The number of times I've had to use a CLI to fix something in Linux is about the same as the number of times I've had to use the Registry Editor to fix something in Windows.
Either you don't use Linux much, or you use Windows a helluva lot.
So I suppose I can switch your argument around a bit: The day that you can have a problem in Windows and can go to a forum and not get "Start > Run... > regedit" as the standard answer is that day that it might be ready for users.
Except resorting to regedit has never, ever been "the standard answer" on Windows forums, not even technically oriented ones.
Anyway, lots of instructions don't have you drop to the commandline. I've seen lots where they have you click to gedit to edit a configuration file. You are simply wrong.
I think, perhaps, you're missing the overall point here...
So "could" a lack of toilet paper, but I'm guessing you wouldn't be advocating laws stating that the toilet must always be fully stocked.
Premeditated murder is already illegal, and generally attracts some of the heaviest punishments a society feels necessary to dish out, including the death penalty. But, apparently, you think people will choose that over copyright infringement.
The Linux install is actually running out of a little embedded ARM card, not the main system. Dell call it Latitude ON, and it's activated by a dedicated button near the power button.
Since suspending/hibernating (rather than sleeping) a Windows laptop usually means you got through much of the boot process anyway (where this thing can kick in), it *might* have some practical value.
Unfortunately I got my E4300 before Latitude ON was available, but I was under the impression that when it was finalised, I'd get the necessary upgrade for free.
As you reply to that troll, you should tell why 10.1 was a free upgrade. Apple made such huge changes (MacOS--->OS X, nothing like that in history) and nobody was happy with 10.0.
I certainly hope you mean "nothing like that in Apple's history".
Apple didn't start stupid things like Mojave project, they admitted it wasn't really ready for production release in real life and made it free. Vista may have looked nice on paper but in real life, it was horrible. MS didn't admit that fact to begin with. Mojave site is still up and running, claiming people (their customers) are hallucinating.
"Mojave" - which is basically just a PR exercise - in no way compares to the utter shite that was OS X for the first few years of its existence. 10.1 was the "yeah, we really fucked that one up" admission, but it wasn't until 10.3, that OS X had performance that could be described as better than sluggish.
You quite literally could not get a "quick" OS X experience for years after its first release (this was a combination of both lacklustre Mac hardware at the time and OS X's almost unbelievable slowness). It took the G5s in 2003 (2004 for the iMacs) for OS X to move into the realms of "not slow", the 10.3 release to make it "OK", and 10.4 for it to be a reasonable comparison to Windows (or Classic MacOS - one of the major reasons it remained popular for so long was performance), in terms of interactive performance.
Contrast this to Vista, where even on its release day, PCs for well under a grand US could run it quite well (and even PCs from ~6 years previously could be made to, if they were top-end in their day, with some minor upgrades).
The "My Computer" icon was a bit like the "Macintosh HD" icon.
Indeed. They were both icons. Shameless plagiarism, indeed.
The Recycle Bin was a bit like Mac's Trash Can.
And, of course, no other GUI anywhere else had that concept. </SARCASM>
The Start Menu was a bit like Mac's Apple Menu. In those days, the Apple Menu had all the apps on it. It doesn't any more.
I'm well aware of what the Apple Menu used to be like, seeing as I've used just about every version of MacOS ever made. It was quite different in implementation, use, and purpose, to the Start Menu.
There is a very popular class of machines that can't run Vista, called Netbooks.
And by "popular" you mean "a tiny minority", right (likely to shrink in the coming couple of years as the recession stops people spending money on toys) ? And they will run Vista, just not particularly fast (then again, they won't run anything particularly fast).
I still think their should be a super user. It should be the only shared account, and only shared between a small group of people in the org that are both willing and by need trust each other entirely anyway.
Shared accounts are a bad idea all round. They're essentially unauditable, which has negative repercussions for everything from security to configuration control.
Throw in 'has unlimited and uncontrollable access to the entire system' on top of that, and it's a recipe for trouble.
You never can have total separation of powers someone always has to have the ability to get access to someone else fife should something happen to that person. Continued..
Being able to take over the privilege levels of another person in emergencies in a controlled and auditable fashion is _NOT_ the same thing as being able to inherently do anything and everything they can do.
If multiple accounts exist that can grant themselves new privileges at will they might just as well have had that access in the first place.
No, they mightn't. See above.
Multiple super user accounts are worthless. Nobody should be using the account except when the are, that is to say admins should not be reading e-mail from the privileged account for example.
[...]
You are hooked up on the idea that there must be a superuser of some sort, which is missing the point - superuser accounts shouldn't exist *AT ALL*. Individual privileges to access restricted resources should be granted as required.
A single user account that, for all intents and purposes, completely bypasses all aspects of access control as if they didn't even exist, is an inherent security flaw that should not exist.
Which part of Windows 95 was a "copy of Apple" ? The substantially different GUI ? The significantly better multitasking and memory management ?
Windows Vista: BAD? (Initially had bad driver support, still has 'ridiculous' hardware requirements. [...]
Vista has never had "ridiculous hardware requirements". Relatively speaking, they were the same as earlier Windows versions. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find a new machine that couldn't run it.
My concern with upgrading my brother's 512meg Vista machine to a 512meg Win7 machine is that (1) I still don't think it will run any faster and (2) Win7 might not have the necessary drivers to operate the video/audio cards and therefore be impossible to use.
You could just, you know, buy some more RAM. At about $10/GB for DDR2, it's not like it's expensive.
However getting more RAM means either higher price because it has only DDR2 slots or upgrading motherboard - and while upgrading motherboard I'll have to upgrade CPU and graphics card.
DDR2 RAM is the cheapest RAM you can buy.
Suddenly it is not that cheap to throw more RAM on the problem.
2GB of DDR2 won't even cost you US$25. Heck, you can pick up 4GB for about $40.
You're not looking at the actual history of Microsoft Windows, though. Windows was (and still is, to a large part) built off what was originally a single-user system that would exist ENTIRELY as a standalone unit that was never connected to any other computers.
No, it's not. Windows NT was designed from the start to be a multiuser, networked OS.
UNIX, on the other hand, started with that kind of functionality in mind.
Actually, no. The very first versions of UNIX were single user. The multiuser stuff was added later, which is probably why it still had (and still has, in most configurations today) the concept of a superuser, even when other OSes had moved on.
Seriously though, despite this being a rediculous idea, what is the Authors' Guild actually trying to do here?
The same thing all copyright holders are trying to do - get more gravy off the Copyright gravy train.
These people will not be happy until they have a system in place where you are automatically billed every time you read/listen/speak/sing/think about/in-any-way-experience their works. And even _then_ they'll be whinging about how they're not making enough money.
This is just another example of why the whole concept of Copyright needs to be completely and fundamentally rethought.
Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?
It's probably more like 200,000 times, and we need it because "browsing the web" involves processing orders of magnitudes more data with dramatically lower required response times.
I know some people need raw computation, but c'mon. The average boot time is still ~60 seconds on the desktop. Why?
For the same reason it still takes your car a minute or two to warm up in the morning.
And it doesn't even matter, which OS. Why do we need more calculations to get ready to so something than it took to get someone up there? Seriously.
Look, going to the moon was an impressive engineering feat, but in terms of the "processing" needed, it was insignificant.
Modern software is bloat. Let's do something about that, first.
Given Apple and Microsoft compete in different markets, and therefore Apple's existence (or lack thereof) is completely irrelevant to Microsoft's status as a monopoly, I'd have to say.... no.
I'm amazed that people are so threatened by religion.
Religion is an inherently discriminatory and exclusionary construct. It has a long, glorious history of threats, abuse oppression and violence towards non-believers. Why _wouldn't_ a rational person be threatened by it ?
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution. I mean, why aren't they protesting dinosaurs? Isn't the Earth supposed to be too young for them to have existed?
Because Evolution disproves one of the basics tenets of most religions - that humans are special, different from other animals, specifically created by god ("in his image").
I would suggest that you price any other companies computer Spec for Spec It doesn't matter if you think the spec is important to you or not. (including Size, Weight, Dimensions, Video Camera,Keyboard type...), in general try to custom build the Mac Model. You will find the price of the Mac, will be about the same price as the competitors.
Of course, this places disproportionate value on certain things that are very uncommon outside of Apple. Like, for example, form factor.
However, for example, if all you want is a minimum buy-in point, then a PCs with roughly twice the hardware resources of a Mac Mini costs only a bit more than half as much, and a PC with only marginally less power than an 8-core Mac Pro costs _less_ than half as much.
If your primary interest is in what the computer does, rather than what it looks like, then nearly all desktop Macs are embarassingly overpriced (the laptops are harder to call).
I just don't believe that sexual selection can produce evolution in a _harmful_ direction.
Of course it could, if it disguised otherwise "harmful" traits.
Consider: if you're rich and powerful, then you will attract mates, because it will do a more than good enough job of disguising that you've only got one lung and genetic predispositions towards obesity and degenerative brain disease.
Note also that future evolution may breed out those "harmful" traits while keeping the solely sexually selected ones intact.
Why did the peacock evolve such a big and handicapping tail? Hur-hur-hur, to impress women, Beavis.
Your fundamental assumption seems to be that the Peacock's tail is, in fact, explicitly disadvantageous to its survival. What evidence do you have to support this assumption ?
I'm _not_ against darwinism or natural selection. I'm just against the "sexual selection" cludge. That's all. Remove that kludge, and I'm perfectly content with Darwinism.
It's not a "kludge". Some traits will, almost certainly, propagate solely due to them making the organism more attractive to a mate. Indeed, given that successful reproduction is the ultimate expression of "fitness", one would assume that traits existing solely for 'sexual selection' would be quite common.
Btw, there was a pretty good David Attenborough programme on BBC TV last week about Darwin and Evolution that showed many of the subsequent discoveries. I forget the title, but it must be available on popular video sharing sites.
There was another excellent show on only a couple of days later on the topic, called something like "What Darwin didn't know". It went into the details of how modern science has shown just how much of a slam-dunk Evolution is.
Particularly stunning, to me, were the comparisons of the early fetal stages of various different organisms and how similar they all are.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of times I've had to use a CLI to fix something in Linux is about the same as the number of times I've had to use the Registry Editor to fix something in Windows.
Either you don't use Linux much, or you use Windows a helluva lot.
So I suppose I can switch your argument around a bit: The day that you can have a problem in Windows and can go to a forum and not get "Start > Run... > regedit" as the standard answer is that day that it might be ready for users.
Except resorting to regedit has never, ever been "the standard answer" on Windows forums, not even technically oriented ones.
Anyway, lots of instructions don't have you drop to the commandline. I've seen lots where they have you click to gedit to edit a configuration file. You are simply wrong.
I think, perhaps, you're missing the overall point here...
Non-inheritable could lead to assassinations
So "could" a lack of toilet paper, but I'm guessing you wouldn't be advocating laws stating that the toilet must always be fully stocked.
Premeditated murder is already illegal, and generally attracts some of the heaviest punishments a society feels necessary to dish out, including the death penalty. But, apparently, you think people will choose that over copyright infringement.
Did you even think before you typed ?
What could possible go wrong ?
The Linux install is actually running out of a little embedded ARM card, not the main system. Dell call it Latitude ON, and it's activated by a dedicated button near the power button.
Since suspending/hibernating (rather than sleeping) a Windows laptop usually means you got through much of the boot process anyway (where this thing can kick in), it *might* have some practical value.
Unfortunately I got my E4300 before Latitude ON was available, but I was under the impression that when it was finalised, I'd get the necessary upgrade for free.
Might have to give my Dell rep a call...
As you reply to that troll, you should tell why 10.1 was a free upgrade. Apple made such huge changes (MacOS--->OS X, nothing like that in history) and nobody was happy with 10.0.
I certainly hope you mean "nothing like that in Apple's history".
Apple didn't start stupid things like Mojave project, they admitted it wasn't really ready for production release in real life and made it free. Vista may have looked nice on paper but in real life, it was horrible. MS didn't admit that fact to begin with. Mojave site is still up and running, claiming people (their customers) are hallucinating.
"Mojave" - which is basically just a PR exercise - in no way compares to the utter shite that was OS X for the first few years of its existence. 10.1 was the "yeah, we really fucked that one up" admission, but it wasn't until 10.3, that OS X had performance that could be described as better than sluggish.
You quite literally could not get a "quick" OS X experience for years after its first release (this was a combination of both lacklustre Mac hardware at the time and OS X's almost unbelievable slowness). It took the G5s in 2003 (2004 for the iMacs) for OS X to move into the realms of "not slow", the 10.3 release to make it "OK", and 10.4 for it to be a reasonable comparison to Windows (or Classic MacOS - one of the major reasons it remained popular for so long was performance), in terms of interactive performance.
Contrast this to Vista, where even on its release day, PCs for well under a grand US could run it quite well (and even PCs from ~6 years previously could be made to, if they were top-end in their day, with some minor upgrades).
The "My Computer" icon was a bit like the "Macintosh HD" icon.
Indeed. They were both icons. Shameless plagiarism, indeed.
The Recycle Bin was a bit like Mac's Trash Can.
And, of course, no other GUI anywhere else had that concept. </SARCASM>
The Start Menu was a bit like Mac's Apple Menu. In those days, the Apple Menu had all the apps on it. It doesn't any more.
I'm well aware of what the Apple Menu used to be like, seeing as I've used just about every version of MacOS ever made. It was quite different in implementation, use, and purpose, to the Start Menu.
There is a very popular class of machines that can't run Vista, called Netbooks.
And by "popular" you mean "a tiny minority", right (likely to shrink in the coming couple of years as the recession stops people spending money on toys) ? And they will run Vista, just not particularly fast (then again, they won't run anything particularly fast).
I still think their should be a super user. It should be the only shared account, and only shared between a small group of people in the org that are both willing and by need trust each other entirely anyway.
Shared accounts are a bad idea all round. They're essentially unauditable, which has negative repercussions for everything from security to configuration control.
Throw in 'has unlimited and uncontrollable access to the entire system' on top of that, and it's a recipe for trouble.
You never can have total separation of powers someone always has to have the ability to get access to someone else fife should something happen to that person. Continued..
Being able to take over the privilege levels of another person in emergencies in a controlled and auditable fashion is _NOT_ the same thing as being able to inherently do anything and everything they can do.
If multiple accounts exist that can grant themselves new privileges at will they might just as well have had that access in the first place.
No, they mightn't. See above.
Multiple super user accounts are worthless. Nobody should be using the account except when the are, that is to say admins should not be reading e-mail from the privileged account for example.
[...]
You are hooked up on the idea that there must be a superuser of some sort, which is missing the point - superuser accounts shouldn't exist *AT ALL*. Individual privileges to access restricted resources should be granted as required.
A single user account that, for all intents and purposes, completely bypasses all aspects of access control as if they didn't even exist, is an inherent security flaw that should not exist.
Exactly, it's a SP. That's why it's come out on virtually the same timescale, a year or so rather than several years.
Windows 7 will be released only a month or two shy of 3 years after Vista.
Which is - especially accounting for the 'Longhorn reboot' - pretty much how long non-trivial Windows revisions have taken for the last ~20 years.
Windows 95: REVOLUTIONARY (copy of apple)
Which part of Windows 95 was a "copy of Apple" ? The substantially different GUI ? The significantly better multitasking and memory management ?
Windows Vista: BAD? (Initially had bad driver support, still has 'ridiculous' hardware requirements. [...]
Vista has never had "ridiculous hardware requirements". Relatively speaking, they were the same as earlier Windows versions. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find a new machine that couldn't run it.
My concern with upgrading my brother's 512meg Vista machine to a 512meg Win7 machine is that (1) I still don't think it will run any faster and (2) Win7 might not have the necessary drivers to operate the video/audio cards and therefore be impossible to use.
You could just, you know, buy some more RAM. At about $10/GB for DDR2, it's not like it's expensive.
However getting more RAM means either higher price because it has only DDR2 slots or upgrading motherboard - and while upgrading motherboard I'll have to upgrade CPU and graphics card.
DDR2 RAM is the cheapest RAM you can buy.
Suddenly it is not that cheap to throw more RAM on the problem.
2GB of DDR2 won't even cost you US$25. Heck, you can pick up 4GB for about $40.
You're not looking at the actual history of Microsoft Windows, though. Windows was (and still is, to a large part) built off what was originally a single-user system that would exist ENTIRELY as a standalone unit that was never connected to any other computers.
No, it's not. Windows NT was designed from the start to be a multiuser, networked OS.
UNIX, on the other hand, started with that kind of functionality in mind.
Actually, no. The very first versions of UNIX were single user. The multiuser stuff was added later, which is probably why it still had (and still has, in most configurations today) the concept of a superuser, even when other OSes had moved on.
Seriously though, despite this being a rediculous idea, what is the Authors' Guild actually trying to do here?
The same thing all copyright holders are trying to do - get more gravy off the Copyright gravy train.
These people will not be happy until they have a system in place where you are automatically billed every time you read/listen/speak/sing/think about/in-any-way-experience their works. And even _then_ they'll be whinging about how they're not making enough money.
This is just another example of why the whole concept of Copyright needs to be completely and fundamentally rethought.
Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?
It's probably more like 200,000 times, and we need it because "browsing the web" involves processing orders of magnitudes more data with dramatically lower required response times.
I know some people need raw computation, but c'mon. The average boot time is still ~60 seconds on the desktop. Why?
For the same reason it still takes your car a minute or two to warm up in the morning.
And it doesn't even matter, which OS. Why do we need more calculations to get ready to so something than it took to get someone up there? Seriously.
Look, going to the moon was an impressive engineering feat, but in terms of the "processing" needed, it was insignificant.
Modern software is bloat. Let's do something about that, first.
Define "bloat".
Can you watch any other video? If so, Flash is bloated.
Your logic is broken.
didn't have anything to do with it?
Given Apple and Microsoft compete in different markets, and therefore Apple's existence (or lack thereof) is completely irrelevant to Microsoft's status as a monopoly, I'd have to say.... no.
And apparently today's scientific academia has used it as an excellent template.
Sorry, I didn't realise you were trolling the first time.
Please, carry on.
I'm amazed that people are so threatened by religion.
Religion is an inherently discriminatory and exclusionary construct. It has a long, glorious history of threats, abuse oppression and violence towards non-believers. Why _wouldn't_ a rational person be threatened by it ?
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution. I mean, why aren't they protesting dinosaurs? Isn't the Earth supposed to be too young for them to have existed?
Because Evolution disproves one of the basics tenets of most religions - that humans are special, different from other animals, specifically created by god ("in his image").
I would suggest that you price any other companies computer Spec for Spec It doesn't matter if you think the spec is important to you or not. (including Size, Weight, Dimensions, Video Camera,Keyboard type...), in general try to custom build the Mac Model. You will find the price of the Mac, will be about the same price as the competitors.
Of course, this places disproportionate value on certain things that are very uncommon outside of Apple. Like, for example, form factor.
However, for example, if all you want is a minimum buy-in point, then a PCs with roughly twice the hardware resources of a Mac Mini costs only a bit more than half as much, and a PC with only marginally less power than an 8-core Mac Pro costs _less_ than half as much.
If your primary interest is in what the computer does, rather than what it looks like, then nearly all desktop Macs are embarassingly overpriced (the laptops are harder to call).
I just don't believe that sexual selection can produce evolution in a _harmful_ direction.
Of course it could, if it disguised otherwise "harmful" traits.
Consider: if you're rich and powerful, then you will attract mates, because it will do a more than good enough job of disguising that you've only got one lung and genetic predispositions towards obesity and degenerative brain disease.
Note also that future evolution may breed out those "harmful" traits while keeping the solely sexually selected ones intact.
Why did the peacock evolve such a big and handicapping tail? Hur-hur-hur, to impress women, Beavis.
Your fundamental assumption seems to be that the Peacock's tail is, in fact, explicitly disadvantageous to its survival. What evidence do you have to support this assumption ?
I'm _not_ against darwinism or natural selection. I'm just against the "sexual selection" cludge. That's all. Remove that kludge, and I'm perfectly content with Darwinism.
It's not a "kludge". Some traits will, almost certainly, propagate solely due to them making the organism more attractive to a mate. Indeed, given that successful reproduction is the ultimate expression of "fitness", one would assume that traits existing solely for 'sexual selection' would be quite common.
Btw, there was a pretty good David Attenborough programme on BBC TV last week about Darwin and Evolution that showed many of the subsequent discoveries. I forget the title, but it must be available on popular video sharing sites.
There was another excellent show on only a couple of days later on the topic, called something like "What Darwin didn't know". It went into the details of how modern science has shown just how much of a slam-dunk Evolution is.
Particularly stunning, to me, were the comparisons of the early fetal stages of various different organisms and how similar they all are.