I hear you, but Joe Blow, Business Owner, isn't interested in ensuring an open market for office suite applications. He wants to get his stuff done and not have to screw around with translating it a year from now. He wants to go to Office Max or Staples or something, get a box, bring it back home or to the office, install it, and be done. And while I know he could as easily go to the web and grab OpenOffice, HE doesn't know that. So next time I do business with Joe Blow, he's going to want his docs in.docx or whatever.
I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's certainly how things end up panning out.
... that it's worth STICKING with Office. Office 2007 is by far the easiest to use so far (in my opinion) of the Microsoft Office family, and the new interface makes old Office and OpenOffice feel downright antique.
There are licensing issues and business practices and so forth that everyone around here gets all in a lather about, but from a purely user-experience standpoint I think it's pretty great.
Either way, things are at a crossroads. The Open Document Format (ODF) is what OpenOffice uses, and Office 2007 uses Microsoft's own more proprietary version of this, OpenXML. Instead of things getting closer together, it's getting harder and harder (really, due to the minor differences more than the major ones) to transfer documents back and forth between OOo and Office. And since most interaction with the outside world requires Microsoft-specific file formats, I think you may as well stick with Office. Purely from a practicality standpoint -- not ethics, not right vs. wrong, just what's going to cost you the least number of hours over the long haul. I'm sure converters will start to come out, but for pure ease of use and reliable translation, Word to Word is always going to work better than OpenOffice to Word.
I run both and like them both for various things -- still, I think I'll probably be using Office 2007 more than anything else as time goes on. I don't have much call for a word processor or spreadsheet app, but what little I do with these is easier in Office. Just is.
I disagree -- I saw Star Wars when I was six, and was roped in like all of us were. Then I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was ten and loved that even more. The second Raiders movie stunk, and I, to this day, think Last Crusade was as good in many ways as the first. I just watched it again the other day, as a matter of fact. And it came out when I was enough of an adult to be jaded (and still annoyed by the Temple of Doom).
So whether Lucas in particular can do anything with Star Wars or not may be the pertinent question, but I do think you can have people who saw the first in a series as a child and continue to enjoy it through adulthood.
I think another point in all of this might be that in sci-fi, you can really knock yourself out with effects and funny characters, often to the detriment of the story, and Lucas just doesn't have the restraint to avoid all of that. It shows in the Raiders movies, too -- each movie has several really horrendous one-liners that their respective films could do better without, but it's just not the kind of atmosphere that lends itself to those lines being spoken by a furry dwarf or a hammerhead humanoid. So a character belches out a groaner, everyone rolls their eyes, and the story moves on. There's not really any room for the effects to create entire characters for the sake of their novelty.
At risk of being modded down (is there a sarcastic jerk mod?), I can't help but notice the inconsistency in the spellings of "inconsistent" in the past few posts...
He explains the Aero issue (he turned off those features so it would more closely mimic the wider user base), and he also goes into quite a few paragraphs of detail about the difference between authentication and approval.
I'll agree, though, that he seems from the outset to show some bias. I've noticed many of these things in Vista (I'm running RC1 right now, waiting for the release), but I also happen to much prefer it to XP. They're getting better at this. And frankly, I have a Mac that I hardly ever use because I find the UI so strange sometimes. It's just me, I'm sure, as most other people much prefer it. But I find, for example, that the Windows MUST CLICK OK FOR EVERY ACT mentality suits me better.
As is mentioned elsewhere in responses, the delay applies to the new product and its original scheduled release, not the gap between the two products. It's not "delayed" until after the scheduled release date.
How do they figure five years? 2003 to 2007, that's four years at best, not "over five years." If you include all of 2003 AND 2007, that gets you right up to five years (but that's not how it worked anyway).
As a person with a moderate stutter (which gets worse while I'm driving, coincidentally), I'm getting pretty sick of everything going to speech recognition. According to the article, this system will be controlled this way as well. It's getting so I can do less and less in my environment unless I can speak fluently. Now I'm going to have to speak fluently to listen to the flippin' radio? Blech. And really, are we going to trust MS with speech recognition after this?
Besides, what's wrong with cars now? They go, the radios have knobs, and we all know how to run them. If we want to listen to music that doesn't exist on the radio, we have devices for that, too. And with many new cars now being released with jacks for mp3 players, seems to me the problems are pretty much solved. The way it works now, you can pick and choose what devices you want, install or order them, and you don't have to fight through a whole computer UI (and let's be honest, it probably won't be as intuitive as it could be) to get to the stuff you want.
And really, I hardly think the biggest problem that Ford currently has is the multimedia experience for its drivers. How about cars that run reliably first, and THEN turn your focus to how to bugger up my radio.
Seems to me that it may also be that CEOs and others who make decisions haven't had the chance to experience it on a new home computer yet. I remember XP didn't take off for a while, but then was adopted by businesses more and more as execs started having it at home and liking the pretty colors and the bells and whistles. I suspect these decisions aren't based as much on stability as we'd all like to think -- I think a lot of adoption of Vista will happen when powerful people (not necessarily technical people) start wanting some of Vista's fun or pretty stuff at the office. And they just haven't had a chance to find out about it yet.
Okay, I don't want to get into too much of a 2nd Amendment fight here, but from TFUSC:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
The focus is clearly on a well-regulated militia for security purposes, not on the right to shoot things. Guns are necessary to a well-regulated militia, and therefore must be allowed. However, ain't nowhere in the Constitution says you are allowed to have guns for anything OTHER than a well-regulated militia. The idea was to be able to defend yourself from this or other tyrannical governments. Not bunnies, deer, or other warring woodland creatures.
'Course, it also lists Native Americans as 3/5 of a person, and ensures that you don't have to quarter soldiers in your home. So times have changed, and perhaps our interpretation needs to widen in some spots and narrow in others. But 2nd Amendment rights get pulled out every time someone wants to shoot something, and all opinions and beliefs aside, it's simply not semantically contained in the Amendment. Add to that the inability to operate a gun safely (because, say, you're blind), and now they're just talking crazy.
I don't begrudge hunters their hunting -- I used to feel more strongly about it, but I can't really work up a good argument against some recreational hunting anymore. So I'm not fighting it on that level. It's just a very shaky argument to say that the 2nd Amendment defends the right to hunt with an assault rifle.
I do, however, begrudge blind hunters their hunting. It's just not safe. And I simply think that the person pulling the trigger of a gun should be able to see what it's aimed at. I can't even imagine being comfortable pulling the trigger if I'm not able to see what I'm shooting at, but then I'm kind of a wuss that way.
(And you're right -- the ADA goes a little nuts in spots. But it was necessary to do something, and however ham-handed it is, it does open a lot of doors for a lot of people, so to speak.)
"A blind person can shoot a rifle by mounting an offset pistol scope on the side of the rifle instead of on top," said Terry Erwin, the Austin-based Hunter Education Coordinator with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
"This allows their companion behind them to peer over their shoulder and help them sight it, but the blind person can pull the trigger," he told Reuters.
Does this seem like extraordinary lengths to go to to make sure every American has the right to shoot stuff? I'm not even sure that just pulling the trigger would be a satisfying alternative to sighted hunting. I'm not a hunter, so I could be wrong. But it seems like a lot of work just so you can hear a loud noise and increase your chances of a bad accident.
But more to the point, an example. I have a moderate (sometimes severe) stutter that worsens on the telephone and under stress. I have never thought that I had a God-given right to be a 911 operator. It's not about my rights -- it's about the potential pitfalls of my answering very high-intensity, life-changing phone calls. Why is it someone's right to shoot a gun at (hopefully) an animal if they don't have the physical requirements to do it safely? I'm all for the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and every rational opportunity for everyone, and I do feel compassion for those who used to enjoy hunting but have now lost their sight. But many people have certain limitations which, in more high-performance cases like 911 call center operators or hunters, may well be too much of an obstacle to merit the profound risk it poses to others.
I think it was Gallagher who was talking about this years ago, and he said, "when you're walking through the forest, how do you make a sound that's NOT like a rabbit?"
My problem with these laws is that they seem to add conditions to the sentence after the fact. (And this one's just dumb, but that seems to be well-covered in the other posts already.) But it seems that if you're a sex offender, you can have new conditions placed on your sentence years after you've done your time and gotten out. That's not how the legal system is supposed to work.
You didn't read MFP (my fine post), did you? The site was Slashdotted already.
Moreover, I suspect, as do many others here, that it's specific to a certain hardware configuration. I've had identical installations of various flavors of Windows AND Linux across different machines, and some things work great on one machine and not the other (sleep being chief among them).
So while I'm most appreciative of your TFA crack, but I still don't know that one can say Vista RTM is fundamentally broken based on one guy's blog post. I can now get to the post, and I've now read it. And I stand by my post from before.
Even if it is about 6 of 8 test machines he's running, we don't know enough. Is he running something else on all of them that could cause this problem? What kind of boxes are they? Are they all one model with one hardware config? Are they different configs but one type of video card? Are they all using one brand of mouse (Logitech hardware/software has a history of causing funny problems like this)? These are just the first few of a hundred questions that would actually get down to the cause of the problem, and none of them are covered in the blog post. They do indicate a few things in the footnotes that begin to cover some of this, but not enough to call it conclusive data.
I'm not trying to be a Microsoft apologist, but this is just the kind of FUD (or more accurately, ID -- insufficient data) that gets bandied about as fact all the time. This is the first I've heard of it, and I tend to do quite a bit of reading about Vista these days. So one shop is having troubles, and no one else has complained of this. Perhaps the shop is doing something unique that causes this problem? No, it must be that Vista is fundamentally flawed.
Maybe it is. But this is a ridiculously small amount of data to go saying that Vista is broken. This isn't error tracking, this is bitching. And that's fine -- I think that's what's great about blogs. But don't defend it as fact until you know more.
... the poster's blog is hosted on a Vista box, as it seems to have fallen asleep. Or been Slashdotted.
Anyhow, I've been running Vista RC1 since it was released (and the beta before that) and never had a problem with the sleep function. Other problems, yes, but none with sleep and none so bad I'd complain about them (mostly my preferences vs. Microsoft's, predictable stuff like that).
In fact, I was just telling my wife the other day (she just melts when I talk sweet to her like this) that the sleep/hibernate function in Vista is so much more stable than it used to be that I haven't actually had my laptop all the way off in a few weeks -- I just open and close it as needed, and it wakes right back up and grabs whatever network it sees. I never had this work so well with XP or W2K.
I also saw no reason to call the previous poster's comments flamebait. MS has problems in the open-vs-proprietary arena, we all know that. True open source is preferred around here, we all know that. But geez, let's try to be civil HERE anyway. Some salient points were made, and this poor schnuck got modded down for it. Do you not see where this is going? Eventually, anyone who speaks against the general tone of Slashdot, no matter how truthfully, correctly, or accurately, will be modded down and left invisible (thanks to the moderation-based threshold system). And let's just say, for sake of argument, MS comes up with the be-all end-all solution to some big document handling problem -- no one here will ever hear about it. That's neither news for nerds nor stuff that matters.
No editorial intent here, but I can confirm that that's what happens. When I go to yahoo.com with Firefox 2.0 in Vista and search, I get the ad and link. When I use IE7, I don't.
I think foundations go stale after a while, and perhaps that's why they're doing this. If you allow a foundation to exist perpetually, it has to spend a certain about of effort worrying about how to best invest its money to keep going. Why not set an end date (or, to use one of the more annoying recently made-up terms, allow it to "sunset") and just let it burn bright and hot for a prescribed period of time? Say what you will about Microsoft, but Bill Gates has some truly fantastic ideas about money. The quote about his kids (something along the lines of, "I will leave them enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing"), some of the things he's doing with the foundation itself (including this now), and so on, lead me to believe that he's really giving this a lot of thought himself (instead of attaching his name for tax purposes to a foundation that is then run by professional Foundation People).
Could also be that he feels like his legacy should last only a prescribed period of time -- why hold future generations to your ideals? It could be that he trusts future generations to figure out money and what's important for themselves. Or not -- just an errant thought.
I have long been a defender of Bill Gates on his philanthropy -- most of my friends (the Linux geeks in particular, but everyone) seem to think he's not giving enough of his fortune. But if you give it all now, it won't be there later to give more. Could be that ten years from now, the most pressing need in the world will be to rebuild the educational system in the Middle East (after the U.S. bombs the bananas out of the Muslim nations). Or maybe AIDS research will need just a billion dollars more. Or Parkinson's. Or something as bad as AIDS that we don't know about yet. Or whatever. But if he had gone ahead and spent all of it on Africa, he couldn't be effective later.
This, when coupled with the 50-year idea, may well create a nice middle-ground response where they can give generously now but will still have enough scratch to give to something they can't anticipate right now. And if you can budget for how long your finite foundation will last, maybe you can give more every year until it burns out instead of constantly worrying about reinvesting. Wouldn't it be great if a foundation had more people employed to spend money on need than to raise it?
The man's foundation is giving 1.75 BILLION dollars a year (an amount larger than the GDP of a lot of countries, if my almanac is accurate). They've committed to double that in the next three years. I see no reason to nitpick about how he does it. AIDS treatment, education, community development, and a lot of it in Africa, where more people are forgotten every day than are born around the rest of the world. If someone wants to get more aggressive and pony up more money for African nations than Bill Gates, go for it -- none of the other few people who can seem to be doing it, though.*
And on that note, good for Warren Buffett -- attaching his fortune to another of equal size increases its power exponentially.
* What's Wal-Mart giving? I don't know -- I'm actually asking. But I bet it's less than $3.5 billion.
on a side note about ketchup... they now have those membrane squirter things in the lids, making it impossible to apply less than five tablespoons of ketchup to whatever you're trying to condimentalize. Bad enough with ketchup, but a total dealbreaker with mustard.
Never mind -- I found the link elsewhere in this discussion. And sorry for the certified humor-free interpretation -- I didn't see the smiley the first time around...
I'm having the same problem with my 650, and I installed the latest greatest Java yesterday when I installed Opera. So I don't think it's old Java implementations (though I'm sure that doesn't help). It seems to me that it's just not ready for primetime.
Anyone know where I can get OperaMini 2 so I can try that? I'm not impressed with Blazer, and I've given up on OperaMini 3 (there are only so many reboots I can go through before I just get p.o.'d).
... developers are sometimes handcuffed by previous expectations. I'm not suggesting that Vista should have everything that every previous version of Windows has had, but users are very, very literal-minded when it comes to this kind of thing. You give users two options where they used to have nine (even if they're the best and most valid two options), and they'll get angry and confused. "I don't want it to sleep -- I want to hibernate!"
Again, I don't condone ridiculous backward-compatibility, but I also don't envy the UI designers for Vista. MS has created a monster, in that they have made themselves the ubiquitous consumer OS. This means that they now have to cater to power users and business apps on down to grandma and her e-mail, and need to do it all within one (somewhat) cohesive UI. And while the Vista UI isn't perfect, I am frankly impressed with how much they've done to improve the UI without changing things so much that XP users would be lost. It's too bloaty for a from-the-ground-up design, but it's not from-the-ground-up -- it has to build elegantly on several previous, less-conscientious UI's. And I think it does that. And Office 2007's new UI is a great improvement, in my opinion, but that's another topic for another day.
Moreover, Vista's faster on my machine than XP was -- I thought Apple was the only company that came out with faster OS's with each release. I'm sure SP1 will bog it down, but for now it's pretty zippy for everything it adds.
So mod me down for being an MS apologist, but I think they're doing all right for once. And as for flaws, there are other, more urgent things to gripe about than maintaining backward-compatibility as it pertains to turning off the computer. You only see your plethora of options when you click a button specifically to see them -- if you had to wade through these options to get to other things, it would be a bigger deal. But really, you don't.
Okay, O'Reilly is a boob. I think that is pretty much well-established. And if he told me the sky was blue, I would tell him he's full of s--t. Because he has been every other time I've ever heard him say anything.
But I did notice last time I was in a coffeeshop to meet a client that every other table was filled (30+), and every other table either had a person on a cell phone or a laptop or listening to an iPod. This coffeehouse has been in my neighborhood for twenty years, and used to be where people went to talk to each other. I was struck by how deathly quiet it was for the number of people there -- there was no interaction happening. Of course, it's a coffeehouse that now offers free wifi, so you can argue that they kind of encourage it, too. I would imagine I drink more coffee if I'm cranking away at work than I do if I'm gabbing with friends (free wifi brought with it the end of free refills), so I'm sure they're happy to make it as easy as possible to work in their establishment.
Don't know if that's good or bad, but I do think technology really has allowed us to build social walls around ourselves. And I think a lot of people tend to shy away from people by default (even if you like people, it's typically easier to be alone than to interact), so having a tool that allows us to visibly be inaccessible to others is quite comforting.
But I must be wrong if O'Reilly agrees with me. So I apologize.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear you, but Joe Blow, Business Owner, isn't interested in ensuring an open market for office suite applications. He wants to get his stuff done and not have to screw around with translating it a year from now. He wants to go to Office Max or Staples or something, get a box, bring it back home or to the office, install it, and be done. And while I know he could as easily go to the web and grab OpenOffice, HE doesn't know that. So next time I do business with Joe Blow, he's going to want his docs in .docx or whatever.
I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's certainly how things end up panning out.
... that it's worth STICKING with Office. Office 2007 is by far the easiest to use so far (in my opinion) of the Microsoft Office family, and the new interface makes old Office and OpenOffice feel downright antique.
There are licensing issues and business practices and so forth that everyone around here gets all in a lather about, but from a purely user-experience standpoint I think it's pretty great.
Either way, things are at a crossroads. The Open Document Format (ODF) is what OpenOffice uses, and Office 2007 uses Microsoft's own more proprietary version of this, OpenXML. Instead of things getting closer together, it's getting harder and harder (really, due to the minor differences more than the major ones) to transfer documents back and forth between OOo and Office. And since most interaction with the outside world requires Microsoft-specific file formats, I think you may as well stick with Office. Purely from a practicality standpoint -- not ethics, not right vs. wrong, just what's going to cost you the least number of hours over the long haul. I'm sure converters will start to come out, but for pure ease of use and reliable translation, Word to Word is always going to work better than OpenOffice to Word.
I run both and like them both for various things -- still, I think I'll probably be using Office 2007 more than anything else as time goes on. I don't have much call for a word processor or spreadsheet app, but what little I do with these is easier in Office. Just is.
I disagree -- I saw Star Wars when I was six, and was roped in like all of us were. Then I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was ten and loved that even more. The second Raiders movie stunk, and I, to this day, think Last Crusade was as good in many ways as the first. I just watched it again the other day, as a matter of fact. And it came out when I was enough of an adult to be jaded (and still annoyed by the Temple of Doom).
So whether Lucas in particular can do anything with Star Wars or not may be the pertinent question, but I do think you can have people who saw the first in a series as a child and continue to enjoy it through adulthood.
I think another point in all of this might be that in sci-fi, you can really knock yourself out with effects and funny characters, often to the detriment of the story, and Lucas just doesn't have the restraint to avoid all of that. It shows in the Raiders movies, too -- each movie has several really horrendous one-liners that their respective films could do better without, but it's just not the kind of atmosphere that lends itself to those lines being spoken by a furry dwarf or a hammerhead humanoid. So a character belches out a groaner, everyone rolls their eyes, and the story moves on. There's not really any room for the effects to create entire characters for the sake of their novelty.
At risk of being modded down (is there a sarcastic jerk mod?), I can't help but notice the inconsistency in the spellings of "inconsistent" in the past few posts ...
He explains the Aero issue (he turned off those features so it would more closely mimic the wider user base), and he also goes into quite a few paragraphs of detail about the difference between authentication and approval.
I'll agree, though, that he seems from the outset to show some bias. I've noticed many of these things in Vista (I'm running RC1 right now, waiting for the release), but I also happen to much prefer it to XP. They're getting better at this. And frankly, I have a Mac that I hardly ever use because I find the UI so strange sometimes. It's just me, I'm sure, as most other people much prefer it. But I find, for example, that the Windows MUST CLICK OK FOR EVERY ACT mentality suits me better.
As is mentioned elsewhere in responses, the delay applies to the new product and its original scheduled release, not the gap between the two products. It's not "delayed" until after the scheduled release date.
How do they figure five years? 2003 to 2007, that's four years at best, not "over five years." If you include all of 2003 AND 2007, that gets you right up to five years (but that's not how it worked anyway).
As a person with a moderate stutter (which gets worse while I'm driving, coincidentally), I'm getting pretty sick of everything going to speech recognition. According to the article, this system will be controlled this way as well. It's getting so I can do less and less in my environment unless I can speak fluently. Now I'm going to have to speak fluently to listen to the flippin' radio? Blech. And really, are we going to trust MS with speech recognition after this?
Besides, what's wrong with cars now? They go, the radios have knobs, and we all know how to run them. If we want to listen to music that doesn't exist on the radio, we have devices for that, too. And with many new cars now being released with jacks for mp3 players, seems to me the problems are pretty much solved. The way it works now, you can pick and choose what devices you want, install or order them, and you don't have to fight through a whole computer UI (and let's be honest, it probably won't be as intuitive as it could be) to get to the stuff you want.
And really, I hardly think the biggest problem that Ford currently has is the multimedia experience for its drivers. How about cars that run reliably first, and THEN turn your focus to how to bugger up my radio.
Seems to me that it may also be that CEOs and others who make decisions haven't had the chance to experience it on a new home computer yet. I remember XP didn't take off for a while, but then was adopted by businesses more and more as execs started having it at home and liking the pretty colors and the bells and whistles. I suspect these decisions aren't based as much on stability as we'd all like to think -- I think a lot of adoption of Vista will happen when powerful people (not necessarily technical people) start wanting some of Vista's fun or pretty stuff at the office. And they just haven't had a chance to find out about it yet.
Okay, I don't want to get into too much of a 2nd Amendment fight here, but from TFUSC:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
The focus is clearly on a well-regulated militia for security purposes, not on the right to shoot things. Guns are necessary to a well-regulated militia, and therefore must be allowed. However, ain't nowhere in the Constitution says you are allowed to have guns for anything OTHER than a well-regulated militia. The idea was to be able to defend yourself from this or other tyrannical governments. Not bunnies, deer, or other warring woodland creatures.
'Course, it also lists Native Americans as 3/5 of a person, and ensures that you don't have to quarter soldiers in your home. So times have changed, and perhaps our interpretation needs to widen in some spots and narrow in others. But 2nd Amendment rights get pulled out every time someone wants to shoot something, and all opinions and beliefs aside, it's simply not semantically contained in the Amendment. Add to that the inability to operate a gun safely (because, say, you're blind), and now they're just talking crazy.
I don't begrudge hunters their hunting -- I used to feel more strongly about it, but I can't really work up a good argument against some recreational hunting anymore. So I'm not fighting it on that level. It's just a very shaky argument to say that the 2nd Amendment defends the right to hunt with an assault rifle.
I do, however, begrudge blind hunters their hunting. It's just not safe. And I simply think that the person pulling the trigger of a gun should be able to see what it's aimed at. I can't even imagine being comfortable pulling the trigger if I'm not able to see what I'm shooting at, but then I'm kind of a wuss that way.
(And you're right -- the ADA goes a little nuts in spots. But it was necessary to do something, and however ham-handed it is, it does open a lot of doors for a lot of people, so to speak.)
"A blind person can shoot a rifle by mounting an offset pistol scope on the side of the rifle instead of on top," said Terry Erwin, the Austin-based Hunter Education Coordinator with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
"This allows their companion behind them to peer over their shoulder and help them sight it, but the blind person can pull the trigger," he told Reuters.
Does this seem like extraordinary lengths to go to to make sure every American has the right to shoot stuff? I'm not even sure that just pulling the trigger would be a satisfying alternative to sighted hunting. I'm not a hunter, so I could be wrong. But it seems like a lot of work just so you can hear a loud noise and increase your chances of a bad accident.
But more to the point, an example. I have a moderate (sometimes severe) stutter that worsens on the telephone and under stress. I have never thought that I had a God-given right to be a 911 operator. It's not about my rights -- it's about the potential pitfalls of my answering very high-intensity, life-changing phone calls. Why is it someone's right to shoot a gun at (hopefully) an animal if they don't have the physical requirements to do it safely? I'm all for the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and every rational opportunity for everyone, and I do feel compassion for those who used to enjoy hunting but have now lost their sight. But many people have certain limitations which, in more high-performance cases like 911 call center operators or hunters, may well be too much of an obstacle to merit the profound risk it poses to others.
Or more to the point ...
"Bob, did I hit anything? Bob? Bob?"
I think it was Gallagher who was talking about this years ago, and he said, "when you're walking through the forest, how do you make a sound that's NOT like a rabbit?"
My problem with these laws is that they seem to add conditions to the sentence after the fact. (And this one's just dumb, but that seems to be well-covered in the other posts already.) But it seems that if you're a sex offender, you can have new conditions placed on your sentence years after you've done your time and gotten out. That's not how the legal system is supposed to work.
You didn't read MFP (my fine post), did you? The site was Slashdotted already.
Moreover, I suspect, as do many others here, that it's specific to a certain hardware configuration. I've had identical installations of various flavors of Windows AND Linux across different machines, and some things work great on one machine and not the other (sleep being chief among them).
So while I'm most appreciative of your TFA crack, but I still don't know that one can say Vista RTM is fundamentally broken based on one guy's blog post. I can now get to the post, and I've now read it. And I stand by my post from before.
Even if it is about 6 of 8 test machines he's running, we don't know enough. Is he running something else on all of them that could cause this problem? What kind of boxes are they? Are they all one model with one hardware config? Are they different configs but one type of video card? Are they all using one brand of mouse (Logitech hardware/software has a history of causing funny problems like this)? These are just the first few of a hundred questions that would actually get down to the cause of the problem, and none of them are covered in the blog post. They do indicate a few things in the footnotes that begin to cover some of this, but not enough to call it conclusive data.
I'm not trying to be a Microsoft apologist, but this is just the kind of FUD (or more accurately, ID -- insufficient data) that gets bandied about as fact all the time. This is the first I've heard of it, and I tend to do quite a bit of reading about Vista these days. So one shop is having troubles, and no one else has complained of this. Perhaps the shop is doing something unique that causes this problem? No, it must be that Vista is fundamentally flawed.
Maybe it is. But this is a ridiculously small amount of data to go saying that Vista is broken. This isn't error tracking, this is bitching. And that's fine -- I think that's what's great about blogs. But don't defend it as fact until you know more.
... the poster's blog is hosted on a Vista box, as it seems to have fallen asleep. Or been Slashdotted.
Anyhow, I've been running Vista RC1 since it was released (and the beta before that) and never had a problem with the sleep function. Other problems, yes, but none with sleep and none so bad I'd complain about them (mostly my preferences vs. Microsoft's, predictable stuff like that).
In fact, I was just telling my wife the other day (she just melts when I talk sweet to her like this) that the sleep/hibernate function in Vista is so much more stable than it used to be that I haven't actually had my laptop all the way off in a few weeks -- I just open and close it as needed, and it wakes right back up and grabs whatever network it sees. I never had this work so well with XP or W2K.
I also saw no reason to call the previous poster's comments flamebait. MS has problems in the open-vs-proprietary arena, we all know that. True open source is preferred around here, we all know that. But geez, let's try to be civil HERE anyway. Some salient points were made, and this poor schnuck got modded down for it. Do you not see where this is going? Eventually, anyone who speaks against the general tone of Slashdot, no matter how truthfully, correctly, or accurately, will be modded down and left invisible (thanks to the moderation-based threshold system). And let's just say, for sake of argument, MS comes up with the be-all end-all solution to some big document handling problem -- no one here will ever hear about it. That's neither news for nerds nor stuff that matters.
How is this modded offtopic? Come on, people, this is a valid observation to this discussion.
No editorial intent here, but I can confirm that that's what happens. When I go to yahoo.com with Firefox 2.0 in Vista and search, I get the ad and link. When I use IE7, I don't.
I think foundations go stale after a while, and perhaps that's why they're doing this. If you allow a foundation to exist perpetually, it has to spend a certain about of effort worrying about how to best invest its money to keep going. Why not set an end date (or, to use one of the more annoying recently made-up terms, allow it to "sunset") and just let it burn bright and hot for a prescribed period of time? Say what you will about Microsoft, but Bill Gates has some truly fantastic ideas about money. The quote about his kids (something along the lines of, "I will leave them enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing"), some of the things he's doing with the foundation itself (including this now), and so on, lead me to believe that he's really giving this a lot of thought himself (instead of attaching his name for tax purposes to a foundation that is then run by professional Foundation People).
Could also be that he feels like his legacy should last only a prescribed period of time -- why hold future generations to your ideals? It could be that he trusts future generations to figure out money and what's important for themselves. Or not -- just an errant thought.
I have long been a defender of Bill Gates on his philanthropy -- most of my friends (the Linux geeks in particular, but everyone) seem to think he's not giving enough of his fortune. But if you give it all now, it won't be there later to give more. Could be that ten years from now, the most pressing need in the world will be to rebuild the educational system in the Middle East (after the U.S. bombs the bananas out of the Muslim nations). Or maybe AIDS research will need just a billion dollars more. Or Parkinson's. Or something as bad as AIDS that we don't know about yet. Or whatever. But if he had gone ahead and spent all of it on Africa, he couldn't be effective later.
This, when coupled with the 50-year idea, may well create a nice middle-ground response where they can give generously now but will still have enough scratch to give to something they can't anticipate right now. And if you can budget for how long your finite foundation will last, maybe you can give more every year until it burns out instead of constantly worrying about reinvesting. Wouldn't it be great if a foundation had more people employed to spend money on need than to raise it?
The man's foundation is giving 1.75 BILLION dollars a year (an amount larger than the GDP of a lot of countries, if my almanac is accurate). They've committed to double that in the next three years. I see no reason to nitpick about how he does it. AIDS treatment, education, community development, and a lot of it in Africa, where more people are forgotten every day than are born around the rest of the world. If someone wants to get more aggressive and pony up more money for African nations than Bill Gates, go for it -- none of the other few people who can seem to be doing it, though.*
And on that note, good for Warren Buffett -- attaching his fortune to another of equal size increases its power exponentially.
* What's Wal-Mart giving? I don't know -- I'm actually asking. But I bet it's less than $3.5 billion.
on a side note about ketchup ... they now have those membrane squirter things in the lids, making it impossible to apply less than five tablespoons of ketchup to whatever you're trying to condimentalize. Bad enough with ketchup, but a total dealbreaker with mustard.
Never mind -- I found the link elsewhere in this discussion. And sorry for the certified humor-free interpretation -- I didn't see the smiley the first time around ...
I'm having the same problem with my 650, and I installed the latest greatest Java yesterday when I installed Opera. So I don't think it's old Java implementations (though I'm sure that doesn't help). It seems to me that it's just not ready for primetime.
Anyone know where I can get OperaMini 2 so I can try that? I'm not impressed with Blazer, and I've given up on OperaMini 3 (there are only so many reboots I can go through before I just get p.o.'d).
... developers are sometimes handcuffed by previous expectations. I'm not suggesting that Vista should have everything that every previous version of Windows has had, but users are very, very literal-minded when it comes to this kind of thing. You give users two options where they used to have nine (even if they're the best and most valid two options), and they'll get angry and confused. "I don't want it to sleep -- I want to hibernate!"
Again, I don't condone ridiculous backward-compatibility, but I also don't envy the UI designers for Vista. MS has created a monster, in that they have made themselves the ubiquitous consumer OS. This means that they now have to cater to power users and business apps on down to grandma and her e-mail, and need to do it all within one (somewhat) cohesive UI. And while the Vista UI isn't perfect, I am frankly impressed with how much they've done to improve the UI without changing things so much that XP users would be lost. It's too bloaty for a from-the-ground-up design, but it's not from-the-ground-up -- it has to build elegantly on several previous, less-conscientious UI's. And I think it does that. And Office 2007's new UI is a great improvement, in my opinion, but that's another topic for another day.
Moreover, Vista's faster on my machine than XP was -- I thought Apple was the only company that came out with faster OS's with each release. I'm sure SP1 will bog it down, but for now it's pretty zippy for everything it adds.
So mod me down for being an MS apologist, but I think they're doing all right for once. And as for flaws, there are other, more urgent things to gripe about than maintaining backward-compatibility as it pertains to turning off the computer. You only see your plethora of options when you click a button specifically to see them -- if you had to wade through these options to get to other things, it would be a bigger deal. But really, you don't.
Okay, O'Reilly is a boob. I think that is pretty much well-established. And if he told me the sky was blue, I would tell him he's full of s--t. Because he has been every other time I've ever heard him say anything.
But I did notice last time I was in a coffeeshop to meet a client that every other table was filled (30+), and every other table either had a person on a cell phone or a laptop or listening to an iPod. This coffeehouse has been in my neighborhood for twenty years, and used to be where people went to talk to each other. I was struck by how deathly quiet it was for the number of people there -- there was no interaction happening. Of course, it's a coffeehouse that now offers free wifi, so you can argue that they kind of encourage it, too. I would imagine I drink more coffee if I'm cranking away at work than I do if I'm gabbing with friends (free wifi brought with it the end of free refills), so I'm sure they're happy to make it as easy as possible to work in their establishment.
Don't know if that's good or bad, but I do think technology really has allowed us to build social walls around ourselves. And I think a lot of people tend to shy away from people by default (even if you like people, it's typically easier to be alone than to interact), so having a tool that allows us to visibly be inaccessible to others is quite comforting.
But I must be wrong if O'Reilly agrees with me. So I apologize.