Reminds me of the one episode of Pinky and the Brain where they actually were successful in taking over the world. Pinky and the Brain were up all night and made a paper mache copy of the earth. Then they gave away free t-shirts to anyone who agreed to move over to the fake earth. Of course everyone went after the free tshirts like sheep so Pinky and the Brain were left to rule the now empty real earth. Of course at the end of the episode they had to join the rest of civilization on the fake earth because a planet killing asteroid came and destroyed the real earth. You didn't know that the earth we live on is a copy did you?:)
When will people ever learn? Anyone who comes up with a scheme to take your guns should be sumarily shot. Think about it, it's logical.
Thats why standards were invented. There will of course have to be some sort of rules created to define what constitutes porn. Hopefully standards that are very rigid and simple to cut down on the bickering. No "full nudity is ok if it somehow falls in the domain of "art". As much as I see an arguement for that, it's too easy to just call it all "art" and then the whole thing is useless. Nay, it has to be very simple...like "if the nipple or any identifyable portion thereof is shown in any form and any context, then it needs to go.xxx". Sure lots of people will complain about that...but that is the only way it can be clear, workable and enforacable.
I got all excited there for a minute that maybe I had missed something or something had changed in the Oracle camp. So I actually tried to access some content at otn.oracle.com. It teased me a little as if I was going to get some love. But then I was presented with the framilliar "please log in to access this content" box.
OTOH, I was able to view stuff in the forums mentioned and they actually seemed helpful. So that is an improvement over what I saw a couple years ago.
I don't blame SAP for using whatever backchannel means nessasary to access Oracle's knowledge base. I'm sure it was completely out of nessesity to support their customers. It has always baffled me how completely locked down Oracle is when it comes to their support. If you are not paying on a support contract and have a login with sufficient rights, there is basically nothing to see of any use on their website. As a deveoper trying to evalute a demo copy of the DBMS, I found it comepletely useless and ultimately was not able to get the demo to work because I couldn't get any support on it. The "big evil corporation" Microsoft doesn't have any problem putting their knowledgebase and troubleshooting guides out for public consumption, why does Oracle need to keep their's a closely guarded company secret?
Oh, and I think what they were referring to with the phrase "Thousands of proprietary software products" was all the patches for their DBMS.
You forgot one important group (you insensitive clod!). The sensible crowd who simply dismiss the article as hot air from a group of people who have the worst security track record of their industry in the past 5 years. I mean seriously, it's pretty bad when the antivirus software starts getting hit with viruses that would otherwise be ineffective against a system. I wouldn't trust Symantec/Norton with anything more important then a string, much less consider them an "authority" on anything security related. And no, I don't use a Mac.
Yep yep, I went 100% laser a while back too. Now I frequently wonder why I spent so many years of frusteration spending unmentionable amounts of money and time with those stupid inkjet printers. And yes, I tried "professional" series printers and the like. I may be wrong, but I really don't think a consumer level inkjet printer could ever be made with a competitive TCO...especially with lasers having gotten much cheaper. Ribbion was good in it's day, Wax Thermal is pretty good, but dry toner is still the best option.
The local cable provider where I live is just now rolling out broadband in my neighborhood. I live in a downtown area (friggin 5 blocks from city hall!) and they are just now getting it going in 2007??? Not only are then about 5 years late, the pricing is going to be off the scale. Have had DSL here for years and while it was kinda slow early on, it's up to 3M/512K real max speeds now (6M/768K advertised) and relatively inexpensive in comparison to cable. Meanwhile the local telco is quietly rolling out fibre to the doorstep so really I don't know why they bothered at this point.
So let me get this straight...you are trying to tell me that you can make Vista run faster then XP by throwing more hardware at it? How is that a reason to get Vista? Just put that upgraded hardware on XP and let Vista wallow in it's bloatedness.
Yes, we don't have alot of surgarcane friendly land here in the US. But we do have some in the gulf states and it seems like it would be dumb to not put some of it to use. Why not turn some of that devistated Louisiana land and unused FL land into surgarcane fields and build ethanol plants? Would economically benefit the area, and no matter what the labor costs are it's still cheaper to make ethanol out of surgarcane then corn. So what if it can't supply the entire demand? That's like saying you shouldn't eat a pineapple because pineapples cannot be your entire diet. Every little bit helps and is part of a bigger picture. We SHOULD be making ethanol out of sugarcane, sugarbeets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet, high-sugar grasses http://www.germinalseeds.com/pages/sugar.htm, and Ribbon Cane [Ribbon Cane is Sub-Tropical and used to be widely grown in the US as far north as N.Carolina]. All of these should be cheaper to process into ethanol as they have high natural sugar content and don't have to have the extra step of converting starch to sugar.
Beyond that, studies have shown that the increased demand for ethanol will not produce a continuous rise in corn prices but rather production will ramp up and maintain an equilibrium after an initial period of adjustment. People are so reactionary getting there panties in a bind anytime things get a tad uncomfortable. sheesh.
Really, most of them are all the same. Took 3 months to get one of our old domains transferred from Register.com to our main registrar at work. That included numerous emails, phone calls, and at least two "do overs" starting the transfer process from scratch because "Something went wrong, sorry but you are going to have to re-submit the request". I can't even describe how frusterated I was with the process.
I find your arguement less then convincing. They can have a Hard Drive with windows or whatever on it for testing and then swap in a hard drive with the OS of choice for the user (or no OS). Fact is, they are conspiring to make sure people adopt certain operating systems.
Take HP for instance. They will let you configure anything about a laptop you want to buy including memory, hard drive, wireless card, processor, even the type of LCD screen. But you say you want XP instead of Vista? Nope, sorry...only flavors of Vista are offered as a configuration option. So I called up and asked a rep if I could get XP, she initally told me that Vista is "just an upgraded version of XP so I should get it instead of XP". When I told her I knew Vista is different and had concerns about compatability with my existing programs and hardware, she got very scared sounding and went into lawyer speak mode telling me "I am not at liberty to comment on that". Then gave me a link where I could order a specific configuration with XP Pro. While I was dissapointed that I did not have the option to get a bigger hard drive, it was pretty close to my needs so I can't really complain too much personlly. It's just that the whole thing made me feel like she was going to loose her job just because I suggested that Vista may not meet my needs. Oh, and lets not forget that they highly recommend 2GB of ram to run Vista...which makes the laptop way more expensive then it needs to be to run a browser, quickbooks and office.
I find it amusing that these purpose built "Gaming" machines come pre-loaded with Windows Vista. Just how many games will people NOT be able to play on them? I'm thinking Earthsiege is not going to run for starters.
Looks like a Picocell to me. The technology has been around for a long time and you can actually get one if you are a business. Not sure why they aren't making them more available to the public tho.
Actually it is a smart political move. Scores points with the constiuents that for the most part agree that demoting pluto was totally dumb to begin with. And creates some good tourist marketing material. "Come visit sunny New Mexico where Pluto is still a planet!".
I will agree with you that Microsoft has alot of relationships and tricks up their sleeve to force adoption of Vista. But my opinion is that Vista is a failure by being just terribly implimented and enterprise customers should and will revolt agaist this system and find other means of meeting their needs. Windows ME saw widespread use as a result of the Microsoft marketing juggernaught but ultimately never graduated from the status of "dismal failure" and Microsoft had to take NT and make something to smooth things over. I may be wrong, but I think the problems with Vista are more fundamental then mere service packs can remedy. It comes down to some poor design/implimentation decisions that were made (Balmer?) that doomed the OS to mediocrety (at best). Early on, there was talk of Vista (longhorn at the time) being a truely revelutionary OS with a file system based on SQL databases and all sorts of cool stuff. In the end all we got was warmed over current technologies with some flashy front end stuff. And a whole lot of "are you sure" boxes.
Vista is a FAILURE! There, you have at least one person telling you its a failure that isn't a die hard Linux person. I cut my teeth on microsoft stuff and work for a Microsoft partner shop. I don't even run a Linux box anymore (though I did try it for a while). The few people I have heard from that said Vista is great were almost certainly paid by Microsoft to "voice their opinion" on the subject.
Re:this was expected
on
Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Was" a 64bit version of XP? No, there *IS* a 64 bit version of XP and it works much better then Vista all around. Just about everyone has released drivers for 64bit xp/2003 now so all the "fun" with drivers there is a thing of the past. The fact that everyone has to go back and write all new drivers for 64 bit Vista because all the APIs have changed is one of the biggest reasons why Vista sucks for both consumers and hardware people. If Vista had support for all the 64 bit drivers that already existed out there, the Vista driver nightmare would have never happened. Microsoft seems to argue that they decided to change everything to improve the driver infrastructure, but the jury is still out on that one. If it makes the OS crash less, then maybe there is an arguement. But I have not seen improved stability in practice and all the driver programmers I have heard from say that writing drivers for Vista consists of nothing but hacks. Forcing them into bad programming practices and therefore unstable drivers.
OK, someone please explain to me how a scrolling start menu is BETTER? I seemed to remember scrolling start menus in Windows 98 (when you got alot of programs going) and they sucked donkey *ss. Windows 2000 fixed that issue by making things expand across the screen so you could see everything and be able to find what you were looking for. So why go back? I thought we were supposed to be IMPROVING things? And for those who would flame me for not having tried it, I have used Vista and I still hate scrolling start menus now just as much as I did 8 years ago.
The carcoal stuff just stores the gas right? Don't need much in the way of infrastructure...just hook up a hose to your gas meter. (yes, I know the connectors and safety considerations are a bit bigger then that, but the general concept is there.
And to answer the E-85 question, the fueling stations are still pretty sparse, but there are two regular gas stations in the Portland, OR area that carry it now. One of them is on my way home...if I had a compatable vehicle I would be fueling up there sometimes. For fueling stations in your area, look here: http://www.e85refueling.com/
Also note that there is a difference between an E-85 compatable vehicle (FFV), and a vehicle specifically designed for E-85. Flex fuel vehicles (FFVs) actually get 5-20% less MPG vs. regular gasoline as the compression ratio isn't high enough in them to operate efficiently on E-85. Boosting the compression ratio to near 15:1 would allow them to get better MPG numbers then regular gasoline but then they would no longer be compatable with regular gas. Currently there are no vehicles sold in the USA designed specifically for running Ethanol (even though they are sold in other countries). It's a catch-22: carmakers dont want to sell the cars till there are sufficient pumps to support them and the pumps aren't popping up very fast because the flex[transition] vehicles are not very efficient so demand is small. With OPEC suddenly managing oil prices very tightly to make sure gasoline undercuts ethanol in the US and some other places, don't expect this situation to change very quickly.
Well Vista was thrashing the disk on my machine with 2GB of ram before I had a chance to install any third party apps. Superfetch is just a bandaid on the leaky dam of extreeme software bloat.
I disagree. I mean do you really think that private enterprise is going to be able to recruit Bruce Willis AND mount the sort of two-shuttle nucular payload mission required to save us all from the killer asteroid? Naw, we still need NASA.
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Reminds me of the one episode of Pinky and the Brain where they actually were successful in taking over the world. Pinky and the Brain were up all night and made a paper mache copy of the earth. Then they gave away free t-shirts to anyone who agreed to move over to the fake earth. Of course everyone went after the free tshirts like sheep so Pinky and the Brain were left to rule the now empty real earth. Of course at the end of the episode they had to join the rest of civilization on the fake earth because a planet killing asteroid came and destroyed the real earth. You didn't know that the earth we live on is a copy did you? :)
When will people ever learn? Anyone who comes up with a scheme to take your guns should be sumarily shot. Think about it, it's logical.
I guess nobody caught the Camp Chaos reference...
Is a hot tub full of filipino sex slaves and a mexican house boy an option?
Thats why standards were invented. There will of course have to be some sort of rules created to define what constitutes porn. Hopefully standards that are very rigid and simple to cut down on the bickering. No "full nudity is ok if it somehow falls in the domain of "art". As much as I see an arguement for that, it's too easy to just call it all "art" and then the whole thing is useless. Nay, it has to be very simple...like "if the nipple or any identifyable portion thereof is shown in any form and any context, then it needs to go .xxx". Sure lots of people will complain about that...but that is the only way it can be clear, workable and enforacable.
I got all excited there for a minute that maybe I had missed something or something had changed in the Oracle camp. So I actually tried to access some content at otn.oracle.com. It teased me a little as if I was going to get some love. But then I was presented with the framilliar "please log in to access this content" box.
OTOH, I was able to view stuff in the forums mentioned and they actually seemed helpful. So that is an improvement over what I saw a couple years ago.
I don't blame SAP for using whatever backchannel means nessasary to access Oracle's knowledge base. I'm sure it was completely out of nessesity to support their customers. It has always baffled me how completely locked down Oracle is when it comes to their support. If you are not paying on a support contract and have a login with sufficient rights, there is basically nothing to see of any use on their website. As a deveoper trying to evalute a demo copy of the DBMS, I found it comepletely useless and ultimately was not able to get the demo to work because I couldn't get any support on it. The "big evil corporation" Microsoft doesn't have any problem putting their knowledgebase and troubleshooting guides out for public consumption, why does Oracle need to keep their's a closely guarded company secret?
Oh, and I think what they were referring to with the phrase "Thousands of proprietary software products" was all the patches for their DBMS.
Yay browncoats. Stupid Fox network. I will never forgive them.
You forgot one important group (you insensitive clod!). The sensible crowd who simply dismiss the article as hot air from a group of people who have the worst security track record of their industry in the past 5 years. I mean seriously, it's pretty bad when the antivirus software starts getting hit with viruses that would otherwise be ineffective against a system. I wouldn't trust Symantec/Norton with anything more important then a string, much less consider them an "authority" on anything security related. And no, I don't use a Mac.
Yep yep, I went 100% laser a while back too. Now I frequently wonder why I spent so many years of frusteration spending unmentionable amounts of money and time with those stupid inkjet printers. And yes, I tried "professional" series printers and the like. I may be wrong, but I really don't think a consumer level inkjet printer could ever be made with a competitive TCO...especially with lasers having gotten much cheaper. Ribbion was good in it's day, Wax Thermal is pretty good, but dry toner is still the best option.
The local cable provider where I live is just now rolling out broadband in my neighborhood. I live in a downtown area (friggin 5 blocks from city hall!) and they are just now getting it going in 2007??? Not only are then about 5 years late, the pricing is going to be off the scale. Have had DSL here for years and while it was kinda slow early on, it's up to 3M/512K real max speeds now (6M/768K advertised) and relatively inexpensive in comparison to cable. Meanwhile the local telco is quietly rolling out fibre to the doorstep so really I don't know why they bothered at this point.
So let me get this straight...you are trying to tell me that you can make Vista run faster then XP by throwing more hardware at it? How is that a reason to get Vista? Just put that upgraded hardware on XP and let Vista wallow in it's bloatedness.
Yes, we don't have alot of surgarcane friendly land here in the US. But we do have some in the gulf states and it seems like it would be dumb to not put some of it to use. Why not turn some of that devistated Louisiana land and unused FL land into surgarcane fields and build ethanol plants? Would economically benefit the area, and no matter what the labor costs are it's still cheaper to make ethanol out of surgarcane then corn. So what if it can't supply the entire demand? That's like saying you shouldn't eat a pineapple because pineapples cannot be your entire diet. Every little bit helps and is part of a bigger picture. We SHOULD be making ethanol out of sugarcane, sugarbeets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet, high-sugar grasses http://www.germinalseeds.com/pages/sugar.htm, and Ribbon Cane [Ribbon Cane is Sub-Tropical and used to be widely grown in the US as far north as N.Carolina]. All of these should be cheaper to process into ethanol as they have high natural sugar content and don't have to have the extra step of converting starch to sugar.
Beyond that, studies have shown that the increased demand for ethanol will not produce a continuous rise in corn prices but rather production will ramp up and maintain an equilibrium after an initial period of adjustment. People are so reactionary getting there panties in a bind anytime things get a tad uncomfortable. sheesh.
Really, most of them are all the same. Took 3 months to get one of our old domains transferred from Register.com to our main registrar at work. That included numerous emails, phone calls, and at least two "do overs" starting the transfer process from scratch because "Something went wrong, sorry but you are going to have to re-submit the request". I can't even describe how frusterated I was with the process.
I find your arguement less then convincing. They can have a Hard Drive with windows or whatever on it for testing and then swap in a hard drive with the OS of choice for the user (or no OS). Fact is, they are conspiring to make sure people adopt certain operating systems. Take HP for instance. They will let you configure anything about a laptop you want to buy including memory, hard drive, wireless card, processor, even the type of LCD screen. But you say you want XP instead of Vista? Nope, sorry...only flavors of Vista are offered as a configuration option. So I called up and asked a rep if I could get XP, she initally told me that Vista is "just an upgraded version of XP so I should get it instead of XP". When I told her I knew Vista is different and had concerns about compatability with my existing programs and hardware, she got very scared sounding and went into lawyer speak mode telling me "I am not at liberty to comment on that". Then gave me a link where I could order a specific configuration with XP Pro. While I was dissapointed that I did not have the option to get a bigger hard drive, it was pretty close to my needs so I can't really complain too much personlly. It's just that the whole thing made me feel like she was going to loose her job just because I suggested that Vista may not meet my needs. Oh, and lets not forget that they highly recommend 2GB of ram to run Vista...which makes the laptop way more expensive then it needs to be to run a browser, quickbooks and office.
I find it amusing that these purpose built "Gaming" machines come pre-loaded with Windows Vista. Just how many games will people NOT be able to play on them? I'm thinking Earthsiege is not going to run for starters.
Looks like a Picocell to me. The technology has been around for a long time and you can actually get one if you are a business. Not sure why they aren't making them more available to the public tho.
Actually it is a smart political move. Scores points with the constiuents that for the most part agree that demoting pluto was totally dumb to begin with. And creates some good tourist marketing material. "Come visit sunny New Mexico where Pluto is still a planet!".
I will agree with you that Microsoft has alot of relationships and tricks up their sleeve to force adoption of Vista. But my opinion is that Vista is a failure by being just terribly implimented and enterprise customers should and will revolt agaist this system and find other means of meeting their needs. Windows ME saw widespread use as a result of the Microsoft marketing juggernaught but ultimately never graduated from the status of "dismal failure" and Microsoft had to take NT and make something to smooth things over. I may be wrong, but I think the problems with Vista are more fundamental then mere service packs can remedy. It comes down to some poor design/implimentation decisions that were made (Balmer?) that doomed the OS to mediocrety (at best). Early on, there was talk of Vista (longhorn at the time) being a truely revelutionary OS with a file system based on SQL databases and all sorts of cool stuff. In the end all we got was warmed over current technologies with some flashy front end stuff. And a whole lot of "are you sure" boxes.
Vista is a FAILURE! There, you have at least one person telling you its a failure that isn't a die hard Linux person. I cut my teeth on microsoft stuff and work for a Microsoft partner shop. I don't even run a Linux box anymore (though I did try it for a while). The few people I have heard from that said Vista is great were almost certainly paid by Microsoft to "voice their opinion" on the subject.
"Was" a 64bit version of XP? No, there *IS* a 64 bit version of XP and it works much better then Vista all around. Just about everyone has released drivers for 64bit xp/2003 now so all the "fun" with drivers there is a thing of the past. The fact that everyone has to go back and write all new drivers for 64 bit Vista because all the APIs have changed is one of the biggest reasons why Vista sucks for both consumers and hardware people. If Vista had support for all the 64 bit drivers that already existed out there, the Vista driver nightmare would have never happened. Microsoft seems to argue that they decided to change everything to improve the driver infrastructure, but the jury is still out on that one. If it makes the OS crash less, then maybe there is an arguement. But I have not seen improved stability in practice and all the driver programmers I have heard from say that writing drivers for Vista consists of nothing but hacks. Forcing them into bad programming practices and therefore unstable drivers.
Count me as one of the 99.9%. I never played the game and yet I quote it. Of course I also quote movies I never watched and people I never met.
OK, someone please explain to me how a scrolling start menu is BETTER? I seemed to remember scrolling start menus in Windows 98 (when you got alot of programs going) and they sucked donkey *ss. Windows 2000 fixed that issue by making things expand across the screen so you could see everything and be able to find what you were looking for. So why go back? I thought we were supposed to be IMPROVING things? And for those who would flame me for not having tried it, I have used Vista and I still hate scrolling start menus now just as much as I did 8 years ago.
The carcoal stuff just stores the gas right? Don't need much in the way of infrastructure...just hook up a hose to your gas meter. (yes, I know the connectors and safety considerations are a bit bigger then that, but the general concept is there.
And to answer the E-85 question, the fueling stations are still pretty sparse, but there are two regular gas stations in the Portland, OR area that carry it now. One of them is on my way home...if I had a compatable vehicle I would be fueling up there sometimes. For fueling stations in your area, look here: http://www.e85refueling.com/
Also note that there is a difference between an E-85 compatable vehicle (FFV), and a vehicle specifically designed for E-85. Flex fuel vehicles (FFVs) actually get 5-20% less MPG vs. regular gasoline as the compression ratio isn't high enough in them to operate efficiently on E-85. Boosting the compression ratio to near 15:1 would allow them to get better MPG numbers then regular gasoline but then they would no longer be compatable with regular gas. Currently there are no vehicles sold in the USA designed specifically for running Ethanol (even though they are sold in other countries). It's a catch-22: carmakers dont want to sell the cars till there are sufficient pumps to support them and the pumps aren't popping up very fast because the flex[transition] vehicles are not very efficient so demand is small. With OPEC suddenly managing oil prices very tightly to make sure gasoline undercuts ethanol in the US and some other places, don't expect this situation to change very quickly.
Well Vista was thrashing the disk on my machine with 2GB of ram before I had a chance to install any third party apps. Superfetch is just a bandaid on the leaky dam of extreeme software bloat.
I disagree. I mean do you really think that private enterprise is going to be able to recruit Bruce Willis AND mount the sort of two-shuttle nucular payload mission required to save us all from the killer asteroid? Naw, we still need NASA.