Science and religion aren't exactly opposed to each other. It is true that science cannot prove the existence of God any more than the existance of the flying spaghetti monster, but it is also true that science cannot disprove the existence of God.
That's why it's called "Faith." For the same reasons, it's foolhardy to try to use the scientific vernacular to articulate matters of faith; if science is worthless to prove/disprove the existance of an Almighty, than it is irrational to assume there is any overlap or conflict between science and religion at all.
If for no other reason, look at Faith from the view of the pragmatist. Although any group has its asshats, the truly faithful have morals, try to be good people in any way they are called, and in my experience are happy. The "evangelical athiests" I know are angry, bitter, elitist, and destructive. Look past the individual: fascism, nazism, and communism are actually perfectly sensical and rational outside some external source of morals.
I can see various counterpoints involving the crusades to trickle up, but stay them a moment. Are kings seeking wealth and power, and a then-corrupt Roman bureacracy actually examples of Faith and religion, or of more secular, political motives?
The point: Believing in something higher than your own mortal self is not a rejection of science. Not everyone who listens to an iPod "enjoying its effect", the product of science, is rejecting Faith or religion. Science cannot disprove the existence of God; by the very definition of an Almighty, this is impossible. There is no reason outside politics of convenience (think secular liberals or witch burners) that the two cannot coexist.
I personally consider science to be God's gift to humanity, that we may better understand His creation. From this viewpoint especially is any conflict ridiculous.
AT&T was given a monopoly but state and federal politicians desperate to avoid the "duplication" that competition would bring. Microsoft was sued for eeking out their own.
So, yes, it is a little interesting that Bell Labs is the "good" research monopoly, but oh well.
What about the assholes beside you while you're merging from an on-ramp?
Those "assholes" have no legal observation whatsoever to move over. You're supposed to find a hole in traffic, match speeds, and move in. That's why it's called "merging" - you merge with the traffic already there.
My local paper had an interesting article about this the other day. They came to the conclusion that the real assholes are those who expect an entire lane of traffic to move for them because they completely fail at driving.
Larger mutual funds track too many stocks to make intraday trades on each one individually. They use expert systems for simple, "maintenance" trading and leave complex stuff like the fund's overall composition to humans.
So, people do make money - not in the "zomg, my magic computer program predicts that stock will go up tomorrow so buy a billion shares" kind of way, but in the "selling on high volume is bad" kind of way.
The "business feature" part of user-mode drivers is an increased percentage of time spent productively due to a more stable computing environment - they kill blue screens. I wanted to alleviate the fears of slashbots that
Microsoft was trying to force every hardware vendor to pony up $dough to get their drivers signed, or
that driver programmers will have to work five times harder to rewrite XP drivers
As for your "Linux can do this all" kneejerk, recall that the grandparent asked "what can Vista do that XP can't?". And I'm sure there are plenty of competent system administrators who know how to use Windows.
Believe it or not, your site is hardly representative of the rest the internet's tubes.
Some people are paid to develop websites designed for a less limited group of users. Some, dare I say most websites, especially on corporate intranets, have some need to support Internet Explorer.
Microsoft made this easier, and they made it free. Seems like a Good Thing to me, even if you never plan on using it.
Vista has a lot of Business features - in fact, they probably have more biz features than consumer features.
BitLocker is a nifty tech that encrypts the system volume, needing a USB key to boot. I wonder how many businesses with (stolen!) laptops would love to have this feature.
Windows MeetingSpace uses the new network implementation in Vista to allow peer-to-peer detection of clients. Meaning you bring your WiFi laptop into a conference room and you're logged into MeetingSpace. The program itself lets you collaborate - you can share an open program and work on it simultaneously, or share your entire desktop, or what have you not.
Speech Recognition is built into the OS and in my experience, actually works pretty well. I can see a lot of secretaries, typing-deficient people, bosses, etc. appreciating being able to dictate to a computer. I can also see some liability disappear as businesses "cure" carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain nonsense.
User Account Control makes it completely possible to run as a standard user or to default to standard user privileges only even when logged into an admin account.
Windows Service Hardening uses the same changes in the Vista kernel that allow IE7 "protected mode" and UAC to function to run each Windows service under its own user. This means that viruses and the like will be unable to mess with the file system, registry, etc. by piggybacking onto a Windows service, because the special user account the service runs under simply won't have those priviliges.
The new Windows Driver Model and Code Integrity make the system more secure and stable. Unsigned drivers are no longer allowed to run in kernel mode. Instead, the kernel exports a set of interfaces used to program most drivers in user mode, meaning:
Less drivers need to be signed
New user mode drivers will most likely be easier to program than their kernel-mode counterparts
A user mode driver crash will not be able to cause a blue screen.
There's a bunch of other stuff, too, like Windows PowerShell that system admins are going to love (although they're releasing this for Windows XP SP2, also).
There's a lot of business features, most of them focusing on security and stability. (Vista also plays a lot nicer with Unix than XP does.) The question isn't whether there's any "business argument", but whether these features are worth the upgrade. For some businesses, they will be; for others, they won't.
In any size company, you will care when the CEO sends everyone a memo written on his personal laptop with Vista and the latest version of Office and you can't read it.
Microsoft has free programs to read the Office file formats. It would cut into their profits if they didn't - who would buy the next version if nobody could read the new documents?.
The 2003 reader for Word is available here, for example. When Vista and Office 2007 are released, I'm sure they'll have a 2007 version, too.
Back in the day, people bought PCs rather than Macs because, "You can't get fired for buying IBM."
Maybe. People also bought PCs because they were a lot cheaper. If you wanted a Mac, you had to buy from Apple, and they charged a premium for their hardware.
Although the IBM PCs were on inferior, non-shiny hardware, all the clones available made them dirt cheap. You would get fired not because of some ingrained shiny-hating bigotry, but because you spent $dough so your number crunchers could have a shiny computer.
That's also how they caught market share. The IBM architecture was a much more "open" standard - Tandy, Compaq, and so could license it and build their own 100% IBM Compatible machines, which happened to run on PC/MS-DOs and Windows - Microsoft Products. Apple would not license anything and remained the sole supplier of their superior, but more expensive hardware.
Guess what? The cheap stuff outsold the Macs, and Windows gained a foothold in the biz. Economics, not suits and conspiracies.
Trivial items placed on a shelf may seem, well... trivial. But, it works on the same principles as traditional advertising - commercials, magazine ads, etc.
The point is never to rationally convince you that product X is better than Y and will save you money. It's to try to associate product X with a "good" feeling, in hopes that your brain will recall that feeling when seeing the product on a store shelf. They're training your brain. Stimulus, response, stimulus, response...
So, if you see a product on a shelf in a movie your mind may (or may not) associate that product with the movie. See it again at a store, recall what an incredibly awesome movie it was (you wouldn't spend $8.75 for gummy popcorn if it wasn't, right?) and fall prey to the impulse subliminally burned into your synapses.
Go look at the Wikipedia entry. Money-hungry Microsoft did not spend 5 very, very expensive years throwing out entirely complete, perfectly polished features one-by-one until all they had was shiny. In fact, my memory says they stole all the features from "Orcas" and now have no ideas for their next OS.
As for those non-RIP features, try BitLocker, a driver model that makes everything run in non-bluescreen-able userland, User Account Control, restartable video drivers (even your beta nVidia drivers won't blue-screen Windows now!), or how unique DirectX 10 actually is compared to any of the previous versions...
Oh, yeah, the GUI is shiny, too. That must've been all they did.
To control data, you control what EXACT code can use it. You should think about this some more, and probably take some Computer Science lessons
Excuse me? It's called "cryptography" and is part of any (every) DRM scheme in existence today.
Take some music purchased on iTunes. The "data" portion is the file your song is contained in, and the "code" portion is the iTunes program. I think that we as CS majors can all figure this much out.
Now, this will totally blow your mind: your iTunes file is DRM'd WITHOUT Apple controlling IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM what programs (code) access it! In fact, you can open an iTunes song in Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice!) right now and mutiliate the data however you want, and Apple won't stop you. You see, Apple does NOTHING AT ALL to control what code access the song data. You can even torrent your song so the entire internet can download it! But how?
Because DRM is all about locking down data. You think Apple is trying to force you to use their iTunes code, or do you think that they're trying to keep the music data that you pay them for from being shared with every tube in the internet?
My original point, for those feeling a bit to intellectually smug to even feign comprehension:
"Trusted Computing Initiative" not equal to "DRM". Palladium/Trusted Computing/Microsoft Windows Paperweight/whatever is an example of DRM, and an extreme example of DRM, but to assume that all DRM is about preventing "unsigned" or disallowed code from running is stupid. It's like saying "rectangles are squares."
DRM is about limiting what you can do with something you bought, plain and simple. I can't think of many (or one) DRM scheme in common use right now that allows only certain PROGRAMS to run on your computer, but I can think of PLENTY that obfuscate data.
There are many, MANY ways that you can control data - none of this "to control data, you conrol what EXACT code can use it" crap. Unless you were referring to the whole FairPlay cryptography thing, but you wouldn't be confusing encrypted data with code, now, would you?
Having every unit relate to every other by a power of 10.. THAT is what makes it better.
Truth - except keep your silly metric system out of my technology. For all those devices that innately use powers of two - think anything digital slash binary, computers especially - it makes a LOT more sense for a megabyte to equal 2^20 bytes instead of the silly SI 10^3 bytes.
DRM is about forcing you to run particular EXACT code [...]
"Digital Rights Management" is a euphemism for a number of controls on copying and using data. DRM isn't about "forcing you to run EXACT code", it's about limiting what you can do with any given "something."
It all depends on exactly what the DRM is protecting, and what exactly it limits. Last time I checked, the iTunes DRM didn't keep me from running Linux - that's different than Palladium/Trusted Computing/whatever has people scared now.
The reason for that is not because the degree is worth less but because there is less opportunities to go around. Our whole economy has been sold off to the god of "global free trade." Of course there is nothing free about it, it's just a catchy name.
Uh huh. Try looking at some silly things called facts
Real median income has been on an almost uninterrupted ride up since 1967. Meaning, if you took every person in America and lined them up from poorest to richest, and then followed the guy in the exact middle for 40 years, and adjusted his salary for inflation, he'd be better off to the tune of $10,000 a year.
This is despite the fact that the "middle" keeps changing. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States - do you think they're pushing median income DOWN (they're making LESS than the average Joe) or UP (they're making MORE than the average Joe)? Not to say that immigration is good/bad/indifferent/whatever - point is that the middle is consistently better off, despite pressures that keep pushing the middle back down.
The actual number of "opportunities" went up by 92,000 in October, and there are 6,800,000 more jobs today than there were in 2003.
Doesn't exactly seem like there's "less opportunies to go around."
As for "free trade", the "free" part is "free as in speech." It refers to trade being "free" from restrictions like tariffs and subsidies - it's not "catchy", it's perfectly accurate.
Trade can be "free" in the other sense, too. Simply put, some countries just make things better - the U.S. can produce a ton of grain for a lot less cost than Japan can. Japan can make a ton of semiconductors cheaper than the U.S. can. By trading grain for semiconductors, the U.S. gets semiconductors at the price of its cheaper grain, and Japan gets grain that would have cost more than the semiconductors it traded for them.
Although a simple example, it's how trade works - you trade what you can make cheapest (relative to other things you make in your country) for things that cost more to make in your country.
Two hundred years ago, when that thing called the "Industrial Revolution" took off that made possible the existence of the computer you're whining from, it was called "division of labor" or "specialization." This is the same concept, but on a global scale.
I thought that code under GPL cannot be taken out of being GPL
It can't (I think). However, that doesn't mean Microsoft can't use it - it means you can't post it on MS-MySpace. You would be violating the GPL, not Microsoft.
The problem has nothing to do with how the code is structured.
In fact, they're not sure there's a problem changinge the date at all.
They're worried that something might happen. Some Windows programs, for example, use the function GetTickCount() for timing - menu delays, simple animation, etc. GetTickCount() returns a DWORD value representing the number of milliseconds since the system was booted, and a common usage is:
if (GetTickCount() > dwOldTickCount + 50) {
//do something, wait 50 milliseconds, do it again
dwOldTickCount = GetTickCount();
}
However, if GetTickCount() overflows and wraps to 0 (how quickly this happens depends on the processor architecture), it could be another month (32-bit DWORDS means 2^32 milliseconds is ~ 49.7 days) before GetTickCount() is "more" than dwOldTickCount again. Your event that was supposed to happen every 50 milliseconds is on indefefinate hiatus.
Granted, there are many better and different ways to write event code in Windows - it's kinda what the API was made for - and the space shuttle sure as hell doesn't use the Windows API, but that's not the point. It's little timing bugs like these that could pop up even in code that's been reused and debugged since God knows when.
So, since there's no reason whatsoever that they have to fly on New Year's, why risk the lives of astronauts and an expensive shuttle? I wouldn't have that much faith in some '70s programms usage of the carry flag.
It's not a problem that the "clock changing routine" that is probably some trivial count-on-one-hand number of machine language instructions is spread all over creation like a clown guts over the walls of my living room - it's that NASA doesn't want any glitches to happen in any procedure that uses the system clock like the Windows API example above. Which I'm guessing is pretty close to 99 and a half point two percent of their code.
They don't "throw them away." There are several cores manufactured onto the die of one CPU. A redundant core is built onto the die due to high fail rates - the cell uses seven cores, but eight are built onto the chip because at least one is expected to fail.
So, they disable the broken core. Or cores. Or an unbroken core. A chip with all 8 cores functional will be sold for "high-grade, scientific purposes", a seven-core system will be used in the PS3, and a chip with 6 cores will be sold for miscellaneous, crap, embedded purposes. Go back to your Wikipedia.
But, yes. Sony doesn't want to throw $R&D away. So, they're trying to market their tech elsewhere. IBM would be pretty happy with it, too.
Wow, I really don't know where to begin with your post.
The Cell chip is expensive and difficult to manufacture. (Although each cell die has 7 cores, 8 are manufactured on each die in the expectation that one will fail. Post-manufacture testing finds the broken core and disables it, finds no broken cores and disables one anyway, or finds the whole chip ruined and scraps it.) That, and the expensive Blu-Ray drives are difficult to make, too.
They sell at $600 a pop. They'll go on eBay for much more than that, I'm sure. The amount of money Sony could make is limited by how fast they can produce consoles. So, do you think Sony is making consoles as fast as humanly possible, or do you think Sony has no interest in money?
If the whole world were communist, free standard issued Mao Ze Dong PS3 for each family! No such issues!
And, under communism, there would be no PS3. What part of a state-run economy do you think values game consoles? Values them enough to invest millions in research and billions in retooling factories for the new tech? State run farms in Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela left/leave people starving. You think a system in which people lack "standard issued Mao Ze Dong [sic]" bread are going to have PS3s? Or televisions? I'm sure they'd settle for houses.
You also forget that capitalism is the reason the PS3 exists in the first place - if Sony didn't have a chance to make $bucks, do you think they'd spend years developing the console? Crawl out of your hole and show me a communist nation that even has Playstation 2s? (China ceased to be communist for all practical intents and purposes when they, shock, adopted mostly-free market capitalism as their economic system)
Are you trolling? I laughed so hard at your comment, but then it hit me that you might not have been.
A "Republican" form of government has nothing to do with the "Republican" party. A "Republic" is a country with the body politic restrained by laws.
A "Democracy" is a synonym for "mob rule."
A "Democratic Republic" (the United States, Great Britain, et al.) is a system of government where the will of the people is restrained by laws. See the dinner analogy above involving two wolves and a sheep.
A "democracy" is not a "framework of laws" - it simply means majority rule. Forget Bush bashing.
When only TVs made are HD and your TV dies what do you do? When only DVD players made are DVD/HD-DVD and yours dies what do you do?
Nobody would make exclusively high-def technology that works exclusively with the new formats - especially when there's more money to be made by selling the cheaper DVD/480p stuff.
The smell of dollars will effectively keep any one company from suppressing something consumers want. There will be a market for "regular" TVs for a long time to come - and that means money for companies to keep making them.
And why would any IT department even consider downgrading [sic] to Vista from XP?
Security?
UAC
User Account Control is a new feature affecting administrator accounts - they run with limited priviliges, just as a normal user account does. When a program/user wants to do tasks that actually require admin powers, you have to explicitly allow it by clicking "continue" on a message box that pops up.
Do message boxes get annoying? Depends. Weigh the extra effort of one extra keystroke when you change screen resolutions or install a program against viruses having to ask you permission to rape your computer.
Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR means that system libraries and DLLs are loaded into random locations in memory at boot time. (Some Linux distros have had this for a while.) This means that even if a zero-day exploit compromises your machine and the attacker can run code on your machine, he won't be able to build the locations of kernel functions into his hack.
"Protected Mode"
New features in the Vista kernel let each process run in its own specialized, super-limited user account. Ninja-ing an svchost process won't do much, since each kernel service lacks the ability to access any more than it has to.
Internet Explorer 7 uses these features to run in something called "protected mode." Iexplore.exe runs under its own super-limited user account, has all disk I/O redirected to some crazy folder ("c:" from IE7 redirects to something like "c:\program files\internet explorer\temp\c") that's locked down tigher than tight.
Although XP has Internet Explorer 7, the XP kernel lacks the ability to manage proccesses in this way. It's not possible to use "protected mode" under XP because XP's kernel is too primitive.
Stability?
Windows Driver Model
The new Windows Driver Model means that drivers not digitally signed and approved by Microsoft will not be allowed to run in kernelspace, meaning crappy drivers - the cause of most Windows bluescreens since the dawn of time - simply won't be allowed to run, let alone crash the system.
The flip side of this is that a new part of the Vista kernel means almost all drivers will not run in kernelspace. The new interface lets 99% of drivers be run in userspace, which doesn't require an expensive Microsoft signature and cannot crash the computer.
About the only drivers that inhabit kernel space are video drviers, which means that we could potentially be seeing less frequent driver releases from nVidia and ATI, but oh well. The Vista kernel will also restart your video driver when it crashes - even with beta drivers, the only time I've seen a blue screen in Vista was when DivX raped my install of Windows Media Player 11.
Windows Update
Yeah, we've had it for quite a while, now - but it's integrated with Windows now, meaning no silly webside + ActiveX control install. You no longer have to use IE for anything.
Shininess? (Though this one's been done to death.)
Granted, there's no one "killer app" for Vista - but that doesn't mean it's not worth using over XP. I haven't been able to make it crash (after removing DivX), and that's running the beta nVidia driver, Steam games (HalfLife 2, CounterStrike: Source, Might & Magic: Dark Messiah), software development on Visual Studio 2005, running the Office 2007 beta, and schoolwork on TASM (legacy DOS programs still seem to run just fine without tweaking under Vista, just that they're not allowed to run full-screen for whatever reason.
Is it RAM and disk heavy? Sure, but so was Windows 95 back in the day, and memory and disk space are cheap. I used to dual-boot Vista over XP, but Vista's my primary OS now - sacrificing a few FPS in HL2 is worth the stabilitiy, although the only antivirus offering compatible with Vista as of now if from TrendMicro.
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Do you assume anyone with Faith is a hypocrite?
Science and religion aren't exactly opposed to each other. It is true that science cannot prove the existence of God any more than the existance of the flying spaghetti monster, but it is also true that science cannot disprove the existence of God.
That's why it's called "Faith." For the same reasons, it's foolhardy to try to use the scientific vernacular to articulate matters of faith; if science is worthless to prove/disprove the existance of an Almighty, than it is irrational to assume there is any overlap or conflict between science and religion at all.
If for no other reason, look at Faith from the view of the pragmatist. Although any group has its asshats, the truly faithful have morals, try to be good people in any way they are called, and in my experience are happy. The "evangelical athiests" I know are angry, bitter, elitist, and destructive. Look past the individual: fascism, nazism, and communism are actually perfectly sensical and rational outside some external source of morals.
I can see various counterpoints involving the crusades to trickle up, but stay them a moment. Are kings seeking wealth and power, and a then-corrupt Roman bureacracy actually examples of Faith and religion, or of more secular, political motives?
The point: Believing in something higher than your own mortal self is not a rejection of science. Not everyone who listens to an iPod "enjoying its effect", the product of science, is rejecting Faith or religion. Science cannot disprove the existence of God; by the very definition of an Almighty, this is impossible. There is no reason outside politics of convenience (think secular liberals or witch burners) that the two cannot coexist.
I personally consider science to be God's gift to humanity, that we may better understand His creation. From this viewpoint especially is any conflict ridiculous.
AT&T was given a monopoly but state and federal politicians desperate to avoid the "duplication" that competition would bring. Microsoft was sued for eeking out their own.
So, yes, it is a little interesting that Bell Labs is the "good" research monopoly, but oh well.
What about the assholes beside you while you're merging from an on-ramp?
Those "assholes" have no legal observation whatsoever to move over. You're supposed to find a hole in traffic, match speeds, and move in. That's why it's called "merging" - you merge with the traffic already there.
My local paper had an interesting article about this the other day. They came to the conclusion that the real assholes are those who expect an entire lane of traffic to move for them because they completely fail at driving.
Larger mutual funds track too many stocks to make intraday trades on each one individually. They use expert systems for simple, "maintenance" trading and leave complex stuff like the fund's overall composition to humans.
So, people do make money - not in the "zomg, my magic computer program predicts that stock will go up tomorrow so buy a billion shares" kind of way, but in the "selling on high volume is bad" kind of way.
Microsoft only a few years ago killed support for Windows 98. You have a long time to fret before your XP machine turns into a cinder block.
The "business feature" part of user-mode drivers is an increased percentage of time spent productively due to a more stable computing environment - they kill blue screens. I wanted to alleviate the fears of slashbots that
As for your "Linux can do this all" kneejerk, recall that the grandparent asked "what can Vista do that XP can't?". And I'm sure there are plenty of competent system administrators who know how to use Windows.
Believe it or not, your site is hardly representative of the rest the internet's tubes.
Some people are paid to develop websites designed for a less limited group of users. Some, dare I say most websites, especially on corporate intranets, have some need to support Internet Explorer.
Microsoft made this easier, and they made it free. Seems like a Good Thing to me, even if you never plan on using it.
Vista has a lot of Business features - in fact, they probably have more biz features than consumer features.
BitLocker is a nifty tech that encrypts the system volume, needing a USB key to boot. I wonder how many businesses with (stolen!) laptops would love to have this feature.
Windows MeetingSpace uses the new network implementation in Vista to allow peer-to-peer detection of clients. Meaning you bring your WiFi laptop into a conference room and you're logged into MeetingSpace. The program itself lets you collaborate - you can share an open program and work on it simultaneously, or share your entire desktop, or what have you not.
Speech Recognition is built into the OS and in my experience, actually works pretty well. I can see a lot of secretaries, typing-deficient people, bosses, etc. appreciating being able to dictate to a computer. I can also see some liability disappear as businesses "cure" carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain nonsense.
User Account Control makes it completely possible to run as a standard user or to default to standard user privileges only even when logged into an admin account.
Windows Service Hardening uses the same changes in the Vista kernel that allow IE7 "protected mode" and UAC to function to run each Windows service under its own user. This means that viruses and the like will be unable to mess with the file system, registry, etc. by piggybacking onto a Windows service, because the special user account the service runs under simply won't have those priviliges.
The new Windows Driver Model and Code Integrity make the system more secure and stable. Unsigned drivers are no longer allowed to run in kernel mode. Instead, the kernel exports a set of interfaces used to program most drivers in user mode, meaning:
There's a bunch of other stuff, too, like Windows PowerShell that system admins are going to love (although they're releasing this for Windows XP SP2, also).
There's a lot of business features, most of them focusing on security and stability. (Vista also plays a lot nicer with Unix than XP does.) The question isn't whether there's any "business argument", but whether these features are worth the upgrade. For some businesses, they will be; for others, they won't.
In any size company, you will care when the CEO sends everyone a memo written on his personal laptop with Vista and the latest version of Office and you can't read it.
Microsoft has free programs to read the Office file formats. It would cut into their profits if they didn't - who would buy the next version if nobody could read the new documents?.
The 2003 reader for Word is available here, for example. When Vista and Office 2007 are released, I'm sure they'll have a 2007 version, too.
Back in the day, people bought PCs rather than Macs because, "You can't get fired for buying IBM."
Maybe. People also bought PCs because they were a lot cheaper. If you wanted a Mac, you had to buy from Apple, and they charged a premium for their hardware.
Although the IBM PCs were on inferior, non-shiny hardware, all the clones available made them dirt cheap. You would get fired not because of some ingrained shiny-hating bigotry, but because you spent $dough so your number crunchers could have a shiny computer.
That's also how they caught market share. The IBM architecture was a much more "open" standard - Tandy, Compaq, and so could license it and build their own 100% IBM Compatible machines, which happened to run on PC/MS-DOs and Windows - Microsoft Products. Apple would not license anything and remained the sole supplier of their superior, but more expensive hardware.
Guess what? The cheap stuff outsold the Macs, and Windows gained a foothold in the biz. Economics, not suits and conspiracies.
Trivial items placed on a shelf may seem, well... trivial. But, it works on the same principles as traditional advertising - commercials, magazine ads, etc.
The point is never to rationally convince you that product X is better than Y and will save you money. It's to try to associate product X with a "good" feeling, in hopes that your brain will recall that feeling when seeing the product on a store shelf. They're training your brain. Stimulus, response, stimulus, response...
So, if you see a product on a shelf in a movie your mind may (or may not) associate that product with the movie. See it again at a store, recall what an incredibly awesome movie it was (you wouldn't spend $8.75 for gummy popcorn if it wasn't, right?) and fall prey to the impulse subliminally burned into your synapses.
Go look at the Wikipedia entry. Money-hungry Microsoft did not spend 5 very, very expensive years throwing out entirely complete, perfectly polished features one-by-one until all they had was shiny. In fact, my memory says they stole all the features from "Orcas" and now have no ideas for their next OS.
As for those non-RIP features, try BitLocker, a driver model that makes everything run in non-bluescreen-able userland, User Account Control, restartable video drivers (even your beta nVidia drivers won't blue-screen Windows now!), or how unique DirectX 10 actually is compared to any of the previous versions...
Oh, yeah, the GUI is shiny, too. That must've been all they did.
Too bad that Windows ME was just a new GUI, whereas Vista has the first significant kernel modifications since NT4. Oh well.
To control data, you control what EXACT code can use it. You should think about this some more, and probably take some Computer Science lessons
Excuse me? It's called "cryptography" and is part of any (every) DRM scheme in existence today.
Take some music purchased on iTunes. The "data" portion is the file your song is contained in, and the "code" portion is the iTunes program. I think that we as CS majors can all figure this much out.
Now, this will totally blow your mind: your iTunes file is DRM'd WITHOUT Apple controlling IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM what programs (code) access it! In fact, you can open an iTunes song in Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice!) right now and mutiliate the data however you want, and Apple won't stop you. You see, Apple does NOTHING AT ALL to control what code access the song data. You can even torrent your song so the entire internet can download it! But how?
Because DRM is all about locking down data. You think Apple is trying to force you to use their iTunes code, or do you think that they're trying to keep the music data that you pay them for from being shared with every tube in the internet?
My original point, for those feeling a bit to intellectually smug to even feign comprehension:
DRM is about limiting what you can do with something you bought, plain and simple. I can't think of many (or one) DRM scheme in common use right now that allows only certain PROGRAMS to run on your computer, but I can think of PLENTY that obfuscate data.
There are many, MANY ways that you can control data - none of this "to control data, you conrol what EXACT code can use it" crap. Unless you were referring to the whole FairPlay cryptography thing, but you wouldn't be confusing encrypted data with code, now, would you?
Having every unit relate to every other by a power of 10 .. THAT is what makes it better.
Truth - except keep your silly metric system out of my technology. For all those devices that innately use powers of two - think anything digital slash binary, computers especially - it makes a LOT more sense for a megabyte to equal 2^20 bytes instead of the silly SI 10^3 bytes.
DRM is about forcing you to run particular EXACT code [...]
"Digital Rights Management" is a euphemism for a number of controls on copying and using data. DRM isn't about "forcing you to run EXACT code", it's about limiting what you can do with any given "something."
It all depends on exactly what the DRM is protecting, and what exactly it limits. Last time I checked, the iTunes DRM didn't keep me from running Linux - that's different than Palladium/Trusted Computing/whatever has people scared now.
Are you about to succumb to the elements, or do you live in France?
Is there a difference?
The reason for that is not because the degree is worth less but because there is less opportunities to go around. Our whole economy has been sold off to the god of "global free trade." Of course there is nothing free about it, it's just a catchy name.
Uh huh. Try looking at some silly things called facts
Real median income has been on an almost uninterrupted ride up since 1967. Meaning, if you took every person in America and lined them up from poorest to richest, and then followed the guy in the exact middle for 40 years, and adjusted his salary for inflation, he'd be better off to the tune of $10,000 a year.
This is despite the fact that the "middle" keeps changing. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States - do you think they're pushing median income DOWN (they're making LESS than the average Joe) or UP (they're making MORE than the average Joe)? Not to say that immigration is good/bad/indifferent/whatever - point is that the middle is consistently better off, despite pressures that keep pushing the middle back down.
The actual number of "opportunities" went up by 92,000 in October, and there are 6,800,000 more jobs today than there were in 2003.
Doesn't exactly seem like there's "less opportunies to go around."
As for "free trade", the "free" part is "free as in speech." It refers to trade being "free" from restrictions like tariffs and subsidies - it's not "catchy", it's perfectly accurate.
Trade can be "free" in the other sense, too. Simply put, some countries just make things better - the U.S. can produce a ton of grain for a lot less cost than Japan can. Japan can make a ton of semiconductors cheaper than the U.S. can. By trading grain for semiconductors, the U.S. gets semiconductors at the price of its cheaper grain, and Japan gets grain that would have cost more than the semiconductors it traded for them.
Although a simple example, it's how trade works - you trade what you can make cheapest (relative to other things you make in your country) for things that cost more to make in your country.
Two hundred years ago, when that thing called the "Industrial Revolution" took off that made possible the existence of the computer you're whining from, it was called "division of labor" or "specialization." This is the same concept, but on a global scale.
But, then again, "Dey turk mah jugh!"
I thought that code under GPL cannot be taken out of being GPL
It can't (I think). However, that doesn't mean Microsoft can't use it - it means you can't post it on MS-MySpace. You would be violating the GPL, not Microsoft.
The problem has nothing to do with how the code is structured.
In fact, they're not sure there's a problem changinge the date at all.
They're worried that something might happen. Some Windows programs, for example, use the function GetTickCount() for timing - menu delays, simple animation, etc. GetTickCount() returns a DWORD value representing the number of milliseconds since the system was booted, and a common usage is:
However, if GetTickCount() overflows and wraps to 0 (how quickly this happens depends on the processor architecture), it could be another month (32-bit DWORDS means 2^32 milliseconds is ~ 49.7 days) before GetTickCount() is "more" than dwOldTickCount again. Your event that was supposed to happen every 50 milliseconds is on indefefinate hiatus.
Granted, there are many better and different ways to write event code in Windows - it's kinda what the API was made for - and the space shuttle sure as hell doesn't use the Windows API, but that's not the point. It's little timing bugs like these that could pop up even in code that's been reused and debugged since God knows when.
So, since there's no reason whatsoever that they have to fly on New Year's, why risk the lives of astronauts and an expensive shuttle? I wouldn't have that much faith in some '70s programms usage of the carry flag.
It's not a problem that the "clock changing routine" that is probably some trivial count-on-one-hand number of machine language instructions is spread all over creation like a clown guts over the walls of my living room - it's that NASA doesn't want any glitches to happen in any procedure that uses the system clock like the Windows API example above. Which I'm guessing is pretty close to 99 and a half point two percent of their code.
They don't "throw them away." There are several cores manufactured onto the die of one CPU. A redundant core is built onto the die due to high fail rates - the cell uses seven cores, but eight are built onto the chip because at least one is expected to fail.
So, they disable the broken core. Or cores. Or an unbroken core. A chip with all 8 cores functional will be sold for "high-grade, scientific purposes", a seven-core system will be used in the PS3, and a chip with 6 cores will be sold for miscellaneous, crap, embedded purposes. Go back to your Wikipedia.
But, yes. Sony doesn't want to throw $R&D away. So, they're trying to market their tech elsewhere. IBM would be pretty happy with it, too.
Wow, I really don't know where to begin with your post.
The Cell chip is expensive and difficult to manufacture. (Although each cell die has 7 cores, 8 are manufactured on each die in the expectation that one will fail. Post-manufacture testing finds the broken core and disables it, finds no broken cores and disables one anyway, or finds the whole chip ruined and scraps it.) That, and the expensive Blu-Ray drives are difficult to make, too.
They sell at $600 a pop. They'll go on eBay for much more than that, I'm sure. The amount of money Sony could make is limited by how fast they can produce consoles. So, do you think Sony is making consoles as fast as humanly possible, or do you think Sony has no interest in money?
And, under communism, there would be no PS3. What part of a state-run economy do you think values game consoles? Values them enough to invest millions in research and billions in retooling factories for the new tech? State run farms in Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela left/leave people starving. You think a system in which people lack "standard issued Mao Ze Dong [sic]" bread are going to have PS3s? Or televisions? I'm sure they'd settle for houses.
You also forget that capitalism is the reason the PS3 exists in the first place - if Sony didn't have a chance to make $bucks, do you think they'd spend years developing the console? Crawl out of your hole and show me a communist nation that even has Playstation 2s? (China ceased to be communist for all practical intents and purposes when they, shock, adopted mostly-free market capitalism as their economic system)
Are you trolling? I laughed so hard at your comment, but then it hit me that you might not have been.
A "Republican" form of government has nothing to do with the "Republican" party. A "Republic" is a country with the body politic restrained by laws.
A "Democracy" is a synonym for "mob rule."
A "Democratic Republic" (the United States, Great Britain, et al.) is a system of government where the will of the people is restrained by laws. See the dinner analogy above involving two wolves and a sheep.
A "democracy" is not a "framework of laws" - it simply means majority rule. Forget Bush bashing.
When only TVs made are HD and your TV dies what do you do? When only DVD players made are DVD/HD-DVD and yours dies what do you do?
Nobody would make exclusively high-def technology that works exclusively with the new formats - especially when there's more money to be made by selling the cheaper DVD/480p stuff.
The smell of dollars will effectively keep any one company from suppressing something consumers want. There will be a market for "regular" TVs for a long time to come - and that means money for companies to keep making them.
And why would any IT department even consider downgrading [sic] to Vista from XP?
Security?
UAC
User Account Control is a new feature affecting administrator accounts - they run with limited priviliges, just as a normal user account does. When a program/user wants to do tasks that actually require admin powers, you have to explicitly allow it by clicking "continue" on a message box that pops up.
Do message boxes get annoying? Depends. Weigh the extra effort of one extra keystroke when you change screen resolutions or install a program against viruses having to ask you permission to rape your computer.
Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR means that system libraries and DLLs are loaded into random locations in memory at boot time. (Some Linux distros have had this for a while.) This means that even if a zero-day exploit compromises your machine and the attacker can run code on your machine, he won't be able to build the locations of kernel functions into his hack.
"Protected Mode"
New features in the Vista kernel let each process run in its own specialized, super-limited user account. Ninja-ing an svchost process won't do much, since each kernel service lacks the ability to access any more than it has to.
Internet Explorer 7 uses these features to run in something called "protected mode." Iexplore.exe runs under its own super-limited user account, has all disk I/O redirected to some crazy folder ("c:" from IE7 redirects to something like "c:\program files\internet explorer\temp\c") that's locked down tigher than tight.
Although XP has Internet Explorer 7, the XP kernel lacks the ability to manage proccesses in this way. It's not possible to use "protected mode" under XP because XP's kernel is too primitive.
Stability?
Windows Driver Model
The new Windows Driver Model means that drivers not digitally signed and approved by Microsoft will not be allowed to run in kernelspace, meaning crappy drivers - the cause of most Windows bluescreens since the dawn of time - simply won't be allowed to run, let alone crash the system.
The flip side of this is that a new part of the Vista kernel means almost all drivers will not run in kernelspace. The new interface lets 99% of drivers be run in userspace, which doesn't require an expensive Microsoft signature and cannot crash the computer.
About the only drivers that inhabit kernel space are video drviers, which means that we could potentially be seeing less frequent driver releases from nVidia and ATI, but oh well. The Vista kernel will also restart your video driver when it crashes - even with beta drivers, the only time I've seen a blue screen in Vista was when DivX raped my install of Windows Media Player 11.
Windows Update
Yeah, we've had it for quite a while, now - but it's integrated with Windows now, meaning no silly webside + ActiveX control install. You no longer have to use IE for anything.
Shininess? (Though this one's been done to death.)
Granted, there's no one "killer app" for Vista - but that doesn't mean it's not worth using over XP. I haven't been able to make it crash (after removing DivX), and that's running the beta nVidia driver, Steam games (HalfLife 2, CounterStrike: Source, Might & Magic: Dark Messiah), software development on Visual Studio 2005, running the Office 2007 beta, and schoolwork on TASM (legacy DOS programs still seem to run just fine without tweaking under Vista, just that they're not allowed to run full-screen for whatever reason.
Is it RAM and disk heavy? Sure, but so was Windows 95 back in the day, and memory and disk space are cheap. I used to dual-boot Vista over XP, but Vista's my primary OS now - sacrificing a few FPS in HL2 is worth the stabilitiy, although the only antivirus offering compatible with Vista as of now if from TrendMicro.