One, these guys are from Germany, which is one of these weird places that are not among the 50 states you all learn at school. You know, "foreign country", "some other place", "not part of the US". Don't know if any of those phrases make much sense to you. The end result is that they are well outside the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Two, or at least I hope so, the FBI is even more worried about whether or not something it does is legal.
Three, even if it were within jurisdiction, the FBI can not grant immunity. They are part of what used to be called the "executive branch", before all those branches were merged and mixed and seperation of power essentially eliminated. As such, they can not make it so you won't be sued, at most they could say "we won't sue you".
So far, Win7 is largely underwhelming. It is certainly better than Vista, but what isn't? It will, however, be compared to Vista and XP, as well as the competition, especially OS X. After companies accepted the thought of not moving to a newer windos release (i.e. Vista), they will entertain the same thoughts with Win7. So this is not an "automatic update", it will have to bring some convincing reasons.
I've yet to see one.
Releasing a beta without any compelling reasons to prefer it over XP might well cause the kind of press that MS doesn't need at all - the kind that says "it's nice, but it does nothing old XP doesn't do".
Spare me the (often incompetent) enthusiasm of youth.
You shouldn't 'believe' in an OS or license like a God. Nobody should.
I'm probably older than you are, and my opinion is the exact opposite: You should believe in an OS or license or other things that can make a real difference to human life. There's a lot of reasons to be enthusiastic about things that have the potential to move humanity forward. On the other hand, believing in a god, any god, is just plain silly.
In the end computers are just tools.
In the end, emotions and beliefs are what make us human and different from machines.
As jedidiah said: It's an intentional misspelling. If you don't like it - how about you just ignore it? Would that be an option? Or is that not "adult" enough for you?;-)
Yes, they asked the market about an educational product. That same approach has ruined education in general in most western countries, as children are "built to order", so to speak, instead of receiving a general education as the humanists set out to.
90% of software that people actually care about that is written for Windows.
I call bullshit on that made-up statistics.
The vast, vast majority of users are entirely happy with three programs:
A browser
An e-mail program
A file manager
For the "high-end", add an IRC client, a photo-management software and a media player.
All of which are available on practically any OS out there except Plan9.:-)
how the heck can you not teach them about the one OS that everyone uses?
Because a general education is worth more than special knowledge, no matter how large the market share of the later is. If you have an understanding of how "computers work", it's easy to adapt to windos, OS X, Linux or anything else. If you only know windos, switching to something else is a lot more difficult, because you are lacking the general concept behind the one specific implementation you know.
I'm certain that the submitter is correct: Allowing windos in killed the project.
Why? Because projects like this rely on the goodwill of volunteers. That comes from ideology, in a neutral sense, i.e. from people believing in something. Very few people believe in windos. It has millions of users, but few "believers". On the other hand, Linux has a very high percentage of believers among its users, it's easy to find volunteers who will contribute for free, or support the distribution channels, convince their local leaders, and so on.
There are things that money can not buy. You can build a religion on money (see Scientology), but not a crusade.
True, brand recognition and all that. However, that works fairly poorly on crowded web sites. When you go for brand recognition, you usually go large, in order to have exclusive eyeballs, at least for a moment.
And I'm not being pedantic, just leaving some thinking to the reader. Yes, of course watching is a precursor. But watching alone is rarely what they pay for. See the massive shift from "views" to "clicks" as the measure for ad space that has happened over the past years.
Specifically, layoffs are being used as a way of culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
That'll be interesting, then. By and large, every performance measuring I've ever seen has been flawed, and unless it was for very simple jobs, greatly so.
Especially in a development environment, performance is hard to measure. There are anecdotes en masse about people who contributed very little measurable output to a project, but when they were fired the whole thing went down the drain.
Cutting "low performers" has, in my experience, always been a sign of a company in financial trouble. One that desperately needs to save money in order to please stockholders, and employees simply are one of those "cutting costs opportunities" that stockholders love.
Look, I've had the same story, but a widely different experience. For me the MBP I bought was largely a "wow" experience.
But yes, there are problems. It isn't perfect. Still, compared to XP, I'd say there are worlds between them. Among those I know who switched to Macs during the past 2-3 years, the general consensus is that it isn't perfect, but there are few flaws and many great things, while XP is just barely bearable.
There are many more reasons, in fact. The most important one is that cross-platform development usually results in higher-quality products.
The most obvious reason is that bugs tend to show up faster if you test on more than one platform. Developers hate that, it appears to make development more difficult, but the truth is that it simply exposes the lousy work that most developers deliver.
The other reason is that you can take advantage of - or start thinking about - the platform features. For example, the old Loki port of Civ3 had additional features that the windos version didn't have, simply because the platform required them. One example: On the windos platform, there was automatically one profile for all users, because the game saved everything in the game directory. On Linux, due to stricter permissions, that was simply not possible, so the game saved everything it had to save into the user directory and every user had his own profile. You can do that in windos, too, but a lot of windos developers never think about it.
So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention.
That's marketing drivel. What it really means is: "The stuff that the user came for is being pushed aside by more and more and more aggressive advertisement."
Geez, wonder if that just might be one of the reasons that more and more people block ads?
The whole advertisement industry needs to get one important fact into their heads, and that is that nobody wants their crap. Once they've realized that, and start working on a way to push it out in ways that people don't mind enough to block and filter, the value of ads might increase again.
However, for the past 20 years or so, the solution to every advertisement problem has been "more ads". These days, when you walk down McDonalds street, past the AOL stadium, on your way to the Powered by IBM subway, you pass more ads than you'd have seen in an hour or two when you were young. But I said "pass", not "notice".
I remember times when the local stadium was named for its team, not some random company, when there were things that were not being "presented by" some logo, and when you could watch TV for 30 minutes straight without one advertisement.
Fact of the matter is: Advertisement has changed. It's a lot about brand recognition today. The problem being that there are hundreds, if not thousands of brands that compete for your recognition, and they compete by trying to scream louder than the others.
On the web, we can filter them, and the louder they scream, the easier it is. That's why what is really a global advertisement business crisis shows up as a problem in web-based ads first.
Or the taxi drivers may have decided that there was a new market segment of lower priced riders that previously took the bus. The new riders could have increased taxi ridership volume so much that they could lower the ride price. If you go from five rides per day to 12 rides per day, you can cut your price in half and still come out ahead.
Only as long as your profit exceeds your costs, and the costs of driving are considerably above zero.
True, we do not know. However, we do have a lot of reasons to assume as I wrote. Some of those reasons are first-hand statements from taxi drivers. While those don't represent all drivers, or might have been "marketing lies" towards reporters, in the absence of evidence to the contrary we should assume in good faith that things are as they appear to be.
I suspect the taxi drivers would not have lowered their prices if they could not survive in doing so, or else they would have gone out of business.
People do all kinds of things that they can not afford to continue forever, motivated by non-market thoughts. You can not explain Ghandi in free market terms, nor Hitler. The market is a small part of the world, not the other way around.
So the market tried to solve the problem, but they were over-regulated!
Not in the least. Not by far. The market did nothing. The taxi drivers didn't change their fares for any economic reasons, but out of sympathy and support. According to free market theory they should have raised fares, because demand had increased.
Be careful what you say at airports and on planes. Never get irate or argue at airports and on planes.
Why?
And why only there? Shouldn't you be careful everywhere? You could frighten someone on the bus just the same. So better be careful what you say. In fact, better not say anything at all. Accept whatever happens, whatever anyone does. Don't speak up. Don't joke. Don't critizise.
Worked great for Germany in the 1930s.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
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· Score: 1
Yepp, XP doesn't crash that often anymore, and seldom to a blue screen. What it does have occasionally are spontaneous reboots.
It does get in the way all the time, however. Especially if you run fullscreen apps or games. *Boom* suddenly you're on the desktop, because it absolutely must tell you right now that new updates are available. Yeah, thanks. It also sometimes decides that it has to reboot in 3 minutes and starts a countdown - which you'll never see before the reboot if you're running something fullscreen.
That's just the tip. Try counting the mouse movements and clicks you need for some simple reconfigurations. I did that for fun a few times. It's horrible. XP regularily takes 3 times as many actions as OS X does. Stuff that you don't notice when you're familiar with the crap, but it's there and if you count them, you suddenly notice.
Wow! 61 people. Of 306 million. That's an incredible 0.00002% - what a horrible, widespread, world-wide problem. Certainly more important than anything else. We definitely absolutely certainly must limit the rights of the other 305,999,939 people!
In the same area (the USA), in 2007 there were 16,929 murders and 90,427 rapes.
There are no comparable discussions on limiting everyone's rights in order to reduce the murder or rape rates, are there? I wonder why...
No idea where you're posting from, but from what I know, the entire western world as well as most of asia and every other cilized place found a solution to that problem a long time ago: "In dubio pro reo." is one way to put it, or "innocent until proven guilty" another.
Note the word "proven" in there. The legal system puts the demand of delivering proof on the accusing party, it does not require the accused to provide evidence of his innocence (even though he usually does, and it usually helps).
You may not like it, but it's one of the foundations of what we call the "rule of law".
In the US, the bigger question is whether or not the society can change to rails, and away from "every family member needs a car, every trip even if it's just around the corner, needs to be made by car".
For a country that was essentially created by the railway, and in your romantic history (i.e. the "western") the railway plays a huge role, it's astonishing how the railway has been abandoned.
I'm not sure which will be the bigger headache when my internet breaks: waiting in line at the new government internet office, or waiting on hold for cable tech support.
Yeah, because reading is for those smartasses that go to schoo-ools.
Dumb editor. The government isn't going to "run the Internet". More likely, they're going to provide financial incentives to ISPs so that those put broadband where the pure economics wouldn't make it happen. Say, some small remote village where the ISPs in the area figure that putting those people on DSL would cost more for building up the infrastructure than they'd see in revenue over the next years. So that village has no broadband, and won't get any unless the government sweetens the deal for the ISPs.
That kind of shit happens all the time, in all areas. Because, you know, not everyone's a redneck and loves living in a trailer park on illusions of self-sufficiency.
This is the government's job, to step in where the lauded market economics fail and need a little pushing in the right direction.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
and don't have any issues which require anything over the top or out of the ordinary
*nod*
Yes, that's the worst part. You've come to accept stuff as "normal" that by all means shouldn't be. I've run some large iron and worked a bit in HA. Maybe that's why I to this day think that a "blue screen" or other system crash should never ever happen, no matter what. Every blue screen you have ever seen in your life is a design defect. But most windos users don't see it that way, they shrug, reboot and continue working.
OS getting in the way? How difficult (or different on a Mac) is it to double click on an icon? You install a program once, and if UAC is still on, it taked all of about 15 seconds longer to install than putting the same software on a Mac. Maybe.
You should really try it. I'm serious. It's hard to explain because it's not one single big "wow" thing, but the total thing. I've not been a Mac fanboy for long, I used to be all about Linux just 3 years ago, and then decided to buy a MacBook Pro because OS X looked real cool and if it wasn't I could always install Linux on it anyways. Never did.
As far as productivity goes, this is a gaming thread. Take your productivity elsewhere. Oh, wait, I guess you can't do much else, since it taked 6 months or more (if ever) for the new, popular games to be ported to Mac.
*nod*
That's why I care about PC gaming, because if it goes then the small bit of Apple gaming goes with it. Though it's becoming better, but by far not as much as I had hoped.
Then again, it's not as if Linux gaming has gone anywhere, either.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
I guess that's why doze has more applications than the entire Apple / Linux / BSD offerings combined and multiplied many times.
Quantity does not quality make. In fact, a couple of the shareware stuff I run is better than a lot of commercial windos offerings. But please, stick with your overpriced crap if it makes you happy.
Slashdot Mirror
One, these guys are from Germany, which is one of these weird places that are not among the 50 states you all learn at school. You know, "foreign country", "some other place", "not part of the US". Don't know if any of those phrases make much sense to you. The end result is that they are well outside the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Two, or at least I hope so, the FBI is even more worried about whether or not something it does is legal.
Three, even if it were within jurisdiction, the FBI can not grant immunity. They are part of what used to be called the "executive branch", before all those branches were merged and mixed and seperation of power essentially eliminated. As such, they can not make it so you won't be sued, at most they could say "we won't sue you".
Getting desperate, Mr. Balmer?
So far, Win7 is largely underwhelming. It is certainly better than Vista, but what isn't? It will, however, be compared to Vista and XP, as well as the competition, especially OS X. After companies accepted the thought of not moving to a newer windos release (i.e. Vista), they will entertain the same thoughts with Win7. So this is not an "automatic update", it will have to bring some convincing reasons.
I've yet to see one.
Releasing a beta without any compelling reasons to prefer it over XP might well cause the kind of press that MS doesn't need at all - the kind that says "it's nice, but it does nothing old XP doesn't do".
Spare me the (often incompetent) enthusiasm of youth.
You shouldn't 'believe' in an OS or license like a God. Nobody should.
I'm probably older than you are, and my opinion is the exact opposite: You should believe in an OS or license or other things that can make a real difference to human life. There's a lot of reasons to be enthusiastic about things that have the potential to move humanity forward. On the other hand, believing in a god, any god, is just plain silly.
In the end computers are just tools.
In the end, emotions and beliefs are what make us human and different from machines.
As jedidiah said: It's an intentional misspelling. If you don't like it - how about you just ignore it? Would that be an option? Or is that not "adult" enough for you? ;-)
They asked the market what it wanted,
Yes, they asked the market about an educational product. That same approach has ruined education in general in most western countries, as children are "built to order", so to speak, instead of receiving a general education as the humanists set out to.
90% of software that people actually care about that is written for Windows.
I call bullshit on that made-up statistics.
The vast, vast majority of users are entirely happy with three programs:
For the "high-end", add an IRC client, a photo-management software and a media player.
All of which are available on practically any OS out there except Plan9. :-)
how the heck can you not teach them about the one OS that everyone uses?
Because a general education is worth more than special knowledge, no matter how large the market share of the later is. If you have an understanding of how "computers work", it's easy to adapt to windos, OS X, Linux or anything else. If you only know windos, switching to something else is a lot more difficult, because you are lacking the general concept behind the one specific implementation you know.
I'm certain that the submitter is correct: Allowing windos in killed the project.
Why? Because projects like this rely on the goodwill of volunteers. That comes from ideology, in a neutral sense, i.e. from people believing in something. Very few people believe in windos. It has millions of users, but few "believers". On the other hand, Linux has a very high percentage of believers among its users, it's easy to find volunteers who will contribute for free, or support the distribution channels, convince their local leaders, and so on.
There are things that money can not buy. You can build a religion on money (see Scientology), but not a crusade.
True, brand recognition and all that. However, that works fairly poorly on crowded web sites. When you go for brand recognition, you usually go large, in order to have exclusive eyeballs, at least for a moment.
And I'm not being pedantic, just leaving some thinking to the reader. Yes, of course watching is a precursor. But watching alone is rarely what they pay for. See the massive shift from "views" to "clicks" as the measure for ad space that has happened over the past years.
Their managers should know who the slackers are,
Except that routinely they don't. They know who appears to be a slacker. Which is an important, and often considerable, difference.
True. Except that usually the managers making those decisions are the last people who know who these two would be.
No, I don't think advertisers want me to *watch* their stuff. What they want me to do is *click* on it, and if possible, buy something.
Specifically, layoffs are being used as a way of culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
That'll be interesting, then. By and large, every performance measuring I've ever seen has been flawed, and unless it was for very simple jobs, greatly so.
Especially in a development environment, performance is hard to measure. There are anecdotes en masse about people who contributed very little measurable output to a project, but when they were fired the whole thing went down the drain.
Cutting "low performers" has, in my experience, always been a sign of a company in financial trouble. One that desperately needs to save money in order to please stockholders, and employees simply are one of those "cutting costs opportunities" that stockholders love.
Look, I've had the same story, but a widely different experience. For me the MBP I bought was largely a "wow" experience.
But yes, there are problems. It isn't perfect. Still, compared to XP, I'd say there are worlds between them. Among those I know who switched to Macs during the past 2-3 years, the general consensus is that it isn't perfect, but there are few flaws and many great things, while XP is just barely bearable.
There are many more reasons, in fact. The most important one is that cross-platform development usually results in higher-quality products.
The most obvious reason is that bugs tend to show up faster if you test on more than one platform. Developers hate that, it appears to make development more difficult, but the truth is that it simply exposes the lousy work that most developers deliver.
The other reason is that you can take advantage of - or start thinking about - the platform features. For example, the old Loki port of Civ3 had additional features that the windos version didn't have, simply because the platform required them. One example: On the windos platform, there was automatically one profile for all users, because the game saved everything in the game directory. On Linux, due to stricter permissions, that was simply not possible, so the game saved everything it had to save into the user directory and every user had his own profile. You can do that in windos, too, but a lot of windos developers never think about it.
So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention.
That's marketing drivel. What it really means is: "The stuff that the user came for is being pushed aside by more and more and more aggressive advertisement."
Geez, wonder if that just might be one of the reasons that more and more people block ads?
The whole advertisement industry needs to get one important fact into their heads, and that is that nobody wants their crap. Once they've realized that, and start working on a way to push it out in ways that people don't mind enough to block and filter, the value of ads might increase again.
However, for the past 20 years or so, the solution to every advertisement problem has been "more ads". These days, when you walk down McDonalds street, past the AOL stadium, on your way to the Powered by IBM subway, you pass more ads than you'd have seen in an hour or two when you were young. But I said "pass", not "notice".
I remember times when the local stadium was named for its team, not some random company, when there were things that were not being "presented by" some logo, and when you could watch TV for 30 minutes straight without one advertisement.
Fact of the matter is: Advertisement has changed. It's a lot about brand recognition today. The problem being that there are hundreds, if not thousands of brands that compete for your recognition, and they compete by trying to scream louder than the others.
On the web, we can filter them, and the louder they scream, the easier it is. That's why what is really a global advertisement business crisis shows up as a problem in web-based ads first.
Or the taxi drivers may have decided that there was a new market segment of lower priced riders that previously took the bus. The new riders could have increased taxi ridership volume so much that they could lower the ride price. If you go from five rides per day to 12 rides per day, you can cut your price in half and still come out ahead.
Only as long as your profit exceeds your costs, and the costs of driving are considerably above zero.
True, we do not know. However, we do have a lot of reasons to assume as I wrote. Some of those reasons are first-hand statements from taxi drivers. While those don't represent all drivers, or might have been "marketing lies" towards reporters, in the absence of evidence to the contrary we should assume in good faith that things are as they appear to be.
I suspect the taxi drivers would not have lowered their prices if they could not survive in doing so, or else they would have gone out of business.
People do all kinds of things that they can not afford to continue forever, motivated by non-market thoughts. You can not explain Ghandi in free market terms, nor Hitler. The market is a small part of the world, not the other way around.
So the market tried to solve the problem, but they were over-regulated!
Not in the least. Not by far. The market did nothing. The taxi drivers didn't change their fares for any economic reasons, but out of sympathy and support. According to free market theory they should have raised fares, because demand had increased.
Be careful what you say at airports and on planes. Never get irate or argue at airports and on planes.
Why?
And why only there? Shouldn't you be careful everywhere? You could frighten someone on the bus just the same. So better be careful what you say. In fact, better not say anything at all. Accept whatever happens, whatever anyone does. Don't speak up. Don't joke. Don't critizise.
Worked great for Germany in the 1930s.
Yepp, XP doesn't crash that often anymore, and seldom to a blue screen. What it does have occasionally are spontaneous reboots.
It does get in the way all the time, however. Especially if you run fullscreen apps or games. *Boom* suddenly you're on the desktop, because it absolutely must tell you right now that new updates are available. Yeah, thanks. It also sometimes decides that it has to reboot in 3 minutes and starts a countdown - which you'll never see before the reboot if you're running something fullscreen.
That's just the tip. Try counting the mouse movements and clicks you need for some simple reconfigurations. I did that for fun a few times. It's horrible. XP regularily takes 3 times as many actions as OS X does. Stuff that you don't notice when you're familiar with the crap, but it's there and if you count them, you suddenly notice.
61 people in the United States
Wow! 61 people. Of 306 million. That's an incredible 0.00002% - what a horrible, widespread, world-wide problem. Certainly more important than anything else. We definitely absolutely certainly must limit the rights of the other 305,999,939 people!
In the same area (the USA), in 2007 there were 16,929 murders and 90,427 rapes.
There are no comparable discussions on limiting everyone's rights in order to reduce the murder or rape rates, are there? I wonder why...
Okay, Solomon, how do we settle this one?
No idea where you're posting from, but from what I know, the entire western world as well as most of asia and every other cilized place found a solution to that problem a long time ago: "In dubio pro reo." is one way to put it, or "innocent until proven guilty" another.
Note the word "proven" in there. The legal system puts the demand of delivering proof on the accusing party, it does not require the accused to provide evidence of his innocence (even though he usually does, and it usually helps).
You may not like it, but it's one of the foundations of what we call the "rule of law".
What a bundle of bollocks. I've read better in /. comments.
My vote? None of these. They're all in the "dumb and dumber" category.
In the US, the bigger question is whether or not the society can change to rails, and away from "every family member needs a car, every trip even if it's just around the corner, needs to be made by car".
For a country that was essentially created by the railway, and in your romantic history (i.e. the "western") the railway plays a huge role, it's astonishing how the railway has been abandoned.
I'm not sure which will be the bigger headache when my internet breaks: waiting in line at the new government internet office, or waiting on hold for cable tech support.
Yeah, because reading is for those smartasses that go to schoo-ools.
Dumb editor. The government isn't going to "run the Internet". More likely, they're going to provide financial incentives to ISPs so that those put broadband where the pure economics wouldn't make it happen. Say, some small remote village where the ISPs in the area figure that putting those people on DSL would cost more for building up the infrastructure than they'd see in revenue over the next years. So that village has no broadband, and won't get any unless the government sweetens the deal for the ISPs.
That kind of shit happens all the time, in all areas. Because, you know, not everyone's a redneck and loves living in a trailer park on illusions of self-sufficiency.
This is the government's job, to step in where the lauded market economics fail and need a little pushing in the right direction.
and don't have any issues which require anything over the top or out of the ordinary
*nod*
Yes, that's the worst part. You've come to accept stuff as "normal" that by all means shouldn't be. I've run some large iron and worked a bit in HA. Maybe that's why I to this day think that a "blue screen" or other system crash should never ever happen, no matter what. Every blue screen you have ever seen in your life is a design defect. But most windos users don't see it that way, they shrug, reboot and continue working.
OS getting in the way? How difficult (or different on a Mac) is it to double click on an icon? You install a program once, and if UAC is still on, it taked all of about 15 seconds longer to install than putting the same software on a Mac. Maybe.
You should really try it. I'm serious. It's hard to explain because it's not one single big "wow" thing, but the total thing. I've not been a Mac fanboy for long, I used to be all about Linux just 3 years ago, and then decided to buy a MacBook Pro because OS X looked real cool and if it wasn't I could always install Linux on it anyways. Never did.
As far as productivity goes, this is a gaming thread. Take your productivity elsewhere. Oh, wait, I guess you can't do much else, since it taked 6 months or more (if ever) for the new, popular games to be ported to Mac.
*nod*
That's why I care about PC gaming, because if it goes then the small bit of Apple gaming goes with it. Though it's becoming better, but by far not as much as I had hoped.
Then again, it's not as if Linux gaming has gone anywhere, either.
I guess that's why doze has more applications than the entire Apple / Linux / BSD offerings combined and multiplied many times.
Quantity does not quality make. In fact, a couple of the shareware stuff I run is better than a lot of commercial windos offerings. But please, stick with your overpriced crap if it makes you happy.