I'd hope that "a learning process modeled on Microsoft's management techniques" would mean that Microsoft went out and spent a year analyzing what teachers, students, and staff actually do, another two years designing and building a system to support them, a year on testbeds getting their system right, a Summer training the staff in the new system, and then allowed a year for the staff to develop curricula using the new media and techniques.
But that'd be a five year effort, and they did this in only three,. So I imagine that it'll be a goat rope with teachers, staff and students struggling with half baked and moderately disfunctional technology and an arrogant, exhausted, and thoroughly overwhelmed IT staff deathmarching toward arbitrary and poorly selected goals.
If this plays out as I would guess it probably will, what should be learned is that education is a complex and poorly understood process and that improving it requires serious analysis, experimentation, and lots of effort. But that's not a message that techies, politicians, and school administrators want to hear. So I imagine that there will be no winners and that the teachers, staff and students will all lose.
Of course it's illegal. I don't think anyone much cares. What you are seeing is another step toward the eventual (and probably inevitable) implosion of Intellectual Property law. For some reason IP owners seem unable or unwilling to grasp the simple fact that to be acceptable, DRM has to work (nearly) perfectly, not be intrusive, and not interfere with fair use. Much of Fair Use isn't really there as a sop to consumers. It's there to legitimize things that everyone knows consumers will do whether it is legal or not.
There's a substantial gap between legality and actuality.
Example. Most libraries in the US have coin operated photocopiers. It's a safe bet that at least 50% of the usage of those machines is technically illegal. What do you think the chances are that Copyright law will be enforced in libraries?
In any case, WGA specifically should be a transitory problem. Anyone who doesn't have, and isn't implementing, a Microsoft exit strategy probably deserves (and will get) WGA and worse. It ought to be pretty obvious by now that WGA is another step toward Microsoft user lock-in -- and that it won't be the last such step. Why on Earth would any sane person allow themself to be locked into using MS software?
I doubt it'll work out, but it's a concept that hasn't been explored much. Maybe it'll actually be effective in at least warning people that they are headed for trouble.
Lord knows, It'd be hard for the Internet to be less secure than it is today. It'd be kind of dumb to reject any remotely plausible idea for making things better just because it came from Microsoft.
It's safe enough to come here BTW -- at least for the time being. On the other hand, Canada is very similar, in better contact with reality, and if the cops decide to beat you up, you'll be bashed by guys in really spiffy uniforms.
Or you could put a racing suspension on the wall, install a 5.8 L V8, paste a Honda logo on it and race it at Talledaga. Except you almost certainly couldn't qualify, because it surely wouldn't be all that good a racing vehicle. And it probably wouldn't be all that good a wall either.
Why you guys are so determined to build shoddy walls and insist that you've accomplished loads of worthwhile stuff has eluded me for decades. I'll give you an example of something done half way right -- plug and play. Shipped in 1995. Barely worked. Cost customers a fortune while techs struggled with Windows bugs, inaccurate documentation, and bad INF scripts. Microsoft and the industry plugged away. A bit better in Windows 98. Finally works pretty well in XP. Took six years. Trouble is that it's an exception in that it had a clear cut goal that was actually both desirable and achieved. PnP sure as hell was not much of an advance when it first appeared although it was touted as one. An example of something done wrong. The Registry. Started in Windows 3 as an object data base. Good idea. Expanded in Windows 95 as a general OS data base. Not a good idea. Should never have been expanded. And should have been deprecated as soon as it's flaws became evident. Instead, MS has tried to keep a flawed concept afloat with the digital equivalent of duct tape. My bet is that it will never work well. This is not progress. Which is more typical of Post 1995 Windows? I fear, the Registry is the model. The one area where I see methodical progress is Network Security, and I fear that may simply be unfixable. But at least they are trying.
No matter... let's move on to something that you will understand completely, and might save you some grief.
Linux printing does more often than not work. The problem is that a significant number of printer models are not supported. This is an issue because if you walk into an existing infrastructure that has a diverse collection of printers and try to convert it to Linux, you are likely to find that many printers -- maybe as many as 20-30% -- don't work. And in most cases, probably can't be persuaded to work unless you write your own driver which would -- I think -- be impractical unless you had a gazillion unsupported printers of the same model.
The problems are kind of complex, but if you use the simplistic assumption that they occur because printer mongers write drivers for Windows, but not for Linux you won't be too wrong. One additional issue is that old printer models that once worked sometimes stop working. That's a testing and architecture issue. Microsoft probably won't break the HP-IIP down on the loading dock in the next Windows release. Linux with fewer test resources might. Why breaking that printer is a bad idea will become clear when some guy looking and acting uncomfortably like the Incredible Hulk strolls into your cube and wants to know WTF you did to his printer. I didn't select the HP-IIP at random, it is broken in cups-1.1.23 and I wouldn't be suprised that every other PCL3 printer is as well.
Anyway, I expect Linux printing coverage to improve in future years especially with IBM and Novell backing enterprise Linux (SUSE). It probably won't ever be as near universal as Windows. But it'll be good enough.
I think the issue was hibernation, no? A lot of Intel world hardware used to have problems coming back from power down in the same state it was in prior to hibernation and lacked clear procedures to get itself back to where it belonged. Could all be fixed on Apple's Intel based systems for all I know, but my bet would be not.
Let me get this straight. You're going to set up a communication system without provisions for a warrantless wire tap? Why any terorist could use that to... to... well... something bad.... I dunno... depopulate Idaho maybe.
It's beautiful Guantamo Bay for you, you fascist, communistic, islamic fundamentalist pig.
You're right of course. The problem appears maybe to be that Microsoft doesn't know how to fix bloat, security issues, DRM, dependancy on the idiot registry (now there's an idea I'll bet they wish they never had), etc, etc, etc. And they have taken most of the real features out of Vista because they can't make them work adequately. So folks are debating trivia.
My Opinion: Give the three percent of users who care (yeah I'd kind of like to know that my nuclear power plant controller has just rebooted) an option to turn the damn sound ON. Give the rest of us and our neighbors some peace and quiet. But personally, I don't much care. I never use XP voluntarilty and doubt I will ever use Vista at all. If I do, I imagine it will be for one boot in order to initiate a Linux install.
***My Mac has gone months without reboots and might add that it is operational within 2 seconds of opening the lid.***
A computer feature that actually works? All the time?
Oh, well, there's a pretty good chance that Apple's switching to Intel CPUs and the associated hardware architecture will fix that and you'll get to enjoy the pleasure of full reboots a lot more often just as we fortunate PC owners do
Well, No I didn't miss the point of your argument. First of all, houses are a terrible example for your argument. They usually fail catastrophically due to fire, natural disaster, or force majeur. If they aren't stuck down by the hand of man or God, they last. Windsor Castle has been continuously occupied for a millenium. My brother and sister in-law live much of the time in a perfectly usable house built just about 200 years ago. I expect that here and there, you will find folks living in a house built before the birth of Christ.
Motor cars would be a better example. They do wear out. But, the dynamics of motor car failure are nothing at all like software system obsolescence. (Software does not rust).
***but everything has a lifespan. Impermanenance is inevitable***
That's correct if you think in cosmic time scales. Eventually, many of mankind's great engineering works will be sucked down a subduction zone if they aren't destroyed in some other fashion sooner. But Windows time scales are not cosmic.
I think you've missed my point while lecturing to me. Let me invoke a different and wiser Chinese man. He is building a wall. He picks up a rock, examines it, and places it carefully in the wall. He turns and says "Progress". He picks up another rock and throws it over a nearby cliff. "Motion", he says. "Not same thing" he says and returns to his work.
You believe, and it is not clear to me why, that Windows (except possibly Windows Me) represent progress toward some goal. Can you identify the goal? I can't. I don't think anyone can. I am increasingly inclined to think -- as I started suspecting a decade ago -- that Windows releases are largely motion -- the floundering of folks who have wandered off into a deep and quite unpleasant swamp. I suspect that Microsoft itself sort of knows that they are not going much of anywhere -- thus the problems getting Vista out the door. They know something is wrong. They don't know how to fix it.
What I think you should think about is this. The reason that I usually use Windows 95 is not because I stubbornly refuse ever to update. It's because when the Windows 98 install that used to be on the P166 died a horrible death, I had a job that needed to be done right now. So I grabbed the first Windows install CD I found -- which turned out to be Windows 95. My plan was to do the job and upgrade later. But Windows 95 booted so quickly and ran so crisply that I decided to keep it and see if it ran as well with the numerous obvious problems fixed by patches or in a few cases quietly plugging in Windows 98 DLLs. Y'know what? It does.
So, the question would be -- if Windows XP on a machine downstairs that is at least an order of magnitude faster, actually has worse touch and feel than a decade old machine and OS, why would I believe that Microsoft is going anywhere I want to go? (Today or any other day). And don't get me wrong on XP. It's a hell of an improvement over W2K which I think was probably the worst desktop Windows since Windows 3. My problem is with XP isn't that XP a lousy OS. It's that it isn't enough better than Windows 9 to justify scrapping perfectly functional older machines that work OK on Windows 9.
I don't plan to use Win95 forever. Eventually, I'll switch to Linux, which I can tweak within limits if I don't like what's in the box. So far tweaking Linux has been a lot easier and less annoying than fighting with XP. Uneven documentation and largely uncommented source beats no documentation and no source all to hell. But I probably won't switch until the 2008-2009 timeframe. There are things like printing, cursor management, and the clipboard that Win95 handles pretty well and Linux is still struggling with. And Linux USB support is still spotty.
Keep in mind "motion and progress -- not same thing"
XCOPY32 had no small number of bugs, and I'm not sure that they ever got fixed. The bottom line was that using it was a crap shoot. It might do what you told it to do in the switches, or it might do something else entirely. And using the same switches in the same order on a different disk sometimes produced different results. e.g the same switch settings that copied files from one hard drive, might set up an empty directory tree when run against a different drive.
Many people solved that problem by downloading the freeware version of XXCOPY which actually works right. At least it always has for me and I've never seen any complaints from any others.
I'm not sure that you still need to worry about that. But I'm not sure that you don't.
Actually, the article doesn't say much. Bottom line, the Environmental Protection Agency is going to close up a bunch of its libraries, box up the collections, and lay off the librarians. There may be some legitimate concerns that research material that isn't available elsewhere is going to become inaccessible. Reason. Who the hell knows? presumably they are trying to cut the deficit by.00001% without annoying their core constituencies -- religious flakes, defense contractors, neofascist whackos and free market uber alles berserkers. Worked pretty well with FEMA until that damn rainstorm came along.
Additional obligatory anti-Bush comment: The Bush administration genuinely doesn't feel that the environment needs protecting. At least not in the same sense that the left and center of American politics do. If the Bush administration thought about environmental protection at all, their thoughts would probably be along the line of "Nice environment you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. Care to buy a few tickets to a $100,000 a plate fund-raising dinner?" They're right, they don't need libraries for that kind of protection.
***It reminds me of a proverb I heard from a wise chinese man:
You can renovate an old house, but it will still be an old house.***
No offense, but that probably wasn't the village wise man. More likely the village idiot. When I work on my house or car, I use a mixture of tools. Some of them are shiny and new. Some of them are 70 or 100 years old. Things do not work less well simply because they are old. Sometimes they work less well because they can not do the job as well as newer things. Sometimes they actually do work as well. A level is a level. A screwdriver is a screwdriver. And a hammer is a hammer
But in the case of computer operating systems, I think you guys are engaged in a Red Queen's race, running as fast as you can to stay in one place. Is it true that Windows 95 has a lot of problems? Of course. Is it true that many are fixed in say Windows XP? Yep. Does Windows XP have a whole bunch of new and exciting problems? Absolutely. Are you better off overall with XP? You ought to be, but it appears to me that actual answers are: "Not much" and "depends on what you are trying to do."
I think perhaps you need to consider the nature of wisdom. And ask the next Chinese savant you encounter (a different one hopefully) about the difficulties resulting from confusing progress and motion.
Last longer and work better with the base orienteed down -- which is not the way most sockets are confitured.
Are slow to start which some folks find to be disconcerting.
Are said not to work well in very cold weather, although I have a couple that seem to work fine at -20F=~-30C
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Subtract not fitting fixtures from the list, Used to be a problem, but the last 26watt fluorescent I bought had pretty much the same form factor as a standard incandescent bulb except for a thicker "stem"
CFLs are deliberately designed to have an incandescent like (2700K) color spectrum. That's because many folks find the bluer cast of more efficient industrial type bulbs unpleasant. But CFLs are actually available in several different color temperatures. We keep some "daylight spectrum" (5000K) CFLs around for my wife to use when sewing. I set one up next to an ordinary incandescent for a couple of years and we asked visitors which they preferred. It was nearly unanimous, they preferred the daylight fluorescent. I'm not sure about CFLs -- which have a spikey spectrum for digital photography. The results (Unlike photos of object illuminated with white LEDs which tend to look like snapshots lit up by spotlights during a prison break) look OK to me, but they might horrify a purist.
***This never works - ever. Managers of IT projects who don't know much about IT seem to have this incredibly bizarre idea that IT people, programmers and analysts are all interchangeable. You can drop someone from a project two months away from the deadline, bring someone else in who knows nothing about what's going on and the new person will instantly hit the ground running. They also do it again, and again, and again and again.***
This is an example of, as a coworker who had just bailed, once told me "Management By Wishful Thinking". Some of the folks who engage in it genuinely are card-carrying fools. Others, probably most, have a pretty good idea that it isn't going to work, but figure that even a miniscule chance of success is better than failure. Personally, I believe that facing up to -- and dealing with -- problems early produces the best result, but I have to tell you that most people would prefer to delude themselves that the pier they are racing down full throttle is really a bridge.
The article doesn't mention it, but Donald Becker is, I'm quite sure, the guy who wrote most of the Linux NIC drivers. I think that anything he says about hardware interfaces and their future is probably worth reading.
It looks to me like he's telling us that drivers are not likely to go away as an issue any time soon. Too bad, but if Becker says so, he's very likely right.
You're right about some things. It is (barely) possible to use a few USB devices with Windows 95 using real mode drivers or OSR2. But hardly anyone can, does, or would. And you are limited to 2GB partitions (except on OSR2) -- which isn't as much of a problem as it sounds like. My complete working set of software and data currently comes in around 1.1GB
Windows 95 is, I think, no less secure than any other Windows. It lacks a lot of patches, but it doesn't have IE and unlike W2K and Windows XP, it is not running dozens of incomprehensible services that are constantly under attack. Moreover, most of the things that might attack it will show up in the Task Manager which normally shows only three (really, only three, tasks). When I was still sysadmining, I could do a quick virus check on Windows 9 machines just by pressing ctrl-alt-del and looking at what was running. There are only about 8 tasks that could reasonably be running on a Windows 9 machine and no machine will be running more than five or six.
With a full patch set, Windows 95 is pretty stable. My experience is that it crashes every 3 or 4 weeks. That's maybe three or four times as often as XP and ten times as often as Linux with X-Windows running. Good enough for most of us I think.
A secure operating system... You're kidding right? Those botnets out there are not composed of Windows 95 PCs. And neither are the servers that are being compromised all the time running Windows 95.
Wireless? Don't acticipate needing it for a while as the place was wired with CAT-5 years ago. But I expect that most wireless cards come with Windows 98 drivers that will work with Windows 95.
What's wrong with an Old OS -- if it works? I wouldn't want WFWG back, but because it was a mediocre OS, not because it's old. Neither would a want my 61 Buick back (One of the 10 worst American cars ever built). But I'd be perfectly happy to replace one of the current cars with another 79 Mazda GLC in good condition if I could get parts without hassle. (More cargo space, better road clearance, I could see the damn corners, and -- suprisingly -- better gas mileage despite not having a computer to tweak its performance).
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But in any case, my point wasn't that Windows 95 is great. It's that XP is not remotely the improvement over Win95 that it ought to be.
It may be possible to build an adaptive user interface that isn't an incredible PITA for users and a nightmare for support personal. But you can ship the first ten releases to someone more masochistic than I am. Why would anyone want an OS that might decide that I need bigger or smaller typefaces, want a variable font instead of courier, and really don't need an File menu because I haven't used the one I have for 97 minutes?
***Some time ago, I worked on a friend's computer that was running Windows 95 on a Pentium 166. I was astounded at how fast and responsive it was.***
I'm typing this on a... P166 running Windows 95. Why am I using this antique? Because it is faster and more responsive than the Windows 98, W2K and XP machines around here. It's also faster and more responsive than the K2-450 with Linux that I can switch to any time using the KVM switch.
No, I don't think we should all be using Windows 95 (plus two dozen patches). But I do think there is something wrong when more modern OSes on much faster hardware consistently deliver inferior performance.... Doing the same damn job.
When OS designers get the GUI interface right, maybe it'll be time to try to improve it. But I think that the GUI interface hasn't improved in the last decade. In fact, it's actually deteriorated a bit. It used to be that I at least knew what single and double click would do. Now days I'm just like everyone else, CUSH (Click Until Something Happens).
Bah...
I feel an attack coming on... where's that blood pressure medication?
Re:Maybe Joe Schmoe shouldn't be using a computer.
on
AOL 9.0 Called Badware
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· Score: 1
***We need to educate him about how to use it safely (SP2, patches, and AV for starters).***
Y'know, I've met Joe, and I think that educating him may be a bit more of a job than it looks like on the surface. To be honest, Joe's got some virtues, but he's not the brightest bulb in the onion patch. Average intelligence. And, y'know what? He finds computers to be about as interesting as cross-stitch, minature poodle bloodlines, or the Nova Scotia Provincial Curling Championships.
Here's a wierd thought? How about we quit dinking around with ever more complex products that never work quite right, and try to give poor old Joe something that is simple, easy to use, secure, not very complicated, and that actually works?
***How hard can it be for the "uninstall" function to actually work? Worse, do I really need several dialog boxes to get rid of something?***
Looks to me like you need to be clairvoyant to write Windows software -- including uninstallers. Since hardly anyone is clairvoyant, it comes as no suprise to me that a lot of Windows stuff barely runs... if it runs at all. Shouldn't suprise anyone much I think. What DOES suprise me is that "they" keep on making this stuff ever complex and less reliable. I sometimes think that the epitath for the software industry will read "Here lies the remains of a business built by slow learners"
Hey man, we're talking security here. It doesn' t HAVE to make sense.
As long as you panic at the least provocation, you are responding normally and appropriately.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think
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Diebold Flops in Alaska
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· Score: 2, Interesting
***The only two ways it can fail (that I can think of):
(1) The ballot is a misprint...
(2) The marker runs dry.***
The town I live in switched to optical scanning of ballots a couple of decades ago when a few thousand blank ballots turned up missing on election day. To this day, no one knows if the ballots were lost, stolen, or indeed ever existed at all. It's certainly remotely possible that they were marked up and somehow used to replace a like number of real ballots although it doesn't seem very likely. Nonetheless, the folks who looked at the issue felt that the optical scanning system offered somewhat better security than the paper ballots.
Personally I think that, if paper ballots are good enough for Canada, where they work fine, I think they are good enough for the US. It's not that hard to run an honest election, and it's probably easier to run a dishonest election if the system is complicated than if it is simple.
***But why bother even with Writely when you have WordPad. After all, most computers don't need 'real time collaboration', either.***
Good question. Answer: Wordpad doesn't do a few of things that I need and I expect others do as well. Spellcheck, Page Breaks, and -- I infer from the Save As menu -- recent DOC formats. There is (or used to be anyway) a really annoying bug in the underlying DLL that changed the indenting of bulleted text every time the file was saved. I myself generally use free alternatives - CWORDPAD, Jarte that at least offer spellcheck plus ANTIWORD for.DOC conversion. But I can't really recommend them to others, and couldn't -- were I still sysadmining -- contemplate deploying them except to a truly impoverished operation. I think Writely might be just good enough to be deployable although one would have to do some field testing to be sure.
Does Writely do recent DOC formats? I know it will read.DOC files shipped with WIN95, but I try to avoid having information I need proprietary file formats, so I don't have a lot of.DOC files around to test it with.
***I'd be very suprised if their quantum computer will be faster than conventional computers by next year. 20 years away, maybe.***
Just a guess. Given the article, one can't do anything other than guess. I think this may be a conventional computer using superconducting technology, not a 'quantum computer' as the term is usually understood. It seems to be expected that a superconducting computer -- if one can be built -- might clock an order of magnitude faster than conventional semiconductor based computers As I understand it, today's supercomputers are little if any faster than Best Buy's $300 special of the week. They just have a huge number of CPUs hooked up in parallel (I'm sure that if I have that wrong, someone will point out that I'm a total moron).
Where does quantum computing come in? Looks to me like it doesn't exactly. My impression is that when you dink around with superconductivity, you need to understand and allow for quantum mechanical effects. That's all the article claims to do as far as I can see.
So, can they build this wonder? Possibly, but my guess is that they can't. AFAIK, no one else has demonstrated or shipped a real, functioning, superconducting computer. I'm dubious that an outfit that needs to send out what are probably misleading press releases will be the first. But I've been wrong before.
As for quantum computing. It's surely going to look like black magic to me, and, I strongly suspect, most other folks. I can sort of vaguely understand how (all?) the possible solutions to an operation can be computed simultaneously and held in a quantum device. I don't have clue how one knows which answer is the desired answer.
I think this will turn out to be a fairly big deal. Many, I think most, computer users don't actually need a word processor or spreadsheet very often -- maybe once or twice a month. For light duty usage, Writely looks to be adequate. If you can get adequate, light duty spreadsheet and word processing from Google, you don't need Office. As you are probably aware, the world is full of system administrators who would love to not have to buy, install, and support MS Office.
So, this isn't great news for Microsoft.
I didn't test Writely extensively, but I ran quick tests with Firefox on Linux using a 450MHz CPU and Windows 95 on a P166. It ran fine, even on the P166 which is pretty minimal by modern standards. The only thing I tried that didn't work was fonts on Linux -- presumably because the names of the fonts from Writely don't match the names of Linux fonts. I sort of expect that sort of thing with Linux at this stage in Linux development. I'd guess that it might be fixable if I want to devote a few hours to tinkering.
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But that'd be a five year effort, and they did this in only three,. So I imagine that it'll be a goat rope with teachers, staff and students struggling with half baked and moderately disfunctional technology and an arrogant, exhausted, and thoroughly overwhelmed IT staff deathmarching toward arbitrary and poorly selected goals.
If this plays out as I would guess it probably will, what should be learned is that education is a complex and poorly understood process and that improving it requires serious analysis, experimentation, and lots of effort. But that's not a message that techies, politicians, and school administrators want to hear. So I imagine that there will be no winners and that the teachers, staff and students will all lose.
There's a substantial gap between legality and actuality.
Example. Most libraries in the US have coin operated photocopiers. It's a safe bet that at least 50% of the usage of those machines is technically illegal. What do you think the chances are that Copyright law will be enforced in libraries?
In any case, WGA specifically should be a transitory problem. Anyone who doesn't have, and isn't implementing, a Microsoft exit strategy probably deserves (and will get) WGA and worse. It ought to be pretty obvious by now that WGA is another step toward Microsoft user lock-in -- and that it won't be the last such step. Why on Earth would any sane person allow themself to be locked into using MS software?
Lord knows, It'd be hard for the Internet to be less secure than it is today. It'd be kind of dumb to reject any remotely plausible idea for making things better just because it came from Microsoft.
We're slow learners.
It's safe enough to come here BTW -- at least for the time being. On the other hand, Canada is very similar, in better contact with reality, and if the cops decide to beat you up, you'll be bashed by guys in really spiffy uniforms.
Why you guys are so determined to build shoddy walls and insist that you've accomplished loads of worthwhile stuff has eluded me for decades. I'll give you an example of something done half way right -- plug and play. Shipped in 1995. Barely worked. Cost customers a fortune while techs struggled with Windows bugs, inaccurate documentation, and bad INF scripts. Microsoft and the industry plugged away. A bit better in Windows 98. Finally works pretty well in XP. Took six years. Trouble is that it's an exception in that it had a clear cut goal that was actually both desirable and achieved. PnP sure as hell was not much of an advance when it first appeared although it was touted as one. An example of something done wrong. The Registry. Started in Windows 3 as an object data base. Good idea. Expanded in Windows 95 as a general OS data base. Not a good idea. Should never have been expanded. And should have been deprecated as soon as it's flaws became evident. Instead, MS has tried to keep a flawed concept afloat with the digital equivalent of duct tape. My bet is that it will never work well. This is not progress. Which is more typical of Post 1995 Windows? I fear, the Registry is the model. The one area where I see methodical progress is Network Security, and I fear that may simply be unfixable. But at least they are trying.
No matter ... let's move on to something that you will understand completely, and might save you some grief.
Linux printing does more often than not work. The problem is that a significant number of printer models are not supported. This is an issue because if you walk into an existing infrastructure that has a diverse collection of printers and try to convert it to Linux, you are likely to find that many printers -- maybe as many as 20-30% -- don't work. And in most cases, probably can't be persuaded to work unless you write your own driver which would -- I think -- be impractical unless you had a gazillion unsupported printers of the same model.
The problems are kind of complex, but if you use the simplistic assumption that they occur because printer mongers write drivers for Windows, but not for Linux you won't be too wrong. One additional issue is that old printer models that once worked sometimes stop working. That's a testing and architecture issue. Microsoft probably won't break the HP-IIP down on the loading dock in the next Windows release. Linux with fewer test resources might. Why breaking that printer is a bad idea will become clear when some guy looking and acting uncomfortably like the Incredible Hulk strolls into your cube and wants to know WTF you did to his printer. I didn't select the HP-IIP at random, it is broken in cups-1.1.23 and I wouldn't be suprised that every other PCL3 printer is as well.
Anyway, I expect Linux printing coverage to improve in future years especially with IBM and Novell backing enterprise Linux (SUSE). It probably won't ever be as near universal as Windows. But it'll be good enough.
I think the issue was hibernation, no? A lot of Intel world hardware used to have problems coming back from power down in the same state it was in prior to hibernation and lacked clear procedures to get itself back to where it belonged. Could all be fixed on Apple's Intel based systems for all I know, but my bet would be not.
It's beautiful Guantamo Bay for you, you fascist, communistic, islamic fundamentalist pig.
You're right of course. The problem appears maybe to be that Microsoft doesn't know how to fix bloat, security issues, DRM, dependancy on the idiot registry (now there's an idea I'll bet they wish they never had), etc, etc, etc. And they have taken most of the real features out of Vista because they can't make them work adequately. So folks are debating trivia.
My Opinion: Give the three percent of users who care (yeah I'd kind of like to know that my nuclear power plant controller has just rebooted) an option to turn the damn sound ON. Give the rest of us and our neighbors some peace and quiet. But personally, I don't much care. I never use XP voluntarilty and doubt I will ever use Vista at all. If I do, I imagine it will be for one boot in order to initiate a Linux install.
A computer feature that actually works? All the time?
Oh, well, there's a pretty good chance that Apple's switching to Intel CPUs and the associated hardware architecture will fix that and you'll get to enjoy the pleasure of full reboots a lot more often just as we fortunate PC owners do
Motor cars would be a better example. They do wear out. But, the dynamics of motor car failure are nothing at all like software system obsolescence. (Software does not rust).
***but everything has a lifespan. Impermanenance is inevitable***
That's correct if you think in cosmic time scales. Eventually, many of mankind's great engineering works will be sucked down a subduction zone if they aren't destroyed in some other fashion sooner. But Windows time scales are not cosmic.
I think you've missed my point while lecturing to me. Let me invoke a different and wiser Chinese man. He is building a wall. He picks up a rock, examines it, and places it carefully in the wall. He turns and says "Progress". He picks up another rock and throws it over a nearby cliff. "Motion", he says. "Not same thing" he says and returns to his work.
You believe, and it is not clear to me why, that Windows (except possibly Windows Me) represent progress toward some goal. Can you identify the goal? I can't. I don't think anyone can. I am increasingly inclined to think -- as I started suspecting a decade ago -- that Windows releases are largely motion -- the floundering of folks who have wandered off into a deep and quite unpleasant swamp. I suspect that Microsoft itself sort of knows that they are not going much of anywhere -- thus the problems getting Vista out the door. They know something is wrong. They don't know how to fix it.
What I think you should think about is this. The reason that I usually use Windows 95 is not because I stubbornly refuse ever to update. It's because when the Windows 98 install that used to be on the P166 died a horrible death, I had a job that needed to be done right now. So I grabbed the first Windows install CD I found -- which turned out to be Windows 95. My plan was to do the job and upgrade later. But Windows 95 booted so quickly and ran so crisply that I decided to keep it and see if it ran as well with the numerous obvious problems fixed by patches or in a few cases quietly plugging in Windows 98 DLLs. Y'know what? It does.
So, the question would be -- if Windows XP on a machine downstairs that is at least an order of magnitude faster, actually has worse touch and feel than a decade old machine and OS, why would I believe that Microsoft is going anywhere I want to go? (Today or any other day). And don't get me wrong on XP. It's a hell of an improvement over W2K which I think was probably the worst desktop Windows since Windows 3. My problem is with XP isn't that XP a lousy OS. It's that it isn't enough better than Windows 9 to justify scrapping perfectly functional older machines that work OK on Windows 9.
I don't plan to use Win95 forever. Eventually, I'll switch to Linux, which I can tweak within limits if I don't like what's in the box. So far tweaking Linux has been a lot easier and less annoying than fighting with XP. Uneven documentation and largely uncommented source beats no documentation and no source all to hell. But I probably won't switch until the 2008-2009 timeframe. There are things like printing, cursor management, and the clipboard that Win95 handles pretty well and Linux is still struggling with. And Linux USB support is still spotty.
Keep in mind "motion and progress -- not same thing"
Many people solved that problem by downloading the freeware version of XXCOPY which actually works right. At least it always has for me and I've never seen any complaints from any others.
I'm not sure that you still need to worry about that. But I'm not sure that you don't.
Additional obligatory anti-Bush comment: The Bush administration genuinely doesn't feel that the environment needs protecting. At least not in the same sense that the left and center of American politics do. If the Bush administration thought about environmental protection at all, their thoughts would probably be along the line of "Nice environment you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. Care to buy a few tickets to a $100,000 a plate fund-raising dinner?" They're right, they don't need libraries for that kind of protection.
You can renovate an old house, but it will still be an old house.***
No offense, but that probably wasn't the village wise man. More likely the village idiot. When I work on my house or car, I use a mixture of tools. Some of them are shiny and new. Some of them are 70 or 100 years old. Things do not work less well simply because they are old. Sometimes they work less well because they can not do the job as well as newer things. Sometimes they actually do work as well. A level is a level. A screwdriver is a screwdriver. And a hammer is a hammer
But in the case of computer operating systems, I think you guys are engaged in a Red Queen's race, running as fast as you can to stay in one place. Is it true that Windows 95 has a lot of problems? Of course. Is it true that many are fixed in say Windows XP? Yep. Does Windows XP have a whole bunch of new and exciting problems? Absolutely. Are you better off overall with XP? You ought to be, but it appears to me that actual answers are: "Not much" and "depends on what you are trying to do."
I think perhaps you need to consider the nature of wisdom. And ask the next Chinese savant you encounter (a different one hopefully) about the difficulties resulting from confusing progress and motion.
Last longer and work better with the base orienteed down -- which is not the way most sockets are confitured.
Are slow to start which some folks find to be disconcerting.
Are said not to work well in very cold weather, although I have a couple that seem to work fine at -20F=~-30C
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Subtract not fitting fixtures from the list, Used to be a problem, but the last 26watt fluorescent I bought had pretty much the same form factor as a standard incandescent bulb except for a thicker "stem"
CFLs are deliberately designed to have an incandescent like (2700K) color spectrum. That's because many folks find the bluer cast of more efficient industrial type bulbs unpleasant. But CFLs are actually available in several different color temperatures. We keep some "daylight spectrum" (5000K) CFLs around for my wife to use when sewing. I set one up next to an ordinary incandescent for a couple of years and we asked visitors which they preferred. It was nearly unanimous, they preferred the daylight fluorescent. I'm not sure about CFLs -- which have a spikey spectrum for digital photography. The results (Unlike photos of object illuminated with white LEDs which tend to look like snapshots lit up by spotlights during a prison break) look OK to me, but they might horrify a purist.
This is an example of, as a coworker who had just bailed, once told me "Management By Wishful Thinking". Some of the folks who engage in it genuinely are card-carrying fools. Others, probably most, have a pretty good idea that it isn't going to work, but figure that even a miniscule chance of success is better than failure. Personally, I believe that facing up to -- and dealing with -- problems early produces the best result, but I have to tell you that most people would prefer to delude themselves that the pier they are racing down full throttle is really a bridge.
It looks to me like he's telling us that drivers are not likely to go away as an issue any time soon. Too bad, but if Becker says so, he's very likely right.
Firefox was still installable on Windows 95 a few months ago. See my website at http://donaldkenney.freewebsitehosting.com for instructions.
OTOH
Windows 95 is, I think, no less secure than any other Windows. It lacks a lot of patches, but it doesn't have IE and unlike W2K and Windows XP, it is not running dozens of incomprehensible services that are constantly under attack. Moreover, most of the things that might attack it will show up in the Task Manager which normally shows only three (really, only three, tasks). When I was still sysadmining, I could do a quick virus check on Windows 9 machines just by pressing ctrl-alt-del and looking at what was running. There are only about 8 tasks that could reasonably be running on a Windows 9 machine and no machine will be running more than five or six.
With a full patch set, Windows 95 is pretty stable. My experience is that it crashes every 3 or 4 weeks. That's maybe three or four times as often as XP and ten times as often as Linux with X-Windows running. Good enough for most of us I think.
A secure operating system ... You're kidding right? Those botnets out there are not composed of Windows 95 PCs. And neither are the servers that are being compromised all the time running Windows 95.
Wireless? Don't acticipate needing it for a while as the place was wired with CAT-5 years ago. But I expect that most wireless cards come with Windows 98 drivers that will work with Windows 95.
What's wrong with an Old OS -- if it works? I wouldn't want WFWG back, but because it was a mediocre OS, not because it's old. Neither would a want my 61 Buick back (One of the 10 worst American cars ever built). But I'd be perfectly happy to replace one of the current cars with another 79 Mazda GLC in good condition if I could get parts without hassle. (More cargo space, better road clearance, I could see the damn corners, and -- suprisingly -- better gas mileage despite not having a computer to tweak its performance).
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But in any case, my point wasn't that Windows 95 is great. It's that XP is not remotely the improvement over Win95 that it ought to be.
1. Non-intrusive.
2. Stable.
3. Efficient.
4. Intuitive.***
and 5. Predictable.
It may be possible to build an adaptive user interface that isn't an incredible PITA for users and a nightmare for support personal. But you can ship the first ten releases to someone more masochistic than I am. Why would anyone want an OS that might decide that I need bigger or smaller typefaces, want a variable font instead of courier, and really don't need an File menu because I haven't used the one I have for 97 minutes? ***Some time ago, I worked on a friend's computer that was running Windows 95 on a Pentium 166. I was astounded at how fast and responsive it was.***
I'm typing this on a ... P166 running Windows 95. Why am I using this antique? Because it is faster and more responsive than the Windows 98, W2K and XP machines around here. It's also faster and more responsive than the K2-450 with Linux that I can switch to any time using the KVM switch.
No, I don't think we should all be using Windows 95 (plus two dozen patches). But I do think there is something wrong when more modern OSes on much faster hardware consistently deliver inferior performance. ... Doing the same damn job.
When OS designers get the GUI interface right, maybe it'll be time to try to improve it. But I think that the GUI interface hasn't improved in the last decade. In fact, it's actually deteriorated a bit. It used to be that I at least knew what single and double click would do. Now days I'm just like everyone else, CUSH (Click Until Something Happens).
Bah...
I feel an attack coming on ... where's that blood pressure medication?
Y'know, I've met Joe, and I think that educating him may be a bit more of a job than it looks like on the surface. To be honest, Joe's got some virtues, but he's not the brightest bulb in the onion patch. Average intelligence. And, y'know what? He finds computers to be about as interesting as cross-stitch, minature poodle bloodlines, or the Nova Scotia Provincial Curling Championships.
Here's a wierd thought? How about we quit dinking around with ever more complex products that never work quite right, and try to give poor old Joe something that is simple, easy to use, secure, not very complicated, and that actually works?
OK, OK, no market for that .... Never mind.
Looks to me like you need to be clairvoyant to write Windows software -- including uninstallers. Since hardly anyone is clairvoyant, it comes as no suprise to me that a lot of Windows stuff barely runs ... if it runs at all. Shouldn't suprise anyone much I think. What DOES suprise me is that "they" keep on making this stuff ever complex and less reliable. I sometimes think that the epitath for the software industry will read "Here lies the remains of a business built by slow learners"
As long as you panic at the least provocation, you are responding normally and appropriately.
(1) The ballot is a misprint ...
(2) The marker runs dry.***
The town I live in switched to optical scanning of ballots a couple of decades ago when a few thousand blank ballots turned up missing on election day. To this day, no one knows if the ballots were lost, stolen, or indeed ever existed at all. It's certainly remotely possible that they were marked up and somehow used to replace a like number of real ballots although it doesn't seem very likely. Nonetheless, the folks who looked at the issue felt that the optical scanning system offered somewhat better security than the paper ballots.
Personally I think that, if paper ballots are good enough for Canada, where they work fine, I think they are good enough for the US. It's not that hard to run an honest election, and it's probably easier to run a dishonest election if the system is complicated than if it is simple.
Good question. Answer: Wordpad doesn't do a few of things that I need and I expect others do as well. Spellcheck, Page Breaks, and -- I infer from the Save As menu -- recent DOC formats. There is (or used to be anyway) a really annoying bug in the underlying DLL that changed the indenting of bulleted text every time the file was saved. I myself generally use free alternatives - CWORDPAD, Jarte that at least offer spellcheck plus ANTIWORD for .DOC conversion. But I can't really recommend them to others, and couldn't -- were I still sysadmining -- contemplate deploying them except to a truly impoverished operation. I think Writely might be just good enough to be deployable although one would have to do some field testing to be sure.
Does Writely do recent DOC formats? I know it will read .DOC files shipped with WIN95, but I try to avoid having information I need proprietary file formats, so I don't have a lot of .DOC files around to test it with.
Just a guess. Given the article, one can't do anything other than guess. I think this may be a conventional computer using superconducting technology, not a 'quantum computer' as the term is usually understood. It seems to be expected that a superconducting computer -- if one can be built -- might clock an order of magnitude faster than conventional semiconductor based computers As I understand it, today's supercomputers are little if any faster than Best Buy's $300 special of the week. They just have a huge number of CPUs hooked up in parallel (I'm sure that if I have that wrong, someone will point out that I'm a total moron).
Where does quantum computing come in? Looks to me like it doesn't exactly. My impression is that when you dink around with superconductivity, you need to understand and allow for quantum mechanical effects. That's all the article claims to do as far as I can see.
So, can they build this wonder? Possibly, but my guess is that they can't. AFAIK, no one else has demonstrated or shipped a real, functioning, superconducting computer. I'm dubious that an outfit that needs to send out what are probably misleading press releases will be the first. But I've been wrong before.
As for quantum computing. It's surely going to look like black magic to me, and, I strongly suspect, most other folks. I can sort of vaguely understand how (all?) the possible solutions to an operation can be computed simultaneously and held in a quantum device. I don't have clue how one knows which answer is the desired answer.
So, this isn't great news for Microsoft.
I didn't test Writely extensively, but I ran quick tests with Firefox on Linux using a 450MHz CPU and Windows 95 on a P166. It ran fine, even on the P166 which is pretty minimal by modern standards. The only thing I tried that didn't work was fonts on Linux -- presumably because the names of the fonts from Writely don't match the names of Linux fonts. I sort of expect that sort of thing with Linux at this stage in Linux development. I'd guess that it might be fixable if I want to devote a few hours to tinkering.