That's a pretty specious argument. Vista doesn't run well on the hardware it is supposed to run on. OS X does. Should we penalize Windows and OS X for both not running on my TI-83?
Uh, what ? Vista runs fine on the hardware it's supposed to - certainly at least as well as OS X does (and vastly better than OS X did at release, and for years afterwards).
I've got Vista on a 3+ year old Dell laptop. It runs fine.
BS. The *AA members need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs them.
It is difficult to comprehend the thought processes that lead to this conclusion. Microsoft are a tiny player in the market for content consumption devices ("players") and less than insignificant in the content creation/distribution market. When most people listen to music on iPods, watch DVDs with standalone DVD players and get their TV through their $CABLECO-provided set-top boxes - and basically all that content is coming from a handful of production companies - exactly where do you think Microsoft has the influence to effect industry-wide change ?
Imagine the hurt if MS announced that their systems will no longer play anything other than Red Book audio CDs.
Minimal.
What's Jane Teenager more likely to do: run out and buy a Mac or just download her albums from now on?
Pretty much. In case you hadn't noticed, that's mostly what Jane Teenager has been doing for years. Heck, if anything your suggestion would bang the final nail into the coffin of (DRM-free) CD media.
Why do you people just not get it ? When Jane Teenager can't rip the latest CD to her iPod, or Joe Average can't watch the latest Super-Duper-cut-your-eyeballs-HD release of Transformers, their reaction is not "zOMG ! Teh 3vil RIAA scum are to blame", it's "so what do I need to buy so I can listen to the music and watch the movies I want". Media players are *irrelevant commodities*, it's the _content_ that people want. Control the content, and you control the players (because if they don't play your content, no-one will buy them).
"DRM" is brought up all the time, yet it is quite possibly the single most irrelevant and insignificant criticism of Vista (with the possible exception of "hardware requirements"). If you don't have DRM-encumbered content, the DRM restrictions simply don't apply. If you *do* have DRM-encumbered content, then Vista isn't applying any more restrictions than any other device capable of playing it will. Either way, it doesn't matter.
And if Microsoft, with 90+ percent of the market, said, "No, if you want to get your movies into our market, you'll get rid of this annoying, overhead causing crap that our consumers hate."
Newsflash: the only part of the market Microsoft owns "90+ percent" of is desktop PCs. In case you've not been out and about a lot, the vast majority of people do *not* use their desktop PCs for listening to music, watching movies or watching TV. They use appliances like iPods, DVD players and set-top boxes.
Microsoft have next to zero influence in the markets where DRM matters. They'd *like* to have a bit more, hence Windows MCE and the Zune, but they certainly don't now.
And as for the old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release you should read this [auckland.ac.nz], last updated earlier this year.
And...? Doesn't change the fact that the "old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release that claimed all audio and video would be degraded if you weren't using DRMed content and/or locked down hardware" was proven false long ago.
Needing a whole DRM stack just to connect your screen is what I find the most abusive.
Then you can relax, because you need nothing of the sort. Vista works just fine outputting to standard analogue VGA, or DVI.
Unless, of course, you're watching DRM-encumbered content. In which case you need an HDMI (or other HDCP-compliant) display anyway, regardless of what device you are using to play it.
It is not a "myth". It depends on what you are trying to do. For general purpose PC use, Vista is no more restrictive than XP. For multimedia, home theater it can get ugly.
Vista's been driving my HTPC for over six months now. At which point is it supposed to "get ugly" ? When I'm watching DVDs ? When I'm watching stuff I download from thepiratebay ? When I'm watching DVDs I ripped myself ? When I'm watching TV ? When I'm watching recorded TV ?
Video gets downgraded to crap if you don't have crappy DRM through the whole path.
Only if the content is DRM-encumbered. Solution: don't buy DRM-encumbered content.
I tried recording some shows and and get sorry Charlie messages. I tried to burn the shows that I could record to DVD and get sorry Charlie messages.
You're lying. DVDs don't support the ICT and can't activate the DRM subsystems.
Sorry, I don't want a computer telling what I can and cannot do.
It's not, the people who own the content are.
I switched to Mac and multimedia has been so much better. The only thing from Apple' that I stay away from is TV/Movies from iTunes since I cannot burn them to a DVD to watch.
Right. Which sounds so much different to your made-up stories about Vista.
Yeah, in Windows, you absolutely need to right-click. That's why it's so hard for Windows-trained users think it's so vital. In Windows, it pretty much is.
Rubbish. Hell, in Windows you can get by quite well without having a mouse at all.
The point of context menus in Windows - like OS X - for quick access to frequently used functions relevant to whatever object it is you might have right clicked. Windows just does a vastly better job of it than OS X does.
Apple did something very smart with the virtual second button. They took advantage of the ease of multiple user accounts on the Mac and made a system that accomodates both novices and experts using the same hardware by changing the functionality in software. For users of shared machines, this is a huge win. For the computer in the living room that four different people use, the geek in the family no longer has to unplug the simple mouse and plug in the 4 button mouse, they just change some settings in their user preferences. And grandma is not confused and just has one button that works for everything.
Or they could have just shipped a normal multibutton mouse and mapped the right-click to the left-click by default (which is essentially what they do with the Mighty Mouse). Same result, less expensive hardware and zero chance of misidentified clicks (which happen to me regularly when I'm using my mum's iMac).
Incidentally, on every Mighty Mouse I've used (probably a dozen of them by now) the side buttons have always struck me as an RSI timebomb. They're awkward to maneuver fingers to and require a relatively large amount of pressure to activate. I've come to the conclusion that the Mighty Mouse is another Apple triumph of form over function - it's got The Steve's fingerprints all over it.
Next time I see tripe like this on the firehose I'm going to throw a negative on it, instead of just ignoring it. Get stardock and window blinds? I mean seriously...
Indeed. Not to mention suggesting that the abortion of usability called the Dock is better than the Taskbar, or that Expose "knocks Alt+Tab out of the park" when they're meant for (and better at) different things.
Quite frankly, I can think of NO reason for an average consumer to even need to pay for an OS aside from being able to play games.
And they don't - even to play games. For the vast, vast majority of people, the OS comes "free" when they buy the computer (just like it does with their PS3, XBox or Tivo).
Can you give an example of a real emulator then? Where do you draw the line between emulators and other compatibility layers?
An emulator will allow you to use features that the underlying hardware (or software) literally cannot support (by "emulating" them). For example, by letting you run NES games on a PC, even thought that PC has neither the hardware or software of an NES.
A "compatibility layer" (probably more accurately described as an "API translator") will only let you use features that the underlying software (or hardware) actually - because all it does is translate between two different ways of referring to an identical piece of functionality (say, reading a file). For example, the WOW16 system in Windows NT/2k/XP/etc that lets you run win16 apps in win32 OSes.
Of course, there's no shortage of products that blur these lines. However, WINE is definitely *NOT* an emulator - it won't, for example, let you run an x86 Windows programs on a non-x86 platform without some other tool (typically qemu) providing emulation for the x86 code of the Windows program.
We have decided to stick with XP; and our new machines will have only 512MB RAM and loaded with Corporate Licensed XP. The addl. cost of 2GB RAM and video cards with DX10 is too sttep.
1. You don't need 2GB of RAM for basic business users (1GB is fine, and adds all of about US$30-$40).
2. You don't need a DX10 card (modern onboard video is fine, and standalone Aero capable cards are about US$30 - or probably free if you want to go dumpster diving).
Sorry MS but I'd rather have a skeleton menu structure that simply duplicates all of the icons/shortcuts because it then means I have the ability to restore a fragged menu simply by copying the default back in. Of course just like the multiple desktops the X windows system has supported for many years, MS had to go and reinvent the damn wheel instead of simply using what was already there. That's why their wheels are not round. They thought it was better to have corners to back into Damn Idiots
No, they're doing something different than you think (which works quite well) and you've completely missed the point of it (centralised manageability).
That is a complex and error-prone solution to what is essentially a non-problem (ie: satisfying OCDers and anal-retentives who simply must have their Start Menus "just so")...
I find that this is the biggest problem. Not that it asks for permission, but that it asks multiple times for one action. I was trying to rename an item in my start menu, and it asked 3 times for permission.
No, it only asked for permission once. The first dialog was just telling you that you were editing an item you didn't have permissions to and would have to elevate to do so (so you could back out then if you know you didn't have the ability to elevate your privileges).
There is no third dialog in this process, so I'm not sure what it might actually have been.
It shouldn't even have to give permission to change an entry in my start menu. In Mandriva, I only get prompted for the admin password when I'm installing new software, or messing with system settings. Windows Vista seems to present me with prompts for just about every action I have to do.
That item wasn't on "your" Start Menu, it was on the "All Users" Start Menu (which, for obvious reasons, requires elevated privileges to change). Items in "your" Start Menu you can edit normally.
Education is also an important factor, it's possible that the cops that have killed with them were not properly educated as to their lethality and would have exercised more caution if they were.
Here's a rule that would lead to some restraint: no police officer should be allowed to carry a taser until they've experienced being at the wrong end of one.
Hey... slow down a bit... if you'd look at my other posts, you'd see that I more than agree with you for the most part; its just that our system is currently so broken that the lawmakers have chosen to avoid the "life" timeline. In an earlier post, I said I thought no copyright should be granted for more than 35 years.
That's still way too long for many things. A blockbuster song or movie, for example, should be in and out of copyright in a matter of years.
Item 2 was not about killing people, item 1 was. Item two is separate -- the idea that people can make a profit off of PD works.
This whole sub-thread is about "killing people" and the implication that some meaningful proportion of the population would choose murder over copyright infringement.
BTW: I notice you skipped the part where I pointed out that copyright infringement can currently carry heavier penalties than murder.
That's because I'm sceptical that any court is actually going to give a lighter sentence for pre-meditated murder than for copyright infringement - of any kind - without some seriously significant other factors being involved.
You're treating this as a "Hey, I want that guy's copywritten works! I'm gonna go kill him!" scenario. I agree that that is (generally) absurd. However, the derivative works scenario I pointed out is less absurd, and situations where someone might not come to the aid of someone who is in trouble but has valuable IP is even more likely in our passive society.
Uh, what ? You think someone's going to do a quick check on whether or not the guy choking in the restaurant has any songs in the charts before they step in and do the heimlich ?
I think you need to elaborate exactly what you mean here.
There has to be a balance, and the current system is way off kilter. What I'm saying is that your suggestion of setting the term to the life of the holder isn't the best solution to our current problem.
It's not meant to be a "solution" to the "current problem", it's a statement of principle. There is no justifiable reason for copyright to last an instant past the copyright holder's death. This is true regardless of whether we're referring to copyright as it exists today or as it existed a century ago.
This is the way it used to be; they found that only rich people and corporations registered copyrights, and everyone else was taken advantage of.
So... Basically just like it is now ?
So they changed it. Do you really want your Thanksgiving Dinner photos of your family plastered all over the place because some company saw them on MySpace and decided they'd work really well in their ads?
If I didn't want my Thanksgiving Dinner photos plaster all over the place, I wouldn't have put them on MySpace. If I *did* put them on MySpace, I would do so in the full knowledge that anyone could take them, use them and change them. My only gripe would be if the corporation using my photos "in their ads" was implying that I supported their products when I did not (and that scenario should be easily handled by other laws, rather than copyright).
Bad idea. Big Corps then ensure a work never becomes popular, and eventually the copyright holder sells them the rights out of desperation to make some money.
Please explain a) how you think this could actually work and b) why it would be a bad thing that the copyright holder made money by selling their work.
The reason copyright terms need to be tied to the popularity and profitability of a work, is to discourage the "one hit wonder". No-one should be given special legal protection just so they - and several generations thereafter - can live off the proceeds of about a day or two's work for the rest of their lives. It is both morally repugnant and grossly inefficient.
Make it TOO severe, and you're back to the "it's easier just to kill him" argument.
Good thing pre-meditated murder is both illegal, a
In fact, and I'm sure someone on Slashdot has raw data on this (that perhaps even shows I'm wrong), Apple are the only company who has ever achieved this on a regular basis.
And one should not lose sight of the fact the only reason Apple *could* do this was because OS X was so godawful slow to start with (and for years afterwards).
When OS X was released, it was a dog on even the fastest Macs available (and remained "slow" until the G5s). Vista runs happily on machines that were merely high-end (not even the best available) 4 years ago.
Vista could be a great OS , we just won't know until they decide to get the drm out of the system and remove what people feel is slowing down everything.
DRM is an utterly irrelevant criticism of Vista. If you're not using DRM-encumbered media, it's simply not active. If you *are* using DRM-encumbered media, Vista isn't imposing any more restrictions than any other player would.
I would like to see a total rewrite of the windows kernel to take advantage of newer ways of doing things. And I mean completely throw out backward compatability much like Linux does when they change core components in the system. Relying on a kernel that is going on almost what 20 years old ? Tells me this company has way to much mucking up the highway.
By that measure, both Linux (ca. 1991) and OS X (NeXTSTEP, ca. 1989) have older kernels than Vista (Windows NT 3.1, ca. 1993).
I guess that depends on your definition of "med-high end". I bought this laptop with a core 2 duo processor and 2 gigs of RAM a couple of weeks ago. It came with Vista Home Premium. The performance has been positively abysmal. Of course I turned aero off, shut the sidebar down, disabled unnecessary services and uninstalled all of the crap-ware. It was still terrible with laggy menus, pegging the processor at 100 percent for no apparent reason, programs taking forever to load, general buggyness, etc.
Something's wrong with your machine. My 3+ year old Dell Precision with a Pentium-M and 2G RAM runs Vista just fine.
1. The incentive is that someone might find it much easier to commit murder and not get caught than to violate copyright and not get caught. Added to this, if copyright terms were for life, the perp would run afoul of copyright for the entire span of the creator's life, for all works they had created to date. With murder, there is only one time of infringement to cover up. Added to this, it is not a case of "Do I murder a person or just steal their work?" Instead, it is a case of added windfall to killing a person. There is LESS incentive to kill them if their copyrights endure or have already expired than there is if you get that bonus of free access to all their work.
This makes no sense. Murder is considered one of - if not the - most abhorrent crimes to civilised societies, and the pursuit of perpetrators reflects that. It is certainly considered orders of magnitude more significant than copyright infringement - of any scale - by basically everyone (jokes here about RIAA CEOs and lawyers notwithstanding). Further, punishments reflect these attitudes (in general, there are always a handful of exceptions).
Yet, you are attempting to argue that someone is more likely to choose murder over copyright infringement ? Ridiculous.
2. Talk to Disney about this one. They have a business model of taking public domain works, tweaking them and then selling their tweaked versions under indefinite copyright. This whole "life" argument isn't as much an issue about redistribution of the original works as it is an issue about the legality of DERIVATIVE works.
When Disney starts a trend of killing people so they can re-release a "tweaked" copy of their work, you might just have the beginnings of a point.
THIS (as well as the "don't dilute Mickey" reason) is one example why "life" is a bad copyright term. There are others, some of which were actually experienced back when life terms WERE set for created works.
The very idea that we should put up with ridiculous copyright terms to reduce the incentive of some psychopaths to commit murder is idiotic, counter-productive and grossly offensive. It is difficult to even know where to start a discussion with someone whose thought processes are so fundamentally broken. I suppose you think we should outlaw suggestive clothes so women are less likely to be raped, as well ?
There is no justifiable reason whatsoever why copyright should last a second past the copyright holder's death. Copyright holders get enough disproportionate benefits during life, carrying them on into death is simply disgusting.
* Copyright should be an opt-in, registered-the-work system, like patents.
* Copyright terms should be tied to the popularity and profitability of the work so more popular works get out of copyright sooner.
* Copyright protection should expire on the death of the holder.
* Punishments for trying to circumvent term lengths should be severe - at the very least repayment of all customers, a fine double the reported revenue from the work and the immediate expiry of its copyright protection.
* Copyright should only protect works from commercial, for-profit copying.
* Derivative works should generally not be considered an infringement of the original.
Alas, you'd likely have a lot of content producers dying young if the law worked this way -- this is why they adopted "life plus" -- so that nobody could immediately benefit from the copyright owner's death.
Fortunately, murder is already illegal.
But that's missing the point. Where is the logic behind this argument ? If copyright expires on the death of the creator, then killing them achieves nothing except making it impossible for anyone to profit from the work. Are you seriously suggesting murder is considered a lesser crime than copyright infringement ?
OK I have just finished writing a book. If copyright was not transferable I would have had no choice other than to self publish.
OK so you didn't quite mean that I guess, you meant that the author's share is not transferable. But that means that I have no option other than to rely on income from royalties. I can't get an advance from the publisher because doing so would mean transfering the rights.
It means neither of these things. In the first case, you simply pay someone else to publish for you. In the second, the publisher simply pays you in advance, and you repay them as you make money from sales.
I do. Why should one tiny segment of society be granted such a disproportionately generous deal by the government ? Why should this incredibly disproportionate economic protection be given automatically and with no evidence of quality or return on investment ?
At *most* copyright should be replaced by an opt-in, fee-charged, quality-tested (no matter how bad) system like patents.
On an older desktop class board with modern drives, and a gigabit ethernet interface all on one 32bit 33mhz PCI bus it can be very significant especially when the array is degraded (a degraded parity based raid means that for every read that would have hit the dead drive you need to read the corresponding data from all the drives). The rebuild itself requires reading all data from all the remaining drives.
There is no difference in the amount of disk reads to a degraded or optimal array. It's just the disk with the parity gets read instead of the disk with the actual data. For example, assuming an 8-drive RAID5 and a single full-stripe read (for simplicity). If the array is optimal, the stripe will be read from the 7 "data" drives and the "parity" drive will not be touched[0]. However, if the array is degraded, 6 of the "data" drives will be read, plus the "parity" drive (for the parity data) and the missing data will then be reconstructed. So, the CPU usage is higher (due to parity reconstruction) but the number of disk reads is identical.
Bus bandwidth is also becoming *much* less of a problem these days as machines with multiple PCIe slots and 4+ SATA ports hanging directly off the chipset become more common. Even a x1 PCIe slot is capable of 250MB/sec, which should be sufficient to attach 4-6 modern drives to without any meaningful performance impact. The problem here is that there are a *LOT* of people (as evidenced by any Slashdot thread on the topic) - even amongst a supposedly tech-savvy audience - who really don't understand what's going on and what can influence the performance of a RAID (particularly software RAID) array. Simply look at the number of people who think software RAID5 and RAID6 are slower because of "the CPU overheads of parity calculations".
According to wikipedia modern desktop hard drives can do sustained transfers of 100MB/sec, one of these will nearly saturate an ordinary 32/33 PCI bus, eight will saturate the fastest version of PCI-X 1.0 64/133.
Note, however, that in real-life access patterns (even during a rebuild) drives would average half that figure.
Looks like it comes down to a choice of use a hardware raid card or select your motherboard and controllers VERY carefully.
While this is true, it must be taken in context. A hardware RAID controller worth having is expensive. Even low-end intel motherboards are now hanging 6 SATA ports directly off the chipset. Added to that, they usually have multiple PCIe slots, from x1 through x4 to x16. "select your motherboard and controllers VERY carefully" is becoming less and less true, because they are now coming with ample bus bandwidth out of the box.
There are reasons to use hardware RAID. the biggest one is the transparency of only having a single device presented is great for a simple RAID1 system drive to install the OS onto. However, if you have reasonably performant hardware - and *especially* with the advent of ZFS - there's little reason, today, to choose hardware RAID for your data. Software RAID will deliver more performance, more reliability, more flexibility and lower ongoing costs (eg: if you suffer a controller failure you don't need to get the exact same controller to access your data).
We have about 30TB of archival data sitting on a number of "storage servers" (exported via iSCSI to a "controller server" that glues them all together with LVM). These machines use a pair of small drives in a hardware RAID1 for the OS install, then use software RAID6 on the remaining drives. Performance is excellent, and since we actually use hardware RAID controllers to attach the drives, we have been able to directly compare the performance of hardware vs software RAID on identical systems - and software RAID has _always_ won, and usually by a non-trivial margin.
[0] Some RAID implementations also read the parity drive and recalculate to verify it is correct. We're ignoring these too.
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That's a pretty specious argument. Vista doesn't run well on the hardware it is supposed to run on. OS X does. Should we penalize Windows and OS X for both not running on my TI-83?
Uh, what ? Vista runs fine on the hardware it's supposed to - certainly at least as well as OS X does (and vastly better than OS X did at release, and for years afterwards).
I've got Vista on a 3+ year old Dell laptop. It runs fine.
BS. The *AA members need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs them.
It is difficult to comprehend the thought processes that lead to this conclusion. Microsoft are a tiny player in the market for content consumption devices ("players") and less than insignificant in the content creation/distribution market. When most people listen to music on iPods, watch DVDs with standalone DVD players and get their TV through their $CABLECO-provided set-top boxes - and basically all that content is coming from a handful of production companies - exactly where do you think Microsoft has the influence to effect industry-wide change ?
Imagine the hurt if MS announced that their systems will no longer play anything other than Red Book audio CDs.
Minimal.
What's Jane Teenager more likely to do: run out and buy a Mac or just download her albums from now on?
Pretty much. In case you hadn't noticed, that's mostly what Jane Teenager has been doing for years. Heck, if anything your suggestion would bang the final nail into the coffin of (DRM-free) CD media.
Why do you people just not get it ? When Jane Teenager can't rip the latest CD to her iPod, or Joe Average can't watch the latest Super-Duper-cut-your-eyeballs-HD release of Transformers, their reaction is not "zOMG ! Teh 3vil RIAA scum are to blame", it's "so what do I need to buy so I can listen to the music and watch the movies I want". Media players are *irrelevant commodities*, it's the _content_ that people want. Control the content, and you control the players (because if they don't play your content, no-one will buy them).
"DRM" is brought up all the time, yet it is quite possibly the single most irrelevant and insignificant criticism of Vista (with the possible exception of "hardware requirements"). If you don't have DRM-encumbered content, the DRM restrictions simply don't apply. If you *do* have DRM-encumbered content, then Vista isn't applying any more restrictions than any other device capable of playing it will. Either way, it doesn't matter.
That's three times more than are necessary.
The mind boggles at how you could assume that.
And if Microsoft, with 90+ percent of the market, said, "No, if you want to get your movies into our market, you'll get rid of this annoying, overhead causing crap that our consumers hate."
Newsflash: the only part of the market Microsoft owns "90+ percent" of is desktop PCs. In case you've not been out and about a lot, the vast majority of people do *not* use their desktop PCs for listening to music, watching movies or watching TV. They use appliances like iPods, DVD players and set-top boxes.
Microsoft have next to zero influence in the markets where DRM matters. They'd *like* to have a bit more, hence Windows MCE and the Zune, but they certainly don't now.
And as for the old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release you should read this [auckland.ac.nz], last updated earlier this year.
And...? Doesn't change the fact that the "old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release that claimed all audio and video would be degraded if you weren't using DRMed content and/or locked down hardware" was proven false long ago.
Needing a whole DRM stack just to connect your screen is what I find the most abusive.
Then you can relax, because you need nothing of the sort. Vista works just fine outputting to standard analogue VGA, or DVI.
Unless, of course, you're watching DRM-encumbered content. In which case you need an HDMI (or other HDCP-compliant) display anyway, regardless of what device you are using to play it.
It is not a "myth". It depends on what you are trying to do. For general purpose PC use, Vista is no more restrictive than XP. For multimedia, home theater it can get ugly.
Vista's been driving my HTPC for over six months now. At which point is it supposed to "get ugly" ? When I'm watching DVDs ? When I'm watching stuff I download from thepiratebay ? When I'm watching DVDs I ripped myself ? When I'm watching TV ? When I'm watching recorded TV ?
Video gets downgraded to crap if you don't have crappy DRM through the whole path.
Only if the content is DRM-encumbered. Solution: don't buy DRM-encumbered content.
I tried recording some shows and and get sorry Charlie messages. I tried to burn the shows that I could record to DVD and get sorry Charlie messages.
You're lying. DVDs don't support the ICT and can't activate the DRM subsystems.
Sorry, I don't want a computer telling what I can and cannot do.
It's not, the people who own the content are.
I switched to Mac and multimedia has been so much better. The only thing from Apple' that I stay away from is TV/Movies from iTunes since I cannot burn them to a DVD to watch.
Right. Which sounds so much different to your made-up stories about Vista.
Yeah, in Windows, you absolutely need to right-click. That's why it's so hard for Windows-trained users think it's so vital. In Windows, it pretty much is.
Rubbish. Hell, in Windows you can get by quite well without having a mouse at all.
The point of context menus in Windows - like OS X - for quick access to frequently used functions relevant to whatever object it is you might have right clicked. Windows just does a vastly better job of it than OS X does.
Apple did something very smart with the virtual second button. They took advantage of the ease of multiple user accounts on the Mac and made a system that accomodates both novices and experts using the same hardware by changing the functionality in software. For users of shared machines, this is a huge win. For the computer in the living room that four different people use, the geek in the family no longer has to unplug the simple mouse and plug in the 4 button mouse, they just change some settings in their user preferences. And grandma is not confused and just has one button that works for everything.
Or they could have just shipped a normal multibutton mouse and mapped the right-click to the left-click by default (which is essentially what they do with the Mighty Mouse). Same result, less expensive hardware and zero chance of misidentified clicks (which happen to me regularly when I'm using my mum's iMac).
Incidentally, on every Mighty Mouse I've used (probably a dozen of them by now) the side buttons have always struck me as an RSI timebomb. They're awkward to maneuver fingers to and require a relatively large amount of pressure to activate. I've come to the conclusion that the Mighty Mouse is another Apple triumph of form over function - it's got The Steve's fingerprints all over it.
Next time I see tripe like this on the firehose I'm going to throw a negative on it, instead of just ignoring it. Get stardock and window blinds? I mean seriously...
Indeed. Not to mention suggesting that the abortion of usability called the Dock is better than the Taskbar, or that Expose "knocks Alt+Tab out of the park" when they're meant for (and better at) different things.
Quite frankly, I can think of NO reason for an average consumer to even need to pay for an OS aside from being able to play games.
And they don't - even to play games. For the vast, vast majority of people, the OS comes "free" when they buy the computer (just like it does with their PS3, XBox or Tivo).
Can you give an example of a real emulator then? Where do you draw the line between emulators and other compatibility layers?
An emulator will allow you to use features that the underlying hardware (or software) literally cannot support (by "emulating" them). For example, by letting you run NES games on a PC, even thought that PC has neither the hardware or software of an NES.
A "compatibility layer" (probably more accurately described as an "API translator") will only let you use features that the underlying software (or hardware) actually - because all it does is translate between two different ways of referring to an identical piece of functionality (say, reading a file). For example, the WOW16 system in Windows NT/2k/XP/etc that lets you run win16 apps in win32 OSes.
Of course, there's no shortage of products that blur these lines. However, WINE is definitely *NOT* an emulator - it won't, for example, let you run an x86 Windows programs on a non-x86 platform without some other tool (typically qemu) providing emulation for the x86 code of the Windows program.
We have decided to stick with XP; and our new machines will have only 512MB RAM and loaded with Corporate Licensed XP. The addl. cost of 2GB RAM and video cards with DX10 is too sttep.
1. You don't need 2GB of RAM for basic business users (1GB is fine, and adds all of about US$30-$40).
2. You don't need a DX10 card (modern onboard video is fine, and standalone Aero capable cards are about US$30 - or probably free if you want to go dumpster diving).
Sorry MS but I'd rather have a skeleton menu structure that simply duplicates all of the icons/shortcuts because it then means I have the ability to restore a fragged menu simply by copying the default back in. Of course just like the multiple desktops the X windows system has supported for many years, MS had to go and reinvent the damn wheel instead of simply using what was already there. That's why their wheels are not round. They thought it was better to have corners to back into Damn Idiots
No, they're doing something different than you think (which works quite well) and you've completely missed the point of it (centralised manageability).
That is a complex and error-prone solution to what is essentially a non-problem (ie: satisfying OCDers and anal-retentives who simply must have their Start Menus "just so")...
I find that this is the biggest problem. Not that it asks for permission, but that it asks multiple times for one action. I was trying to rename an item in my start menu, and it asked 3 times for permission.
No, it only asked for permission once. The first dialog was just telling you that you were editing an item you didn't have permissions to and would have to elevate to do so (so you could back out then if you know you didn't have the ability to elevate your privileges).
There is no third dialog in this process, so I'm not sure what it might actually have been.
It shouldn't even have to give permission to change an entry in my start menu. In Mandriva, I only get prompted for the admin password when I'm installing new software, or messing with system settings. Windows Vista seems to present me with prompts for just about every action I have to do.
That item wasn't on "your" Start Menu, it was on the "All Users" Start Menu (which, for obvious reasons, requires elevated privileges to change). Items in "your" Start Menu you can edit normally.
Education is also an important factor, it's possible that the cops that have killed with them were not properly educated as to their lethality and would have exercised more caution if they were.
Here's a rule that would lead to some restraint: no police officer should be allowed to carry a taser until they've experienced being at the wrong end of one.
Hey... slow down a bit... if you'd look at my other posts, you'd see that I more than agree with you for the most part; its just that our system is currently so broken that the lawmakers have chosen to avoid the "life" timeline. In an earlier post, I said I thought no copyright should be granted for more than 35 years.
That's still way too long for many things. A blockbuster song or movie, for example, should be in and out of copyright in a matter of years.
Item 2 was not about killing people, item 1 was. Item two is separate -- the idea that people can make a profit off of PD works.
This whole sub-thread is about "killing people" and the implication that some meaningful proportion of the population would choose murder over copyright infringement.
BTW: I notice you skipped the part where I pointed out that copyright infringement can currently carry heavier penalties than murder.
That's because I'm sceptical that any court is actually going to give a lighter sentence for pre-meditated murder than for copyright infringement - of any kind - without some seriously significant other factors being involved.
You're treating this as a "Hey, I want that guy's copywritten works! I'm gonna go kill him!" scenario. I agree that that is (generally) absurd. However, the derivative works scenario I pointed out is less absurd, and situations where someone might not come to the aid of someone who is in trouble but has valuable IP is even more likely in our passive society.
Uh, what ? You think someone's going to do a quick check on whether or not the guy choking in the restaurant has any songs in the charts before they step in and do the heimlich ?
I think you need to elaborate exactly what you mean here.
There has to be a balance, and the current system is way off kilter. What I'm saying is that your suggestion of setting the term to the life of the holder isn't the best solution to our current problem.
It's not meant to be a "solution" to the "current problem", it's a statement of principle. There is no justifiable reason for copyright to last an instant past the copyright holder's death. This is true regardless of whether we're referring to copyright as it exists today or as it existed a century ago.
This is the way it used to be; they found that only rich people and corporations registered copyrights, and everyone else was taken advantage of.
So... Basically just like it is now ?
So they changed it. Do you really want your Thanksgiving Dinner photos of your family plastered all over the place because some company saw them on MySpace and decided they'd work really well in their ads?
If I didn't want my Thanksgiving Dinner photos plaster all over the place, I wouldn't have put them on MySpace. If I *did* put them on MySpace, I would do so in the full knowledge that anyone could take them, use them and change them. My only gripe would be if the corporation using my photos "in their ads" was implying that I supported their products when I did not (and that scenario should be easily handled by other laws, rather than copyright).
Bad idea. Big Corps then ensure a work never becomes popular, and eventually the copyright holder sells them the rights out of desperation to make some money.
Please explain a) how you think this could actually work and b) why it would be a bad thing that the copyright holder made money by selling their work.
The reason copyright terms need to be tied to the popularity and profitability of a work, is to discourage the "one hit wonder". No-one should be given special legal protection just so they - and several generations thereafter - can live off the proceeds of about a day or two's work for the rest of their lives. It is both morally repugnant and grossly inefficient.
Make it TOO severe, and you're back to the "it's easier just to kill him" argument.
Good thing pre-meditated murder is both illegal, a
In fact, and I'm sure someone on Slashdot has raw data on this (that perhaps even shows I'm wrong), Apple are the only company who has ever achieved this on a regular basis.
And one should not lose sight of the fact the only reason Apple *could* do this was because OS X was so godawful slow to start with (and for years afterwards).
When OS X was released, it was a dog on even the fastest Macs available (and remained "slow" until the G5s). Vista runs happily on machines that were merely high-end (not even the best available) 4 years ago.
Vista could be a great OS , we just won't know until they decide to get the drm out of the system and remove what people feel is slowing down everything.
DRM is an utterly irrelevant criticism of Vista. If you're not using DRM-encumbered media, it's simply not active. If you *are* using DRM-encumbered media, Vista isn't imposing any more restrictions than any other player would.
I would like to see a total rewrite of the windows kernel to take advantage of newer ways of doing things. And I mean completely throw out backward compatability much like Linux does when they change core components in the system. Relying on a kernel that is going on almost what 20 years old ? Tells me this company has way to much mucking up the highway.
By that measure, both Linux (ca. 1991) and OS X (NeXTSTEP, ca. 1989) have older kernels than Vista (Windows NT 3.1, ca. 1993).
I guess that depends on your definition of "med-high end". I bought this laptop with a core 2 duo processor and 2 gigs of RAM a couple of weeks ago. It came with Vista Home Premium. The performance has been positively abysmal. Of course I turned aero off, shut the sidebar down, disabled unnecessary services and uninstalled all of the crap-ware. It was still terrible with laggy menus, pegging the processor at 100 percent for no apparent reason, programs taking forever to load, general buggyness, etc.
Something's wrong with your machine. My 3+ year old Dell Precision with a Pentium-M and 2G RAM runs Vista just fine.
1. The incentive is that someone might find it much easier to commit murder and not get caught than to violate copyright and not get caught. Added to this, if copyright terms were for life, the perp would run afoul of copyright for the entire span of the creator's life, for all works they had created to date. With murder, there is only one time of infringement to cover up. Added to this, it is not a case of "Do I murder a person or just steal their work?" Instead, it is a case of added windfall to killing a person. There is LESS incentive to kill them if their copyrights endure or have already expired than there is if you get that bonus of free access to all their work.
This makes no sense. Murder is considered one of - if not the - most abhorrent crimes to civilised societies, and the pursuit of perpetrators reflects that. It is certainly considered orders of magnitude more significant than copyright infringement - of any scale - by basically everyone (jokes here about RIAA CEOs and lawyers notwithstanding). Further, punishments reflect these attitudes (in general, there are always a handful of exceptions).
Yet, you are attempting to argue that someone is more likely to choose murder over copyright infringement ? Ridiculous.
2. Talk to Disney about this one. They have a business model of taking public domain works, tweaking them and then selling their tweaked versions under indefinite copyright. This whole "life" argument isn't as much an issue about redistribution of the original works as it is an issue about the legality of DERIVATIVE works.
When Disney starts a trend of killing people so they can re-release a "tweaked" copy of their work, you might just have the beginnings of a point.
THIS (as well as the "don't dilute Mickey" reason) is one example why "life" is a bad copyright term. There are others, some of which were actually experienced back when life terms WERE set for created works.
The very idea that we should put up with ridiculous copyright terms to reduce the incentive of some psychopaths to commit murder is idiotic, counter-productive and grossly offensive. It is difficult to even know where to start a discussion with someone whose thought processes are so fundamentally broken. I suppose you think we should outlaw suggestive clothes so women are less likely to be raped, as well ?
There is no justifiable reason whatsoever why copyright should last a second past the copyright holder's death. Copyright holders get enough disproportionate benefits during life, carrying them on into death is simply disgusting.
* Copyright should be an opt-in, registered-the-work system, like patents.
* Copyright terms should be tied to the popularity and profitability of the work so more popular works get out of copyright sooner.
* Copyright protection should expire on the death of the holder.
* Punishments for trying to circumvent term lengths should be severe - at the very least repayment of all customers, a fine double the reported revenue from the work and the immediate expiry of its copyright protection.
* Copyright should only protect works from commercial, for-profit copying.
* Derivative works should generally not be considered an infringement of the original.
Alas, you'd likely have a lot of content producers dying young if the law worked this way -- this is why they adopted "life plus" -- so that nobody could immediately benefit from the copyright owner's death.
Fortunately, murder is already illegal.
But that's missing the point. Where is the logic behind this argument ? If copyright expires on the death of the creator, then killing them achieves nothing except making it impossible for anyone to profit from the work. Are you seriously suggesting murder is considered a lesser crime than copyright infringement ?
OK I have just finished writing a book. If copyright was not transferable I would have had no choice other than to self publish.
OK so you didn't quite mean that I guess, you meant that the author's share is not transferable. But that means that I have no option other than to rely on income from royalties. I can't get an advance from the publisher because doing so would mean transfering the rights.
It means neither of these things. In the first case, you simply pay someone else to publish for you. In the second, the publisher simply pays you in advance, and you repay them as you make money from sales.
no one wants to abolish copyrights.
I do. Why should one tiny segment of society be granted such a disproportionately generous deal by the government ? Why should this incredibly disproportionate economic protection be given automatically and with no evidence of quality or return on investment ?
At *most* copyright should be replaced by an opt-in, fee-charged, quality-tested (no matter how bad) system like patents.
On an older desktop class board with modern drives, and a gigabit ethernet interface all on one 32bit 33mhz PCI bus it can be very significant especially when the array is degraded (a degraded parity based raid means that for every read that would have hit the dead drive you need to read the corresponding data from all the drives). The rebuild itself requires reading all data from all the remaining drives.
There is no difference in the amount of disk reads to a degraded or optimal array. It's just the disk with the parity gets read instead of the disk with the actual data. For example, assuming an 8-drive RAID5 and a single full-stripe read (for simplicity). If the array is optimal, the stripe will be read from the 7 "data" drives and the "parity" drive will not be touched[0]. However, if the array is degraded, 6 of the "data" drives will be read, plus the "parity" drive (for the parity data) and the missing data will then be reconstructed. So, the CPU usage is higher (due to parity reconstruction) but the number of disk reads is identical.
Bus bandwidth is also becoming *much* less of a problem these days as machines with multiple PCIe slots and 4+ SATA ports hanging directly off the chipset become more common. Even a x1 PCIe slot is capable of 250MB/sec, which should be sufficient to attach 4-6 modern drives to without any meaningful performance impact. The problem here is that there are a *LOT* of people (as evidenced by any Slashdot thread on the topic) - even amongst a supposedly tech-savvy audience - who really don't understand what's going on and what can influence the performance of a RAID (particularly software RAID) array. Simply look at the number of people who think software RAID5 and RAID6 are slower because of "the CPU overheads of parity calculations".
According to wikipedia modern desktop hard drives can do sustained transfers of 100MB/sec, one of these will nearly saturate an ordinary 32/33 PCI bus, eight will saturate the fastest version of PCI-X 1.0 64/133.
Note, however, that in real-life access patterns (even during a rebuild) drives would average half that figure.
Looks like it comes down to a choice of use a hardware raid card or select your motherboard and controllers VERY carefully.
While this is true, it must be taken in context. A hardware RAID controller worth having is expensive. Even low-end intel motherboards are now hanging 6 SATA ports directly off the chipset. Added to that, they usually have multiple PCIe slots, from x1 through x4 to x16. "select your motherboard and controllers VERY carefully" is becoming less and less true, because they are now coming with ample bus bandwidth out of the box.
There are reasons to use hardware RAID. the biggest one is the transparency of only having a single device presented is great for a simple RAID1 system drive to install the OS onto. However, if you have reasonably performant hardware - and *especially* with the advent of ZFS - there's little reason, today, to choose hardware RAID for your data. Software RAID will deliver more performance, more reliability, more flexibility and lower ongoing costs (eg: if you suffer a controller failure you don't need to get the exact same controller to access your data).
We have about 30TB of archival data sitting on a number of "storage servers" (exported via iSCSI to a "controller server" that glues them all together with LVM). These machines use a pair of small drives in a hardware RAID1 for the OS install, then use software RAID6 on the remaining drives. Performance is excellent, and since we actually use hardware RAID controllers to attach the drives, we have been able to directly compare the performance of hardware vs software RAID on identical systems - and software RAID has _always_ won, and usually by a non-trivial margin.
[0] Some RAID implementations also read the parity drive and recalculate to verify it is correct. We're ignoring these too.
A mirrored RAID 0 is called a RAID 10.
No, it's called a RAID0+1. There *is* a difference.