> For me, a primary motivation for updating > linux is getting driver support for new devices.
Meh. As long as your existing hardware works, this is unnecessary.
Usually what pushes me to upgrade (when I'm not doing a clean install anyway, either on a new system or due to hard drive problems) is when a new version of some desktop application that I use on a regular basis is available and has improvements that I want but won't install on the old OS due to dependency issues. One time it was Inkscape that required the new stuff (a recent version of GTK IIRC). Another time it was Mozilla (the suite; Firefox didn't exist yet at the time).
Applying this same logic to Windows, XP won't really be dead until new software starts coming out that won't run on it. If experience with past Microsoft OSes is any guide, this will probably be sometime after 2014.
Of course, if you're buying new hardware for some reason, that's a different matter. At that point you're going to be starting from a clean install anyway, so it may as well be a clean install of the latest stable release.
> You would be using [ITYM esound], because... PulseAudio hadn't come around yet.
In other words, your sound might actually *work*. (I find it hard to get excited about the difference between OSS and ALSA. There doesn't seem to *be* a user-visible difference. But the difference between esound and PulseAudio is profound. One never gives anyone any trouble. The other promises esoteric features most people don't need, like the ability to listen to sound from two computers at once via one computer's speakers, but even the gurus frequently can't get it to work right.)
> Most people don't keep cars that long
Depends on the income bracket.
I have a friend who sold a 1977 Ford Phoenix last year.
Some people don't *buy* a car until it's pushing ten years old. There are still quite a few cars on the road that were obviously manufactured in the eighties or earlier. Cars from 2001 are less visually obvious, because they look more similar to today's new models, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there too.
Re:Taskbar differences
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> Sure, you can switch back to the old taskbar
Actually, you can't. You can configure the new one to do certain things a little more like the old one (e.g., you can get it to group windows only when necessary, instead of whenever possible), but you can't get back the stationary launcher icons you had in Windows 98 and XP. Every time a window opens or closes, your launchers slide to a different place on the bar, and as far as I can tell there's nothing you can do to fix this.
I would have called it "chaotic and confusing". Stuff moves around all the time, so you can never find your icons easily. You have to stop and look at every single thing on the bar, one at a time, until you find the one you're looking for. In Windows XP, the Quicklaunch icons are stationary, so you don't even have to look. You can just click. That was better. It wasn't perfect, but it was better. In fact, it was a lot better.
That's really the only change in Windows Seven that I greatly dislike.
I *do* like the way pinning works on the Start menu. It's still not as good as panel drawers (in Gnome), but it's a marked improvement over the previous incarnation of the Start menu.
> If someone needs to be trained to use Windows 7 > then there is something wrong with them.
There's a lot wrong with most people. What else is new? I've seen people have to be retrained just because the desktop wallpaper changed. That's an extreme case, but it illustrates the point nicely: even small changes can create training costs.
Of course people need training when they have to work with new stuff that's different from the old stuff. The IT department can reduce the training costs by configuring the new version to look and feel a lot like the old version (you know, turn off the more gratuitous or disruptive new features where possible, set the visual theme to look like the old version, organize the icons in a reasonable way, that sort of thing), but there will still be *some* training required.
If a dozen programmers spent two years writing it in VB6, I imagine a team of three competent Perl programmers holed up in a back office with no interruptions could probably write a working replacement in six months.
*Theoretically*, but that was a barely-beta-quality release that nobody sane ever actually deployed.
I would argue that the version of Windows XP that people are actually *using* was released in 2004. There's been another service pack since then, as well, but those are relatively minor changes. SP2, on the other hand, was a *huge* sweeping swath of fixes, which pretty much turned Windows XP into a fundamentally different product, one that was actually usable in a production environment.
Still, that was almost six years ago now, so I would say it no longer makes sense to roll out new computers with XP, except in special cases (most of which involve line-of-business software that can't be updated yet for one reason or another).
Re:Getting back to the topic...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
Training issues can be significantly reduced if the IT department does a little more work setting up and deploying a sensible and conservative configuration. You know, set things up so that (by default, unless the users change it) most of the new features are turned off and the theme is Classic and the entries in the Start menu are cleaned up and better organized and so on and so forth. Basically, make it look and feel a lot like the old version, at least at first. (Later, as more and more of your users have the new version at home, you can modernize your configuration a little, if you want, without incurring so many training costs.)
This is a large part of what the IT department is *for*. Any IT department that doesn't know how to do this is incompetent.
Re:Back to the original subject...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
We do all of our development on Debian...
Oh, we've *planned* it, but it'll take time...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
If all goes according to plan and there are no further delays or budget cuts, we should phase out our last Windows XP system in the fall of 2014. This is with the new improved plan (upgrading about 15% of our computers per annum). The old plan (upgrading about 10% per annum) would have had it happening circa 2017, but I made up some color-coded bar charts (blue and green bars are good, yellow and orange are not so good, red and ugly purple are bad...) and managed to convince the board to step things up a little.
I hope nobody's suggesting we should just buy the software licenses and try to run Windows Seven on low-end hardware from 2005. Haha. That would be amusing to read a journal about, but I wouldn't want to be the one trying it. No, we're looking at phasing out the XP-era hardware as well, and that's going to take time.
> 48 hours a week is about what I work (ok, it's usually a bit more, but not really much)
Not all jobs are that heavy. Some employers consider 35 hours/week to be full time, and it's possible (depending on your hourly rate and your spending habits) to pay the bills on less than full time. I currently work about 25 hours per week and put money into savings every month.
> considering how I usually do NOT have another 8 hours per day left to play games
I could put 8 hours a day into games and hold my job, no sweat. I'd have to give up language study, reading junk on the internet, and most of my church-related activities, but I could keep my job.
Also, 8 hours per day would be 56 per week. 48 per week is a bit less than 7 per day, less on work days if you do extra on your days off.
So yeah, it's totally doable. Personally I can't imagine *wanting* to devote that kind of time to games, but it's entirely possible.
Indeed. 48 hours a week? That's almost like you're just playing games for fun in your spare time. *Truly* extreme gamers get a second PC so they can do 48 hours in a single day.
> as I've heard pretty much everywhere that [Verizon] have the best network
You have apparently been talking with Verizon employees, then. Verizon hasn't even been able to maintain the existing landline network that they acquired when they bought GTE. If I ever inherit a hillion jillion dollars, Verizon is the first company I will buy just to shut them down.
As far as I'm concerned, coffee falls under the same rule as beer and buttermilk: anything that smells that foul is NOT going in my mouth. I also don't chew on old sweaty gym socks.
Exercise is like chemotherapy: it CAN prolong your life, but there's no real guarantee, and it can also have such a negative impact on the quality of your life that sometimes it's just not worth it.
> In common parlance all stimulants that are not cocaine and > don't have hallucinogenic effects are referred to as "speed".
Only if it comes in a pill. Things you smoke (e.g., nicotine) are not generally called "speed", and neither are things you drink (e.g., energy drinks), even if the same thing (caffeine) *would* be called speed when taken in pill form.
The position requires five years of job experience programming in Malbolge in a team programming environment. Experience programming network services, databases, and printer drivers in Malbolge is desirable. Please submit a portfolio of your previous work in the language, along with your resume and three references, including at least one former supervisor, one former coworker who is a fellow Malbolge programmer, and one character reference, preferably a minister.
A strict formal dress code and standards of professional conduct will be enforced. Relocation may be required, to a location that will not be disclosed in advance of hiring. Salary is to be negotiated after you sign the thirty-year contract.
> So if I want to develop an application for both of these platforms, > in what language should I express the business logic of the application
Perl. Every major platform comes with Perl out of the box except for MS Windows, and you can either distribute one of the various Windows versions of Perl with your application, or else use PAR or something along those lines to bundle your application and Perl into a single executable file. There are other options too, but I would use Perl.
The hard part is deciding what widget toolkit to use (assuming you want to create a GUI app; if you're aiming more for a command-line interface, then this issue just goes away).
Perl, like any major programming language, of course has libraries for all the major widget sets (and some of the minor ones), but that doesn't really answer the question. Some people are really only going to be happy if you use the "native" widgets on each platform, but that pretty much shoots the whole idea of cross-platform design right out the nearest window. You could use a widget set that's available on all the platforms (GTK, for instance), but it won't feel fully native on every platform. You could use a "wrapper" set (e.g., wxWidgets), but then you either have to limit yourself to doing things that can be done in all the sets it wraps, or else you need a bunch of platform-specific (or widget-set-specific) code. You could create your own wrapper set, but that way lies madness.
Or you could run your code on a server and give it a web-based interface and let people access it through a browser. This completely sidesteps the whole issue of widget sets, though it is of course not without limitations of its own.
> I mean, come on, the sample size was *one* (in the experiment > group, and one in the control group). If that doesn't scream > "statistically insignificant", I don't know what would.
I feel I should elaborate on this.
My sister uses a cellphone, and I don't. She has severe ADHD, and I don't. Therefore, cellphones contribute to ADHD. Also, she has two X chromosomes, and I only have one, so we can further conclude that X chromosomes contribute to ADHD.
When "studies" are based on extremely tiny sample populations, the results aren't just questionable: they're totally meaningless.
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> For me, a primary motivation for updating
> linux is getting driver support for new devices.
Meh. As long as your existing hardware works, this is unnecessary.
Usually what pushes me to upgrade (when I'm not doing a clean install anyway, either on a new system or due to hard drive problems) is when a new version of some desktop application that I use on a regular basis is available and has improvements that I want but won't install on the old OS due to dependency issues. One time it was Inkscape that required the new stuff (a recent version of GTK IIRC). Another time it was Mozilla (the suite; Firefox didn't exist yet at the time).
Applying this same logic to Windows, XP won't really be dead until new software starts coming out that won't run on it. If experience with past Microsoft OSes is any guide, this will probably be sometime after 2014.
Of course, if you're buying new hardware for some reason, that's a different matter. At that point you're going to be starting from a clean install anyway, so it may as well be a clean install of the latest stable release.
> You would be using [ITYM esound], because... PulseAudio hadn't come around yet.
In other words, your sound might actually *work*. (I find it hard to get excited about the difference between OSS and ALSA. There doesn't seem to *be* a user-visible difference. But the difference between esound and PulseAudio is profound. One never gives anyone any trouble. The other promises esoteric features most people don't need, like the ability to listen to sound from two computers at once via one computer's speakers, but even the gurus frequently can't get it to work right.)
> Most people don't keep cars that long
Depends on the income bracket.
I have a friend who sold a 1977 Ford Phoenix last year.
Some people don't *buy* a car until it's pushing ten years old. There are still quite a few cars on the road that were obviously manufactured in the eighties or earlier. Cars from 2001 are less visually obvious, because they look more similar to today's new models, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there too.
> Sure, you can switch back to the old taskbar
Actually, you can't. You can configure the new one to do certain things a little more like the old one (e.g., you can get it to group windows only when necessary, instead of whenever possible), but you can't get back the stationary launcher icons you had in Windows 98 and XP. Every time a window opens or closes, your launchers slide to a different place on the bar, and as far as I can tell there's nothing you can do to fix this.
> The 7 taskbar is also very intuitive.
I would have called it "chaotic and confusing". Stuff moves around all the time, so you can never find your icons easily. You have to stop and look at every single thing on the bar, one at a time, until you find the one you're looking for. In Windows XP, the Quicklaunch icons are stationary, so you don't even have to look. You can just click. That was better. It wasn't perfect, but it was better. In fact, it was a lot better.
That's really the only change in Windows Seven that I greatly dislike.
I *do* like the way pinning works on the Start menu. It's still not as good as panel drawers (in Gnome), but it's a marked improvement over the previous incarnation of the Start menu.
> If someone needs to be trained to use Windows 7
> then there is something wrong with them.
There's a lot wrong with most people. What else is new? I've seen people have to be retrained just because the desktop wallpaper changed. That's an extreme case, but it illustrates the point nicely: even small changes can create training costs.
Of course people need training when they have to work with new stuff that's different from the old stuff. The IT department can reduce the training costs by configuring the new version to look and feel a lot like the old version (you know, turn off the more gratuitous or disruptive new features where possible, set the visual theme to look like the old version, organize the icons in a reasonable way, that sort of thing), but there will still be *some* training required.
If a dozen programmers spent two years writing it in VB6, I imagine a team of three competent Perl programmers holed up in a back office with no interruptions could probably write a working replacement in six months.
> XP was release in 2001
*Theoretically*, but that was a barely-beta-quality release that nobody sane ever actually deployed.
I would argue that the version of Windows XP that people are actually *using* was released in 2004. There's been another service pack since then, as well, but those are relatively minor changes. SP2, on the other hand, was a *huge* sweeping swath of fixes, which pretty much turned Windows XP into a fundamentally different product, one that was actually usable in a production environment.
Still, that was almost six years ago now, so I would say it no longer makes sense to roll out new computers with XP, except in special cases (most of which involve line-of-business software that can't be updated yet for one reason or another).
Training issues can be significantly reduced if the IT department does a little more work setting up and deploying a sensible and conservative configuration. You know, set things up so that (by default, unless the users change it) most of the new features are turned off and the theme is Classic and the entries in the Start menu are cleaned up and better organized and so on and so forth. Basically, make it look and feel a lot like the old version, at least at first. (Later, as more and more of your users have the new version at home, you can modernize your configuration a little, if you want, without incurring so many training costs.)
This is a large part of what the IT department is *for*. Any IT department that doesn't know how to do this is incompetent.
We do all of our development on Debian...
If all goes according to plan and there are no further delays or budget cuts, we should phase out our last Windows XP system in the fall of 2014. This is with the new improved plan (upgrading about 15% of our computers per annum). The old plan (upgrading about 10% per annum) would have had it happening circa 2017, but I made up some color-coded bar charts (blue and green bars are good, yellow and orange are not so good, red and ugly purple are bad...) and managed to convince the board to step things up a little.
I hope nobody's suggesting we should just buy the software licenses and try to run Windows Seven on low-end hardware from 2005. Haha. That would be amusing to read a journal about, but I wouldn't want to be the one trying it. No, we're looking at phasing out the XP-era hardware as well, and that's going to take time.
I think it's time to drive a steak through this thread's heart.
They make the highway smell like DEC-style modular connectors?
But since we know what it was, wouldn't that make it an _Identified_ Flying Object?
> Clearly knowledge satisfies you on some level otherwise you wouldn't be saying this.
It's not so much that knowledge satisfies us, as it is that curiosity compels us.
> Someone who spends 4 hours gaming per night is no
> different to those who spend 4 hours watching TV
Oh, man, don't even get me started on TV. At least playing games for four hours straight leaves you with some brain function.
> 48 hours a week is about what I work (ok, it's usually a bit more, but not really much)
Not all jobs are that heavy. Some employers consider 35 hours/week to be full time, and it's possible (depending on your hourly rate and your spending habits) to pay the bills on less than full time. I currently work about 25 hours per week and put money into savings every month.
> considering how I usually do NOT have another 8 hours per day left to play games
I could put 8 hours a day into games and hold my job, no sweat. I'd have to give up language study, reading junk on the internet, and most of my church-related activities, but I could keep my job.
Also, 8 hours per day would be 56 per week. 48 per week is a bit less than 7 per day, less on work days if you do extra on your days off.
So yeah, it's totally doable. Personally I can't imagine *wanting* to devote that kind of time to games, but it's entirely possible.
Indeed. 48 hours a week? That's almost like you're just playing games for fun in your spare time. *Truly* extreme gamers get a second PC so they can do 48 hours in a single day.
> as I've heard pretty much everywhere that [Verizon] have the best network
You have apparently been talking with Verizon employees, then. Verizon hasn't even been able to maintain the existing landline network that they acquired when they bought GTE. If I ever inherit a hillion jillion dollars, Verizon is the first company I will buy just to shut them down.
> I don't actually have anything against coffee
As far as I'm concerned, coffee falls under the same rule as beer and buttermilk: anything that smells that foul is NOT going in my mouth. I also don't chew on old sweaty gym socks.
> Or you could exercise
Exercise is like chemotherapy: it CAN prolong your life, but there's no real guarantee, and it can also have such a negative impact on the quality of your life that sometimes it's just not worth it.
> In common parlance all stimulants that are not cocaine and
> don't have hallucinogenic effects are referred to as "speed".
Only if it comes in a pill. Things you smoke (e.g., nicotine) are not generally called "speed", and neither are things you drink (e.g., energy drinks), even if the same thing (caffeine) *would* be called speed when taken in pill form.
I need to hire a skilled Malbolge programmer.
The position requires five years of job experience programming in Malbolge in a team programming environment. Experience programming network services, databases, and printer drivers in Malbolge is desirable. Please submit a portfolio of your previous work in the language, along with your resume and three references, including at least one former supervisor, one former coworker who is a fellow Malbolge programmer, and one character reference, preferably a minister.
A strict formal dress code and standards of professional conduct will be enforced. Relocation may be required, to a location that will not be disclosed in advance of hiring. Salary is to be negotiated after you sign the thirty-year contract.
Thanks.
> So if I want to develop an application for both of these platforms,
> in what language should I express the business logic of the application
Perl. Every major platform comes with Perl out of the box except for MS Windows, and you can either distribute one of the various Windows versions of Perl with your application, or else use PAR or something along those lines to bundle your application and Perl into a single executable file. There are other options too, but I would use Perl.
The hard part is deciding what widget toolkit to use (assuming you want to create a GUI app; if you're aiming more for a command-line interface, then this issue just goes away).
Perl, like any major programming language, of course has libraries for all the major widget sets (and some of the minor ones), but that doesn't really answer the question. Some people are really only going to be happy if you use the "native" widgets on each platform, but that pretty much shoots the whole idea of cross-platform design right out the nearest window. You could use a widget set that's available on all the platforms (GTK, for instance), but it won't feel fully native on every platform. You could use a "wrapper" set (e.g., wxWidgets), but then you either have to limit yourself to doing things that can be done in all the sets it wraps, or else you need a bunch of platform-specific (or widget-set-specific) code. You could create your own wrapper set, but that way lies madness.
Or you could run your code on a server and give it a web-based interface and let people access it through a browser. This completely sidesteps the whole issue of widget sets, though it is of course not without limitations of its own.
> Apple is the new bad guy, not Microsoft.
There can, of course, only ever be one bad guy in the world at any given time.
> I mean, come on, the sample size was *one* (in the experiment
> group, and one in the control group). If that doesn't scream
> "statistically insignificant", I don't know what would.
I feel I should elaborate on this.
My sister uses a cellphone, and I don't. She has severe ADHD, and I don't. Therefore, cellphones contribute to ADHD. Also, she has two X chromosomes, and I only have one, so we can further conclude that X chromosomes contribute to ADHD.
When "studies" are based on extremely tiny sample populations, the results aren't just questionable: they're totally meaningless.