I agree that Windows networking isn't best; I find Linux to get better throughput. It's better in Vista from personal experience but I haven't really compared it to Linux so I'll leave the evaluation up to others.
What do you mean about prioritizing? How else would one prioritize if you're using multimedia or games even? Would you prefer a non-time sensitive download have equal priority with a time-sensitive audio or video stream? Or have say Outlook running in the background have equal priority with a media player? Multimedia is time-sensitive (and relatively processor intensive) so it has a higher priority. That just makes sense to me and should be the default but if it bothers people they should have the ability to turn it off. (Note: I'm more talking about whether Windows necessarily gets all the priorities right, I'm more talking about the concept)
I didn't say you will never use a Gig network, that would be beyond stupid. What I did say was that it almost never happens that someone uses the full bandwidth, meaning currently and in the near future. Few people have gigabit routers. Additionally, even fewer have access to a gigabit internet connection. So for the vast majority of users they could only use the full gigabit between local computers. Additionally, both sides need to be able to send and receive at a gigabit which isn't a small feat considering at 128MB/s, you're around the maximum sustained transfer rate of a hard drive. I'm not defending the quality of Microsoft's implementation of their prioritizing mechanism just that I understand their reasoning.
DRM had nothing to do with it. In order to make sure that non-multimedia I/O and processing didn't overwhelm the I/O and processing needed for content (audio and video), processes and I/O are prioritized. Multimedia runs at the highest priority. From what I remember, Microsoft said that it could only affect gigabit network connections that are running at full speed (basically never on a desktop PC). I think they said they're going to tweak the behavior so it can decide better whether non-multimedia related processes and I/O should be limited. Additionally, there was a bug in the method used to decide how much bandwidth should be allocated to a network connection. The total bandwidth allocated for network connections was equally split across all network adapters even if you had say a gigabit adapter connected and an wireless adapter that wasn't. This caused the issue to show up more often than intended because oftentimes the gigabit connection was getting cut in half without a real reason.
All that said, I think the idea of prioritizing multimedia is fine but there should be a method to turn it off (perhaps a registry setting).
Well if you really want to nitpick, technically Veterans Day is solely an American holiday as other countries celebrate Rememberance Day (which I think is more appropriate but crazy thing is no one asked me).
The poppy isn't well known for Veterans Day in the US. In fact until I found it on wikipedia a few months ago, I had no idea that about the significance of the poppy and November 11. From Google's perspective it wouldn't make much sense to make a logo that would make no sense to one of their largest markets. Military helmets are more universal in this case
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I think you're confusing the electoral college in this. With an electoral college, IRV would be used inside a state to decide the states delegates to the electoral college. Preferably the electoral college would be eliminated and we'd simply have a popular vote for the President.
Outside of Paul, the best example of IRV having benefit would be Nader in 2000. A significant portion of people wanted Nader but voted for Gore because they really didn't want Bush to be President.
I do agree that the IRV seems confusing but it has proved successful most notably in Australia. Also, a number of municipalities use it for local elections and a few states are testing out its viability and potential.
Really in the end though IRV is part of a number of reforms and alone won't do a whole lot.
There's something called instant runoff voting where you rank candidates. A few liberal Democrats support it but its mostly supported by third parties. I'm a Democrat and proud of it and I think such a system is a great idea. It would show that there is more support for liberal causes in America and would prevent Democrats from always having the Republican position as a fallback point.
Fortunately, not all states have such a silly requirement. In Wisconsin, all you have to do is write a party on your application to run for office. It doesn't have to be a legitimate party and you don't have to be a member of that party.
Don't try to extrapolate a Southern state's arcane requirements to every part of the country.
The issue here is really over what a point release should be. An Apple point release includes new features as well as being for bugfixes. It's like something half way between a new Windows version and a service pack.
Windows service packs are not supposed to include new features outside of supporting new hardware. SP2 was an exception but the "features" were mainly one big bugfix dealing with a bunch of bugs related to security.
Does your motherboard have an nVidia nForce chipset? I had a problem with incredibly slow hard drive transfer rates when I got Vista and I traced it down to the built in bus mastering controller driver. Apparently nVidia decided that a really crappy, early release driver from June of 06 is all that should be on Windows Update. I went to nvidia.com, installed the driver and after the restart my transfer rates were between MUCH faster.
Judge Jackson's order would have done absolutely nothing to deal with the cost of Windows, retail or OEM. What would help the cost though would be preventing Microsoft from restricting the options on the OEM product lines. If you could choose Ubuntu, Vista Home Premium, and Vista Ultimate when you buy a new computer, it would lower the cost of Windows because there'd be direct competition.
(I say this as a person who tends to feel Windows is superior to Linux in most ways as well.)
I would honestly be really surprised if Excel used undocumented APIs. That would be inviting a lawsuit. Anyways Microsoft doesn't exactly hide when they do such things (IE, Windows Media Player, Search) because they don't see a problem with them.
If Excel is bluescreening your machine you have problems that go far beyond office. I assume you're using XP in this case. Either you have a MAJOR problem with your Windows install, you have a bad driver or your hardware is failing. Take your pick.
Ya isn't this just sort of a good thing for everyone? I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft used this as an example of how extensible they're accessibility platform is. "Not only does it work for our products, it works for products that compete with our own!"
I've heard mixed reviews of Microsoft's accessibility platform and I'm not qualified to make judgments on that but I think this is a net positive for Microsoft (and for everyone interested in more accessible technology).
The impression I'm getting is that Microsoft is using Windows Live as a way to add stuff to the Windows "package" without worrying about the anti-trust issues. For example, previously Windows included Windows Messenger and lets be honest, it sucked but it was bundled. Now in Vista they have an advertisement in the welcome center for Windows Live Messenger. Windows Live Photo Gallery is a replacement of the built in photo gallery (which isn't really that bad to be fair) but includes more functionality. None of those programs are part of the official Windows API or built in so you can't say they're bundled. Are they taking advantage of their monopoly in this case? Possibly but in a less blatant way than before. Microsoft would be incredibly stupid to add these programs into Windows as that'd be an invitation to additional scrutiny by regulators and lawsuits by competitors.
No he's not allowed to use his OS of choice for 5 months until his confinement ends because his OS is supported for the tracking software. That's it. He broke a law, agreed to the conditions of his home confinement and doesn't like the result of it. Its like complaining that he can't go out to eat at night like he'd prefer, instead he'll have to go out to eat during the day.
Send him to a supermax so he can see what is truly cruel and unusual punishment. No human contact, in the cell 23 hours a day, no tv, no computer. There are significantly more important issues when it comes to our corrections system than this.
I live in Wisconsin, a state where deer hunting is a tradition that in many cases overrides Thanksgiving since they are at the same time. My uncle and cousins have over many Thanksgivings came into the house for lunch and went back out to their tree stands right after they finished and we're not the only family where that is a tradition. So yes, I do live in the United States.
I didn't say mostly unrestricted, I said RELATIVELY unrestricted. We have some of the loosest gun laws in the world. As the ACLU points out, if you believe in an unrestricted right of people to keep and bear arms you believe in a person's right to own machine guns, bazookas, missiles and any other type of arms you can think of. The issue is not whether to restrict possession of weapons, it's how much. I happen to think people, with few exceptions, have the right under the second amendment to possess non-automatic weapons which is basically the law in the United States.
And you are right that education and ethics is incredibly important. Unfortunately, we really can't require people to get education in firearms use or safety. Most states don't allow that and in my interpretation of the second amendment I don't think we can require it anyways (then again my interpretation doesn't matter that much but whatever).
My understanding is that the right to bear arms to participate in the militia does make sense historically. I looked into this issue after I posted originally and according to Wikipedia in England people (wealthy landowners) were required to own a firearm to participate in the militia for the protection of the monarch. In early America, one of the fears of the anti-Federalists was that a strong federal government with a standing army would have the force necessary to take away rights from the states and the people. A way to prevent that would be through state militias who could repel the federal army which is an important reason for the second amendment. They didn't think people needed protection from the militias as the people were the militias, they thought the people needed protection from the army.
As to whether a hand gun keep an oppressive state at bay, you have to remember that the difference between a weapon that a person could own and the army's weapons weren't near the difference they are today. The army of the time had muskets and horses which people could own and cannons which people could not. The armies of the world today have precision guided missiles, tanks, nuclear weapons, etc., etc. Even now though I think you could argue that people still have more than enough power to resist an oppressive state when you consider the success and longevity of numerous guerrilla movements throughout the world today (Iraq being the most noticeable).
As an aside, the ACLU points out that almost no one believes there should be no restriction on the personal use of arms because that would entail people having the right to have just about any weapon include bombs, machine guns, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, bazookas and any other type of arms you can think of. The main debate is not really over whether we restrict, it's how much we restrict.
I used the metaphor of pornography because the parent used it before. And since I don't know what "cutting switches" means I'll ignore that but it sounds bad. I based my metaphor on the language of the amendment. I also don't see what the point of claiming my argument is the argument of a six year old considering the same argument has been made in front of and concurred with by the United States Supreme Court and at least two state Supreme Courts, as well as being the interpretation of every US Appeals Court prior to 2001 and every one except 2 since and the US Justice Department until 2001. In fact those people interpreted it more restrictively than I did as I believe the amendment provides some sort of protection to individuals from being prosecuted for possessing a weapon for personal use whereas they believe it provides a collective right which only allows individuals to own guns for the sole purpose of being part of the state militia; militias that incidentally no longer exist. So unless you're saying my more expansive understanding is the argument of a six year old I'd recommend you take it up with each of those people which have far more legal expertise than my own.
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I agree that Windows networking isn't best; I find Linux to get better throughput. It's better in Vista from personal experience but I haven't really compared it to Linux so I'll leave the evaluation up to others.
What do you mean about prioritizing? How else would one prioritize if you're using multimedia or games even? Would you prefer a non-time sensitive download have equal priority with a time-sensitive audio or video stream? Or have say Outlook running in the background have equal priority with a media player? Multimedia is time-sensitive (and relatively processor intensive) so it has a higher priority. That just makes sense to me and should be the default but if it bothers people they should have the ability to turn it off. (Note: I'm more talking about whether Windows necessarily gets all the priorities right, I'm more talking about the concept)
I didn't say you will never use a Gig network, that would be beyond stupid. What I did say was that it almost never happens that someone uses the full bandwidth, meaning currently and in the near future. Few people have gigabit routers. Additionally, even fewer have access to a gigabit internet connection. So for the vast majority of users they could only use the full gigabit between local computers. Additionally, both sides need to be able to send and receive at a gigabit which isn't a small feat considering at 128MB/s, you're around the maximum sustained transfer rate of a hard drive. I'm not defending the quality of Microsoft's implementation of their prioritizing mechanism just that I understand their reasoning.
DRM had nothing to do with it. In order to make sure that non-multimedia I/O and processing didn't overwhelm the I/O and processing needed for content (audio and video), processes and I/O are prioritized. Multimedia runs at the highest priority. From what I remember, Microsoft said that it could only affect gigabit network connections that are running at full speed (basically never on a desktop PC). I think they said they're going to tweak the behavior so it can decide better whether non-multimedia related processes and I/O should be limited. Additionally, there was a bug in the method used to decide how much bandwidth should be allocated to a network connection. The total bandwidth allocated for network connections was equally split across all network adapters even if you had say a gigabit adapter connected and an wireless adapter that wasn't. This caused the issue to show up more often than intended because oftentimes the gigabit connection was getting cut in half without a real reason.
All that said, I think the idea of prioritizing multimedia is fine but there should be a method to turn it off (perhaps a registry setting).
If I'm 24 and haven't heard of it once, then maybe its not the most common thing at least where I come from. YMMV
Well if you really want to nitpick, technically Veterans Day is solely an American holiday as other countries celebrate Rememberance Day (which I think is more appropriate but crazy thing is no one asked me).
The poppy isn't well known for Veterans Day in the US. In fact until I found it on wikipedia a few months ago, I had no idea that about the significance of the poppy and November 11. From Google's perspective it wouldn't make much sense to make a logo that would make no sense to one of their largest markets. Military helmets are more universal in this case
That cracked me up
Good point. I apologize, I had forgotten how weak of computers we used to get by with. :)
Uh huh... You tell me when the handcrank computer is ready for that... geez
Why wouldn't they? This is a news site isn't it? And isn't this news?
I think you're confusing the electoral college in this. With an electoral college, IRV would be used inside a state to decide the states delegates to the electoral college. Preferably the electoral college would be eliminated and we'd simply have a popular vote for the President.
Outside of Paul, the best example of IRV having benefit would be Nader in 2000. A significant portion of people wanted Nader but voted for Gore because they really didn't want Bush to be President.
I do agree that the IRV seems confusing but it has proved successful most notably in Australia. Also, a number of municipalities use it for local elections and a few states are testing out its viability and potential.
Really in the end though IRV is part of a number of reforms and alone won't do a whole lot.
There's something called instant runoff voting where you rank candidates. A few liberal Democrats support it but its mostly supported by third parties. I'm a Democrat and proud of it and I think such a system is a great idea. It would show that there is more support for liberal causes in America and would prevent Democrats from always having the Republican position as a fallback point.
Fortunately, not all states have such a silly requirement. In Wisconsin, all you have to do is write a party on your application to run for office. It doesn't have to be a legitimate party and you don't have to be a member of that party.
Don't try to extrapolate a Southern state's arcane requirements to every part of the country.
The issue here is really over what a point release should be. An Apple point release includes new features as well as being for bugfixes. It's like something half way between a new Windows version and a service pack.
Windows service packs are not supposed to include new features outside of supporting new hardware. SP2 was an exception but the "features" were mainly one big bugfix dealing with a bunch of bugs related to security.
That was the very first thing I thought of when I read the summary
How about it's juut a bug in the software? (And I think I've been called a Windows apologist)
Actually the kernel is simpler in Vista because graphics drivers run primarily in userspace. That's why nvidia and AMD had to make new drivers.
Does your motherboard have an nVidia nForce chipset? I had a problem with incredibly slow hard drive transfer rates when I got Vista and I traced it down to the built in bus mastering controller driver. Apparently nVidia decided that a really crappy, early release driver from June of 06 is all that should be on Windows Update. I went to nvidia.com, installed the driver and after the restart my transfer rates were between MUCH faster.
Judge Jackson's order would have done absolutely nothing to deal with the cost of Windows, retail or OEM. What would help the cost though would be preventing Microsoft from restricting the options on the OEM product lines. If you could choose Ubuntu, Vista Home Premium, and Vista Ultimate when you buy a new computer, it would lower the cost of Windows because there'd be direct competition.
(I say this as a person who tends to feel Windows is superior to Linux in most ways as well.)
I would honestly be really surprised if Excel used undocumented APIs. That would be inviting a lawsuit. Anyways Microsoft doesn't exactly hide when they do such things (IE, Windows Media Player, Search) because they don't see a problem with them.
If Excel is bluescreening your machine you have problems that go far beyond office. I assume you're using XP in this case. Either you have a MAJOR problem with your Windows install, you have a bad driver or your hardware is failing. Take your pick.
Ya isn't this just sort of a good thing for everyone? I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft used this as an example of how extensible they're accessibility platform is. "Not only does it work for our products, it works for products that compete with our own!"
I've heard mixed reviews of Microsoft's accessibility platform and I'm not qualified to make judgments on that but I think this is a net positive for Microsoft (and for everyone interested in more accessible technology).
The impression I'm getting is that Microsoft is using Windows Live as a way to add stuff to the Windows "package" without worrying about the anti-trust issues. For example, previously Windows included Windows Messenger and lets be honest, it sucked but it was bundled. Now in Vista they have an advertisement in the welcome center for Windows Live Messenger. Windows Live Photo Gallery is a replacement of the built in photo gallery (which isn't really that bad to be fair) but includes more functionality. None of those programs are part of the official Windows API or built in so you can't say they're bundled. Are they taking advantage of their monopoly in this case? Possibly but in a less blatant way than before. Microsoft would be incredibly stupid to add these programs into Windows as that'd be an invitation to additional scrutiny by regulators and lawsuits by competitors.
No he's not allowed to use his OS of choice for 5 months until his confinement ends because his OS is supported for the tracking software. That's it. He broke a law, agreed to the conditions of his home confinement and doesn't like the result of it. Its like complaining that he can't go out to eat at night like he'd prefer, instead he'll have to go out to eat during the day.
Send him to a supermax so he can see what is truly cruel and unusual punishment. No human contact, in the cell 23 hours a day, no tv, no computer. There are significantly more important issues when it comes to our corrections system than this.
I live in Wisconsin, a state where deer hunting is a tradition that in many cases overrides Thanksgiving since they are at the same time. My uncle and cousins have over many Thanksgivings came into the house for lunch and went back out to their tree stands right after they finished and we're not the only family where that is a tradition. So yes, I do live in the United States.
I didn't say mostly unrestricted, I said RELATIVELY unrestricted. We have some of the loosest gun laws in the world. As the ACLU points out, if you believe in an unrestricted right of people to keep and bear arms you believe in a person's right to own machine guns, bazookas, missiles and any other type of arms you can think of. The issue is not whether to restrict possession of weapons, it's how much. I happen to think people, with few exceptions, have the right under the second amendment to possess non-automatic weapons which is basically the law in the United States.
And you are right that education and ethics is incredibly important. Unfortunately, we really can't require people to get education in firearms use or safety. Most states don't allow that and in my interpretation of the second amendment I don't think we can require it anyways (then again my interpretation doesn't matter that much but whatever).
My understanding is that the right to bear arms to participate in the militia does make sense historically. I looked into this issue after I posted originally and according to Wikipedia in England people (wealthy landowners) were required to own a firearm to participate in the militia for the protection of the monarch. In early America, one of the fears of the anti-Federalists was that a strong federal government with a standing army would have the force necessary to take away rights from the states and the people. A way to prevent that would be through state militias who could repel the federal army which is an important reason for the second amendment. They didn't think people needed protection from the militias as the people were the militias, they thought the people needed protection from the army.
As to whether a hand gun keep an oppressive state at bay, you have to remember that the difference between a weapon that a person could own and the army's weapons weren't near the difference they are today. The army of the time had muskets and horses which people could own and cannons which people could not. The armies of the world today have precision guided missiles, tanks, nuclear weapons, etc., etc. Even now though I think you could argue that people still have more than enough power to resist an oppressive state when you consider the success and longevity of numerous guerrilla movements throughout the world today (Iraq being the most noticeable).
As an aside, the ACLU points out that almost no one believes there should be no restriction on the personal use of arms because that would entail people having the right to have just about any weapon include bombs, machine guns, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, bazookas and any other type of arms you can think of. The main debate is not really over whether we restrict, it's how much we restrict.
I used the metaphor of pornography because the parent used it before. And since I don't know what "cutting switches" means I'll ignore that but it sounds bad. I based my metaphor on the language of the amendment. I also don't see what the point of claiming my argument is the argument of a six year old considering the same argument has been made in front of and concurred with by the United States Supreme Court and at least two state Supreme Courts, as well as being the interpretation of every US Appeals Court prior to 2001 and every one except 2 since and the US Justice Department until 2001. In fact those people interpreted it more restrictively than I did as I believe the amendment provides some sort of protection to individuals from being prosecuted for possessing a weapon for personal use whereas they believe it provides a collective right which only allows individuals to own guns for the sole purpose of being part of the state militia; militias that incidentally no longer exist. So unless you're saying my more expansive understanding is the argument of a six year old I'd recommend you take it up with each of those people which have far more legal expertise than my own.