> If you don't need WMP since it's only an Office PC: tough luck, you have to pay for it anyway.
Lousy argument. If I use Red Hat in the office and don't use any of the media stuff, have I not paid for the time RH Q&A spent on them?
If you want to pay only for what you need, get a custom system designed. You'll find it costs you more. The entire point of products -- any product, from automobiles to software -- is that you get something that approximates (not matches) your needs for a low price.
As an aside, I wonder how many/.-ers would feel if bureaucrats in Brussels were dictating terms for Linux development.
but French literature (and indeed German) is to be treasured
Why only French and German to the exclusion of Italian, which is just as beautiful a language as French (and more so than German IMO, but that's just me)? Or Hindi, or Arabic?
My point is, if the native speakers of a language feel the need to "treasure" a language, they ought to spend money to preserve their linguistic history and not expect others to do it for them. You don't see the Japanese crying about how no one uses Japanese anymore, do you?
In France's case they could do the _sensible_ thing: lose the head-in-ass mentality let the language officially free and let it evolve the way real languages (like, say, Japanese) do, instead of trying to regulate it via a bunch of fossils. Abolishing the Académie française would be a great start.
>more and more applications just not running on IE, and preferring FireFox / Mozilla
Ignoring the fact that it'd be bad for the web if such a thing did happen, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
This demo was done by (probably) one guy working away on a demo for a university project. He probably uses Firefox himself (and so do his colleagues) and can't be bothered to do cross-browser compatibility for a simple demo (and neither should he: experimentation, not web-standards nazism, is the true essence of the web).
On the other hand, no major generally available site will ignore IE anytime soon. Even DHTML-heavy sites go to great lengths to accomodate IE (and in fact usually work best on IE). For example, Gmail's current interface is "tuned" for IE -- you need an extra click if you want to attach a file on Firefox, for example.
but considering this guy has basically laid out a "What It Might Look Like" roadmap, this looks like more more vaporware than Avalon ever was. Three more years, at least.
Crichton raises some very valid points about how consensus science has historically been bunk. It's a pity you are shooting the messenger instead of addressing his points. Of course, this is not new, as Jerry Pournelle found out -- most global-warming adherents (like the one linked above) have very little appetite for having their beliefs questioned. (Either that, or they are lousy explainers and so prefer instead to appeal to people's innate 'green' instincts for a clean environment to peddle their theories) This is what primarily makes me wary.
About Realclimate.org, I've been following that site for some time and frankly am not impressed by their rather simplistic cause and effect theories. Simply put: we do not know everything about earth's climate patterns. We've barely scratched the surface about aperiodic phenomena like El Nino/La Nina (and these are geologically speaking short-term -- longer term phenomena are still unknown) and are not doing enough research about how solar activity interacts with Earth's weather systems (the usual argument being that there is not enough data so it's too early to comment on solar activity's role).
Realclimate's answer to all of this, of course, is that -- forget about the things we don't know about, forget the fact that the earth has been on a warming trend since the last ice age, Big Bad Industry(tm) will Kill The Planet(tm), let's tie 'em down in Kyoto-brand bureaucratic red-tape so that... the unencumbered industries in China and India gets lots more work to do.
Please note that none of this makes me anti-environment per se. Like most people, I too would like a good balance of environment and lifestyle. Emissions reduction is a worthy goal in and of itself-- it makes the air cleaner and improves the quality of life for communities.
But making clean air a bureaucratic _requirement_ is expensive and time-consuming and really hurts up-and-comers while aiding the big guys who have funds to divert to meeting new regulations. In short, systems like Kyoto are really a prescription for stasis and has no place in an economy that develops bottom-up (like the US does).
But even if this new scheme works, won't people just switch over to the 3% that still work? It's not like you can try the "kills 99% bacteria" line on DVD copying software.
In MS' case, the developer relations and platform evangelism teams are actually marketing teams (in effect if not in the org chart). Remember MS was always mainly a 'platform and tools' company (even now they're scaling back their plans for MSN to become a content provider and making it a window through which they can sell software services).
In my experience, MS devs have uniformly been bright and competent and so have their developer relations teams (including evangelists).
The bad apples are the enterprise sales teams. Their policy is to milk each customer for what its worth, and as a result you _cannot_ get honest pricing answers out of them. (To be fair, other enterprise vendors -- bar Sun's new licensing -- are as bad or worse, but MS has to deal with the added stigma of bad press every other day).
I must be a dying breed. I want my OS to provide I/O and memory management services, a program loader and a job control language. The way I see it, soon my OS will bundle window managers, networking stacks (as if it's difficult to roll my own!) and read my email for me. Why can't I have an OS that works just as an OS?
I never cease to be surprised by how many Slashdotters are luddites when it comes to technology. Ever noticed that making calls on phones is, pretty much, a solved problem? Ever noticed that it's easier to cram more silicon and memory in a small space these days? Ever noticed that real people hate lugging an mp3 player, a digital camera *and* a mobile around and then having to charge all three (and if they had to pick _one_, they'd carry the mobile?
And given that the market has been _very_ efficient about punishing phones that have been too big or that have had poor calling interfaces, I wouldn't worry about added features making the phone feature difficult to use. And in the meantime you always have "basic" phones like the Nokia 1100.
I thought XML support in Office was limited to the Enterprise versions (and possibly the professional version). Can the cheaper home/academic versions of Office produce or read XML?
Whoa, dude! Why do we have to fight a "bunch of belligerant goons"?
It's a bit more complex than WW2, I'm afraid. The belligerent goons are not the nations, but rogue ideological factions within nations. Pakistan's Musharraf today wants peace on both borders because he wants to save his hide, but the hardliners in the army haven't disappeared, they're biding their time. Ditto the royal family in KSA-- the top knows their lives are on the line if/when the hardliners ever move in. Ditto Egypt.
US and UK soldiers are attacked daily abroad, but our borders aren't threatened.
You forget USS Cole etc during the wonderful Clinton years. Soldiers were attacked abroad and finally the attackers worked themselves into believing that an attack on US soil would go unanswered. You think Osama believed that 9/11 would mean the end of his cozy Afghan operation?
There's no nation - not one - attacking the USA or the UK now.
That's the problem. Our enemies are no longer nations, as I've noted before. As an Indian-American, I've had the 'privilege' of experiencing this twice over: first when Pakistan entered into a proxy war with India over Kashmir with "jihadis", and now when the Wahhabi/Militant brigade of Islam is out to make sure that the great Satan is punished for its (depending on who you ask) oil-sucking greediness/Israel policy/general cultural hedonism.
Now, some of their complaints are valid, and some are not. But frankly, I am *tired* of people justifying the actions of brutal murderous cut-throats and asking me "ask yourself why they hate you so". IMO we are being very sensible and civilized in not bombing the shit out of KSA and Egypt, the two strongholds of Wahhabi rabidness.
Al Qaeda et al were - and are - largely irrelevant to our safety. They only threaten us where anarchy has been allowed to occur: in Iraq, in Somalia, etc.
What about Al-Qaeda's hit on USS Cole in Yemen? it's attack on NYC (I know a lot of people think NYC is two steps short of anarchy, but still)? Al-Qaeda isn't just a terrorist (or criminal, as you called 'em) gang, it is a way of life (or death) for the people who believe in it -- the Islamic militant who fantasises about a glory period in Muslim history they've never quite managed to rebuild.
And oh, here's something you ought to remember: Wahhabi Militancy is not limited by intent, it is limited by capability. They would attack Wellington tomorrow if they could, after all, as they (or their affiliates) showed in Bali, what they really crave is the spilling of blood: that gets them the news cycles they need to build up fervour for their cause in their recruiting grounds.
On the other hand, we are limited by intent (we really don't want to nuke Cairo, Riyadh and Mecca) not by capability. Remember that when you hear some twit try to pull "moral equivalence" on western leaders vis-a-vis OBL and gang.
Kudos to the original poster - the West's attitude towards Pakistan (and Saudi Arabia, and Operation Condor-era South American, and our new client states in former-Soviet Asia) is shameful.
When you have to fight a bunch of belligerent goons, do you fight 'em one at a time or all at once (and start a world war in the process)? Common sense'd say one at a time: Iraq first, and the others will follow (we already got Libya's capitulation thrown in for free). So far, it seems to be working.
Actually, even with that, it'd be a 95% success, because his best training camps got busted and ability to move freely became seriously impaired. And 95% is pretty good in my book.
Action that does some good is better than doing nothing at all.
> I see, once again, that somebody who has no experience installing Office is talking about installing Office!
Way to go, champion, jumping to conclusions. Sorry, I must've been hallucinating about the multiple editions of Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003 I installed for various NT/2000/XP systems these past 7 years.
Which part of non-administrative *USE* did you miss? Sheesh. Quite a few programs require you to be admin while installing, and that goes for Office too since it installs a lot of COM components into HKLM. That goes for a lot of OSX software too. *Running* Office, OTOH, does NOT require you to be admin -- not if the admin knew what he was doing.
Now, one can debate whether MS is right to require admin access for Office *installs* -- IMO, there's nothing wrong with that, given the way the home and office markets actually use the product.
Most employers with good IT departments do not allow administrative access to their desktops -or- laptops. Further, most software written in the last 4 years (especially those targeting Windows NT/2000) were designed with non-administrative use in mind. This includes MS Office and practically every modern Microsoft app.
The problem comes with poor coding in some older MS and some newer non-MS apps: one 2000-era Java IDE I remember refused to run in non-admin mode (despite claiming to support NT and 2000). A chess program I still have around (KChess) writes its settings into its program folder, meaning that a default administrative install would mean users could not use the app. However, most of this stuff is fixable via ACL-twiddling on the filesystem or the registry and/or RunAs.
> why should a #%$%# update to a movie player require a reboot!
It doesn't, unless it updates your CDROM drivers (which it does to support ripping). For example, WMP9 -> WMP10 on XPSP2 went through with no reboot required.
> With QT I can transfer and send the links anywhere and know they will work.
It does not _legally_ work under linux, which may be a problem for some users, specially businesses (And, btw, the Quicktime player on Windows is a piece of trash).
If you need crossplatform video, use Real (don't like them much, but they support the most platforms) or stick to MPEG-2.
I patch Windows and FreeBSD machines (both at home and at work) and I'd say Windows isn't the only OS you have to patch on a regular basis (this is true for Linux too back when I was working with Linux day-to-day); however Windows IMO makes things worse because *both* the OS and the drivers are black boxes and you can't figure out what's going wrong when things do go wrong.
However, your situation would be the same if you were running any closed source OS, including OSX. IMHO here DLink is being a dick by not supporting OS updates, especially a major one like XP SP2: it's not like SP2 was a patch du jour released on some arbitary Tuesday. MS gave a lot of notice, plus a lot of partner and external betas for OEMs to prepare for this.
Bad drivers will crash the OS. This is true for pretty much any OS that allows driver code to execute in privileged mode (ring 0 on the x86) -- which includes *BSDs, Linux and Windows.
This is generally true - no userland app (including explorer.exe) can blue-screen an NT-family OS.
OTOH, userland apps often use drivers which run in ring 0, and bugs in app/driver interaction *can* bring down the OS.
Related anecdote about I've noticed quite often: Media Player Classic causes Windows 2000 to blue-screen while playing badly encoded divx-es. Might be because of bugs in the divx decoder (the one in the Matroska pack), one would think. However for the same file Windows Media Player does not crash, which is odd, considering it's supposed to be using the same codec. Makes one wonder...
Lakhs are not a unit, they are a different way to say 1e5 in some cultures, notably South Asia. Cubits and hogsheads *are* units of measure (length and capacity).
With something as clumsy as '=victor.grey'
on
i-Names Pick Up Steam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...I really don't see a chance of this becoming popular, especially when it's arriving late in the game. Like it or not, the guys who thought up foo@bar.com-style addressing hit pay dirt in terms of coming up with an addressing scheme that real people could deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
> If you don't need WMP since it's only an Office PC: tough luck, you have to pay for it anyway.
/.-ers would feel if bureaucrats in Brussels were dictating terms for Linux development.
Lousy argument. If I use Red Hat in the office and don't use any of the media stuff, have I not paid for the time RH Q&A spent on them?
If you want to pay only for what you need, get a custom system designed. You'll find it costs you more. The entire point of products -- any product, from automobiles to software -- is that you get something that approximates (not matches) your needs for a low price.
As an aside, I wonder how many
MS Office for the Mac is still wildly unstable, and although it's an option, it's not a very good one.
Ironic, considering Excel started life as The Mac Spreadsheet(tm).
but French literature (and indeed German) is to be treasured
Why only French and German to the exclusion of Italian, which is just as beautiful a language as French (and more so than German IMO, but that's just me)? Or Hindi, or Arabic?
My point is, if the native speakers of a language feel the need to "treasure" a language, they ought to spend money to preserve their linguistic history and not expect others to do it for them. You don't see the Japanese crying about how no one uses Japanese anymore, do you?
In France's case they could do the _sensible_ thing: lose the head-in-ass mentality let the language officially free and let it evolve the way real languages (like, say, Japanese) do, instead of trying to regulate it via a bunch of fossils. Abolishing the Académie française would be a great start.
>more and more applications just not running on IE, and preferring FireFox / Mozilla
Ignoring the fact that it'd be bad for the web if such a thing did happen, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
This demo was done by (probably) one guy working away on a demo for a university project. He probably uses Firefox himself (and so do his colleagues) and can't be bothered to do cross-browser compatibility for a simple demo (and neither should he: experimentation, not web-standards nazism, is the true essence of the web).
On the other hand, no major generally available site will ignore IE anytime soon. Even DHTML-heavy sites go to great lengths to accomodate IE (and in fact usually work best on IE). For example, Gmail's current interface is "tuned" for IE -- you need an extra click if you want to attach a file on Firefox, for example.
but considering this guy has basically laid out a "What It Might Look Like" roadmap, this looks like more more vaporware than Avalon ever was. Three more years, at least.
Crichton raises some very valid points about how consensus science has historically been bunk. It's a pity you are shooting the messenger instead of addressing his points. Of course, this is not new, as Jerry Pournelle found out -- most global-warming adherents (like the one linked above) have very little appetite for having their beliefs questioned. (Either that, or they are lousy explainers and so prefer instead to appeal to people's innate 'green' instincts for a clean environment to peddle their theories) This is what primarily makes me wary.
... the unencumbered industries in China and India gets lots more work to do.
About Realclimate.org, I've been following that site for some time and frankly am not impressed by their rather simplistic cause and effect theories. Simply put: we do not know everything about earth's climate patterns. We've barely scratched the surface about aperiodic phenomena like El Nino/La Nina (and these are geologically speaking short-term -- longer term phenomena are still unknown) and are not doing enough research about how solar activity interacts with Earth's weather systems (the usual argument being that there is not enough data so it's too early to comment on solar activity's role).
Realclimate's answer to all of this, of course, is that -- forget about the things we don't know about, forget the fact that the earth has been on a warming trend since the last ice age, Big Bad Industry(tm) will Kill The Planet(tm), let's tie 'em down in Kyoto-brand bureaucratic red-tape so that
Please note that none of this makes me anti-environment per se. Like most people, I too would like a good balance of environment and lifestyle. Emissions reduction is a worthy goal in and of itself-- it makes the air cleaner and improves the quality of life for communities.
But making clean air a bureaucratic _requirement_ is expensive and time-consuming and really hurts up-and-comers while aiding the big guys who have funds to divert to meeting new regulations. In short, systems like Kyoto are really a prescription for stasis and has no place in an economy that develops bottom-up (like the US does).
But even if this new scheme works, won't people just switch over to the 3% that still work? It's not like you can try the "kills 99% bacteria" line on DVD copying software.
> engineering good, sales & marketing bad
In MS' case, the developer relations and platform evangelism teams are actually marketing teams (in effect if not in the org chart). Remember MS was always mainly a 'platform and tools' company (even now they're scaling back their plans for MSN to become a content provider and making it a window through which they can sell software services).
In my experience, MS devs have uniformly been bright and competent and so have their developer relations teams (including evangelists).
The bad apples are the enterprise sales teams. Their policy is to milk each customer for what its worth, and as a result you _cannot_ get honest pricing answers out of them. (To be fair, other enterprise vendors -- bar Sun's new licensing -- are as bad or worse, but MS has to deal with the added stigma of bad press every other day).
I must be a dying breed. I want my OS to provide I/O and memory management services, a program loader and a job control language. The way I see it, soon my OS will bundle window managers, networking stacks (as if it's difficult to roll my own!) and read my email for me. Why can't I have an OS that works just as an OS?
I never cease to be surprised by how many Slashdotters are luddites when it comes to technology. Ever noticed that making calls on phones is, pretty much, a solved problem? Ever noticed that it's easier to cram more silicon and memory in a small space these days? Ever noticed that real people hate lugging an mp3 player, a digital camera *and* a mobile around and then having to charge all three (and if they had to pick _one_, they'd carry the mobile?
And given that the market has been _very_ efficient about punishing phones that have been too big or that have had poor calling interfaces, I wouldn't worry about added features making the phone feature difficult to use. And in the meantime you always have "basic" phones like the Nokia 1100.
I thought XML support in Office was limited to the Enterprise versions (and possibly the professional version). Can the cheaper home/academic versions of Office produce or read XML?
Whoa, dude! Why do we have to fight a "bunch of belligerant goons"?
It's a bit more complex than WW2, I'm afraid. The belligerent goons are not the nations, but rogue ideological factions within nations. Pakistan's Musharraf today wants peace on both borders because he wants to save his hide, but the hardliners in the army haven't disappeared, they're biding their time. Ditto the royal family in KSA-- the top knows their lives are on the line if/when the hardliners ever move in. Ditto Egypt.
US and UK soldiers are attacked daily abroad, but our borders aren't threatened.
You forget USS Cole etc during the wonderful Clinton years. Soldiers were attacked abroad and finally the attackers worked themselves into believing that an attack on US soil would go unanswered. You think Osama believed that 9/11 would mean the end of his cozy Afghan operation?
There's no nation - not one - attacking the USA or the UK now.
That's the problem. Our enemies are no longer nations, as I've noted before. As an Indian-American, I've had the 'privilege' of experiencing this twice over: first when Pakistan entered into a proxy war with India over Kashmir with "jihadis", and now when the Wahhabi/Militant brigade of Islam is out to make sure that the great Satan is punished for its (depending on who you ask) oil-sucking greediness/Israel policy/general cultural hedonism.
Now, some of their complaints are valid, and some are not. But frankly, I am *tired* of people justifying the actions of brutal murderous cut-throats and asking me "ask yourself why they hate you so". IMO we are being very sensible and civilized in not bombing the shit out of KSA and Egypt, the two strongholds of Wahhabi rabidness.
Al Qaeda et al were - and are - largely irrelevant to our safety. They only threaten us where anarchy has been allowed to occur: in Iraq, in Somalia, etc.
What about Al-Qaeda's hit on USS Cole in Yemen? it's attack on NYC (I know a lot of people think NYC is two steps short of anarchy, but still)? Al-Qaeda isn't just a terrorist (or criminal, as you called 'em) gang, it is a way of life (or death) for the people who believe in it -- the Islamic militant who fantasises about a glory period in Muslim history they've never quite managed to rebuild.
And oh, here's something you ought to remember: Wahhabi Militancy is not limited by intent, it is limited by capability. They would attack Wellington tomorrow if they could, after all, as they (or their affiliates) showed in Bali, what they really crave is the spilling of blood: that gets them the news cycles they need to build up fervour for their cause in their recruiting grounds.
On the other hand, we are limited by intent (we really don't want to nuke Cairo, Riyadh and Mecca) not by capability. Remember that when you hear some twit try to pull "moral equivalence" on western leaders vis-a-vis OBL and gang.
Kudos to the original poster - the West's attitude towards Pakistan (and Saudi Arabia, and Operation Condor-era South American, and our new client states in former-Soviet Asia) is shameful.
When you have to fight a bunch of belligerent goons, do you fight 'em one at a time or all at once (and start a world war in the process)? Common sense'd say one at a time: Iraq first, and the others will follow (we already got Libya's capitulation thrown in for free). So far, it seems to be working.
Actually, even with that, it'd be a 95% success, because his best training camps got busted and ability to move freely became seriously impaired. And 95% is pretty good in my book.
Action that does some good is better than doing nothing at all.
My bad-- I meant MPEG1. As you mentioned, ugly big files, but great compatibility, especially with tons of hardware.
> I see, once again, that somebody who has no experience installing Office is talking about installing Office!
Way to go, champion, jumping to conclusions. Sorry, I must've been hallucinating about the multiple editions of Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003 I installed for various NT/2000/XP systems these past 7 years.
Which part of non-administrative *USE* did you miss? Sheesh. Quite a few programs require you to be admin while installing, and that goes for Office too since it installs a lot of COM components into HKLM. That goes for a lot of OSX software too. *Running* Office, OTOH, does NOT require you to be admin -- not if the admin knew what he was doing.
Now, one can debate whether MS is right to require admin access for Office *installs* -- IMO, there's nothing wrong with that, given the way the home and office markets actually use the product.
Most employers with good IT departments do not allow administrative access to their desktops -or- laptops. Further, most software written in the last 4 years (especially those targeting Windows NT/2000) were designed with non-administrative use in mind. This includes MS Office and practically every modern Microsoft app.
The problem comes with poor coding in some older MS and some newer non-MS apps: one 2000-era Java IDE I remember refused to run in non-admin mode (despite claiming to support NT and 2000). A chess program I still have around (KChess) writes its settings into its program folder, meaning that a default administrative install would mean users could not use the app. However, most of this stuff is fixable via ACL-twiddling on the filesystem or the registry and/or RunAs.
The Non-admin blog http://weblogs.asp.net/aaron_margosis/ may be useful reading in this regard. Also see this article about how to read mail/browse safely if you absolutely have to run as admin.
> why should a #%$%# update to a movie player require a reboot!
It doesn't, unless it updates your CDROM drivers (which it does to support ripping). For example, WMP9 -> WMP10 on XPSP2 went through with no reboot required.
> With QT I can transfer and send the links anywhere and know they will work.
It does not _legally_ work under linux, which may be a problem for some users, specially businesses (And, btw, the Quicktime player on Windows is a piece of trash).
If you need crossplatform video, use Real (don't like them much, but they support the most platforms) or stick to MPEG-2.
You forgot... global warming :-)
The fact that the universe is finite but expanding explains a lot of experimental data, notably red-shifted stars, and also why the night sky is dark.
I patch Windows and FreeBSD machines (both at home and at work) and I'd say Windows isn't the only OS you have to patch on a regular basis (this is true for Linux too back when I was working with Linux day-to-day); however Windows IMO makes things worse because *both* the OS and the drivers are black boxes and you can't figure out what's going wrong when things do go wrong.
However, your situation would be the same if you were running any closed source OS, including OSX. IMHO here DLink is being a dick by not supporting OS updates, especially a major one like XP SP2: it's not like SP2 was a patch du jour released on some arbitary Tuesday. MS gave a lot of notice, plus a lot of partner and external betas for OEMs to prepare for this.
Bad drivers will crash the OS. This is true for pretty much any OS that allows driver code to execute in privileged mode (ring 0 on the x86) -- which includes *BSDs, Linux and Windows.
Ask your vendor for updated drivers.
This is generally true - no userland app (including explorer.exe) can blue-screen an NT-family OS.
OTOH, userland apps often use drivers which run in ring 0, and bugs in app/driver interaction *can* bring down the OS.
Related anecdote about I've noticed quite often: Media Player Classic causes Windows 2000 to blue-screen while playing badly encoded divx-es. Might be because of bugs in the divx decoder (the one in the Matroska pack), one would think. However for the same file Windows Media Player does not crash, which is odd, considering it's supposed to be using the same codec. Makes one wonder...
Lakhs are not a unit, they are a different way to say 1e5 in some cultures, notably South Asia. Cubits and hogsheads *are* units of measure (length and capacity).
...I really don't see a chance of this becoming popular, especially when it's arriving late in the game. Like it or not, the guys who thought up foo@bar.com-style addressing hit pay dirt in terms of coming up with an addressing scheme that real people could deal with.