Migrating off Windows 2000 workstation should be something you're already doing - not keeping a proactive upgrade policy is just ASKING for trouble
Huh? Why is this asking for trouble? I can't think of any reason to have a "proactive upgrade policy" unless you have a burning urge to line MS's pockets with your company funds. It doesn't benefit your corporation at all.
In any event, the forced continual upgrade path for Microsoft products and OS's keeps me employed and keeps me learning new stuff.
Well, that pretty much sums the number of reasons to upgrade up...
I'll second that. It's slower, the default UI looks like it was made for mentally retarded adults that have a deep love for highly saturated colors, it eats even more memory, and it has more irritating screw-the-consumer junk embedded in it.
I'd like to hear *anyone* here list off a real, serious reason why they're using XP instead of 2k or NT (aside from "it's newer and MS made it") that isn't due to a misconfiguration of the older OS (like the grandparent's system).
Bah. Patch distribution is *part* of the designer's responsibility. If there are a lot of vulnerable systems out there, it doesn't matter that there's a patch out if the vendor did a poor job of notification or whatever.
You can't say "well, I have a bunch of holes, but I made a patch, so the fact that I put out tons of vulnerable systems and 95% of them are still vulnerable doesn't count".
If you're willing to put some effort in, Linux can be quite customizable for this. Almost all fonts can be enlarged, cursors can be arbitrarily enlarged, most programs can be modified to pipe text to festival, etc.
I've tried to simply increase Windows font size for use on a high resolution monitor, and I don't believe it's *possible* with many applications and all the dialog boxes I've run across (especially annoying, since I thought that dialog boxes used dialog units precisely to allow this).
Will you get your publisher to put out some nice high-res desktop backgrounds promoting your books? I find that this is a very cheap form of advertising, and something that we all love to have. Heck, reformatted cover art is more than good enough...
I want my root desktop containing dragons and whatnot...
...seemed out of character and gratuitously sexual
Well...I believe a lot of Mr. Anthony's characters are gratuitously sexual...but that's the style he writes in, which suits the target audience very well: relatively lighthearted, scifi/fantasy, teasingly sexual stories, usually with puzzle-based plot resolution a la Star Trek.
You can't deny that he's done a good job of producing his target market what they want, right?
That being said, I wouldn't mind a more serious, less sexual variant of Killobyte. There are too few authors that really understand (or go to the trouble of researching) the tech in their tech stories and have the guts to make things relatively plausible. When you run across something like this (I believe someone earlier mentioned Neal Stephenson, who did a particularly good job), it's absolutely glorious. You can read through the book without constantly wincing at factual errors or impossibilities.
Finally, whether you like the plots or writing style or not, one thing that cannot be denied is that Mr. Anthony has come up with an incredible variety of very original settings. He has produced an enormous number of fantastic worlds (especially when considering that he's a single author). I find that most of the interest in his books comes not from the character-character interaction, but from in absorbing the worlds he's come up with.
For example (spoiler warning):
Xanth, a peninsula which somehow overlays various peninsulas in our world (Florida, Italy).
The Apprentice Adept series, where a technological world exists in parallel with a fantasy world, each of which has a similar social structure and characters. The tech society is heavily based around the playing of a massive game.
The Incarnations of Immortality series, where humans in a modern society both technologically and magically advanced take on roles similar to those of beings in the Greek panetheon. The rules governing these beings are complex and where most of the content in the story comes from.
Killobyte, Mr. Anthony's attempt to do for VR something like what Wired does for the Internet -- predict social impact and changes. (This may sound dry, but it's in fact a quick-moving bit of fiction).
The Mode series, where characters stream through a rapid succesion of worlds that Mr. Anthony creates.
The best series to prove my point is Firefly. Perhaps someone has different feelings on this book, but I read it and found it pretty awful. Why? It's one of the few (the only?) books done where Mr. Anthony worked within the confines of our existing world, and didn't create his own. Removing the fantastic worlds, you're left with some semi-plausible characters, less than incredible dialog, the mandantory gratuitous sexuality...not that great.
I'd actually love to see a collaboration where Mr. Anthony does all the setting design and someone else does all the character and dialog work...Patricia C Wrede would be a good choice, as I like her upbeat dialog and character work).
I don't think being a "professional writer" precludes one from being a "professional computer nerd". Just look at Neal Stephenson.
I think that was the other way around. Being a pro techie doesn't stop you from being a great author.:-)
Even better, (after all the flak Mac users catch for not "being technically sophisticated"), he was a Mac graphics coder.
I miss his Snow Crash-era writing style, where it felt like he rolled each sentence around in his mouth for a couple of minutes to give it exactly the right gritty, cynical flavor. Beautiful source for quotes. I own four copies of the thing (each one I get keeps getting too well-read and starts looking shabby.
I want Snow Crash v2. Forget this Diamond Age/Cryptonomicron stuff.:-)
I remember one of his forewords talking about how he used CP/M and a custom-done word processor at one point. He's probably fairly technically experienced compared to what you'd expect from your Average Joe author.:-)
This guy's had a pretty good history of being a pro-tech advocate. He's kind of the Slashdot "dream representative", and has had a bunch of stories about him on here before.
Re:Is this going to be the new whipping boy?
on
MS Palladium Patent
·
· Score: 2
That's a good point.
MS is providing a service that the media companies want. Five years down the road, they're going to be using this service, and Slashdotters will be complaining that media companies are all in league with Microsoft.
The only way for people to have a reason to complain here is if there was a non-Microsoft alternative DRM system. The media companies want a DRM option. Right now, the only DRM option available on home PCs is going to be Microsoft's propriatary system. Sure enough, they're going to use it. If you want them to have another option, you have to build an alternative.
No company wants to touch this -- competing with MS for something that MS can use predatory pricing on is suicide (see Netscape for example).
Palladium and code signing in general is no more than a hack MS made because their OS has a crummy permissions model -- you have your drivers running with access to everything, which means they have to be signed. Palladium is just the logical extension of code-signed drivers. There wouldn't be a problem in the first place if the subsystems didn't have such unnecessarily high rights. Unfortunately, AFAIK Windows doesn't give fine-grained enough control to restrict this.
If the operating system cannot be reasonably modified to do what you want, which is more of an issue with a closed-source, limited license OS like Windows* than Linux.
Using a monopoly in one area...to build dominance in another
No, but the government has yet to be able to nail MS, thanks to the occasional MS-friendly judge and the fortuitous arrival of the Bush administration (there was a big push to push a judgement on MS before the change of administration).
Of course, by the same token, *you* could run out and use a free access P2P network like Napster or GnutellaNet. Few people go to the effort of putting out large garbage files if they aren't getting anything in return.
Besides, the irony here is pretty strong -- someone who spends time ripping people off (warezers) is complaining about being ripped off in the process.
It also doesn't taste exactly like sugar (once diluted). It has a flavor of its own, which will have to be taken into account. I could see people prefering it to sugar, but you can't just take a cup of coffee or a pie and toss this in and expect it to taste the same as if there were sugar in it.
The point is not to help programmers out, it's to leverage programmers who feel that they're comfortable with Java and move them to a closed, propriatary environment.
Not only are the claims weak, they're weak for a reason. If you had any rights whatsoever to your given name, you'd see eight zillion collisions a year.
People generally dispose of cars after only a few years and don't constantly run their cars. As a result, the higher initial cost and the less beneficial per-mile savings aren't worth nearly as much as with trains. Plus, most consumers are fairly dumb when it comes to calculating in costs over the lifetime of a product (cheap PCs with mandatory Internet access, cheap inkjet printers with insanely expensive cartridges, buying cars on credit). This way is more appealing to most consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
Migrating off Windows 2000 workstation should be something you're already doing - not keeping a proactive upgrade policy is just ASKING for trouble
Huh? Why is this asking for trouble? I can't think of any reason to have a "proactive upgrade policy" unless you have a burning urge to line MS's pockets with your company funds. It doesn't benefit your corporation at all.
In any event, the forced continual upgrade path for Microsoft products and OS's keeps me employed and keeps me learning new stuff.
Well, that pretty much sums the number of reasons to upgrade up...
A Slashdot poll that doesn't have an answer for Linux users?
So what is the *point* of getting XP, other than "because MS made it and it's newer"?
I mean, he's doing nothing but mindlessly handing out company funds. If he has no reason to drop thousands of dollars, then why do it?
An intelligent corporation with sane IT spending? Say it ain't so!
NT 4.0/Office 97 is the most common configuration I've heard of for MS systems where people want a stable platform to get work done on.
The only issue could be planned obsolescence as you have to be compatible with file formats from newer client Office installations.
I'll second that. It's slower, the default UI looks like it was made for mentally retarded adults that have a deep love for highly saturated colors, it eats even more memory, and it has more irritating screw-the-consumer junk embedded in it.
I'd like to hear *anyone* here list off a real, serious reason why they're using XP instead of 2k or NT (aside from "it's newer and MS made it") that isn't due to a misconfiguration of the older OS (like the grandparent's system).
Perhaps, but GNOME does run on the Linux kernel v2.2, 2.0, etc, and it doesn't cost you a cent to download and compile the Linux kernel v2.4.
Bah. Patch distribution is *part* of the designer's responsibility. If there are a lot of vulnerable systems out there, it doesn't matter that there's a patch out if the vendor did a poor job of notification or whatever.
You can't say "well, I have a bunch of holes, but I made a patch, so the fact that I put out tons of vulnerable systems and 95% of them are still vulnerable doesn't count".
If you're willing to put some effort in, Linux can be quite customizable for this. Almost all fonts can be enlarged, cursors can be arbitrarily enlarged, most programs can be modified to pipe text to festival, etc.
I've tried to simply increase Windows font size for use on a high resolution monitor, and I don't believe it's *possible* with many applications and all the dialog boxes I've run across (especially annoying, since I thought that dialog boxes used dialog units precisely to allow this).
Will you get your publisher to put out some nice high-res desktop backgrounds promoting your books? I find that this is a very cheap form of advertising, and something that we all love to have. Heck, reformatted cover art is more than good enough...
I want my root desktop containing dragons and whatnot...
What, you'd rather have 14 year old guys attracted to 35 year old women than girls their own age? That's more appropriate? ;-)
Ah, what a society we live in.
...seemed out of character and gratuitously sexual
Well...I believe a lot of Mr. Anthony's characters are gratuitously sexual...but that's the style he writes in, which suits the target audience very well: relatively lighthearted, scifi/fantasy, teasingly sexual stories, usually with puzzle-based plot resolution a la Star Trek.
You can't deny that he's done a good job of producing his target market what they want, right?
That being said, I wouldn't mind a more serious, less sexual variant of Killobyte. There are too few authors that really understand (or go to the trouble of researching) the tech in their tech stories and have the guts to make things relatively plausible. When you run across something like this (I believe someone earlier mentioned Neal Stephenson, who did a particularly good job), it's absolutely glorious. You can read through the book without constantly wincing at factual errors or impossibilities.
Finally, whether you like the plots or writing style or not, one thing that cannot be denied is that Mr. Anthony has come up with an incredible variety of very original settings. He has produced an enormous number of fantastic worlds (especially when considering that he's a single author). I find that most of the interest in his books comes not from the character-character interaction, but from in absorbing the worlds he's come up with.
For example (spoiler warning):
Xanth, a peninsula which somehow overlays various peninsulas in our world (Florida, Italy).
The Apprentice Adept series, where a technological world exists in parallel with a fantasy world, each of which has a similar social structure and characters. The tech society is heavily based around the playing of a massive game.
The Incarnations of Immortality series, where humans in a modern society both technologically and magically advanced take on roles similar to those of beings in the Greek panetheon. The rules governing these beings are complex and where most of the content in the story comes from.
Killobyte, Mr. Anthony's attempt to do for VR something like what Wired does for the Internet -- predict social impact and changes. (This may sound dry, but it's in fact a quick-moving bit of fiction).
The Mode series, where characters stream through a rapid succesion of worlds that Mr. Anthony creates.
The best series to prove my point is Firefly. Perhaps someone has different feelings on this book, but I read it and found it pretty awful. Why? It's one of the few (the only?) books done where Mr. Anthony worked within the confines of our existing world, and didn't create his own. Removing the fantastic worlds, you're left with some semi-plausible characters, less than incredible dialog, the mandantory gratuitous sexuality...not that great.
I'd actually love to see a collaboration where Mr. Anthony does all the setting design and someone else does all the character and dialog work...Patricia C Wrede would be a good choice, as I like her upbeat dialog and character work).
I don't think being a "professional writer" precludes one from being a "professional computer nerd". Just look at Neal Stephenson.
:-)
:-)
I think that was the other way around. Being a pro techie doesn't stop you from being a great author.
Even better, (after all the flak Mac users catch for not "being technically sophisticated"), he was a Mac graphics coder.
I miss his Snow Crash-era writing style, where it felt like he rolled each sentence around in his mouth for a couple of minutes to give it exactly the right gritty, cynical flavor. Beautiful source for quotes. I own four copies of the thing (each one I get keeps getting too well-read and starts looking shabby.
I want Snow Crash v2. Forget this Diamond Age/Cryptonomicron stuff.
I remember one of his forewords talking about how he used CP/M and a custom-done word processor at one point. He's probably fairly technically experienced compared to what you'd expect from your Average Joe author. :-)
Anyone read Killobyte, his sci-fi VR book?
This guy's had a pretty good history of being a pro-tech advocate. He's kind of the Slashdot "dream representative", and has had a bunch of stories about him on here before.
That's a good point.
MS is providing a service that the media companies want. Five years down the road, they're going to be using this service, and Slashdotters will be complaining that media companies are all in league with Microsoft.
The only way for people to have a reason to complain here is if there was a non-Microsoft alternative DRM system. The media companies want a DRM option. Right now, the only DRM option available on home PCs is going to be Microsoft's propriatary system. Sure enough, they're going to use it. If you want them to have another option, you have to build an alternative.
No company wants to touch this -- competing with MS for something that MS can use predatory pricing on is suicide (see Netscape for example).
Palladium and code signing in general is no more than a hack MS made because their OS has a crummy permissions model -- you have your drivers running with access to everything, which means they have to be signed. Palladium is just the logical extension of code-signed drivers. There wouldn't be a problem in the first place if the subsystems didn't have such unnecessarily high rights. Unfortunately, AFAIK Windows doesn't give fine-grained enough control to restrict this.
That being said, the same thing applies to Linux.
If the operating system cannot be reasonably modified to do what you want, which is more of an issue with a closed-source, limited license OS like Windows* than Linux.
Using a monopoly in one area...to build dominance in another
No, but the government has yet to be able to nail MS, thanks to the occasional MS-friendly judge and the fortuitous arrival of the Bush administration (there was a big push to push a judgement on MS before the change of administration).
Of course, by the same token, *you* could run out and use a free access P2P network like Napster or GnutellaNet. Few people go to the effort of putting out large garbage files if they aren't getting anything in return.
Besides, the irony here is pretty strong -- someone who spends time ripping people off (warezers) is complaining about being ripped off in the process.
I'd say that macrumors.com gave them more good press than bad.
It also doesn't taste exactly like sugar (once diluted). It has a flavor of its own, which will have to be taken into account. I could see people prefering it to sugar, but you can't just take a cup of coffee or a pie and toss this in and expect it to taste the same as if there were sugar in it.
The point is not to help programmers out, it's to leverage programmers who feel that they're comfortable with Java and move them to a closed, propriatary environment.
Not only are the claims weak, they're weak for a reason. If you had any rights whatsoever to your given name, you'd see eight zillion collisions a year.
People generally dispose of cars after only a few years and don't constantly run their cars. As a result, the higher initial cost and the less beneficial per-mile savings aren't worth nearly as much as with trains. Plus, most consumers are fairly dumb when it comes to calculating in costs over the lifetime of a product (cheap PCs with mandatory Internet access, cheap inkjet printers with insanely expensive cartridges, buying cars on credit). This way is more appealing to most consumers.
I'm curious as to how much waste is produced and how many resources are consumed in producing solar cells, and what their expected lifetime is.
I will give you that at least wind and water power are probably worthwhile.