'In general, if you use any GPL license, you need to provide ALL source for your application unless it has an exception. GPL can be applied to libraries applications and plugins (but only as long as the parent application has the same license - in this case GPL)'
Whether the GPL extends to the main application when a library is used is a debate never settled. The LGPL exists because of the question and the debate, not because the 'gpl is a virus' crowd were correct. AFAIK nobody ever made a legitimate claim that binary plugins ever needed to be under the same license.
A EULA can impact what is done at runtime but the license can not. It doesn't matter what licenses your code mixes with at runtime, that is use and outside the rights reserved for the copyright holder by copyright law (in the US).
Go back, re-read my post. At no point did I suggest using the metric system. The choice of the reference points you mention was indeed largely arbitrary, the point is not what is used for the unit (natural or unnatural) the point is that there is a fixed and unchanging unit that is constant and all other reference units are derived from that unit. Natural phenomenon is fine as long as it is constant. The length of time it takes light to travel one meter in a vacuum would be fine and dandy for a time unit. But all clocks, calendars, etc should be derived in multiples of 10 from that fixed unit instead of the other way around.
We aren't tied to sun cycles or seasons anymore. We have artificial lighting and climate controlled buildings these days. I'm all for measuring the time it takes the earth to circle the sun, it'd make for a fine bit of trivia but we measure that in our fixed and unchanging unit of time, we don't build our lives around a bit of information that should be relegated to reference books.
That's the problem, they kept this days, years, months, nonsense. There is no particular reason we should be basing a fixed unit of time measurement on natural events of varying length. We should use a fixed unit of time, and a fixed system of measurement and time accounting, and leave the measures of time associated with particular natural events to reference books and the obscure people who need them.
Tying our clocks and calendars made sense when our lives revolved around visibility provided by the sun and harvests dictated by the seasons but they don't make sense in the modern age. Today we have lighting that assures you can rise at 6pm and do anything you could have done having risen at 6am and we have air conditioning and heating.
Bottom line is that we simply don't need clocks based around sunlight and calendars centered around seasons anymore.
My proposal wasn't the metric time system per say but to use an easy to calculate and measure unit of time and to decouple our calendars and clocks from the natural events you speak of.
You agree upon a unit of time first, and then measure natural events in that unit. You don't base your unit on the variable natural events. The length of time it takes for our planet to orbit the sun is something that fits better into an almanac and is recorded for scientific purposes. It really shouldn't impact my calendar and alarm clock.
'Let's go for computer specific: to imitate (a particular computer system) by using a software system, often including a microprogram or another computer that enables it to do the same work, run the same programs, etc., as the first.'
Exactly and Wine does not meet this definition. Wine and Windows both run on the same computer system and wine does not emulate that system.
Cross-Platform API's are NOT emulations. Your broad definitions (which run contrary to the usage of the term Emulator by any technical expert) would count the standard C libraries as emulations.
Wine isn't an emulator. Seriously, wine is a native implementation of the win32 api. Saying that wine is an emulator is like saying mono is a.net emulator, or that glut is an OpenGL emulator. An API isn't code, its a specification. Win32 is a specification not code, Wine is just an implementation of that specification on Linux.
'It's like drinking from a well. Connoisseurs may claim to be able to taste the difference between it and tap water, but that's just the extra tang from all the bull shit.'
Probably not the best example. Humans have an amazing ability to taste very minute differences in water. My TDS meter tells me that tap water here is extremely pure to begin with, but I can pick the same that has undergone carbon and ro filtering versus straight tap water in a blind taste test with 100% accuracy. I'm certainly no connoisseur.
Actually, I'm from rural Illinois, and all the water be it tap or properly maintained well is fairly sweet there with minimal filtering. Actually the streams there are a bit muddy tasting but the water itself is sweet as it flows. It definitely beats this Florida swap water. I tasted unfiltered Florida well water once (most Florida wells have filters built in) and I vomited. The tap water here won't make you sick and it isn't that nasty but it still tastes funky.
That said, I doubt I could tell the difference between tap, well, Illinois, or Florida water that has had that additional filtering (Carbon and Reverse Osmosis, any of those machines for $0.39/gallon at the grocery store will do). My TDS meter shows a difference in purity even from one dispensing machine to the next, but I can't taste that difference. Whatever minerals survive that process are probably pretty much the same anywhere and taste good. That filtered water tastes better than any of the unfiltered waters.
I don't see that any of the meat of my post consists of unsupported statement. Most of it is in fact supported by your own statements.
'Not in the least, do you even care for me to correct you though? Would you even believe me?'
Of course not, you are some random idiot on Slashdot. I believe credible, accurate, and reasoned arguments. I never claimed anything you said was untrue. You seem to be refusing to rebute the comments I did provide until I grant you some sort of magical 'expert' status that no expert would need.
If you had any sort of expertise you wouldn't be crying about how my refusal to consider you an expert with superior knowledge to my own makes me a willfully ignorant idiot of questionable character. You would instead be using that expertise to make solid rebuttals that innately stand on their own logic and verifiable accuracy.
Of course if you were an expert, you'd actually be doing neither because there would be no genuine rebuttals to make. You'd recognize the accuracy of my statements and concede the point.
Hardened cockpits can stop bullets as well, basically taking the teeth from your own argument.
But I actually agree that firearms shouldn't be carried on planes (by anyone, including law enforcement who can't be trusted any more than the average joe on the street and probably less). Crossfire is dangerous. There are plenty of weapons that don't require an explosive charge. Everything else can be checked.
Weapons is one thing, firearms and bombs are another. You still make people check their firearms (and probably pass on the explosives) because of pressurization issues. A bullet hole in the pressurized cabin is a bad thing m'kay.
But knives and other edged weapons are pretty reasonable. 100 armed knife bearers would stop 3-4 knife bearers fairly easily and slaughtered 3-4 boxcutter wielders.
Although people are ignoring the other factor, they likely had a steward(ess? half of them are ugly gay guys now) by the juggler with that box cutter.
It also disarms us. I'd rather face 100 guys with fists than 100 guys with knives.
But the reality is that the terrorist wouldn't be facing a 100 man mob. He'd be facing the one or two with the balls to try to act. I'd rather give those one or two the best odds possible.
All matchlit shoe bombs demonstrate is that its always possible to come up with some kind of weapon, all anti-weapon rules do is disarm those who aren't willing or have no need to be so creative.
Because rocketrabbit says its so? Sorry RocketRabbit but operating system designers, teachers, and authors around the world beg to differ. The operating system typically doesn't interact with the user at all, it interacts with applications (system and otherwise) that in turn may or may not interact with the user.
The only real debate is whether the lowest level libraries that are needed to interact with the kernel and utilize system hardware are part of the OS. I'm in the camp that says no, the programmer can write code to interact with the kernel directly without the need to use those libraries or to directly interface with the bare metal. Therefore they are optional along with everything else.
'Otherwise you ain't operating the system, you're booting a kernel.'
You're never operating the system, the kernel is operating the system. You are operating applications that are probably operating other applications, that are in turn interacting with the kernel that is operating the system.
An operating system is a program that operates the hardware (aka the system) and manages resources so that every programmer out there doesn't have to know the details of your hardware and how to control it manually.
'Anyway, I don't know if this post is necessary because I'm pretty sure you just accused him of using anecdotal evidence and then countered it... with anecdotal evidence.'
On the contrary, while I did indeed throw anecdotal evidence back at him (evidence that didn't conflict with anything in your smoking gun post) the established consensus is already that vista runs at a snail's pace. It is for him to prove otherwise, not for me to establish what is already established.
'Four year old Dell that I ran Vista on with 1GB of RAM, the lowest end, first dual-core Pentium that came out (Pentium D 820 I think.)'
Age is irrelevant, you had a gig of ram on a multi-ghz dual core system and that is not typical of a 4yr old commodity desktop pc.
'I ran Vista on it before it came out for a year or so.'
Let me paraphrase. I ran the Vista beta while it was supposed to be a beta and therefore had no problem with it being a beta quality system with beta level performance and stability. But I think I should mention the experience anyway in a discussion about the system still performing at that level after production release.
'Sure, I didn't tell the indexing service to search my entire hard drive'
Sure I disabled a fundamental and core feature of the new system that uses tons of resources, something the entire search function has now been tuned around and if disabled you must manually specify search options each time you use the windows search several dozen times a day.
'In fact, with a decent video card (Radeon 7500 baby,) it was faster thanks to the offloading of graphics processing to the GPU. '
Faster at what precisely? Unless you were stressing the system the configuration you specified would have had almost instantaneous response from a (spyware free) XP UI in every task. Except perhaps viewing the contents of my computer which is slow on all version of windows for obvious reasons.
'So yeah, the kernel used more RAM, ditto with going from Linux 2.4 to 2.6.'
So yeah, sure it requires 2gb+ of ram to function with all the options turned on (compared with xp's 256mb ram), but the Linux kernel went from needing like 4mb of ram to needing at least 16mb between 2.4 and 2.6 so there biotch (note how your system that 'worked great' didn't even have enough memory to use a fully functioning vista with everything turned on).
'On the other hand, it used what RAM was left afterward more intelligently.'
And like, it definitely used the extra ram (that didn't exist) much better (than what? and based on what?).
You aren't referring to the 'free memory' in windows are you? You do realize that windows swaps by default whether it is needed or not and the 'free memory' number doesn't actually have anything to do with the memory requirements of the software on your system right?
I'm not worried. Video isn't a bad or evil thing. Video doesn't rot brains. And good luck getting to interesting video content on the web without being able to read.
Load google, okay maybe you know the big blue e and google is the default page or you have firefox with a handy lil bar in the corner. Next.... ooops can't google without knowing how to read and write.
Well what about youtube? You'll need to know how to spell youtube to start with. Then you'll need to be able to read the categories and understand the text to find other videos by that poster and related videos. The preview picture is rarely useful.
Reading will probably be more of a functional affair and Readers who read long novels and the like may decline and the decline of that media is very sad (particularly to a book reader like myself). But lots of old and beautiful forms of content consumption have gone the way of the dodo bird or been regulated to eccentric enthusiast groups and 'artists'. Ham radio, stage, vinyl, etc.
'I have no idea why people are saying I'm wrong on this. All Vista DVDs are the same, right? Or am I in some kind of bizarro fantasy-land?'
You are simply ignoring the fact that people are saying that said vista default is a problem and blindly continuing to pretend people are saying that something else is the problem.
The default is a problem, we are on a globe and interacting with people who aren't on local time. Having conferences at late local hours and doing work at late local hours. Not to mention the fact that many of us leave processes running when we step away from the machine that are interrupted on systems where we forget to change that poor default behavior.
Even without that, automatically downloading code from a source I don't trust and installing it without my permission is a serious security breach.
Last but not lease, requiring a reboot for anything short of kernel update is simply poor system design.
Really Blakey, is there some reason you can be seen all over this story making the same apologies for Vista and unsubstantiated claims that the entire world is mistaken and nobody has tried it?
'You're right, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a person being *forced off* the computer to install the patch. Vista won't do that by default. The default in Vista is to wait until 3:00 AM local time and install/restart then. Unless this conference was being given at 3:00 AM, there's no way it was Vista's default behavior.'
The problem is that the default behavior of vista is to download and install software (potentially bad software) without user intervention or even user notification unless the install is successful and system comes back online.
The conference not being at 3am would just be coincidence. One time is as good as another and if said conference was an international one then 3am is a reasonable possibility. If for one have a computer usage that typically involves being in the middle of work at 3am.
'Alright, then. Despite working as a software developer for years, clearly I'm inferior to someone who doesn't even know how to use paragraphs.'
His demonstrated usage of paragraphs is relevant to the discussion at hand in what way?
'Wrong. It's just prohibitively expensive to produce it, in cases more complex than "Hello, World."'
False. There is no such thing as bug free software. It is prohibitively expensive to produce software that APPEARS to be bug free and said software only continues to appear bug free because it remains installed on propriety internal systems where it receives no public and widespread review.
'However, when there's a new Linux kernel released, it's pretty much ready to go into production. When there's a new Ubuntu released, people pretty much just push the Upgrade button. When there's a new Windows released, everyone waits for SP1 before even considering rolling it to production, or to corporate desktops.'
You aren't going to hear any arguments here on that point.
'What makes that really inexcusable is, Microsoft charges for that first release. With Ubuntu, if it doesn't work out, you've lost a ten cent blank CD.'
And the upgrades will be free. Microsoft will continue to charge at random intervals for its subsequent releases.
'the company feels a need to rush this product to market with barely any of the pre-release hype that was done from Win95 and WinNT onward,'
The reason is simple. Windows 7 is the next service pack of vista. It still has all the problems vista has. Microsoft wants it out and onto a significant install base before techs have time to warn one another and spread word to end users. They gave a particularly long period of hype before Vista and techs had plenty of time to spread word and block the use of that flaming ball of garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
'In general, if you use any GPL license, you need to provide ALL source for your application unless it has an exception. GPL can be applied to libraries applications and plugins (but only as long as the parent application has the same license - in this case GPL)'
Whether the GPL extends to the main application when a library is used is a debate never settled. The LGPL exists because of the question and the debate, not because the 'gpl is a virus' crowd were correct. AFAIK nobody ever made a legitimate claim that binary plugins ever needed to be under the same license.
A EULA can impact what is done at runtime but the license can not. It doesn't matter what licenses your code mixes with at runtime, that is use and outside the rights reserved for the copyright holder by copyright law (in the US).
Go back, re-read my post. At no point did I suggest using the metric system. The choice of the reference points you mention was indeed largely arbitrary, the point is not what is used for the unit (natural or unnatural) the point is that there is a fixed and unchanging unit that is constant and all other reference units are derived from that unit. Natural phenomenon is fine as long as it is constant. The length of time it takes light to travel one meter in a vacuum would be fine and dandy for a time unit. But all clocks, calendars, etc should be derived in multiples of 10 from that fixed unit instead of the other way around.
We aren't tied to sun cycles or seasons anymore. We have artificial lighting and climate controlled buildings these days. I'm all for measuring the time it takes the earth to circle the sun, it'd make for a fine bit of trivia but we measure that in our fixed and unchanging unit of time, we don't build our lives around a bit of information that should be relegated to reference books.
That's the problem, they kept this days, years, months, nonsense. There is no particular reason we should be basing a fixed unit of time measurement on natural events of varying length. We should use a fixed unit of time, and a fixed system of measurement and time accounting, and leave the measures of time associated with particular natural events to reference books and the obscure people who need them.
Tying our clocks and calendars made sense when our lives revolved around visibility provided by the sun and harvests dictated by the seasons but they don't make sense in the modern age. Today we have lighting that assures you can rise at 6pm and do anything you could have done having risen at 6am and we have air conditioning and heating.
Bottom line is that we simply don't need clocks based around sunlight and calendars centered around seasons anymore.
My proposal wasn't the metric time system per say but to use an easy to calculate and measure unit of time and to decouple our calendars and clocks from the natural events you speak of.
You agree upon a unit of time first, and then measure natural events in that unit. You don't base your unit on the variable natural events. The length of time it takes for our planet to orbit the sun is something that fits better into an almanac and is recorded for scientific purposes. It really shouldn't impact my calendar and alarm clock.
'Let's go for computer specific:
to imitate (a particular computer system) by using a software system, often including a microprogram or another computer that enables it to do the same work, run the same programs, etc., as the first.'
Exactly and Wine does not meet this definition. Wine and Windows both run on the same computer system and wine does not emulate that system.
Cross-Platform API's are NOT emulations. Your broad definitions (which run contrary to the usage of the term Emulator by any technical expert) would count the standard C libraries as emulations.
Wine isn't an emulator. Seriously, wine is a native implementation of the win32 api. Saying that wine is an emulator is like saying mono is a .net emulator, or that glut is an OpenGL emulator. An API isn't code, its a specification. Win32 is a specification not code, Wine is just an implementation of that specification on Linux.
maybe we could just move to a calendar and time system that gives finer resolution and is based on 10's like the metric system.
Don't forget there are errors in the hardware processes anyway and error correction algorithms running on the software side that take care of them.
'It's like drinking from a well. Connoisseurs may claim to be able to taste the difference between it and tap water, but that's just the extra tang from all the bull shit.'
Probably not the best example. Humans have an amazing ability to taste very minute differences in water. My TDS meter tells me that tap water here is extremely pure to begin with, but I can pick the same that has undergone carbon and ro filtering versus straight tap water in a blind taste test with 100% accuracy. I'm certainly no connoisseur.
Actually, I'm from rural Illinois, and all the water be it tap or properly maintained well is fairly sweet there with minimal filtering. Actually the streams there are a bit muddy tasting but the water itself is sweet as it flows. It definitely beats this Florida swap water. I tasted unfiltered Florida well water once (most Florida wells have filters built in) and I vomited. The tap water here won't make you sick and it isn't that nasty but it still tastes funky.
That said, I doubt I could tell the difference between tap, well, Illinois, or Florida water that has had that additional filtering (Carbon and Reverse Osmosis, any of those machines for $0.39/gallon at the grocery store will do). My TDS meter shows a difference in purity even from one dispensing machine to the next, but I can't taste that difference. Whatever minerals survive that process are probably pretty much the same anywhere and taste good. That filtered water tastes better than any of the unfiltered waters.
I don't see that any of the meat of my post consists of unsupported statement. Most of it is in fact supported by your own statements.
'Not in the least, do you even care for me to correct you though? Would you even believe me?'
Of course not, you are some random idiot on Slashdot. I believe credible, accurate, and reasoned arguments. I never claimed anything you said was untrue. You seem to be refusing to rebute the comments I did provide until I grant you some sort of magical 'expert' status that no expert would need.
If you had any sort of expertise you wouldn't be crying about how my refusal to consider you an expert with superior knowledge to my own makes me a willfully ignorant idiot of questionable character. You would instead be using that expertise to make solid rebuttals that innately stand on their own logic and verifiable accuracy.
Of course if you were an expert, you'd actually be doing neither because there would be no genuine rebuttals to make. You'd recognize the accuracy of my statements and concede the point.
'Or indeed, started it.'
Assuming the rest of the passengers have been disarmed. But with 100 passengers all as likely as not to be carrying a knife, not so much.
Hardened cockpits can stop bullets as well, basically taking the teeth from your own argument.
But I actually agree that firearms shouldn't be carried on planes (by anyone, including law enforcement who can't be trusted any more than the average joe on the street and probably less). Crossfire is dangerous. There are plenty of weapons that don't require an explosive charge. Everything else can be checked.
Weapons is one thing, firearms and bombs are another. You still make people check their firearms (and probably pass on the explosives) because of pressurization issues. A bullet hole in the pressurized cabin is a bad thing m'kay.
But knives and other edged weapons are pretty reasonable. 100 armed knife bearers would stop 3-4 knife bearers fairly easily and slaughtered 3-4 boxcutter wielders.
Although people are ignoring the other factor, they likely had a steward(ess? half of them are ugly gay guys now) by the juggler with that box cutter.
It also disarms us. I'd rather face 100 guys with fists than 100 guys with knives.
But the reality is that the terrorist wouldn't be facing a 100 man mob. He'd be facing the one or two with the balls to try to act. I'd rather give those one or two the best odds possible.
All matchlit shoe bombs demonstrate is that its always possible to come up with some kind of weapon, all anti-weapon rules do is disarm those who aren't willing or have no need to be so creative.
'Not wanting the general public carrying weapons on a plane is neither paranoid nor moronic.'
It is both and people commandeering a plane with box-cutters is evidence of that. Two passengers with knives could have stopped the whole affair.
Firearms should be checked but only because of pressurization concerns.
Because rocketrabbit says its so? Sorry RocketRabbit but operating system designers, teachers, and authors around the world beg to differ. The operating system typically doesn't interact with the user at all, it interacts with applications (system and otherwise) that in turn may or may not interact with the user.
The only real debate is whether the lowest level libraries that are needed to interact with the kernel and utilize system hardware are part of the OS. I'm in the camp that says no, the programmer can write code to interact with the kernel directly without the need to use those libraries or to directly interface with the bare metal. Therefore they are optional along with everything else.
'Otherwise you ain't operating the system, you're booting a kernel.'
You're never operating the system, the kernel is operating the system. You are operating applications that are probably operating other applications, that are in turn interacting with the kernel that is operating the system.
An operating system is a program that operates the hardware (aka the system) and manages resources so that every programmer out there doesn't have to know the details of your hardware and how to control it manually.
'Are you going to assume I'm ignorant of how Windows works, or can we have a reasonable discussion? '
Of course I'm going to assume you are ignorant of how windows works. You and everyone else I encounter.
Perhaps the tone of my response was a bit mocking and biting but turnabout is fair play and you invited it.
Of course, none of that changes that my post was accurate.
'Anyway, I don't know if this post is necessary because I'm pretty sure you just accused him of using anecdotal evidence and then countered it... with anecdotal evidence.'
On the contrary, while I did indeed throw anecdotal evidence back at him (evidence that didn't conflict with anything in your smoking gun post) the established consensus is already that vista runs at a snail's pace. It is for him to prove otherwise, not for me to establish what is already established.
'Four year old Dell that I ran Vista on with 1GB of RAM, the lowest end, first dual-core Pentium that came out (Pentium D 820 I think.)'
Age is irrelevant, you had a gig of ram on a multi-ghz dual core system and that is not typical of a 4yr old commodity desktop pc.
'I ran Vista on it before it came out for a year or so.'
Let me paraphrase. I ran the Vista beta while it was supposed to be a beta and therefore had no problem with it being a beta quality system with beta level performance and stability. But I think I should mention the experience anyway in a discussion about the system still performing at that level after production release.
'Sure, I didn't tell the indexing service to search my entire hard drive'
Sure I disabled a fundamental and core feature of the new system that uses tons of resources, something the entire search function has now been tuned around and if disabled you must manually specify search options each time you use the windows search several dozen times a day.
'In fact, with a decent video card (Radeon 7500 baby,) it was faster thanks to the offloading of graphics processing to the GPU. '
Faster at what precisely? Unless you were stressing the system the configuration you specified would have had almost instantaneous response from a (spyware free) XP UI in every task. Except perhaps viewing the contents of my computer which is slow on all version of windows for obvious reasons.
'So yeah, the kernel used more RAM, ditto with going from Linux 2.4 to 2.6.'
So yeah, sure it requires 2gb+ of ram to function with all the options turned on (compared with xp's 256mb ram), but the Linux kernel went from needing like 4mb of ram to needing at least 16mb between 2.4 and 2.6 so there biotch (note how your system that 'worked great' didn't even have enough memory to use a fully functioning vista with everything turned on).
'On the other hand, it used what RAM was left afterward more intelligently.'
And like, it definitely used the extra ram (that didn't exist) much better (than what? and based on what?).
You aren't referring to the 'free memory' in windows are you? You do realize that windows swaps by default whether it is needed or not and the 'free memory' number doesn't actually have anything to do with the memory requirements of the software on your system right?
I'm not worried. Video isn't a bad or evil thing. Video doesn't rot brains. And good luck getting to interesting video content on the web without being able to read.
Load google, okay maybe you know the big blue e and google is the default page or you have firefox with a handy lil bar in the corner. Next.... ooops can't google without knowing how to read and write.
Well what about youtube? You'll need to know how to spell youtube to start with. Then you'll need to be able to read the categories and understand the text to find other videos by that poster and related videos. The preview picture is rarely useful.
Reading will probably be more of a functional affair and Readers who read long novels and the like may decline and the decline of that media is very sad (particularly to a book reader like myself). But lots of old and beautiful forms of content consumption have gone the way of the dodo bird or been regulated to eccentric enthusiast groups and 'artists'. Ham radio, stage, vinyl, etc.
'I have no idea why people are saying I'm wrong on this. All Vista DVDs are the same, right? Or am I in some kind of bizarro fantasy-land?'
You are simply ignoring the fact that people are saying that said vista default is a problem and blindly continuing to pretend people are saying that something else is the problem.
The default is a problem, we are on a globe and interacting with people who aren't on local time. Having conferences at late local hours and doing work at late local hours. Not to mention the fact that many of us leave processes running when we step away from the machine that are interrupted on systems where we forget to change that poor default behavior.
Even without that, automatically downloading code from a source I don't trust and installing it without my permission is a serious security breach.
Last but not lease, requiring a reboot for anything short of kernel update is simply poor system design.
Really Blakey, is there some reason you can be seen all over this story making the same apologies for Vista and unsubstantiated claims that the entire world is mistaken and nobody has tried it?
'You're right, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a person being *forced off* the computer to install the patch. Vista won't do that by default. The default in Vista is to wait until 3:00 AM local time and install/restart then. Unless this conference was being given at 3:00 AM, there's no way it was Vista's default behavior.'
The problem is that the default behavior of vista is to download and install software (potentially bad software) without user intervention or even user notification unless the install is successful and system comes back online.
The conference not being at 3am would just be coincidence. One time is as good as another and if said conference was an international one then 3am is a reasonable possibility. If for one have a computer usage that typically involves being in the middle of work at 3am.
'Alright, then. Despite working as a software developer for years, clearly I'm inferior to someone who doesn't even know how to use paragraphs.'
His demonstrated usage of paragraphs is relevant to the discussion at hand in what way?
'Wrong. It's just prohibitively expensive to produce it, in cases more complex than "Hello, World."'
False. There is no such thing as bug free software. It is prohibitively expensive to produce software that APPEARS to be bug free and said software only continues to appear bug free because it remains installed on propriety internal systems where it receives no public and widespread review.
'However, when there's a new Linux kernel released, it's pretty much ready to go into production. When there's a new Ubuntu released, people pretty much just push the Upgrade button. When there's a new Windows released, everyone waits for SP1 before even considering rolling it to production, or to corporate desktops.'
You aren't going to hear any arguments here on that point.
'What makes that really inexcusable is, Microsoft charges for that first release. With Ubuntu, if it doesn't work out, you've lost a ten cent blank CD.'
And the upgrades will be free. Microsoft will continue to charge at random intervals for its subsequent releases.
'the company feels a need to rush this product to market with barely any of the pre-release hype that was done from Win95 and WinNT onward,'
The reason is simple. Windows 7 is the next service pack of vista. It still has all the problems vista has. Microsoft wants it out and onto a significant install base before techs have time to warn one another and spread word to end users. They gave a particularly long period of hype before Vista and techs had plenty of time to spread word and block the use of that flaming ball of garbage.
Expect the unexpected. That is why multiple rc's are prepared for and one is hoped for. You don't determine in advance how many you are going to have.
Then again, Microsoft final releases are typically beta quality code so maybe it doesn't matter.
'And why should anybody that did try it, and hated it, bother trying it again at this point? '
I don't know but they shouldn't, since the CURRENT state of vista really isn't much better than the release state.