With Windows 10 Microsoft wants everyone to adopt an even more frequent update cycle, as the spring and fall versions of the OS will only be supported for 18 months.
This actually makes more sense than you might think, because fewer Windows versions and patch levels means testing is easier, which in turn reduces the risk of undetected problems with the upgrade process in the released version.
There is still a long term stability option for organizations with strict certification demands, but that branch obviously won't get the benefit of updated features and technology everybody else can enjoy.
I'd hate to be a third-party vendor though, they will need to adapt much faster than today. Then again, if I was a customer of the third party vendor I'd want to put more pressure on them to stay current and keep my product working.
Also, having kids helps you live longer? Did they take into account the physical, mental, and financial strain that parenthood can bring? I'm willing to bet 99.999% of parents are scratching their heads over this one too.
Not sure which part of the world you live in, but the study looked at Swedes, who typically don't have to worry about tuition fees, health insurance, maternity/paternity leave and other common U.S. parenting challenges.:)
That said, what other posters have already suggested about children providing positive experiences to your old age lifestyle is the most likely mechanic behind these observations. Not sure I would find enough reason to stick around if I found myself unable to enjoy life due to geriatric problems and no one left to mourn my passing.
Well, you start by realizing that owning lethal weapons is not a human right.
Next, you either amend the constitution or clarify the interpretation of the existing amendment to make it possible to get better control over who gets to own such weapons.
And on a much higher level, work to reduce the "need" for people to own guns. When everyone can live happy without weapons no one will be interested in owning them.
I don't really see home-made guns as a big problem. In fact, we all have hundreds of items in our homes that could be combined to form lethal devices. Strangely enough, most of us don't...
So is a home-made gun legal? Maybe in the US, but not in the more civilized parts of the world. It certainly wouldn't be legal for me without a proper license.
What is interesting in this case is that making it easy to create your own gun is likely to work against the motives of Defense Distributed and force the US to adopt more gun control. Maybe even looking at how other countries solve this problem.:)
“The other 94 percent of the samples don't represent what our customers encounter. When we explicitly looked for these files, we could not find them on our customers' machines.”
Or in other words: "Thank you for installing the software necessary to allow us to browse through the contents of your computer when we feel like it and report any interesting findings back to us..."
Speaking as a non-american I think you are asking the wrong question.
There is little doubt that there would be no dramatic improvement to the quality of life for the average american person if you switched today. However, the lives of all future Americans will certainly be improved if they learn the same system the rest of the world uses.
From a societal perspective, you are unlikely to ever find a "golden moment" when it would make both short-term and long-term economic sense to make the switch, but since the long-term benefit is definitely there this is something you should consider a necessary investment and get it over with.
If I was American, I'd start asking myself what the long-term costs of NOT switching to metric are, and how clinging to the old ways serve myself and my country in the new global economy.
My impression is that the US health care system has been doing this for as long as it has existed. Having digital records should be a great help to the insurance companies to make it easier to track down fraudulent health care providers.
Since I live in Sweden I don't usually have a problem with health care bills, but once during a vacation to the US I had to visit a hospital due to severe stomach pain. Four hours and a trip through the CT machine later I was released with a prescription for some pills. Six months later (back home in Sweden) a bill for $14000 arrives...
When I brought this to my insurance company and explained that the examination I went through couldn't possibly have cost that much they just shrugged and said "yeah, they always try this when dealing with foreign insurance companies". A few weeks later they had everything settled at just under $3000.
So what's the point of this story? If a system is open to exploitation you need someone to monitor it. Monitoring is easier with good records of what's been going on.
One of the best ways to go about this is to use the same approach as Stockholm, where we've had "ultra-fast" 1Gbps broadband for quite a few years now.
The city has founded and funded a city owned company with the sole purpose of putting fiber in the ground to every part of the city. The company then allows any ISP to rent space in the fiber, ensuring fair competion in the internet connectivity marketplace. Since the company has easier access to city decision makers whenever they need to dig up a street it is possible to coordinate the work and put more cable in the ground at a faster pace.
Since the company gets good revenue from the ISPs the city only had to use taxpayer money for the initial part of the network and has now regained that investment.
What would be an awesome addition to other systems would be a working Group Policy client with GP settings to apply through Active Directory. This would make managing other platforms just as easy as managing Windows.
When your company grows bigger your admin will learn the hard way why big companies run Windows.
Without a good technology to control large amounts of computers it gets too expensive to run your IT. When you're a small company this is not a problem, and especially not in high-tech startups where most people want full control of their own PC.
Once you get real users the admin pain starts...
Windows has Active Directory and Group Policy, the two best friends of any enterprise IT-organization.
If I was to name a single Windows technology that keeps the enterprise running Windows today I'd say it's Group Policy.
Most people don't give this incredible idea the credit it deserves, since they take it for granted and don't see the big picture. Having a built-in feature that gives you total control over the OS on your computers, regardless of where they are located or how many you might have is just awesome from an administrative perspective.
Even in the largest corporations it's enough with a single administrator to deal with stuff that might take departments of people to handle on other platforms. No one will ever know the exact number of work hours this have saved, but it definitely helps explain why Windows gets good TCO results.
If you want access to the desktop market today, you'd better start building something similar for your platform.
There should also be a nice 3rd party market for Group Policy clients for other operating systems, but for some reason these people don't like to integrate with Microsoft stuff...
Another interesting aspect in this whole IPRED mess is the amount of time the other ISPs save their IP-address data.
According to the IPRED law it is up to the lower court to order an ISP to turn over the subscriber information, but only after examining the evidence of possible copyright infringement.
This means that if the data is saved for a shorter period than the time it normally takes to investigate an infringement, any order to turn over the data would also eventually fail.
I've heard from at least one ISP that they normally save data for three weeks, so that should be sufficient, unless the courts suddenly decide to start prioritizing these cases.:(
Someone made a conversion error. The diagram shows a 1,5x2,5mm playing field, with goals 0.5x0.9mm.
Maybe nanosoccer will force the US to finally adopt the metric system?:)
I've just read through the actual suit, and I must say the evidence looks rather weak.
The prosecutor brings into evidence a number of already well established facts, such as the identities of the TPB admins, and a number of invoices with figures on the alleged income from TPB's advertising. I'm pretty sure the defense won't dispute any of this since that part is hardly illegal
The only evidence that is has anything to do with an actual crime are interviews with IFPI and Antipiratbyrån personell stating that they were indeed able to download "fully functional copies" of infringing files through TPB. Duh!
The main issue in this case will be to prove that the TPB admins helped facilitate these downloads, and deciding if that is even illegal. As in all copyright infringement cases, the technical evidence is hardly mentioned, if there even is any. Apparently there will be some demonstration of how the Bittorrent protocol works, but I think it's entirely unclear if they can link that to "facilitating copyright infringement".
This is quite interesting to follow since here in Sweden the debate climate has just made an interesting turn. For the first time, politicians in our parliament has come out in support of scrapping the current laws against file sharing on the grounds that enforcing them requires giving either ISP:s or rights owners too much insight into people's personal communications, thus violating our privacy.
This was sparked by a government report suggesting that the law should be changed to require ISP:s to scan the network traffic of their customers and possibly terminate the internet service if multiple violations were made. One thing we should not here is that in Sweden, the ISP:s are strongly opposed to monitoring their customers and wish to remain providers of a service, not the internet police of rights owners.
The main problem in this whole issue is that people tend to think that just because something can be done with new technology (such as monitoring what I send over the internet to my friends) it's ok to do so. Free societies value personal freedom and the freedom to keep our private lives to ourselves. No one would dream of suggesting that the postal service should start opening people's mail to see if there's something illegal inside. If it's not right in the analog world, it's not right in the digital world either.
Now I'm just waiting to see how long it takes the rest of the EU to catch on. There's a big chance that we'll see soon see the largest changes to copyright laws since they were originally thought up. Personally I'll be satisfied with a clarification that clearly states that it's illegal for anyone to monitor my personal communication regardless of what medium I use, unless specifically required to do so by a court of law (as in other wiretapping cases).
If you actually take the time to analyze these "stories" you'll realize that almost all of the problems people blaim Vista for is actually not anything that has to do with the operating system, but the applications that run on it.
Just take the complaints about no wireless access in the above posts for example. Vista has nothing to do with the fact that these universities force people to run a Cisco VPN client to get access. Considering how long Vista has been availible to developers, this shouldn't even be an issue, but apparently Cisco has more important things to do than update their software to work on the new OS. Same thing goes for a lot of other high profile vendors who seem very reluctant to adapt to a Vista compatible world.
The pressure on these vendors to adapt will continue to increase as Vista will slowly but surely replace XP as the Microsoft desktop platform of choice.
Personally I'm getting very tired of the all the noise about hardware requirements. Why do we even bother to make faster and better components if we already get what we need out of existing hardware?
I especially liked the Greenpeace opinion that we should all blame Microsoft for making people in "developing countries" want to use the same features availible to the rest of the world with all this new and fancy stuff in Vista. Perhaps we should seek a UN resolution prohibiting the use of advanced technology anywhere outside the US and Europe?
Naturally I'm all for a better environment, but it's not realistic to expect people to lower their standard of living in order to achieve it. Instead, we need to work out ways to make it possible to improve the quality of life on the entire planet without causing harm to our ecosphere. I'm sure our new computer hardware will play a big role in doing that, so when historians look back at this period of time they will likely say that improving our computer hardware was a very good thing for the environment.
Swedish politicians are actually not funded directly by private interests, since we don't have personal elections in the true sense of the word.
Although you are allowed to check your personal favourite on the ballot, your vote still counts mainly against the party of that candidate. While this reduces the need for candidates to fund their own election campaigns, it creates an interesting problem in my opinion since the political parties instead get their funding from the taxpayers.
This means there's no way for me to avoid supporting people with ideas I really don't care for.:(
On the other hand, with a larger share of the popular vote, the pirate party would also get money from the taxpayers... I bet the MPA and RIAA would love that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
With Windows 10 Microsoft wants everyone to adopt an even more frequent update cycle, as the spring and fall versions of the OS will only be supported for 18 months.
This actually makes more sense than you might think, because fewer Windows versions and patch levels means testing is easier, which in turn reduces the risk of undetected problems with the upgrade process in the released version.
There is still a long term stability option for organizations with strict certification demands, but that branch obviously won't get the benefit of updated features and technology everybody else can enjoy.
I'd hate to be a third-party vendor though, they will need to adapt much faster than today. Then again, if I was a customer of the third party vendor I'd want to put more pressure on them to stay current and keep my product working.
Also, having kids helps you live longer? Did they take into account the physical, mental, and financial strain that parenthood can bring? I'm willing to bet 99.999% of parents are scratching their heads over this one too.
Not sure which part of the world you live in, but the study looked at Swedes, who typically don't have to worry about tuition fees, health insurance, maternity/paternity leave and other common U.S. parenting challenges. :)
That said, what other posters have already suggested about children providing positive experiences to your old age lifestyle is the most likely mechanic behind these observations. Not sure I would find enough reason to stick around if I found myself unable to enjoy life due to geriatric problems and no one left to mourn my passing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Just sayin...
Well, you start by realizing that owning lethal weapons is not a human right.
Next, you either amend the constitution or clarify the interpretation of the existing amendment to make it possible to get better control over who gets to own such weapons.
And on a much higher level, work to reduce the "need" for people to own guns. When everyone can live happy without weapons no one will be interested in owning them.
I don't really see home-made guns as a big problem. In fact, we all have hundreds of items in our homes that could be combined to form lethal devices. Strangely enough, most of us don't...
So is a home-made gun legal? Maybe in the US, but not in the more civilized parts of the world. It certainly wouldn't be legal for me without a proper license.
What is interesting in this case is that making it easy to create your own gun is likely to work against the motives of Defense Distributed and force the US to adopt more gun control. Maybe even looking at how other countries solve this problem. :)
From the article:
“The other 94 percent of the samples don't represent what our customers encounter. When we explicitly looked for these files, we could not find them on our customers' machines.”
Or in other words: "Thank you for installing the software necessary to allow us to browse through the contents of your computer when we feel like it and report any interesting findings back to us..."
All in good faith, of course.
Speaking as a non-american I think you are asking the wrong question.
There is little doubt that there would be no dramatic improvement to the quality of life for the average american person if you switched today. However, the lives of all future Americans will certainly be improved if they learn the same system the rest of the world uses.
From a societal perspective, you are unlikely to ever find a "golden moment" when it would make both short-term and long-term economic sense to make the switch, but since the long-term benefit is definitely there this is something you should consider a necessary investment and get it over with.
If I was American, I'd start asking myself what the long-term costs of NOT switching to metric are, and how clinging to the old ways serve myself and my country in the new global economy.
My impression is that the US health care system has been doing this for as long as it has existed. Having digital records should be a great help to the insurance companies to make it easier to track down fraudulent health care providers.
Since I live in Sweden I don't usually have a problem with health care bills, but once during a vacation to the US I had to visit a hospital due to severe stomach pain. Four hours and a trip through the CT machine later I was released with a prescription for some pills. Six months later (back home in Sweden) a bill for $14000 arrives...
When I brought this to my insurance company and explained that the examination I went through couldn't possibly have cost that much they just shrugged and said "yeah, they always try this when dealing with foreign insurance companies". A few weeks later they had everything settled at just under $3000.
So what's the point of this story? If a system is open to exploitation you need someone to monitor it. Monitoring is easier with good records of what's been going on.
One of the best ways to go about this is to use the same approach as Stockholm, where we've had "ultra-fast" 1Gbps broadband for quite a few years now.
The city has founded and funded a city owned company with the sole purpose of putting fiber in the ground to every part of the city. The company then allows any ISP to rent space in the fiber, ensuring fair competion in the internet connectivity marketplace. Since the company has easier access to city decision makers whenever they need to dig up a street it is possible to coordinate the work and put more cable in the ground at a faster pace.
Since the company gets good revenue from the ISPs the city only had to use taxpayer money for the initial part of the network and has now regained that investment.
Everyone wins and the internet gets better!
...as the article seems to show that while there is certainly *some* money in FOSS, unless you're the top exec you probably won't be seeing any of it.
Gah!!!
...everyone already knows the aliens are hiding ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON!!!
What would be an awesome addition to other systems would be a working Group Policy client with GP settings to apply through Active Directory. This would make managing other platforms just as easy as managing Windows.
When your company grows bigger your admin will learn the hard way why big companies run Windows.
Without a good technology to control large amounts of computers it gets too expensive to run your IT. When you're a small company this is not a problem, and especially not in high-tech startups where most people want full control of their own PC.
Once you get real users the admin pain starts...
Windows has Active Directory and Group Policy, the two best friends of any enterprise IT-organization.
If I was to name a single Windows technology that keeps the enterprise running Windows today I'd say it's Group Policy.
Most people don't give this incredible idea the credit it deserves, since they take it for granted and don't see the big picture. Having a built-in feature that gives you total control over the OS on your computers, regardless of where they are located or how many you might have is just awesome from an administrative perspective.
Even in the largest corporations it's enough with a single administrator to deal with stuff that might take departments of people to handle on other platforms. No one will ever know the exact number of work hours this have saved, but it definitely helps explain why Windows gets good TCO results.
If you want access to the desktop market today, you'd better start building something similar for your platform. There should also be a nice 3rd party market for Group Policy clients for other operating systems, but for some reason these people don't like to integrate with Microsoft stuff...
No need to read the sensationalist newspaper, just go straight to the original source instead. In english, ofc...
This is actually a quite interesting find, though far from the story described in the Daily Mail.
Another interesting aspect in this whole IPRED mess is the amount of time the other ISPs save their IP-address data.
According to the IPRED law it is up to the lower court to order an ISP to turn over the subscriber information, but only after examining the evidence of possible copyright infringement.
This means that if the data is saved for a shorter period than the time it normally takes to investigate an infringement, any order to turn over the data would also eventually fail.
I've heard from at least one ISP that they normally save data for three weeks, so that should be sufficient, unless the courts suddenly decide to start prioritizing these cases. :(
Someone made a conversion error. The diagram shows a 1,5x2,5mm playing field, with goals 0.5x0.9mm. Maybe nanosoccer will force the US to finally adopt the metric system? :)
I've just read through the actual suit, and I must say the evidence looks rather weak.
The prosecutor brings into evidence a number of already well established facts, such as the identities of the TPB admins, and a number of invoices with figures on the alleged income from TPB's advertising. I'm pretty sure the defense won't dispute any of this since that part is hardly illegal
The only evidence that is has anything to do with an actual crime are interviews with IFPI and Antipiratbyrån personell stating that they were indeed able to download "fully functional copies" of infringing files through TPB. Duh!
The main issue in this case will be to prove that the TPB admins helped facilitate these downloads, and deciding if that is even illegal. As in all copyright infringement cases, the technical evidence is hardly mentioned, if there even is any. Apparently there will be some demonstration of how the Bittorrent protocol works, but I think it's entirely unclear if they can link that to "facilitating copyright infringement".
This is quite interesting to follow since here in Sweden the debate climate has just made an interesting turn. For the first time, politicians in our parliament has come out in support of scrapping the current laws against file sharing on the grounds that enforcing them requires giving either ISP:s or rights owners too much insight into people's personal communications, thus violating our privacy.
This was sparked by a government report suggesting that the law should be changed to require ISP:s to scan the network traffic of their customers and possibly terminate the internet service if multiple violations were made. One thing we should not here is that in Sweden, the ISP:s are strongly opposed to monitoring their customers and wish to remain providers of a service, not the internet police of rights owners.
The main problem in this whole issue is that people tend to think that just because something can be done with new technology (such as monitoring what I send over the internet to my friends) it's ok to do so. Free societies value personal freedom and the freedom to keep our private lives to ourselves. No one would dream of suggesting that the postal service should start opening people's mail to see if there's something illegal inside. If it's not right in the analog world, it's not right in the digital world either.
Now I'm just waiting to see how long it takes the rest of the EU to catch on. There's a big chance that we'll see soon see the largest changes to copyright laws since they were originally thought up. Personally I'll be satisfied with a clarification that clearly states that it's illegal for anyone to monitor my personal communication regardless of what medium I use, unless specifically required to do so by a court of law (as in other wiretapping cases).
If you actually take the time to analyze these "stories" you'll realize that almost all of the problems people blaim Vista for is actually not anything that has to do with the operating system, but the applications that run on it.
Just take the complaints about no wireless access in the above posts for example. Vista has nothing to do with the fact that these universities force people to run a Cisco VPN client to get access. Considering how long Vista has been availible to developers, this shouldn't even be an issue, but apparently Cisco has more important things to do than update their software to work on the new OS. Same thing goes for a lot of other high profile vendors who seem very reluctant to adapt to a Vista compatible world.
The pressure on these vendors to adapt will continue to increase as Vista will slowly but surely replace XP as the Microsoft desktop platform of choice.
Personally I'm getting very tired of the all the noise about hardware requirements. Why do we even bother to make faster and better components if we already get what we need out of existing hardware?
I especially liked the Greenpeace opinion that we should all blame Microsoft for making people in "developing countries" want to use the same features availible to the rest of the world with all this new and fancy stuff in Vista. Perhaps we should seek a UN resolution prohibiting the use of advanced technology anywhere outside the US and Europe?
Naturally I'm all for a better environment, but it's not realistic to expect people to lower their standard of living in order to achieve it. Instead, we need to work out ways to make it possible to improve the quality of life on the entire planet without causing harm to our ecosphere. I'm sure our new computer hardware will play a big role in doing that, so when historians look back at this period of time they will likely say that improving our computer hardware was a very good thing for the environment.
Swedish politicians are actually not funded directly by private interests, since we don't have personal elections in the true sense of the word. Although you are allowed to check your personal favourite on the ballot, your vote still counts mainly against the party of that candidate. While this reduces the need for candidates to fund their own election campaigns, it creates an interesting problem in my opinion since the political parties instead get their funding from the taxpayers. This means there's no way for me to avoid supporting people with ideas I really don't care for. :(
On the other hand, with a larger share of the popular vote, the pirate party would also get money from the taxpayers... I bet the MPA and RIAA would love that. :)