Has it occured to you guys that a lot of these people just don't know any better? That they don't know that a metal case with spaces for more fans is better than a case with space for one fan and a plexiglass window? Go ask people and you'll fidn out that a lot of them don't know. And why not? Because when they shop for them it says nothing about how one fan isn't such a good idea for a high-powered computer or that plexiglass windows can scratch up. Hell, even the metal cases with space for four fans don't even say that -- go look over cases at newegg.com and you'll see. The reviews are one of the best ways to learn but not everyone shops there and even a lot of those who do don't read reviews beyond those on the item's description page.
Give me an ugly old solid case with space for three or four fans any day over those with the plexiglass windows, but the fact is most of them have that now. I don't even look at the cheap plastic cases myself.
Oh give me a break. If this was open source, the whole community would be claiming victory and using this as an example of how quick problems are fixed.
I thought that too.
I've used Norton Firewall and Antivirus for over 6 years now. Guess what, in that 6 year period, I have never once had my computer compromised or any viruses infecting my computer. I'm a perfectly happy customer and will continue to trust my security with Norton whose entire reputation is dependent on the abilities of their software. IMO, that alone is what makes Norton a good company.
Then you're a minority. Your one of two I've ever heard say that, as compared to over a hundred more people who've had to reinstall Windows because of Symantec's software. I'd had my first computer about a month in 2001, running Norton's, when it got owned by a worm that wrecked Windows so that I had to reinstall. It later got owned by another virus that also wrecked it so that I had to reinstall, it just did it more slowly. Not only that but there were other incidents related to viruses that caused me problems. Was I downloading stuff that had viruses? Not according to Norton's scanner. Finally, after I'd heard that AVG was good and free (I didn't know much about this stuff back then) I decided to give it a try. I scanned all the files on my computer and it found three OLD files that were viruses that always passed Norton's scan as clean. The youngest of these files was seven months! The oldest was 13 months. That's just plain incompentence on their part, as far as I'm concerned.
Anyhow, after AVG I never had problems with a virus again. Of ocurse, that was urgent for only about another year as I switched to *nix later. Now viruses rarely concern me personally at all, only with regard to my customers who bring me their PCs to fix and anytime I fidn one with Norton's or McAfee's I install Avast (Win 2k/XP) or AVG (98/ME). Virtually all of them have reported that Avast or AVG did much better at catching virused files they had and weren't so invasive, so Norton's doesn't seem to have improved since I was using their products.
Here's an idea: if you're so confident in Norton's, try uninstalling it, install AVG or Avast and scan all your backup files with it as well as your computer. You say that your system is clean and Norton's has kept it so, but how do you know? Why not check to make sure? Because if you've been using Norton's exclusively that long, I believe you most likely do have a trojan that you don't know about.
I'm not trying to troll you, but I don't see how that is applicable with Blu-Ray (or however they've decided to spell it) -- you won't be able to burn Blu-Ray discs at all. Sony is once again trying to use their own format which only delivers content but is useless to everyone else. Unless I missed an announcement about that? Hell if they did make it so people could make their own Blu-Ray discs I'd probably have a heart attack. Sony has been trying to lock-in the media market with their own formats for... what, twenty years?
Would you trade a market of 95% of all Windows-users for even 50%? And how long do you think it'll take before Vista hits 50%? We (nerds) know that Vista isn't really that much of an improvement over XP now and the average user doesn't, but they will as soon as people they know get it -- and are likely disappointed unless they're upgrading from 98.
Let's rehash Vista for a moment: 1. Aero: You can make XP look just like Aero right now for free; just go look at softpedia.com or download.com. 2. The sidebar (is that even still on Vista?): desktop sidebar works even on Win 2k. And then's there the Google Desktop. 3. Better security: You'd be better off sticking with Win 2k or XP and getting the free version of Win Patrol. More security and it uses less than 5 mb of Ram to run in the background -- how much memory is Vista going to require again? 4. DirectX 10: It'll be almost useless for a long time. No game company is going to trade the market of almost all Windows-users for the Vista-users market exclusively. I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).
Those are its pluses! Consider the biggest negative of all: 8 different versions, each costing more than the last. Is everyone going to rush out and buy a copy of Vista when the version they can afford has less features than the copy of XP they already have? Most who do so would by mistake.... and they won't be very quiet about how they feel they got screwed either. Personally, I think the 8 versions thing is what is going to be the biggest detriment to selling it. MS is trying to force everyone to pay through the nose for Windows and a great many simply will not. MS has forgotten that their target market is cheap; if they weren't a lot more of them would be using Macs (and I'm no Apple fangirl by any means, so don't take it that way).
Pirate Vista? A lot of them won't even bother with that when they find out from folks who have it that it's not really that much of an improvement over XP (from a user's standpoint) and requires powerful, expensive hardware -- which a lot of people simply don't have even now. You can't download hardware over p2p so Vista will be useless to many, who aren't going to upgrade without a compelling reason to do so. And what complelling reason will there be? MS's own games? That's not good enough for most, not so long as there are a lot of games that still support XP. No, I think Microsoft's only real hope lies with companies like Dell, who will sell pre-built computers with Vista. And guess how happy those people are going to be when they find out that they have to pay do much exta for features? To summarize, I think word of mouth alone will do a lot to prevent Vista's widespread adoption -- it will cost too much to have anything beyond the basics, most hardware can't even utilize it and hardware that can won't be all that common for another couple of years. For all that inconvenience Vista Premium should have a boatload of great features, but it's apparently not going to. Even with all that aside it would be very foolish for a game company to go Vista-only because the Vista market share is going to be too small. And if Vista bombs they certainly won't. Even if it is suceesful, its market share is still going to be low enough compared to previous versions of Windows that marketing games to it exclusively just wouldn't be profitable enough, especially since OpenGL can be used instead.
Come to think of it, maybe Vista will do more to push OpenGL than anything else. Bonus! Go MS!:-D
hey didn't want horses for NWN1 to come out officially before NWN2
Officially there aren't horses in NWN1, but there have been horses in several modules and more importantly, the CEP (Community Expansion Pack) for, over a year now, so whether or not there are to ever "officially" horses in NWN1 is pretty much irrelevant to most users.
Why put myself through this when there is an easier way? I use gmail pretty much exclusively. I just checked my account and there is currently 850 (!) spam emails in my spam folder. There was one spam email in my inbox. Nomrally I never see this at all because what doesn't register as spam with gmail gets caught by Thunderbird. Furthermore, I can set Thunderbird to download copies of my email and leave the originals on the server, so if there is spam in my inbox all I have to do is go to my gmail account in my browser, open the spam email and click the "report spam" button.
I'm not trying to troll Spamcop or anything but why deal with an anti-spam service that complicated enough to need a tutorial on how to report spam when it's much easier to do that with gmail? Plus whatever gets past gmail usually gets caught by Thunderbird's junk mail filter.
Oooh, bad example. Sun lived to tell the tale but MS stabbed them in the back, didn't they? Microsoft promised never to make an alternative to Java when working with Sun, but then they made the Virtual Java Machine.
So, yeah, MS has had some partnerships that were profitable for their partners, but they've also had so many where they screwed over their partners that most every company in the world is wary of dealing with them. Some say that they haven't screwed over Intel, IBM, Dell and a few others simply because they're still useful, but Microsoft will burn them as soon as they're not. True? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but they've done it before.
Dude, I'm 35, so I'm kind of old, but calculators were never allowed in any school I went to. Not even once in grades K-12. Using a calculator was cheating and if you got caught you were punished, the idea being you had to be able to do it yourself, no matter how complicated the problem was.
Ok, we have a (probably BS) estimate on how customers are screwing over software companies. Where's the estimate on how much software companies have screwed over customers? Oh, wait, we're not supposed to give a damn about that, are we? It's okay for the software companies to screw over people but not the reverse.
This is why people don't give a crap -- including me. My first computer came with Widnows ME which caused me no end of trouble because it was buggy as hell. I was running Norton's Internet Security Suite and kept it fully updated. Within a month a worm downloaded itself into my system when I went to (of all things) a charity site. The worm wrecked my system and I had to get everything reinstalled. After that I downloaded a shareware anti-worm program to supplement Norton's. It worked fine, or seemed to, so I bought it. They sent me a keyfile in my email and told me how to install it. It didn't work. The program responded as if the time had run out and loaded my screen with one pop-up box after another to inform me that I needed to buy it. I literally could do nothing with my comuter because of all the pop-up boxes; I'd estimate that there were two hundred piled on top of each other when I had to force shut-down my computer.... and then reinstall Windows. Did I get my money back? No.
So, if you're not keeping score here, I got screwed by Microsoft, Symantec and one of the small software companies you guys are defending so ferociously. But no one else is saying anything about this sort of thing happening. Here's a clue: until the protection goes both ways we, your potential customers, don't give a damn. People have been screwed over enough that they assume that the software companies are trying to screw them over -- and a great many are -- so they don't care about you. But no one is even trying to do anything about that happening; no, all the effort is directed at trying to prevent piracy, not software makers abusing licenses and committing outright fraud. Until an actual effort is made to curb that people won't care. And why should they? I wouldn't be surprised if the guys who sold me that anti-worm program posted in this thread.
Oh, and btw, I'm a *nix-user now, so when a program doesn't work or screws up everything I can at least console myself with the fact that I wasn't defruaded out of money for it. Plus I know that someone will eventually fix it, instead of hoping that the software company will. All too many software companies never will fix their buggy software, or if they do they release it as the new version and expect you to pay for it all over again just to get a copy that workd even though you've already paid for it once. But it's okay for them do that but not for the customer who got screwed over with the earlier buggy version to pirate the new version, isn't it?
By that logic if I work really hard on building a house and sell it, I should be paid for it hundreds of times, not once. Why should software programmers be paid over and over for their hard work when the rest of us get paid only once for the same amount of effort? Yes, I've said the same thing about musicians and song-writers. You seem to think you have a moral right here, but I don't think you do. Legal, yes, moral, no, not until everyone has the same right.
"And people seem to forget that carbon nanotubes were fiction less than two decades ago."
Exactly. Just because we don't have a material to make this out of now that will work doesn't mean we won't make a new material that will in the future. How many materials are there that are entirely man-made now? How many more will there be, say, 100 years from now? Especially if someone were to design a material expressly for this purpose.
"isn't it logical to start on the most popular platform and if it pans out, expand"
For any other company, yes, but I'm not so sure with Google. Google is where they are today in part because of geeks. Geeks were using Google when everyone else was using Yahoo and MSN search. When Google started putting out software, it was all for Windows -- and it's only been in the last, what 2 years? less?, that using Google became common among non-geeks (most of whom run Windows). In other words, their software wasn't aimed at the people who were their fans in order to get more market share from MS's crowd. Problem was, most of the software they were offering -- with the notable exception of Google Earth -- was the kind of stuff that is common freeware on Windows, so this didn't really make their market share grow nearly as much as they hoped, and it also irritated a portion of their loyal user base. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but see the porting to *nix as kind of making up to the geeks. On the plus side, as others have noted, they're contributing to Wine.
(I hope that made sense; I've had a lot of beer tonight and it's late here.)
Me. Virgins reach orgasm in seconds and don't how to give even half-decent oral sex, leaving a woman looking for a guy with a modicum of self-control and knowledge of how to soemthing with his tongue other than bragging to his friends about how many bitches he's slept with. Oh, wait, you're talking about female virgins, right? Then I'm definitely not interested. But I probably wouldn't be even if I were male, as I'm not the type to use someone once and then throw them away.
... But I use gmail almost exclusively and receive a ton of spam, but what little gets through their filter is caught by Thunderbird. Now, I know Google and Mozilla, Inc. are pretty innovative groups, but why can't others do what they're doing? Especially as Thunderbird is open source? Spam exists because it is profitable. If people saw very little spam it wouldn't be so profitable anymore.
"How about if someone with a Windows PC at hand compared the speed of opening and saving OpenDocument vs. the usual.doc to give us some real numbers. "
Been there, done that, couldn't even tell the difference -- although OOo was definitely faster when MS Office was hung, which is a common thing with MS office but not OOo. Other than that, if there's a difference it's a very small one.
Considering that they knew about the prior art and have been trolling with the patent against software-makers using the jpeg format, I vote for them being tried for extortion. Why is it that in cases where some company claims they have a patent or copyright on something and its later proven that they don't that they're not charged with extortion (yeah, I'm thinking of SCO too)?
Pure, unadulterated BS. I've used both and Nortons absolutely sucks compared to AVG. With Norton's my computer got so badly infected that I had to reinstall the OS two different times. Installed AVG and never had that problem again. Did I download anything that had the virus in it? No! Both times the viruses downlaoded themselves straight into my computer from the internet -- which means Norton's firewall didn't do anything to stop them. On top of this, one time I uninstalled it in order to reinstall it and I couldn't boot Windows afterward.
Nevertheless, I think Avast! is the best antivirus, but I've heard a great deal of good aobut NOD32 and Kaspersky's. Any of them beat Norton's. Hell, as bad as Norton's can screw up your computer no antivirus is sometimes better. I don't know how many times I had to reinstall it because it started screwing up or just didn't install right in the first place. All of that applies equally to McAffee too.
I don't know what the deal is here with you and whoever is modding anything critical of Symantec as "flamebait" and your BS as insightful, but you can't quit with the outright lying. You've both made yourselves as transparent as freshly-cleaned glass. Normally, I'd think someone who made such an accusation was paranoid, but that's how blindlingly obvious you guys have been. And the thread is still young. Too bad the people running this site aren't involved enough to care anymore.
And who gets to decide what's offensive? They do. And if it doesn' tinvolve school, how the hell is it any of their business if a kid says something offensive anyway? You're an absolute fool to think it would only be used against kids who did something illegal.
"Yeah, like Apple. And Apple sure is hurting these days...."
Bad analogy. Apple isn't hurting now, but before the iPod they were. And it is still a valid argument that their anal-retentiveness kept them from being in the position that they could've been -- bigger and more powerful than Microsoft. If they had opened the Mac OS to PC hardware long ago, Microsoft would've never stood a chance. Instead, people who wanted computers cobbled together their own PCs and put DOS on them because they had little other choice.
I've been hearing this a lot too and it's pure BS. In the 70s a young girl took a gun to school and killed several of her classmates. When asked why, "I hate Mondays" was her only reply. (IIRC, a punk rock song came out of that incident.) This girl was not the only student to commit such violence at a school in the 70s. You can't blame GTA or any other violent game for that; all that was available at that time was pinball and the early Atari games. This has been going on longer than there have been violent video games. Why are they focusing on video games being a cause now when this problem obviously began -- and well withing living memory -- before these kind of video games existed?
Thing is, a lot of people who advocate this are the same age as me or even older so they should remember these incidents too, which makes me wonder what kind of brain-washing techniques the leaders of this movement are using.
I think they can. Try selling you copy of Windows XP. Same thing, it's just software, but it's illegal to resell a used copy of XP. Then there's XP's product activation, which ensures that the person who bought the used copy has to crack it or they can't even use it after the initial two-week period. Sony's patent on tying the game software to individual consoles amounts to the same thing. So if Microsoft has been getting away with this for years with their OS, why can't Sony with their games?
Settle? Most of them never even have to settle. Somebody tell me again why regular citizens shouldn't be allowed to break the law while corporations do so whenever they please.
"I hate to be the MS supporter here (and I rarely do), but Microsofts permission model is just as powerful as UNIX's."
No it's not. User accounts on unix are kept separate on unix. If a user account on Unix gets screwed with (malware, whatever) it does not mess up the OS; all you have to do is delete that user account and make another one. With Windows, if a user account gets a virus it affects the whole OS, including other user accounts. And on *nix there is a definite lack of programs that require root privileges just to run.
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Has it occured to you guys that a lot of these people just don't know any better? That they don't know that a metal case with spaces for more fans is better than a case with space for one fan and a plexiglass window? Go ask people and you'll fidn out that a lot of them don't know. And why not? Because when they shop for them it says nothing about how one fan isn't such a good idea for a high-powered computer or that plexiglass windows can scratch up. Hell, even the metal cases with space for four fans don't even say that -- go look over cases at newegg.com and you'll see. The reviews are one of the best ways to learn but not everyone shops there and even a lot of those who do don't read reviews beyond those on the item's description page.
Give me an ugly old solid case with space for three or four fans any day over those with the plexiglass windows, but the fact is most of them have that now. I don't even look at the cheap plastic cases myself.
I thought that too.
Then you're a minority. Your one of two I've ever heard say that, as compared to over a hundred more people who've had to reinstall Windows because of Symantec's software. I'd had my first computer about a month in 2001, running Norton's, when it got owned by a worm that wrecked Windows so that I had to reinstall. It later got owned by another virus that also wrecked it so that I had to reinstall, it just did it more slowly. Not only that but there were other incidents related to viruses that caused me problems. Was I downloading stuff that had viruses? Not according to Norton's scanner. Finally, after I'd heard that AVG was good and free (I didn't know much about this stuff back then) I decided to give it a try. I scanned all the files on my computer and it found three OLD files that were viruses that always passed Norton's scan as clean. The youngest of these files was seven months! The oldest was 13 months. That's just plain incompentence on their part, as far as I'm concerned.
Anyhow, after AVG I never had problems with a virus again. Of ocurse, that was urgent for only about another year as I switched to *nix later. Now viruses rarely concern me personally at all, only with regard to my customers who bring me their PCs to fix and anytime I fidn one with Norton's or McAfee's I install Avast (Win 2k/XP) or AVG (98/ME). Virtually all of them have reported that Avast or AVG did much better at catching virused files they had and weren't so invasive, so Norton's doesn't seem to have improved since I was using their products.
Here's an idea: if you're so confident in Norton's, try uninstalling it, install AVG or Avast and scan all your backup files with it as well as your computer. You say that your system is clean and Norton's has kept it so, but how do you know? Why not check to make sure? Because if you've been using Norton's exclusively that long, I believe you most likely do have a trojan that you don't know about.
I'm not trying to troll you, but I don't see how that is applicable with Blu-Ray (or however they've decided to spell it) -- you won't be able to burn Blu-Ray discs at all. Sony is once again trying to use their own format which only delivers content but is useless to everyone else. Unless I missed an announcement about that? Hell if they did make it so people could make their own Blu-Ray discs I'd probably have a heart attack. Sony has been trying to lock-in the media market with their own formats for... what, twenty years?
Would you trade a market of 95% of all Windows-users for even 50%? And how long do you think it'll take before Vista hits 50%? We (nerds) know that Vista isn't really that much of an improvement over XP now and the average user doesn't, but they will as soon as people they know get it -- and are likely disappointed unless they're upgrading from 98.
Let's rehash Vista for a moment:
1. Aero: You can make XP look just like Aero right now for free; just go look at softpedia.com or download.com.
2. The sidebar (is that even still on Vista?): desktop sidebar works even on Win 2k. And then's there the Google Desktop.
3. Better security: You'd be better off sticking with Win 2k or XP and getting the free version of Win Patrol. More security and it uses less than 5 mb of Ram to run in the background -- how much memory is Vista going to require again?
4. DirectX 10: It'll be almost useless for a long time. No game company is going to trade the market of almost all Windows-users for the Vista-users market exclusively. I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).
Those are its pluses! Consider the biggest negative of all: 8 different versions, each costing more than the last. Is everyone going to rush out and buy a copy of Vista when the version they can afford has less features than the copy of XP they already have? Most who do so would by mistake.... and they won't be very quiet about how they feel they got screwed either. Personally, I think the 8 versions thing is what is going to be the biggest detriment to selling it. MS is trying to force everyone to pay through the nose for Windows and a great many simply will not. MS has forgotten that their target market is cheap; if they weren't a lot more of them would be using Macs (and I'm no Apple fangirl by any means, so don't take it that way).
Pirate Vista? A lot of them won't even bother with that when they find out from folks who have it that it's not really that much of an improvement over XP (from a user's standpoint) and requires powerful, expensive hardware -- which a lot of people simply don't have even now. You can't download hardware over p2p so Vista will be useless to many, who aren't going to upgrade without a compelling reason to do so. And what complelling reason will there be? MS's own games? That's not good enough for most, not so long as there are a lot of games that still support XP. No, I think Microsoft's only real hope lies with companies like Dell, who will sell pre-built computers with Vista. And guess how happy those people are going to be when they find out that they have to pay do much exta for features? To summarize, I think word of mouth alone will do a lot to prevent Vista's widespread adoption -- it will cost too much to have anything beyond the basics, most hardware can't even utilize it and hardware that can won't be all that common for another couple of years. For all that inconvenience Vista Premium should have a boatload of great features, but it's apparently not going to. Even with all that aside it would be very foolish for a game company to go Vista-only because the Vista market share is going to be too small. And if Vista bombs they certainly won't. Even if it is suceesful, its market share is still going to be low enough compared to previous versions of Windows that marketing games to it exclusively just wouldn't be profitable enough, especially since OpenGL can be used instead.
Come to think of it, maybe Vista will do more to push OpenGL than anything else. Bonus! Go MS! :-D
Officially there aren't horses in NWN1, but there have been horses in several modules and more importantly, the CEP (Community Expansion Pack) for, over a year now, so whether or not there are to ever "officially" horses in NWN1 is pretty much irrelevant to most users.
Why put myself through this when there is an easier way? I use gmail pretty much exclusively. I just checked my account and there is currently 850 (!) spam emails in my spam folder. There was one spam email in my inbox. Nomrally I never see this at all because what doesn't register as spam with gmail gets caught by Thunderbird. Furthermore, I can set Thunderbird to download copies of my email and leave the originals on the server, so if there is spam in my inbox all I have to do is go to my gmail account in my browser, open the spam email and click the "report spam" button.
I'm not trying to troll Spamcop or anything but why deal with an anti-spam service that complicated enough to need a tutorial on how to report spam when it's much easier to do that with gmail? Plus whatever gets past gmail usually gets caught by Thunderbird's junk mail filter.
Oooh, bad example. Sun lived to tell the tale but MS stabbed them in the back, didn't they? Microsoft promised never to make an alternative to Java when working with Sun, but then they made the Virtual Java Machine.
So, yeah, MS has had some partnerships that were profitable for their partners, but they've also had so many where they screwed over their partners that most every company in the world is wary of dealing with them. Some say that they haven't screwed over Intel, IBM, Dell and a few others simply because they're still useful, but Microsoft will burn them as soon as they're not. True? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but they've done it before.
I'm sure that's what Apple intended, but there are alternatives: iPod Plug-in for Winamp 1.33, iPod nano Player 3.1, MyPodPlayer 1.0, YamiPod 0.99.2 (which is pretty popular) and iDump. There are undoubtedly others too. (Of course, this is all off-topic so I expect it will be modded as such.)
Dude, I'm 35, so I'm kind of old, but calculators were never allowed in any school I went to. Not even once in grades K-12. Using a calculator was cheating and if you got caught you were punished, the idea being you had to be able to do it yourself, no matter how complicated the problem was.
Ok, we have a (probably BS) estimate on how customers are screwing over software companies. Where's the estimate on how much software companies have screwed over customers? Oh, wait, we're not supposed to give a damn about that, are we? It's okay for the software companies to screw over people but not the reverse.
This is why people don't give a crap -- including me. My first computer came with Widnows ME which caused me no end of trouble because it was buggy as hell. I was running Norton's Internet Security Suite and kept it fully updated. Within a month a worm downloaded itself into my system when I went to (of all things) a charity site. The worm wrecked my system and I had to get everything reinstalled. After that I downloaded a shareware anti-worm program to supplement Norton's. It worked fine, or seemed to, so I bought it. They sent me a keyfile in my email and told me how to install it. It didn't work. The program responded as if the time had run out and loaded my screen with one pop-up box after another to inform me that I needed to buy it. I literally could do nothing with my comuter because of all the pop-up boxes; I'd estimate that there were two hundred piled on top of each other when I had to force shut-down my computer.... and then reinstall Windows. Did I get my money back? No.
So, if you're not keeping score here, I got screwed by Microsoft, Symantec and one of the small software companies you guys are defending so ferociously. But no one else is saying anything about this sort of thing happening. Here's a clue: until the protection goes both ways we, your potential customers, don't give a damn. People have been screwed over enough that they assume that the software companies are trying to screw them over -- and a great many are -- so they don't care about you. But no one is even trying to do anything about that happening; no, all the effort is directed at trying to prevent piracy, not software makers abusing licenses and committing outright fraud. Until an actual effort is made to curb that people won't care. And why should they? I wouldn't be surprised if the guys who sold me that anti-worm program posted in this thread.
Oh, and btw, I'm a *nix-user now, so when a program doesn't work or screws up everything I can at least console myself with the fact that I wasn't defruaded out of money for it. Plus I know that someone will eventually fix it, instead of hoping that the software company will. All too many software companies never will fix their buggy software, or if they do they release it as the new version and expect you to pay for it all over again just to get a copy that workd even though you've already paid for it once. But it's okay for them do that but not for the customer who got screwed over with the earlier buggy version to pirate the new version, isn't it?
By that logic if I work really hard on building a house and sell it, I should be paid for it hundreds of times, not once. Why should software programmers be paid over and over for their hard work when the rest of us get paid only once for the same amount of effort? Yes, I've said the same thing about musicians and song-writers. You seem to think you have a moral right here, but I don't think you do. Legal, yes, moral, no, not until everyone has the same right.
"And people seem to forget that carbon nanotubes were fiction less than two decades ago."
Exactly. Just because we don't have a material to make this out of now that will work doesn't mean we won't make a new material that will in the future. How many materials are there that are entirely man-made now? How many more will there be, say, 100 years from now? Especially if someone were to design a material expressly for this purpose.
"isn't it logical to start on the most popular platform and if it pans out, expand"
For any other company, yes, but I'm not so sure with Google. Google is where they are today in part because of geeks. Geeks were using Google when everyone else was using Yahoo and MSN search. When Google started putting out software, it was all for Windows -- and it's only been in the last, what 2 years? less?, that using Google became common among non-geeks (most of whom run Windows). In other words, their software wasn't aimed at the people who were their fans in order to get more market share from MS's crowd. Problem was, most of the software they were offering -- with the notable exception of Google Earth -- was the kind of stuff that is common freeware on Windows, so this didn't really make their market share grow nearly as much as they hoped, and it also irritated a portion of their loyal user base. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but see the porting to *nix as kind of making up to the geeks. On the plus side, as others have noted, they're contributing to Wine.
(I hope that made sense; I've had a lot of beer tonight and it's late here.)
"Who wouldn't like to only sleep with virgins"
Me. Virgins reach orgasm in seconds and don't how to give even half-decent oral sex, leaving a woman looking for a guy with a modicum of self-control and knowledge of how to soemthing with his tongue other than bragging to his friends about how many bitches he's slept with. Oh, wait, you're talking about female virgins, right? Then I'm definitely not interested. But I probably wouldn't be even if I were male, as I'm not the type to use someone once and then throw them away.
... But I use gmail almost exclusively and receive a ton of spam, but what little gets through their filter is caught by Thunderbird. Now, I know Google and Mozilla, Inc. are pretty innovative groups, but why can't others do what they're doing? Especially as Thunderbird is open source? Spam exists because it is profitable. If people saw very little spam it wouldn't be so profitable anymore.
"How about if someone with a Windows PC at hand compared the speed of opening and saving OpenDocument vs. the usual .doc to give us some real numbers. "
Been there, done that, couldn't even tell the difference -- although OOo was definitely faster when MS Office was hung, which is a common thing with MS office but not OOo. Other than that, if there's a difference it's a very small one.
Maybe it also has something to do with the patent applicants funding them too?
Considering that they knew about the prior art and have been trolling with the patent against software-makers using the jpeg format, I vote for them being tried for extortion. Why is it that in cases where some company claims they have a patent or copyright on something and its later proven that they don't that they're not charged with extortion (yeah, I'm thinking of SCO too)?
Pure, unadulterated BS. I've used both and Nortons absolutely sucks compared to AVG. With Norton's my computer got so badly infected that I had to reinstall the OS two different times. Installed AVG and never had that problem again. Did I download anything that had the virus in it? No! Both times the viruses downlaoded themselves straight into my computer from the internet -- which means Norton's firewall didn't do anything to stop them. On top of this, one time I uninstalled it in order to reinstall it and I couldn't boot Windows afterward.
Nevertheless, I think Avast! is the best antivirus, but I've heard a great deal of good aobut NOD32 and Kaspersky's. Any of them beat Norton's. Hell, as bad as Norton's can screw up your computer no antivirus is sometimes better. I don't know how many times I had to reinstall it because it started screwing up or just didn't install right in the first place. All of that applies equally to McAffee too.
I don't know what the deal is here with you and whoever is modding anything critical of Symantec as "flamebait" and your BS as insightful, but you can't quit with the outright lying. You've both made yourselves as transparent as freshly-cleaned glass. Normally, I'd think someone who made such an accusation was paranoid, but that's how blindlingly obvious you guys have been. And the thread is still young. Too bad the people running this site aren't involved enough to care anymore.
And who gets to decide what's offensive? They do. And if it doesn' tinvolve school, how the hell is it any of their business if a kid says something offensive anyway? You're an absolute fool to think it would only be used against kids who did something illegal.
"Yeah, like Apple. And Apple sure is hurting these days...."
Bad analogy. Apple isn't hurting now, but before the iPod they were. And it is still a valid argument that their anal-retentiveness kept them from being in the position that they could've been -- bigger and more powerful than Microsoft. If they had opened the Mac OS to PC hardware long ago, Microsoft would've never stood a chance. Instead, people who wanted computers cobbled together their own PCs and put DOS on them because they had little other choice.
I've been hearing this a lot too and it's pure BS. In the 70s a young girl took a gun to school and killed several of her classmates. When asked why, "I hate Mondays" was her only reply. (IIRC, a punk rock song came out of that incident.) This girl was not the only student to commit such violence at a school in the 70s. You can't blame GTA or any other violent game for that; all that was available at that time was pinball and the early Atari games. This has been going on longer than there have been violent video games. Why are they focusing on video games being a cause now when this problem obviously began -- and well withing living memory -- before these kind of video games existed?
Thing is, a lot of people who advocate this are the same age as me or even older so they should remember these incidents too, which makes me wonder what kind of brain-washing techniques the leaders of this movement are using.
I think they can. Try selling you copy of Windows XP. Same thing, it's just software, but it's illegal to resell a used copy of XP. Then there's XP's product activation, which ensures that the person who bought the used copy has to crack it or they can't even use it after the initial two-week period. Sony's patent on tying the game software to individual consoles amounts to the same thing. So if Microsoft has been getting away with this for years with their OS, why can't Sony with their games?
Settle? Most of them never even have to settle. Somebody tell me again why regular citizens shouldn't be allowed to break the law while corporations do so whenever they please.
"I hate to be the MS supporter here (and I rarely do), but Microsofts permission model is just as powerful as UNIX's."
No it's not. User accounts on unix are kept separate on unix. If a user account on Unix gets screwed with (malware, whatever) it does not mess up the OS; all you have to do is delete that user account and make another one. With Windows, if a user account gets a virus it affects the whole OS, including other user accounts. And on *nix there is a definite lack of programs that require root privileges just to run.