While I'm sure you enjoy muddying the waters very much, using the argument that seeing some things in black and white is childish is just a way to weasel out of the responsibility for helping to prolong the current state of affairs in which we tell people it is wrong to commit murder, and then we murder people.
It is trivial to think of situations where the blanket assertion "killing is wrong" may not hold. Self defence and euthanasia are but two examples.
Some things are black and white.
I've yet to find such a thing.
It's wrong to take life if you don't have to.
See ? Even while arguing otherwise you agree there are shades of grey.
And we don't have to, but we do anyway. Why? Revenge, plain and simple. But revenge doesn't bring back the dead.
Or we do it to people whose actions dictate such extreme measures are necessary.
I support capital punishment because I firmly believe that some criminals are beyond any chance of rehabilitation and both the ongoing financial drain, and risk to society, resulting from their continued presence in it is unacceptable.
However, I don't support capital punishment because I know the current legal system is corrupt and focussed primarily on finding a victim and a perpetrator, rather than the truth. Thus the risk of convicting an innocent is unacceptably high.
So, on the whole, I don't support capital punishment - but because I think it's unworkable in the current system, not because I think "killing is always wrong".
Either it is wrong to kill, or it is not. If it is not wrong, then I should be able to kill indiscriminately. It is wrong, so we should not be killing people.
While I'm sure you enjoy your black and white reality very much, out here in in the real world such simplistic, childlike distinctions are the antithesis of a civilised society.
There is a vast gulf of grey between "killing is always wrong" and "killing is never wrong".
Outlook Express, now renamed "Windows Mail" shipped with every one.
And ? OE is not an Exchange client, it's a generic email client. It talks IMAP, POP and HTTP.
In Vista there is now a calendar application as well.
Which uses the iCalendar standard and WebDAV to share calendars.
Also, there is the MS Office integration, although MS has fought long and hard to make sure no lawsuits that might see MS Office declared a monopoly ever reach a verdict, being careful to settle them all out of court.
I have to ask... Why are you using Windows Media Center Edition?
Because it's the best piece of software I've found to do the job.
Can't the videos on your other computers be placed in shared folders which vanilla mac os x can access, and aren't there good HT frontends for the mac?
I can't say I spent a great deal of time looking, since I was buying the Mini to replace another MCE HTPC, but none of the OS X HTPC frontends I looked at could hold a candle to MCE.
I know there are a few tv tuners available. If I were in the market for a WMCE box, I would probably buy one with it preinstalled and save a few bucks.
All the prebuilt MCE boxes I could find either a) sucked (big/ugly/noisy) or b) cost (lots) more (in some cases justifiably so, since they were doing lots more) than the Mini.
As far as I'm concerned, the Mac Mini - running MCE - is the perfect HTPC. Small, quiet, powerful (enough) and - for that combination - not expensive.
Minis are due for an update. I'll probably buy one for the same reason when they do get updated. In the next rev, 1080 should not be an issue. BTW, 1080i and 1080p are equivalently sized data streams and 1080i can be converted to 1080p.
1080p on a 1.66Ghz Core Duo Mini works fine now (at least, running Windows MCE and using Microsoft's 1080p WMV HD demos it does - YMMV with other codecs, but the machine isn't struggling).
I have so far failed in attempts to integrate my computer with my TV.
What are you having trouble with ? My HTPC setup is a Mac Mini running Windows MCE and it certainly does everything I have had any interest in trying (plays music and [HD] video files from a central fileserver, plays DVDs, shows picture slideshows, watches and records multiple [HD] TV streams, connects to the TV via DVI and stereo via SPDIF). The whole setup is controlled by a relatively simple remote. All for around an hour or two of my time invested installing and configuring MCE (at least half of which was watching files copy).
IP based TV is one area where I don't see Apple making a dent on Microsoft's solution. There are many things going Microsoft's way here:
(a) Microsoft's 10 million or so install-base
(b) The fact that unlike most other Microsoft products, 360 has decent reputation and following in it's field
(c) Xbox Live is also very much "alive" already
(d) There will be a huge intersection of gamers and early adopters of IP based TV
(e) Xbox 360 is already connected to your TV and your home-theatre
(f) The Xbox 360 has several times the functionality.
So about when did/etc become the de-facto standard in Unix for configuation?
No idea, but since/etc and the Registry are worlds apart in function, purpose, usage and capabilities, it's hardly relevant.
"It was designed a long time ago" is not a valid argument for how something is today.
It most certainly is. You can't just remake something as big as a modern operating system from the ground up every time the latest cool fad comes around.
(And I'm sure you'd be happy to defend the train wreck that is/etc with some line about how long it's been around, so that's just the way it is.)
"Users" aren't supposed to modify the registry, but it's still where apps store settings, what app is storing settings in/sbin or/boot?
How is it relevant ? The complaint was that twiddling the right bit in the Registry could render the whole system unbootable. The point is that the same thing can happen on any system.
However - a broken byte in an unbacked up (yeah a bad idea) registry [...]
The Registry is automatically backed up at the completion of a successful system boot. This has been true since at least Windows 2000, and probably longer.
Difference being you're not supposed to modify things in/boot and/sbin for all your settings, and/etc is text and therefore much harder to screw up. (you could put an EOF as the first byte in the file, but the system will still probably at least give you a "file x is empty" error message).
Users aren't supposed to modify the Registry, either.
What you've said is correct, the gp's gripe is really about using a binary configuration file.. a fairly stupid decision but that is only my opinion.
It was designed in the late '80s (well, arguably the late '70s) when a 20Mhz 386 with 4MB of RAM was "bleeding edge". Text-parsing is expensive.
I think what it really comes down to is this; If you decided to write a new OS today from scratch and wanted to have a central configuration database (a good idea, as shown by/etc), would YOU come up with the windows registry?
Windows NT wasn't designed today, it was designed in the late 80s.
A lot of companies bought a Windows based exchange server instead of a Linux based server because exchange was built into their Windows desktops and they needed something to talk to them and the Linux server could not do so because the protocol was being kept secret.
No aspect of Exchange is "built into" anyone's "Windows desktops".
Windows routinely reboots itself in the middle of the night to finish installing patches. One night I was doing something important and it prompted me, telling me it was about to reboot, and the only options I had were to reboot or wait another 10 minutes. There was a timer, so if I left the box alone, the box would reboot on it's own.
This is not default behaviour. Talk to your Windows sysadmin, because it's his fault.
I could set up apt-get dist-upgrade as a cron job, and I'd bet cash that it would never reboot my machine, and it would NEVER force me to reboot against my will.
It certainly would if the sysadmin had configured it to.
Absolutely true.. until the machine is about 2 years old. Then the first hit is free model kicks in and you are hit with the sticker shock of the upgrade treadmill.
Er, why ? Is this the mythical "forced upgrade" that doesn't exist anywhere outside of anti-Microsoft FUD ?
Have you priced a retail version of Windows XP, MS Office, Norton AV, and Photoshop Elements? Compare that with a bundled new PC price.
Of course they're vastly different. Bundled vs unbundled products always are. This applies to everything from house and land packages to McDonald's meals.
My older PC's are not ready for the landfill. I also have no desire to empty the bank to update them.
So don't. No-one's making you. If it hadn't been melted by lightning last year, I have little doubt my mum would still be quite happily using the PC I bought her in 2000, rather than the nice G5 iMac she has now. Why do you think the average person is any different ?
What is so wrong with wanting a version of MS Office I can load on my laptop and desktop without paying 2X the price?
Nothing. That doesn't mean Microsoft has to give it to you, though.
Thanks. By not meeting consumer demands, they are quickly being left out of this market.
Reality disagrees. The only company Microsoft is seriously losing ground to in the end user market is Apple, who are - by and large - just as bad.
I wish I had figures on the number of Open Office installations on both Linux and Windows.
I doubt they'd say what you want them to say.
The Open Document Format as certified by ISO is going to give MS nightmares.
Possible, but unlikely. First there needs to be a significantly better piece of software that uses it. OpenOffice is not that software. You cannot displace an entrenched product with another if the new product is only "good enough". It needs to be *better* - sbstantially better - to convince people to change. Open Office loses here, because its only remotely compelling feature for most people is (zero) up-front cost. But that argument is mostly over before it's begun, because it's largely irrelevant. To most home users, MS Office is "free" (either bundled or pirated). To a business user, its price barely qualifies as a rounding error in the overall costs incurred by the computer it runs on and the employee(s) who use it over its 3 - 5 year lifetime (an average employee earning ~$25k/yr, plus their computer, will cost the company on the order of $150k - $200k over three years - and those numbers only get bigger as you add higher end employees and time - compared to that, who cares about a few hundred bucks for Office ?).
The bottom line is this: the purchasing/upgrade cost argument against Windows and Office is very weak, at best.
I didnt do anything crazy like install it at home (2k 4ever), but I did install it on my main work pc.
Yeah, I remember luddites like you from the 80s (DOS 4ever !) and 90s (Windows 3.1 4ever!). You're the guys whose first act on an XP system is to turn off the new-style Start Menu, despite it being superior in basically every way to the "Classic" Start Menu. Terrified of anything different.
To tell you the truth, aside from the fact that there are no drivers and many programs no longer work, its not that different from xp. You have to turn all the crap off, change the folders back to classic, etc. After that it pretty much operates like winxp and win2k.
So if you turn off all the visible stuff that makes it different from XP and Windows 2000, it acts just like Windows 2000 ? NO WAY !
I do have to wonder why you'd bother, however, if you weren't going to actually _use_ any of the new features...
Well, that's certainly not an interpretation I can see coming from the post I responded to, however, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
I am suggesting that in my environment like many SOHO setups with a family, per seat licenses will fail next to a site license.
Only if it's cheaper. There's no reason it must (or even should) be so. Microsoft will sell you a site license, but be prepared to pay for it.
The several hundred dollar per seat license does not work in a typical family environment. The software costs is why many families have to share one PC and have to negotiate for PC time.
The typical family doesn't pay "several hundred dollars per seat". They get their software OEM at a significantly lower cost or they "pirate" it.
Older hardware is dirt cheap. Using Pentium III and faster machines for Internet, Graphics and Homework is fine when the high cost software is eliminated.
Chances are extremely high that "old hardware" came with cheap OEM software as well. A P3 will happily run XP. Heck, a P3 with a cheap RAM and video card upgrade will happily run Vista.
Some software I have purchased has come with a home site license.
Some software does, and it's a good idea - but it's hardly common.
You may argue that Microsoft is missing an opportunity by not offering "site licenses" for home users, and I wouldn't disagree, but to suggest they can only charge per-seat licenses because they're a monopoly - as you did in the post I replied to - when the vast, vast bulk of commercial software charges in exactly the same way, is ridiculous.
And the consumer has all the purchasing power and can choose alternatives. [...]
I'm not quite sure why you're arguing this point. It's not something I disagree with in general (usually getting me a bunch of "Microsoft shill!" replies in the process), and certainly isn't something I disagreed with in my reply.
MS will lose again while they stick with WGA to maintain their per seat model and eliminate casual piracy.
Unlikely. As I said, most people get Windows "free" with the computer and a similarly "free" copy of Office either via OEM or piracy. Microsoft's WGA strategy is more aimed at dodgy resellers and SMBs than casual [home] end-users. Few "typical users" feel pain from it, despite that being all you hear about on Slashdot.
Absolutely correct. A monopoly can set those license terms. There is no negotiation, no user specifications to be met by the vendor.
Utter tripe. The copyright owner can set those license terms, and most do. The vast bulk of commercial software (*including commercial OSS) you will buy is licensed for use on one computer - are you suggesting all those vendors are monopolies ?
I could see them having a normal distribution with a very proprietary closed source application which would allow a user to run windows apps natively. This could be set up so that end users could run MS linux with some of their favorite free apps alongside MS Office. Or maybe run Exchange server on the same box as the local OpenLDAP server.
I'm struggling to see a technical or business justification for this...
You've just outlined the major reason that scientific programming is not done under Windows. When you're relying on your system to stay online for 3 days while it's compiling or running a simulation, you don't use something that crashes all the time or will restart itself or prompts you for updates, or may even interrupt whatever it is you're doing.
Windows is no more likely to do any of these things than Linux. What's your point ?
The reason my school has a *nix lab is because we use it for scientific programming. It's not something the IT department seems to care about. We wouldn't even think of writing anything truly important for Windows.
The reason your school has a *nix lab is because it has a whole bunch of *nix software and likely a whole bunch of people along with it who have an irrational fear of anything that isn't *nix.
Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards
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eSATA Connectors
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While I'm not as certain when it comes to graphics cards, PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards.
Hardly. The typical PC wouldn't even go close to saturating a basic 33Mhz/32 bit PCI bus. They just don't do enough "stuff".
PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate (A single gigabit NIC would hit a bandwidth wall at something like 400mbit).
33/32 PCI, as seen in most consumer level systems, tops out at around 120MB/sec aggregate bandwidth. *Most* people wouldn't come anywhere close to that, except in contrived (and hence rare) benchmarking situations. Copying a file over the network to another machine is a reasonable example of one of the few ways this might happen, but average consumer level hard disks won't sustain much more than about 50MB/s (except in ideal conditions) and it's unlikely the machine on the other end will be much better.
I've used the Vista betas. My first though when I used them were "pretty", just like when I used Mac OSX for the first time. After that, I wasn't impressed by its functionality or features. Now if we had gone from Windows 95/98 to that then I would agree it was worth the wait and the price. But from XP to Vista, it really isn't much of an upgrade.
From a software perspective the change is significant. On the same order of Apple's re-engineering of NeXTSTEP to get to OS X 10.2.
Vista is a large upgrade and improvement over XP in basically every way. If you don't find it compelling, that's more of a compliment to XP than it is criticism of Vista.
Also, what makes you think they don't already have a port for DX10 for XP ready or almost complete? They wouldn't release it right now because it would directly compete with one of the selling points on Vista, but they could see it as necessary if Vista doesn't sell well right out of the gate.
Because it would be a monumental waste of time and developer effort. "Porting" DX10 to XP would require non-trivial changes to XP, a product now over 5 years old and soon to be entering its EOL phase. Further, for most of the people who would be interested in DX10 (higher-end gamers) the software cost of upgrading to Vista is a drop in the bucket compared to yearly upgrades of video cards, CPUs, etc.
In short, there is no real reason to put DX10 on XP, nor is there ever likely to be. The proportion of customers wanting DX10 but not prepared to upgrade to Vista will be insignificant.
Vista's uptake isn't slow because it's bad, it's slow because XP is good enough. When DX10 games start showing up in real numbers, XP will no longer be at the "good enough" stage (at least for some people) and Vista uptake will increase.
Look, they should get one thing straight: Managers BLUFF. I know one employee at my company that was severely underpaid, asked for a raise but they didn't want to give her anything at all. If they'd given her a few grand then, all would be well. Three weeks later, she had a new job and put in her resignation. Then the fun started when they realized they needed her really badly. She got a raise of about 14000$. Yes, she was that underpaid.
I don't care about OSX (BSD) vs Linux. Both have the same (or similar) underlying structure, which makes it stable and safer than Windows.
What "underlying structure" is that ?
I have used OSX to learn how to work with a UNIX-like system. I've tried to use linux then, but it was too much to handle at the time. I'm probably not the typical user, but for my next computer I'm considering moving to Ubuntu.
OS X will not teach you how to use UNIX, because its "UNIXness" is an incidental feature. OS X might be a UNIX, but the typical user doesn't use it like one.
Wow. I wonder why they would put in all that effort when they could develop against OpenGL+OpenAL and get all Windows versions working in addition to OS X and Linux support.
Probably they save more money using DX than they they would make selling to the 0.1% of the market who plays games but doesn't have a Windows box to do it with.
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While I'm sure you enjoy muddying the waters very much, using the argument that seeing some things in black and white is childish is just a way to weasel out of the responsibility for helping to prolong the current state of affairs in which we tell people it is wrong to commit murder, and then we murder people.
It is trivial to think of situations where the blanket assertion "killing is wrong" may not hold. Self defence and euthanasia are but two examples.
Some things are black and white.
I've yet to find such a thing.
It's wrong to take life if you don't have to.
See ? Even while arguing otherwise you agree there are shades of grey.
And we don't have to, but we do anyway. Why? Revenge, plain and simple. But revenge doesn't bring back the dead.
Or we do it to people whose actions dictate such extreme measures are necessary.
I support capital punishment because I firmly believe that some criminals are beyond any chance of rehabilitation and both the ongoing financial drain, and risk to society, resulting from their continued presence in it is unacceptable.
However, I don't support capital punishment because I know the current legal system is corrupt and focussed primarily on finding a victim and a perpetrator, rather than the truth. Thus the risk of convicting an innocent is unacceptably high.
So, on the whole, I don't support capital punishment - but because I think it's unworkable in the current system, not because I think "killing is always wrong".
Either it is wrong to kill, or it is not. If it is not wrong, then I should be able to kill indiscriminately. It is wrong, so we should not be killing people.
While I'm sure you enjoy your black and white reality very much, out here in in the real world such simplistic, childlike distinctions are the antithesis of a civilised society.
There is a vast gulf of grey between "killing is always wrong" and "killing is never wrong".
Outlook Express, now renamed "Windows Mail" shipped with every one.
And ? OE is not an Exchange client, it's a generic email client. It talks IMAP, POP and HTTP.
In Vista there is now a calendar application as well.
Which uses the iCalendar standard and WebDAV to share calendars.
Also, there is the MS Office integration, although MS has fought long and hard to make sure no lawsuits that might see MS Office declared a monopoly ever reach a verdict, being careful to settle them all out of court.
Therefore, by definition, no monopoly exists.
I have to ask... Why are you using Windows Media Center Edition?
Because it's the best piece of software I've found to do the job.
Can't the videos on your other computers be placed in shared folders which vanilla mac os x can access, and aren't there good HT frontends for the mac?
I can't say I spent a great deal of time looking, since I was buying the Mini to replace another MCE HTPC, but none of the OS X HTPC frontends I looked at could hold a candle to MCE.
I know there are a few tv tuners available. If I were in the market for a WMCE box, I would probably buy one with it preinstalled and save a few bucks.
All the prebuilt MCE boxes I could find either a) sucked (big/ugly/noisy) or b) cost (lots) more (in some cases justifiably so, since they were doing lots more) than the Mini.
As far as I'm concerned, the Mac Mini - running MCE - is the perfect HTPC. Small, quiet, powerful (enough) and - for that combination - not expensive.
Minis are due for an update. I'll probably buy one for the same reason when they do get updated. In the next rev, 1080 should not be an issue. BTW, 1080i and 1080p are equivalently sized data streams and 1080i can be converted to 1080p.
1080p on a 1.66Ghz Core Duo Mini works fine now (at least, running Windows MCE and using Microsoft's 1080p WMV HD demos it does - YMMV with other codecs, but the machine isn't struggling).
I have so far failed in attempts to integrate my computer with my TV.
What are you having trouble with ? My HTPC setup is a Mac Mini running Windows MCE and it certainly does everything I have had any interest in trying (plays music and [HD] video files from a central fileserver, plays DVDs, shows picture slideshows, watches and records multiple [HD] TV streams, connects to the TV via DVI and stereo via SPDIF). The whole setup is controlled by a relatively simple remote. All for around an hour or two of my time invested installing and configuring MCE (at least half of which was watching files copy).
What's missing from your HTPC experience ?
IP based TV is one area where I don't see Apple making a dent on Microsoft's solution. There are many things going Microsoft's way here:
(a) Microsoft's 10 million or so install-base
(b) The fact that unlike most other Microsoft products, 360 has decent reputation and following in it's field
(c) Xbox Live is also very much "alive" already
(d) There will be a huge intersection of gamers and early adopters of IP based TV
(e) Xbox 360 is already connected to your TV and your home-theatre
(f) The Xbox 360 has several times the functionality.
So about when did /etc become the de-facto standard in Unix for configuation?
No idea, but since /etc and the Registry are worlds apart in function, purpose, usage and capabilities, it's hardly relevant.
"It was designed a long time ago" is not a valid argument for how something is today.
It most certainly is. You can't just remake something as big as a modern operating system from the ground up every time the latest cool fad comes around.
(And I'm sure you'd be happy to defend the train wreck that is /etc with some line about how long it's been around, so that's just the way it is.)
"Users" aren't supposed to modify the registry, but it's still where apps store settings, what app is storing settings in /sbin or /boot?
How is it relevant ? The complaint was that twiddling the right bit in the Registry could render the whole system unbootable. The point is that the same thing can happen on any system.
However - a broken byte in an unbacked up (yeah a bad idea) registry [...]
The Registry is automatically backed up at the completion of a successful system boot. This has been true since at least Windows 2000, and probably longer.
Difference being you're not supposed to modify things in /boot and /sbin for all your settings, and /etc is text and therefore much harder to screw up. (you could put an EOF as the first byte in the file, but the system will still probably at least give you a "file x is empty" error message).
Users aren't supposed to modify the Registry, either.
What you've said is correct, the gp's gripe is really about using a binary configuration file.. a fairly stupid decision but that is only my opinion.
It was designed in the late '80s (well, arguably the late '70s) when a 20Mhz 386 with 4MB of RAM was "bleeding edge". Text-parsing is expensive.
I think what it really comes down to is this; If you decided to write a new OS today from scratch and wanted to have a central configuration database (a good idea, as shown by /etc), would YOU come up with the windows registry?
Windows NT wasn't designed today, it was designed in the late 80s.
A lot of companies bought a Windows based exchange server instead of a Linux based server because exchange was built into their Windows desktops and they needed something to talk to them and the Linux server could not do so because the protocol was being kept secret.
No aspect of Exchange is "built into" anyone's "Windows desktops".
Could you say for certain that Samba didn't have a sneaky peak at this copyrighted document floating around the net?
Doesn't matter if they read it, as long as they don't copy it.
Windows routinely reboots itself in the middle of the night to finish installing patches. One night I was doing something important and it prompted me, telling me it was about to reboot, and the only options I had were to reboot or wait another 10 minutes. There was a timer, so if I left the box alone, the box would reboot on it's own.
This is not default behaviour. Talk to your Windows sysadmin, because it's his fault.
I could set up apt-get dist-upgrade as a cron job, and I'd bet cash that it would never reboot my machine, and it would NEVER force me to reboot against my will.
It certainly would if the sysadmin had configured it to.
Absolutely true.. until the machine is about 2 years old. Then the first hit is free model kicks in and you are hit with the sticker shock of the upgrade treadmill.
Er, why ? Is this the mythical "forced upgrade" that doesn't exist anywhere outside of anti-Microsoft FUD ?
Have you priced a retail version of Windows XP, MS Office, Norton AV, and Photoshop Elements? Compare that with a bundled new PC price.
Of course they're vastly different. Bundled vs unbundled products always are. This applies to everything from house and land packages to McDonald's meals.
My older PC's are not ready for the landfill. I also have no desire to empty the bank to update them.
So don't. No-one's making you. If it hadn't been melted by lightning last year, I have little doubt my mum would still be quite happily using the PC I bought her in 2000, rather than the nice G5 iMac she has now. Why do you think the average person is any different ?
What is so wrong with wanting a version of MS Office I can load on my laptop and desktop without paying 2X the price?
Nothing. That doesn't mean Microsoft has to give it to you, though.
Thanks. By not meeting consumer demands, they are quickly being left out of this market.
Reality disagrees. The only company Microsoft is seriously losing ground to in the end user market is Apple, who are - by and large - just as bad.
I wish I had figures on the number of Open Office installations on both Linux and Windows.
I doubt they'd say what you want them to say.
The Open Document Format as certified by ISO is going to give MS nightmares.
Possible, but unlikely. First there needs to be a significantly better piece of software that uses it. OpenOffice is not that software. You cannot displace an entrenched product with another if the new product is only "good enough". It needs to be *better* - sbstantially better - to convince people to change. Open Office loses here, because its only remotely compelling feature for most people is (zero) up-front cost. But that argument is mostly over before it's begun, because it's largely irrelevant. To most home users, MS Office is "free" (either bundled or pirated). To a business user, its price barely qualifies as a rounding error in the overall costs incurred by the computer it runs on and the employee(s) who use it over its 3 - 5 year lifetime (an average employee earning ~$25k/yr, plus their computer, will cost the company on the order of $150k - $200k over three years - and those numbers only get bigger as you add higher end employees and time - compared to that, who cares about a few hundred bucks for Office ?).
The bottom line is this: the purchasing/upgrade cost argument against Windows and Office is very weak, at best.
I didnt do anything crazy like install it at home (2k 4ever), but I did install it on my main work pc.
Yeah, I remember luddites like you from the 80s (DOS 4ever !) and 90s (Windows 3.1 4ever!). You're the guys whose first act on an XP system is to turn off the new-style Start Menu, despite it being superior in basically every way to the "Classic" Start Menu. Terrified of anything different.
To tell you the truth, aside from the fact that there are no drivers and many programs no longer work, its not that different from xp. You have to turn all the crap off, change the folders back to classic, etc. After that it pretty much operates like winxp and win2k.
So if you turn off all the visible stuff that makes it different from XP and Windows 2000, it acts just like Windows 2000 ? NO WAY !
I do have to wonder why you'd bother, however, if you weren't going to actually _use_ any of the new features...
Not at all.
Well, that's certainly not an interpretation I can see coming from the post I responded to, however, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
I am suggesting that in my environment like many SOHO setups with a family, per seat licenses will fail next to a site license.
Only if it's cheaper. There's no reason it must (or even should) be so. Microsoft will sell you a site license, but be prepared to pay for it.
The several hundred dollar per seat license does not work in a typical family environment. The software costs is why many families have to share one PC and have to negotiate for PC time.
The typical family doesn't pay "several hundred dollars per seat". They get their software OEM at a significantly lower cost or they "pirate" it.
Older hardware is dirt cheap. Using Pentium III and faster machines for Internet, Graphics and Homework is fine when the high cost software is eliminated.
Chances are extremely high that "old hardware" came with cheap OEM software as well. A P3 will happily run XP. Heck, a P3 with a cheap RAM and video card upgrade will happily run Vista.
Some software I have purchased has come with a home site license.
Some software does, and it's a good idea - but it's hardly common.
You may argue that Microsoft is missing an opportunity by not offering "site licenses" for home users, and I wouldn't disagree, but to suggest they can only charge per-seat licenses because they're a monopoly - as you did in the post I replied to - when the vast, vast bulk of commercial software charges in exactly the same way, is ridiculous.
And the consumer has all the purchasing power and can choose alternatives. [...]
I'm not quite sure why you're arguing this point. It's not something I disagree with in general (usually getting me a bunch of "Microsoft shill!" replies in the process), and certainly isn't something I disagreed with in my reply.
MS will lose again while they stick with WGA to maintain their per seat model and eliminate casual piracy.
Unlikely. As I said, most people get Windows "free" with the computer and a similarly "free" copy of Office either via OEM or piracy. Microsoft's WGA strategy is more aimed at dodgy resellers and SMBs than casual [home] end-users. Few "typical users" feel pain from it, despite that being all you hear about on Slashdot.
Absolutely correct. A monopoly can set those license terms. There is no negotiation, no user specifications to be met by the vendor.
Utter tripe. The copyright owner can set those license terms, and most do. The vast bulk of commercial software (*including commercial OSS) you will buy is licensed for use on one computer - are you suggesting all those vendors are monopolies ?
Seriously, when was the last time MS came out with something that really got you excited, something elegant and useful?
When was the last time someone else did ?
I could see them having a normal distribution with a very proprietary closed source application which would allow a user to run windows apps natively. This could be set up so that end users could run MS linux with some of their favorite free apps alongside MS Office. Or maybe run Exchange server on the same box as the local OpenLDAP server.
I'm struggling to see a technical or business justification for this...
You've just outlined the major reason that scientific programming is not done under Windows. When you're relying on your system to stay online for 3 days while it's compiling or running a simulation, you don't use something that crashes all the time or will restart itself or prompts you for updates, or may even interrupt whatever it is you're doing.
Windows is no more likely to do any of these things than Linux. What's your point ?
The reason my school has a *nix lab is because we use it for scientific programming. It's not something the IT department seems to care about. We wouldn't even think of writing anything truly important for Windows.
The reason your school has a *nix lab is because it has a whole bunch of *nix software and likely a whole bunch of people along with it who have an irrational fear of anything that isn't *nix.
While I'm not as certain when it comes to graphics cards, PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards.
Hardly. The typical PC wouldn't even go close to saturating a basic 33Mhz/32 bit PCI bus. They just don't do enough "stuff".
PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate (A single gigabit NIC would hit a bandwidth wall at something like 400mbit).
33/32 PCI, as seen in most consumer level systems, tops out at around 120MB/sec aggregate bandwidth. *Most* people wouldn't come anywhere close to that, except in contrived (and hence rare) benchmarking situations. Copying a file over the network to another machine is a reasonable example of one of the few ways this might happen, but average consumer level hard disks won't sustain much more than about 50MB/s (except in ideal conditions) and it's unlikely the machine on the other end will be much better.
I've used the Vista betas. My first though when I used them were "pretty", just like when I used Mac OSX for the first time. After that, I wasn't impressed by its functionality or features. Now if we had gone from Windows 95/98 to that then I would agree it was worth the wait and the price. But from XP to Vista, it really isn't much of an upgrade.
From a software perspective the change is significant. On the same order of Apple's re-engineering of NeXTSTEP to get to OS X 10.2.
Vista is a large upgrade and improvement over XP in basically every way. If you don't find it compelling, that's more of a compliment to XP than it is criticism of Vista.
Also, what makes you think they don't already have a port for DX10 for XP ready or almost complete? They wouldn't release it right now because it would directly compete with one of the selling points on Vista, but they could see it as necessary if Vista doesn't sell well right out of the gate.
Because it would be a monumental waste of time and developer effort. "Porting" DX10 to XP would require non-trivial changes to XP, a product now over 5 years old and soon to be entering its EOL phase. Further, for most of the people who would be interested in DX10 (higher-end gamers) the software cost of upgrading to Vista is a drop in the bucket compared to yearly upgrades of video cards, CPUs, etc.
In short, there is no real reason to put DX10 on XP, nor is there ever likely to be. The proportion of customers wanting DX10 but not prepared to upgrade to Vista will be insignificant.
Vista's uptake isn't slow because it's bad, it's slow because XP is good enough. When DX10 games start showing up in real numbers, XP will no longer be at the "good enough" stage (at least for some people) and Vista uptake will increase.
Look, they should get one thing straight: Managers BLUFF. I know one employee at my company that was severely underpaid, asked for a raise but they didn't want to give her anything at all. If they'd given her a few grand then, all would be well. Three weeks later, she had a new job and put in her resignation. Then the fun started when they realized they needed her really badly. She got a raise of about 14000$. Yes, she was that underpaid.
She _stayed_ ?!
I don't care about OSX (BSD) vs Linux. Both have the same (or similar) underlying structure, which makes it stable and safer than Windows.
What "underlying structure" is that ?
I have used OSX to learn how to work with a UNIX-like system. I've tried to use linux then, but it was too much to handle at the time. I'm probably not the typical user, but for my next computer I'm considering moving to Ubuntu.
OS X will not teach you how to use UNIX, because its "UNIXness" is an incidental feature. OS X might be a UNIX, but the typical user doesn't use it like one.
Wow. I wonder why they would put in all that effort when they could develop against OpenGL+OpenAL and get all Windows versions working in addition to OS X and Linux support.
Probably they save more money using DX than they they would make selling to the 0.1% of the market who plays games but doesn't have a Windows box to do it with.