Given this information, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that any operating system should not run very comfortably using a tiny fraction of my system's resources, no matter how many bells and whistles it has.
When was the last time you ran the KDE Desktop Settings Wizard, by chance? Bells and whistles take computing power, it says so right in there and gives you a slider to illustrate the point, though it should be common sense that the more you have your OS doing at any given time, the more it's going to demand from your system.
By the way, if you meet the minimum comfort level for running Windows XP, you meet the minimum comfort level for running Windows Vista. Don't expect whiz-bang stuff like Aero to rock out on your antiquated hardware (And yes, four years is antiquated in terms of performance), and also keep in mind that there's a lot of functionality (Services, etc...) in the system that can be trimmed if you need to make your system leaner, same as XP.
Wrong direction? I'm sorry, I beg to differ. I actually enjoy having the OS evolve with the times, and I'm thankful that Aero didn't make its debut as a resource hogging slow-poke, like Aqua did when it first hit the street. Good thing for everyone though that Apple continued to tweak things, but charging for minor updates is a load of crap IMHO though I love the software.
People can cry all they want about how software development is going back asswards, and how software written today is by and large nothing but a bloat fest, but that doesn't change the fact that, hey, these days, people tend to multitask, a lot. Or at least power users who complain about system resources being eaten up on modern systems do. What you call bloat I call making the product easier to use and in general more pleasant to use, but hey, remember how the old saying goes? One man's trash is another man's treasure, and for what it's worth, on my system, Vista runs much faster than XP. That's progress, same as with how GNOME2/GTK+2 and KDE3/QT3 keep improving.
Is it so hard to act like the adult you should be if you were to be in the profession of teaching? One cannot justify something like this with "Well my work is so stressful" as if that's a free ticket to do your job poorly. These kids got what they wanted, if it was really a baiting situation (which, frankly, doesn't matter at all), and the teacher did nothing but embolden them to do it again in the future. I've dealt with enough asshat teachers though over the years to understand that it's not too far fetched that a person in authority could abuse that authority, and then struggle with damage control once caught.
Kids who deliberately provoke a teacher to film the results don't need to be yelled at so much as slapped around a little. And that's why I'd be a terrible teacher.
That statement speaks volumes, it really does. Any teacher with a clue about their job would never be sucked into a stunt in the first place. The same goes for someone in basically any other field where they could be baited like this, and my own personal example is any customer service field. Just take a chill pill when things get fired up, because the only thing that an outburst is likely to cause is your own firing.
Wow, I wish I could live in such a black and white world and not realize it's a fabrication of my mind. Seriously, you appear to have no idea that there are so many variables, more than can be accurately brought up in this reply and keep it at a sane length to myself, that influence one's financial situation. I'll respond directly to the two (predictable) points you mention though:
1. Not always a possibility at any given time, sorry.
2. The best managing of one's money in the world does not modify one's actual income, and your recommendation makes the presumption that the person is spending wastefully in the first place.
But hey, it's cool to talk down to people in a worse situation than you are these days. I won't even go into something like being a single parent, whatever gender you happen to be.
I have two words for you -- Purchasing power. The people that bot ruin the game economy across all servers through their ill-gotten goods, whether those goods be trade items or raw gold. A person who bots their way to 60 in a week, effectively having no downtime due to the bot, is going to have gained plenty in gold and items by that time. There's plenty of fine loot to be had outside of instances, though without a doubt if you want the best for your level you're going to have to group it in an instance, and most of the money is to be had in trade skills. A miner/herbalist is always a guaranteed way to make a good living on any server. Certainly not a killer unless you devote a lot of time to it (So much so that leveling takes a back seat), and not as big a cash cow as high level enchanting, but it is good money nonetheless.
You might think otherwise, but quite frankly, the facts speak for themselves, and everyone is getting sick of gold farmers and the like being a largely ignored problem. I've been playing since the game was released, on old servers and new, and they all share the same affliction.
P.S. -- The really good loot in any instance is bind on pickup for the most part, so you can't resell it in the first place, so pointing out that bots aren't raiding instances is a little misguided. PvP is not the focus, though it is a point, because of course with easier funds, better equipment is more easily had. And yes, it is just a game. A game that is at high risk of losing a considerable amount of its base through this problem. This can be said of any gaming community -- Cheaters piss off every legit character who feels their time investment is worth a damn. That this is not a valuation of a man's soul is irrelevant and your attempt to minimize the situation by "putting it in perspective" fails, simply because you misunderstand the entire issue at hand.
I didn't realize that every game was supposed to be as instantly gratifying as, say, Duck Hunt. You're looking for the wrong thing in a game if you dislike it because of "grunt work" that you have to do. Would you rather that reagents and tradeskill items were simply rationed out to people? Or that every mob in the game dropped, to use an EQ term, phat lewtz? There's grunt work in everything, and depending on my mood I could turn the question around and ask it of real life.
In any case, anyone who's played a pen-and-paper RPG, and didn't have a DM/whatever just make life a breeze for them, is quite familiar with trudging through the average stuff in order to get to the goodies. World of Warcraft and for the most part every other MMORPG emulates this as best they can.
There are plenty of people living paycheck to paycheck who have an outlet like World of Warcraft when they want to relax and play a game or just kill time. There are also plenty of kids whose allowance or money earned from chores/etc doesn't cover a whole lot other than their favorite game. But I guess it certainly was easier to do what you did. Requires less thinking about possible scenarios, or thinking in general, rather.
Exactly, WoW bot programs, and Glider is the only one that I've even looked into before out of curiosity (A friend of mine was using it for a very short time to grind overnight while sleeping, stopped after a couple days because he decided it wasn't worth losing his account over), do nothing complicated. From what I remember reading before about Glider specifically, you set up an area to be patrolled with your character and outline basic actions that your character is to take as it does its patrols. These bots can resurrect themselves and pick up where they left off should they die (And they do, a lot. Especially if someone goes PvP on you. No bots react to PvP). Tell your botted character to run around the zone picking herbs or mining ore, or to kill the same mob over and over in an attempt to get its prized loot, they do stuff like that IIRC.
It's not like people are using bots to run raids or instances, they use them for the grunt work.:) Oh, and it sure has taken long enough for Blizz to do something.
Uhhh, what? Daemon Tools 4.0.6 runs just fine in both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista. And Jesus Christ, as far as affording certs go I guess the majority of Slashdot has never heard of donating to a project you care about keeping around. $500 for a one-year license? Oh no, whatever shall we do?! Give me a fscking break, am a regular at many sites which operate off donations and pitch in when I can to keep what I like active.
I would call out "the Linux developers", if my Debian or Ubuntu kernels ever caused me that kind of problem. Of course, Linux is not a $MULTIBILLION corporation, even over at RedHat, like Microsoft is. And kernel releases aren't the same as the Vista release.
So let me get this straight, you would be willing to bitch about the problems of a Linux kernel release with a serious bug that causes filesystem corruption if and only if it affected you. Yet, you're doing the same thing about a Vista that's not even a release? Nice. I'll say it again (I said it in another reply on this story), throwing money at a problem is no way to fix it, much less in the way of QA. You're practically saying F/OSS is never going to be able to compete with Microsoft if Microsoft were to smartly use it's money in solving problems. Riiiight. Kernel releases are the same as Vista releases, in that we're talking about what has been deemed release-quality code.
The Microsoft model is supposedly to release new OS'es every few years, after rigorous internal testing of their proprietary code. This bug episode shows that model is not reliable - they obviously don't test enough internally before releasing even a beta to outside developers/testers.
If you think that such a huge and massive project such as this is ever going to be bug-free, you're quite mistaken. Even Debian stable has bugs. Even OpenBSD has bugs. You completely ignore the fact that Vista development wasn't something that followed rigorous guidelines set back a little while after XP was released. You completely ignore the fact that time and the competition does not stop for Microsoft, Apple, or F/OSS developers. New features are introduced to different platforms on a regular basis, and this means new code must be implemented in your system lest you fall behind. This code might not be as well tested as the code that came before it, and vice versa. In any case, I would generally be glad that Microsoft is not releasing a piece of software that is known to cause such problems for some people, and are pushing back the release date for it. That's just not good enough for some people though who are under the impression that developing such a large-scale OS is a cakewalk, and that bugs are inexcusable this late in the game. I still can't get a Linux kernel to compile without warnings, or to be an entirely bug-free release. Do you hear me bitching about this anywhere? No, because I understand that for a moving target in terms of development, it's unreasonable.
Let's have a sense of proportion. Microsoft has a model whose money depends on insecurities and bugs to force upgrades every few years. Linux has lots of different models, the main one being frequent releases of code that interested people can fix ourselves. Not a good comparison, especially when considering the stakes: 95% of computers running MS, maybe 1-5% running Linux.
Proportion? Alright. Plenty of people are still running Microsoft operating systems already quite outside the support window, the EOL'ed bunch. There are coders out there who still help support those systems with whatever upgrades they can possibly deliver. Nobody is forced to do an upgrade to the latest Microsoft OS, it is simply something that is made easier by the fact that quite a lot (Most) of new PCs are shipped with the latest from Microsoft pre-installed for convenience to the end-user. If you don't want a system with Windows pre-installed, there are many ways that you can get that and it's quite ineffective to claim otherwise these days. If I wanted to, I could use Windows 98SE with a full firewall and AV solution. I would be limited in what I could do with it simply because, as anyone with brains would acknowledge, it's an inferior product with a dead codebase that wasn't and isn't going anywhere. I could do the same thing with Windows 2000, and it would be quite a bit easier, and that's what a lot of Slashdot users who refuse to upgrade do, last time I checked. I suppose you're going to
So they said they broke it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Besides, if it is true, their products will be rendered ineffective when Microsoft (rightly) fixes the leak in the dam. Way to go guys, sell a service that depends on playing catch-up with Microsoft's efforts to keep the base system secure! I don't think I'm alone in thinking that is borderline retarded. I think I'll just keep up with using my free antivirus solutions and smart computing, combined with whatever security measures the base system has to offer, whether I'm working in my Linux or Windows. Kinda makes me want to put the x64 Edition of XP back on here, because it at least has the same protection the 64bit Vista is offering as far as PatchGuard goes.
Maybe you should do some research on how many releases of the Linux kernel have had filesystem corruption issues much like this one affecting Vista, a product that has not been released yet. I'll give you a hint, the latest one happened in 2.6.18, and no, it wasn't in -mm.
Look, I use Linux, I love the software I use on it, and when I used to run my home servers, I did it on Linux because I trusted the technology. However, if you're going to be so harsh on Microsoft for pushing back a release date to fix a bug in a scenario that's so reminiscent of the recent pushing back of Fedora Core 6 because of an ext3 bug (Well, I guess I kind you the rest of the info from that hint earlier) then I would hope that you do the same thing to the kernel developers and flame them for apparent incompetence, which of course is not my position at all. Shit happens anywhere you go.
Would Apple take full liability for any portion of any of their software causing data loss through a difficult to reproduce bug that occurs on certain hardware combinations with certain software combinations? The answer is no. No sane company does that except ones that make mission-critical software and present it as such. In fact, most software companies and developers release themselves from any legal liability in the terms of use for their program.
I agree with you that the one millionth user is important, that the problem is important, the thing is that you have to have priorities. You fix what's going to affect the most people first, and then focus your efforts on whatever else takes that items place on your list of priorities.
I've gotten so used to reading this, from the GPL and many other licenses (Though the wording may differ):
NO WARRANTY
11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
Also try running something like Rawhide, Gentoo unstable branch (Which I do), Debian unstable, or any plethora of other systems out there which include software that's not extensively tested. While it is true that it is rare to find incredible bugs that create a big headache for end-users in a Linux distribution release, it's not impossible and there have been many occurrences of these bugs in release Linux kernels themselves. Let's not kid ourselves, shit happens on both sides of the fence, and it's not only unfair but naive to hold Microsoft to some golden standard because they have a large bankroll. Throwing money at a problem is the worst way to solve it, especially when it comes to QA.
P.S. -- Even in the stable branches of distros breakage can happen and it can be difficult or impossible to recover vital data from the system. I'm running reiser4 on my ~amd64 Gentoo and I keep hoping I don't end up with filesystem corruption that would hit me quite often in the past when I was pretty much forced to use a vanilla kernel with reiser4 or the -mm patchset, which is about as unstable as they come. Plenty of other people get hit by random difficult to reproduce bugs for any filesystem, daily. ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs, you name it. I dunno about ext2 though, but since they're so closely related (ext2/3), I'd figure most things that ail one ail the other. Also, you were speaking directly on a bug forcing a reinstall of the system, which usually means a gross configuration error or some other form of data loss. The Mandrake link is the only one which diverts from this train of thought, but it most certainly was a big hitter if you can remember when the story hit, as I do.
Another P.S. -- You say they've had all this time to iron Vista out as if they started out with "This is what Vista is going to be, period. Get there and release it." Sorry buddy, that's not how development goes, especially when competitors are around introducing new ideas all the time, never mind your own R&D department.
As mentioned by RLaager, CTRL+R will solve your issue, however after hearing about this issue and thinking about it I think it would be a good idea to make the behavior completely optional with a toggle in the preferences, maybe even the individual chat window itself. Wish I knew how to code better.:(
Thanks for the link, I hadn't really thought of the issue that way before. It should be a preferences option for those that do custom formatting if they would like their formatting destroyed or not.
The bug report is here. I don't know if the developers of the Win32 port of GTK+ are aware of the issue, but the Gaim developers certainly are. Unfortunately it seems to be a difficult to pin down issue, and it might be as simple as using a different Win32 GTK+ build. I would try it right now while getting something to eat, but I'm in Linux land getting some things working.:)
Can you give a link to the bug report for that issue about cut/paste, because it sounds like you just need to hit the Clear Formatting button to get things back to normal. I've never suffered this issue. For the second, that sounds like the GTK+ rendering issue that's present with ClearType enabled in anything higher than 16-bit color depth. This is not a GAIM problem, but it is a problem with the build of GTK+ that GAIM uses/needs.
That's the job of those who provide drivers for their products. The onus is on them to provide efficient interface between the kernel and the rest of the system. The different versions of Vista have nothing to do with this, the fact that the hardware market is so varied and not every manufacturer cares about providing quality drivers has everything to do with it.
The new UI requires a DirectX 9-capable card and takes advantage of all the features made possible through DX9. I'm not aware of any internals in Vista that utilize DX10, since it's more orientated at allowing games to run better. Some details about DX10.
As with, for example, KDE, the CPU requirements drop off quite sharply if you disable things that you don't want/need which are enabled by default. Vista probably can run on the same CPU which you were running XP on out-of-spec, but I'm not so sure if you can get away with not having at least 512MB of RAM. Personally I wouldn't run Vista on less than 1GB of RAM, but I also don't consider running XP on less than 512MB of RAM. There's the indexer, the sidebar, the interface, the previews, a whole plethora of options. KDE puts it forward pretty simply too when the first run configuration wizard is used, telling you that if you have enough CPU power, feel free to push the slider to the right to get more glitz. Otherwise, it's probably smart to tone things down.
There are many factors that influence overall system performance and it's not so simple as to boil it down to well I have an Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB of RAM, an nForce2 chipset, the onboard audio solution, and an NVidia GeForce 6600. What code name/make is the CPU? What are the timings and what is the speed of that RAM? What nForce2 chipset and from what manufacturer? The onboard audio solutions greatly differ when you take into account that motherboard manufacturers often don't agree on using the same onboard audio solution. What make/model is the GeForce 6600, many manufacturers use different techniques and parts on their hardware that makes it hard to pin down what performance you can expect with which card and the behavior is just as prevalent in all other aspects of hardware.
Having complete control over the hardware and software means that you're able to optimize your code for specific hardware combinations that are to be expected. You generally don't have to worry about what hardware the end-user will have because they simply don't have much capability to modify that. When you switch to generic x86 boxes you have to take into account that your programs will need to deal gracefully with a lot of different hardware configurations, especially exotic ones that are hardly ever seen. A lot of code in the Windows world is not really effectively optimized to take full advantage of all hardware configurations, but rather the code is designed to run, and any optimizations for certain pieces of hardware are introduced when and if the coder had the time and motivation to. Last time I checked, there wasn't much of a market for hardware on the Apple side of things except for whole systems.
To put it simply, there's not much variability in hardware configurations on the Mac platform. Microsoft has to accommodate a lot of hardware from a lot of different providers, and they also have to make a lot of concessions to appease those who put backwards compatibility as a paramount concern (And really it should be, but progress should not be halted because of it).
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When was the last time you ran the KDE Desktop Settings Wizard, by chance? Bells and whistles take computing power, it says so right in there and gives you a slider to illustrate the point, though it should be common sense that the more you have your OS doing at any given time, the more it's going to demand from your system.
By the way, if you meet the minimum comfort level for running Windows XP, you meet the minimum comfort level for running Windows Vista. Don't expect whiz-bang stuff like Aero to rock out on your antiquated hardware (And yes, four years is antiquated in terms of performance), and also keep in mind that there's a lot of functionality (Services, etc...) in the system that can be trimmed if you need to make your system leaner, same as XP.
Wrong direction? I'm sorry, I beg to differ. I actually enjoy having the OS evolve with the times, and I'm thankful that Aero didn't make its debut as a resource hogging slow-poke, like Aqua did when it first hit the street. Good thing for everyone though that Apple continued to tweak things, but charging for minor updates is a load of crap IMHO though I love the software.
People can cry all they want about how software development is going back asswards, and how software written today is by and large nothing but a bloat fest, but that doesn't change the fact that, hey, these days, people tend to multitask, a lot. Or at least power users who complain about system resources being eaten up on modern systems do. What you call bloat I call making the product easier to use and in general more pleasant to use, but hey, remember how the old saying goes? One man's trash is another man's treasure, and for what it's worth, on my system, Vista runs much faster than XP. That's progress, same as with how GNOME2/GTK+2 and KDE3/QT3 keep improving.
Is it so hard to act like the adult you should be if you were to be in the profession of teaching? One cannot justify something like this with "Well my work is so stressful" as if that's a free ticket to do your job poorly. These kids got what they wanted, if it was really a baiting situation (which, frankly, doesn't matter at all), and the teacher did nothing but embolden them to do it again in the future. I've dealt with enough asshat teachers though over the years to understand that it's not too far fetched that a person in authority could abuse that authority, and then struggle with damage control once caught.
That statement speaks volumes, it really does. Any teacher with a clue about their job would never be sucked into a stunt in the first place. The same goes for someone in basically any other field where they could be baited like this, and my own personal example is any customer service field. Just take a chill pill when things get fired up, because the only thing that an outburst is likely to cause is your own firing.
Wow, I wish I could live in such a black and white world and not realize it's a fabrication of my mind. Seriously, you appear to have no idea that there are so many variables, more than can be accurately brought up in this reply and keep it at a sane length to myself, that influence one's financial situation. I'll respond directly to the two (predictable) points you mention though:
1. Not always a possibility at any given time, sorry.
2. The best managing of one's money in the world does not modify one's actual income, and your recommendation makes the presumption that the person is spending wastefully in the first place.
But hey, it's cool to talk down to people in a worse situation than you are these days. I won't even go into something like being a single parent, whatever gender you happen to be.
I have two words for you -- Purchasing power. The people that bot ruin the game economy across all servers through their ill-gotten goods, whether those goods be trade items or raw gold. A person who bots their way to 60 in a week, effectively having no downtime due to the bot, is going to have gained plenty in gold and items by that time. There's plenty of fine loot to be had outside of instances, though without a doubt if you want the best for your level you're going to have to group it in an instance, and most of the money is to be had in trade skills. A miner/herbalist is always a guaranteed way to make a good living on any server. Certainly not a killer unless you devote a lot of time to it (So much so that leveling takes a back seat), and not as big a cash cow as high level enchanting, but it is good money nonetheless.
You might think otherwise, but quite frankly, the facts speak for themselves, and everyone is getting sick of gold farmers and the like being a largely ignored problem. I've been playing since the game was released, on old servers and new, and they all share the same affliction.
P.S. -- The really good loot in any instance is bind on pickup for the most part, so you can't resell it in the first place, so pointing out that bots aren't raiding instances is a little misguided. PvP is not the focus, though it is a point, because of course with easier funds, better equipment is more easily had. And yes, it is just a game. A game that is at high risk of losing a considerable amount of its base through this problem. This can be said of any gaming community -- Cheaters piss off every legit character who feels their time investment is worth a damn. That this is not a valuation of a man's soul is irrelevant and your attempt to minimize the situation by "putting it in perspective" fails, simply because you misunderstand the entire issue at hand.
I didn't realize that every game was supposed to be as instantly gratifying as, say, Duck Hunt. You're looking for the wrong thing in a game if you dislike it because of "grunt work" that you have to do. Would you rather that reagents and tradeskill items were simply rationed out to people? Or that every mob in the game dropped, to use an EQ term, phat lewtz? There's grunt work in everything, and depending on my mood I could turn the question around and ask it of real life.
In any case, anyone who's played a pen-and-paper RPG, and didn't have a DM/whatever just make life a breeze for them, is quite familiar with trudging through the average stuff in order to get to the goodies. World of Warcraft and for the most part every other MMORPG emulates this as best they can.
There are plenty of people living paycheck to paycheck who have an outlet like World of Warcraft when they want to relax and play a game or just kill time. There are also plenty of kids whose allowance or money earned from chores/etc doesn't cover a whole lot other than their favorite game. But I guess it certainly was easier to do what you did. Requires less thinking about possible scenarios, or thinking in general, rather.
Exactly, WoW bot programs, and Glider is the only one that I've even looked into before out of curiosity (A friend of mine was using it for a very short time to grind overnight while sleeping, stopped after a couple days because he decided it wasn't worth losing his account over), do nothing complicated. From what I remember reading before about Glider specifically, you set up an area to be patrolled with your character and outline basic actions that your character is to take as it does its patrols. These bots can resurrect themselves and pick up where they left off should they die (And they do, a lot. Especially if someone goes PvP on you. No bots react to PvP). Tell your botted character to run around the zone picking herbs or mining ore, or to kill the same mob over and over in an attempt to get its prized loot, they do stuff like that IIRC.
It's not like people are using bots to run raids or instances, they use them for the grunt work. :) Oh, and it sure has taken long enough for Blizz to do something.
P.S. -- Nice low number Cookie3. I r jealous. :(
And I should have used the preview button to catch that missing 'I'.
Uhhh, what? Daemon Tools 4.0.6 runs just fine in both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista. And Jesus Christ, as far as affording certs go I guess the majority of Slashdot has never heard of donating to a project you care about keeping around. $500 for a one-year license? Oh no, whatever shall we do?! Give me a fscking break, am a regular at many sites which operate off donations and pitch in when I can to keep what I like active.
To be fair, you can have, say, an ATI or NVidia graphics solution. ;) Granted though.
I would call out "the Linux developers", if my Debian or Ubuntu kernels ever caused me that kind of problem. Of course, Linux is not a $MULTIBILLION corporation, even over at RedHat, like Microsoft is. And kernel releases aren't the same as the Vista release.
So let me get this straight, you would be willing to bitch about the problems of a Linux kernel release with a serious bug that causes filesystem corruption if and only if it affected you. Yet, you're doing the same thing about a Vista that's not even a release? Nice. I'll say it again (I said it in another reply on this story), throwing money at a problem is no way to fix it, much less in the way of QA. You're practically saying F/OSS is never going to be able to compete with Microsoft if Microsoft were to smartly use it's money in solving problems. Riiiight. Kernel releases are the same as Vista releases, in that we're talking about what has been deemed release-quality code.
The Microsoft model is supposedly to release new OS'es every few years, after rigorous internal testing of their proprietary code. This bug episode shows that model is not reliable - they obviously don't test enough internally before releasing even a beta to outside developers/testers.
If you think that such a huge and massive project such as this is ever going to be bug-free, you're quite mistaken. Even Debian stable has bugs. Even OpenBSD has bugs. You completely ignore the fact that Vista development wasn't something that followed rigorous guidelines set back a little while after XP was released. You completely ignore the fact that time and the competition does not stop for Microsoft, Apple, or F/OSS developers. New features are introduced to different platforms on a regular basis, and this means new code must be implemented in your system lest you fall behind. This code might not be as well tested as the code that came before it, and vice versa. In any case, I would generally be glad that Microsoft is not releasing a piece of software that is known to cause such problems for some people, and are pushing back the release date for it. That's just not good enough for some people though who are under the impression that developing such a large-scale OS is a cakewalk, and that bugs are inexcusable this late in the game. I still can't get a Linux kernel to compile without warnings, or to be an entirely bug-free release. Do you hear me bitching about this anywhere? No, because I understand that for a moving target in terms of development, it's unreasonable.
Let's have a sense of proportion. Microsoft has a model whose money depends on insecurities and bugs to force upgrades every few years. Linux has lots of different models, the main one being frequent releases of code that interested people can fix ourselves. Not a good comparison, especially when considering the stakes: 95% of computers running MS, maybe 1-5% running Linux.
Proportion? Alright. Plenty of people are still running Microsoft operating systems already quite outside the support window, the EOL'ed bunch. There are coders out there who still help support those systems with whatever upgrades they can possibly deliver. Nobody is forced to do an upgrade to the latest Microsoft OS, it is simply something that is made easier by the fact that quite a lot (Most) of new PCs are shipped with the latest from Microsoft pre-installed for convenience to the end-user. If you don't want a system with Windows pre-installed, there are many ways that you can get that and it's quite ineffective to claim otherwise these days. If I wanted to, I could use Windows 98SE with a full firewall and AV solution. I would be limited in what I could do with it simply because, as anyone with brains would acknowledge, it's an inferior product with a dead codebase that wasn't and isn't going anywhere. I could do the same thing with Windows 2000, and it would be quite a bit easier, and that's what a lot of Slashdot users who refuse to upgrade do, last time I checked. I suppose you're going to
So they said they broke it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Besides, if it is true, their products will be rendered ineffective when Microsoft (rightly) fixes the leak in the dam. Way to go guys, sell a service that depends on playing catch-up with Microsoft's efforts to keep the base system secure! I don't think I'm alone in thinking that is borderline retarded. I think I'll just keep up with using my free antivirus solutions and smart computing, combined with whatever security measures the base system has to offer, whether I'm working in my Linux or Windows. Kinda makes me want to put the x64 Edition of XP back on here, because it at least has the same protection the 64bit Vista is offering as far as PatchGuard goes.
Maybe you should do some research on how many releases of the Linux kernel have had filesystem corruption issues much like this one affecting Vista, a product that has not been released yet. I'll give you a hint, the latest one happened in 2.6.18, and no, it wasn't in -mm.
Look, I use Linux, I love the software I use on it, and when I used to run my home servers, I did it on Linux because I trusted the technology. However, if you're going to be so harsh on Microsoft for pushing back a release date to fix a bug in a scenario that's so reminiscent of the recent pushing back of Fedora Core 6 because of an ext3 bug (Well, I guess I kind you the rest of the info from that hint earlier) then I would hope that you do the same thing to the kernel developers and flame them for apparent incompetence, which of course is not my position at all. Shit happens anywhere you go.
Would Apple take full liability for any portion of any of their software causing data loss through a difficult to reproduce bug that occurs on certain hardware combinations with certain software combinations? The answer is no. No sane company does that except ones that make mission-critical software and present it as such. In fact, most software companies and developers release themselves from any legal liability in the terms of use for their program.
I agree with you that the one millionth user is important, that the problem is important, the thing is that you have to have priorities. You fix what's going to affect the most people first, and then focus your efforts on whatever else takes that items place on your list of priorities.
I've gotten so used to reading this, from the GPL and many other licenses (Though the wording may differ):
When's the last time you heard of a bug in Linux forcing a reinstall?
Hey Bright Boy, you must not pay attention to Linux news nor how many different distributions there are. Allow me to enlighten you a bit.
Mandrake 9.2 may kill LG CD-ROM drives | Fedora Core 6 release date pushed back | Kernel Newsflash (Do a quick search for this section of the page and the old production kernels) | ReiserFS and filesystem corruption issues -- how to fix them, etc (Has to do with an old known issue between Gentoo and ReiserFS | ext3 corruption issue in 2.6.18 found by RedHat
Also try running something like Rawhide, Gentoo unstable branch (Which I do), Debian unstable, or any plethora of other systems out there which include software that's not extensively tested. While it is true that it is rare to find incredible bugs that create a big headache for end-users in a Linux distribution release, it's not impossible and there have been many occurrences of these bugs in release Linux kernels themselves. Let's not kid ourselves, shit happens on both sides of the fence, and it's not only unfair but naive to hold Microsoft to some golden standard because they have a large bankroll. Throwing money at a problem is the worst way to solve it, especially when it comes to QA.
P.S. -- Even in the stable branches of distros breakage can happen and it can be difficult or impossible to recover vital data from the system. I'm running reiser4 on my ~amd64 Gentoo and I keep hoping I don't end up with filesystem corruption that would hit me quite often in the past when I was pretty much forced to use a vanilla kernel with reiser4 or the -mm patchset, which is about as unstable as they come. Plenty of other people get hit by random difficult to reproduce bugs for any filesystem, daily. ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs, you name it. I dunno about ext2 though, but since they're so closely related (ext2/3), I'd figure most things that ail one ail the other. Also, you were speaking directly on a bug forcing a reinstall of the system, which usually means a gross configuration error or some other form of data loss. The Mandrake link is the only one which diverts from this train of thought, but it most certainly was a big hitter if you can remember when the story hit, as I do.
Another P.S. -- You say they've had all this time to iron Vista out as if they started out with "This is what Vista is going to be, period. Get there and release it." Sorry buddy, that's not how development goes, especially when competitors are around introducing new ideas all the time, never mind your own R&D department.
As mentioned by RLaager, CTRL+R will solve your issue, however after hearing about this issue and thinking about it I think it would be a good idea to make the behavior completely optional with a toggle in the preferences, maybe even the individual chat window itself. Wish I knew how to code better. :(
Thanks for the link, I hadn't really thought of the issue that way before. It should be a preferences option for those that do custom formatting if they would like their formatting destroyed or not.
The bug report is here. I don't know if the developers of the Win32 port of GTK+ are aware of the issue, but the Gaim developers certainly are. Unfortunately it seems to be a difficult to pin down issue, and it might be as simple as using a different Win32 GTK+ build. I would try it right now while getting something to eat, but I'm in Linux land getting some things working. :)
Can you give a link to the bug report for that issue about cut/paste, because it sounds like you just need to hit the Clear Formatting button to get things back to normal. I've never suffered this issue. For the second, that sounds like the GTK+ rendering issue that's present with ClearType enabled in anything higher than 16-bit color depth. This is not a GAIM problem, but it is a problem with the build of GTK+ that GAIM uses/needs.
Thanks for the edumacation! Nice trick I was too lazy to look up myself.
Interesting, thank you very much for the input. :)
That's the job of those who provide drivers for their products. The onus is on them to provide efficient interface between the kernel and the rest of the system. The different versions of Vista have nothing to do with this, the fact that the hardware market is so varied and not every manufacturer cares about providing quality drivers has everything to do with it.
The new UI requires a DirectX 9-capable card and takes advantage of all the features made possible through DX9. I'm not aware of any internals in Vista that utilize DX10, since it's more orientated at allowing games to run better. Some details about DX10.
As with, for example, KDE, the CPU requirements drop off quite sharply if you disable things that you don't want/need which are enabled by default. Vista probably can run on the same CPU which you were running XP on out-of-spec, but I'm not so sure if you can get away with not having at least 512MB of RAM. Personally I wouldn't run Vista on less than 1GB of RAM, but I also don't consider running XP on less than 512MB of RAM. There's the indexer, the sidebar, the interface, the previews, a whole plethora of options. KDE puts it forward pretty simply too when the first run configuration wizard is used, telling you that if you have enough CPU power, feel free to push the slider to the right to get more glitz. Otherwise, it's probably smart to tone things down.
There are many factors that influence overall system performance and it's not so simple as to boil it down to well I have an Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB of RAM, an nForce2 chipset, the onboard audio solution, and an NVidia GeForce 6600. What code name/make is the CPU? What are the timings and what is the speed of that RAM? What nForce2 chipset and from what manufacturer? The onboard audio solutions greatly differ when you take into account that motherboard manufacturers often don't agree on using the same onboard audio solution. What make/model is the GeForce 6600, many manufacturers use different techniques and parts on their hardware that makes it hard to pin down what performance you can expect with which card and the behavior is just as prevalent in all other aspects of hardware.
Having complete control over the hardware and software means that you're able to optimize your code for specific hardware combinations that are to be expected. You generally don't have to worry about what hardware the end-user will have because they simply don't have much capability to modify that. When you switch to generic x86 boxes you have to take into account that your programs will need to deal gracefully with a lot of different hardware configurations, especially exotic ones that are hardly ever seen. A lot of code in the Windows world is not really effectively optimized to take full advantage of all hardware configurations, but rather the code is designed to run, and any optimizations for certain pieces of hardware are introduced when and if the coder had the time and motivation to. Last time I checked, there wasn't much of a market for hardware on the Apple side of things except for whole systems.
To put it simply, there's not much variability in hardware configurations on the Mac platform. Microsoft has to accommodate a lot of hardware from a lot of different providers, and they also have to make a lot of concessions to appease those who put backwards compatibility as a paramount concern (And really it should be, but progress should not be halted because of it).