tell the difference between even 2GB and 3GB of RAM, let alone 3GB and 10GB.
My system currently has 3.25GB of usable RAM, ~1GB of which is used for "system cache", ~1GB is free, but Windows still use ~640MB of the 1.5GB swap file.
This does not necessarily mean that 640MB of data is _only_ in the pagefile.
Wrong. PAE is essentially invisible to 99.9% of software, other than drivers that need to support DMA.
Exactly. It breaks a LOT of drivers.
If you read the article, or knew how modern operating systems use page tables to translate linear addresses into physical addresses, you would realize this already.
I know quite well how PAE works, and also why Microsoft no longer supports it in XP. Unlike the people who think it's some big conspiracy.
If you're right and PAE is so shitty, why does MS reserve the use of PAE to just the server editions where reliability counts for a lot more than consumer editions?
Because the hardware drivers for the typical server are _vastly_ higher quality than the drivers for the average piece of crappy consumer level hardware.
The key here is that PAE support exists already in 32 bit Windows, but that Microsoft chooses to disable it for consumer operating systems so they can differentiate the consumer and server OS's.
No, they disable it because it breaks a whole bunch of badly written software that they have no control over.
No. Not like you guys trying to paint Netscape as some white knight who was coming to save the internet when they were cruelly cut down from behind by the evil Microsoft, and that the only reason anyone, anywhere, would ever use IE was because it was "forced" on them.
I cut my teeth on Xterms at the local University running Mosaic in the early '90s, and experienced the "browser wars" first hand. You can't bullshit me about how good Navigator was "back in the day" and that IE only took over by subterfuge, because I remember a) sticking with Navigator 3.x when 4.0 came out (because 4.0 was so unbelievably bad), and b) later switching to the IE4 *betas* because they were so much better.
Netscape shot themselves in both feet try to pick up the ball they dropped, then fell into quicksand. That they aggravated Microsoft a few minutes beforehand was unfortunate, but not decisive. Netscape has no-one to blame except Netscape.
In October 1998, Internet Explorer barely had 40% [...]
A self-selecting poll with a question of "which browser do you expect to be your primary browser in 12 months" ?
I suspect the failed communication was due to pronunciation rather than vocabulary.
I'm sure it did as well, although it does make a good story, and having travelled the the US a few times I can certainly see the grain of truth in there.
This was probably 20-30 years ago, as well, although I cannot remember where in the US he claimed to have been at the time.
I actually tend to think the opposite. I have so many friends on facebook that aren't my real friends that invites over fb tend to mean less to me then a phone call, or even an email.
But that's not the question. The question is if one of your "facebook friends" sent you a link to a song and said "have a listen", would you ?
Because people keep saying that Microsoft was/is intentionally "holding back web standards", that they introduced "proprietary tags in order to break the web" [...]
What's particularly funny about this reasoning, is that Netscape's long-term business plan was, pretty much, to add proprietary extensions that only their browser and web server would work with.
Microsoft's dominance over the Web came with Windows 98's bundling of Internet Explorer 4.
Actually, no, the tide was clearly turning long before that. It was IE4, during 1997 and early 1998 - in the face of the steaming pile that was Netscape Navigator 4.0 - that won the "browser wars" for Microsoft (people were preferring IE4 *betas* over NN 4.x). IE had hit ~50% marketshare before Windows 98 was even released, and 60-70% long before it had more marketshare than Windows 95.
Or, to put it another way, it was the version of IE that people had to deliberately seek out and install, that displaced Navigator. Attributing it to the release of Windows 98 is laughable.
Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
In the days of people having 100s (if not1000s) of "friends" on sites like Facebook, "word of mouth" is a hell of a lot more effective than it ever was before - and that's likely to remain true going forward.
I, too, find American's aversion to referring to toilets by anything that vaguely resembles what one might do in them, damn strange. With that said, given their obsession with germs and hygiene is unsurpassed by pretty much no other culture (with the possible exception of the Japanese), I suppose it's not all that surprising.
I have an English friend who likes to tell the story of the first time he was in the US, trying to find a toilet in a shopping centre ("though they call it a 'mall'", he likes to chuckle about), and asked a security guard for directions.
First he asked "where's the loo". <blank stare>
Then he asked "where's the WC". <blank stare>
Then he asked "where's the bathroom". <blank stare>
Then he asked "where's the toilet". <blank stare>
Finally, someone standing nearby who had overheard, said "the rest room is over there".
He likes to reflect on how, of all the countries he's travelled to in the world (most of which do not have English as a local language), the one he had the hardest trouble finding a toilet in (due to comprehension problems) was America. This usually happens in the context of a "Great Britain and the USA, two countries separated by a common language" style discussion.:)
Hmm, how about every country in the first world that has outlawed recreational drugs? How about the 'sin taxes' that are imposed on booze and tobacco to make them more expensive? How about the fact that victimless crimes like prostitution are illegal in most jurisdictions? How about the fact that most terminally ill patients can't choose to end their own lives in most of the first world?
Your argument might carry a slight amount of weight if most or all of those things weren't already illegal before nationalised healthcare was even conceived.
Filing bankruptcy is not the end of the World. It's a legal preceding. Nothing more, nothing less. If you've properly structured your assets you aren't likely to lose anything that really matters (house, family heirlooms, etc).
And how many people do you think would have the knowledge and foresight to do that before they were bankrupted by a medical emergency ?
I have choices right now. I'm doubtful that anything that comes out of Washington is going to increase the number of choices I have.
It will probably, however, increase the choices for lots of people who don't have any at all.
No, the Conservative way would be for the hospital to have the choice to refuse to treat you if you can't pay. No business should be forced to service a non-paying customer. I would have no problem with this.
Awesome. I bet you're one of the guys who thinks the fire departments should show up with the credit card reader out, and if the person in question can't pay then their is left to burn down. Or when some woman rings up after being raped, the first question asked is can she afford to pay the police a hundred bucks and hour to investigate.
Some of us like to approach society with less of the "I'm ok, fuck the rest of you" attitude. It's a morality thing, you might not get it.
So are you also going to tell me what I can eat (no big macs I presume?) and what recreational chemicals I can enjoy (no nicotine or booze?) because those can increase your costs as well? What about hobbies? Going to tell me that I can't engage in skydiving or bungee jumping because of the increased risk of injury?
No. Nor does any country with a public healthcare system.
If I don't like the plan(s) offered by my employer I can try to buy one on my own or get a different job.
Lucky you. Not everyone is so lucky.
My health insurance can't drop me whenever it chooses. If yours can then find a different job or plan.
Not possible for vast numbers of people.
All insurance companies do that.
Maybe in America. Here in a more sane country, my wife and I have probably made insurance claims for various things (theft, car accidents, medical treatment, cancelled travel) totalling around ten grand over the last 10-15 years and not once have we ever had to do anything more than fill in the requisite forms, perhaps be paid a visit by an assessor, and wait for the money to arrive.
Should we have the Government take over the automobile insurance industry too?
Clearly, if you think it's normal for a routine insurance claim to need threats of legal action just to be paid out, then the system is so broken that someone in a position of power needs to step in and start cracking heads.
That said, there's nothing stopping you from bargaining with your medical provider(s) to get a lower rate.
You mean apart from being ill and them being your only chance to get better ?
I'm sure there are alternatives that are better than what we have now. I just don't think a Government run plan is going to be one of them.
The evidence presented by pretty much every other first world country suggests otherwise. The spend less and they get better value for their money.
If there really were 10,000 or 100,000 advanced civilizations out there, it would be naive to assume that every single one of them can cloak from us, or just doesn't want to contact us.
Not nearly as naive as assuming we would be able to detect and interpret any signals they might be sending.
At some point, you want to avoid a single point of failure. A very advanced civilization is probably aware that they cannot predict every type of violent action in the universe, so the more spread out they are, the more likely they are to survive, even if they've found a way to keep their energy source in stasis and blow up asteroids reliably.
But it does not automatically follow that they would be able to execute a plan to mitigate that risk. Unless you can think of a good reason they wouldn't be any more prone to politicking and heads-in-the-sand than humanity is ?
After all it only takes one single ancient civilization anywhere to take a course of development that creates a detectable signal for any reason to overturn the Fermi Paradox.
No, it takes one that we detect. Like you say, space is big and old.
Attempting to dismiss it by claiming that civilizations exist, but that no civilization ever makes human-detectable signals, begs the question (in one of the original and correct senses of the term): it attempts refutation by assuming an unsupported premise (in this case two of them) : 1) that they do exist, but and an arbitrary special universal law holds that prevents any from being detected.
On the contrary, it assumes that any such signals would only be broadcast for a relatively miniscule period of time, that we would be unlikely to be listening in the right way, at the right time, with sufficiently advanced monitoring technology, and that we would be unlikely to detect whether or not it was actually a "signal" at all. These assumptions are all *at least* as reasonable as those in the "Fermi Paradox" (and dramatically more so, IMHO).
Look around your house. You probably have more stuff than your parents did. Lots more. And most pieces of stuff you have do much more than your parents' stuff. You also have much more free time than your parents did, because the amount of time spent on chores and cooking have been hugely reduced. And your house likely has twice the square footage of you parent's. And it's air conditioned. All of this despite increased government spending.
By your logic, anyone not living a hand-to-mouth hunter/gather lifestyle is fabulously wealthy.
Something with a 12" widescreen with at least 1280x720 resolution, 2 GB ram, 32 or 64GB of SSD and with the ARM enough staying power to run all day (12+ hours at least) while still being lighter than the X31.
I must admit I have troubling understanding why anyone would want to spend any longer looking at a tiny 12" screen and working on a tiny keyboard, with only a trackpad or clitmouse, for any longer than they had to.
Just thinking about working on a laptop all day gives me a head and back ache.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have can point to some part of their argument that's flawed, then do so.
One of the more egregious examples of their FUD:
Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don't meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.
But, really, the whole article is swimming in it. Another gem:
With Windows Media Player, Microsoft works in collusion with the big media companies to build restrictions on copying and playing media into their operating system. For example, at the request of NBC, Microsoft was able to prevent Windows users from recording television shows that they have the legal right to record.
In fact, _Microsoft_ does not apply any DRM restrictions to content. They merely provide a system where the restrictions put in place by the content owners, are enforced. The only time the DRM systems in Windows do anything, is when the owner of content tells them to.
Oh, and let's not forget presenting standard software licensing practices like this:
Microsoft is up to their usual tricks again -- only this time, they're also inserting artificial restrictions into the operating system itself. While not the first time they've done this, this is the first release of Windows that can magically remove limitations instantly upon purchasing a more expensive version from Microsoft.
As if they were something pioneered by - or even unique to - Microsoft.
These "quit the government" types often define government as that which has a monopoly on force.
I've never met a "quit the government type" who thought the only people who have guns are the ones working for the government.
However, could we agree that a good chunk could use 10GB?
No. I play games and typically have >10 apps running at once (and one of those - Firefox - typically chewing up 500MB+ of RAM on its own) and 4GB is more than enough.
I'd be amazed if most users could tell the difference between even 2GB and 3GB of RAM, let alone 3GB and 10GB.
My system currently has 3.25GB of usable RAM, ~1GB of which is used for "system cache", ~1GB is free, but Windows still use ~640MB of the 1.5GB swap file.
This does not necessarily mean that 640MB of data is _only_ in the pagefile.
Wrong. PAE is essentially invisible to 99.9% of software, other than drivers that need to support DMA.
Exactly. It breaks a LOT of drivers.
If you read the article, or knew how modern operating systems use page tables to translate linear addresses into physical addresses, you would realize this already.
I know quite well how PAE works, and also why Microsoft no longer supports it in XP. Unlike the people who think it's some big conspiracy.
If you're right and PAE is so shitty, why does MS reserve the use of PAE to just the server editions where reliability counts for a lot more than consumer editions?
Because the hardware drivers for the typical server are _vastly_ higher quality than the drivers for the average piece of crappy consumer level hardware.
The key here is that PAE support exists already in 32 bit Windows, but that Microsoft chooses to disable it for consumer operating systems so they can differentiate the consumer and server OS's.
No, they disable it because it breaks a whole bunch of badly written software that they have no control over.
Rewriting history much ?
No. Not like you guys trying to paint Netscape as some white knight who was coming to save the internet when they were cruelly cut down from behind by the evil Microsoft, and that the only reason anyone, anywhere, would ever use IE was because it was "forced" on them.
I cut my teeth on Xterms at the local University running Mosaic in the early '90s, and experienced the "browser wars" first hand. You can't bullshit me about how good Navigator was "back in the day" and that IE only took over by subterfuge, because I remember a) sticking with Navigator 3.x when 4.0 came out (because 4.0 was so unbelievably bad), and b) later switching to the IE4 *betas* because they were so much better.
Netscape shot themselves in both feet try to pick up the ball they dropped, then fell into quicksand. That they aggravated Microsoft a few minutes beforehand was unfortunate, but not decisive. Netscape has no-one to blame except Netscape.
In October 1998, Internet Explorer barely had 40% [...]
A self-selecting poll with a question of "which browser do you expect to be your primary browser in 12 months" ?
Statistics. You suck at it.
I suspect the failed communication was due to pronunciation rather than vocabulary.
I'm sure it did as well, although it does make a good story, and having travelled the the US a few times I can certainly see the grain of truth in there.
This was probably 20-30 years ago, as well, although I cannot remember where in the US he claimed to have been at the time.
America isn't a country tough, you know, it's a continent.
Since you're being a pedantic ass...
There is no continent called "America".
I actually tend to think the opposite. I have so many friends on facebook that aren't my real friends that invites over fb tend to mean less to me then a phone call, or even an email.
But that's not the question. The question is if one of your "facebook friends" sent you a link to a song and said "have a listen", would you ?
Because people keep saying that Microsoft was/is intentionally "holding back web standards", that they introduced "proprietary tags in order to break the web" [...]
What's particularly funny about this reasoning, is that Netscape's long-term business plan was, pretty much, to add proprietary extensions that only their browser and web server would work with.
Microsoft's dominance over the Web came with Windows 98's bundling of Internet Explorer 4.
Actually, no, the tide was clearly turning long before that. It was IE4, during 1997 and early 1998 - in the face of the steaming pile that was Netscape Navigator 4.0 - that won the "browser wars" for Microsoft (people were preferring IE4 *betas* over NN 4.x). IE had hit ~50% marketshare before Windows 98 was even released, and 60-70% long before it had more marketshare than Windows 95.
Or, to put it another way, it was the version of IE that people had to deliberately seek out and install, that displaced Navigator. Attributing it to the release of Windows 98 is laughable.
There was a time where the only thing IE was good for (IE3) was to download Netscape without using FTP.
IE3 was quite a reasonable alternative to Navigator 3. You're thinking of IE2 (standard with NT4 and some earlier versions of Win95).
Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
In the days of people having 100s (if not1000s) of "friends" on sites like Facebook, "word of mouth" is a hell of a lot more effective than it ever was before - and that's likely to remain true going forward.
The same when I asked for the 'bathroom'.
I, too, find American's aversion to referring to toilets by anything that vaguely resembles what one might do in them, damn strange. With that said, given their obsession with germs and hygiene is unsurpassed by pretty much no other culture (with the possible exception of the Japanese), I suppose it's not all that surprising.
I have an English friend who likes to tell the story of the first time he was in the US, trying to find a toilet in a shopping centre ("though they call it a 'mall'", he likes to chuckle about), and asked a security guard for directions.
First he asked "where's the loo". <blank stare>
Then he asked "where's the WC". <blank stare>
Then he asked "where's the bathroom". <blank stare>
Then he asked "where's the toilet". <blank stare>
Finally, someone standing nearby who had overheard, said "the rest room is over there".
He likes to reflect on how, of all the countries he's travelled to in the world (most of which do not have English as a local language), the one he had the hardest trouble finding a toilet in (due to comprehension problems) was America. This usually happens in the context of a "Great Britain and the USA, two countries separated by a common language" style discussion. :)
Hmm, how about every country in the first world that has outlawed recreational drugs? How about the 'sin taxes' that are imposed on booze and tobacco to make them more expensive? How about the fact that victimless crimes like prostitution are illegal in most jurisdictions? How about the fact that most terminally ill patients can't choose to end their own lives in most of the first world?
Your argument might carry a slight amount of weight if most or all of those things weren't already illegal before nationalised healthcare was even conceived.
Filing bankruptcy is not the end of the World. It's a legal preceding. Nothing more, nothing less. If you've properly structured your assets you aren't likely to lose anything that really matters (house, family heirlooms, etc).
And how many people do you think would have the knowledge and foresight to do that before they were bankrupted by a medical emergency ?
I have choices right now. I'm doubtful that anything that comes out of Washington is going to increase the number of choices I have.
It will probably, however, increase the choices for lots of people who don't have any at all.
Nevertheless, THOUSANDS do, each and every year. Far more than die under the US semi-free market system.
That's a bold claim. Evidence ?
No, the Conservative way would be for the hospital to have the choice to refuse to treat you if you can't pay. No business should be forced to service a non-paying customer. I would have no problem with this.
Awesome. I bet you're one of the guys who thinks the fire departments should show up with the credit card reader out, and if the person in question can't pay then their is left to burn down. Or when some woman rings up after being raped, the first question asked is can she afford to pay the police a hundred bucks and hour to investigate.
Some of us like to approach society with less of the "I'm ok, fuck the rest of you" attitude. It's a morality thing, you might not get it.
So are you also going to tell me what I can eat (no big macs I presume?) and what recreational chemicals I can enjoy (no nicotine or booze?) because those can increase your costs as well? What about hobbies? Going to tell me that I can't engage in skydiving or bungee jumping because of the increased risk of injury?
No. Nor does any country with a public healthcare system.
If I don't like the plan(s) offered by my employer I can try to buy one on my own or get a different job.
Lucky you. Not everyone is so lucky.
My health insurance can't drop me whenever it chooses. If yours can then find a different job or plan.
Not possible for vast numbers of people.
All insurance companies do that.
Maybe in America. Here in a more sane country, my wife and I have probably made insurance claims for various things (theft, car accidents, medical treatment, cancelled travel) totalling around ten grand over the last 10-15 years and not once have we ever had to do anything more than fill in the requisite forms, perhaps be paid a visit by an assessor, and wait for the money to arrive.
Should we have the Government take over the automobile insurance industry too?
Clearly, if you think it's normal for a routine insurance claim to need threats of legal action just to be paid out, then the system is so broken that someone in a position of power needs to step in and start cracking heads.
That said, there's nothing stopping you from bargaining with your medical provider(s) to get a lower rate.
You mean apart from being ill and them being your only chance to get better ?
I'm sure there are alternatives that are better than what we have now. I just don't think a Government run plan is going to be one of them.
The evidence presented by pretty much every other first world country suggests otherwise. The spend less and they get better value for their money.
If there really were 10,000 or 100,000 advanced civilizations out there, it would be naive to assume that every single one of them can cloak from us, or just doesn't want to contact us.
Not nearly as naive as assuming we would be able to detect and interpret any signals they might be sending.
At some point, you want to avoid a single point of failure. A very advanced civilization is probably aware that they cannot predict every type of violent action in the universe, so the more spread out they are, the more likely they are to survive, even if they've found a way to keep their energy source in stasis and blow up asteroids reliably.
But it does not automatically follow that they would be able to execute a plan to mitigate that risk. Unless you can think of a good reason they wouldn't be any more prone to politicking and heads-in-the-sand than humanity is ?
After all it only takes one single ancient civilization anywhere to take a course of development that creates a detectable signal for any reason to overturn the Fermi Paradox.
No, it takes one that we detect. Like you say, space is big and old.
Attempting to dismiss it by claiming that civilizations exist, but that no civilization ever makes human-detectable signals, begs the question (in one of the original and correct senses of the term): it attempts refutation by assuming an unsupported premise (in this case two of them) : 1) that they do exist, but and an arbitrary special universal law holds that prevents any from being detected.
On the contrary, it assumes that any such signals would only be broadcast for a relatively miniscule period of time, that we would be unlikely to be listening in the right way, at the right time, with sufficiently advanced monitoring technology, and that we would be unlikely to detect whether or not it was actually a "signal" at all. These assumptions are all *at least* as reasonable as those in the "Fermi Paradox" (and dramatically more so, IMHO).
Look around your house. You probably have more stuff than your parents did. Lots more. And most pieces of stuff you have do much more than your parents' stuff. You also have much more free time than your parents did, because the amount of time spent on chores and cooking have been hugely reduced. And your house likely has twice the square footage of you parent's. And it's air conditioned. All of this despite increased government spending.
By your logic, anyone not living a hand-to-mouth hunter/gather lifestyle is fabulously wealthy.
Something with a 12" widescreen with at least 1280x720 resolution, 2 GB ram, 32 or 64GB of SSD and with the ARM enough staying power to run all day (12+ hours at least) while still being lighter than the X31.
I must admit I have troubling understanding why anyone would want to spend any longer looking at a tiny 12" screen and working on a tiny keyboard, with only a trackpad or clitmouse, for any longer than they had to.
Just thinking about working on a laptop all day gives me a head and back ache.