But the real failure in Windows is a decent way to keep any number of applications up to date.
Actually it does, along with having a way to populate that "Add" section, as per your comment above.
The downside is you need a properly managed AD environment to see it.
As for the reason it's not there "by default", that should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used the word "Microsoft" and "monopoly" in the same sentence.
This is one of the areas where Free Software is far, far ahead of what Windows currently has.
Right up until the software you want isn't in the repo, or is broken. Then it falls way, way behind.
There's also the "what the hell is it called" issue, but that's become less significant in the last year or two, although that benefit is largely restricted to Ubuntu and its derivatives.
[...] place config and state data and even user files in predictable standardized places, to make them easy to find AND easy to collectively back-up.
I'm unclear on how this is any different to the Registry.
I'm also unclear on how it is any sort of improvement. Would your text files be transactional ? How would you apply ACLs to their contents ? How would you implement sanity checking on the data ?
"Critical" being defined as presenting an acute, immediate and essentially guaranteed risk of death or serious injury in case of failure.
Besides being critical for situations where you need to get out of the way fast, [...]
Examples that aren't don't involve bad driving in the first place ?
[...] your engine powers the hydraulics for both the brakes and the steering, making them vastly more effective.
Both are quite usable even without hydraulic assistance.
Again, the power from the engine provides a great deal of assistance, but it's extremely difficult to think of a situation (that doesn't rely on a setup of incompetence) where the engine cutting out puts you in immediate danger of a serious accident, whereas the sudden loss of braking and/or steering capability is almost a guarantee of same, unless the driver is exceptionally skilled.
If you were ever in a car that just stopped because the electronics were fried while driving in the left lane on a freeway you'd think that power was a critical system.
I have been in such a situation. Thanks to inertia, not only was I was able to pull over to the side of the road, but vehicles behind me had plenty of time to notice my speed diminishing and act accordingly. Even the wanker tailgating me.
The engine failing on a freeway won't cause your car to stop dead in the middle of the road. If you're travelling at speed, you'll have plenty of distance (and time) to pull over. If you're in heavy, slow-moving traffic, your life won't be at risk (at least, not from a crash).
Don't get me wrong I do believe that electronics in cars is a good idea, but I do not believe that critical systems should rely on electronics.
There are only two "critical systems" in a car. The steering and the brakes. Both of which are still mechanical connections in every modern car I can think of (even if they are frequently electronically augmented to varying degrees).
Comparing a Model T's engine to a modern cars engine is actually a very good analogy, except for one thing. Electronic controls do not give anything that a well engineered engine does not, while a Model T's engine was a vast improvement over the horse and buggy.
Say what ? Electronic controls give your engine more power, produce it more efficiently and produce fewer emissions. All while allowing you to use a wide variety of different fuel octanes without any real concerns.
You couldn't come close to the combination of power, efficiency, cleanliness and flexibility of a modern engine without electronic controls.
What? No - it reboots your computer without asking.
You are mistaken. A stock Windows XP SP2 install will not reboot your machine after installing updates. Indeed, a default Windows/Automatic Updates configuration won't even *install* the updates automatically, it just downloads them and pops up a nag balloon.
Either you, your system administrator or possibly even your hardware vendor has changed the default configuration.
Nothing on that page supports your assertion that "there remains a significant wage gap between women and men doing the same job".
"Women being paid less for doing the same job" (your argument) and "women more like to have lower paying jobs" (what that page is talking about) are two _vastly_ different things. One is discrimination, the other is statistics.
Trying to get some work done, and the "Windows has just installed a Very Important Update" dialog pops up just after I got a "Save changes?" dialog. So not only does the machine reboot, but it sends SIGHUP (or whatever the Windows equivalent is) to all the open apps. Which of course my app interprets as "cancel save and then exit". So now not only and I stuck waiting for my machine to boot, but I've lost my work.
The dialog that prompts to reboot has no default button to select.
. If you press cancel, it will wait 10 minutes or so, and display the message again. I was in the middle of working on a major software project when I got this stupid message.
You can temporarily disable this by stopping the "Automatic Updates" service.
However, the point the systme is trying to get across is that you NEED TO REBOOT. Until you do, it's potentially in a state of limbo, with some updates only half-applied, which can cause all sorts of strange problems from conflicting file versions and the like.
Another nice side-effect of this feature is that if you step away from your computer for more than 10 minutes and a security update happens to come in while you're gone, you'll come back to a rebooted computer with no explanation.
Only if you tell it to. That is *not* the default configuration.
So I'm doing something on my box, the darn thing pops up right when I'm about to press enter or click in the place where the reboot button appears, and the box reboots.
Difficult to believe, since the dialog that prompts to reboot does not have either of the buttons in it selected by default.
Second, there remains a significant wage gap between women and men doing the same job, which is a labor issue - frankly I think it's pitiful that this type of inequality is still lurking around.
Evidence ? Every analysis I have ever seen show that women get paid just as much as men for the same job, but on average they work less - and hence get paid less.
Terminal Server VNC/ARD/X (there's even alternatives to that, again for free)
I don't mean to be rude, but you don't really appear to know what you're talking about (the above being the most obvious example in your reply to demonstrate this).
Uhh, I run an ibook with a 1.33Ghz G4 and a gig of ram and I know that it runs smoother than say, a PIII at the same clock speed.
Funny, because I've got a 768MB, 1Ghz G4 iBook and it's painful to do anything more than, say, watch a DVD, check email, *very* basic web browsing or pull photos off my camera. Which is ok from the perspective of that's all I bought it to do, but I also have an old ~550Mhz P3 laptop that absolutely stomps all over it in terms of responsiveness. I could grudgingly use the P3 full time (with the exception of games), whereas even the light usage I subject my iBook to frequently becomes an exercise in frustration of beachballs and UI pauses.
Heck, my Mum's G5 iMac, with a gig of RAM, still has far too many annoying UI pauses for my liking - and it's easily twice as powerful as my iBook. An equivalent costing (at the time) PC, however, runs XP blazingly fast.
OS X is just slow. I've used a lot of Macs and a lot of versions of OS X (since a Beige G3 running "Rhapsody"), and the only ones that have even come close to being able to run it well are the dual G5 and Intel machines.
Exchange, Terminal Server (Apple hasn't even *vaguely suggested* that they might have a competitor to TS), SMS, WSUS (WSUS is free, by the way, so you don't need to worry about "CALs" for it).
Of course it's not going to be Exchange but it's going to have the same functionality.
Nothing that comes with OS X Server, as far as I know, has the functionality of Exchange. At least, not yet. Exchange *is* more than just sending and receiving email, you know.
[...] (it did borrow the code for HPFS - the original NTFS was in fact *interchangeable* with HPFS, because they were the same filesystem)
Not really. Well, maybe in the _very_ early development stages - but NTFS was created specifically from scratch for NT and even in its first release was a significantly more complex and more capable FS than HPFS.
Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", [...]
No, they weren't. OS/2 and "OS/2 NT" (Windows NT) were completely different codebases. About 30 seconds with an archtecitural block diagram of each should make that pretty obvious.
Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!
OS/2 didn't evolve into NT. However, technically he's still right, since the product he would have been talking about at the time - OS/2 1.x's replacement - becamse Windows NT.
The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.
Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.
MS took their work and used it to shape Windows NT, and everything derived from NT still has an OS/2 heart.
In name, maybe, but not in any meaningful way. There's certainly not any architectural similarities between the two. Windows NT is in no way derived from the OS/2 codebase.
For evidence of this, just check out:
Linux runs Win32 binaries, too - does that mean in every Linux box beats the heart of DOS ?
Personally, I really loved OS/2. It's wasn't the best piece of software *ever*, but it was truely remarkable for it's time.
OS/2 was certainly solid, but "truly remarkable" ? Not really. Pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection weren't exactly cutting edge, even back in the mid-late 80s.
I wish MS would have stol^h^h^h borrowed more ideas from it.
Like what ? Windows NT was superior in pretty much every measurable way (except maybe the WPS - but IME opinions about the WPS tend to be pretty polarised, so even that's debateable). Not to mention Microsoft _wrote_ a non-trivial chunk of OS/2, so they couldn't really stea^H^H^H^Hborrow from themselves, could they ?
Windows NT started out with the name 'OS/2-NT' internally at Microsoft, despite the fact that many, many revisionist historians love to leave this point out.
Like who ? That Windows NT was originally written to be a replacement for OS/2 is a pretty widely and well known fact (amongst people who are interested in this sort of thing). It'd be hard to see how (or why) anyone could/would "leave it out".
Slashdot Mirror
But the real failure in Windows is a decent way to keep any number of applications up to date.
Actually it does, along with having a way to populate that "Add" section, as per your comment above.
The downside is you need a properly managed AD environment to see it.
As for the reason it's not there "by default", that should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used the word "Microsoft" and "monopoly" in the same sentence.
This is one of the areas where Free Software is far, far ahead of what Windows currently has.
Right up until the software you want isn't in the repo, or is broken. Then it falls way, way behind.
There's also the "what the hell is it called" issue, but that's become less significant in the last year or two, although that benefit is largely restricted to Ubuntu and its derivatives.
[...] place config and state data and even user files in predictable standardized places, to make them easy to find AND easy to collectively back-up.
I'm unclear on how this is any different to the Registry.
I'm also unclear on how it is any sort of improvement. Would your text files be transactional ? How would you apply ACLs to their contents ? How would you implement sanity checking on the data ?
Wrong. Engine power is critical in a car.
No, it's not. It's useful, but it's not critical.
"Critical" being defined as presenting an acute, immediate and essentially guaranteed risk of death or serious injury in case of failure.
Besides being critical for situations where you need to get out of the way fast, [...]
Examples that aren't don't involve bad driving in the first place ?
[...] your engine powers the hydraulics for both the brakes and the steering, making them vastly more effective.
Both are quite usable even without hydraulic assistance.
Again, the power from the engine provides a great deal of assistance, but it's extremely difficult to think of a situation (that doesn't rely on a setup of incompetence) where the engine cutting out puts you in immediate danger of a serious accident, whereas the sudden loss of braking and/or steering capability is almost a guarantee of same, unless the driver is exceptionally skilled.
If you were ever in a car that just stopped because the electronics were fried while driving in the left lane on a freeway you'd think that power was a critical system.
I have been in such a situation. Thanks to inertia, not only was I was able to pull over to the side of the road, but vehicles behind me had plenty of time to notice my speed diminishing and act accordingly. Even the wanker tailgating me.
The engine failing on a freeway won't cause your car to stop dead in the middle of the road. If you're travelling at speed, you'll have plenty of distance (and time) to pull over. If you're in heavy, slow-moving traffic, your life won't be at risk (at least, not from a crash).
Don't get me wrong I do believe that electronics in cars is a good idea, but I do not believe that critical systems should rely on electronics.
There are only two "critical systems" in a car. The steering and the brakes. Both of which are still mechanical connections in every modern car I can think of (even if they are frequently electronically augmented to varying degrees).
Comparing a Model T's engine to a modern cars engine is actually a very good analogy, except for one thing. Electronic controls do not give anything that a well engineered engine does not, while a Model T's engine was a vast improvement over the horse and buggy.
Say what ? Electronic controls give your engine more power, produce it more efficiently and produce fewer emissions. All while allowing you to use a wide variety of different fuel octanes without any real concerns.
You couldn't come close to the combination of power, efficiency, cleanliness and flexibility of a modern engine without electronic controls.
What? No - it reboots your computer without asking.
You are mistaken. A stock Windows XP SP2 install will not reboot your machine after installing updates. Indeed, a default Windows/Automatic Updates configuration won't even *install* the updates automatically, it just downloads them and pops up a nag balloon.
Either you, your system administrator or possibly even your hardware vendor has changed the default configuration.
Boo fucking hoo! I'm the USER, damnit. Whatever I'm doing is more important than applying updates!
Duh. That's why it ASKS you to reboot.
And if it can break itself just by half-updating, it's got bigger problems anyway.
Hardly. Changing files out from underneath running applications can cause weird and wonderful problems on all platforms.
Nothing on that page supports your assertion that "there remains a significant wage gap between women and men doing the same job".
"Women being paid less for doing the same job" (your argument) and "women more like to have lower paying jobs" (what that page is talking about) are two _vastly_ different things. One is discrimination, the other is statistics.
Trying to get some work done, and the "Windows has just installed a Very Important Update" dialog pops up just after I got a "Save changes?" dialog. So not only does the machine reboot, but it sends SIGHUP (or whatever the Windows equivalent is) to all the open apps. Which of course my app interprets as "cancel save and then exit". So now not only and I stuck waiting for my machine to boot, but I've lost my work.
The dialog that prompts to reboot has no default button to select.
. If you press cancel, it will wait 10 minutes or so, and display the message again. I was in the middle of working on a major software project when I got this stupid message.
You can temporarily disable this by stopping the "Automatic Updates" service.
However, the point the systme is trying to get across is that you NEED TO REBOOT. Until you do, it's potentially in a state of limbo, with some updates only half-applied, which can cause all sorts of strange problems from conflicting file versions and the like.
Another nice side-effect of this feature is that if you step away from your computer for more than 10 minutes and a security update happens to come in while you're gone, you'll come back to a rebooted computer with no explanation.
Only if you tell it to. That is *not* the default configuration.
So I'm doing something on my box, the darn thing pops up right when I'm about to press enter or click in the place where the reboot button appears, and the box reboots.
Difficult to believe, since the dialog that prompts to reboot does not have either of the buttons in it selected by default.
Second, there remains a significant wage gap between women and men doing the same job, which is a labor issue - frankly I think it's pitiful that this type of inequality is still lurking around.
Evidence ? Every analysis I have ever seen show that women get paid just as much as men for the same job, but on average they work less - and hence get paid less.
Much better to walk around the corner and find the train that goes all the way.
Right. So which train do you think is "right around the corner" that's going to take us all the way ?
You mean fusion power plants ? Because trading oil dependence for uranium dependence leads nowhere.
Well, sure, in the same sense hitching a lift 800km along a 1000km journey "leads nowhere"...
Terminal Server VNC/ARD/X (there's even alternatives to that, again for free)
I don't mean to be rude, but you don't really appear to know what you're talking about (the above being the most obvious example in your reply to demonstrate this).
Uhh, I run an ibook with a 1.33Ghz G4 and a gig of ram and I know that it runs smoother than say, a PIII at the same clock speed.
Funny, because I've got a 768MB, 1Ghz G4 iBook and it's painful to do anything more than, say, watch a DVD, check email, *very* basic web browsing or pull photos off my camera. Which is ok from the perspective of that's all I bought it to do, but I also have an old ~550Mhz P3 laptop that absolutely stomps all over it in terms of responsiveness. I could grudgingly use the P3 full time (with the exception of games), whereas even the light usage I subject my iBook to frequently becomes an exercise in frustration of beachballs and UI pauses.
Heck, my Mum's G5 iMac, with a gig of RAM, still has far too many annoying UI pauses for my liking - and it's easily twice as powerful as my iBook. An equivalent costing (at the time) PC, however, runs XP blazingly fast.
OS X is just slow. I've used a lot of Macs and a lot of versions of OS X (since a Beige G3 running "Rhapsody"), and the only ones that have even come close to being able to run it well are the dual G5 and Intel machines.
What exactly is more functional?
Exchange, Terminal Server (Apple hasn't even *vaguely suggested* that they might have a competitor to TS), SMS, WSUS (WSUS is free, by the way, so you don't need to worry about "CALs" for it).
Of course it's not going to be Exchange but it's going to have the same functionality.
Nothing that comes with OS X Server, as far as I know, has the functionality of Exchange. At least, not yet. Exchange *is* more than just sending and receiving email, you know.
[...] (it did borrow the code for HPFS - the original NTFS was in fact *interchangeable* with HPFS, because they were the same filesystem)
Not really. Well, maybe in the _very_ early development stages - but NTFS was created specifically from scratch for NT and even in its first release was a significantly more complex and more capable FS than HPFS.
Not to mention Microsoft wrote HPFS as well ;).
Only in the sence that lower primates are decendent from homo sapiens.
Not even in that sense. There is no common ancestor.
Heck, FreeBSD and Linux have more in common than OS/2 and Windows NT.
Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", [...]
No, they weren't. OS/2 and "OS/2 NT" (Windows NT) were completely different codebases. About 30 seconds with an archtecitural block diagram of each should make that pretty obvious.
Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!
OS/2 didn't evolve into NT. However, technically he's still right, since the product he would have been talking about at the time - OS/2 1.x's replacement - becamse Windows NT.
The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.
Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.
Ironic.
MS took their work and used it to shape Windows NT, and everything derived from NT still has an OS/2 heart.
In name, maybe, but not in any meaningful way. There's certainly not any architectural similarities between the two. Windows NT is in no way derived from the OS/2 codebase.
For evidence of this, just check out:
Linux runs Win32 binaries, too - does that mean in every Linux box beats the heart of DOS ?
Personally, I really loved OS/2. It's wasn't the best piece of software *ever*, but it was truely remarkable for it's time.
OS/2 was certainly solid, but "truly remarkable" ? Not really. Pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection weren't exactly cutting edge, even back in the mid-late 80s.
I wish MS would have stol^h^h^h borrowed more ideas from it.
Like what ? Windows NT was superior in pretty much every measurable way (except maybe the WPS - but IME opinions about the WPS tend to be pretty polarised, so even that's debateable). Not to mention Microsoft _wrote_ a non-trivial chunk of OS/2, so they couldn't really stea^H^H^H^Hborrow from themselves, could they ?
Windows NT really has as much, or more, conceptually in common with OS/2 as it does with Windows 1.x - 3.x.
Well, it doesn't really have much "conceptually" in common with either of them...
Windows NT started out with the name 'OS/2-NT' internally at Microsoft, despite the fact that many, many revisionist historians love to leave this point out.
Like who ? That Windows NT was originally written to be a replacement for OS/2 is a pretty widely and well known fact (amongst people who are interested in this sort of thing). It'd be hard to see how (or why) anyone could/would "leave it out".