I'd agree that it will depend on whether MS impements this perfectly. Unfortunately, this will mean implementing it far better than sudo. As a result of the way that many Windows apps work, if you allow a normal user to run an app with administrative privs, you are basically giving that user administrator.
Here's an example... I have an appraisal application. The user runs this, gets elevated to admin rights, and can now pop up an open file common dialog and start any other program they would like. Perhaps they were only elevated to local admin, so they at least can't access the entire network as admin. Of course, this means that they can't access content on the file server. The sudo approach doesn't work well because of this. I *could* go through tremendous pains creating a second set of users for all of my normal users, just that have local admin privs to the machine they are working on. This would be a nightmare.
From everything that I've heard about this, it looks great for a knowledgable user that is trying to run their machine well, but it won't really work in a corporate setup, and normal home users would never know how to take advantage, nor would they want the inconvenience of doing it properly.
.NET may be very good for what you're doing, but what is the benefit of using it for a Win32 2k/XP specific driver control panel that will only control a driver written strictly for the x86 Win32 NT Kernel v5+?
At least you can use the old control application...
By the generation of your ATI card, they were rather good with their drivers. Unfortunately for me, I've always chosen very poor periods to buy ATI products, so I've been burned a few times and don't really want to deal with them again. Just FYI, ATI releases new drivers every month. Their versioning scheme is year.month, so this month would be 6.1. NVIDIA releases drivers only when they have a reason to provide an update, so they're released less often.
I did look up your monitor. The max resolution that Sony reports for it is 1600x1200@75Hz. Perhaps the NVIDIA drivers were not reporting modes above what the DDC info from the monitor listed, but the ATI drivers were. If you ran it above 75Hz in that resolution, you were risking destroying the monitor; the most obvious first sign is that the brightness drops harshly. Looks like a nifty monitor, though, considering it should've had BNC inputs, and it could've connected to a Sun with HD-15. You don't see that very often, at all.
If you were to connect your NVIDIA card to a new high quality CRT, you would be able to set much higher refresh rates and resolutions than 1600x1200@75Hz.
Everything since the GeForce FX series cards can do 2048 × 1536 at 85Hz The GeForce 2 could do 2048 x 1536 at 75Hz The RIVA TNT could do 1600 x 1200 at 85Hz
Your NVIDIA board has dual 400MHz RAMDACs, and that ATI card had dual 400MHz RAMDACs, so they have the same sync capabilities. If you can't push higher than you are, it's because your *monitor* can't sync at that frequency. Many monitors won't do 1600x1200 at over 75Hz.
It also wasn't urban legend about ATI's drivers being terrible. They still have issues today, though they is *much* better than before. ATI still loves to strand people with prior generation cards, though. Their control software is also one of the worst ones out there, courtesy of whatever bright star decided to write it in.NET, and poorly at that.
Well, the "rumor" started from Microsoft basically telling everyone that it was how they did it.
MS Office documents are stored as OLE Compound Documents, and have been since Office 97. The way this works is to take the OLE structure that you're working with in memory, and save it to a file. Office stores these as serialized structures representing different OLE objects.
This enables Office to embed many types of other content, as long as it can be represented by an OLE object. The method of saving the OLE memory objects to disc also allows Office applications to quickly load and save complex documents, however it carries the penalty of large file sizes. It also makes it incredibly difficult to load an Office OLE document without access to the format specifications.
While the OLE Compound Document format is documented, the ways that Office stores the data within its specific OLE containers is not officially documented *at all*. This means that you can fairly easily open an OLE document and see the OLE containers in the stream, but you can't manipulate most of them, for lack of documentation.
As an aside, Word 2003 can *usually* open a Word 97 document, and less often, Word 97 can open a Word 2003 document. You will usually get an intact document in the former case, but you will often lose formatting in the latter. In other words, Word 97 and Word 2003 aren't actually fully compatible, in either direction.
It's a poor choice to enter into a contract that you don't have the full terms for. I've never been happy about contract terms that allow for a party to amend the contract after signing. Generally this only occurs for policy contracts, such as credit cards, bank accounts, or utilities. I would never enter into an important contract where the terms could be changed without all original signatories accepting the new terms. You shouldn't either.
The right answer is to print the document, and have all parties sign the printed version. You either have every sign each copy, or you sign one and make notarised copies.
In my line of work, the only terms that are acceptable as part of a contract, but not supplied with the contract, are those that are specified in law.
From the archaeological standpoint, DOC is worse than hieroglyphics. MS DOC format is not a text format, it's an obfuscated binary format that is, in reality, a memory dump of the OLE objects that Word was working with. You have huge amounts of data in that file that is not text, and you can't guarantee that the text is stored as actual text.
BTW - contracts are still typically printed, signed, and stored, all on wood pulp paper.
OK, so there is a problem in a manufactured problem, and this is a partial "fix". DRM is broken by design. MS decided to release a new OS that breaks audio playback further, and then "fix" one of the problems they created in the first place.
Or they could just stop fucking all their users over and keep DRM in the trash, where it belongs. DRM was the very first reason that I was never going to touch Vista.
You see, that's bullshit though. Manufacturers will just have to do hack add-ons for other Windows versions, and then (maybe) use this new API on Vista. Most users won't have Vista for years after release. If the vendor wants people to *buy* their product, they'll have to support more than just Vista.
The most useful place for these sorts of mini-displays are on laptops. Laptop manufacturers can just write drivers to interface to their mini-LCDs on other OS'. Kind of like they do today. By making it specific to Vista, they heavily limit where this can be taken advantage of.
Those are the WinXP powertoys from Microsoft. One of them is called "Virtual Desktop Manager", which gives you control over four virtual desktops. There are a ton of shareware and freeware apps that give you desktop pagers, too.
As for keeping apps visible, that's what multiple monitor support is for.:) I use this all the time so that I can have reference open on one screen, and work on the other. I don't really want my PIM/Email app taking up screen, since it tells me when I get mail as a notification. Pretty much every OS out there will let you do multiple screen spanned desktops.
The LCD thing is more for cute external displays so you could close a laptop, or have an LCD mounted on your case, and get all sorts of info. It's a cute feature, but by no means needing of an OS upgrade. MS could add a common driver API to do this, and make it available as a DirectX upgrade or something.
Think of it slightly differently and you'll probably see my point. Home users won't care one way or the other; they certainly don't know anything about APIs. Business users won't be using Vista any time soon, and most of them don't care about APIs, just about applications. As a result of this, a lot of applications won't use the Vista specific functionality of WinFX, since most of the users won't have a copy for quite some time.
You're right that I don't care about a lot of the features. As an occasional Windows user at home, and someone who does MIS for work, most of these features are ones that will not be useful to me or my users. I approached my response not from a personal preference stance, anyway, but from a more objective analysis. A lot of these things really aren't a big deal, and don't require an OS revision, by any means. Many of them are already available, and certainly do not require hardware or software upgrades, and the very large associated cost of doing so. It will be many years after the release of Vista before businesses are going to be using it.
The volume control thing is nice, but by no means important enough to be major feature. It's also something that could be done by a third-party application by intercepting DirectSound for each app accessing the API. The priv-escalation would be nice for me, but not something that I could deploy across the enterprise. Tweaks that enhance performance are always nice, so I can't complain about them. IE use is already discouraged, and IE7 isn't going to change that. The IE design is broken, and IE7 isn't going to be fixing it. The existing printing system works, and is also of no concern to the vast majority of users. Also, PDF is ubiquious, and a MS-only alternative is not desireable nor welcome in most places. Fast user switching in domains is useful in very isolated cases, but not for the general business case. It is useless at home, since you don't have a domain at home.
The decision to not backport the full WinFX API kind of dooms the API. WinFX is not cross-platform, and won't be available on Win2K, which immediately means that I can't and won't use any apps that require it in the enterprise. The same is true of most businesses, since most have Win2K in wide deployment. Any applications targetted at business users will not be able to touch it.
It still takes memory to keep the structures describing your models. Also, like most processors, the more load you put on the 3d accelerator, the more energy it uses.
There are a lot of changes coming along with Vista, but they aren't as startling as you imply. Many of the big features that MS is publisizing aren't a big thing, and many of the remaining will be made available to previous versions of Windows. After you take out all of that, there isn't a tremendous amount left. Worse yet, some of what is left won't see the types of benefit that MS is proposing (ie: account privs).
- Brand new networking stack that is 100% IPv6 internally Might be useful, if people were using IPv6, or likely to do so any time soon.
- New audio subsystem with per-application mixing Applications could do this today, but most just set the system mixers.
- UAP support (not running as admin all the time) with automatic privelage elevation (with user approval) for installers and other programs that need admin access Could be nice, but users will just get used to typing in the password, so offers no real security. Doesn't fix all the broken apps out there that depend on improper permissions. Not useful in a corporate setting, and not used in a home setting.
- Major memory manager tweaks This is an update, not a new feature
- Kernel tweaks to improve streaming performance This is an update, not a new feature
- New programming framework (WinFX) based on.NET 2.0, WPF, and a host of other new technologies Whee, *another* new framework. It will also be available on WinXP.
- 3D accelerated UI / window manager Resource wasting
- New Media Center and Tablet PC features Useless to a majority of users
- Fast User Switching on AD Domains Useless to a majority of users
- Integrated indexing / search (ala Spotlight) including extensive metadata and tagging support Available today, will be backported to WinXP
- New Windows Media Player This does not need to be locked to the OS revision.
- New version of IE with CSS fixes, phishing filter, tabbed browsing, native XMLHTTP, freform resize (ala Opera), and many security enhancements This does not need to be locked to the OS revision.
- Support for auxiliry LCD displays (windows SideShow) Whee.
- New, faster install system (no more text-mode 'copying files') Again, whee.
- New Windows Installer version Will be available on other revisions of Windows
- New printing system / PDF alternative (Metro) Whee some more.
Wow, did people seem to miss that one. To all those people who read this far... six months from now is *SUMMER*. It will be 50-60*F warmer then, at least.
A tax refund is not equivalent to a paycheck, though. For many people, their SSI check is what they live on. The same is true of disability and welfare recipients. These people are not working, and so are not receiving the dictionary definition of a paycheck, but their primary source of income are the government checks. As I said, nitpick if you like, but that isn't going to get us anywhere.
The topic at hand is who is getting paid by the government. To that end, 40% of those being paid are getting it directly from the government.
Again with the missing the point almost completely... who cares if it's technically not a "paycheck"; this is one of those reasons why the US keeps going to hell. To quote from three posts up the tree:
"More specifically, there are two things for which dollars are the only standard. You must pay your taxes in dollars, and the goernment will pay you only in dollars. Those two items define a national currency. In a country such as a America where such a significant percentage (a majority?) receives their primary paycheck from the government, however, this is a pretty significant technicality."
SSI counts in the above context because it is a primary source of income, and it comes directly from the government. The above is the post that you replied to where you said that only ~15% of people get their primary paycheck from the government. Then I replied showing how it was more like 40%, and you replied complaining about how a SSI check isn't a paycheck.
Basically, it doesn't matter... ~40% of income earning people get money directly from the government, and in the legally required form of dollars. Now that ~40% of income earning people get paid in dollars, it becomes the method that a very large percentage of the population will want to use to pay for things. Compound this with how *everyone* must pay the government in dollars, and that everyone needs to pay the government for most of their lives, and you have a very difficult competition for currency in the free market.
That's why bank notes pretty much disappeared when the Federal introduced the dollar.
If a merchant sets a dollar price, they must honor all legal tender unless they explicity say otherwise before the point of purchase. There is some law and precedent about how to accomplish this, but it is not uniform. A store can also refuse payment in nuisance denominations, but I believe that is only pennies. A dollar based debt can be paid with any legal tender, whether the debtee likes the denomination or not.
The reason that currency is useful is because it is accepted so widely. At this point, a company like VISA could probably get away with having their own system. Most merchants already accept payment via VISA, so it would only be a matter of converting between currency. The dollar is the currency used because a dollar is known no matter the location, within the US. It has the same relative value throughout the country.
Anyway, I'm not sure what your point is, as that is barely relavent to my reply. I know that people can use alternative currency, but the reason they largely don't is because the dollar is more convenient. Hence my point about government programs supplanting private industry.
Add in people that get money from Social Security, disability, unemployement, and welfare and that number goes up considerably. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-15% of the population was on Social Security, and that would account for between 29.6 and 44.4 million people. The 2000 census lists ~35 million as 65+ years old. According to the SSA, there are ~6.8 million on disability.
That means that there is a good chance that there are 62.8 million people drawing pay from the government. That means that ~34% of people receiving a paycheck are getting it from the government. Assuming a 4% unemployment rate, that could another 11.84 million (total population of 296 million). I'd only want 18 x 65, though, so I'll chop off 70 million, which means 9.04 million. That brings it up to 71.84 million receiving money from the government, and about 38%.
In addition, we have approx 2.5% of the population on welfare, which is another 7.4 million people. That brings the percentage of paychecks from government up to around 40%.
40% of those receiving a paycheck is much closer to a majority of the workforce. I'm sure there are programs that I missed, as well. There are also all the indirect employees: those that operate because of government grant, or that operate within the public sector.
The argument is similar to the one about why a market tends to dry up once the government starts operating in it. If the service is provided for no up front cost by the government, why would people want to knowingly spend money to use something else?
You see it in many areas, such as schools, retirement funds, charity, etc. Most people go to public school, depend on Social Security, and figure that people will get welfare/medicaid if they need it.
Currency would be a similar argument. The Federal backed currency would be accepted everywhere, by law. Your private currency would be accepted fewer places, and there would need to be some cost to using it, or it wouldn't exist. Some people would understand the benefit of using the privacy currency (ie: little or no inflation), but most people would keep on using the Federal currency. Eventually, the private currency would likely become useless due to how uncommon it was.
Most Libertarians aren't opposed to the Federal creating currency; they tend to be opposed to the Federal creating fiat currency.
First off, privacy is not completely a red herring in this issue. It is a right, and this system potentially violates that right. That makes the privacy implications important, even if the system functions 100% in the security aspect.
So, here is the scenario: the child is your child, and you are their legal guardian. That means, among many other things, that when you walk in, you can take that child from the school.
You have been furnished with positive ID from the State, which proves your identity. The State doesn't even require an iris scan for you to get that ID. Now, the school is demanding you to furnish them a set of data that identifies you biologically, and you have to trust them to properly safeguard this data. If it gets compromised, you have no way to change the identifying information.
The school is requiring you to go above and beyond the legal requirements to identify yourself to any other government institution in order for you to execute your legal privilege as the child's guardian.
Should the school also demand iris scans for police, doctors, and other public servants, such as child services? If they require it to identify a parent, then obviously State issued ID is insufficient. It is generally even easier to forge most employee IDs issued by government institutions than it is the State ID or drivers license issued as proof of identity. It is trivial to get a fake badge and uniform to impersonate a police officer.
This system will not work, so it is not efficacious. Iris scans are still problematic as far as reliability, and this system is necessarily cumbersome. There is no legal precedent for a system such as this for use in a public building, which makes it hard to defend in court. You have to provide for people that are handicapped in terms of damaged or missing eyes, so there needs to be a workaround. If you've had eye surgery and get a ride to pick up your child, there is no way for you to do an iris scan, for example. The existance of the workaround means the system has an unhandled failure mode.
This yet another feel good pretend security enhancement that will only cost taxpayers substantial amounts of money, and make life harder on everyone involved.
I have had OpenOffice crash quite a bit when trying to read MS formats. While 2.0 has much better luck parsing those formats, it also crashes occasionally while doing so. This is especially frequent when trying to read MS Access databases into OOo Base.
I prefer using Linux to Windows on a desktop, too. The system tends to be more stable, but the applications are not. This is the case for quite a few OSS programs, such as those I mentioned. Firefox has a lot of issues with being left running, for example, which is much improved in 1.5. I run Ubuntu on my own workstation, because I get all the benefits of running a UNIX work-alike, but I also get excellent hardware support, and it *just works*. The only annoyances that I've had with it that I didn't have on Windows have been dual-monitor support, encumbered video/audio codec support, and VMWare.
As far as reasons to go to newer kernel releases, there are reasons for this. I try to keep things on the 2.4 kernel, for stability. However, as mentioned in the other response to you, there is occasional hardware that isn't supported, or supported as well, in the 2.4.x kernel as in the 2.6.x kernels. Also, depending on what you're doing, sometimes you are forced to use later released because of applications. An example of this is WebGUI... the latest release requires Apache 2, mod_perl 2, and they recommend using MySQL 5.
As I said, my reasons for switching off of Linux on my servers, and over to BSD, was stability. I've found the BSDs to just be more trusthworthy than Linux. What initially pulled me over to that side was actually running an OpenBSD router. After seeing BSD pf, I have no desire to ever touch Linux's iptables again. The more I worked with OpenBSD, the more I liked it. I liked the management capabilities from things like the ports tree so very much that I always get annoyed when going to work on my Linux servers. OpenBSD is too restrictive for some software, so I then tried out FreeBSD, and that was even nicer to work with.
As for your comment about things being stable two years ago... I said I switched *away* two years ago, because of stability issues. I don't find that it's improved over the intervening two years. I *could* run old versions of the kernel, but then I wouldn't have the security fixes. I started to get quite upset when the kernel maintainers started making big changes that affected stability in the normal maintanance cycle of the kernel. Things like messing with the scheduler, VFS, VM, etc. I don't like the idea of trusting something when going from 2.4.5 to 2.4.6 might mean that the virtual memory subsystem was replaced with a new design, and could cause data corruption. That mean that the patch release that gives me the security fix might also include a whole new critical subsystem.
Unfortunately, you're very correct, and you see it throughout the popular OSS projects.
The projects from Mozilla are far from "finished", but they add features instead of fixing bugs. We wind up with a somewhat slow UI, a huge memory footprint, and random crashes. The OpenOffice people are too busy needlessly throwing in features and coding Java into a C++ program instead of finishish the version. We wind up with a slow UI, very slow startup time, a huge memory footprint, and reliance on C libraries, C++ libraries, *and* the Java runtime.
I still use things like Firefox and OpenOffice, because they're still the best ones out there, but I have no devotion to them. When the devs stop playing happy little games throwing in a bunch of code from their favorite language of the year, or building an IRC client in, or messing about with plugin interfaces well after version 1.0, and just finish what they have first, then I'll be very happy. Instead we have tons of software that are *almost* done.
Exactly what you mentioned about the Linux kernel doing this has a lot of people unhappy. On the few Linux server I keep around, I use Slackware and 2.4.x kernels. I don't want the machines to crash, so I don't trust 2.6.x. They don't need new features; they need stable code, and the constant feature-add game doesn't get me stable code.
What these games *have* done is get a lot of people, such as myself, to use more stable platforms. Some people choose a Linux distro like Debian. Many others just jumped over to BSD or Solaris.
So, in the end, I'm willing to run Linux on my workstation, but I try to avoid running it on my servers. I want to minimize the potential for that server to crash, and Linux isn't giving me that anymore. About two years ago, I waved goodbye to Linux, after having used it heavily since 1993.
Ugh, if you do that, you make the language less useful. You hinder communication between all speakers of that language, and make it that much more difficult for someone to learn. The way that *your* talking about language changing is to shift around the meanings of existing words. The result of doing so is that now you even need to have the etymology sitting next to you to read a book written out of your generation.
BTW, "nice" and "mean" have exactly the definition that most people expect. You can also use slang/informal definitions that suit your purposes... but that is called sarcasm. "Nice" is a positive adjective, and "mean" is a negative one, with the only other adjective form being the mathematical one.
Also, "flammable" and "inflammable" have *always* meant the same thing. The "in" is from a latin preposition, not from the negative "in-" prefix. The "in" preposition that "inflammable" uses actually turns into an intensive prefix, and meant that something could be "enflamed". IOW, the same thing as "flammable".
Looks to me that your post is an example of why you shouldn't change the definitions of words to match slang. You add a dictionary entry describing the "new" use as slang/informal so that people don't get the idea that the word actually means what the trend use of the day wants it to mean. That way you keep a coherent language, but note other uses that people may encounter in literature. Of course, this requires you to learn how to use a dictionary.
The change of language, in the fashion that you describe, is a direct result of poor education and ignorance. In that respect, language does evolve, but it does so in a *negative* way. Formal education, the dictionary, and proper use in literature and formal speech, help to stave off the shift to a less expressive language.
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I'd agree that it will depend on whether MS impements this perfectly. Unfortunately, this will mean implementing it far better than sudo. As a result of the way that many Windows apps work, if you allow a normal user to run an app with administrative privs, you are basically giving that user administrator.
Here's an example... I have an appraisal application. The user runs this, gets elevated to admin rights, and can now pop up an open file common dialog and start any other program they would like. Perhaps they were only elevated to local admin, so they at least can't access the entire network as admin. Of course, this means that they can't access content on the file server. The sudo approach doesn't work well because of this. I *could* go through tremendous pains creating a second set of users for all of my normal users, just that have local admin privs to the machine they are working on. This would be a nightmare.
From everything that I've heard about this, it looks great for a knowledgable user that is trying to run their machine well, but it won't really work in a corporate setup, and normal home users would never know how to take advantage, nor would they want the inconvenience of doing it properly.
.NET may be very good for what you're doing, but what is the benefit of using it for a Win32 2k/XP specific driver control panel that will only control a driver written strictly for the x86 Win32 NT Kernel v5+?
At least you can use the old control application...
By the generation of your ATI card, they were rather good with their drivers. Unfortunately for me, I've always chosen very poor periods to buy ATI products, so I've been burned a few times and don't really want to deal with them again. Just FYI, ATI releases new drivers every month. Their versioning scheme is year.month, so this month would be 6.1. NVIDIA releases drivers only when they have a reason to provide an update, so they're released less often.
I did look up your monitor. The max resolution that Sony reports for it is 1600x1200@75Hz. Perhaps the NVIDIA drivers were not reporting modes above what the DDC info from the monitor listed, but the ATI drivers were. If you ran it above 75Hz in that resolution, you were risking destroying the monitor; the most obvious first sign is that the brightness drops harshly. Looks like a nifty monitor, though, considering it should've had BNC inputs, and it could've connected to a Sun with HD-15. You don't see that very often, at all.
If you were to connect your NVIDIA card to a new high quality CRT, you would be able to set much higher refresh rates and resolutions than 1600x1200@75Hz.
Everything since the GeForce FX series cards can do 2048 × 1536 at 85Hz
.NET, and poorly at that.
The GeForce 2 could do 2048 x 1536 at 75Hz
The RIVA TNT could do 1600 x 1200 at 85Hz
Your NVIDIA board has dual 400MHz RAMDACs, and that ATI card had dual 400MHz RAMDACs, so they have the same sync capabilities. If you can't push higher than you are, it's because your *monitor* can't sync at that frequency. Many monitors won't do 1600x1200 at over 75Hz.
It also wasn't urban legend about ATI's drivers being terrible. They still have issues today, though they is *much* better than before. ATI still loves to strand people with prior generation cards, though. Their control software is also one of the worst ones out there, courtesy of whatever bright star decided to write it in
Well, the "rumor" started from Microsoft basically telling everyone that it was how they did it.
MS Office documents are stored as OLE Compound Documents, and have been since Office 97. The way this works is to take the OLE structure that you're working with in memory, and save it to a file. Office stores these as serialized structures representing different OLE objects.
This enables Office to embed many types of other content, as long as it can be represented by an OLE object. The method of saving the OLE memory objects to disc also allows Office applications to quickly load and save complex documents, however it carries the penalty of large file sizes. It also makes it incredibly difficult to load an Office OLE document without access to the format specifications.
While the OLE Compound Document format is documented, the ways that Office stores the data within its specific OLE containers is not officially documented *at all*. This means that you can fairly easily open an OLE document and see the OLE containers in the stream, but you can't manipulate most of them, for lack of documentation.
As an aside, Word 2003 can *usually* open a Word 97 document, and less often, Word 97 can open a Word 2003 document. You will usually get an intact document in the former case, but you will often lose formatting in the latter. In other words, Word 97 and Word 2003 aren't actually fully compatible, in either direction.
It's a poor choice to enter into a contract that you don't have the full terms for. I've never been happy about contract terms that allow for a party to amend the contract after signing. Generally this only occurs for policy contracts, such as credit cards, bank accounts, or utilities. I would never enter into an important contract where the terms could be changed without all original signatories accepting the new terms. You shouldn't either.
The right answer is to print the document, and have all parties sign the printed version. You either have every sign each copy, or you sign one and make notarised copies.
In my line of work, the only terms that are acceptable as part of a contract, but not supplied with the contract, are those that are specified in law.
From the archaeological standpoint, DOC is worse than hieroglyphics. MS DOC format is not a text format, it's an obfuscated binary format that is, in reality, a memory dump of the OLE objects that Word was working with. You have huge amounts of data in that file that is not text, and you can't guarantee that the text is stored as actual text.
BTW - contracts are still typically printed, signed, and stored, all on wood pulp paper.
OK, so there is a problem in a manufactured problem, and this is a partial "fix". DRM is broken by design. MS decided to release a new OS that breaks audio playback further, and then "fix" one of the problems they created in the first place.
Or they could just stop fucking all their users over and keep DRM in the trash, where it belongs. DRM was the very first reason that I was never going to touch Vista.
You see, that's bullshit though. Manufacturers will just have to do hack add-ons for other Windows versions, and then (maybe) use this new API on Vista. Most users won't have Vista for years after release. If the vendor wants people to *buy* their product, they'll have to support more than just Vista.
The most useful place for these sorts of mini-displays are on laptops. Laptop manufacturers can just write drivers to interface to their mini-LCDs on other OS'. Kind of like they do today. By making it specific to Vista, they heavily limit where this can be taken advantage of.
Not sure how much you're kidding, but on the chance that you aren't:
r toys/xppowertoys.mspx
:) I use this all the time so that I can have reference open on one screen, and work on the other. I don't really want my PIM/Email app taking up screen, since it tells me when I get mail as a notification. Pretty much every OS out there will let you do multiple screen spanned desktops.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powe
Those are the WinXP powertoys from Microsoft. One of them is called "Virtual Desktop Manager", which gives you control over four virtual desktops. There are a ton of shareware and freeware apps that give you desktop pagers, too.
As for keeping apps visible, that's what multiple monitor support is for.
The LCD thing is more for cute external displays so you could close a laptop, or have an LCD mounted on your case, and get all sorts of info. It's a cute feature, but by no means needing of an OS upgrade. MS could add a common driver API to do this, and make it available as a DirectX upgrade or something.
Think of it slightly differently and you'll probably see my point. Home users won't care one way or the other; they certainly don't know anything about APIs. Business users won't be using Vista any time soon, and most of them don't care about APIs, just about applications. As a result of this, a lot of applications won't use the Vista specific functionality of WinFX, since most of the users won't have a copy for quite some time.
You're right that I don't care about a lot of the features. As an occasional Windows user at home, and someone who does MIS for work, most of these features are ones that will not be useful to me or my users. I approached my response not from a personal preference stance, anyway, but from a more objective analysis. A lot of these things really aren't a big deal, and don't require an OS revision, by any means. Many of them are already available, and certainly do not require hardware or software upgrades, and the very large associated cost of doing so. It will be many years after the release of Vista before businesses are going to be using it.
The volume control thing is nice, but by no means important enough to be major feature. It's also something that could be done by a third-party application by intercepting DirectSound for each app accessing the API. The priv-escalation would be nice for me, but not something that I could deploy across the enterprise. Tweaks that enhance performance are always nice, so I can't complain about them. IE use is already discouraged, and IE7 isn't going to change that. The IE design is broken, and IE7 isn't going to be fixing it. The existing printing system works, and is also of no concern to the vast majority of users. Also, PDF is ubiquious, and a MS-only alternative is not desireable nor welcome in most places. Fast user switching in domains is useful in very isolated cases, but not for the general business case. It is useless at home, since you don't have a domain at home.
The decision to not backport the full WinFX API kind of dooms the API. WinFX is not cross-platform, and won't be available on Win2K, which immediately means that I can't and won't use any apps that require it in the enterprise. The same is true of most businesses, since most have Win2K in wide deployment. Any applications targetted at business users will not be able to touch it.
It still takes memory to keep the structures describing your models. Also, like most processors, the more load you put on the 3d accelerator, the more energy it uses.
There are a lot of changes coming along with Vista, but they aren't as startling as you imply. Many of the big features that MS is publisizing aren't a big thing, and many of the remaining will be made available to previous versions of Windows. After you take out all of that, there isn't a tremendous amount left. Worse yet, some of what is left won't see the types of benefit that MS is proposing (ie: account privs).
.NET 2.0, WPF, and a host of other new technologies
- Brand new networking stack that is 100% IPv6 internally
Might be useful, if people were using IPv6, or likely to do so any time soon.
- New audio subsystem with per-application mixing
Applications could do this today, but most just set the system mixers.
- UAP support (not running as admin all the time) with automatic privelage elevation (with user approval) for installers and other programs that need admin access
Could be nice, but users will just get used to typing in the password, so offers no real security. Doesn't fix all the broken apps out there that depend on improper permissions. Not useful in a corporate setting, and not used in a home setting.
- Major memory manager tweaks
This is an update, not a new feature
- Kernel tweaks to improve streaming performance
This is an update, not a new feature
- New programming framework (WinFX) based on
Whee, *another* new framework. It will also be available on WinXP.
- 3D accelerated UI / window manager
Resource wasting
- New Media Center and Tablet PC features
Useless to a majority of users
- Fast User Switching on AD Domains
Useless to a majority of users
- Integrated indexing / search (ala Spotlight) including extensive metadata and tagging support
Available today, will be backported to WinXP
- New Windows Media Player
This does not need to be locked to the OS revision.
- New version of IE with CSS fixes, phishing filter, tabbed browsing, native XMLHTTP, freform resize (ala Opera), and many security enhancements
This does not need to be locked to the OS revision.
- Support for auxiliry LCD displays (windows SideShow)
Whee.
- New, faster install system (no more text-mode 'copying files')
Again, whee.
- New Windows Installer version
Will be available on other revisions of Windows
- New printing system / PDF alternative (Metro)
Whee some more.
Wow, did people seem to miss that one. To all those people who read this far... six months from now is *SUMMER*. It will be 50-60*F warmer then, at least.
A tax refund is not equivalent to a paycheck, though. For many people, their SSI check is what they live on. The same is true of disability and welfare recipients. These people are not working, and so are not receiving the dictionary definition of a paycheck, but their primary source of income are the government checks. As I said, nitpick if you like, but that isn't going to get us anywhere.
The topic at hand is who is getting paid by the government. To that end, 40% of those being paid are getting it directly from the government.
Again with the missing the point almost completely... who cares if it's technically not a "paycheck"; this is one of those reasons why the US keeps going to hell. To quote from three posts up the tree:
"More specifically, there are two things for which dollars are the only standard. You must pay your taxes in dollars, and the goernment will pay you only in dollars. Those two items define a national currency. In a country such as a America where such a significant percentage (a majority?) receives their primary paycheck from the government, however, this is a pretty significant technicality."
SSI counts in the above context because it is a primary source of income, and it comes directly from the government. The above is the post that you replied to where you said that only ~15% of people get their primary paycheck from the government. Then I replied showing how it was more like 40%, and you replied complaining about how a SSI check isn't a paycheck.
Basically, it doesn't matter... ~40% of income earning people get money directly from the government, and in the legally required form of dollars. Now that ~40% of income earning people get paid in dollars, it becomes the method that a very large percentage of the population will want to use to pay for things. Compound this with how *everyone* must pay the government in dollars, and that everyone needs to pay the government for most of their lives, and you have a very difficult competition for currency in the free market.
That's why bank notes pretty much disappeared when the Federal introduced the dollar.
It's around 40% of those receiving a paycheck.
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175545&cid=14
If a merchant sets a dollar price, they must honor all legal tender unless they explicity say otherwise before the point of purchase. There is some law and precedent about how to accomplish this, but it is not uniform. A store can also refuse payment in nuisance denominations, but I believe that is only pennies. A dollar based debt can be paid with any legal tender, whether the debtee likes the denomination or not.
The reason that currency is useful is because it is accepted so widely. At this point, a company like VISA could probably get away with having their own system. Most merchants already accept payment via VISA, so it would only be a matter of converting between currency. The dollar is the currency used because a dollar is known no matter the location, within the US. It has the same relative value throughout the country.
Anyway, I'm not sure what your point is, as that is barely relavent to my reply. I know that people can use alternative currency, but the reason they largely don't is because the dollar is more convenient. Hence my point about government programs supplanting private industry.
Add in people that get money from Social Security, disability, unemployement, and welfare and that number goes up considerably. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-15% of the population was on Social Security, and that would account for between 29.6 and 44.4 million people. The 2000 census lists ~35 million as 65+ years old. According to the SSA, there are ~6.8 million on disability.
That means that there is a good chance that there are 62.8 million people drawing pay from the government. That means that ~34% of people receiving a paycheck are getting it from the government. Assuming a 4% unemployment rate, that could another 11.84 million (total population of 296 million). I'd only want 18 x 65, though, so I'll chop off 70 million, which means 9.04 million. That brings it up to 71.84 million receiving money from the government, and about 38%.
In addition, we have approx 2.5% of the population on welfare, which is another 7.4 million people. That brings the percentage of paychecks from government up to around 40%.
40% of those receiving a paycheck is much closer to a majority of the workforce. I'm sure there are programs that I missed, as well. There are also all the indirect employees: those that operate because of government grant, or that operate within the public sector.
The argument is similar to the one about why a market tends to dry up once the government starts operating in it. If the service is provided for no up front cost by the government, why would people want to knowingly spend money to use something else?
You see it in many areas, such as schools, retirement funds, charity, etc. Most people go to public school, depend on Social Security, and figure that people will get welfare/medicaid if they need it.
Currency would be a similar argument. The Federal backed currency would be accepted everywhere, by law. Your private currency would be accepted fewer places, and there would need to be some cost to using it, or it wouldn't exist. Some people would understand the benefit of using the privacy currency (ie: little or no inflation), but most people would keep on using the Federal currency. Eventually, the private currency would likely become useless due to how uncommon it was.
Most Libertarians aren't opposed to the Federal creating currency; they tend to be opposed to the Federal creating fiat currency.
First off, privacy is not completely a red herring in this issue. It is a right, and this system potentially violates that right. That makes the privacy implications important, even if the system functions 100% in the security aspect.
So, here is the scenario: the child is your child, and you are their legal guardian. That means, among many other things, that when you walk in, you can take that child from the school.
You have been furnished with positive ID from the State, which proves your identity. The State doesn't even require an iris scan for you to get that ID. Now, the school is demanding you to furnish them a set of data that identifies you biologically, and you have to trust them to properly safeguard this data. If it gets compromised, you have no way to change the identifying information.
The school is requiring you to go above and beyond the legal requirements to identify yourself to any other government institution in order for you to execute your legal privilege as the child's guardian.
Should the school also demand iris scans for police, doctors, and other public servants, such as child services? If they require it to identify a parent, then obviously State issued ID is insufficient. It is generally even easier to forge most employee IDs issued by government institutions than it is the State ID or drivers license issued as proof of identity. It is trivial to get a fake badge and uniform to impersonate a police officer.
This system will not work, so it is not efficacious. Iris scans are still problematic as far as reliability, and this system is necessarily cumbersome. There is no legal precedent for a system such as this for use in a public building, which makes it hard to defend in court. You have to provide for people that are handicapped in terms of damaged or missing eyes, so there needs to be a workaround. If you've had eye surgery and get a ride to pick up your child, there is no way for you to do an iris scan, for example. The existance of the workaround means the system has an unhandled failure mode.
This yet another feel good pretend security enhancement that will only cost taxpayers substantial amounts of money, and make life harder on everyone involved.
I have had OpenOffice crash quite a bit when trying to read MS formats. While 2.0 has much better luck parsing those formats, it also crashes occasionally while doing so. This is especially frequent when trying to read MS Access databases into OOo Base.
I prefer using Linux to Windows on a desktop, too. The system tends to be more stable, but the applications are not. This is the case for quite a few OSS programs, such as those I mentioned. Firefox has a lot of issues with being left running, for example, which is much improved in 1.5. I run Ubuntu on my own workstation, because I get all the benefits of running a UNIX work-alike, but I also get excellent hardware support, and it *just works*. The only annoyances that I've had with it that I didn't have on Windows have been dual-monitor support, encumbered video/audio codec support, and VMWare.
As far as reasons to go to newer kernel releases, there are reasons for this. I try to keep things on the 2.4 kernel, for stability. However, as mentioned in the other response to you, there is occasional hardware that isn't supported, or supported as well, in the 2.4.x kernel as in the 2.6.x kernels. Also, depending on what you're doing, sometimes you are forced to use later released because of applications. An example of this is WebGUI... the latest release requires Apache 2, mod_perl 2, and they recommend using MySQL 5.
As I said, my reasons for switching off of Linux on my servers, and over to BSD, was stability. I've found the BSDs to just be more trusthworthy than Linux. What initially pulled me over to that side was actually running an OpenBSD router. After seeing BSD pf, I have no desire to ever touch Linux's iptables again. The more I worked with OpenBSD, the more I liked it. I liked the management capabilities from things like the ports tree so very much that I always get annoyed when going to work on my Linux servers. OpenBSD is too restrictive for some software, so I then tried out FreeBSD, and that was even nicer to work with.
As for your comment about things being stable two years ago... I said I switched *away* two years ago, because of stability issues. I don't find that it's improved over the intervening two years. I *could* run old versions of the kernel, but then I wouldn't have the security fixes. I started to get quite upset when the kernel maintainers started making big changes that affected stability in the normal maintanance cycle of the kernel. Things like messing with the scheduler, VFS, VM, etc. I don't like the idea of trusting something when going from 2.4.5 to 2.4.6 might mean that the virtual memory subsystem was replaced with a new design, and could cause data corruption. That mean that the patch release that gives me the security fix might also include a whole new critical subsystem.
Unfortunately, you're very correct, and you see it throughout the popular OSS projects.
The projects from Mozilla are far from "finished", but they add features instead of fixing bugs. We wind up with a somewhat slow UI, a huge memory footprint, and random crashes. The OpenOffice people are too busy needlessly throwing in features and coding Java into a C++ program instead of finishish the version. We wind up with a slow UI, very slow startup time, a huge memory footprint, and reliance on C libraries, C++ libraries, *and* the Java runtime.
I still use things like Firefox and OpenOffice, because they're still the best ones out there, but I have no devotion to them. When the devs stop playing happy little games throwing in a bunch of code from their favorite language of the year, or building an IRC client in, or messing about with plugin interfaces well after version 1.0, and just finish what they have first, then I'll be very happy. Instead we have tons of software that are *almost* done.
Exactly what you mentioned about the Linux kernel doing this has a lot of people unhappy. On the few Linux server I keep around, I use Slackware and 2.4.x kernels. I don't want the machines to crash, so I don't trust 2.6.x. They don't need new features; they need stable code, and the constant feature-add game doesn't get me stable code.
What these games *have* done is get a lot of people, such as myself, to use more stable platforms. Some people choose a Linux distro like Debian. Many others just jumped over to BSD or Solaris.
So, in the end, I'm willing to run Linux on my workstation, but I try to avoid running it on my servers. I want to minimize the potential for that server to crash, and Linux isn't giving me that anymore. About two years ago, I waved goodbye to Linux, after having used it heavily since 1993.
If you have your freedom, then you no longer have to worry about attaining that freedom.
Freedom is - defining freedom to be
Free of the need - released of the need
To be free - to attain freedom
You could also interpret the quote to mean that freedom has been attained, and so no longer must desire its own freedom; that people are now free.
If you're more pessimistic, you could interpret it as a satirical statement that what we call freedom no longer means being truly free.
Ugh, if you do that, you make the language less useful. You hinder communication between all speakers of that language, and make it that much more difficult for someone to learn. The way that *your* talking about language changing is to shift around the meanings of existing words. The result of doing so is that now you even need to have the etymology sitting next to you to read a book written out of your generation.
BTW, "nice" and "mean" have exactly the definition that most people expect. You can also use slang/informal definitions that suit your purposes... but that is called sarcasm. "Nice" is a positive adjective, and "mean" is a negative one, with the only other adjective form being the mathematical one.
Also, "flammable" and "inflammable" have *always* meant the same thing. The "in" is from a latin preposition, not from the negative "in-" prefix. The "in" preposition that "inflammable" uses actually turns into an intensive prefix, and meant that something could be "enflamed". IOW, the same thing as "flammable".
Looks to me that your post is an example of why you shouldn't change the definitions of words to match slang. You add a dictionary entry describing the "new" use as slang/informal so that people don't get the idea that the word actually means what the trend use of the day wants it to mean. That way you keep a coherent language, but note other uses that people may encounter in literature. Of course, this requires you to learn how to use a dictionary.
The change of language, in the fashion that you describe, is a direct result of poor education and ignorance. In that respect, language does evolve, but it does so in a *negative* way. Formal education, the dictionary, and proper use in literature and formal speech, help to stave off the shift to a less expressive language.