Isn't that what competition is about? Taking business from competitors?
Remember that next time Microsoft is brought up.
There is more to a situation than just "that's what companies do". The reason Slashdotters get their panties in a twist when Microsoft is brought up is because their business practices are not always kosher.
Your +5 Insightful proves, it seems, that Slashdot likes to forget that this can apply to any large company, and that includes IBM and Google.
I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the job we want here?
Documents created with office software usually need to do a number of things, things that when described in plain text and all the associated markup must result in incredibly bloated files. For example, how do you save an embedded image? An embedded audio clip? An embedded video? Base-64 encode them? Now we're talking bloat. Throw in vector and raster line art and we've defined the word "bloat". I realize the files will probably be zipped, but that won't make up for it.
I guess I just don't see why an open binary format, which can store all this information much more precisely and efficiently, wouldn't be better. XML is dandy, sure, but the specs for these formats are going to be so complicated that nobody will be able to open the file in a text editor and just read through it. The formatting instructions will be so verbose that they will completely overshadow any content. Writing a parser for these will be easily as complex as a parser designed to read a binary file representing the same document.
Talk about an interesting way to sneak information out of a company/country... transcribe it into the DNA of an infectious bacteria or virus, and then infect yourself with it. You walk out the door with a sniffle and 10 million dollars worth in classified secrets.
"New company policy is no isolinear chips, holocubes, or antiquated 'flash' drives on the campus. Additionally, all employees must submit to a biological cleansing and surrender their belongings for baryon sweeping before leaving the building."
At least they might cure the common cold as I side effect to preventing data theft.
It does work in Firefox 2.0.2 on XP SP2 with standard options set.
I think the problem some people are having may be that when you type too fast or hit extra keys like backspace or enter, the event misfires and doesn't catch the character. If you type exactly what it says without making any mistakes, it will work. You can tell if it's taking the keystrokes right by checking the box down below. It should start spelling out "C:\boot.ini" as you come across the first occurrence of each character. The IE implementation seems better at catching characters as they come in.
You can test it easily by just slowly typing "C:\boot.ini" in the box.
That said, this is one of the more interesting exploits I've seen. There are no "holes" per se, just an interesting use of forms and javascript, but not too much to worry about for most people I'd imagine. At least on Windows it's a little harder to fish for filenames because there isn't a shortcut for the user's home directory. On XP you'd need to type "C:\Documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\foo.txt" while I assume on Linux you can enter "~/foo.txt" in a form field it will work (?).
Just one more reason not to keep your hidden stuff in ~/secrets.txt I guess.
The first two I see have already been mentioned, and then there's Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff. There's no way we're going to see Torchwood here in the US...
And thank deity for that. I watched the first season and was ASTOUNDED when it was renewed for another one. The BBC must be desperate for shows to kill airtime.
Too much swearing and nudity... Likely too much homosexual 'activity', as well.
You've just defined the entire show. Really. That's all there is to it.
Torchwood is proof that Doctor Who fans will watch anything, anything mind you, that even vaguely mentions the Doctor, and they can completely forget the previous 40 minutes of torture if they hear the TARDIS sound at the end. As I watched I kept hoping that it might get better, but the end of the season had some of the worst episodes of all. That show is the absolute worst thing I've ever been unfortunate enough to watch.
And when have Europeans had to pay a "US sales tax"? Considering the US does not have a federal sales tax, you must be referring to a state's sales tax. However, if you order something online and specify a delivery (or perhaps billing) address that is *outside* the US, that tax won't get applied. Last time I checked, Europe wasn't in a US state. Of course if you buy something and ship it to a friend/relative/whatever in the US, you might then have to pay sales tax depending on the state. When I lived in Montana, I didn't pay sales taxes for anything online. Now I'm in Utah, I do, and it blows.
Does this mean that sellers will now add a "sales tax" to what they're selling in order to compensate for this new tax? And who decides how much tax is paid? States? The National Government?
IANAA, but I believe any revenue generated by selling items via online auction would simply be added to your gross income for the year. You would add it to any other income (working, tips, bank account interest, investments, etc) and then figure you state and federal taxes as normal.
The issue strikes me as "no duh" and "simply a matter of time". As online commerce has grown of the last decade, I'm surprised they didn't go after that income sooner. There's nothing really wrong with it (unless you don't believe in paying taxes in the first place), but the execution of the idea might be a little more difficult. Tracking users and equating them to SSN might be kinda tricky.
Sellers could add sales tax I suppose, to try and cover their taxes, but I don't think it will cause a huge upheaval in online auctions. That widget you want on eBay will still cost $0.99, but now you need to add the obligatory $40 shipping cost and $20 in arbitrary "sales taxes".
If you use Outlook or Access, you should be prepared to pay the "price" associated with proprietary formats. It's one of those "no duh" given things that people usually accept. If you use Adobe's products, then you deal with their proprietary formats. Companies use these formats for a number of reasons, partially for efficiency and partially for extendability (and of course partially to lock you in to using their software).
Open formats are an interesting idea, but it's not worth griping about if you choose to use software that you know doesn't support them. It's stupid to assume that everyone will support everyone else's formats. If you are so worried about 100% coverage and support, stick to plain text files (and none of that fancy Unicode. I want to read it in Notepad!)
This has nothing to do with "renting" software. Your tirade is about open document standards, and that's off-topic and for another discussion.
Not to mention that nobody had to invoke Godwin during a flamewar between the kernel and shell teams! Hell, do the two teams at Microsoft even have flamewars? If not, how can they possibly communicate?
*Yawn* Let me know when they get some REAL developers over in Redmond.
However, the point is, many distros, such as Ubuntu, require 0 drivers to install (depending on your hardware).
Do you have any idea how ironic this sentence is? OF COURSE it depends on your hardware! I bet you could find a hardware configuration that will work completely off Vista's native driver cache as well, especially if you're happy with vanilla video and sound support.
On my desktop the only drivers I would have had to install were video drivers if I wanted 3d acceleration.
Anymore 3D acceleration is pretty much a must-have. Especially with newfangled things like Aero and XGL becoming the norm. Even basic tasks like moving windows around perform much, much better with acceleration.
(certainly it's more difficult than OS X)
I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.
Honestly, the way Windows (and Linux to a large extent, though it's vendor base is significantly smaller than Windows) manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive. It's one thing to claim stability when 95% consumer configurations are identical to your test bench, it's another to have no idea what kind of cheap crazy crap consumers will install and still have comparable stability.
The real bastard is that each distro has subtle differences in how the packages and the dependencies are organized. The only way that I can see to fix that is to design a universal package tree, and convince all the major distros to conform to it. Which is not impossible, but it aint easy, either. And it might cause other problems.
Which is why, as it currently stands, this year will not be Year Of The Linux Desktop. Consumers won't just accept that they can't install software X because it's an RPM and alien doesn't work (this is of course after looking online for half an hour to figure out that alien is the tool to use). Manually compiling from source is simply not an option for standard users. Sure it's a dandy idea, and if you get a "fullproof" GUI that handles the compilation and installation then maybe, but I can't count the number of times make/make install has failed for some obscure reason. The first time grandma needs to go download dependencies means Linux has failed on the consumer desktop.
This is one place that Microsoft and Apple have it right. By having a standardized method of installing and storing program information they make getting new software many times easier than on Linux (excluding the "normal" packages. I'm thinking more along the lines of tools and apps you download from the web). This is also one reason people are willing to pay for an operating system that has a standardized and dependable way of doing things.
Microsoft even released the WiX toolkit that allows anyone to create MSI installer packages. MSIs are one of the best ideas for Windows in a while: No more dealing with poorly-written homebrew installers or 10-year old, 16-bit InstallShield programs. Instead you have a fully scriptable installer that's transaction-based and has near 100% support coverage.
I like apt, but downloading a gzipped file of source or a deb that complains about dependencies still can't compare to an MSI package. Even if a solution was developed that worked as well as or better than MSI, as you say, it would take significant effort (and maybe not even then) to get it supported by all the major distributions. Some people seem to think that the fact that Debian does things differently from Mandriva that does it different than Fedora is what makes the distribution "special". Be that as it may, I think it's only hurting Linux users as a whole.
Considering that most 24" LCDs cost at least as much if not more than a pair of smaller ones, I wonder why they opted for less screen real estate
That is odd. At work we upgraded to dual 19" LCDs a few months ago and I can say there is a huge difference. I *feel* more productive because I spend less time bouncing between windows. I find it especially useful when coding, be it web or applications. You can have your code full on one screen, then the resulting webpage or documentation on the other. I think that a third monitor would be even better, having three full screens for different parts of a project. With one huge monitor you can't arrange windows as easily as you can with smaller monitors where you can just maximize the two or three windows you are working with. (An aside: if you have multiple monitors on Windows, you must try Ultramon. Worth every penny.)
I don't understand why anyone would want a 24" monitor for work. Watching movies maybe, but not the day-to-day stuff. Somebody who just started doing research at the university where I work got dual 24" LCDs with his new $8,000 workstation. For the cost of those two monitors he could have gotten three 20" LCDs, which would have given him more desktop space and (in my opinion) a much more useful setup. He just thought two 24" beasts sitting side by side would look frakking cool. He's right, but I still prefer multiple smaller monitors.
"The impersonal nature of online ads are very different than the one-on-one personalized service that radio advertising normally uses."
Don't you have that backwards?
IANAP, but I don't think so.
With online ads, you see static text that says something. You read it silently and interpret it's logical meaning. 5 seconds and you're done.
With radio ads, you are listening to a person's voice for 30 seconds to a minute. You hear the inflections and emotional state of the voice. Years of conversing with people have taught you to pick up subtle hints of honesty, deceit, confidence, etc. In addition to hearing what is verbally said and deducing it's practical meaning, you are consciously and subconsciously analyzing the voice and it's message.
Yeah, that might be over the top a bit, but I think it has merit. Online vs radio ads are like 1-D compared to 2-D. Going from radio to television is like going to 3-D. Now you not only have voice, but images as well. Think about how things changed with the Nixon/Kennedy debates that were televised for the first time after being on the radio for years.
SVGA seems a little low resolution wise - don't forget this is your whole field of vision. You'd want probably 4-5 times that at least to resolve floating screens and such in front of you.
IANAB, but as I recall, our vision is already not quite as great as it appears to be at first glance (ha ha). Our eyes essentially experience "page faults", where something we want to see isn't available because we have poor "resolution" in everywhere except a small cone around the center of our field of view. There is also a spot directly in the center of this cone that is lower resolution. Our brains compensate for these deficiencies by quickly moving our eyes around to take in a larger area, then making composite image.
The same type of thing takes place when watching animation. The brain builds missing information from previous and next frames of reference.
Again, I'm no expert, but I imagine that at least some of the technological problems may very well be overcome by the brain's compensation abilities, especially if the devices were implanted as early as possible after birth.
Personally, I think it would be pretty neat to have uber-night vision as well as the ability to switch to other spectrums like ultraviolet or x-rays (ala Geordi's VISOR).
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 14:4 These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
Prepare all ye, for the end of the world is nigh at hand!
Honestly? I'm glad Java applets' popularity has died. I have always hated pages that make use of Java, primarily because the applets are traditionally slow and clunky, and cause all sorts of problems for the browser.
Flash usually loads fast, has good response, and have great interfaces. Java usually loads slow (and by slow I mean that in the time it takes the Flash applet to download and be ready to use, the JVM has just started) and has a poor interface with slow response. More "industrial" use of Javascript has also removed the need for many of these client-side applications.
I guess while reading the EULA I was expecting some level of common sense, but assuming Paul is accurate, in this case Microsoft appears to have thrown it out the window.
What possible *reason* is there to prevent people from running Home in a VM? It's not like they're losing money when people do it. The only thing I can think of is greed: they think running the OS in a VM is a "feature" you should pay extra for. What's next? Hosting a VM on Windows is a "feature"?
The wording is somewhat odd, but it's probably partially because the idea of VMs is pretty new and they are just trying to adjust traditional licensing terms to the idea.
What is a "licensed device"?
I think the licensed device is the system that Windows is running on. If you buy one copy of Home and install it on your computer, that system is the licensed device. If you buy a computer from Dell, that computer is the licensed device. A VM running on these systems would be considered a separate entity and need it's own software license.
Now, what would the "licensed device" be with a standalone copy of Vista Home Basic if the original intent is to run it in a VM?
The way I read it, the licensed device in this case would be the VM. I see no reason why you couldn't run Home under a Windows/Mac/Linux VM if that is the only place you install it.
you can't have the same licensed software installed in two or more places
I think that's exactly it. Home versions of Vista come with ONE "full" license (to be used on any hardware) and ZERO "virtual" licenses. Enterprise and Ultimate versions come with ONE full license and ONE virtual license (to be used on the same machine as the full license was). Following this logic, it would be just fine if you bought Ultimate, installed it first in a VM (using the full license), then installed it in another VM (using the virtual license) running inside the original VM.
Really, it's not that bad. If this is indeed what they were trying to say, the license is pretty nice for the Ultimate and Enterprise editions. The whole point seems to be to prevent someone from trying to bypass the licensing agreement by installing Vista in dozens of VMs using only a single license.
4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.
MICROSOFT WINDOWS VISTA HOME PREMIUM
4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.
MICROSOFT WINDOWS VISTA ULTIMATE
6. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device. If you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.
f. Use with Virtualization Technologies. You may use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system. If you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.
Obviously this says nothing about Macs.
It is intended to limit your use of the same license for multiple installations.
The wording does seem to suggest this. By saying you cannot install it in VM running on the "licensed device " it sounds like it just means you cannot run the software inside a VM on the same machine that's already been licensed for it. If you buy Ultimate, they're basically giving you two licenses, one for the physical machine and one for use in the VM. The Home versions do not include this "bonus" license.
TrueCrypt is pretty cool. In addition to making an encrypted partition/drive, you can create a file that gets mounted as a drive once you've accessed it. This is what I usually do and it's handy for using it on a USB key or if you need to send some files via email/FTP. You can also have it use one or more files for the decryption key for the volume instead of the standard text passphrase.
The GUI is quite good, lots of choices on encryption algorithms, and there's nothing cooler than using sol.exe as your decryption key:)
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that what competition is about? Taking business from competitors?
Remember that next time Microsoft is brought up.
There is more to a situation than just "that's what companies do". The reason Slashdotters get their panties in a twist when Microsoft is brought up is because their business practices are not always kosher.
Your +5 Insightful proves, it seems, that Slashdot likes to forget that this can apply to any large company, and that includes IBM and Google.
An Open XML-based format
I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the job we want here?
Documents created with office software usually need to do a number of things, things that when described in plain text and all the associated markup must result in incredibly bloated files. For example, how do you save an embedded image? An embedded audio clip? An embedded video? Base-64 encode them? Now we're talking bloat. Throw in vector and raster line art and we've defined the word "bloat". I realize the files will probably be zipped, but that won't make up for it.
I guess I just don't see why an open binary format, which can store all this information much more precisely and efficiently, wouldn't be better. XML is dandy, sure, but the specs for these formats are going to be so complicated that nobody will be able to open the file in a text editor and just read through it. The formatting instructions will be so verbose that they will completely overshadow any content. Writing a parser for these will be easily as complex as a parser designed to read a binary file representing the same document.
What's the big advantage of XML?
You mean a Biowolf cluster.
Talk about an interesting way to sneak information out of a company/country... transcribe it into the DNA of an infectious bacteria or virus, and then infect yourself with it. You walk out the door with a sniffle and 10 million dollars worth in classified secrets.
"New company policy is no isolinear chips, holocubes, or antiquated 'flash' drives on the campus. Additionally, all employees must submit to a biological cleansing and surrender their belongings for baryon sweeping before leaving the building."
At least they might cure the common cold as I side effect to preventing data theft.
Did I miss something from TFA that makes this windows-specific?
I think the presence of a C:\ might help.
False. These are the defaults on XPSP2 and Win2003:
It works for anybody >= Power Users.
Then I tried with an administrator user, and still boot.ini wasn't shown.
It works for Administrators too.
Fud?
No. Full response.
Neither on 2.0.2 xpsp1
It does work in Firefox 2.0.2 on XP SP2 with standard options set.
I think the problem some people are having may be that when you type too fast or hit extra keys like backspace or enter, the event misfires and doesn't catch the character. If you type exactly what it says without making any mistakes, it will work. You can tell if it's taking the keystrokes right by checking the box down below. It should start spelling out "C:\boot.ini" as you come across the first occurrence of each character. The IE implementation seems better at catching characters as they come in.
You can test it easily by just slowly typing "C:\boot.ini" in the box.
That said, this is one of the more interesting exploits I've seen. There are no "holes" per se, just an interesting use of forms and javascript, but not too much to worry about for most people I'd imagine. At least on Windows it's a little harder to fish for filenames because there isn't a shortcut for the user's home directory. On XP you'd need to type "C:\Documents and settings\%username%\My Documents\foo.txt" while I assume on Linux you can enter "~/foo.txt" in a form field it will work (?).
Just one more reason not to keep your hidden stuff in ~/secrets.txt I guess.
I think this has been reviewed once or twice before on Slashdot
No, no. That was Rails Recipes. Completely different. That's just a bunch of recipes. This is a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!
The first two I see have already been mentioned, and then there's Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff. There's no way we're going to see Torchwood here in the US...
And thank deity for that. I watched the first season and was ASTOUNDED when it was renewed for another one. The BBC must be desperate for shows to kill airtime.
Too much swearing and nudity... Likely too much homosexual 'activity', as well.
You've just defined the entire show. Really. That's all there is to it.
Torchwood is proof that Doctor Who fans will watch anything, anything mind you, that even vaguely mentions the Doctor, and they can completely forget the previous 40 minutes of torture if they hear the TARDIS sound at the end. As I watched I kept hoping that it might get better, but the end of the season had some of the worst episodes of all. That show is the absolute worst thing I've ever been unfortunate enough to watch.
What's this "M$" you speak of?
. gif
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20020722h
your reply in the subject line.
:)
And when have Europeans had to pay a "US sales tax"? Considering the US does not have a federal sales tax, you must be referring to a state's sales tax. However, if you order something online and specify a delivery (or perhaps billing) address that is *outside* the US, that tax won't get applied. Last time I checked, Europe wasn't in a US state. Of course if you buy something and ship it to a friend/relative/whatever in the US, you might then have to pay sales tax depending on the state. When I lived in Montana, I didn't pay sales taxes for anything online. Now I'm in Utah, I do, and it blows.
Besides, I have one word for you: tea
Does this mean that sellers will now add a "sales tax" to what they're selling in order to compensate for this new tax? And who decides how much tax is paid? States? The National Government?
IANAA, but I believe any revenue generated by selling items via online auction would simply be added to your gross income for the year. You would add it to any other income (working, tips, bank account interest, investments, etc) and then figure you state and federal taxes as normal.
The issue strikes me as "no duh" and "simply a matter of time". As online commerce has grown of the last decade, I'm surprised they didn't go after that income sooner. There's nothing really wrong with it (unless you don't believe in paying taxes in the first place), but the execution of the idea might be a little more difficult. Tracking users and equating them to SSN might be kinda tricky.
Sellers could add sales tax I suppose, to try and cover their taxes, but I don't think it will cause a huge upheaval in online auctions. That widget you want on eBay will still cost $0.99, but now you need to add the obligatory $40 shipping cost and $20 in arbitrary "sales taxes".
guaranteeing me free access at anytime I decide not to continue the subscription?
As an aside, several Office products have free viewers available:
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
A Publisher option
If you use Outlook or Access, you should be prepared to pay the "price" associated with proprietary formats. It's one of those "no duh" given things that people usually accept. If you use Adobe's products, then you deal with their proprietary formats. Companies use these formats for a number of reasons, partially for efficiency and partially for extendability (and of course partially to lock you in to using their software).
Open formats are an interesting idea, but it's not worth griping about if you choose to use software that you know doesn't support them. It's stupid to assume that everyone will support everyone else's formats. If you are so worried about 100% coverage and support, stick to plain text files (and none of that fancy Unicode. I want to read it in Notepad!)
This has nothing to do with "renting" software. Your tirade is about open document standards, and that's off-topic and for another discussion.
Not to mention that nobody had to invoke Godwin during a flamewar between the kernel and shell teams! Hell, do the two teams at Microsoft even have flamewars? If not, how can they possibly communicate?
*Yawn* Let me know when they get some REAL developers over in Redmond.
However, the point is, many distros, such as Ubuntu, require 0 drivers to install (depending on your hardware).
Do you have any idea how ironic this sentence is? OF COURSE it depends on your hardware! I bet you could find a hardware configuration that will work completely off Vista's native driver cache as well, especially if you're happy with vanilla video and sound support.
On my desktop the only drivers I would have had to install were video drivers if I wanted 3d acceleration.
Anymore 3D acceleration is pretty much a must-have. Especially with newfangled things like Aero and XGL becoming the norm. Even basic tasks like moving windows around perform much, much better with acceleration.
(certainly it's more difficult than OS X)
I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.
Honestly, the way Windows (and Linux to a large extent, though it's vendor base is significantly smaller than Windows) manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive. It's one thing to claim stability when 95% consumer configurations are identical to your test bench, it's another to have no idea what kind of cheap crazy crap consumers will install and still have comparable stability.
So does this mean that they're gonna arrest Taco, Zonk and Co.?
:)
It's worth a try!
*cough*
The real bastard is that each distro has subtle differences in how the packages and the dependencies are organized. The only way that I can see to fix that is to design a universal package tree, and convince all the major distros to conform to it. Which is not impossible, but it aint easy, either. And it might cause other problems.
Which is why, as it currently stands, this year will not be Year Of The Linux Desktop. Consumers won't just accept that they can't install software X because it's an RPM and alien doesn't work (this is of course after looking online for half an hour to figure out that alien is the tool to use). Manually compiling from source is simply not an option for standard users. Sure it's a dandy idea, and if you get a "fullproof" GUI that handles the compilation and installation then maybe, but I can't count the number of times make/make install has failed for some obscure reason. The first time grandma needs to go download dependencies means Linux has failed on the consumer desktop.
This is one place that Microsoft and Apple have it right. By having a standardized method of installing and storing program information they make getting new software many times easier than on Linux (excluding the "normal" packages. I'm thinking more along the lines of tools and apps you download from the web). This is also one reason people are willing to pay for an operating system that has a standardized and dependable way of doing things.
Microsoft even released the WiX toolkit that allows anyone to create MSI installer packages. MSIs are one of the best ideas for Windows in a while: No more dealing with poorly-written homebrew installers or 10-year old, 16-bit InstallShield programs. Instead you have a fully scriptable installer that's transaction-based and has near 100% support coverage.
I like apt, but downloading a gzipped file of source or a deb that complains about dependencies still can't compare to an MSI package. Even if a solution was developed that worked as well as or better than MSI, as you say, it would take significant effort (and maybe not even then) to get it supported by all the major distributions. Some people seem to think that the fact that Debian does things differently from Mandriva that does it different than Fedora is what makes the distribution "special". Be that as it may, I think it's only hurting Linux users as a whole.
Considering that most 24" LCDs cost at least as much if not more than a pair of smaller ones, I wonder why they opted for less screen real estate
That is odd. At work we upgraded to dual 19" LCDs a few months ago and I can say there is a huge difference. I *feel* more productive because I spend less time bouncing between windows. I find it especially useful when coding, be it web or applications. You can have your code full on one screen, then the resulting webpage or documentation on the other. I think that a third monitor would be even better, having three full screens for different parts of a project. With one huge monitor you can't arrange windows as easily as you can with smaller monitors where you can just maximize the two or three windows you are working with. (An aside: if you have multiple monitors on Windows, you must try Ultramon. Worth every penny.)
I don't understand why anyone would want a 24" monitor for work. Watching movies maybe, but not the day-to-day stuff. Somebody who just started doing research at the university where I work got dual 24" LCDs with his new $8,000 workstation. For the cost of those two monitors he could have gotten three 20" LCDs, which would have given him more desktop space and (in my opinion) a much more useful setup. He just thought two 24" beasts sitting side by side would look frakking cool. He's right, but I still prefer multiple smaller monitors.
"The impersonal nature of online ads are very different than the one-on-one personalized service that radio advertising normally uses."
Don't you have that backwards?
IANAP, but I don't think so.
With online ads, you see static text that says something. You read it silently and interpret it's logical meaning. 5 seconds and you're done.
With radio ads, you are listening to a person's voice for 30 seconds to a minute. You hear the inflections and emotional state of the voice. Years of conversing with people have taught you to pick up subtle hints of honesty, deceit, confidence, etc. In addition to hearing what is verbally said and deducing it's practical meaning, you are consciously and subconsciously analyzing the voice and it's message.
Yeah, that might be over the top a bit, but I think it has merit. Online vs radio ads are like 1-D compared to 2-D. Going from radio to television is like going to 3-D. Now you not only have voice, but images as well. Think about how things changed with the Nixon/Kennedy debates that were televised for the first time after being on the radio for years.
SVGA seems a little low resolution wise - don't forget this is your whole field of vision. You'd want probably 4-5 times that at least to resolve floating screens and such in front of you.
IANAB, but as I recall, our vision is already not quite as great as it appears to be at first glance (ha ha). Our eyes essentially experience "page faults", where something we want to see isn't available because we have poor "resolution" in everywhere except a small cone around the center of our field of view. There is also a spot directly in the center of this cone that is lower resolution. Our brains compensate for these deficiencies by quickly moving our eyes around to take in a larger area, then making composite image.
The same type of thing takes place when watching animation. The brain builds missing information from previous and next frames of reference.
Again, I'm no expert, but I imagine that at least some of the technological problems may very well be overcome by the brain's compensation abilities, especially if the devices were implanted as early as possible after birth.
Personally, I think it would be pretty neat to have uber-night vision as well as the ability to switch to other spectrums like ultraviolet or x-rays (ala Geordi's VISOR).
Revelation 14:4
These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
Prepare all ye, for the end of the world is nigh at hand!
Honestly? I'm glad Java applets' popularity has died. I have always hated pages that make use of Java, primarily because the applets are traditionally slow and clunky, and cause all sorts of problems for the browser.
Flash usually loads fast, has good response, and have great interfaces. Java usually loads slow (and by slow I mean that in the time it takes the Flash applet to download and be ready to use, the JVM has just started) and has a poor interface with slow response. More "industrial" use of Javascript has also removed the need for many of these client-side applications.
Good riddance is my response.
[informative email]
:(
Well, frak.
I guess while reading the EULA I was expecting some level of common sense, but assuming Paul is accurate, in this case Microsoft appears to have thrown it out the window.
What possible *reason* is there to prevent people from running Home in a VM? It's not like they're losing money when people do it. The only thing I can think of is greed: they think running the OS in a VM is a "feature" you should pay extra for. What's next? Hosting a VM on Windows is a "feature"?
Stupid
The wording is somewhat odd, but it's probably partially because the idea of VMs is pretty new and they are just trying to adjust traditional licensing terms to the idea.
What is a "licensed device"?
I think the licensed device is the system that Windows is running on. If you buy one copy of Home and install it on your computer, that system is the licensed device. If you buy a computer from Dell, that computer is the licensed device. A VM running on these systems would be considered a separate entity and need it's own software license.
Now, what would the "licensed device" be with a standalone copy of Vista Home Basic if the original intent is to run it in a VM?
The way I read it, the licensed device in this case would be the VM. I see no reason why you couldn't run Home under a Windows/Mac/Linux VM if that is the only place you install it.
you can't have the same licensed software installed in two or more places
I think that's exactly it. Home versions of Vista come with ONE "full" license (to be used on any hardware) and ZERO "virtual" licenses. Enterprise and Ultimate versions come with ONE full license and ONE virtual license (to be used on the same machine as the full license was). Following this logic, it would be just fine if you bought Ultimate, installed it first in a VM (using the full license), then installed it in another VM (using the virtual license) running inside the original VM.
Really, it's not that bad. If this is indeed what they were trying to say, the license is pretty nice for the Ultimate and Enterprise editions. The whole point seems to be to prevent someone from trying to bypass the licensing agreement by installing Vista in dozens of VMs using only a single license.
Be nice to see some confirmation from MS tho'.
Well, here are the important parts from the license agreement: And here: Obviously this says nothing about Macs.
It is intended to limit your use of the same license for multiple installations.
The wording does seem to suggest this. By saying you cannot install it in VM running on the "licensed device " it sounds like it just means you cannot run the software inside a VM on the same machine that's already been licensed for it. If you buy Ultimate, they're basically giving you two licenses, one for the physical machine and one for use in the VM. The Home versions do not include this "bonus" license.
I use TrueCrypt
:)
TrueCrypt is pretty cool. In addition to making an encrypted partition/drive, you can create a file that gets mounted as a drive once you've accessed it. This is what I usually do and it's handy for using it on a USB key or if you need to send some files via email/FTP. You can also have it use one or more files for the decryption key for the volume instead of the standard text passphrase.
The GUI is quite good, lots of choices on encryption algorithms, and there's nothing cooler than using sol.exe as your decryption key