It's the difference between a potential employer requesting a CRB Check and large swathes of the population potentially having access to your record whenever you use your ID card (such as buying any age-controlled items).
Publically accessible by request is not the same as browsable on demand.
The claim that they will be used for "background checks on people who work with children and vulnerable people" as just an extension of the earlier plans to issue the cards to foreigners, i.e. a way to try and make the deployment of the cards acceptable to the public by initially issuing them to disliked groups (Paedophiles, Immigrants & Criminals) so that by the time they get to the rest of society it's too late to do anything about it.
Twitter is just an extension of MyFace & SpaceBook in that it allows you to create an even greater illusion that the mundane and tedious facets of your everyday life are something that thousands, nay millions of people are desperate to read about. So desperate, in fact, that they can't even wait for a daily rundown and must instead know about them within seconds of them occuring.
Now, not only can you pretend that you've got more friends than some random people on the internet, but also that said friends care in the slightest about what you do.
Much more likely people are rescheduling their P2P downloads to run outside of peak hours. I know my ISP (Virgin Media) throttles connection speeds during peak hours, so I schedule anything I want to download to run outside of those times.
If all the above issues are still in place come October 22nd (and it turns out that none of them are being caused by my own stupidity) then I'll agree with you - otherwise they are, for me at least, minor niggles (And the ATI one seems to be caused by them sticking the "Windows 7" label onto the Vista drivers without actually testing them) which can mostly turned off, worked around or got used to. The only one that really annoys me is the taskbar pinning (especially when there's such a straightforward workaround - it seems like an entirely arbitrary restriction).
The multi-monitor quriks with the VM are surrounding Window placement - it seems to treat the whole desktop as a single entity rather than individual monitors; though to be fair the XP Mode is still only at RC level rather than RTM, so I'm hoping it'll be fixed by then.
I'm not trying to pretend it's perfect, or that it's ideal for businesses to roll out across their estate, but for my personal needs it's the first time that I've though it's worth upgrading from XP (FTR I run Ubuntu on my laptop, but the app and gaming compatibility just isn't there yet for me to contemplate putting it onto my main PC).
OK, I admit it, I like Windows 7. I've been running Enterprise x64 at work since it was released on Technet and it's really good - driver support was almost flawless out of the box (Although when I tried to install the latest Catalyst drivers they consistant BSOD it, but that's really an ATI issue) and it runs much better than Vista on the same machine. The only things I've had problems with so far are old or stupid apps with hardcoded OS detection limits or 32-bit only libraries and so far all of them have worked via the XP Mode VM (Although there are some quirks with multiple monitors). My current plan is to upgrade my home PC from XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Technet again) in the coming weeks. One completely awesome feature that they should have added years ago is the ability to right-click on a DHCP lease and convert it into a reservation, which saves me a hell of a lot of time.
There are still negatives - there are some real issues with pinning certain apps to the taskbar, especially if they're located on a network drive (though there are workarounds), I'm not a fan of the way that they've over-simplified some of the menus making it difficult to find the advanced settings you want and the libraries are annoying, though I suspect they'll grow on me; also, Sharepoint still behaves inconsistently when trying to save documents directly to the site via Office 2007 as it did in Vista, especially with Visio for some reason. Oh, and even the new and improved UAC still annoyed me, so I had to turn it off completely - though I'd imagine non-power users probably wouldn't have as many issues with it.
All in all, I think we all know that Windows 7 is the OS Vista should have been - and probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't decided on an arbitrary release date for it whether it was done or not (ignoring the business implications of letting Vista development continue for another 2 years) and I for one am very impressed with it so far.
1. If any of the 3rd party materials violate the GPL then as distributers of the device it's their responsibility to ensure that the whole thing is legally compliant, just as they would with any proprietary code, before they start selling it.
2. "It might affect our profits" is not a sound legal defence.
It doesn't help that, in my case at least, I was told by pretty much everyone from highschool teachers, through careers advisors and university staff that "a Degree will bring me to the top automagically" - I wasn't exactly convinced, but when everyone's telling you that it's easy to buy into the hype.
Then you leave university and end up in the real world where you either a) Realise it was all a load of bollocks and get on with your life or b) Get all bitter about it as this woman appears to have done.
The Adverts on the Noscript site are, frankly, ingenious and I hope nobody else starts deploying them in the same way that he has because they'd become almost impossible to block without some pretty complex document inspection; for example:
<style type="text/css">#vzt a {display: block; float: right; clear: left; width: 482px; height: 100px; background: transparent url("data:image/png;base64,[Base64 encoded PNG image data stripped for lameness filter]") no-repeat center;}</style>
Put simply, most games shipped in Europe in the pre-HD days were done with chunky black boarders at the top and botom of the screen to get the same number of lines as NTSC and thus avoid the slowdown issue normally associated with moving from NTSC to PAL. PAL60 is a fudge that allows them to use the whole of the screen without any slowdown and in general it works pretty well if your TV supports it.
I guess it'll have to join BSD, mice & keyboards, desktop PCs, email and all the other things that we're always been told are dead & buried; to be inevitably replaced by something newer and shinier.
The 360 is hardly a sales giant - its top selling game is Halo 3 at a mere 8 million copies. The Sims 2 expansion packs sell almost that many on their own. The original SMB has sold over 40 million copies. The PS3's top seller clocks in at less than 3.5 million copies.
Interestingly, of the Top 20 highest selling console games ever, Microsoft don't have a single title for the XBox or 360. Sony only have 3 (Gran Tourismo 3, Gran Tourismo & GTA: San Andreas). Every other game is for a Nintendo console or handheld.
The NHS (~1.3 Million staff) National Patient Record System still only "officially" supports IE6, though most of it seems to work in IE7 anecdotally, but IE8 doesn't have a prayer. Given that Vista (32-bit only) support didn't arrive until March of this year and there's no 64-bit support on their roadmap, not to mention all the other critical NHS webapps that are IE6/2K-XP/32-bit only, I wouldn't expect them to move off IE6 for quite some time yet.
It's still not great (The iPlayer currently lists 57 "Science & Nature" programmes and 116 "Arts & Culture" shows, but it's still more than: Antiques (26), Beauty & Style (6), Cars & Motors (6), Cinema (5), Consumer (12), Crime & Justice (7), Disability (1), Families & Relationships (2), Food & Drink (17), Health & Wellbeing (12), History (36), Homes & Gardens (37), Money (51), Pets & Animals (10) & Travel (2)).
That said, there are some excellent examples (though mostly on the radio, rather than TV); I'm a great fan of Radio 4's Material World and there are also shows like Digital Planet, Fossil Detectives, Leading Edge, Science Cafe & Science In Action.
The sad truth is that most people either don't give a shit about science as long as their internets work or would be interested but struggle with the exclusionary aura that a lot of science programmes exude - which is why I like Material World as it makes a effort to be accessible to everyone.
The people buying drugs from spam emails are precisely the people who won't pay for such a service, because they don't need it, becuase they're such geniuses for managing to find all these cheap drug offers that nobody else seems to know about.
Intel used their position to blackmail and bribe vendors into not selling AMD products to the extent that AMD couldn't even give *free* processors to vendors to sell because they were either on the take from Intel (Making them just as guilty IMO) or couldn't afford to have Intel cut off their CPU supply for selling AMD.
I really have trouble understanding why so many people think the EU just files anti-trust lawsuits against companies for [Insert petty, childish reason, probably just jealousy about how great [country] is compared to them, or for the money] rather than for actual violations of EU anti-trust law.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between a potential employer requesting a CRB Check and large swathes of the population potentially having access to your record whenever you use your ID card (such as buying any age-controlled items).
Publically accessible by request is not the same as browsable on demand.
The claim that they will be used for "background checks on people who work with children and vulnerable people" as just an extension of the earlier plans to issue the cards to foreigners, i.e. a way to try and make the deployment of the cards acceptable to the public by initially issuing them to disliked groups (Paedophiles, Immigrants & Criminals) so that by the time they get to the rest of society it's too late to do anything about it.
Twitter is just an extension of MyFace & SpaceBook in that it allows you to create an even greater illusion that the mundane and tedious facets of your everyday life are something that thousands, nay millions of people are desperate to read about. So desperate, in fact, that they can't even wait for a daily rundown and must instead know about them within seconds of them occuring.
Now, not only can you pretend that you've got more friends than some random people on the internet, but also that said friends care in the slightest about what you do.
England - hell, I got myself one just so that I can avoid having to carry lots of carts around with me when I go on holiday.
Much more likely people are rescheduling their P2P downloads to run outside of peak hours. I know my ISP (Virgin Media) throttles connection speeds during peak hours, so I schedule anything I want to download to run outside of those times.
Depends on what you need: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions#Comparison_chart
Don't forget pints
If all the above issues are still in place come October 22nd (and it turns out that none of them are being caused by my own stupidity) then I'll agree with you - otherwise they are, for me at least, minor niggles (And the ATI one seems to be caused by them sticking the "Windows 7" label onto the Vista drivers without actually testing them) which can mostly turned off, worked around or got used to. The only one that really annoys me is the taskbar pinning (especially when there's such a straightforward workaround - it seems like an entirely arbitrary restriction).
The multi-monitor quriks with the VM are surrounding Window placement - it seems to treat the whole desktop as a single entity rather than individual monitors; though to be fair the XP Mode is still only at RC level rather than RTM, so I'm hoping it'll be fixed by then.
I'm not trying to pretend it's perfect, or that it's ideal for businesses to roll out across their estate, but for my personal needs it's the first time that I've though it's worth upgrading from XP (FTR I run Ubuntu on my laptop, but the app and gaming compatibility just isn't there yet for me to contemplate putting it onto my main PC).
OK, I admit it, I like Windows 7. I've been running Enterprise x64 at work since it was released on Technet and it's really good - driver support was almost flawless out of the box (Although when I tried to install the latest Catalyst drivers they consistant BSOD it, but that's really an ATI issue) and it runs much better than Vista on the same machine. The only things I've had problems with so far are old or stupid apps with hardcoded OS detection limits or 32-bit only libraries and so far all of them have worked via the XP Mode VM (Although there are some quirks with multiple monitors). My current plan is to upgrade my home PC from XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Technet again) in the coming weeks. One completely awesome feature that they should have added years ago is the ability to right-click on a DHCP lease and convert it into a reservation, which saves me a hell of a lot of time.
There are still negatives - there are some real issues with pinning certain apps to the taskbar, especially if they're located on a network drive (though there are workarounds), I'm not a fan of the way that they've over-simplified some of the menus making it difficult to find the advanced settings you want and the libraries are annoying, though I suspect they'll grow on me; also, Sharepoint still behaves inconsistently when trying to save documents directly to the site via Office 2007 as it did in Vista, especially with Visio for some reason. Oh, and even the new and improved UAC still annoyed me, so I had to turn it off completely - though I'd imagine non-power users probably wouldn't have as many issues with it.
All in all, I think we all know that Windows 7 is the OS Vista should have been - and probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't decided on an arbitrary release date for it whether it was done or not (ignoring the business implications of letting Vista development continue for another 2 years) and I for one am very impressed with it so far.
1. If any of the 3rd party materials violate the GPL then as distributers of the device it's their responsibility to ensure that the whole thing is legally compliant, just as they would with any proprietary code, before they start selling it.
2. "It might affect our profits" is not a sound legal defence.
3. See 2
Nonesense! Depending on your point of view we have either 1 or 2.5 parties.
It doesn't help that, in my case at least, I was told by pretty much everyone from highschool teachers, through careers advisors and university staff that "a Degree will bring me to the top automagically" - I wasn't exactly convinced, but when everyone's telling you that it's easy to buy into the hype.
Then you leave university and end up in the real world where you either a) Realise it was all a load of bollocks and get on with your life or b) Get all bitter about it as this woman appears to have done.
I believe the intent is for it to be part of the "OOBE" that the user gets when they first boot a machine from Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.
Most CAs will grant you a certificate for anything if you pay them the going rate.
The Adverts on the Noscript site are, frankly, ingenious and I hope nobody else starts deploying them in the same way that he has because they'd become almost impossible to block without some pretty complex document inspection; for example:
<style type="text/css">#vzt a {display: block; float: right; clear: left; width: 482px; height: 100px; background: transparent url("data:image/png;base64,[Base64 encoded PNG image data stripped for lameness filter]") no-repeat center;}</style>
<div> <div> <div id="vzt"> <div><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><a href="/t/vz/cotsohqbrnm76VUKNt"></a><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span></span><span> </span></div> </div> </div> </div> </div>
Same reason people buy high-level MMO accounts - so they can skip all that tedious playing and get on with the all-important posturing.
Put simply, most games shipped in Europe in the pre-HD days were done with chunky black boarders at the top and botom of the screen to get the same number of lines as NTSC and thus avoid the slowdown issue normally associated with moving from NTSC to PAL. PAL60 is a fudge that allows them to use the whole of the screen without any slowdown and in general it works pretty well if your TV supports it.
I guess it'll have to join BSD, mice & keyboards, desktop PCs, email and all the other things that we're always been told are dead & buried; to be inevitably replaced by something newer and shinier.
The 360 is hardly a sales giant - its top selling game is Halo 3 at a mere 8 million copies. The Sims 2 expansion packs sell almost that many on their own. The original SMB has sold over 40 million copies. The PS3's top seller clocks in at less than 3.5 million copies.
Interestingly, of the Top 20 highest selling console games ever, Microsoft don't have a single title for the XBox or 360. Sony only have 3 (Gran Tourismo 3, Gran Tourismo & GTA: San Andreas). Every other game is for a Nintendo console or handheld.
The NHS (~1.3 Million staff) National Patient Record System still only "officially" supports IE6, though most of it seems to work in IE7 anecdotally, but IE8 doesn't have a prayer. Given that Vista (32-bit only) support didn't arrive until March of this year and there's no 64-bit support on their roadmap, not to mention all the other critical NHS webapps that are IE6/2K-XP/32-bit only, I wouldn't expect them to move off IE6 for quite some time yet.
It was horribly flaky last time I used it.
"Spyware-infested" if you say yes to the clear and unambiguous "Install Daemon Tools browser toolbar" option in the installer.
It's still not great (The iPlayer currently lists 57 "Science & Nature" programmes and 116 "Arts & Culture" shows, but it's still more than: Antiques (26), Beauty & Style (6), Cars & Motors (6), Cinema (5), Consumer (12), Crime & Justice (7), Disability (1), Families & Relationships (2), Food & Drink (17), Health & Wellbeing (12), History (36), Homes & Gardens (37), Money (51), Pets & Animals (10) & Travel (2)).
That said, there are some excellent examples (though mostly on the radio, rather than TV); I'm a great fan of Radio 4's Material World and there are also shows like Digital Planet, Fossil Detectives, Leading Edge, Science Cafe & Science In Action.
The sad truth is that most people either don't give a shit about science as long as their internets work or would be interested but struggle with the exclusionary aura that a lot of science programmes exude - which is why I like Material World as it makes a effort to be accessible to everyone.
The people buying drugs from spam emails are precisely the people who won't pay for such a service, because they don't need it, becuase they're such geniuses for managing to find all these cheap drug offers that nobody else seems to know about.
Intel used their position to blackmail and bribe vendors into not selling AMD products to the extent that AMD couldn't even give *free* processors to vendors to sell because they were either on the take from Intel (Making them just as guilty IMO) or couldn't afford to have Intel cut off their CPU supply for selling AMD.
I really have trouble understanding why so many people think the EU just files anti-trust lawsuits against companies for [Insert petty, childish reason, probably just jealousy about how great [country] is compared to them, or for the money] rather than for actual violations of EU anti-trust law.
Yes, because that worked so well before with Napster. And Audiogalaxy. And Kazaa. And eMule. And so on.