They can replace it with OSX computers, thus spending a lot more money in the process, or they can use some Linux variety which will not support most of the software they need, requiring custom solutions and ports, thus spending a lot more money in the process.
So which one will it be?
Instead of dumping Windows randomly (wtf is getting rid of "25% of the monopoly"??) they could instead negotiate to get better deals out of MS. If they buy XP now, they're set with support and a modern OS for at least the next 7 years (I know Vista is coming, but XP will be a factor for a long, long time still).
"That's quite a long time to have a flaw in your OS. Maybe they should focus more on security rather than a fancy new AeroGlass interface."
Probably you've not noticed but they are focusing on both just fine:) The WMF flaw was patched ahead of schedule and it works fine. In the meantime Vista has whole new ways of battling malware.
If you believe delving through millions of code lines written 30 years ago to look for potential holes is what they should concentrate on, they wouldn't be in business by now.
BTW accept the AuroGlass as a knee jerk reaction by the OSX interface. Bill Gates has always knew that when you're on top, the only way is down. They'd rather catch up than do nothing and hope it's some fad that'll pass.
The benefit is for everyone: multithreaded GUI, more responsive, faster, better HW accelerated via DX, and last but not least, it looks pretty nice.
"This question was about the only thing that I liked about the show. Maybe I'm the only slashdot reader who feels this way, but the Ghost in the Shell material always seemed pretty heavy and kind of inaccessible to me."
This is an overall trend in Japanese sci-fi and horror.
Basically, Japan authors are not afraid that their audience won't 100% "get it". The way our brain works, you need to think about what's happening, and what you do NOT know is sometimes the best part of the experience, it makes you involved in the story than just a side spectator of a well laid out story.
In the real world you never know everything, that keeps you moving and progressing through life. Japanese authors simply bring this element in their films. We can't expect to jump 150 years into the future and instantly know everything.
Imagine someone from 1850 having to deal with our transportation system, credit cards, software, mp3 players and what not.
In the case of horror films, what is scarrier: that some alien worms are just spread around town squirting nasty things into people which makes them die while spraying alien jelly stuff over everything (Slither) or the silent, spooky and mysterios characters of Japanese horror films like the Grudge and Ringu.
For the latter, you'll notice the originals are better than their US counterparts for the most part. The US movie makers simply felt the need to have more CGI and dumb down the story into something everyone can understand. Each approach has its benefits, but I'm certainly a fan of the Japanese approach.
Similar with GITS, do I understand 100% of all the tech slang and philosophical references? No, but this doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy every second of it. It also increases the replay value of the series incredibly.
"No, mine aren't. They are on multiple site, geographically dispersed, diverse routed synchronous data arrays in secure and hardened data centres."
If I was a hacker, seeing such a large attack surface for obtaining your data would put a huge smile on my face.
As you probably know from your job, the better you protect that data from being LOST, the easier it is to be STOLEN actually if someone finds the weakest link.
I'd start with stone age techniques like visiting each of the server clusters claiming I'm the electrician and gotta fix something I was called for.
As demonstrated earlier by Mercedes, here is one more next-gen driving system in your car that can fail in unexpected situations.
No wonder that for mission critical systems in space ships, NASA still uses previous generation computers.
- Body Area Network (BAN)
Perfect marketing strategy: call little electornic devices you implant in your body "ban". Cue in music from the Matrix.
There will be of course, major privacy concerns about this (imagine someone waving a small device around you and obtaining full personal info and medical records).
- IPTV
2006 is a bit earlier to call it a win for IPTV and a bit late to call it a "new concept" as well.
- Metadata
Again, why the heck is this called a "new" concept? OSX had it before 2006, office (and other apps) had it for years, but most importantly, Internet had it for ages and is already sick of it and deprecated it.
Metadata in that context is just poor man's data indexing. Search engines in the past used metadata because they didn't have the brains and power to read the pages themselves, now Desktop search engines need that hack until smarter algorithms are developed.
While I'm all for it, it's just too old to be new again.
- NAND Flash Memory
Uh 16 GB? Nope, 16Gb, err 2GB in other words. That said with those prices and sizes, you can still have a 2.5 inch hard disk sized Flash block at around 200GB capacity.
Which will cost roughly $9000.
- Nanoparticle Batteries / Micro Fuel Cells
We've had revolutionary laptop and mobile batteries coming every next year and still nothing. I'd rather wait and see this time, instead of trusting the hype again.
- SPIT
Right, we have new tech concept for spamming. Thanks for mentioning it folks, just rub it in, won't ya.
- EMR (electronic medical records)
Hehe, wait until we have the "600 000 medical records lost (or stolen) from hospital X" news, following similar trends for other important electronic data we see nowadays.
- Coal Gasification
I prefer mine hard, but ok I have no clue about this anyway:) I just use electricity...
- Perpendicular Storage
They missed the more important news. It's not perpendicular storage, which is great but which most of us shouldn't care about, but what it enables and how it changes the HDD designs.
2.5 inch designs are set to replace the current 3.5 inch drives on desktops (Seagate pioneers this move). the avdantages are:
- much lower noise - higher rotation speed - much faster access time and reading speed - much less electricity spent (I think around 5-6 times less than current generation 3.5 inch disks) - they are a lot smaller and look pretty cute (yep I know I know..)
With that you can have reasonably priced desktop 2.5 disks with capacity 160GB.
I for one, welcome our new... ah forget it. ------------
At MacExpo Steve Jobs repeatedly pointed out that Apple shares are now 4 times faster and much more interesting compared to other shares.
"Yes our shares are operating in the same market as other shares, but there's just so much more you can do with our shares compared to regular boring shares, it's amazing. Repeat after me: amazing Apple shares, simply amazing Apple shares."
Preliminary specs of PS3 proved that XBOX 360 is rather close to this.
Also "movie-quality games" depend mostly on the GPU, not CPU. Cell is the CPU, so maybe movie-quality hair phisics and accurate collision detection but graphics ain't really a part of this.
Cell sounded revolutionary few years ago, but with Intel prepping to offer 32-core (yep, 32 core..) processor in less than 2 years, which also means compatible with the tons of 86 apps out there, it just lost its magic.
Re:Apple: we sell whatever we can hype up
on
iCell in the Works?
·
· Score: 1
"I realize you're just a troll, but, were you a born idiot, or did you go to school for that? And here's a safer bet: You got your head up your ass. Put your allowance on that one.. Meanwhile, who in their right mind wants to watch shitty audio-tracked, butchered aspect ratio wmv files on a Mac? Shit dude, strike three on shit for brains, eh?"
It's called sarcasm (regarding full screen). You'll do yourself a favor and relax a bit, who wants "heart attack caused by overly intensive slashdot post replies" on their thumbstone.
Well damn. They should definitely mean "lesser" as in "smaller" and "cheaper" in price, cuz I swear my cheap $50 mp3 player is like 5 times smaller, more durable (no HDD), and doubles as a plug-n-play USB mass storage flash stick (and triples as a music source for my subwoofer system when my PC is off).
I've never seen anything else handier.
But oh yes, shiait... it has no cool ads on TV nor Steve Jobs to hype it up, that must be why it's lesser.
"No. There is an inherent problem in the OS. Window's refusal to compartmentalize memory and Window's insistence on running everything in one big memory segment creates a greater likelihood a catastrophic crash than Unix/Linux systems."
You don't realize we're talking the same thing. The "one big memory segment" issue where one program could poke the memory of another program and crash it (including system critical drivers etc.), is present only in 9x series and it was part of ensuring DOS apps can run natively, since they don't understand 32-bit protected mode.
This problem is non-existent in NT since it only emulates DOS mode instead of making it part of the core OS... NT works like Unix instead, where the address space of a program is local to the program (so even with the best of intentions, the program can't touch the memory outside its own space).
And FYI Microsoft was fully aware, but it was apparent the casual users won't jump on an OS that doesn't run their Windows 3.11 apps (where Win 3.11 is really a graphic shell over DOS, W 3.11 has no its own API for file access for example and instead uses DOS's one).
NT 3.51 and 4.0 was available at the time, so it's not like NT was invented post factum.
You see, it's good to know things, but when you don't know the whole story it's easy to blame and come up with the wrong conclusions.
Microsoft just did whatever was necessary to transition the users to the NT experience and keep its market share.
BTW, if you had random crashing while playing MPlayer after fresh 9x install, it's most likely bad hardware. I remember at the time VIA was selling a bunch of terrible mobos, I had to return my VIA motherboard after repeated BSOD's on fresh Win98 and switched to Intel mobo and never had such serious issues on that PC since.
"I am speaking of 9x, the only versions I have used"
Oh ok, that's pretty different. Microsoft knew very well that 9x is problematic, which is why the goal was from the very start to transition to NT. 9x was just a short term strategy.
9x was the best that could be done at the time (to ensure full compatibility with the plethora of DOS/Win3.11 apps that were present at the time). As you know, compatibility plays crucial role in the success of the Windows series.
Just an observation. Some of the commenters try to find some logic of whether cellphones with camera and mp3 service and so on have a point or not.
This doesn't matter in the least for Apple.
When Steve Jobs and fellas bashed mp3 cell phones (and the ROKR in particular) for saying people want specialised devices that do one thing, and so iPod will do forever only music, wtf is this:
- Repeatedly we're told that integrating camera on an iPod sucks (though we have an add-on), yet.. uhmm anyone notices iMac has one? and the new MacBook Pro. How the hell is a desktop machine more deserving of a camera than a portable camera shaped device:)?
- After repeatedly denying video for iPod because it'll suck and makes no sense, we now have video capable iPod
- After repeatedly bashing Intel and "undeniably proving" how so much better and faster PowerPC is, now Macs are Intel based. The remaining targets for the marketing campaigns are "Windows sucks" and "PC-s are boring". Why are they boring? Cuz they don't have backlit keyboard or something? No clue. My PC is pretty interesting, and my PC case even has blinking red lights. But it still costs less than $1000.
Anyway, it's understandable, since Apple is a branding company. The rules bend, morph and change to accomodate the latest campaign Apple is launching.
The fact that they are producing computers is just a side effect from the need to make something appealing to the artsy crowd and casual users and hype it up as much as possible.
Whatever it is. Leave it to Apple and Jobs and soon you'll be buying overpriced paper iTissues, why? Because they are THE BEST in the world, and WAY BEYOND anything else the regular paper tissue is. They are JUST amazing. Why? Because [insert bogus claims that sound reasonable to non experts]. Ok now go buy.
In that light, if they see market opportunity in hyped up cellphones, they'll go for it, no doubt about it.
"I know you were trolling...you just didn't know you were half right, did you?"
Take it as you wish. I'm just being real. Windows has no magic "crash" API, there's always a rational reason for a problem - overheating, bad hardware, bad electricity, bad software, wrong configuration.. OR last: bug in the OS.
You'll be surprised how stable Windows is if you handle it properly (first hand experience). But of course it's much easier to just say "Hey, Windows sucks that's why it crashes" and be done with it.
"to be honest as humans become more centralised they're going to need to ditch the idea that everyone has a right to a car like device."
Well that's a phenomenon that is most obvious in USA. Over here (Bulgaria), I can say I never had the need for a car. The public transport is strong, the taxi is very cheap, and I can even walk (!!!) to reach some of the places I need to reach:).
If you could support that with facts it wouldn't be bad. There are threemajor player - QT, Real and WMP. The onyl one I have good streaming/playback experience with is WMP. Real used to be good, before they bloated it and riddled it with adware.
WMP has only been improving since. Oh and guess what, you don't have to BUY a pro version to run in full screen (like QuickTime)? How cool is that eh?
I bet Mac users think fullscreen playback is some sort of extremely hard to do feature worth paying for.
I've yet to see an example where a patent did good.
Flash Player licensed that patented text rendering tech from Mitsubishi Labs, but it's weirdly colored and looks like a christmas tree so that doesn't count.
I'll feel better if you confess that you were just hitting random kb keys with a hammer resulting in this sentence rather that actually meaning what you said.
BTW, I'm selling moon rocks, only $200 each piece. It's like totally rippin' me. You in?
"Telling "It will work out in the future, somehow" is the best motivation-killer."
Well yea, but telling them "no matter what you do, somehow, you'll end up in a nuclear holocaust and highly toxic environment with lots of deadly mutation and deseases, the last surviving human societies will be a bunch of ruthless scavengers forced to canibalize their fellow buddies for survival, in the hope of slowing the their imminent doom".... ain't a lot better motivation-wise.
Plus everytime someone predicts flying cars next year someone sits down and works on it for real. Some day, some year, someone will succeed, and we'll have flying cars! How cool would be that ?!
"QuickTime har supported everything you just said Flash does for ages"
Yea... That's funny right, cause if you didn't know it has embeded Flash 5 player in it among other things.
And by everything do you also mean robust JIT compilator, sockets, XML parser, full OOP programming environment with type checking/classes/interfaces and all the other niceties.
BTW, half assed feature addition does not a nice product make. Flash has a solid (well slightly less solid in the last few version but still solid enough) authoring environment and ecosystem of authoring products, as well as light footprint (unless you missed that Flash is like 800kb in flash 8, how much is QuickTime? Like 15mb or something?) and much faster interactivity / startup / light on resources.
And it doesn't crash my firefox every time I open flash video/applet in it.
`` "Sorry," I said, "that's just Windows. It crashes. That's why I don't like it." ``
Yeaa..so it doesn't crash because of faulty software or hardware (the reason fro most crashes and restarts, usually blamed on Windows), but it crashes because it's "just" Windows.
If someone'd help me in that way I'd be stressed too. No offence, though, just it's true (reason for crashes/restarts).
My PC hasn't been restarted for months, no crash, no hang, no restart. It's XP. But I also don't install random software on it and I'm careful what hardware I buy (well venitlated, good PSU etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
They can replace it with OSX computers, thus spending a lot more money in the process, or they can use some Linux variety which will not support most of the software they need, requiring custom solutions and ports, thus spending a lot more money in the process.
So which one will it be?
Instead of dumping Windows randomly (wtf is getting rid of "25% of the monopoly"??) they could instead negotiate to get better deals out of MS. If they buy XP now, they're set with support and a modern OS for at least the next 7 years (I know Vista is coming, but XP will be a factor for a long, long time still).
"That's quite a long time to have a flaw in your OS. Maybe they should focus more on security rather than a fancy new AeroGlass interface."
:)
Probably you've not noticed but they are focusing on both just fine
The WMF flaw was patched ahead of schedule and it works fine. In the meantime Vista has whole new ways of battling malware.
If you believe delving through millions of code lines written 30 years ago to look for potential holes is what they should concentrate on, they wouldn't be in business by now.
BTW accept the AuroGlass as a knee jerk reaction by the OSX interface. Bill Gates has always knew that when you're on top, the only way is down. They'd rather catch up than do nothing and hope it's some fad that'll pass.
The benefit is for everyone: multithreaded GUI, more responsive, faster, better HW accelerated via DX, and last but not least, it looks pretty nice.
"This question was about the only thing that I liked about the show. Maybe I'm the only slashdot reader who feels this way, but the Ghost in the Shell material always seemed pretty heavy and kind of inaccessible to me."
This is an overall trend in Japanese sci-fi and horror.
Basically, Japan authors are not afraid that their audience won't 100% "get it". The way our brain works, you need to think about what's happening, and what you do NOT know is sometimes the best part of the experience, it makes you involved in the story than just a side spectator of a well laid out story.
In the real world you never know everything, that keeps you moving and progressing through life. Japanese authors simply bring this element in their films. We can't expect to jump 150 years into the future and instantly know everything.
Imagine someone from 1850 having to deal with our transportation system, credit cards, software, mp3 players and what not.
In the case of horror films, what is scarrier: that some alien worms are just spread around town squirting nasty things into people which makes them die while spraying alien jelly stuff over everything (Slither) or the silent, spooky and mysterios characters of Japanese horror films like the Grudge and Ringu.
For the latter, you'll notice the originals are better than their US counterparts for the most part. The US movie makers simply felt the need to have more CGI and dumb down the story into something everyone can understand. Each approach has its benefits, but I'm certainly a fan of the Japanese approach.
Similar with GITS, do I understand 100% of all the tech slang and philosophical references? No, but this doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy every second of it. It also increases the replay value of the series incredibly.
"There are only a couple of minor bugs to work through, such as Flash and Java support."
I knew it that Flash and Java support were bugs all along.
"No, mine aren't. They are on multiple site, geographically dispersed, diverse routed synchronous data arrays in secure and hardened data centres."
If I was a hacker, seeing such a large attack surface for obtaining your data would put a huge smile on my face.
As you probably know from your job, the better you protect that data from being LOST, the easier it is to be STOLEN actually if someone finds the weakest link.
I'd start with stone age techniques like visiting each of the server clusters claiming I'm the electrician and gotta fix something I was called for.
Total worth of 2 cents:
:) I just use electricity...
------------
- Driver-Monitoring System
As demonstrated earlier by Mercedes, here is one more next-gen driving system in your car that can fail in unexpected situations.
No wonder that for mission critical systems in space ships, NASA still uses previous generation computers.
- Body Area Network (BAN)
Perfect marketing strategy: call little electornic devices you implant in your body "ban". Cue in music from the Matrix.
There will be of course, major privacy concerns about this (imagine someone waving a small device around you and obtaining full personal info and medical records).
- IPTV
2006 is a bit earlier to call it a win for IPTV and a bit late to call it a "new concept" as well.
- Metadata
Again, why the heck is this called a "new" concept? OSX had it before 2006, office (and other apps) had it for years, but most importantly, Internet had it for ages and is already sick of it and deprecated it.
Metadata in that context is just poor man's data indexing. Search engines in the past used metadata because they didn't have the brains and power to read the pages themselves, now Desktop search engines need that hack until smarter algorithms are developed.
While I'm all for it, it's just too old to be new again.
- NAND Flash Memory
Uh 16 GB? Nope, 16Gb, err 2GB in other words. That said with those prices and sizes, you can still have a 2.5 inch hard disk sized Flash block at around 200GB capacity.
Which will cost roughly $9000.
- Nanoparticle Batteries / Micro Fuel Cells
We've had revolutionary laptop and mobile batteries coming every next year and still nothing. I'd rather wait and see this time, instead of trusting the hype again.
- SPIT
Right, we have new tech concept for spamming. Thanks for mentioning it folks, just rub it in, won't ya.
- EMR (electronic medical records)
Hehe, wait until we have the "600 000 medical records lost (or stolen) from hospital X" news, following similar trends for other important electronic data we see nowadays.
- Coal Gasification
I prefer mine hard, but ok I have no clue about this anyway
- Perpendicular Storage
They missed the more important news. It's not perpendicular storage, which is great but which most of us shouldn't care about, but what it enables and how it changes the HDD designs.
2.5 inch designs are set to replace the current 3.5 inch drives on desktops (Seagate pioneers this move). the avdantages are:
- much lower noise
- higher rotation speed
- much faster access time and reading speed
- much less electricity spent (I think around 5-6 times less than current generation 3.5 inch disks)
- they are a lot smaller and look pretty cute (yep I know I know..)
With that you can have reasonably priced desktop 2.5 disks with capacity 160GB.
I for one, welcome our new... ah forget it.
------------
"The share market is a funny thing."
At MacExpo Steve Jobs repeatedly pointed out that Apple shares are now 4 times faster and much more interesting compared to other shares.
"Yes our shares are operating in the same market as other shares, but there's just so much more you can do with our shares compared to regular boring shares, it's amazing. Repeat after me: amazing Apple shares, simply amazing Apple shares."
[/sarcasm]
Preliminary specs of PS3 proved that XBOX 360 is rather close to this.
Also "movie-quality games" depend mostly on the GPU, not CPU. Cell is the CPU, so maybe movie-quality hair phisics and accurate collision detection but graphics ain't really a part of this.
Cell sounded revolutionary few years ago, but with Intel prepping to offer 32-core (yep, 32 core..) processor in less than 2 years, which also means compatible with the tons of 86 apps out there, it just lost its magic.
Little thing indeed.
"I realize you're just a troll, but, were you a born idiot, or did you go to school for that? And here's a safer bet: You got your head up your ass. Put your allowance on that one.. Meanwhile, who in their right mind wants to watch shitty audio-tracked, butchered aspect ratio wmv files on a Mac? Shit dude, strike three on shit for brains, eh?"
It's called sarcasm (regarding full screen).
You'll do yourself a favor and relax a bit, who wants "heart attack caused by overly intensive slashdot post replies" on their thumbstone.
"Lesser music players"
Well damn. They should definitely mean "lesser" as in "smaller" and "cheaper" in price, cuz I swear my cheap $50 mp3 player is like 5 times smaller, more durable (no HDD), and doubles as a plug-n-play USB mass storage flash stick (and triples as a music source for my subwoofer system when my PC is off).
I've never seen anything else handier.
But oh yes, shiait... it has no cool ads on TV nor Steve Jobs to hype it up, that must be why it's lesser.
Oh ok when your expert starts talking like:
"So it makes no sense to set an abort proc in a metafile. But even so, there would presumably be no reason for not allowing an abort proc to be set"
doesn't it remind you of the washing machine repair guy who knows "better" and found some parts of your washing machine are just unnecessary?
My point: don't assume conspiracy where you just "don't understand" stuff.
"No. There is an inherent problem in the OS. Window's refusal to compartmentalize memory and Window's insistence on running everything in one big memory segment creates a greater likelihood a catastrophic crash than Unix/Linux systems."
You don't realize we're talking the same thing. The "one big memory segment" issue where one program could poke the memory of another program and crash it (including system critical drivers etc.), is present only in 9x series and it was part of ensuring DOS apps can run natively, since they don't understand 32-bit protected mode.
This problem is non-existent in NT since it only emulates DOS mode instead of making it part of the core OS... NT works like Unix instead, where the address space of a program is local to the program (so even with the best of intentions, the program can't touch the memory outside its own space).
And FYI Microsoft was fully aware, but it was apparent the casual users won't jump on an OS that doesn't run their Windows 3.11 apps (where Win 3.11 is really a graphic shell over DOS, W 3.11 has no its own API for file access for example and instead uses DOS's one).
NT 3.51 and 4.0 was available at the time, so it's not like NT was invented post factum.
You see, it's good to know things, but when you don't know the whole story it's easy to blame and come up with the wrong conclusions.
Microsoft just did whatever was necessary to transition the users to the NT experience and keep its market share.
BTW, if you had random crashing while playing MPlayer after fresh 9x install, it's most likely bad hardware. I remember at the time VIA was selling a bunch of terrible mobos, I had to return my VIA motherboard after repeated BSOD's on fresh Win98 and switched to Intel mobo and never had such serious issues on that PC since.
"I am speaking of 9x, the only versions I have used"
Oh ok, that's pretty different. Microsoft knew very well that 9x is problematic, which is why the goal was from the very start to transition to NT. 9x was just a short term strategy.
9x was the best that could be done at the time (to ensure full compatibility with the plethora of DOS/Win3.11 apps that were present at the time). As you know, compatibility plays crucial role in the success of the Windows series.
Just an observation. Some of the commenters try to find some logic of whether cellphones with camera and mp3 service and so on have a point or not.
:)?
This doesn't matter in the least for Apple.
When Steve Jobs and fellas bashed mp3 cell phones (and the ROKR in particular) for saying people want specialised devices that do one thing, and so iPod will do forever only music, wtf is this:
- Repeatedly we're told that integrating camera on an iPod sucks (though we have an add-on), yet.. uhmm anyone notices iMac has one? and the new MacBook Pro. How the hell is a desktop machine more deserving of a camera than a portable camera shaped device
- After repeatedly denying video for iPod because it'll suck and makes no sense, we now have video capable iPod
- After repeatedly bashing Intel and "undeniably proving" how so much better and faster PowerPC is, now Macs are Intel based. The remaining targets for the marketing campaigns are "Windows sucks" and "PC-s are boring". Why are they boring? Cuz they don't have backlit keyboard or something? No clue. My PC is pretty interesting, and my PC case even has blinking red lights. But it still costs less than $1000.
Anyway, it's understandable, since Apple is a branding company. The rules bend, morph and change to accomodate the latest campaign Apple is launching.
The fact that they are producing computers is just a side effect from the need to make something appealing to the artsy crowd and casual users and hype it up as much as possible.
Whatever it is. Leave it to Apple and Jobs and soon you'll be buying overpriced paper iTissues, why? Because they are THE BEST in the world, and WAY BEYOND anything else the regular paper tissue is. They are JUST amazing. Why? Because [insert bogus claims that sound reasonable to non experts]. Ok now go buy.
In that light, if they see market opportunity in hyped up cellphones, they'll go for it, no doubt about it.
And those cellphones will have one single button!
"I know you were trolling...you just didn't know you were half right, did you?"
Take it as you wish. I'm just being real. Windows has no magic "crash" API, there's always a rational reason for a problem - overheating, bad hardware, bad electricity, bad software, wrong configuration.. OR last: bug in the OS.
You'll be surprised how stable Windows is if you handle it properly (first hand experience). But of course it's much easier to just say "Hey, Windows sucks that's why it crashes" and be done with it.
"to be honest as humans become more centralised they're going to need to ditch the idea that everyone has a right to a car like device."
:).
Well that's a phenomenon that is most obvious in USA. Over here (Bulgaria), I can say I never had the need for a car. The public transport is strong, the taxi is very cheap, and I can even walk (!!!) to reach some of the places I need to reach
If you could support that with facts it wouldn't be bad. There are threemajor player - QT, Real and WMP. The onyl one I have good streaming/playback experience with is WMP. Real used to be good, before they bloated it and riddled it with adware.
WMP has only been improving since. Oh and guess what, you don't have to BUY a pro version to run in full screen (like QuickTime)? How cool is that eh?
I bet Mac users think fullscreen playback is some sort of extremely hard to do feature worth paying for.
I've yet to see an example where a patent did good.
Flash Player licensed that patented text rendering tech from Mitsubishi Labs, but it's weirdly colored and looks like a christmas tree so that doesn't count.
"That would require very large magnets, so prepare for a car the size of a city."
How about a magnet city that keeps my regular size car in the air. Hmm...
** PATENT PENDING **
"I even got a PhD through one of my spam emails."
I'll feel better if you confess that you were just hitting random kb keys with a hammer resulting in this sentence rather that actually meaning what you said.
BTW, I'm selling moon rocks, only $200 each piece. It's like totally rippin' me. You in?
"Telling "It will work out in the future, somehow" is the best motivation-killer."
.. .. ain't a lot better motivation-wise.
Well yea, but telling them "no matter what you do, somehow, you'll end up in a nuclear holocaust and highly toxic environment with lots of deadly mutation and deseases, the last surviving human societies will be a bunch of ruthless scavengers forced to canibalize their fellow buddies for survival, in the hope of slowing the their imminent doom"
Plus everytime someone predicts flying cars next year someone sits down and works on it for real. Some day, some year, someone will succeed, and we'll have flying cars! How cool would be that ?!
"QuickTime har supported everything you just said Flash does for ages"
Yea... That's funny right, cause if you didn't know it has embeded Flash 5 player in it among other things.
And by everything do you also mean robust JIT compilator, sockets, XML parser, full OOP programming environment with type checking/classes/interfaces and all the other niceties.
BTW, half assed feature addition does not a nice product make. Flash has a solid (well slightly less solid in the last few version but still solid enough) authoring environment and ecosystem of authoring products, as well as light footprint (unless you missed that Flash is like 800kb in flash 8, how much is QuickTime? Like 15mb or something?) and much faster interactivity / startup / light on resources.
And it doesn't crash my firefox every time I open flash video/applet in it.
"it was Windows' misbehavior. I learned to love those other things later, after I found Linux to be much better behaved."
Dude use DOS, it has never showed blue screen on me.
`` "Sorry," I said, "that's just Windows. It crashes. That's why I don't like it." ``
Yeaa..so it doesn't crash because of faulty software or hardware (the reason fro most crashes and restarts, usually blamed on Windows), but it crashes because it's "just" Windows.
If someone'd help me in that way I'd be stressed too.
No offence, though, just it's true (reason for crashes/restarts).
My PC hasn't been restarted for months, no crash, no hang, no restart. It's XP. But I also don't install random software on it and I'm careful what hardware I buy (well venitlated, good PSU etc.)