Have you ever used XP or 2000? It's not "shitty". It's certainly not the best thing ever, but it sure as fuck beats using Linux for a desktop machine. Please note that I ran Linux as my only OS from 1997 through 2002 and then went back and haven't returned.
It may not be shitty in an absolute sense, but given the amount of money and time that have been spent on it, shitty it still is. If our industry was composed of several large operating system companies rather than one behemoth and a dozen hanging on by their fingernails we would be much much better off. Microsoft didn't get where they are primarily by the strength of their technology offerings but by other less ethical means. Bait and switch, kickbacks, embrace and extinguish, buyout and extinguish and numerous similar gimmickry do more to describe the company than any feature set, or heaven forbid "innovation" that they are responsible for. They are where they are for little other reason than the federal government (followed by the states) eventually standardized on their products forcing a chain reaction of most companies to do likewise.
If they made any other product than software (which still possesses a mysterious legal immunity) they would have been sued out of business by now.
Given the amount of time and money they have had to spend on it, it would be a miracle if they hadn't achieve some degree of stability by now, as it is, it is a miracle that they have achieved as little as they have.
Glad you are enjoying your Microsoft experience again. I switched to Linux in the late 90's too and have seen no reason to go back. Linux is marginally harder to install, but the "thrill" of re-installing operating systems wore off for me while I was still a Windows user. Maybe you actually look forward to each "new" release.
As Microsoft always does, now that the NEW version is out, they have suddenly become aware and willing to talk openly about how miserable a failure the OLD version was.
Microsoft continues to go to the bank on the basis of "You CAN fool MOST of the people ALL of the time."
Just like during the.com boom and subsequent bust, right now we have businesses like Amazon.com and Netflix with business models, but we also have businesses like Google which have no discernible business plan besides making money.
Bad example. Google actually DOES make money, and the fact that they have plans to make more money is a GOOD thing (for them and investors). The problem is with companies that HAVE NO PLAN, or have a plan that MAKES NO SENSE. One problem right now is that Google's success has lead to a lot of companies coming along and saying to investors "Yeah, like, see Google over there making money? We're gonna do that too. So give us a few million to get started. That's our plan."
So, what we have here (in addition to the ever present failure to communicate) is a lack of imaginative NEW ways to make money on the Internet. Too many "me too" people have jumped on the bandwagon too late to really be called innovative.
No doubt there is money to be made on the Internet with advertising. Google is sucking up a lot of that money, hurting old-style advertising in the process. Other companies will come along and compete for those dollars, but make no mistake about it there are only so many dollars spent on advertising at any given time, and a few companies will get a lot of them, while other companies will get few to none. Those companies offering all sorts of "free" services that don't succeed in geting that ad revenue are going to be short-lived, and when we see one after the other of them closing down I think it will look like a bubble burst, even if massive layoffs and bankruptcies aren't invlved.. There is still more money that can be made by retailing (not too many people seem to be on that bandwagon lately). And after a few more newspapers and TV networks go out of business there will still be room for profit making journalism and entertainment on the Internet. Whether ALL of these possibilities, and others can be tacked on to the current rush to "social networking" I think is what is debatable here.
My guess is that there is no "plot" involved, there certainly is a goodly amount of bureaucratic incompetence though. In such an environment there can be no single person who is a point of failure. You can't blame it on an intern, or his manager, or his manager's manager, but you CAN blame it on a good part of the organization, from top to bottom, that would come up with such a back-up "strategy". consider...
In hindsight, administrators we interviewed universally agreed that they should have notified the patrol and other authorities at least 48 hours earlier.
Ummm, so why hasn't ayone else been fired, or even reprimanded in any way?
Finally, we note that the theft would never have compromised the identities of hundreds of thousands of state employees, taxpayers, public assistance recipients and others had OAKS administrators responded appropriately to a call they received from an assistant state auditor in late February 2007. The auditor warned that access to Social Security numbers and other sensitive data was readily available on a shared drive on the OAKS intranet. Four months later, state officials would learn that the stolen backup tape contained a massive quantity of data that had been stored on that drive.
Why? Nobody else fired, government worker or contractor. Why?
Given the complexity of the OAKS conversion and the enormous pressure nearly 300 state employees and contractors have been under to meet tight delivery schedules, it is clear that security and confidentiality were secondary concerns at OAKS.
Ahhh, I see, they were under time pressure, so all is forgiven.
So, for all future management types, project planning types, government desk-jockeys, contractors, and even interns, lets save you those thirty or so seconds you couldn't find to come up with a better backup strategy than this:
(1) It makes no sense to take the most recent back-up tape home, or even off-site. It DOES make sense to have back-ups off site, but consider how you are likely to use them... The most likely uses for back-up tapes at all are: Software failure resulting in lost or corruption of data; human error resulting in same; hard drive failure; total system failure (in roughly that order of likelihood). In all such cases you are going to want to have a back-up tape on-site, not off-site.
(2) When would you be most likely to need an off-site tape? Well, I'm thinking that would be only in the event that the site (you know, the place where your computers are) is destroyed or unavailable for some reason. Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Although in that case, having someone you work with take the tapes home and leave them on their TV set, or in their car, or anywhere else they are likely to leave them wouldn't be any better than just leaving them on the top of a bookshelf somewhere in your data center. Next 911 comes to mind, but there too, you wouldn't want them nearby, just laying around. Oh, and by the way you would need to arrange for an alternate facility to take such a tape (you know, for the "restore" part of the "back-up" plan). And if you didn't have time to think of your plan as far as where to take the tapes, it's really, REALLY hard to imagine that you even have an alternate site in mind, much less that you have made arrangements to use it on a moments notice. Weren't planning to run the whole system on your son's Playstation were you? When your primary site becomes unavailable, nobody is going to expect you to have everything running again the same day, even if such a thing was remotely possible (even if you had planned for such an eventuality). So what would it matter if your backup were a day old, or a week old? And don't tell me you only have ONE set of back-up tapes. You do daily back-up right? And Weeklies? Throw in some incremental tapes for times when they will do? No? Maybe you need to find an intern to make a back-up strategy for yourselves.
WOW that's pretty quick turn-around for Microsoft. Maybe they had better just stick to a few new 3-D icons, a more eco-friendly retail packaging, and a mandatory upgrade to 14 or so price levels. Now thats what I call INOVATION!
I've seen the hinges wear out on several laptops, but more frequently than that, the various parts that connect the display to the motherboard go bad and you start getting displays that intermittently dim or go off altogether. I've also had a couple of people ask me for help with non-functional laptops and say things like "I've been very careful with it, it's only been dropped a couple of times."
Let me settle this argument and say that we all know when portable TV and stereo units came out everyone got rid of their stationary models.
Of course the above isn't true, and there is no reason to expect that as PCs become low cost appliances (FINALLY!) people will think nothing of having two, three or half a dozen. I've always told people, don't get a laptop as your ONLY computer. Get a desktop first, then a laptop. Keep your data synced as best you can (given constraints of smaller laptop disk size) and you've solved to a great extent the biggest problem that home computer users have: too lazy to do backups.
With the backing of some of the groups opposed to the Google Library project, the Open Content Alliance should experience smooth sailing.
In other words, the group trying to tie up Google in the courts is off doing something very similar on it's own. Typical outcomes for such efforts is to plod along offering competition to the product being litigated and in the process try to make the venture unprofitable for the target organization. Once case is settle out of court (or in) competing product is dropped like a hot potato.
Why would ANYONE trust Yahoo, MSN, HP or Adobe with content of any kind?
I fail to see what is wrong with the Google approach: I can search on content with strings. If the found content is not under copyright I have full access to it right away. If the found content is still under copyright I can at least verify that it actually covers the topic I'm interested in (as opposed to just containing a word or two in the glossary) and I can then procede to order the book, go to my public library, or whatever I need to do to get the information.
I love Project Gutenberg and the like, but considering the players involved this thing stinks to high heaven.
Of course Google could just make it easy on themselves and pull the plug on their efforts right now. Let these bandwagoneers do the heavy lifting and just provide searches on it all (which they are likely to do in any event).
My guess is though that this group will disband about a day after Google stops scanning.
"In most cases, they fugged up their IE tool bars."
How about... they clicked "view" and turned the toolbar off? I just helped a guy who had lost his "go back" button. This was a home user. For weeks now he had been browsing the web, until he gets to a page that doesn't link to anything he is interested in. So then he drops the connection, reboots his computer and starts over. Of course this isn't a problem unique to Windows PCs, I could do the same thing here with Linux and Firefox. What is unique to Windows users is that they are so used to random things going wrong that it doesn't even occur to them that they might have accidentally changed an option. I told him how to turn the toolbar back on. Also helped him get his start bar back to the bottom rather than off on the right side where he claimed he never put it. Then his system blue-screened. I told him there was nothing I could do about that and that no doubt Microsoft had received a notification of that and would fix it automatically. Nothing wrong with a little fantasy to help him stay a loyal Microsoft user, and to get me out of an unpaid support call a lot sooner.
It runs faster on my Linux box than on my Apple computer. A recent Google presentation claimed they'd be doing more and more things on Linux and I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In addition, to better characterize the type of people Microsoft prefers to do business with it might make sense to link the phrase "Dumb-Fuck Ready to the target site. At least to me that characterizes the people who haven't at least started seriously considering alternative to a continued relationship with the company.
"The BBC has chosen Microsoft's DRM technology to limit the viewing of content downloaded from their website."
Well, I'll not bother to check their site anymore. Someone tell them for me that their attempt to limit visitors has been successful.
"DRM is theoretically impossible. That's true. Unfortunately, DRM that can only be inexpensively hacked with an allowed player and recapture equipment is probably entirely possible. What that means is this: It's possible to create a DRM system that will prevent people from playing videos on Linux. It'll still be possible to crack the DRM and extract the video, but you'll have to use an approved player in the process."
You know, the question of motive always puzzles me. Here they are, trying to get their stuff out there, trying to get attention, why would they want to pull a stunt like this other than the possibility of some form of payola from Microsoft? I mean if you had to PAY to watch BBC web clips it would make more sense. For the majority of content like this where the objective is to gain as wide an audience as possible, the only explanations I can think of for DRM are stupidity and kickbacks. Am I missing something?
While I am no expert on religion, and I did at one time have the same "never been to church since my parents forced me to go when I was 6" attitude that causes most of the posters above to refer to "the apple", I have made a renewed study of the material as an adult and conclude something like the following (which should be read as my interpretation of what the early parts of the Bible are meant to convey as opposed to my opinion of what events actually took place):
Humans were created at least initially as automatons with little if any free will. I think the words "clothed in light" have been used, and some interpret this to possible existence in some other dimension or state of being. Free will having been introduced to the universe by the consumption of this "forbidden fruit", things were changed. A grand experiment was begun at that point, and if you read and accept the entire Bible you conclude that God, and only God (by definition), already knows the outcome of the experiment. To ask if God knew the outcome of the experiment before it was begun can confuse the issue simply because we exist at only one point in space at any given time. The creator of the "universe" would not be subject to the laws of space or time. Could God "roll the dice" in the creation of the universe, not knowing "before" how it would come out, but knowing "after" (the "instant" after creation that is) what the outcome was? To me that is both consistent with what the Bible says, and consistent with our current theories about the Big Bang (which itself is still being questioned).
Of more interest than the details of how the universe came into being which I suspect will never be knowable for certain given the tools at our disposal (we might for example learn all there is to know about sub atomic particles and still not discover how they came about in the first place) is the irrational approach that most people take whether they are religious or not of reaching near certitude about how it all happened and claiming superiority over anyone who hasn't reached the same conclusions. The game has no winners (in our lifetime at least) and in fact guarantees needless friction among us. As a religions person I would rather say (quoting from a post above) let science be science. "Subdue the Earth" can in fact be interpreted as a commandment to do science without limits. As a secular person, I would rather say, let the unknown and unknowable be open to full human speculation. To settle on full determinism versus unlimited chaos without all the data (and we will probably never have all the data) is both bad science and bad religion.
Here is my advice: Look to the motives of *anyone* trying to make you decide the undecidable here an now, and avoid buying any "real estate" from them. The Universe is a big enough place that you can stake out your own claim without fear of poachers.
Why I used to have to carry data on a box full of floppies seven times a day between my office machine and home machine. On foot, and it was uphill, BOTH WAYS!
his name will be familiar to people in the open-source community. In an e-mail late Thursday night, a Microsoft representative said the role will be filled by Tom Hanrahan,
Feel free to take your own advice about "whinging".
If users sit idly by and let vendors walk all over them it will lead to exactly the situation users currently have with Microsoft, a "benevolent" dictatorship that puts out products and services that don't do the majority of users any good but feed Wall Streets urges for "innovation".
As a believer in a functioning free market, I see it as my job to complain, boycott, and change vendors as frequently as it takes to get attention focused back on MY needs and desires.
Keep in mind my complaint is not that the NEW features don't work perfectly, it is that the OLD features still need work and I am afraid that these deficiencies are being ignored to continue to engage in this turf battle with Microsoft/Yahoo. In the long run people will use what works best for them, including factors such as performance, ease of use and (for example) special video card and memory requirements (parts of the MS interface tell me that I HAVE to be running Windows XP or later with a maxed out video card, typical). As far as the announcement yesterday, I think the widgets are going to be far more useful, and to everyone, and soon. I have no problem with that part of it. I just want better satellite data, and soon, and everywhere.
The competition between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google over all these features is wonderful, but as each new feature is announced they work only in a few major cities and in some cases there seems to be no prospects for a wider roll out. While New York and Silicon Valley may have 3D rotating virtual reality animations large parts of the coastline are still low resolution 8 year old images. This is starting to look more like a pissing contest between the big players rather than anything that will be useful in the near term for most Americans (let alone other countries).
For comparison I picked a random part of Washington DC and zoomed in using Microsoft maps to see the 3D view, which (since Google isn't there yet with this feature, would put MS in the lead as far as usability for my general area) but as I zoomed in I noticed that I was looking at a construction site and during my zoom the construction went from bare dirt to a fully developed community (ie the closer pictures were more up to date). Well, thats nice, but in general it is very distracting to see roads change and seasons come and go as you zoom in or out of an area. Google is no better with often old fuzzy-to-the-point-of-useless sections right up next to crystal clear housetop photos, with no rhyme nor reason to which sections are sharp and which are fuzzy. At least with Google the image resolution doesn't change as you zoom in or out, but I've certainly been following a road in mid density areas and found that the road would be clear enough to see vehicles on it in one section and then almost impossible to discern the road from the surrounding objects in the next.
Let's face it: ALL the imagery is a nice to have not a need to have. The cartoon maps are good enough for navigation. But if they are going to present us with imagery at all, isn't it time some of these things get out of the laboratory phase and into something more closely resembling production?
"The Walmart version looked identical to the hardware store version in every way, but it had plastic gears instead of the metal gears in the hardware store version."
If you saw it on the Internet, I'm sure it's true but...
It's also "well known" for companies to sell large stores like Walmart, Frys, Compu USA (RIP), Circuit City, etc. unique model numbered items so that those stores can "price match" one another. You know: "Bring us the ad from a competing store with the same product and we will match their price." Followed by "Oh, I'm sorry sir, that ad is for the HP 37509Q783RT7 laptop computer, the one you are looking at here is the much better 37509Q783RT8." With computers instead of swapping out the metal gears for plastic ones, you get lower end graphics cards 8X instead of 24X burners etc.
Well, anyway, that's my apocryphal consumerism story, and I'm sticking to it.
Missing from the discussion above is the fact that in many rural areas the only store in town is a Walmart. I haven't had any particular quality problems with the one here. For business products they often have lower prices and more selection than the nearby Staples (but Staples does have a better selection of laptops). I can drive 30 miles to a Best Buy (the smallest in the country they tell me) and do even better as far as selection. But if the close-by Walmart has what I'm looking for I have no hesitation buying it there.
Same here. I had just about talked myself into a desktop PPC system (learned to like Apple on this here Powerbook) when they made the announcement. No way am going to buy what is essentially a glorified Windows system just to run OS X. I'd rather just get a high end generic Intel box and go back to Linux (well, I've since done that actually, I just use the Powerbook for travel these days). This will probably be my last Apple computer (unless they change their minds again, which I don' anticipate).
I think the point still stands that Windows is a poor choice for secure applications. The report (as you cited it) didn't say that viruses and worms had NO impact, but simply that it was not significant. You can drive a truck through that. These institutions do NOT like to admit to error.
When the Chinese got into the State Department networks a year or so ago they trotted out an "official" to tell the press that their computers were unaffected. Only catch was that official was in the mainframe group (and the mainframes were truly not affected). Of course what they covered over for as long as they could was that the PC networks were largely incapacitated. You couldn't get to the data on the mainframes to actually do any useful work because the end user stuff is now all PC based.
The only way to have reasonable secure Windows systems is to take them totally off he Internet, better yet, power them off completely and just pay MS for the license so you can get your kick-back.
This is a troll. Universal binaries are not twice as hard to create as architecture-specific code. For almost all programs, there is no extra work needed beyond a checkbox.
I don't think it's a troll, I just see evidence that the Apple fanbase can't admit that there was any downsides to whatever Steve comes up with then, now or in the future. It would OBVIOUSLY be better to keep support for multiple processor types (I think that discipline actually makes the code more stable too), allowing Apple to use high-end PowerPC systems for "mainframe" type applications, or even newer low-end units if they indeed beat Intel in whatever area the market is hot. That flexibility is in fact what Apple boasted about with OS X, but I think all the fanbase got out of it was "Intel good, PPC bad, Og no more like PPC, Ugh."
Big computing grids will just get the chips from IBM, other integrators, or (as they have already done) gangs of Playstations. How many large installations of Apple servers are there? Not specialized applications, but whole companies, Ford, GE, GM? Not a lot I don't think and Apple hasn't shown much of an appetite for changing that. Artsy Fartsy gadgets is the future for Apple (and I'm using one right now by the way, but one of the "old" PPC models). I may even get an Intel Apple at some point, but it will have to beat head to head whatever HP Dell, and Sony are offering. I won't pay a premium for what I consider a plebeian "Windoows" machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Bolo made silly typo.
It may not be shitty in an absolute sense, but given the amount of money and time that have been spent on it, shitty it still is. If our industry was composed of several large operating system companies rather than one behemoth and a dozen hanging on by their fingernails we would be much much better off. Microsoft didn't get where they are primarily by the strength of their technology offerings but by other less ethical means. Bait and switch, kickbacks, embrace and extinguish, buyout and extinguish and numerous similar gimmickry do more to describe the company than any feature set, or heaven forbid "innovation" that they are responsible for. They are where they are for little other reason than the federal government (followed by the states) eventually standardized on their products forcing a chain reaction of most companies to do likewise.
If they made any other product than software (which still possesses a mysterious legal immunity) they would have been sued out of business by now.
Given the amount of time and money they have had to spend on it, it would be a miracle if they hadn't achieve some degree of stability by now, as it is, it is a miracle that they have achieved as little as they have.
Glad you are enjoying your Microsoft experience again. I switched to Linux in the late 90's too and have seen no reason to go back. Linux is marginally harder to install, but the "thrill" of re-installing operating systems wore off for me while I was still a Windows user. Maybe you actually look forward to each "new" release.
Not to mention...
As Microsoft always does, now that the NEW version is out, they have suddenly become aware and willing to talk openly about how miserable a failure the OLD version was.
Microsoft continues to go to the bank on the basis of "You CAN fool MOST of the people ALL of the time."
How much longer will this formula work for them?
Ethics, honesty, style, humor, etc.
Bad example. Google actually DOES make money, and the fact that they have plans to make more money is a GOOD thing (for them and investors). The problem is with companies that HAVE NO PLAN, or have a plan that MAKES NO SENSE. One problem right now is that Google's success has lead to a lot of companies coming along and saying to investors "Yeah, like, see Google over there making money? We're gonna do that too. So give us a few million to get started. That's our plan."
So, what we have here (in addition to the ever present failure to communicate) is a lack of imaginative NEW ways to make money on the Internet. Too many "me too" people have jumped on the bandwagon too late to really be called innovative.
No doubt there is money to be made on the Internet with advertising. Google is sucking up a lot of that money, hurting old-style advertising in the process. Other companies will come along and compete for those dollars, but make no mistake about it there are only so many dollars spent on advertising at any given time, and a few companies will get a lot of them, while other companies will get few to none. Those companies offering all sorts of "free" services that don't succeed in geting that ad revenue are going to be short-lived, and when we see one after the other of them closing down I think it will look like a bubble burst, even if massive layoffs and bankruptcies aren't invlved.. There is still more money that can be made by retailing (not too many people seem to be on that bandwagon lately). And after a few more newspapers and TV networks go out of business there will still be room for profit making journalism and entertainment on the Internet. Whether ALL of these possibilities, and others can be tacked on to the current rush to "social networking" I think is what is debatable here.
vi?
If you can use a boot loader I would think a flat file editor would be a big advancement.
From the http://watchdog.ohio.gov/investigations/2007190.p
Ummm, so why hasn't ayone else been fired, or even reprimanded in any way?
Why? Nobody else fired, government worker or contractor. Why?
Ahhh, I see, they were under time pressure, so all is forgiven.
So, for all future management types, project planning types, government desk-jockeys, contractors, and even interns, lets save you those thirty or so seconds you couldn't find to come up with a better backup strategy than this:
(1) It makes no sense to take the most recent back-up tape home, or even off-site. It DOES make sense to have back-ups off site, but consider how you are likely to use them... The most likely uses for back-up tapes at all are: Software failure resulting in lost or corruption of data; human error resulting in same; hard drive failure; total system failure (in roughly that order of likelihood). In all such cases you are going to want to have a back-up tape on-site, not off-site.
(2) When would you be most likely to need an off-site tape? Well, I'm thinking that would be only in the event that the site (you know, the place where your computers are) is destroyed or unavailable for some reason. Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Although in that case, having someone you work with take the tapes home and leave them on their TV set, or in their car, or anywhere else they are likely to leave them wouldn't be any better than just leaving them on the top of a bookshelf somewhere in your data center. Next 911 comes to mind, but there too, you wouldn't want them nearby, just laying around. Oh, and by the way you would need to arrange for an alternate facility to take such a tape (you know, for the "restore" part of the "back-up" plan). And if you didn't have time to think of your plan as far as where to take the tapes, it's really, REALLY hard to imagine that you even have an alternate site in mind, much less that you have made arrangements to use it on a moments notice. Weren't planning to run the whole system on your son's Playstation were you? When your primary site becomes unavailable, nobody is going to expect you to have everything running again the same day, even if such a thing was remotely possible (even if you had planned for such an eventuality). So what would it matter if your backup were a day old, or a week old? And don't tell me you only have ONE set of back-up tapes. You do daily back-up right? And Weeklies? Throw in some incremental tapes for times when they will do? No? Maybe you need to find an intern to make a back-up strategy for yourselves.
WOW that's pretty quick turn-around for Microsoft. Maybe they had better just stick to a few new 3-D icons, a more eco-friendly retail packaging, and a mandatory upgrade to 14 or so price levels. Now thats what I call INOVATION!
Well, that's what some people call it anyway.
I've seen the hinges wear out on several laptops, but more frequently than that, the various parts that connect the display to the motherboard go bad and you start getting displays that intermittently dim or go off altogether. I've also had a couple of people ask me for help with non-functional laptops and say things like "I've been very careful with it, it's only been dropped a couple of times."
Let me settle this argument and say that we all know when portable TV and stereo units came out everyone got rid of their stationary models.
Of course the above isn't true, and there is no reason to expect that as PCs become low cost appliances (FINALLY!) people will think nothing of having two, three or half a dozen. I've always told people, don't get a laptop as your ONLY computer. Get a desktop first, then a laptop. Keep your data synced as best you can (given constraints of smaller laptop disk size) and you've solved to a great extent the biggest problem that home computer users have: too lazy to do backups.
In other words, the group trying to tie up Google in the courts is off doing something very similar on it's own. Typical outcomes for such efforts is to plod along offering competition to the product being litigated and in the process try to make the venture unprofitable for the target organization. Once case is settle out of court (or in) competing product is dropped like a hot potato.
Why would ANYONE trust Yahoo, MSN, HP or Adobe with content of any kind?
I fail to see what is wrong with the Google approach: I can search on content with strings. If the found content is not under copyright I have full access to it right away. If the found content is still under copyright I can at least verify that it actually covers the topic I'm interested in (as opposed to just containing a word or two in the glossary) and I can then procede to order the book, go to my public library, or whatever I need to do to get the information.
I love Project Gutenberg and the like, but considering the players involved this thing stinks to high heaven.
Of course Google could just make it easy on themselves and pull the plug on their efforts right now. Let these bandwagoneers do the heavy lifting and just provide searches on it all (which they are likely to do in any event).
My guess is though that this group will disband about a day after Google stops scanning.
We WILL get fooled again!
Remind me not to borrow your Nokia 770.
How about... they clicked "view" and turned the toolbar off? I just helped a guy who had lost his "go back" button. This was a home user. For weeks now he had been browsing the web, until he gets to a page that doesn't link to anything he is interested in. So then he drops the connection, reboots his computer and starts over. Of course this isn't a problem unique to Windows PCs, I could do the same thing here with Linux and Firefox. What is unique to Windows users is that they are so used to random things going wrong that it doesn't even occur to them that they might have accidentally changed an option. I told him how to turn the toolbar back on. Also helped him get his start bar back to the bottom rather than off on the right side where he claimed he never put it. Then his system blue-screened. I told him there was nothing I could do about that and that no doubt Microsoft had received a notification of that and would fix it automatically. Nothing wrong with a little fantasy to help him stay a loyal Microsoft user, and to get me out of an unpaid support call a lot sooner.
Picasa may have used Wine, but it certainly didn't set a pattern. Google Earth isn't using Wine as far as I can tell:
http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
It runs faster on my Linux box than on my Apple computer. A recent Google presentation claimed they'd be doing more and more things on Linux and I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In addition, to better characterize the type of people Microsoft prefers to do business with it might make sense to link the phrase "Dumb-Fuck Ready to the target site. At least to me that characterizes the people who haven't at least started seriously considering alternative to a continued relationship with the company.
Well, I'll not bother to check their site anymore. Someone tell them for me that their attempt to limit visitors has been successful.
You know, the question of motive always puzzles me. Here they are, trying to get their stuff out there, trying to get attention, why would they want to pull a stunt like this other than the possibility of some form of payola from Microsoft? I mean if you had to PAY to watch BBC web clips it would make more sense. For the majority of content like this where the objective is to gain as wide an audience as possible, the only explanations I can think of for DRM are stupidity and kickbacks. Am I missing something?
While I am no expert on religion, and I did at one time have the same "never been to church since my parents forced me to go when I was 6" attitude that causes most of the posters above to refer to "the apple", I have made a renewed study of the material as an adult and conclude something like the following (which should be read as my interpretation of what the early parts of the Bible are meant to convey as opposed to my opinion of what events actually took place):
Humans were created at least initially as automatons with little if any free will. I think the words "clothed in light" have been used, and some interpret this to possible existence in some other dimension or state of being. Free will having been introduced to the universe by the consumption of this "forbidden fruit", things were changed. A grand experiment was begun at that point, and if you read and accept the entire Bible you conclude that God, and only God (by definition), already knows the outcome of the experiment. To ask if God knew the outcome of the experiment before it was begun can confuse the issue simply because we exist at only one point in space at any given time. The creator of the "universe" would not be subject to the laws of space or time. Could God "roll the dice" in the creation of the universe, not knowing "before" how it would come out, but knowing "after" (the "instant" after creation that is) what the outcome was? To me that is both consistent with what the Bible says, and consistent with our current theories about the Big Bang (which itself is still being questioned).
Of more interest than the details of how the universe came into being which I suspect will never be knowable for certain given the tools at our disposal (we might for example learn all there is to know about sub atomic particles and still not discover how they came about in the first place) is the irrational approach that most people take whether they are religious or not of reaching near certitude about how it all happened and claiming superiority over anyone who hasn't reached the same conclusions. The game has no winners (in our lifetime at least) and in fact guarantees needless friction among us. As a religions person I would rather say (quoting from a post above) let science be science. "Subdue the Earth" can in fact be interpreted as a commandment to do science without limits. As a secular person, I would rather say, let the unknown and unknowable be open to full human speculation. To settle on full determinism versus unlimited chaos without all the data (and we will probably never have all the data) is both bad science and bad religion.
Here is my advice: Look to the motives of *anyone* trying to make you decide the undecidable here an now, and avoid buying any "real estate" from them. The Universe is a big enough place that you can stake out your own claim without fear of poachers.
Why I used to have to carry data on a box full of floppies seven times a day between my office machine and home machine. On foot, and it was uphill, BOTH WAYS!
And I STILL got viruses!
Are you sure you don't mean... SATAN!???
Feel free to take your own advice about "whinging".
If users sit idly by and let vendors walk all over them it will lead to exactly the situation users currently have with Microsoft, a "benevolent" dictatorship that puts out products and services that don't do the majority of users any good but feed Wall Streets urges for "innovation".
As a believer in a functioning free market, I see it as my job to complain, boycott, and change vendors as frequently as it takes to get attention focused back on MY needs and desires.
Keep in mind my complaint is not that the NEW features don't work perfectly, it is that the OLD features still need work and I am afraid that these deficiencies are being ignored to continue to engage in this turf battle with Microsoft/Yahoo. In the long run people will use what works best for them, including factors such as performance, ease of use and (for example) special video card and memory requirements (parts of the MS interface tell me that I HAVE to be running Windows XP or later with a maxed out video card, typical). As far as the announcement yesterday, I think the widgets are going to be far more useful, and to everyone, and soon. I have no problem with that part of it. I just want better satellite data, and soon, and everywhere.
The competition between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google over all these features is wonderful, but as each new feature is announced they work only in a few major cities and in some cases there seems to be no prospects for a wider roll out. While New York and Silicon Valley may have 3D rotating virtual reality animations large parts of the coastline are still low resolution 8 year old images. This is starting to look more like a pissing contest between the big players rather than anything that will be useful in the near term for most Americans (let alone other countries).
For comparison I picked a random part of Washington DC and zoomed in using Microsoft maps to see the 3D view, which (since Google isn't there yet with this feature, would put MS in the lead as far as usability for my general area) but as I zoomed in I noticed that I was looking at a construction site and during my zoom the construction went from bare dirt to a fully developed community (ie the closer pictures were more up to date). Well, thats nice, but in general it is very distracting to see roads change and seasons come and go as you zoom in or out of an area. Google is no better with often old fuzzy-to-the-point-of-useless sections right up next to crystal clear housetop photos, with no rhyme nor reason to which sections are sharp and which are fuzzy. At least with Google the image resolution doesn't change as you zoom in or out, but I've certainly been following a road in mid density areas and found that the road would be clear enough to see vehicles on it in one section and then almost impossible to discern the road from the surrounding objects in the next.
Let's face it: ALL the imagery is a nice to have not a need to have. The cartoon maps are good enough for navigation. But if they are going to present us with imagery at all, isn't it time some of these things get out of the laboratory phase and into something more closely resembling production?
If you saw it on the Internet, I'm sure it's true but...
It's also "well known" for companies to sell large stores like Walmart, Frys, Compu USA (RIP), Circuit City, etc. unique model numbered items so that those stores can "price match" one another. You know: "Bring us the ad from a competing store with the same product and we will match their price." Followed by "Oh, I'm sorry sir, that ad is for the HP 37509Q783RT7 laptop computer, the one you are looking at here is the much better 37509Q783RT8." With computers instead of swapping out the metal gears for plastic ones, you get lower end graphics cards 8X instead of 24X burners etc.
Well, anyway, that's my apocryphal consumerism story, and I'm sticking to it.
Missing from the discussion above is the fact that in many rural areas the only store in town is a Walmart. I haven't had any particular quality problems with the one here. For business products they often have lower prices and more selection than the nearby Staples (but Staples does have a better selection of laptops). I can drive 30 miles to a Best Buy (the smallest in the country they tell me) and do even better as far as selection. But if the close-by Walmart has what I'm looking for I have no hesitation buying it there.
That way they can get the articles spell-checked.
I don't think they have a logic-check yet though.
Same here. I had just about talked myself into a desktop PPC system (learned to like Apple on this here Powerbook) when they made the announcement. No way am going to buy what is essentially a glorified Windows system just to run OS X. I'd rather just get a high end generic Intel box and go back to Linux (well, I've since done that actually, I just use the Powerbook for travel these days). This will probably be my last Apple computer (unless they change their minds again, which I don' anticipate).
I think the point still stands that Windows is a poor choice for secure applications. The report (as you cited it) didn't say that viruses and worms had NO impact, but simply that it was not significant. You can drive a truck through that. These institutions do NOT like to admit to error.
When the Chinese got into the State Department networks a year or so ago they trotted out an "official" to tell the press that their computers were unaffected. Only catch was that official was in the mainframe group (and the mainframes were truly not affected). Of course what they covered over for as long as they could was that the PC networks were largely incapacitated. You couldn't get to the data on the mainframes to actually do any useful work because the end user stuff is now all PC based.
The only way to have reasonable secure Windows systems is to take them totally off he Internet, better yet, power them off completely and just pay MS for the license so you can get your kick-back.
I don't think it's a troll, I just see evidence that the Apple fanbase can't admit that there was any downsides to whatever Steve comes up with then, now or in the future. It would OBVIOUSLY be better to keep support for multiple processor types (I think that discipline actually makes the code more stable too), allowing Apple to use high-end PowerPC systems for "mainframe" type applications, or even newer low-end units if they indeed beat Intel in whatever area the market is hot. That flexibility is in fact what Apple boasted about with OS X, but I think all the fanbase got out of it was "Intel good, PPC bad, Og no more like PPC, Ugh."
Big computing grids will just get the chips from IBM, other integrators, or (as they have already done) gangs of Playstations. How many large installations of Apple servers are there? Not specialized applications, but whole companies, Ford, GE, GM? Not a lot I don't think and Apple hasn't shown much of an appetite for changing that. Artsy Fartsy gadgets is the future for Apple (and I'm using one right now by the way, but one of the "old" PPC models). I may even get an Intel Apple at some point, but it will have to beat head to head whatever HP Dell, and Sony are offering. I won't pay a premium for what I consider a plebeian "Windoows" machine.