>I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.
And wait for the "fix it yourself" smartass replies. Lets not exaggerate the kindness of FOSS developers. The big issue is that you can have the code and change it, but expecting someone else to do so results in scenarios not too different from commercial software.
So in other words paper MCSE's dont understand how to do compatibility testing or XP mode. I love how on slashdot we bash the business class and pointy haired managers until they say something anti-MS then they are the wisest people in the world.
Im not surprised. I think we're going to find that as people start taking Win7 apart that its not too much different from Vista because Vista itself was pretty efficient to begin with. The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
Excellent point. When it comes to powerleving and automation that means the cheater now has 5 level 60 avatars when he really should have one. The game designers didnt expect that many high levels so now there's less rare gear to go around.
The typical reaction is just to up the number of rare items or whatever rare resource automation is targeting. A 'real world' scarcity becomes impossible. Your not in a shared universe anymore, but just seeing the same landscapes as you all mine some materials that keeps popping up. This is also why MMO games become more like dumb arcade games as they age. You cant do all this neat world building when everyone is gaming the system. Outside of high level guild-raiding its essentially a simple one player game that other people can socialize on.
All the rationalizations for cheating fail when you consider the system as a whole.
>And needing more graphics power than was considered normal in order to display a modern UI.
Normal is 2D with no transparencies. I dont see the problem in paying more in power to run prettier interfaces. Especially when I have a video card that can handle it. Turns out that Joe and Jane Sixpack dont compare OSs on anything reasonable, but which one looks prettier. How long can MS listen to complains about its fisher price interface especially when OSX looks so much better?
>And UAC being maybe the most annoying thing ever added to any piece of software ever.
IMHO its not annoying enough. It should be like it is in OSX. It should ask for the password. Im glad your opinion is the minority. Having people run as admin 24/7 is not acceptable anymore. UAC post SP1 and in Win7 rarely comes up.
>And inexpicably long file transfer times.
That was addressed in early patches and vista tried being more honest about transfer times. Turns out people prefer the XP way. Now thats what we are all stuck with.
>And backward compatibility
If anything MS goes out of its way for this and its the core of most of its problems. Id love to get rid of the cruft, but its not happening. I have Mac software that doesnt even exist anymore for Tiger. Heck, when XP came out people were still using OS9! Good luck getting that to run on Snow Leopard.
>I suspect this is more to shut the EU up than because they really want to
Considering pretty much all IT shops are mixed shops, Im sure every MS rep gets an earful about how about a company with a few linux-based NASs or servers dont integrate with AD. MS is now in the position where it needs to embrace a lot of OSS or their customers will revolt. I suspect the MS of the 90s is behind us. The market is just too diversified and competitive now. Fixing SAMBA is something that should have been done years ago. Hopefully, SAMBA4 will really be headache free.
>And more liberal prison systems are sometimes too soft and too worried about the opinion of the outside layperson.
Actually, in real life Sheriff Joe is a thug and generally prison systems arent conservative or liberal, instead they come in different security flavors. A low security prison is very, very different than a high security prison. One isnt more liberal than the other, but they serve different needs of the state for different types of prisoners. You dont need as many armed guards, lockdowns, etc in a minimum security prison. Its not practical or economical to make everything a high security prison. In minimum security you can offset the cost by "hiring" the inmates to do prison jobs, but IT should really be off limits.
If anything, this article reveals mismanagement. You shouldnt let prisonors mess with infrastructure. This isnt an indictment against any prison system. Some warden just needs to be fired.
If prisons do come in liberal or conservative measures then considering the lawsuit culture of the US, its most likely liberal as prisoners can and do sue for the most ridiculous things.
Yeah, this article is nothing but crap navel-gazing. If anything it just shows you the power of marketing. The Wii brought a lot of multiplayer and coop games to the forefront, now we're supposed to see this as "political?" Sorry, its just business and nothing more.
Ive heard similiar things about the rise of the FPS. Sorry, but politics or society or ADHD or whatever didnt let the adventure game genre die, they did it all to themselves with their boring gameplay, dead ends, and shit release schedules.
In the end humans are social animals. They like coop and multiplayer. Now that everyone has broadband and this generation of consoles is using it, suddenly people are able to fulfill their social wants in gaming.
>Insurance companies will use it to deny health insurance outright or label any diseases that this thing finds as "pre-existing conditions".
Sounds like all the more reason to support healthcare reform and to shut people up who equate it with Nazi Germany, or whatever the right complains about in public.
Is it really? Id rather see this in a politics class or an english literature class after theyve been taught enough history to understand what Stalinism was. I think its 99% political and 1% scifi and without the proper polisci background it just is a dystopian tale instead of the critique and dark satire of oppressive communist governments its supposed to be.
>That customer base is one thing MS can only dream about.
Are you kidding me? Every Mac user I know is a serious pirate. The only reason things have gotten better nowadays is because Adobe and MS started putting online validation in their products. Before everyone use the same Office and Photoshop keys.
Apple is more "generous" with its OS because its already made money off the hardware. If MS was selling computers it would be the same way.
>Then you buy your key digitally with a steam-like system
I dont understand why MS just doesnt let people download the ISO and use their already existing Vista key. Sure, they cant know which ones were bought after June, but they can take a guess and do us a favor.
I forsee a lot of these upgrades needing reinstalls when Joe User crams it full of malware, but with the key lost somewhere in his email. Unless this key comes with a sticker to put on the case, its useless. Just let them use their Vista license. Heaven forbid, MS throw anyone a bone now and again.
I thought the idea was that there has to be some lifeform in the shuttle before it would allow you to close the door. The idea being that the lifeboat shuttles are never locked hence the comment about a safety switch.
Of course, that theory got tested when the senator died and stopped being a lifeform. Or at least a living one.
>With newspapers people want more 'local' stories. Less AP/Reuters shoveled at us. So sites like drudge/fark/slashdot and so on took over that market.
Huh? Drudge is political bullshit, fark is jokey news, and slashdot is random tech stuff. None of this is news, either local or global. For news people go to CNN, google news, etc. Thats what really killed the paper.
Wireless power has a responsible niche: cell phones, mp3 players, laptop etc. My TV doesnt need wireless power. It never moves and it has tons of other cables.
The palm pre already support wireless power. I picture a pad like the touchstone, but bigger, and which can charge all my little toys just by tossing them on there. No fuss.
>I think the difference between those and WoW is that to write for a MUD meant your only technical requirement was to have an good command of the language. Adding content to WoW, Eve, or whatever, would require you to have 3D modeling skills.
Low level MUD designers were just non-coders who used a dumbed-down level creator interface. They would map out rooms and select mobs/objects that have been precreated for them.
The 3D version of this is the same. They map out rooms and select pre-created 3D objects like "dungeon room-4542" and "staircase-452." No need to sit there creating models. A decent level designer will have a lot of these things, including room templates or even entire easily modified level templates.
Customized procs and objects can be made by people with programming and 3D modeling skills. Every designer can be given a few hours of their labor. They cant go crazy, but they can add a few unique things.
FTPS does this. You can disable/enable encryption on the fly. I believe this functionality is disable in filezilla by default, but other servers support it.
I say this as a liberal, but Seymour Hersh is full of shit. Every few months he has some new breathless expose or other incredible statement. His reports usually dont name sources other than anonymous or offer any evidence. Yes, he's correct on occasion like when he broke the My Lai story, but he deals strictly with the rumormill so he has to get lucky sometime. Usually, he can be dismissed, but he does know how to sell papers and books.
Right, not to mention there are 3 or 4 other free AV products out there. Yesterday we have a story from the slashdot editors about how MSE isnt very good. Now we have whining from the same editors that it doesnt run on pirated machines.
The less reasonable the editors's whining the better MS is doing. If this is the worst they can find then its probably safe to buy Win7 and use MSE.
>so the graphics requirements are based on what's in an X-Box 360.
I dont think thats such a limiting factor. Lets say they develop the xbox game first, instead of the PC version. They settle on 1080i for resolution and only a certain level of quality for textures. They also tone down the physics and AI to a level it doesnt slow down the xbox cpus.
Okay, now when you port the PC version, you let the user select the resolution he likes and you up the textures to max and ungimp the physics and AI. Its not that hard. Any company that wants to produce a good PC game from an Xbox start is able to. The real question here isnt the technical limitations, which are easy enough to get past, but if the business wants to produce a quality port. If the PC market isnt big enough then they have little incentive to make a decent port and will just outsource the port to some shitty porting company and PC users will just have to deal with it.
The guy who can break your encryption can easily get past your mac filter pretty easily. The mac filter is there for people who cant or wont use encryption. So its kinda like locking your car but putting a note on the steering wheel asking "Please dont steal this car." The person who gets that far wont care.
>A soldier has consented to harm and death, while a civilian has made no such choice.
Historically, soldiers are draftees who server under the penalty of treason, which is traditionally punishable by death. The US's professional military is the exception, not the rule. So when youre shooting Nazis in any of the hundreds of WWII games, you're killing the virtual equivalent of some kid who was drafted by leadership and forced to fight under the penalty of death.
Right. Loans for school are cheap money. Universities see this and raise their rates. So right now not only is school historically the most expensive its ever been, students are graduating with something like 22k in debt average, and they have to do it to even get a low paying entry-level job that in the past did not require a degree.
There's something to be said about not having universal education in your country, but being able to hand out large loans. It only hurts the student and in the end hurts the economy as young people cant afford to buy anything other than the basics. Industries that rely on purchases that young people typically do like first house, car, marriage, etc have to wait 5 or even 10 years later. Not to mention its demoralizing to be saddled with debt at a young age and have nothing to show for it but a degree that -might- get you a entry level job. The previous generation was making living wages and buying houses at the age most of us graduate.
>I'd wager, though, that hardware consideration aside, average consumers would rather run XP than Windows 7.
Thank Jeebus that the lowest common denominator doesnt make all the decisions and their wants are usually ignored. If the average guy dictated Windows features you'd have him running as admin 24/7, built-in Bonzai buddy spyware, eighteen toolbars, comic sans as default font, and fifteen shortcuts to the coupons.com, etc etc. For more on this concept, please see the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car.
Heaven forbid the industry does some leadership here. Im glad MS is doing user-level privs by default, UAC, push for 64-bit, powershell, new APIs, TRIM command for SSDs, etc. Average Joe really doesnt want XP. Heck, when XP came out Average Joe was pining for Win95 or Win3.11. Screw what Joe User wants. Nothing good has ever come from pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Slashdot Mirror
>I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.
And wait for the "fix it yourself" smartass replies. Lets not exaggerate the kindness of FOSS developers. The big issue is that you can have the code and change it, but expecting someone else to do so results in scenarios not too different from commercial software.
So in other words paper MCSE's dont understand how to do compatibility testing or XP mode. I love how on slashdot we bash the business class and pointy haired managers until they say something anti-MS then they are the wisest people in the world.
>No, it's not surprising.
Im not surprised. I think we're going to find that as people start taking Win7 apart that its not too much different from Vista because Vista itself was pretty efficient to begin with. The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
Excellent point. When it comes to powerleving and automation that means the cheater now has 5 level 60 avatars when he really should have one. The game designers didnt expect that many high levels so now there's less rare gear to go around.
The typical reaction is just to up the number of rare items or whatever rare resource automation is targeting. A 'real world' scarcity becomes impossible. Your not in a shared universe anymore, but just seeing the same landscapes as you all mine some materials that keeps popping up. This is also why MMO games become more like dumb arcade games as they age. You cant do all this neat world building when everyone is gaming the system. Outside of high level guild-raiding its essentially a simple one player game that other people can socialize on.
All the rationalizations for cheating fail when you consider the system as a whole.
>And needing more graphics power than was considered normal in order to display a modern UI.
Normal is 2D with no transparencies. I dont see the problem in paying more in power to run prettier interfaces. Especially when I have a video card that can handle it. Turns out that Joe and Jane Sixpack dont compare OSs on anything reasonable, but which one looks prettier. How long can MS listen to complains about its fisher price interface especially when OSX looks so much better?
>And UAC being maybe the most annoying thing ever added to any piece of software ever.
IMHO its not annoying enough. It should be like it is in OSX. It should ask for the password. Im glad your opinion is the minority. Having people run as admin 24/7 is not acceptable anymore. UAC post SP1 and in Win7 rarely comes up.
>And inexpicably long file transfer times.
That was addressed in early patches and vista tried being more honest about transfer times. Turns out people prefer the XP way. Now thats what we are all stuck with.
>And backward compatibility
If anything MS goes out of its way for this and its the core of most of its problems. Id love to get rid of the cruft, but its not happening. I have Mac software that doesnt even exist anymore for Tiger. Heck, when XP came out people were still using OS9! Good luck getting that to run on Snow Leopard.
>I suspect this is more to shut the EU up than because they really want to
Considering pretty much all IT shops are mixed shops, Im sure every MS rep gets an earful about how about a company with a few linux-based NASs or servers dont integrate with AD. MS is now in the position where it needs to embrace a lot of OSS or their customers will revolt. I suspect the MS of the 90s is behind us. The market is just too diversified and competitive now. Fixing SAMBA is something that should have been done years ago. Hopefully, SAMBA4 will really be headache free.
>And more liberal prison systems are sometimes too soft and too worried about the opinion of the outside layperson.
Actually, in real life Sheriff Joe is a thug and generally prison systems arent conservative or liberal, instead they come in different security flavors. A low security prison is very, very different than a high security prison. One isnt more liberal than the other, but they serve different needs of the state for different types of prisoners. You dont need as many armed guards, lockdowns, etc in a minimum security prison. Its not practical or economical to make everything a high security prison. In minimum security you can offset the cost by "hiring" the inmates to do prison jobs, but IT should really be off limits.
If anything, this article reveals mismanagement. You shouldnt let prisonors mess with infrastructure. This isnt an indictment against any prison system. Some warden just needs to be fired.
If prisons do come in liberal or conservative measures then considering the lawsuit culture of the US, its most likely liberal as prisoners can and do sue for the most ridiculous things.
Yeah, this article is nothing but crap navel-gazing. If anything it just shows you the power of marketing. The Wii brought a lot of multiplayer and coop games to the forefront, now we're supposed to see this as "political?" Sorry, its just business and nothing more.
Ive heard similiar things about the rise of the FPS. Sorry, but politics or society or ADHD or whatever didnt let the adventure game genre die, they did it all to themselves with their boring gameplay, dead ends, and shit release schedules.
In the end humans are social animals. They like coop and multiplayer. Now that everyone has broadband and this generation of consoles is using it, suddenly people are able to fulfill their social wants in gaming.
>Insurance companies will use it to deny health insurance outright or label any diseases that this thing finds as "pre-existing conditions".
Sounds like all the more reason to support healthcare reform and to shut people up who equate it with Nazi Germany, or whatever the right complains about in public.
>1984 is a must.
Is it really? Id rather see this in a politics class or an english literature class after theyve been taught enough history to understand what Stalinism was. I think its 99% political and 1% scifi and without the proper polisci background it just is a dystopian tale instead of the critique and dark satire of oppressive communist governments its supposed to be.
>That customer base is one thing MS can only dream about.
Are you kidding me? Every Mac user I know is a serious pirate. The only reason things have gotten better nowadays is because Adobe and MS started putting online validation in their products. Before everyone use the same Office and Photoshop keys.
Apple is more "generous" with its OS because its already made money off the hardware. If MS was selling computers it would be the same way.
>Then you buy your key digitally with a steam-like system
I dont understand why MS just doesnt let people download the ISO and use their already existing Vista key. Sure, they cant know which ones were bought after June, but they can take a guess and do us a favor.
I forsee a lot of these upgrades needing reinstalls when Joe User crams it full of malware, but with the key lost somewhere in his email. Unless this key comes with a sticker to put on the case, its useless. Just let them use their Vista license. Heaven forbid, MS throw anyone a bone now and again.
I thought the idea was that there has to be some lifeform in the shuttle before it would allow you to close the door. The idea being that the lifeboat shuttles are never locked hence the comment about a safety switch.
Of course, that theory got tested when the senator died and stopped being a lifeform. Or at least a living one.
>With newspapers people want more 'local' stories. Less AP/Reuters shoveled at us. So sites like drudge/fark/slashdot and so on took over that market.
Huh? Drudge is political bullshit, fark is jokey news, and slashdot is random tech stuff. None of this is news, either local or global. For news people go to CNN, google news, etc. Thats what really killed the paper.
Wireless power has a responsible niche: cell phones, mp3 players, laptop etc. My TV doesnt need wireless power. It never moves and it has tons of other cables.
The palm pre already support wireless power. I picture a pad like the touchstone, but bigger, and which can charge all my little toys just by tossing them on there. No fuss.
>I think the difference between those and WoW is that to write for a MUD meant your only technical requirement was to have an good command of the language. Adding content to WoW, Eve, or whatever, would require you to have 3D modeling skills.
Low level MUD designers were just non-coders who used a dumbed-down level creator interface. They would map out rooms and select mobs/objects that have been precreated for them.
The 3D version of this is the same. They map out rooms and select pre-created 3D objects like "dungeon room-4542" and "staircase-452." No need to sit there creating models. A decent level designer will have a lot of these things, including room templates or even entire easily modified level templates.
Customized procs and objects can be made by people with programming and 3D modeling skills. Every designer can be given a few hours of their labor. They cant go crazy, but they can add a few unique things.
>Not all CPUs can encrypt/decrypt at 1Gbps.
FTPS does this. You can disable/enable encryption on the fly. I believe this functionality is disable in filezilla by default, but other servers support it.
I say this as a liberal, but Seymour Hersh is full of shit. Every few months he has some new breathless expose or other incredible statement. His reports usually dont name sources other than anonymous or offer any evidence. Yes, he's correct on occasion like when he broke the My Lai story, but he deals strictly with the rumormill so he has to get lucky sometime. Usually, he can be dismissed, but he does know how to sell papers and books.
Stop letting your users run as local admins.
Right, not to mention there are 3 or 4 other free AV products out there. Yesterday we have a story from the slashdot editors about how MSE isnt very good. Now we have whining from the same editors that it doesnt run on pirated machines.
The less reasonable the editors's whining the better MS is doing. If this is the worst they can find then its probably safe to buy Win7 and use MSE.
>so the graphics requirements are based on what's in an X-Box 360.
I dont think thats such a limiting factor. Lets say they develop the xbox game first, instead of the PC version. They settle on 1080i for resolution and only a certain level of quality for textures. They also tone down the physics and AI to a level it doesnt slow down the xbox cpus.
Okay, now when you port the PC version, you let the user select the resolution he likes and you up the textures to max and ungimp the physics and AI. Its not that hard. Any company that wants to produce a good PC game from an Xbox start is able to. The real question here isnt the technical limitations, which are easy enough to get past, but if the business wants to produce a quality port. If the PC market isnt big enough then they have little incentive to make a decent port and will just outsource the port to some shitty porting company and PC users will just have to deal with it.
The guy who can break your encryption can easily get past your mac filter pretty easily. The mac filter is there for people who cant or wont use encryption. So its kinda like locking your car but putting a note on the steering wheel asking "Please dont steal this car." The person who gets that far wont care.
>A soldier has consented to harm and death, while a civilian has made no such choice.
Historically, soldiers are draftees who server under the penalty of treason, which is traditionally punishable by death. The US's professional military is the exception, not the rule. So when youre shooting Nazis in any of the hundreds of WWII games, you're killing the virtual equivalent of some kid who was drafted by leadership and forced to fight under the penalty of death.
Right. Loans for school are cheap money. Universities see this and raise their rates. So right now not only is school historically the most expensive its ever been, students are graduating with something like 22k in debt average, and they have to do it to even get a low paying entry-level job that in the past did not require a degree.
There's something to be said about not having universal education in your country, but being able to hand out large loans. It only hurts the student and in the end hurts the economy as young people cant afford to buy anything other than the basics. Industries that rely on purchases that young people typically do like first house, car, marriage, etc have to wait 5 or even 10 years later. Not to mention its demoralizing to be saddled with debt at a young age and have nothing to show for it but a degree that -might- get you a entry level job. The previous generation was making living wages and buying houses at the age most of us graduate.
>I'd wager, though, that hardware consideration aside, average consumers would rather run XP than Windows 7.
Thank Jeebus that the lowest common denominator doesnt make all the decisions and their wants are usually ignored. If the average guy dictated Windows features you'd have him running as admin 24/7, built-in Bonzai buddy spyware, eighteen toolbars, comic sans as default font, and fifteen shortcuts to the coupons.com, etc etc. For more on this concept, please see the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car.
Heaven forbid the industry does some leadership here. Im glad MS is doing user-level privs by default, UAC, push for 64-bit, powershell, new APIs, TRIM command for SSDs, etc. Average Joe really doesnt want XP. Heck, when XP came out Average Joe was pining for Win95 or Win3.11. Screw what Joe User wants. Nothing good has ever come from pandering to the lowest common denominator.