I mean, seriously? I can see people being quite attached to their VBA Macros in Excel, their Access database with forms, or even just pissed off because Word and Writer don't have exactly equivalent formatting and their documents look like ass when opened by Office. But Powerpoint? It puts stuff up on a screen. So does Impress.
You still need the healthcare. If you don't die of one thing, you'll die of another.
You might be much better able to PAY for the healthcare - obesity and its accompanying diseases occur in relatively young people. Here in the UK where our healthcare is universal, we actually have people arguing that we should be more widely offering stomach stapling surgery, especially for younger recipients, because the benefits outweigh the costs - what the state pays in surgical costs will be more than made up for by the patient getting thinner, getting back to work, and paying their taxes again.
I was recently watching a documentary on wartime rationing - as a nation we had never been fed better. Our kids were taller and stronger than they ever had been, at a time of adversity and privation, because we were actually educated on what was good to eat - not so we could get thinner, but so we could be strong enough to carry on even though our supplies were limited. We grew vegetables. We ATE the vegetables.
I have to take that study with a pinch of salt, because the author advocates "wind, solar, and hydrogen energy". The wind and solar, I can dig, but the primary source of hydrogen is, surprise surprise, fossil fuel oil.
Electrolytically sourced hydrogen is inefficient compared with battery electric vehicles run from coal power stations. Hydrogen requires expensive catalysts (cheaper replacements have only recently been discovered and they have not been productized yet), and is incredibly difficult to store in quantities that are useful.
Hydrogen is liked by the oil industry though - watch "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and see the Shell branded hydrogen pumps, along with endorsements from Dubya and Arnie. It's almost as if they know it's a non-starter, and like it for it's ability to remove attention and funding from battery-electric vehicle technology. It does have some great taglines - the favourite is always that you "just get water from the tailpipe".
I thought they just did it in a great big whammy when they brought back Classic Coke after the New Coke fiasco - the tinfoil hat wearers think that was the REASON for "New Coke" - to provide enough of a gap in peoples consumption that they wouldn't notice the flavour shift.
Although it seems that the transition was already happening, they just finished it when they put Classic Coke on the shelves.
There is a linked article from the "business" section by Kevin Partner that does this ; the author mentions that his Ubuntu install (on wubi, which will slow it down) was up and editing his article on Google Docs in 60s, whereas Windows took 335s to do the same thing.
The reason for this is that the proprietary drivers need an open-source shim to integrate them into the kernel. Since the kernel changes ABI a lot, this needs keeping up to date. If you can't get driver support for more recent kernels, it's likely to be because your card manufacturer doesn't want to update their shims. One reason is that this is obviously not free to do ; an unspoken reason is maybe that they think Linux users are enthusiasts and will update their card more freely (sheesh!).
Of course, the open driver may continue to improve across older models because of community effort, while the closed driver will likely not receive a great deal of development effort from the manufacturer.
I feel your pain. I still use the proprietary nVidia driver (my experience with the open source ones has not been good). In an ideal world I'd like to use open drivers, not least because they would get maintained more reliably, but in the real world, a lot of the differentiating features in GPU cards are implemented in driver software which the manufacturer is just not happy to give away for free (or cannot, because of licensing considerations).
Not for tests involving file I/O - anything where "load snappiness" is a consideration, and the bulk copy test they mentioned, will be affected by the fact that your file system is embedded inside a file in NTFS.
The bulk copy test isn't a very good test of file system performance anyway. What you want to try is copying a mixture including hundreds or thousands of small files as well as larger files, and see which one wins. I think most Linux systems will beat Windows soundly on such a test.
... the perfect copy machine, why shouldn't we use it?... Star Trek... Replicator
In a "Replicator" society, there are only two commodities ; matter and energy.
Matter you can get from most places, with the right tools and a variable amount of energy. Energy you can collect for yourself with the right arrangements of matter.
In such a society, there is no excuse for everyone not to be physically wealthy. I'm not talking about gold toilet seats and yachts, I'm talking about there being no excuse for anyone lacking food, water, and shelter.
But we don't live in such a society yet (I'm optimistic that it's possible within my lifetime). We still have an economy of scarcity (whether you believe that's artificial or not). Perhaps if and when we solve this problem, we will have collectives of people, who because they are freed up from the constraints of having to struggle to survive, who can just get together and make movies because it's freaking awesome. But until then, artists need to eat. I'm not saying that the current means of achieving that is equitable or fair, but it sorta-kinda works, in that works of art are produced and that you don't see masses of dying artists on the 9 o'clock news.
Why should I pay you for something that costs you next to nothing?
The first answer is there in your question ; it doesn't cost nothing - even if you concede that it's "next to nothing", zero is not the same thing as more-than-zero.
The second answer is that it costs a lot more than next to nothing. Did you ever see the credits for a Pixar movie? They roll on for a looong time. Sure, the marginal cost of duplication is small, but the up front cost is huge. Yes, Hollywood accounting is bent and evil. Yes, they'll claim that the movie didn't make any money while rolling in piles of greenbacks. Yes, I disapprove of that. No, I don't think that all those people should entertain me for nothing but kudos and job satisfaction - unless they are all independently wealthy, just like everyone on Earth should be in a Replicator economy.
Yes, it is. But you have to, download it, save it, set the executable bit, and then run it.
The core problems in Windows that enable this ;
The shell decides which file types are executables based on the file name extension
The shell, by default, is configured to hide the file name extension from the user
The shell trusts executable files to be able to choose their own icon
There is no executable bit in the filesystem
This means files like MyHappyDocumentAndNotAnEvilWorm_pdf.scr can pass themselves off as a PDF file by having a PDF icon, but will be executed as soon as a user double clicks them (because they have the obscure but "executable" extension for screen savers, which are just normal executables).
On Unix...
The shell makes it's own mind up about what a file is, it doesn't trust the extension
The shell presents a single icon for binary executables, and a single icon for scripts
The user has to explicitly set the executable bit on anything they download
All of which means that they are not so easy to take in with this particular variant of user-exploit.
He said a 32-hour SESSION. As in, they programmed from 0900 until 1700 the next day
Although that doesn't impress me. Rather it speaks of bad management - crunches to meet deadlines might be occasionally necessary for a small company trying to break into a market. For a company that essentially IS the market, it just sounds like a harsh taskmaster wringing as much as he can out of his team.
I agree, but the chances of Joe Average User, and let's face it, most of us as well, inspecting the source code for the majority of the applications they use is low. Changing to Foxit still represents a vast improvement in security.
That said, use SumatraPDF. It's probably not as polished as Foxit, but it suits my purposes for most things, and it's licensed GPLv3.
The.scr file extension (screensaver) is treated the same as.exe on Windows ; stupid isn't it.
Unpacking the content of that file reveals a bunch of nasty VBScript that tries to worm it's way into your machine and anything else near it on the network, amongst other stuff, I'm sure. Nice.
You lost my sympathy right there. I've downloaded ISOs to replace lost or damaged game CDs (my pirate copy of Halo is right there in the case next to the original which you still need for the DRM, since I haven't risked cracking it). I'm quite comfortable with recording hundreds of GB of films from TV because when it comes down to it, I just paid to see them a different way. I can even see your point of view about regional availability, although when it comes down to it, there is this thing called the postal system.
But impatience? The rate of new stuff arriving is constant anyway - enjoy the stuff arriving now, wait your 6 months, and remain entertained. It's not like it's a frickin' vaccine. You can do without it for a while, and meanwhile, there's the vast influx of other stuff that was released 6 months ago.
Yes, you haven't HAD to run as admin. (since NT, which I remember). But the default config that Windows does for it's home editions is to configure the first user created as a member of the Administrators group. The pathetic lame-ass situation you describe with applications that require admin privs to even run has been fostered because Windows made it a pain in the ass to elevate privileges, so most software developers wrote all their code with a user in the Administrators group, because being a software developer on Windows without admin access is a chore, and many of them never tested their software on a limited user account. Unix makes it a pain in the ass to use root, and a chore to put files in system locations by default, and allows you to develop software without privileged access to the almighty central database of components available to the system (the COM section of the registry).
UAC in Vista is an improvement. But there needs to be a tutorial on what it is you are actually doing when you click on a UAC confirm dialog. And it should show up every time you log in until you answer a quiz to turn it off. "Do you want to allow this program to make changes to this computer?" isn't strident enough. It should say "Do you trust this program?".
Well, no. Most of them are configured to remove the possibility of that choice from the user - if they detect a virus, they quarantine the file and don't give you a choice. It's more that they can't detect everything. After that, it's not the virus scanners fault if users have poor digital hygiene.
For what it's worth, I run my personal Windows boxes without anti-malware and anti-virus, respect a few general principles, and don't have problems. But explaining this to common users seems to be impossible. They seem to be unable to apply general principles, instead needing specific directions for every little circumstance.
People will scoff at the idea that Unix has a more secure model, but really little things - like the executable bit, like not running as admin - raise the barrier for malware..NET tried to implement a third way - by sandboxing applications - but it was realistically too much of a faff to configure, and not much good if you could still write all your malware in plain C.
VB6 and below just made it easy to screw up. If you knew what you were doing, you could crank out applications entirely fit for purpose, in a fraction of the time of a C equivalent.
VB.NET is an entirely different prospect though. I have deliberately avoided it for a number of reasons.
First amongst these is that C# is nicer, cleaner, and better paid for, so why learn VB.NET when it targets exactly the same libraries and runtime, and even interoperates with components written in C#.
Secondly, VB6 is the COBOL of the modern business in that vast numbers of existing applications are written in it - while I hate writing code in it, I'm very good at writing code in it that's much better engineered than average, and good at taking existing VB6 systems and unravelling the mess. In 10 years time, it might be the only thing that pays into my retirement fund, once all the cool kids have declined to learn it. VB.NET is close to VB6 syntax but differs in lots of subtle ways which would only muddle my potentially valuable VB6 knowledge base.
Not that I use either extensively at them moment, Java is my day job.
The worst thing about Hershey's is the texture. The flavour is pretty uninspiring too.
I mean, FFS, Americans go nuts when they visit Britain and taste Dairy Milk... it's only 22% cocoa solids. It's our basic level cheapie mass-produced chocolate. But it's sooo much better than Hershey's.
Wasn't Hershey's formulated so that it wouldn't spoil in WWII combat zones? It would explain a lot if the first priority was durability....
Don't be a total bonehead. Listen to them. Let them do their job.
Ok, the tongue is in the cheek a little there, but nothing saps my motivation more than being told to do something really stupid. Like the project I'm on ; the code is some amateur coders PhD project, the code quality is utterly excretional, and EVERY engineer working on it that I've asked agrees that we could have thrown the whole thing away and written something superior inside of 6 months.
Management were told, almost as soon as the external code arrived. But management shelled out lots of cash for the thing, so management would never dare to follow their engineers advice because it would make them look stupid.
Meanwhile, 2 years later, the thing is still causing deadlines to stretch and users to curse at it's astounding lack of user friendliness.
My previous project was a success - because management kept their snoot out of the implementation details and just let the engineers get on with it.
Communications technologies depend on network effects. Gmail succeeded, despite restricting the number of subscribers, because it already had a vast network of email users to interact with. Mobile phones worked because they interacted with the existing phone system.
Wave was restricted to communicating with Wave. Getting the people you wanted to use it to sign up, grok it, then use it, was too much of an obstacle.
Storage space has outpaced software development for some time. The only thing that has a hope of keeping up with it in the consumer space is high definition 3D video. Video games consume a lot of media space too, but producing the content takes a lot more effort.
The mere storage of software? People already just deploy an individual copy of the libraries for each application.
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How the hell is Powerpoint the killer app?
I mean, seriously? I can see people being quite attached to their VBA Macros in Excel, their Access database with forms, or even just pissed off because Word and Writer don't have exactly equivalent formatting and their documents look like ass when opened by Office. But Powerpoint? It puts stuff up on a screen. So does Impress.
You still need the healthcare. If you don't die of one thing, you'll die of another.
You might be much better able to PAY for the healthcare - obesity and its accompanying diseases occur in relatively young people. Here in the UK where our healthcare is universal, we actually have people arguing that we should be more widely offering stomach stapling surgery, especially for younger recipients, because the benefits outweigh the costs - what the state pays in surgical costs will be more than made up for by the patient getting thinner, getting back to work, and paying their taxes again.
I was recently watching a documentary on wartime rationing - as a nation we had never been fed better. Our kids were taller and stronger than they ever had been, at a time of adversity and privation, because we were actually educated on what was good to eat - not so we could get thinner, but so we could be strong enough to carry on even though our supplies were limited. We grew vegetables. We ATE the vegetables.
I have to take that study with a pinch of salt, because the author advocates "wind, solar, and hydrogen energy". The wind and solar, I can dig, but the primary source of hydrogen is, surprise surprise, fossil fuel oil.
Electrolytically sourced hydrogen is inefficient compared with battery electric vehicles run from coal power stations. Hydrogen requires expensive catalysts (cheaper replacements have only recently been discovered and they have not been productized yet), and is incredibly difficult to store in quantities that are useful.
Hydrogen is liked by the oil industry though - watch "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and see the Shell branded hydrogen pumps, along with endorsements from Dubya and Arnie. It's almost as if they know it's a non-starter, and like it for it's ability to remove attention and funding from battery-electric vehicle technology. It does have some great taglines - the favourite is always that you "just get water from the tailpipe".
I thought they just did it in a great big whammy when they brought back Classic Coke after the New Coke fiasco - the tinfoil hat wearers think that was the REASON for "New Coke" - to provide enough of a gap in peoples consumption that they wouldn't notice the flavour shift.
Although it seems that the transition was already happening, they just finished it when they put Classic Coke on the shelves.
There is a linked article from the "business" section by Kevin Partner that does this ; the author mentions that his Ubuntu install (on wubi, which will slow it down) was up and editing his article on Google Docs in 60s, whereas Windows took 335s to do the same thing.
The reason for this is that the proprietary drivers need an open-source shim to integrate them into the kernel. Since the kernel changes ABI a lot, this needs keeping up to date. If you can't get driver support for more recent kernels, it's likely to be because your card manufacturer doesn't want to update their shims. One reason is that this is obviously not free to do ; an unspoken reason is maybe that they think Linux users are enthusiasts and will update their card more freely (sheesh!).
Of course, the open driver may continue to improve across older models because of community effort, while the closed driver will likely not receive a great deal of development effort from the manufacturer.
I feel your pain. I still use the proprietary nVidia driver (my experience with the open source ones has not been good). In an ideal world I'd like to use open drivers, not least because they would get maintained more reliably, but in the real world, a lot of the differentiating features in GPU cards are implemented in driver software which the manufacturer is just not happy to give away for free (or cannot, because of licensing considerations).
Not for tests involving file I/O - anything where "load snappiness" is a consideration, and the bulk copy test they mentioned, will be affected by the fact that your file system is embedded inside a file in NTFS.
The bulk copy test isn't a very good test of file system performance anyway. What you want to try is copying a mixture including hundreds or thousands of small files as well as larger files, and see which one wins. I think most Linux systems will beat Windows soundly on such a test.
... the perfect copy machine, why shouldn't we use it? ... Star Trek ... Replicator
In a "Replicator" society, there are only two commodities ; matter and energy.
Matter you can get from most places, with the right tools and a variable amount of energy. Energy you can collect for yourself with the right arrangements of matter.
In such a society, there is no excuse for everyone not to be physically wealthy. I'm not talking about gold toilet seats and yachts, I'm talking about there being no excuse for anyone lacking food, water, and shelter.
But we don't live in such a society yet (I'm optimistic that it's possible within my lifetime). We still have an economy of scarcity (whether you believe that's artificial or not). Perhaps if and when we solve this problem, we will have collectives of people, who because they are freed up from the constraints of having to struggle to survive, who can just get together and make movies because it's freaking awesome. But until then, artists need to eat. I'm not saying that the current means of achieving that is equitable or fair, but it sorta-kinda works, in that works of art are produced and that you don't see masses of dying artists on the 9 o'clock news.
Why should I pay you for something that costs you next to nothing?
The first answer is there in your question ; it doesn't cost nothing - even if you concede that it's "next to nothing", zero is not the same thing as more-than-zero.
The second answer is that it costs a lot more than next to nothing. Did you ever see the credits for a Pixar movie? They roll on for a looong time. Sure, the marginal cost of duplication is small, but the up front cost is huge. Yes, Hollywood accounting is bent and evil. Yes, they'll claim that the movie didn't make any money while rolling in piles of greenbacks. Yes, I disapprove of that. No, I don't think that all those people should entertain me for nothing but kudos and job satisfaction - unless they are all independently wealthy, just like everyone on Earth should be in a Replicator economy.
Looks like a 3D first person Dwarf Fortress, so it's a vast complex sandbox game with lots of cool stuff.
Yes, it is. But you have to, download it, save it, set the executable bit, and then run it.
The core problems in Windows that enable this ;
This means files like MyHappyDocumentAndNotAnEvilWorm_pdf.scr can pass themselves off as a PDF file by having a PDF icon, but will be executed as soon as a user double clicks them (because they have the obscure but "executable" extension for screen savers, which are just normal executables).
On Unix...
All of which means that they are not so easy to take in with this particular variant of user-exploit.
He said a 32-hour SESSION. As in, they programmed from 0900 until 1700 the next day
Although that doesn't impress me. Rather it speaks of bad management - crunches to meet deadlines might be occasionally necessary for a small company trying to break into a market. For a company that essentially IS the market, it just sounds like a harsh taskmaster wringing as much as he can out of his team.
I agree, but the chances of Joe Average User, and let's face it, most of us as well, inspecting the source code for the majority of the applications they use is low. Changing to Foxit still represents a vast improvement in security.
That said, use SumatraPDF. It's probably not as polished as Foxit, but it suits my purposes for most things, and it's licensed GPLv3.
The .scr file extension (screensaver) is treated the same as .exe on Windows ; stupid isn't it.
Unpacking the content of that file reveals a bunch of nasty VBScript that tries to worm it's way into your machine and anything else near it on the network, amongst other stuff, I'm sure. Nice.
or I have to wait 6 months
You lost my sympathy right there. I've downloaded ISOs to replace lost or damaged game CDs (my pirate copy of Halo is right there in the case next to the original which you still need for the DRM, since I haven't risked cracking it). I'm quite comfortable with recording hundreds of GB of films from TV because when it comes down to it, I just paid to see them a different way. I can even see your point of view about regional availability, although when it comes down to it, there is this thing called the postal system.
But impatience? The rate of new stuff arriving is constant anyway - enjoy the stuff arriving now, wait your 6 months, and remain entertained. It's not like it's a frickin' vaccine. You can do without it for a while, and meanwhile, there's the vast influx of other stuff that was released 6 months ago.
Yes, you haven't HAD to run as admin. (since NT, which I remember). But the default config that Windows does for it's home editions is to configure the first user created as a member of the Administrators group. The pathetic lame-ass situation you describe with applications that require admin privs to even run has been fostered because Windows made it a pain in the ass to elevate privileges, so most software developers wrote all their code with a user in the Administrators group, because being a software developer on Windows without admin access is a chore, and many of them never tested their software on a limited user account. Unix makes it a pain in the ass to use root, and a chore to put files in system locations by default, and allows you to develop software without privileged access to the almighty central database of components available to the system (the COM section of the registry).
UAC in Vista is an improvement. But there needs to be a tutorial on what it is you are actually doing when you click on a UAC confirm dialog. And it should show up every time you log in until you answer a quiz to turn it off. "Do you want to allow this program to make changes to this computer?" isn't strident enough. It should say "Do you trust this program?".
Well, no. Most of them are configured to remove the possibility of that choice from the user - if they detect a virus, they quarantine the file and don't give you a choice. It's more that they can't detect everything. After that, it's not the virus scanners fault if users have poor digital hygiene.
For what it's worth, I run my personal Windows boxes without anti-malware and anti-virus, respect a few general principles, and don't have problems. But explaining this to common users seems to be impossible. They seem to be unable to apply general principles, instead needing specific directions for every little circumstance.
People will scoff at the idea that Unix has a more secure model, but really little things - like the executable bit, like not running as admin - raise the barrier for malware. .NET tried to implement a third way - by sandboxing applications - but it was realistically too much of a faff to configure, and not much good if you could still write all your malware in plain C.
Trade <snip> usually ends in quasi-slave labour and a few rich managers who exploit people and exert undemocratic influence on their government.
Fixed that for you.
VB6 and below just made it easy to screw up. If you knew what you were doing, you could crank out applications entirely fit for purpose, in a fraction of the time of a C equivalent.
VB.NET is an entirely different prospect though. I have deliberately avoided it for a number of reasons.
First amongst these is that C# is nicer, cleaner, and better paid for, so why learn VB.NET when it targets exactly the same libraries and runtime, and even interoperates with components written in C#.
Secondly, VB6 is the COBOL of the modern business in that vast numbers of existing applications are written in it - while I hate writing code in it, I'm very good at writing code in it that's much better engineered than average, and good at taking existing VB6 systems and unravelling the mess. In 10 years time, it might be the only thing that pays into my retirement fund, once all the cool kids have declined to learn it. VB.NET is close to VB6 syntax but differs in lots of subtle ways which would only muddle my potentially valuable VB6 knowledge base.
Not that I use either extensively at them moment, Java is my day job.
Unless we defeat it. Then we'll get another chance, ad infinitum, like one of those timeless creatures of evil that will never truly die.
The worst thing about Hershey's is the texture. The flavour is pretty uninspiring too.
I mean, FFS, Americans go nuts when they visit Britain and taste Dairy Milk... it's only 22% cocoa solids. It's our basic level cheapie mass-produced chocolate. But it's sooo much better than Hershey's.
Wasn't Hershey's formulated so that it wouldn't spoil in WWII combat zones? It would explain a lot if the first priority was durability....
Don't be a total bonehead. Listen to them. Let them do their job.
Ok, the tongue is in the cheek a little there, but nothing saps my motivation more than being told to do something really stupid. Like the project I'm on ; the code is some amateur coders PhD project, the code quality is utterly excretional, and EVERY engineer working on it that I've asked agrees that we could have thrown the whole thing away and written something superior inside of 6 months.
Management were told, almost as soon as the external code arrived. But management shelled out lots of cash for the thing, so management would never dare to follow their engineers advice because it would make them look stupid.
Meanwhile, 2 years later, the thing is still causing deadlines to stretch and users to curse at it's astounding lack of user friendliness.
My previous project was a success - because management kept their snoot out of the implementation details and just let the engineers get on with it.
Communications technologies depend on network effects. Gmail succeeded, despite restricting the number of subscribers, because it already had a vast network of email users to interact with. Mobile phones worked because they interacted with the existing phone system.
Wave was restricted to communicating with Wave. Getting the people you wanted to use it to sign up, grok it, then use it, was too much of an obstacle.
Storage space has outpaced software development for some time. The only thing that has a hope of keeping up with it in the consumer space is high definition 3D video. Video games consume a lot of media space too, but producing the content takes a lot more effort.
The mere storage of software? People already just deploy an individual copy of the libraries for each application.
It's not user friendly to set up and configure, but it must be OK to use, because my wife can do it.
WAF levels on MythTV are so high that it's the one system in the house that she actually complains about if it goes down.
Take the mould. File the patent number down until it's flat. Done.