The only people the MS ad campaign could hope to work on are naive Windows users, perhaps have just gotten a new Windows computer and are regretting it a little bit, when probably most of the people who are buying Macs now instead of Windows-based computers have already made up their minds, and seem to be very happy with their new Apples.
The same people who drop $2000 on a "image editing workstation", who then deal with whatever gawky or limited-edition software was bundled with their computer, and doesn't want to plunk down another few C-notes for Photoshop, Illustrator or whatever other full-blown, "real" app that will Get To Where They Were Promised To Go By Microsoft(tm).
As compared to those who have new Macs start off with about a Warp Factor 2 or so advantage over just about any PC-based solution for the same problem. The Mac user probably doesn't need Photoshop or Illustrator right away, because the built-in tools work good enough.
It's right up there with the Gateway integrated PC commercial, the one that supposedly is more powerful and "Flexible" than a new iMac, etc.
...for a really humbling experience, you should have gone to Arlington National Cemetery, and seen the Changing of the Honor Guard, the Kennedy's gravesites, or the Lockerbie Memorial...
...I seem to remember when we lived in San Diego that someone was doing this with soda bottles, aluminum and muriatic acid (HCl).
PETE soda bottles can withstand some pretty good pressures, so I imagine one of these going off has got to be...eye-opening.
No, the real fear was presented by Stewart Alsop a few years ago in an April Fool's article in InfoWorld magazine.
The real fear in an XBox PC is that EVERYTHING in the box becomes controlled by Microsoft. Gamers might be affected first, but OpenSource developers would (because it would then require license fees to get specs for whatever interface or protocol someone is trying to write to), 3rd-party hardware providers would then have to cough up the same fees to provide their HW for the new computers, and MS would then definitely be able to shape the Internet to their needs. Bye bye TCP/IP, hello MSTCP/IP (or whatever replaces it).
Hello MS licenses for software development tools that explicitly say "this product cannot be used to develop software under any terms besides this:", yadayadayada.
...actually, I am amazed. Not only from the technology, but the magnitude of changes.
Remember, in 1982, PCs didn't exist. Think Commodore PET.
Think the Internet. Think Ethernet. Think 56K modems. Think hard drives (they were for mainframes only. a removable 100MB disc pack for the Cyber computer at the UW was quite large. The external drive was roughly the size of a dishwasher. And they had quite a few at the UW... I was also there when they finally took it apart).
4MHz was about it for your 6502-based or Z80-based computers. 4K RAM was a LOT. LCDs? No, the cool thing was LED displays for electronics. You never had an LED watch from Texas Instruments.
A lot of other things haven't changed, but computers, especially the extent that things have reached into so many corners of modern life, is amazing.
...you forgot the other reason toll roads exist: politics.
Say, for a state with a city that pretty much accounts for half of the state: population, revenue, etc. Said city wants new highways, and wants a state tax increase to help pay for it, because the state is going to be buiidng it, etc. The country bumpkins don't want to pay no stinkin' tax for the richboy city slickers, so they get the city/region to do it with a toll, so the "users" of the roads can pay for it.
...it also means more complicated steering. A car that can concievably go ~180MPH (if only for a second or two) should also have to corner well.
The 8 tires will probably help with braking, but how with cornering? You now have 8 slip angles to manage, not 4.
8 tires also implies 2x rolling resistance, even if some of the wheels are "freewheeling" at cruise.
It also means 2x suspension pieces to keep working and working together.
Tyrell in the 70's tried a Formula 1 car with 4 small front wheels, instead of 2. While it looked cool, I don't think it really worked as well as hoped, and was abandoned. Rule changes probably ensued also to keep it from being done again.
Brake dive/squat is a function of suspension design, weight distribution and torque transfer. If that is the concern, then a well-designed 4x4/AWD car will have an advantage over an 8x8 because it has 4 fewer wheels, unless they happen to be slogging through a mud pit.
Not to say 8x8 is a bad design (for mobile cranes and military equipment), but it's probably sub-optimal for a car.
I think they probably did the 8x8 to help spread the weight of the batteries over more wheels more than anything.
...they DID change Enigma at least once, going from a 2-wheel box to a 3-wheel box.
It is because the dunderheads in the German High Command didn't understand crypto and had too much faith in it that partially helped us out.
And we had some smart people (von Neuman, et al) trying to think at least a couple of steps ahead in the information theory area and leaders willing to play along with them.
Once again, a contract that "allows" one to commit an illegal act as part of the contract terms is not legally binding.
In this case, while the KaZaa EULA might "authorize" them to intercept the grant from your side (whether you read it or not), I'm pretty sure they did not get the permission from the party on the other side to do the same thing...
They aren't really ripping the KaZaa users off, but they are defauding the other parties they are denying the $$$ to.
...how do you think that Microsoft got to be where it is today? They knew full well that being a little loose on the enforcement of their license, even in the US, would seed the market. Then, they can encourage users to get new versions of software later. Microsoft iss not tied to supporting hardware the way Apple or most Unix vendors are. Where are the profits at Sun or Apple for selling their OS? Not in the software, but in add-on tools (in the case of Solaris) and in the hardware.
Only in the last couple of years, as their sales have flattened off, have they explored new models ("subscription") and stepped up their involvment with the SBA and legislatively. There aren't too many untapped markets in the US for their software products, as well as trying to figure out other ways to put the screws on everyone, as well as worrying about every penny sent their way.
You can use UltraEdit to write a VBScript file that activates Excel and gets it to convert the XLS file to a "HTML" file, and then set up a custom command in UltraEdit that runs the VBSCript file.
...and there are plenty of young men and women who spend too much time on whatever their pursuit is, instead of socializing and playing all the other reindeer games. It doesn't have to be EverCrack. It could be Chess, Cheerleading, Soccer, Cycling, Skateboarding, Computer Programming, whatever.
As long as they're not sneaking aroudn the neighborhood at night rounding up stray animals and performing vivisections on them...
Yes, these 3 cars all have "anti-styling". Either they are so mediocre (sentra) or other characteristics (Metro, Yugo) of those cars are so negative as to warrant not imitating the design so as to not inheret the bad associations from the other car. You don't see too many Yugo or Metro look-alikes, do you?
Does anyone notice the styling cues in cars borrowed from other cars?
Think back to when the 190/300 series MB's first came out. Hondas, Mitsu Galants, etc. had no similar cues in their cars. Then, a couple of years after, when new designs of the Honda Accord and Mitsu Galant came out these cars had very similar rear light treatments and trunk openings, and for several years the Lexus LS400 looked very much like a MB knockoff (which leads to the Cadillac DeVile Lexus knock-off, which does not lead to the Cadillac CTS. What the hell were they thinking of with THAT car?)
I have the copy of the R&T article for my former 1991 MR-2 Turbo, that did stylistic and performance comparisons with the "low end" Ferarri at the time. The MR2 dimensionally and stylistically had a lot more in common with the Ferarri than one would normally think.
Or, when the C-4 Corvettes first came out, R-T had a "special issue" about the designing of the new 'Vettes, and how they literally copied the rear lights of the Ferarri (348), using two simple circular lights per side instead of just one ala Ferarri.
Car designers plagiarize each other, too. More of them though should watch the first "Vacation" movie, and have in their studios the Family Truckster as a design to NOT borrow design cues and elements from (can you say, Pontiac Aztec or Cadillac CTS?), or the dorkomatic anti-fender extensions on the new Chevy Monte Carlos (they crease the fender panels IN instead of pushing them out to make it LOOK like the fenders flare out).
...but eventually things in Linux seem to work out so that either the best ideas win and are generally accepted by all or the competing egos are equally provided (ext2fs/ext3fs/reiserfs/xfs).
People seem to think of KDE & Gnome as being more than what they are, i.e., KDE+all the Kapps vs. Gnome+all the Gnome apps. If I think the best app for a certain task happens to be implemented in a KDE version, great. If another app is best implemented in a Gnome app, great.
If I need both, why should I have to choose one desktop environment or another to run the apps *I* want to run? Isn't this the f'ing point?
If it isn't then why have both strived to provide a good measure of interoperability between each other, so that a Gnome app can run in KDE, and vice-versa?
RedHat is trying to do that. Like others have said, if it minimizes applets of one environment over another, tough nuts. Grow up. If the other apps you like instead can still be run, though, hey, that is still fine, isn't it?
double-click is a Microsoft-ism (probably the one kudo for the Windows GUI over Apple's and X's), where you have been able to [clumsily] navigate through menus, icons in windows and even items in the taskbar with the keyboard, and NOT with limited "hotkey" combos.
A mouse double-click is analogous to "select icon with keyboard arrow keys, and then hit Enter key to activate it". Hard to see how to do that in a single-click environment. It is hard to see how click-and-hold can let you choose between either drag or move the selection to another icon to activate it (ala menus).
While double-click may not make sense to some, those who have difficulty using the mouse or use the keyboard while minimizing their use of the mouse will hate you for enforcing single-click if it screws up keyboard navigation and selection of everything, not just menu items and hot-key'd items.
Check the Linux Journal archives about the work of someone at Cisco who replaced all their departmental/organizational Windows-based print servers with Linux-based boxes.
It IS possible. Most workplaces standardize on a few printer types as well. Printers attached to Windows machines also can be shared to Linux boxes easily thru Samba (and vice-versa).
...perhaps if Google, et al., could reply to CoS' demands to delete anti-CoS data by also promising to delete pro-CoS data as well... maybe that would shut them up. That is what I would do, anyways. But I don't run Google.
CoS: "You have no right to do that!"
Them: "Actually, we do. It's our website, not yours. What is fair for the goose is fair for the gander."
drive letters are relevant to most Windows-based software.
Since an NT-based computer still has no concept of a "root" drive ala "/", one is left with some kludgy shortcuts for some API calls and shell script system variables to get the Windows directory, the System directory, etc.
The My Computer icon on one's desktop sort of works the same way as "/", but it's an artificial construct only for the GUI...
You cannot do a "DIR %MYCOMPUTER%", the way you can do a "ls/".
...then, you have some user/dept that has evaluated a software system and it only uses Oracle or an older version of SQL Server, instead of SQL Server 2000. Let's say the Oracle-based solution is significantly better than its next-nearest competitor in the review process that runs on your system-compliant SQL Server 2000.
What do you do?
You suck it up and buy Oracle and a server or two to run the better app, because running the other software on your more compliant enterprise database would not be worth the less time required for you to maintain, because of the time and $$$ needed for the 100, 1000, whatever users to figure out how to make the lesser software work to meet their needs.
If you are using a "real" back-end database, you should be able to create roles and assign them to databsae usernames to secure tables, even from access by Access.
If you use one database user/schema, you should think about creating a read-only user/schema (see above about roles) for use by potential backdoors like MS Access. Tools like this, as well as the native data client software (isql/sqlplus), to me, justify putting as much "middleware" functionality into the database (via triggers, referential integrity, stored procs, etc) instead of only at the application layer, otherwise you are counting on some clever user not ever figuring out how to access the database more-or-less directly with tools besides your application, a bit of "security-by-obscurity". YMWV.
...all it takes is someone with a boot sector virus on a floppy to insert it into the otherwise-locked down system and cycle the power, to infect the machine.
While systems for some time have been able to have a different boot order than FD0->HD0->HD1, there are older systems that don't allow this...
...and in the book, "War in 2020", the Japanese had a technology called "the scrambler" that used EMF waves to bake one's voluntary nervous system. Imagine being completely paralyzed, i.e., you can breathe (that's automatic), but you can't talk, move, etc. You'd get to live out that Metallica song...
...because it's kind of pointless. OEMs will have a spec, and at any given time, will buy the cheapest lots that meet the spec.
Like it's so difficult to open up the box to see what the firmware is. Of course, you probably break at least one "warranty void if sticker broken" sticker.
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The only people the MS ad campaign could hope to work on are naive Windows users, perhaps have just gotten a new Windows computer and are regretting it a little bit, when probably most of the people who are buying Macs now instead of Windows-based computers have already made up their minds, and seem to be very happy with their new Apples.
The same people who drop $2000 on a "image editing workstation", who then deal with whatever gawky or limited-edition software was bundled with their computer, and doesn't want to plunk down another few C-notes for Photoshop, Illustrator or whatever other full-blown, "real" app that will Get To Where They Were Promised To Go By Microsoft(tm).
As compared to those who have new Macs start off with about a Warp Factor 2 or so advantage over just about any PC-based solution for the same problem. The Mac user probably doesn't need Photoshop or Illustrator right away, because the built-in tools work good enough.
It's right up there with the Gateway integrated PC commercial, the one that supposedly is more powerful and "Flexible" than a new iMac, etc.
...for a really humbling experience, you should have gone to Arlington National Cemetery, and seen the Changing of the Honor Guard, the Kennedy's gravesites, or the Lockerbie Memorial...
...I seem to remember when we lived in San Diego that someone was doing this with soda bottles, aluminum and muriatic acid (HCl). PETE soda bottles can withstand some pretty good pressures, so I imagine one of these going off has got to be...eye-opening.
No, the real fear was presented by Stewart Alsop a few years ago in an April Fool's article in InfoWorld magazine. The real fear in an XBox PC is that EVERYTHING in the box becomes controlled by Microsoft. Gamers might be affected first, but OpenSource developers would (because it would then require license fees to get specs for whatever interface or protocol someone is trying to write to), 3rd-party hardware providers would then have to cough up the same fees to provide their HW for the new computers, and MS would then definitely be able to shape the Internet to their needs. Bye bye TCP/IP, hello MSTCP/IP (or whatever replaces it). Hello MS licenses for software development tools that explicitly say "this product cannot be used to develop software under any terms besides this:", yadayadayada.
No, x86->MIPS is one challenge, the bigger challenge would be converting NVidia GPU code to the PS2's GPU code.
...actually, I am amazed. Not only from the technology, but the magnitude of changes. Remember, in 1982, PCs didn't exist. Think Commodore PET. Think the Internet. Think Ethernet. Think 56K modems. Think hard drives (they were for mainframes only. a removable 100MB disc pack for the Cyber computer at the UW was quite large. The external drive was roughly the size of a dishwasher. And they had quite a few at the UW... I was also there when they finally took it apart). 4MHz was about it for your 6502-based or Z80-based computers. 4K RAM was a LOT. LCDs? No, the cool thing was LED displays for electronics. You never had an LED watch from Texas Instruments. A lot of other things haven't changed, but computers, especially the extent that things have reached into so many corners of modern life, is amazing.
...you forgot the other reason toll roads exist: politics. Say, for a state with a city that pretty much accounts for half of the state: population, revenue, etc. Said city wants new highways, and wants a state tax increase to help pay for it, because the state is going to be buiidng it, etc. The country bumpkins don't want to pay no stinkin' tax for the richboy city slickers, so they get the city/region to do it with a toll, so the "users" of the roads can pay for it.
one metric ton (1000 Kg) = 2200 lbs or so.
...it also means more complicated steering. A car that can concievably go ~180MPH (if only for a second or two) should also have to corner well.
The 8 tires will probably help with braking, but how with cornering? You now have 8 slip angles to manage, not 4.
8 tires also implies 2x rolling resistance, even if some of the wheels are "freewheeling" at cruise.
It also means 2x suspension pieces to keep working and working together.
Tyrell in the 70's tried a Formula 1 car with 4 small front wheels, instead of 2. While it looked cool, I don't think it really worked as well as hoped, and was abandoned. Rule changes probably ensued also to keep it from being done again.
Brake dive/squat is a function of suspension design, weight distribution and torque transfer. If that is the concern, then a well-designed 4x4/AWD car will have an advantage over an 8x8 because it has 4 fewer wheels, unless they happen to be slogging through a mud pit.
Not to say 8x8 is a bad design (for mobile cranes and military equipment), but it's probably sub-optimal for a car.
I think they probably did the 8x8 to help spread the weight of the batteries over more wheels more than anything.
...they DID change Enigma at least once, going from a 2-wheel box to a 3-wheel box. It is because the dunderheads in the German High Command didn't understand crypto and had too much faith in it that partially helped us out. And we had some smart people (von Neuman, et al) trying to think at least a couple of steps ahead in the information theory area and leaders willing to play along with them.
Once again, a contract that "allows" one to commit an illegal act as part of the contract terms is not legally binding.
In this case, while the KaZaa EULA might "authorize" them to intercept the grant from your side (whether you read it or not), I'm pretty sure they did not get the permission from the party on the other side to do the same thing...
They aren't really ripping the KaZaa users off, but they are defauding the other parties they are denying the $$$ to.
...how do you think that Microsoft got to be where it is today? They knew full well that being a little loose on the enforcement of their license, even in the US, would seed the market. Then, they can encourage users to get new versions of software later. Microsoft iss not tied to supporting hardware the way Apple or most Unix vendors are. Where are the profits at Sun or Apple for selling their OS? Not in the software, but in add-on tools (in the case of Solaris) and in the hardware. Only in the last couple of years, as their sales have flattened off, have they explored new models ("subscription") and stepped up their involvment with the SBA and legislatively. There aren't too many untapped markets in the US for their software products, as well as trying to figure out other ways to put the screws on everyone, as well as worrying about every penny sent their way.
UltraEdit could.
You can use UltraEdit to write a VBScript file that activates Excel and gets it to convert the XLS file to a "HTML" file, and then set up a custom command in UltraEdit that runs the VBSCript file.
...and there are plenty of young men and women who spend too much time on whatever their pursuit is, instead of socializing and playing all the other reindeer games. It doesn't have to be EverCrack. It could be Chess, Cheerleading, Soccer, Cycling, Skateboarding, Computer Programming, whatever.
As long as they're not sneaking aroudn the neighborhood at night rounding up stray animals and performing vivisections on them...
Yes, these 3 cars all have "anti-styling". Either they are so mediocre (sentra) or other characteristics (Metro, Yugo) of those cars are so negative as to warrant not imitating the design so as to not inheret the bad associations from the other car. You don't see too many Yugo or Metro look-alikes, do you?
Does anyone notice the styling cues in cars borrowed from other cars?
Think back to when the 190/300 series MB's first came out. Hondas, Mitsu Galants, etc. had no similar cues in their cars. Then, a couple of years after, when new designs of the Honda Accord and Mitsu Galant came out these cars had very similar rear light treatments and trunk openings, and for several years the Lexus LS400 looked very much like a MB knockoff (which leads to the Cadillac DeVile Lexus knock-off, which does not lead to the Cadillac CTS. What the hell were they thinking of with THAT car?)
I have the copy of the R&T article for my former 1991 MR-2 Turbo, that did stylistic and performance comparisons with the "low end" Ferarri at the time. The MR2 dimensionally and stylistically had a lot more in common with the Ferarri than one would normally think.
Or, when the C-4 Corvettes first came out, R-T had a "special issue" about the designing of the new 'Vettes, and how they literally copied the rear lights of the Ferarri (348), using two simple circular lights per side instead of just one ala Ferarri.
Car designers plagiarize each other, too. More of them though should watch the first "Vacation" movie, and have in their studios the Family Truckster as a design to NOT borrow design cues and elements from (can you say, Pontiac Aztec or Cadillac CTS?), or the dorkomatic anti-fender extensions on the new Chevy Monte Carlos (they crease the fender panels IN instead of pushing them out to make it LOOK like the fenders flare out).
...but eventually things in Linux seem to work out so that either the best ideas win and are generally accepted by all or the competing egos are equally provided (ext2fs/ext3fs/reiserfs/xfs).
People seem to think of KDE & Gnome as being more than what they are, i.e., KDE+all the Kapps vs. Gnome+all the Gnome apps. If I think the best app for a certain task happens to be implemented in a KDE version, great. If another app is best implemented in a Gnome app, great.
If I need both, why should I have to choose one desktop environment or another to run the apps *I* want to run? Isn't this the f'ing point?
If it isn't then why have both strived to provide a good measure of interoperability between each other, so that a Gnome app can run in KDE, and vice-versa?
RedHat is trying to do that. Like others have said, if it minimizes applets of one environment over another, tough nuts. Grow up. If the other apps you like instead can still be run, though, hey, that is still fine, isn't it?
double-click is a Microsoft-ism (probably the one kudo for the Windows GUI over Apple's and X's), where you have been able to [clumsily] navigate through menus, icons in windows and even items in the taskbar with the keyboard, and NOT with limited "hotkey" combos.
A mouse double-click is analogous to "select icon with keyboard arrow keys, and then hit Enter key to activate it". Hard to see how to do that in a single-click environment. It is hard to see how click-and-hold can let you choose between either drag or move the selection to another icon to activate it (ala menus).
While double-click may not make sense to some, those who have difficulty using the mouse or use the keyboard while minimizing their use of the mouse will hate you for enforcing single-click if it screws up keyboard navigation and selection of everything, not just menu items and hot-key'd items.
Check the Linux Journal archives about the work of someone at Cisco who replaced all their departmental/organizational Windows-based print servers with Linux-based boxes. It IS possible. Most workplaces standardize on a few printer types as well. Printers attached to Windows machines also can be shared to Linux boxes easily thru Samba (and vice-versa).
...perhaps if Google, et al., could reply to CoS' demands to delete anti-CoS data by also promising to delete pro-CoS data as well... maybe that would shut them up. That is what I would do, anyways. But I don't run Google.
CoS: "You have no right to do that!"
Them: "Actually, we do. It's our website, not yours. What is fair for the goose is fair for the gander."
drive letters are relevant to most Windows-based software.
/".
Since an NT-based computer still has no concept of a "root" drive ala "/", one is left with some kludgy shortcuts for some API calls and shell script system variables to get the Windows directory, the System directory, etc.
The My Computer icon on one's desktop sort of works the same way as "/", but it's an artificial construct only for the GUI...
You cannot do a "DIR %MYCOMPUTER%", the way you can do a "ls
...then, you have some user/dept that has evaluated a software system and it only uses Oracle or an older version of SQL Server, instead of SQL Server 2000. Let's say the Oracle-based solution is significantly better than its next-nearest competitor in the review process that runs on your system-compliant SQL Server 2000.
What do you do?
You suck it up and buy Oracle and a server or two to run the better app, because running the other software on your more compliant enterprise database would not be worth the less time required for you to maintain, because of the time and $$$ needed for the 100, 1000, whatever users to figure out how to make the lesser software work to meet their needs.
If you are using a "real" back-end database, you should be able to create roles and assign them to databsae usernames to secure tables, even from access by Access. If you use one database user/schema, you should think about creating a read-only user/schema (see above about roles) for use by potential backdoors like MS Access. Tools like this, as well as the native data client software (isql/sqlplus), to me, justify putting as much "middleware" functionality into the database (via triggers, referential integrity, stored procs, etc) instead of only at the application layer, otherwise you are counting on some clever user not ever figuring out how to access the database more-or-less directly with tools besides your application, a bit of "security-by-obscurity". YMWV.
...all it takes is someone with a boot sector virus on a floppy to insert it into the otherwise-locked down system and cycle the power, to infect the machine. While systems for some time have been able to have a different boot order than FD0->HD0->HD1, there are older systems that don't allow this...
...and in the book, "War in 2020", the Japanese had a technology called "the scrambler" that used EMF waves to bake one's voluntary nervous system. Imagine being completely paralyzed, i.e., you can breathe (that's automatic), but you can't talk, move, etc. You'd get to live out that Metallica song...
...because it's kind of pointless. OEMs will have a spec, and at any given time, will buy the cheapest lots that meet the spec.
Like it's so difficult to open up the box to see what the firmware is. Of course, you probably break at least one "warranty void if sticker broken" sticker.