Heh. It does look a bit like an okudagram, but the assortment of colors is wrong for Federation equipment. Maybe it's alien, though; Cardassian equipment uses a a different color set (teals, greens, and purples), so it's reasonable to guess that different galactic powers have different displays...
Stallman, for his part, is one of the most extreme hardliners ever, and so self-absorbed that he actually believes it's a *good* thing if his software license is mutually incompatible with more than half of the (otherwise just as good) free software licenses in existence. Not that he hasn't contributed some really useful stuff; he has (not least Emacs, which is eleven different kinds of awesome). But you can't take all of his political views entirely seriously. That way lies madness.
Then there's De Icaza, who actually believes that it would be useful and worthwhile to implement Microsoft's.NET framework for *nix systems. It is difficult to think of a free-software programming project that would be more counterproductive, and I *sincerely* hope Mono never gains any significant traction or becomes widely deployed. The whole concept vibrantly illustrates the meaning of the phrase "Do Not Want".
And what the $@#! is up with that whole "Moonlight" thing? Do the cretinous rapscallions involved with the Mono project actually think it would be an okay thing for web developers to feel like they can use that Silverlight junk on websites, without alienating non-Windows users? Gah! Java was bad enough, and Flash is worse. We ABSOLUTELY do **NOT** want Yet Another Gratuitous Plugin to become ubiquitous on the web. Die, Moonlight, die, Die, DIE!
> the lowest common denominator really is the lowest > common denominator. If there are people out there > stupid enough to believe a prince in Nigeria is going > to give them a million dollars,
But, it's only a small percentage of the total fortune!
In all seriousness, I am pretty certain that it is completely impossible to construct an assertion so bizarre and obviously false that there isn't anyone on the planet dumb enough to believe it.
> As far as I can tell, this XP hate is just revisionist history.
It's not. Go back and read archives of usenet (or slashdot, or UserFriendly for that matter) from 2001. There was a lot of whining to the effect that Windows XP was a big step down, although people were divided about whether it would be preferable to downgrade to Windows 2000 or 98SE.
Let's see if I can recall some of the specific complaints I remember seeing at the time...
It looked like it was made by Fisher Price. (This was easily solved by switching to the Classic theme, but that didn't stop a lot of people from complaining about it. A *lot* of people.)
Performance was absolutely wretched on the low-end hardware of the day. The amount of RAM you needed to run more than two apps at a time was just obscene by the standards of the time (though obviously it sounds like a ridiculously small amount now, in this decadent era of multiple gigabytes and 64-bit address spaces). Furthermore, there were a lot of complaints to the effect that the official System Requirements were understated and did not result in satisfactory performance. For example, User Friendly ran a strip wherein a new Windows install held a computer hostage, took over the printer, and printed up a list of its demands. One of the techs was seen saying something like, "Hold it to its box specs! Give no quarter!" (Unfortunately I can't seem to find this particular strip at the moment. Searching for text within the cartoon bubbles of comic strip images doesn't always yield perfect results some reason, and I may have the wording slightly off in any case.)
A lot of games wouldn't run right (because they were doing crazy/stupid things, like trying to store user settings in places like C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 for instance, and Windows XP didn't like this, for some odd reason).
Plug-and-play hardware detection was even worse than in Windows 98, which to be frank is really going some.
Hardware support in general was a good deal worse than Windows 98. This changed over the next several years as hardware manufacturers realized that lots of users had Windows XP, so they had to make drivers for it. But at first it was a real problem for many users.
Stupid annoying terrible unnecessary pop-up notifications arose out of the system tray every four seconds to interrupt and annoy the user for no good reason. There was a *LOT* of complaining about this one. The behavior was later considerably toned down in the service packs, but not before a lot of people swore to switch back to Windows 98SE or 2000 and never upgrade again just for this one issue. People were at *least* as angry about this as they later were about UAC in Vista.
There were a lot of unnecessary services running out of the box, listening on various ports, which made the system pretty insecure. You could turn on the firewall, but most users didn't know how. (SP2 fixed this by turning on the firewall by default).
File and printer sharing wasn't always fully interoperable with existing peer-to-peer networks (of mostly Windows 98 systems), and it failed in unpredictable and inexplicable ways.
However, Windows XP did also get a fair amount of praise, among other things because the fabled Blue Screen of Death occurred *MUCH* less often than in Windows 98, probably as a result of the memory protection. Early adoption of Windows XP was not as high as some people expected or Microsoft wanted, but it was higher than for Vista, I think, despite the fact that people had been waiting for and anticipating Vista for much longer.
> the fact is, most people simply won't swap because > of the simple fact you have to find the correct > drivers for the OS your on for your hardware
That was true in 1998, but for the last several years it's been much harder to find and install the drivers for all your hardware for Windows than for Linux.
I mean, say you buy a used printer at a garage sale, and the former owner lost the install CD. (Yeah, I know nobody ever loses the install CD and manual that come with their hardware, but bear with me.) With Windows, you now have to track down the manufacturer's website (assuming the manufacturer is still in business, heaven help you if it's Apollo or some yum-cha junk like that), navigate through the (usually horrible) support website, find the drivers for the correct model (assuming you can figure out exactly which model you have; the numbers on the unit itself frequently don't quite match what you have to select on the website), download the drivers, and then install them. Then if you're lucky you can print. On a modern Linux system, you just tell it you want to install a local printer and let it automatically detect the printer. The software recommends a driver automatically, and you just click yes, and Bob is your uncle. You don't even have to know what model of printer you've got: the software figures it out for you.
And don't even get me started on graphics cards. Have you *ever* seen a non-OEM install of any version of Windows correctly detect a graphics card and install a working driver? I haven't. Ever. And I've installed Windows *MANY* times, on a *wide* variety of hardware.
Actually, Windows was a terrible annoyance for game developers and gamers. DOS was *MUCH* better. Scorched Earth *never* quite worked properly on Windows.
Why are you looking at me like that? I'm going to go play Zork now.
> Is there even a way in Windows 7 to make > it look like XP or the old Win2K?
Up to a point, but not entirely.
You can and should turn off Aero and select the Windows Classic theme, of course, and IIRC you can still turn off "Personalized Menus" in the Start Menu, and there are some other things you can do. (Go through the control panels. You'll find them.)
But there are limits. You can't get back the old Quicklaunch (introduced in Windows 98), for instance. If you want launchers on the taskbar, the only way to have them in Seven, as far as I can see, is through pinning, which causes them to be interspersed with the window list in a manner that appears to have been expressly designed to confuse and annoy users. Microsoft claims this is a feature, but I think the engineers were just too lazy to code an option to keep all the pinned launchers on the left of the window list and list any associated windows separately.
You can't *exactly* get the classic Start Menu back, but you *can* pin whatever apps you want in the main body of the start menu *and* configure away most of the gratuitous junk on the right side, so with a bit of work you can create a reasonably usable setup.
The most annoying limitation of the pinning is that you can't pin a folder and thereby create a drawer or submenu. They really should add that possibility in a service pack.
I don't use virtual desktops either, and I came to Linux from DOS. I experimented with Windows 95 in a multi-boot setup (DOS, Win95, and Debian), but I never really liked the Windows UI. At this point, I've used Gnome much more than Windows, and that doesn't count time I've spent using KDE and other window managers. (I used twm for a while, toyed with enlightenment, experimented with ion,...)
But I never liked virtual desktops because, frankly, I don't use my computer for three (or six...) discreet unrelated tasks each with a similar number of windows. I suppose there are overall categories into which my windows could be divided, but it's not *useful* to do so, because I'm not more likely to switch from one window to another within a category than between categories. The contrary, if anything.
However, this is really no problem with a sufficiently configurable desktop environment, because unlike the Windows UI it can be set up in a sensible fashion that leaves plenty of room on the list for as many windows as you please. The clock and system tray and launchers, for instance, can be on a completely different panel from the window list. The way windows are or are not grouped is also configurable, on a per-application basis if desired, which comes in handy for thinks like gnome-terminal (which I'd never EVER want grouped) and gmessage (which I *would* want grouped, even if there are only two of them, and even if they just launched).
Actually, I hate it. Among other things, the launchers end up interspersed with the window list and, importantly, are NOT always in the same place, which is bad because it prevents you from just instinctively reaching for them out of habit and quickly getting what you want. Instead, with Seven's pinning system you end up having to look through the whole list to find what you want every time you want to launch an application. Annoying. And if you want to launch a (new instance of) an application that already has a window open, the usability is even worse (you have to go through a context menu). Ugh.
I like the pinning in the Start menu. They got it right there, I think. But I'm a lot less happy with the taskbar pinning. It has some of the same usability problems as the annoying OS X dock. Almost enough to make you think they *copied* the OS X dock, which would definitely be a big step in the wrong direction, because the Windows taskbar had always been better than the OS X dock. Until now.
> The old model with the labels just doesn't > scale to more than a few windows.
There are reasons for this, all of which boil down to bad design.
In the first place, Microsoft's panel layout is about as flexible as cement. The menu and launchers cannot be positioned anywhere else except to the left of the window list (above it if the taskbar is vertical). The clock and the notification area (which includes icons for windowless running applications) cannot be positioned anywhere except to the right of the window list (below it if the taskbar is vertical). Meanwhile the panel applets ("gadgets") in Vista can *only* go on a separate panel where you can't put anything else (or on the desktop in Seven, which makes them even more useless), are entirely too positively enormous, and cannot be resized. Panel thickness adjustability is also extremely suboptimal. You cannot, for instance, give the window list its own panel taking the entire width of the screen 24 pixels thick across the bottom (or 36 pixels with two rows, or...) and then put the menu and launchers and clock and system tray and panel applets all on a 48-pixel-wide vertical panel on the left side. This would be a good workable arrangement, but it's not an option.
The options for how window-grouping is handled in the window list are also pretty limited. You can't tell it not to group certain applications. You can't choose whether to start by grouping the least recently used applications or the ones with the most windows or use a combination formula. And as near as I can tell you can't really control how small the entries are allowed to get, which is pretty important IMO. If you're running a lot of windows of the same app with the same icon, you need more of the text showing; if like me you use a lot of *different* applications or at least windows with different icons (e.g., different terminal themes) the icon by itself is just about enough to tell your windows apart so you hardly need any of the title at all. This is heavily dependent on usage pattern, but so far as I can see Windows doesn't let you adjust it.
I could go on, but the long and short of it is that the Windows UI appears to have been designed for people who never have more than three windows open at once and want their screen to look exactly like the out-of-the-box display model screen. They didn't really bother to make it configurable or flexible enough to handle power-user usage scenarios. This hasn't really changed in Seven. The details are a little different, but the same old rigid inflexibility and pointless unnecessary limitations are still present.
> Say what you will against proprietary things, > the MS VS IDE is quite nice to work in.
Whatever's wrong with you, it's no little thing.
I'm not altogether against proprietary software. Pegasus Mail, for example, has by far the nicest UI of any email software I've ever seen. It makes Thunderbird look like a steaming heap of excrement. Also, the Query Analyzer that comes with MS SQL Server is pretty good. (SQL Server itself is lacking some extremely important features without which it cannot really compete with real RDBMSes, not least regular expressions and case discrimination. But the Query Analyzer UI is nice.)
But the Visual Studio UI is the most horrifically terrible IDE UI that I have ever witnessed. It is actively *painful* to work with. It has a number of creative and quite *bizarre* usability problems, that they apparently had to go far out of their way to design.
> You just posted on a website running Slash. Although it > is Perl, so maybe the codebase is less than ten lines.
It could be golfed down to ten lines, but then it wouldn't be maintainable.
> > Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code > That would have been what, 6 million lines in Python?
I'd be more than that.
If you look at simple functions that do the same thing side by side, Python looks almost as terse as Perl, but you'd be missing the considerable fact that the corpus of available modules for Python is a great deal less comprehensive than the CPAN. When you take that into account, three million lines of Perl code is a terrifyingly large amount of code.
I don't even want to think about how many million lines of C it would be. The mind boggles.
> Perl use had dropped to 15% of its former level in the past five years
Obviously that's not true.
But even if Perl usage *did* drop to 15% of its former level, it would still be more widely used than Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Python, and Visual Basic.NET, combined.
> When an e-mail is rejected with a "please try again later" > response, it makes the recipient's company look bad at an > organizational level.
Only if the delay gets noticed.
> What's worse, senders may ignore these "try again" messages, > or never see them at all.
Under anything vaguely resembling normal conditions, the sending user never sees the "try again" message and never knows that there's greylisting involved. The mail server takes care of all that. All the major MTAs since the beginning of time have supported queue-and-resend, because when the internet was young mail got delayed all the time due to unreliable infrastructure.
The problem with greylisting isn't that mail would ever completely fail to get through, but rather than mail from new senders would be *delayed*, at least for several minutes, possibly for several *hours*. Given the way email was originally designed to work, this should theoretically be no big deal, but in practice a lot of organizations won't tolerate that kind of delay in incoming mail.
For personal email, though, it can be an attractive option. Bear in mind, recognized whitelisted senders get through right away; only mail from unknown senders gets delayed.
> unsolicited email distributed across many IPs and domains > in order to avoid triggering volume-based filters.
I hereby propose we just call it "spam" and have done.
I mean, seriously, is anybody really still worried about the old-fashioned kind of spam that was sent back in the early nineties, going out from one mail server with one IP for months on end, using an actual valid return email address from an actual valid domain owned by the senders? Have you *received* any of that lately?
I haven't. Near as I can tell, *all* modern spam is sent by a collection of nodes distributed across many IPs on many subnets and randomly generates a new forged sender address for each message. We don't need a special name specifically for spam that's sent like that. If you just say "spam", that communicates the whole idea. Everybody who has been paying attention knows that it's sent in the described fashion these days.
Application compatibility. We have a system at work that came with 64-bit Vista, and it's currently running a 32-bit OS, because the most important application it needs to run won't work on the 64-bit OS until we upgrade our entire network to the next version of the application. That means several hours of downtime and several hundred dollars in assorted other costs, plus some preparatory administrative work (which I'm currently studying up on how to do; it involves Active Directory, which I had successfully avoided learning much about until now).
If an 8-bit computer with 128 kilobytes of RAM is good enough for PC-DOS 3.3, it should be good enough for everything. Office software? Who needs that junk? WYSIWYG is for posers. They can pry EDLIN from my cold, dead fingers. Why, back in my day we *appreciated* the time it took our software to compute results, and the fact that we couldn't do anything else while it was happening. It gave us time to read the manuals while we were waiting! Those were the days...
> Cali has way more money/ability to get money than most states.
When the other commenter said "if California can do this any state can", he wasn't talking about the money issue. He was talking about delays caused by "all of the NIMBY's and environmental impact statements", as mentioned by the grandparent comment.
I suspect that assessment is incorrect, on the grounds that a lot of environmentalists tend to be in *favor* of such trains, on the theory that they reduce motor vehicle traffic.
> Not to mention they have more of a 'need' for this type of transport
It's more than that. You're headed in the right direction saying they have more need, but it would be even more accurate to say they have an actual *use* for a bullet train, where a lot of other states wouldn't. Southern California is basically one great big city, so public transportation is widely available and city-to-city passenger trains are actually *practical*, much like in Europe and Japan. People could take the buss to the train station in San Diego, hop on the bullet train, get off in San Francisco, and take the streetcar or a taxi to their final destination.
Whereas, a bullet train in Indiana would be a pointless curiosity; its actual usefulness in practice would be virtually nil.
I would think trademark law would be at least twice as pertinent to the situation as copyright, but I'm from the other side of the pond, so maybe it's different in England.
> If and when Iran tests a bomb, I'm not sure what will happen, but I sure as hell expect > Israel to respond more aggressively than the rest of the world did when NK tested theirs.
Iran is not North Korea. North Korea has what I call a "sane government", in nuclear terms, by which I mean that they would in practice not risk starting a nuclear war, because they do not want to disrupt the status quo and risk losing what they have (particularly, they wouldn't want to risk losing power in their own country). They did a test because they knew a test would not start a war, and because they wanted to show off and be perceived as powerful. But North Korea is not going to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack. There's essentially zero risk they'd do that. It would be completely out of character for them.
Iran is not North Korea. The government of Iran is, in a word, unstable. Khamenei would be dangerous enough, and then there's Ahmadinejad. As far as I'm concerned, the question isn't "What would Israel do if Iran had nuclear weapons" but rather "What would *Iran* do if Iran had nuclear weapons." It's not an easy question to answer, and that's just a little bit unnerving.
> And if you're Israel, apparently we pretend that we don't know
Eh, everyone suspects that Israel probably has the bomb, and it's not like they're denying it. They won't officially confirm it either, but that's probably for the express purpose of making it even more likely that the other nations in their immediate vicinity will *believe* that they are a nuclear power, which is generally a positive thing for Israel. I'm not sure they care what the US knows or doesn't know -- why would they? The US is definitely known to be a nuclear power (strongest evidence for it of any nation -- we actually used two of the danged things in a real warfare situation) and has historically been an ally for Israel in any case (so they don't need to bluster against us) and have no problem at all being allies with other nuclear powers (so there's no reason to hide it from us; it's not like we've sanctioned the UK for being a nuclear power, for instance). So it's not what the US thinks but rather what other nations think that matters. Other nations such as their middle-eastern neighbors, and Russia, and Pakistan, and certain European countries...
Frankly, whether Israel actually *has* nuclear warheads is more or less immaterial to the US.
In the first place, they certainly are sufficiently technologically advanced to be *able* to create them, probably in relatively short order, if they should ever have a reason to do so. Having actually done would not be significantly more dangerous, particularly considering that of all the nations on the planet Israel is one of the most likely to be able to effectively and consistently keep the things under tight control to prevent unauthorized use -- particularly compared to known nuclear powers Russia, China, and Pakistan. Frankly even the western nuclear powers (US, UK, France) are significantly more likely than Israel to have a security snafu and inadvertently lose a nuclear warhead to an unauthorized party.
Additionally, it should be obvious to everyone who pays any attention at all to international politics that Israel's main objective in having the things is as a deterrent. Specifically, if the world thinks Israel is a nuclear power, it is a deterrent against nations like Russia and Pakistan who otherwise might potentially have been persuaded to back the Islamic world in its desire to, umm, "liberate" Israel's territory. Israel wants them to believe that doing so would risk starting a nuclear war. That way they'll hopefully stay out of any regional conflict that might arise in the Middle East. Because in a purely regional conflict Israel's odds of coming out on top are pretty good, but in a World War scenario, not so much.
Yeah. We've got ninety-minute screensaver delays on most of the computers, because when they complained about the ten-minute ones ("I was just using it! I only stepped away for thirty seconds to help a patron! I don't have time to log back in every thirty seconds!"), I told them "Well, we can increase the time..." and this seemed reasonable to them. So we set 'em to twenty minutes, and the complaining did not abate, and we set them to forty-five minutes, and the complaining did not abate, and we set them to sixty minutes, and still there was significant complaining.
So we eventually ended up at ninety minutes, and if they complain about that I give them a hard look and suggest that maybe if they aren't using the computer every hour and a half perhaps this is an indication that they don't really need a newer faster one that badly when upgrade time comes around, since they aren't using it that much anyway.
And what will the food industry do if high-fructose corn syrup is taxed in a way that makes it expensive to use as a major ingredient? One supposes they will find a different inexpensive concentrated sugar to use.
The only way around that, legislatively, is to make the tax more general, so that it applies to any concentrated sugar. Actually, artificial sweeteners should probably be included as well.
> If they simply replaced all of the HFCS in everything > that seems to have it nowadays, with pure cane sugar > (not that processed white shit), then there wouldn't > be half the problems there are now with weight issues.
I think the significance of high-fructose corn syrup is overrated. Yes, it's bad for you, because it's basically pure sugar. But I'm pretty sure that pretty much any refined sugar is bad for you in large amounts. Fructose, sucrose, glucose, whatever -- pure sugar as a major component of the diet isn't healthy, duh.
There's almost no HFCS in my diet. (I cook most of my own food, because it tastes better that way. And I hardly ever drink pop.) But I have weight issues nonetheless, and I'm pretty sure sugar (in other forms) is a major contributing factor, although starchy foods are probably also relevant.
> HFCS can't be processed by the human body
What's your source for this information? From the limited amount of molecular biology I've had, I was under the impression that normal amounts of fructose are metabolized in just about the same way as normal amounts of galactose or glucose or any other cyclic six-carbon sugar.
> and are converted directly into fat
That's what your body does whenever it doesn't have an immediate use for all the food energy you've consumed. Sugars are fairly energy-dense (though fats are worse), so any time you eat a lot of them you're likely to have spare energy left, and your body stores it.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. It does look a bit like an okudagram, but the assortment of colors is wrong for Federation equipment. Maybe it's alien, though; Cardassian equipment uses a a different color set (teals, greens, and purples), so it's reasonable to guess that different galactic powers have different displays...
Stallman, for his part, is one of the most extreme hardliners ever, and so self-absorbed that he actually believes it's a *good* thing if his software license is mutually incompatible with more than half of the (otherwise just as good) free software licenses in existence. Not that he hasn't contributed some really useful stuff; he has (not least Emacs, which is eleven different kinds of awesome). But you can't take all of his political views entirely seriously. That way lies madness.
.NET framework for *nix systems. It is difficult to think of a free-software programming project that would be more counterproductive, and I *sincerely* hope Mono never gains any significant traction or becomes widely deployed. The whole concept vibrantly illustrates the meaning of the phrase "Do Not Want".
Then there's De Icaza, who actually believes that it would be useful and worthwhile to implement Microsoft's
And what the $@#! is up with that whole "Moonlight" thing? Do the cretinous rapscallions involved with the Mono project actually think it would be an okay thing for web developers to feel like they can use that Silverlight junk on websites, without alienating non-Windows users? Gah! Java was bad enough, and Flash is worse. We ABSOLUTELY do **NOT** want Yet Another Gratuitous Plugin to become ubiquitous on the web. Die, Moonlight, die, Die, DIE!
> the lowest common denominator really is the lowest
> common denominator. If there are people out there
> stupid enough to believe a prince in Nigeria is going
> to give them a million dollars,
But, it's only a small percentage of the total fortune!
In all seriousness, I am pretty certain that it is completely impossible to construct an assertion so bizarre and obviously false that there isn't anyone on the planet dumb enough to believe it.
> I dunno, most people I knew at the time were
> running 2K. That's probably more a comment on
> the demographics of PC users I knew back then.
It is. Windows 2000 never had more than about 10% market share. Most folks used something from the Win9x product line until after XP SP1 came out.
> As far as I can tell, this XP hate is just revisionist history.
It's not. Go back and read archives of usenet (or slashdot, or UserFriendly for that matter) from 2001. There was a lot of whining to the effect that Windows XP was a big step down, although people were divided about whether it would be preferable to downgrade to Windows 2000 or 98SE.
Let's see if I can recall some of the specific complaints I remember seeing at the time...
It looked like it was made by Fisher Price. (This was easily solved by switching to the Classic theme, but that didn't stop a lot of people from complaining about it. A *lot* of people.)
Performance was absolutely wretched on the low-end hardware of the day. The amount of RAM you needed to run more than two apps at a time was just obscene by the standards of the time (though obviously it sounds like a ridiculously small amount now, in this decadent era of multiple gigabytes and 64-bit address spaces). Furthermore, there were a lot of complaints to the effect that the official System Requirements were understated and did not result in satisfactory performance. For example, User Friendly ran a strip wherein a new Windows install held a computer hostage, took over the printer, and printed up a list of its demands. One of the techs was seen saying something like, "Hold it to its box specs! Give no quarter!" (Unfortunately I can't seem to find this particular strip at the moment. Searching for text within the cartoon bubbles of comic strip images doesn't always yield perfect results some reason, and I may have the wording slightly off in any case.)
A lot of games wouldn't run right (because they were doing crazy/stupid things, like trying to store user settings in places like C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 for instance, and Windows XP didn't like this, for some odd reason).
Plug-and-play hardware detection was even worse than in Windows 98, which to be frank is really going some.
Hardware support in general was a good deal worse than Windows 98. This changed over the next several years as hardware manufacturers realized that lots of users had Windows XP, so they had to make drivers for it. But at first it was a real problem for many users.
Stupid annoying terrible unnecessary pop-up notifications arose out of the system tray every four seconds to interrupt and annoy the user for no good reason. There was a *LOT* of complaining about this one. The behavior was later considerably toned down in the service packs, but not before a lot of people swore to switch back to Windows 98SE or 2000 and never upgrade again just for this one issue. People were at *least* as angry about this as they later were about UAC in Vista.
There were a lot of unnecessary services running out of the box, listening on various ports, which made the system pretty insecure. You could turn on the firewall, but most users didn't know how. (SP2 fixed this by turning on the firewall by default).
File and printer sharing wasn't always fully interoperable with existing peer-to-peer networks (of mostly Windows 98 systems), and it failed in unpredictable and inexplicable ways.
However, Windows XP did also get a fair amount of praise, among other things because the fabled Blue Screen of Death occurred *MUCH* less often than in Windows 98, probably as a result of the memory protection. Early adoption of Windows XP was not as high as some people expected or Microsoft wanted, but it was higher than for Vista, I think, despite the fact that people had been waiting for and anticipating Vista for much longer.
> the fact is, most people simply won't swap because
> of the simple fact you have to find the correct
> drivers for the OS your on for your hardware
That was true in 1998, but for the last several years it's been much harder to find and install the drivers for all your hardware for Windows than for Linux.
I mean, say you buy a used printer at a garage sale, and the former owner lost the install CD. (Yeah, I know nobody ever loses the install CD and manual that come with their hardware, but bear with me.) With Windows, you now have to track down the manufacturer's website (assuming the manufacturer is still in business, heaven help you if it's Apollo or some yum-cha junk like that), navigate through the (usually horrible) support website, find the drivers for the correct model (assuming you can figure out exactly which model you have; the numbers on the unit itself frequently don't quite match what you have to select on the website), download the drivers, and then install them. Then if you're lucky you can print. On a modern Linux system, you just tell it you want to install a local printer and let it automatically detect the printer. The software recommends a driver automatically, and you just click yes, and Bob is your uncle. You don't even have to know what model of printer you've got: the software figures it out for you.
And don't even get me started on graphics cards. Have you *ever* seen a non-OEM install of any version of Windows correctly detect a graphics card and install a working driver? I haven't. Ever. And I've installed Windows *MANY* times, on a *wide* variety of hardware.
Actually, Windows was a terrible annoyance for game developers and gamers. DOS was *MUCH* better. Scorched Earth *never* quite worked properly on Windows.
Why are you looking at me like that? I'm going to go play Zork now.
> Is there even a way in Windows 7 to make
> it look like XP or the old Win2K?
Up to a point, but not entirely.
You can and should turn off Aero and select the Windows Classic theme, of course, and IIRC you can still turn off "Personalized Menus" in the Start Menu, and there are some other things you can do. (Go through the control panels. You'll find them.)
But there are limits. You can't get back the old Quicklaunch (introduced in Windows 98), for instance. If you want launchers on the taskbar, the only way to have them in Seven, as far as I can see, is through pinning, which causes them to be interspersed with the window list in a manner that appears to have been expressly designed to confuse and annoy users. Microsoft claims this is a feature, but I think the engineers were just too lazy to code an option to keep all the pinned launchers on the left of the window list and list any associated windows separately.
You can't *exactly* get the classic Start Menu back, but you *can* pin whatever apps you want in the main body of the start menu *and* configure away most of the gratuitous junk on the right side, so with a bit of work you can create a reasonably usable setup.
The most annoying limitation of the pinning is that you can't pin a folder and thereby create a drawer or submenu. They really should add that possibility in a service pack.
I don't use virtual desktops either, and I came to Linux from DOS. I experimented with Windows 95 in a multi-boot setup (DOS, Win95, and Debian), but I never really liked the Windows UI. At this point, I've used Gnome much more than Windows, and that doesn't count time I've spent using KDE and other window managers. (I used twm for a while, toyed with enlightenment, experimented with ion, ...)
But I never liked virtual desktops because, frankly, I don't use my computer for three (or six...) discreet unrelated tasks each with a similar number of windows. I suppose there are overall categories into which my windows could be divided, but it's not *useful* to do so, because I'm not more likely to switch from one window to another within a category than between categories. The contrary, if anything.
However, this is really no problem with a sufficiently configurable desktop environment, because unlike the Windows UI it can be set up in a sensible fashion that leaves plenty of room on the list for as many windows as you please. The clock and system tray and launchers, for instance, can be on a completely different panel from the window list. The way windows are or are not grouped is also configurable, on a per-application basis if desired, which comes in handy for thinks like gnome-terminal (which I'd never EVER want grouped) and gmessage (which I *would* want grouped, even if there are only two of them, and even if they just launched).
> The new taskbar alone is a step forward.
...) and then put the menu and launchers and clock and system tray and panel applets all on a 48-pixel-wide vertical panel on the left side. This would be a good workable arrangement, but it's not an option.
Actually, I hate it. Among other things, the launchers end up interspersed with the window list and, importantly, are NOT always in the same place, which is bad because it prevents you from just instinctively reaching for them out of habit and quickly getting what you want. Instead, with Seven's pinning system you end up having to look through the whole list to find what you want every time you want to launch an application. Annoying. And if you want to launch a (new instance of) an application that already has a window open, the usability is even worse (you have to go through a context menu). Ugh.
I like the pinning in the Start menu. They got it right there, I think. But I'm a lot less happy with the taskbar pinning. It has some of the same usability problems as the annoying OS X dock. Almost enough to make you think they *copied* the OS X dock, which would definitely be a big step in the wrong direction, because the Windows taskbar had always been better than the OS X dock. Until now.
> The old model with the labels just doesn't
> scale to more than a few windows.
There are reasons for this, all of which boil down to bad design.
In the first place, Microsoft's panel layout is about as flexible as cement. The menu and launchers cannot be positioned anywhere else except to the left of the window list (above it if the taskbar is vertical). The clock and the notification area (which includes icons for windowless running applications) cannot be positioned anywhere except to the right of the window list (below it if the taskbar is vertical). Meanwhile the panel applets ("gadgets") in Vista can *only* go on a separate panel where you can't put anything else (or on the desktop in Seven, which makes them even more useless), are entirely too positively enormous, and cannot be resized. Panel thickness adjustability is also extremely suboptimal. You cannot, for instance, give the window list its own panel taking the entire width of the screen 24 pixels thick across the bottom (or 36 pixels with two rows, or
The options for how window-grouping is handled in the window list are also pretty limited. You can't tell it not to group certain applications. You can't choose whether to start by grouping the least recently used applications or the ones with the most windows or use a combination formula. And as near as I can tell you can't really control how small the entries are allowed to get, which is pretty important IMO. If you're running a lot of windows of the same app with the same icon, you need more of the text showing; if like me you use a lot of *different* applications or at least windows with different icons (e.g., different terminal themes) the icon by itself is just about enough to tell your windows apart so you hardly need any of the title at all. This is heavily dependent on usage pattern, but so far as I can see Windows doesn't let you adjust it.
I could go on, but the long and short of it is that the Windows UI appears to have been designed for people who never have more than three windows open at once and want their screen to look exactly like the out-of-the-box display model screen. They didn't really bother to make it configurable or flexible enough to handle power-user usage scenarios. This hasn't really changed in Seven. The details are a little different, but the same old rigid inflexibility and pointless unnecessary limitations are still present.
> Say what you will against proprietary things,
> the MS VS IDE is quite nice to work in.
Whatever's wrong with you, it's no little thing.
I'm not altogether against proprietary software. Pegasus Mail, for example, has by far the nicest UI of any email software I've ever seen. It makes Thunderbird look like a steaming heap of excrement. Also, the Query Analyzer that comes with MS SQL Server is pretty good. (SQL Server itself is lacking some extremely important features without which it cannot really compete with real RDBMSes, not least regular expressions and case discrimination. But the Query Analyzer UI is nice.)
But the Visual Studio UI is the most horrifically terrible IDE UI that I have ever witnessed. It is actively *painful* to work with. It has a number of creative and quite *bizarre* usability problems, that they apparently had to go far out of their way to design.
> You just posted on a website running Slash. Although it
> is Perl, so maybe the codebase is less than ten lines.
It could be golfed down to ten lines, but then it wouldn't be maintainable.
> > Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code
> That would have been what, 6 million lines in Python?
I'd be more than that.
If you look at simple functions that do the same thing side by side, Python looks almost as terse as Perl, but you'd be missing the considerable fact that the corpus of available modules for Python is a great deal less comprehensive than the CPAN. When you take that into account, three million lines of Perl code is a terrifyingly large amount of code.
I don't even want to think about how many million lines of C it would be. The mind boggles.
> It must be real good if it goes to eleven.
That's nothing, Emacs is at version 23 already.
> Perl use had dropped to 15% of its former level in the past five years
.NET, combined.
Obviously that's not true.
But even if Perl usage *did* drop to 15% of its former level, it would still be more widely used than Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Python, and Visual Basic
> When an e-mail is rejected with a "please try again later"
> response, it makes the recipient's company look bad at an
> organizational level.
Only if the delay gets noticed.
> What's worse, senders may ignore these "try again" messages,
> or never see them at all.
Under anything vaguely resembling normal conditions, the sending user never sees the "try again" message and never knows that there's greylisting involved. The mail server takes care of all that. All the major MTAs since the beginning of time have supported queue-and-resend, because when the internet was young mail got delayed all the time due to unreliable infrastructure.
The problem with greylisting isn't that mail would ever completely fail to get through, but rather than mail from new senders would be *delayed*, at least for several minutes, possibly for several *hours*. Given the way email was originally designed to work, this should theoretically be no big deal, but in practice a lot of organizations won't tolerate that kind of delay in incoming mail.
For personal email, though, it can be an attractive option. Bear in mind, recognized whitelisted senders get through right away; only mail from unknown senders gets delayed.
> unsolicited email distributed across many IPs and domains
> in order to avoid triggering volume-based filters.
I hereby propose we just call it "spam" and have done.
I mean, seriously, is anybody really still worried about the old-fashioned kind of spam that was sent back in the early nineties, going out from one mail server with one IP for months on end, using an actual valid return email address from an actual valid domain owned by the senders? Have you *received* any of that lately?
I haven't. Near as I can tell, *all* modern spam is sent by a collection of nodes distributed across many IPs on many subnets and randomly generates a new forged sender address for each message. We don't need a special name specifically for spam that's sent like that. If you just say "spam", that communicates the whole idea. Everybody who has been paying attention knows that it's sent in the described fashion these days.
Application compatibility. We have a system at work that came with 64-bit Vista, and it's currently running a 32-bit OS, because the most important application it needs to run won't work on the 64-bit OS until we upgrade our entire network to the next version of the application. That means several hours of downtime and several hundred dollars in assorted other costs, plus some preparatory administrative work (which I'm currently studying up on how to do; it involves Active Directory, which I had successfully avoided learning much about until now).
32-bit? Megabytes of RAM? Meh, kids these days.
If an 8-bit computer with 128 kilobytes of RAM is good enough for PC-DOS 3.3, it should be good enough for everything. Office software? Who needs that junk? WYSIWYG is for posers. They can pry EDLIN from my cold, dead fingers. Why, back in my day we *appreciated* the time it took our software to compute results, and the fact that we couldn't do anything else while it was happening. It gave us time to read the manuals while we were waiting! Those were the days...
> Cali has way more money/ability to get money than most states.
When the other commenter said "if California can do this any state can", he wasn't talking about the money issue. He was talking about delays caused by "all of the NIMBY's and environmental impact statements", as mentioned by the grandparent comment.
I suspect that assessment is incorrect, on the grounds that a lot of environmentalists tend to be in *favor* of such trains, on the theory that they reduce motor vehicle traffic.
> Not to mention they have more of a 'need' for this type of transport
It's more than that. You're headed in the right direction saying they have more need, but it would be even more accurate to say they have an actual *use* for a bullet train, where a lot of other states wouldn't. Southern California is basically one great big city, so public transportation is widely available and city-to-city passenger trains are actually *practical*, much like in Europe and Japan. People could take the buss to the train station in San Diego, hop on the bullet train, get off in San Francisco, and take the streetcar or a taxi to their final destination.
Whereas, a bullet train in Indiana would be a pointless curiosity; its actual usefulness in practice would be virtually nil.
I would think trademark law would be at least twice as pertinent to the situation as copyright, but I'm from the other side of the pond, so maybe it's different in England.
> If and when Iran tests a bomb, I'm not sure what will happen, but I sure as hell expect
> Israel to respond more aggressively than the rest of the world did when NK tested theirs.
Iran is not North Korea. North Korea has what I call a "sane government", in nuclear terms, by which I mean that they would in practice not risk starting a nuclear war, because they do not want to disrupt the status quo and risk losing what they have (particularly, they wouldn't want to risk losing power in their own country). They did a test because they knew a test would not start a war, and because they wanted to show off and be perceived as powerful. But North Korea is not going to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack. There's essentially zero risk they'd do that. It would be completely out of character for them.
Iran is not North Korea. The government of Iran is, in a word, unstable. Khamenei would be dangerous enough, and then there's Ahmadinejad. As far as I'm concerned, the question isn't "What would Israel do if Iran had nuclear weapons" but rather "What would *Iran* do if Iran had nuclear weapons." It's not an easy question to answer, and that's just a little bit unnerving.
> And if you're Israel, apparently we pretend that we don't know
Eh, everyone suspects that Israel probably has the bomb, and it's not like they're denying it. They won't officially confirm it either, but that's probably for the express purpose of making it even more likely that the other nations in their immediate vicinity will *believe* that they are a nuclear power, which is generally a positive thing for Israel. I'm not sure they care what the US knows or doesn't know -- why would they? The US is definitely known to be a nuclear power (strongest evidence for it of any nation -- we actually used two of the danged things in a real warfare situation) and has historically been an ally for Israel in any case (so they don't need to bluster against us) and have no problem at all being allies with other nuclear powers (so there's no reason to hide it from us; it's not like we've sanctioned the UK for being a nuclear power, for instance). So it's not what the US thinks but rather what other nations think that matters. Other nations such as their middle-eastern neighbors, and Russia, and Pakistan, and certain European countries...
Frankly, whether Israel actually *has* nuclear warheads is more or less immaterial to the US.
In the first place, they certainly are sufficiently technologically advanced to be *able* to create them, probably in relatively short order, if they should ever have a reason to do so. Having actually done would not be significantly more dangerous, particularly considering that of all the nations on the planet Israel is one of the most likely to be able to effectively and consistently keep the things under tight control to prevent unauthorized use -- particularly compared to known nuclear powers Russia, China, and Pakistan. Frankly even the western nuclear powers (US, UK, France) are significantly more likely than Israel to have a security snafu and inadvertently lose a nuclear warhead to an unauthorized party.
Additionally, it should be obvious to everyone who pays any attention at all to international politics that Israel's main objective in having the things is as a deterrent. Specifically, if the world thinks Israel is a nuclear power, it is a deterrent against nations like Russia and Pakistan who otherwise might potentially have been persuaded to back the Islamic world in its desire to, umm, "liberate" Israel's territory. Israel wants them to believe that doing so would risk starting a nuclear war. That way they'll hopefully stay out of any regional conflict that might arise in the Middle East. Because in a purely regional conflict Israel's odds of coming out on top are pretty good, but in a World War scenario, not so much.
Yeah. We've got ninety-minute screensaver delays on most of the computers, because when they complained about the ten-minute ones ("I was just using it! I only stepped away for thirty seconds to help a patron! I don't have time to log back in every thirty seconds!"), I told them "Well, we can increase the time..." and this seemed reasonable to them. So we set 'em to twenty minutes, and the complaining did not abate, and we set them to forty-five minutes, and the complaining did not abate, and we set them to sixty minutes, and still there was significant complaining.
So we eventually ended up at ninety minutes, and if they complain about that I give them a hard look and suggest that maybe if they aren't using the computer every hour and a half perhaps this is an indication that they don't really need a newer faster one that badly when upgrade time comes around, since they aren't using it that much anyway.
And what will the food industry do if high-fructose corn syrup is taxed in a way that makes it expensive to use as a major ingredient? One supposes they will find a different inexpensive concentrated sugar to use.
The only way around that, legislatively, is to make the tax more general, so that it applies to any concentrated sugar. Actually, artificial sweeteners should probably be included as well.
> If they simply replaced all of the HFCS in everything
> that seems to have it nowadays, with pure cane sugar
> (not that processed white shit), then there wouldn't
> be half the problems there are now with weight issues.
I think the significance of high-fructose corn syrup is overrated. Yes, it's bad for you, because it's basically pure sugar. But I'm pretty sure that pretty much any refined sugar is bad for you in large amounts. Fructose, sucrose, glucose, whatever -- pure sugar as a major component of the diet isn't healthy, duh.
There's almost no HFCS in my diet. (I cook most of my own food, because it tastes better that way. And I hardly ever drink pop.) But I have weight issues nonetheless, and I'm pretty sure sugar (in other forms) is a major contributing factor, although starchy foods are probably also relevant.
> HFCS can't be processed by the human body
What's your source for this information? From the limited amount of molecular biology I've had, I was under the impression that normal amounts of fructose are metabolized in just about the same way as normal amounts of galactose or glucose or any other cyclic six-carbon sugar.
> and are converted directly into fat
That's what your body does whenever it doesn't have an immediate use for all the food energy you've consumed. Sugars are fairly energy-dense (though fats are worse), so any time you eat a lot of them you're likely to have spare energy left, and your body stores it.