They already offer GNU/Linux preloads on select models but all of the vendors could do more. It would be nice if they offered a GNU/Linux certified option that gave you peace of mind and let you avoid the M$ tax on every model that had 100% free driver support. Imagine that. It also gets around the age old excuse of extra costs to the vendor. Models sold that way require nothing more than certification and would probably sell better than Vista. I hate giving people money for software I have no use for, M$, XP and Vista fall into this catagory.
That previous venting is why IE only sites are an endangered species and IE browser share is falling. M$ can't win for losing and Vista brings the OS tipping point very close. What do they have to offer besides a hard time buying any other OS? Hardware does not work with Vista, the interface is unfamiliar and painful, Vista is slow, buggy and does less than previous Windoze while both Mac and GNU/Linux run circles around it. M$'s needs a developer and support community more than the community needs them.
It's nice they want to give people money but why are they worried about the long term success of free software? GNU was started in 1983 and free software has been around as long as there was software. How much longer term can you get than that? Companies have come and gone in the mean time. Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software. They can make it do what they need and it costs nothing to share.
The point isn't that iPods and other players don't have the power to decode Oggs (hell, they all do video, which is in a whole 'nother league), but more processing power sucks up more juice, and that's pretty crucial for portable devices. And we're talking about QUITE A BIT more battery power... like a 25% loss in consumption.
Well no, that is exactly what the tubesteak said and what Rockbox disproves.
As far as power consumption goes, I think you are getting confused with another format (WMA 12%) (WMA with DRM 25%). My nano sized Trekstore easily gets more than 8 hours of play off it's tiny lithium battery.
Ugh, that trollish imposter again. It's nice of you to link to the rest of my comments here, because I say something a little different in all of them, but I'm amazed by the following:
Since that never actually came to pass, your theory that "M$" is somehow responsible for the lack of Ogg support in media players (as opposed to, say, the sheer inertia of MP3) is somehow hard to believe.
No reasonable person could conclude that. M$ was caught in a single jurisdiction but NOTHING happened to them and they got away with it. They did not even get caught elsewhere and all the music players were made by the same companies with the same outrageous licensing terms from M$. I've already dealt with FUD about technical issues and costs in other threads. I'm sure you have read them already and have to thank you for pointing people to them. It saves me further effort dealing with your bullshit.
You can say all of that about any embedded device, but free software is winning the day anyway. Licensing fees, SDKs and the intentional waste created by non free software add up when you sell by the million and have to rewrite all of your software for each new piece of hardware. Do you really think there's room for licensing fees on a device that retails for $27? Free formats will dominate eventually if for no other reason that the expiration of mp3 patents. A free market will move to ogg sooner than that. The only thing more expensive than freedom is slavery.
So I get the desire for Ogg, but to get to a market where format is not an issue, the music companies have to mandate MP3.
It costs nothing to add ogg decoders to hardware. Unlike mp3, ogg is patent, license and royalty free. My PDA does ogg and so does my better portable player. It's just software and this is not a technical problem, it's a monopoly problem.
We are all still paying the price for M$'s blatant and court proved attack on ogg. When portable music makers were starting to use ogg because it's better and free in every way, M$ put forth their best threats and incentives. Because they dumped the old restrictions system to push Zune, both makers and vendors can see what the incentive was worth. MP3 gets around M$ problems like that. In the mean time, there are hardly any players on the market that work with ogg and you won't find them at Walmart or any of the other big box stores. This too will change.
Software Freedom is never mentioned. Instead the authors depressingly assume a complete triumph of ISPs and software owners. No wonder their outlook for "security" is so bleak. Real security comes from freedom. Every step away from freedom hands someone else a tool to hurt you. Their future is too bad to let happen and it won't because it will be too expensive.
M$ conceals their problems and lies about it. So says former M$ employees and the result has been covered here many times. Who cares how many rooms they have set aside to formulate their lie? The result is consistent.
they are not even coming close to telling you the truth!
The truth is more like, "the entertainment industry, AOL, M$ and other have all threatened retaliation if we do not do as they say and eliminate this growing alternate content distribution system." They would rather you conclusde that blocking P2P with rst packets will somehow make things faster for you and other customers. They also hope you don't know about upload speed caps they already have in place that are already supposed to eliminate bandwith hogging. Money wasted on these measures could have solved bandwith problems directly by building better networks. In a few years time, the networks and the equipment bought to cripple it will be hoplessly obsolete and the US will have fallen out of the top 20 nations in networking access and speed.
Besides, what's so special even if they'd do this? It's the norm to not encrypt mails. It's the norm to not encrypt instant messages on servers on services that provide offline messaging (Messenger, ICQ,...). Software may send usage information to some company's servers. Game companies analyze your system to detect cheats, and could in the process find a lot of other things on it.
There's a problem with the way things have been done, that's why we are having this discussion. Yes, there's a large component of FUDGoogle to this and that's silly because Google has been one of the least invasive and coercive companies. Using Google to store files you encrypt is a nice way to use a public resource for private sharing. The other options are things like M$'s Live Desktop Rape Service and the calender/address/note system offered by the likes of ATT.
Email and other communications should be encrypted. Business, political opposition and personal dignity all depend on privacy. There's nothing special about any of this.
The problems of OS9 do not make Vista a modern or capable OS that has reached the 1993 design goals / marketing hype of NT. They still don't have adequate memory and process management, proper user separation, or a good network stack. This is mostly because they waste so much effort making things difficult for others to work with and the impossible task of digital restrictions. Sooner than later, M$ will be forced to use fresh BSD and or GNU/Linux code the way Apple did when they ate Next to make OSX. People expect more from an OS than M$ can deliver.
I'm just one guy - and come to think of it - so is this guy.
This guy also works for PC Magazine, which gets most of it's revenue from Redmond.
Before the author calls anything "Vista" he should have waited about a year and collected lots of opinions. At least he admits that XP was a turd too, but his selective memory is working against him.
XP Pro pre-SP1 crashed all the time, and Microsoft owned up to itmostly. XP Pro post-SP2 crashed once in a while, and we sighed and kept working while Microsoft looked embarrassed and yelled at someone to work faster on SP3. From the start, Vista crashed noticeably less than XP Pro with SP2.
The Microsoft he's talking about is not the M$ of my memory. M$ hyped XP's stability before it was even released with nonsens about how wonderful it was going to be for using an NT kernel. His rosy view of Vista is equally amusing, given the chorus of people who say that it's anything but stable.
The only consistent picture that emerges from all of this is that no version of Windoze is ever stable, compatible or works well. No version of Windoze has ever run as well as any of it's competitors.
If he really wants to make a comparison that's meaningful, he can can sat that Vista is like MacOS 9 because M$ always follows Apple's lead. M$ will have to make use of free software soon or they won't be around much longer. It's easy to see that Vista is both a technical and market failure. They can't keep pushing the same old mess.
One of the guys who works at JPL is currently 'confined' for child rape. His third offense, I believe.
The first two of these violent convictions should be easy to point to and would have resulted in dismissal. No one needs your permission to look up a criminal record because many of your rights end on conviction.
It's obviously new and forced. They want current employees to sign. That's changing the game on a captive work group and is second cousin to contract violations.
Then again, this is an abusive administration that lost it's mind long ago. Is ripping down posters from the gift shop at gunpoint crazy enough for you? How about tyring to deny the big bang and global warming? Yes, that's crazy political censorship of scientists. The investigative powers demanded here go hand in hand with that. When scientists say things that go against the immediate financial interests of the administration or it's corporate allies, public smear will be part of the punishment. There is no place for this kind of screening outside of classified work and even there a credit history and interview of a few friends is about as good as you can do.
Are you so afraid of "terrorists" that you forgot about free speech and due process?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'd like you to tell me any constitutionally valid outcome of this study. Monitoring and list making violate your right to due process in the same way current "terror" watch lists do. They create a new class of criminal that can be stripped of rights without trail.
The models for action are not comforting:
Certain governments, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have significant experience with homegrown terrorism and the United States can benefit from lessons learned by those nations.
There is nothing here but cowardice and malice. I am ashamed of my government and hope this silly invitation to run away domestic spying and precrime insanity is defeated. Crimes are impossible to predict and should be investigated after they are committed. Anything else is an oppressive waste of resources.
The planned budget is on the order of one billion dollars if we can believe the $1/citizen x 4 years on the bill's page. The loss of liberty these idiots are championing will be much more expensive.
They are not trying to preserve copyright, they are trying to make it into something unAmerican that violates the US Constitution. In other words, their actions have destroyed copyright regardless of success or failure. They have used several techniques to make their exclusive franchise eternal, have redefined the meaning of the franchise from protection against commercial publication to nonsensical "making available" and "unauthorized copy," and worst of all have made a civil mater into a criminal one with unusual punishment. To do this they have trampled free speech, due process, the fourth amendment and have technically sabotaged legitimate competitors. That's not copyright, it's information and market control straight out of the former Soviet Union.
It will be good to get back real copyright law and put it in balance with the way information really flows. The goals of copyright law is encouragement of the public domain and to advance the state of the art. People should not lose their house for sharing a few songs, books, movies and other material with their friends. Businesses that can't compete in freedom don't deserve to exist.
Luckily, its informational value doesn't depend on whether or not it makes you with your theistic system of morality sick. I believe the question it was addressing was whether radiation is as dangerous as it was thought to be.
There is no informational value to the article. Current models have little to fear from the data mentioned because they already incorporate it or it's bogus. Hiroshima and Nagasaki data have been poured over and form the basis of acute exposure models. Official records from Stalin's USSR are no more reliable than Tass/Pravda. There are a few quibbles about the effects of lower doses, but none in the territory questioned by the article. Radiation effects are some of the best studdied and documented kinds of injury you can find.
My moral outrage needs no God. You can not justify the contamination, pollution and suffering caused by Soviet bomb making methods on any grounds. The result is an economic and humanitarian dissaster. The cause was negligence, incompetence and malice of the type found in totalitarian societies. Soviet power production decisions were not much better. Water cooled, graphite moderated reactors were an accident waiting to happen. The complete lack of containment is unforgivable. The cost of a single accident in economic terms outweighed any savings these designs gave. The cost in human suffering is something that drove some of those responsible to madness and suicide. Everyone wishes things had been done some other way. The article's disregard for suffering is as bad as the research that went into it.
The whole tone of the article can be summed up here:
About 4,000 children were afflicted with cancer. Less well-known, however, is the fact that only nine of those 4,000 died -- thyroid cancers are often easy to operate on.
See there, not so bad! "Only" nine people died. The 3991 others did not mind having their thyroid glands removed at all. All is well that ends in useless pain and suffering.
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They already offer GNU/Linux preloads on select models but all of the vendors could do more. It would be nice if they offered a GNU/Linux certified option that gave you peace of mind and let you avoid the M$ tax on every model that had 100% free driver support. Imagine that. It also gets around the age old excuse of extra costs to the vendor. Models sold that way require nothing more than certification and would probably sell better than Vista. I hate giving people money for software I have no use for, M$, XP and Vista fall into this catagory.
That previous venting is why IE only sites are an endangered species and IE browser share is falling. M$ can't win for losing and Vista brings the OS tipping point very close. What do they have to offer besides a hard time buying any other OS? Hardware does not work with Vista, the interface is unfamiliar and painful, Vista is slow, buggy and does less than previous Windoze while both Mac and GNU/Linux run circles around it. M$'s needs a developer and support community more than the community needs them.
It's nice they want to give people money but why are they worried about the long term success of free software? GNU was started in 1983 and free software has been around as long as there was software. How much longer term can you get than that? Companies have come and gone in the mean time. Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software. They can make it do what they need and it costs nothing to share.
The point isn't that iPods and other players don't have the power to decode Oggs (hell, they all do video, which is in a whole 'nother league), but more processing power sucks up more juice, and that's pretty crucial for portable devices. And we're talking about QUITE A BIT more battery power... like a 25% loss in consumption.
Well no, that is exactly what the tubesteak said and what Rockbox disproves.
As far as power consumption goes, I think you are getting confused with another format (WMA 12%) (WMA with DRM 25%). My nano sized Trekstore easily gets more than 8 hours of play off it's tiny lithium battery.
Ugh, that trollish imposter again. It's nice of you to link to the rest of my comments here, because I say something a little different in all of them, but I'm amazed by the following:
No reasonable person could conclude that. M$ was caught in a single jurisdiction but NOTHING happened to them and they got away with it. They did not even get caught elsewhere and all the music players were made by the same companies with the same outrageous licensing terms from M$. I've already dealt with FUD about technical issues and costs in other threads. I'm sure you have read them already and have to thank you for pointing people to them. It saves me further effort dealing with your bullshit.
You can say all of that about any embedded device, but free software is winning the day anyway. Licensing fees, SDKs and the intentional waste created by non free software add up when you sell by the million and have to rewrite all of your software for each new piece of hardware. Do you really think there's room for licensing fees on a device that retails for $27? Free formats will dominate eventually if for no other reason that the expiration of mp3 patents. A free market will move to ogg sooner than that. The only thing more expensive than freedom is slavery.
IIRC, it takes more CPU power to decode OGG files than to decode MP3s.
My PDA does it, my tiny Trekstore does it, and so can your iPod. This is NOT a technical issue.
A Court proved anti-trust violation is the primary reason you can't find cheap multiformat players, specifically players that work with ogg.
So I get the desire for Ogg, but to get to a market where format is not an issue, the music companies have to mandate MP3.
It costs nothing to add ogg decoders to hardware. Unlike mp3, ogg is patent, license and royalty free. My PDA does ogg and so does my better portable player. It's just software and this is not a technical problem, it's a monopoly problem.
We are all still paying the price for M$'s blatant and court proved attack on ogg. When portable music makers were starting to use ogg because it's better and free in every way, M$ put forth their best threats and incentives. Because they dumped the old restrictions system to push Zune, both makers and vendors can see what the incentive was worth. MP3 gets around M$ problems like that. In the mean time, there are hardly any players on the market that work with ogg and you won't find them at Walmart or any of the other big box stores. This too will change.
Software Freedom is never mentioned. Instead the authors depressingly assume a complete triumph of ISPs and software owners. No wonder their outlook for "security" is so bleak. Real security comes from freedom. Every step away from freedom hands someone else a tool to hurt you. Their future is too bad to let happen and it won't because it will be too expensive.
M$ conceals their problems and lies about it. So says former M$ employees and the result has been covered here many times. Who cares how many rooms they have set aside to formulate their lie? The result is consistent.
The front page still has a former M$ employee talking about bugs being denied and going unfixed for months and years. The spin room is a lie room. It's not surprising they hate GNU/Linux, free software and anything else that allows users to talk to each other openly.
they are not even coming close to telling you the truth!
The truth is more like, "the entertainment industry, AOL, M$ and other have all threatened retaliation if we do not do as they say and eliminate this growing alternate content distribution system." They would rather you conclusde that blocking P2P with rst packets will somehow make things faster for you and other customers. They also hope you don't know about upload speed caps they already have in place that are already supposed to eliminate bandwith hogging. Money wasted on these measures could have solved bandwith problems directly by building better networks. In a few years time, the networks and the equipment bought to cripple it will be hoplessly obsolete and the US will have fallen out of the top 20 nations in networking access and speed.
There's a problem with the way things have been done, that's why we are having this discussion. Yes, there's a large component of FUDGoogle to this and that's silly because Google has been one of the least invasive and coercive companies. Using Google to store files you encrypt is a nice way to use a public resource for private sharing. The other options are things like M$'s Live Desktop Rape Service and the calender/address/note system offered by the likes of ATT.
Email and other communications should be encrypted. Business, political opposition and personal dignity all depend on privacy. There's nothing special about any of this.
The problems of OS9 do not make Vista a modern or capable OS that has reached the 1993 design goals / marketing hype of NT. They still don't have adequate memory and process management, proper user separation, or a good network stack. This is mostly because they waste so much effort making things difficult for others to work with and the impossible task of digital restrictions. Sooner than later, M$ will be forced to use fresh BSD and or GNU/Linux code the way Apple did when they ate Next to make OSX. People expect more from an OS than M$ can deliver.
I'm just one guy - and come to think of it - so is this guy.
This guy also works for PC Magazine, which gets most of it's revenue from Redmond.
Before the author calls anything "Vista" he should have waited about a year and collected lots of opinions. At least he admits that XP was a turd too, but his selective memory is working against him.
The Microsoft he's talking about is not the M$ of my memory. M$ hyped XP's stability before it was even released with nonsens about how wonderful it was going to be for using an NT kernel. His rosy view of Vista is equally amusing, given the chorus of people who say that it's anything but stable.
The only consistent picture that emerges from all of this is that no version of Windoze is ever stable, compatible or works well. No version of Windoze has ever run as well as any of it's competitors.
If he really wants to make a comparison that's meaningful, he can can sat that Vista is like MacOS 9 because M$ always follows Apple's lead. M$ will have to make use of free software soon or they won't be around much longer. It's easy to see that Vista is both a technical and market failure. They can't keep pushing the same old mess.
One of the guys who works at JPL is currently 'confined' for child rape. His third offense, I believe.
The first two of these violent convictions should be easy to point to and would have resulted in dismissal. No one needs your permission to look up a criminal record because many of your rights end on conviction.
It's obviously new and forced. They want current employees to sign. That's changing the game on a captive work group and is second cousin to contract violations.
Then again, this is an abusive administration that lost it's mind long ago. Is ripping down posters from the gift shop at gunpoint crazy enough for you? How about tyring to deny the big bang and global warming? Yes, that's crazy political censorship of scientists. The investigative powers demanded here go hand in hand with that. When scientists say things that go against the immediate financial interests of the administration or it's corporate allies, public smear will be part of the punishment. There is no place for this kind of screening outside of classified work and even there a credit history and interview of a few friends is about as good as you can do.
+1 Funny, not informative. RTFA that is linked. It's satire.
There's more truth in that satire than I've seen in any newspaper.
Are you so afraid of "terrorists" that you forgot about free speech and due process?
I'd like you to tell me any constitutionally valid outcome of this study. Monitoring and list making violate your right to due process in the same way current "terror" watch lists do. They create a new class of criminal that can be stripped of rights without trail.
The models for action are not comforting:
There is nothing here but cowardice and malice. I am ashamed of my government and hope this silly invitation to run away domestic spying and precrime insanity is defeated. Crimes are impossible to predict and should be investigated after they are committed. Anything else is an oppressive waste of resources.
The planned budget is on the order of one billion dollars if we can believe the $1/citizen x 4 years on the bill's page. The loss of liberty these idiots are championing will be much more expensive.
They are not trying to preserve copyright, they are trying to make it into something unAmerican that violates the US Constitution. In other words, their actions have destroyed copyright regardless of success or failure. They have used several techniques to make their exclusive franchise eternal, have redefined the meaning of the franchise from protection against commercial publication to nonsensical "making available" and "unauthorized copy," and worst of all have made a civil mater into a criminal one with unusual punishment. To do this they have trampled free speech, due process, the fourth amendment and have technically sabotaged legitimate competitors. That's not copyright, it's information and market control straight out of the former Soviet Union.
It will be good to get back real copyright law and put it in balance with the way information really flows. The goals of copyright law is encouragement of the public domain and to advance the state of the art. People should not lose their house for sharing a few songs, books, movies and other material with their friends. Businesses that can't compete in freedom don't deserve to exist.
Luckily, its informational value doesn't depend on whether or not it makes you with your theistic system of morality sick. I believe the question it was addressing was whether radiation is as dangerous as it was thought to be.
There is no informational value to the article. Current models have little to fear from the data mentioned because they already incorporate it or it's bogus. Hiroshima and Nagasaki data have been poured over and form the basis of acute exposure models. Official records from Stalin's USSR are no more reliable than Tass/Pravda. There are a few quibbles about the effects of lower doses, but none in the territory questioned by the article. Radiation effects are some of the best studdied and documented kinds of injury you can find.
My moral outrage needs no God. You can not justify the contamination, pollution and suffering caused by Soviet bomb making methods on any grounds. The result is an economic and humanitarian dissaster. The cause was negligence, incompetence and malice of the type found in totalitarian societies. Soviet power production decisions were not much better. Water cooled, graphite moderated reactors were an accident waiting to happen. The complete lack of containment is unforgivable. The cost of a single accident in economic terms outweighed any savings these designs gave. The cost in human suffering is something that drove some of those responsible to madness and suicide. Everyone wishes things had been done some other way. The article's disregard for suffering is as bad as the research that went into it.
How about:
radiation protects you.
YOU shield the reactor.
radiation shields you.
you contaminate plutonium.
And so on and so forth in the callous manner of the article. It's not funny.
The whole tone of the article can be summed up here:
See there, not so bad! "Only" nine people died. The 3991 others did not mind having their thyroid glands removed at all. All is well that ends in useless pain and suffering.
This article makes me sick.