From your explanation, I would gather that the Mac OS X "bsod" does not display an error message indicating what went wrong. With Windows, you get the error code, which means you can Google the error right away. With Mac OS X, how do you find out what's wrong if your machine won't boot back up?
Also, I'd think that if your machine kernel panics on you, finding out what's wrong would take priority over having it displayed as a pretty graphical image with multi-language text. Sounds like form over function to me. What happens if your graphics driver is hosed?
Finally, I'll note that by your definition of "legitimate reasons", I've only ever had "legitimate" BSoDs on any Windows version since (and including) 2000.
Fine, here's another story: At work, we upgraded each and every workstation to Vista and Office 2007. Mostly laptops. None new, each one was previously running XP SP2. Driver hassles have been limited to one HP printer (the driver would crash repeatedly), but it was fixed quickly thanks to a quick Google search. All in all, Vista has been a very nice upgrade, and I've personally started using it at home as well. Sure, it doesn't quite have the maturity of XP SP2, but it's also a big improvement in many key areas. My guess is most people puking over Vista here at/. have never actually used it, or are blaming Microsoft for the lack of mature drivers, despite the fact that third party vendors are providing the drivers for the most part, not Microsoft.
i thought it was all done through firehose now. people rate the articles and they get submitted when the rating is high enough. i thought the editors were all replaced a long time ago?
Not really, it seems the editors don't really care what the firehose thinks about a story. I've stopped using it since it seems to be quite useless other than as a toy for editor wannabes.
Apparently. That message is not there anymore. Instead, Microsoft Update displays this:
Concerned about privacy? When you check for updates, basic information about your computer, not you, is used to determine which updates your programs need. To learn more, see our privacy statement.
Surprisingly, the linked statement is not written in lawyerspeak.
I could easily imagine it as being in the range of tens of megabytes. You know how many different versions of Windows there are, right? Add to that SQL Server, Office, Visual Studio and lots of other software which Microsoft Update handles. Add to that all the hardware components (likely tens of thousands) that MU carries updates for. Unfortunately, I don't have any hard numbers to back this up.
I also don't see what the big deal is. Microsoft is getting some information about the hardware and software configuration of my PC - so? When I open my computer in a busy lecture hall, ten people behind me can get mostly the same information (and possibly something actually sensitive) by peering at my screen for ten minutes. Also, considering the intense scrutiny Microsoft is constantly being put under by this and other websites, I believe word would spread quite quickly if they actually used this data for sinister purposes.
You realize that the complete list of patches and optional downloads, for all supported versions of all supported products, is likely to be freaking huge? You wouldn't want it downloading that every time you run Windows Update - especially not dial-up users.
Lots of people have responded to my post same as you, "if you have to mention Office experience to fill your CV you suck", or "if your employer thinks you need retraining to switch Office versions they're daft", etc. That's beside the point. The point is that HR people will use "office 2007" as a search term when looking through the stack of digitized CV's they got in response for their latest job offering. HR people really are that clueless. And if you don't want to lie on your CV, it will serve you to be able to put "Office 2007" in there.
Remember that I am talking about jobs that a student, in his last couple of years or just post graduation, might consider. NOT the most technically advanced positions, more like entry-level. In those, I've found, they only care about past positions.
Business won't be considering moving for 2-3 years
That's a generalization. The company where I am currently employed has already moved to Vista and Office 2007. Rather painlessly too, from my point of view, though we have yet to move every last desk over.
But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience. In this sense, the students being allowed to buy Office 2007 for cheap is a Good Thing for them.
Now, perhaps most companies running Office 2003/2007 could also have managed with OpenOffice, but that argument is not going to help a job-seeking student...
The thing is, Sony has no right to tell another website what they may or may not publish. Sony even trying to tell a journalist what he may or may not write about them is unethical. Kotaku did the right thing by standing up for journalistic integrity, and Sony's PR department are a bunch of asshats. Keeping information from being leaked is an internal matter for Sony. Once it's out, it's out. Now they've left an influential gaming blog with nothing left to lose in terms of their relationship to Sony. And Kotaku no doubt still has whatever source they got the rumours from.
It can be argued whether Kotaku was smart to act the way they did, but they are certainly right - and Sony wrong - from a moral perspective. The big mistake was the Sony PR guy threatening to blackball. To Kotaku, that must have been a sure sign they were sitting on some hot stuff. It would have been stupid not to publish at that point.
Two people who despise each other at some stupid public social function pretending that they are all honky dory while one is ready to take a clue from a co-worker and throw a chair and the other wants to give a wedgie.
I think you'll find that this is often considered good social skills out there in the real world. Also, why would you think that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer despise each other?
MOD PARENT UP. This is exactly my problem with Linux, and his experiences perfectly mirror mine (just replace Kubuntu with Fedora and Amarok with some other bundled app whose name I forgot).
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, June 4th Incident, or the Political Turmoil between Spring and Summer of 1989 by the government of the People's Republic of China, were a series of demonstrations led by students, intellectuals and labour activists in the People's Republic of China between April 15, 1989 and June 4, 1989. The demonstrations centred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but large scale protests also occured in cities throughout China, such as in Shanghai.
It's an exceptionally well designed phone. Many phones, even simple ones, are complex messes with cryptic or unlabelled buttons. Having a phone that's fairly simple to use but powerful is surprisingly rare.
You're assuming it will be easy to use. I am expecting to get many laughs out of watching people trying to get the gestures right. There is likely to be a considerable learning curve during which users will find that it takes more time and effort to carry out the simplest tasks. I'll say the iPhone looks good - but that's comparing to the rather old Windows Mobile 5 UI. A pretty UI won't make me switch from my current PDA, which has real buttons to speed up common tasks.
It can browse the web more beautifully than any other device smaller than a laptop computer.
Who cares about "beautiful"? Marketing people? I prefer my web browsers to have slim UI:s and reproduce pages faithful to what the designer intended. A web page is a web page, it's not going to look any better because you surf it on an iPhone. My current PDA (running Opera) faithfully reproduces web pages so they look the same as on the PC. The iPhone offers no advantage here.
It has the best text messaging system
I'm not going to take your word for it, and I suspect this is highly subjective.
It supports Google Maps, so you can pull down driving directions
So do current Windows Mobile PDA:s. I saw GM running on Java on my colleague's phone yesterday, and for directions, there's the whole Internet. Which is nice and snappy because my phone has 3G, which the iPhone lacks. Newer Windows Mobile PDA:s also come with GPS.
It has full-featured email
So du current Windows Mobile PDA:s, unless your definition of "full-featured" differs significantly from mine. Please tell me, what e-mailing features does the iPhone support that a recent Windows Mobile PDA lacks? Because I know the iPhone lacks ability to sync with Exchange/Outlook, a critical must-have for many business users.
It has a camera that's fairly strong by smartphone standards (most of them have 1.3 megapixel phones, but the iPhone is 2 megapixels).
My 6 months old Windows Mobile PDA also has a 2 megapixel camera, and newer models have 4 megapixel cameras. 2 mp is far from state of the art.
It supports widgets, which give us news aggregation, weather, etc.
On a PDA running Windows Mobile, you can install any third-party application (unless it's vendor-locked, but unlock hacks exist). And you can store stuff on disk. Or in SQL Server Mobile. And you can code in real programming languages. I think that beats javascript "widgets".
Other than a low price and open source for ideological reasons, I don't see anything this phone doesn't have that a Slashdot user would need.
The killer missing features for me is 3G, no third-party apps, and no Outlook/Exchange sync (which is what we have at work, not my choice). If I'm going to buy a new PDA, it better have a fast connection to the Internet and support for C#/.NET 2.0 (or equivalent) for writing (actually, porting from my current PDA) my own apps. I'm sure many people would like GPS. Oh, and real buttons and a stylus.
The article describes two separate issues: TCP window scaling, and SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection). These have very little to do with each other, excepting the fact that they're both networking features in Windows Vista.
From what I gather from a quick Google, the problem with TCP window scaling is actually one with crap routers that don't support the feature and misbehave upon encountering it. Furthermore, TCP window scaling is not new to Windows Vista. It was merely disabled by default in previous versions of Windows. The fix is extremely simple, see this article for information.
The second issue, with SPI, seems to indeed be a Vista bug, but I can find no evidence whatsoever that it exists in Vista RTM, or even RC1/RC2. It's seriously not "stuff that matters" anymore. Prerelease versions always have bugs! If you don't like it, wait for the RTM (or as is usually the case with Microsoft, the first service pack)!
I'll concede that MSDN is a very nice collection of CDs, but I'd trade those CDs for source code any day of the week. On that note, the Linux stack has a wealth of documentation... but at your local book store.
MSDN is not just a nice collection of CD's - it's all available on-line, and free as in beer. No ads, and it works well in Firefox! That's more than you can say for high-quality documentation for any other platform. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
I personally find the CD collection inferior because you have to update it. Fortunately, the MSDN integration in Visual Studio also uses the on-line MSDN if the sought information is not available locally.
Now, on that note, typically, the architects, developers, and testers you're referring to wouldn't know what to do with source code if it hit them in the head. They represent the lower ranks of the tech profession. Those of us who work in pushing the envelope of new technology almost unanimously reject MS products because they are far too contraining.
That's a pretty unfair and ignorant way to look at people who use Visual Studio. Not only are you ignoring the fact that the most commercially successful pieces of software ever conceived - Microsoft Windows and Office - were developed in Visual Studio by people who certainly do not deserve to be called "the lower ranks of the tech profession" (well, some of them perhaps), you are also ignoring the many other companies who have created successful products developed using Microsoft's tools. I work at such a company, and we are in fact pushing the envelope of new technology in our market. While I would not call Microsoft's products perfect, they have been instrumental to our success.
If your tools constrain you, you may be using the wrong ones; or you may be using them incorrectly. I think you have to try very hard to fail at using Visual Studio.
Slashdot Mirror
Many politicians have blogs. As for government (.gov) websites, the Library of Congress blog allows comments.
I would post the processing key, but I'll link to the original posting instead:
g e=6
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121866&pa
I recommend interested slashdotters read the thread, there's a lot of interesting context to the discovery.
From your explanation, I would gather that the Mac OS X "bsod" does not display an error message indicating what went wrong. With Windows, you get the error code, which means you can Google the error right away. With Mac OS X, how do you find out what's wrong if your machine won't boot back up?
Also, I'd think that if your machine kernel panics on you, finding out what's wrong would take priority over having it displayed as a pretty graphical image with multi-language text. Sounds like form over function to me. What happens if your graphics driver is hosed?
Finally, I'll note that by your definition of "legitimate reasons", I've only ever had "legitimate" BSoDs on any Windows version since (and including) 2000.
Fine, here's another story: At work, we upgraded each and every workstation to Vista and Office 2007. Mostly laptops. None new, each one was previously running XP SP2. Driver hassles have been limited to one HP printer (the driver would crash repeatedly), but it was fixed quickly thanks to a quick Google search. All in all, Vista has been a very nice upgrade, and I've personally started using it at home as well. Sure, it doesn't quite have the maturity of XP SP2, but it's also a big improvement in many key areas. My guess is most people puking over Vista here at /. have never actually used it, or are blaming Microsoft for the lack of mature drivers, despite the fact that third party vendors are providing the drivers for the most part, not Microsoft.
Storage Area Network. You could have just googled it. It's not an uncommon term.
I could easily imagine it as being in the range of tens of megabytes. You know how many different versions of Windows there are, right? Add to that SQL Server, Office, Visual Studio and lots of other software which Microsoft Update handles. Add to that all the hardware components (likely tens of thousands) that MU carries updates for. Unfortunately, I don't have any hard numbers to back this up.
I also don't see what the big deal is. Microsoft is getting some information about the hardware and software configuration of my PC - so? When I open my computer in a busy lecture hall, ten people behind me can get mostly the same information (and possibly something actually sensitive) by peering at my screen for ten minutes. Also, considering the intense scrutiny Microsoft is constantly being put under by this and other websites, I believe word would spread quite quickly if they actually used this data for sinister purposes.
You realize that the complete list of patches and optional downloads, for all supported versions of all supported products, is likely to be freaking huge? You wouldn't want it downloading that every time you run Windows Update - especially not dial-up users.
Lots of people have responded to my post same as you, "if you have to mention Office experience to fill your CV you suck", or "if your employer thinks you need retraining to switch Office versions they're daft", etc. That's beside the point. The point is that HR people will use "office 2007" as a search term when looking through the stack of digitized CV's they got in response for their latest job offering. HR people really are that clueless. And if you don't want to lie on your CV, it will serve you to be able to put "Office 2007" in there.
Remember that I am talking about jobs that a student, in his last couple of years or just post graduation, might consider. NOT the most technically advanced positions, more like entry-level. In those, I've found, they only care about past positions.
Business won't be considering moving for 2-3 years
That's a generalization. The company where I am currently employed has already moved to Vista and Office 2007. Rather painlessly too, from my point of view, though we have yet to move every last desk over.
But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience. In this sense, the students being allowed to buy Office 2007 for cheap is a Good Thing for them.
Now, perhaps most companies running Office 2003/2007 could also have managed with OpenOffice, but that argument is not going to help a job-seeking student...
The thing is, Sony has no right to tell another website what they may or may not publish. Sony even trying to tell a journalist what he may or may not write about them is unethical. Kotaku did the right thing by standing up for journalistic integrity, and Sony's PR department are a bunch of asshats. Keeping information from being leaked is an internal matter for Sony. Once it's out, it's out. Now they've left an influential gaming blog with nothing left to lose in terms of their relationship to Sony. And Kotaku no doubt still has whatever source they got the rumours from.
It can be argued whether Kotaku was smart to act the way they did, but they are certainly right - and Sony wrong - from a moral perspective. The big mistake was the Sony PR guy threatening to blackball. To Kotaku, that must have been a sure sign they were sitting on some hot stuff. It would have been stupid not to publish at that point.
You are my fscking hero, seriously. I have that EXACT CONFIGURATION and was just contemplating whether or not it would be able to run Vista well.
Considering The Pirate Bay is still on-line... Sweden, I believe. Makes me proud to live here.
Use the command prompt defragger. The GUI one is just there for the n00bs who can't figure out cmd.
Two people who despise each other at some stupid public social function pretending that they are all honky dory while one is ready to take a clue from a co-worker and throw a chair and the other wants to give a wedgie.
I think you'll find that this is often considered good social skills out there in the real world. Also, why would you think that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer despise each other?
MOD PARENT UP. This is exactly my problem with Linux, and his experiences perfectly mirror mine (just replace Kubuntu with Fedora and Amarok with some other bundled app whose name I forgot).
It comes from kopimi (copyme).
It's an exceptionally well designed phone. Many phones, even simple ones, are complex messes with cryptic or unlabelled buttons. Having a phone that's fairly simple to use but powerful is surprisingly rare.
You're assuming it will be easy to use. I am expecting to get many laughs out of watching people trying to get the gestures right. There is likely to be a considerable learning curve during which users will find that it takes more time and effort to carry out the simplest tasks. I'll say the iPhone looks good - but that's comparing to the rather old Windows Mobile 5 UI. A pretty UI won't make me switch from my current PDA, which has real buttons to speed up common tasks.
It can browse the web more beautifully than any other device smaller than a laptop computer.
Who cares about "beautiful"? Marketing people? I prefer my web browsers to have slim UI:s and reproduce pages faithful to what the designer intended. A web page is a web page, it's not going to look any better because you surf it on an iPhone. My current PDA (running Opera) faithfully reproduces web pages so they look the same as on the PC. The iPhone offers no advantage here.
It has the best text messaging system
I'm not going to take your word for it, and I suspect this is highly subjective.
It supports Google Maps, so you can pull down driving directions
So do current Windows Mobile PDA:s. I saw GM running on Java on my colleague's phone yesterday, and for directions, there's the whole Internet. Which is nice and snappy because my phone has 3G, which the iPhone lacks. Newer Windows Mobile PDA:s also come with GPS.
It has full-featured email
So du current Windows Mobile PDA:s, unless your definition of "full-featured" differs significantly from mine. Please tell me, what e-mailing features does the iPhone support that a recent Windows Mobile PDA lacks? Because I know the iPhone lacks ability to sync with Exchange/Outlook, a critical must-have for many business users.
It has a camera that's fairly strong by smartphone standards (most of them have 1.3 megapixel phones, but the iPhone is 2 megapixels).
My 6 months old Windows Mobile PDA also has a 2 megapixel camera, and newer models have 4 megapixel cameras. 2 mp is far from state of the art.
It supports widgets, which give us news aggregation, weather, etc.
On a PDA running Windows Mobile, you can install any third-party application (unless it's vendor-locked, but unlock hacks exist). And you can store stuff on disk. Or in SQL Server Mobile. And you can code in real programming languages. I think that beats javascript "widgets".
Other than a low price and open source for ideological reasons, I don't see anything this phone doesn't have that a Slashdot user would need.
The killer missing features for me is 3G, no third-party apps, and no Outlook/Exchange sync (which is what we have at work, not my choice). If I'm going to buy a new PDA, it better have a fast connection to the Internet and support for C#/.NET 2.0 (or equivalent) for writing (actually, porting from my current PDA) my own apps. I'm sure many people would like GPS. Oh, and real buttons and a stylus.
I think you're absolutely right. Someone should mod your comment up...
The article describes two separate issues: TCP window scaling, and SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection). These have very little to do with each other, excepting the fact that they're both networking features in Windows Vista.
From what I gather from a quick Google, the problem with TCP window scaling is actually one with crap routers that don't support the feature and misbehave upon encountering it. Furthermore, TCP window scaling is not new to Windows Vista. It was merely disabled by default in previous versions of Windows. The fix is extremely simple, see this article for information.
The second issue, with SPI, seems to indeed be a Vista bug, but I can find no evidence whatsoever that it exists in Vista RTM, or even RC1/RC2. It's seriously not "stuff that matters" anymore. Prerelease versions always have bugs! If you don't like it, wait for the RTM (or as is usually the case with Microsoft, the first service pack)!
You were replying to a post about Java vs .NET with regards to desktop performance. Nothing about AJAX.
I'll concede that MSDN is a very nice collection of CDs, but I'd trade those CDs for source code any day of the week. On that note, the Linux stack has a wealth of documentation ... but at your local book store.
MSDN is not just a nice collection of CD's - it's all available on-line, and free as in beer. No ads, and it works well in Firefox! That's more than you can say for high-quality documentation for any other platform. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
I personally find the CD collection inferior because you have to update it. Fortunately, the MSDN integration in Visual Studio also uses the on-line MSDN if the sought information is not available locally.
Now, on that note, typically, the architects, developers, and testers you're referring to wouldn't know what to do with source code if it hit them in the head. They represent the lower ranks of the tech profession. Those of us who work in pushing the envelope of new technology almost unanimously reject MS products because they are far too contraining.
That's a pretty unfair and ignorant way to look at people who use Visual Studio. Not only are you ignoring the fact that the most commercially successful pieces of software ever conceived - Microsoft Windows and Office - were developed in Visual Studio by people who certainly do not deserve to be called "the lower ranks of the tech profession" (well, some of them perhaps), you are also ignoring the many other companies who have created successful products developed using Microsoft's tools. I work at such a company, and we are in fact pushing the envelope of new technology in our market. While I would not call Microsoft's products perfect, they have been instrumental to our success.
If your tools constrain you, you may be using the wrong ones; or you may be using them incorrectly. I think you have to try very hard to fail at using Visual Studio.