Boy, so much talk over this release name... And to think they passed on calling 7.04 "Flatulent Flamingo"... Now THAT would've generated some discussions!
Sad thing is, they used to have this kind of jokes all through the 90's. You know, how MS will release a floppy that doubles as a CC reader and so on. They used to be funny back then. It gets a bit chilly when you see it happening.
The hosting services I use all offer Postgres as well. And it's no accident.
I don't think that's the issue. The issue are all those very popular applications that use only MySQL. Such as WordPress. For many of them, migrating to Postgres is not trivial.
In regard to licensing, since a hosting service makes money out of hosting stuff on MySQL, do they need to pay for a MySQL commercial license?
But if you compare you can compare upwards too. I own a MobilePro (off eBay, naturally) but I use mainly as a bookreader and to cover my basic computing needs on trips. I'm gonna be all over the 9in eeePC when it comes out.
The only way I see for them to effectively stop people taking this "XP-lite" out of the EeePC is to somehow cripple the OS into not accepting any drivers other than what's strictly needed to run on the EeePC. I mean lock in the mobo, sound, video, wired network, wifi, USB... and leave peripheral stuff (printers and such) alone. But it could just as easily backfire in unforeseen ways. And it would send a not-very-nice message.
Neither can Dell, HP or any other hardware manufacturer. This trend impacts them every bit as much as Microsoft, although on the whole I think hardware manufacturers should be able to adapt easier than Microsoft. Not necessarily. They depend on the OS, and they don't make the OS. Sure, they could start building their own using Linux, but it's not that easy. For one thing, they risk scarying Microsoft into God knows what reaction. And then it's not so easy to just slap Linux somewhere and let it be. You have to R&D a nicely integrated hardware+software bundle, offer technical support for it and so on.
CE is a no-go. It's not XP/Vista so most of the XP/Vista software won't run on it. And the stuff that does run on CE was meant for handhelds and PDA's -- it has inadequate interfaces and needs a touchscreen most of the time. Sure, they could put CE on it but what will people do with it?
If they could have picked something else over XP to put on the EeePC they would've done it.
I don't know why you're omitting Windows CE. It can run on x86 and takes very little resources.
I know why Microsoft omitted it: because it won't run XP software and most of the CE software is meant to work with touchscreens, not mouse.
Basically what caught MS on the wrong leg wasn't any one factor, but a combination. To successfully exploit the UMPC platform they need a (1) lightweight (2) desktop OS and (3) as large an application mass as they can get.
Vista is too heavy; CE, XP embedded and Mobile are light but don't bring in the right apps; some of the server variants of Windows may have made the cut but they weren't meant for desktop use. So it was either retrofit XP or give up on UMPC's. Or ressurect Windows 98, but seriously.:D
Or buy one. F15 is not the only model in the world. Nor are all fighter planes made by the US.
That's not the point. It's not about getting war tech, it's about studying current american war tech to find weaknesses.
Stuff like this surfacing on eBay is silly for many reasons. Frankly, I'm doubting the entire story, or at the very least the angle.
The WP article is full of inflamatory speculation, slapping together possibly unrelated information to make a troll. Every other paragraph has dubious points in it. What exactly are those "plane parts"? They're not saying. Who bought them? Not a peep, so then why finger Iran if there's no evidence? They say they couldn't figure out where the parts came from, yet they "must" be "stolen", because that's how they automatically define selling certain kinds of Army items.
Granted, any piece of knowledge about the US army may be useful for any foreign power. But if the US army doesn't want stuff to end up on eBay they should guard it more careful. Since they didn't, there's either major incompetence at play, or it wasn't such sensitive material after all.
Seriously, do you really think that truly useful information or material of this kind would be sold on eBay? When there are professional arms dealers and spies out there? Let's give those Hollywood movies a rest, shall we.
If I were to take this article at face value, I'd say it's an attempt at sticking it to the army for not taking better care of its stuff. While I'm all for that, it stops being funny once non sequitur allegations are made about certain foreign countries. Then it becomes a transparent attempt at instilling paranoia among the public. "Oh noes, Iran is buying our planes on eBay! How low have we sunk! We're doomed!" Please.
Now, the average user turns off UAC. For a simple reason: Imagine some tool you don't know much besides operating it asks you "The futzgrabber in the argamajig wants to mirfl. Cancel or allow?"
Giving the users some credit (ie. "it helps protect the computer"), I think the reason is simpler than that. Removing UAC is the most obvious solution to the problem (extreme UAC annoyance).
Let me offer another example: if Linda from Accounting makes for 75% of my daily tech support problems, the most obvious solution for that is not replacing all 2nd floor printers, rewiring Accounting and reinstalling her Windows. It's eliminating Linda.
So do other countries, such as Bulgaria or Romania, who were neck-deep in the Ottoman Empire for centuries and yet have some of the highest rate of support for Turkey joining EU. You don't hold grudges in Europe over the past because at some point everybody fought everybody else.
You think Greece is ever going to say, "hey, lets put a few hundred years of Ottoman Occupation behind us...", or, Austria might just say, "that siege of vienna just an old thing..."
That's a silly way to look at it. There are various reasons that make Turkey joining EU a problem. Such as friction related to opressed minorities, semi-autonomous enclaves, acknowledgment of the Cyprus Republic and various borders and so on.
The Ottoman Empire is not one of the reasons. That's ancient history. You seem to forget that in Europe almost every country fought a war against anybody else at some point. If they were to hold grudges over the past they'd never get anywhere.
I'd rather live in a society which is not over-populated and workforce scarcity comes from a large percentage of the population being old people and children.
Compare it to an over-populated society. Overall you get an even larger non-productive percentage which has to be supported, except it's not children enjoying family support or old people enjoying a pension, but able workers driven to artificial inactivity.
Over-population is the plague of the modern times and should start being regarded as one. As technology advances, more brute work force is replaced by machines and human work is required for higher skills only. Which means that more and more people need to work less and then the question arises: what level of quality of life should these people that work less enjoy?
If the nation has a population problem, the answer is "fuck 'em, give them just enough to survive" and you get Soylent Green. If the nation doesn't have an over-population problem and can afford high level social services, you get Childhood's End (without the aliens), where people can dedicate themselves to other things, such as art or research.
The problem is dire for the US because, unlike China, for instance, the government can't even impose birth control. It's not a totalitarian government and you can't force people to do this, right? Especially not when God forbids it. So the problem has yet to even be acknowledged. Google for "US birth control" and "China birth control" and you'll get generic contraception advice for the first and population control for the second.
So if they approve something you 'believe' to be wrong, then it invalidates everything they have ever done?
No, just everything they ever done in the future. Proper standardization involves a level of credibility and reputation. Once that is gone, you're just another organization claiming to produce "standards" that nobody cares about.
Granted, ISO was a sitting duck. It's just as much Microsoft's merit for noticing that that it's the rest of the world's fault for not believing that Microsoft would do it. ISO was wide open to abuse. Its highly bureaucratic structure made it react like a fat cow attacked by a pack of wolves: just stood there and mooed a couple of times as it went down.
I hope ISO will review their procedures and make it so this kind of abuse is not possible in the future. Unless they do, they're history.
It's already been pointed often elsewhere in the discussion that Apple didn't have a large installed base when they did that. They could afford to lose it because they were practically restarting from scratch anyway. Microsoft doesn't have that luxury.
And virtualization is just as performant on any platform where the emulator runs. That includes Linux and Mac. Given that, when the time comes one may not necessarily upgrade to Windows 7 + XP emulation but to Linux + XP emulation. XP is not developed anymore, hardware performance increases all the time, so support from all kinds of emulators will only get better.
But I doubt it'll be a whole new OS. I reckon they'll just change Vista enough so that it doesn't suck anymore.
Not if they have half a brain. By now they must've figured out that part of the GNU/Linux/FOSS success is their highly modular nature that allows stuff to be combined to service any kind of platform with minimal effort.
Windows OS's are cumbersome dinosaurs when compared to that. If you want it to run on servers, desktops and handhelds you need 3 wildly different variants of Windows (and they'll only run on one or two architectures). And when something new comes along, like the low-cost laptop frenzy, you have to do a half-baked dead-end solution like partially upgrading the hardware to support a slimmed-down XP for a while. But there are very successful platforms out there (like home routers) where Windows as we know it has never set foot and never will unless it changes drastically.
For Microsoft, "does it run Linux" is not a joke, it's a sad truth. I'm thinking this is where they're going with Windows 7. Whether, when and how they'll ever get there is another matter, though.
If Apps manufacturers are forced to follow suit, all new apps will have no (or poor) XP compatibility and thus will not run on the likes of ReactOS - in other words, end-users MUST use Win7 in order to run the latest apps.
But this way of doing things has one major drawback: a middle ground where Windows 7's application pool will be severely cut back. Not even Vista has ever been in this situation. It's a very delicate position to be in. A vicious circle: why would users upgrade to an OS without apps? Why would app makers port their apps to an OS without users?
It opens the door for alternatives like Linux to suddenly seem a lot more attractive. Remember, we're talking 2010 (2012 at best, realistically). That's 4 years. Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE/etc. will be a lot more polished by then. New technologies may conquer the desktop in the meantime (Adobe for instance is moving in strongly with AIR, Mozilla with Weave and XULRunner etc.)
I'm afraid that this move comes late. Vista is a detour that should have never been taken. It ate precious time at a very sensitive moment in IT evolution. It may come to be remembered as the second Windows ME (although arguably doesn't have the stability issues that plagued ME).
ISO's credibility is shot. Period. When its NB's do whatever they can to approve a specification that is technically and legally impossible to implement, just because one company tells them to, I say ISO is dead in the water. Its work has just lost all meaning.
The NB's went to ridiculous lengths to pass OOXML. We've seen small companies joining commitees in drones days before the vote and voting to approve without any kind of justification; we've seen commitee chairs openly lobbying OOXML and spreading Microsoft propaganda; we've seen overwhelming opposition simply shut out, rules changed on the fly and generally doing everything but dancing naked on a pole just so that OOXML is passed.
Fuck ISO. I cannot believe how wide open they were to this kind of abuse. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. And the second they pass OOXML under these conditions, "ISO certified" transforms to shit. Who's to say what other ISO "standards" in the future won't be passed this way? An ISO standard used to mean something. Now it doesn't mean anything.
Thank you, Microsoft, for destroying a global organization. If after this anybody still doesn't believe that Microsoft will fuck up anything as long as it's good for them, they're cracked in the head.
Does anyone have any studies, polls or surveys backing up either position?
Probably, but what good are they? If you saw a survey claiming that 90% of PC users say "Vista sucks/rules", would it change your opinion if it happened to be the opposite? No, you'd be saying to yourself "what a load of bull, that's SO not true" and you'd go digging for proof it was fabricated by fanboys/corporations etc.
When the subject is something that everybody has their own strong opinion of, polls and survey's don't matter much anymore, they're just flamebait. And if Vista is anything, it's something that everybody has a strong opinion of, I'll give it that.
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Boy, so much talk over this release name... And to think they passed on calling 7.04 "Flatulent Flamingo"... Now THAT would've generated some discussions!
Sad thing is, they used to have this kind of jokes all through the 90's. You know, how MS will release a floppy that doubles as a CC reader and so on. They used to be funny back then. It gets a bit chilly when you see it happening.
The hosting services I use all offer Postgres as well. And it's no accident.
I don't think that's the issue. The issue are all those very popular applications that use only MySQL. Such as WordPress. For many of them, migrating to Postgres is not trivial.
In regard to licensing, since a hosting service makes money out of hosting stuff on MySQL, do they need to pay for a MySQL commercial license?
I meant strangle her. The boss can shag the carcass all he wants. At least she'll be quiet.
But if you compare you can compare upwards too. I own a MobilePro (off eBay, naturally) but I use mainly as a bookreader and to cover my basic computing needs on trips. I'm gonna be all over the 9in eeePC when it comes out.
The only way I see for them to effectively stop people taking this "XP-lite" out of the EeePC is to somehow cripple the OS into not accepting any drivers other than what's strictly needed to run on the EeePC. I mean lock in the mobo, sound, video, wired network, wifi, USB... and leave peripheral stuff (printers and such) alone. But it could just as easily backfire in unforeseen ways. And it would send a not-very-nice message.
CE is a no-go. It's not XP/Vista so most of the XP/Vista software won't run on it. And the stuff that does run on CE was meant for handhelds and PDA's -- it has inadequate interfaces and needs a touchscreen most of the time. Sure, they could put CE on it but what will people do with it?
If they could have picked something else over XP to put on the EeePC they would've done it.
I don't know why you're omitting Windows CE. It can run on x86 and takes very little resources.
:D
I know why Microsoft omitted it: because it won't run XP software and most of the CE software is meant to work with touchscreens, not mouse.
Basically what caught MS on the wrong leg wasn't any one factor, but a combination. To successfully exploit the UMPC platform they need a (1) lightweight (2) desktop OS and (3) as large an application mass as they can get.
Vista is too heavy; CE, XP embedded and Mobile are light but don't bring in the right apps; some of the server variants of Windows may have made the cut but they weren't meant for desktop use. So it was either retrofit XP or give up on UMPC's. Or ressurect Windows 98, but seriously.
Or buy one. F15 is not the only model in the world. Nor are all fighter planes made by the US.
That's not the point. It's not about getting war tech, it's about studying current american war tech to find weaknesses.
Stuff like this surfacing on eBay is silly for many reasons. Frankly, I'm doubting the entire story, or at the very least the angle.
The WP article is full of inflamatory speculation, slapping together possibly unrelated information to make a troll. Every other paragraph has dubious points in it. What exactly are those "plane parts"? They're not saying. Who bought them? Not a peep, so then why finger Iran if there's no evidence? They say they couldn't figure out where the parts came from, yet they "must" be "stolen", because that's how they automatically define selling certain kinds of Army items.
Granted, any piece of knowledge about the US army may be useful for any foreign power. But if the US army doesn't want stuff to end up on eBay they should guard it more careful. Since they didn't, there's either major incompetence at play, or it wasn't such sensitive material after all.
Seriously, do you really think that truly useful information or material of this kind would be sold on eBay? When there are professional arms dealers and spies out there? Let's give those Hollywood movies a rest, shall we.
If I were to take this article at face value, I'd say it's an attempt at sticking it to the army for not taking better care of its stuff. While I'm all for that, it stops being funny once non sequitur allegations are made about certain foreign countries. Then it becomes a transparent attempt at instilling paranoia among the public. "Oh noes, Iran is buying our planes on eBay! How low have we sunk! We're doomed!" Please.
OK, so it can be done, but let's not get carried away and call it "easy". :)
Let me offer another example: if Linda from Accounting makes for 75% of my daily tech support problems, the most obvious solution for that is not replacing all 2nd floor printers, rewiring Accounting and reinstalling her Windows. It's eliminating Linda.
And by that he means they'll be dislodged by the blast.
So do other countries, such as Bulgaria or Romania, who were neck-deep in the Ottoman Empire for centuries and yet have some of the highest rate of support for Turkey joining EU. You don't hold grudges in Europe over the past because at some point everybody fought everybody else.
The Ottoman Empire is not one of the reasons. That's ancient history. You seem to forget that in Europe almost every country fought a war against anybody else at some point. If they were to hold grudges over the past they'd never get anywhere.
I'd rather live in a society which is not over-populated and workforce scarcity comes from a large percentage of the population being old people and children.
Compare it to an over-populated society. Overall you get an even larger non-productive percentage which has to be supported, except it's not children enjoying family support or old people enjoying a pension, but able workers driven to artificial inactivity.
Over-population is the plague of the modern times and should start being regarded as one. As technology advances, more brute work force is replaced by machines and human work is required for higher skills only. Which means that more and more people need to work less and then the question arises: what level of quality of life should these people that work less enjoy?
If the nation has a population problem, the answer is "fuck 'em, give them just enough to survive" and you get Soylent Green. If the nation doesn't have an over-population problem and can afford high level social services, you get Childhood's End (without the aliens), where people can dedicate themselves to other things, such as art or research.
The problem is dire for the US because, unlike China, for instance, the government can't even impose birth control. It's not a totalitarian government and you can't force people to do this, right? Especially not when God forbids it. So the problem has yet to even be acknowledged. Google for "US birth control" and "China birth control" and you'll get generic contraception advice for the first and population control for the second.
Granted, ISO was a sitting duck. It's just as much Microsoft's merit for noticing that that it's the rest of the world's fault for not believing that Microsoft would do it. ISO was wide open to abuse. Its highly bureaucratic structure made it react like a fat cow attacked by a pack of wolves: just stood there and mooed a couple of times as it went down.
I hope ISO will review their procedures and make it so this kind of abuse is not possible in the future. Unless they do, they're history.
It's already been pointed often elsewhere in the discussion that Apple didn't have a large installed base when they did that. They could afford to lose it because they were practically restarting from scratch anyway. Microsoft doesn't have that luxury.
And virtualization is just as performant on any platform where the emulator runs. That includes Linux and Mac. Given that, when the time comes one may not necessarily upgrade to Windows 7 + XP emulation but to Linux + XP emulation. XP is not developed anymore, hardware performance increases all the time, so support from all kinds of emulators will only get better.
Windows OS's are cumbersome dinosaurs when compared to that. If you want it to run on servers, desktops and handhelds you need 3 wildly different variants of Windows (and they'll only run on one or two architectures). And when something new comes along, like the low-cost laptop frenzy, you have to do a half-baked dead-end solution like partially upgrading the hardware to support a slimmed-down XP for a while. But there are very successful platforms out there (like home routers) where Windows as we know it has never set foot and never will unless it changes drastically.
For Microsoft, "does it run Linux" is not a joke, it's a sad truth. I'm thinking this is where they're going with Windows 7. Whether, when and how they'll ever get there is another matter, though.
Make that 6.
It opens the door for alternatives like Linux to suddenly seem a lot more attractive. Remember, we're talking 2010 (2012 at best, realistically). That's 4 years. Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE/etc. will be a lot more polished by then. New technologies may conquer the desktop in the meantime (Adobe for instance is moving in strongly with AIR, Mozilla with Weave and XULRunner etc.)
I'm afraid that this move comes late. Vista is a detour that should have never been taken. It ate precious time at a very sensitive moment in IT evolution. It may come to be remembered as the second Windows ME (although arguably doesn't have the stability issues that plagued ME).
Jesus, we never actually evolved, did we? It just dawned on me. We're adults, yet acting just like dogs, cavemen or 4yr olds.
Somebody mod the parent troll down.
ISO's credibility is shot. Period. When its NB's do whatever they can to approve a specification that is technically and legally impossible to implement, just because one company tells them to, I say ISO is dead in the water. Its work has just lost all meaning.
The NB's went to ridiculous lengths to pass OOXML. We've seen small companies joining commitees in drones days before the vote and voting to approve without any kind of justification; we've seen commitee chairs openly lobbying OOXML and spreading Microsoft propaganda; we've seen overwhelming opposition simply shut out, rules changed on the fly and generally doing everything but dancing naked on a pole just so that OOXML is passed.
Fuck ISO. I cannot believe how wide open they were to this kind of abuse. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. And the second they pass OOXML under these conditions, "ISO certified" transforms to shit. Who's to say what other ISO "standards" in the future won't be passed this way? An ISO standard used to mean something. Now it doesn't mean anything.
Thank you, Microsoft, for destroying a global organization. If after this anybody still doesn't believe that Microsoft will fuck up anything as long as it's good for them, they're cracked in the head.
When the subject is something that everybody has their own strong opinion of, polls and survey's don't matter much anymore, they're just flamebait. And if Vista is anything, it's something that everybody has a strong opinion of, I'll give it that.