Unless you count the new start menu, the "sleep" mode (suspend to hibernate), the 3d-based Aero Glass, the "everybody's a user" security model, the sidebar, the new XPS print system, the bundle of included apps, the new WiFi networking model that can remember which security settings for which network, the new "Performance Statistcits" page on the computer management, and few hundred changes I haven't noticed yet. (Oh, and there's 64-bit support, to boot.)
Except that virtually everyone beat them to almost all of that on every other OS and in third-party programs for XP. Really. Go look around. You can get a new start menu, a 3d interface (including one that looks just like Aero), better security, the sidebar (or a better one), better WiFi and performance statistics as programs for XP -- hell, most work on Win2k -- and your computer will still be using far less RAM and CPU than Vista when just idling. And all of it spyware-free, in case you were wondering.
That's a lovely sentiment.... if you had an idyllic childhood. Many of us did not. I'd rather die than relive my childhood, unless I were to get a new set of parents living in a better place.
As to the subject of the article, I must agree. Adults nowadays can't seem to interact with each other in a mature manner. Why is that? I think it has to do with the ways kids were treated in school. Remember the kids that picked on so terribly? Most often nothing was done about that. At some point it became acceptable for kids to treat other kids like crap and teachers turned a blind eye toward it. Kids were allowed to act as cruel and immature as they wanted so long as they didn't disrupt the class too much, pretty much amounting to near-constant torment for the poor kids who were targeted. In times past all of that was completely unacceptable and most kids who did that sort of thing to other kids could expect discipline from their parents. Now it's dismissed as "kid's stuff". We let kids treat other kids like crap and now we're surprised when these kids grow into immature adults.
It has a 2.4 kernel because it still supports older hardware. 2.6 does not. It doesn't even support some not-so-old hardware that 2.4 did, as I've elarned from personal experience.
Unless you are some kind of console fanboy, why on earth would you want them to die rather than simply improve?
Because they keep influencing the industry with their methods. By this I mean prop formats that lock you in -- Sony is most famous for it, but others have tried to do the same thing. And with their quality going down but their prices continually going up they make all of us look even more like suckers than we are (which is saying a lot because so many are suckers) and that negatively influences the industry as well.
And yet, in all my time at Digg, I've never once seen a "First Post!" or a whole post of racial slurs -- i.e., trolling. Funny how all you snobs say that Diggers are so immature but fail to mention that/. has far more trolls.
Indeed. There are other programs (free- and shareware) but one simple reason I like PDF Creator better is this: it doesn't put a line in the.pdf to tell what file it was. Nor does it have to tell the reader in big, bold letters that the person made the file with PDF Creator. I hope the word gets out more on PDF Creator because I've tried some of the free- and share-ware programs of its ilk and none of them compare -- and PDF Creator isn't even up to 1.0 yet. Now if only we had an open source alternative to Acrobat Pro.
I wish I could, but believe it or not, their defenders are still out there. I ran into 2 on another site just today. No matter what they do, people defend them with "well, it's their IP so they should be able to do what they want".
And while we're at it, we should study the effects in countries in like Japan and South Korea, where lots of violent video games are also played, yet they seem to have lower rates of violent crimes than the US. Could it be that we're simply a violent culture and kids pick up on that? Well, let's see, how often are we at war compared to other countries? Maybe our kids wouldn't be so inclined to violence if we weren't so violent ourselves.
Sometimes it's your onboard LAN. Check what its maximum speed is supposed to be. I assume that whoever posted this article thought of that but you'd be amazed how many don't think of it or just don't know.
Good idea, but what safeguards? Why aren't we actually doing anything that works, like closing the borders? A terrorist can get into the US from Mexico any time they want to. Frankly, I don't quite know what the government is up to, but it's pretty clear that they're not really worried about terrorists because they're not doing the simplest and most vital things to stop them. All they're doing is waging war against a country that wasn't involved in the terrorist attack on the US and stripping away our freedoms. Conclusion: If terrorism is still a real threat then we're in big trouble because our government isn't actually doing much to protect us. They're too busy grabbing power left and right, power the government in this country was never supposed to have.
Oh, right, like/. has never had any of them. Get real. Do you actually read the posts at this site?
You know what bugs me about Digg? I'll say it outright: a lot of the users are just assholes. Witness the trolls to the recent article on a game developers suicide. Sure, you get that here, but not as much. So there, a legitimate reason to slam diggers, without making shit up or acting like/.ers never do what you're criticizing diggers for. At least be honest about it because insulting them for doing the same things/.ers do is just plain hypocrisy.
It's only a downside if you stick with companies like MS in those fields of software. We already have alternatives, and we will have alternatives when they come out with new software that isn't around now. Open source software that's actually on your computer isn't going anywhere. I think they may well be successful in a subscription-based service, but in the end it will drive more people to open source alternatives and those alternatives will improve -- possibly at even faster rate with a somehwat larger user base. Even some people who can't live without Word or whatever may look into alternatives when they get tired of paying a subscription fee or just having to be online to use their software.
You just hit the nail on the head. Why the hell do you need captcha to prevent spammers from downloading files you're offering to download? At DriverGuide -- a necessary evil for folks who fix computers -- you have to register and then fill out a captcha when you want to download a file. I was at a font site with the same thing the other day, you had fill out the captcha for each and every file you wanted to download. It's obviously gotten to the point where webmasters use this for no apparent reason other than to make you jump through hoops, again, for no apparent reason. What's up with this crap?
[sarcasm] Oh, yeah, right it's ALL the user's fault. And *nix allows remote users to make changes to your system without your knowledge or permission whenever you're online too. And let's not forget that ton of Unix viruses that have made the internet nearly impossible to use because all the servers keep failing. And of course, *nix also requires a whole bunch of third-party software to secure it as well. Oh, and all OSes have browsers with Active X![/sarcasm]
Yes, a lot of users are stupid. But if the vulnerabilities weren't there in the first place there would be far fewer problems. If Windows was as secure as OS X -- and sorry, Apple fans, it's not as secure as some other *nix distros -- a virus would be a rare thing simply because it wouldn't have anything to work with. So, yeah, if they fixed it that would eliminate most viruses right there. Despite the stereotypes many would have you believe, there are a lot of Mac users who are just as clueless as the Windows user you're describing, but their systems haven't been compromised because the OS they're using isn't horribly insecure to begin with.
How to secure Windows by yours truly (hope this makes sense; I haven't had much coffee yet): 1. Firewall! Better still firewall + hardware router. 2. Anti-virus. I recommend Avast! for 2k and XP, AVG for 9x. If you want to pay for anti-virus, I've heard NOD32 is the best, with Kaspersky's coming in a close second. 3. Win Patrol prevents many changes fromt aking place without your permission; just scroll down the page for the link to download the free version. 4. If you're using Xp, get xpy which can disable a whole lot of Windows problems, such as the remote regsitry severice which allows remote users to change your registry whenever you're online -- yes, MS made it that on purpose and isn't going to fix it -- and Active X, Windows' most infamous security hole. You need to know what you're doing with this program though; if you don't, get someone who does to help you. 5. Be careful. Research *everything* you'd like to install. Check the program's ratings at download sites and do a search on the program's name with a good search engine.
Personally, though, I tend to think Winsdows is hopeless. Patches aren't enough, the system needs to be built from the ground up with much higher security. That means a lot of programs wouldn't even work after that. And would MS provide this as a free fix to all of their customers? Ha!
But speculation is useless. Microsoft is never going to try to really fix Windows; as successful as they've been already, why should they? Especially not when they can make money selling services to protect Windows! Never mind that they should've built a secure OS in the first place like practically everyone else did.
or do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X
The difference is that a huge market of a specific type of software is not dependent on any of what you mentioned. 98% -- or more -- of the games market for Windows is dependent on DirectX 10. Furthermore, users of the Core development apps are not a huge proportion of Apple's customers, whereas again, gamers are a huge proportion of the Windows market. I think this is an apples to oranges comparison.
I don't have an iPod (just don't really need an mp3 player) but I have an external hard drive that seemed to die on me after my cat knocked it off my desk. It turned out that the cable in the enclosure had simply come unplugged. I now tell folks when they say a drive died to check the cables. So far, that's been the problem 1 out of 4 times with my customers.
Very good point. Remember that classic American prejudice about lazy Mexicans? All of the Mexcians I've ever known were hard workers, but they were stereotyped as lazy because of the siesta by bigots who didn't have sense enough to know that if you work during the hottest part of the day in a hot climate you'll get sick. Wll, that and the fact that they were just looking for something to be bigoted about - hey, what's more fun than putting other people down and thinking your so much better? Hmmm, maybe that has something to do with the stereotypes about certain nationalities being lazy, bigotry = I'm better than them? After all, it's not PC to be bigoted against them based just on nationlity anymore so you ahve to find another excuse.
My husband worked 48 hours last week and 42 hours the week before that. I don't know how many 60 hour weeks he puts in a year; seven, maybe as high as 10. Does he have a nice sit-down job where he can looka t a computer screen? No, he's on his feet all night working. So a lot of Americans may well be lazy slobs but not all of us, thank you very much.
Re:The Myth of the 80 Hour Week
on
On Point On Slacking
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I have not met a single soul outside of the medical and legal profession whose actual and typical workload could not be accomplished in 30-40 hours of real honest work.
Then you've obviously never met a factory worker as I used to be, and as such, I have to say this is BS. 30-40 hours? You try that shit on an assmebly line --- the work literally never stops coming, not even for a minute. You don't have time to think, you barely have time to breathe. Don't give me this "you should work harder" shit; you truly cannot work any harder in a job like that because you have to work as hard as you absolutely can to keep up at all. If you don't keep up, you don't keep the job. Vacation? 1 single week a year and you have to have been working there at elast 3 years to get paid for that vacation. Or don't factory workers count? Because if there weren't any factory workers you wouldn't have even half of everything you have now, inlcuding the parts in your computer.
I agree with a great deal of what you said, Enderandrew, but I have to disagre with some. This is all been gone over at distrowatch time and again.
Yes, there should be standards. We already have good installers and package managers. The Fedora install works great so why does every distro need a different one? And like you said, a Linnux app should be a Linux app. You ought to be able to apt-get what you want and install a package you find at, say, IceWalkers without so much trouble. A standardized file structure would help the user in many ways.
On an unrelated note, we also need a driver repo. That would help enormously, as devs could concentrate on including network drivers so that the package manager could download and install other drivers that were detected during the installation. I don't know how many times I've read someone sticking with this or that distro because it detected a piece of hardware that another distro didn't. If we had a driver repo and the package manager was coded to handle that we wouldn't have that problem, and it would give the user far more freedom of choice. As it is, when only one or two distros supports your hardware, it's either those two or Windows, regardless of which distro you actually like best.
But I completely disagree about the fewer distros. If you implement standards, how many distros would that take out? Probably about 10. Go look at distrowatch sometime and read the descriptions. There's likely no more 20 standard English-language distros anyway. The rest are specifically for other languages or specialized functions, many more than those you've listed. And what if you've coded special improvements, submit them to your favorite distro and they won't use them? The only thing you can do is start another distro -- and that's how some of those you consider standard now originally came from, such as SuSE and Mandrake (Mandriva). They came from Red Hat; likewise, Ubuntu came from Debian. Don't try to curtail creativity with the "too many distros" argument. Not only does it irritate the hell out of long-time users but if you stigimatize new distros you'll impede innovation. Without the innovation of open source we might as well be using prop software. Few ever come out with a new distros just so that they can vary the filesystem. Sure, there are variations of Slack that implement Apt and other good stuff, but most have more important changes -- and standards can't touch that without becoming so overbearing that no one will use it.
So basically what you need it to establish some standards that help the user and distros can carry a "standards compliant" badge -- but there will be those who don't, such as Gentoo. But standards should be there to benefit the end user. If a distro comes up with a new, great way to do something, let it become the standard instead of clinging to an older standard that's nto as good; if we had all done that, there would be no Apt, YAST, Yum or anything besides the dependency hell of pure RPM.
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Except that virtually everyone beat them to almost all of that on every other OS and in third-party programs for XP. Really. Go look around. You can get a new start menu, a 3d interface (including one that looks just like Aero), better security, the sidebar (or a better one), better WiFi and performance statistics as programs for XP -- hell, most work on Win2k -- and your computer will still be using far less RAM and CPU than Vista when just idling. And all of it spyware-free, in case you were wondering.
That's a lovely sentiment.... if you had an idyllic childhood. Many of us did not. I'd rather die than relive my childhood, unless I were to get a new set of parents living in a better place.
As to the subject of the article, I must agree. Adults nowadays can't seem to interact with each other in a mature manner. Why is that? I think it has to do with the ways kids were treated in school. Remember the kids that picked on so terribly? Most often nothing was done about that. At some point it became acceptable for kids to treat other kids like crap and teachers turned a blind eye toward it. Kids were allowed to act as cruel and immature as they wanted so long as they didn't disrupt the class too much, pretty much amounting to near-constant torment for the poor kids who were targeted. In times past all of that was completely unacceptable and most kids who did that sort of thing to other kids could expect discipline from their parents. Now it's dismissed as "kid's stuff". We let kids treat other kids like crap and now we're surprised when these kids grow into immature adults.
It has a 2.4 kernel because it still supports older hardware. 2.6 does not. It doesn't even support some not-so-old hardware that 2.4 did, as I've elarned from personal experience.
Because they keep influencing the industry with their methods. By this I mean prop formats that lock you in -- Sony is most famous for it, but others have tried to do the same thing. And with their quality going down but their prices continually going up they make all of us look even more like suckers than we are (which is saying a lot because so many are suckers) and that negatively influences the industry as well.
Considering how bad so many people think the new layout is, I wonder if more will start to actually read the articles.
(And, yes, this font is hard on my eyes too. Firefox, 17" flat-panel CRT.)
Aha, I knew I was the only one who did! Man, what a sucker I am. I quit!
And yet, in all my time at Digg, I've never once seen a "First Post!" or a whole post of racial slurs -- i.e., trolling. Funny how all you snobs say that Diggers are so immature but fail to mention that /. has far more trolls.
Indeed. There are other programs (free- and shareware) but one simple reason I like PDF Creator better is this: it doesn't put a line in the .pdf to tell what file it was. Nor does it have to tell the reader in big, bold letters that the person made the file with PDF Creator. I hope the word gets out more on PDF Creator because I've tried some of the free- and share-ware programs of its ilk and none of them compare -- and PDF Creator isn't even up to 1.0 yet. Now if only we had an open source alternative to Acrobat Pro.
Wow, that's even better than "Jesus jumped up Christ on a chariot-driven sidecar". How the hell did you come up with that?!
I wish I could, but believe it or not, their defenders are still out there. I ran into 2 on another site just today. No matter what they do, people defend them with "well, it's their IP so they should be able to do what they want".
And while we're at it, we should study the effects in countries in like Japan and South Korea, where lots of violent video games are also played, yet they seem to have lower rates of violent crimes than the US. Could it be that we're simply a violent culture and kids pick up on that? Well, let's see, how often are we at war compared to other countries? Maybe our kids wouldn't be so inclined to violence if we weren't so violent ourselves.
Sometimes it's your onboard LAN. Check what its maximum speed is supposed to be. I assume that whoever posted this article thought of that but you'd be amazed how many don't think of it or just don't know.
True, but it could be a lot worse. At least he isn't quoting Chakotay.
Good idea, but what safeguards? Why aren't we actually doing anything that works, like closing the borders? A terrorist can get into the US from Mexico any time they want to. Frankly, I don't quite know what the government is up to, but it's pretty clear that they're not really worried about terrorists because they're not doing the simplest and most vital things to stop them. All they're doing is waging war against a country that wasn't involved in the terrorist attack on the US and stripping away our freedoms. Conclusion: If terrorism is still a real threat then we're in big trouble because our government isn't actually doing much to protect us. They're too busy grabbing power left and right, power the government in this country was never supposed to have.
Oh, right, like /. has never had any of them. Get real. Do you actually read the posts at this site?
You know what bugs me about Digg? I'll say it outright: a lot of the users are just assholes. Witness the trolls to the recent article on a game developers suicide. Sure, you get that here, but not as much. So there, a legitimate reason to slam diggers, without making shit up or acting like /.ers never do what you're criticizing diggers for. At least be honest about it because insulting them for doing the same things /.ers do is just plain hypocrisy.
You forgot to fit games in there somewhere.
It's only a downside if you stick with companies like MS in those fields of software. We already have alternatives, and we will have alternatives when they come out with new software that isn't around now. Open source software that's actually on your computer isn't going anywhere. I think they may well be successful in a subscription-based service, but in the end it will drive more people to open source alternatives and those alternatives will improve -- possibly at even faster rate with a somehwat larger user base. Even some people who can't live without Word or whatever may look into alternatives when they get tired of paying a subscription fee or just having to be online to use their software.
You just hit the nail on the head. Why the hell do you need captcha to prevent spammers from downloading files you're offering to download? At DriverGuide -- a necessary evil for folks who fix computers -- you have to register and then fill out a captcha when you want to download a file. I was at a font site with the same thing the other day, you had fill out the captcha for each and every file you wanted to download. It's obviously gotten to the point where webmasters use this for no apparent reason other than to make you jump through hoops, again, for no apparent reason. What's up with this crap?
[sarcasm] Oh, yeah, right it's ALL the user's fault. And *nix allows remote users to make changes to your system without your knowledge or permission whenever you're online too. And let's not forget that ton of Unix viruses that have made the internet nearly impossible to use because all the servers keep failing. And of course, *nix also requires a whole bunch of third-party software to secure it as well. Oh, and all OSes have browsers with Active X![/sarcasm]
Yes, a lot of users are stupid. But if the vulnerabilities weren't there in the first place there would be far fewer problems. If Windows was as secure as OS X -- and sorry, Apple fans, it's not as secure as some other *nix distros -- a virus would be a rare thing simply because it wouldn't have anything to work with. So, yeah, if they fixed it that would eliminate most viruses right there. Despite the stereotypes many would have you believe, there are a lot of Mac users who are just as clueless as the Windows user you're describing, but their systems haven't been compromised because the OS they're using isn't horribly insecure to begin with.
How to secure Windows by yours truly (hope this makes sense; I haven't had much coffee yet):
1. Firewall! Better still firewall + hardware router.
2. Anti-virus. I recommend Avast! for 2k and XP, AVG for 9x. If you want to pay for anti-virus, I've heard NOD32 is the best, with Kaspersky's coming in a close second.
3. Win Patrol prevents many changes fromt aking place without your permission; just scroll down the page for the link to download the free version.
4. If you're using Xp, get xpy which can disable a whole lot of Windows problems, such as the remote regsitry severice which allows remote users to change your registry whenever you're online -- yes, MS made it that on purpose and isn't going to fix it -- and Active X, Windows' most infamous security hole. You need to know what you're doing with this program though; if you don't, get someone who does to help you.
5. Be careful. Research *everything* you'd like to install. Check the program's ratings at download sites and do a search on the program's name with a good search engine.
Personally, though, I tend to think Winsdows is hopeless. Patches aren't enough, the system needs to be built from the ground up with much higher security. That means a lot of programs wouldn't even work after that. And would MS provide this as a free fix to all of their customers? Ha!
But speculation is useless. Microsoft is never going to try to really fix Windows; as successful as they've been already, why should they? Especially not when they can make money selling services to protect Windows! Never mind that they should've built a secure OS in the first place like practically everyone else did.
The difference is that a huge market of a specific type of software is not dependent on any of what you mentioned. 98% -- or more -- of the games market for Windows is dependent on DirectX 10. Furthermore, users of the Core development apps are not a huge proportion of Apple's customers, whereas again, gamers are a huge proportion of the Windows market. I think this is an apples to oranges comparison.
I don't have an iPod (just don't really need an mp3 player) but I have an external hard drive that seemed to die on me after my cat knocked it off my desk. It turned out that the cable in the enclosure had simply come unplugged. I now tell folks when they say a drive died to check the cables. So far, that's been the problem 1 out of 4 times with my customers.
Very good point. Remember that classic American prejudice about lazy Mexicans? All of the Mexcians I've ever known were hard workers, but they were stereotyped as lazy because of the siesta by bigots who didn't have sense enough to know that if you work during the hottest part of the day in a hot climate you'll get sick. Wll, that and the fact that they were just looking for something to be bigoted about - hey, what's more fun than putting other people down and thinking your so much better? Hmmm, maybe that has something to do with the stereotypes about certain nationalities being lazy, bigotry = I'm better than them? After all, it's not PC to be bigoted against them based just on nationlity anymore so you ahve to find another excuse.
My husband worked 48 hours last week and 42 hours the week before that. I don't know how many 60 hour weeks he puts in a year; seven, maybe as high as 10. Does he have a nice sit-down job where he can looka t a computer screen? No, he's on his feet all night working. So a lot of Americans may well be lazy slobs but not all of us, thank you very much.
Then you've obviously never met a factory worker as I used to be, and as such, I have to say this is BS. 30-40 hours? You try that shit on an assmebly line --- the work literally never stops coming, not even for a minute. You don't have time to think, you barely have time to breathe. Don't give me this "you should work harder" shit; you truly cannot work any harder in a job like that because you have to work as hard as you absolutely can to keep up at all. If you don't keep up, you don't keep the job. Vacation? 1 single week a year and you have to have been working there at elast 3 years to get paid for that vacation. Or don't factory workers count? Because if there weren't any factory workers you wouldn't have even half of everything you have now, inlcuding the parts in your computer.
I agree with a great deal of what you said, Enderandrew, but I have to disagre with some. This is all been gone over at distrowatch time and again.
Yes, there should be standards. We already have good installers and package managers. The Fedora install works great so why does every distro need a different one? And like you said, a Linnux app should be a Linux app. You ought to be able to apt-get what you want and install a package you find at, say, IceWalkers without so much trouble. A standardized file structure would help the user in many ways.
On an unrelated note, we also need a driver repo. That would help enormously, as devs could concentrate on including network drivers so that the package manager could download and install other drivers that were detected during the installation. I don't know how many times I've read someone sticking with this or that distro because it detected a piece of hardware that another distro didn't. If we had a driver repo and the package manager was coded to handle that we wouldn't have that problem, and it would give the user far more freedom of choice. As it is, when only one or two distros supports your hardware, it's either those two or Windows, regardless of which distro you actually like best.
But I completely disagree about the fewer distros. If you implement standards, how many distros would that take out? Probably about 10. Go look at distrowatch sometime and read the descriptions. There's likely no more 20 standard English-language distros anyway. The rest are specifically for other languages or specialized functions, many more than those you've listed. And what if you've coded special improvements, submit them to your favorite distro and they won't use them? The only thing you can do is start another distro -- and that's how some of those you consider standard now originally came from, such as SuSE and Mandrake (Mandriva). They came from Red Hat; likewise, Ubuntu came from Debian. Don't try to curtail creativity with the "too many distros" argument. Not only does it irritate the hell out of long-time users but if you stigimatize new distros you'll impede innovation. Without the innovation of open source we might as well be using prop software. Few ever come out with a new distros just so that they can vary the filesystem. Sure, there are variations of Slack that implement Apt and other good stuff, but most have more important changes -- and standards can't touch that without becoming so overbearing that no one will use it.
So basically what you need it to establish some standards that help the user and distros can carry a "standards compliant" badge -- but there will be those who don't, such as Gentoo. But standards should be there to benefit the end user. If a distro comes up with a new, great way to do something, let it become the standard instead of clinging to an older standard that's nto as good; if we had all done that, there would be no Apt, YAST, Yum or anything besides the dependency hell of pure RPM.