...and AT&T UNIX is responsible for TCP/IP without which OpenSSH, OpenBGPD & OpenNTPD would be irrelevant... bleh bleh bleh...
The clue is in the word "Open" - i.e. open specification so you can compile it on pretty much what you want, even though you may have built it originally on a specific OS.
Jeez, you guys are worse fanbois than that Apple crowd...
And just one final point - ACPI probably is a big issue to Windows users because in my experience, corporate Windows laptops suffer very badly from OS rot. So a nice brand new XP laptop that once booted XP in about 30 seconds can, a year or two later, take anything up to 5 minutes to boot - and we all know how corporate IT departments hate their users fiddling with their systems running defragmenters, registry cleaners, etc.
You don't get the same problem on Linux - if it boots now in 30 seconds, it probably will still do so in a year's time.
Therefore, ACPI suspend features are really not as important to Linux users as maybe they are to Windows users - as a Linux user of some 15 years experience, I've never found the need to use suspend in all honesty...
Right. In which case you then go speak to the hardware manufacturers and request they write proper Linux drivers for ACPI, or publish their hardware specs properly so the kernel developers can write the drivers.
By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay for me to call my kid an idiot for not knowing what year the Battle Of Hastings was, even though he's never done anything about it in his history class!
It is not uncommon to see a Mac running Mac OS X, even though the corp network doesn't really support it. I haven't seen any Linux use on laptops, but that's probably because ACPI support in Linux sucks ass.
I actually quite liked your post until you threw out this statement - it sounds to me like you started writing the post with the intention of getting a cheap shot at Linux somewhere in it...
Actually, I take this comment as a credit to Linux because had you made this statement five years ago, you'd have said how Linux hardware support on laptops was so bad, particularly for things like WLAN interfaces - so it's quite clear it's come a long way since then.
I've not yet used Vista or Windows 7 so I don't know how good their ACPI support is - but although, in my experience, XP's ACPI support is generally better than on Linux, it still has a long way to go.
If I can throw in an example from the other side of the fence, this very weekend I have been replacing a motherboard in a PC due to a failure, that PC used to dual boot Windows XP and Linux. I went from a Pentium Dual Core mobo to an AMD X2 mobo (it's a cheap and cheerful secondary PC) and the old hard disk booted the old Linux install perfectly fine - all I had to do was recompile the kernel for some new driver options and off it went...
Windows XP, however, blue-screened on boot, even in safe mode, and when I did a fresh install of it, it kept locking up during the installation, rather ironically at the installation screen that says "Your computer will be faster and more reliable". In the end, I ditched the Windows installation completely, Windows was only on there for gaming so now I will see what I can do with Wine.
I fully accept that many people don't want to and never will use Linux, and many of them have very valid reasons for doing so. But picking up on the ACPI issue is, frankly, a petty and trivial point - if you know anything about Linux and plan running it on a laptop, if you've a brain in your head then the first thing you will do is research the hardware support and choose the best supported laptop anyway.
And if by chance ACPI doesn't work then there are other options - for starters, suspend mode is a security issue anyway (as opposed to just turning the thing off) and if lack of ACPI functionality means the battery drains quicker, then there's always the option of buying a second or extended life battery.
By all means voice your opinions about Linux but please do so from a position of knowledge about it, rather than FUD.
As the GP stated, even if Microsoft ends support for a product, you can still use it, you just won't get tech support for it. There are still companies running stuff on NT and Win9x because it still works for them.
Yes, but the reason they *can* still run those is that, at best, all you had to do was put in a license key that was validated within the OS itself - i.e. once you put the correct key in, it's never checked again and you can use it as long as you like.
I don't claim to be a full-blown Windows expert but as I understand it, the purpose of WGA is to regularly check the license key of, say, Windows XP; by implication I take that to mean that even under a corporate license, that key can be set to expire by Microsoft at any point they choose.
Now how do we get all the Apple fanbois on the Moon at once and then blast it out of orbit?
Incidentally, as a British sci-fi fan and Gerry Anderson nut, Space 1999 is a very sore point with me... an interesting a promising first series, then the Americans and Fred "The producer with a CV full of final series of popular TV shows" Freiberger got their hands on it and we ended up with a shapechanging alien being substituted for the great Barry Morse!
...and UNIX has had shell-scripting for 30-odd years and Perl since 1987.
From a configuration and data manipulation perspective, as well as piping data between applications, there is nothing simpler than manipulating straightforward & boring text files.
It's because Microsoft went down the closed standards and proprietary formats path that there became a need to have a language like VB to work within the locked-down environment. So please don't credit Microsoft with anything innovative, VB just acts as a means to an end but was just "re-inventing the wheel" because of proprietary standards.
Advance warning: do not allow another company to control your software upgrade cycle for critical business infrastructure, or they will control you.
It sounds to me that the above statement applies equally as much to Microsoft as it does to Google!
Businesses require software support & accountability for in-house applications (perhaps the main reason why Linux hasn't been that well adopted in the Enterprise up till now) and if they are perfectly happy running Office 2000 or 2003 and Windows 2000 or XP, then isn't it just the same thing when Microsoft ends support for those products and forces them to upgrade?
My company is still using XP and Office 2003, I just got given a new Lenovo laptop after my Dell laptop went out of three-year warranty, and in actuality, for the first time ever there's very little change in specification between the two - they're both widescreen laptops based on Intel Dual Core CPUs.
What this says to me is that for general business use, Microsoft has really run out of ideas now & has nothing new to offer them from a feature perspective. Therefore, they are forcing upgrades just to guarantee the income stream...
I don't work in a business directly linked to mobile phones but I do work in the telecoms industry for a company that does produce VoIP clients for mobile phones, as well as business telephony servers.
In my experience, Windows is currently in a decline as an OS for mobile phones, it now all seems to be Blackberry, iPhone, Android & Symbian...
Sure, it may well be that Windows Mobile 7 means it will pick up for Microsoft at some point in the future but presumably a lot of people who work in Microsoft are gadget freaks like the rest of us & want to buy the latest gizmos... that means gizmos that probably don't run Windows Mobile at this moment in time.
I just don't see that there's anything amazing to report here - if anything, MS employees are used to working with locked down operating systems & hardware, therefore iPhone would be second nature to them...
Microsoft will get behind anything that means the wheel can be reinvented - because somehow, some way, they will be able to make money from not actually having done anything new.
All law abiding people will agree that murderers should be punished for their crimes but not all of them will believe that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment.
Let's end this argument here now - clearly you can't respond directly to my comments because you've now diverted this argument into a discussion about my personal tastes; since I don't know you, your opinions on what you believe my tastes are are irrelevant, likewise any abuse you throw at me is also irrelevant.
I declare myself victor in this argument, thanks for your time.
If I've already stated that I just don't buy stuff (or copy it) if I don't think it's worth the money, then doesn't that automatically imply that when it comes to buying music, movies or games, I do lot of research first? Because I do, and quite clearly I'm missing something in your argument.
And in reality, you couldn't be further from the truth with any of the film or TV titles you've mentioned - I've never seen Twilight, I believe it's something to do with teenage vampires and that's about all I know about it because based on what I do know, it sounds like derivative mind-numbing pap.
Yes, I like sci-fi amongst other things but as far as I'm concerned they stopped making good Terminator movies after the second one... I've seen the others on rental but spending a couple of quid to watch a crap movie is far better than paying £15 for my own copy.
And as to your final point - no, I don't want to subsidise anybody. So go do your own research, buy stuff you think is worth the money and stop leeching everything just because it's free and you have no concept of the value of money.
To be honest, it's even simpler than you describe - you can just block the person who's pestering you on Facebook.
Unfortunately, every problem with the Internet can be traced back down to stupid people who don't feel there's any need to learn how a PC works, update regularly or read instructions or manuals. Anyone who takes the time to look at the configuration on Facebook will see that you can actually lock things down very tightly and restrict who can do or say anything to you.
It all comes down to laziness and not taking the time to learn something and to do things properly.
Actually, I take back some of what I said - here in the UK there aren't that many places where you're truly "out in the wilds" and miles away from any civilisation; however, I hadn't considered a place like Canada where I guess it's still possible to be living many miles from anywhere.
What a clever little "Dick Whittington, highwayman of the Internet" you are - with the emphasis on "Dick"!
Unfortunately, your miniscule intellect fails to grasp the concept that you're only able to download the movie from "TPB" because lots of other people have actually gone out and bought it in the first place - thus subsidising your entertainment.
So close your fat mouth and go grow a backbone. If you think shit is overpriced then don't buy it and don't copy it. Then honest people like me don't get DRM restricting our fair usage because Dicks like you give them the excuses they need to do it.
Surely the purchasing mechanism that you used for your PS3 is scaleable to the point where it can be used as a similar mechanism for the purchase of games and movies?
I also find it difficult to believe that anyone wakes up in the morning in their own bed and says "Oh shit! I just realised that public transport links to my home are not suitable for my lifestyle."
Actually, I do agree with you but, in my own defence, there are quite a few modern artists who's albums I have been buying.
However, music listening and live concerts are my primary hobbies and as such I don't mind spending time researching good music, both old and new, and finding the cheapest prices for CDs. But none of it is particularly mainstream, I don't remember the last time I found anything I wanted to buy in any local music CD stockists.
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...and AT&T UNIX is responsible for TCP/IP without which OpenSSH, OpenBGPD & OpenNTPD would be irrelevant... bleh bleh bleh...
The clue is in the word "Open" - i.e. open specification so you can compile it on pretty much what you want, even though you may have built it originally on a specific OS.
Jeez, you guys are worse fanbois than that Apple crowd...
With Gentoo Linux I just do:
emerge --sync && emerge -vuDN world
All done on rolling upgrades, no need to sit in and wait for that new CD in the post.
Ahem!
Puppy Linux has a minimum Pentium 166 CPU spec and will run in 64MB up to release 1.0.2.
And just one final point - ACPI probably is a big issue to Windows users because in my experience, corporate Windows laptops suffer very badly from OS rot. So a nice brand new XP laptop that once booted XP in about 30 seconds can, a year or two later, take anything up to 5 minutes to boot - and we all know how corporate IT departments hate their users fiddling with their systems running defragmenters, registry cleaners, etc.
You don't get the same problem on Linux - if it boots now in 30 seconds, it probably will still do so in a year's time.
Therefore, ACPI suspend features are really not as important to Linux users as maybe they are to Windows users - as a Linux user of some 15 years experience, I've never found the need to use suspend in all honesty...
Right. In which case you then go speak to the hardware manufacturers and request they write proper Linux drivers for ACPI, or publish their hardware specs properly so the kernel developers can write the drivers.
By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay for me to call my kid an idiot for not knowing what year the Battle Of Hastings was, even though he's never done anything about it in his history class!
It is not uncommon to see a Mac running Mac OS X, even though the corp network doesn't really support it. I haven't seen any Linux use on laptops, but that's probably because ACPI support in Linux sucks ass.
I actually quite liked your post until you threw out this statement - it sounds to me like you started writing the post with the intention of getting a cheap shot at Linux somewhere in it...
Actually, I take this comment as a credit to Linux because had you made this statement five years ago, you'd have said how Linux hardware support on laptops was so bad, particularly for things like WLAN interfaces - so it's quite clear it's come a long way since then.
I've not yet used Vista or Windows 7 so I don't know how good their ACPI support is - but although, in my experience, XP's ACPI support is generally better than on Linux, it still has a long way to go.
If I can throw in an example from the other side of the fence, this very weekend I have been replacing a motherboard in a PC due to a failure, that PC used to dual boot Windows XP and Linux. I went from a Pentium Dual Core mobo to an AMD X2 mobo (it's a cheap and cheerful secondary PC) and the old hard disk booted the old Linux install perfectly fine - all I had to do was recompile the kernel for some new driver options and off it went...
Windows XP, however, blue-screened on boot, even in safe mode, and when I did a fresh install of it, it kept locking up during the installation, rather ironically at the installation screen that says "Your computer will be faster and more reliable". In the end, I ditched the Windows installation completely, Windows was only on there for gaming so now I will see what I can do with Wine.
I fully accept that many people don't want to and never will use Linux, and many of them have very valid reasons for doing so. But picking up on the ACPI issue is, frankly, a petty and trivial point - if you know anything about Linux and plan running it on a laptop, if you've a brain in your head then the first thing you will do is research the hardware support and choose the best supported laptop anyway.
And if by chance ACPI doesn't work then there are other options - for starters, suspend mode is a security issue anyway (as opposed to just turning the thing off) and if lack of ACPI functionality means the battery drains quicker, then there's always the option of buying a second or extended life battery.
By all means voice your opinions about Linux but please do so from a position of knowledge about it, rather than FUD.
When was the last time you gave an intelligent response to an argument, rather than just throwing out abuse?
As the GP stated, even if Microsoft ends support for a product, you can still use it, you just won't get tech support for it. There are still companies running stuff on NT and Win9x because it still works for them.
Yes, but the reason they *can* still run those is that, at best, all you had to do was put in a license key that was validated within the OS itself - i.e. once you put the correct key in, it's never checked again and you can use it as long as you like.
I don't claim to be a full-blown Windows expert but as I understand it, the purpose of WGA is to regularly check the license key of, say, Windows XP; by implication I take that to mean that even under a corporate license, that key can be set to expire by Microsoft at any point they choose.
Sounds good.
Now how do we get all the Apple fanbois on the Moon at once and then blast it out of orbit?
Incidentally, as a British sci-fi fan and Gerry Anderson nut, Space 1999 is a very sore point with me... an interesting a promising first series, then the Americans and Fred "The producer with a CV full of final series of popular TV shows" Freiberger got their hands on it and we ended up with a shapechanging alien being substituted for the great Barry Morse!
...and UNIX has had shell-scripting for 30-odd years and Perl since 1987.
From a configuration and data manipulation perspective, as well as piping data between applications, there is nothing simpler than manipulating straightforward & boring text files.
It's because Microsoft went down the closed standards and proprietary formats path that there became a need to have a language like VB to work within the locked-down environment. So please don't credit Microsoft with anything innovative, VB just acts as a means to an end but was just "re-inventing the wheel" because of proprietary standards.
Advance warning: do not allow another company to control your software upgrade cycle for critical business infrastructure, or they will control you.
It sounds to me that the above statement applies equally as much to Microsoft as it does to Google!
Businesses require software support & accountability for in-house applications (perhaps the main reason why Linux hasn't been that well adopted in the Enterprise up till now) and if they are perfectly happy running Office 2000 or 2003 and Windows 2000 or XP, then isn't it just the same thing when Microsoft ends support for those products and forces them to upgrade?
My company is still using XP and Office 2003, I just got given a new Lenovo laptop after my Dell laptop went out of three-year warranty, and in actuality, for the first time ever there's very little change in specification between the two - they're both widescreen laptops based on Intel Dual Core CPUs.
What this says to me is that for general business use, Microsoft has really run out of ideas now & has nothing new to offer them from a feature perspective. Therefore, they are forcing upgrades just to guarantee the income stream...
I don't work in a business directly linked to mobile phones but I do work in the telecoms industry for a company that does produce VoIP clients for mobile phones, as well as business telephony servers.
In my experience, Windows is currently in a decline as an OS for mobile phones, it now all seems to be Blackberry, iPhone, Android & Symbian...
Sure, it may well be that Windows Mobile 7 means it will pick up for Microsoft at some point in the future but presumably a lot of people who work in Microsoft are gadget freaks like the rest of us & want to buy the latest gizmos... that means gizmos that probably don't run Windows Mobile at this moment in time.
I just don't see that there's anything amazing to report here - if anything, MS employees are used to working with locked down operating systems & hardware, therefore iPhone would be second nature to them...
Microsoft will get behind anything that means the wheel can be reinvented - because somehow, some way, they will be able to make money from not actually having done anything new.
The point is moot.
All law abiding people will agree that murderers should be punished for their crimes but not all of them will believe that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment.
Let's end this argument here now - clearly you can't respond directly to my comments because you've now diverted this argument into a discussion about my personal tastes; since I don't know you, your opinions on what you believe my tastes are are irrelevant, likewise any abuse you throw at me is also irrelevant.
I declare myself victor in this argument, thanks for your time.
... iLaughed.
Sorry, I don't get your logic.
If I've already stated that I just don't buy stuff (or copy it) if I don't think it's worth the money, then doesn't that automatically imply that when it comes to buying music, movies or games, I do lot of research first? Because I do, and quite clearly I'm missing something in your argument.
And in reality, you couldn't be further from the truth with any of the film or TV titles you've mentioned - I've never seen Twilight, I believe it's something to do with teenage vampires and that's about all I know about it because based on what I do know, it sounds like derivative mind-numbing pap.
Yes, I like sci-fi amongst other things but as far as I'm concerned they stopped making good Terminator movies after the second one... I've seen the others on rental but spending a couple of quid to watch a crap movie is far better than paying £15 for my own copy.
And as to your final point - no, I don't want to subsidise anybody. So go do your own research, buy stuff you think is worth the money and stop leeching everything just because it's free and you have no concept of the value of money.
Yes, well being an Apple user you *WOULD* say that, wouldn't you.
To be honest, it's even simpler than you describe - you can just block the person who's pestering you on Facebook.
Unfortunately, every problem with the Internet can be traced back down to stupid people who don't feel there's any need to learn how a PC works, update regularly or read instructions or manuals. Anyone who takes the time to look at the configuration on Facebook will see that you can actually lock things down very tightly and restrict who can do or say anything to you.
It all comes down to laziness and not taking the time to learn something and to do things properly.
No more of this nonsense or I will have to LAMP you!
Actually, I take back some of what I said - here in the UK there aren't that many places where you're truly "out in the wilds" and miles away from any civilisation; however, I hadn't considered a place like Canada where I guess it's still possible to be living many miles from anywhere.
What a clever little "Dick Whittington, highwayman of the Internet" you are - with the emphasis on "Dick"!
Unfortunately, your miniscule intellect fails to grasp the concept that you're only able to download the movie from "TPB" because lots of other people have actually gone out and bought it in the first place - thus subsidising your entertainment.
So close your fat mouth and go grow a backbone. If you think shit is overpriced then don't buy it and don't copy it. Then honest people like me don't get DRM restricting our fair usage because Dicks like you give them the excuses they need to do it.
And your point is what precisely?
Surely the purchasing mechanism that you used for your PS3 is scaleable to the point where it can be used as a similar mechanism for the purchase of games and movies?
I also find it difficult to believe that anyone wakes up in the morning in their own bed and says "Oh shit! I just realised that public transport links to my home are not suitable for my lifestyle."
Actually, I do agree with you but, in my own defence, there are quite a few modern artists who's albums I have been buying.
However, music listening and live concerts are my primary hobbies and as such I don't mind spending time researching good music, both old and new, and finding the cheapest prices for CDs. But none of it is particularly mainstream, I don't remember the last time I found anything I wanted to buy in any local music CD stockists.
So how did you manage to get hold of a PS3 then?