First, I have to say something about the end of the summary:
a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers
Nearly every single Intel CPU made in the last several years includes their VT technology built in. All new i7 chips include it. I have no idea why someone would think the embedded VM is restricted to "power users". By the time Win7 is released, almost every computer running it will have the capability to run XP Mode.
I know a few people who are really well connected in Fortune 500 IT circles, and they tell me to a man that *NOBODY* is planning to move to Vista or 7 [...] much of which DOESN'T work in Vista or 7
I have to call BS on this. The biggest drawback to moving to Vista/7 for a large company will be training users and verifying that productivity/office/custom applications work correctly. For locking down workstations, Vista and Win7 include a LOT of new GPO options that corporations love. They include native support for disk imaging and encryption. Yeah, there are a lot of people skipping Vista but that's mostly due to how quickly Win7 is being released. If it was going to be another 5-6 years then you would see a lot more Vista adoption.
break out of the emulation sandbox
The user is running the emulated application, so any rights the user has are likely inherited by it. If the user is admin, then obviously the emulated XP application/environment will have the ability to frak the Win7 install up. Since the emulation is running on top of the Win7 host, security will be handled by that.
Honestly, this is really great news. People/companies that need it will love it and those that don't or are scared will have the option to disable it. Even better, if the emulation is 32-bit, then it gives you the ability to run older 16-bit programs which are completely incompatible with 64-bit versions of Windows (which lack the 16-bit subsystem). It means I can keep playing TriPeaks! (scroll down).
As somebody who learned HTML and Javascript with GeoCities, that's really too bad. Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music but I still occasionally come across very worthwhile information on GeoCities via Google and in terms of reliable free hosting with pretty unobtrusive ads it was pretty good. It seems somewhat rash to just shut it down outright.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online. Give site owners the ability to delete their site, but no longer allow editing or uploading. That would be pretty low maintenance and certainly they still receive ad revenue from it, but maybe not enough to cover costs.
Robocopy is a free command-line tool similar to rsync that comes with Vista and is a free download for previous versions of Windows. The syntax is a little clumsy, but it works pretty well for simple backups (that is, directory replication). A free 3rd party tool that's pretty good is Cobian Backup. However there are probably hundreds of different "backup" utilities for Windows so you might want to just try a couple and see how they work for you.
PowerShell is pretty nice, certainly it's leaps and bounds better than CMD or WSH. Object-oriented and allows full access to the.NET framework which is pretty nice. Easily extensible as well by writing your own "cmdlets" (a.NET program invoked like a built-in command).
To improve story quality they just need to get rid of kdawson and ScuttleMonkey.
Meh. The kdawson script is just ScuttleMonkey v2. Obviously, not only did they not get rid of all the bugs, but they introduced a bunch of new ones. Hey Taco, I think you should name ScuttleMonkey v3 "RickJames". That way if anyone complains, you can have an automated response that just says, "I'm RickJames, bitch!" No one can argue with that.
In any case, those are the only two that I know are computer programs. There's no way to tell how many other/. editors are scripts. Call me paranoid, but I wonder sometimes if Slashdot as a whole isn't a ploy by the machines to waste humanity's time while they plan their attack. You thought Caprica Six planted a virus in the Colonial defense system? Nope. She just installed Slashdot on the defense network and waited. Once everyone was busy arguing about the latest kdawson dupe the Cylons attacked.
Oh, and in case anyone needs help getting the "Spend all my modpoints" achievement, I'd be happy to accept Funny mods. Here, I'll even tell a penguin joke.
A vacationing penguin is driving through Arizona, when he notices that the oil-pressure light is on. He gets out to look, and sees oil dripping out of the motor. He drives to the nearest town and stops at the first gas station.
After dropping the car off, the penguin goes for a walk around town. He sees an ice cream shop, and being a penguin in Arizona, decides that something cold would really hit the spot. He gets a big bowl of vanilla ice cream and sits down to eat. Having no hands, he makes a real mess trying to eat with his little flippers.
After finishing his ice cream, he goes back to the gas station and asks the mechanic if he's found the problem.
The mechanic looks up and says, "Well, it looks like you blew a seal."
"Hm? Oh, no," the penguin replies, "it's just ice cream."
While not directly the same, I've seen some impressive things done with Markov Chains. If you had a big enough database to pull from, I wonder if you couldn't come up with a bot that's at least comprehensive enough to fool some people.
A good example is Kooky, an IRC bot with a huge database built by sitting in IRC channels and monitoring conversations (the quotes database has some great stuff in it). The biggest challenge would probably be stringing cohesive statements together so it's not just a bunch of semi-random blurbs.
Given a good enough database, you might even be able to infer answers to simple questions like "What is faster, a bullet or a baseball?" If you can assume there might be something of a language barrier between the tester and the bot, it's even better.
The reason she boots every morning is because she thinks she will "break" the computer by leaving it on. Not sure if she is afraid of malware or thinks the computer is suffering 'wear and tear' in hibernation mode, but she just thinks its safer to turn it off. And before you say "educate her" - she doesn't listen to me when her 'intuition' tells her something.
Then it is her ignorance that's standing in the way of a fast-access system, not software.
If you put your system in hibernation mode, the wake up process is much faster then a cold boot
I concur with this. I have an older Dell laptop with XP and Ubuntu on it. I always hibernate Windows, and it takes (once past Grub) about 8 seconds to be ready to log in. I've never had any trouble keeping Windows hibernated for weeks at a time.
On the flip side, I don't know what the problem is, but Ubuntu takes longer to boot up after being hibernated (assuming it comes up at all -- now and then it just stops resuming). I keep hearing about low power modes being better supported in Linux distributions, but I've yet to come across something that will work reliably in standby or hibernation on any of the laptops I've used.
It's unfortunate because it means if I need to do something quick, I always go for Windows. On the same machine I can be up and running Windows in literally 15 seconds, while Ubuntu takes over 4 minutes to be ready (or even longer when there's no network connected) with or without a previous hibernation.
To dumb your message down, CPU manufacturers act like book publishers [...]
What is this "books" crap? Pft, I remember when car analogies were good enough for everyone. Now you have to get all fancy. Let me try and explain it more clearly:
CPUs are like cars. Intel and Friends haven't been able to keep increasing the velocity they can safely and reliably run, so instead of relying on increased speed to get more people from point A to point B, they are instead starting to look at parallelization as a means to achieve better performance.
Now you are chopped up into 10 pieces and FedEx'd to your destination with 100 other people. Pieces may go by road, rail, air, or ship and thus overall capacity--"bandwidth" you might say--of the lanes of travel has been increased.
The only problem is that the people who make use of this new technique ("programmers", that is) have a hard time chopping you up in such a way that you can be put back together again. Usually it's a bit of a mess and more trouble that it's worth, thus we just keep driving our old-fashioned cars at normal speeds while adding lanes to the roads.
So, keep your criticism anonymous and steal what you can. Everyone else is.
Insightful indeed.
In the same vein, I find the quote by Alexander Tytler (made in the 1950's) to be incredibly applicable to the United States today:
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
- From bondage to spiritual faith; - From spiritual faith to great courage; - From courage to liberty; - From liberty to abundance; - From abundance to complacency; - From complacency to apathy; - From apathy to dependence; - From dependence back into bondage.
I can't help but see our current state as being between apathy and dependence -- so yes, steal what you can while you can. It probably won't be around much longer.
Maybe Obama is banking on them passing it on to the customers. It means more money into the economy through increased charges.
I certainly hope Obama's grand plan for the economy doesn't whittle down to a governmental implementation of the broken window fallacy.
Increased customer fees will hurt the economy, not help it. By increasing fees, it means more money going to the government not out into the economy where it might help smaller businesses from shutting down. It also means more people might cancel their service, or opt not to sign up in the first place, both of which hurt the cell providers.
Oh good grief. Yeah, the grandparent was a little exuberant, but your post is so overblown in the opposite direction that the net result is zero.
Microsoft has used unfair business practices to destroy one company after another. They got so blatant about their mission to destroy all potential competition, that the government got involved.
There is ample evidence that Microsoft was trying (sometimes successfully) to use their market penetration and sway over OEMs to their benefit. Examples include not allowing OEMs to bundle certain software. It should go without saying that they wanted to best the competition, that's any corporation's goal. The problem was with some of their anti-competitive techniques crossed the line.
browsers manage to catch the limelight because there are so many, and people notice them.
Except there weren't (this started in 1995 remember) and people don't. The browsers were almost exclusively either IE or Netscape/Mozilla. Maybe the biggest nail in the coffin for Netscape was twofold: Microsoft started bundling IE for free with Windows, and at a certain point IE started to eclipse Netscape in features and stability (shock, I know). Considering there was no real money for MS to make with their browser it made sense to include it with the OS because it meant they could leverage it for other OS-related purposes such as rich help files and things like Windows Update. It also helped them market Windows as an all-inclusive ready out-of-the-box product, pretty much exactly like Apple does now with OS X.
Tell us - why do you suppose that Microsoft has simply refused to make IE standards compliant?
Because Microsoft is a corporation and there was no profit in doing so. Likely a simple cost/benefit analysis. Windows and Office are their bread and butter, why blow development money on a browser?
You don't think it could POSSIBLY be that it helps to break the interweb
Break it? Originally the "interweb" was defined largely by what IE and Netscape implemented.
Why does Microsoft push ActiveX
How do they "push" it?
but won't turn over the source code, or even standards, so that other browser might use it?
Obviously they don't turn over source code because they are a closed-source commercial company. Besides, pretty much all browsers have a plugin/app architecture that serves the same purpose as ActiveX does on IE. While starting to be largely eclipsed by other technology like Flash/Silverlight/AJAX, ActiveX and friends still serve a useful role in providing web applications additional access to the users's computer through a browser when needed.
With or without a browser, Microsoft is going to make billions this year, eclipsing ANY OTHER software company. I say, take away one of Microsoft's toys, if they can't play nicely with the other kids.
We should punish a company just because it makes more money than anyone else? Punish their misdeeds, not their success. Statements like this just come across as envious spite with a weak facade of desiring justice.
Maybe next year, we'll consider taking away Windows media player, if they can't learn to be nice.
Uh, yeah, the brilliant minds at the EU already took a shot at that with forcing Windows XP N Edition. Nobody wanted it.
I think a lot of this "look what they did 15 years ago" stuff is pretty meaningless now. Enough time has passed that we'd be better off remembering the past, but punishing and investigating them for current infractions, and the best place to try and fix potential problems is going to be at the OEM level. Make sure Microsoft can't dictate to Dell what they can or cannot bundle in terms of competitiveness and make sure and keep hardware standards open and documented, but don't restrict what can be included in a retail Windows box. When I buy Windows off the shelf I expect it to come ready-to-use with Microsoft apps like IE, WMP, Wordpad, and Paint. If I want an alternative to one or all of these, I'll go find one.
When the user clicks a "Internet" button for the first time, they are presented with an option to either install IE or are given links to install files for a bunch of competitors browsers?
This by itself is fraught with all sorts of potential issues, but the biggest problem is probably one of liability. As I pointed out in one of the previous umpteen discussions about this, liability is a very serious matter to a commercial software company like Microsoft. Without rehashing it all, something else to consider is just what you suggested.
For example, if they had a link to SomeBrowser's website, and SomeBrowser.com was compromised in some way (hacked, registration expired, DNS compromised, whatever), all of a sudden everyone who clicks to install SomeBrowser is installed what could probably be called Microsoft-sanctioned malware. As soon as they transfer control to an external entity, they are at their mercy. Sure, mozilla.org and opera.com are probably pretty dang secure, but when you're talking about a potential class-action lawsuit, I have to think Microsoft isn't real keen on the idea of linking to a bunch of third-party executables or sites saying "Go install these programs".
Much the same can be said for bundled software. Regardless of what the EULA or any other license says, if a program comes bundled with Windows and it is discovered to have some problems, whose responsibility is it to issue a fix? Sure it might be the Firefox browser, but Microsoft shipped it with Windows. Now it's in their lap.
Regardless, I think this was a poor decision. It shows a lack of understanding and foresight into the precedent and technical/legal problems that will stem from compliance.
The registry is a horrible idea, you make one mistake in the registry and your computer might not boot.
Conf files are a horrible idea, you make one mistake in/boot/[somefile] and your computer might not boot (without the implied user intervention needed in both cases).
Using conf files instead of the registry doesn't prevent people from making mistakes. A better argument would be that the registry puts all your eggs in one basket (or several large baskets) and deletion or corruption of a hive has the potential to cause widespread damage. Of course, this is also one of it's strengths; the idea being that centralized binary storage is more organized, efficient, and performant than an untold number of text conf files scattered across the filesystem.
Both methods work and can even co-exist with neither being inherently or totally wrong. Certainly with modern computers and XML-frenzy, conf files are making a strong comeback on Windows.
So you're complaining that you've invested in the wrong hardware and software?
No. If a Windows dev shop wants to branch into mobile phone development, it makes sense for them to look into the iPhone. They aren't abandoning or giving up on their primary platform, just branching out.
Maybe look at it this way - to build for WinMob, you're going to need to build a windows VM (windows vista home premium: $240) and then you're going to need to get visual studio (standard: $299). I make that $539 total, for some software.
Except that Vista Home Premium OEM costs $100 and, depending on your needs, Visual Studio is free with a license that has no commercial-use restrictions. So we have a total of $100.
If you want to build for iPhone, you need a mac mini ($599 for the basic model) and a $0 download of Xcode. So you're moaning about the fact that you have to pay $60 to get a mac mini.
Just because I've already spent $100 for Vista doesn't negate or cancel out the $600 for the Mac. So yes, people are annoyed they have to essentially purchase a $600 per-seat devkit to write applications for the iPhone. If you could run OSX in a VM, that would put it on more equal footing as Windows -- buy a license for the OS and you're done.
So requiring offline and non-updateable pages to tell IE8 to fall back to IE7 rendering helps backward compatibility how?
As another poster said, part of the problem can be fixed by checking the DOCTYPE like IE7 does now. What I was referring to, however, was just that IE8 still has the ability to display using an IE7 rendering mode. Yes, the offline pages might be broken initially, but if the user clicks the IE7 compatibility button they should start working again. I probably should have been clearer that I was not referring to META tags or headers in that case.
Watching the development of IE8, the teams is taking great pains to make sure that site authors and owners have an overall say about how their page is rendered with respect to new IE standards-compliance. You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards. Companies can also specify compatibility options using GPOs which should help keep older intranet sites working.
I think it's a pretty good tradeoff between pushing for modern standards and not "breaking the web". Yes, it is largely IE's fault that there are so many non-conforming sites out there, but compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc). At least by having the new rendering mode the default it will encourage standards compliance (or at least IE's [admittedly improving] version of it.)
Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has taken a huge nosedive
You're completely correct. The second link (the "story" from yesterday) was obviously the rant of a Windows luser who didn't have a clue what they were doing. The fact that it actually got accepted and posted to Slashdot was somehow both unbelievable and sadly also not that surprising.
Oh, that's right! Both of your examples were posted by the worthless "editor" kdawson. Since we can't do anything else, I suggest everyone who is sick of this crap exclude articles posted by kdawson in their preferences. Maybe if enough people do it Taco will get the message (assuming, of course, that kdawson isn't just a puppet Taco uses to post the asinine anti-Microsoft stuff which always gets plenty of adviews).
So why does so much taxpayer money go towards a poverty industrial complex which isn't even doing its job?
I think that's being just a little disingenuous. You could just as easily say "Crimes go unsolved and criminal unpunished. Why does so much taxpayer money go towards police departments which aren't doing their jobs?" or similarly, "People break laws all the time with no consequences. Why does so much taxpayer money go towards enforcing and creating laws which aren't doing their jobs?".
Just because something doesn't work all the time for all the people doesn't mean it isn't worth the investment or that it should be dismissed outright. The fact is that while the law enforcement/prison system may not be perfect, it is preventing some people from committing additional unlawful acts. When you're talking about crimes such as theft, rape, murder, etc., that is a significant and worthy cause.
Resources is still a reason used (almost anything in the Middle East since 10,000 BC, for example), but to say that 99% of conflicts are due to resources as someone did isn't true. It's just a scapegoat people and countries try to use since it sounds valid (but we need this!) but it belies the true intent.
Didn't even get a chance to read the previous post before submitting. Oh well.
You've been modded funny, but historically, the vast majority of wars seem to have been fought over resources
I see this stated as a given fact all the time, but when I stop and think about it, I'm not sure it's really the case. Sure, the lack of resources makes a great scapegoat, and it's been used for some conflicts, but most modern wars seem to be about something else.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I came up with off the top of my head. (I don't consider a goal of "take over the world" as a need for resources. At some point, even if they say it is, resources isn't a valid argument anymore.)
Crusades - Religion, not resources
American revolution - not resources (at least not entirely, Britain probably did want access to North American resources)
War of 1812 - trade restrictions might be considered resources, but more comes down to one nation interfering with another
World War I - Not resources, largely due to a domino effect of alliances
World Ward II - Not resources, though Germany and others claimed they wanted "room to grow", true goal was larger than that. That said, Japan might have a valid claim to resources
Cold War - Not resources, primarily ideological
Vietnam - Not resources, also largely ideological
I think "classic" wars, that is ones > 2000 years ago, were largely about resources. There was a lot of new and unclaimed (or tentatively claimed) land that was pretty much up for grabs. However, since the political layout of the world has settled somewhat, people are also finding new reasons to kill each other. Resources is still a reason used (
My first thought from reading the summary is that essentially we're at a point in technology or whatever that we could, POSSIBLY, destroy the planet in a literal sense
I came across this site some time ago and found it well written and pretty interesting (especially in a mad scientist sort of way). Assuming you're not one of the "wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity", I'm not sure we really do have the tech to destroy the planet "in a literal sense."
By contrast, my wife's laptop which was running Windows XP...required constant de-spywareification and resource intensive anti-virus programs always on alert.
Then, as they say, you're doing it wrong. Running XP/Vista securely is pretty easy:
Most importantly: don't run as admin.
Stay updated.
(Optional) Use a browser like Firefox with addons like NoScript. Makes browsing new sites painful, but more secure.
That combined with a little common sense means you don't even need any realtime anti-virus software. If you do accidentally get something malicious installed, cleaning a user profile is really easy. Worst case means copying files and then deleting and re-creating the profile, just like you would have to do on an infected Linux system.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I have to say something about the end of the summary:
a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers
Nearly every single Intel CPU made in the last several years includes their VT technology built in. All new i7 chips include it. I have no idea why someone would think the embedded VM is restricted to "power users". By the time Win7 is released, almost every computer running it will have the capability to run XP Mode.
I know a few people who are really well connected in Fortune 500 IT circles, and they tell me to a man that *NOBODY* is planning to move to Vista or 7 [...] much of which DOESN'T work in Vista or 7
I have to call BS on this. The biggest drawback to moving to Vista/7 for a large company will be training users and verifying that productivity/office/custom applications work correctly. For locking down workstations, Vista and Win7 include a LOT of new GPO options that corporations love. They include native support for disk imaging and encryption. Yeah, there are a lot of people skipping Vista but that's mostly due to how quickly Win7 is being released. If it was going to be another 5-6 years then you would see a lot more Vista adoption.
break out of the emulation sandbox
The user is running the emulated application, so any rights the user has are likely inherited by it. If the user is admin, then obviously the emulated XP application/environment will have the ability to frak the Win7 install up. Since the emulation is running on top of the Win7 host, security will be handled by that.
Honestly, this is really great news. People/companies that need it will love it and those that don't or are scared will have the option to disable it. Even better, if the emulation is 32-bit, then it gives you the ability to run older 16-bit programs which are completely incompatible with 64-bit versions of Windows (which lack the 16-bit subsystem). It means I can keep playing TriPeaks! (scroll down).
As somebody who learned HTML and Javascript with GeoCities, that's really too bad. Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music but I still occasionally come across very worthwhile information on GeoCities via Google and in terms of reliable free hosting with pretty unobtrusive ads it was pretty good. It seems somewhat rash to just shut it down outright.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online. Give site owners the ability to delete their site, but no longer allow editing or uploading. That would be pretty low maintenance and certainly they still receive ad revenue from it, but maybe not enough to cover costs.
rsync for Windows?
Robocopy is a free command-line tool similar to rsync that comes with Vista and is a free download for previous versions of Windows. The syntax is a little clumsy, but it works pretty well for simple backups (that is, directory replication). A free 3rd party tool that's pretty good is Cobian Backup. However there are probably hundreds of different "backup" utilities for Windows so you might want to just try a couple and see how they work for you.
PowerShell is pretty nice, certainly it's leaps and bounds better than CMD or WSH. Object-oriented and allows full access to the .NET framework which is pretty nice. Easily extensible as well by writing your own "cmdlets" (a .NET program invoked like a built-in command).
Exmerge has been depreciated for years, primarily due to it not supporting the new PST formats.
In keeping with Exchange 2007's newfound love of PowerShell, you should use the Export-Mailbox and Import-Mailbox cmdlets to replace Exmerge.
To improve story quality they just need to get rid of kdawson and ScuttleMonkey.
Meh. The kdawson script is just ScuttleMonkey v2. Obviously, not only did they not get rid of all the bugs, but they introduced a bunch of new ones. Hey Taco, I think you should name ScuttleMonkey v3 "RickJames". That way if anyone complains, you can have an automated response that just says, "I'm RickJames, bitch!" No one can argue with that.
In any case, those are the only two that I know are computer programs. There's no way to tell how many other /. editors are scripts. Call me paranoid, but I wonder sometimes if Slashdot as a whole isn't a ploy by the machines to waste humanity's time while they plan their attack. You thought Caprica Six planted a virus in the Colonial defense system? Nope. She just installed Slashdot on the defense network and waited. Once everyone was busy arguing about the latest kdawson dupe the Cylons attacked.
ME TOO!
Oh, and in case anyone needs help getting the "Spend all my modpoints" achievement, I'd be happy to accept Funny mods. Here, I'll even tell a penguin joke.
I can has funny? :D
While not directly the same, I've seen some impressive things done with Markov Chains. If you had a big enough database to pull from, I wonder if you couldn't come up with a bot that's at least comprehensive enough to fool some people.
A good example is Kooky, an IRC bot with a huge database built by sitting in IRC channels and monitoring conversations (the quotes database has some great stuff in it). The biggest challenge would probably be stringing cohesive statements together so it's not just a bunch of semi-random blurbs.
Given a good enough database, you might even be able to infer answers to simple questions like "What is faster, a bullet or a baseball?" If you can assume there might be something of a language barrier between the tester and the bot, it's even better.
The reason she boots every morning is because she thinks she will "break" the computer by leaving it on. Not sure if she is afraid of malware or thinks the computer is suffering 'wear and tear' in hibernation mode, but she just thinks its safer to turn it off. And before you say "educate her" - she doesn't listen to me when her 'intuition' tells her something.
Then it is her ignorance that's standing in the way of a fast-access system, not software.
If you put your system in hibernation mode, the wake up process is much faster then a cold boot
I concur with this. I have an older Dell laptop with XP and Ubuntu on it. I always hibernate Windows, and it takes (once past Grub) about 8 seconds to be ready to log in. I've never had any trouble keeping Windows hibernated for weeks at a time.
On the flip side, I don't know what the problem is, but Ubuntu takes longer to boot up after being hibernated (assuming it comes up at all -- now and then it just stops resuming). I keep hearing about low power modes being better supported in Linux distributions, but I've yet to come across something that will work reliably in standby or hibernation on any of the laptops I've used.
It's unfortunate because it means if I need to do something quick, I always go for Windows. On the same machine I can be up and running Windows in literally 15 seconds, while Ubuntu takes over 4 minutes to be ready (or even longer when there's no network connected) with or without a previous hibernation.
To dumb your message down, CPU manufacturers act like book publishers [...]
What is this "books" crap? Pft, I remember when car analogies were good enough for everyone. Now you have to get all fancy. Let me try and explain it more clearly:
CPUs are like cars. Intel and Friends haven't been able to keep increasing the velocity they can safely and reliably run, so instead of relying on increased speed to get more people from point A to point B, they are instead starting to look at parallelization as a means to achieve better performance.
Now you are chopped up into 10 pieces and FedEx'd to your destination with 100 other people. Pieces may go by road, rail, air, or ship and thus overall capacity--"bandwidth" you might say--of the lanes of travel has been increased.
The only problem is that the people who make use of this new technique ("programmers", that is) have a hard time chopping you up in such a way that you can be put back together again. Usually it's a bit of a mess and more trouble that it's worth, thus we just keep driving our old-fashioned cars at normal speeds while adding lanes to the roads.
So, keep your criticism anonymous and steal what you can. Everyone else is.
Insightful indeed.
In the same vein, I find the quote by Alexander Tytler (made in the 1950's) to be incredibly applicable to the United States today:
I can't help but see our current state as being between apathy and dependence -- so yes, steal what you can while you can. It probably won't be around much longer.
Maybe Obama is banking on them passing it on to the customers. It means more money into the economy through increased charges.
I certainly hope Obama's grand plan for the economy doesn't whittle down to a governmental implementation of the broken window fallacy.
Increased customer fees will hurt the economy, not help it. By increasing fees, it means more money going to the government not out into the economy where it might help smaller businesses from shutting down. It also means more people might cancel their service, or opt not to sign up in the first place, both of which hurt the cell providers.
They could just put th [CARRIER LOST]
Oh, the irony! :)
Oh good grief. Yeah, the grandparent was a little exuberant, but your post is so overblown in the opposite direction that the net result is zero.
Microsoft has used unfair business practices to destroy one company after another. They got so blatant about their mission to destroy all potential competition, that the government got involved.
There is ample evidence that Microsoft was trying (sometimes successfully) to use their market penetration and sway over OEMs to their benefit. Examples include not allowing OEMs to bundle certain software. It should go without saying that they wanted to best the competition, that's any corporation's goal. The problem was with some of their anti-competitive techniques crossed the line.
browsers manage to catch the limelight because there are so many, and people notice them.
Except there weren't (this started in 1995 remember) and people don't. The browsers were almost exclusively either IE or Netscape/Mozilla. Maybe the biggest nail in the coffin for Netscape was twofold: Microsoft started bundling IE for free with Windows, and at a certain point IE started to eclipse Netscape in features and stability (shock, I know). Considering there was no real money for MS to make with their browser it made sense to include it with the OS because it meant they could leverage it for other OS-related purposes such as rich help files and things like Windows Update. It also helped them market Windows as an all-inclusive ready out-of-the-box product, pretty much exactly like Apple does now with OS X.
Tell us - why do you suppose that Microsoft has simply refused to make IE standards compliant?
Because Microsoft is a corporation and there was no profit in doing so. Likely a simple cost/benefit analysis. Windows and Office are their bread and butter, why blow development money on a browser?
You don't think it could POSSIBLY be that it helps to break the interweb
Break it? Originally the "interweb" was defined largely by what IE and Netscape implemented.
Why does Microsoft push ActiveX
How do they "push" it?
but won't turn over the source code, or even standards, so that other browser might use it?
Obviously they don't turn over source code because they are a closed-source commercial company. Besides, pretty much all browsers have a plugin/app architecture that serves the same purpose as ActiveX does on IE. While starting to be largely eclipsed by other technology like Flash/Silverlight/AJAX, ActiveX and friends still serve a useful role in providing web applications additional access to the users's computer through a browser when needed.
With or without a browser, Microsoft is going to make billions this year, eclipsing ANY OTHER software company. I say, take away one of Microsoft's toys, if they can't play nicely with the other kids.
We should punish a company just because it makes more money than anyone else? Punish their misdeeds, not their success. Statements like this just come across as envious spite with a weak facade of desiring justice.
Maybe next year, we'll consider taking away Windows media player, if they can't learn to be nice.
Uh, yeah, the brilliant minds at the EU already took a shot at that with forcing Windows XP N Edition. Nobody wanted it.
I think a lot of this "look what they did 15 years ago" stuff is pretty meaningless now. Enough time has passed that we'd be better off remembering the past, but punishing and investigating them for current infractions, and the best place to try and fix potential problems is going to be at the OEM level. Make sure Microsoft can't dictate to Dell what they can or cannot bundle in terms of competitiveness and make sure and keep hardware standards open and documented, but don't restrict what can be included in a retail Windows box. When I buy Windows off the shelf I expect it to come ready-to-use with Microsoft apps like IE, WMP, Wordpad, and Paint. If I want an alternative to one or all of these, I'll go find one.
When the user clicks a "Internet" button for the first time, they are presented with an option to either install IE or are given links to install files for a bunch of competitors browsers?
This by itself is fraught with all sorts of potential issues, but the biggest problem is probably one of liability. As I pointed out in one of the previous umpteen discussions about this, liability is a very serious matter to a commercial software company like Microsoft. Without rehashing it all, something else to consider is just what you suggested.
For example, if they had a link to SomeBrowser's website, and SomeBrowser.com was compromised in some way (hacked, registration expired, DNS compromised, whatever), all of a sudden everyone who clicks to install SomeBrowser is installed what could probably be called Microsoft-sanctioned malware. As soon as they transfer control to an external entity, they are at their mercy. Sure, mozilla.org and opera.com are probably pretty dang secure, but when you're talking about a potential class-action lawsuit, I have to think Microsoft isn't real keen on the idea of linking to a bunch of third-party executables or sites saying "Go install these programs".
Much the same can be said for bundled software. Regardless of what the EULA or any other license says, if a program comes bundled with Windows and it is discovered to have some problems, whose responsibility is it to issue a fix? Sure it might be the Firefox browser, but Microsoft shipped it with Windows. Now it's in their lap.
Regardless, I think this was a poor decision. It shows a lack of understanding and foresight into the precedent and technical/legal problems that will stem from compliance.
The registry is a horrible idea, you make one mistake in the registry and your computer might not boot.
Conf files are a horrible idea, you make one mistake in /boot/[somefile] and your computer might not boot (without the implied user intervention needed in both cases).
Using conf files instead of the registry doesn't prevent people from making mistakes. A better argument would be that the registry puts all your eggs in one basket (or several large baskets) and deletion or corruption of a hive has the potential to cause widespread damage. Of course, this is also one of it's strengths; the idea being that centralized binary storage is more organized, efficient, and performant than an untold number of text conf files scattered across the filesystem.
Both methods work and can even co-exist with neither being inherently or totally wrong. Certainly with modern computers and XML-frenzy, conf files are making a strong comeback on Windows.
So you're complaining that you've invested in the wrong hardware and software?
No. If a Windows dev shop wants to branch into mobile phone development, it makes sense for them to look into the iPhone. They aren't abandoning or giving up on their primary platform, just branching out.
Maybe look at it this way - to build for WinMob, you're going to need to build a windows VM (windows vista home premium: $240) and then you're going to need to get visual studio (standard: $299). I make that $539 total, for some software.
Except that Vista Home Premium OEM costs $100 and, depending on your needs, Visual Studio is free with a license that has no commercial-use restrictions. So we have a total of $100.
If you want to build for iPhone, you need a mac mini ($599 for the basic model) and a $0 download of Xcode. So you're moaning about the fact that you have to pay $60 to get a mac mini.
Just because I've already spent $100 for Vista doesn't negate or cancel out the $600 for the Mac. So yes, people are annoyed they have to essentially purchase a $600 per-seat devkit to write applications for the iPhone. If you could run OSX in a VM, that would put it on more equal footing as Windows -- buy a license for the OS and you're done.
So requiring offline and non-updateable pages to tell IE8 to fall back to IE7 rendering helps backward compatibility how?
As another poster said, part of the problem can be fixed by checking the DOCTYPE like IE7 does now. What I was referring to, however, was just that IE8 still has the ability to display using an IE7 rendering mode. Yes, the offline pages might be broken initially, but if the user clicks the IE7 compatibility button they should start working again. I probably should have been clearer that I was not referring to META tags or headers in that case.
What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...
Oh if we only could!
Watching the development of IE8, the teams is taking great pains to make sure that site authors and owners have an overall say about how their page is rendered with respect to new IE standards-compliance. You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards. Companies can also specify compatibility options using GPOs which should help keep older intranet sites working.
I think it's a pretty good tradeoff between pushing for modern standards and not "breaking the web". Yes, it is largely IE's fault that there are so many non-conforming sites out there, but compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc). At least by having the new rendering mode the default it will encourage standards compliance (or at least IE's [admittedly improving] version of it.)
Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has taken a huge nosedive
You're completely correct. The second link (the "story" from yesterday) was obviously the rant of a Windows luser who didn't have a clue what they were doing. The fact that it actually got accepted and posted to Slashdot was somehow both unbelievable and sadly also not that surprising.
Oh, that's right! Both of your examples were posted by the worthless "editor" kdawson. Since we can't do anything else, I suggest everyone who is sick of this crap exclude articles posted by kdawson in their preferences. Maybe if enough people do it Taco will get the message (assuming, of course, that kdawson isn't just a puppet Taco uses to post the asinine anti-Microsoft stuff which always gets plenty of adviews).
One uses buckets for bailing.
I knew the government was doing it wrong.
So why does so much taxpayer money go towards a poverty industrial complex which isn't even doing its job?
I think that's being just a little disingenuous. You could just as easily say "Crimes go unsolved and criminal unpunished. Why does so much taxpayer money go towards police departments which aren't doing their jobs?" or similarly, "People break laws all the time with no consequences. Why does so much taxpayer money go towards enforcing and creating laws which aren't doing their jobs?".
Just because something doesn't work all the time for all the people doesn't mean it isn't worth the investment or that it should be dismissed outright. The fact is that while the law enforcement/prison system may not be perfect, it is preventing some people from committing additional unlawful acts. When you're talking about crimes such as theft, rape, murder, etc., that is a significant and worthy cause.
...whoops. I was saying:
Resources is still a reason used (almost anything in the Middle East since 10,000 BC, for example), but to say that 99% of conflicts are due to resources as someone did isn't true. It's just a scapegoat people and countries try to use since it sounds valid (but we need this!) but it belies the true intent.
Didn't even get a chance to read the previous post before submitting. Oh well.
You've been modded funny, but historically, the vast majority of wars seem to have been fought over resources
I see this stated as a given fact all the time, but when I stop and think about it, I'm not sure it's really the case. Sure, the lack of resources makes a great scapegoat, and it's been used for some conflicts, but most modern wars seem to be about something else.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I came up with off the top of my head. (I don't consider a goal of "take over the world" as a need for resources. At some point, even if they say it is, resources isn't a valid argument anymore.)
I think "classic" wars, that is ones > 2000 years ago, were largely about resources. There was a lot of new and unclaimed (or tentatively claimed) land that was pretty much up for grabs. However, since the political layout of the world has settled somewhat, people are also finding new reasons to kill each other. Resources is still a reason used (
My first thought from reading the summary is that essentially we're at a point in technology or whatever that we could, POSSIBLY, destroy the planet in a literal sense
I came across this site some time ago and found it well written and pretty interesting (especially in a mad scientist sort of way). Assuming you're not one of the "wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity", I'm not sure we really do have the tech to destroy the planet "in a literal sense."
Too bad :(
By contrast, my wife's laptop which was running Windows XP...required constant de-spywareification and resource intensive anti-virus programs always on alert.
Then, as they say, you're doing it wrong. Running XP/Vista securely is pretty easy:
That combined with a little common sense means you don't even need any realtime anti-virus software. If you do accidentally get something malicious installed, cleaning a user profile is really easy. Worst case means copying files and then deleting and re-creating the profile, just like you would have to do on an infected Linux system.