I'm not surprised MS bought them off. I wouldn't be surprised of any corporation acting in the same manner. That makes me suspicious. If you need to pay a developer license fee to unlock your phone, it's a pretty clear indication what the vendor thinks of that ability. ChevronWP7 is such a clear contradiction of that -- regardless of what we think of it politically -- that the developers couldn't possibly have thought MS would react in any other way. Could this have been their plan all along? It's a gamble, true, since they might be sued, but to me this seems like a brilliant way to get paid if you don't get too greedy.
Read through the ChevronWP7 website/blog and tell me they're not just asking to be bought off.
I'm a devout Linux/Mac user that has to support Windows 7 for a living. I can say that it's a dog. - It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines
That hasn't been my experience at all. The only times I've experienced any vitrual OS being a dog the issue was hardware-related -- CPUs not supporting VM extensions or insufficient physical memory. I've run Win 7 on my Atom-based netbook with no problems, although it does have 1GB of RAM. Vista on the same system would barely let you log in. I've run Win 7 with great success on older hardware, although you did need to disable Aero. Just like I've had to disable compiz or use xfce instead of Gnome, too.
- Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself
You're doing something wrong. Win 7 Ent can be deployed with WDS with no problems, IMX. Are you trying to use disk-based imaging (cloning) instead of file-based images that MS supports (WIM)? Are you not using the Enterprise SKU?
I've not done anything with VHDs, though, so I can't speak to any problems there.
- Still no decent backup system
Agreed. Although the presense of Previous Versions (aka, shadow copy aka copy-on-write-like behavior) has been quite welcome.
- XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions)
Been lucky enough to not have to mess with the ACT. Nevertheless, XP Mode is only necessessary to support software which was poorly coded in the first place. This problem is as much Microsoft's as poor hardware support due to proprietary drivers is Linux's.
- Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
What do you mean no large FAT support? It will mount large FAT32 volumes just fine. You just can't format them larger than 32GB using the built-in tools. If your problem is inter-OS compatability, though, this is rarely a problem. Just format the partition in a different OS. Otherwise just use NTFS.
There are a number of wonky work-arounds for ext3/4 filesystems (ext2read, booting a Linux-based VM, using an ext2 driver in read-only mode, etc.), but there aren't any good solutions. I don't see how this is a common problem, or even Microsoft's problem.
- Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
That's a limit of 2 processor sockets, and either 32 cores (32-bit) or 256 cores (64-bit). That means that yes, you can get your workstation with Dual six core Xeons if you want to. If you seriously need more hardware than that, buy a Server SKU. You're already dropping at least $10,000 USD on hardware for such a system. The cost of the Server SKU is going to be negligible.
AFAIK Redhat sells RHEL on a per-socket basis. Additionally, you can't even get a Mac with more than 2 processor sockets. Not even a server. They do not exist.
- Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
Maybe you should spec your hardware to meet your needs instead of blaming the OS for not being magical? If you need true full disk encryption then you should be aware of that when you buy your systems.
Additionally, BitLocker does *not* require a TPM; it's just not as secure: "By default, BitLocker is configured to look for and use a TPM. You can use Group Policy to allow BitLocker to work without a TPM, and store keys on an external USB flash drive; however, BitLocker cannot then verify the early startup components." -- See "What works differently?" http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725719(WS.10).aspx
Yes, but the reason the US machines were able to take off is because the European mills were all destroyed or put out of business by the people who worked, owned, or invested in the manually run non-industrialized mills. If the Europeans hadn't so soundly rejected the new processes then industry in the US would have floundered by being unable to produce goods at competitive prices.
Today we remember these angry Europeans -- who are infamous for storming the new mills and breaking the machines -- for the name of one of the most outspoken among them: George Ludd. Yes, they were the Luddites.
Yes, the plans were stolen away to the US, but they were not being used in Europe because the technology was socially unacceptable!
Well said. I've long been of the opinion that it is not religions that cause strife so much as dogma and zealotry. The genocides/xenocides experienced in the 20th century seem to hold that out, as most (all?) off the killings have been perpetuated by dogmatic governments even when such governments are wholly opposed to religions (Stalinist Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia spring to mind).
Solution: Use a fixed-width font when printing and change the limit to a character limit rather than a word limit.
Then again, these types of issues are often steered by people who have no idea how to manage a project or engineer a system. They fail to understand the problem or research a solution and instead pick the first solution they find regardless of how well it meets the needs of people involved.
Case in point: I work for a public school district. There is a county-wide initiative which requires additional testing forms to be filled out to determine if each district is meeting goals of the county-wide entity. The tests are all multiple-choice selections. Do they use a web-based form which submits to a database? No. Do they perhaps leverage the tried-and-true scantron forms that students have used for multiple choice tests for the better part of 30 years and the school has reams and reams of? No. Do they perhaps use the Canon copiers which they just leased and got a service contract for this year and are district-wide and have built-in document scanning? No.
Here's what they do. They want teachers to administer the tests. No problem there. Then they need to fill out specialized bubble forms which are downloaded using special login and passwords on a vendor website we don't control in any way. If passwords don't work then the teacher is out of luck for about a week. Then they use custom software and individual document scanners to scan these forms and encode the data for collection. These scanners are expensive, and the software is per-install licensed. There is only enough money for one scanner and software license per high school. So each high school -- some of which have 50 or more teachers collecting data -- now have a single kiosk computer set up to scan these forms which the teachers have to reserve time for. The few middle school teachers who also need to do this need to come to the high schools to do this work. The high schools and middle schools are not located close to each other at all. But it gets better. They alloted money for the scanners, but nothing for the computers. They're forced to cannibalize one computer from a computer lab in each school... all of which had classes at max capacity. I don't know what the teachers in those classes are doing for the student who has no PC. Additionally, the software is really picky. It requires you to calibrate the scanner. To calibrate the scanner, you must download another form and fill it out as requested using the same pen or pencil you used on the other forms. You must do this for each class -- that's right not each teacher, but each class -- because the forms can vary from class to class. The only saving grace of all this is that the scanners themselves are really nice and work very well, but they ought to at the price we're paying. We're just hoping that the volume these scanners will need to handle doesn't cause jamming. We don't have a service agreement on these scanners, so if they break we'll have to figure them out ourselves or buy more scanners.
This is what happens when you make a technical decision without consulting with technical people. You make everyone's life a living nightmare and waste hundreds of hours and thousands of tax dollars. You virtually guarantee that the data will not be gathered in a timely manner and that the project is likely to fail.
This is indeed a wonderful accomplishment and the Debian team deserves a lot of praise for what must have been a lot of hard work, however, I wonder if they're shooting themselves in the foot and removing hardware support. One of the things that drove me to Ubuntu over Debian on my laptop has been that Ubuntu is willing to package binary blobs for drivers. Nothing is quite as frustrating as getting a system installed only to find that some piece of hardware isn't detected right and is non-functional... particularly when it's something critical like network drivers.
I am very pleased that Debian has been able to get so far while maintaining such integrity to it's mission. I really respect that. But at the end of the day, I want a system that I can use.
The ANSI SQL standard way to do this is to create "INSTEAD OF" triggers, which means you're permanently modifying how INSERT works on a given table. ON DUPLICATE KEY means the behavior of the DB ("On INSERT do I error or UPDATE?") is dictated by the query and not the DB schema. That's sloppy. If Bob writes an application that uses the same database as Alice, now he has to use ON DUPLICATE KEY in order to ensure consistent behavior. That's awful.
1) It was originally an embedded or server-less DBMS. That instantly makes devs think "Oh Lord, it's Access!" 2) It had a large number of security problems at one point (pre v2 era) in the past that went un-addressed for entirely too long. 3) It uses Interbase Public License (a modified Mozilla Public License) that is not compatible with the GPL... that's really, really bad for an Open Source embedded-style DB.
It's gotten leaps and bounds better since early versions, but it's never really beaten the early reputation, IMO.
It does render very fast, but certain things were just awful when this was present in the Dev channel and convinced me to disable the thing. Last time I played with it, selecting text to copy and paste worked dreadfully. Letters would be dropped or the text would select in unpredictable ways. Additionally, printing the PDF resulted in something that looked exactly nothing like the PDF document I was using. I found the latter particularly silly given the design intent and implementation of the PDF document format (ostensibly a PostScript printer file with extra metadata). I was also particularly annoyed that there was no way in the Dev version to save the PDF to file rather than merely view it. (At least, none that I could discern.) This made it more irritating than not when you wanted to download a PDF to store for later or to distribute to others.
So while it's great for viewing, I found it limited and the inability to save meant that you couldn't easily fall back on a thicker PDF reader when the browser-based version failed.
Organ transplant triage is based on success rates, not the value of life. The young and those with no chemical dependencies or complicating conditions have a documented higher success rate. They can undergo the extremely traumatic procedures and will be more likely to have positive outcomes. This is, in fact, based ultimately on the fact that two lives *are* equal. Given the choice between a 70% chance of saving one life and a 40% chance of saving another, which is the more responsible choice of action? If, on the other hand, there were a surplus of suitable organs, then such procedures would be done to these less attractive patients. Triage is about preserving the most life, not selecting which is more valuable.
Self-defense is an accepted justification because it deters attacks. It means an attacker has to accept that by breaking another's right to safety, they themselves lose that same right. Again, this is equality in action, not a value judgement on life.
Thanks, but we've heard this for the last two dozen Blizzard articles. Can we please move on with something more interesting to talk about? It's not like acting tough on SlashDot while crying on your keyboard is really convincing Blizzard to change their business model.
Oh God, I so hope this happens. Microsoft may have a bad reputation for security, but quite honestly nothing is as big a nightmare for IT than anything and everything Adobe. Reader, Flash, CS... it's all a perpetual pain in the butt that Adobe always drops the ball with deployment and maintenance.
Plus maybe then we can stop every MS site from needing SilverLight and every MS application installing an XPS Viewer/Printer.
It really does sound like a "working as designed" problem. Honestly, if you design something to broadcast data with no technical security policies at all, you really can't complain when your data gets intercepted and used for things you can't control. Removing the iPhone app doesn't even remotely fix the problem either, of course, since this kind of device could just be purpose-built.
An IP troll is someone who leverages the power of IP law as a means to turn a profit. IP laws are intended to protect creativity in Arts and foster ingenuity in Science and Engineering. The ideal is to protect and nurture those who seek the betterment of all Humanity through the enrichment of our culture or expansion of our knowledge. Anyone who profits from patents and copyrights solely as a consequence of the laws that back the IP and not because of their own creativity and ingenuity of the creation itself is a parasitic troll engaging in abuse of tort.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised MS bought them off. I wouldn't be surprised of any corporation acting in the same manner. That makes me suspicious. If you need to pay a developer license fee to unlock your phone, it's a pretty clear indication what the vendor thinks of that ability. ChevronWP7 is such a clear contradiction of that -- regardless of what we think of it politically -- that the developers couldn't possibly have thought MS would react in any other way. Could this have been their plan all along? It's a gamble, true, since they might be sued, but to me this seems like a brilliant way to get paid if you don't get too greedy.
Read through the ChevronWP7 website/blog and tell me they're not just asking to be bought off.
It's sad how that one skit from Saturday Night Live in 1976 is still relevant and still accurate:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4163/saturday-night-live-ernestine
Seriously, what the heck is it with telecom companies?
I'm a devout Linux/Mac user that has to support Windows 7 for a living. I can say that it's a dog.
- It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines
That hasn't been my experience at all. The only times I've experienced any vitrual OS being a dog the issue was hardware-related -- CPUs not supporting VM extensions or insufficient physical memory. I've run Win 7 on my Atom-based netbook with no problems, although it does have 1GB of RAM. Vista on the same system would barely let you log in. I've run Win 7 with great success on older hardware, although you did need to disable Aero. Just like I've had to disable compiz or use xfce instead of Gnome, too.
- Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself
You're doing something wrong. Win 7 Ent can be deployed with WDS with no problems, IMX. Are you trying to use disk-based imaging (cloning) instead of file-based images that MS supports (WIM)? Are you not using the Enterprise SKU?
I've not done anything with VHDs, though, so I can't speak to any problems there.
- Still no decent backup system
Agreed. Although the presense of Previous Versions (aka, shadow copy aka copy-on-write-like behavior) has been quite welcome.
- XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions)
Been lucky enough to not have to mess with the ACT. Nevertheless, XP Mode is only necessessary to support software which was poorly coded in the first place. This problem is as much Microsoft's as poor hardware support due to proprietary drivers is Linux's.
- Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
What do you mean no large FAT support? It will mount large FAT32 volumes just fine. You just can't format them larger than 32GB using the built-in tools. If your problem is inter-OS compatability, though, this is rarely a problem. Just format the partition in a different OS. Otherwise just use NTFS.
There are a number of wonky work-arounds for ext3/4 filesystems (ext2read, booting a Linux-based VM, using an ext2 driver in read-only mode, etc.), but there aren't any good solutions. I don't see how this is a common problem, or even Microsoft's problem.
- Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
That's a limit of 2 processor sockets, and either 32 cores (32-bit) or 256 cores (64-bit). That means that yes, you can get your workstation with Dual six core Xeons if you want to. If you seriously need more hardware than that, buy a Server SKU. You're already dropping at least $10,000 USD on hardware for such a system. The cost of the Server SKU is going to be negligible.
AFAIK Redhat sells RHEL on a per-socket basis. Additionally, you can't even get a Mac with more than 2 processor sockets. Not even a server. They do not exist.
- Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
Maybe you should spec your hardware to meet your needs instead of blaming the OS for not being magical? If you need true full disk encryption then you should be aware of that when you buy your systems.
Additionally, BitLocker does *not* require a TPM; it's just not as secure: "By default, BitLocker is configured to look for and use a TPM. You can use Group Policy to allow BitLocker to work without a TPM, and store keys on an external USB flash drive; however, BitLocker cannot then verify the early startup components." -- See "What works differently?" http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725719(WS.10).aspx
Yes, but the reason the US machines were able to take off is because the European mills were all destroyed or put out of business by the people who worked, owned, or invested in the manually run non-industrialized mills. If the Europeans hadn't so soundly rejected the new processes then industry in the US would have floundered by being unable to produce goods at competitive prices.
Today we remember these angry Europeans -- who are infamous for storming the new mills and breaking the machines -- for the name of one of the most outspoken among them: George Ludd. Yes, they were the Luddites.
Yes, the plans were stolen away to the US, but they were not being used in Europe because the technology was socially unacceptable!
Your search - Italy - did not match any documents.
Did you mean: Italic?
The decade ended last year. 2010 is the first year of a new decade.
It makes obvious sense when you think about "the 70s", for example, being 1970-1979 rather than 1971-1980.
Well said. I've long been of the opinion that it is not religions that cause strife so much as dogma and zealotry. The genocides/xenocides experienced in the 20th century seem to hold that out, as most (all?) off the killings have been perpetuated by dogmatic governments even when such governments are wholly opposed to religions (Stalinist Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia spring to mind).
Solution: Use a fixed-width font when printing and change the limit to a character limit rather than a word limit.
Then again, these types of issues are often steered by people who have no idea how to manage a project or engineer a system. They fail to understand the problem or research a solution and instead pick the first solution they find regardless of how well it meets the needs of people involved.
Case in point: I work for a public school district. There is a county-wide initiative which requires additional testing forms to be filled out to determine if each district is meeting goals of the county-wide entity. The tests are all multiple-choice selections. Do they use a web-based form which submits to a database? No. Do they perhaps leverage the tried-and-true scantron forms that students have used for multiple choice tests for the better part of 30 years and the school has reams and reams of? No. Do they perhaps use the Canon copiers which they just leased and got a service contract for this year and are district-wide and have built-in document scanning? No.
Here's what they do. They want teachers to administer the tests. No problem there. Then they need to fill out specialized bubble forms which are downloaded using special login and passwords on a vendor website we don't control in any way. If passwords don't work then the teacher is out of luck for about a week. Then they use custom software and individual document scanners to scan these forms and encode the data for collection. These scanners are expensive, and the software is per-install licensed. There is only enough money for one scanner and software license per high school. So each high school -- some of which have 50 or more teachers collecting data -- now have a single kiosk computer set up to scan these forms which the teachers have to reserve time for. The few middle school teachers who also need to do this need to come to the high schools to do this work. The high schools and middle schools are not located close to each other at all. But it gets better. They alloted money for the scanners, but nothing for the computers. They're forced to cannibalize one computer from a computer lab in each school... all of which had classes at max capacity. I don't know what the teachers in those classes are doing for the student who has no PC. Additionally, the software is really picky. It requires you to calibrate the scanner. To calibrate the scanner, you must download another form and fill it out as requested using the same pen or pencil you used on the other forms. You must do this for each class -- that's right not each teacher, but each class -- because the forms can vary from class to class. The only saving grace of all this is that the scanners themselves are really nice and work very well, but they ought to at the price we're paying. We're just hoping that the volume these scanners will need to handle doesn't cause jamming. We don't have a service agreement on these scanners, so if they break we'll have to figure them out ourselves or buy more scanners.
This is what happens when you make a technical decision without consulting with technical people. You make everyone's life a living nightmare and waste hundreds of hours and thousands of tax dollars. You virtually guarantee that the data will not be gathered in a timely manner and that the project is likely to fail.
This is indeed a wonderful accomplishment and the Debian team deserves a lot of praise for what must have been a lot of hard work, however, I wonder if they're shooting themselves in the foot and removing hardware support. One of the things that drove me to Ubuntu over Debian on my laptop has been that Ubuntu is willing to package binary blobs for drivers. Nothing is quite as frustrating as getting a system installed only to find that some piece of hardware isn't detected right and is non-functional... particularly when it's something critical like network drivers.
I am very pleased that Debian has been able to get so far while maintaining such integrity to it's mission. I really respect that. But at the end of the day, I want a system that I can use.
The ANSI SQL standard way to do this is to create "INSTEAD OF" triggers, which means you're permanently modifying how INSERT works on a given table. ON DUPLICATE KEY means the behavior of the DB ("On INSERT do I error or UPDATE?") is dictated by the query and not the DB schema. That's sloppy. If Bob writes an application that uses the same database as Alice, now he has to use ON DUPLICATE KEY in order to ensure consistent behavior. That's awful.
Pretty easy really.
1) It was originally an embedded or server-less DBMS. That instantly makes devs think "Oh Lord, it's Access!"
2) It had a large number of security problems at one point (pre v2 era) in the past that went un-addressed for entirely too long.
3) It uses Interbase Public License (a modified Mozilla Public License) that is not compatible with the GPL... that's really, really bad for an Open Source embedded-style DB.
It's gotten leaps and bounds better since early versions, but it's never really beaten the early reputation, IMO.
I'd love it if they were the next buggy whip industry.
Slashdot: We'll nit-pick the funny out of any joke.
It does render very fast, but certain things were just awful when this was present in the Dev channel and convinced me to disable the thing. Last time I played with it, selecting text to copy and paste worked dreadfully. Letters would be dropped or the text would select in unpredictable ways. Additionally, printing the PDF resulted in something that looked exactly nothing like the PDF document I was using. I found the latter particularly silly given the design intent and implementation of the PDF document format (ostensibly a PostScript printer file with extra metadata). I was also particularly annoyed that there was no way in the Dev version to save the PDF to file rather than merely view it. (At least, none that I could discern.) This made it more irritating than not when you wanted to download a PDF to store for later or to distribute to others.
So while it's great for viewing, I found it limited and the inability to save meant that you couldn't easily fall back on a thicker PDF reader when the browser-based version failed.
Every grot knows da red onez go fasta!
They've been trying to drop XP for about two years.
No. You're confusing equal with identical.
Organ transplant triage is based on success rates, not the value of life. The young and those with no chemical dependencies or complicating conditions have a documented higher success rate. They can undergo the extremely traumatic procedures and will be more likely to have positive outcomes. This is, in fact, based ultimately on the fact that two lives *are* equal. Given the choice between a 70% chance of saving one life and a 40% chance of saving another, which is the more responsible choice of action? If, on the other hand, there were a surplus of suitable organs, then such procedures would be done to these less attractive patients. Triage is about preserving the most life, not selecting which is more valuable.
Self-defense is an accepted justification because it deters attacks. It means an attacker has to accept that by breaking another's right to safety, they themselves lose that same right. Again, this is equality in action, not a value judgement on life.
It is this type of thinking that separates a carpenter from an engineer.
Thanks, but we've heard this for the last two dozen Blizzard articles. Can we please move on with something more interesting to talk about? It's not like acting tough on SlashDot while crying on your keyboard is really convincing Blizzard to change their business model.
Honestly, you're worse than Steam haters.
Who cares? How many security holes have there been in XPS or Silverlight?
I highly doubt they'd want to change the name from PDF or Flash, though. If you buy Adobe it's for brand recognition more than anything.
Oh God, I so hope this happens. Microsoft may have a bad reputation for security, but quite honestly nothing is as big a nightmare for IT than anything and everything Adobe. Reader, Flash, CS... it's all a perpetual pain in the butt that Adobe always drops the ball with deployment and maintenance.
Plus maybe then we can stop every MS site from needing SilverLight and every MS application installing an XPS Viewer/Printer.
People in India don't want higher pay and better working conditions?
It really does sound like a "working as designed" problem. Honestly, if you design something to broadcast data with no technical security policies at all, you really can't complain when your data gets intercepted and used for things you can't control. Removing the iPhone app doesn't even remotely fix the problem either, of course, since this kind of device could just be purpose-built.
Don't we call those "graphics cards"?
This is a silly question.
An IP troll is someone who leverages the power of IP law as a means to turn a profit. IP laws are intended to protect creativity in Arts and foster ingenuity in Science and Engineering. The ideal is to protect and nurture those who seek the betterment of all Humanity through the enrichment of our culture or expansion of our knowledge. Anyone who profits from patents and copyrights solely as a consequence of the laws that back the IP and not because of their own creativity and ingenuity of the creation itself is a parasitic troll engaging in abuse of tort.