The current model of, wait 3 or 4 years between versions, and charge $300 for it doesn't work, because nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
No regular consumer pays $300 for Windows. They either get it "free" with a new PC (= about $50) or they get an upgrade for $120ish.
Don't forget that Apple has become the new Microsoft, in a sense. They've adopted Microsoft's approach of vendor lock-in, and taken it to a degree that Microsoft never could.
"New" ? "Adopted" ? Apple's methods haven't changed one iota in decades - it's just a lot more people seem to be paying attention all of a sudden.
And XP3, Vista, and 7 all fix the horrid architectural mistakes abetted by Allchin and Gates. Demoting users from root in Windows fixed a healthy chunk of their design problems.... all instigated by Gates and his 'wizards'.
In no way, shape, or form is having the first user account be 'Administrator' an "architectural mistake" . It's a minor configuration semantic.
Pretty much everything that makes OS X interesting is closed source. Take it away and about all that's left is Yet Another UNIX (and a mediocre one at that).
Open 20 tabs and the entire thing chugs to a grinding halt as only one (1) of my four (4) processor cores gets maxed out. So much for the "multithreading" everybody says that Firefox.
I run 150+ open tabs in Firefox (times two, because I have a "work" and "personal" instance of Firefox Portable), all day, every day. Sure, it crashes every few days (Session Manager to the rescue), but calling 20 tabs anything significant, is laughable.
To pass legislation the government must get the Greens and Fielding on side to out vote the opposition Liberal Party who are not liberals but conservatives.
The Libs are, indeed, liberals. It's just the term has a different meaning in Australia (and the rest of the world) as compared to America - it refers to the economic, not social, policies (though even on that front, the Libs are far more 'liberal' than so-called 'liberals' in the US).
That argument might hold water if illegal downloaders waited 14 years after a song, movie or game came out before downloading it (28 if the author was still alive) because they actually believed in the copyright act of 1790 and promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
These lengths of time were "short and reasonable" back when reproduction was expensive and time consuming, and distribution slow. In the modern world of nearly-free and immediate reproduction, and practically instantaneous distribution, they should probably be around an order of magnitude lower.
Is copyright infringement somehow not as bad as theft?
Unquestionably.
Is it because theft is something that those gang-bangers do in the bad part of town (therefore "I'm not a thief like them") and copyright infringement an acceptable highbrow, victimless, "non-crime" ("I may have downloaded the.mp3, but the content creator still has the.mp3, so I didn't steal anything.")?
No, it's because theft takes something from another's possession and denies them use of it, while copyright infringement does not.
What's with the whole nonsensical hair splitting about theft or infringement?
Because they're two different things whose only real similarity is outcome. You might as well ask "what's with the whole nonsensical hair splitting about involuntary manslaughter or premeditated murder".
Deepwater Horizon was a series of mistakes with known causes, not a tail-end probabilistic event. Future deep-water drilling will likely be more carefully regulated.
At least until those regulations are repealed because they're stifling innovation in the free market...
Several of my Magic: The Gathering cards (mostly Revised aka 3rd Edition) felt like they had a powdery coating on them. I assume this is mold. If it was on my cards, I'm certain it was on countless other surfaces we just never touched enough.
It's dried up minerals dust from the evaporated water - the water in Phoenix is extremely "hard", so pretty much anything that involves evaporating water (swamp coolers, humidifiers, dishwashers, etc) will result in a film of white dust building up.
The solution is to either a) use distilled water or b) use a water softener.
What proportion of the audience will flip the channel if they don't see someone they recognize? Seeing attractive celebrities is a big part of the appeal of television.
You're missing the point, which is that "it costs $millions to make a TV episode" is not an accurate statement in terms of the future viability of making TV shows, if a non-trivial proportion of those $millions goes towards a relatively insignificant number of people for little reason other than they're famous.
Well, see, that's the thing, I don't want my problem to "increase in severity and complexity." I (speaking as the hypothetical customer on the phone) want my problem fixed. That's it. Not a more severe problem. Not a more complex problem. A fixed problem.
You're missing the point. From your perspective, true, the problem hasn't changed at all. However, from the perspective of the tech support, it has. Ergo, they have to escalate it to someone who has the knowledge - or simply the necessary access privileges - to fix it.
Just saying "I'm going to move your call up the ladder to a more qualified person" would be nice. It gives you the sense that (while) the person speaking can't help you, they may get you connected to someone who can. Not as pithy obviously, but (to me at least) sounds a lot more neutral and a tiny bit positive.
That's exactly what "escalate" means in that context. It *is* a positive connotation - you're important enough that your issue is being prioritised higher and pushed up to someone more important and more capable. It's perfectly appropriate word usage, conveying the necessary meaning in a concise and descriptive fashion.
Parenthetically - WTF is it with escalating a problem? I want a problem SOLVED, not escalated. I'm not fighting a band of rebels in the jungle, and I don't need artillery called in, with an airstrike. I just want the damned server rebooted, or the networking services on the router restarted, no escalations please.
The mind boggles at how someone posting to Slashdot could not be familiar with a tiered support model.
Of course you do. There is a group that has a near monopoly on making babies dead. They need sustained demand, and a permanent cultural shift into thinking that unborn babies are just harvestable tissue.
Embryos are a renewable resource. Heck, the average woman has a pretty good chance of having at least one miscarriage in her lifetime.
As the father of a baby we got with IVF, I do not consider the other fertilized eggs as surplus material to be put to some use. They asked us if we wanted them to be used for stem cells, I said no.
You felt better about them going into an incinerator ?
They are potential life forms and not to be used.
Do you eat meat ? Do you own anything made of leather ? Do you use any medical or other product that has been tested on animals ?
Hundreds of thousands of westerners go to Thailand for treatment every year. I was treated for a very serious lung infection at Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok back in 1995 and the treatment was better than any I've received in the US or Europe.
How frequently do you get serious lung infections ?!
I asked for damage, not ideology. Who is suffering harm, and how.
So I don't have a right to police and a legal system, sure. But they exist to protect my rights.
I noticed you left out firefighters and utilities. Not to mention some other things that I didn't highlight the first time but are completely obvious like education, food standards, industrial safety standards and worker's rights.
Public health care protects no one's rights. At all. In any way.
Sorry, but by the same argument of the police protecting your right [to live safely], so does public healthcare (by minimising things like contagious diseases and potentially fatal medical conditions).
Not true. There are private clinics in Canada. But you must pay for them out of pocket, not with private insurance (where those services are covered by Canada's public system).
So what, exactly, is the damage being caused here ?
No, it's not: it's an entitlement. There's a difference. A right cannot be something someone else is obligated to give to you. A right is something you can get for yourself. Saying "health care is a right" renders the word "right" virtually meaningless. It's like saying that I can force someone else to speak on my behalf, because I have a right to free speech. It's nonsense.
Healthcare is an "entitlement" in the same way the police, firefighters, utilities and a legal system are "entitlements". Trying to present it as a non-essential luxury, renders the world "entitlement" essentially meaningless.
A bill is 'tabled' (put off until a later date) when either there are more pressing issues, or there are not enough votes to get it passed. They did not 'table' this bill, they introduced it.
"Tabling a motion" in pretty much everywhere except the USA means beginning the process of discussion, not ending it (ie: "I put this paper on the table so [everyone seated at the table] may discuss its contents").
Please, stop using the word soccer. The real name of the game is FOOTBALL. It goes for that name in all the world but the US [...]
It's fairly commonly called Soccer in Australia as well. Though at least here we have 3 other "football" codes that are (more) popular as a reasonable justification.
Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where falling on the ground and begging for a foul when another player is within arm's reach is more important than number of shots.
Slashdot Mirror
In 2000 they should have copied Apple again and based their next windows(that would become Vista) on a BSD or Linux kernel.
And stepped backwards technologically ? Why ?
IBM unwisely decided to ditch DOS and use its own in-house offering OS2, which bombed badly.
Note that Microsoft were significant contributors to OS/2 - particularly the early versions.
The current model of, wait 3 or 4 years between versions, and charge $300 for it doesn't work, because nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
No regular consumer pays $300 for Windows. They either get it "free" with a new PC (= about $50) or they get an upgrade for $120ish.
Don't forget that Apple has become the new Microsoft, in a sense. They've adopted Microsoft's approach of vendor lock-in, and taken it to a degree that Microsoft never could.
"New" ? "Adopted" ? Apple's methods haven't changed one iota in decades - it's just a lot more people seem to be paying attention all of a sudden.
And XP3, Vista, and 7 all fix the horrid architectural mistakes abetted by Allchin and Gates. Demoting users from root in Windows fixed a healthy chunk of their design problems.... all instigated by Gates and his 'wizards'.
In no way, shape, or form is having the first user account be 'Administrator' an "architectural mistake" . It's a minor configuration semantic.
I thought all their stuff was based on FreeBSD?
Pretty much everything that makes OS X interesting is closed source. Take it away and about all that's left is Yet Another UNIX (and a mediocre one at that).
Open 20 tabs and the entire thing chugs to a grinding halt as only one (1) of my four (4) processor cores gets maxed out. So much for the "multithreading" everybody says that Firefox.
I run 150+ open tabs in Firefox (times two, because I have a "work" and "personal" instance of Firefox Portable), all day, every day. Sure, it crashes every few days (Session Manager to the rescue), but calling 20 tabs anything significant, is laughable.
To pass legislation the government must get the Greens and Fielding on side to out vote the opposition Liberal Party who are not liberals but conservatives.
The Libs are, indeed, liberals. It's just the term has a different meaning in Australia (and the rest of the world) as compared to America - it refers to the economic, not social, policies (though even on that front, the Libs are far more 'liberal' than so-called 'liberals' in the US).
That argument might hold water if illegal downloaders waited 14 years after a song, movie or game came out before downloading it (28 if the author was still alive) because they actually believed in the copyright act of 1790 and promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
These lengths of time were "short and reasonable" back when reproduction was expensive and time consuming, and distribution slow. In the modern world of nearly-free and immediate reproduction, and practically instantaneous distribution, they should probably be around an order of magnitude lower.
Is copyright infringement somehow not as bad as theft?
Unquestionably.
Is it because theft is something that those gang-bangers do in the bad part of town (therefore "I'm not a thief like them") and copyright infringement an acceptable highbrow, victimless, "non-crime" ("I may have downloaded the .mp3, but the content creator still has the .mp3, so I didn't steal anything.")?
No, it's because theft takes something from another's possession and denies them use of it, while copyright infringement does not.
What's with the whole nonsensical hair splitting about theft or infringement?
Because they're two different things whose only real similarity is outcome. You might as well ask "what's with the whole nonsensical hair splitting about involuntary manslaughter or premeditated murder".
Deepwater Horizon was a series of mistakes with known causes, not a tail-end probabilistic event. Future deep-water drilling will likely be more carefully regulated.
At least until those regulations are repealed because they're stifling innovation in the free market...
Several of my Magic: The Gathering cards (mostly Revised aka 3rd Edition) felt like they had a powdery coating on them. I assume this is mold. If it was on my cards, I'm certain it was on countless other surfaces we just never touched enough.
It's dried up minerals dust from the evaporated water - the water in Phoenix is extremely "hard", so pretty much anything that involves evaporating water (swamp coolers, humidifiers, dishwashers, etc) will result in a film of white dust building up.
The solution is to either a) use distilled water or b) use a water softener.
What proportion of the audience will flip the channel if they don't see someone they recognize? Seeing attractive celebrities is a big part of the appeal of television.
You're missing the point, which is that "it costs $millions to make a TV episode" is not an accurate statement in terms of the future viability of making TV shows, if a non-trivial proportion of those $millions goes towards a relatively insignificant number of people for little reason other than they're famous.
Well, see, that's the thing, I don't want my problem to "increase in severity and complexity." I (speaking as the hypothetical customer on the phone) want my problem fixed. That's it. Not a more severe problem. Not a more complex problem. A fixed problem.
You're missing the point. From your perspective, true, the problem hasn't changed at all. However, from the perspective of the tech support, it has. Ergo, they have to escalate it to someone who has the knowledge - or simply the necessary access privileges - to fix it.
Just saying "I'm going to move your call up the ladder to a more qualified person" would be nice. It gives you the sense that (while) the person speaking can't help you, they may get you connected to someone who can. Not as pithy obviously, but (to me at least) sounds a lot more neutral and a tiny bit positive.
That's exactly what "escalate" means in that context. It *is* a positive connotation - you're important enough that your issue is being prioritised higher and pushed up to someone more important and more capable. It's perfectly appropriate word usage, conveying the necessary meaning in a concise and descriptive fashion.
Don't want to put words in Runaway1956's mouth, but I'm pretty sure he's angry more at the choice of the word "escalate" then the idea of tiered CS.
And a more appropriate word for an increase in severity and complexity would be...?
Parenthetically - WTF is it with escalating a problem? I want a problem SOLVED, not escalated. I'm not fighting a band of rebels in the jungle, and I don't need artillery called in, with an airstrike. I just want the damned server rebooted, or the networking services on the router restarted, no escalations please.
The mind boggles at how someone posting to Slashdot could not be familiar with a tiered support model.
A one-hour scripted drama can cost anywhere from $1 mil to $5 mil an episode.
What proportion of that goes into paying the salaries of a handful of well-known "stars", though ?
Of course you do. There is a group that has a near monopoly on making babies dead. They need sustained demand, and a permanent cultural shift into thinking that unborn babies are just harvestable tissue.
Embryos are a renewable resource. Heck, the average woman has a pretty good chance of having at least one miscarriage in her lifetime.
As the father of a baby we got with IVF, I do not consider the other fertilized eggs as surplus material to be put to some use. They asked us if we wanted them to be used for stem cells, I said no.
You felt better about them going into an incinerator ?
They are potential life forms and not to be used.
Do you eat meat ? Do you own anything made of leather ? Do you use any medical or other product that has been tested on animals ?
Hundreds of thousands of westerners go to Thailand for treatment every year. I was treated for a very serious lung infection at Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok back in 1995 and the treatment was better than any I've received in the US or Europe.
How frequently do you get serious lung infections ?!
Forcing people and companies into that system.
I asked for damage, not ideology. Who is suffering harm, and how.
So I don't have a right to police and a legal system, sure. But they exist to protect my rights.
I noticed you left out firefighters and utilities. Not to mention some other things that I didn't highlight the first time but are completely obvious like education, food standards, industrial safety standards and worker's rights.
Public health care protects no one's rights. At all. In any way.
Sorry, but by the same argument of the police protecting your right [to live safely], so does public healthcare (by minimising things like contagious diseases and potentially fatal medical conditions).
Not true. There are private clinics in Canada. But you must pay for them out of pocket, not with private insurance (where those services are covered by Canada's public system).
So what, exactly, is the damage being caused here ?
No, it's not: it's an entitlement. There's a difference. A right cannot be something someone else is obligated to give to you. A right is something you can get for yourself. Saying "health care is a right" renders the word "right" virtually meaningless. It's like saying that I can force someone else to speak on my behalf, because I have a right to free speech. It's nonsense.
Healthcare is an "entitlement" in the same way the police, firefighters, utilities and a legal system are "entitlements". Trying to present it as a non-essential luxury, renders the world "entitlement" essentially meaningless.
A bill is 'tabled' (put off until a later date) when either there are more pressing issues, or there are not enough votes to get it passed. They did not 'table' this bill, they introduced it.
"Tabling a motion" in pretty much everywhere except the USA means beginning the process of discussion, not ending it (ie: "I put this paper on the table so [everyone seated at the table] may discuss its contents").
Please, stop using the word soccer. The real name of the game is FOOTBALL. It goes for that name in all the world but the US [...]
It's fairly commonly called Soccer in Australia as well. Though at least here we have 3 other "football" codes that are (more) popular as a reasonable justification.
Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where falling on the ground and begging for a foul when another player is within arm's reach is more important than number of shots.
FTFY.