So you are saying that because some Vista computers are switched to XP, we should not count *any* Vista computers as Vista sales? So therefore sales of Vista are zero?
Not only that, but an HDTV improves the appearance of a normal DVD, by (IMHO) a far bigger factor than the additional improvement by getting 1080p playback.
For us, a wide-screen 480p display from the DVD is almost indistinguishable from the 1080i and 720p broadcasts on a 1080p capable 42" Samsung LCD screen, when viewed from more than about 8 feet away. Yes you can tell when the end credits are somewhat fuzzy but otherwise it is impossible. 1080p is probably a bit better but I have nothing producing that except static computer displays so it is difficult to compare. I understand there are better DVD players that do better upscaling than the TV does, so even better picture is possible, but we are pretty happy with the el-cheapo region-free DVD player we bought.
I think for an average consumer, there was an enormous improvement from VHS to DVD. There is a smaller but quite noticeable improvement when they plug their DVD into a new HDTV (provided somebody enables the progressive wide screen on the DVD), plus that expensive HDTV gave them a much brighter and larger screen in a flat wall-hangable object which for most consumers is probably excuses it's cost.
But the further improvement to 1080p playback is relatively tiny and not visible to users.
Also note the HD ads on the start of DVDs. They show action scenes with the contrast cranked up, and your mind says "that looks really sharp!" but in fact that is a DVD picture!
I just don't get it though. To my mind an unambiguious abbreviation just does not seem that bad, it's as though Microsoft's defenders see something evil in money.
It is pretty obvious that somebody calling Obama "Osama" does not like him, as he is using a name that is associated with an enemy of the US. Unless "$" is to you evil or an enemy, you cannot say that using that term is negative. If you think '$" is evil then I'm not sure if I want to talk to you. Also very strange that people who say '$' is bad suggest that the *stock symbol* be used instead, I believe there are more people who dislike stocks than dollars, though again pretty much in the minority.
Another way to look at it is whether there would be a problem calling Open Source "O$$" (or maybe "OS$").
Except for people insisting incredibly quickly and vehemently that this is "childish" I do not see any reason or logic behind it. And the fact that people are so incredibly fast to immediatly say "you are a child" whenevery somebody writes "M$" indicates that they are not very confident in their position either.
Also people saying this is "old" have not been paying attention. The old insulting name for Microsoft was "Micros~1", not "M$". I did not see "M$" until perhaps 2000 or so.
I've never seen a point-to-type (the more common name for "sloppy focus", where did that term come from?) on OSX. Can you tell me how to turn it on? How do they handle the menubar, with a timeout?
KDE is actually ahead of everybody else in that "don't raise the window when I click in it" actually works. This has never worked in Windows, no matter what point-to-type hacks are installed, and Gnome has been broken for several versions now...
Point-to-type is obviously superior but both Windows and Gnome even if you set it to it leaves it useless because of them raising windows when you click. Gnome claims to be able to turn this off, but those idiots made that setting disable a program raising *itself*, which is just a bunch of stuck-up morons trying disparately to prove that point-to-type is bad by purposely making the alternative broken. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Middle-mouse pasting is actually a better form of drag&drop, the problem is that people don't seem to be able to grasp that fact and thus fail to see how good it is.
Selecting anything starts a "drag", while middle-mouse click is a "drop". Big advantages over conventional drag & drop is that you can rearrange windows and even start/kill programs during a "drag", and that it is intuitively obvious how to abort a "drag" in the middle, and you can cut & paste at the same time.
The problem is lots of people (including Linux developers) think of it as some variation of cut & paste. They make it interfere with cut & paste sometimes (less often nowadays), and conversely they don't make it do the exact same thing as drag & drop of the same data.
The Nvidia drivers do not work correctly with R&R and have to be restareted.
I discovered this by accident when I set the driver to nv, suddenly you could plug a monitor in and it worked!
However OpenGL was crap without the official drivers so I put it back. I certianly don't change the screens much.
Anybody looking for an argument can find many for all kinds of positions here: the nvidia drivers are closed and that can be blamed (but are you really certain that if open somebody would have fixed them to work with R&R)? Conversely perhaps xord R&R is so fiendishly complicated of an API that Nvidia just can't get it right. Who knows...
It is rather shocking the ignorance of people here. Apparently the above poster is so used to Windows that they cannot imagine it working differently.
Okay, let's imagine there is a special directory called "the files that are open right now". On Linux what happens when you write a new version of a shared library (sorry, a "DLL" which of course is a far better descriptive name, right?): imagine that it first moves the old file to this special "these files are open right now" directory. Then it puts the new file into the directory it was supposed to be in. Not sure if I really explained this right or managed to avoid Windows problems (I think Windows has been fixed recently so it is safe to rename/mv a file while it is open?).
This is called hard links/inodes/whatever. It was only invented in 1970 (or perhaps earlier since Unix was based on Multics and that may have taken the idea from other systems before that). Therefore I can understand why Windows users are not quite up on the technology considering it is only 40 years old..
RMS is certainly not involved in why the binary api for kernel modules keeps changing. The GPL is not really involved either, you can certainly imagine a stable binary api that is GPL'd, as well as a changing binary api that does not require the modules to be GPL'd, both would have some or even all of the problems you are complaining about.
You might want to not go off on incorrect tangents, because the basics of your argument are sound: RMS should not be a spokesman other than perhaps an indication of an extreme position (this can be useful to catch astroturfers: somebody agreeing with one extreme position of RMS but disagreeing with a less extreme Linus+RMS position at the same time is trying to make a bogus strawman argument). But accusing RMS of having something to do with the non-portability of binarly kernel modules is incorrect.
I do believe that technically the drivers will eventually move to user space except for the very high-speed ones such as disks/memory (where oddly enough there seem to be no real problems with GPL and changing binary apis), and that will solve this problem without compromising the kernel. Though this is really accidental I'm sure a lot of Linux fans will jump on the success of this as a big win for Linux and ignore the history.
I think it is interesting that you are so threatened by somebody associating your beloved company with dollars that you INSTANTLY respond with the "Oh if you put a $ next to an M you are a CHILD! A CHILD, I TELL YOU, A LITTLE LITTLE CHILD! BECAUSE I SAY SO! YOU ARE A CHILD!!!!! CHILD!! CHILD!! You are a child, because I say so! WAHHH!"
Oddly enough somebody here could post that Bill Gates eats babies for breakfast and it won't get such a response. The fact that you respond so quickly with the "you are infantile" insta-message, when in fact saying nothing would be much more effective, shows exactly where the insecurity and infant attitude is.
Everytime somebody posts this you people ask, "what about saying Linsux". But the writer did not write "microsuck". They wrote "M$". Why not ask if anybody would be upset if Open Source was called "O$$" (in fact I think that would be a very good name to use for people making a profit from open source)
Just as somebody who really did not have any interest in this, and am quite willing to pay for music.
This is complete nonsense and will not even serve the RIAA's interests. This penalty is so far out of line that it is completely fantasy, the risk of being sued for millions of dollars is so abstract and impossible to prepare for that the logical thing to do is ignore it. Also even copying ONE song has in effect bankrupted you, so there is no financial incentive not to copy more.
If they really wanted to make a deterrent, a civil case where the person is fined about $50 per song would be much more effective.
Yes there is a lot of great FOSS but FOSS has yet to produce great software that fills every need.
You really need to get out more if you think it is impossible to run non-FOSS software on Linux. That is a totally ignorant statement, and one of the oldest pieces of FUD out there.
Actually arbitrary pointers are not a problem, if in fact you can reliably prevent any system calls that the program should not do.
I agree with you that detecting whether the system calls are allowed is a problem. Describing it as a "VM" is probably wrong (I suspect you are confusing it with the rather delicate way you have to do this on Windows as opposed to the LD_PRELOAD on Linux). However once the calls are trapped there would have to be an extrodinarily complex AI system to actually figure out if they are really what that program should do.
For instance some program that can update your web bookmarks could probably also insert or modify them all to spam addresses, I think it will be hard for the call detector to prevent that!
Have not tried this but I am guessing that if the porn images are blocked but not the results page itself, users at the company can still figure out how to click to get the porn itself by clicking on the broken image in the page. Blocking the entire resulting page if safe search is off will prevent this.
Still it does seem like Microsoft's solution is by far the easier one to handle, and there is no reason why both solutions can't be provided. You could also use domain filtering for the entire page so there would be a simple way to get the Google results by blocking a site, just have "safe search" change the target of the search button rather than setting a cookie or whatever it is doing.
I don't know if you are joking, but we certainly knew Mars gravity to within some tiny fraction of a percent. The period and distance of it's orbiting moons can be used to figure it out pretty accurately. You may be thinking of the spaceship that was lost because of metric/english unit confusion?
Evolution certainly does not "negate the very possibility that god exists". Nothing can do so, it is quite impossible to prove from any evidence that god does not exist.
God may very well exist and created a universe where evolution would happen, on purpose. It is also possible God created the world exactly like we see it (perhaps last Thursday morning, there is no need for 6000 years or anything), however it does appear he really wants us to believe life evolved as he created a huge mass of evidence for evolution at the same time, so I don't think it is wise to go against his wishes.
Creationists do not realize that all their arguments are equivalent to "my god is too stupid to create evolution so he must have created the end result". They do not realize this however because they are blockheads.
Translation, having seen this "amazing" technology:
IE8 can turn off all the decoration around the applet in the window, thus making it look like the applet is a native application.
I do have to say that is a good idea, but I have problems with Microsoft advertising it as though it is some incredible complicated development rather than just a simple good idea.
Yes there are "ships" and there are always going to be MANY times as many ships as wind turbines. Also "ships" have some big problems that these turbines don't have: they move, and they are far more likely to be in places (called "sealanes") where a collision is likely.
The grandparent poster is really grasping for reasons to oppose this! Anybody who can think even the tiniest amount will realize that the objection is totally silly.
I recall hearing that the pressure on the turbine really is not that great. The vanes actually act like wings with lift and have an opposing force into the wind. You really want to transfer the maximum amount of energy possible into *spinning* the turbine, so any action at right angles is wasted.
It's very cute how you carefully word all your sentences to imply that IE will be unavailable. Some of the keywords are "instead" in the first sentence, and all your implication that people who don't know how to do anything other than click the 'e' will somehow be unable to click it because of the presence of Firefox.
OEMs will include Firefox if Microsoft allowed them to because "users may have heard of and prefer it, and now they can run it IF THEY WANT without installing it. And we still provide Microsoft's Internet Explorer for users that are familiar with and prefer it."
Of course you are going to keep tying stuff implying that IE will be removed from the machines or that somehow it is impossible or incredibly complicated for an OEM to include Firefox without somehow magically making it impossible for people to see the 'e'. You sir are living in a fantasy world, I guess a fantasy that is from being paid to write your bullshit.
An objective supporter of OOXML would say "some people claim there were shenanigans in trying to pass this, but here is my evidence otherwise". That is not happening, which looks incredibly bogus to everybody.
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So you are saying that because some Vista computers are switched to XP, we should not count *any* Vista computers as Vista sales? So therefore sales of Vista are zero?
Not only that, but an HDTV improves the appearance of a normal DVD, by (IMHO) a far bigger factor than the additional improvement by getting 1080p playback.
For us, a wide-screen 480p display from the DVD is almost indistinguishable from the 1080i and 720p broadcasts on a 1080p capable 42" Samsung LCD screen, when viewed from more than about 8 feet away. Yes you can tell when the end credits are somewhat fuzzy but otherwise it is impossible. 1080p is probably a bit better but I have nothing producing that except static computer displays so it is difficult to compare. I understand there are better DVD players that do better upscaling than the TV does, so even better picture is possible, but we are pretty happy with the el-cheapo region-free DVD player we bought.
I think for an average consumer, there was an enormous improvement from VHS to DVD. There is a smaller but quite noticeable improvement when they plug their DVD into a new HDTV (provided somebody enables the progressive wide screen on the DVD), plus that expensive HDTV gave them a much brighter and larger screen in a flat wall-hangable object which for most consumers is probably excuses it's cost.
But the further improvement to 1080p playback is relatively tiny and not visible to users.
Also note the HD ads on the start of DVDs. They show action scenes with the contrast cranked up, and your mind says "that looks really sharp!" but in fact that is a DVD picture!
I just don't get it though. To my mind an unambiguious abbreviation just does not seem that bad, it's as though Microsoft's defenders see something evil in money.
It is pretty obvious that somebody calling Obama "Osama" does not like him, as he is using a name that is associated with an enemy of the US. Unless "$" is to you evil or an enemy, you cannot say that using that term is negative. If you think '$" is evil then I'm not sure if I want to talk to you. Also very strange that people who say '$' is bad suggest that the *stock symbol* be used instead, I believe there are more people who dislike stocks than dollars, though again pretty much in the minority.
Another way to look at it is whether there would be a problem calling Open Source "O$$" (or maybe "OS$").
Except for people insisting incredibly quickly and vehemently that this is "childish" I do not see any reason or logic behind it. And the fact that people are so incredibly fast to immediatly say "you are a child" whenevery somebody writes "M$" indicates that they are not very confident in their position either.
Also people saying this is "old" have not been paying attention. The old insulting name for Microsoft was "Micros~1", not "M$". I did not see "M$" until perhaps 2000 or so.
I've never seen a point-to-type (the more common name for "sloppy focus", where did that term come from?) on OSX. Can you tell me how to turn it on? How do they handle the menubar, with a timeout?
KDE is actually ahead of everybody else in that "don't raise the window when I click in it" actually works. This has never worked in Windows, no matter what point-to-type hacks are installed, and Gnome has been broken for several versions now...
Point-to-type is obviously superior but both Windows and Gnome even if you set it to it leaves it useless because of them raising windows when you click. Gnome claims to be able to turn this off, but those idiots made that setting disable a program raising *itself*, which is just a bunch of stuck-up morons trying disparately to prove that point-to-type is bad by purposely making the alternative broken. They should be ashamed of themselves.
If you count every person who customizes somebody's Windows installation there must be tens of thousands of versions of Windows, too.
Middle-mouse pasting is actually a better form of drag&drop, the problem is that people don't seem to be able to grasp that fact and thus fail to see how good it is.
Selecting anything starts a "drag", while middle-mouse click is a "drop". Big advantages over conventional drag & drop is that you can rearrange windows and even start/kill programs during a "drag", and that it is intuitively obvious how to abort a "drag" in the middle, and you can cut & paste at the same time.
The problem is lots of people (including Linux developers) think of it as some variation of cut & paste. They make it interfere with cut & paste sometimes (less often nowadays), and conversely they don't make it do the exact same thing as drag & drop of the same data.
The Nvidia drivers do not work correctly with R&R and have to be restareted.
I discovered this by accident when I set the driver to nv, suddenly you could plug a monitor in and it worked!
However OpenGL was crap without the official drivers so I put it back. I certianly don't change the screens much.
Anybody looking for an argument can find many for all kinds of positions here: the nvidia drivers are closed and that can be blamed (but are you really certain that if open somebody would have fixed them to work with R&R)? Conversely perhaps xord R&R is so fiendishly complicated of an API that Nvidia just can't get it right. Who knows...
It is rather shocking the ignorance of people here. Apparently the above poster is so used to Windows that they cannot imagine it working differently.
Okay, let's imagine there is a special directory called "the files that are open right now". On Linux what happens when you write a new version of a shared library (sorry, a "DLL" which of course is a far better descriptive name, right?): imagine that it first moves the old file to this special "these files are open right now" directory. Then it puts the new file into the directory it was supposed to be in. Not sure if I really explained this right or managed to avoid Windows problems (I think Windows has been fixed recently so it is safe to rename/mv a file while it is open?).
This is called hard links/inodes/whatever. It was only invented in 1970 (or perhaps earlier since Unix was based on Multics and that may have taken the idea from other systems before that). Therefore I can understand why Windows users are not quite up on the technology considering it is only 40 years old..
RMS is certainly not involved in why the binary api for kernel modules keeps changing. The GPL is not really involved either, you can certainly imagine a stable binary api that is GPL'd, as well as a changing binary api that does not require the modules to be GPL'd, both would have some or even all of the problems you are complaining about.
You might want to not go off on incorrect tangents, because the basics of your argument are sound: RMS should not be a spokesman other than perhaps an indication of an extreme position (this can be useful to catch astroturfers: somebody agreeing with one extreme position of RMS but disagreeing with a less extreme Linus+RMS position at the same time is trying to make a bogus strawman argument). But accusing RMS of having something to do with the non-portability of binarly kernel modules is incorrect.
I do believe that technically the drivers will eventually move to user space except for the very high-speed ones such as disks/memory (where oddly enough there seem to be no real problems with GPL and changing binary apis), and that will solve this problem without compromising the kernel. Though this is really accidental I'm sure a lot of Linux fans will jump on the success of this as a big win for Linux and ignore the history.
I think it is interesting that you are so threatened by somebody associating your beloved company with dollars that you INSTANTLY respond with the "Oh if you put a $ next to an M you are a CHILD! A CHILD, I TELL YOU, A LITTLE LITTLE CHILD! BECAUSE I SAY SO! YOU ARE A CHILD!!!!! CHILD!! CHILD!! You are a child, because I say so! WAHHH!"
Oddly enough somebody here could post that Bill Gates eats babies for breakfast and it won't get such a response. The fact that you respond so quickly with the "you are infantile" insta-message, when in fact saying nothing would be much more effective, shows exactly where the insecurity and infant attitude is.
Everytime somebody posts this you people ask, "what about saying Linsux". But the writer did not write "microsuck". They wrote "M$". Why not ask if anybody would be upset if Open Source was called "O$$" (in fact I think that would be a very good name to use for people making a profit from open source)
There's also the Nazi spaceport, don't forget about it!
Just as somebody who really did not have any interest in this, and am quite willing to pay for music.
This is complete nonsense and will not even serve the RIAA's interests. This penalty is so far out of line that it is completely fantasy, the risk of being sued for millions of dollars is so abstract and impossible to prepare for that the logical thing to do is ignore it. Also even copying ONE song has in effect bankrupted you, so there is no financial incentive not to copy more.
If they really wanted to make a deterrent, a civil case where the person is fined about $50 per song would be much more effective.
Yes there is a lot of great FOSS but FOSS has yet to produce great software that fills every need.
You really need to get out more if you think it is impossible to run non-FOSS software on Linux. That is a totally ignorant statement, and one of the oldest pieces of FUD out there.
Actually arbitrary pointers are not a problem, if in fact you can reliably prevent any system calls that the program should not do.
I agree with you that detecting whether the system calls are allowed is a problem. Describing it as a "VM" is probably wrong (I suspect you are confusing it with the rather delicate way you have to do this on Windows as opposed to the LD_PRELOAD on Linux). However once the calls are trapped there would have to be an extrodinarily complex AI system to actually figure out if they are really what that program should do.
For instance some program that can update your web bookmarks could probably also insert or modify them all to spam addresses, I think it will be hard for the call detector to prevent that!
Have not tried this but I am guessing that if the porn images are blocked but not the results page itself, users at the company can still figure out how to click to get the porn itself by clicking on the broken image in the page. Blocking the entire resulting page if safe search is off will prevent this.
Still it does seem like Microsoft's solution is by far the easier one to handle, and there is no reason why both solutions can't be provided. You could also use domain filtering for the entire page so there would be a simple way to get the Google results by blocking a site, just have "safe search" change the target of the search button rather than setting a cookie or whatever it is doing.
I don't know if you are joking, but we certainly knew Mars gravity to within some tiny fraction of a percent. The period and distance of it's orbiting moons can be used to figure it out pretty accurately. You may be thinking of the spaceship that was lost because of metric/english unit confusion?
Evolution certainly does not "negate the very possibility that god exists". Nothing can do so, it is quite impossible to prove from any evidence that god does not exist.
God may very well exist and created a universe where evolution would happen, on purpose. It is also possible God created the world exactly like we see it (perhaps last Thursday morning, there is no need for 6000 years or anything), however it does appear he really wants us to believe life evolved as he created a huge mass of evidence for evolution at the same time, so I don't think it is wise to go against his wishes.
Creationists do not realize that all their arguments are equivalent to "my god is too stupid to create evolution so he must have created the end result". They do not realize this however because they are blockheads.
Translation, having seen this "amazing" technology:
IE8 can turn off all the decoration around the applet in the window, thus making it look like the applet is a native application.
I do have to say that is a good idea, but I have problems with Microsoft advertising it as though it is some incredible complicated development rather than just a simple good idea.
I believe Microsoft is making an even bigger token effort in interoperabilty, actually.
In both cases it is token, however.
Thank you for some reason here!
Yes there are "ships" and there are always going to be MANY times as many ships as wind turbines. Also "ships" have some big problems that these turbines don't have: they move, and they are far more likely to be in places (called "sealanes") where a collision is likely.
The grandparent poster is really grasping for reasons to oppose this! Anybody who can think even the tiniest amount will realize that the objection is totally silly.
Wind power at sea is less expensive than land wind power.
I recall hearing that the pressure on the turbine really is not that great. The vanes actually act like wings with lift and have an opposing force into the wind. You really want to transfer the maximum amount of energy possible into *spinning* the turbine, so any action at right angles is wasted.
It's very cute how you carefully word all your sentences to imply that IE will be unavailable. Some of the keywords are "instead" in the first sentence, and all your implication that people who don't know how to do anything other than click the 'e' will somehow be unable to click it because of the presence of Firefox.
OEMs will include Firefox if Microsoft allowed them to because "users may have heard of and prefer it, and now they can run it IF THEY WANT without installing it. And we still provide Microsoft's Internet Explorer for users that are familiar with and prefer it."
Of course you are going to keep tying stuff implying that IE will be removed from the machines or that somehow it is impossible or incredibly complicated for an OEM to include Firefox without somehow magically making it impossible for people to see the 'e'. You sir are living in a fantasy world, I guess a fantasy that is from being paid to write your bullshit.
An objective supporter of OOXML would say "some people claim there were shenanigans in trying to pass this, but here is my evidence otherwise". That is not happening, which looks incredibly bogus to everybody.