So, it seems as though those people who have actually *used* it seem to *like* it. Unlike the majority of stories, posts, blogs, etc. etc. we've seen recently.
Those people got it for free and used it for two weeks. Let's see how people who pay $600 for it and use it for two years locked on a contract like it.
Like free candy? Ok, how about $100 candy bar. And you'll eat it for the next two years.
How could this not affect Intel Macs? They use the same machine instructions that everyone else does!
Question is, how come you patch microcode hardware flaw with a software patch - is this affecting performance? Possibly.
About the Macs not being affected: that was funny. Given how secretive the MS/Intel patches are, and we know Apple is totally open about stuff like that, right?
You ignore one small detail: Microsoft is a convicted criminal monopolist.
Honestly this keep popping several times in each article about Microsoft, and each time I see this, I want to twist the neck of a little sweet kitty or shoot a baby seal.
Writing it in bold makes it that much worse.
We know they are "convicted monopolist". We're not ignoring it, we're not "forgetting it", we just realize it doesn't automatically apply to everything Microsoft ever does.
By locking games to Vista they aren't using their OS monopoly to improve their games business. they are just crippling their games in attempt to make us migrate. Stupid and transparent? Sure. Illegal? No.
OpenGL is keeping *AHEAD* of Direct3D. We had Shader Model 4.0 (Geometry Shaders, aka "DX10") months before DX10.
The highlights of DX10 aren't the shaders. The same shaders are avasilable in 9L. It's about the rebuilt lighter API, multithreading and graphics memory swap file.
As an example can mapquest come along and demand that when a user searches for a street in google that their map be displayed prominantly as the first search item instead of google maps? This has a huge impact in the online maps business. Google has used a dominant product to gain a massive advantage in a new area. Not entirely unlike what the boys from Redmond like to do. Im not saying its evil, but it does seem kind of like a bully who starts crying when a bigger bully comes along.
Not just that but people apparently don't see Google's lock-in effect on the Internet. All the mash-ups: that's lock-in. The Google apps, gmail: that's lock-in.
Lock-in doesn't mean you can't possibly get rid of the product and move to another, it just means it's not practical, because of all the integration.
If most of the sites there show you their address using a Google Map mashup, would you just click in there for driving directions, or go out of your way to copy the address and paste it in a competing maps solution?
Even worse, when I want to migrate from Windows to Linux, I know I need to find alternatives for X products I use and I'm done. with Google, you can't migrate: if the Internet is stuck on using Google all over the place, no change on your machine could accomplish migrating away fro Google's services. They're just stuck there forever.
personally, I've never had google maps actually find an address I've looked for, mapquest and yahoo maps do a much better job than google maps.
I'd like to chime in here. Google's address find is ridiculously poor. I've not used Yahoo or MapQuest, but Microsoft's Live Maps always seems to magically find what I need. With google, I have to be way too precise or it goes in a totally random direction.
After all, Mission Impossible had the whole problem of off-site IT equipment solved decades ago with simple self-destruct technology.
Right. We should make the laptops constantly read some sort of signal that fades away out of the pentagon, for example. If the signal fades away, the laptop explodes.
Now combine this with the recent news about NSA brownouts, and we're effectively decimating our military in few minutes. Or how about a laptop battery fire causing the explosive to go off.
Who would walk with a ticking bomb in his suitcase? Get real. This is not a movie where everything is scripted and accidents don't happen, just like that, for no reason at all (unless there's a very thick plot around the accident, and it involves aliens).
If I was given the task of making sure no one even brings his laptop out of the lab, I'd make sure two things:
1) no regular laptop ever gets inside the lab (by making rules clear, and checking for devices on entry).
2) make the in-lab laptops and devices so ridiculously branded with military signs on their case, and use so ridiculous colors, that anyone would be immediately spot such a device in the wild (and hence no one would dare to put it out). And of course checking for such marked devices on lab exit.
It's not a perfect solution, but a step in the right direction at least.
I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but if you honestly believe their strategy is competent and it's money wise spent, then I better be a tinfoil beanie.
Just because you don't care doesn't mean our enemies don't either.
Don't forget: they're not "our enemies". They're just the US military/govt current targets.
Why on Earth would Iraq be your enemy as a US citizen. What did Iraqi do to you or your US buddies. The only thing happening in Iraq right now is a bunch of citizen wars, caused by the invasion by USA in there. Saddam is dead, there weren't WMD-s in there, and Iraq had no connection to the 9/11 attacks.
I don't like how short people's memory about those things is.
The machine reportedly contained government documents of a sensitive nature.
I for one am sick of hearing about the military's sensitive nature. What was the document containing, poems about the war in Iraq or something?
We all know 90% of those documents have no reason to be hidden from anyone, except to hide the abuse and money laundering that's going on at furious speeds over there.
I don't think the technology itself is a waste. It would take me forever to back up everything I have on DVD-R discs (I would need to burn 50-60 of them), but with a writeable Blu-Ray disc I would only need to burn maybe six discs
Right, but trust me, I'm sure they've spent far more money on the various DRM and media format functionality, than the basic disc technology.
Discs are going away in 5-6 years anyway. I'm sure advancement in solid state memory will soon replace removable disk media (check out latest technology by Intel and Samsung).
There's no reason to disagree with his claim. Heck, I could build a space elevator today with enough money.
So how much you need? $100, $200?
Put the money and R&D into personal jetpacks for God's sake.
Actually the alternative is creating huge rocket's with huge amounts of fuel in them, and throwing the rockets away in space (or ocean) every time you go up.
You consider if it's "for God's sake" or just the next very practical step in space trips. A space elevator would allow an entire new class of lightweight space ships which can't operate in Earth atmosphere. They'll be build and tested here, then elevated up and launch directly from space.
Well, there's some people who think we should force people to stop breeding. Put a limit on how many children you can have so that the birth rate is less than the death rate. Stop treating the sick and old. Stop giving aid to third world countries. Just let em all die so that the population of Earth gets down to a nice manageable level.
You can't forbid people to have kids, but there's a much simpler way to ensure they never have any (no, not neuter them).
You see, population grows, and all of that growth is coming from poor countries, and poor ghettos in richer countries. Truth is, in a modern society, the more educated you are, the better off you are, the more better off you want your kids to be, have access to birth control measures, and eventually have less kids, sometimes even have no kids.
At the end of the spectrum you're thinking about everything so much, you may never get a girlfriend in the first place.
So what do we need to do: get the world educated, and thinking a lot. The more they think about everything, the lower the birthrate.
It's a fact of life that when you're not busy thinking, you usually fill the time making lots of kids.
No, many of us are reading it as "If it's bad for Microsoft, then it's the right thing for everyone".
Yea, I know many of you are sitting down there refreshing Slashdot every second, in the hope of negative news for Microsoft to masturbate upon. But people with more objective opinion know the world isn't that black and white.
Do you realize Microsoft was the first commercial software company ever - they came up with this business model, and the idea of computers in every home. It's them who made a lot of the industry today possible.
What am I to use if something really bad happened to Microsoft and Windows disappeared - go Linux? No thanks. Go OSX? Oh yea, and be locked exclusively to Mac hardware and Steve Jobs' insane propaganda tactics. Those guys are worse than Microsoft by a looong long shot.
I hope you wake up one day and realize how complex the entire picture is.
Which company in their right mind would stop demanding random stuff from their competition that benefits them. Especially if it seems to work. None.
And in this light, the fact Google is never happy, they're just maximizing their luck with the entire "Microsoft locked Windows down" inertia.
I just see how many of your are trying to read into this "if Google does it, then it's the right thing for everyone". No, you idiots. It's the right thing for Google. It's completely irrelevant if it's the right thing for everyone.
It's "Don't be Evil." Doing evil and being evil are subjectively different IMO.
Wooooa. That sounds smart. I don't get it, since we're talking two huge companies with politics as complex as the number of sheer number of employees that work in them. But I'm sure it's smart. Discussing the finer nuances of "evil"-ness. Makes my life complere.
Ok, no, let's face it: every time I hear an argument about Google/Microsoft that includes "evil" in it, I feel dumber. And I believe I'm dumber, but I just prefer denial, like everyone else here.
Google isn't the evil company that we know Microsoft as.
Microsoft isn't the evil company we know Microsoft as either, so the point is moot.
Google focusing on the development of a great search engine, instead of taking the money and selling out for media development(Yahoo), is why they have grown to such heights.
But.. Microsoft isn't Yahoo as well, so the point is moot again. What the hell is your point again. Going blindly after slogans again? When will you people learn ?!
People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?
Agreed, the irony of this is their own marketing tactics have made this possible. It's not as much the rest of the tracks are crap, but they're just not marketed, if you don't listen to them enough, you don't like them, and think they're worse, and hence not buy 'em.
And hence the "one good single and the rest is filler" talk.
To confirm this, just try to listen to a new "super album" without ever hearing the marketed single (hard, I admit). You'll never guess which is the song marketed on 80% of the albums. It's actually often decided post factum after the album has been recorded.
Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats.
Exactly right, and this is why I'm pissing my pants laughing here watching the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray race. They seem to genuiely don't understand, that whoever wins, they both lose in the end. Just consider the amoutn of money spent on technology, production and marketing on those duds. That's funny, right.
What is the likelihood of humans sending life accidentally or otherwise to Mars. Compare that likelihood to the evolution of life during the same period.
"Sending life accidentally". That's not "intelligent design" at all. It's "negligent accident".
The creator of the Universe caring about what happens to us is like us caring about what happens to some Ant hill somewhere.
Can we please stop with the ants. The only reason we don't care about the ants are they are kinda too tiny to care about.
Would most people just randomly stomp a parrot though. Maybe we're like parrots to him. Or little baby seals. Or kittens even.
Our understanding of Evolution is incomplete. That is to say, we can see the trees, but not the entire forest.
We understand how evolution works, basically, but mutations are still random. Can you really get very good at guessing truly random numbers?
It's just incredible how people cling to their existing beliefs though. I'm sure the Bible sounded convincing some 2000 thousands of years ago. But daaaaamn...
Slashdot Mirror
So, it seems as though those people who have actually *used* it seem to *like* it. Unlike the majority of stories, posts, blogs, etc. etc. we've seen recently.
Those people got it for free and used it for two weeks. Let's see how people who pay $600 for it and use it for two years locked on a contract like it.
Like free candy? Ok, how about $100 candy bar. And you'll eat it for the next two years.
How could this not affect Intel Macs? They use the same machine instructions that everyone else does!
Question is, how come you patch microcode hardware flaw with a software patch - is this affecting performance? Possibly.
About the Macs not being affected: that was funny. Given how secretive the MS/Intel patches are, and we know Apple is totally open about stuff like that, right?
Honestly this keep popping several times in each article about Microsoft, and each time I see this, I want to twist the neck of a little sweet kitty or shoot a baby seal.
Writing it in bold makes it that much worse.
We know they are "convicted monopolist". We're not ignoring it, we're not "forgetting it", we just realize it doesn't automatically apply to everything Microsoft ever does.
By locking games to Vista they aren't using their OS monopoly to improve their games business. they are just crippling their games in attempt to make us migrate. Stupid and transparent? Sure. Illegal? No.
OpenGL is keeping *AHEAD* of Direct3D. We had Shader Model 4.0 (Geometry Shaders, aka "DX10") months before DX10.
The highlights of DX10 aren't the shaders. The same shaders are avasilable in 9L. It's about the rebuilt lighter API, multithreading and graphics memory swap file.
OpenGL doesn't have the latter two AFAIK.
MS is just evil with no good products at all besides perhaps excel.
How about: grow up.
If I had to pick between Mac OS or Windows back in the 90-s I'd pick Windows any time. It was the superior product.
As an example can mapquest come along and demand that when a user searches for a street in google that their map be displayed prominantly as the first search item instead of google maps? This has a huge impact in the online maps business. Google has used a dominant product to gain a massive advantage in a new area. Not entirely unlike what the boys from Redmond like to do. Im not saying its evil, but it does seem kind of like a bully who starts crying when a bigger bully comes along.
Not just that but people apparently don't see Google's lock-in effect on the Internet. All the mash-ups: that's lock-in. The Google apps, gmail: that's lock-in.
Lock-in doesn't mean you can't possibly get rid of the product and move to another, it just means it's not practical, because of all the integration.
If most of the sites there show you their address using a Google Map mashup, would you just click in there for driving directions, or go out of your way to copy the address and paste it in a competing maps solution?
Even worse, when I want to migrate from Windows to Linux, I know I need to find alternatives for X products I use and I'm done. with Google, you can't migrate: if the Internet is stuck on using Google all over the place, no change on your machine could accomplish migrating away fro Google's services. They're just stuck there forever.
personally, I've never had google maps actually find an address I've looked for, mapquest and yahoo maps do a much better job than google maps.
I'd like to chime in here. Google's address find is ridiculously poor. I've not used Yahoo or MapQuest, but Microsoft's Live Maps always seems to magically find what I need. With google, I have to be way too precise or it goes in a totally random direction.
Microsoft has cemented its dominant position in the industry by employing tactics against its rivals only slightly less ruthless than Saddam
Okkkkayy... we're comparing Microsoft with Saddam. Good going. So when should we expect our military to free Redmond?
After all, Mission Impossible had the whole problem of off-site IT equipment solved decades ago with simple self-destruct technology.
Right. We should make the laptops constantly read some sort of signal that fades away out of the pentagon, for example.
If the signal fades away, the laptop explodes.
Now combine this with the recent news about NSA brownouts, and we're effectively decimating our military in few minutes.
Or how about a laptop battery fire causing the explosive to go off.
Who would walk with a ticking bomb in his suitcase? Get real. This is not a movie where everything is scripted and accidents don't happen, just like that, for no reason at all (unless there's a very thick plot around the accident, and it involves aliens).
If I was given the task of making sure no one even brings his laptop out of the lab, I'd make sure two things:
1) no regular laptop ever gets inside the lab (by making rules clear, and checking for devices on entry).
2) make the in-lab laptops and devices so ridiculously branded with military signs on their case, and use so ridiculous colors, that anyone would be immediately spot such a device in the wild (and hence no one would dare to put it out). And of course checking for such marked devices on lab exit.
It's not a perfect solution, but a step in the right direction at least.
Get a grip on that tinfoil beanie.
I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but if you honestly believe their strategy is competent and it's money wise spent, then I better be a tinfoil beanie.
Just because you don't care doesn't mean our enemies don't either.
Don't forget: they're not "our enemies". They're just the US military/govt current targets.
Why on Earth would Iraq be your enemy as a US citizen. What did Iraqi do to you or your US buddies. The only thing happening in Iraq right now is a bunch of citizen wars, caused by the invasion by USA in there. Saddam is dead, there weren't WMD-s in there, and Iraq had no connection to the 9/11 attacks.
I don't like how short people's memory about those things is.
The machine reportedly contained government documents of a sensitive nature.
I for one am sick of hearing about the military's sensitive nature. What was the document containing, poems about the war in Iraq or something?
We all know 90% of those documents have no reason to be hidden from anyone, except to hide the abuse and money laundering that's going on at furious speeds over there.
In one, an e-mail containing classified material was sent over the open Internet rather than through the secure defense network.
So he sent one mail and it was intercepted? Damn, this puts the "insecurity" of email communication in an entire new light.
I don't think the technology itself is a waste. It would take me forever to back up everything I have on DVD-R discs (I would need to burn 50-60 of them), but with a writeable Blu-Ray disc I would only need to burn maybe six discs
Right, but trust me, I'm sure they've spent far more money on the various DRM and media format functionality, than the basic disc technology.
Discs are going away in 5-6 years anyway. I'm sure advancement in solid state memory will soon replace removable disk media (check out latest technology by Intel and Samsung).
We're hopelessly desperate, aren't we.
Damn.
Oh, I don't disagree, but how exactly how you going to make everyone on Earth rich enough to become educated enough to reduce population growth?
Hmmm... Ah, damn it, let's neuter them!
There's no reason to disagree with his claim. Heck, I could build a space elevator today with enough money.
So how much you need? $100, $200?
Put the money and R&D into personal jetpacks for God's sake.
Actually the alternative is creating huge rocket's with huge amounts of fuel in them, and throwing the rockets away in space (or ocean) every time you go up.
You consider if it's "for God's sake" or just the next very practical step in space trips. A space elevator would allow an entire new class of lightweight space ships which can't operate in Earth atmosphere. They'll be build and tested here, then elevated up and launch directly from space.
Well, there's some people who think we should force people to stop breeding. Put a limit on how many children you can have so that the birth rate is less than the death rate. Stop treating the sick and old. Stop giving aid to third world countries. Just let em all die so that the population of Earth gets down to a nice manageable level.
You can't forbid people to have kids, but there's a much simpler way to ensure they never have any (no, not neuter them).
You see, population grows, and all of that growth is coming from poor countries, and poor ghettos in richer countries. Truth is, in a modern society, the more educated you are, the better off you are, the more better off you want your kids to be, have access to birth control measures, and eventually have less kids, sometimes even have no kids.
At the end of the spectrum you're thinking about everything so much, you may never get a girlfriend in the first place.
So what do we need to do: get the world educated, and thinking a lot. The more they think about everything, the lower the birthrate.
It's a fact of life that when you're not busy thinking, you usually fill the time making lots of kids.
So there's my conclusion to this one problem
No, many of us are reading it as "If it's bad for Microsoft, then it's the right thing for everyone".
Yea, I know many of you are sitting down there refreshing Slashdot every second, in the hope of negative news for Microsoft to masturbate upon. But people with more objective opinion know the world isn't that black and white.
Do you realize Microsoft was the first commercial software company ever - they came up with this business model, and the idea of computers in every home. It's them who made a lot of the industry today possible.
What am I to use if something really bad happened to Microsoft and Windows disappeared - go Linux? No thanks.
Go OSX? Oh yea, and be locked exclusively to Mac hardware and Steve Jobs' insane propaganda tactics. Those guys are worse than Microsoft by a looong long shot.
I hope you wake up one day and realize how complex the entire picture is.
It takes f*cking ages to send one across the internet and really quite a while to dump a dozen or so onto a USB drive to take over to a mates' house.
That's funny. Over here it takes 4 seconds of buffering.
Which company in their right mind would stop demanding random stuff from their competition that benefits them. Especially if it seems to work. None.
And in this light, the fact Google is never happy, they're just maximizing their luck with the entire "Microsoft locked Windows down" inertia.
I just see how many of your are trying to read into this "if Google does it, then it's the right thing for everyone". No, you idiots. It's the right thing for Google. It's completely irrelevant if it's the right thing for everyone.
It's "Don't be Evil." Doing evil and being evil are subjectively different IMO.
Wooooa. That sounds smart. I don't get it, since we're talking two huge companies with politics as complex as the number of sheer number of employees that work in them. But I'm sure it's smart. Discussing the finer nuances of "evil"-ness. Makes my life complere.
Ok, no, let's face it: every time I hear an argument about Google/Microsoft that includes "evil" in it, I feel dumber. And I believe I'm dumber, but I just prefer denial, like everyone else here.
Google isn't the evil company that we know Microsoft as.
Microsoft isn't the evil company we know Microsoft as either, so the point is moot.
Google focusing on the development of a great search engine, instead of taking the money and selling out for media development(Yahoo), is why they have grown to such heights.
But.. Microsoft isn't Yahoo as well, so the point is moot again. What the hell is your point again. Going blindly after slogans again? When will you people learn ?!
People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?
Agreed, the irony of this is their own marketing tactics have made this possible. It's not as much the rest of the tracks are crap, but they're just not marketed, if you don't listen to them enough, you don't like them, and think they're worse, and hence not buy 'em.
And hence the "one good single and the rest is filler" talk.
To confirm this, just try to listen to a new "super album" without ever hearing the marketed single (hard, I admit). You'll never guess which is the song marketed on 80% of the albums. It's actually often decided post factum after the album has been recorded.
Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats.
Exactly right, and this is why I'm pissing my pants laughing here watching the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray race. They seem to genuiely don't understand, that whoever wins, they both lose in the end. Just consider the amoutn of money spent on technology, production and marketing on those duds. That's funny, right.
What is the likelihood of humans sending life accidentally or otherwise to Mars. Compare that likelihood to the evolution of life during the same period.
"Sending life accidentally". That's not "intelligent design" at all. It's "negligent accident".
The creator of the Universe caring about what happens to us is like us caring about what happens to some Ant hill somewhere.
Can we please stop with the ants. The only reason we don't care about the ants are they are kinda too tiny to care about.
Would most people just randomly stomp a parrot though. Maybe we're like parrots to him. Or little baby seals. Or kittens even.
Our understanding of Evolution is incomplete. That is to say, we can see the trees, but not the entire forest.
We understand how evolution works, basically, but mutations are still random. Can you really get very good at guessing truly random numbers?
It's just incredible how people cling to their existing beliefs though. I'm sure the Bible sounded convincing some 2000 thousands of years ago. But daaaaamn...