I can tell you with a straight face that only a few professionals actually need the one or two tweaks found in non free software and that even they would be better off if software patents and device makers games did not make things that way.
And you base this on what... Personal experience with both the free and non-free programs in question? Or is this just more of the mindless, reactive "Twitter smash big bad business!" hatred that you've cultivated such a well-deserved repuation for?
What I don't understand is how I can tell you the truth over and over and you don't want to listen... I had nothing to do with the install, of course, and can't really tell you more than what he told me. (Emphasis mine)
Waitaminute. Not only are you making this assertion without proof, but also without evidence or observation?!
Son, you have to bring better than truthiness, FUD, hearsay, and assertion by tantrum if you want to be taken seriously in a debate.
It was and that's how Windoze guided him through it. Believe me, he did not like it.
What part of BULLSHIT don't you understand? I want to know how, exactly, you two fucked up a Windows XP SP2 install enough to require 16 reboots to patch up. It's about fucking time you provided some proof to back up the shit you spew every day.
One, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Two, was it Service Pack 2? If so, I call bullshit. Ain't no way you need that many reboots to bring an SP2 install up to the latest patch level, unless you're deliberately installing patches one-at-a-time with reboots in between. In fact, I call bullshit either way, because anyone with a clue about Windows administration knows that you install Service Packs before individual patches.
I have a copy of the T2 extreme edition which comes with a 2nd disc that has the movie in 1080p encoded using the WM9 codec... If the VC-1 codec is powerful enough to fit a full-length feature film in 1080p on a mere DVD9 disc... why exactly do we need the new formats again?
The "HD" disc of T2 Extreme Edition is 720p, not 1080p. The "making of" bits in the liner notes state that they made a 1080p24 master from the film transfer. Once they were done with post-production, the last step was to down-sample to 720p for WMV9 encoding. And I recall them saying that they made damn sure that they archived that 1080p24 master, so it shouldn't take much effort to make a Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD pressing. (If they haven't already. I haven't been paying much attention to titles, since I'm not touching either format until they get their crap straight.)
Why do that when you could have a nice stable GNU/Linux installed in twenty minutes?
Replacing the entire operating system just for one little quality-of-life feature is like replacing your entire house just for the new garage door opener.
(And you all thought I was going to drop a Bad Car Analogy on you.)
Things are getting better on the "install == reboot" assumption front.
More and more ISVs are realizing that, unless they're installing drivers for hardware that isn't hot-pluggable, or specifically replacing existing files in %WINDIR%\system32, a reboot isn't necessary. Some of that is Microsoft's fault, because the sick, twisted coupling of Explorer.exe and Internet Explorer forces a reboot to detect plugins that may be installed. Mostly, though, it's been on the ISVs, because the people responsible for the installer packages were too sloppy, lazy, or apathetic to care about what truly required a reboot. But they're getting better.
Vista itself is switching to an image-based installer for the OS. One boot from the DVD to start the installation process and write the system image to the hard drive, then one reboot to start from the hard drive, detect all hardware (instead of only the critical systems used to write the image), and set the initial driver state for the rest of the system.
No, just the cognitive dissonance of how someone who, by all evidence, knows Linux well can allow their primitive, reactive hindbrain to lash out at every post about Microsoft with such aggression and hatred.
Dammit, twitter. Every time I stumble on one of your posts, it's like an icepick in my ear.
The problem, for you, is that all things M$ [sic] are diminishing.
Typos aside, that's the one fair statement in the whole post. Microsoft has monopoly power, so there's nowhere to go but down.
The only people still interested in developing anything on Windoze are a handful of legacy program owners, malware and DRM weenies. They can't keep up without everyone else`s help.
Ah, typical twitter logic. "Hmm, I want to get my software on 90% of desktops in the world. I'm not building it for that nasty, tricksy Windowses. If I make it cross-platform, somebody might run it on Windows anyway. I know! I'll write it for Linux, then wait for 90% of the desktops in the world to convert! And if anybody asks for a Windows version, I'll tell them to fuck off! Then they'll convert to Linux for sure!"
Everyone else ran to free software a decade ago and that's where the action still is.
Oh, bloody hell. I fell into a decade-long coma again? The first time, The Police broke up. Now Linux has conquered the desktop and Microsoft went Chapter 11, and they're just building keyboards and mice for Sun?! At least my hairstyle is back in fashion again.
Of course, the only reason you picked that quote from the parent post in the first place was because somewhere, deep down, you recognized yourself in it.
Why didn't you just stop there? You had a genuinely useful, informative post, and you pissed it all away. You could have mustered the self-control necessary to post something to Slashdot without veering off into a non sequitur of irrational hatred, but you didn't.
...according to the Inquirer... it could be an NVidia screwup...
No surprise. I'm not sure who Jen-Hsun Huang pissed off over there, but somebody at the Inq really hates Nvidia.
Speaking of... Whatever happened to that whole Rydermark image quality "hack" that looked an awful lot like a hasty Photoshop filter on the screenshot?
If you understand what M$ (sic) is selling with M$ (sic) Office, you understand why the new services are such a great threat. What M$ (sic) is selling is the ability of "information workers" to co-operate in the creation of "complex business documents". What that boils down to is formatted text with a few graphs, figures and equations along with a presentation with the same.
So far, so good, spelling errors aside. The feature race Microsoft got into with WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite created a lot of esoteric bloat. This is where a lot of these web-based tools are seeing an opportunity.
There's much FUD about Open Office not being able to work "100%" with M$ (sic) Office. It's FUD because M$ (sic) Office does not work 100% with itself because it's format has been ruined by decades of anti-competitive effort.
Ah, well. It was good while it lasted.
Let's put the blame where it is due. Microsoft has made two fundamental format changes since Office 95. The first was in Office 97. It was different enough from 95 to break some compatibility, but it set the baseline for the 2000 and 2003 versions. Now, they're making the transition to XML, which started in 2003 and will be completed when 2007 goes gold. 2007 apps can save files as "Office 97/2003" format quite easily, or you can use the XML formats, which follow the "zip bundle" pattern used by OpenOffice.org and iWork.
The problem Microsoft forces us to deal with isn't a format that seems to be ever-changing, even when it's not. It's the licensing. Because Microsoft has those Office formats so tightly coupled with their purse strings, they're loathe to allow just anybody to read and write Office files easily. Thus, everybody had to reverse-engineer the formats, and hope they got it right. In fact, I'd estimate that 75% of "mangled" Office files involve a reverse-engineered file filter.
Office file formats are near to my heart right now. This is purely anecdotal, of course, but it eventually rambles its way to a point.
I frequently work with PowerPoint at my church, where we use it to present song lyrics and scripture during worship. We have a bunch of lyric sheets in "PowerPoint" files that were exported from Corel Presentations when they switched to Microsoft Office. I put PowerPoint in quotes because, while the files have a.ppt extension, Corel made a figurative hash of the export. For a long time, I had to open the files in a hex editor on my Mac because neither Keynote (my preferred app at the time) nor OO.o (both on my PC and in NeoOffice form on the Mac) would open any of those files. It wasn't until I downloaded the beta for Office 2007 that I could open the files in PowerPoint itself. Even then, the formatting was a mess, and the high-order bit of every character with an ASCII code > 127 was unset, leaving a bunch of "=" and "Y" characters where Corel had SmartQuote-d apostrophes and ellipses.
Notice where things really went wrong? By now, everybody has filters that can at least import well-formed Office files. But when an "unlicensed", reverse-engineered export filter (which I no longer have access to) fed malformed files to somebody else's "unlicensed", reverse-engineered import filter, I hit an impasse. And you see how this all works out for Microsoft in the end, as their product is the only one that makes an effort to salvage the bad files.
Somehow, I doubt Office XML will be licensed on terms suitable for use in products under OSI-approved licenses anytime soon. But the XML itself should be easier to reverse-engineer, so we have that going for us, which is nice. But we're going to be suffering the consequences of Office 97/2003 format for years to come.
(BTW, those Corel exports? I'm dumping the formatting and saving the lyrics as plain text. I am not going through this again.)
As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
Don't bite if offered flame-bait. Too many threads degenerate into a "My O/S is better than your O/S" argument. Let's accurately describe the capabilities of Linux and leave it at that.
Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own.
Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative spelling". If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel. Without the efforts of people involved with the GNU project , MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux kernel would not be very useful to most people.
Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive others of their freedom.
There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution.
Zaurus, and other PDAs, died because the companies got sued by the Wintel conglomerate members and because M$ made their OS difficult for anything but their own PDAs.
You know, we've had three "patch regression" stories this month. Before the Ubuntu and Windows stories at hand, Mozilla had to turn around a quick point release for Firefox, to fix a regression that blocked the MMS protocol.
Despite everybody's best efforts and practices, sometimes a regression bug reaches production. And while the grandparent comment was a bit snarky about it, I would hope that whoever down-modded that comment did so to rebuke the tone, not to deny or supress the underlying issue.
The more detailed answer: When you bring PS3 into the equation, you're adding the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD variable, so let's not solve for it yet.
Making the %HDMOVIE% drive a separate accessory gives the customer the choice of when to buy: at the same time as the console, later, or not at all. Microsoft is reinforcing the "not at all" choice by committing to DVD, not %HDMOVIE%, for game content. Yeah, there are trade-offs because you're duplicating a drive, power supply, and housing, but that's just one more thing each customer will have to figure out. With PS3, Sony is declaring %HDMOVIE% the wave of the future, so you better be ready. They have PS2's DVD history on their side. What's not on their side is the cost of %HDMOVIE% drives today. It's that difference in price between %HDMOVIE% today and DVD back in the day that is, in my opinion, putting Sony at greater risk. They may be able to justify it with quality games that benefit from Blu-Ray. I'm afraid we'll just add "stunning HD quality" to the 30-minute unskippable, unpausable cutscenes in the next Xenogears.:-)
Which brings us back to HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Sony was obviously going to support Blu-Ray exclusively. Their Chronic Not Invented Here Syndrome compelled it. Maybe Microsoft was just being contrarian when they hitched the wagon to HD-DVD, or maybe there was a fight over VC-1. I don't know, and the research really doesn't interest me. Maybe the real problem is that, with the lack of consensus on what technology would become the value of %HDMOVIE%, the R&D and production costs of hardware haven't dropped as fast or as much as Sony and Microsoft had hoped. In that light, Microsoft's decision to make DVD the standard game medium and HD-DVD an accessory look like a good hedge bet.
They way Microsoft sees it, you can get a next-gen game console and a next-gen movie player for a price in the same ballpark as the player alone. (This is where the MBAs would start spouting off about "value-added synergy".) If you already have a 360, you can add an HD-DVD player for ~$200 (based on the latest rumours). If not, you can buy a 360 and the HD-DVD drive at the same time, and spend ~$500-$600. That's right around the price range of dedicated HD-DVD players right now, although pricegrabber.com is showing some street prices as low as $430 for the least-expensive Toshiba model. If the 360 is better at HD-DVD playback than the first PS2s were at DVDs, Microsoft may have a winner.
Well, there ya go. If I was shipping something via UPS, I'd over-pad my boxes, too.
I sometimes wonder if parcels handled by UPS didn't make their way from the road to my porch by the driver hanging the box out the back of the truck, racing down the road at high speed, then executing a handbrake turn in front of my house.
No Commodore 8-bits, even though they reached critical mass in the United States. No Sinclairs, even though they reached critical mass in the UK. But a 6-month old Toshiba makes the list because it has an HD-DVD drive that almost nobody can use today?
Yeah, I agree with another poster: This Top 25 list was brought to you by Toshiba.
Slashdot Mirror
And you base this on what... Personal experience with both the free and non-free programs in question? Or is this just more of the mindless, reactive "Twitter smash big bad business!" hatred that you've cultivated such a well-deserved repuation for?
Waitaminute. Not only are you making this assertion without proof, but also without evidence or observation?!
Son, you have to bring better than truthiness, FUD, hearsay, and assertion by tantrum if you want to be taken seriously in a debate.
What part of BULLSHIT don't you understand? I want to know how, exactly, you two fucked up a Windows XP SP2 install enough to require 16 reboots to patch up. It's about fucking time you provided some proof to back up the shit you spew every day.
One, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Two, was it Service Pack 2? If so, I call bullshit. Ain't no way you need that many reboots to bring an SP2 install up to the latest patch level, unless you're deliberately installing patches one-at-a-time with reboots in between. In fact, I call bullshit either way, because anyone with a clue about Windows administration knows that you install Service Packs before individual patches.
The "HD" disc of T2 Extreme Edition is 720p, not 1080p. The "making of" bits in the liner notes state that they made a 1080p24 master from the film transfer. Once they were done with post-production, the last step was to down-sample to 720p for WMV9 encoding. And I recall them saying that they made damn sure that they archived that 1080p24 master, so it shouldn't take much effort to make a Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD pressing. (If they haven't already. I haven't been paying much attention to titles, since I'm not touching either format until they get their crap straight.)
Replacing the entire operating system just for one little quality-of-life feature is like replacing your entire house just for the new garage door opener.
(And you all thought I was going to drop a Bad Car Analogy on you.)
Things are getting better on the "install == reboot" assumption front.
More and more ISVs are realizing that, unless they're installing drivers for hardware that isn't hot-pluggable, or specifically replacing existing files in %WINDIR%\system32, a reboot isn't necessary. Some of that is Microsoft's fault, because the sick, twisted coupling of Explorer.exe and Internet Explorer forces a reboot to detect plugins that may be installed. Mostly, though, it's been on the ISVs, because the people responsible for the installer packages were too sloppy, lazy, or apathetic to care about what truly required a reboot. But they're getting better.
Vista itself is switching to an image-based installer for the OS. One boot from the DVD to start the installation process and write the system image to the hard drive, then one reboot to start from the hard drive, detect all hardware (instead of only the critical systems used to write the image), and set the initial driver state for the rest of the system.
[spit take]
You'd never think that to read your posting history. You do realize that it's visible to others, right?
No, just the cognitive dissonance of how someone who, by all evidence, knows Linux well can allow their primitive, reactive hindbrain to lash out at every post about Microsoft with such aggression and hatred.
Dammit, twitter. Every time I stumble on one of your posts, it's like an icepick in my ear.
Typos aside, that's the one fair statement in the whole post. Microsoft has monopoly power, so there's nowhere to go but down.
Ah, typical twitter logic. "Hmm, I want to get my software on 90% of desktops in the world. I'm not building it for that nasty, tricksy Windowses. If I make it cross-platform, somebody might run it on Windows anyway. I know! I'll write it for Linux, then wait for 90% of the desktops in the world to convert! And if anybody asks for a Windows version, I'll tell them to fuck off! Then they'll convert to Linux for sure!"
Oh, bloody hell. I fell into a decade-long coma again? The first time, The Police broke up. Now Linux has conquered the desktop and Microsoft went Chapter 11, and they're just building keyboards and mice for Sun?! At least my hairstyle is back in fashion again.
Of course, the only reason you picked that quote from the parent post in the first place was because somewhere, deep down, you recognized yourself in it.
This is a troll???!!! Meta-moderators, take note. This mod is on crack.
Why didn't you just stop there? You had a genuinely useful, informative post, and you pissed it all away. You could have mustered the self-control necessary to post something to Slashdot without veering off into a non sequitur of irrational hatred, but you didn't.
No surprise. I'm not sure who Jen-Hsun Huang pissed off over there, but somebody at the Inq really hates Nvidia.
Speaking of... Whatever happened to that whole Rydermark image quality "hack" that looked an awful lot like a hasty Photoshop filter on the screenshot?
So far, so good, spelling errors aside. The feature race Microsoft got into with WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite created a lot of esoteric bloat. This is where a lot of these web-based tools are seeing an opportunity.
Ah, well. It was good while it lasted.
Let's put the blame where it is due. Microsoft has made two fundamental format changes since Office 95. The first was in Office 97. It was different enough from 95 to break some compatibility, but it set the baseline for the 2000 and 2003 versions. Now, they're making the transition to XML, which started in 2003 and will be completed when 2007 goes gold. 2007 apps can save files as "Office 97/2003" format quite easily, or you can use the XML formats, which follow the "zip bundle" pattern used by OpenOffice.org and iWork.
The problem Microsoft forces us to deal with isn't a format that seems to be ever-changing, even when it's not. It's the licensing. Because Microsoft has those Office formats so tightly coupled with their purse strings, they're loathe to allow just anybody to read and write Office files easily. Thus, everybody had to reverse-engineer the formats, and hope they got it right. In fact, I'd estimate that 75% of "mangled" Office files involve a reverse-engineered file filter.
Office file formats are near to my heart right now. This is purely anecdotal, of course, but it eventually rambles its way to a point.
I frequently work with PowerPoint at my church, where we use it to present song lyrics and scripture during worship. We have a bunch of lyric sheets in "PowerPoint" files that were exported from Corel Presentations when they switched to Microsoft Office. I put PowerPoint in quotes because, while the files have a .ppt extension, Corel made a figurative hash of the export. For a long time, I had to open the files in a hex editor on my Mac because neither Keynote (my preferred app at the time) nor OO.o (both on my PC and in NeoOffice form on the Mac) would open any of those files. It wasn't until I downloaded the beta for Office 2007 that I could open the files in PowerPoint itself. Even then, the formatting was a mess, and the high-order bit of every character with an ASCII code > 127 was unset, leaving a bunch of "=" and "Y" characters where Corel had SmartQuote-d apostrophes and ellipses.
Notice where things really went wrong? By now, everybody has filters that can at least import well-formed Office files. But when an "unlicensed", reverse-engineered export filter (which I no longer have access to) fed malformed files to somebody else's "unlicensed", reverse-engineered import filter, I hit an impasse. And you see how this all works out for Microsoft in the end, as their product is the only one that makes an effort to salvage the bad files.
Somehow, I doubt Office XML will be licensed on terms suitable for use in products under OSI-approved licenses anytime soon. But the XML itself should be easier to reverse-engineer, so we have that going for us, which is nice. But we're going to be suffering the consequences of Office 97/2003 format for years to come.
(BTW, those Corel exports? I'm dumping the formatting and saving the lyrics as plain text. I am not going through this again.)
Still haven't read this, have you?
Citation, please?
He's from the UK, so I'm sure somebody could scrape up a ZX-81 with a wobbly RAM pack for him to use.
Don't give up hope!
You know, we've had three "patch regression" stories this month. Before the Ubuntu and Windows stories at hand, Mozilla had to turn around a quick point release for Firefox, to fix a regression that blocked the MMS protocol.
Despite everybody's best efforts and practices, sometimes a regression bug reaches production. And while the grandparent comment was a bit snarky about it, I would hope that whoever down-modded that comment did so to rebuke the tone, not to deny or supress the underlying issue.
Does the Architect know his thesaurus is missing?
The short, snarky answer: Because PS3 is Blu-Ray.
The more detailed answer: When you bring PS3 into the equation, you're adding the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD variable, so let's not solve for it yet.
Making the %HDMOVIE% drive a separate accessory gives the customer the choice of when to buy: at the same time as the console, later, or not at all. Microsoft is reinforcing the "not at all" choice by committing to DVD, not %HDMOVIE%, for game content. Yeah, there are trade-offs because you're duplicating a drive, power supply, and housing, but that's just one more thing each customer will have to figure out. With PS3, Sony is declaring %HDMOVIE% the wave of the future, so you better be ready. They have PS2's DVD history on their side. What's not on their side is the cost of %HDMOVIE% drives today. It's that difference in price between %HDMOVIE% today and DVD back in the day that is, in my opinion, putting Sony at greater risk. They may be able to justify it with quality games that benefit from Blu-Ray. I'm afraid we'll just add "stunning HD quality" to the 30-minute unskippable, unpausable cutscenes in the next Xenogears. :-)
Which brings us back to HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Sony was obviously going to support Blu-Ray exclusively. Their Chronic Not Invented Here Syndrome compelled it. Maybe Microsoft was just being contrarian when they hitched the wagon to HD-DVD, or maybe there was a fight over VC-1. I don't know, and the research really doesn't interest me. Maybe the real problem is that, with the lack of consensus on what technology would become the value of %HDMOVIE%, the R&D and production costs of hardware haven't dropped as fast or as much as Sony and Microsoft had hoped. In that light, Microsoft's decision to make DVD the standard game medium and HD-DVD an accessory look like a good hedge bet.
They way Microsoft sees it, you can get a next-gen game console and a next-gen movie player for a price in the same ballpark as the player alone. (This is where the MBAs would start spouting off about "value-added synergy".) If you already have a 360, you can add an HD-DVD player for ~$200 (based on the latest rumours). If not, you can buy a 360 and the HD-DVD drive at the same time, and spend ~$500-$600. That's right around the price range of dedicated HD-DVD players right now, although pricegrabber.com is showing some street prices as low as $430 for the least-expensive Toshiba model. If the 360 is better at HD-DVD playback than the first PS2s were at DVDs, Microsoft may have a winner.
Well, there ya go. If I was shipping something via UPS, I'd over-pad my boxes, too.
I sometimes wonder if parcels handled by UPS didn't make their way from the road to my porch by the driver hanging the box out the back of the truck, racing down the road at high speed, then executing a handbrake turn in front of my house.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
It's a post about the Caps Lock key!!! Of course, I'm yelling!!! God, this lameness filter is so bloody stupid!!!
No Commodore 8-bits, even though they reached critical mass in the United States. No Sinclairs, even though they reached critical mass in the UK. But a 6-month old Toshiba makes the list because it has an HD-DVD drive that almost nobody can use today?
Yeah, I agree with another poster: This Top 25 list was brought to you by Toshiba.