Please, I'm obviously not as smart as you are, so can you please give me a list of the "large" holes of Windows that happen on a daily basis? My memory is obviously failing me already as I don't remember very many at all. Certainly not more than 400 "large holes" since W2K was released.
And odder still I do remember that every time that I have heard of a "major" flaw it was fixed very quickly, and then took a few days to go under the standard regression tests on all platforms and machines before it was publically released. If you were affected by one of these problems, you could get the "unsupported" patch as soon as it was developed, but before they could complete testing.
You can't do complete testing of a patch in 24-48 hours and release it as public with support.
Also, when a "serious" problem does come out, the relevant MS developers are told to work 18 hours a day 7 days a week until it's solved.
It's one thing to say "hey, it looks like here's the problem, here we just corrected it and compiled it, that should do", and another completely to have performed all of the tests required to make sure that one small "fix" didn't corrupt something on some obscure hardware configuration that other major clients are using.
You're all so quick to cut down Microsoft and defend Linux when worse problems happen. You'll also have to explain to me how this is not completely hypocritical, because the logic on that one eludes me as well.
There wasn't any bugs so serious in a public release that when you turned off your computer it corrupted your hard drive on just about any computer. There were some, yes, where with an obscure set of hardware the drivers would fuck something up, and BTW it's *driver* problems in the majority of cases.
It's not "_AMAZING_" that Linux has as few bugs as it does, when you consider that is one of the major good points about OSS. Add to that fact that many many users are able to actually look at the source code when they do find a bug and fix it themselves, or at least point out where they think the problem is, and it's not all that crazy to believe that there aren't very many bugs. It's still a badge, yes, absolutely, but I don't think it's "_AMAZING_" that is the case.
What amazes me is how quickly everyone and their brother post disperaging remarks here on/. whenever there's a MS problem, but as soon as there is a major linux one, it's just bad luck dude.... If that isn't hypocritical I don't know what is.
Oh I see, it wasn't anti-ms and pro-linux so thus it's trolling.
Too bad they're all hypocritical. IF this was the other way around, everyone here would be yelling up and down how it was obviously due to gross incometance in Microsoft that caused these problems to go unchecked (when the MS problems are never of this severity), but since it's linux it is obviously just bad luck, and just about nobody here goes to say any disperaging remarks about the linux programmers.
And this, IMHO, is one of the major reasons that linux won't be a major desktop OS anytime soon. The people who use it have turned it into a religon. It's all about how MS is the big bad wolf and by using Linux somehow they'll have less to repent for when they die. It does Linux no good to have their supporters running around immaturely saying how "MS SUX!" all over the place, to the rest of the world they're just hurting Linux's image. This isn't all users, of course, but enough that it gets noticed.
If they went through 50+ articles a day then perhaps I could agree with you, but come on, they have more than 200 articles submitted per day, and lately (especially pretty much every day this week) there has been a duplicate story. When there are only around 12 stories that are accepted, a quick 5 minute scan before going to go through the submission pile would have prevented all of these. I can't understand how they couldn't do that, especially how there aren't all that many stories. And if the editors themselves aren't even keeping up with what is happening on this site...
Re:Microsoft can't be to happy about this...
on
XBox Netplay Already
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· Score: 5, Insightful
don't you think that it might be a good thing for them, since if it becomes this open, then more people will buy them, and more and more games? It's bound to make them more money in the long run.
The only thing that they might be angry about is that they didn't get there first, or they won't be able to provide the service if it's free.
I'm sorry if I missed the news announcement when the US openly declared war on all third war countries.
THIS WAS A CRIME, NOT A WAR we just have taken this as a convenient excuse for the atrocities that we will commit back in return just cuz we're pissed.
If Windows is so advanced and easy to us e then why in the world do these training progams even exist?
Because it's a concept that we simply can't grasp. We grew up with these things, and we are quite tech savvy. To us it's second nature. They have never gotten into it, and it'd be like you stepping in front of a 1900's printing press. Once you are used to something, you know how it works and it becomes "intuitive".
For another example, I became rather enamoured with sound when I was in highschool. Take a look at this board. To me, that's completely intuitive. I can tell you exactly what to do where to get whatever result you want. To most other people they'd just drown in it and have absolutely no idea what to do.
It's just all a matter of what you've had experience with. People who have never seen computers before who don't understand the concept of menus or webpages, well you won't be able to make anything completely "intuitive" for them, they will need to get some sort of help to figure out how to do anything. You can't expect the OS to handle everything for them, but you can expect it to make it relatively easy to take instructions to do it.
Face it, you walk into a consumer level electronics store to buy a computer you walk out with something that has Windows on it
Yup. That's the reason why they're in trouble. However you can always return the OEM windows for a partial refund, but it's a bit too much of a hassle for most people to bother with. I don't think you can blame them much either. Exclusivity deals are all over the place, that is nothing new. If you were trying to push to make sure that you maintain your "edge" in the market, saying "ok look, if you sell every computer with a copy of windows, sans exception, we'll give you a bit of a discount".
Illegal, yes, but only if you get caught. They did. You can bet that they're not the only company that's using those tactics to get an edge in the market. Coke buys exclusive spots at large major functions so that only coke and family beverages will be sold. That's just one example. So why isn't everyone yelling at coke for unfair business practices? Because they're not in the spotlight. Check out coca-karma for an interesting view on what slimy things coke does in their spare time...
do you ever say "my OS crashed?" no, I say "my computer just crashed", and I assure you I am quite an advanced computer user. It's just a matter of habit there.
While they might not think about it much, if you ask anyone they can surely distinguish between software and hardware enough to know that they're not the same thing.
apparently I didn't do the math for that part, I must have missed when they said it, but they said that the laptops were between $500-600 each and that there would be 1 million of them distributed over 14,000 schools (that's a lot of laptops per school!).
And for people who don't seem to think that $500-$600 for a used laptop is a lot, I can get a factory refurbished IBM Thinkpad 570 - PII366MHz,64MB,6.4GB,1.44,13.3"TFT,56K(Int.) for $497USD (just for example) and NEW IBM ThinkPad iSeries 1200 Celeron 500, 32MB, 6.0GB, 12.1"HPA (800x600), 24X, Modem, NiMH, W98SE for $620USD. These are single price discounts too. Buy 5 or more, get 10% off those prices... Buy a million and you can most likely get quite a substancial discount indeed! That $620 would turn into about $400, so you can get an even better laptop than that for $600USD end-run.
By the same argument, since cars worked perfectly well without seatbelts, for what most people used them for (not getting in accidents), there was no need to have seatbelts, and it was ok that you couldn't get a car with seatbelts without paying more?
No, if MS was still pushing Windows 3.11 as their OS with Word 6.0 then your analogy would hold. I think there is a little bit of difference between Win311/Word6 and WindowsXP/OfficeXP. A lot more than just seatbelts difference.
Yes, you're absolutely right about this point, you should be allowed to buy a computer without an OS, and IIRC you could always, just take back the unopened package that you got with the computer to MS and tell them that you didn't agree with the EULA, and they are obligated to refund your money. It's just that this was far too much trouble for most people to worry about so they didn't care.
You accuse me of being "stupid" and yet you have such a wonderful way of twisting words to fit whatever you want to say. I will respond to your post in the same tone that you gave me.
That so called "praising" was merely saying "there's nothing wrong in using it if it's not a needed feature of the website, only a frivilous addon". That's not praising, I think you need a dictionary.
The so called "defending slowness of XP" was making a joke about how their comparisons were silly, and people moderated it as such. I think you might need a sense of humour.
As for MS stuff being all people want and need, let's put it this way. They didn't get to 90%+ of the market simply by monopolistic practices. The fact of the matter is that, for most people, they produce what is needed and what people want. Just because you've decided to be anti-MS doesn't mean that the rest of the world will follow (hate to bruise your ego boy).
And as for "trolling", if you consider a troll to be someone at full karma and someone who actually has an opinion and isn't afraid to defend it, even if it's against the (completely and unfairly biased and hypocritical) norm, then so be it. Perhaps I should call you a troll just because your views don't happen to coincide with mine.
The overwhelming majority of non-technical computer users that I know (a couple of dozen people) keep asking "Why is my computer so hard to use? Why does it keep crashing? Isn't there something better? Can't you smart computer guys make a computer that just works?". They are really frustrated and would love to switch to something else.
If you exclude the "I don't know how to use this" questions, and look at the actual merit of them, exclude crappyness about windows 95/98/ME, how much are you left with?
The overwhelming majority of questions that I get are "How can I make this font bigger?" "How can I print? Why isn't that working?" and the vast majority of the anger that is directed at the computer is because something isn't working the way that they think that it should work. When I look at it, it's pretty intuitive and I can't think of a better way. And in addition the majority of crashes that I see on any NT/2K/XP machine are due to shitty drivers.
Why am I excluding 95/98/ME? Read my parent post. The same reason why you don't ask people to use Linux 2.0 distros.
The problem with suggesting Linux is that they always have a hard requirement of compatibility with Microsoft file formats
Whenever I try to suggest linux, which I do sometimes for some users, they take a look at me when I use it (and I do sometimes on some servers here), and they laugh "You expect me to be able to know how to use THAT?", and for the 2 users who I did convince to try, they quickly quickly returned back to windows because linux may work OK for the average user when it's functioning perfectly, but when it doesn't it is a bitch to fix.
For the average computer user they should be able to turn it on and have instant access and turn if off without a shutdown
Right, they can, and XP makes that a lot easier due to reduced startup/shutdown times... But most users don't like to leave their computers turned on... I've had my computer on 24/7, and I have a Windows 2000 server with 241 days of uptime now, still trucking along. I ask my coworkers why they turn off their computers, and they just say that they don't like to waste power, or they don't like the noise, or whatnot.
While the computer is on they should have reliable access to their data and applications. They should only have to authenticate themselves once (probably with some sort of hardware dongle so they can use any computer anywhere). Upgrading should not be a concern.
This is not really a technical issue, more an implementation issue. I only have to log in once, I don't know why you have to log in more than once, IE stores all of my passwords for websites, my software stores the passwords for email and other things, I don't have many problems. As for the hardware dongle, it's called a smart card, it's been integrated for use into Windows 2000 and XP, but people just don't see a need to use one yet. If you don't want to have to log on, don't! With any windows version you can either assign no password, or just use a tweak utility to auto-login all the time.
Microsoft also sees the problem and they are positioning themselves to... The executives at Microsoft understand that and the corollary urgency of controlling those points better than anyone else.
Right, so they're doing what's smart, and what you and I would do if we were in their position...
My point was problems about the operating system itself. Not drivers, not computers, not email, about the O/S.
Or, since this is MS, The about MS Office as well. And I'm talking about questions about problems, not like "I can't figure out how to make this text bold". I mean serious knowledgeable questions about an actual bug or deficiency in the software, or legitimate complaints.
If you could put $5mil more sales into your company, and $500k more money into your personal bank account by using slimy tactics to squash that competetor over there, can you HONESTLY say that you would do the "morally right" thing and not?
If you can say yes, pat yourself on the back all the way to the unemployment line. This is a dog-eat-dog world, and this is one dog who knew never to back down. If you don't do it to them, they will do it to you. This is a fact of business life.
If you said no (you would squish'em), pat yourself on the wallet, and congrats, you're human. This is the heart of the democratic society. Sad fact, yes. If everyone were to play by the "nice" rules then yes, indeed, companies could be nice to one another. However all it takes is one to screw it up, and it's more likely to say that there's only a few who are trying not to. There are many many many more companies who are far worse than microsoft is, they're just not in the spotlight as much as MS is.
So what are the options? Communism? Socialism? Yourownism?
Would you rather be the CEO of a company who's got a great head start, barrelling down, getting rich, loving the lavish expenditures, only to have the government step in when you're not even there yet and say "sorry son, you've gotta leave room for the competetors. doesn't matter if they don't have a good product, we have to stop you at this line..." I don't think you'd be to impressed with them if they did that.
And think about it. If MS products really all were crap, then some competetor would have come out of the framework with software that WASN'T complete crap, and people would buy it because it was better. Sure, perhaps there would have been other pieces of software out there that got squashed before they had the chance, but if there really was that big a margin, then the sales of the other OS would have skyrocketed...
And lets not forget how nice it is for all of the developers out there that 95% of the people run the same operating system. There *are* benefits to having basically one OS out there you know.
And before anyone talks about "innovation", has anyone taken a look at linux lately, from a superficial level? It is so blatantly copying what is on Windows desktops that it's not funny... So where's the innovation in that? That new personal manager software (yeah, the outlook for linux one, you know which one I'm talking about)... they couldn't have made a better copy with a photocopier. You know that they say that the most sinscere form of flattery is imitation...;)
They'll lie to the voters about how they did it for the children. I think I'm gonna be sick
Who? The government will lie about it? They're they ones who suggested it in the first place. MS just said... "Uh, ok sure".
Yeah, and newsflash: government is corrupt! money buys power there too! (whodathunkit?)
If anyone has any better ideas of a feasible society that can fix all of these problems, please feel free to raise your hand.:)
can you give me some examples of things that are broken, and point to the microsoft written code that is doing it?
"Oh, my printer is not working!" "Goddam Microsoft!"
"Oh, my screen is garbled!" "Goddam microsoft!"
"Oh, my modem isn't working and now Windows Crashed!" "Goddam microsoft!" (obviously Windows' fault, couldn't have been a driver problem)
I am not, of course, saying that they deserve no responsibility, I am saying however that a great deal of the responsibility is misattributed to them.
I am, of course, excluding Windows9X/ME series, as I don't count them as a real OS, and it was the customers, not Microsoft, who dragged out 98OSR2 and ME... Take linux back to the 2.0 kernel days, and tell them that they must maintain absolute backward compatibility with that... Oops, linux would be fucked! Good thing they don't have to worry about that...
And before you go on saying how that's because you can just recompile the source code (although that is a good point of OSS), the majority of problems that were caused on windows were due to either (a) shitty drivers, or (b) programs doing what they weren't supposed to be doing, or (c) shitty base code that had to be kept for compatibility.
Windows 98 was supposed to be the last of that series. Windows 2000 was supposed to have Personal, Professional and Server series, but the customer base said "NO! We have too many stupid applications that aren't compatible with the Windows NT platform, and thus we need more Windows 9X releases!"... This is why they called it Win98OSR2, not Win99... and WinME was supposed to be Win98OSR3 however some marketing brilliantos decided that was a bad move so they vetoed that idea and said they should give it the ME designation instead.
And yes, I have done end user technical support, and the vast majority of problems that I came across were application problems or drivers. Yes, it was easy for a driver or a shitty program to stomp all over Windows9X series, but that was necessary for backwards compatibility. See how long you can extend a code base and still have it maintain stability and backwards compatibility... you only get 1 of the 2 choices.
changed the average user's mindset to believe that this is as good as computers get, and getting any better stability, inherent virus resistance and security and so forth isn't really possible.
Actually, that is a pretty good point.
I just asked 3 of my non-technie friends here what they thought about the nimda/email virii/codeRed/whatever crisii that have been happening lately, and they expressed their concern and dismay (well, as much as they could), but they were not very surprised that it happened. To them having bugs in software is an inevitability.
And, yes, this is where having 95% of your user base being tech savvy and a large portion of people peering through your source code has an advantage, that is conceeded, they win that point, don't argue it anymore:) (not to you, just in general)
Microsoft also doesn't have the luxury of handing out kernel upgrades once every 2 weeks and new entire packages for download every month or so. Tell me, if you were to scour the changelogs from the time that W2K Gold was released to W2K SP1 for the linuxes, how many security holes would you find? How many holes would you find that were silently fixed because someone found it and patched it? And how many more holes were fixed without even a note in the changelogs?
Again, another clear bonus for open source, but this isn't something that you can fault Microsoft exclusively for.
It's getting rediculous when you don't even bother to read the articles properly before posting the headlines, thus biasing people. You are far from an unbiased news source...
$900m in software + 200,000 reconditioned computers + $90m in teacher training + $38m in technical support + $250m for the foundation + $160 to teach kids how to work with computers, guys, basic math.
900 + 90 + 38 + 250 + (est $40m for the computers) + 160 = $1478m... this is NOT EQUAL TO $1.1B.
I watch all of the people here who complain without even reading the articles, and believing word-for-word what the editors post in the headlines and it makes me sick. You are a jouralist outlet that serves half a million pages a day, and you should be a lot more responsible than that.
Let me also call this fact into light:
The settlement proposal came from one of the lead plaintiffs' lawyers in the case
Oh interesting, so it was the prosecution's idea to do this...
and also:
Estimates of the value of the settlement ranged from $1.1 billion to as much as $1.7 billion, one source said. "It's going to get money to the people that need it the most," this source said.
And as I counted, the $1.7B is a lot closer to the value than the $1.1B, and this is also not counting the costs of actually figuring all of this stuff out for MS. And don't think that for each copy of windows handed out they don't have any costs either, they're not free once you consider everything into account (you add up all costs of developing and divide by the number of products made)... It's not going to cost them $900mil, but it will cost $400mil or so...
I just get tired of people who hate Microsoft and blindly believe everything that they're told (partially because they want to believe), and yet are being completely hypocritical. We're in a capitialistic society ladies and gentlemen... In this society man exploits man... If you were in their shoes, can you honestly say that you wouldn't do things any differently?
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Having said all of that, yeah, they're being overly monopolistic, and yes, this is a rediculously small punishment for what they've been caught doing. I mean, not that $1.5B is a small chunk of change, that is a large chunk of money for any corporation, but they're not really being restricted hardcore from repeating the same "mistakes"/"crimes" in the future. And as anyone knows, the companies that survive don't do so because they're magnanimous, they just learn how to hide their mistakes better the next time.
But then again, with the court's track record lately, could you honestly have expected anything different? (sigh)... Justice will have to be postponed for yet another day.
And tell me, how many of them go complaining back to the shop saying how they hate the goddam computer because the operating system sucks ass?
Oh that's interesting, basically none..
Thus, Windows is doing everything that the majority of users need, and thus is doing a good job. Just because use tech savvy people (who, BY THE WAY have different needs/wants from our software, and we are also in the vast minority) want more out of our operating systems and don't necessarily like what Microsoft gives us, doesn't mean that for the vast majority of the people it doesn't work perfectly fine for them...
If I think that this is just a retarded stupid idea.
The people whose web pages are being thrusted to the top of the query lists are the people who are polluting the metadata and other tags for the sole purpose of getting their sites higher in the search lists
So lemmy get this straight: you want all good and honest people (who aren't causing the problem in the first place) to opt-out of common searches (which they'd never want to do), and this will thus remove the legitimate entries from the pool of queries, returning an even more polluted list from your search engine.
am I missing something here?
Although there are a few people who would be helped by removing absolutely irrelivant queries, the vast majority would actually suffer if they used this.
Dunno, I got a Optiplex 150 here and the case is great... I agree with you about the recessed floppy (the recessed WHAT?) being a pain, but I hardly ever use it so it really doesn't matter.
everything inside is on "rails" if you would like to call them, and don't need screws even to attach to the rails, so it's very quick and easy to swap stuff around.
take a Dell case, lie it sideways, the case is hinged so it's easy to open, and in front of you are the hard drives and the cdrom drives, angled out at you because they're on the hinged part. unplug power and ribbon, use the easy tabbed sliders that are a sinch to remove (and install on another drive because of the way that they clip into the screw holes instead of actually screwing in), put on new drive, replace, reattach, done. entire endeavour : 30s.
Or for any normal computer, remove side conver, disconnect, unscrew, remove drive, replace, rescrew, reattach, replace side cover. this is not brain surgery folks. total time : 60s.
the only way to make it easier is to have actual slots where the drives themselves just slide in and out of, so you don't need to screw around with any wires, but you can also get those, unfortunately they are a bit more expensive.
the reason why things are the way they are is because (drumroll please)... there is no big demand for it to change.
Dell has the cases setup the way that they do because their primary customers are businesses (well, these are business cases I'm talking about anyways), and they will have IT departments that are more likely to screw around with the insides and want easy access to things than your mom&pop home users. Most people still refer to their computer chassis as the "CPU" or the "hard drive", and they think it's just a magical box. they couldn't care, and really don't know about what's inside of it, thus there is no demand to create a modularized system. It is cheaper to not, thus things aren't modularized.
So if somebody WITHOUT background in signal processing will write the working code he will be not eligible for the award?
No, what he's saying is someone WITHOUT background in DSP will NOT be able to write the driver, as you must have intimate knowledge of DSP in order to write the driver in the first place.
Programming on the other hand is a continuous design process. Implementation is a non-problem
I totally disagree with the implementation part. That philosophy is what ends up making me wade through (and usually throwing out) countless lines of crappy code because people don't know how to program, or are just doing whatever it takes to get it done.
You need to be working just as hard while doing the programming itself as during the design phase. Constantly checking what you've done and thinking if there are better ways, making sure that there are no snags or potential problems, generally writing elegant code. That's the hard part.
its all non-visual
Again I disagree. If the projects that I worked on were nonvisual we would have died a horrible death. I might be nitpicking on the definition of the word as you meant it, but using diagrams and heirarchical trees of how classes and portions of code interact is usually a very good idea, that gives you the "visual" aspect that you can keep in your mind (and on paper) to remember how everything fits together.
An architect can look at rendered pictures of what he is designing to get an intuitive feel for its correctness, whereas a programmer must form his image without the benefit of evolved human spacial perception
Absolutely not. I can look at code, and just visually on an aestetic level get a feel as to whether or not it's good code. If it looks like crap, it generally is crap. Once the "prettyness" of the code has been looked at, the actual code itself can be browsed. It is not difficult to tell, just by a quick browse over the code, if the code is good or bad. If you're spending too many lines of code here or there, then you might be overdoing it. If the task of the block of code is to take X input and produce Y output and you're using 200 lines of code to do it, chances are you're not doing it properly.
Requirements analysis for a bridge is so simple a child can grok it: "something i can walk over the river on". For your typical programming job requirements are much more nebulous
I find that many times customers give just as simple an explanation as to what they want :
"We need to pay our bills online. We need to have it interact with the bank and allow us to have complete control over what gets authorized and denied". Usually there's much more fluff in there, but it's a simple concept that requires quite a lot of work to design.
However I do agree that there are many customers who don't know what they want.
I find that the term "Computer Engineering" is applied usually when you're dealing with the physical components of the computer much more than the software. Similarly "Software Engineering" is the process of designing the software itself. This is engineering just like construction work in the sense that you must create a structure that the code will fit into. "Computer programming" is the process where you take the structure and then fill in the code, once the design work has been done. Unfortunately the line between design and programming is usually very blurred (or nonexistant) and people spend far too little time on the design aspect, and then far too MUCH time on the programming because they don't know where they're going.
By that very nature I find that people who say that there is no hard distinction between the "engineering" of the software and the "programming" of it usually don't know how to design very well (present company excluded of course).
So from your final statement, yes, there is no analogy between "Construction Engineering" and "Programming" that is valid, however there are analogies between "Construction Engineering" and "Software Engineering" (design) that are quite valid.
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Please, I'm obviously not as smart as you are, so can you please give me a list of the "large" holes of Windows that happen on a daily basis? My memory is obviously failing me already as I don't remember very many at all. Certainly not more than 400 "large holes" since W2K was released.
And odder still I do remember that every time that I have heard of a "major" flaw it was fixed very quickly, and then took a few days to go under the standard regression tests on all platforms and machines before it was publically released. If you were affected by one of these problems, you could get the "unsupported" patch as soon as it was developed, but before they could complete testing.
You can't do complete testing of a patch in 24-48 hours and release it as public with support.
Also, when a "serious" problem does come out, the relevant MS developers are told to work 18 hours a day 7 days a week until it's solved.
It's one thing to say "hey, it looks like here's the problem, here we just corrected it and compiled it, that should do", and another completely to have performed all of the tests required to make sure that one small "fix" didn't corrupt something on some obscure hardware configuration that other major clients are using.
You're all so quick to cut down Microsoft and defend Linux when worse problems happen. You'll also have to explain to me how this is not completely hypocritical, because the logic on that one eludes me as well.
There wasn't any bugs so serious in a public release that when you turned off your computer it corrupted your hard drive on just about any computer. There were some, yes, where with an obscure set of hardware the drivers would fuck something up, and BTW it's *driver* problems in the majority of cases.
/. whenever there's a MS problem, but as soon as there is a major linux one, it's just bad luck dude.... If that isn't hypocritical I don't know what is.
It's not "_AMAZING_" that Linux has as few bugs as it does, when you consider that is one of the major good points about OSS. Add to that fact that many many users are able to actually look at the source code when they do find a bug and fix it themselves, or at least point out where they think the problem is, and it's not all that crazy to believe that there aren't very many bugs. It's still a badge, yes, absolutely, but I don't think it's "_AMAZING_" that is the case.
What amazes me is how quickly everyone and their brother post disperaging remarks here on
I love how someone moderates you as "Troll".
How was that trolling?
Oh I see, it wasn't anti-ms and pro-linux so thus it's trolling.
Too bad they're all hypocritical. IF this was the other way around, everyone here would be yelling up and down how it was obviously due to gross incometance in Microsoft that caused these problems to go unchecked (when the MS problems are never of this severity), but since it's linux it is obviously just bad luck, and just about nobody here goes to say any disperaging remarks about the linux programmers.
And this, IMHO, is one of the major reasons that linux won't be a major desktop OS anytime soon. The people who use it have turned it into a religon. It's all about how MS is the big bad wolf and by using Linux somehow they'll have less to repent for when they die. It does Linux no good to have their supporters running around immaturely saying how "MS SUX!" all over the place, to the rest of the world they're just hurting Linux's image. This isn't all users, of course, but enough that it gets noticed.
obviously it was gross incompetance on the programmers part.
Or at least that's what most people here say when much less serious problems happen in Microsoft software.
But since it's Linux, it must just be bad luck dude!
If they went through 50+ articles a day then perhaps I could agree with you, but come on, they have more than 200 articles submitted per day, and lately (especially pretty much every day this week) there has been a duplicate story. When there are only around 12 stories that are accepted, a quick 5 minute scan before going to go through the submission pile would have prevented all of these. I can't understand how they couldn't do that, especially how there aren't all that many stories. And if the editors themselves aren't even keeping up with what is happening on this site...
don't you think that it might be a good thing for them, since if it becomes this open, then more people will buy them, and more and more games? It's bound to make them more money in the long run.
The only thing that they might be angry about is that they didn't get there first, or they won't be able to provide the service if it's free.
How the FSCK is this a war???????
I'm sorry if I missed the news announcement when the US openly declared war on all third war countries.
THIS WAS A CRIME, NOT A WAR we just have taken this as a convenient excuse for the atrocities that we will commit back in return just cuz we're pissed.
I REPEAT, THERE IS NO WAR.
here's a good article about it
If Windows is so advanced and easy to us e then why in the world do these training progams even exist?
Because it's a concept that we simply can't grasp. We grew up with these things, and we are quite tech savvy. To us it's second nature. They have never gotten into it, and it'd be like you stepping in front of a 1900's printing press. Once you are used to something, you know how it works and it becomes "intuitive".
For another example, I became rather enamoured with sound when I was in highschool. Take a look at this board. To me, that's completely intuitive. I can tell you exactly what to do where to get whatever result you want. To most other people they'd just drown in it and have absolutely no idea what to do.
It's just all a matter of what you've had experience with. People who have never seen computers before who don't understand the concept of menus or webpages, well you won't be able to make anything completely "intuitive" for them, they will need to get some sort of help to figure out how to do anything. You can't expect the OS to handle everything for them, but you can expect it to make it relatively easy to take instructions to do it.
Face it, you walk into a consumer level electronics store to buy a computer you walk out with something that has Windows on it
Yup. That's the reason why they're in trouble. However you can always return the OEM windows for a partial refund, but it's a bit too much of a hassle for most people to bother with. I don't think you can blame them much either. Exclusivity deals are all over the place, that is nothing new. If you were trying to push to make sure that you maintain your "edge" in the market, saying "ok look, if you sell every computer with a copy of windows, sans exception, we'll give you a bit of a discount".
Illegal, yes, but only if you get caught. They did. You can bet that they're not the only company that's using those tactics to get an edge in the market. Coke buys exclusive spots at large major functions so that only coke and family beverages will be sold. That's just one example. So why isn't everyone yelling at coke for unfair business practices? Because they're not in the spotlight. Check out coca-karma for an interesting view on what slimy things coke does in their spare time...
do you ever say "my OS crashed?" no, I say "my computer just crashed", and I assure you I am quite an advanced computer user. It's just a matter of habit there.
While they might not think about it much, if you ask anyone they can surely distinguish between software and hardware enough to know that they're not the same thing.
apparently I didn't do the math for that part, I must have missed when they said it, but they said that the laptops were between $500-600 each and that there would be 1 million of them distributed over 14,000 schools (that's a lot of laptops per school!).
And for people who don't seem to think that $500-$600 for a used laptop is a lot, I can get a factory refurbished IBM Thinkpad 570 - PII366MHz,64MB,6.4GB,1.44,13.3"TFT,56K(Int.) for $497USD (just for example) and NEW IBM ThinkPad iSeries 1200 Celeron 500, 32MB, 6.0GB, 12.1"HPA (800x600), 24X, Modem, NiMH, W98SE for $620USD. These are single price discounts too. Buy 5 or more, get 10% off those prices... Buy a million and you can most likely get quite a substancial discount indeed! That $620 would turn into about $400, so you can get an even better laptop than that for $600USD end-run.
By the same argument, since cars worked perfectly well without seatbelts, for what most people used them for (not getting in accidents), there was no need to have seatbelts, and it was ok that you couldn't get a car with seatbelts without paying more?
No, if MS was still pushing Windows 3.11 as their OS with Word 6.0 then your analogy would hold. I think there is a little bit of difference between Win311/Word6 and WindowsXP/OfficeXP. A lot more than just seatbelts difference.
Yes, you're absolutely right about this point, you should be allowed to buy a computer without an OS, and IIRC you could always, just take back the unopened package that you got with the computer to MS and tell them that you didn't agree with the EULA, and they are obligated to refund your money. It's just that this was far too much trouble for most people to worry about so they didn't care.
You accuse me of being "stupid" and yet you have such a wonderful way of twisting words to fit whatever you want to say. I will respond to your post in the same tone that you gave me.
That so called "praising" was merely saying "there's nothing wrong in using it if it's not a needed feature of the website, only a frivilous addon". That's not praising, I think you need a dictionary.
The so called "defending slowness of XP" was making a joke about how their comparisons were silly, and people moderated it as such. I think you might need a sense of humour.
As for MS stuff being all people want and need, let's put it this way. They didn't get to 90%+ of the market simply by monopolistic practices. The fact of the matter is that, for most people, they produce what is needed and what people want. Just because you've decided to be anti-MS doesn't mean that the rest of the world will follow (hate to bruise your ego boy).
And as for "trolling", if you consider a troll to be someone at full karma and someone who actually has an opinion and isn't afraid to defend it, even if it's against the (completely and unfairly biased and hypocritical) norm, then so be it. Perhaps I should call you a troll just because your views don't happen to coincide with mine.
The overwhelming majority of non-technical computer users that I know (a couple of dozen people) keep asking "Why is my computer so hard to use? Why does it keep crashing? Isn't there something better? Can't you smart computer guys make a computer that just works?". They are really frustrated and would love to switch to something else.
... The executives at Microsoft understand that and the corollary urgency of controlling those points better than anyone else.
If you exclude the "I don't know how to use this" questions, and look at the actual merit of them, exclude crappyness about windows 95/98/ME, how much are you left with?
The overwhelming majority of questions that I get are "How can I make this font bigger?" "How can I print? Why isn't that working?" and the vast majority of the anger that is directed at the computer is because something isn't working the way that they think that it should work. When I look at it, it's pretty intuitive and I can't think of a better way. And in addition the majority of crashes that I see on any NT/2K/XP machine are due to shitty drivers.
Why am I excluding 95/98/ME? Read my parent post. The same reason why you don't ask people to use Linux 2.0 distros.
The problem with suggesting Linux is that they always have a hard requirement of compatibility with Microsoft file formats
Whenever I try to suggest linux, which I do sometimes for some users, they take a look at me when I use it (and I do sometimes on some servers here), and they laugh "You expect me to be able to know how to use THAT?", and for the 2 users who I did convince to try, they quickly quickly returned back to windows because linux may work OK for the average user when it's functioning perfectly, but when it doesn't it is a bitch to fix.
For the average computer user they should be able to turn it on and have instant access and turn if off without a shutdown
Right, they can, and XP makes that a lot easier due to reduced startup/shutdown times... But most users don't like to leave their computers turned on... I've had my computer on 24/7, and I have a Windows 2000 server with 241 days of uptime now, still trucking along. I ask my coworkers why they turn off their computers, and they just say that they don't like to waste power, or they don't like the noise, or whatnot.
While the computer is on they should have reliable access to their data and applications. They should only have to authenticate themselves once (probably with some sort of hardware dongle so they can use any computer anywhere). Upgrading should not be a concern.
This is not really a technical issue, more an implementation issue. I only have to log in once, I don't know why you have to log in more than once, IE stores all of my passwords for websites, my software stores the passwords for email and other things, I don't have many problems. As for the hardware dongle, it's called a smart card, it's been integrated for use into Windows 2000 and XP, but people just don't see a need to use one yet. If you don't want to have to log on, don't! With any windows version you can either assign no password, or just use a tweak utility to auto-login all the time.
Microsoft also sees the problem and they are positioning themselves to
Right, so they're doing what's smart, and what you and I would do if we were in their position...
I can't fault them much for that.
I am constantly surrounded by Microsoft users.
My point was problems about the operating system itself. Not drivers, not computers, not email, about the O/S.
Or, since this is MS, The about MS Office as well. And I'm talking about questions about problems, not like "I can't figure out how to make this text bold". I mean serious knowledgeable questions about an actual bug or deficiency in the software, or legitimate complaints.
Of those questions, I don't get a lot.
HELL YES I WOULD DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY!
;)
... "Uh, ok sure".
:)
You'd do things differently my ass you would...
Money has a funny way of outweighing morals...
If you could put $5mil more sales into your company, and $500k more money into your personal bank account by using slimy tactics to squash that competetor over there, can you HONESTLY say that you would do the "morally right" thing and not?
If you can say yes, pat yourself on the back all the way to the unemployment line. This is a dog-eat-dog world, and this is one dog who knew never to back down. If you don't do it to them, they will do it to you. This is a fact of business life.
If you said no (you would squish'em), pat yourself on the wallet, and congrats, you're human. This is the heart of the democratic society. Sad fact, yes. If everyone were to play by the "nice" rules then yes, indeed, companies could be nice to one another. However all it takes is one to screw it up, and it's more likely to say that there's only a few who are trying not to. There are many many many more companies who are far worse than microsoft is, they're just not in the spotlight as much as MS is.
So what are the options? Communism? Socialism? Yourownism?
Would you rather be the CEO of a company who's got a great head start, barrelling down, getting rich, loving the lavish expenditures, only to have the government step in when you're not even there yet and say "sorry son, you've gotta leave room for the competetors. doesn't matter if they don't have a good product, we have to stop you at this line..." I don't think you'd be to impressed with them if they did that.
And think about it. If MS products really all were crap, then some competetor would have come out of the framework with software that WASN'T complete crap, and people would buy it because it was better. Sure, perhaps there would have been other pieces of software out there that got squashed before they had the chance, but if there really was that big a margin, then the sales of the other OS would have skyrocketed...
And lets not forget how nice it is for all of the developers out there that 95% of the people run the same operating system. There *are* benefits to having basically one OS out there you know.
And before anyone talks about "innovation", has anyone taken a look at linux lately, from a superficial level? It is so blatantly copying what is on Windows desktops that it's not funny... So where's the innovation in that? That new personal manager software (yeah, the outlook for linux one, you know which one I'm talking about)... they couldn't have made a better copy with a photocopier. You know that they say that the most sinscere form of flattery is imitation...
They'll lie to the voters about how they did it for the children. I think I'm gonna be sick
Who? The government will lie about it? They're they ones who suggested it in the first place. MS just said
Yeah, and newsflash: government is corrupt! money buys power there too! (whodathunkit?)
If anyone has any better ideas of a feasible society that can fix all of these problems, please feel free to raise your hand.
(devil's advocate, signing off)
can you give me some examples of things that are broken, and point to the microsoft written code that is doing it?
"Oh, my printer is not working!" "Goddam Microsoft!"
"Oh, my screen is garbled!" "Goddam microsoft!"
"Oh, my modem isn't working and now Windows Crashed!" "Goddam microsoft!" (obviously Windows' fault, couldn't have been a driver problem)
I am not, of course, saying that they deserve no responsibility, I am saying however that a great deal of the responsibility is misattributed to them.
I am, of course, excluding Windows9X/ME series, as I don't count them as a real OS, and it was the customers, not Microsoft, who dragged out 98OSR2 and ME... Take linux back to the 2.0 kernel days, and tell them that they must maintain absolute backward compatibility with that... Oops, linux would be fucked! Good thing they don't have to worry about that...
And before you go on saying how that's because you can just recompile the source code (although that is a good point of OSS), the majority of problems that were caused on windows were due to either (a) shitty drivers, or (b) programs doing what they weren't supposed to be doing, or (c) shitty base code that had to be kept for compatibility.
Windows 98 was supposed to be the last of that series. Windows 2000 was supposed to have Personal, Professional and Server series, but the customer base said "NO! We have too many stupid applications that aren't compatible with the Windows NT platform, and thus we need more Windows 9X releases!"... This is why they called it Win98OSR2, not Win99... and WinME was supposed to be Win98OSR3 however some marketing brilliantos decided that was a bad move so they vetoed that idea and said they should give it the ME designation instead.
And yes, I have done end user technical support, and the vast majority of problems that I came across were application problems or drivers. Yes, it was easy for a driver or a shitty program to stomp all over Windows9X series, but that was necessary for backwards compatibility. See how long you can extend a code base and still have it maintain stability and backwards compatibility... you only get 1 of the 2 choices.
changed the average user's mindset to believe that this is as good as computers get, and getting any better stability, inherent virus resistance and security and so forth isn't really possible.
:) (not to you, just in general)
Actually, that is a pretty good point.
I just asked 3 of my non-technie friends here what they thought about the nimda/email virii/codeRed/whatever crisii that have been happening lately, and they expressed their concern and dismay (well, as much as they could), but they were not very surprised that it happened. To them having bugs in software is an inevitability.
And, yes, this is where having 95% of your user base being tech savvy and a large portion of people peering through your source code has an advantage, that is conceeded, they win that point, don't argue it anymore
Microsoft also doesn't have the luxury of handing out kernel upgrades once every 2 weeks and new entire packages for download every month or so. Tell me, if you were to scour the changelogs from the time that W2K Gold was released to W2K SP1 for the linuxes, how many security holes would you find? How many holes would you find that were silently fixed because someone found it and patched it? And how many more holes were fixed without even a note in the changelogs?
Again, another clear bonus for open source, but this isn't something that you can fault Microsoft exclusively for.
In any case, good point.
It's getting rediculous when you don't even bother to read the articles properly before posting the headlines, thus biasing people. You are far from an unbiased news source...
... this is NOT EQUAL TO $1.1B.
$900m in software + 200,000 reconditioned computers + $90m in teacher training + $38m in technical support + $250m for the foundation + $160 to teach kids how to work with computers, guys, basic math.
900 + 90 + 38 + 250 + (est $40m for the computers) + 160 = $1478m
I watch all of the people here who complain without even reading the articles, and believing word-for-word what the editors post in the headlines and it makes me sick. You are a jouralist outlet that serves half a million pages a day, and you should be a lot more responsible than that.
Let me also call this fact into light:
The settlement proposal came from one of the lead plaintiffs' lawyers in the case
Oh interesting, so it was the prosecution's idea to do this...
and also:
Estimates of the value of the settlement ranged from $1.1 billion to as much as $1.7 billion, one source said. "It's going to get money to the people that need it the most," this source said.
And as I counted, the $1.7B is a lot closer to the value than the $1.1B, and this is also not counting the costs of actually figuring all of this stuff out for MS. And don't think that for each copy of windows handed out they don't have any costs either, they're not free once you consider everything into account (you add up all costs of developing and divide by the number of products made)... It's not going to cost them $900mil, but it will cost $400mil or so...
I just get tired of people who hate Microsoft and blindly believe everything that they're told (partially because they want to believe), and yet are being completely hypocritical. We're in a capitialistic society ladies and gentlemen... In this society man exploits man... If you were in their shoes, can you honestly say that you wouldn't do things any differently?
---
Having said all of that, yeah, they're being overly monopolistic, and yes, this is a rediculously small punishment for what they've been caught doing. I mean, not that $1.5B is a small chunk of change, that is a large chunk of money for any corporation, but they're not really being restricted hardcore from repeating the same "mistakes"/"crimes" in the future. And as anyone knows, the companies that survive don't do so because they're magnanimous, they just learn how to hide their mistakes better the next time.
But then again, with the court's track record lately, could you honestly have expected anything different? (sigh)... Justice will have to be postponed for yet another day.
And tell me, how many of them go complaining back to the shop saying how they hate the goddam computer because the operating system sucks ass?
Oh that's interesting, basically none..
Thus, Windows is doing everything that the majority of users need, and thus is doing a good job. Just because use tech savvy people (who, BY THE WAY have different needs/wants from our software, and we are also in the vast minority) want more out of our operating systems and don't necessarily like what Microsoft gives us, doesn't mean that for the vast majority of the people it doesn't work perfectly fine for them...
Just food for thought.
If I think that this is just a retarded stupid idea.
The people whose web pages are being thrusted to the top of the query lists are the people who are polluting the metadata and other tags for the sole purpose of getting their sites higher in the search lists
So lemmy get this straight: you want all good and honest people (who aren't causing the problem in the first place) to opt-out of common searches (which they'd never want to do), and this will thus remove the legitimate entries from the pool of queries, returning an even more polluted list from your search engine.
am I missing something here?
Although there are a few people who would be helped by removing absolutely irrelivant queries, the vast majority would actually suffer if they used this.
Dunno, I got a Optiplex 150 here and the case is great... I agree with you about the recessed floppy (the recessed WHAT?) being a pain, but I hardly ever use it so it really doesn't matter.
everything inside is on "rails" if you would like to call them, and don't need screws even to attach to the rails, so it's very quick and easy to swap stuff around.
yeah, so?
... there is no big demand for it to change.
take a Dell case, lie it sideways, the case is hinged so it's easy to open, and in front of you are the hard drives and the cdrom drives, angled out at you because they're on the hinged part. unplug power and ribbon, use the easy tabbed sliders that are a sinch to remove (and install on another drive because of the way that they clip into the screw holes instead of actually screwing in), put on new drive, replace, reattach, done. entire endeavour : 30s.
Or for any normal computer, remove side conver, disconnect, unscrew, remove drive, replace, rescrew, reattach, replace side cover. this is not brain surgery folks. total time : 60s.
the only way to make it easier is to have actual slots where the drives themselves just slide in and out of, so you don't need to screw around with any wires, but you can also get those, unfortunately they are a bit more expensive.
the reason why things are the way they are is because (drumroll please)
Dell has the cases setup the way that they do because their primary customers are businesses (well, these are business cases I'm talking about anyways), and they will have IT departments that are more likely to screw around with the insides and want easy access to things than your mom&pop home users. Most people still refer to their computer chassis as the "CPU" or the "hard drive", and they think it's just a magical box. they couldn't care, and really don't know about what's inside of it, thus there is no demand to create a modularized system. It is cheaper to not, thus things aren't modularized.
So if somebody WITHOUT background in signal processing will write the working code he will be not eligible for the award?
No, what he's saying is someone WITHOUT background in DSP will NOT be able to write the driver, as you must have intimate knowledge of DSP in order to write the driver in the first place.
Using browser-specific extensions (like IE's marquee tag) would be an example of brain-dead web design
Not unless that is an added feature that is not required for use of the site, or you provide an alternative feature for use in other browsers.
Programming on the other hand is a continuous design process. Implementation is a non-problem
I totally disagree with the implementation part. That philosophy is what ends up making me wade through (and usually throwing out) countless lines of crappy code because people don't know how to program, or are just doing whatever it takes to get it done.
You need to be working just as hard while doing the programming itself as during the design phase. Constantly checking what you've done and thinking if there are better ways, making sure that there are no snags or potential problems, generally writing elegant code. That's the hard part.
its all non-visual
Again I disagree. If the projects that I worked on were nonvisual we would have died a horrible death. I might be nitpicking on the definition of the word as you meant it, but using diagrams and heirarchical trees of how classes and portions of code interact is usually a very good idea, that gives you the "visual" aspect that you can keep in your mind (and on paper) to remember how everything fits together.
An architect can look at rendered pictures of what he is designing to get an intuitive feel for its correctness, whereas a programmer must form his image without the benefit of evolved human spacial perception
Absolutely not. I can look at code, and just visually on an aestetic level get a feel as to whether or not it's good code. If it looks like crap, it generally is crap. Once the "prettyness" of the code has been looked at, the actual code itself can be browsed. It is not difficult to tell, just by a quick browse over the code, if the code is good or bad. If you're spending too many lines of code here or there, then you might be overdoing it. If the task of the block of code is to take X input and produce Y output and you're using 200 lines of code to do it, chances are you're not doing it properly.
Requirements analysis for a bridge is so simple a child can grok it: "something i can walk over the river on". For your typical programming job requirements are much more nebulous
I find that many times customers give just as simple an explanation as to what they want :
"We need to pay our bills online. We need to have it interact with the bank and allow us to have complete control over what gets authorized and denied". Usually there's much more fluff in there, but it's a simple concept that requires quite a lot of work to design.
However I do agree that there are many customers who don't know what they want.
I find that the term "Computer Engineering" is applied usually when you're dealing with the physical components of the computer much more than the software. Similarly "Software Engineering" is the process of designing the software itself. This is engineering just like construction work in the sense that you must create a structure that the code will fit into. "Computer programming" is the process where you take the structure and then fill in the code, once the design work has been done. Unfortunately the line between design and programming is usually very blurred (or nonexistant) and people spend far too little time on the design aspect, and then far too MUCH time on the programming because they don't know where they're going.
By that very nature I find that people who say that there is no hard distinction between the "engineering" of the software and the "programming" of it usually don't know how to design very well (present company excluded of course).
So from your final statement, yes, there is no analogy between "Construction Engineering" and "Programming" that is valid, however there are analogies between "Construction Engineering" and "Software Engineering" (design) that are quite valid.