Do you honestly believe that the Linux driver ecosystem is better?
I'd say they have different strengths and weaknesses.
Windows has the advantage that every consumer device that plugs into a computer is going to get a Windows driver from the manufacturer, and the driver will be pretty full-featured typically. Not so with Linux, where the typical lack of hardware documentation leads to drivers that take longer to develop, and sometimes lack the bells and whistles of the manufacturer-developed Windows drivers.
However, the Linux drivers generally have these things going for them:
Once they're developed, they tend to be maintained with the rest of the kernel for years and years.
They're freely available, and often baked into the kernel itself. So if a Linux driver for a device does exist, it's often very easy to get it, if you even have to install it at all. Contrast to Windows, where for older devices you sometimes have to do lots of searching to find a driver.
No. Epson choose to not support your scanner any more. It's not Microsoft's fault that a 3rd party decided not to fully support your hardware with drivers for the latest OS. Vista would support it perfectly fine if Epson would write drivers for it, but they are banking on you choosing to buy a newer model scanner.
Don't blame Microsoft for Epson's greed.
But you might reasonably blame Microsoft for developing an ecosystem in which each vendor keeps the source to his own drivers, but with no obligation to update those drivers to be compatible with future OS releases.
This is an area where Linux generally does much much much much better. For example, ATI is soon to stop supporting some of their old cards. For Windows users, this means that in not many years, new versions of Windows won't work with those cards. In contrast, and Linux user that uses those cards has an open source driver for them, and it's very probably that the driver maintainer will choose to keep the driver up to date, even as Linux's driver interface evolves. This feature of the Linux ecosystem really is just much better than what the Windows ecosystem offers.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
I'm sorry, and I honestly am not trying to troll here, but are you fucking kidding me???
Long term? Linux supports pretty much the whole POSIX API and, for graphics, X11. Those were mature before Steve Ballmer threw his first chair. Many serious, graphical programs written 20 years ago for Unix still build and run no problem on Linux. And it's a pretty damn good bet that it I write clean Linux code today, it will build in 2019 version of Linux or its successor. Tried running a Win16 program lately? Or tried lately accessing a web page written in their proprietary dialects of HTML from back in the browser war days? Good luck being able to use those web applications with the browsers that are available in 20 years.
Reliability? Windows servers have historically needed a period reboot, just because. The DoD recently disallowed USB thumbdrives on any of their computers. Hint: it wasn't because of the Linux computers. And what would you rather hook up to the open internet for 24 hours after installing the operating system: Windows XP, or Linux?
Or maybe you're referring to their steadfast trustworthiness as a company. Surely we can trust their products because as a company they're so wise, right? Like their decision to encourage web page designers to include ActiveX controls on the web pages? Or how many apps broke when Vista was rolled out?
But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with the latest and greatest.
I can't speak about Apple stuff, but for Linux, who cares if the people shipping a distribution needed to re-compile 50% of the apps when preparing a release, because of some library ABI change? When you have the source code to the apps, and someone else (the distro maintainers) recompile everything for you anyway, it. just. doesn't. matter.
I don't think I am. I'm considering the total level of satisfaction with a Windows 7-based system, a Snow Leopard system, and a Ubuntu 9.10 system.
For example, I consider the difficulty/inability to run iTunes on Ubuntu to be a relevant factor when considering Ubuntu vs. W7. On the other hand, the ready availability of a bizillion applications on Ubuntu affects my happiness regarding my choice of operating systems as well.
Each new release of OS X might, at best, be compared to a service pack.
Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November.
Between now and then, Apple will likely have released OS X 10.6, and there will have been two new release of Ubuntu.
I wonder what's moving faster: Microsoft, or the goal posts?
This is a pretty fundamental observation of economics, but if you can refute it with something besides "you're a brainwashed sheep," I'd be interested to hear your argument.
If I had to choose whether to chance my family's safety or take out a family half a world away, would I do it? You bet I would. I value me and my family more than I value someone I have never seen nor met that wants to kill me.
You're mixing scenarios. Does the other family want to kill you, or don't they?
If they want to kill you, then it's reasonable to kill them first, even if they're your next door neighbors.
If they don't want to kill you, but you're still willing to kill them first out of self-preservation, then it's a different picture.
. Disposing of nukes, or guns or cricket bats won't stop violence. The only way to ensure lasting peace is through diplomacy and not engaging in international dipshittery.
Diplomacy is necessary but, sadly, insufficient. The problem is that even if your own country decides it's serious about peace, there are plenty of other people in the world who won't feel the same way, despite your willingness to get along with them.
And those people are sometimes armed quite heavily, perhaps even with nukes. At that point, the probability of war goes down significantly if you yourself possess nukes. No sane person wants M.A.D. to be a sound doctrine, but it just seems to be so.
You know, there is a school of thought which says that a stockpile of nuclear weapons big enough to kill every living thing on the planet is big enough, and any extra are probably unnecessary expense. A nuclear deterrent only needs to be large enough to completely and totally annihilate any country that may attack you. The British nuclear arsenal is big enough for that. The US has about an order of magnitude more.
I think you're forgetting the probability of missile failure, and missile silos at the less-fortunate end of a preemptive strike.
If your adversary thinks he can eliminate 90% of your missiles before they get to him, you should ponder having 10x more missiles than you otherwise might.
Just because you can put executable code in a document, doesn't mean the document reader should execute it.
True, but at least with LaTeX and Postscript, some code must be executed just to render the document. So for some document formats, precluding all document code execution makes the rendering program useless.
The issue isn't physical vs. non-phsyical, but rather arrangements of molecules (DVDs) vs. energy (WiFi/ethernet/fiber optic/etc.) Energy is physical to.
The alternative would be awesome, though: meta-physical data transfers.
Users will be able to connect to their virtual and fully functional Windows environments without any knowledge that the operating system and the applications are executing on the mainframe and not the desktop.
When a bunch of people are sharing a network, and sharing computer resources, one person's performance is at the mercy of other people. That's not so often true when it's all running on your own desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on..
Do you honestly believe that the Linux driver ecosystem is better?
I'd say they have different strengths and weaknesses.
Windows has the advantage that every consumer device that plugs into a computer is going to get a Windows driver from the manufacturer, and the driver will be pretty full-featured typically. Not so with Linux, where the typical lack of hardware documentation leads to drivers that take longer to develop, and sometimes lack the bells and whistles of the manufacturer-developed Windows drivers.
However, the Linux drivers generally have these things going for them:
No. Epson choose to not support your scanner any more. It's not Microsoft's fault that a 3rd party decided not to fully support your hardware with drivers for the latest OS. Vista would support it perfectly fine if Epson would write drivers for it, but they are banking on you choosing to buy a newer model scanner.
Don't blame Microsoft for Epson's greed.
But you might reasonably blame Microsoft for developing an ecosystem in which each vendor keeps the source to his own drivers, but with no obligation to update those drivers to be compatible with future OS releases.
This is an area where Linux generally does much much much much better. For example, ATI is soon to stop supporting some of their old cards. For Windows users, this means that in not many years, new versions of Windows won't work with those cards. In contrast, and Linux user that uses those cards has an open source driver for them, and it's very probably that the driver maintainer will choose to keep the driver up to date, even as Linux's driver interface evolves. This feature of the Linux ecosystem really is just much better than what the Windows ecosystem offers.
I'm sorry, and I honestly am not trying to troll here, but are you fucking kidding me???
Long term? Linux supports pretty much the whole POSIX API and, for graphics, X11. Those were mature before Steve Ballmer threw his first chair. Many serious, graphical programs written 20 years ago for Unix still build and run no problem on Linux. And it's a pretty damn good bet that it I write clean Linux code today, it will build in 2019 version of Linux or its successor. Tried running a Win16 program lately? Or tried lately accessing a web page written in their proprietary dialects of HTML from back in the browser war days? Good luck being able to use those web applications with the browsers that are available in 20 years.
Reliability? Windows servers have historically needed a period reboot, just because. The DoD recently disallowed USB thumbdrives on any of their computers. Hint: it wasn't because of the Linux computers. And what would you rather hook up to the open internet for 24 hours after installing the operating system: Windows XP, or Linux?
Or maybe you're referring to their steadfast trustworthiness as a company. Surely we can trust their products because as a company they're so wise, right? Like their decision to encourage web page designers to include ActiveX controls on the web pages? Or how many apps broke when Vista was rolled out?
I must concede, though, that Linux might just not be ready for mission critical deployments.
I can't speak about Apple stuff, but for Linux, who cares if the people shipping a distribution needed to re-compile 50% of the apps when preparing a release, because of some library ABI change? When you have the source code to the apps, and someone else (the distro maintainers) recompile everything for you anyway, it. just. doesn't. matter.
I don't think I am. I'm considering the total level of satisfaction with a Windows 7-based system, a Snow Leopard system, and a Ubuntu 9.10 system.
For example, I consider the difficulty/inability to run iTunes on Ubuntu to be a relevant factor when considering Ubuntu vs. W7. On the other hand, the ready availability of a bizillion applications on Ubuntu affects my happiness regarding my choice of operating systems as well.
No argument there.
Between now and then, Apple will likely have released OS X 10.6, and there will have been two new release of Ubuntu.
I wonder what's moving faster: Microsoft, or the goal posts?
That might create jobs in the hit-man industry.
You're a brainwashed llama. Oh, SNAP!
Fair enough. OTOH, if you have access to adamantium, you probably also could just use a brick with a +3 data storage bonus, rather than a hard drive.
Anyone know if/how this version can play iTMS-encrypted music and/or videos?
If I had to choose whether to chance my family's safety or take out a family half a world away, would I do it? You bet I would. I value me and my family more than I value someone I have never seen nor met that wants to kill me.
You're mixing scenarios. Does the other family want to kill you, or don't they?
If they want to kill you, then it's reasonable to kill them first, even if they're your next door neighbors.
If they don't want to kill you, but you're still willing to kill them first out of self-preservation, then it's a different picture.
Well, Hillary Clinton is now our Secretary of State. Does that make snukes an option?
Diplomacy is necessary but, sadly, insufficient.
The problem is that even if your own country decides it's serious about peace, there are plenty of other people in the world who won't feel the same way, despite your willingness to get along with them.
And those people are sometimes armed quite heavily, perhaps even with nukes. At that point, the probability of war goes down significantly if you yourself possess nukes. No sane person wants M.A.D. to be a sound doctrine, but it just seems to be so.
You know, there is a school of thought which says that a stockpile of nuclear weapons big enough to kill every living thing on the planet is big enough, and any extra are probably unnecessary expense. A nuclear deterrent only needs to be large enough to completely and totally annihilate any country that may attack you. The British nuclear arsenal is big enough for that. The US has about an order of magnitude more.
I think you're forgetting the probability of missile failure, and missile silos at the less-fortunate end of a preemptive strike.
If your adversary thinks he can eliminate 90% of your missiles before they get to him, you should ponder having 10x more missiles than you otherwise might.
The entire earth is a skin job??? Season 4 officially sucks.
The first rule of Intelligence Community Club is...
Are they also open to civil lawsuits from affected employees?
What do you think will happen when all external media starts using alternative formatting?
Microsoft to start filing patent lawsuits against users of the EXT 2/3/4 file systems.
Just because you can put executable code in a document, doesn't mean the document reader should execute it.
True, but at least with LaTeX and Postscript, some code must be executed just to render the document. So for some document formats, precluding all document code execution makes the rendering program useless.
Sorry, but you lost this fight a long time ago. Even emacs supports embedded executable code in documents.
And don't forget Postscritpt. And LaTeX.
At the ICFP08 conference, there was a student who'd written an autonomous (simulated) robot controller, in LaTeX.
The issue isn't physical vs. non-phsyical, but rather arrangements of molecules (DVDs) vs. energy (WiFi/ethernet/fiber optic/etc.) Energy is physical to.
The alternative would be awesome, though: meta-physical data transfers.
I'm gonna need that. Imagine watching porn on a mainframe? I bet I could have 60,000 videos running simultaneously.
Yeah, but they'd be coming out on the line printer.
Do you honesting thing the person sitting in front of the average windows workstation is the only person using it?
I, for one, think your comment deserved +1 funny.
ce, removing the "just a gut feeling" factor. Sorry, dude, the rest is way over my head, but thanks for the conversation.
Thanks, it was interesting.
now we're back to dumb terminals.
No way. Getting their human caretakers to uninstall Windows is the smartest thing the terminals ever did!
When a bunch of people are sharing a network, and sharing computer resources, one person's performance is at the mercy of other people. That's not so often true when it's all running on your own desktop.