You know, I already have a touch tablet on my notebook, as many others do too. The problem is that the software is programmed to make it act as a mouse (and I also always carry a small wireless mouse with my notebook). So the ideal solution would seem to be a piece of software that lets one use this touch sensitive surface for what it really is rather than forcing it to be a mouse. Has no one written and released such software?
I'm aware that Microsoft released some patches, and bundled some into so called "service packs". But even Microsoft seems to be saying that Vista is still bad, thus people need to go out and buy a replacement. But if you already paid for Vista and never got a decent workable OS, why should you be expected to pay again for the supposedly fixed version with a different name?
Windows 7 is basically a service pack for Vista rolled into something with a different name. The purpose of the name change is multi-faceted. It lets Microsoft distance itself from the stink of the Vista name (the OS that even Microsoft executives said was awful), and it completely screws any legitimate Vista owners, who never got a decent OS for their money (or their Microsoft tax if buying it bundled), and asks them to pay again before getting a fixed OS (assuming it is finally fixed). So once again Microsoft screws its customers, as they are the easiest group to screw.
OK, I've done the RTFM, and I've read most of the posted comments here too. But I can't find the answer to the most basic question of all, just what type of memory is this? Is it some sore of flash memory? Is it volatile RAM, and if RAM is it Static or Dynamic and what is it's access speed (also worth knowing if it is some sort of flash RAM). And of course that includes all of the other related technical data, like how how many read/write cycles it can survive. I can't get too excited about thinking this might show up in a computer in my lifetime unless there is some technical discussion about what kind of hardware this really is.
The bad news is they just fired him, they didn't really terminate him in the "Arnold" sense of the word. And, of course, he has plenty of ill gotten gains as a result of all of this.
UT2004 is great, I play it several times a week, but finding a Linux copy can be hard. I have a friend who has a legal copy of the Anthology, but that didn't include the Linux version, and he can't find a copy of the Linux version (and has no Windows system and longer).
a sense of the relative size of atoms--the closer to the centre, the smaller they are--something that is missing from the current form of the table
Oh, come on. The size of the circles don't scale to the size of the atoms, they just use the "closer to the center" nonsense. Is that really any better than just saying "the closer to the top row the smaller they are"? I don't see any merit to this at all.
This is interesting, but I expect this is the last that I will hear of it and that this story will never make it into the main stream media, by which I mean outlets like the three major U.S.A. network TV news shows. It sends a message contrary to what they seem to want to preach, and almost encourages people to think and make informed choices for themselves.
Yea, it is absolutely absurd to have made this post and not identify the seller in question. The poster questions if a seller can get away with this, and them demonstrates that they can by failing to even say who they are or what the bad product is. The whole post is extremely pointless. If the original review was this void of information then maybe there is an alternate reason it was never accepted for listing.
At least we can see that the Slashdot editors can not be accused of editing, or making informed choices about which stories to post.
(I have really old embedded software compilers that only run on 98, and yes I have tried every trick in the book to make them run on Linux),
When you say that you have tried every trick, does your book include installing VMware player (free) and running Win98 in a virtual machine under Linux? If that doesn't work I sure would like to hear how it fails.
I remember reading about Google's technique of converting books to e-books
My suggestion is that you look at some of the Google books that are on-line. I have, and they show the problems that you mention and more, curved pages, dark areas, and even text that is distorted and harder to read than most captchas. Whatever you have read (and yea, I remember reading it too), it doesn't seem to actually be viable in practice. Sure, photographs are easier than scanning, particularly if you do it fast and cheap, but the result is poorer. If you can scan the book without damaging them I suggest you go back and do that.
I never even wanted USB1.1, there were and are better technologies (such as networking or firewire). USB2 addressed the speed issue somewhat, but has so much overhead that the supposed faster usb2 has less throughput than firewire 400. Now we get another USB standard that no user really wanted. (The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them).
But the article mentioned the need for an extra £22.99 controller to make a desktop computer use this drive as intended. I can't help wondering what additional cost beyond this there is for most Windows users, like an expensive "upgrade" to Windows 7? After all, will XP even support this thing, and if so what level of service pack must you infest your system with? Win98 users had to move to XP to use USB2. Most Windows owners even needed to upgrade their OS when USB1.1 came out to use it, is this any different? It seems to me that a high speed networked drive would be a far better choice for most users.
Although forces of evil like Disney would like to have it otherwise, copyrights are still for a limited period of time. In the U.S. this is even spelled out in our Constitution, with the copyrighted material them passing into Public Domain. This article is talking about traditional foods, not some newfangled "Invention" (which might be covered by shorter lasting patents than longer lasting copyright). So even if the concept of copyright on food were valid (and I believe it is bogus), wouldn't these foods have passed into Public Domain long ago?
Alternately, can a claim of copyright be made by a country? Wouldn't a copyright claim have to be made by an author? Clearly the government of these countries are not the authors of these foods, so they have no copyright claim on them. It is more reasonable to assume that the real author wanted their intellectual property to pass into public domain than to fall into the hands of politicians.
Also worth mentioning that, far from dead, XP is still being actively sold for Netbooks. Microsoft aggressively went after that market to take it away from Linux. Now you have Microsoft saying that it will not fix problems in a currently selling product because, well, lets be honest about it, they don't want to. Heck with the military, the consumers should start a class action suit over this one.
They will pretty much change whatever they want whenever they want. In addition to the things you mention, lots of software for XP insists on SP2 or even SP3 to install, it was more than just bug fixes here. And somewhere in the series they snuck in.NET (although.NET is also available as a separate download, so that doesn't explain the service pack requirements for some XP software.
But perhaps the most significant example that shows how much an existing system was changed was Win98 Second Edition, a.k.a. Win98SE. Released less than a year after Win98, this version not only included fixes like the notorious memory leak fix, but it included new USB and AGP support, connection sharing, and plenty more. The changes in Win98SE were at least as significant as the changes being made to Vista, and with the exception of the GUI these changes were all things that the Vista team must have been at work on to address serious problems that were well protested in Vista. And the GUI changes are something that no one outside Microsoft really asked for, they are being done to support the claim that this is a new OS as much as for any other reason.
Thanks for the correction. The comment that you referenced was not yet posted back in 2007 when I read this Slashdot article, and, of course, I didn't go back and read every comment again (including the ones new to me) when I searched for this old article and posted the link. I don't think this does anything to undercut my basic assertion that Win 7 is really a service pack for Vista, with a different GUI (I'm sure M$ has lots of experimental GUIs floating around and this GUI seems to be more intended to look different than to bring anything important to the OS). And I'll support my position with two things to consider. Benchmarks of Win7 show a lot of performance numbers that very closely match Vista (and in many cases are not as good as XP, which helps refute the "of cousre they reuse code" logic), and overall a lot of people say that this OS is much more bug free. Since when has M$ released a predominantly bug free OS before the first few SPs? This sure smells to me a lot more like a third or fourth service pack for Vista than a truly new OS.
And, of course, even if it was a new OS there could be a strong case made that those who paid for Vista (including getting it with a new system) should be entitled to this OS since even Microsoft has admitted the usability problems with Vista.
I rarely respond to ACs but this is too good to ignore. You're absolutely correct, plans for anything really new are set years in advance. Yet in May of 2007 Slashdot reported that Microsoft announced that Vista was to be it's last 32 bit OS and that the sucessor to Vista would be 64 bit only. See here: http://slashdot.org/articles/07/05/17/1452228.shtml
Now only two years later we are being told that Win 7 is the next great thing, and that it will be available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions (Just like Vista). If 7 really was the next new OS then you would be absolutely correct, it would have been years in development and Microsoft would not have stated two years ago that it was going to be 64 bit only if indeed it was designed to have 32 bit and 64 bit versions. The only way that this "mistake" could reasonably be made is if the real next OS was intended to be 64 its all along (as it should be), but then M$ decided to claim this repair job on Vista was a "new" OS at the last minute and surprise
everyone with this OS that supposedly came out of nowhere. It's just a Vista fix with an alternate GUI and a new name (and a new price tag), to wash off the stink of Vista and to double bill all those who paid for Vista but want a working OS.
And to respond to another issue raised by another cowardly AC, it is completely believable that M$ could still release service packs for Vista, but fail to correct as much as they did in the version of Vista that they now want to call Win 7. Future service packs for the old Vista in no way disprove that they are just re-skinning Vista and getting people who should not have to pay for the fixes to buy it again.
Remember the Mohave ads? Microsoft showed people a "new" OS and supposedly they liked it (although they could only really see it under very controlled conditions that would not show the faults, like driver incompatability). And then it was revealed that the OS was really Vista, which no one liked.
Now jump forward to the present. MS finally has a service pack that will fix many of the problems in Vista (although not all, and it still has very Vista characteristic performance benchmarks). Someone at M$ wants to release the service pack, but someone higher up who understands the M$ way of doing things better says "If we give people this service pack, even though it fixes many things, it will still have the stink of the Vista name on it. Lets do this: change the GUI around just enough that we can claim it's a new OS. Then rather than give people a new service pack for Vista, we can charge them for a whole new Operating System. Call it something other than Mohave and no one will get wise."
An so, with much hype, they release Windows 7. Everyone who bought Vista and was entitled to a workable OS gets screwed. M$ charges anyone who wants their Vista fixed for a supposedly different OS, even though Vista was so broken that even M$ executives called it a disaster. Profit.
You prediction was made in much simpler terms years ago, and so far it seems to be coming true: Everything that has traditionally been sent by wires will be transmitted wirelessly, everything that has traditionally been sent wirelessly will be sent by wire.
Ham radio doomed itself years ago when the old farts in the ARRL insisted that morse code be kept as a requirement for most licenses, and any license that had good range without using satellites. Of course, many of them quit using morse right after they got their license. But they still insisted that new hams learn it (and using a computer that could send and receive code wasn't an acceptable option, perhaps because the ARRL couldn't sell computers training materials). Now the code requirement has finally been dropped, but too little too late. Many of us who would have gladly worked for General or advanced "tickets" decades ago were blocked out by the asinine requirement, even after all other radio services completely abandoned the code. Now there seems little reason to get the equipment that has continued to spiral in price, particularly when the Internet and other services have made ham almost obsolete. Yes, it still comes in very handy in emergency situations when other forms of communication break down, but it's utility is greatly diminished by having driven away many potential members of the ham community.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I already have a touch tablet on my notebook, as many others do too. The problem is that the software is programmed to make it act as a mouse (and I also always carry a small wireless mouse with my notebook). So the ideal solution would seem to be a piece of software that lets one use this touch sensitive surface for what it really is rather than forcing it to be a mouse. Has no one written and released such software?
I'm aware that Microsoft released some patches, and bundled some into so called "service packs". But even Microsoft seems to be saying that Vista is still bad, thus people need to go out and buy a replacement. But if you already paid for Vista and never got a decent workable OS, why should you be expected to pay again for the supposedly fixed version with a different name?
Windows 7 is basically a service pack for Vista rolled into something with a different name. The purpose of the name change is multi-faceted. It lets Microsoft distance itself from the stink of the Vista name (the OS that even Microsoft executives said was awful), and it completely screws any legitimate Vista owners, who never got a decent OS for their money (or their Microsoft tax if buying it bundled), and asks them to pay again before getting a fixed OS (assuming it is finally fixed). So once again Microsoft screws its customers, as they are the easiest group to screw.
OK, I've done the RTFM, and I've read most of the posted comments here too. But I can't find the answer to the most basic question of all, just what type of memory is this? Is it some sore of flash memory? Is it volatile RAM, and if RAM is it Static or Dynamic and what is it's access speed (also worth knowing if it is some sort of flash RAM). And of course that includes all of the other related technical data, like how how many read/write cycles it can survive. I can't get too excited about thinking this might show up in a computer in my lifetime unless there is some technical discussion about what kind of hardware this really is.
The bad news is they just fired him, they didn't really terminate him in the "Arnold" sense of the word. And, of course, he has plenty of ill gotten gains as a result of all of this.
So the proof of Sexism is that when an absurd claim of it is made, the accuser is met with a negative response?
This is a new low for /. How do I configure my account to no longer show me any stories edited by ScuttleMonkey ?
UT2004 is great, I play it several times a week, but finding a Linux copy can be hard. I have a friend who has a legal copy of the Anthology, but that didn't include the Linux version, and he can't find a copy of the Linux version (and has no Windows system and longer).
a sense of the relative size of atoms--the closer to the centre, the smaller they are--something that is missing from the current form of the table
Oh, come on. The size of the circles don't scale to the size of the atoms, they just use the "closer to the center" nonsense. Is that really any better than just saying "the closer to the top row the smaller they are"? I don't see any merit to this at all.
This is interesting, but I expect this is the last that I will hear of it and that this story will never make it into the main stream media, by which I mean outlets like the three major U.S.A. network TV news shows. It sends a message contrary to what they seem to want to preach, and almost encourages people to think and make informed choices for themselves.
a well-known online computer component shop
Yea, it is absolutely absurd to have made this post and not identify the seller in question. The poster questions if a seller can get away with this, and them demonstrates that they can by failing to even say who they are or what the bad product is. The whole post is extremely pointless. If the original review was this void of information then maybe there is an alternate reason it was never accepted for listing.
At least we can see that the Slashdot editors can not be accused of editing, or making informed choices about which stories to post.
(I have really old embedded software compilers that only run on 98, and yes I have tried every trick in the book to make them run on Linux),
When you say that you have tried every trick, does your book include installing VMware player (free) and running Win98 in a virtual machine under Linux? If that doesn't work I sure would like to hear how it fails.
I remember reading about Google's technique of converting books to e-books
My suggestion is that you look at some of the Google books that are on-line. I have, and they show the problems that you mention and more, curved pages, dark areas, and even text that is distorted and harder to read than most captchas. Whatever you have read (and yea, I remember reading it too), it doesn't seem to actually be viable in practice. Sure, photographs are easier than scanning, particularly if you do it fast and cheap, but the result is poorer. If you can scan the book without damaging them I suggest you go back and do that.
I never even wanted USB1.1, there were and are better technologies (such as networking or firewire). USB2 addressed the speed issue somewhat, but has so much overhead that the supposed faster usb2 has less throughput than firewire 400. Now we get another USB standard that no user really wanted. (The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them).
But the article mentioned the need for an extra £22.99 controller to make a desktop computer use this drive as intended. I can't help wondering what additional cost beyond this there is for most Windows users, like an expensive "upgrade" to Windows 7? After all, will XP even support this thing, and if so what level of service pack must you infest your system with? Win98 users had to move to XP to use USB2. Most Windows owners even needed to upgrade their OS when USB1.1 came out to use it, is this any different? It seems to me that a high speed networked drive would be a far better choice for most users.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/09/13/1712216
Seems like a DUP timothy.
Although forces of evil like Disney would like to have it otherwise, copyrights are still for a limited period of time. In the U.S. this is even spelled out in our Constitution, with the copyrighted material them passing into Public Domain. This article is talking about traditional foods, not some newfangled "Invention" (which might be covered by shorter lasting patents than longer lasting copyright). So even if the concept of copyright on food were valid (and I believe it is bogus), wouldn't these foods have passed into Public Domain long ago?
Alternately, can a claim of copyright be made by a country? Wouldn't a copyright claim have to be made by an author? Clearly the government of these countries are not the authors of these foods, so they have no copyright claim on them. It is more reasonable to assume that the real author wanted their intellectual property to pass into public domain than to fall into the hands of politicians.
Also worth mentioning that, far from dead, XP is still being actively sold for Netbooks. Microsoft aggressively went after that market to take it away from Linux. Now you have Microsoft saying that it will not fix problems in a currently selling product because, well, lets be honest about it, they don't want to. Heck with the military, the consumers should start a class action suit over this one.
I have a red one. What would the acronym for that be?
What could possibly go wrong?
... make sure that anything that uses batteries has the batteries removed. Otherwise you'll likely find ruined electronics in 16 years from leakage.
They will pretty much change whatever they want whenever they want. In addition to the things you mention, lots of software for XP insists on SP2 or even SP3 to install, it was more than just bug fixes here. And somewhere in the series they snuck in .NET (although .NET is also available as a separate download, so that doesn't explain the service pack requirements for some XP software.
But perhaps the most significant example that shows how much an existing system was changed was Win98 Second Edition, a.k.a. Win98SE. Released less than a year after Win98, this version not only included fixes like the notorious memory leak fix, but it included new USB and AGP support, connection sharing, and plenty more. The changes in Win98SE were at least as significant as the changes being made to Vista, and with the exception of the GUI these changes were all things that the Vista team must have been at work on to address serious problems that were well protested in Vista. And the GUI changes are something that no one outside Microsoft really asked for, they are being done to support the claim that this is a new OS as much as for any other reason.
Thanks for the correction. The comment that you referenced was not yet posted back in 2007 when I read this Slashdot article, and, of course, I didn't go back and read every comment again (including the ones new to me) when I searched for this old article and posted the link. I don't think this does anything to undercut my basic assertion that Win 7 is really a service pack for Vista, with a different GUI (I'm sure M$ has lots of experimental GUIs floating around and this GUI seems to be more intended to look different than to bring anything important to the OS). And I'll support my position with two things to consider. Benchmarks of Win7 show a lot of performance numbers that very closely match Vista (and in many cases are not as good as XP, which helps refute the "of cousre they reuse code" logic), and overall a lot of people say that this OS is much more bug free. Since when has M$ released a predominantly bug free OS before the first few SPs? This sure smells to me a lot more like a third or fourth service pack for Vista than a truly new OS.
And, of course, even if it was a new OS there could be a strong case made that those who paid for Vista (including getting it with a new system) should be entitled to this OS since even Microsoft has admitted the usability problems with Vista.
I rarely respond to ACs but this is too good to ignore. You're absolutely correct, plans for anything really new are set years in advance. Yet in May of 2007 Slashdot reported that Microsoft announced that Vista was to be it's last 32 bit OS and that the sucessor to Vista would be 64 bit only. See here: http://slashdot.org/articles/07/05/17/1452228.shtml
Now only two years later we are being told that Win 7 is the next great thing, and that it will be available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions (Just like Vista). If 7 really was the next new OS then you would be absolutely correct, it would have been years in development and Microsoft would not have stated two years ago that it was going to be 64 bit only if indeed it was designed to have 32 bit and 64 bit versions. The only way that this "mistake" could reasonably be made is if the real next OS was intended to be 64 its all along (as it should be), but then M$ decided to claim this repair job on Vista was a "new" OS at the last minute and surprise everyone with this OS that supposedly came out of nowhere. It's just a Vista fix with an alternate GUI and a new name (and a new price tag), to wash off the stink of Vista and to double bill all those who paid for Vista but want a working OS.
And to respond to another issue raised by another cowardly AC, it is completely believable that M$ could still release service packs for Vista, but fail to correct as much as they did in the version of Vista that they now want to call Win 7. Future service packs for the old Vista in no way disprove that they are just re-skinning Vista and getting people who should not have to pay for the fixes to buy it again.
Remember the Mohave ads? Microsoft showed people a "new" OS and supposedly they liked it (although they could only really see it under very controlled conditions that would not show the faults, like driver incompatability). And then it was revealed that the OS was really Vista, which no one liked.
Now jump forward to the present. MS finally has a service pack that will fix many of the problems in Vista (although not all, and it still has very Vista characteristic performance benchmarks). Someone at M$ wants to release the service pack, but someone higher up who understands the M$ way of doing things better says "If we give people this service pack, even though it fixes many things, it will still have the stink of the Vista name on it. Lets do this: change the GUI around just enough that we can claim it's a new OS. Then rather than give people a new service pack for Vista, we can charge them for a whole new Operating System. Call it something other than Mohave and no one will get wise."
An so, with much hype, they release Windows 7. Everyone who bought Vista and was entitled to a workable OS gets screwed. M$ charges anyone who wants their Vista fixed for a supposedly different OS, even though Vista was so broken that even M$ executives called it a disaster. Profit.
You prediction was made in much simpler terms years ago, and so far it seems to be coming true: Everything that has traditionally been sent by wires will be transmitted wirelessly, everything that has traditionally been sent wirelessly will be sent by wire. Ham radio doomed itself years ago when the old farts in the ARRL insisted that morse code be kept as a requirement for most licenses, and any license that had good range without using satellites. Of course, many of them quit using morse right after they got their license. But they still insisted that new hams learn it (and using a computer that could send and receive code wasn't an acceptable option, perhaps because the ARRL couldn't sell computers training materials). Now the code requirement has finally been dropped, but too little too late. Many of us who would have gladly worked for General or advanced "tickets" decades ago were blocked out by the asinine requirement, even after all other radio services completely abandoned the code. Now there seems little reason to get the equipment that has continued to spiral in price, particularly when the Internet and other services have made ham almost obsolete. Yes, it still comes in very handy in emergency situations when other forms of communication break down, but it's utility is greatly diminished by having driven away many potential members of the ham community.