Vista isn't exactly the first big time flop Microsoft have had. Windows ME was unreliable rubbish that offered little benefit over 98 and was a huge flop. XP which followed it up was a huge success and, is a good, solid, reliable OS (despite all the venom directed at it).
Windows 7 has had glowing reports from everyone I know who's installed the beta and they find it incredibly fast, reliable and easy to use and that's only a beta> Microsoft have gone through every major critisism of Vista and fixed it or taken a better approach to it.
The only thing that was 'wrong' with Vista that currently remains is the DRM but that was a whole load of FUD to begin with. Don't want DRM? Don't buy DRM protected content that won't play on software without the DRM features Vista has.
As for no need to upgrade, XP is approaching the end of its lifespan, it's not designed for technologies such as SSDs nor is it really designed for Netbooks (the only reason it runs well on them is because XP was designed to run on 500mhz systems with 512mb ram). software is starting to hit the 4gb ram limit of 32bit OS' and it's not going to be worth spending a lot of time and money 'upgrading' to xp 64 when it would cost them little extra to upgrade to 7.
Shortened version: When MS last had an OS flop, they followed it up with their most successful OS ever.
The problem with free hardware designs ( I'm at loathe to use the term OS HW because it makes no sense and frankly, it reaks of abusing buzzwords) is that there's no point other than hobbyist interest.
Stuff like the Open Moko... It's expensive, not well designed and horribly lacking in features. I can't even build it myself. When Windows mobile and Android have a lot of leeway with software development, there's little reason for the handset.
Likewise stuff like MP3 players. I can buy a 1gig player from Tescos for £7 if I want a low quality player. It does have the building element but frankly, I'd get as much fun out of modifying an existing player. Would be less likely to fry components or even cause a battery to blow up due to my poor electronic skills.
What we need are people to find gaps in the market. How about designs for an ARM based media centre that can cope with HD output. Currently the only HD Media player around under £100 is the Western Digital one. Rather than looking for markets where there are endless solutions for hardware enthusiasts to tweak, give them a chance to get a product they otherwise wouldn't be able to get for that money.
Because Microsoft, amazingly enough, realised there were going to be plenty of cheapo DX10 cards which aren't fully featured, it would run the unsupported elements using DX9 functions or emulation taking a visual or performance hit. These hacks almost certainly cause DirectX to look at your DX10 card in XP and all it will be able to see is a cheapo card which can't handle a lot of functions.
With XP you're never going to have full DX10 support. The kernel can't physically do a lot of the functions itself. With DX10, Microsoft wanted to give developers a whole new framework without having to worry about legacy DX code.
Get someone to code a tech demo comprised of nothing but DX10 specific functions (the large texture sizes etc.) and you'll be able see the difference. It's hard to tell the difference at the moment because stuff like Crysis implements DX10 poorly.
How the hell did you come to that conclusion? It's a software driver. To the OS it's probably little difference than a hardware driver.
DX10 cannot run properly on XP, for one thing it can't do the the sound (Vista has an extra software layer designed to prevent crappy sound drivers crashing the system). What you're doing it Forcing DX10 and It looks at your system, see loads of features it can't do and puts it in a compatibility mode with lots of DX9 filling all the gaps.
You can hack these things into any OS you wish but unless an OS is designed around these features, you have to put in extra software layers and code yourself in knots. The end result will be a slow, buggy implementation.
You can fool yourself by pretending that because you can hack a game famed for it's inefficient coding and poor implementation of DX10 to give you a game that's dx9.5 and tell you it's dx10, that XP can do dx10 without issue but it won't be correct.
How dare MS maximise compatibility for Windows 7 and implement what will be a handy feature for low end systems, particularly netbooks (it's the chipset that draws all the power in atom based systems, not the CPU).
Improving performance over a dedicated graphics chip (albeit a weak one) is still a respectable achievement, especially when you consider games typically use ~100% cpu anyway. Whilst it may be unplayable for crysis, I can see it giving a solid frame rate on things like WoW.
London is footing the vast majority of the bill through council taxes. Also London generates some £25billion more in tax money than it receives from the government.
You get so many large areas that are underdeveloped because the north whines so much when there are developments in London that no politician wants to start projects.
We're one of the few countries where people seem ashamed and angry at the prospect of having a capital city we can be proud of. Could you imagine France letting Paris slide so they can build up lille? Italy not spending on Rome to develop Turin?
Sometimes it would be nice for people to have some national pride rather than going "me me me!" all the time.
And? An open market means they're free to price their goods at whatever they want to whoever they want and people can choose to buy or not buy at those prices. It has nothing to do with making their quotes confidential.
It's pretty hard for a single company to be a cartel or fix prices by themselves in a competative industry.
I thought this was pretty much standard in a large number of industries, especially when contracts are involved.
If your prices become well known, you leave yourself open to being undercut or pissing off other customers who weren't as good at negotiating a deal. Conversely, if you're making a bid for an exclusive licence and the amount you're bidding becomes public, a rival can come in and bid slightly higher to sabotage you.
>>Since the Olympics were installed people are MORE fat than ever, not less. The Olympics have done nothing of what you claim.
Ah, you're clearly from the future, can you tell me what the year 2012 is like? I assume the world didn't end...
>>The fact that we are both sitting here with college degrees, and now contributing back to society with our respective design expertise, belies that claim. Schools contribute for the simple reason that people walk into kindergarten going "duh" and they come out with the ability to read, write, and do basic math (or go onto college).
Never said education wasn't important. It's just there's a point where money becomes wasted. For example you could spend £500,000 and get everyone in the school a £300 laptop. Alternatively you could then increase the budget to £1mill and buy people faster £600 laptops. The benefit the first 500k provides would be huge, the benefit the second 500k provides would be minor at best. If you budget the money it will be spent, however, the more you budget, the less value you tend to get.
It seems unlikely that if you build more and better sports facilities that people will use them?
The whole country will benefit. There's nowhere in the UK that's more than a day's driving or a 1 hour plane journey away from London. Besides, Londoners are paying the vast majority of the costs, why the hell shouldn't they benefit? Were Londoners whining when Manchester got the commonwealth games (which were paid for by the whole country with no council tax rises). Besides, tax from tourism in London benefits the whole country. London as a whole is grossly underfunded compared to other cities in terms of spending per capita and spending to tax revenue ratio
The Olympics create a whole infra-structure, not just a handful of stadia. The olympic village gets converted into housing, you can easily convert one of the buildings or areas into shopping complexesm you have excellent public transport. The Jubilee line is getting more work done to it and there's the crosslink project to create a new rail line through london.
The increased funding has gone almost entirely on wages, they're not compensating for the underfunding (they've had 10 years to do that), it's being inefficiently run. I don't buy the "but thatcher..." crap anymore. If you can't fix something in 10 years, you're the one to blame.
The olympics encourage people to take up sports and get fit. That lowers the strain on the NHS and has all sorts of benefits for people.
They promote tourism. Before and during the olympics there will be countless documentaries around the world showing off the UK. This provides a insane amount of tourist cash during the Olympics but also provides a boost that can last years as people decide to try their holiday here.
It's developing an area of London that has been run down for decade. No money has been spent on it because there's a perception (especially among northerners) that London gets too much money spent. The olympic village will provide the backbone of a new London town and regenerate the area.
Finally, you can pump as much money as you want into schools and research and it tends to dissapear into a black hole. These institutions have a habbit of spending money with few noticable gains. Just look at the money pumped into the NHS, most of it has gone on middle management and new contracts for doctors (more money for less work).
It means most of the work will be done on laptops. laptops use around 1/10th the power of desktops. Not to mention they won't be on 24/7, unlike public terminals.
The photo evidence they show isn't convincing on that front. The wound on the top is still healing and tender but the wound on the bottom is mostly healed but with that ugly crater.
You'll have to forgive me for not reading through every single comment...
A clean cut can heal in a way that has minimal impact. When you melt flesh you're doing lasting, siginificant changes that doesn't really heal. You'll change a thin white line that fades with a tan to a large pink splotch on the skin that won't really ever go away.
None of those things are 'basic rights'. Thinking you have automatic rights to those things is the kind of attitude I was parodying.
Having companies or people open source their software when not required (ie due to infringements or legislation) should always be treated as a generous act.
*company releases software*
*People complain it's not on linux*
*company ports software to linux*
*people complain it's not OSS*
*company GPLs software*
*people complain it's not GPLv3*
*company forces a GPL2 or later licence*
*people complain that the company has a trademarked logo*
*company curls up in the corner, quietly sobbing*
*people complain that the design of the corner it's crying in isn't covered by creative commons*
No it isn't. Unless of course you assume that for every bug hackers flip a coin and go "heads, I'll write an exploit for this".
40% accuracy in predicting with no false negatives? There are plenty of distaster agencies around the world who would be incredibly pleased with that kind of accuracy
There is a view with OSS that "you should be greatful with what others have done otherwise code it yourself" Which to some extent is true. You should be thankful that these hubs and support sites are provided or supported by the authors.
Unfortunately this can only run so far. If you're a business and you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later, that can work out to be very expensive.
Likewise if you're a student and a paper is due but you can't complete it due to a bug/error and the support section for the program you've used no longer exists, it's a big issue.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software and usually commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete (not always, companies go bust, get taken over etc.). It's no good software being free if lack of support means you waste a fortune on wages trying to fix issues.
Two possible solutions: OSS developers give in and run ads on their sites (it's not hard to find unobstrusive ads with acceptable rates nowadays) or owners of sites are given incentives to hand over control of their sites to a central OSS archive where you can at least get snapshots of support forums and wikis, as well as the downloads and source.
That is incredibly difficult. you'd need to hook up each individual vein and artery (with the flow going in the correct direction) and get the pressure spot on else you'll either damage the veins or just fill up the finger like a balloon.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 has had glowing reports from everyone I know who's installed the beta and they find it incredibly fast, reliable and easy to use and that's only a beta> Microsoft have gone through every major critisism of Vista and fixed it or taken a better approach to it.
The only thing that was 'wrong' with Vista that currently remains is the DRM but that was a whole load of FUD to begin with. Don't want DRM? Don't buy DRM protected content that won't play on software without the DRM features Vista has.
As for no need to upgrade, XP is approaching the end of its lifespan, it's not designed for technologies such as SSDs nor is it really designed for Netbooks (the only reason it runs well on them is because XP was designed to run on 500mhz systems with 512mb ram). software is starting to hit the 4gb ram limit of 32bit OS' and it's not going to be worth spending a lot of time and money 'upgrading' to xp 64 when it would cost them little extra to upgrade to 7.
Shortened version: When MS last had an OS flop, they followed it up with their most successful OS ever.
Stuff like the Open Moko... It's expensive, not well designed and horribly lacking in features. I can't even build it myself. When Windows mobile and Android have a lot of leeway with software development, there's little reason for the handset.
Likewise stuff like MP3 players. I can buy a 1gig player from Tescos for £7 if I want a low quality player. It does have the building element but frankly, I'd get as much fun out of modifying an existing player. Would be less likely to fry components or even cause a battery to blow up due to my poor electronic skills.
What we need are people to find gaps in the market. How about designs for an ARM based media centre that can cope with HD output. Currently the only HD Media player around under £100 is the Western Digital one. Rather than looking for markets where there are endless solutions for hardware enthusiasts to tweak, give them a chance to get a product they otherwise wouldn't be able to get for that money.
With XP you're never going to have full DX10 support. The kernel can't physically do a lot of the functions itself. With DX10, Microsoft wanted to give developers a whole new framework without having to worry about legacy DX code.
Get someone to code a tech demo comprised of nothing but DX10 specific functions (the large texture sizes etc.) and you'll be able see the difference. It's hard to tell the difference at the moment because stuff like Crysis implements DX10 poorly.
DX10 cannot run properly on XP, for one thing it can't do the the sound (Vista has an extra software layer designed to prevent crappy sound drivers crashing the system). What you're doing it Forcing DX10 and It looks at your system, see loads of features it can't do and puts it in a compatibility mode with lots of DX9 filling all the gaps.
You can hack these things into any OS you wish but unless an OS is designed around these features, you have to put in extra software layers and code yourself in knots. The end result will be a slow, buggy implementation.
You can fool yourself by pretending that because you can hack a game famed for it's inefficient coding and poor implementation of DX10 to give you a game that's dx9.5 and tell you it's dx10, that XP can do dx10 without issue but it won't be correct.
Improving performance over a dedicated graphics chip (albeit a weak one) is still a respectable achievement, especially when you consider games typically use ~100% cpu anyway. Whilst it may be unplayable for crysis, I can see it giving a solid frame rate on things like WoW.
You get so many large areas that are underdeveloped because the north whines so much when there are developments in London that no politician wants to start projects.
We're one of the few countries where people seem ashamed and angry at the prospect of having a capital city we can be proud of. Could you imagine France letting Paris slide so they can build up lille? Italy not spending on Rome to develop Turin?
Sometimes it would be nice for people to have some national pride rather than going "me me me!" all the time.
And? An open market means they're free to price their goods at whatever they want to whoever they want and people can choose to buy or not buy at those prices. It has nothing to do with making their quotes confidential.
It's pretty hard for a single company to be a cartel or fix prices by themselves in a competative industry.
If your prices become well known, you leave yourself open to being undercut or pissing off other customers who weren't as good at negotiating a deal. Conversely, if you're making a bid for an exclusive licence and the amount you're bidding becomes public, a rival can come in and bid slightly higher to sabotage you.
Ah, you're clearly from the future, can you tell me what the year 2012 is like? I assume the world didn't end...
>>The fact that we are both sitting here with college degrees, and now contributing back to society with our respective design expertise, belies that claim. Schools contribute for the simple reason that people walk into kindergarten going "duh" and they come out with the ability to read, write, and do basic math (or go onto college).
Never said education wasn't important. It's just there's a point where money becomes wasted. For example you could spend £500,000 and get everyone in the school a £300 laptop. Alternatively you could then increase the budget to £1mill and buy people faster £600 laptops. The benefit the first 500k provides would be huge, the benefit the second 500k provides would be minor at best. If you budget the money it will be spent, however, the more you budget, the less value you tend to get.
The whole country will benefit. There's nowhere in the UK that's more than a day's driving or a 1 hour plane journey away from London. Besides, Londoners are paying the vast majority of the costs, why the hell shouldn't they benefit? Were Londoners whining when Manchester got the commonwealth games (which were paid for by the whole country with no council tax rises). Besides, tax from tourism in London benefits the whole country. London as a whole is grossly underfunded compared to other cities in terms of spending per capita and spending to tax revenue ratio
The Olympics create a whole infra-structure, not just a handful of stadia. The olympic village gets converted into housing, you can easily convert one of the buildings or areas into shopping complexesm you have excellent public transport. The Jubilee line is getting more work done to it and there's the crosslink project to create a new rail line through london.
The increased funding has gone almost entirely on wages, they're not compensating for the underfunding (they've had 10 years to do that), it's being inefficiently run. I don't buy the "but thatcher..." crap anymore. If you can't fix something in 10 years, you're the one to blame.
a large screened terminal is still looking at around 125-150W and have the added disadvantage of being incredibly hard to sell off after the olympics.
They promote tourism. Before and during the olympics there will be countless documentaries around the world showing off the UK. This provides a insane amount of tourist cash during the Olympics but also provides a boost that can last years as people decide to try their holiday here.
It's developing an area of London that has been run down for decade. No money has been spent on it because there's a perception (especially among northerners) that London gets too much money spent. The olympic village will provide the backbone of a new London town and regenerate the area.
Finally, you can pump as much money as you want into schools and research and it tends to dissapear into a black hole. These institutions have a habbit of spending money with few noticable gains. Just look at the money pumped into the NHS, most of it has gone on middle management and new contracts for doctors (more money for less work).
Overall it's some smart cost cutting
Nope they just have a lot of money that they would've otherwise spent on those things to spend on research instead
You'll have to forgive me for not reading through every single comment...
A clean cut can heal in a way that has minimal impact. When you melt flesh you're doing lasting, siginificant changes that doesn't really heal. You'll change a thin white line that fades with a tan to a large pink splotch on the skin that won't really ever go away.
It has nothing to do with religion
Having companies or people open source their software when not required (ie due to infringements or legislation) should always be treated as a generous act.
Lists the different approach Silverlight takes over flash. It's mostly about making it better for developers than the end user.
Haven't all the web2.0 things you've mentioned there actually been around since the dawn of the WWW (or at least the dawn of javascript and cookies)?
*company releases software*
*People complain it's not on linux*
*company ports software to linux*
*people complain it's not OSS*
*company GPLs software*
*people complain it's not GPLv3*
*company forces a GPL2 or later licence*
*people complain that the company has a trademarked logo*
*company curls up in the corner, quietly sobbing*
*people complain that the design of the corner it's crying in isn't covered by creative commons*
windows 7ven, the worlds first swedish OS?
40% accuracy in predicting with no false negatives? There are plenty of distaster agencies around the world who would be incredibly pleased with that kind of accuracy
Unfortunately this can only run so far. If you're a business and you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later, that can work out to be very expensive.
Likewise if you're a student and a paper is due but you can't complete it due to a bug/error and the support section for the program you've used no longer exists, it's a big issue.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software and usually commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete (not always, companies go bust, get taken over etc.). It's no good software being free if lack of support means you waste a fortune on wages trying to fix issues.
Two possible solutions: OSS developers give in and run ads on their sites (it's not hard to find unobstrusive ads with acceptable rates nowadays) or owners of sites are given incentives to hand over control of their sites to a central OSS archive where you can at least get snapshots of support forums and wikis, as well as the downloads and source.
That is incredibly difficult. you'd need to hook up each individual vein and artery (with the flow going in the correct direction) and get the pressure spot on else you'll either damage the veins or just fill up the finger like a balloon.