Because of marketting.. It doesn`t matter how massively inferior and more expensive windows is, microsoft will market it to the non technical people in higher positions and they will commit to it without consulting anyone more knowlegeable, leaving those who know what they`re doing with a huge mess to clean up.
Actually most of us select the driver (or app) we want to install from a list of packages available for download from the OS vendor.. Then we click install and it downloads and installs... No need to trawl round webpages finding drivers, no need to click through license agreements and no need to keep hitting next or rebooting just to install drivers, and no need to fork out money for most of the apps.
I always found word to handle large files much worse than openoffice... Openoffice may slow down and use huge amounts of memory when editing large files, but word either crashes, refuses to work at all, or corrupts the file..
But you work at a college, isn`t training people the purpose of a college? You should be teaching people how to use programs in general, rather than specific apps anyway.. The apps being used now may not be around when your students move out into the field of work (I was taught wordperfect in college for instance)
Actually it is the laptop which lacks proper power management support... Linux`s ACPI support complies with Intel`s specifications on the ACPI standard.. ACPI offers a feature called DSDT, which is basically a scripting language defining how to interact with the hardware in the system.. Intel offer a compiler which will compile this script into a DSDT block which is typically stored in the BIOS.. Intel`s compiler follows Intel`s specs and will not tollerate errors in the code. Microsoft also supply a DSDT compiler, which is very tollerent of errors, consequently microsoft`s implementations of ACPI tollerate these errors, whereas an implementation following intel`s specifications will not. Most hardware vendors use microsoft`s compiler and a broken DSDT, which will fail on an implementation of ACPI that follows intel`s specs..
More information can be found on acpi.sourceforge.net, including patched DSDT`s for many systems.
Re:Safe? they should find a more efficient way
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 1
As unpleasant as the smell of shit might be..
It`s both harmless and natural... Pigs don`t choose to shit, and there`s no way to stop them doing so.. Smoking on the other hand is a choice someone has made, it is a completely artificial and unnatural act. Infact, it is natural for us to avoid having smoke in our lungs, that`s why we often cough when subjected to any kind of smoke.
Safe? they should find a more efficient way
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I`m all for freedom, if people choose to harm themselves, practice strange fetishes among consenting adults, or take huge amounts of drugs that`s fine. So long as they don`t inflict their choices upon anyone who has not consented.
Smoking is a horrendously inefficient method of ingesting a drug, the vast majority of it goes up in the air to affect people nearby, or to settle on clothes, furniture, walls etc and make the environment stink. If people choose to inject drugs into their bodies, or take tablets, good for them.. But to burn toxic substances and allow the fumes to pollute the environment of others should be made illegal. You have no right to go polluting the air that other people have to breathe.
Smoking does not gain you anything, there are much more efficient ways you could ingest nicotine, and the result won`t result in the smell of your presence causing offense to those nearby.
The stench of smoke has different effects on different people. I personally have a very negative reaction to it, especially to an environment which stinks of stale smoke.. If you imagine the worst possible hangover, where your head is thumping and you feel like your going to vomit any minute, then that`s the effect that inhaling smoke has on me. Most people aren`t affected so severely, but the vast majority of people dislike the smell, and that includes some smokers.
Also being in the presence of someone who smokes heavily, or has smoked recently is equally disgusting, they will stink of stale smoke and their presence is offensive.
If you think it`s acceptable to make other people breathe toxic fumes, i invite you to spend a few hours in a room where you are subjected to sulfur, various insecticides and strong solvents.. The kind of chemicals where people wear gas masks to work with them.
Personally i think smoking should be completely banned. If you really want to ingest nicotine, there are many other ways, such as patches, gum, tablets etc, which don`t affect others.
By smoking you are infact launching a chemical weapons attack against those around you. You are polluting their air with toxic fumes which will harm and potentially kill them.
Why are most forms of harming others banned, while smoking is not? What if Al-Qaeda blanketted a major city in a thick cloud of smoke? Would this attack simply be ignored? Why can a smoker get away with poisoning me and yet i can`t get away with beating him with a baseball bat? What if i instead got my revenge on him by gassing him with mustard gas ?
And by this same reckoning, since using gaseous poisoning seems to be acceptable, why is the holocaust considered a crime? Surely the nazis were just practicing their right to force others to breathe toxic fumes.
The "cost" of licensing linux is one you chose to pay, there are many linux distributions you can get without paying a license fee. Linux will run on the POWER5 platforms, IBM actively support it on these platforms too. And as for patches, this is also distribution specific, and it`s also easier to remove what you dont use from linux (consequently you don`t need to install a patch for something you don`t have installed)
But the computers kids are typically exposed to in school will not have any kind of development tools installed. No compiler, no BASIC interpreter, no assembler, nothing.. They will have a word processor, a web browser and maybe one or two other useless pre-packaged applications that noone ever uses. And the students won`t learn how to research for themselves, they will learn by repetition "word is access by clicking on the W in the top right corner of the screen" and will freak out if anyone moves the icon (!). I have encountered many people who are unable to use the computer anymore because the icon has moved, they don`t think to even look around the screen for it. I`m sure you could train a babboon to use a computer in the same way most people are taught in school nowadays.
One more point.. The main problem with the site right now, is the bar at the top.. This is meant to be fixed position, so that on some of the sub pages when you scroll down the bar stays put.. I couldn`t find any way of doing this in IE other than using frames (nasty) or floating javascript iframes (nastier, since they still scroll down and then get snapped back up by the javascript)
Well, if the site depends on errors in firefox rendering it also depends on opera, safari, konqueror and ie5/mac etc, making the same errors, because it looks identical in all of these browsers.. As for testing with IE, i did, on a mac, and it worked.. I had no access to a windows system at the time and didn`t expect the windows version to behave differently to the mac version, seeing as they`re supposed to be the same product. The notice was actually supposed to target users of netscape 3/4 etc, which were cropping up occasionally in the stats and which wouldn`t render the site at all.
As for the repetitive CSS, yeah i know it needs cleaning up, but at the time the site was designed it worked on every browser i had access to (even lynx, and yes you do get the css message), and validated on the w3c validator which was good enough for me.
As for a quick fix, i did try the "ie7" javascript kludge pack at one point, but it still didn`t correct everything... the image backgrounds were still grey (should be transparent with anti-aliasing to transparent round the edges) and it made it much slower..
But at the end of the day, i spent more time trying to kludge it to work in the windows version of ie than i did actually making the whole site in the first place and eventually got sick of doing so.
Maybe IE7 has actually fixed these issues, could someone post a screenshot of how it looks if they have access to this browser?
How exactly would the xeon have met your needs better? I`ve not seen any such situations on servers for quite a while, AMD seems to have them beat in every area.
If they passed on the costs they paid their suppliers, then fair enough.. However, just how much "cost" is involved with producing a license-string for msoffice and emailing it out for $80k ? A company i was working at recently just spent $80k on msoffice, and all they recieved was an email with some license codes, not even any physical media..
A reasonable profit after covering production costs is one thing, but $80k for a short email is just extortion.. We didn`t even recieve any support, physical media or printed manuals for that 80k.. For that amount of money i`d expect physical media, printed manuals and a phone number where i can call them up for help if/when i encounter problems.. As it happens, they`ve completely ignored the multiple bug reports we`ve made and we can`t exactly fix it ourselves either.
Well, www.ev6.net is one such site.. It renders perfectly in every other browser, including ie5 for mac.. Any version of IE on windows screws it up (tho i didn`t try the beta of 7). There is a notice on the site saying that you need a modern browser with support for CSS, this notice uses a CSS property to mark it non displayable which broken browsers like IE ignore. Navigation of the site works perfectly in any browser however, even lynx.. The layout looks screwed in IE for windows, and obviously any graphical elements are lost in lynx.
Why is it like this? Well, i wrote the site by following standards, the result works perfectly in mozilla/safari/opera/etc, just not in IE.. My attitude is that it`s the browser that`s broken, not my site, and i won`t modify my site to cater to buggy browsers.
I`m not bashing their move to have multiple competitive prices, that very much makes sense.. What i`m bashing is MS`s constant moves to lock competition out of markets where they`re strong, their use of proprietary APIs and file formats to prevent competition entering markets where they`re dominant. If your a microsoft customer, your in exactly the same situation apple was.. For whatever products you buy from microsoft (office, windows etc) your are totally dependant on them. There is no other competitor that offers a compatible replacement for windows (contrast that to unix where the api`s are very similar and there is often binary compatibility between different unixes running on similar hardware, freebsd can execute linux binaries for instance) Not to mention proprietary networking protocols (such as exchange) and file formats (such as office).. Microsoft customers are locked in, and that lets MS keep prices artificially high, exactly the kind of deal they themselves don`t want to be on the wrong side of. I will very much welcome the day when you can buy software from multiple vendors and drop in compatible replacements as easily as with hardware.
> If you only have one supplier, you have less price negotiation leverage. > Multiple suppliers keep the prices competitive. The other thing is that > this time we own the IP on the chips. So we can make them at our own foundries.
So it`s good for microsoft to have multiple suppliers so it keeps the prices they pay competitive, but they build their own products to make it as difficult as possible for other suppliers. They are openly benefitting from a competitive marketplace while trying their hardest to take these benefits away from their customers.
Also if you really don't want to download it, you can buy the CD for $5.. Fact is, downloading is most convenient for most people so that`s what they do.. Then they complain about how long it takes, but it`s still quicker than waiting for the CD to arrive in the post. On the other hand, msoffice is much larger (and illegal) to download, and getting it on CD will cost you a lot more.
OpenOffice CAN`T do that.. because it needs to remain cross platform, KDE is very unlikely to be present on windows or macos systems, if it even runs on them at all.
And black people tell jokes too, and often refer to each other as "niggers" just listen to some rap music for an example.. And yet if a white man was to call a black man a nigger that would be considered offensive and racist.
Because if a large number of people use phone X which renders it`s own proprietary markup that`s incompatible with any other phone, then sites will pop up that use it.. Leaving those of you using phone Y screwed. Then as a result, people will think that phone Y is crap, and phone X will become more popular even if it`s a massively inferior device.
Well if everyone else is wiped out by hiv and the black death, then the remaining people will suffer the side effects.. If these side effects cause death then people would die out. On the other hand, there's always the chance that a small percentage wouldn`t suffer these side effects, so these people would survive and go on to reproduce.
This is the natural progression of evolution tho, those who have this gene are a step above the rest of us in the evolutionary scale. If it weren't for modern technology, those of us without this gene would have been wiped out long ago by a combination of HIV and the black death, leaving only those with this superior gene.
I believe it is possible to use gentoo with binary packages, tho i haven`t tried this myself. Also i`m not sure if everything is available as a binary package yet... But atleast then you get the choice.
That has to do with linux being updated more frequently than windows.. XP came out in 2001, and consequently only supports hardware which existed in 2001 out of the box... It can be a HUGE hassle especially if you have no other system on which you can download drivers and place them on some kind of removeable media.. But your right, as much as people complain about linux being difficult to install, windows is much harder and less intuitive nowadays. 99% of people have never installed either, but people would have more luck installing a modern linux distro.
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Because of marketting..
It doesn`t matter how massively inferior and more expensive windows is, microsoft will market it to the non technical people in higher positions and they will commit to it without consulting anyone more knowlegeable, leaving those who know what they`re doing with a huge mess to clean up.
Actually most of us select the driver (or app) we want to install from a list of packages available for download from the OS vendor.. Then we click install and it downloads and installs...
No need to trawl round webpages finding drivers, no need to click through license agreements and no need to keep hitting next or rebooting just to install drivers, and no need to fork out money for most of the apps.
I always found word to handle large files much worse than openoffice... Openoffice may slow down and use huge amounts of memory when editing large files, but word either crashes, refuses to work at all, or corrupts the file..
But you work at a college, isn`t training people the purpose of a college?
You should be teaching people how to use programs in general, rather than specific apps anyway.. The apps being used now may not be around when your students move out into the field of work (I was taught wordperfect in college for instance)
Actually it is the laptop which lacks proper power management support...
Linux`s ACPI support complies with Intel`s specifications on the ACPI standard..
ACPI offers a feature called DSDT, which is basically a scripting language defining how to interact with the hardware in the system.. Intel offer a compiler which will compile this script into a DSDT block which is typically stored in the BIOS.. Intel`s compiler follows Intel`s specs and will not tollerate errors in the code.
Microsoft also supply a DSDT compiler, which is very tollerent of errors, consequently microsoft`s implementations of ACPI tollerate these errors, whereas an implementation following intel`s specifications will not. Most hardware vendors use microsoft`s compiler and a broken DSDT, which will fail on an implementation of ACPI that follows intel`s specs..
More information can be found on acpi.sourceforge.net, including patched DSDT`s for many systems.
As unpleasant as the smell of shit might be..
It`s both harmless and natural... Pigs don`t choose to shit, and there`s no way to stop them doing so.. Smoking on the other hand is a choice someone has made, it is a completely artificial and unnatural act.
Infact, it is natural for us to avoid having smoke in our lungs, that`s why we often cough when subjected to any kind of smoke.
I`m all for freedom, if people choose to harm themselves, practice strange fetishes among consenting adults, or take huge amounts of drugs that`s fine.
So long as they don`t inflict their choices upon anyone who has not consented.
Smoking is a horrendously inefficient method of ingesting a drug, the vast majority of it goes up in the air to affect people nearby, or to settle on clothes, furniture, walls etc and make the environment stink.
If people choose to inject drugs into their bodies, or take tablets, good for them.. But to burn toxic substances and allow the fumes to pollute the environment of others should be made illegal. You have no right to go polluting the air that other people have to breathe.
Smoking does not gain you anything, there are much more efficient ways you could ingest nicotine, and the result won`t result in the smell of your presence causing offense to those nearby.
The stench of smoke has different effects on different people. I personally have a very negative reaction to it, especially to an environment which stinks of stale smoke.. If you imagine the worst possible hangover, where your head is thumping and you feel like your going to vomit any minute, then that`s the effect that inhaling smoke has on me. Most people aren`t affected so severely, but the vast majority of people dislike the smell, and that includes some smokers.
Also being in the presence of someone who smokes heavily, or has smoked recently is equally disgusting, they will stink of stale smoke and their presence is offensive.
If you think it`s acceptable to make other people breathe toxic fumes, i invite you to spend a few hours in a room where you are subjected to sulfur, various insecticides and strong solvents.. The kind of chemicals where people wear gas masks to work with them.
Personally i think smoking should be completely banned. If you really want to ingest nicotine, there are many other ways, such as patches, gum, tablets etc, which don`t affect others.
By smoking you are infact launching a chemical weapons attack against those around you. You are polluting their air with toxic fumes which will harm and potentially kill them.
Why are most forms of harming others banned, while smoking is not? What if Al-Qaeda blanketted a major city in a thick cloud of smoke? Would this attack simply be ignored? Why can a smoker get away with poisoning me and yet i can`t get away with beating him with a baseball bat? What if i instead got my revenge on him by gassing him with mustard gas ?
And by this same reckoning, since using gaseous poisoning seems to be acceptable, why is the holocaust considered a crime? Surely the nazis were just practicing their right to force others to breathe toxic fumes.
The "cost" of licensing linux is one you chose to pay, there are many linux distributions you can get without paying a license fee.
Linux will run on the POWER5 platforms, IBM actively support it on these platforms too.
And as for patches, this is also distribution specific, and it`s also easier to remove what you dont use from linux (consequently you don`t need to install a patch for something you don`t have installed)
But the computers kids are typically exposed to in school will not have any kind of development tools installed. No compiler, no BASIC interpreter, no assembler, nothing.. They will have a word processor, a web browser and maybe one or two other useless pre-packaged applications that noone ever uses.
And the students won`t learn how to research for themselves, they will learn by repetition "word is access by clicking on the W in the top right corner of the screen" and will freak out if anyone moves the icon (!). I have encountered many people who are unable to use the computer anymore because the icon has moved, they don`t think to even look around the screen for it.
I`m sure you could train a babboon to use a computer in the same way most people are taught in school nowadays.
One more point..
The main problem with the site right now, is the bar at the top.. This is meant to be fixed position, so that on some of the sub pages when you scroll down the bar stays put..
I couldn`t find any way of doing this in IE other than using frames (nasty) or floating javascript iframes (nastier, since they still scroll down and then get snapped back up by the javascript)
Well, if the site depends on errors in firefox rendering it also depends on opera, safari, konqueror and ie5/mac etc, making the same errors, because it looks identical in all of these browsers..
As for testing with IE, i did, on a mac, and it worked.. I had no access to a windows system at the time and didn`t expect the windows version to behave differently to the mac version, seeing as they`re supposed to be the same product. The notice was actually supposed to target users of netscape 3/4 etc, which were cropping up occasionally in the stats and which wouldn`t render the site at all.
As for the repetitive CSS, yeah i know it needs cleaning up, but at the time the site was designed it worked on every browser i had access to (even lynx, and yes you do get the css message), and validated on the w3c validator which was good enough for me.
As for a quick fix, i did try the "ie7" javascript kludge pack at one point, but it still didn`t correct everything... the image backgrounds were still grey (should be transparent with anti-aliasing to transparent round the edges) and it made it much slower..
But at the end of the day, i spent more time trying to kludge it to work in the windows version of ie than i did actually making the whole site in the first place and eventually got sick of doing so.
Maybe IE7 has actually fixed these issues, could someone post a screenshot of how it looks if they have access to this browser?
How exactly would the xeon have met your needs better? I`ve not seen any such situations on servers for quite a while, AMD seems to have them beat in every area.
If they passed on the costs they paid their suppliers, then fair enough..
However, just how much "cost" is involved with producing a license-string for msoffice and emailing it out for $80k ?
A company i was working at recently just spent $80k on msoffice, and all they recieved was an email with some license codes, not even any physical media..
A reasonable profit after covering production costs is one thing, but $80k for a short email is just extortion.. We didn`t even recieve any support, physical media or printed manuals for that 80k.. For that amount of money i`d expect physical media, printed manuals and a phone number where i can call them up for help if/when i encounter problems.. As it happens, they`ve completely ignored the multiple bug reports we`ve made and we can`t exactly fix it ourselves either.
Well, www.ev6.net is one such site.. It renders perfectly in every other browser, including ie5 for mac.. Any version of IE on windows screws it up (tho i didn`t try the beta of 7).
There is a notice on the site saying that you need a modern browser with support for CSS, this notice uses a CSS property to mark it non displayable which broken browsers like IE ignore.
Navigation of the site works perfectly in any browser however, even lynx.. The layout looks screwed in IE for windows, and obviously any graphical elements are lost in lynx.
Why is it like this? Well, i wrote the site by following standards, the result works perfectly in mozilla/safari/opera/etc, just not in IE.. My attitude is that it`s the browser that`s broken, not my site, and i won`t modify my site to cater to buggy browsers.
I`m not bashing their move to have multiple competitive prices, that very much makes sense..
What i`m bashing is MS`s constant moves to lock competition out of markets where they`re strong, their use of proprietary APIs and file formats to prevent competition entering markets where they`re dominant.
If your a microsoft customer, your in exactly the same situation apple was.. For whatever products you buy from microsoft (office, windows etc) your are totally dependant on them. There is no other competitor that offers a compatible replacement for windows (contrast that to unix where the api`s are very similar and there is often binary compatibility between different unixes running on similar hardware, freebsd can execute linux binaries for instance)
Not to mention proprietary networking protocols (such as exchange) and file formats (such as office)..
Microsoft customers are locked in, and that lets MS keep prices artificially high, exactly the kind of deal they themselves don`t want to be on the wrong side of.
I will very much welcome the day when you can buy software from multiple vendors and drop in compatible replacements as easily as with hardware.
I like the comment from the microsoft engineer:
> If you only have one supplier, you have less price negotiation leverage.
> Multiple suppliers keep the prices competitive. The other thing is that
> this time we own the IP on the chips. So we can make them at our own foundries.
So it`s good for microsoft to have multiple suppliers so it keeps the prices they pay competitive, but they build their own products to make it as difficult as possible for other suppliers.
They are openly benefitting from a competitive marketplace while trying their hardest to take these benefits away from their customers.
Also if you really don't want to download it, you can buy the CD for $5..
Fact is, downloading is most convenient for most people so that`s what they do.. Then they complain about how long it takes, but it`s still quicker than waiting for the CD to arrive in the post.
On the other hand, msoffice is much larger (and illegal) to download, and getting it on CD will cost you a lot more.
OpenOffice CAN`T do that.. because it needs to remain cross platform, KDE is very unlikely to be present on windows or macos systems, if it even runs on them at all.
And black people tell jokes too, and often refer to each other as "niggers" just listen to some rap music for an example.. And yet if a white man was to call a black man a nigger that would be considered offensive and racist.
And which big iron hardware has been doing since the 1960`s
Because if a large number of people use phone X which renders it`s own proprietary markup that`s incompatible with any other phone, then sites will pop up that use it.. Leaving those of you using phone Y screwed. Then as a result, people will think that phone Y is crap, and phone X will become more popular even if it`s a massively inferior device.
Well if everyone else is wiped out by hiv and the black death, then the remaining people will suffer the side effects.. If these side effects cause death then people would die out.
On the other hand, there's always the chance that a small percentage wouldn`t suffer these side effects, so these people would survive and go on to reproduce.
This is the natural progression of evolution tho, those who have this gene are a step above the rest of us in the evolutionary scale. If it weren't for modern technology, those of us without this gene would have been wiped out long ago by a combination of HIV and the black death, leaving only those with this superior gene.
I believe it is possible to use gentoo with binary packages, tho i haven`t tried this myself. Also i`m not sure if everything is available as a binary package yet... But atleast then you get the choice.
That has to do with linux being updated more frequently than windows..
XP came out in 2001, and consequently only supports hardware which existed in 2001 out of the box...
It can be a HUGE hassle especially if you have no other system on which you can download drivers and place them on some kind of removeable media..
But your right, as much as people complain about linux being difficult to install, windows is much harder and less intuitive nowadays. 99% of people have never installed either, but people would have more luck installing a modern linux distro.