I (personally) find Windows to be around the right level of trade off between the "I want to be consumer electronics" Mac ethos and the "compile your own damn Kernel, biatch" way in the Linux world.
We all know Win9x stunk like hell. NT was too lacking inuser friendliness. Win 2k and XP really are solid and useable for a lot of people, though. The last time I say the fabled BSOD other than through overclocking and shitty drivers - probably 2001 or something.
Office is a slick bit of kit for people like me who can make a tidy sum developing and selling (cha-ching!) custom solutions centred around it. Word surely sucks but Excel is top notch and Access being good for smaller projects.
At the risk of sounding like an astroturfing troll, mainstream MS software just gets the job done and if you know what you're doing - with the minimum of fuss. OSS is all well and good, and a wonderful concept, but until it's got those Ts crossed and Is dotted, Microsoft just offers a more compelling option for those wanting to run a business that don't have the resources of someone like IBM.
In 5-10 years maybe I'll be singing the praises of a Linux/OO.o/xSQL solution, and I hope so too - I like the concept and theoretical freedom.
Anything involving the reduction of scope for C/Z/net to grow is good. Rarely in my life have I ever come across such a poor source of information.
Seriously, what the hell are they actually good for? Biased reviews, news available elsewhere, and alleged 'gurus' writing columns that are either blindingly obvious or hilariously incorrect.
If I were Mr. Google, I'd refuse to talk to them purely because they're rubbish, never mind any previous articles and privacy concerns.
All 'information' isn't the same. Some - some might call 'better' - information will repeatedly 'try' to become free and once it manages it will flourish. Other 'worse' information will degrade and die.
It's kind of like evolution. I expect some religious plonker to come along soon and tell me that I'm wrong - all information was made equal in the eyes of God, and is exactly the same as trhe day God made it. There is no evolution of information. No new 'kinds' of information can come into being either.
Jeez louise - it's a joke. Does the whole "FBI wanting to liberate enslaved information" thing not give the game away?
And for the record I'd read the phrase in full context previously, even before in was mentioned a few news items ago. Only a moron would take my origian post as something intended to be deathly serious. Unfortunately you've found yourself stepping up to the plate.
OH what the hell. Here's something else deadly serious for you to rant and rave about. "Google are teh ev1l!!!111 Micro$sux is my ghay lover!!!"
Feel free to berate me for my inability to grasp the global ramifications of the Google/Microsoft interations, and of course point out to me than an organisation cannot inherently be homosexual. Cheers.
Personally I can scarely imagine anything worse than being kept alive against my wishes under extreme and enduring pain. To the most civilised of people, that would be described as torture in the extreme.
To "pro-life"ers, it's actually a beautiful and wonderful thing to keep you alive under certain circumstances.
18 years of punishment for just having sex? And not just on the mother, on the father who has to pay to keep the littl;e bastard alive, and the little bastard him/herself for being forced into a life where (s)he is unwanted.
Damn you're one sick and evil SOB. That's more than most murderers get.
"pro-life" is just another term for "an abomination of pure unadulterated evil, punishing innocent, uneducated, and irresponsible alike". Stick that on your damn banner and wave it.
>The elicist seem to forget that a company is not for making money. Its purpose is making money so that the society benefits from it!
HAHAHAHAHA! What planet have you been living on? Xena? The only interest companies have in social enrichment is that a 90% unemployed population won't be buying their products. Beyond that they don't give a damn.
>Lets say, theoretically, every company would only employ the best 10% of the people. Ignoring that some people may have multiple skills, that leaves 90% of the population unemployed! What a great thing to do!
Well firstly, the logical thing to do is to ignore the "top X%" nonsense, and look at it another way. Employ from the top down until you get to a point where adding the increasingly less skilled starts becoming a hinderance instead of a benefit.
Besides, there's no reason why the bottom 20% of developers can't get a job elsewhere. They can crunch numbers, pick up a broom, stack shelves, or whatever.
If you are completely crap at your attempted porofession, either be unemployed, improve yourself, or try another profession.
Oh, and if you're talking social responsibility - what is socially responsible about allowing and encouraging incompetent people into the workplace to hold everyone else back?
Seriously, isn't it nice when companies agree to stop being evil, monopolistic, and unlawful. I bet they only had to be asked politely a few dozen times first, too. I think we should take this stance with other society-harming crimes, too - murders should be let off if they agree to stop killing people.
What's wrong with a good old fashioned bitch-slapping and imprisoning those responsible for a dozen years or so? Nah, we can't do that, their bribes are all lovely and money-filled. Lert them off with a mere claim that they won't break the law again.
I believe that we are very close to 400 channels now. And yes, most of them are turd.
They are completely NOT turd! 200 channels of either selling me crap or some dumb blonde bint flashing her bits telling me to txt her for £2/message is the height of modern culture.
Stop wasting your time with pointless TV like news, documentaries and movies!
So is this a suitable alternative to video on demand?
True, it has a much higher direct cost to the consumer for the extra kit, but you're not replying on the broadcasters to buy into the VoD deal, and you wonl't be paying the undoubtedly higher prices they'll be charging for it, along with bandwidth costs.
Other than movies, there's very little reason to have the expense and trouble of Vod until we all have very high bandwidth connections at a low cost. I'm talking 100mb/s here.
Until we all have terrabit connections ot our handheld PCs, this just seems the better way to go to me - a PVR or steroids for those who want it.
Five TERRESTRIAL channels, and a whole bunch more on Digital (Freeview). Plus Cable and Sky, but I'm not counting those since they're not accessible to everyone.
Even that's not right really. Five ANALOGUE terrestrial channels, DIGITAL terrestrial has dozens. Cable/Sky has hundreds.
Yes, it is a lame patent application - it's a trvial patent that does only a little more than something like Base64/UUE/yEnc'ing an image with a bit of metadata along for the trip (emoticon name/ket combination/etc).
Still, as has been said before, the key problem isn't the companies filing for these dumb patents (ok I make an exception for Amazon - it IS their fault, and they unlike most others try to enforce shitty patents). As long as the screwy patent office allows them, it's not unreasonable to expect companies to try and get there first if only to defend theirselves.
What would be a good idea would be penalties for filing dumb patents. So as not to punish the little guy unduly, the cost should rise exponentially with each dumb patent you fail to get each year.
The patent APPLICATION is for encoding and transfer of CUSTOM smilies. ie an arbiary image or animation on one computer being transferred to another one automatically in a seamless manner via encoing, transmisson, reconstruction.
Not to say that this application is good - it's not. Just that 99% of people here have it so wrong that it's laughable.
From TFA: ""Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.""
*Note the key words such as CREATE and RECONSTRUCTING.
*Note the lack of the words "changing:) into a picture"
A lot of people are reading this wrong. They've probably skimmed over the text and read "MS.... patent... emoticon..." and jumped to incorrect conclusions.
As it says, it is for CUSTOM emoticons, ie an arbitary emoticon on Client1 being encoded, transferred, and reassembled, installed, and displayed on Client2.
Now I don't agree with this patent application either, but IF you're going to attack MS here, at least attack them for the right thing. Bitching at them for trying to patent emoticons is just wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I (personally) find Windows to be around the right level of trade off between the "I want to be consumer electronics" Mac ethos and the "compile your own damn Kernel, biatch" way in the Linux world.
We all know Win9x stunk like hell. NT was too lacking inuser friendliness. Win 2k and XP really are solid and useable for a lot of people, though. The last time I say the fabled BSOD other than through overclocking and shitty drivers - probably 2001 or something.
Office is a slick bit of kit for people like me who can make a tidy sum developing and selling (cha-ching!) custom solutions centred around it. Word surely sucks but Excel is top notch and Access being good for smaller projects.
At the risk of sounding like an astroturfing troll, mainstream MS software just gets the job done and if you know what you're doing - with the minimum of fuss. OSS is all well and good, and a wonderful concept, but until it's got those Ts crossed and Is dotted, Microsoft just offers a more compelling option for those wanting to run a business that don't have the resources of someone like IBM.
In 5-10 years maybe I'll be singing the praises of a Linux/OO.o/xSQL solution, and I hope so too - I like the concept and theoretical freedom.
Anything involving the reduction of scope for C/Z/net to grow is good. Rarely in my life have I ever come across such a poor source of information.
Seriously, what the hell are they actually good for? Biased reviews, news available elsewhere, and alleged 'gurus' writing columns that are either blindingly obvious or hilariously incorrect.
If I were Mr. Google, I'd refuse to talk to them purely because they're rubbish, never mind any previous articles and privacy concerns.
All 'information' isn't the same. Some - some might call 'better' - information will repeatedly 'try' to become free and once it manages it will flourish. Other 'worse' information will degrade and die.
It's kind of like evolution. I expect some religious plonker to come along soon and tell me that I'm wrong - all information was made equal in the eyes of God, and is exactly the same as trhe day God made it. There is no evolution of information. No new 'kinds' of information can come into being either.
Jeez louise - it's a joke. Does the whole "FBI wanting to liberate enslaved information" thing not give the game away?
And for the record I'd read the phrase in full context previously, even before in was mentioned a few news items ago. Only a moron would take my origian post as something intended to be deathly serious. Unfortunately you've found yourself stepping up to the plate.
OH what the hell. Here's something else deadly serious for you to rant and rave about. "Google are teh ev1l!!!111 Micro$sux is my ghay lover!!!"
Feel free to berate me for my inability to grasp the global ramifications of the Google/Microsoft interations, and of course point out to me than an organisation cannot inherently be homosexual. Cheers.
I wonder how believers of that tired incorrect cliché will tie that in with this.
Surely the FBI were liberating imprisoned information from it's overbearing masters?
I have great pity for the situation you describe.
Personally I can scarely imagine anything worse than being kept alive against my wishes under extreme and enduring pain. To the most civilised of people, that would be described as torture in the extreme.
To "pro-life"ers, it's actually a beautiful and wonderful thing to keep you alive under certain circumstances.
Prevention does a whole lot of good after the fact though.
A: "Prevention is better, so we're never going to cure"
B: "But it's already happened, we must cure!"
A: "No, I said prevention is better, we shall not cure. Curing is less effective than preventing."
B: "You sick bastard."
18 years of punishment for just having sex? And not just on the mother, on the father who has to pay to keep the littl;e bastard alive, and the little bastard him/herself for being forced into a life where (s)he is unwanted.
Damn you're one sick and evil SOB. That's more than most murderers get.
"pro-life" is just another term for "an abomination of pure unadulterated evil, punishing innocent, uneducated, and irresponsible alike". Stick that on your damn banner and wave it.
>The elicist seem to forget that a company is not for making money. Its purpose is making money so that the society benefits from it!
HAHAHAHAHA! What planet have you been living on? Xena? The only interest companies have in social enrichment is that a 90% unemployed population won't be buying their products. Beyond that they don't give a damn.
>Lets say, theoretically, every company would only employ the best 10% of the people. Ignoring that some people may have multiple skills, that leaves 90% of the population unemployed! What a great thing to do!
Well firstly, the logical thing to do is to ignore the "top X%" nonsense, and look at it another way. Employ from the top down until you get to a point where adding the increasingly less skilled starts becoming a hinderance instead of a benefit.
Besides, there's no reason why the bottom 20% of developers can't get a job elsewhere. They can crunch numbers, pick up a broom, stack shelves, or whatever.
If you are completely crap at your attempted porofession, either be unemployed, improve yourself, or try another profession.
Oh, and if you're talking social responsibility - what is socially responsible about allowing and encouraging incompetent people into the workplace to hold everyone else back?
Some bozo got a dictate from head office to stop using Windows and go with an alternative, they got a bit confused.
Expect the next study to show that using open source fibre optics has a higher TCO than Windows.
"The only thing missing is the witty satire of the slashdot crowd."
TO be fair, that's missing here, too.
> Except that a car uses consummables, but an operating system should come complete and not need fixes!
I guess you'll be spending all your life without having a computer then, since no such beast exists.
What a stupid thing to say.
> > Unless you count freeview we have 5 channels. Yep, 5.
> And if you only count 60% of those 5 you end up with 3. Sure, just 3. That's 40% down on your bizarre subset of the channels available for free.
And if you don't count those 3, we have no TV.
MY GOD, WE HAVE NO TV! Who will watch the tellytubbies now?
Seriously, isn't it nice when companies agree to stop being evil, monopolistic, and unlawful. I bet they only had to be asked politely a few dozen times first, too. I think we should take this stance with other society-harming crimes, too - murders should be let off if they agree to stop killing people.
What's wrong with a good old fashioned bitch-slapping and imprisoning those responsible for a dozen years or so? Nah, we can't do that, their bribes are all lovely and money-filled. Lert them off with a mere claim that they won't break the law again.
I believe that we are very close to 400 channels now. And yes, most of them are turd.
They are completely NOT turd! 200 channels of either selling me crap or some dumb blonde bint flashing her bits telling me to txt her for £2/message is the height of modern culture.
Stop wasting your time with pointless TV like news, documentaries and movies!
So is this a suitable alternative to video on demand?
True, it has a much higher direct cost to the consumer for the extra kit, but you're not replying on the broadcasters to buy into the VoD deal, and you wonl't be paying the undoubtedly higher prices they'll be charging for it, along with bandwidth costs.
Other than movies, there's very little reason to have the expense and trouble of Vod until we all have very high bandwidth connections at a low cost. I'm talking 100mb/s here.
Until we all have terrabit connections ot our handheld PCs, this just seems the better way to go to me - a PVR or steroids for those who want it.
Five TERRESTRIAL channels, and a whole bunch more on Digital (Freeview). Plus Cable and Sky, but I'm not counting those since they're not accessible to everyone.
Even that's not right really. Five ANALOGUE terrestrial channels, DIGITAL terrestrial has dozens. Cable/Sky has hundreds.
The UK has hundreds of channels, so I don't know where you get your dumb ideas from.
Depends on who you ask for money. I'm sure many governments would throw more money at you than you could carry if you gave them a proposal like that.
Hell, I'm sure several ad companies would love that kind of information, too.
Surveilance, tracking people, and outright spying are always going to have rich interested parties...
I guess they've stopped being smartphones, and started being smartass phones.
the REAL news is that Google have just released a search engine!
Anyway, I'm off to try out the new beta of Windows 95...
Yes, it is a lame patent application - it's a trvial patent that does only a little more than something like Base64/UUE/yEnc'ing an image with a bit of metadata along for the trip (emoticon name/ket combination/etc).
Still, as has been said before, the key problem isn't the companies filing for these dumb patents (ok I make an exception for Amazon - it IS their fault, and they unlike most others try to enforce shitty patents). As long as the screwy patent office allows them, it's not unreasonable to expect companies to try and get there first if only to defend theirselves.
What would be a good idea would be penalties for filing dumb patents. So as not to punish the little guy unduly, the cost should rise exponentially with each dumb patent you fail to get each year.
Learn to read, people!
:) into a picture"
"OMG M$ have patented teh smilies!!!!1" - wrong
The patent APPLICATION is for encoding and transfer of CUSTOM smilies. ie an arbiary image or animation on one computer being transferred to another one automatically in a seamless manner via encoing, transmisson, reconstruction.
Not to say that this application is good - it's not. Just that 99% of people here have it so wrong that it's laughable.
From TFA:
""Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.""
*Note the key words such as CREATE and RECONSTRUCTING.
*Note the lack of the words "changing
A lot of people are reading this wrong. They've probably skimmed over the text and read "MS.... patent... emoticon..." and jumped to incorrect conclusions.
As it says, it is for CUSTOM emoticons, ie an arbitary emoticon on Client1 being encoded, transferred, and reassembled, installed, and displayed on Client2.
Now I don't agree with this patent application either, but IF you're going to attack MS here, at least attack them for the right thing. Bitching at them for trying to patent emoticons is just wrong.
People get bent over and anally raped by the entertainment/corrupt bribery industry - the solution - bend them over and take their stuff for free.
Some nutter in the middle east kills thousands of people - the solution involves killing thousands of people.
Some lowlife scum spam the world - the solution is obviously to spam them back in return.
This is just how things work now. No point trying to fight it.