I don't think the problem is that Windows is "buggy", though.
The problem is that Windows has too many layers upon layers of stuff. This isn't a problem as far as functionality, but it is a problem as far as evolving the OS itself. I get the feeling that Microsoft spends all of their time trying to update/fix all those layers to keep them working together, when many of those layers should really just GO AWAY.
Of course, Microsoft knows all this. But I think that Vista has proved that they have reached the limit of what even a very large team of programmers can accomplish. They don't need to start over, but they need to dump all the bad stuff, and keep all the good stuff.
Dell has the bucks and "political" power to get some of the big commercial software packages ported to Linux.
Maybe they can convince Adobe to port all their stuff. If Linux had the Adobe apps (and Flash, for God's sake) and Quicken, that would go a long way to filling the major gaps in the software library.
Of course, there is still the problem of games, but I think that is becoming less-and-less of an issue as consoles take over the market.
Hell, Dell should just *buy* Canonical, and spin off their own version of Linux that fixes all the usability problems that make it not-as-good-as Windows for general desktop use.
You are an idiot. The "shared" nature of a cablemodem network isn't the problem AT ALL.
The problem is the cost of bandwidth in general. Do you know how much the bandwidth your ISP resells to you costs THEM? It's a hell of a lot more than $40-$60 for 6 megabits. More like $100/megabit. More than that if your ISP is in a rural area.
Cable ISPs aren't trying to be dicks. They're trying to keep the cost of the service down. To actually provide 6/8/10 megabits to EVERY user would mean that, guess what, you'd be paying a $200/month for the service. At least.
ALL ISPs oversubscribe their bandwidth. That's the business. It's not going to change. It isn't profitable any other way.
Open source software doesn't mean you can just LOOK at the source. It means you can look at it AND modify it and use it (redistributing it is another matter, and depends on the specific license). That's what "open" MEANS. Microsoft is playing semantic games with the "shared source" license. It *sounds* like it's open source, but it's not. It's "shared".
So, yeah, you're the only one who sees it that way. And you're wrong. That's not what open source means at all.
Except that EVERY mouse made in the last ten years is sensitive enough that you could set the sensitivity so that merely TOUCHING the mouse could whip your cursor across the entire screen.
I'm not saying DPI is imaginary, I'm saying that it's irrelevant. Every mouse has a high enough DPI rating. More isn't better, it's pointless.
You do realize that mouse sensitivity is COMPLETELY dependent on software, right? The "DPI" rating of your mouse hardware is totally irrelevant.
Think about it. What's the smallest distance you can move your mouse pointer on screen? One pixel. No matter WHAT the DPI rating of your mouse is, this will never change. It's the sensitivity settings in software that are determining how far you have to move your mouse in order to move the pointer one pixel on the actual screen.
DPI ratings are a scam on mice.
Re:Watch for criminal manslaughter charges....
on
Who Owns Software?
·
· Score: 1
Oh, give me a fucking BREAK!
Blizzard is trying to pully a shitty little legal stunt here, but can you SERIOUSLY think that Blizzard, or any company, should have to take *responsibility* for the way in which people abuse their products? If you want to play WoW until you literally drop dead, that is 100% YOUR problem.
Surely you don't think that a chainsaw manufacturer should be sued when someone loses their are trying to juggle the damn thing.
Linux wasn't an overnight success, that's true. But it's a success *now*. OpenSolaris needs to do everything Linux does, but better. Until it can do that, no one will bother with it. The problem being, of course, that if no one bothers with it, it will NEVER be better than Linux. So, yeah, it's dead. Everyone but Sun knew this would happen.
It's the same issue that prevents any truly *new* operating systems from gaining traction. Simply being *technically* better doesn't mean shit. You have to have wide-ranging hardware support, and all the apps that people are used to using.
There's no reason to insult people, or treat them badly in general. But the users, or more specifically management and HR, are also a major part of the problem. FAR too many employees at every level have very minimal computer skills. That would be fine, if a computer wasn't the PRIMARY (and possibly ONLY) tool needed to perform their job.
IT gets frustrated when they are constantly helping other employees to do tasks that the other employee was *hired to do*. Of course IT doesn't expect anyone to be an expert, but they DO and SHOULD expect that most users are capable of doing the things they are *getting paid to do or know*.
Everyone should know how to use the tools they need to do their job. No exceptions.
A new sci-fi movie? Have they checked the availability of the "Official Sci-Fi/Fantasy Actors of the 21st Century":
Patrick Stewart
Milla Jovovich
Wesley Snipes
Toby Macguire
Christian Bale
Liam Neeson
Natalie Portman
Hugo Weaving
Samuel L. Jackson
Hugh Jackman
and, of course, Ray Park
I mean, you can't make a sci-fi movie without *at least* 2 people from that list!
You *do* realize that 64-bit XP is an orphaned operating system, right? I don't expect that any forthcoming 64-bit applications from *any* developer/vendor are going to support 64-bit XP. Why would they bother? Hardly anyone uses it. 64-bit Vista has a VASTLY larger userbase, and it's officially supported by MS.
If we assume that business customers are where MS's real profits come from, then Vista is a fuck-up of epic proportions. I don't know of ANY business that plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Why would they? A five-year-old PC will run XP and basic office-type appliations at full-speed (especially if those machines have 1GB of RAM or more). What does Vista offer as an improvement? Yeah, the security is better, but in a corporate setting, those machines are (hopefully) locked down via Group Policies and permissions anyway.
It's just impossible to justify in a corporate setting. Upgrade all the machines, to get performance rougly equal to what you already have. Oh, and lets not forget that quite a few peripherals don't and WON'T have Vista drivers.
Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better. But even then, I imagine that many companies are planning to stick with XP until it's just no longer possible to run it on new machines. And that could be a long time.
Yet another "end-user" who doesn't realize what the ISPs are paying for bandwidth.
$50 or $60 per month for 6 or 8 or even 10 megabits/second downloads, and a couple megabits/second upload? That's incredibly cheap. Go price a dedicated T1 for your home. It will cost you, at the VERY least, $200/month. And that's if you live in a MAJOR metropolitan area. In most of the country, a full T1 would cost you around $700/month.
The entire ISP model is built on oversubscribing. That isn't going to change. There isn't enough bandwidth available to give everyone all the bandwidth they want all the time. It's not "screwing the customer", it's REALITY.
I agree that it needs to be done. But the expense is ENORMOUS.
Here are some figures to help you understand the problem:
Land area in square kilometers of Sweden: 449964
Land area in square kilometers of the United States: 9629091
The US is very big. The population is spread all over the place. Worse, most of the cities have very old infrastructure that is hard to upgrade without basically digging up streets and tearing down walls.
What it comes down to is, the federal goverment of the U.S. is going to have to step in and build a national fiber network. Private enterprise can't do it.
Anyone who has worked in the cable TV industry saw this coming a mile away. It's not like Comcast and pretty much EVERY OTHER "digital cable" providers wasn't already doing this.
Here's the thing: Coax cable networks, even hybrid fiber/coax cable networks, just don't have the bandwidth to handle very many HD channels without compressing the hell out of them. They just don't. It's not going to improve. The ONLY thing they can do is either drastically reduce the number of digital and HD channels they offer their subscribers, or bite the bullet and start massively upgrading their network. Basically, they need to run fiber to every home. Which they aren't going to do.
This is why I laugh at people who buy HDTVs and expect some kind of massive improvement. In most of the country, the infrastructure just isn't there to give people very many full-res HD channels over cable. Digital satellite has many of the same issues. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
What about OTA, you say? Yeah, OTA broadcasts only have to be *digital*, not HD.
The problem with open-sourcing code that your business relies on is that a company/competitor with bigger pockets can take it and run with it. And that sucks.
By giving away useful code, you are making it a trivial thing for a competitor to enter into your market. Whereas before they might have thought, "You know, this market is too small for us to spend money developing the software we need", now they get the software for FREE. They can enter into your market easily. And if they are a big enough player, they can sink you rather quickly.
What they REALLY mean is that they are going to be taking out huge chunks of functionality, and then charging you separately for each of those chunks.
I *fully* expect that the first version of Office that runs on "Windows 7" will have formerly free features that no require you to pay for add-ons to Windows before they will work.
I actually like Microsoft for the most part, but their push towards software-as-a-service is really turning me off. If anything is going to bring them down, it will be this. I don't think they understand just how much of a backlash their is going to be. No one wants to be nickeled-and-dimed to death. Business won't do it, and consumers won't care.
Those are 2 companies that have VAST patent portfolios, I'm sure. Especially Intel.
I imagine that Seagate is violating some Intel and/or Samsung patents, in one obscure and stupid way or another. Seriously, Seagate doesn't have the juice to take on those 2 companies. Never mind that if Seagate really decides to start some shit with their hard-drive patents, I imagine that IBM will get involved, since they own most of the patents on the basic technology of hard drives. And we all know how IBM deals with people that sue them- they take no prisoners.
Though, to me the major problem with "Bender's Big Score" is that they just threw everything but the kitchen sink into the plot. By the end of the movie, it's just a confusing mess of plots/subplots. The STRENGHT of "Futurama" has been that the plots are typically pretty tight. They ALWAYS had a good plot, and stuck with it.
Well, performance-wise, a single-core 4GHz Core 2 makes more sense.
We still don't have much software that can really take advantage of multiple cores. A single core running at 4GHz is going to be MUCH faster on almost every benchmark than 2 cores running at 2GHz each.
But, it doesn't matter. Multi-cores are the future, and we need to figure out a way to take advantage of them.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's basically what I meant.
Rails is *nice*. I like it. I just don't get the obsession with it. And, let's be honest, it's not in widespread use. From a purely *financial* perspective, you're much better of learning the in-and-outs of something like ASP.net or PHP. Or, hell, even Perl. Those are all more widely used, and better supported.
Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 4, Funny
When you feel like learning a language/framework that won't EVER pay the bills.
Spying on everyone, and having everyone spy on *each other*, is a fabulous way to run a civilization. As we all know, the former Soviet Union and China are the closest we've come to paradise-on-earth.
What the fuck is wrong with England? I mean, Orwell *showed* them in "1984" how bad it could be, but they keep moving towards it. It's very strange.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the problem is that Windows is "buggy", though.
The problem is that Windows has too many layers upon layers of stuff. This isn't a problem as far as functionality, but it is a problem as far as evolving the OS itself. I get the feeling that Microsoft spends all of their time trying to update/fix all those layers to keep them working together, when many of those layers should really just GO AWAY.
Of course, Microsoft knows all this. But I think that Vista has proved that they have reached the limit of what even a very large team of programmers can accomplish. They don't need to start over, but they need to dump all the bad stuff, and keep all the good stuff.
Dell has the bucks and "political" power to get some of the big commercial software packages ported to Linux.
Maybe they can convince Adobe to port all their stuff. If Linux had the Adobe apps (and Flash, for God's sake) and Quicken, that would go a long way to filling the major gaps in the software library.
Of course, there is still the problem of games, but I think that is becoming less-and-less of an issue as consoles take over the market.
Hell, Dell should just *buy* Canonical, and spin off their own version of Linux that fixes all the usability problems that make it not-as-good-as Windows for general desktop use.
You are an idiot. The "shared" nature of a cablemodem network isn't the problem AT ALL.
The problem is the cost of bandwidth in general. Do you know how much the bandwidth your ISP resells to you costs THEM? It's a hell of a lot more than $40-$60 for 6 megabits. More like $100/megabit. More than that if your ISP is in a rural area.
Cable ISPs aren't trying to be dicks. They're trying to keep the cost of the service down. To actually provide 6/8/10 megabits to EVERY user would mean that, guess what, you'd be paying a $200/month for the service. At least.
ALL ISPs oversubscribe their bandwidth. That's the business. It's not going to change. It isn't profitable any other way.
Dyanmite!
Open source software doesn't mean you can just LOOK at the source. It means you can look at it AND modify it and use it (redistributing it is another matter, and depends on the specific license). That's what "open" MEANS. Microsoft is playing semantic games with the "shared source" license. It *sounds* like it's open source, but it's not. It's "shared".
So, yeah, you're the only one who sees it that way. And you're wrong. That's not what open source means at all.
Except that EVERY mouse made in the last ten years is sensitive enough that you could set the sensitivity so that merely TOUCHING the mouse could whip your cursor across the entire screen.
I'm not saying DPI is imaginary, I'm saying that it's irrelevant. Every mouse has a high enough DPI rating. More isn't better, it's pointless.
You do realize that mouse sensitivity is COMPLETELY dependent on software, right? The "DPI" rating of your mouse hardware is totally irrelevant.
Think about it. What's the smallest distance you can move your mouse pointer on screen? One pixel. No matter WHAT the DPI rating of your mouse is, this will never change. It's the sensitivity settings in software that are determining how far you have to move your mouse in order to move the pointer one pixel on the actual screen.
DPI ratings are a scam on mice.
Oh, give me a fucking BREAK!
Blizzard is trying to pully a shitty little legal stunt here, but can you SERIOUSLY think that Blizzard, or any company, should have to take *responsibility* for the way in which people abuse their products? If you want to play WoW until you literally drop dead, that is 100% YOUR problem.
Surely you don't think that a chainsaw manufacturer should be sued when someone loses their are trying to juggle the damn thing.
You're a retard.
It's not premature at all.
Linux wasn't an overnight success, that's true. But it's a success *now*. OpenSolaris needs to do everything Linux does, but better. Until it can do that, no one will bother with it. The problem being, of course, that if no one bothers with it, it will NEVER be better than Linux. So, yeah, it's dead. Everyone but Sun knew this would happen.
It's the same issue that prevents any truly *new* operating systems from gaining traction. Simply being *technically* better doesn't mean shit. You have to have wide-ranging hardware support, and all the apps that people are used to using.
You're sort-of correct.
There's no reason to insult people, or treat them badly in general. But the users, or more specifically management and HR, are also a major part of the problem. FAR too many employees at every level have very minimal computer skills. That would be fine, if a computer wasn't the PRIMARY (and possibly ONLY) tool needed to perform their job.
IT gets frustrated when they are constantly helping other employees to do tasks that the other employee was *hired to do*. Of course IT doesn't expect anyone to be an expert, but they DO and SHOULD expect that most users are capable of doing the things they are *getting paid to do or know*.
Everyone should know how to use the tools they need to do their job. No exceptions.
A new sci-fi movie? Have they checked the availability of the "Official Sci-Fi/Fantasy Actors of the 21st Century": Patrick Stewart Milla Jovovich Wesley Snipes Toby Macguire Christian Bale Liam Neeson Natalie Portman Hugo Weaving Samuel L. Jackson Hugh Jackman and, of course, Ray Park I mean, you can't make a sci-fi movie without *at least* 2 people from that list!
You *do* realize that 64-bit XP is an orphaned operating system, right? I don't expect that any forthcoming 64-bit applications from *any* developer/vendor are going to support 64-bit XP. Why would they bother? Hardly anyone uses it. 64-bit Vista has a VASTLY larger userbase, and it's officially supported by MS.
They released either too soon, or too late.
If we assume that business customers are where MS's real profits come from, then Vista is a fuck-up of epic proportions. I don't know of ANY business that plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Why would they? A five-year-old PC will run XP and basic office-type appliations at full-speed (especially if those machines have 1GB of RAM or more). What does Vista offer as an improvement? Yeah, the security is better, but in a corporate setting, those machines are (hopefully) locked down via Group Policies and permissions anyway.
It's just impossible to justify in a corporate setting. Upgrade all the machines, to get performance rougly equal to what you already have. Oh, and lets not forget that quite a few peripherals don't and WON'T have Vista drivers.
Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better. But even then, I imagine that many companies are planning to stick with XP until it's just no longer possible to run it on new machines. And that could be a long time.
My copy of Windows XP doesn't just *crash*, it crashes into *buildings*.
Yet another "end-user" who doesn't realize what the ISPs are paying for bandwidth.
$50 or $60 per month for 6 or 8 or even 10 megabits/second downloads, and a couple megabits/second upload? That's incredibly cheap. Go price a dedicated T1 for your home. It will cost you, at the VERY least, $200/month. And that's if you live in a MAJOR metropolitan area. In most of the country, a full T1 would cost you around $700/month.
The entire ISP model is built on oversubscribing. That isn't going to change. There isn't enough bandwidth available to give everyone all the bandwidth they want all the time. It's not "screwing the customer", it's REALITY.
I agree that it needs to be done. But the expense is ENORMOUS.
Here are some figures to help you understand the problem:
Land area in square kilometers of Sweden: 449964
Land area in square kilometers of the United States: 9629091
The US is very big. The population is spread all over the place. Worse, most of the cities have very old infrastructure that is hard to upgrade without basically digging up streets and tearing down walls.
What it comes down to is, the federal goverment of the U.S. is going to have to step in and build a national fiber network. Private enterprise can't do it.
Anyone who has worked in the cable TV industry saw this coming a mile away. It's not like Comcast and pretty much EVERY OTHER "digital cable" providers wasn't already doing this.
Here's the thing: Coax cable networks, even hybrid fiber/coax cable networks, just don't have the bandwidth to handle very many HD channels without compressing the hell out of them. They just don't. It's not going to improve. The ONLY thing they can do is either drastically reduce the number of digital and HD channels they offer their subscribers, or bite the bullet and start massively upgrading their network. Basically, they need to run fiber to every home. Which they aren't going to do.
This is why I laugh at people who buy HDTVs and expect some kind of massive improvement. In most of the country, the infrastructure just isn't there to give people very many full-res HD channels over cable. Digital satellite has many of the same issues. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
What about OTA, you say? Yeah, OTA broadcasts only have to be *digital*, not HD.
The problem with open-sourcing code that your business relies on is that a company/competitor with bigger pockets can take it and run with it. And that sucks.
By giving away useful code, you are making it a trivial thing for a competitor to enter into your market. Whereas before they might have thought, "You know, this market is too small for us to spend money developing the software we need", now they get the software for FREE. They can enter into your market easily. And if they are a big enough player, they can sink you rather quickly.
What they REALLY mean is that they are going to be taking out huge chunks of functionality, and then charging you separately for each of those chunks.
I *fully* expect that the first version of Office that runs on "Windows 7" will have formerly free features that no require you to pay for add-ons to Windows before they will work.
I actually like Microsoft for the most part, but their push towards software-as-a-service is really turning me off. If anything is going to bring them down, it will be this. I don't think they understand just how much of a backlash their is going to be. No one wants to be nickeled-and-dimed to death. Business won't do it, and consumers won't care.
Those are 2 companies that have VAST patent portfolios, I'm sure. Especially Intel.
I imagine that Seagate is violating some Intel and/or Samsung patents, in one obscure and stupid way or another. Seriously, Seagate doesn't have the juice to take on those 2 companies. Never mind that if Seagate really decides to start some shit with their hard-drive patents, I imagine that IBM will get involved, since they own most of the patents on the basic technology of hard drives. And we all know how IBM deals with people that sue them- they take no prisoners.
I have to agree.
Though, to me the major problem with "Bender's Big Score" is that they just threw everything but the kitchen sink into the plot. By the end of the movie, it's just a confusing mess of plots/subplots. The STRENGHT of "Futurama" has been that the plots are typically pretty tight. They ALWAYS had a good plot, and stuck with it.
Well, performance-wise, a single-core 4GHz Core 2 makes more sense.
We still don't have much software that can really take advantage of multiple cores. A single core running at 4GHz is going to be MUCH faster on almost every benchmark than 2 cores running at 2GHz each.
But, it doesn't matter. Multi-cores are the future, and we need to figure out a way to take advantage of them.
That's basically what I meant.
Rails is *nice*. I like it. I just don't get the obsession with it. And, let's be honest, it's not in widespread use. From a purely *financial* perspective, you're much better of learning the in-and-outs of something like ASP.net or PHP. Or, hell, even Perl. Those are all more widely used, and better supported.
When you feel like learning a language/framework that won't EVER pay the bills.
Spying on everyone, and having everyone spy on *each other*, is a fabulous way to run a civilization. As we all know, the former Soviet Union and China are the closest we've come to paradise-on-earth.
What the fuck is wrong with England? I mean, Orwell *showed* them in "1984" how bad it could be, but they keep moving towards it. It's very strange.