Depends on how partisan the House will be with Nancy Pelosi in charge. If they stay moderate, things will be fine, but if they start going crazy with tax hikes and other programs, forget it.
One of the really interesting things I noticed this year is that the Democrats successfully distracted everyone from the fact that 90% of them voted for the Iraq War. I also found it really interesting that nobody in the media called them on it. What happened to investigative journalism? What happened to asking tough questions of everybody?
I went to sleep understanding Democrats would take the house (at least), and being a conservative it doesn't really bother me; Bush and the republican congress did not represent conservatives at all.
This position among conservatives to punish Republicans interests me, mostly because voting Democrat seems to be the complete opposite of what you would want. Pelosi has already stated her "100-hour" plan to go all out in instituting her so-called San Francisco values in the House. Tax increases and more social spending, even bigger government, never-ending partisan investigations and subpoenas, removal of the embryonic stem cell research federal funding ban (that's a whole other issue, but suffice to say it has always been about money and nothing more...only cord blood and adult stem cells have ever yielded any research results) and so forth.
There are two factions in the Democratic party--the ultra-left anti-war guys, and the "new blood" Democrats who got elected last night who are anti-abortion, pro-gun, and in some cases, pro-Iraq War (Lieberman). So not only will we have a stalled government between them and Bush, but a stalled Democratic party. It makes one wonder how long the Democratic majority will last by the time 2008 rolls around.
The only thing I'm wondering about is the economy, which has been roaring. I haven't heard mention of removing the Bush tax cuts, but I'm sure it's coming. What really intrigues me is how the mainstream media essentially declared the election for the Democrats several months ago, then spent every week disregarding positive economic news and pushing negative stories like Foley while sweeping Democrat scandals under the rug, like the Reid real estate deal. Papers like the New York Times don't even bother hiding their partisan bias anymore--for the first time in history, they endorsed nothing but Democrats. The media only cares about "storylines" to sell their papers, and it makes for a good storyline to have a Democratic takeover of the House, so that's what they pushed for and won.
Exactly, which means even bigger government, more spending, endless investigations, and today's record-high economy going down the toilet thanks to tax hikes.
Well, I don't pay attention to any position that uses the absolutist word "evil" to describe opposition to a rights management technology. To me, evil means rapists, murderers, Hitler, and professional wrestling. When people use the word evil, they're using hyperbole and emotional connotation to try to convince people of a position, and it just turns me off. Convince me using facts and reason, pros and cons. Don't tell me some copyright protection scheme is evil, because it's just stupid geek hyperbole.
Yeah, those silly Democrats. They're not happy if Republicans steal an election with paper ballots, they're not happy if Republicans steal them with electronic ballots. How do they want you to steal them, eh?
My favorite part of politics is when the fanatics come out and ignore the sins of their own party while accusing others. Voter fraud on the part of Democrats was well-documented in 2004, from paying homeless people with crack to go in and vote to signing up dead people as voters. Even GOP voter vans had their tires slashed the night before the election. But of course, only the Republicans cheat!
Well, if you ask me, the deal is that the Bush machine is getting ready to pull some fast ones tomorrow
As is the Dean machine. The left-wing Buckeye blog is even on "Phase II" of recruiting folks to infiltrate GOP get-out-the-vote efforts as a means of discouraging turnout. But of course, only the Republicans cheat!
This story is amusing because Republicans are claiming the same thing about Democrats. In fact, a caller on Rush Limbaugh's show today described a call she received at 3 in the morning from someone claiming to be a Republican, and that others are also receiving calls specifically from 10 to 3 at night, the theory being that pranksters are trying to anger voters.
Why does global warming have to either be universally accepted or flat-out debunked? Why can't it just be in a state of "still gathering research to find out exactly what's going on?"
Oh, right, because people attach politics to everything. Bastards.
A Microsoft dev stated that they didn't want to disrupt their exist 2D artwork generation process by moving to vectors. You can still use vectors in the content area of a WPF-aware application; the interface will still be bitmap-based, however.
Aero is not shipping "in less than what was promised". That's the first such claim I've heard so far.
There was the vector-based Aero Diamond tier that was to be included in Ultimate that never showed up. Vista's using plain old bitmaps for its interface and scaling through differently sized layers for its resolution independence.
Of course XP "stagnated". You expected them to start releasing a new OS via patches or something? Once it's out, expect no more features.
Stagnation denotes a longer period of inactivity. The last time Windows saw a major release, the September 11th attacks hadn't even happened yet. Five years is an incredibly long time to give customers nothing, and they paid for it with ancient technologies (for comparison, Apple had a next-generation, vector-based graphics API on the market in 2001, hardware compositing in 2002, and so forth) and security vulnerabilities for half a decade.
Since you apparently need to be reminded:
stagnate |?stag?n?t| verb [ intrans. ] cease developing; become inactive or dull
And there were significant improvements over its lifetime.
Could you name these significant improvements beyond a Security Center or a firewall?
Aero is not shipping "in less than what was promised". That's the first such claim I've heard so far.
You need to read Paul Thurrot's Road to Gold article where he specifically mentions that Beta 1 showed the same Aero Glass as before despited promised improvements from Microsoft: "Aero Glass all around (and curiously nearly identical to the final Aero version, despite promises that improvements were coming)."
Indigo was NOT canceled!
Indigo lost several major features like Hailstorm and morphed into the less exciting Windows Communication Foundation.
And you're ignoring the other pillars (lie about one half, and then conveniently don't mention the other?)
Those are the three "pillars of Longhorn" that Microsoft advertised at WinHEC '04. Take it up with Microsoft.
WinFS was scrapped AFAIK, and that's the ONLY point you have (although hardly a big deal). The rest is 100%, totally unfounded FUD.
Hardly. Vista is shipping in severely crippled form compared to what was promised in 2004. Even the original Sidebar was scrapped and restarted in 2005 in response to the reaction Apple's Dashboard was getting and the inability to deliver on the original promises of the Sidebar (namely, getting rid of the crowded system tray on the taskbar which still exists in Vista). The original Sidebar was a notification center based on XML "tiles." I even worked with the SDK back in 2002. Today's Sidebar is nothing more than a lame Gadget tray.
Microsoft, supposed to be the #1 software developer in the world, couldn't push out an update to its flagship product in less than half a decade. In that time, the industry has changed significantly. The issue involves several facets:
The economy relies on Microsoft's operating system, but XP was allowed to stagnate for five years with only the addition of a Security Center in SP2 and some recompiled DLLs.
Trust in the company. They consistently broke their promises with Longhorn. The project originally consisted of the "pillars of Longhorn"--Aero, Indigo, and WinFS. The first is shipping in less than what was promised (Microsoft once claimed it was a temporary theme and that improvements were forthcoming), and the last two were canceled.
The poor performance of the company since Ballmer took over. Steve Jobs once said that companies are in trouble when a marketing guy takes over, and he cited Ballmer at Microsoft as an example. Since 2001, the stock price has flatlined, and products like Office 2003 were sales bombs. XP was such a slow seller that Microsoft wouldn't release sales statistics, instead referring to the number of OEM licensees. The marketing department controls Microsoft now, leading to things like seven different versions of Vista to confuse customers.
Vista looks and feels like a minor improvement to XP. You illustrate the problem in your post by pointing out that you don't feel the need to upgrade. Vista is not as compelling an upgrade as it should be for something that's taken so long to be released. When you use it, you immediately get the impression that it's been cobbled together (the interface is hugely inconsistent in several places), and the product feels like something that should have been out since 2003.
Most importantly of all, the difficulty Microsoft experienced in updating Windows is illustrative of Windows becoming something of a swansong. The industry is shifting toward online services and digital media. In many ways, the entire Longhorn debacle lends credence to the comparisons made to IBM in its waning years.
The reason for this is that Microsoft wants to pretend it's shipping Vista in 2006, but no enterprise customers are going to install a brand new OS without months of testing. Microsoft knows this, so they're releasing to those customers, celebrating the faux RTM, then spending the next couple of months actually bugfixing and polishing Vista and "really" releasing next year on January 30.
Don't let them fool you--Vista is being released on January 30th, 2007.
According to the study, it does. Another recent study done shows that mid-term election coverage in the media, again, heavily favors the Democrats. The New York Times recently endorsed Democrats across the board for the first time in its history--no Republicans at all.
You meant to say that most of the reporters employed by the media lean to the left.
No, I didn't.
What does the political leanings of a company's employees have to do with its own political ties?
A lot. The net result is a filter on the news you see and hear and a relentless denial from its enablers.
Most of the media does not lean left. You meant to say that most of the reporters employed by the media lean to the left. What does the political leanings of a company's employees have to do with its own political ties?
As far as Democratic stories getting buried: Yep, I remember 1994 - 2000. No stories about Democrats in the news at all. You're an idiot, but I'm not surprised. It's sort of a prerequisite for your political persuasion. Your last two sentences have assisted in making my case.
Another angry Democrat posting anonymously. As for 1994-2000, positive economic stories abounded during those years. Yet today we're looking at a booming economy with an unemployment rate even lower than Clinton's era, and you don't see that trumpeted by the press at all like during the Clinton years, do you? Pretty interesting how that works out. Have you examined the political leanings of the last few New York Times editors? Have you read into why CNN's head exec Eason Jordan resigned after certain anti-military comments (I wonder if you even know about it, since the press buried it even though it would be plastered all over the media if it was a Fox News exec)?
Heck, Newsweek was going to bury the Monica Lewinsky story at the request of the Clinton administration, but the Drudge Report caught wind and exposed it. If a Republican president had an affair with an intern, it would be instant front page news on the New York Times. If it's a Democrat, it gets buried at the last minute by Newsweek's higher-ups who deem it as "non-news."
Why do you think conservatives dominate talk radio and political blogs? It's because they feel like they don't have a fair outlet in the mainstream press, so they took over an alternative market to get their voice out, and the market responded enthusiastically. It's not a comment on which side is right or wrong; it's just a point to illustrate how fucked up politics is due to extremists filtering the facts on either side. You have to navigate the sea of bias to get the facts from both sides.
Way to misrepresent the UCLA/Stanford study. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it showed that reporters are more liberal than the average reader, but that editors and owners (you know, the guys who decide what goes in the media?) are decidedly more conservative than their readers.
The study watched "what goes in the media"--e.g., actual reporting--to determine its conclusions.
You complain about bias, but show an amazing amount of it yourself.
What, because I point out how political extremists on both sides have severely fucked American politics?
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Depends on how partisan the House will be with Nancy Pelosi in charge. If they stay moderate, things will be fine, but if they start going crazy with tax hikes and other programs, forget it.
One of the really interesting things I noticed this year is that the Democrats successfully distracted everyone from the fact that 90% of them voted for the Iraq War. I also found it really interesting that nobody in the media called them on it. What happened to investigative journalism? What happened to asking tough questions of everybody?
This position among conservatives to punish Republicans interests me, mostly because voting Democrat seems to be the complete opposite of what you would want. Pelosi has already stated her "100-hour" plan to go all out in instituting her so-called San Francisco values in the House. Tax increases and more social spending, even bigger government, never-ending partisan investigations and subpoenas, removal of the embryonic stem cell research federal funding ban (that's a whole other issue, but suffice to say it has always been about money and nothing more...only cord blood and adult stem cells have ever yielded any research results) and so forth.
There are two factions in the Democratic party--the ultra-left anti-war guys, and the "new blood" Democrats who got elected last night who are anti-abortion, pro-gun, and in some cases, pro-Iraq War (Lieberman). So not only will we have a stalled government between them and Bush, but a stalled Democratic party. It makes one wonder how long the Democratic majority will last by the time 2008 rolls around.
The only thing I'm wondering about is the economy, which has been roaring. I haven't heard mention of removing the Bush tax cuts, but I'm sure it's coming. What really intrigues me is how the mainstream media essentially declared the election for the Democrats several months ago, then spent every week disregarding positive economic news and pushing negative stories like Foley while sweeping Democrat scandals under the rug, like the Reid real estate deal. Papers like the New York Times don't even bother hiding their partisan bias anymore--for the first time in history, they endorsed nothing but Democrats. The media only cares about "storylines" to sell their papers, and it makes for a good storyline to have a Democratic takeover of the House, so that's what they pushed for and won.
Exactly, which means even bigger government, more spending, endless investigations, and today's record-high economy going down the toilet thanks to tax hikes.
Well, I don't pay attention to any position that uses the absolutist word "evil" to describe opposition to a rights management technology. To me, evil means rapists, murderers, Hitler, and professional wrestling. When people use the word evil, they're using hyperbole and emotional connotation to try to convince people of a position, and it just turns me off. Convince me using facts and reason, pros and cons. Don't tell me some copyright protection scheme is evil, because it's just stupid geek hyperbole.
My favorite part of politics is when the fanatics come out and ignore the sins of their own party while accusing others. Voter fraud on the part of Democrats was well-documented in 2004, from paying homeless people with crack to go in and vote to signing up dead people as voters. Even GOP voter vans had their tires slashed the night before the election. But of course, only the Republicans cheat!
As is the Dean machine. The left-wing Buckeye blog is even on "Phase II" of recruiting folks to infiltrate GOP get-out-the-vote efforts as a means of discouraging turnout. But of course, only the Republicans cheat!
This story is amusing because Republicans are claiming the same thing about Democrats. In fact, a caller on Rush Limbaugh's show today described a call she received at 3 in the morning from someone claiming to be a Republican, and that others are also receiving calls specifically from 10 to 3 at night, the theory being that pranksters are trying to anger voters.
Why does global warming have to either be universally accepted or flat-out debunked? Why can't it just be in a state of "still gathering research to find out exactly what's going on?"
Oh, right, because people attach politics to everything. Bastards.
Vista won't be driving hardware sales, and there certainly won't be a "best first quarter ever." Consumer buzz for Vista is actually very low.
Why is there no trend simply because Windows searches are also decreasing?
In fact, the graph shows Windows searches beginning to increase again.
Most affected users probably don't know that they're infected. Their machine is simply turned into a zombie without their knowing it.
Macs don't cost more than equivalent PCs. In fact, the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro are thousands less than their Dell equivalents.
No, you can't. Apple has been beating Dell on price for many months now.
Separating the names of the two products hasn't been a problem for users. Apparently, only Slashdot editors are the ones who get confused.
Scientists are skeptical of this, calling it "mind-boggling stupid."
A Microsoft dev stated that they didn't want to disrupt their exist 2D artwork generation process by moving to vectors. You can still use vectors in the content area of a WPF-aware application; the interface will still be bitmap-based, however.
There was the vector-based Aero Diamond tier that was to be included in Ultimate that never showed up. Vista's using plain old bitmaps for its interface and scaling through differently sized layers for its resolution independence.
Stagnation denotes a longer period of inactivity. The last time Windows saw a major release, the September 11th attacks hadn't even happened yet. Five years is an incredibly long time to give customers nothing, and they paid for it with ancient technologies (for comparison, Apple had a next-generation, vector-based graphics API on the market in 2001, hardware compositing in 2002, and so forth) and security vulnerabilities for half a decade.
Since you apparently need to be reminded:
stagnate |?stag?n?t| verb [ intrans. ] cease developing; become inactive or dull
Could you name these significant improvements beyond a Security Center or a firewall?
You need to read Paul Thurrot's Road to Gold article where he specifically mentions that Beta 1 showed the same Aero Glass as before despited promised improvements from Microsoft: "Aero Glass all around (and curiously nearly identical to the final Aero version, despite promises that improvements were coming)."
Indigo lost several major features like Hailstorm and morphed into the less exciting Windows Communication Foundation.
Those are the three "pillars of Longhorn" that Microsoft advertised at WinHEC '04. Take it up with Microsoft.
Hardly. Vista is shipping in severely crippled form compared to what was promised in 2004. Even the original Sidebar was scrapped and restarted in 2005 in response to the reaction Apple's Dashboard was getting and the inability to deliver on the original promises of the Sidebar (namely, getting rid of the crowded system tray on the taskbar which still exists in Vista). The original Sidebar was a notification center based on XML "tiles." I even worked with the SDK back in 2002. Today's Sidebar is nothing more than a lame Gadget tray.
http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Med ia.Bias.8.htm
The reason for this is that Microsoft wants to pretend it's shipping Vista in 2006, but no enterprise customers are going to install a brand new OS without months of testing. Microsoft knows this, so they're releasing to those customers, celebrating the faux RTM, then spending the next couple of months actually bugfixing and polishing Vista and "really" releasing next year on January 30.
Don't let them fool you--Vista is being released on January 30th, 2007.
According to the study, it does. Another recent study done shows that mid-term election coverage in the media, again, heavily favors the Democrats. The New York Times recently endorsed Democrats across the board for the first time in its history--no Republicans at all.
No, I didn't.
A lot. The net result is a filter on the news you see and hear and a relentless denial from its enablers.
Another angry Democrat posting anonymously. As for 1994-2000, positive economic stories abounded during those years. Yet today we're looking at a booming economy with an unemployment rate even lower than Clinton's era, and you don't see that trumpeted by the press at all like during the Clinton years, do you? Pretty interesting how that works out. Have you examined the political leanings of the last few New York Times editors? Have you read into why CNN's head exec Eason Jordan resigned after certain anti-military comments (I wonder if you even know about it, since the press buried it even though it would be plastered all over the media if it was a Fox News exec)?
Heck, Newsweek was going to bury the Monica Lewinsky story at the request of the Clinton administration, but the Drudge Report caught wind and exposed it. If a Republican president had an affair with an intern, it would be instant front page news on the New York Times. If it's a Democrat, it gets buried at the last minute by Newsweek's higher-ups who deem it as "non-news."
Why do you think conservatives dominate talk radio and political blogs? It's because they feel like they don't have a fair outlet in the mainstream press, so they took over an alternative market to get their voice out, and the market responded enthusiastically. It's not a comment on which side is right or wrong; it's just a point to illustrate how fucked up politics is due to extremists filtering the facts on either side. You have to navigate the sea of bias to get the facts from both sides.
The study watched "what goes in the media"--e.g., actual reporting--to determine its conclusions.
What, because I point out how political extremists on both sides have severely fucked American politics?