I've had my PayPal account for a long time and I have not run into any problems whatsoever. I have done so many transactions (including $1,000's) with it. I do not know how all those things paypalsucks.com happened, but none have happened to me, and it has been years.
What I have changed over the past year or so is to stop doing stuff on eBay and just use craigslist. Most of the time, people pay in cash and are very friendly. I have not had problems with it, although I still get nervous every time I decide to do a delivery (I deliver if they live within 15 miles of my house). I allow people to pay with their credit card using PayPal, and I have not had a problem with this either.
In my opinion, to get bidders and/or buyers on eBay with anything, the listing costs are pretty expensive in comparison to free (craigslist). It's now $20 extra to have your item on Featured items. I understand the cost but at least on craigslist my item is first right after I post it. That's "featured items" to me. eBay is going the way of the dinosaurs because of places like craigslist IMO unless it changes its ways. And due to negative feedback altogether about PayPal, I think this is sure to hurt them a lot more. I have never minded paying or being paid with PayPal, but it seems MANY others have.
I believe Wine, ReactOS, and MingW are using MSDN and "clean room reverse engineering" to develop (meaning a group writes documentation, another group implements). And they are well making sure that no code in the trees are taken from the leak of the Windows 2000 code a few years ago, and no code is written via direct reverse engineering Windows. This information MIGHT be helpful, but Microsoft is unpredictable when it comes to enforcing its patents and loves them. If I were on any of these teams, I would advise to stay away from this documentation until it is cleared with FSF that the licence is compatible with GPL (which I highly doubt it will be).
I remember being in elementary school (US) and all they had were of course classic Macs, this kind or something similar, because Apple gave a better bulk discount than IBM or clones at the time. In elementary school, we had quite a number of games that were tons of fun IMO and people ALWAYS wanted to play (including me). We had typing programmes as well. In about 3rd grade, we had these Macs, and the most popular games in class were Treasure Mountain! (very arithmetic-oriented, to the point where it would say something like "To continue: _ + 5 = 9") and Kid Pix Studio (again). Further in elementary school (when I had moved to a town where Dell donated computers; Windows 98 FE was the OS) I used Type to Learn; best touch-typing trainer I have ever seen for kids at least (I know people who STILL can't touch-type!). Type to Learn was also available for Mac, and my middle school had it on their Macs (which were mostly iMacs). Treasure Mountain! was also available for DOS and Windows (I only had a 386 "Enhanced" at home at the time). I also played Carmen Sandiego series games, which taught (just like the television programme) about earth geography.
Why is Kid Pix important? Hand-eye coordination. Treasure Mountain? Math. There were also lots of other math games too. But the problem is a lot of games that were supposed to be educational were generically made. The developers would create a template application that could be used for any subject, then just put what they need in (History, Art, Math, whatever). Lots of parents get fooled into buying these series of "games" for their kids who are struggling in school, and I know they suck for the most part.
What happened Apple? All the developers (The Learning Company especially) seemed to have left you. I doubt the reason is OS X, however. But I have to recall that when my school received new eMacs which all had OS X 10.2 already on them, the "great" school administrator decided to downgrade all of them to OS 9 because he thought OS X was too advanced an interface, whilst I was excited thinking we might have a stable OS on the computers at school up until that point.
Regardless, I think gaming for education can certainly be fun. Today, I still play around with Kid Pix every now and then. The stamps are just fun, and I even converted them to PNG for usage as icons on my computer for when I get around to creating an icon theme for KDE or Xfce. I even play Tuxmath every now and then (where simple math arithmetic falls down as ice/fireballs and you must evaluate before it hits the ground), just to speed up my arithmetic (and I am obviously much further than that). If I could find my copy of Treasure Mountain, I would definitely have played it again, even at age 19. It was that much fun, even if you have to do some math (simple multiplication and division) to get through it. My idea of at least a math teaching game is just that. Solve a problem and you get to move on. How else are kids going to learn math? This could even be applied to calculus. Imagine Treasure Mountain with calculus expressions to solve. "Solve this integral and you can move on", "get this derivative", "maximise profit given the following equation", etc.
A game could even do physics by having situations where you need to figure out the correct values using math. Wrong or right, you see the results (say, explosion and now you're dead or no explosion and you're alive). A simulator game that can violate laws in order to teach. Where are these games?
IMO, kids loved Kid Pix because of the "dynamite" eraser, which made an explosion sound. People love to hear explosion sounds.
Yes, another long post. Didn't mean to do it, I swear.
GIMP runs on nearly everything it can compile on (Windows, Linux, Mac, 64-bit versions as well). I don't care about this news because Adobe is irrelevant to me until they open up Flash or something open replaces Flash. I haven't used Photoshop in at least a few years now. GIMP has replaced Photoshop for me. I know there are a lot of people who will say Photoshop cannot be replaced with GIMP, but I disagree for what I do. In many aspects, I found some things easier to do in GIMP than in Photoshop. The only thing I would say that I miss from Photoshop is borders and shading option dialogue and the basic shapes you could easily make.
Yes, but most people actually wanted PDF to become an ISO standard. Adobe embraces the idea, and have since created a lot of competition against themselves, but they are willing to take this risk. So many people still think Acrobat is the only programme to produce PDFs, but there are so many out there, many are free, many are freeware, and many are FOSS (dvi2pdf and ps2pdf, for example). There is nothing bad about PDF in my opinion. Looking at blogs and documents, it looks like there was not any fiddling with the voting process. Today, I see more readers than just Adobe's and they run on every OS imaginable.
On the other hand, Microsoft is not willing to take this risk. They have purposely not changed anything in the format which was requested and this whole process was corrupted. We all know. That is how Microsoft operates. I am not saying 'Die MS Office forever' and I am not even saying 'Release the source or you're evil' like RMS. I am simply saying Microsoft should support real standards (ODF, a practical one, even PDF export in Word without a 3rd party plug-in), embrace having competition to compete against. They have had virtually none since they got their hands on DOS. Even if Intel could (and maybe it can), I am not sure it would buy out AMD simply because competition means motivation to progress (Adobe certainly knows this, stating in its own PDF format blog that you 'may still need to pay money to use quality [PDF creation] software'). Microsoft does not progress; it spits out the same thing every few years with 'new features' that nobody needs (Vista, Office 2007, even XP, etc). And what was their response to programme incompatibility? Something in an attempt to kill Java (.NET). There is no end to this 'kill all competition by all means necessary' attitude of Microsoft. I think Microsoft is scared to death about free software making it anywhere.
I'm glad that OpenOffice (and KOffice has plans to) supports reading and writing OOXML and all but I'm sure the implementation is not completely done yet. I also do not think the implementation can legally be entirely GPL/LGPL either. Personally, I write most of my documents, whether it be lab reports or research papers for English, in LaTeX, and generate DVIs and PDFs. If the teacher wants a digital copy I send a PDF. This is what makes PDF so great. I do not have to worry that their Office is going to say 'whoops, this binary piece was written wrong, display it wrong' when I do export in Writer, etc.
Sorry. What I meant to say was RISC-based PowerPC CPUs. They got to become cheap enough again to the point at which every PC is using them. Every current generation console (except PS3 which still uses an architecture similar to PowerPC) uses PowerPC or MIPS (ARM too). There must be a good reason for this.
but does anybody find it ironic that the comment links in the PDF are in DOC format?
From the box of Office 14
on
ISO Approves OOXML
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· Score: 3, Insightful
* Microsoft's own Open Office XML (OOXML) format is now an ISO standard. This means anyone with software capable of reading OOXML can can read your documents.
Translation: * Whilst OOXML is an ISO standard now, we still own the patents and the right to sue anyone who implements it (even if we issued a covenant not to sue; covenants mean nothing to Microsoft, just to let you know). Lastly, OOXML is open however we are only ones who know how to read the blob (binary) parts of the standard perfectly and no one else can.
Internal document at Microsoft: * Finally we have an ISO and ECMA standard, just so we can say to you that we care about the future of digital documents, when we really just want more money. Saying OOXML is an ISO standard is a great way to have businesses automatically approve of our standard. And now we can put ODF and its hopes and dreams in the dark. --- I am very disappointed in ISO, OSI, and ECMA. I held them with high regard, until they started approving standards and licences of a company that has been holding back the PC industry all to make a little more money. I will ignore the three bodies for now, until they withdraw their positions on these Microsoft entities.
When will MIPS-based-CPU desktops running Linux at high speeds (much faster than any x86 at the same clocked speed) take over the home PC market? x86 and even x86-64 are dying faster than we can count in my opinion the way things are going. --- (Written on Gentoo Linux 2.6.24.3 AMD64, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.13, KDE 3.5.8)
I'm imagining that so many of the failed installs are installations filled with crapware (spyware, adware, and bloatware (iTunes anyone?)). Microsoft's operating systems are hard to manage because of how easy it is to get software (including bad software), and how hard it often is to remove. There is no standard method of deployment (think apt or Portage), and there is no standard method of removal. It has been this way ever since DOS (just copy EXE's all you want to wherever and run wherever), but Linux and BSD distros always wanted a standard method deployment and removal (and generally bins are not linked to libs that are in the same directory). Even Apple has no real standard of deployment and removal (although the defacto standard seems to be make a DMG file and have it launch a simple programme where the user drags the programme folder to his Applications folder), but at the least they do not make it easy to trash the system (even Mac OS pre-X was better at managing software, just put it in the bin when you do not want it anymore, and that has not even changed in OS X).
Microsoft makes it way too easy to "trash" a system. Most tasks in Vista do not even ask for a password if they prompt you to check what your doing. I could have a system "dirty" within minutes and I know users could easily do that, however they would not even know. When any programme says it wants to add a service to Windows (one that will run in the background, slow down things possibly) or even a quick-starter, a user just thinks "whatever" it seems. I prefer to have my Windows light as possible (many disabled services and startup processes), but that is because I know how and know how to do it correctly. I think a lot of other people would prefer this if they had the knowledge and knew how to do it correctly. It is surprising Windows Defender has a piece where it handles startup entries, but users will generally have no idea what to disable and what is good to keep enabled. How do you teach this? Microsoft definitely does not want to get involved, unless it involves money (think Microsoft's certifications and A+, etc).
These "trashed" systems are exactly the ones that receive the BSODs or RSODs upon such a big update like SP1. But in a sense, I cannot blame the users entirely. They are having a bad OS forced down their throats as always and no real simple easy-to-read manual (that explains EVERYTHING) to come with it (and how many will go to the computer store? Next to 0? Then you guessed right).
To your post, "What?!" I write in XHTML and I write to standards (I always make sure my pages validate). I think the idea behind XHTML is for other devices besides web browsers to be able to get data from web pages. The Doctype at the top of the document tells the browser how to treat the page, and as you might already know there are thousands of pages that do not even have a doctype specified. I see the future of the web as being parseable, and XHTML allows a lot more than regular HTML where you can forget about tag ordering and even some tag endings (what's the parser to think then?). This is why a lot of programmes cannot yet just "get" data from whatever web site (because it's not easy to parse the page). XML is generally easy for a computer to parse through, and XHTML is just the HTML version of that. I think it's great and future-proof (even W3C says XHTML makes sites "future-proof", meaning ready to parse through easily, I think).
As you can see, my post is all about parsing data. This is SO important. Parsing data can be also through binary means or by guessing (which is how browsers engine's often render HTML), etc. If every page is XHTML, then there will not be any problems parsing data whether it's a browser, or just a programme getting some small bits of data from a page (like say a weather programme getting the temperatures from a weather site by parsing through the page and knowing what to look for).
"Web 2.0 is a bullshit buzzword made up to describe everything new that is happening on the web. It is mostly meaningless marketing speak. Treat it as such."
I agree, and thought this ever since I heard the term, so I hereby propose abolishment of the term.
Someone again try to explain to me the definition of web 2.0, and don't tell me flash.
I personally think it's the move of the entire web (the content that matters) to valid XHTML, CSS, etc (of course everything is controlled dynamically by PHP/Perl/whatever you want). I also hope there can be an open standard soon to do the same functionality that Youtube's Flash container that runs on everything and that everyone agrees upon. Silverlight is obviously closed and so is Flash. We need an open source mid-quality (and high-quality) video player that loads quickly and is OS-independent, just like Flash. I think that is all that is missing in this 'Web 2.0'.
Once again, on Slashdot, I say, 'who cares?' This is a Windows vulnerability and I thought Slashdot was an open source outlet for news and for some stories that people so-called 'care about', not Windows vulnerabilities. Yeah sure, every time a Windows Vista (which is always negative, in fact every Microsoft story is negative) story comes out and we can bash all we want and everything, and same for a story similar to this, but this is getting old. It has gotten old. I do not feel the need to bash Microsoft any more, they're going whatever which way they are, bad or not.
I know the poster of this story certainly feels like 'this'll definitely get them started', or whatever. Not me. I could go on and on all day about the mistakes that I feel Microsoft is making right now and past mistakes that are causing all these issues of now, but nothing is going to change substantially until we stop bashing and start pushing open source software usage, if that is what we care about. I am not going to waste much time bashing Microsoft.
I need not go any further than 'Windows + security = joke'. We already know that. That makes this news old. I do not care about this news because I, like most other 'power computer users', know how to use Windows 'properly' enough to not run into these vulnerabilities. Besides, don't we use Linux most of the time anyway? (I know I do.)
All I'm saying is, Slashdot has no need to post these stories about vulnerabilities in Windows or Mac. If stories are going to be related at all to Windows or Mac, then it should have to do with open source. Apple praise/Microsoft bashing is old. Soon enough, if Apple takes over the market, it will become Apple bashing. We all know this. Apple is easily able to be just anti-open-source as Microsoft.
We want open source OS's (Linux, FreeBSD, Syllable, etc) to be the most-used, don't we? Well, posting stories like this just to point and laugh at Microsoft makes the open source community look very pretentious, like looking at a 'Windows admin' and laughing at them because they do not know basic UNIX commands. How about this: teach, do not laugh. It is the only way to get those people on our side.
All I know is AMD made a bad decision when buying ATI because now they have to fix all the mistakes made by them (which of course, caused their demise), and then attempt to fix their own (which I don't think they have many, but I think things like the number of plants (of which there are 2 AFAIK) are important things for them to think about. ATI always and still does make bad drivers for both Windows and Linux (so much so that people hack ATI drivers on Windows to make them better), and only for a very short time withstood the power that nVidia has on the market. nVidia IS the standard whether we like it or not. I hope only good comes from released specs on the ATI cards (and I hope mine is better supported in Linux, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M), but if nVidia releases theirs as a result, AMD loses big time yet again. nVidia is the Sony of video card to all enthusiasts. (Hopefully though open specs of hardware will become a PC market standard.) I hope AMD doesn't die because I tried EM64T and I don't think it is nearly as good as true AMD64 (which is what I'm using with Linux). In the event that the future of AMD looks bad, will it be Intel or IBM that buys them out? Honestly, I hope it's IBM because Intel will destroy everything about AMD that made it often "the better alternative." We wouldn't see the AMD name ever again. With IBM, it might stay a company but a subsidiary. Again, I would hope for the latter, but I truly hope AMD can recover from its losses. I know I'll keep buying AMD while it lasts. AMD64 architecture is the best x86-64 implementation. Remember how far Itaninum went? Intel now has EM64T as their implementation of x86-64 because backward compatibility is extremely important when it comes to what binaries you can run on an architecture WITHOUT emulation (the Itanium uses emulation for 32-bit).
And again with backwards compatibility, did Apple care that people may have wanted to run classic apps on the Intel Macs? I would say no. Microsoft should do the same, and their security problems are solved. It's been said a thousand times: Microsoft should make old apps run in a special compatibility mode that uses no libraries or executables from the main system to avoid security issues (they should have a lot of versions of DLLs and executables included with Windows for backward compatibility in this mode).
Intel not caring about backward compatibility and not even caring about the future of x86-64 was a bad decision outright. AMD is going to last if they can keep their AMD64 architecture extremely solid and push for it to be used (even by Windows).
Well, clients should set a default upload speed, something like 20 KB/s because most people leave it set to 0 (infinite) and have no idea how to change it. Most clients I've seen set upload to 0 (infinite) by default, which is insane.
I get that all the time. It just says "Directory listing not allowed" and I click refresh, and then five minutes later it's back. It's getting to be ridiculous.
I choose OpenOffice over Office (previously long-time user of Office), GIMP over Photoshop (also previously long-time user of Photoshop), etc.
Nothing wrong with non-Microsoft products. I still use Windows here and there for a few programmes, and games, but I'm 90% of the time on Linux. Web design is easier on Linux, application development is easier, and everything is much more streamlined to me.
This would be great. I was actually hoping Vista would be this way. But instead Vista breaks a lot of compatibility, and checks if your copy is "valid" EVERY TIME you boot. Luckily on XP, you do not need that software (WGA) installed.
I cannot say I care much about Vista breaking compatibility if the APIs were simply not secure, or 'dangerous'. Far too many programmes in the past have used these 'dangerous' APIs that were undocumented (found through reverse-engineering). I still blame Microsoft for not giving API information out properly to developers.
I agree they should make a classic mode, but there are so many workarounds put in the Windows API that of course it is buggy. In the leaked 2000 code, there were comments all over about very specific (old) programmes that people (businesses) might still use.
I can see the problem: security vs compatibility with old software (especially software no longer supported that businesses cannot just simply upgrade). Microsoft is having big trouble there. For some strange reason they get criticised every time they break a compatibility. Apple does not; no classic applications can run on new Macs (x86-based) natively and nobody seems to be complaining. Microsoft's user base EXPECTS nearly 100% compatibility with EVERY Windows application from 3.1 to now.
Next version of Windows should be much similar to today's (no DRM, no WGA, no reboots on updates EVER, no locking files just because they are in use unless absolutely necessary), but IMO it should have Windows 98 and XP (SP1 and SP2) files located somewhere safe with blocked writing or accessing without password input from an administrator. All programmes that run in these modes should be well-protected from the operating system's programmes. And of course it should protect its own files as well the same way. All programmes for it should be entirely written from scratch with a new Win64 API (Microsoft should get companies like Adobe and EA to make 'launch titles', just like a video game console), also written from scratch with security in mind throughout the whole way. It would be like a whole new Windows, marketed the same way OS X was, as new and perhaps not compatible but why care since it will be much more secure and stable? Software almost always needs a complete rewrite EVENTUALLY, as much as Microsoft does not want to believe it.
Eventually, that old software will be replaced (with newer software, better software, etc) or found to be not needed IMO, much like on OS X people see no need for the classic application much any more. Far ahead in the future, Microsoft can entirely remove the compatibility layer thus an even more secure operating system if made properly.
The documentation for this API should be EXTREMELY well-documented (no hidden functions, etc), and given to everyone at no cost. When the API changes significantly (functions become deprecated due to security concerns, etc), release new information immediately to developers on a mailing list (yes, Microsoft, a mailing list) so that they can update their software. These changes should only occur on service packs, and software that will not be updated should run in a compatibility mode with the older version of the OS.
That is the only way IMO that Microsoft can succeed. Apple still sells a mostly closed OS, so obviously selling an OS still works. Microsoft perhaps should not charge so much, but I would say they could charge more than Apple for this one, because it would be a LOT of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I say, 'too fucking bad for them'. These are the people we don't want using FOSS. IMO, not everyone is welcome. Sorry.
I've had my PayPal account for a long time and I have not run into any problems whatsoever. I have done so many transactions (including $1,000's) with it. I do not know how all those things paypalsucks.com happened, but none have happened to me, and it has been years.
What I have changed over the past year or so is to stop doing stuff on eBay and just use craigslist. Most of the time, people pay in cash and are very friendly. I have not had problems with it, although I still get nervous every time I decide to do a delivery (I deliver if they live within 15 miles of my house). I allow people to pay with their credit card using PayPal, and I have not had a problem with this either.
In my opinion, to get bidders and/or buyers on eBay with anything, the listing costs are pretty expensive in comparison to free (craigslist). It's now $20 extra to have your item on Featured items. I understand the cost but at least on craigslist my item is first right after I post it. That's "featured items" to me. eBay is going the way of the dinosaurs because of places like craigslist IMO unless it changes its ways. And due to negative feedback altogether about PayPal, I think this is sure to hurt them a lot more. I have never minded paying or being paid with PayPal, but it seems MANY others have.
Right. Go to MSDN and try browsing. Microsoft is obsessed with an expanding tree design for MSDN. It's awful. Imagine if they just used Doxygen.
I believe Wine, ReactOS, and MingW are using MSDN and "clean room reverse engineering" to develop (meaning a group writes documentation, another group implements). And they are well making sure that no code in the trees are taken from the leak of the Windows 2000 code a few years ago, and no code is written via direct reverse engineering Windows. This information MIGHT be helpful, but Microsoft is unpredictable when it comes to enforcing its patents and loves them. If I were on any of these teams, I would advise to stay away from this documentation until it is cleared with FSF that the licence is compatible with GPL (which I highly doubt it will be).
I remember being in elementary school (US) and all they had were of course classic Macs, this kind or something similar, because Apple gave a better bulk discount than IBM or clones at the time. In elementary school, we had quite a number of games that were tons of fun IMO and people ALWAYS wanted to play (including me). We had typing programmes as well. In about 3rd grade, we had these Macs, and the most popular games in class were Treasure Mountain! (very arithmetic-oriented, to the point where it would say something like "To continue: _ + 5 = 9") and Kid Pix Studio (again). Further in elementary school (when I had moved to a town where Dell donated computers; Windows 98 FE was the OS) I used Type to Learn; best touch-typing trainer I have ever seen for kids at least (I know people who STILL can't touch-type!). Type to Learn was also available for Mac, and my middle school had it on their Macs (which were mostly iMacs). Treasure Mountain! was also available for DOS and Windows (I only had a 386 "Enhanced" at home at the time). I also played Carmen Sandiego series games, which taught (just like the television programme) about earth geography.
Why is Kid Pix important? Hand-eye coordination. Treasure Mountain? Math. There were also lots of other math games too. But the problem is a lot of games that were supposed to be educational were generically made. The developers would create a template application that could be used for any subject, then just put what they need in (History, Art, Math, whatever). Lots of parents get fooled into buying these series of "games" for their kids who are struggling in school, and I know they suck for the most part.
What happened Apple? All the developers (The Learning Company especially) seemed to have left you. I doubt the reason is OS X, however. But I have to recall that when my school received new eMacs which all had OS X 10.2 already on them, the "great" school administrator decided to downgrade all of them to OS 9 because he thought OS X was too advanced an interface, whilst I was excited thinking we might have a stable OS on the computers at school up until that point.
Regardless, I think gaming for education can certainly be fun. Today, I still play around with Kid Pix every now and then. The stamps are just fun, and I even converted them to PNG for usage as icons on my computer for when I get around to creating an icon theme for KDE or Xfce. I even play Tuxmath every now and then (where simple math arithmetic falls down as ice/fireballs and you must evaluate before it hits the ground), just to speed up my arithmetic (and I am obviously much further than that). If I could find my copy of Treasure Mountain, I would definitely have played it again, even at age 19. It was that much fun, even if you have to do some math (simple multiplication and division) to get through it. My idea of at least a math teaching game is just that. Solve a problem and you get to move on. How else are kids going to learn math? This could even be applied to calculus. Imagine Treasure Mountain with calculus expressions to solve. "Solve this integral and you can move on", "get this derivative", "maximise profit given the following equation", etc.
A game could even do physics by having situations where you need to figure out the correct values using math. Wrong or right, you see the results (say, explosion and now you're dead or no explosion and you're alive). A simulator game that can violate laws in order to teach. Where are these games?
IMO, kids loved Kid Pix because of the "dynamite" eraser, which made an explosion sound. People love to hear explosion sounds.
Yes, another long post. Didn't mean to do it, I swear.
People actually listen to Mythbusters?
GIMP runs on nearly everything it can compile on (Windows, Linux, Mac, 64-bit versions as well). I don't care about this news because Adobe is irrelevant to me until they open up Flash or something open replaces Flash. I haven't used Photoshop in at least a few years now. GIMP has replaced Photoshop for me. I know there are a lot of people who will say Photoshop cannot be replaced with GIMP, but I disagree for what I do. In many aspects, I found some things easier to do in GIMP than in Photoshop. The only thing I would say that I miss from Photoshop is borders and shading option dialogue and the basic shapes you could easily make.
When I read Web 2.0 in the description, I had total disregard for this entire post.
Yes, but most people actually wanted PDF to become an ISO standard. Adobe embraces the idea, and have since created a lot of competition against themselves, but they are willing to take this risk. So many people still think Acrobat is the only programme to produce PDFs, but there are so many out there, many are free, many are freeware, and many are FOSS (dvi2pdf and ps2pdf, for example). There is nothing bad about PDF in my opinion. Looking at blogs and documents, it looks like there was not any fiddling with the voting process. Today, I see more readers than just Adobe's and they run on every OS imaginable.
On the other hand, Microsoft is not willing to take this risk. They have purposely not changed anything in the format which was requested and this whole process was corrupted. We all know. That is how Microsoft operates. I am not saying 'Die MS Office forever' and I am not even saying 'Release the source or you're evil' like RMS. I am simply saying Microsoft should support real standards (ODF, a practical one, even PDF export in Word without a 3rd party plug-in), embrace having competition to compete against. They have had virtually none since they got their hands on DOS. Even if Intel could (and maybe it can), I am not sure it would buy out AMD simply because competition means motivation to progress (Adobe certainly knows this, stating in its own PDF format blog that you 'may still need to pay money to use quality [PDF creation] software'). Microsoft does not progress; it spits out the same thing every few years with 'new features' that nobody needs (Vista, Office 2007, even XP, etc). And what was their response to programme incompatibility? Something in an attempt to kill Java (.NET). There is no end to this 'kill all competition by all means necessary' attitude of Microsoft. I think Microsoft is scared to death about free software making it anywhere.
I'm glad that OpenOffice (and KOffice has plans to) supports reading and writing OOXML and all but I'm sure the implementation is not completely done yet. I also do not think the implementation can legally be entirely GPL/LGPL either. Personally, I write most of my documents, whether it be lab reports or research papers for English, in LaTeX, and generate DVIs and PDFs. If the teacher wants a digital copy I send a PDF. This is what makes PDF so great. I do not have to worry that their Office is going to say 'whoops, this binary piece was written wrong, display it wrong' when I do export in Writer, etc.
Sorry. What I meant to say was RISC-based PowerPC CPUs. They got to become cheap enough again to the point at which every PC is using them. Every current generation console (except PS3 which still uses an architecture similar to PowerPC) uses PowerPC or MIPS (ARM too). There must be a good reason for this.
PDF is an open standard by the way...
but does anybody find it ironic that the comment links in the PDF are in DOC format?
* Microsoft's own Open Office XML (OOXML) format is now an ISO standard. This means anyone with software capable of reading OOXML can can read your documents.
Translation:
* Whilst OOXML is an ISO standard now, we still own the patents and the right to sue anyone who implements it (even if we issued a covenant not to sue; covenants mean nothing to Microsoft, just to let you know). Lastly, OOXML is open however we are only ones who know how to read the blob (binary) parts of the standard perfectly and no one else can.
Internal document at Microsoft:
* Finally we have an ISO and ECMA standard, just so we can say to you that we care about the future of digital documents, when we really just want more money. Saying OOXML is an ISO standard is a great way to have businesses automatically approve of our standard. And now we can put ODF and its hopes and dreams in the dark.
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I am very disappointed in ISO, OSI, and ECMA. I held them with high regard, until they started approving standards and licences of a company that has been holding back the PC industry all to make a little more money. I will ignore the three bodies for now, until they withdraw their positions on these Microsoft entities.
When will MIPS-based-CPU desktops running Linux at high speeds (much faster than any x86 at the same clocked speed) take over the home PC market? x86 and even x86-64 are dying faster than we can count in my opinion the way things are going.
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(Written on Gentoo Linux 2.6.24.3 AMD64, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.13, KDE 3.5.8)
What? Nobody on /. has a girlfriend!
I'm imagining that so many of the failed installs are installations filled with crapware (spyware, adware, and bloatware (iTunes anyone?)). Microsoft's operating systems are hard to manage because of how easy it is to get software (including bad software), and how hard it often is to remove. There is no standard method of deployment (think apt or Portage), and there is no standard method of removal. It has been this way ever since DOS (just copy EXE's all you want to wherever and run wherever), but Linux and BSD distros always wanted a standard method deployment and removal (and generally bins are not linked to libs that are in the same directory). Even Apple has no real standard of deployment and removal (although the defacto standard seems to be make a DMG file and have it launch a simple programme where the user drags the programme folder to his Applications folder), but at the least they do not make it easy to trash the system (even Mac OS pre-X was better at managing software, just put it in the bin when you do not want it anymore, and that has not even changed in OS X).
Microsoft makes it way too easy to "trash" a system. Most tasks in Vista do not even ask for a password if they prompt you to check what your doing. I could have a system "dirty" within minutes and I know users could easily do that, however they would not even know. When any programme says it wants to add a service to Windows (one that will run in the background, slow down things possibly) or even a quick-starter, a user just thinks "whatever" it seems. I prefer to have my Windows light as possible (many disabled services and startup processes), but that is because I know how and know how to do it correctly. I think a lot of other people would prefer this if they had the knowledge and knew how to do it correctly. It is surprising Windows Defender has a piece where it handles startup entries, but users will generally have no idea what to disable and what is good to keep enabled. How do you teach this? Microsoft definitely does not want to get involved, unless it involves money (think Microsoft's certifications and A+, etc).
These "trashed" systems are exactly the ones that receive the BSODs or RSODs upon such a big update like SP1. But in a sense, I cannot blame the users entirely. They are having a bad OS forced down their throats as always and no real simple easy-to-read manual (that explains EVERYTHING) to come with it (and how many will go to the computer store? Next to 0? Then you guessed right).
Uh...it's called Ubuntu. It's already out there. It just does not seem so bloated.
To your post, "What?!" I write in XHTML and I write to standards (I always make sure my pages validate). I think the idea behind XHTML is for other devices besides web browsers to be able to get data from web pages. The Doctype at the top of the document tells the browser how to treat the page, and as you might already know there are thousands of pages that do not even have a doctype specified. I see the future of the web as being parseable, and XHTML allows a lot more than regular HTML where you can forget about tag ordering and even some tag endings (what's the parser to think then?). This is why a lot of programmes cannot yet just "get" data from whatever web site (because it's not easy to parse the page). XML is generally easy for a computer to parse through, and XHTML is just the HTML version of that. I think it's great and future-proof (even W3C says XHTML makes sites "future-proof", meaning ready to parse through easily, I think).
As you can see, my post is all about parsing data. This is SO important. Parsing data can be also through binary means or by guessing (which is how browsers engine's often render HTML), etc. If every page is XHTML, then there will not be any problems parsing data whether it's a browser, or just a programme getting some small bits of data from a page (like say a weather programme getting the temperatures from a weather site by parsing through the page and knowing what to look for).
"Web 2.0 is a bullshit buzzword made up to describe everything new that is happening on the web. It is mostly meaningless marketing speak. Treat it as such."
I agree, and thought this ever since I heard the term, so I hereby propose abolishment of the term.
Someone again try to explain to me the definition of web 2.0, and don't tell me flash.
I personally think it's the move of the entire web (the content that matters) to valid XHTML, CSS, etc (of course everything is controlled dynamically by PHP/Perl/whatever you want). I also hope there can be an open standard soon to do the same functionality that Youtube's Flash container that runs on everything and that everyone agrees upon. Silverlight is obviously closed and so is Flash. We need an open source mid-quality (and high-quality) video player that loads quickly and is OS-independent, just like Flash. I think that is all that is missing in this 'Web 2.0'.
Once again, on Slashdot, I say, 'who cares?' This is a Windows vulnerability and I thought Slashdot was an open source outlet for news and for some stories that people so-called 'care about', not Windows vulnerabilities. Yeah sure, every time a Windows Vista (which is always negative, in fact every Microsoft story is negative) story comes out and we can bash all we want and everything, and same for a story similar to this, but this is getting old. It has gotten old. I do not feel the need to bash Microsoft any more, they're going whatever which way they are, bad or not.
I know the poster of this story certainly feels like 'this'll definitely get them started', or whatever. Not me. I could go on and on all day about the mistakes that I feel Microsoft is making right now and past mistakes that are causing all these issues of now, but nothing is going to change substantially until we stop bashing and start pushing open source software usage, if that is what we care about. I am not going to waste much time bashing Microsoft.
I need not go any further than 'Windows + security = joke'. We already know that. That makes this news old. I do not care about this news because I, like most other 'power computer users', know how to use Windows 'properly' enough to not run into these vulnerabilities. Besides, don't we use Linux most of the time anyway? (I know I do.)
All I'm saying is, Slashdot has no need to post these stories about vulnerabilities in Windows or Mac. If stories are going to be related at all to Windows or Mac, then it should have to do with open source. Apple praise/Microsoft bashing is old. Soon enough, if Apple takes over the market, it will become Apple bashing. We all know this. Apple is easily able to be just anti-open-source as Microsoft.
We want open source OS's (Linux, FreeBSD, Syllable, etc) to be the most-used, don't we? Well, posting stories like this just to point and laugh at Microsoft makes the open source community look very pretentious, like looking at a 'Windows admin' and laughing at them because they do not know basic UNIX commands. How about this: teach, do not laugh. It is the only way to get those people on our side.
All I know is AMD made a bad decision when buying ATI because now they have to fix all the mistakes made by them (which of course, caused their demise), and then attempt to fix their own (which I don't think they have many, but I think things like the number of plants (of which there are 2 AFAIK) are important things for them to think about. ATI always and still does make bad drivers for both Windows and Linux (so much so that people hack ATI drivers on Windows to make them better), and only for a very short time withstood the power that nVidia has on the market. nVidia IS the standard whether we like it or not. I hope only good comes from released specs on the ATI cards (and I hope mine is better supported in Linux, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M), but if nVidia releases theirs as a result, AMD loses big time yet again. nVidia is the Sony of video card to all enthusiasts. (Hopefully though open specs of hardware will become a PC market standard.) I hope AMD doesn't die because I tried EM64T and I don't think it is nearly as good as true AMD64 (which is what I'm using with Linux). In the event that the future of AMD looks bad, will it be Intel or IBM that buys them out? Honestly, I hope it's IBM because Intel will destroy everything about AMD that made it often "the better alternative." We wouldn't see the AMD name ever again. With IBM, it might stay a company but a subsidiary. Again, I would hope for the latter, but I truly hope AMD can recover from its losses. I know I'll keep buying AMD while it lasts. AMD64 architecture is the best x86-64 implementation. Remember how far Itaninum went? Intel now has EM64T as their implementation of x86-64 because backward compatibility is extremely important when it comes to what binaries you can run on an architecture WITHOUT emulation (the Itanium uses emulation for 32-bit).
And again with backwards compatibility, did Apple care that people may have wanted to run classic apps on the Intel Macs? I would say no. Microsoft should do the same, and their security problems are solved. It's been said a thousand times: Microsoft should make old apps run in a special compatibility mode that uses no libraries or executables from the main system to avoid security issues (they should have a lot of versions of DLLs and executables included with Windows for backward compatibility in this mode).
Intel not caring about backward compatibility and not even caring about the future of x86-64 was a bad decision outright. AMD is going to last if they can keep their AMD64 architecture extremely solid and push for it to be used (even by Windows).
I'm sure vLite will be able to do it.
Well, clients should set a default upload speed, something like 20 KB/s because most people leave it set to 0 (infinite) and have no idea how to change it. Most clients I've seen set upload to 0 (infinite) by default, which is insane.
I get that all the time. It just says "Directory listing not allowed" and I click refresh, and then five minutes later it's back. It's getting to be ridiculous.
Gentoo Linux -> KDE -> Firefox here.
I choose OpenOffice over Office (previously long-time user of Office), GIMP over Photoshop (also previously long-time user of Photoshop), etc.
Nothing wrong with non-Microsoft products. I still use Windows here and there for a few programmes, and games, but I'm 90% of the time on Linux. Web design is easier on Linux, application development is easier, and everything is much more streamlined to me.
This would be great. I was actually hoping Vista would be this way. But instead Vista breaks a lot of compatibility, and checks if your copy is "valid" EVERY TIME you boot. Luckily on XP, you do not need that software (WGA) installed.
I cannot say I care much about Vista breaking compatibility if the APIs were simply not secure, or 'dangerous'. Far too many programmes in the past have used these 'dangerous' APIs that were undocumented (found through reverse-engineering). I still blame Microsoft for not giving API information out properly to developers.
I agree they should make a classic mode, but there are so many workarounds put in the Windows API that of course it is buggy. In the leaked 2000 code, there were comments all over about very specific (old) programmes that people (businesses) might still use.
I can see the problem: security vs compatibility with old software (especially software no longer supported that businesses cannot just simply upgrade). Microsoft is having big trouble there. For some strange reason they get criticised every time they break a compatibility. Apple does not; no classic applications can run on new Macs (x86-based) natively and nobody seems to be complaining. Microsoft's user base EXPECTS nearly 100% compatibility with EVERY Windows application from 3.1 to now.
Next version of Windows should be much similar to today's (no DRM, no WGA, no reboots on updates EVER, no locking files just because they are in use unless absolutely necessary), but IMO it should have Windows 98 and XP (SP1 and SP2) files located somewhere safe with blocked writing or accessing without password input from an administrator. All programmes that run in these modes should be well-protected from the operating system's programmes. And of course it should protect its own files as well the same way. All programmes for it should be entirely written from scratch with a new Win64 API (Microsoft should get companies like Adobe and EA to make 'launch titles', just like a video game console), also written from scratch with security in mind throughout the whole way. It would be like a whole new Windows, marketed the same way OS X was, as new and perhaps not compatible but why care since it will be much more secure and stable? Software almost always needs a complete rewrite EVENTUALLY, as much as Microsoft does not want to believe it.
Eventually, that old software will be replaced (with newer software, better software, etc) or found to be not needed IMO, much like on OS X people see no need for the classic application much any more. Far ahead in the future, Microsoft can entirely remove the compatibility layer thus an even more secure operating system if made properly.
The documentation for this API should be EXTREMELY well-documented (no hidden functions, etc), and given to everyone at no cost. When the API changes significantly (functions become deprecated due to security concerns, etc), release new information immediately to developers on a mailing list (yes, Microsoft, a mailing list) so that they can update their software. These changes should only occur on service packs, and software that will not be updated should run in a compatibility mode with the older version of the OS.
That is the only way IMO that Microsoft can succeed. Apple still sells a mostly closed OS, so obviously selling an OS still works. Microsoft perhaps should not charge so much, but I would say they could charge more than Apple for this one, because it would be a LOT of work.