I have started telling people that if you want tech support from me, you will have to trust me like a guru. If you don't trust my tech support advice, feel free to shop around until you find somebody whose advice you like!
If this person isn't a paying client, but rather a friend who wants advice, the above is the "law."
Do you really expect Microsoft to be prosecuted under the DMCA for basically writing buggy code? That's crazy talk man.
Operating systems providers are under no particular obligation to provide perfect, never fail DRM. They simply do so because it is good for business. The DMCA doesn't enter in to the equation in the slightest bit.
"the music labels will successfully sue MS for a few billions before you can say shazam"
I seriously doubt it. Microsoft may be playing nice with them, but I'm sure MS has indemnified themselves if there is any legal partnership or contract.
One big difference is that in Denmark (and most of the civilized world) they don't allow Thimerosal as a preservative. Thimerosal contains mercury, which has been linked with autism.
It's not that people are simply anti-vaccine, they are anti-mercury!
Rural viewers can always mount a directional antenna aimed at the nearest large market of their choice. I agree, the whole thing stinks, but it's not the end of the world.
I work in a shop that does some.NET development, although that's not my job. I'm more of a system administrator. But while there isn't absolutely undeniable evidence that Mono isn't a poison pill, there isn't evidence that it isn't either.
Until such evidence surfaces, I will remain skeptical.
How was your last 20 years in a cave on Mars, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears?
Microsoft has made it quite clear that they will do what it thinks it must to kill any open source competitors. They have shown, over and over and OVER again the willingness to use the dirtiest tricks it can muster to attack actual or even perceived competition.
If somebody punched me in the face every day for a year, and then suddenly wants to be my friend, should I invite them in with open arms, or treat them with the suspicion that their past behavior has warranted?
Baseless paranoia indeed. Suspicion of Microsoft is neither baseless nor could it be considered even slightly paranoid. Healthy skepticism is a better term.
Actually, with the family pack upgrade option, upgrading is more like $30 per major release. It may be only one "point" but it's a major release.
Point releases are named 10.5.3 or such.
"In roughly the same period of time you could have gone from XP to, well Vista. Even if you paid retail for it, it would have only cost about $240."
Sure, $240 for two major releases, one of which I wouldn't willingly touch with a 10 foot pole. And then I get the service packs "for free" which fix what has constantly proven to be a prematurely released OS!
As far as speed of OS X, it has indeed gotten faster with each release on the same hardware. It will get much faster as Apple optimizes their OS for OpenCL. In the very near future you will be able to speed up almost everything by adding another GPU.
And I'll upgrade all the computers in the house for $30 / pop. Where's Microsoft's Family Pack?
Everything you need for your app should be contained within the "icon" the user sees anyway. You shouldn't be blasting shit all over the hard drive in the first place!
DAB can be OK if they use the higher bitrates and excellent encoding pipelines. But the stations like to slice up their bandwidth and broadcast a ton of crappy quality streams, much like a certain large "HD" capable provider does. I'm looking your way, Comcast!
We have a similarly shitty thing here, called "HD Radio" which has the side effect of screwing with the analog signals. One company has a lock on the whole technology - you use their chip, or none at all. Some standard, no?
You're wrong. The "operating system" is what a user needs to use the kernel. Utilities and an interface (or shell) combined with a kernal is an operating system. Otherwise you ain't operating the system, you're booting a kernel.
"I have those. A G4 Powerbook. Chokes on Youtube to the point its not usable. 'nuff said. I have another 450MHz G4 Tower, and it runs "ok" after spending a few putting in a DVDRW, more RAM, and a new video card."
I also have a Powerbook G4, which I bought in early 2002. I used it until last summer as my main computer mainly as an exercise in simplicity. I got a Mac Pro to supplement it - not to replace it. The G4 runs Youtube just fine. I can edit video just fine on it. Sure, it is a little slow for some tasks compared to the Intel macs, but it does most things just fine, including running Photoshop CS3!
If your G4 Powerbook was choking on mere Youtube videos, I suspect another problem like lack of ram.
At my workplace we are mostly a Windows shop and we simply will not use Vista let alone Windows 7 until Microsoft stops selling us XP licenses. That's it. Why not? Firstly, we concentrate on embedded systems, so can not afford any additional bloat over what XP already has. Second, Vista and Windows 7 give us nothing over XP which is important to our users. And finally, almost everybody out there knows how to use XP. In Vista everything has moved if not really changed. Windows 7 will exacerbate this problem, causing extra headaches for the field repair people.
If you are a typical home or business user where you treat a PC as a toaster - use it till you get a nicer, newer one or until it is broken and then throw it out - you WILL use Windows 7 eventually. How do you think Vista has gotten any market penetration at all? It's simply what comes on most new PCs.
If you are like us, making a custom solution for certain applications, then what's the point? I suppose the day will come where Windows stops selling licenses for XP, and Vista, forcing us to go with Windows 7 or whatever of its bastard children MS is pushing at that point. By then we're probably going to be using a different platform simply to avoid headaches.
Which ones? Even if there weren't a lot of new, user visible features added between some of the releases, there has been a constant supply of new APIs, bug fixes, and many many speedups added with each release of OS X. with 10.3 they added Altivec support to as much of the OS as they could, and all of a sudden the system ran faster than the previous rev. In fact, I have used all the OS X versions as my main desktop OS since 10.0, and it has gotten faster and more stable with each version. Who can claim that their same computer got faster with each new version of Windows they have installed on it?
The core of the OS hasn't changed much since the 1980s though.
Do you complain that Linux still has grep and an/etc directory and so forth? If something is good, it should stay.
"I've had various Desktop Linux distro's (and OS X) crash on me far more often than XP sp2+ and Vista has over the past 4-5 years."
For some reason I don't believe you. That reason? I administer and work with all those platforms and more. Windows crashes more than all other OS's put together, and for entirely mundane reasons. To make OS X fail you have to install some poorly designed extensions, most of the time. Making Windows fail is so, SO much easier.
Sure, XP SP2 or SP3 is better than XP SP1 or Vista, but it isn't as stable as Windows 2000 was. And it certainly isn't as stable as a Mac. We have a Windows Storage Server 2003, an expensive machine from Dell, and if you could see the weird shit it does you'd apologize for making suck an ignorant, Microass kissing statement.
I have to reboot my Windows workstation at work biweekly to monthly, because it just gets weird, confused, and messed up. I don't have to ever reboot my Mac except when a system update is installed.
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Because it's exponentially more difficult to infect non-Windows computers?
After all, Macs are what, 5% of the computing world at this point? And yet, not 0.005% of the virus infections are on Macs.
The old saw of Macs or Linux or whatever not being worth targeting doesn't sing.
You know what they say, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which fills up first!
I have started telling people that if you want tech support from me, you will have to trust me like a guru. If you don't trust my tech support advice, feel free to shop around until you find somebody whose advice you like!
If this person isn't a paying client, but rather a friend who wants advice, the above is the "law."
"The street racing crowd is not going to be showing off too many Rabbits or Jettas."
How was Mars these last 10-15 years? It is evident you just got back to planet Earth.
DMCA?
Do you really expect Microsoft to be prosecuted under the DMCA for basically writing buggy code? That's crazy talk man.
Operating systems providers are under no particular obligation to provide perfect, never fail DRM. They simply do so because it is good for business. The DMCA doesn't enter in to the equation in the slightest bit.
"the music labels will successfully sue MS for a few billions before you can say shazam"
I seriously doubt it. Microsoft may be playing nice with them, but I'm sure MS has indemnified themselves if there is any legal partnership or contract.
I use a 5 button mouse on my Mac without issue. The mouse happens to be made by Microsoft - one of the only quality products they have ever created.
Agreed. Anybody with half a brain stopped watching television years ago.
I bought a 3 pack of Underberg and mixed them in a crystal goblet. No, really.
Thimerosal may not have been found to bioaccumulate, according to one study.
But note this isn't the same as thimerosal being proven not to bioaccumulate, or to have other interactions in the body.
Nooo, better stay completely away from mercury.
One big difference is that in Denmark (and most of the civilized world) they don't allow Thimerosal as a preservative. Thimerosal contains mercury, which has been linked with autism.
It's not that people are simply anti-vaccine, they are anti-mercury!
Are you suggesting that MS asserts no intellectual property rights over .NET, and that they won't in the future?
I remain wary.
Right. The poor suffer these taxes while the rich don't really even notice.
Or does your enlightened country's energy tax scale with income?
Rural viewers can always mount a directional antenna aimed at the nearest large market of their choice. I agree, the whole thing stinks, but it's not the end of the world.
I work in a shop that does some .NET development, although that's not my job. I'm more of a system administrator. But while there isn't absolutely undeniable evidence that Mono isn't a poison pill, there isn't evidence that it isn't either.
Until such evidence surfaces, I will remain skeptical.
How was your last 20 years in a cave on Mars, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears?
Microsoft has made it quite clear that they will do what it thinks it must to kill any open source competitors. They have shown, over and over and OVER again the willingness to use the dirtiest tricks it can muster to attack actual or even perceived competition.
If somebody punched me in the face every day for a year, and then suddenly wants to be my friend, should I invite them in with open arms, or treat them with the suspicion that their past behavior has warranted?
Baseless paranoia indeed. Suspicion of Microsoft is neither baseless nor could it be considered even slightly paranoid. Healthy skepticism is a better term.
If you couldn't get off your butt and solve the problem yet, I doubt the incumbent has much to worry about.
Actually, with the family pack upgrade option, upgrading is more like $30 per major release. It may be only one "point" but it's a major release.
Point releases are named 10.5.3 or such.
"In roughly the same period of time you could have gone from XP to, well Vista. Even if you paid retail for it, it would have only cost about $240."
Sure, $240 for two major releases, one of which I wouldn't willingly touch with a 10 foot pole. And then I get the service packs "for free" which fix what has constantly proven to be a prematurely released OS!
As far as speed of OS X, it has indeed gotten faster with each release on the same hardware. It will get much faster as Apple optimizes their OS for OpenCL. In the very near future you will be able to speed up almost everything by adding another GPU.
And I'll upgrade all the computers in the house for $30 / pop. Where's Microsoft's Family Pack?
Everything you need for your app should be contained within the "icon" the user sees anyway. You shouldn't be blasting shit all over the hard drive in the first place!
DAB can be OK if they use the higher bitrates and excellent encoding pipelines. But the stations like to slice up their bandwidth and broadcast a ton of crappy quality streams, much like a certain large "HD" capable provider does. I'm looking your way, Comcast!
We have a similarly shitty thing here, called "HD Radio" which has the side effect of screwing with the analog signals. One company has a lock on the whole technology - you use their chip, or none at all. Some standard, no?
You're wrong. The "operating system" is what a user needs to use the kernel. Utilities and an interface (or shell) combined with a kernal is an operating system. Otherwise you ain't operating the system, you're booting a kernel.
"I have those. A G4 Powerbook. Chokes on Youtube to the point its not usable. 'nuff said. I have another 450MHz G4 Tower, and it runs "ok" after spending a few putting in a DVDRW, more RAM, and a new video card."
I also have a Powerbook G4, which I bought in early 2002. I used it until last summer as my main computer mainly as an exercise in simplicity. I got a Mac Pro to supplement it - not to replace it. The G4 runs Youtube just fine. I can edit video just fine on it. Sure, it is a little slow for some tasks compared to the Intel macs, but it does most things just fine, including running Photoshop CS3!
If your G4 Powerbook was choking on mere Youtube videos, I suspect another problem like lack of ram.
At my workplace we are mostly a Windows shop and we simply will not use Vista let alone Windows 7 until Microsoft stops selling us XP licenses. That's it. Why not? Firstly, we concentrate on embedded systems, so can not afford any additional bloat over what XP already has. Second, Vista and Windows 7 give us nothing over XP which is important to our users. And finally, almost everybody out there knows how to use XP. In Vista everything has moved if not really changed. Windows 7 will exacerbate this problem, causing extra headaches for the field repair people.
If you are a typical home or business user where you treat a PC as a toaster - use it till you get a nicer, newer one or until it is broken and then throw it out - you WILL use Windows 7 eventually. How do you think Vista has gotten any market penetration at all? It's simply what comes on most new PCs.
If you are like us, making a custom solution for certain applications, then what's the point? I suppose the day will come where Windows stops selling licenses for XP, and Vista, forcing us to go with Windows 7 or whatever of its bastard children MS is pushing at that point. By then we're probably going to be using a different platform simply to avoid headaches.
Which ones? Even if there weren't a lot of new, user visible features added between some of the releases, there has been a constant supply of new APIs, bug fixes, and many many speedups added with each release of OS X. with 10.3 they added Altivec support to as much of the OS as they could, and all of a sudden the system ran faster than the previous rev. In fact, I have used all the OS X versions as my main desktop OS since 10.0, and it has gotten faster and more stable with each version. Who can claim that their same computer got faster with each new version of Windows they have installed on it?
The core of the OS hasn't changed much since the 1980s though.
Do you complain that Linux still has grep and an /etc directory and so forth? If something is good, it should stay.
"I've had various Desktop Linux distro's (and OS X) crash on me far more often than XP sp2+ and Vista has over the past 4-5 years."
For some reason I don't believe you. That reason? I administer and work with all those platforms and more. Windows crashes more than all other OS's put together, and for entirely mundane reasons. To make OS X fail you have to install some poorly designed extensions, most of the time. Making Windows fail is so, SO much easier.
Sure, XP SP2 or SP3 is better than XP SP1 or Vista, but it isn't as stable as Windows 2000 was. And it certainly isn't as stable as a Mac. We have a Windows Storage Server 2003, an expensive machine from Dell, and if you could see the weird shit it does you'd apologize for making suck an ignorant, Microass kissing statement.
I have to reboot my Windows workstation at work biweekly to monthly, because it just gets weird, confused, and messed up. I don't have to ever reboot my Mac except when a system update is installed.