Now that's funny, because I recall reading just a few days ago that Microsoft is stating the highest ever profits (or is it revenues?) for its last quarter. And the MS games division announced it's profitable now as well after running for a loss for years.
Vista is a big stumble for MS, no doubt about it. But to say this is the beginning of the end? That's a stretch.
"Separate partition or physical volume" was referring to a different OS install on another disk.
No kidding, AC. I kinda figured that one out on my own. And how many people keep either spare drives or unallocated drive space laying around for this fanciful exercise you're suggesting?
I'll refer you to either of my other two replies to my original post. The idea is not very practical as a testing method for the reasons outlined within.
Before lashing out and telling someone that they don't know what they're talking about, you might do well to first check and make sure you know what you're talking about.
Oh for God's sake, I know what a goddamn partition is. I know you can make more than one of them. But you've only got one OS partition you can test this on! Get your your finger out of your ear long enough to think about the post before responding to it.
Yes, I know you can have multiple OS installations on multiple partitions. And how many people commonly have whole OS install partitions laying around for such testing? How many people have unallocated drive space to partition in the first place these days? Most people have their hard drive (or drives) fully allocated. If they have multiple drives laying around those get allocated, too. Data expands to fill all available space. If you get more space you find for stuff to put in that space. It's an immutable law of nature that people use the storage they have paid good money for, and typically that's not for keeping spare OS installs laying around.
Sure, you can shrink an existing partition, add a new one, install the OS, install all your OS patches/updates, install all your apps, install all your application patches and updates, and then test the final update you're concerned about...but exactly how many individual users do you really expect will go through this much trouble? It's a number suspiciously close to zero. Same goes for extra drives.
Further, consider that testing such an update might take a while; updates that appear stable for the first few minutes or hours may not remain that way over days or weeks of use. Updates that work fine under light "let's see if it works" testing loads may fail spectacularly when real, production-level loads are placed on the system. And keep in mind that unless you're running some sort of VM setup, you're either running your "production" OS partition or your "testing" OS partition, but not both at the same time. Therefore, testing means production must stop and vice versa.
There really is no practical substitute to having a separate test machine for stuff like this, and that's something individual users are ill-equipped to afford.
Oh for God's sake, I know what a goddamn partition is. I know you can make more than one of them. But you've only got one OS partition you can test this on! Get your your finger out of your ear long enough to think about the post before responding to it.
Now for the next item: yes, I know you can have multiple OS installations on multiple partitions. And how many people commonly have whole OS install partitions laying around for such testing? How many people have unallocated drive space to partition in the first place these days? Most people have their hard drive (or drives) fully allocated.
Sure, you can shrink an existing partition, add a new one, install the OS, install all your OS patches/updates, install all your apps, install all your application patches and updates, and then test the final update you're concerned about...but exactly how many individual users do you really expect will go through this much trouble? It's a number suspiciously close to zero.
Further, consider that testing such an update might take a while; updates that appear stable for the first few minutes or hours may not remain that way over days or weeks of use. Updates that work fine under light "let's see if it works" testing loads may fail spectacularly when real, production-level loads are placed on the system. And keep in mind that unless you're running some sort of VM setup, you're either running your "production" OS partition or your "testing" OS partition, but not both at the same time. Therefore, testing means production must stop and vice versa.
There really is no practical substitute to having a separate test machine for stuff like this, and that's something individual users are ill-equipped to afford.
I'm quite familiar with the speculation on "Aurora" and all the other names associated with this hypothetical craft. There's absolutely no hard evidence anywhere that it exists. Everything you can dig up is pure circumstantial evidence. I'll be the first to admit that if such a plane did exist, it would naturally be almost -- if not completely -- impossible to verify its existence due to classification. However, lack of verifiable information does not necessarily conclude there is a government cover-up of a hypersonic aircraft. It may exist, it may not.
Based upon the costs to develop and operate such a craft, not to mention the support infrastructure that would be required, I'm of the opinion it does not exist. Defense intelligence ops have centered around satellites for some time now, as has photo reconnaissance. It's cheaper and safer than sending in a manned aircraft. The few advantages available in a hypersonic recon platform such as the "Aurora" are hugely outweighed by the negatives.
Good point, maybe instead you could perform your software testing on a separate partition or physical volume, or something.
You apparently don't understand what's going on here. This is OSX, not Windows. OSX has Quicktime embedded into the operating system, whereas Windows has it as an optional third-party component. There is no "separate partition or physical volume" option available to you on a Mac; Quicktime is either updated across the entire OS (and, by proxy, all installed video editing apps which use Quicktime) or it's not. This is the crux of the complaint by users.
The lack of an easy roll-back option is similarly inexcusable. I'm sure Apple will patch this in short order, but it's a major annoyance until then.
Seriously, this was known about forty years ago and are called pogo oscillations. They are generally disastrous, and they were the cause of Apollo 13's fifth engine shut down after liftoff.
They're "generally disastrous" only in the sense that they'll destroy the craft if they aren't addressed. Apollo solved the problem by essentially adding a big bellows to the fuel supply feed, allowing the pressure pulses to be damped instead of allowing the fuel flow to resonate. The Space Shuttle main engines have similar dampers in place, and their design was based on data acquired during Apollo.
In general, I'm pretty non-plussed by NASA's moon landing attempts. Their design is basically Apollo rehashed plus forty years (fifty years if it actually launches - pretty depressing), the vast majority of it isn't reusable (I haven't got a clue how they can call it a shuttle replacement) and it really doesn't get us any further forwards in terms of making getting into space easier, safer and something that can be done on a regular basis.
Your observation shows a shocking lack of perspective. Just because the design has a capsule on top doesn't mean it's "Apollo...plus forty years." First off, given currently available technologies, a capsule design is the most efficient, most practical way to get people out of orbit. I'll remind you that the Shuttle, for all its supposed advantages, hasn't left LEO and can't leave LEO. It's too heavy. Reusability carries a very heavy penalty (no pun intended).
Speaking of reusability, you've again missed the mark. The capsule itself is designed to be reused a number of times. The ablative heat shield can't be reused like the shuttle tiles, but then again an ablative shield doesn't have the maintenance (and failure) issues of shuttle tiles, either. The solid booster first stage is, unless I'm mistaken, designed for re-use just like current Shuttle SRB's.
Also, don't forget that reusability hasn't proven to be the huge advantage NASA thought it would be back in the 60's when the Shuttle was on the drawing board. Tile inspection and replacement is extremely time consuming and expensive. The Shuttle engines, for all their fantastic performance, are maintenance nightmares. Until we have some radical breakthroughs in materials technology or propulsion, it's actually cheaper to use expendable stages than it is to reclaim, disassemble, inspect, repair, re-assemble, and re-certify a reusable spacecraft or propulsion system. If you doubt this, consider the cost per pound of Apollo launches versus the cost per pound of Shuttle launches; the Shuttle is far more expensive.
When compared with Apollo, the Shuttle actually comes off quite poorly. The Shuttle is far more expensive to fly. It can't launch with the same frequency as Apollo. It has no abort system for most of the launch profile. The abort modes available even after the SRB's detach are extremely hazardous. It can't leave LEO. It can't carry anywhere near as much payload as the Saturn V. Still think that "going back" to Apollo is a bad idea?
In fact, the Shuttle only exceeds the "forty year old" Apollo in two notable areas: it can carry seven astronauts instead of three, and it can return orbiting satellites to Earth. The former ability is useful but with a limited return; seven orbiting astronauts hasn't given us nearly as much of a return as three moon-bound ones did forty years ago. The latter ability -- returning satellites -- has rarely been used. The original idea (thanks, Air Force) was to snag Soviet satellites and return them for intelligence purposes. Beyond that, returning, repairing, and re-launching a satellite makes absolutely no economic sense. The Shuttle is a neat idea. It's been a wonderful test-bed for new concepts. But as a practical, useful, reliable, affordable space truck, it is an abject failure. The Shuttle has taught us what not to build.
It doesn't matter who's at the helm of world events, as long as you have control within your own borders. This is without a doubt the most short-sighted, naive comment I've yet seen. You're advocating complete isolationism, something that was popular back in the late 1930's. There was this belief that if you just keep to yourself, nobody will ever both you. It's a fallacy, a pipe dream. Millions of people died during WWII because all the people that could have stopped the war before it got started were too busy "controlling their own borders" and ignoring events outside them. You advocate that same belief, and such a myopic viewpoint merely encourages those outside your precious bubble to take advantage of the situation.
Why not? If you're worried about being invaded, sticking to yourself and staying extremely well-armed is the best defense.
You've never played many strategy wargames, have you? This whole concept is called "turtling," and not just in home gaming circles. Military wargames simulate this as well. Guess what happens?
You turtle, focusing on defense and internal resources only. In the meantime, your opposition now has unchecked sway over the rest of the globe outside your borders. You didn't expect them to pass up this golden opportunity now that you've "stepped out," did you? By flaunting their unilateral power, they can sway world events to their benefit, your detriment, or both. You sit comfortably ensconced behind your defenses and suddenly, one day, you find out you're vastly outnumbered, outgunned, out-resourced, and out-maneuvered.
Think it can't happen? It already has happened. Look up 19th century Japan, once a major power, overtaken militarily, economically, and politically by the West in 1852. Similar things happened in China and in countless other examples throughout history. The U.S. was stoically neutral for WWI and WWII until world events dragged us into a shooting war, and our dogmatic avoidance of getting involved "over there" made sure we were woefully under prepared when the battle call was sounded. Millions perished because Hitler (and, later, Japan) steered events instead of the Allies.
If, as a wise man once said, all the world is a stage, then the stage demands a leading actor. Someone will step up if we don't. Odds are they won't have our best interests in mind when they do, so it's better that we are that leading actor. Would you rather Kim Jong Il at the helm? Vladimir Putin? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
In other words, you download, you run the.cmd file...and then the process STARTS! \
So, I guess when I do a make && make install under Linux, I'm "jumping through hoops" in exactly the same manner, right? After all, I download an "installation script" for some program off the web, I "run" the file...and then the process starts! Also, I'll bring up that there's more than a few Linux programs these days that allow you to download and install short install script that does nothing more than download and install the full executable from some web-based distribution site. How in any way is this different than what's being described in the RC1 install docs?
Furthermore, your "apt-get dist-upgrade" is great, but it requires you to reboot in order to take advantage of certain things such as an upgraded kernel. Since SP1 modifies the Windows kernel, it's in the exact same class as a Linux kernel patch, and most (if not all) of those require restarting the OS in order to make the changes take effect. I'll also point out that you're running an updater/installer tool (apt-get) that is functionally identical to Windows Update, so you run the command...and then the process STARTS! That fizzling sound you hear is the air leaking out of your argument.
And since when is rebooting "jumping through a hoop"? If that's something you consider difficult, you're a pathetic example of a computer user.
Bah, why am I wasting my time? You can't see reason or logic, you're too interested in being a software zealot. As I said in an earlier post, you're a fool and I have no time in my day for fools.
something goes awry like it always seems to with MS products, leaving your system in limbo right in the middle of some random install. Bring in the hoops, start jumpin'. I see. And you have proof that this is happening widespread to anything remotely close to resembling a majority of the RC1 users? Or are you just making stuff up because you got sour on Microsoft back with Windows 95? News flash, bub: Windows isn't the "bad old Windows" you used to get. It's not perfect, but it's light years better than whatever yardstick you seem to be applying to it.
Have you even downloaded it and tried it? I put the RC1 on about six machines yesterday (two laptops, three Dell desktops, and one of my own personal machines at home) and all of them implemented the RC1 exactly the same. No stumbles, no hangs, no "leaving [my] system in limbo right in the middle of some random install."
Quit making stuff up to suit some predetermined conclusion you came up with years ago. If you can't speak from experience (note: saying you have experience also means admitting to having and using Vista, so be careful what you say) then you're obviously speaking from ignorance. I have no time for fools.
Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed. OK, this is just getting to be sad. Slashdot can't announce anything about a Microsoft product without resorting to needless hyperbole.
Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:
Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.
So, speaking as someone that's compiled their own Linux kernel and most of my apps from source more than a few times, the above is no "hoop" at all. Slashdot again goes out of its way to make things seem worse than they are. It's a Release Candidate for crying out loud! I never see this level of scrutiny and criticism directed at any Linux-related software, be it free, open, or commercial.
You make a good point, but miss an obvious solution: promoters can be hired by the artist to promote. They can then negotiate with the artist for compensation. Today, the exact opposite happens: the label "discovers" the talent and locks them into a contract that sells their soul to the label. If they do moderately good, they'll stay locked into that contract forever, much to their financial detriment (and the label's profit). If they do poorly, the label drops them and they crash and burn. If they do fantastically well (i.e. Britney Spears, 50 Cent, other similarly-successful trash), they break their contract with the label and renegotiate a more favorable stance.
Mechanisms exist for garage bands to make a splash today, right now, without the assistance of any label. It has happened. If the labels disappeared tomorrow, such successes would become de rigueur, and the obsoleteness of the labels that much more obvious.
Such is the evil of "intellectual property" and should be banned from the planet. I'm going to take extreme disagreement with your point here, despite any hints to the contrary from my prior posts. I'm a strong believer in property owner rights, and that includes intellectual property. If I come up with a new formula, design, song, movie, or anything else that I personally created, it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it. I can -- and probably will -- charge whatever the free market will bear for the fruit of my hard work. Such is my right, since without me the idea would not have come into being.
The counterbalance to any kind of overzealous inventor is the free market. Note the above paragraph's use of "whatever the free market will bear" when I speak of compensation for my work. I could design a new type of birdhouse and charge a trillion dollars for it. Nobody would buy it, of course, and I would make no money for my new idea. On the other hand, should I come up with a cheap, clean, and safe design for practical nuclear fusion, I could charge a trillion dollars for it and the world governments will beat a path to my door overnight. What I can charge is directly related to the perceived value of what I'm selling.
The part where I disagree with the labels is that they no longer serve any useful function. The artist creates. A promoter can be hired to promote if need be, but it is not required. A distributor, however, is completely irrelevant. If people want to buy music, they should be able to go directly to the artist's site, download the MP3 (or, preferably, FLAC) and that's that. The artist compensates the promoter (if one was used) and pays for their own site and bandwidth. Everybody wins except the distributor network, but that's nothing new; people complained that machines were stealing their jobs back during the Industrial Revolution, too. Last time I checked, fighting against the steady march of technology is rather futile unless you're Amish.
Major music labels spend much more money on promotion than distribution. Given that, the "obsolete" argument implodes. I've already stated this in a prior response, so I'll just summarize here: promotion makes the labels no money, it costs them money. So why do they promote things? To sell more media. Ipso facto, they are in business to distribute what others make. The only thing that's "imploding" here is their business model.
Your first statement, I agree with. You second, I do not agree with.
The reason for the labels existence is not distribution. It is promotion. I would argue that promotion is merely the opposing side of the same coin. What is the purpose of promotion? It serves no purpose unto itself. Promotion exists to facilitate distribution. So, in reality, although the labels spend a fair amount of time, money, and effort at promotion, they do it because they want to sell more media. Ergo, they are in business to distribute the entertainment that others create, just as I stated.
But this approach must be counter-productive. Even the fuckwits at the RIAA and their equivalents must be able to see not allowing fair use reduces the value of their CDs and makes them less attractive. That must lead to lower sales and lower profits. This is not a difficult concept. No, you're missing their Grand Idea. They want to sell you the CD. They also want to sell you the music in DRM'd pre-ripped format of their choosing. Then they want a cut of the profits from the sale of the portable device (iPod, etc.) you play their DRM'd files on. And so on for every variation in "format" that's possible.
You see, in their perfect world, they sell you the same content over and over again, each time in a different format. The artist gets a decreasing revenue, the labels get a greater revenue, and the consumer gets screwed. This has been how they've operated since their inception. They're simply trying to take the Old Way Of Doing Business(tm) and force it onto a fundamentally different digitally-connected world.
The reality is, the labels are the walking dead and they know it. Their sole reason for existence is music distribution. The Internet obsoletes that need. Every executive at every label is desperately trying to stave off the inevitable destruction of their business model just long enough for them to retire or shift the problem to someone else. When anyone, anywhere can effectively distribute their work -- be it books, songs, videos, or something else -- globally with minimal costs, the need for any kind of "distributor" is removed. The labels know this, but they're going to pretend not to know just as long as they can.
OK, enough with the negative-veiwpoint-only here. The poster is making it sound like Amazon is trying to patent and codify a method to give bad customer service. This is misleading in the extreme (not that that's anything new in Slashdot articles). Amazon is trying to ID and reward customers who are likely to do larger amounts of business with them in the future.
You can make the argument that the corollary of such a policy is that "bad customers" get the shafted, but that's not the intent. Using that logic, any "customer loyalty program" that anyone ever introduces is shafting someone. Does that sound like a sensible argument?
While I can certainly understand and, to a certain point, sympathize with your feelings towards the guy, I think you're missing something here.
Ever deal with an inexperienced computer user who does something completely stupid? Sure, we all have. Did that person know it was stupid when they did it? Most likely not. People don't know what they don't know. A more exact translation of that would be "all actions seem valid to those who have an insufficient understanding of the situation."
Try to put yourself in this guy's shoes for just a nanosecond. On one had he's got SCO, its armies of lawyers, and its long history of Unix. SCO is a business, and this guy understands businesses (he works at Forbes, for crying out loud). On the other hand you've got this nebulous Linux thingy run by a bunch of longhairs with Cheeto dust on their keyboards. They're all about free this, open that, and frequently associated with software, music, and video piracy. In short, most are openly anti-business, anti-establishment, go-fuck-The-Man types. Given his background, can you not help but understand why he'd give more credibility to SCO? This same anti-business reputation (deserved or not) is also a stumbling block to larger corporate Linux acceptance.
Sure, you and I can see the fallibility in what he did, but that's due to our different perspective. He lacked that. While that doesn't change the fact that he's wrong, it certainly takes the nefariousness out of this argument, don't you think? Ignorance may be bliss, but it's not a crime. They guy is limited by the blinders of his experience and environment. If anything, you should be happy that he's had an experience that will likely change his viewpoint on such things.
I decided to go through the list to compare the number of "potentially affected people." Here's the list (in descending order):
* Chernobyl, Ukraine - 5,500,000 (initial)
* Linfen, China - 3,000,000
* Sukinda, India - 2,600,000
* Dzerzhinsk, Russia - 300,000
* Sumgayit, Azerbaijan - 275,000
* Kabwe, Zambia - 255,000
* Tianying, China - 140,000
* Norilsk, Russia - 134,000
* Vapi, India - 71,000
* La Oroya, Peru - 35,000
So, for the one example cited in the/. header, the poster chooses to pick the one site affecting the least people, then goes out of its way to point out it's run by an American corporation. Why not choose to castigate the Chinese government for its massive neglect of the environment? Or the Indian conglomerates? No, we have to pick the American one because it it fits the evil-rich-Americans-causing-everyone-else-harm motif. So, I guess it's PC to leave the Chinese and Indians alone -- even though they're causing orders of magnitude more harm -- just so long as we find an American organization to smear in the teaser.
Regardless, burns are the most painful injuries you can possibly suffer from. Hacking off a limb doesn't even come close to the pain of burning it.
A fact that was no doubt exploited by Uday and Qusay on more than one occasion when plain old boring "conventional" torture just didn't get their rocks off that day.
Weapons...torture...you're quibbling over methods. The real purpose of both is to exercise power over another. That can be done just as easily with a machete as it can with a 50 megaton thermonuclear weapon, the only difference is scale.
Oh, don't get me wrong; I'd love to have Steve J.'s compensation package. It's just I'd much rather have Bill G.'s if I had to choose between the two. That's the difference market share revenues bring.
But we're not talking about money, we're talking about power. Apple has a very limited ability to shape the future of the computing world due to its small market presence. Companies don't make lots of hardware for it. The gaming market is next to nil. It's made in low volumes at high prices compared to PC's. Thus, while Apple can make an amazing product, its benefit for "all of us" is rather low. If Microsoft or Intel decide things are going to be a certain way, there's very little Apple can do to influence them.
This is a common misconception due to the focus on oil. In fact, the U.S. has enough fossil fuel reserves for centuries right within its own borders in the form of coal and oil shale. See the following on coal (from Wikipedia):
United States Department of Energy uses estimates of coal reserves in the region of 1,081,279 million short tons (9.81 × 1014 kg), which is about 4,786 BBOE (billion barrels of oil equivalent).[30] The amount of coal burned during 2001 was calculated as 2.337 GTOE (gigatonnes of oil equivalent), which is about 46 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.[31] Were consumption to continue at that rate those reserves would last about 285 years. As a comparison, natural gas provided 51 million barrels (oil equivalent), and oil 76 million barrels, per day during 2001.
and on oil shale:
The world deposits of oil shale are estimated to be equal to 2.9-3.3 trillion barrels of potentially recoverable oil. Although oil shale resources occur in many countries, only 33 countries possess deposits of possible economic value.Total resources of these countries are estimated at 411 gigatons, which is enough to yield 2.9 trillion U.S. barrels. Among those, the USA accounts for 62 % of the world resources, and the USA, Russia and Brazil together account for 86 % in terms of shale oil content.
So the likelihood of running out of fossil fuels is pretty darned low. If the boffins and propeller-heads haven't figured out fusion in the next 285 years or so -- and if nuclear fission is eschewed by the tree-huggers as an alternative -- we deserve to all freeze and starve to death.
And before anyone starts to beat the coal-is-evil-to-the-environment drum, coal can be a clean fuel source. It isn't right now because it's not economically viable as a clean fuel source compared to oil, natural gas, and so forth. As oil becomes more scarce, other energy sources become "cheaper" relative to it. At some point, the cost of finding and extracting scarce oil will equal or exceed the cost of things like coal gasification and processing of oil shale. When that happens, oil use will automatically decline and these other sources will pick up the slack. Energy costs will increase, of course, but that's unavoidable so long as humans use up reserves of any fixed-amount energy resource.
Long-term, nuclear is the only option, though. It's estimated there are 5.1 million tons of Uranium worldwide, the bulk of which is in Australia. A half pound of Uranium (~1kg) enriched to 3% makes about 20 trillion joules, or about the same amount as 1,600 ton of coal. Thus, worldwide Uranium reserves equal about 8.1 billion tons of coal. That's enough for well over a thousand years of consumption assuming todays consumption rates (although consumption is obviously increasing). Surely we can figure out fusion in that time frame, and that has the potential to keep Earth warm and well-powered until the sun turns into a red giant and fries this little blue-and-green marble to a cinder.
Note the qualifier "at retail" in the teaser. I seem to recall an article some months or years back that said AMD had overtaken Intel in chip sales...at retail stores. It was trumpeted like some great victory or something.
The truth of the matter is that retail sales of computer hardware pales in comparison to corporate and online purchases. If you focus solely on the corporate market, Apple makes up 5% or less (plus or minus a point or so) of the total market. Go look around your average company and see how many Mac's you see. Outside of the art/marketing/web design departments, it's very unlikely you'll find any of them. Last I heard, Linux had a better penetration versus Microsoft than Apple has versus the PC, and that's not saying much.
OK, what's with the selective quoting of the Microsoft response? The article header tries mightily to make it seem like Microsoft thinks this problem is not much of a problem. It also tries to imply this is happening to everyone, all the time, and Microsoft could care less.
However, reading the actual Microsoft response gives a completely different take on things. Microsoft realizes that this behavior, while having good intentions, is causing issues. Far from being some unfounded bug, there is a real purpose behind why the slowdown is occurring, namely a focus of multimedia scheduling performance trumping all. They are going to address these issues, not ignore them, but you wouldn't know it from the article teaser.
I have Vista on one of my PC's. I find it slower and more or less undesirable compared to Windows XP64 on my other boxen. It's there largely for me to get familiar with, as we're all undoubtedly going to be dealing with it soon and for a long time to come. You may be able to avoid Windows in your personal computing, but you'd have to live in a tiny bubble indeed to go through a work day without interacting with a co-worker, client, or customer who isn't on a Microsoft product of some sort.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's funny, because I recall reading just a few days ago that Microsoft is stating the highest ever profits (or is it revenues?) for its last quarter. And the MS games division announced it's profitable now as well after running for a loss for years.
Vista is a big stumble for MS, no doubt about it. But to say this is the beginning of the end? That's a stretch.
"Separate partition or physical volume" was referring to a different OS install on another disk.
No kidding, AC. I kinda figured that one out on my own. And how many people keep either spare drives or unallocated drive space laying around for this fanciful exercise you're suggesting?
I'll refer you to either of my other two replies to my original post. The idea is not very practical as a testing method for the reasons outlined within.
Before lashing out and telling someone that they don't know what they're talking about, you might do well to first check and make sure you know what you're talking about.
Oh for God's sake, I know what a goddamn partition is. I know you can make more than one of them. But you've only got one OS partition you can test this on! Get your your finger out of your ear long enough to think about the post before responding to it.
Yes, I know you can have multiple OS installations on multiple partitions. And how many people commonly have whole OS install partitions laying around for such testing? How many people have unallocated drive space to partition in the first place these days? Most people have their hard drive (or drives) fully allocated. If they have multiple drives laying around those get allocated, too. Data expands to fill all available space. If you get more space you find for stuff to put in that space. It's an immutable law of nature that people use the storage they have paid good money for, and typically that's not for keeping spare OS installs laying around.
Sure, you can shrink an existing partition, add a new one, install the OS, install all your OS patches/updates, install all your apps, install all your application patches and updates, and then test the final update you're concerned about...but exactly how many individual users do you really expect will go through this much trouble? It's a number suspiciously close to zero. Same goes for extra drives.
Further, consider that testing such an update might take a while; updates that appear stable for the first few minutes or hours may not remain that way over days or weeks of use. Updates that work fine under light "let's see if it works" testing loads may fail spectacularly when real, production-level loads are placed on the system. And keep in mind that unless you're running some sort of VM setup, you're either running your "production" OS partition or your "testing" OS partition, but not both at the same time. Therefore, testing means production must stop and vice versa.
There really is no practical substitute to having a separate test machine for stuff like this, and that's something individual users are ill-equipped to afford.
Oh for God's sake, I know what a goddamn partition is. I know you can make more than one of them. But you've only got one OS partition you can test this on! Get your your finger out of your ear long enough to think about the post before responding to it.
Now for the next item: yes, I know you can have multiple OS installations on multiple partitions. And how many people commonly have whole OS install partitions laying around for such testing? How many people have unallocated drive space to partition in the first place these days? Most people have their hard drive (or drives) fully allocated.
Sure, you can shrink an existing partition, add a new one, install the OS, install all your OS patches/updates, install all your apps, install all your application patches and updates, and then test the final update you're concerned about...but exactly how many individual users do you really expect will go through this much trouble? It's a number suspiciously close to zero.
Further, consider that testing such an update might take a while; updates that appear stable for the first few minutes or hours may not remain that way over days or weeks of use. Updates that work fine under light "let's see if it works" testing loads may fail spectacularly when real, production-level loads are placed on the system. And keep in mind that unless you're running some sort of VM setup, you're either running your "production" OS partition or your "testing" OS partition, but not both at the same time. Therefore, testing means production must stop and vice versa.
There really is no practical substitute to having a separate test machine for stuff like this, and that's something individual users are ill-equipped to afford.
I'm quite familiar with the speculation on "Aurora" and all the other names associated with this hypothetical craft. There's absolutely no hard evidence anywhere that it exists. Everything you can dig up is pure circumstantial evidence. I'll be the first to admit that if such a plane did exist, it would naturally be almost -- if not completely -- impossible to verify its existence due to classification. However, lack of verifiable information does not necessarily conclude there is a government cover-up of a hypersonic aircraft. It may exist, it may not.
Based upon the costs to develop and operate such a craft, not to mention the support infrastructure that would be required, I'm of the opinion it does not exist. Defense intelligence ops have centered around satellites for some time now, as has photo reconnaissance. It's cheaper and safer than sending in a manned aircraft. The few advantages available in a hypersonic recon platform such as the "Aurora" are hugely outweighed by the negatives.
Good point, maybe instead you could perform your software testing on a separate partition or physical volume, or something.
You apparently don't understand what's going on here. This is OSX, not Windows. OSX has Quicktime embedded into the operating system, whereas Windows has it as an optional third-party component. There is no "separate partition or physical volume" option available to you on a Mac; Quicktime is either updated across the entire OS (and, by proxy, all installed video editing apps which use Quicktime) or it's not. This is the crux of the complaint by users.
The lack of an easy roll-back option is similarly inexcusable. I'm sure Apple will patch this in short order, but it's a major annoyance until then.
Seriously, this was known about forty years ago and are called pogo oscillations. They are generally disastrous, and they were the cause of Apollo 13's fifth engine shut down after liftoff.
They're "generally disastrous" only in the sense that they'll destroy the craft if they aren't addressed. Apollo solved the problem by essentially adding a big bellows to the fuel supply feed, allowing the pressure pulses to be damped instead of allowing the fuel flow to resonate. The Space Shuttle main engines have similar dampers in place, and their design was based on data acquired during Apollo.
In general, I'm pretty non-plussed by NASA's moon landing attempts. Their design is basically Apollo rehashed plus forty years (fifty years if it actually launches - pretty depressing), the vast majority of it isn't reusable (I haven't got a clue how they can call it a shuttle replacement) and it really doesn't get us any further forwards in terms of making getting into space easier, safer and something that can be done on a regular basis.
Your observation shows a shocking lack of perspective. Just because the design has a capsule on top doesn't mean it's "Apollo...plus forty years." First off, given currently available technologies, a capsule design is the most efficient, most practical way to get people out of orbit. I'll remind you that the Shuttle, for all its supposed advantages, hasn't left LEO and can't leave LEO. It's too heavy. Reusability carries a very heavy penalty (no pun intended).
Speaking of reusability, you've again missed the mark. The capsule itself is designed to be reused a number of times. The ablative heat shield can't be reused like the shuttle tiles, but then again an ablative shield doesn't have the maintenance (and failure) issues of shuttle tiles, either. The solid booster first stage is, unless I'm mistaken, designed for re-use just like current Shuttle SRB's.
Also, don't forget that reusability hasn't proven to be the huge advantage NASA thought it would be back in the 60's when the Shuttle was on the drawing board. Tile inspection and replacement is extremely time consuming and expensive. The Shuttle engines, for all their fantastic performance, are maintenance nightmares. Until we have some radical breakthroughs in materials technology or propulsion, it's actually cheaper to use expendable stages than it is to reclaim, disassemble, inspect, repair, re-assemble, and re-certify a reusable spacecraft or propulsion system. If you doubt this, consider the cost per pound of Apollo launches versus the cost per pound of Shuttle launches; the Shuttle is far more expensive.
When compared with Apollo, the Shuttle actually comes off quite poorly. The Shuttle is far more expensive to fly. It can't launch with the same frequency as Apollo. It has no abort system for most of the launch profile. The abort modes available even after the SRB's detach are extremely hazardous. It can't leave LEO. It can't carry anywhere near as much payload as the Saturn V. Still think that "going back" to Apollo is a bad idea?
In fact, the Shuttle only exceeds the "forty year old" Apollo in two notable areas: it can carry seven astronauts instead of three, and it can return orbiting satellites to Earth. The former ability is useful but with a limited return; seven orbiting astronauts hasn't given us nearly as much of a return as three moon-bound ones did forty years ago. The latter ability -- returning satellites -- has rarely been used. The original idea (thanks, Air Force) was to snag Soviet satellites and return them for intelligence purposes. Beyond that, returning, repairing, and re-launching a satellite makes absolutely no economic sense. The Shuttle is a neat idea. It's been a wonderful test-bed for new concepts. But as a practical, useful, reliable, affordable space truck, it is an abject failure. The Shuttle has taught us what not to build.
In closing, I'll r
Why not? If you're worried about being invaded, sticking to yourself and staying extremely well-armed is the best defense.
You've never played many strategy wargames, have you? This whole concept is called "turtling," and not just in home gaming circles. Military wargames simulate this as well. Guess what happens?
You turtle, focusing on defense and internal resources only. In the meantime, your opposition now has unchecked sway over the rest of the globe outside your borders. You didn't expect them to pass up this golden opportunity now that you've "stepped out," did you? By flaunting their unilateral power, they can sway world events to their benefit, your detriment, or both. You sit comfortably ensconced behind your defenses and suddenly, one day, you find out you're vastly outnumbered, outgunned, out-resourced, and out-maneuvered.
Think it can't happen? It already has happened. Look up 19th century Japan, once a major power, overtaken militarily, economically, and politically by the West in 1852. Similar things happened in China and in countless other examples throughout history. The U.S. was stoically neutral for WWI and WWII until world events dragged us into a shooting war, and our dogmatic avoidance of getting involved "over there" made sure we were woefully under prepared when the battle call was sounded. Millions perished because Hitler (and, later, Japan) steered events instead of the Allies.
If, as a wise man once said, all the world is a stage, then the stage demands a leading actor. Someone will step up if we don't. Odds are they won't have our best interests in mind when they do, so it's better that we are that leading actor. Would you rather Kim Jong Il at the helm? Vladimir Putin? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
So, I guess when I do a make && make install under Linux, I'm "jumping through hoops" in exactly the same manner, right? After all, I download an "installation script" for some program off the web, I "run" the file...and then the process starts! Also, I'll bring up that there's more than a few Linux programs these days that allow you to download and install short install script that does nothing more than download and install the full executable from some web-based distribution site. How in any way is this different than what's being described in the RC1 install docs?
Furthermore, your "apt-get dist-upgrade" is great, but it requires you to reboot in order to take advantage of certain things such as an upgraded kernel. Since SP1 modifies the Windows kernel, it's in the exact same class as a Linux kernel patch, and most (if not all) of those require restarting the OS in order to make the changes take effect. I'll also point out that you're running an updater/installer tool (apt-get) that is functionally identical to Windows Update, so you run the command...and then the process STARTS! That fizzling sound you hear is the air leaking out of your argument.
And since when is rebooting "jumping through a hoop"? If that's something you consider difficult, you're a pathetic example of a computer user.
Bah, why am I wasting my time? You can't see reason or logic, you're too interested in being a software zealot. As I said in an earlier post, you're a fool and I have no time in my day for fools.
It's people like you that give Linux a bad name.
Have you even downloaded it and tried it? I put the RC1 on about six machines yesterday (two laptops, three Dell desktops, and one of my own personal machines at home) and all of them implemented the RC1 exactly the same. No stumbles, no hangs, no "leaving [my] system in limbo right in the middle of some random install."
Quit making stuff up to suit some predetermined conclusion you came up with years ago. If you can't speak from experience (note: saying you have experience also means admitting to having and using Vista, so be careful what you say) then you're obviously speaking from ignorance. I have no time for fools.
Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:
1. Download the RC1 package.
2. Execute the
3. Done!
Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.
So, speaking as someone that's compiled their own Linux kernel and most of my apps from source more than a few times, the above is no "hoop" at all. Slashdot again goes out of its way to make things seem worse than they are. It's a Release Candidate for crying out loud! I never see this level of scrutiny and criticism directed at any Linux-related software, be it free, open, or commercial.
You make a good point, but miss an obvious solution: promoters can be hired by the artist to promote. They can then negotiate with the artist for compensation. Today, the exact opposite happens: the label "discovers" the talent and locks them into a contract that sells their soul to the label. If they do moderately good, they'll stay locked into that contract forever, much to their financial detriment (and the label's profit). If they do poorly, the label drops them and they crash and burn. If they do fantastically well (i.e. Britney Spears, 50 Cent, other similarly-successful trash), they break their contract with the label and renegotiate a more favorable stance.
Mechanisms exist for garage bands to make a splash today, right now, without the assistance of any label. It has happened. If the labels disappeared tomorrow, such successes would become de rigueur, and the obsoleteness of the labels that much more obvious.
The counterbalance to any kind of overzealous inventor is the free market. Note the above paragraph's use of "whatever the free market will bear" when I speak of compensation for my work. I could design a new type of birdhouse and charge a trillion dollars for it. Nobody would buy it, of course, and I would make no money for my new idea. On the other hand, should I come up with a cheap, clean, and safe design for practical nuclear fusion, I could charge a trillion dollars for it and the world governments will beat a path to my door overnight. What I can charge is directly related to the perceived value of what I'm selling.
The part where I disagree with the labels is that they no longer serve any useful function. The artist creates. A promoter can be hired to promote if need be, but it is not required. A distributor, however, is completely irrelevant. If people want to buy music, they should be able to go directly to the artist's site, download the MP3 (or, preferably, FLAC) and that's that. The artist compensates the promoter (if one was used) and pays for their own site and bandwidth. Everybody wins except the distributor network, but that's nothing new; people complained that machines were stealing their jobs back during the Industrial Revolution, too. Last time I checked, fighting against the steady march of technology is rather futile unless you're Amish.
Your first statement, I agree with. You second, I do not agree with.
The reason for the labels existence is not distribution. It is promotion. I would argue that promotion is merely the opposing side of the same coin. What is the purpose of promotion? It serves no purpose unto itself. Promotion exists to facilitate distribution. So, in reality, although the labels spend a fair amount of time, money, and effort at promotion, they do it because they want to sell more media. Ergo, they are in business to distribute the entertainment that others create, just as I stated.
You see, in their perfect world, they sell you the same content over and over again, each time in a different format. The artist gets a decreasing revenue, the labels get a greater revenue, and the consumer gets screwed. This has been how they've operated since their inception. They're simply trying to take the Old Way Of Doing Business(tm) and force it onto a fundamentally different digitally-connected world.
The reality is, the labels are the walking dead and they know it. Their sole reason for existence is music distribution. The Internet obsoletes that need. Every executive at every label is desperately trying to stave off the inevitable destruction of their business model just long enough for them to retire or shift the problem to someone else. When anyone, anywhere can effectively distribute their work -- be it books, songs, videos, or something else -- globally with minimal costs, the need for any kind of "distributor" is removed. The labels know this, but they're going to pretend not to know just as long as they can.
OK, enough with the negative-veiwpoint-only here. The poster is making it sound like Amazon is trying to patent and codify a method to give bad customer service. This is misleading in the extreme (not that that's anything new in Slashdot articles). Amazon is trying to ID and reward customers who are likely to do larger amounts of business with them in the future.
You can make the argument that the corollary of such a policy is that "bad customers" get the shafted, but that's not the intent. Using that logic, any "customer loyalty program" that anyone ever introduces is shafting someone. Does that sound like a sensible argument?
While I can certainly understand and, to a certain point, sympathize with your feelings towards the guy, I think you're missing something here.
Ever deal with an inexperienced computer user who does something completely stupid? Sure, we all have. Did that person know it was stupid when they did it? Most likely not. People don't know what they don't know. A more exact translation of that would be "all actions seem valid to those who have an insufficient understanding of the situation."
Try to put yourself in this guy's shoes for just a nanosecond. On one had he's got SCO, its armies of lawyers, and its long history of Unix. SCO is a business, and this guy understands businesses (he works at Forbes, for crying out loud). On the other hand you've got this nebulous Linux thingy run by a bunch of longhairs with Cheeto dust on their keyboards. They're all about free this, open that, and frequently associated with software, music, and video piracy. In short, most are openly anti-business, anti-establishment, go-fuck-The-Man types. Given his background, can you not help but understand why he'd give more credibility to SCO? This same anti-business reputation (deserved or not) is also a stumbling block to larger corporate Linux acceptance.
Sure, you and I can see the fallibility in what he did, but that's due to our different perspective. He lacked that. While that doesn't change the fact that he's wrong, it certainly takes the nefariousness out of this argument, don't you think? Ignorance may be bliss, but it's not a crime. They guy is limited by the blinders of his experience and environment. If anything, you should be happy that he's had an experience that will likely change his viewpoint on such things.
I decided to go through the list to compare the number of "potentially affected people." Here's the list (in descending order):
/. header, the poster chooses to pick the one site affecting the least people, then goes out of its way to point out it's run by an American corporation. Why not choose to castigate the Chinese government for its massive neglect of the environment? Or the Indian conglomerates? No, we have to pick the American one because it it fits the evil-rich-Americans-causing-everyone-else-harm motif. So, I guess it's PC to leave the Chinese and Indians alone -- even though they're causing orders of magnitude more harm -- just so long as we find an American organization to smear in the teaser.
* Chernobyl, Ukraine - 5,500,000 (initial)
* Linfen, China - 3,000,000
* Sukinda, India - 2,600,000
* Dzerzhinsk, Russia - 300,000
* Sumgayit, Azerbaijan - 275,000
* Kabwe, Zambia - 255,000
* Tianying, China - 140,000
* Norilsk, Russia - 134,000
* Vapi, India - 71,000
* La Oroya, Peru - 35,000
So, for the one example cited in the
Regardless, burns are the most painful injuries you can possibly suffer from. Hacking off a limb doesn't even come close to the pain of burning it.
A fact that was no doubt exploited by Uday and Qusay on more than one occasion when plain old boring "conventional" torture just didn't get their rocks off that day.
Weapons...torture...you're quibbling over methods. The real purpose of both is to exercise power over another. That can be done just as easily with a machete as it can with a 50 megaton thermonuclear weapon, the only difference is scale.
Oh, don't get me wrong; I'd love to have Steve J.'s compensation package. It's just I'd much rather have Bill G.'s if I had to choose between the two. That's the difference market share revenues bring.
But we're not talking about money, we're talking about power. Apple has a very limited ability to shape the future of the computing world due to its small market presence. Companies don't make lots of hardware for it. The gaming market is next to nil. It's made in low volumes at high prices compared to PC's. Thus, while Apple can make an amazing product, its benefit for "all of us" is rather low. If Microsoft or Intel decide things are going to be a certain way, there's very little Apple can do to influence them.
This is a common misconception due to the focus on oil. In fact, the U.S. has enough fossil fuel reserves for centuries right within its own borders in the form of coal and oil shale. See the following on coal (from Wikipedia):
United States Department of Energy uses estimates of coal reserves in the region of 1,081,279 million short tons (9.81 × 1014 kg), which is about 4,786 BBOE (billion barrels of oil equivalent).[30] The amount of coal burned during 2001 was calculated as 2.337 GTOE (gigatonnes of oil equivalent), which is about 46 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.[31] Were consumption to continue at that rate those reserves would last about 285 years. As a comparison, natural gas provided 51 million barrels (oil equivalent), and oil 76 million barrels, per day during 2001.
and on oil shale:
The world deposits of oil shale are estimated to be equal to 2.9-3.3 trillion barrels of potentially recoverable oil. Although oil shale resources occur in many countries, only 33 countries possess deposits of possible economic value.Total resources of these countries are estimated at 411 gigatons, which is enough to yield 2.9 trillion U.S. barrels. Among those, the USA accounts for 62 % of the world resources, and the USA, Russia and Brazil together account for 86 % in terms of shale oil content.
So the likelihood of running out of fossil fuels is pretty darned low. If the boffins and propeller-heads haven't figured out fusion in the next 285 years or so -- and if nuclear fission is eschewed by the tree-huggers as an alternative -- we deserve to all freeze and starve to death.
And before anyone starts to beat the coal-is-evil-to-the-environment drum, coal can be a clean fuel source. It isn't right now because it's not economically viable as a clean fuel source compared to oil, natural gas, and so forth. As oil becomes more scarce, other energy sources become "cheaper" relative to it. At some point, the cost of finding and extracting scarce oil will equal or exceed the cost of things like coal gasification and processing of oil shale. When that happens, oil use will automatically decline and these other sources will pick up the slack. Energy costs will increase, of course, but that's unavoidable so long as humans use up reserves of any fixed-amount energy resource.
Long-term, nuclear is the only option, though. It's estimated there are 5.1 million tons of Uranium worldwide, the bulk of which is in Australia. A half pound of Uranium (~1kg) enriched to 3% makes about 20 trillion joules, or about the same amount as 1,600 ton of coal. Thus, worldwide Uranium reserves equal about 8.1 billion tons of coal. That's enough for well over a thousand years of consumption assuming todays consumption rates (although consumption is obviously increasing). Surely we can figure out fusion in that time frame, and that has the potential to keep Earth warm and well-powered until the sun turns into a red giant and fries this little blue-and-green marble to a cinder.
Note the qualifier "at retail" in the teaser. I seem to recall an article some months or years back that said AMD had overtaken Intel in chip sales...at retail stores. It was trumpeted like some great victory or something.
The truth of the matter is that retail sales of computer hardware pales in comparison to corporate and online purchases. If you focus solely on the corporate market, Apple makes up 5% or less (plus or minus a point or so) of the total market. Go look around your average company and see how many Mac's you see. Outside of the art/marketing/web design departments, it's very unlikely you'll find any of them. Last I heard, Linux had a better penetration versus Microsoft than Apple has versus the PC, and that's not saying much.
OK, what's with the selective quoting of the Microsoft response? The article header tries mightily to make it seem like Microsoft thinks this problem is not much of a problem. It also tries to imply this is happening to everyone, all the time, and Microsoft could care less.
However, reading the actual Microsoft response gives a completely different take on things. Microsoft realizes that this behavior, while having good intentions, is causing issues. Far from being some unfounded bug, there is a real purpose behind why the slowdown is occurring, namely a focus of multimedia scheduling performance trumping all. They are going to address these issues, not ignore them, but you wouldn't know it from the article teaser.
I have Vista on one of my PC's. I find it slower and more or less undesirable compared to Windows XP64 on my other boxen. It's there largely for me to get familiar with, as we're all undoubtedly going to be dealing with it soon and for a long time to come. You may be able to avoid Windows in your personal computing, but you'd have to live in a tiny bubble indeed to go through a work day without interacting with a co-worker, client, or customer who isn't on a Microsoft product of some sort.