Admittedly, I'm not a big-time sysadmin (although I have a number of boxes at home), but I've never understood what is so wrong with the built-in distro tools like apt, yum, portage and what have you.
Why are these somehow worse or "more expensive" than Windows, and, not least, why do we need Xen when we already have those?
Compare this to clicking your way through an endless sequence of directories or menus or trying to find what ever it is you want on an overcrowded desktop.
Of course, I don't expect others to follow my example, but this is one of the foremost reasons as to why I tend not to be using point-and-click GUIs. With CLIs, you haven't needed to do that, ever. Of course, the learning curve may be steeper, but since your possible actions are layed out linearily (rather than hierarchically as in a GUI), you save a lot of steps when using a CLI.
How funny that they decided to integrate web searches into this desktop search tool. I'm guessing that now that MSN Search will be integrated into the Windows desktop, we might see an otherwise unexpected drop in Google's traffic.
Isn't this suspiciously similar to how Internet Explorer took market share from Netscape?
"Oh, I'm sorry. MSN Search is so tightly integrated into Longhorn that our customers cannot use Google without crashing Windows. That's why we're blocking Google by default in the Longhorn firewall. No other reason."
I think that goes for the M3 Power as well, though. The only way to somehow be affected by the 1.5 V battery in the M3 Power would probably if you connected it directly to your brain. Don't try that at home, kids.
I haven't read Adam Smith or anything, but it is obvious that MicroSoft has superior products. Clearly not in the technical sense, but in the sense that it is what the consumers want.
Consumers aren't "trapped" -- they are free to switch to another supplier whenever they want to. It's just that they don't want to. It is, of course, as you say, because MicroSoft's products have become ubiquitous -- customers don't want the technically superior word processor, they want the word processor that can read the files they are being sent -- in other words, they want MicroSoft Word. That still doesn't mean that they are "trapped", though. The market is free to choose other options.
All in all, this isn't a problem with MicroSoft, but it's a problem with the IT culture of today. People send MicroSoft Word documents when they should be sending PDFs or similar, they use ActiveX when they should be using either a stand-alone application or Java, etc.
Of course, it's hard to change culture, but after all, that's what we're trying (or at least wanting) to do every day here on Slashdot, isn't it? Just because it's hard to change culture doesn't mean that we should forcibly change MicroSoft. However nice it would be to blow up MS HQ or similar (such as convicting them under some anti-"monopoly" law), that would, honestly, just be wrong.
Actually, the Firefox devs have said themselves that it is a bug in Firefox, not in the Slashcode. I don't remember the specifics, but it was some kind of race condition. IIRC, Firefox 1.1 will fix it along with some other fixes in the incremental rendering code.
Also, Firefox also uses Quirks mode for certain DOCTYPEs. More or less every browser on earth does, since some DOCTYPEs are known to more or less always house messed up code. If you pop up Firefox's Page Info dialog for a given page, you'll see if it's rendering it in quirks mode or standards compliance mode.
Keyloggers do not work against you, because you are booting from known media. (On the other hand, if the NSA REALLY wants you, they will hack your bios - but no one else is probably that anal).
Now, I may not have made my homework correctly, but if I have, the price probably isn't a big problem.
To begin with, my laptop can do for ~3 hours on a 15 V battery with ~3 Ah of charge, making for ~4 mW of power.
As for Tritium, Wikipedia says that you get around 6.5 keV per decay on average. It also says that Tritium has a half-life of 12.32 years.
If I formulate a function m(t) describing the mass in kilos of Tritium left after t seconds as m(t) = m(0) * (2 ^ -(t / T)), where m(0) is the initial amount of Tritium and T is the half-life in seconds, that means that m'(t) = ln(2) * m(0) * (2 ^ -(t / T)) * -(1 / T).
The power that could be extracted from Tritium given 100% efficiency (which, of course, varies over time) is P(t) = m'(t) * Na * 6.5e3 * e, where Na = Avogadros number = 6.022e23 and e = the electron charge = 1.6e-19 C.
Isolating the initial required Tritium mass from those parameters gives m(0) = (P * T) / (ln(2) * (2 ^ -(t / T)) * Na * 6.5e3 * e).
Given t = T and P = 4 mW, that would yield m(0) ~= 7.4e-6 grams ~= 1e-5 grams.
So, it all comes down to the efficiency of the battery, of course, but given your price, that would yield a Tritium cost of 1e5 * 1e-5 * (1 / E) USD, where E is the efficiency. With E = 1, that would be $10 per battery. With E = 10%, it would be $100 per battery, which isn't an impossible cost if you expect the battery to run for over a decade.
Again, I may well have done something wrong, so correct me if you spot something. And of course, that is excluding the price of your testicles.;-)
I shan't contend that Windows is working well, but it certainly works well enough that it would be far less work fixing it up than starting with another OS and add all their stuff to it.
Also, what sucks with Windows -- unlike pre-OSX versions of Mac OS -- isn't the NT kernel (not that I'm saying that it's as good as Unix or Linux, but it certainly isn't that bad). What sucks with Windows is the software on top of the NT kernel -- the Win32 subsystem, the explorer shell, IE, etc.
By taking Unix or Linux, they would only be replacing the best part of Windows. If they still have to port or rewrite the userland tools, they can just as well do that on the NT kernel either way.
Thus, Microsoft simply has no reason to take Unix or Linux and name it Windows.
It can access a central server for Calendaring, etc. Since version 2, it is capable of accessing at least Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupware servers.
Well, I don't like forcing anything on end-users either, but the fact is that if updates are not carried out automatically, then Joe Sixpack's systems will not be up-to-date.
I think it should be a selectable option when installing the system. That way, knowledgable users can turn it off if they so wish and update their systems manually, while the Joe Sixpacks, easily identifiable by leaving all options on the default, will get it automatically.
Are you referring to up2date, yum update, synpatic, etc.?
If you are, then Windows has that too -- it's called Windows Update.
If you aren't, would you mind telling me what you actually are referring to? Last I looked (five seconds ago, in other words), up2date is just as voluntary and manual as Windows Update.
In fact, WinXP SP2 is even more automatic than that, since it actually allows one to set a setting to allow the system to update itself completely automatically. That may well be the best thing about Windows XP (and no, I don't like Microsoft).
See anything in there mentioning that you're allowed to lie about a company in order to defame it and damage its business?
IANAL, but I do not understand why lying would not be protected as free speech.
Free speech, as far as I know, is that one is allowed to utter anything, anywhere. I do not understand why lies would not be protected under the same law as truths. Neither do I understand why defaming someone would undermine the protectedness of the statements made.
Otherwise, who is to draw the line between lies and uninformed statements, and the line between defaming and not defaming? And not least, why should lying or defaming be outlawed to begin with? Is not the point with free speech to be able to say anything, anywhere without worrying about legal consequences. After all, it is up to the listener to decide whether to believe the speaker.
Java offers the same choice; if you want to turn off bounds checking, use gcj with the -fno-bounds-check option. I suspect every other native Java compiler offers the same option, as do most native compilers for languages with bounds checking.
But by your own argument of bounds checking being mandated by the Java language specification, Java doesn't offer that choice. Only some compilers offer the option of breaking the standard.
On the other hand, Java offers choice, in that you can chose how to handle an out-of-bounds condition, whereas even your hypothetical C compiler with bounds checking just kills the program.
Even though I might agree with you on that point, the fact remains that I have yet to see a single instance where you actually want to do that by catching the exception. I haven't seen a single instance of manual bounds checking (even in Java) where an exception is caught instead of checking the length of the array in advance.
Even so, naturally C is no more a Final Solution then Java is.
No, a crash dump tells the end user absolutely nothing, but the fatal error message actually tells the end user what's wrong.
By that definition, I'd have to classify Java's exception messages as fatal error messages rather than crash dumps, because they are plenty informational. Maybe you didn't notice, but the entire purpose of the getMessage() method of an Exception is to get an informational message about the reason for the Exception being thrown. Since the getMessage() string is printed on the first line of the Java exception dump, the exception dump is also informational. For example:
java.io.FileNotFoundException: test (No such file or directory)
(Followed by stack trace)
That seems very informational to me -- the program terminated abnormally because a file couldn't be found.
Then what's your problem? Write them in Java. But you can't expect language changes based on some of these types of programs might be better written in a modified Java, at the cost of programs that are currently written in Java.
What made you think that I was expecting language changes? I'm merely trying to point out that Java isn't the "Final Solution" that so many tout it to be. I would even say that in a generic case, it's even worse than many other languages, in particular including LISP, Perl, shell scripts, etc., but also C. Of course, situations differ, and sometimes Java may be the better language, but I'm also trying to point out that if the Java inventors had thought of these things before they unleashed the language on the unsuspecting populace, Java could have been the better language for even more situations.
You can certainly authenticate non-Windows clients against a Windows server. You can, however, not authenticate Windows clients against a non-Windows server.
AD is, amazingly enough, (almost) all standard LDAP and Kerberos. The only "extension" of weight that they have made is the use the PAC field of a Kerberos ticket to include authorization data (IIRC, this includes the group SIDs of the principal).
The thing is that while the PAC field is standardized by the Krb5 RFC, so that all clients (Microsoft or not) can handle it and forward it correctly and everything, only a Microsoft Kerberos Key Distribution Center can actually produce one (the process of which includes a lot of proprietary Microsoft protocols). That's why you need a Microsoft server in an AD setup.
My take on this is that Microsoft is already sure of their desktop install base, and can practice some interoperability on the surface, while locking the server market into using the Windows Server System, since the server market is where they are feeling a bit more insecure.
I agree fully. I've long been lamenting both the concept of copying MS Office and its entire programming architecture -- both OOo and Mozilla are more or less operating systems in their own right. Like you say, what needs to be done is creating something better than MS Office rather than copying it.
However:
One has to admit, OpenOffice.org is the perfect transitional element. Copying MS Office makes it far easier for people to switch from MSO to OOo and never notice, except they suddenly have a lot more cash in their pockets.
In that regard, OOo is making the perfect changes to MSO while copying it. It makes it easy to work with for MSO junkies, while switching people over to open standards -- PDF, open document formats, platform independence, you name it.
Once the world has switched to an infrastructure based on open standards, people can start innovating from those standards, and change the underlying operating system however they see fit. This is, of course, also Microsoft's worst nightmare -- if the world uses open standards, they can't practice lock-in strategies on their customers anymore. Which is probably why they keep inventing new closed formats and hiding it under the "openness" of XML.
That is why I applause OOo exactly for what it does, even though I don't like it in itself.
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Why are these somehow worse or "more expensive" than Windows, and, not least, why do we need Xen when we already have those?
No, I don't know. Please enlighten me.
Isn't this suspiciously similar to how Internet Explorer took market share from Netscape?
"Oh, I'm sorry. MSN Search is so tightly integrated into Longhorn that our customers cannot use Google without crashing Windows. That's why we're blocking Google by default in the Longhorn firewall. No other reason."
I think that goes for the M3 Power as well, though. The only way to somehow be affected by the 1.5 V battery in the M3 Power would probably if you connected it directly to your brain. Don't try that at home, kids.
Consumers aren't "trapped" -- they are free to switch to another supplier whenever they want to. It's just that they don't want to. It is, of course, as you say, because MicroSoft's products have become ubiquitous -- customers don't want the technically superior word processor, they want the word processor that can read the files they are being sent -- in other words, they want MicroSoft Word. That still doesn't mean that they are "trapped", though. The market is free to choose other options.
All in all, this isn't a problem with MicroSoft, but it's a problem with the IT culture of today. People send MicroSoft Word documents when they should be sending PDFs or similar, they use ActiveX when they should be using either a stand-alone application or Java, etc.
Of course, it's hard to change culture, but after all, that's what we're trying (or at least wanting) to do every day here on Slashdot, isn't it? Just because it's hard to change culture doesn't mean that we should forcibly change MicroSoft. However nice it would be to blow up MS HQ or similar (such as convicting them under some anti-"monopoly" law), that would, honestly, just be wrong.
Also, Firefox also uses Quirks mode for certain DOCTYPEs. More or less every browser on earth does, since some DOCTYPEs are known to more or less always house messed up code. If you pop up Firefox's Page Info dialog for a given page, you'll see if it's rendering it in quirks mode or standards compliance mode.
Sorry, it was just my reflex to convert USD into SEK.
Of course, it makes the costs even less.
To begin with, my laptop can do for ~3 hours on a 15 V battery with ~3 Ah of charge, making for ~4 mW of power.
As for Tritium, Wikipedia says that you get around 6.5 keV per decay on average. It also says that Tritium has a half-life of 12.32 years.
If I formulate a function m(t) describing the mass in kilos of Tritium left after t seconds as m(t) = m(0) * (2 ^ -(t / T)), where m(0) is the initial amount of Tritium and T is the half-life in seconds, that means that m'(t) = ln(2) * m(0) * (2 ^ -(t / T)) * -(1 / T).
The power that could be extracted from Tritium given 100% efficiency (which, of course, varies over time) is P(t) = m'(t) * Na * 6.5e3 * e, where Na = Avogadros number = 6.022e23 and e = the electron charge = 1.6e-19 C.
Isolating the initial required Tritium mass from those parameters gives m(0) = (P * T) / (ln(2) * (2 ^ -(t / T)) * Na * 6.5e3 * e).
Given t = T and P = 4 mW, that would yield m(0) ~= 7.4e-6 grams ~= 1e-5 grams.
So, it all comes down to the efficiency of the battery, of course, but given your price, that would yield a Tritium cost of 1e5 * 1e-5 * (1 / E) USD, where E is the efficiency. With E = 1, that would be $10 per battery. With E = 10%, it would be $100 per battery, which isn't an impossible cost if you expect the battery to run for over a decade.
Again, I may well have done something wrong, so correct me if you spot something. And of course, that is excluding the price of your testicles. ;-)
Do they mean that it's actually possible to run Windows on anything less than a P4 or Athlon?
I shan't contend that Windows is working well, but it certainly works well enough that it would be far less work fixing it up than starting with another OS and add all their stuff to it.
Also, what sucks with Windows -- unlike pre-OSX versions of Mac OS -- isn't the NT kernel (not that I'm saying that it's as good as Unix or Linux, but it certainly isn't that bad). What sucks with Windows is the software on top of the NT kernel -- the Win32 subsystem, the explorer shell, IE, etc.
By taking Unix or Linux, they would only be replacing the best part of Windows. If they still have to port or rewrite the userland tools, they can just as well do that on the NT kernel either way.
Thus, Microsoft simply has no reason to take Unix or Linux and name it Windows.
Not very strange, is it?
It can access a central server for Calendaring, etc. Since version 2, it is capable of accessing at least Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupware servers.
I think it should be a selectable option when installing the system. That way, knowledgable users can turn it off if they so wish and update their systems manually, while the Joe Sixpacks, easily identifiable by leaving all options on the default, will get it automatically.
If you are, then Windows has that too -- it's called Windows Update.
If you aren't, would you mind telling me what you actually are referring to? Last I looked (five seconds ago, in other words), up2date is just as voluntary and manual as Windows Update.
In fact, WinXP SP2 is even more automatic than that, since it actually allows one to set a setting to allow the system to update itself completely automatically. That may well be the best thing about Windows XP (and no, I don't like Microsoft).
Free speech, as far as I know, is that one is allowed to utter anything, anywhere. I do not understand why lies would not be protected under the same law as truths. Neither do I understand why defaming someone would undermine the protectedness of the statements made.
Otherwise, who is to draw the line between lies and uninformed statements, and the line between defaming and not defaming? And not least, why should lying or defaming be outlawed to begin with? Is not the point with free speech to be able to say anything, anywhere without worrying about legal consequences. After all, it is up to the listener to decide whether to believe the speaker.
Care to explain to me?
Even so, naturally C is no more a Final Solution then Java is.
By that definition, I'd have to classify Java's exception messages as fatal error messages rather than crash dumps, because they are plenty informational. Maybe you didn't notice, but the entire purpose of the getMessage() method of an Exception is to get an informational message about the reason for the Exception being thrown. Since the getMessage() string is printed on the first line of the Java exception dump, the exception dump is also informational. For example:java.io.FileNotFoundException: test (No such file or directory)
(Followed by stack trace)
That seems very informational to me -- the program terminated abnormally because a file couldn't be found.
What made you think that I was expecting language changes? I'm merely trying to point out that Java isn't the "Final Solution" that so many tout it to be. I would even say that in a generic case, it's even worse than many other languages, in particular including LISP, Perl, shell scripts, etc., but also C. Of course, situations differ, and sometimes Java may be the better language, but I'm also trying to point out that if the Java inventors had thought of these things before they unleashed the language on the unsuspecting populace, Java could have been the better language for even more situations.AD is, amazingly enough, (almost) all standard LDAP and Kerberos. The only "extension" of weight that they have made is the use the PAC field of a Kerberos ticket to include authorization data (IIRC, this includes the group SIDs of the principal).
The thing is that while the PAC field is standardized by the Krb5 RFC, so that all clients (Microsoft or not) can handle it and forward it correctly and everything, only a Microsoft Kerberos Key Distribution Center can actually produce one (the process of which includes a lot of proprietary Microsoft protocols). That's why you need a Microsoft server in an AD setup.
My take on this is that Microsoft is already sure of their desktop install base, and can practice some interoperability on the surface, while locking the server market into using the Windows Server System, since the server market is where they are feeling a bit more insecure.
How about using any system that conforms to open standards? I'd say that would be anything except a Microsoft system.
However:
One has to admit, OpenOffice.org is the perfect transitional element. Copying MS Office makes it far easier for people to switch from MSO to OOo and never notice, except they suddenly have a lot more cash in their pockets.
In that regard, OOo is making the perfect changes to MSO while copying it. It makes it easy to work with for MSO junkies, while switching people over to open standards -- PDF, open document formats, platform independence, you name it.
Once the world has switched to an infrastructure based on open standards, people can start innovating from those standards, and change the underlying operating system however they see fit. This is, of course, also Microsoft's worst nightmare -- if the world uses open standards, they can't practice lock-in strategies on their customers anymore. Which is probably why they keep inventing new closed formats and hiding it under the "openness" of XML.
That is why I applause OOo exactly for what it does, even though I don't like it in itself.