If anything, the price of the N version would be *higher* because MS had to do work to remove WMP. So MS did in fact give people a discount from what the price would have been.
Computing only became popular once it became a COMMODITY. Computers had been around for quite some time before they really caught on. And when they did catch on, they caught on something fierce. Why did this happen all of a sudden? Because IBM's virtual monopoly on PCs was broken by Compaq's clean-room BIOS reverse engineering and Microsoft not being held to distribute the IBM PC's OS only to IBM. This allowed for everybody and their brother to make a PC that was compatible with IBM's and drive the prices way down and IBM eventually out of the business.
Big commercial software firms try as hard as they can to de-commoditize their software offerings by various methods. They can charge much more money in licensing when they have users over a barrel to either use their products or completely lose compatibility with their existing data or other users. If they had a piece of software that was a commodity, they couldn't get away with it as the customers would just go with somebody else's software as a drop-in replacement such as you can drop in one kind of PCI 10/100 Ethernet card in for any other and they will work the same. FOSS is basically the zenith of commodity software as anybody can legally make a derivative version of a specific program or simply grab the original source code. You can thus have a bunch of people selling the exact same product, just how many tangible commodities dealers sell the exact same product (gold, copper, oil, pork bellies, soybeans, etc.) as the guy next to them.
The risk of being shafted by a company with or without class action suits does differ quite a bit:
1. If there are a ton of class-action suits as there are today, companies may be deterred from pulling a few fast ones. However, there is a CERTAINTY that the customer will be shafted because the increased cost of the much larger legal team needed to deal with class-action suits isn't free and is passed on in the form of higher prices.
2. If there are no class-action suits, companies may feel less of a deterrent to pull fast ones, but there still is one *huge* deterrent- PR. If a company pulls a fast one on people, it gets out and gets out in a hurry in the media (because it would be a high-selling story) and the Internet. All somebody would have to do is make a few posts on some of the big forums or submit a story on Slashdot and it WILL get a bunch of peoples' attention and affect the bottom line of the company.
So the gamble is either a 100% possibility of getting screwed by higher prices or a variable but certainly much less than 100% chance of getting screwed by the company. I don't know about you, but personally I'd take my chance with the lower prices, fewer billions of dollars in lawyers' pockets, and the smaller probability of the company trying to pull a fast one.
The Intel IGPs may be fine for general desktop usage but anything that uses the IGP to do much more than draw the desktop is MUCH better served by a discrete GPU.
The country mostly located south of Canada and north of Mexico is typically called: 1. United States of America 2. United States 3. USA 4. US 5. The States (typically by English-speaking people who do not live in the US) 6. America
The adjective term for somebody living in the US is "American," not "USian" as I have seen some Europeans, Canadians, and Australians use here on/., or "gringo," which is a racial slur referring to Caucasians living in the US usually used by Hispanics living in Mexico and Central America.
When somebody is referring to the continent that the US is part of, it is called North America and the people living there are called North Americans.
When somebody is referring to the two continents that comprise the bulk of the Western Hemisphere, they are collectively called "The Americas." However, I haven't heard any adjective term be used to describe the region other than "of the Americas" or "of North and South America."
You are both correct, at least in part. Fines are collected completely in addition to taxes for any individual who gets fined (e.g. there is no deduction on your tax forms for government fines.) But governments DO assume there will be a certain revenue from fines each year and put that in their budgets, even though that amount is not actually guaranteed to be there at the end of the year. If the governments did not fine or fine revenue came in well below expectations, their total revenues would decrease and they'd have to either raise taxes, increase the price of future fines, or try some method to increase the number of fines collected. The latter two are the most popular as it does not affect everybody directly and as such is more politically popular. It's much easier to fight against a property or sales tax increase (trot out some old person on a fixed income) than it is to fight fine increases (the government would merely have to say that the person is a criminal to largely discredit their claim.) The big increase in the number of red-light cameras, pressure-sensitive/radio-linked parking meters, and photo radar is enough to show what's going on.
That is only the case on lower-end CrossFire boards. The better ones not only have two full x16 slots but they are PCIe v2.0 and have 8 MB/sec full duplex. So a 3870 X2 on a new 790FX board allows each GPU the 4 MB/sec bandwidth that a single PCIe v.1 x16 slot provides.
You must have waited a bit to have gotten into computing or are pretty young as relatively affordable HDDs in the 4 GB range came out in the mid-1990s. My first computer that had a HDD was bought in '89 or so and had a 30 MB HDD, and I am not even all that old (in my 20s.) The real old-timers remember when a HDD was the size of a fridge and you used punch cards to enter data into the computer.
Yes, it makes sense. The U.S. blamed China for rampant copyright infringement, so China blames an American-owned company (or as much American-owned as a company can be in China) for the infringement. It's a time-honored legal tactic: blame the person blaming you for causing the problem.
Vista has quite a few changes that make it more similar to running *nix as far as a user is concerned:
- UI is different than XP. (IMHO, the Vista version of Explorer seems to have taken design hints from Gnome's Nautilus with the bread-crumbs menu bar and the folders/favorites pane at the left.) - Users run non-privileged and have to authenticate to make changes to system settings or files. - Installer is fully graphical and does not need the SATA/RAID floppy. - Driver availability is less than that of XP. - Many programs that run on XP don't run on the OS. - IMHO stability and ability to juggle multiple active threads and processors is improved over XP. - Full-volume disk encryption.
I find it funny whenever a *nix user disses Vista for one of those reasons or plugs one of them as a reason *nix is better than Windows or if a Vista user takes a rip at a *nix user as it's the pot calling the kettle black. Somebody who is tolerant of some of the issues with *nix vs. XP should also be tolerant of the same issues WRT Vista vs. XP. Somebody should also be tolerant of the same issues in *nix vs. XP as they are in Vista vs. XP.
I read the PC World laptop page that proclaims the MacBook Pro was the fastest "power laptop" they tested. There is one big caveat: it was only during a very short period of time and only faster than the next machine by a little. If you look at the "Top 10 Power Laptops" page today, it's obvious that the MacBook Pro is nowhere near the fastest machine. The fastest Vista machine on the list is the Eurocom D900C, which has a Core 2 Quad Q6700 and a 512 MB GeForce 7950GT versus the MacBookPro's Core 2 Duo T7700 and a GeForce 8600M.
The federal government provides very little funding for public schools. The district I attended got well under 10% of its funding from the federal government- almost all of funding was local or state. Abolishing the federal Department of Education would do little more than have the states and local municipalities be completely in control of their school districts that they almost completely pay for anyway. The students would probably not even notice and the teachers wouldn't either, perhaps with the exception of fewer weeks spent taking achievement tests.
Actually I think you really need to define what a root-kit is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit (I particularly like the part about "non-hostile rootkits")
If somebody does something to my computer that is intended to be hidden from my knowledge and prevents me from doing something with my computer, I sure as hell consider it hostile.
This is anecdotal evidence, but almost all of the problems I've seen in modern-type OSes (Windows NT and most *nixes) have been due to hardware or driver problems. Windows is primarily driver problems because most device markers have to write the driver and it doesn't make them money, so they naturally cobble something together as cheaply as possible. With the *nixes, it's primarily a hardware problem like a disk drive going bad and corrupting data or RAM or the mobo dying due to the drivers almost all being written/approved by the kernel guys and being of higher quality than most 3rd-party stuff. MacOS X problems tend to not be that common, but they are typically OS bugs than anything else. That does not surprise me much as drivers shouldn't be an issue as like in Linux and many other *nixes, the OS kernel guys write most all of the drivers and they should be of high quality. The hardware is also expensive and thus should be quality; also the Mac users I've seen tend to replace hardware much sooner than others do (when a new model comes out) so HW rarely gets old enough to fail. This pretty much leaves the OS as the point of failure, and I've certainly seen systems with The Pinwheel of Death before.
Like all companies that are on top of their respective markets, MS will end up toppling themselves. They may not go out of business, but will be severely reduced in stature. They will get (have gotten?) big enough that they are too cumbersome or locked into a certain market paradigm that moving on with the market is extremely difficult to impossible. To tell the truth, I think that Vista is the start of this as it's rather apparent with that release that MS themselves are locked into the old legacy DOS and Win9x compatibility and can't move to new technology without severely hurting their customer base and bottom line. They are in a pickle- either try to hack together an even more bloated OS to try to support most every old program or migrate to something new and risk most of your customers getting teed off and migrating to something new...that is not yours.
If I were in charge of MS, I'd immediately put the large cash reserves into developing a truly from-the-ground-up OS and running all of the old DOS and 9x stuff in an emulator. There will be growing pains, especially drivers, but if they pull it off right, they might buy themselves another 10 years or so until they have to do it again. Also, today the Microsoft name is pretty ubiquitous with "any computer software." Most people do not even know that there is any other OS than can run on a computer that wasn't bought from Apple. In the future, that may not the case and in fact, probably will not be the case as much of the time unless MS seriously does something in new OS releases rather than just gild the existing lily.
It's very similar to Gnome's Nautilus file manager in this regard, and somewhat similar to how Finder works (although the buttons are much better than the gawdawful panes in Finder.)
This is exactly the case with my unit (Gateway TB120.) It shipped with XP Tablet PC 2005 and the drivers were pure garbage. The drivers were really designed for Vista and it runs much better with Vista than XP Tablet. I also have OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64 on there too and it *flies* compared to Vista, but the TB120 uses a USB Wacom tablet that currently has no driver for Linux. When the linux-wacom guys ship the USB tablet driver, I'll be sure to drop Windows and use Linux.
Don't mind the Europeans, they are just angry that they're not the ones holding the seed patents. The "US seeds are sterile and kill local species!" bit is exactly like the "if you do any OSS work, you have to give away everything you make" bit. It's all FUD through and through and you just have to look at who is behind it all.
I wonder if text messaging was considered as one of the non-email communication methods. That is probably the most reliable and quickest way to send anybody under 30 a message. It's kind of handy, sort of like a poor-man's BlackBerry.
Personally, I am a graduate student and 22 and I prefer e-mail to any other form of communication. IM is okay, but it's pretty much a typed phone call- you both have to be at the computer at the same time and have the time to type. And Facebook? If somebody puts a message on Facebook, how do I know? Yup, that's right- I get a notification e-mail. Why not send me that e-mail yourself and save the trouble of going through Facebook?
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, the price of the N version would be *higher* because MS had to do work to remove WMP. So MS did in fact give people a discount from what the price would have been.
Computing only became popular once it became a COMMODITY. Computers had been around for quite some time before they really caught on. And when they did catch on, they caught on something fierce. Why did this happen all of a sudden? Because IBM's virtual monopoly on PCs was broken by Compaq's clean-room BIOS reverse engineering and Microsoft not being held to distribute the IBM PC's OS only to IBM. This allowed for everybody and their brother to make a PC that was compatible with IBM's and drive the prices way down and IBM eventually out of the business.
Big commercial software firms try as hard as they can to de-commoditize their software offerings by various methods. They can charge much more money in licensing when they have users over a barrel to either use their products or completely lose compatibility with their existing data or other users. If they had a piece of software that was a commodity, they couldn't get away with it as the customers would just go with somebody else's software as a drop-in replacement such as you can drop in one kind of PCI 10/100 Ethernet card in for any other and they will work the same. FOSS is basically the zenith of commodity software as anybody can legally make a derivative version of a specific program or simply grab the original source code. You can thus have a bunch of people selling the exact same product, just how many tangible commodities dealers sell the exact same product (gold, copper, oil, pork bellies, soybeans, etc.) as the guy next to them.
The risk of being shafted by a company with or without class action suits does differ quite a bit:
1. If there are a ton of class-action suits as there are today, companies may be deterred from pulling a few fast ones. However, there is a CERTAINTY that the customer will be shafted because the increased cost of the much larger legal team needed to deal with class-action suits isn't free and is passed on in the form of higher prices.
2. If there are no class-action suits, companies may feel less of a deterrent to pull fast ones, but there still is one *huge* deterrent- PR. If a company pulls a fast one on people, it gets out and gets out in a hurry in the media (because it would be a high-selling story) and the Internet. All somebody would have to do is make a few posts on some of the big forums or submit a story on Slashdot and it WILL get a bunch of peoples' attention and affect the bottom line of the company.
So the gamble is either a 100% possibility of getting screwed by higher prices or a variable but certainly much less than 100% chance of getting screwed by the company. I don't know about you, but personally I'd take my chance with the lower prices, fewer billions of dollars in lawyers' pockets, and the smaller probability of the company trying to pull a fast one.
The Intel IGPs may be fine for general desktop usage but anything that uses the IGP to do much more than draw the desktop is MUCH better served by a discrete GPU.
This is what I have seen in common usage:
/., or "gringo," which is a racial slur referring to Caucasians living in the US usually used by Hispanics living in Mexico and Central America.
The country mostly located south of Canada and north of Mexico is typically called:
1. United States of America
2. United States
3. USA
4. US
5. The States (typically by English-speaking people who do not live in the US)
6. America
The adjective term for somebody living in the US is "American," not "USian" as I have seen some Europeans, Canadians, and Australians use here on
When somebody is referring to the continent that the US is part of, it is called North America and the people living there are called North Americans.
When somebody is referring to the two continents that comprise the bulk of the Western Hemisphere, they are collectively called "The Americas." However, I haven't heard any adjective term be used to describe the region other than "of the Americas" or "of North and South America."
Except that you don't get a TV out of that deal...
You are both correct, at least in part. Fines are collected completely in addition to taxes for any individual who gets fined (e.g. there is no deduction on your tax forms for government fines.) But governments DO assume there will be a certain revenue from fines each year and put that in their budgets, even though that amount is not actually guaranteed to be there at the end of the year. If the governments did not fine or fine revenue came in well below expectations, their total revenues would decrease and they'd have to either raise taxes, increase the price of future fines, or try some method to increase the number of fines collected. The latter two are the most popular as it does not affect everybody directly and as such is more politically popular. It's much easier to fight against a property or sales tax increase (trot out some old person on a fixed income) than it is to fight fine increases (the government would merely have to say that the person is a criminal to largely discredit their claim.) The big increase in the number of red-light cameras, pressure-sensitive/radio-linked parking meters, and photo radar is enough to show what's going on.
That is only the case on lower-end CrossFire boards. The better ones not only have two full x16 slots but they are PCIe v2.0 and have 8 MB/sec full duplex. So a 3870 X2 on a new 790FX board allows each GPU the 4 MB/sec bandwidth that a single PCIe v.1 x16 slot provides.
You must have waited a bit to have gotten into computing or are pretty young as relatively affordable HDDs in the 4 GB range came out in the mid-1990s. My first computer that had a HDD was bought in '89 or so and had a 30 MB HDD, and I am not even all that old (in my 20s.) The real old-timers remember when a HDD was the size of a fridge and you used punch cards to enter data into the computer.
Yes, it makes sense. The U.S. blamed China for rampant copyright infringement, so China blames an American-owned company (or as much American-owned as a company can be in China) for the infringement. It's a time-honored legal tactic: blame the person blaming you for causing the problem.
Tiny1877, there is a lawyer representing Metallica and their label knocking on your door for use of a song title without paying a royalty...
Vista has quite a few changes that make it more similar to running *nix as far as a user is concerned:
- UI is different than XP. (IMHO, the Vista version of Explorer seems to have taken design hints from Gnome's Nautilus with the bread-crumbs menu bar and the folders/favorites pane at the left.)
- Users run non-privileged and have to authenticate to make changes to system settings or files.
- Installer is fully graphical and does not need the SATA/RAID floppy.
- Driver availability is less than that of XP.
- Many programs that run on XP don't run on the OS.
- IMHO stability and ability to juggle multiple active threads and processors is improved over XP.
- Full-volume disk encryption.
I find it funny whenever a *nix user disses Vista for one of those reasons or plugs one of them as a reason *nix is better than Windows or if a Vista user takes a rip at a *nix user as it's the pot calling the kettle black. Somebody who is tolerant of some of the issues with *nix vs. XP should also be tolerant of the same issues WRT Vista vs. XP. Somebody should also be tolerant of the same issues in *nix vs. XP as they are in Vista vs. XP.
I read the PC World laptop page that proclaims the MacBook Pro was the fastest "power laptop" they tested. There is one big caveat: it was only during a very short period of time and only faster than the next machine by a little. If you look at the "Top 10 Power Laptops" page today, it's obvious that the MacBook Pro is nowhere near the fastest machine. The fastest Vista machine on the list is the Eurocom D900C, which has a Core 2 Quad Q6700 and a 512 MB GeForce 7950GT versus the MacBookPro's Core 2 Duo T7700 and a GeForce 8600M.
The federal government provides very little funding for public schools. The district I attended got well under 10% of its funding from the federal government- almost all of funding was local or state. Abolishing the federal Department of Education would do little more than have the states and local municipalities be completely in control of their school districts that they almost completely pay for anyway. The students would probably not even notice and the teachers wouldn't either, perhaps with the exception of fewer weeks spent taking achievement tests.
If somebody does something to my computer that is intended to be hidden from my knowledge and prevents me from doing something with my computer, I sure as hell consider it hostile.
This is anecdotal evidence, but almost all of the problems I've seen in modern-type OSes (Windows NT and most *nixes) have been due to hardware or driver problems. Windows is primarily driver problems because most device markers have to write the driver and it doesn't make them money, so they naturally cobble something together as cheaply as possible. With the *nixes, it's primarily a hardware problem like a disk drive going bad and corrupting data or RAM or the mobo dying due to the drivers almost all being written/approved by the kernel guys and being of higher quality than most 3rd-party stuff. MacOS X problems tend to not be that common, but they are typically OS bugs than anything else. That does not surprise me much as drivers shouldn't be an issue as like in Linux and many other *nixes, the OS kernel guys write most all of the drivers and they should be of high quality. The hardware is also expensive and thus should be quality; also the Mac users I've seen tend to replace hardware much sooner than others do (when a new model comes out) so HW rarely gets old enough to fail. This pretty much leaves the OS as the point of failure, and I've certainly seen systems with The Pinwheel of Death before.
Like all companies that are on top of their respective markets, MS will end up toppling themselves. They may not go out of business, but will be severely reduced in stature. They will get (have gotten?) big enough that they are too cumbersome or locked into a certain market paradigm that moving on with the market is extremely difficult to impossible. To tell the truth, I think that Vista is the start of this as it's rather apparent with that release that MS themselves are locked into the old legacy DOS and Win9x compatibility and can't move to new technology without severely hurting their customer base and bottom line. They are in a pickle- either try to hack together an even more bloated OS to try to support most every old program or migrate to something new and risk most of your customers getting teed off and migrating to something new...that is not yours.
If I were in charge of MS, I'd immediately put the large cash reserves into developing a truly from-the-ground-up OS and running all of the old DOS and 9x stuff in an emulator. There will be growing pains, especially drivers, but if they pull it off right, they might buy themselves another 10 years or so until they have to do it again. Also, today the Microsoft name is pretty ubiquitous with "any computer software." Most people do not even know that there is any other OS than can run on a computer that wasn't bought from Apple. In the future, that may not the case and in fact, probably will not be the case as much of the time unless MS seriously does something in new OS releases rather than just gild the existing lily.
It's very similar to Gnome's Nautilus file manager in this regard, and somewhat similar to how Finder works (although the buttons are much better than the gawdawful panes in Finder.)
This is exactly the case with my unit (Gateway TB120.) It shipped with XP Tablet PC 2005 and the drivers were pure garbage. The drivers were really designed for Vista and it runs much better with Vista than XP Tablet. I also have OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64 on there too and it *flies* compared to Vista, but the TB120 uses a USB Wacom tablet that currently has no driver for Linux. When the linux-wacom guys ship the USB tablet driver, I'll be sure to drop Windows and use Linux.
No, they're too busy suing Apple over the iPhone prices dropping.
Yes, and China is a republic. Why else would they call it the People's Republic of China?
Don't mind the Europeans, they are just angry that they're not the ones holding the seed patents. The "US seeds are sterile and kill local species!" bit is exactly like the "if you do any OSS work, you have to give away everything you make" bit. It's all FUD through and through and you just have to look at who is behind it all.
Then riddle me this: how does the high-fructose corn syrup end up as fat?
I'm thinking you need to go back though your biochem or physiology notes there, bud.
I wonder if text messaging was considered as one of the non-email communication methods. That is probably the most reliable and quickest way to send anybody under 30 a message. It's kind of handy, sort of like a poor-man's BlackBerry.
Personally, I am a graduate student and 22 and I prefer e-mail to any other form of communication. IM is okay, but it's pretty much a typed phone call- you both have to be at the computer at the same time and have the time to type. And Facebook? If somebody puts a message on Facebook, how do I know? Yup, that's right- I get a notification e-mail. Why not send me that e-mail yourself and save the trouble of going through Facebook?
What, and sack sales of more-expensive LGA 771 Xeon 51xx/53xx setups that run that oh-so-wonderful, cool-running, low-latency FB-DIMM memory?