Why pay cable/satellite companies for TV in general? I've found that I'm perfectly happy with getting all of my TV online through iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and various network's websites.
Why would you assume your TV would be the same as anyone else's?
I primarily watch PBS and live in an area that's a bit too far out for good reception with a converter box. Admittedly, there is some PBS programming available on the web, but it's far from complete.
I also watch C-SPAN. That's funded by cable providers and available only to their subscribers. The on-line situation is the same as for PBS.
Admittedly, the line up for most of the pay channels is piss poor given the cost, and HBO hasn't been worth watching since the Sopranos ended. That's not to say there aren't occasional bursts or original programming that are worth watching, or something similar on the minor channels (NatGeo, etc.).
Oh, yeah. English League football! That's gotta be worth something, right?
... if I did want to "look elsewhere" for gender-based discrimination, what better place to look than in a field highly dominated by one sex?
Indeed. It never stops bothering me that strippers, nurses, nannies, and cosmetologists are almost invariably female. And if it wasn't for gay men, our numbers in certain industries would even worse.
don't want to be the one modded to hell and back for saying it, but isn't this an issue with the company not purchasing the proper licenses in the appropriate amount of time rather than an issue with DRM?
Consider an alcoholic who beats his wife. Is the problem that he beats his wife (with a solution that he signs up for marriage counseling), or that he can't stop drinking?
Say he also doesn't pay his bills on time. When the gas or electric get shut off and the kids don't get fed, what's the problem? That the kids are hungry, that he doesn't have enough money, that he didn't find a sympathetic ear at the utility company, or that he can't stop drinking?
Microsoft routinely brushes off Windows activation "issues" with an implicit argument that it's an implementation snafu. Your argument is the same. Personally, I think it misses the point.
If you ask a guy or a girl the price of big boobs, they'd both agree the cost is often prohibitive.
The same applies to big girls. If the rumour that fat girls are easy is true, then they should cost less on a per-date basis, yes? It's possible they actually cost more on a daily basis (care and feeding of a spouse, for example), but I'd like to think that if they're happy to swallow anything they put into their mouth (another rumour), that would more than make up for the extra cost.
My chronic tinnitus aside, if you limit my decibelage, I will find a way to crank it.
Kids today.;-)
You may want to consider that as you get older, your hearing will start to go (you're obviously one of those who are on an accelerated path). Just as importantly, the music you're cranking up today will be forgotten. And if it is remembered, the memories will cause a sudden flush of embarrassment when realise what you regularly listened to was crap, and it was way too loud.
Ya know, I've created more bootable (and/or non-bootable) CDs and DVDs than I care to count. I've also created (almost routinely) bootable (and/or non-bootable) USB hard drives drives, USB flash drives, flash memory cards, and SSDs.
I've read the two stories, the two respective articles, visited any links provided, re-read your quote, and I still don't know WTF this tool is supposed to do.
Is it a download tool (ftp, wget, fetch), a CD mastering or burning tool (cdrtools, growisofs, burncd), a disk or file system tool (fdisk, newfs, mke2fs), a copy tool (cp, tar, cpio, dump, dd), something else, something more, or all of the above wrapped in a wizard or some sort of GUI?
Please someone answer me as honestly as they can: even if that guy happened to willingly watch child porn images, what damage does that do to society?
Putting aside the the hypotheticals and tenuous claims that another poster referred to, I'd say that realistically, damage can come in two forms:
1. Loss of Productivity. Consider what happens when someone regularly indulges themselves on a diet of porn, any kind of porn. If it doesn't involve sitting around the house, eating Cheetos or pizza, it would be an anomoly. The same could be said for watching too much violence.
2. Moral Outrage. The origin for most of these laws date back to the Reagan era (the Meese commission, specifically) and political ascendency of the Christian right and various women's rights groups. That those groups still wield significant power and continue to maintain near-dogmatic positions prevents society as a whole from engaging in any kind of reasonable discussion. When issues become black and white, what's left but draconian legislation, increased incarceration, and hysteria?
So why we can't allow someone to watch child porn? We can't, because the idea of allowing it is simply too outrageous. Not too hard to understand.
If you did a poll that asked "Are you creeped out by the thought of a Cheetos-eating scumbag whacking off to pictures of your daughter, or someone that looks like your daughter, or someone the same age as your daughter?", the answer would be yes. Even from Cheetos-eating scumbags.
What is hard to understand is how we allowed ourselves as a society to take that "creeped out" reaction, and codify it into more and more laws that turn ordinary citizens into criminals of the worst kind.
FreeBSD is indeed outstanding in the documentation area -- complete, thorough and consistent. And as an added bonus, most manpages are written to include examples and handholding (where applicable).
Linux, I'm afraid, suffers from, among other things, the man/info dilemma. Personally, I find info somewhere between retarded and useless, but to the extent anyone relies on using info as it was originally conceived, they'll discover soon enough that the info referenced in the manpage was never written.
As a workaround for the shoddy quality of Linux documentation, what I do is one of the following: (a) install the FreeBSD manpages into my home directory; (b) use a script to dump the on-line version into my terminal; or (c) simply write my own. Granted the FreeBSD manpages won't necessarily match up, but they're generally close enough to be adequate, and especially useful for unfamiliar concepts or commands.
As for writing one's own manpages, that does take a bit of knowledge, but it's far simpler than it appears. An alternative is to use Perl's immensely-readable and easy-to-learn POD format. Running 'perldoc/path/to/mypod' (or simply 'pod2man') gives you the same bold, overstriking and other formatting you'd typically expect from a manpage. Either way, writing your own seems to be increasingly necessary. Took me a while to document Firefox correctly, but I haven't had to waste any time since bouncing around dozens of Firefox sites to lookup the meaning of about:config settings. If you've got documentation, Google is *never* faster.
Manpages ideally should contain examples, but they shouldn't take the form of a tutorial. The web is littered with tutorials, so finding one is easy enough.
openssl enc -aes256 -salt -a -e -in passwd.txt -out secrets rm passwd.txt mail -s "My Secret Passwords" myname@gmail.com < secrets
So not only can you have your passwords "written down", but you can have a a copy of them (conveniently base64 encoded) in your Gmail inbox available to you when travelling. Assuming, of course, you've memorised the password to your Gmail account.;-)
Yeah, kernel infrastructure that can't cope with running out of memory. That fills me with confidence. Particularly I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris on a 48MB Pentium laptop and it coped fine.
And your point is what? That you want to use ZFS on a 48MB laptop? Whether a 2-line warning against using ZFS in low-memory environments fills you with confidence isn't much more than an uninformed opinion, is it? The caveat that ZFS is new, the recommendations, and the reasons for those recommendations are clearly spelled out in the documentation. A fairer (preliminary) judgment would be to evaluate the requirements (reasonable at face value, and more so if you took the time to investigate the implementation), and weigh the experiences of those who rely on ZFS in production environments. FWIW, I use ZFS on my home systems and have had zero issues.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD ZFS pages are a wiki, which means they're badly organised and out of date. I have no idea when the above was written or whether it's still valid. Does anyone know?
Another wild-assed opinion. If by "FreeBSD ZFS pages" you mean documentation, that's found where it always is, in the well-written manpages, the Handbook, and the source code. The existence of one or more Wikis is irrelevant. Unless, of course, we're talking about Linux where the term documentation is regrettably synonymous with wikis.
yet. When I can read 8 different newspapers with the exact same AP story, the differential between the newspapers becomes the experience.
Sigh. I don't know why I bother with reading any article on Slashdot that involves newspapers.
Your opinion, like your perspective, is embarrassingly narrow. If you think a paper like the NY Times or the Washington post is a collection of AP stories, you obviously haven't read either, and are blissfully unaware of why it is they are read.
As for "8 different newspapers with the exact same AP story", that's a bit redundant given the nature of AP, doncha think? If you're trying to make the point that "lesser" newspapers increasingly do little reporting or offer anything unique or otherwise original, well, that's another "duh". Fewer readers (for whatever the reason) means fewer people to paying for it.
I think you misunderstood. Idioms are unique to the language, not the listener. My point was that the Perl is an "expressive" language designed with "English words" (the subject of the post), and the widespread use and preference for idiomatic constructs is a natural outgrowth of that expressiveness.
Your example, despite using common words, is straightforward (i.e., not idiomatic), and if anything, is an example of the "clarity" advocated by the OP. By contrast, Perl's motto of TMTOWTDI advocates a very different approach.
In this respect, I think "clarity" is improved much more by using constructs from mathematics than from "english".
That might explain the popular notion that Perl is a write-only language. For those unfamiliar with Larry Wall:
Wall's qualification as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale. He also often uses linguistic terms for Perl language constructs, so instead of traditional "variable", "function", and "accessor" he sometimes says "noun", "verb", and "topicalizer".
The counter argument, however, is that valuing clarity over expressiveness can make Jack a dull boy. For someone well-versed in Perl's idioms, writing and reading Perl can be a pleasure.
Those unfamiliar with idiomatic constructs, on the other hand, balk for the same reasons many learning English as a second language find English uniquely difficult. But it's the expressiveness of a language like English that allows one to write a "one-liner" like Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind instead of 500 fat and flabby pages that laboriously document the psychology of interpersonal relationships.
Yeah, alot of people don't realize how much better life is without TV.
Generally, yes. But you're talking about commercial television, just like people who complain about crappy radio are talking about commercial radio
I'm a regular viewer of of PBS and C-SPAN. The Charlie Rose show, for example, is probably the closest most people will get to an intelligent and informative conversation than they'll have had all year long in their personal lives, reading material included. How is that, or the latest documentary or episode of Frontline not enriching? And C-SPAN, hell, what could be more informative? Instead of reading on Slashdot re-circulated Bruce Schneier blogposts, why not watch and listen to him directly?
You need to get out more. Your comments reminds me of the time when I mentioned to a friend that I stumbled across this nutty but really well done show called A Prairie Home Companion on the radio. He told me had been a regular listener longer than he could remember.
Language is communication. If someone says "tuna sushi" and the listener understands what they said, then it is accurate communication and language.
So to use your reasoning, a resident of Kansas complaining to a paleontologist that evolution is "just a theory" is an example of "accurate communication and language"? The paelontologist certainly understood what he heard. And most likely, he also understood that the speaker is either an idiot, or a person who doesn't understand or respect the meaning of the words he's using.
Words matter. That two people understand each other means nothing. Chimpanzees and teenagers have been known to communicate successfully among themselves using all manner of sounds, words, and gestures. If you remove the sounds and gestures, and write the words down on paper for someone else to read, what have you got, other than incorrectness mixed with nonsense? Personally, I find it regrettable that people champion, or even aspire, to the mediocrity you're espousing.
Brawndo is literally awesome!
I could care less.
Is that the world you want to live in?
they purposefully abused language to convey an idea in a memorable way...
You have to understand the correctness of something before you're able to abuse it, have fun with it, or manipulate it to your own ends. Otherwise, chances are good that there is no real communication. If words don't have meanings, lies resemble truths, and the one being manipulated is the listener who can't tell the difference. But why should he care, right? And why should I care, other than that nagging concern about idiots having the right to vote.
In many Western countries, the health authorities specify that fish served raw must be frozen first to kill certain types of parasite, so what you get in the middle of the country probably doesn't differ much from what you get on the coast.
Similar to chicken.
Storage and handling regulations mandate a range of temperatures, but the bottom of that range is below freezing, a fact you can be sure the producers are happy to take advantage of. The result is that most of the "fresh" chicken sold at your local store is really frozen, or perhaps "lightly frozen for indeterminate periods of time".
Fresh chicken, fresh fish, or fresh anything is noticeably better, and is best purchased directly, or at least earlier in the chain. When I go to my local Chinatown to get a freshly slaughtered chicken, it's not uncommon to see little old Chinese ladies carrying fish home for dinner. For some, it seems, "fresh" means "live, in a bag of water".
A fairer and more broadly accpeptable calculation of how old XP is would be to determine the date large OEMs stopped shipping PCs with XP installed.
Put another way, from a consumer's perspective, XP is as old as his new computer. From a corporate perspective (both the cubicle-worker and the IT folks), XP is as old as the date testing was finished and deployment was given the go ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Why pay cable/satellite companies for TV in general? I've found that I'm perfectly happy with getting all of my TV online through iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and various network's websites.
Why would you assume your TV would be the same as anyone else's?
I primarily watch PBS and live in an area that's a bit too far out for good reception with a converter box. Admittedly, there is some PBS programming available on the web, but it's far from complete.
I also watch C-SPAN. That's funded by cable providers and available only to their subscribers. The on-line situation is the same as for PBS.
Admittedly, the line up for most of the pay channels is piss poor given the cost, and HBO hasn't been worth watching since the Sopranos ended. That's not to say there aren't occasional bursts or original programming that are worth watching, or something similar on the minor channels (NatGeo, etc.).
Oh, yeah. English League football! That's gotta be worth something, right?
Marshmallows are made with gelatin, which is made from meat. (Technically, it's the ground cartilage of food-grade animals)
You're right about the marshmallows, but everything else is wrong.
Folks might want to check the Wiki article for a better explanation. Or ask their grandmothers how soup/stock is made.
... if I did want to "look elsewhere" for gender-based discrimination, what better place to look than in a field highly dominated by one sex?
Indeed. It never stops bothering me that strippers, nurses, nannies, and cosmetologists are almost invariably female. And if it wasn't for gay men, our numbers in certain industries would even worse.
don't want to be the one modded to hell and back for saying it, but isn't this an issue with the company not purchasing the proper licenses in the appropriate amount of time rather than an issue with DRM?
Consider an alcoholic who beats his wife. Is the problem that he beats his wife (with a solution that he signs up for marriage counseling), or that he can't stop drinking?
Say he also doesn't pay his bills on time. When the gas or electric get shut off and the kids don't get fed, what's the problem? That the kids are hungry, that he doesn't have enough money, that he didn't find a sympathetic ear at the utility company, or that he can't stop drinking?
Microsoft routinely brushes off Windows activation "issues" with an implicit argument that it's an implementation snafu. Your argument is the same. Personally, I think it misses the point.
True for laptops, laptop batteries, cars, women.
I don't think that applies to women.
If you ask a guy or a girl the price of big boobs, they'd both agree the cost is often prohibitive.
The same applies to big girls. If the rumour that fat girls are easy is true, then they should cost less on a per-date basis, yes? It's possible they actually cost more on a daily basis (care and feeding of a spouse, for example), but I'd like to think that if they're happy to swallow anything they put into their mouth (another rumour), that would more than make up for the extra cost.
My chronic tinnitus aside, if you limit my decibelage, I will find a way to crank it.
Kids today. ;-)
You may want to consider that as you get older, your hearing will start to go (you're obviously one of those who are on an accelerated path). Just as importantly, the music you're cranking up today will be forgotten. And if it is remembered, the memories will cause a sudden flush of embarrassment when realise what you regularly listened to was crap, and it was way too loud.
Now get off my lawn.
Source: http://wudt.codeplex.com/ from TFA.
Ya know, I've created more bootable (and/or non-bootable) CDs and DVDs than I care to count. I've also created (almost routinely) bootable (and/or non-bootable) USB hard drives drives, USB flash drives, flash memory cards, and SSDs.
I've read the two stories, the two respective articles, visited any links provided, re-read your quote, and I still don't know WTF this tool is supposed to do.
Is it a download tool (ftp, wget, fetch), a CD mastering or burning tool (cdrtools, growisofs, burncd), a disk or file system tool (fdisk, newfs, mke2fs), a copy tool (cp, tar, cpio, dump, dd), something else, something more, or all of the above wrapped in a wizard or some sort of GUI?
Customers who bought iRan also bought iAtollah.
Please someone answer me as honestly as they can: even if that guy happened to willingly watch child porn images, what damage does that do to society?
Putting aside the the hypotheticals and tenuous claims that another poster referred to, I'd say that realistically, damage can come in two forms:
1. Loss of Productivity. Consider what happens when someone regularly indulges themselves on a diet of porn, any kind of porn. If it doesn't involve sitting around the house, eating Cheetos or pizza, it would be an anomoly. The same could be said for watching too much violence.
2. Moral Outrage. The origin for most of these laws date back to the Reagan era (the Meese commission, specifically) and political ascendency of the Christian right and various women's rights groups. That those groups still wield significant power and continue to maintain near-dogmatic positions prevents society as a whole from engaging in any kind of reasonable discussion. When issues become black and white, what's left but draconian legislation, increased incarceration, and hysteria?
So why we can't allow someone to watch child porn? We can't, because the idea of allowing it is simply too outrageous. Not too hard to understand.
If you did a poll that asked "Are you creeped out by the thought of a Cheetos-eating scumbag whacking off to pictures of your daughter, or someone that looks like your daughter, or someone the same age as your daughter?", the answer would be yes. Even from Cheetos-eating scumbags.
What is hard to understand is how we allowed ourselves as a society to take that "creeped out" reaction, and codify it into more and more laws that turn ordinary citizens into criminals of the worst kind.
Wow... Just... wow!
I was think the same. I never carry my purse when going to Starbucks.
Trying to FIND the command to do something is nearly impossible.
Typing 'man -k somecommand' is impossible?
FreeBSD is indeed outstanding in the documentation area -- complete, thorough and consistent. And as an added bonus, most manpages are written to include examples and handholding (where applicable).
Linux, I'm afraid, suffers from, among other things, the man/info dilemma. Personally, I find info somewhere between retarded and useless, but to the extent anyone relies on using info as it was originally conceived, they'll discover soon enough that the info referenced in the manpage was never written.
As a workaround for the shoddy quality of Linux documentation, what I do is one of the following: (a) install the FreeBSD manpages into my home directory; (b) use a script to dump the on-line version into my terminal; or (c) simply write my own. Granted the FreeBSD manpages won't necessarily match up, but they're generally close enough to be adequate, and especially useful for unfamiliar concepts or commands.
As for writing one's own manpages, that does take a bit of knowledge, but it's far simpler than it appears. An alternative is to use Perl's immensely-readable and easy-to-learn POD format. Running 'perldoc /path/to/mypod' (or simply 'pod2man') gives you the same bold, overstriking and other formatting you'd typically expect from a manpage. Either way, writing your own seems to be increasingly necessary. Took me a while to document Firefox correctly, but I haven't had to waste any time since bouncing around dozens of Firefox sites to lookup the meaning of about:config settings. If you've got documentation, Google is *never* faster.
Manpages ideally should contain examples, but they shouldn't take the form of a tutorial. The web is littered with tutorials, so finding one is easy enough.
A bit overstated, no?
So not only can you have your passwords "written down", but you can have a a copy of them (conveniently base64 encoded) in your Gmail inbox available to you when travelling. Assuming, of course, you've memorised the password to your Gmail account. ;-)
Yeah, kernel infrastructure that can't cope with running out of memory. That fills me with confidence. Particularly I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris on a 48MB Pentium laptop and it coped fine.
And your point is what? That you want to use ZFS on a 48MB laptop? Whether a 2-line warning against using ZFS in low-memory environments fills you with confidence isn't much more than an uninformed opinion, is it? The caveat that ZFS is new, the recommendations, and the reasons for those recommendations are clearly spelled out in the documentation. A fairer (preliminary) judgment would be to evaluate the requirements (reasonable at face value, and more so if you took the time to investigate the implementation), and weigh the experiences of those who rely on ZFS in production environments. FWIW, I use ZFS on my home systems and have had zero issues.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD ZFS pages are a wiki, which means they're badly organised and out of date. I have no idea when the above was written or whether it's still valid. Does anyone know?
Another wild-assed opinion. If by "FreeBSD ZFS pages" you mean documentation, that's found where it always is, in the well-written manpages, the Handbook, and the source code. The existence of one or more Wikis is irrelevant. Unless, of course, we're talking about Linux where the term documentation is regrettably synonymous with wikis.
yet. When I can read 8 different newspapers with the exact same AP story, the differential between the newspapers becomes the experience.
Sigh. I don't know why I bother with reading any article on Slashdot that involves newspapers.
Your opinion, like your perspective, is embarrassingly narrow. If you think a paper like the NY Times or the Washington post is a collection of AP stories, you obviously haven't read either, and are blissfully unaware of why it is they are read.
As for "8 different newspapers with the exact same AP story", that's a bit redundant given the nature of AP, doncha think? If you're trying to make the point that "lesser" newspapers increasingly do little reporting or offer anything unique or otherwise original, well, that's another "duh". Fewer readers (for whatever the reason) means fewer people to paying for it.
LOL. I'd think people who spend their time evaluating screenshots aren't the folks who would grasp the inherent irony.
I think you misunderstood. Idioms are unique to the language, not the listener. My point was that the Perl is an "expressive" language designed with "English words" (the subject of the post), and the widespread use and preference for idiomatic constructs is a natural outgrowth of that expressiveness.
Your example, despite using common words, is straightforward (i.e., not idiomatic), and if anything, is an example of the "clarity" advocated by the OP. By contrast, Perl's motto of TMTOWTDI advocates a very different approach.
His name is Gary, not Gray. Stellar editing as always, slashdot staff.
If it helps, I think that for most, proper editing on Slashdot may be a gray area, while for others it's certainly grey. I don't know who Stellar is.
In this respect, I think "clarity" is improved much more by using constructs from mathematics than from "english".
That might explain the popular notion that Perl is a write-only language. For those unfamiliar with Larry Wall:
The counter argument, however, is that valuing clarity over expressiveness can make Jack a dull boy. For someone well-versed in Perl's idioms, writing and reading Perl can be a pleasure.
Those unfamiliar with idiomatic constructs, on the other hand, balk for the same reasons many learning English as a second language find English uniquely difficult. But it's the expressiveness of a language like English that allows one to write a "one-liner" like Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind instead of 500 fat and flabby pages that laboriously document the psychology of interpersonal relationships.
Yeah, alot of people don't realize how much better life is without TV.
Generally, yes. But you're talking about commercial television, just like people who complain about crappy radio are talking about commercial radio
I'm a regular viewer of of PBS and C-SPAN. The Charlie Rose show, for example, is probably the closest most people will get to an intelligent and informative conversation than they'll have had all year long in their personal lives, reading material included. How is that, or the latest documentary or episode of Frontline not enriching? And C-SPAN, hell, what could be more informative? Instead of reading on Slashdot re-circulated Bruce Schneier blogposts, why not watch and listen to him directly?
You need to get out more. Your comments reminds me of the time when I mentioned to a friend that I stumbled across this nutty but really well done show called A Prairie Home Companion on the radio. He told me had been a regular listener longer than he could remember.
This whole thing is ... nothing but anti-Microsoft / anti-Bing bashing.
I don't see a problem. ;-)
Language is communication. If someone says "tuna sushi" and the listener understands what they said, then it is accurate communication and language.
So to use your reasoning, a resident of Kansas complaining to a paleontologist that evolution is "just a theory" is an example of "accurate communication and language"? The paelontologist certainly understood what he heard. And most likely, he also understood that the speaker is either an idiot, or a person who doesn't understand or respect the meaning of the words he's using.
Words matter. That two people understand each other means nothing. Chimpanzees and teenagers have been known to communicate successfully among themselves using all manner of sounds, words, and gestures. If you remove the sounds and gestures, and write the words down on paper for someone else to read, what have you got, other than incorrectness mixed with nonsense? Personally, I find it regrettable that people champion, or even aspire, to the mediocrity you're espousing.
Brawndo is literally awesome!
I could care less.
Is that the world you want to live in?
they purposefully abused language to convey an idea in a memorable way...
You have to understand the correctness of something before you're able to abuse it, have fun with it, or manipulate it to your own ends. Otherwise, chances are good that there is no real communication. If words don't have meanings, lies resemble truths, and the one being manipulated is the listener who can't tell the difference. But why should he care, right? And why should I care, other than that nagging concern about idiots having the right to vote.
most luncheon meat is "cooked" by injecting it with salt and spices
I'd hope the Slashdot audience isn't as dumb as that. How about
Most luncheon meat is cured) instead of cooked.
In many Western countries, the health authorities specify that fish served raw must be frozen first to kill certain types of parasite, so what you get in the middle of the country probably doesn't differ much from what you get on the coast.
Similar to chicken.
Storage and handling regulations mandate a range of temperatures, but the bottom of that range is below freezing, a fact you can be sure the producers are happy to take advantage of. The result is that most of the "fresh" chicken sold at your local store is really frozen, or perhaps "lightly frozen for indeterminate periods of time".
Fresh chicken, fresh fish, or fresh anything is noticeably better, and is best purchased directly, or at least earlier in the chain. When I go to my local Chinatown to get a freshly slaughtered chicken, it's not uncommon to see little old Chinese ladies carrying fish home for dinner. For some, it seems, "fresh" means "live, in a bag of water".
It was released in 2001, 8 years ago.
A fairer and more broadly accpeptable calculation of how old XP is would be to determine the date large OEMs stopped shipping PCs with XP installed.
Put another way, from a consumer's perspective, XP is as old as his new computer. From a corporate perspective (both the cubicle-worker and the IT folks), XP is as old as the date testing was finished and deployment was given the go ahead.