YMMV, as with anything. My work machine is win2k running on stock Dell hardware. It's got an old hard drive thats starting to really slow down. I abuse the hell out of it with installing software, removing software, breaking software, etc, etc, etc. It routinely stays up for 6 weeks+ without crashes or slowdowns. I generally reboot for other reasons well before I see a crash (installing new system services, that sort of thing - I'm behind our corporate firewall and we don't have any patchy goodness).
BTW, it's trivial to write an app that will bring just about any system to a crawl - certainly any Linux install. When testing an XP machine, for example, I made an app that just chewed up ever-increasing amounts of memory - the sytem bogged down as it started allocating more and more swap to feed the demand (and writing all this ram to disk). However, once I killed the app, the system _immediately_ restored itself to it's previous snappiness. Thats about as good of a result as you can expect from a general purpose OS.
See, theres a problem with claims like this. See, I've got a win2k machine that can stay up for months at a time without problems. Therefore, since there is at least one Windows 2000 install without the problems you mention, the issue is _not_ simply leaking resources, because those would be common across all Windows 2000 installs. Therefore, there had to be something in your environment, that was different than my environment, that was causing the problem. The most likely candidate, of course, is a driver.
They claim that this doesn't require a windows install to work. Therefore, they're claiming that this is not only a working Windows runtime environment, but that they've got a 100% working and compatible (even unpublished and buggy behavior that , for example, old versions of Office rely on) implementation of the Win32 API available. This I do not believe, and that claim alone makes me think they're full of crap.
The broken systray is old/stupid applications, not Windows fault - explorer broadcasts a notification when it starts up asking applications to re-register systray icons, but many apps (especially older ones, from before Windows did this) don't respond to the message. Well behaved and up to date systray icons will re-appear when you restart explorer.
As a side note, I don't have any trouble with explorer dying even after weeks of uptime, you might look at any third party shell extensions you're using as the culprit.
You're totally correct. Thats why this is a tax on VOIP systems like Vonage that interact with POTS, and they would be taxed at the point where the interact with the normal telephone system.
There's a delicate balance between rewarding innovation and stifling it. I believe that in recent years, advancement in research and especially the broadning of IP law have largely tipped that balance too far. The key issue with patents is process patents - once you let patents be granted on abstract concepts, you opened the door for all kinds of crap, including submarine patants like these. Basically, every new industry now has to deal with loads of patents filed, without an actual invention, by scumbags trying to cash in. You don't have to have an actual working invention anymore and I think that really undermines the entire concept of patents. The Eolas patent is a great example, because all it describes is a concept, there's none of the actual implementation details that would make it usefull to the public domain once it expired. I don't have ready access to numbers, but the percentage of these types of patentes being granted is growing enormously.
No. You can choose your sexual activities, but not your preference. You can also be acclimated through abuse, but once that happens you aren't really talking about "preference" anymore.
Greater good can (and has) been used to trump privacy in the past. It's a very, very hard sell to most courts, which is a good thing. In other cases, it's not so hard - we don't publish AIDs victims, but we publish sex offenders.
Think about if right to privacy trumped free speech in ALL cases - there wouldn't be _any_ leaked memos. I think that, in this case, a newspaper might very well win the case, but it's not a forgone conclusion, nor should it be.
Illegally obtained information is not specially protected - this is a long standing principle. For example, the Pentagon Papers, which were obtained illegally. The main difference here is that it's a private entity and not the government which is involved, and that does make me nervous.
I agree with the social contract aspect, but you're way off base with it being actionable to report flaws, at least in the US. The "precedents" you're talking about are where theres an existing contract, like an NDA in place. You could _possibly_ be liable if you caused a panic and the exploit wasn't real. You ARE, of course, susceptible to scare tactics like DMCA and libel suits, where there's no real case but they want to pressure you to shut up.
Still to this day, developers can whip out business info systems for Windows faster than on Linux, Mac, etc.
This is actually a relatively recent thing. VB was a huge step in this direction, and the main reason "RAD" is so fast on windows is not because Windows is better, but because there's so much more software on Windows - if you're a VB shop you can spend a few grand on components and have everything you need to cut & paste together your applications. I'd say this is a plus for Windows but it hardly started that way. Win 3.1 programming was a black art and it certainly wasn't easier than a Mac.
Maybe in his normal work day he's an international photography consultant and he meets all sorts of exotic people all the time and his idea of a good prize is the chance to just chill out with a beer and play some GTA?
There's actually one much harder condition for voting machines, and thats anonyimity. It's much harder to make a secured system when you can't (and in fact don't want to) trace transactions to users.
If you think of a union as a little mini-company that provides workers to other companies (which is more or less what they are), then what does that do to your bitchy world view? Unions aren't magical faeries. They only have power because workers join them and respect the strikes. Market forces aren't only for employers, you know.
We've got the same crap at my job. I'm about 80% sure that the reason is that the crappy contractors who set up our payroll system (which only tracks hours, and has no provision for non-hourly people) and the stupid managment who decided everyone had to use it, and stupid financial policies about charging time are the reason, rather than any sort of actual evilness. Everyone I know just sticks down 40 hours of time no matter how much or little time they work anyway.
This is actually not true. Unions exist for most skilled industries (airplane pilots are just bodies?). One of the services that unions provide are minimal skill requirements. I work in a very heavily unionized industry and while theres tons of crap that comes with all our unions, lack of skilled labor isn't one of them.
A union is a usefull tool for any worker where the employer is in a power position. That's true for just about anyone except the very cream of the crop in a field - if you can't easily walk away from your job, change geopraphic location, and/or speedily get another job, then your employer has more power than you in any negotiation. I think theres alot of people who like to think they're in that cream spot but when you get to brass tacks, by definition, only a few people can be. Too many IT people are still spoiled by demand during the boom and think that only stupid or unskilled people might need or want organized representation.
As a worker in a heavily unionized industry (rail transportation), I'd say that the biggest problem with unions is the petty beuraucracy and jealous territory grabbing that grows out of them. I understand the idea behind them and I think it's important, but as time goes on they get just as bad as the corporate policies involved.
Everything you're saying is based on process-level protection provided by the OS. If the OS provides sufficently correct thread-level protection, then almost all of those issues become a dead heat. Also, it's not just spinning a thread vrs forking a process - process-level IPC is slower than thread-level IPC as well. And process-level IPC is no safer than thread-level. If one of your processes corrupts and crashes during a write, your database is just as hosed as if a thread did it.
On Windows, at least, threading is far more performant - you _must_ thread for very fast IO, network or disk. Now that linux has a non-crap thread library, that may end up being true there also. The most reliable and performant databases in the world are threaded - thats a logical argument in favor of threading.
Oracle is insanely expensive to support. MS-SQL less so, just because tech support is more widely available. You don't throw around big $$ without being able to justify it, the bean-counters are there for a reason.
Sadly, this is totally untrue, in both my professional and private experience. I've see a LOT of money wasted on Oracle solutions when SQL Server would have been fine. Or Postgre, or even MySQL. In fact, using insanely expensive "enterprise" applications when they don't need to is a major waste of money in my experience, but you've got the buzzwords to "justify" the cost.
That said, I think Access is basically never the correct choice for an application. It's just barely tolerable as something that suits use to slap stuff together, but as one of the guys who gets to re-work all that slapped together crap into real applications, I'm leery of even allowing that.
The most common application level use of Access is as a datastore for VB apps. This is a crummy use of Access because it's slow and feature-poor and ugly. SQLite is a much better choice in this case. MySQL is often used in the OSS world for this purpose, and it's a crummy choice because it's server based and not file based and adds alot of complexity to installing/configuring the application.
MySQL is excellent for low-end shared data apps, however. Anywhere you need concurrency, Access is out.
Note that I'm talking about Access as a database, not Access as an application - Access as an application is still totally crap, but there's no viable alternatives so I have to put up with that.
MS "new" compiler compiles fast, optimizes well for both size and speed, and is very standards compliant.
BCC compiles very fast, optimizes well for size and speed, and is poorly standards compliant.
OpenWatcom is similiar to BCC
GCC (in the form of MingW) compiles slowly, optimizes well for speed but (very) poorly for size, and is very standards compliant.
Of the free beer options, on Windows, MS C++ 7.1 is the all-round winner imo. GCC/MingW is a very close second, however, with the main issues being much slower compile time (partially correctable via things like ccache, and the new pch support should help) and signifigantly larger binaries. In terms of standards compliance they're about equal,
with GCC taking a slight lead.
They're totally different things - Access is a file-based system, MySQL is server based. Use SQLite where you'd use an access back end. In fact, SQLite would be an acceptable back-end replacement for a whole lot of the MySQL based projects out there.
My starting salary at a (non-union) govt. job with great benefits in NYC was about 45k (little over $20 an hour). It was hard to live on that much but with 2 incomes it was doable.
From what I recall of the original case, sex.com was bringing in a million dollars a year in advertising revenue (banners), at least at the height of the boom.
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BTW, it's trivial to write an app that will bring just about any system to a crawl - certainly any Linux install. When testing an XP machine, for example, I made an app that just chewed up ever-increasing amounts of memory - the sytem bogged down as it started allocating more and more swap to feed the demand (and writing all this ram to disk). However, once I killed the app, the system _immediately_ restored itself to it's previous snappiness. Thats about as good of a result as you can expect from a general purpose OS.
See, theres a problem with claims like this. See, I've got a win2k machine that can stay up for months at a time without problems. Therefore, since there is at least one Windows 2000 install without the problems you mention, the issue is _not_ simply leaking resources, because those would be common across all Windows 2000 installs. Therefore, there had to be something in your environment, that was different than my environment, that was causing the problem. The most likely candidate, of course, is a driver.
They claim that this doesn't require a windows install to work. Therefore, they're claiming that this is not only a working Windows runtime environment, but that they've got a 100% working and compatible (even unpublished and buggy behavior that , for example, old versions of Office rely on) implementation of the Win32 API available. This I do not believe, and that claim alone makes me think they're full of crap.
As a side note, I don't have any trouble with explorer dying even after weeks of uptime, you might look at any third party shell extensions you're using as the culprit.
You're totally correct. Thats why this is a tax on VOIP systems like Vonage that interact with POTS, and they would be taxed at the point where the interact with the normal telephone system.
There's a delicate balance between rewarding innovation and stifling it. I believe that in recent years, advancement in research and especially the broadning of IP law have largely tipped that balance too far. The key issue with patents is process patents - once you let patents be granted on abstract concepts, you opened the door for all kinds of crap, including submarine patants like these. Basically, every new industry now has to deal with loads of patents filed, without an actual invention, by scumbags trying to cash in. You don't have to have an actual working invention anymore and I think that really undermines the entire concept of patents. The Eolas patent is a great example, because all it describes is a concept, there's none of the actual implementation details that would make it usefull to the public domain once it expired. I don't have ready access to numbers, but the percentage of these types of patentes being granted is growing enormously.
Have a baby. You'll leave work each day with a song in your heart, knowing that there will be a minimum of bodily fluids to contend with.
No. You can choose your sexual activities, but not your preference. You can also be acclimated through abuse, but once that happens you aren't really talking about "preference" anymore.
Think about if right to privacy trumped free speech in ALL cases - there wouldn't be _any_ leaked memos. I think that, in this case, a newspaper might very well win the case, but it's not a forgone conclusion, nor should it be.
Illegally obtained information is not specially protected - this is a long standing principle. For example, the Pentagon Papers, which were obtained illegally. The main difference here is that it's a private entity and not the government which is involved, and that does make me nervous.
I agree with the social contract aspect, but you're way off base with it being actionable to report flaws, at least in the US. The "precedents" you're talking about are where theres an existing contract, like an NDA in place. You could _possibly_ be liable if you caused a panic and the exploit wasn't real. You ARE, of course, susceptible to scare tactics like DMCA and libel suits, where there's no real case but they want to pressure you to shut up.
This is actually a relatively recent thing. VB was a huge step in this direction, and the main reason "RAD" is so fast on windows is not because Windows is better, but because there's so much more software on Windows - if you're a VB shop you can spend a few grand on components and have everything you need to cut & paste together your applications. I'd say this is a plus for Windows but it hardly started that way. Win 3.1 programming was a black art and it certainly wasn't easier than a Mac.
Maybe in his normal work day he's an international photography consultant and he meets all sorts of exotic people all the time and his idea of a good prize is the chance to just chill out with a beer and play some GTA?
There's actually one much harder condition for voting machines, and thats anonyimity. It's much harder to make a secured system when you can't (and in fact don't want to) trace transactions to users.
If you think of a union as a little mini-company that provides workers to other companies (which is more or less what they are), then what does that do to your bitchy world view? Unions aren't magical faeries. They only have power because workers join them and respect the strikes. Market forces aren't only for employers, you know.
We've got the same crap at my job. I'm about 80% sure that the reason is that the crappy contractors who set up our payroll system (which only tracks hours, and has no provision for non-hourly people) and the stupid managment who decided everyone had to use it, and stupid financial policies about charging time are the reason, rather than any sort of actual evilness. Everyone I know just sticks down 40 hours of time no matter how much or little time they work anyway.
A union is a usefull tool for any worker where the employer is in a power position. That's true for just about anyone except the very cream of the crop in a field - if you can't easily walk away from your job, change geopraphic location, and/or speedily get another job, then your employer has more power than you in any negotiation. I think theres alot of people who like to think they're in that cream spot but when you get to brass tacks, by definition, only a few people can be. Too many IT people are still spoiled by demand during the boom and think that only stupid or unskilled people might need or want organized representation.
As a worker in a heavily unionized industry (rail transportation), I'd say that the biggest problem with unions is the petty beuraucracy and jealous territory grabbing that grows out of them. I understand the idea behind them and I think it's important, but as time goes on they get just as bad as the corporate policies involved.
Actually, the median American income is about 27k. 21k a year is not rich by any standard, although in many places it's at least not poor.
On Windows, at least, threading is far more performant - you _must_ thread for very fast IO, network or disk. Now that linux has a non-crap thread library, that may end up being true there also. The most reliable and performant databases in the world are threaded - thats a logical argument in favor of threading.
Sadly, this is totally untrue, in both my professional and private experience. I've see a LOT of money wasted on Oracle solutions when SQL Server would have been fine. Or Postgre, or even MySQL. In fact, using insanely expensive "enterprise" applications when they don't need to is a major waste of money in my experience, but you've got the buzzwords to "justify" the cost.
That said, I think Access is basically never the correct choice for an application. It's just barely tolerable as something that suits use to slap stuff together, but as one of the guys who gets to re-work all that slapped together crap into real applications, I'm leery of even allowing that.
The most common application level use of Access is as a datastore for VB apps. This is a crummy use of Access because it's slow and feature-poor and ugly. SQLite is a much better choice in this case. MySQL is often used in the OSS world for this purpose, and it's a crummy choice because it's server based and not file based and adds alot of complexity to installing/configuring the application.
MySQL is excellent for low-end shared data apps, however. Anywhere you need concurrency, Access is out.
Note that I'm talking about Access as a database, not Access as an application - Access as an application is still totally crap, but there's no viable alternatives so I have to put up with that.
MS "new" compiler compiles fast, optimizes well for both size and speed, and is very standards compliant.
BCC compiles very fast, optimizes well for size and speed, and is poorly standards compliant.
OpenWatcom is similiar to BCC
GCC (in the form of MingW) compiles slowly, optimizes well for speed but (very) poorly for size, and is very standards compliant.
Of the free beer options, on Windows, MS C++ 7.1 is the all-round winner imo. GCC/MingW is a very close second, however, with the main issues being much slower compile time (partially correctable via things like ccache, and the new pch support should help) and signifigantly larger binaries. In terms of standards compliance they're about equal, with GCC taking a slight lead.
They're totally different things - Access is a file-based system, MySQL is server based. Use SQLite where you'd use an access back end. In fact, SQLite would be an acceptable back-end replacement for a whole lot of the MySQL based projects out there.
My starting salary at a (non-union) govt. job with great benefits in NYC was about 45k (little over $20 an hour). It was hard to live on that much but with 2 incomes it was doable.
From what I recall of the original case, sex.com was bringing in a million dollars a year in advertising revenue (banners), at least at the height of the boom.