The number one reason Vista is Sinking Like a Stone, is "DRM problems and lack of anything even remotely demonstrating an understanding of how users want to use digital media." If DVD makers tighten up, people are going to route around them the same way they are routing around the RIAA member companies. They will flock to independent film makers and the big dumb publishers will watch their earnings collapse at 20% per year. Their greed goes beyond the already insane limits of copyright and that kind of thing is simply not fun.
Now, does this mean that Vista driver programmers are simply going to give up, Vista will collapse, and we'll all switch to another OS? Of course not; these companies *will* manage to overcome the overly complex development environment, and will create working drivers. In Time.
The page being linked to has so much advertising-related dreck that it uses 8-12% of the CPU just sitting there.
Not bad for IE, are you using that on top of Vista or XP?
Kidding aside, the page is nasty but not so bad as the average MSNBC or CNN monster. For my dinky 1GHz PIII, Konqueror sports between 0.3 and 20% CPU with that and about 50 other pages open. Closing that one page puts it to less than 2%. Neither case has any effect on overall speed and responsiveness of my system. I use it a lot to look at my thesis work, which is why I have so many browser windows and tabs open. The average MSNBC page will actually stall my browser, peg CPU use and mess with my window manager. The article was worth looking at and now it is gone, which is not something I can say for the average MSNBC page.
I very much doubt you can claim that Windows is losing somehow when the market share of Apple and Linux is utterly dwarfed by that of Windows, even if Windows' is slowly shrinking.
They have lost the share that matters and it's all downhill from there. They are not competitive. Their shiny new Vista is not selling and that is hurting their former partners. Their collapse is not far away.
I think Microsoft's fatal flaw is summed up in this quote, "Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck."
What's really funny is that he then goes on to suggest that M$ can save itself by purchasing a collection of Web2 companies - exactly how M$ built itself in the first place. They can't buy themselves dominance on a standards based web and that is why they are history and increasingly turning to patents and legal absurdities they once derided.
A beautiful turn of phrase, but he's forgetting how much barbed wire Microsoft has laid. Not just Outlook and IE and Word and Excel and Powerpoint, but the way IE renders HTML, and the.DOC format, and billions of lines of Excel macros, and hundreds of millions of vapid PowerPoint presentations.
Ah, but these are self extinguishing. M$ must constantly break their own "standards" to thwart their competitors. As each layer is absorbed, M$ must push out a new incompatible "standard" which breaks older ones. The user notices and uses less voletile formats like pdf for "things that matter" and eventually M$ ends up being used only where it does not matter.
The Geek lives in a bubble. Bubbles burst. [cites popularity studies in favor of Bill Gates]
A company that spends billions of dollars a year in marketing and lives on public perception is always in a precarious position. The disfavor of "geeks" is fatal to them. It's amazing that you would try to turn this on it's head.
People who matter to the future of computing live and die on facts. Bubbles are built on emotions. All the marketing in the world falls on it's face when the user's computer gets creamed by the virus of the month and the user's opinion of Bill Gates does not matter at all. The shift has happened and it's all over.
All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
Slap, how truth stings. It's been over for a while, but people don't realize it because M$ spends about a billion dollars a month telling the world they are number one. Even grandmas are seeing through it.
If you think US roads are poorly designed, please come to Japan and spend some time driving. These people in the article must spend all their time on farm roads during off hours.
I spent a summer in Tokyo and thought the roads were well built for my purposes. I got everywhere I needed to go by bike and public transport. Grids work, even when they are intentionally convoluted as they are in Tokyo and Washington DC. If you live close to your work and play, you are always better off. I understand there are people who spend hours on trains everyday and that is sad, but they would never get where they are going by car. It would be better for them if their company had places for them to work that were closer to where they lived.
If low density development is encouraged, mass transit and bicycles become impractical,
Tokyo, which is low density because of earthquake danger, is a good counterpoint to that. Paris is also a place that has intentionally lower density but excellent public transport.
It works when you have mixed development and a decent street grid. The kind of development that does not work is the large unmixed kind, where square miles are carved out for houses or business or shopping and then connected with two or three roads that everyone must drive. A low density grid system is much better than that. Everything is close because you have not banished grocers and other business from your neighborhood. Everyone takes a different road to get where they need to go because they can and they are not all going to the same place. Less transport is needed because things are made close to where people are.
How exactly does sprawl help protect against nuclear terrorism?
The type of development I'm talking about creates redundancy and spreads the target out. Fires don't spread, people can evacuate to avoid fall out and fewer people are obliterated and exposed to begin with. A tool that's not effective is less likely to be used.
Pulse and Glide Says it All, Average Speed 26 MPH.
on
Japanese Mileage Maniacs
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Oh, it's real. FTFA:
Toya accelerates, or pulses, to 29 mph, then glides down to 25 mph before pulsing again. The car uses no fuel when gliding.
This style of driving is as real as being able to drive 26 MPH to work. With stop and start traffic, which can slow you to an average of 4MPH despite bursts of 45, you can not do this. It is impossible in most US cities due to urban sprawl and poorly thought out streets.
It is possible in cities with decent ground streets like parts of Chicago and New Orleans. Where this is possible, you could also ride a bike or other human or solar powered vehicle and public transport also works. Finally, note that sprawl is still desirable as a protection against nuclear terrorism.
Low density, mixed business residential and leisure spaces built on grid street layouts should be encouraged.
Of course having a leech syphoning off the high-value residential customers does nothing but piss Verizon, AT&T and others off.
That's funny, as a "high-value residentail customer" I think of Verizon, AT&T and others as government dependent leeches. I'd love to see some real competition in infrastructure and I'm tired of government being the barrier to that. US infrastructure is no longer the world's best, despite great spending by people such as myself.
This will continue into the future as long as government auctions bandwith and telco access to the highest bidders without reciprocal obligations. Liberating bandwith and access or forcing co-operation could fix things. Sucking taxes from monopolies does not.
Remember when Ars Technica used to be 20 page articles about the details of new processor designs?
They still do that but those details don't mean a thing when bad laws get in the way of your using that processor the way you want. Bill that threaten the freedom of the internet are news worthy. You need to stand up and express your concern while you still can. QoS and similar programs are designed to lock you out of the digital future the way your parents were locked out of publishing in the analog past.
Wasting public education money in the interests of large publishing companies is disgraceful. The reason given, the supposed "theft" of "billions of dollars in intellectual property from hardworking people whose jobs hang in the balance," is disgustingly cynical when those same companies are busy offshoring as fast as they can and when the creators of that "property" are the very people victimized by the lockdown. Your culture is yours to share, not theirs to profitter.
>These days, using free software is easier and more productive than using non free.
Not if you want to play games, which you might recall was the subject of this thread.
Hmmm, you and Steve can go be "productive" with Xbox, yet another second rate thing. Don't tell him I said that, or he'll smash you with something heavy.
I'll dream about Playstation 3 and ID Games while I slave away on other things without time, money or inclination to shop. Tuxcart, PlanetPenguin, Quake2 and other toys do it for me for now.
I don't know what RMS plays other than world hero and global liberation but he's having more fun than the rest of us put together.
The point remains, the vast majority of users don't want Vista. When they find out they can only get a new computer with Vista, the likely result is to not buy a new computer. People who have waited six years can wait another.
People like Michael Dell, on the other hand, should be moving full steam ahead with gnu/linux if they want to keep selling computers.
If the machine is sitting still and doing nothing, it shouldn't matter if the OS uses 100% of available memory, maybe for pre-caching the next chunks of data it think you'll ask for... The issue is when you start to add application load to the machine -- does the OS release memory it's using for those "idle" tasks so that apps can use it, or is it greedy?
I'd rather my computer do what I told it to, than try to read my mind. Session management is about me telling the computer what I want to run and it works just fine in KDE, Gnome and others. Loading up a bunch of stuff I did not ask for is the surest way to run into disk thrashing when you want to do something. Modern systems have two to four gigs of RAM these days, enough to fit entire gnu/linux distributions in, there's no excuse to fill half of that memory with a window manager and a browser!
The average end-consumer simply doesn't have the time to learn enough computer science to eye-verify every line of code in every piece of software they run.... It's not a morality question. It's a risk-reward question.
None of us has the time to verify everything, but it's much easier in the free software world. Distributions like Debian do a lot of the work for you, but the same auditing community that exists for non free software also works on free software. People are constantly monitoring their network traffic for anything strange. You can be sure that the Wintel press would be the first to sound alarms if anything got by Debian or any other major gnu/linux distribution. You can also be sure that the distribution would not deny a real problem. As an end user, I know that each and every package I install has a hash that matches what the distribution says it should be. No comprehensive list like that exists in the non free world - all of their checks are about making sure you have paid them recently.
I can't bring myself to whole-kool-aid on the morality argument
Demanding respect is not suicide. Free software use is not so much a condemnation of non free software immorality as it is about demanding respect for yourself. The only way you can use non free software is if you don't care about the malicious things it's owners have and might do to you. These days, using free software is easier and more productive than using non free.
"there is no possible ethical way you could use [a game console]"
What's not funny is how the console may use you. The point of software freedom is to avoid malicious use by the software's owner of the type seen in cell phone tapping. If the software is not free, you can't know what the device is doing. Giving your money to people who abuse you is a bad idea. The viewpoint is extreme, but consistent and sensible.
Now, something that is funny is Steve-o's iPod and Google "brainwash". The only reason he does not like either is because they represent another company's product. His language is just as disrespectful as his company and the picture drawn is simple bully.
Slashdot Mirror
The number one reason Vista is Sinking Like a Stone, is "DRM problems and lack of anything even remotely demonstrating an understanding of how users want to use digital media." If DVD makers tighten up, people are going to route around them the same way they are routing around the RIAA member companies. They will flock to independent film makers and the big dumb publishers will watch their earnings collapse at 20% per year. Their greed goes beyond the already insane limits of copyright and that kind of thing is simply not fun.
and other digital restrictions only available with Vista. On second thought, I'll pass.
It's not Konqueror or IE. It's the flash plugin.
I don't have flash, so it's the web site.
saddening to see such a massive amount of resources and time and energy spent on those issues, rather than everything else that should be done.
Yes, it's sad. That's why I quit giving AOL my money.
The facts laid out by the Gaim developers were:
What a bunch of assholes, but I suppose that's what runs Time Warner. "Ass on Line" sounds like a good name for them.
Lessons learned:
Now, does this mean that Vista driver programmers are simply going to give up, Vista will collapse, and we'll all switch to another OS? Of course not; these companies *will* manage to overcome the overly complex development environment, and will create working drivers. In Time.
Why would anyone waste time on an OS only one in ten people want? Especially when it's expensive and owned by a company that considers them pawns to be lied to and fucked over? It's not in their best interst now and may never be.
The page being linked to has so much advertising-related dreck that it uses 8-12% of the CPU just sitting there.
Not bad for IE, are you using that on top of Vista or XP?
Kidding aside, the page is nasty but not so bad as the average MSNBC or CNN monster. For my dinky 1GHz PIII, Konqueror sports between 0.3 and 20% CPU with that and about 50 other pages open. Closing that one page puts it to less than 2%. Neither case has any effect on overall speed and responsiveness of my system. I use it a lot to look at my thesis work, which is why I have so many browser windows and tabs open. The average MSNBC page will actually stall my browser, peg CPU use and mess with my window manager. The article was worth looking at and now it is gone, which is not something I can say for the average MSNBC page.
It means, "Your computer will need an exorcist." And that was before Vista.
outside of Slashdot, the people I've talked to have said they're very impressed with Vista and hope to get it soon.
Dude, only one in ten people have plans to get Vista. You are talking to an unusual group of people.
I very much doubt you can claim that Windows is losing somehow when the market share of Apple and Linux is utterly dwarfed by that of Windows, even if Windows' is slowly shrinking.
They have lost the share that matters and it's all downhill from there. They are not competitive. Their shiny new Vista is not selling and that is hurting their former partners. Their collapse is not far away.
I think Microsoft's fatal flaw is summed up in this quote, "Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck."
What's really funny is that he then goes on to suggest that M$ can save itself by purchasing a collection of Web2 companies - exactly how M$ built itself in the first place. They can't buy themselves dominance on a standards based web and that is why they are history and increasingly turning to patents and legal absurdities they once derided.
A beautiful turn of phrase, but he's forgetting how much barbed wire Microsoft has laid. Not just Outlook and IE and Word and Excel and Powerpoint, but the way IE renders HTML, and the .DOC format, and billions of lines of Excel macros, and hundreds of millions of vapid PowerPoint presentations.
Ah, but these are self extinguishing. M$ must constantly break their own "standards" to thwart their competitors. As each layer is absorbed, M$ must push out a new incompatible "standard" which breaks older ones. The user notices and uses less voletile formats like pdf for "things that matter" and eventually M$ ends up being used only where it does not matter.
The Geek lives in a bubble. Bubbles burst. [cites popularity studies in favor of Bill Gates]
A company that spends billions of dollars a year in marketing and lives on public perception is always in a precarious position. The disfavor of "geeks" is fatal to them. It's amazing that you would try to turn this on it's head.
People who matter to the future of computing live and die on facts. Bubbles are built on emotions. All the marketing in the world falls on it's face when the user's computer gets creamed by the virus of the month and the user's opinion of Bill Gates does not matter at all. The shift has happened and it's all over.
FTFA, and yes an instant classic:
All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
Slap, how truth stings. It's been over for a while, but people don't realize it because M$ spends about a billion dollars a month telling the world they are number one. Even grandmas are seeing through it.
That style of driving would work in Japan except for Metro Tokyo.
Yeah, there you need to get on the subway or ride a bike. I don't know about the rest of the place but apparently it happens.
If you think US roads are poorly designed, please come to Japan and spend some time driving. These people in the article must spend all their time on farm roads during off hours.
I spent a summer in Tokyo and thought the roads were well built for my purposes. I got everywhere I needed to go by bike and public transport. Grids work, even when they are intentionally convoluted as they are in Tokyo and Washington DC. If you live close to your work and play, you are always better off. I understand there are people who spend hours on trains everyday and that is sad, but they would never get where they are going by car. It would be better for them if their company had places for them to work that were closer to where they lived.
If low density development is encouraged, mass transit and bicycles become impractical,
Tokyo, which is low density because of earthquake danger, is a good counterpoint to that. Paris is also a place that has intentionally lower density but excellent public transport.
It works when you have mixed development and a decent street grid. The kind of development that does not work is the large unmixed kind, where square miles are carved out for houses or business or shopping and then connected with two or three roads that everyone must drive. A low density grid system is much better than that. Everything is close because you have not banished grocers and other business from your neighborhood. Everyone takes a different road to get where they need to go because they can and they are not all going to the same place. Less transport is needed because things are made close to where people are.
How exactly does sprawl help protect against nuclear terrorism?
The type of development I'm talking about creates redundancy and spreads the target out. Fires don't spread, people can evacuate to avoid fall out and fewer people are obliterated and exposed to begin with. A tool that's not effective is less likely to be used.
Oh, it's real. FTFA:
Toya accelerates, or pulses, to 29 mph, then glides down to 25 mph before pulsing again. The car uses no fuel when gliding.
This style of driving is as real as being able to drive 26 MPH to work. With stop and start traffic, which can slow you to an average of 4MPH despite bursts of 45, you can not do this. It is impossible in most US cities due to urban sprawl and poorly thought out streets.
It is possible in cities with decent ground streets like parts of Chicago and New Orleans. Where this is possible, you could also ride a bike or other human or solar powered vehicle and public transport also works. Finally, note that sprawl is still desirable as a protection against nuclear terrorism.
Low density, mixed business residential and leisure spaces built on grid street layouts should be encouraged.
Of course having a leech syphoning off the high-value residential customers does nothing but piss Verizon, AT&T and others off.
That's funny, as a "high-value residentail customer" I think of Verizon, AT&T and others as government dependent leeches. I'd love to see some real competition in infrastructure and I'm tired of government being the barrier to that. US infrastructure is no longer the world's best, despite great spending by people such as myself.
This will continue into the future as long as government auctions bandwith and telco access to the highest bidders without reciprocal obligations. Liberating bandwith and access or forcing co-operation could fix things. Sucking taxes from monopolies does not.
Remember when Ars Technica used to be 20 page articles about the details of new processor designs?
They still do that but those details don't mean a thing when bad laws get in the way of your using that processor the way you want. Bill that threaten the freedom of the internet are news worthy. You need to stand up and express your concern while you still can. QoS and similar programs are designed to lock you out of the digital future the way your parents were locked out of publishing in the analog past.
Wasting public education money in the interests of large publishing companies is disgraceful. The reason given, the supposed "theft" of "billions of dollars in intellectual property from hardworking people whose jobs hang in the balance," is disgustingly cynical when those same companies are busy offshoring as fast as they can and when the creators of that "property" are the very people victimized by the lockdown. Your culture is yours to share, not theirs to profitter.
Hmmm, you and Steve can go be "productive" with Xbox, yet another second rate thing. Don't tell him I said that, or he'll smash you with something heavy.
I'll dream about Playstation 3 and ID Games while I slave away on other things without time, money or inclination to shop. Tuxcart, PlanetPenguin, Quake2 and other toys do it for me for now.
I don't know what RMS plays other than world hero and global liberation but he's having more fun than the rest of us put together.
The point remains, the vast majority of users don't want Vista. When they find out they can only get a new computer with Vista, the likely result is to not buy a new computer. People who have waited six years can wait another.
People like Michael Dell, on the other hand, should be moving full steam ahead with gnu/linux if they want to keep selling computers.
poot_rootbeer attempts to justify bloat:
If the machine is sitting still and doing nothing, it shouldn't matter if the OS uses 100% of available memory, maybe for pre-caching the next chunks of data it think you'll ask for ... The issue is when you start to add application load to the machine -- does the OS release memory it's using for those "idle" tasks so that apps can use it, or is it greedy?
I'd rather my computer do what I told it to, than try to read my mind. Session management is about me telling the computer what I want to run and it works just fine in KDE, Gnome and others. Loading up a bunch of stuff I did not ask for is the surest way to run into disk thrashing when you want to do something. Modern systems have two to four gigs of RAM these days, enough to fit entire gnu/linux distributions in, there's no excuse to fill half of that memory with a window manager and a browser!
How's that karma whoring going twitter? Gotta make up all those troll mods, noes?
Out of mod points, loser?
The average end-consumer simply doesn't have the time to learn enough computer science to eye-verify every line of code in every piece of software they run. ... It's not a morality question. It's a risk-reward question.
None of us has the time to verify everything, but it's much easier in the free software world. Distributions like Debian do a lot of the work for you, but the same auditing community that exists for non free software also works on free software. People are constantly monitoring their network traffic for anything strange. You can be sure that the Wintel press would be the first to sound alarms if anything got by Debian or any other major gnu/linux distribution. You can also be sure that the distribution would not deny a real problem. As an end user, I know that each and every package I install has a hash that matches what the distribution says it should be. No comprehensive list like that exists in the non free world - all of their checks are about making sure you have paid them recently.
I can't bring myself to whole-kool-aid on the morality argument
Demanding respect is not suicide. Free software use is not so much a condemnation of non free software immorality as it is about demanding respect for yourself. The only way you can use non free software is if you don't care about the malicious things it's owners have and might do to you. These days, using free software is easier and more productive than using non free.
heinousjay thinks this is funny:
"there is no possible ethical way you could use [a game console]"
What's not funny is how the console may use you. The point of software freedom is to avoid malicious use by the software's owner of the type seen in cell phone tapping. If the software is not free, you can't know what the device is doing. Giving your money to people who abuse you is a bad idea. The viewpoint is extreme, but consistent and sensible.
Now, something that is funny is Steve-o's iPod and Google "brainwash". The only reason he does not like either is because they represent another company's product. His language is just as disrespectful as his company and the picture drawn is simple bully.
Surely there's a successful business model hiding in logic like that?