I never had a problem with 2K stability. In fact, I hacked that thing to pieces bypassing "XP only" checks that programs tended to do to. I also had a stable file server running at my parents house for years on 2K. I eventually switched it over to a dedicated Linux build, but when it was a 2K server it just worked.
I have no complaints over 2K as much as I dislike Microsoft.
You don't go and move the drivers seat to the front of the car because it allows the driver to see better.
You don't swap pedals because you find that the average person's right foot has a better response time, stronger muscles and is therefore better suited for braking.
You don't sell cars in the US with metric only readings on the dashboard because it's a better system.
(non-car) You don't replace all your chairs at work because you read that employees work better sitting in bean bags.
You don't go swap everyone's keyboard to an alternate layout because you saw research that said it's less stressing to the hand and faster.
There are some things that people are used to and changing it would invalidate all things a person learned. It also invalidates all help features on the web that have been compiled for the novice users. Even though it's a different OS, doesn't mean you need to take the familiarity and throw it out the window.
It's not the fact that Vista is or isn't stable for me and people I know. It's that Microsoft went and changed EVERYTHING. Just the other day at work one of the guys in accounting was trying to find his bookmarks in IE. To the savvy person, they'd right click and add the file menu back in... but to the normal user, this is a feature that was removed. "I can't use bookmarks anymore? This sucks!"
Not only that, but everything is hidden and tucked away in further menus making it harder to get to if needed and you don't know what you're looking for. The simplicity in Windows was that you could poke around a few menus and find exactly what you wanted.
The iphone screen is insanely tiny for a Windows application. I'm sure there are some really useful Windows applications that fit nicely in 480x320 pixels but I can't think of any.
Chat clients, a good part of the common property dialog, a view of solitaire with a few cards on screen at one time, a 5 pixel view of the web after adding the yahoo toolbar to IE...
Have you ever tried playing any RTS using a small screen and no keyboard? It may sound like a "neat" idea but you'll have to put the computer on easy and suffer with the handicap of not being able to do anything fast or efficient. When I first got my Tablet PC, I was psyched to be able to play RTS and other dexterity limit games with a pen (or almost touch screen) and I have to tell you, it's not as cool as it sounds. Even games like MOO2 and GalCiv that are turn based so you can take your time were less enjoyable.
It already has and only uses SSL right now. It's not secure and therefore my company chooses NOT to use it. So, I'm limited to using a Windows network client that supports IPSec connectivity.
You only need one smart rail builder. The rest of the cars just have to follow the rail and dump their load when they hit an empty location on the side. Make that a moving spur, make the rails movable and you can build a sheet line by line. Have the rail loop back to a collection bin and pick up another chunk.
1. Make everyone afraid of this new tech. Make them think it's bad for us. 2. Let them vote to leave it in the hands of the government or someone wiser. 3. ??? 4. Profit!
Joking aside. You bring up a valid point, but I give you a counterpoint. If you fear that the technology will be used against you and you delegate such power to control it to someone else, you are essentially giving them the wheel. Do you think someone else can run your life better than yourself? I'm talking about your view on yourself. Not what you think of your neighbor, relative, or the person in front of you on the road. Do you lack the self confidence that you could live a happy productive life without someone else keeping you from the "bad" things people might think of?
I know it's a small victory but my VirtualBox "woohoo" moment was running XP in Ubuntu 8.10 Laptop and using the AT&T Global Client to VPN connect to work since AT&T's Linux Client only uses SSL. (If you work for AT&T Global Client Development... PLEASE add the other protocols like the Windows client!) I then used Remote Desktop to get into my machine at work and I was ready to go. Just as fast as running it off my XP game machine...
Yes, I know there are better ways to work remotely, but I never said it was a groundbreaking experience. Just a "woohoo" I can finally get to my work machine from my Linux laptop... meaning anywhere.
I have a question (not saying one if right or wrong) but if you took a human and raised it in a monitored and controlled environment to see if it developed a personality... would it?
At least the story could have linked to the AIR download page. Sure it's a simple URL and it auto detects your OS, but a link would have been nice instead of forcing people through wikipedia or the lame article.
I agree with you, but I also think that raster 3D is hitting a downward slope in "realistically programmable" feature sets and hopefully ray tracing or hybrid rendering will start to pick up in it's place. I actually think keeping the bleeding edge market going is a good thing toward both obtainable real time tracing and lower power consumption. Even today, I think (even today) nVidia/ATI have to reduce energy costs to go faster.
So by your argument, nVidia is still working on the drivers... still paying their devs the same... but they can accept tweaks from the community that improve them for free. I don't see the issue here.
I was unable to play Left 4 Dead with a friend 2 days ago because the steam servers were fucked up giving me an error stating they were too busy. The game wouldn't launch at all and even if it did, I'm sure I wouldn't be able to play with my friend. If it didn't require Steam, I'm sure I could just plug in his IP or connect to him over Hamachi with no problems.
IMHO, L4D isn't that good in the first place. I got suckered into buying it with one of my friends and we went through the entire story in one night on the difficulty level just below "death on one hit." Now the only goal is to try to get all the achievements. That's akin to playing a repetitive MMO quest of "return 10,000 bear pelts to me for a stupid hat."
Also, my friend called me up to try to get some of his achievements two nights ago and the servers were down so we couldn't play at all. One of the definite downfalls to Steam like systems. I feel cheated out of my money to tell you the truth.
Also, I'm pretty sure I just selected an option to automatically install security updates in my Ubuntu 8.10 build... I could have been dreaming, but I'm pretty sure I was wide awake.
I really hope that over 200 years humanity will look back at religion in the same way most of us now look at L. Ron Hubbert's sect or like an adult looking in amazement at the imagination of a child.
What is likely to happen is that archeologists will dig up remains of temples and make wild assumptions that we were all religious people and followed the same religious beliefs based on territory. (ie: all Egyptians believe in Ra, all Greeks believed in multiple gods, all Aztecs were sacrificial gold mongering neanderthals.)
That is, unless we can somehow create a written history that could survive a meteoric catastrophe, and the fanatic people that may come after such a disaster trying to erase that history for fear of it happening again.
Slashdot Mirror
I never had a problem with 2K stability. In fact, I hacked that thing to pieces bypassing "XP only" checks that programs tended to do to. I also had a stable file server running at my parents house for years on 2K. I eventually switched it over to a dedicated Linux build, but when it was a 2K server it just worked.
I have no complaints over 2K as much as I dislike Microsoft.
Because actions right now determine the outcome of the next century...
Did they ask someone to bring in a retail Vista and install it or was this computer preset by the engineers that wrote the system?
I can see it now:
"Hey, this ___ feature is slowing things down a bit."
"Ok... here's a compiled version of the DLL without that feature. Just don't do ___ in the presentation."
"Cool. We weren't planning on it anyway."
I know lots of demonstrations I've been to that tweak the product a bit to make sure it works fast and flawless during the sell.
Not necessarily.
You don't go and move the drivers seat to the front of the car because it allows the driver to see better.
You don't swap pedals because you find that the average person's right foot has a better response time, stronger muscles and is therefore better suited for braking.
You don't sell cars in the US with metric only readings on the dashboard because it's a better system.
(non-car)
You don't replace all your chairs at work because you read that employees work better sitting in bean bags.
You don't go swap everyone's keyboard to an alternate layout because you saw research that said it's less stressing to the hand and faster.
There are some things that people are used to and changing it would invalidate all things a person learned. It also invalidates all help features on the web that have been compiled for the novice users. Even though it's a different OS, doesn't mean you need to take the familiarity and throw it out the window.
What about the hiding of the file menu in IE making people think that IE doesn't support things like bookmarks and all the features they had before?
It's not the fact that Vista is or isn't stable for me and people I know. It's that Microsoft went and changed EVERYTHING. Just the other day at work one of the guys in accounting was trying to find his bookmarks in IE. To the savvy person, they'd right click and add the file menu back in... but to the normal user, this is a feature that was removed. "I can't use bookmarks anymore? This sucks!"
Not only that, but everything is hidden and tucked away in further menus making it harder to get to if needed and you don't know what you're looking for. The simplicity in Windows was that you could poke around a few menus and find exactly what you wanted.
The iphone screen is insanely tiny for a Windows application. I'm sure there are some really useful Windows applications that fit nicely in 480x320 pixels but I can't think of any.
Chat clients, a good part of the common property dialog, a view of solitaire with a few cards on screen at one time, a 5 pixel view of the web after adding the yahoo toolbar to IE...
Have you ever tried playing any RTS using a small screen and no keyboard? It may sound like a "neat" idea but you'll have to put the computer on easy and suffer with the handicap of not being able to do anything fast or efficient. When I first got my Tablet PC, I was psyched to be able to play RTS and other dexterity limit games with a pen (or almost touch screen) and I have to tell you, it's not as cool as it sounds. Even games like MOO2 and GalCiv that are turn based so you can take your time were less enjoyable.
It already has and only uses SSL right now. It's not secure and therefore my company chooses NOT to use it. So, I'm limited to using a Windows network client that supports IPSec connectivity.
An "unofficial petition"/status query for more options in the Linux sub-forum for the client:
http://www.attnetclient.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=673
Railroads.
You only need one smart rail builder. The rest of the cars just have to follow the rail and dump their load when they hit an empty location on the side. Make that a moving spur, make the rails movable and you can build a sheet line by line. Have the rail loop back to a collection bin and pick up another chunk.
1. Make everyone afraid of this new tech. Make them think it's bad for us.
2. Let them vote to leave it in the hands of the government or someone wiser.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Joking aside. You bring up a valid point, but I give you a counterpoint. If you fear that the technology will be used against you and you delegate such power to control it to someone else, you are essentially giving them the wheel. Do you think someone else can run your life better than yourself? I'm talking about your view on yourself. Not what you think of your neighbor, relative, or the person in front of you on the road. Do you lack the self confidence that you could live a happy productive life without someone else keeping you from the "bad" things people might think of?
I just installed it from the repository the other day... granted, I had to disable KVM to actually get it to run.
I know it's a small victory but my VirtualBox "woohoo" moment was running XP in Ubuntu 8.10 Laptop and using the AT&T Global Client to VPN connect to work since AT&T's Linux Client only uses SSL. (If you work for AT&T Global Client Development... PLEASE add the other protocols like the Windows client!) I then used Remote Desktop to get into my machine at work and I was ready to go. Just as fast as running it off my XP game machine...
Yes, I know there are better ways to work remotely, but I never said it was a groundbreaking experience. Just a "woohoo" I can finally get to my work machine from my Linux laptop... meaning anywhere.
I have a question (not saying one if right or wrong) but if you took a human and raised it in a monitored and controlled environment to see if it developed a personality... would it?
At least the story could have linked to the AIR download page. Sure it's a simple URL and it auto detects your OS, but a link would have been nice instead of forcing people through wikipedia or the lame article.
Two words:
Duct Tape
I agree with you, but I also think that raster 3D is hitting a downward slope in "realistically programmable" feature sets and hopefully ray tracing or hybrid rendering will start to pick up in it's place. I actually think keeping the bleeding edge market going is a good thing toward both obtainable real time tracing and lower power consumption. Even today, I think (even today) nVidia/ATI have to reduce energy costs to go faster.
So by your argument, nVidia is still working on the drivers... still paying their devs the same... but they can accept tweaks from the community that improve them for free. I don't see the issue here.
I was unable to play Left 4 Dead with a friend 2 days ago because the steam servers were fucked up giving me an error stating they were too busy. The game wouldn't launch at all and even if it did, I'm sure I wouldn't be able to play with my friend. If it didn't require Steam, I'm sure I could just plug in his IP or connect to him over Hamachi with no problems.
And this is a fairly new game.
IMHO, L4D isn't that good in the first place. I got suckered into buying it with one of my friends and we went through the entire story in one night on the difficulty level just below "death on one hit." Now the only goal is to try to get all the achievements. That's akin to playing a repetitive MMO quest of "return 10,000 bear pelts to me for a stupid hat."
Also, my friend called me up to try to get some of his achievements two nights ago and the servers were down so we couldn't play at all. One of the definite downfalls to Steam like systems. I feel cheated out of my money to tell you the truth.
Trust is an understatement.
Also, I'm pretty sure I just selected an option to automatically install security updates in my Ubuntu 8.10 build ... I could have been dreaming, but I'm pretty sure I was wide awake.
So "green" is the new "pink" and "eco" is the new "black"? Or is "black" the new "light"? I'm so confused.
I really hope that over 200 years humanity will look back at religion in the same way most of us now look at L. Ron Hubbert's sect or like an adult looking in amazement at the imagination of a child.
What is likely to happen is that archeologists will dig up remains of temples and make wild assumptions that we were all religious people and followed the same religious beliefs based on territory. (ie: all Egyptians believe in Ra, all Greeks believed in multiple gods, all Aztecs were sacrificial gold mongering neanderthals.)
That is, unless we can somehow create a written history that could survive a meteoric catastrophe, and the fanatic people that may come after such a disaster trying to erase that history for fear of it happening again.
I hear VB and the only thing that comes to mind anymore is SendKey. The ridiculous amount of automation scripting... it brains my make hurt.