> But please please please don't forget we're watching Star Trek for the philosophical questions that arise
No we're not. Speaking as someone who missed Boy Scouts to watch the first airing of The Man Trap, any appeal that endless philosophical discussions might have had has been thoroughly beat out of me in the last few years. I want to see epic, multi-ship space battles. When I get tired of that, and for some reason want to go back to watching tepid discussions in ultra-modern conference rooms, I'll let you know.
You're right, there was more to Star Trek than "set phasers on quick-fry-to-a-crackly-crunch" but in more recent years, wayyyyy too many stories went too far the other way. Star Trek became more boring than watching the NASA channel. About four episodes into Enterprise, I decided life was too short for mediocre Trek, and never looked back. Until now.
You misspelled... um... ok, you didn't misspell anything. Drat.
Ok, speaking as a regular slashdot'r and unrepentant linux geek, my pronouncement of Microsoft is... XP works fine. It really does. I have it on five machines at home and two at work, depend on it daily and it does everything I need. Despite the rather eclectic set-up of my primary workstation, it rarely bluescreens, and as long as I remember to reboot about once a month I rarely have problems with it. The degree of third-party compatibility is very high. After a few initial missteps, Microsoft did a very good job with XP.
To migrate to a newer version of Windows requires a substantial reason to do so. That it's not that much slower than XP is not a good reason. That it's compatible with most of my applications and hardware means, conversely, that I have to dink with the hardware and applications that aren't.
The point is, there's not much carrot here. The stick, of course, is that Microsoft will eventually stop supporting XP. But they haven't supported Windows 98 in some time, and valuable work is still being done on that iteration.
Part of the carrot, for me, was the XP compatibility mode, as it meant, hopefully, that I'd have to dink with it less should I decide to migrate. I've already checked, and my machines are unlikely to have the problems described in that rather slanted Ars Technica article. But I can see a reason for mild concern with my less technical customers. It's not a case of "Micro$$$oft Suckkkkkkkkz", it's a case of "I wonder what additional work this will mean for me". That's all.
I think we can both agree that this is not a plot by Microsoft and/or Intel to extinguish XP by sabotaging XP compatibility. Neither company is that stupid.
Ok, I'm as tepid towards Microsoft as any geek who's had to deal with them, but this doesn't seem right.
It's in Microsoft's best interest to include XP compatibility, if they want to entice people to upgrade. The people who need it most are the less-technical who don't necessarily have the expertise to deal with migration issues. For this feature to be useful to them, it has to work reliably and transparently.
Moreover, Intel would be insane to allow a situation where AMD had a clear advantage to people who wanted to upgrade to Windows 7. AMD: "You don't have a Sempron, you're fine." Intel: "Well, you gotta squint at this spreadsheet and hope." This is the kind of issue that builds mindshare.
Neither Intel nor Microsoft are arrogant enough, or stupid enough, to do this deliberately. Sabotaging XP compatibility doesn't make XP go away, it makes people more likely to cling to their copy of XP and perhaps hope for Windows 8. As a tiny but well-publicized minority give up and switch to Ubuntu.
If this is true in it's technical aspects, expect some hurried re-implementation.
Parenthetically, I expected a little more objectivity from Ars Technica. Slanted much?
Sigh, alright. Let's call them Moe and Larry. I learned the details later, partly from the police report and partly from Moe when he got bailed out and came back to the apartment for his stuff.
Larry worked in a big warehouse-type store, the kind where you pay for your purchase in one part of the store and then take your receipt to the stockroom entrance to receive your merchandise. Moe and Larry thought it was a really stupid system that just begged to be abused.
Their foolproof plan was for Larry to fake a bunch of receipts, and Moe to take them to the stockroom and collect the merchandise. They didn't have a clear plan to fence the stuff, but thought it should be a simple matter for two smart guys to find a way to sell the products they didn't keep and use the funds to pay off their college debts, set themselves up in a house furnished by the rest of the stolen goods, and live like kings.
This was in the days before ubiquitous CCTV, but even then, they had apparently never heard of inventory control, or that there was only a few people who had access to the forms, or that the store could narrow down to the shift what time the shortages had occurred, or that the stockroom would notice that one guy (Moe) was apparently buying a quarter million in merchandise a few thousand at a time. Or even, apparently, that the forms were numbered.
My understanding is that during the investigation, Larry was questioned and released, and then he and Moe spent a hair-raising evening run along a lonely country road tossing merchandise out of the truck. This ingenious plan to cover their tracks, sadly, was not sufficient, and they were arrested the next day.
I lost track of them after that, but heard later that they had figured out the flaw in their plan, and decided that the thing to do was to pull one big caper instead of a lot of small ones. Their new plan was to rent a van, break into the warehouse, load up, drive far far away to a different state, fence the goods, pay off their tuition, and live like kings. I understand their next arrest was courtesy the FBI. I can't imagine they're any more gentle than the local cops.
As far as I know, Moe and Larry are currently two really smart guys in orange jumpsuits.
Parenthetically, "white collar" crime was surprisingly common in college. In those days student loans were easy to come by, and it was pathetically simple to run up huge debts while partying your college days away. Sometime around junior or senior year, some of these geniuses came to the cold realization that they were in the bottom third of their class with a debt they couldn't pay off in their lifetime. Little surprise that the more opportunistic looked for a way to leverage their natural intelligence to fleece the proles. And then they found out society was more prepared than they expected.
For me it's not the mode of transport but the number of transfers.
When I got my first professional job, it so happened that I could walk three blocks, hop on a bus, and ride it to a point just two blocks from work. I rode the bus a lot.
In a different job, I found a house just over five miles from work and could bicycle to and from pretty easily. So, I rode my bike whenever the weather permitted.
But jobs change, more often and more easily than one can buy and sell houses. My current situation is an ugly commute, but I'm not about to look for a closer job, or try to sell my house, in this economy.
I would have to drive literally halfway to work to get to the park-and-ride so I could take light rail to the bus stop for the final leg of the journey. Besides the time wasted on transfers, I'm not doing the environment much good either, because practically all the miles I'm putting on the car are "warm up" miles, when exhaust pollution is highest.
Due to poor feeder-line planning, it takes two buses to get to the light rail station, one of which is one of these huge two-part articulated monsters which never seems to have more than twelve people aboard. But that's a different story.
So, I have a choice of making the 45 minute drive each way in my vehicle, or spend a little over 2 hours each way, on average, doorstep to doorstep, to take mass transit.
That kind of commute time may be practical for a young single person, especially if they have no social life, but when you have a family, frequent interaction is required. I just can't spend that much time sitting on plastic seats reading Tolstoy. I need to be helping the kid with homework, not just looking from the doorway after they're asleep. If that makes me an environmental criminal, then bring out the plastic disposable handcuffs.
Mass transit is like recycling -- I'll do it if the powers-that-be make it worth my while. If it's quick and convenient, I'm up for some amount of extra effort.
Cost doesn't really enter into it. Light rail is usually heavily subsidized and the fares are often artificially low. But I'd gladly pay the real cost of the fare if I could walk to the station, ride one train, and then walk from the station to work. But it only works like that for a comparative handful of people.
When I hear stories like this, (and they are legion) I have to wonder if the tech was really that stupid, or did he believe that a lack of computer expertise in his customers meant they were that stupid. Speaking as a geek, I've noticed a tendency among a (fortunately small) subset of geeks to believe that having a deep expertise in one area makes them generally more competent in everything, including areas completely out of their expertise, like, say, crime.
When I was in college, two roommates apparently had such a misunderstanding, which led to a "foolproof plan" to pay off their student loans and retire in geek luxury. Their criminal career lasted a mere 24 hours. I still have the front page showing them spread-eagled against a cop car.
Sometimes I wonder if extreme geeks -- meaning not the truly hyper-intelligent, but the self-sequestered wannabes -- lacking normal social interaction, have less of an understanding of basic morals than the rest of us.
Sorry, "The Sun" is not The WSJ. Ok, that's not terribly fair, but you'd think a billionaire would have a better grasp of supply and demand. Sounds like he's discovered a way to turn a billion dollars into a million dollars.
The problem is, Murdoch thinks he owns a product, and what he really owns is a distribution system. An outmoded distribution system. Putting the same content, that anyone can get elsewhere, on a page and demanding you pay for it is doomed to failure.
Watch, the next step will be legislation -- bailouts and levies. At a fundamental level, it's the only way to keep the newspapers going.
> I have used Windows 7 and it works a lot better than Vista.
So have I, and the beta was not a bad experience at all. But to make sure we're talking the same bits, have you gone through the same process with the release candidate?
That's true. But, you know that (ostensibly to keep costs down, but probably also for marketing reasons) netbooks are often limited by the manufacturer as to how much ram they can hold, right?
For example, the spec sheet for the Acer Aspire One, the netbook used in the article, has "1 Gb RAM max". So unless you're good with a soldering iron, that's all you're getting. And at $350 (street), the Aspire One is not even at the bottom end.
I suspect that even with all the rumored optimization, it's still going to be a struggle to sell bottom-end netbooks with Windows 7. We may see XP hang around even longer than expected, or risk Linux owning the low end.
> Ideally, the electronics would be a separate long life module and the actual fluorescent tube would be the disposable part. Then it would be practical to include power factor correction in the electronics.
You could buy CFL's like this, with replaceable tubes and non-disposable electronics, when CFL's first came out. They're hard to find now. I suspect this is a social issue rather than a technical one.
> In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year."
At first milidly interested in the technology, eventually appalled at the general lack of content.
Or to put it another way, twitter is the sound of millions of people collectively discovering they have nothing important to say. Or in today's "Pickles", "Is it me, or is the world getting sillier and sillier?"
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I mean this in the most positive possible way, but you're the one the onion was talking about.
> But please please please don't forget we're watching Star Trek for the philosophical questions that arise
No we're not. Speaking as someone who missed Boy Scouts to watch the first airing of The Man Trap, any appeal that endless philosophical discussions might have had has been thoroughly beat out of me in the last few years. I want to see epic, multi-ship space battles. When I get tired of that, and for some reason want to go back to watching tepid discussions in ultra-modern conference rooms, I'll let you know.
You're right, there was more to Star Trek than "set phasers on quick-fry-to-a-crackly-crunch" but in more recent years, wayyyyy too many stories went too far the other way. Star Trek became more boring than watching the NASA channel. About four episodes into Enterprise, I decided life was too short for mediocre Trek, and never looked back. Until now.
You misspelled... um... ok, you didn't misspell anything. Drat.
Ok, speaking as a regular slashdot'r and unrepentant linux geek, my pronouncement of Microsoft is... XP works fine. It really does. I have it on five machines at home and two at work, depend on it daily and it does everything I need. Despite the rather eclectic set-up of my primary workstation, it rarely bluescreens, and as long as I remember to reboot about once a month I rarely have problems with it. The degree of third-party compatibility is very high. After a few initial missteps, Microsoft did a very good job with XP.
To migrate to a newer version of Windows requires a substantial reason to do so. That it's not that much slower than XP is not a good reason. That it's compatible with most of my applications and hardware means, conversely, that I have to dink with the hardware and applications that aren't.
The point is, there's not much carrot here. The stick, of course, is that Microsoft will eventually stop supporting XP. But they haven't supported Windows 98 in some time, and valuable work is still being done on that iteration.
Part of the carrot, for me, was the XP compatibility mode, as it meant, hopefully, that I'd have to dink with it less should I decide to migrate. I've already checked, and my machines are unlikely to have the problems described in that rather slanted Ars Technica article. But I can see a reason for mild concern with my less technical customers. It's not a case of "Micro$$$oft Suckkkkkkkkz", it's a case of "I wonder what additional work this will mean for me". That's all.
I think we can both agree that this is not a plot by Microsoft and/or Intel to extinguish XP by sabotaging XP compatibility. Neither company is that stupid.
Ok, I'm as tepid towards Microsoft as any geek who's had to deal with them, but this doesn't seem right.
It's in Microsoft's best interest to include XP compatibility, if they want to entice people to upgrade. The people who need it most are the less-technical who don't necessarily have the expertise to deal with migration issues. For this feature to be useful to them, it has to work reliably and transparently.
Moreover, Intel would be insane to allow a situation where AMD had a clear advantage to people who wanted to upgrade to Windows 7. AMD: "You don't have a Sempron, you're fine." Intel: "Well, you gotta squint at this spreadsheet and hope." This is the kind of issue that builds mindshare.
Neither Intel nor Microsoft are arrogant enough, or stupid enough, to do this deliberately. Sabotaging XP compatibility doesn't make XP go away, it makes people more likely to cling to their copy of XP and perhaps hope for Windows 8. As a tiny but well-publicized minority give up and switch to Ubuntu.
If this is true in it's technical aspects, expect some hurried re-implementation.
Parenthetically, I expected a little more objectivity from Ars Technica. Slanted much?
How many seconds would you hesitate before you pressed it?
When you're a genius, the whole rest of the world are proles.
Sigh, alright. Let's call them Moe and Larry. I learned the details later, partly from the police report and partly from Moe when he got bailed out and came back to the apartment for his stuff.
Larry worked in a big warehouse-type store, the kind where you pay for your purchase in one part of the store and then take your receipt to the stockroom entrance to receive your merchandise. Moe and Larry thought it was a really stupid system that just begged to be abused.
Their foolproof plan was for Larry to fake a bunch of receipts, and Moe to take them to the stockroom and collect the merchandise. They didn't have a clear plan to fence the stuff, but thought it should be a simple matter for two smart guys to find a way to sell the products they didn't keep and use the funds to pay off their college debts, set themselves up in a house furnished by the rest of the stolen goods, and live like kings.
This was in the days before ubiquitous CCTV, but even then, they had apparently never heard of inventory control, or that there was only a few people who had access to the forms, or that the store could narrow down to the shift what time the shortages had occurred, or that the stockroom would notice that one guy (Moe) was apparently buying a quarter million in merchandise a few thousand at a time. Or even, apparently, that the forms were numbered.
My understanding is that during the investigation, Larry was questioned and released, and then he and Moe spent a hair-raising evening run along a lonely country road tossing merchandise out of the truck. This ingenious plan to cover their tracks, sadly, was not sufficient, and they were arrested the next day.
I lost track of them after that, but heard later that they had figured out the flaw in their plan, and decided that the thing to do was to pull one big caper instead of a lot of small ones. Their new plan was to rent a van, break into the warehouse, load up, drive far far away to a different state, fence the goods, pay off their tuition, and live like kings. I understand their next arrest was courtesy the FBI. I can't imagine they're any more gentle than the local cops.
As far as I know, Moe and Larry are currently two really smart guys in orange jumpsuits.
Parenthetically, "white collar" crime was surprisingly common in college. In those days student loans were easy to come by, and it was pathetically simple to run up huge debts while partying your college days away. Sometime around junior or senior year, some of these geniuses came to the cold realization that they were in the bottom third of their class with a debt they couldn't pay off in their lifetime. Little surprise that the more opportunistic looked for a way to leverage their natural intelligence to fleece the proles. And then they found out society was more prepared than they expected.
For me it's not the mode of transport but the number of transfers.
When I got my first professional job, it so happened that I could walk three blocks, hop on a bus, and ride it to a point just two blocks from work. I rode the bus a lot.
In a different job, I found a house just over five miles from work and could bicycle to and from pretty easily. So, I rode my bike whenever the weather permitted.
But jobs change, more often and more easily than one can buy and sell houses. My current situation is an ugly commute, but I'm not about to look for a closer job, or try to sell my house, in this economy.
I would have to drive literally halfway to work to get to the park-and-ride so I could take light rail to the bus stop for the final leg of the journey. Besides the time wasted on transfers, I'm not doing the environment much good either, because practically all the miles I'm putting on the car are "warm up" miles, when exhaust pollution is highest.
Due to poor feeder-line planning, it takes two buses to get to the light rail station, one of which is one of these huge two-part articulated monsters which never seems to have more than twelve people aboard. But that's a different story.
So, I have a choice of making the 45 minute drive each way in my vehicle, or spend a little over 2 hours each way, on average, doorstep to doorstep, to take mass transit.
That kind of commute time may be practical for a young single person, especially if they have no social life, but when you have a family, frequent interaction is required. I just can't spend that much time sitting on plastic seats reading Tolstoy. I need to be helping the kid with homework, not just looking from the doorway after they're asleep. If that makes me an environmental criminal, then bring out the plastic disposable handcuffs.
Mass transit is like recycling -- I'll do it if the powers-that-be make it worth my while. If it's quick and convenient, I'm up for some amount of extra effort.
Cost doesn't really enter into it. Light rail is usually heavily subsidized and the fares are often artificially low. But I'd gladly pay the real cost of the fare if I could walk to the station, ride one train, and then walk from the station to work. But it only works like that for a comparative handful of people.
When I hear stories like this, (and they are legion) I have to wonder if the tech was really that stupid, or did he believe that a lack of computer expertise in his customers meant they were that stupid. Speaking as a geek, I've noticed a tendency among a (fortunately small) subset of geeks to believe that having a deep expertise in one area makes them generally more competent in everything, including areas completely out of their expertise, like, say, crime.
When I was in college, two roommates apparently had such a misunderstanding, which led to a "foolproof plan" to pay off their student loans and retire in geek luxury. Their criminal career lasted a mere 24 hours. I still have the front page showing them spread-eagled against a cop car.
Sometimes I wonder if extreme geeks -- meaning not the truly hyper-intelligent, but the self-sequestered wannabes -- lacking normal social interaction, have less of an understanding of basic morals than the rest of us.
That's what VMs are for. :-)
Sorry, "The Sun" is not The WSJ. Ok, that's not terribly fair, but you'd think a billionaire would have a better grasp of supply and demand. Sounds like he's discovered a way to turn a billion dollars into a million dollars.
The problem is, Murdoch thinks he owns a product, and what he really owns is a distribution system. An outmoded distribution system. Putting the same content, that anyone can get elsewhere, on a page and demanding you pay for it is doomed to failure.
Watch, the next step will be legislation -- bailouts and levies. At a fundamental level, it's the only way to keep the newspapers going.
> I have used Windows 7 and it works a lot better than Vista.
So have I, and the beta was not a bad experience at all. But to make sure we're talking the same bits, have you gone through the same process with the release candidate?
Phase 5: Profit!
Wow, blast from the past...
Okaaay. I'm officially grossed out now.
> Nobody at Apple is stupid enough to buy an SMS service.
Holy carp, you're absolutely right. It would be Apple buying an SMS service. That's funny!
I wonder if they'll disable the multimedia features...
> Uh, you do know that RAM is cheap, right?
That's true. But, you know that (ostensibly to keep costs down, but probably also for marketing reasons) netbooks are often limited by the manufacturer as to how much ram they can hold, right?
For example, the spec sheet for the Acer Aspire One, the netbook used in the article, has "1 Gb RAM max". So unless you're good with a soldering iron, that's all you're getting. And at $350 (street), the Aspire One is not even at the bottom end.
I suspect that even with all the rumored optimization, it's still going to be a struggle to sell bottom-end netbooks with Windows 7. We may see XP hang around even longer than expected, or risk Linux owning the low end.
> Ideally, the electronics would be a separate long life module and the actual fluorescent tube would be the disposable part. Then it would be practical to include power factor correction in the electronics.
You could buy CFL's like this, with replaceable tubes and non-disposable electronics, when CFL's first came out. They're hard to find now. I suspect this is a social issue rather than a technical one.
> In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year."
Yeah, but what about tipping points?
But this cuts Windows out of the low end netbook market, where the manufacturers have chosen to fix ram at 1 Gb maximum.
Unless you're good with a soldering iron.
Why in God's name would someone running Office 2000 want to try Office 2007?
At first milidly interested in the technology, eventually appalled at the general lack of content.
Or to put it another way, twitter is the sound of millions of people collectively discovering they have nothing important to say. Or in today's "Pickles", "Is it me, or is the world getting sillier and sillier?"
I have that reaction to most power drinks.