I think in 2010 we're only going to go so far with the driver issues between Windows and Ubuntu.
For every person who had a Ubuntu install 'just work' on a clean install there is another who had the same on Win7. For every person who could find the driver from the manufacturer's site within 2 minutes on Windows there is a ubuntu user who didn't have to in the first place. For every person who had a wifi card not work on Linux there is a Win7 user who can't get their scanner to work.
My experience is that I have had a harder time with Ubuntu than Win7, but I accept that someone else may have quite legitimately had the exact opposite experience.
If you want to bring up specific instances of Windows not grabbing drivers properly you're opening yourself up to a hundred counter examples of Ubuntu doing the same (and it would be the same if the OSes were switched).
Re:Getting back to the topic...
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
I guess they mean training of their tech support staff, who would now have to learn all the subtleties and nuance of a new system in order to deal with the support calls.
You triangulate to measure location/position (synonyms) from the two know points, referenced either from each individual known point or from the centre point between the two. Location or position both imply a known distance from the reference point/s.
The further apart your two known points are, the more accurate your triangulation. This is why there are often efforts to put radio telescopes into space so pairs of them can be separate by a greater distance than eart based array allow.
Yeah, Word has a lovely feature whereby when you remove sections from a document it doesn't so much delete that content from a file as just delete the references to it. So, if someone changes one image in a doc for another it will keep a copy of both images in the file but only show the new one.
It would be a good feature if it was actually made use of in some sort of revision history system, but as far as I can tell the only effect of it is the increased file size of some docs.
I agree with you that the talk about making it pretty must refer to markup code of some kind, so you're right, my talk of plain text doesn't really address the issue.
I think Hierofalcon was probably referring more the huge inefficiency of MS Word and co to store even a simple text based document.
I have seen 70MB+ Word files, which you can open, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and then paste into a new empty doc - save that doc and you have a 50kb Word file.
Plain text doesn't really have the capability of being inefficient (unless I suppose you fill the file with crap, but then it is simply efficiently storing a load of crap).
The Higg's Boson is supposed to be the quantum particle that mediates mass. The 'graviton' isn predicted to quantise gravity.
I however have never understood why there must be a graviton. All the other quantum force particles (photons, gluons, etc.) are quantum physics representations of classical physics forces (EM, strong and weak nuclear, etc.). But gravity isn't a similar force, aka general theory of relativity.
Presumably general relativity could be quantised, but I don't see why a force mediating quantum particle should necessarily be the method (presumably some kind of quantisation of spacetime itself at the plank scale would be more appropriate?). The entire logic seems grounded in the Newtonian assumption that Gravity is a force and not a manifestation of spacetime curvature.
I'm afraid this isn't the case. What you're describing is the Dopler effect (the same effect that accounts for the red shifting on object moving away from you - stellar objects moving way from Earth at a high speed appear more red than similar objects not moving rapidly away).
If you took two observers with two clocks (assuming both clocks are perfect and synchronised) and one of them moved away from the other at a high speed for a certain duration then they both checked the clocks they would both get different read outs.
This leads to all sorts of odd situations where things like simultaneity are dependent on the observer - i.e. on observer in one frame of reference may see two events as being simultaneous, while a different observer at a different relative speed may see the same two events as happening at different times.
On a site with over a million subscribed users, and countless millions of lurkers, it does seem unlikely that you're the one and only reader of the post. I think using the third person was just the chap's way of being polite to everyone else.
Trouble is, while this isn't Linux's fault it is Linux's problem.
If basic software doesn't exist or work properly on Linux then people wont use it. If people don't use it then why is it in Adobe's or any else's interest to bother writing software that works for it?
1) Those dollars are going to companies in other countries.
2) Those foreign companies need to pay their bills so they need to exchange those dollars for their local currency.
3) Foreign banks end up owning those dollars.
4) Foreign banks need to invest those dollars somewhere.
5) Those dollars end up being invested in some US enterprise, either as stock purchases, government bond purchases or some other form of investment in the US economy.
The idea that buying foreign products leave the country in a worse state is not automatically true - it just move money into the investment area away from the M1/M2 area.
Incidentally, it has always stuck me as odd as a European (well, UK) that the US being one of the more free market nations of the western world seems to have the strongest anti-trade movements of any western nation.
I agree with this. About 25% of our customers have trouble using normal FTP, plus an awful lot of corporate firewalls have trouble with passive FTP (the random data connection port gets blocked).
There is no sensible payoff to me implementing SSL for our FTP transfers.
In your first paragraph you are saying that the system should commit irreversible torture on a convict, implying that you think the system correctly identifies perpetrators in most cases (torturing someone for punishment cannot be revoked, a jail sentence can be appealed and the conviction shown to be erroneous).
In your second paragraph you jump to suggesting that the system is unable to correctly perpetrators and therefore a sort of in-situ vigilantism is in order.
I'm not sure your argument can be classed as consistent.
I had quite the opposite experience, as by default sharing a directory on XP would cause it to be shared to 'Everyone' (i.e. anyone who samba browses to your computer would have access to the share). Limiting access permissions was a little too complex to describe to to a new user.
Win7 (can't remember about Vista) default to just the homegroup and quite easily allows you to give local users access with only a couple of clicks.
When connecting to a normal IP4 TCP/IP wireless network Windows 7 will only ask you a couple of things:
- Network security key (if it is a secured network).
- To confirm that you're happy to join the network (if it is not a secure network - a reasonable question to remind about wifi sniffing and such like)
- Whether you want to autoconnect to the network again in future (again, a reasonable question to ask the first time you join a particular wifi netowrk)
- The public/private status of the network (so it can use the correct firewall profile).
That doesn't sound so bad to me. Anything else has got to be due to a service running on the network rather than the network itself.
I must agree with the sentiment if not the expression of this comment.
I see a lot of people on/. who write as if software production is and should be an art form, whereas in almost all (i.e. commercial) cases it is a product to be sold.
A programmer is useful to the company, and therefore a valuable employee, if they help make the product more easily sold, not if they make it more perfect.
This is why standard economics suggests, and most companies will try to, when faced with issues that are best solved by labour cost reductions, make layoffs rather than reduce employees compensation.
If you make layoffs you can choose the least productive or effective employees and get rid of them.
If you reduce compensation (wages and perks) then the most able and qualified will likely just leave (as they are most able to find better paying work elsewhere) and the rest will be less motivated as described above.
It is logic that rarely gets considered when papers report on companies slashing jobs.
I completely agree with this statement. Bandwidth is the commodity that will really change things, not CPU power or any other measurement. Once we have sufficient bandwidth to render the physical location of the storage device redundant then we will see change.
At that point all our devices will become equally important, as they will all become interfaces for the same data.
A decade is a period of ten years. This is a clear cut de jure definition.
The eighties or the nineties or the 'x'ies is a perioed running from 1980-1989 or 1990-1999 etc. This is a de facto definition based upon popular consensus.
The definition of when the eighties start has nothing to do with when the Gregorian or Julian calendar began. It is merely a popular way of describing a commonly understood time period.
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I think in 2010 we're only going to go so far with the driver issues between Windows and Ubuntu.
For every person who had a Ubuntu install 'just work' on a clean install there is another who had the same on Win7. For every person who could find the driver from the manufacturer's site within 2 minutes on Windows there is a ubuntu user who didn't have to in the first place. For every person who had a wifi card not work on Linux there is a Win7 user who can't get their scanner to work.
My experience is that I have had a harder time with Ubuntu than Win7, but I accept that someone else may have quite legitimately had the exact opposite experience.
If you want to bring up specific instances of Windows not grabbing drivers properly you're opening yourself up to a hundred counter examples of Ubuntu doing the same (and it would be the same if the OSes were switched).
I guess they mean training of their tech support staff, who would now have to learn all the subtleties and nuance of a new system in order to deal with the support calls.
You triangulate to measure location/position (synonyms) from the two know points, referenced either from each individual known point or from the centre point between the two. Location or position both imply a known distance from the reference point/s.
The further apart your two known points are, the more accurate your triangulation. This is why there are often efforts to put radio telescopes into space so pairs of them can be separate by a greater distance than eart based array allow.
Yeah, Word has a lovely feature whereby when you remove sections from a document it doesn't so much delete that content from a file as just delete the references to it. So, if someone changes one image in a doc for another it will keep a copy of both images in the file but only show the new one.
It would be a good feature if it was actually made use of in some sort of revision history system, but as far as I can tell the only effect of it is the increased file size of some docs.
I agree with you that the talk about making it pretty must refer to markup code of some kind, so you're right, my talk of plain text doesn't really address the issue.
I think Hierofalcon was probably referring more the huge inefficiency of MS Word and co to store even a simple text based document.
I have seen 70MB+ Word files, which you can open, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and then paste into a new empty doc - save that doc and you have a 50kb Word file.
Plain text doesn't really have the capability of being inefficient (unless I suppose you fill the file with crap, but then it is simply efficiently storing a load of crap).
If only there were an 'Ironic' mod...
The Higg's Boson is supposed to be the quantum particle that mediates mass. The 'graviton' isn predicted to quantise gravity.
I however have never understood why there must be a graviton. All the other quantum force particles (photons, gluons, etc.) are quantum physics representations of classical physics forces (EM, strong and weak nuclear, etc.). But gravity isn't a similar force, aka general theory of relativity.
Presumably general relativity could be quantised, but I don't see why a force mediating quantum particle should necessarily be the method (presumably some kind of quantisation of spacetime itself at the plank scale would be more appropriate?). The entire logic seems grounded in the Newtonian assumption that Gravity is a force and not a manifestation of spacetime curvature.
Can anyone enlighten me?
Ok, well it is actually 360 times as fast, not 3600 times faster.
I'm afraid this isn't the case. What you're describing is the Dopler effect (the same effect that accounts for the red shifting on object moving away from you - stellar objects moving way from Earth at a high speed appear more red than similar objects not moving rapidly away).
If you took two observers with two clocks (assuming both clocks are perfect and synchronised) and one of them moved away from the other at a high speed for a certain duration then they both checked the clocks they would both get different read outs.
This leads to all sorts of odd situations where things like simultaneity are dependent on the observer - i.e. on observer in one frame of reference may see two events as being simultaneous, while a different observer at a different relative speed may see the same two events as happening at different times.
The typical example is given by Adam Smith in On the Wealth of Nations - Diamonds vs Water.
Water is often very cheap or free, and yet is absolutely vital to everybody on Earth.
Diamonds (at Adam Smith's time at least) served no useful purposes at all, yet were and are hugely expensive.
The exchange value (price) of an entity need not have any relation to its usage value (worth).
On a site with over a million subscribed users, and countless millions of lurkers, it does seem unlikely that you're the one and only reader of the post. I think using the third person was just the chap's way of being polite to everyone else.
I must admit I find Navicat to be a huge help and a massive time saver.
You're making a rather circular arguement:
Microsoft is breaking its contractual agreement to provide updates to those customers who don't install a particular set of updates.
So, the only people to who it witholding updates are those who explicitly chose not to install some of them.
Trouble is, while this isn't Linux's fault it is Linux's problem.
If basic software doesn't exist or work properly on Linux then people wont use it. If people don't use it then why is it in Adobe's or any else's interest to bother writing software that works for it?
In a macro-economic sense -
1) Those dollars are going to companies in other countries.
2) Those foreign companies need to pay their bills so they need to exchange those dollars for their local currency.
3) Foreign banks end up owning those dollars.
4) Foreign banks need to invest those dollars somewhere.
5) Those dollars end up being invested in some US enterprise, either as stock purchases, government bond purchases or some other form of investment in the US economy.
The idea that buying foreign products leave the country in a worse state is not automatically true - it just move money into the investment area away from the M1/M2 area.
Incidentally, it has always stuck me as odd as a European (well, UK) that the US being one of the more free market nations of the western world seems to have the strongest anti-trade movements of any western nation.
I agree with this. About 25% of our customers have trouble using normal FTP, plus an awful lot of corporate firewalls have trouble with passive FTP (the random data connection port gets blocked).
There is no sensible payoff to me implementing SSL for our FTP transfers.
In your first paragraph you are saying that the system should commit irreversible torture on a convict, implying that you think the system correctly identifies perpetrators in most cases (torturing someone for punishment cannot be revoked, a jail sentence can be appealed and the conviction shown to be erroneous).
In your second paragraph you jump to suggesting that the system is unable to correctly perpetrators and therefore a sort of in-situ vigilantism is in order.
I'm not sure your argument can be classed as consistent.
What were the apps in question?
I had quite the opposite experience, as by default sharing a directory on XP would cause it to be shared to 'Everyone' (i.e. anyone who samba browses to your computer would have access to the share). Limiting access permissions was a little too complex to describe to to a new user.
Win7 (can't remember about Vista) default to just the homegroup and quite easily allows you to give local users access with only a couple of clicks.
Just checked my Win7 laptop:
1) Open Network Centre
2) Click 'Manage Wireless Networks'
3) Click 'Add'
4) Enter the details of the network.
5) Done.
This is no more complex than, for example, Ubuntu (Network Connections -> Wireless Networks -> Add)
When connecting to a normal IP4 TCP/IP wireless network Windows 7 will only ask you a couple of things:
- Network security key (if it is a secured network).
- To confirm that you're happy to join the network (if it is not a secure network - a reasonable question to remind about wifi sniffing and such like)
- Whether you want to autoconnect to the network again in future (again, a reasonable question to ask the first time you join a particular wifi netowrk)
- The public/private status of the network (so it can use the correct firewall profile).
That doesn't sound so bad to me. Anything else has got to be due to a service running on the network rather than the network itself.
I must agree with the sentiment if not the expression of this comment.
I see a lot of people on /. who write as if software production is and should be an art form, whereas in almost all (i.e. commercial) cases it is a product to be sold.
A programmer is useful to the company, and therefore a valuable employee, if they help make the product more easily sold, not if they make it more perfect.
This is why standard economics suggests, and most companies will try to, when faced with issues that are best solved by labour cost reductions, make layoffs rather than reduce employees compensation.
If you make layoffs you can choose the least productive or effective employees and get rid of them.
If you reduce compensation (wages and perks) then the most able and qualified will likely just leave (as they are most able to find better paying work elsewhere) and the rest will be less motivated as described above.
It is logic that rarely gets considered when papers report on companies slashing jobs.
I completely agree with this statement. Bandwidth is the commodity that will really change things, not CPU power or any other measurement. Once we have sufficient bandwidth to render the physical location of the storage device redundant then we will see change.
At that point all our devices will become equally important, as they will all become interfaces for the same data.
It is a simple case of mixing concepts.
A decade is a period of ten years. This is a clear cut de jure definition.
The eighties or the nineties or the 'x'ies is a perioed running from 1980-1989 or 1990-1999 etc. This is a de facto definition based upon popular consensus.
The definition of when the eighties start has nothing to do with when the Gregorian or Julian calendar began. It is merely a popular way of describing a commonly understood time period.