Point taken. It's true that backwards-compability fetishes result in some interesting success stories, too. I mean check this one out. Emulator piled on top of VM piled on top of emulator dating back to 1973. Freakin' amazing.
Microsoft's in a more complicated place than Mac OS, but I think they could probably solve their problems the same way (See my comment here).
Microsoft's biggest problem, really, is that their application development community is HUGE and not all of them do things the "right" way. I'm talking apps writing things they shouldn't to the registry (which is a depressing sh*tstorm anyway) and handling their files the wrong way. Having a BSD-style security model would make the whole thing much more secure, no doubt, but it would break all of those apps. Having a sandboxed VM that runs legacy apps would help from the user's point of view so lon as it was lightweight enough for them not to notice it, but any kind of major change to the OS and how it handles itself will be a major strain on applications.
As I said above, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask application providers to update their stuff, but it's a slow process. Windows has a looooong way to go before it can be 100% changed, even if everyone involved recognized it's a better way to be.
Best steps now would be . . .
Get rid of the Registry. Have it be in a sandboxed mode and don't rely on it for the operating system—or, have a non-sandboxed registry for the OS.
Dump internet explorer and bundle something else when the OS installs. IE is a pretty terrible web browser anyway, and it's one big huge security issue because it's tied so deeply into the operating system.
Stop trying to add so many features to the OS!!!! For the love of GOD there's just no need. Have those things handled by applications that run in userspace so they're not always running and/or exploited constantly.
STOP NOTIFYING ME THAT I HAVE UNUSED ITEMS ON MY DESKTOP 'CAUSE I CLEARLY DON'T CARE
Ok. Got a little off-topic there but someone somewhere had to say it.
This is at least somewhat correct. Legacy support is responsible for a lot of Windows's problems.
All the more reason to put the legacy crap in a VM so that the OS, in the ordinary course of running modern apps, isn't bogged down by them.
Take, for example, how Apple had Mac OS X and Mac OS Classic running concurrently. It was kind of a bitch to wait for Classic to start up that first time you opened a Classic app, but it would happily run in the background and once you were done with your Classic apps you could shut it down and it wouldn't be a drain on your resources any more. Imagine Windows Vista running Windows Classic XP, Windows Classic 2000, Windows Classic 98 and Windows Classic 95 all at once, all the time, without the option of turning them all off, and that's kind of the situation now. The fact that I can open super-old apps in Windows is kind of cool, I guess, but for me I keep imagining what a kludge it is to keep all those compatibility layers in the core OS. My Intel mac can't run any Classic apps, but those are all ten years old; why would I need any of them?
I think it's interesting that the backwards compatibility fetish is so extreme with MS. I don't think it's too unreasonable to ask software makers to keep their stuff up to date or face obsolescence when the OS gets upgraded a few versions later. Even Starcraft has a patch to run on my macbookpro. Doesn't seem to be hurting Blizzard all that much to keep that going....
But with rear-facing seats you face the possibility of debris flying directly at you with nothing to block it. It's sort of a trade-off. When I heard an engineer talking about this on TV (was it mythbusters?), he said that a baby sitting in its parent's lap could "become a projectile" in a crash. Kind of a wild way of putting it but it makes sense. I lean towards backward-facing seats, though. The flying public would put up with it just as well as forward-facing seats if they could board from the rear anyway.
Or, you're just an asshole. You can disagree about Snow Crash, but don't belittle someone and then presume yourself to be better read than they are simply because you disagree.
Look back on history at all the things the US government tried like hell, and for good reason, to keep secret. Terrible, horrible things that they just couldn't keep a lid on.
There comes a certain point where a government has either confessed or accidentally leaked or fucked up enough things that are genuinely and truly horrific that an alien spaceship crash just pales in comparison. I think by now we've reached that point.
Interestingly enough, when I worked at a comic book shop/record shop in high school, my boss had an elaborate setup for playing records in his car (read: a pillow with a technics 1200 on top of it and a ghettotacular homebrew pre-amp), but he needed to have a passenger sit with it in his/her lap and babysit it so that nothing terrible happened to it.
It's a good thing that the same side of the moon is always facing Earth. Otherwise, they'd fire this puppy up, and 180 degrees' rotation later, a loud, collective "Oh shit!" is heard 'round the world.
2. It doesn't burn battery -- are you perhaps using Aero Glass?
Maybe I'm old-fashioned this way, but I'm a man who believes that having a fancy (in a usable way) interface should be no excuse for slow multitasking and horrible battery life. Obviously, if I'm playing a really graphics-intensive game or something like that, I have little to no expectation of good battery life, but the operating system just sitting there and my ordinary work that I do on it should not be impeded significantly by the operating system's eye candy.
I have only played with Vista a couple of times (on a Mac that triple-boots XP, Ubuntu and Mac OS over here), but one of the things I was struck by was the sheer amount of purely unnecessary eye candy. The weird application-switching thing doesn't actually make your life any easier, in particular, even though it's prettier than simple alt-tabbing. People make it seem like such a revolutionary thing, and maybe it is for Windows but over here in mac country we have had exposé for a while now, and linux folk have their beryl/compiz/xgl/awesomeness.
I think what most people are complaining about is that Vista is no more functional than XP on a fundamental level, and yet it consumes many more resources, costs more, and is on some levels less functional (vis-a-vis DRM restrictions). DX10 is a big deal, but if that's all, why is that worth a full OS update? Why can't DirectX be something separate?
4. The copy doesn't stop if it requires elevation.
As has been pointed out previously, that may be the case on your machines, but your evidence (and I guess your parents' too) is just as anecdotal as his/hers is. This is a problem I've heard about enough to say it probably does exist, even though I've not seen it on any of my machines so far. I will say that Vista asks for elevation an awful lot, whereas my other operating systems really only ask for it when I'm trying to write to one of the strictly system directories (like/Applications or/Library on my mac, / and/bin and such on my linux system).
Microsoft (the abomination that is windows) vs. Sony (rootkit fiasco and the PSP). . . . Hrmmmm. . . . That's a really tough choice which one I hate more.
Creationists then come and say "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made in keeping with the idea the earth is 6,000 years old".
And this is exactly why it's not real science. That's why we have hypotheses rather than preconceived notions, be they from your own head or from the Bible. Young-Earth creationists aren't trying to come up with a rational and logical theory for how the Universe came to be; they're trying to find anything they can find, even if they have to resort to making up gibberish and waving their hands around, that can "prove" the Bible correct as a historical text.
The question that always comes to my mind is, Why are these people interpreting the current Bible as the literal word of God? Don't they realize that it's been translated and reinterpreted half a dozen times since it was originally written? One of my favourite things to point out to people is that in Genesis, the hebrew word usually translated to "day" as in seven days to create the Heaven and Earth literally translates to either "day" or "age". A lot of the language of the original torah is ambiguous, and I think that's mostly because nobody who was writing it at the time could possibly have conceived of the fact that if they mis-spelled a word it might start a war six thousand years later.
And while we're on the subject, if you're literally interpreting the Bible as the actual word of God, how come it's okay to eat meat on fridays now, women can share a bed with their husbands when they're on their period, and it's been so long since this country's seen a good old fashioned public stoning?
Not to mention those oh-so-1993 "back to top" links.
Oh and before anyone asks, yes, I am a web designer.
Seriously though folks. I'd be worried about this and thinking the world is coming to an end if I thought there was any chance that this sort of thing could even happen. Obviousness, the backed-up patent system in this decaying republic, derivative work... people have already brought all these things up. At the risk of sounding repetitive, though, I'm going to say this is a worthless pipe dream if it's not an April Fools joke that's a few months late.
Or for those of us who are using a Mac, it's option-e, then e. Deadkeys, they're called, and they make my typing in Spanish pretty trivial even when my keyboard has a US layout.
While it didn't eliminate straight-ports, it quickly exposed ports for being gimped versions of full games... meaning a lot of portable development went towards unique games unlike their more homebodied cousins.
One of the things that really impressed me about the DS was the uniqueness of the games available for it. Some of them are kinda silly (I'm lookin' at you, Nintendogs!), but most of them are super innovative and kind of amazing. Just like what's been happening with the Wii, the unique set of inputs has created really unique games. I think it's telling that I couldn't really play these effectively in an emulator, nor could they be trivially ported to another system without losing a lot of functionality.
By contrast, the straight ports from other systems are either clunky (Super Mario 64; using the touchscreen as a surrogate analogue stick is really annoying) or straight-up boring.
As for internet access, I'd recommend getting a R4DS and a memory card and running DSLinux or, just as good, write your own browser and run it on there. Despite not supporting homebrew out of the box, the DS is pretty easy to work for homebrew use anyway.
That's correct. Money is obviously still being spent and illegal downloading hasn't shut down our national economy. They're right in that the act of illegal downloading does not in and of itself generate economic activity, though that's arguable because of all the other monetary exchanges going on in the process (payments for internet access, ad revenues, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. It's true that backwards-compability fetishes result in some interesting success stories, too. I mean check this one out. Emulator piled on top of VM piled on top of emulator dating back to 1973. Freakin' amazing.
Microsoft's in a more complicated place than Mac OS, but I think they could probably solve their problems the same way (See my comment here).
Microsoft's biggest problem, really, is that their application development community is HUGE and not all of them do things the "right" way. I'm talking apps writing things they shouldn't to the registry (which is a depressing sh*tstorm anyway) and handling their files the wrong way. Having a BSD-style security model would make the whole thing much more secure, no doubt, but it would break all of those apps. Having a sandboxed VM that runs legacy apps would help from the user's point of view so lon as it was lightweight enough for them not to notice it, but any kind of major change to the OS and how it handles itself will be a major strain on applications.
As I said above, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask application providers to update their stuff, but it's a slow process. Windows has a looooong way to go before it can be 100% changed, even if everyone involved recognized it's a better way to be.
Best steps now would be . . .
Ok. Got a little off-topic there but someone somewhere had to say it.
All the more reason to put the legacy crap in a VM so that the OS, in the ordinary course of running modern apps, isn't bogged down by them.
Take, for example, how Apple had Mac OS X and Mac OS Classic running concurrently. It was kind of a bitch to wait for Classic to start up that first time you opened a Classic app, but it would happily run in the background and once you were done with your Classic apps you could shut it down and it wouldn't be a drain on your resources any more. Imagine Windows Vista running Windows Classic XP, Windows Classic 2000, Windows Classic 98 and Windows Classic 95 all at once, all the time, without the option of turning them all off, and that's kind of the situation now. The fact that I can open super-old apps in Windows is kind of cool, I guess, but for me I keep imagining what a kludge it is to keep all those compatibility layers in the core OS. My Intel mac can't run any Classic apps, but those are all ten years old; why would I need any of them?
I think it's interesting that the backwards compatibility fetish is so extreme with MS. I don't think it's too unreasonable to ask software makers to keep their stuff up to date or face obsolescence when the OS gets upgraded a few versions later. Even Starcraft has a patch to run on my macbookpro. Doesn't seem to be hurting Blizzard all that much to keep that going....
s/baby/laptop/ and my point still stands.
But with rear-facing seats you face the possibility of debris flying directly at you with nothing to block it. It's sort of a trade-off. When I heard an engineer talking about this on TV (was it mythbusters?), he said that a baby sitting in its parent's lap could "become a projectile" in a crash. Kind of a wild way of putting it but it makes sense. I lean towards backward-facing seats, though. The flying public would put up with it just as well as forward-facing seats if they could board from the rear anyway.
Yeah as long as you don't bring a knife to spread it with.
I'm a corn farmer, you insensitive clod!
Nah I'm not really. Just live in the midwest.
In Soviet Russia, toilet flushes YOU!
Or, you're just an asshole. You can disagree about Snow Crash, but don't belittle someone and then presume yourself to be better read than they are simply because you disagree.
I love it. This article is both tagged "haha" AND "hahahaha", 'cause only one of those wouldn't be quite enough.
*whoosh!*
There's a reason it's modded "funny", guys.
Look back on history at all the things the US government tried like hell, and for good reason, to keep secret. Terrible, horrible things that they just couldn't keep a lid on.
There comes a certain point where a government has either confessed or accidentally leaked or fucked up enough things that are genuinely and truly horrific that an alien spaceship crash just pales in comparison. I think by now we've reached that point.
Interestingly enough, when I worked at a comic book shop/record shop in high school, my boss had an elaborate setup for playing records in his car (read: a pillow with a technics 1200 on top of it and a ghettotacular homebrew pre-amp), but he needed to have a passenger sit with it in his/her lap and babysit it so that nothing terrible happened to it.
I just wish I could listen to my 78s in my car....
Seriously, though, folks, lossless compression *does* exist, but those downloads cost money on the server end, too.
It's a good thing that the same side of the moon is always facing Earth. Otherwise, they'd fire this puppy up, and 180 degrees' rotation later, a loud, collective "Oh shit!" is heard 'round the world.
Maybe they're all scheme programmers and are used to having "?" at the end of predicate functions rather than "p".
For the record, I know this and I'm 24. I <3 lisp :D.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned this way, but I'm a man who believes that having a fancy (in a usable way) interface should be no excuse for slow multitasking and horrible battery life. Obviously, if I'm playing a really graphics-intensive game or something like that, I have little to no expectation of good battery life, but the operating system just sitting there and my ordinary work that I do on it should not be impeded significantly by the operating system's eye candy.
I have only played with Vista a couple of times (on a Mac that triple-boots XP, Ubuntu and Mac OS over here), but one of the things I was struck by was the sheer amount of purely unnecessary eye candy. The weird application-switching thing doesn't actually make your life any easier, in particular, even though it's prettier than simple alt-tabbing. People make it seem like such a revolutionary thing, and maybe it is for Windows but over here in mac country we have had exposé for a while now, and linux folk have their beryl/compiz/xgl/awesomeness.
I think what most people are complaining about is that Vista is no more functional than XP on a fundamental level, and yet it consumes many more resources, costs more, and is on some levels less functional (vis-a-vis DRM restrictions). DX10 is a big deal, but if that's all, why is that worth a full OS update? Why can't DirectX be something separate?
4. The copy doesn't stop if it requires elevation.As has been pointed out previously, that may be the case on your machines, but your evidence (and I guess your parents' too) is just as anecdotal as his/hers is. This is a problem I've heard about enough to say it probably does exist, even though I've not seen it on any of my machines so far. I will say that Vista asks for elevation an awful lot, whereas my other operating systems really only ask for it when I'm trying to write to one of the strictly system directories (like /Applications or /Library on my mac, / and /bin and such on my linux system).
Just my two cents....
The goal isn't to become a popular web browser, it's to create a development platform for the iPhone.
Microsoft (the abomination that is windows) vs. Sony (rootkit fiasco and the PSP). . . . Hrmmmm. . . . That's a really tough choice which one I hate more.
And this is exactly why it's not real science. That's why we have hypotheses rather than preconceived notions, be they from your own head or from the Bible. Young-Earth creationists aren't trying to come up with a rational and logical theory for how the Universe came to be; they're trying to find anything they can find, even if they have to resort to making up gibberish and waving their hands around, that can "prove" the Bible correct as a historical text.
The question that always comes to my mind is, Why are these people interpreting the current Bible as the literal word of God? Don't they realize that it's been translated and reinterpreted half a dozen times since it was originally written? One of my favourite things to point out to people is that in Genesis, the hebrew word usually translated to "day" as in seven days to create the Heaven and Earth literally translates to either "day" or "age". A lot of the language of the original torah is ambiguous, and I think that's mostly because nobody who was writing it at the time could possibly have conceived of the fact that if they mis-spelled a word it might start a war six thousand years later.
And while we're on the subject, if you're literally interpreting the Bible as the actual word of God, how come it's okay to eat meat on fridays now, women can share a bed with their husbands when they're on their period, and it's been so long since this country's seen a good old fashioned public stoning?
Nuclear power plants are hardware. Big, dangerous, fancy hardware.
Not to mention those oh-so-1993 "back to top" links.
Oh and before anyone asks, yes, I am a web designer.
Seriously though folks. I'd be worried about this and thinking the world is coming to an end if I thought there was any chance that this sort of thing could even happen. Obviousness, the backed-up patent system in this decaying republic, derivative work... people have already brought all these things up. At the risk of sounding repetitive, though, I'm going to say this is a worthless pipe dream if it's not an April Fools joke that's a few months late.
Or for those of us who are using a Mac, it's option-e, then e. Deadkeys, they're called, and they make my typing in Spanish pretty trivial even when my keyboard has a US layout.
One of the things that really impressed me about the DS was the uniqueness of the games available for it. Some of them are kinda silly (I'm lookin' at you, Nintendogs!), but most of them are super innovative and kind of amazing. Just like what's been happening with the Wii, the unique set of inputs has created really unique games. I think it's telling that I couldn't really play these effectively in an emulator, nor could they be trivially ported to another system without losing a lot of functionality.
By contrast, the straight ports from other systems are either clunky (Super Mario 64; using the touchscreen as a surrogate analogue stick is really annoying) or straight-up boring.
As for internet access, I'd recommend getting a R4DS and a memory card and running DSLinux or, just as good, write your own browser and run it on there. Despite not supporting homebrew out of the box, the DS is pretty easy to work for homebrew use anyway.
That's correct. Money is obviously still being spent and illegal downloading hasn't shut down our national economy. They're right in that the act of illegal downloading does not in and of itself generate economic activity, though that's arguable because of all the other monetary exchanges going on in the process (payments for internet access, ad revenues, etc.).