The problem isn't the OS becoming unstable. It's the craplets becoming unstable, crashing and the lusers thinking that the crash message is "Vista crashing".
Since the crash message is provided by Windows, if users are likely to confuse the crash message presented when an application crashes with a Windows crash, isn't that the fault of MS for designing error feedback that isn't sufficiently understandable?
So, you aren't willing to properly report issues, but you are upset that the issues you have noticed don't get fixed? Seems to me you've got every right not to use the product if it doesn't do what you want, but little ground to complain that the problems you can't be bothered to report properly aren't getting fixed.
I am personally amazed at some of the countries signing up. Libya? Pakistan? I suspect they are too fanatically blinded and technologically ignorant to foresee the trouble they will have in a generation.
Gadafi, though perhaps best known in the west for his regimes connection to Cold War anti-Western terrorism, has for quite some time been rather heavily interested in promoting development throughout Africa and using his regimes position to advance that goal (that's particulary been true since the end of the Cold War.) He's long been more interested in building his personal legacy that way than securing some kind of durable, generational dictatorship in Libya. This is hardly out of character for Gadafi (either in signing Libya on or in his regime's exploration of the possibility of sponsoring even poorer African countries that can't afford to buy into the project themselves.)
If no one runs it, how can anyone know that it doesn't run?
I'm not trolling -- I actually paid the $39 a couple of years back when it looked like they were making progress. QB runs, but not well -- lots of little graphic glitches and refresh issues that make me nervous when I'm entering financial data...
But if you did run it and experienced these issues, why are there no known issues? Is it possible that maybe you didn't report the issues, and are complaining because no one has addressed the unreported issues?
Clearly, the problem isn't just no one trying to run it that is why there are no reported issues, its that the people who do run it—people like you—don't report their issues in order to get them addressed.
One reason that games probably get more attention is because people are more willing to experiment with games. Which means, issues get reported and, therefore, can be fixed.
So, I have tried. Can I bitch now?
But it doesn't seem to me that you have tried what the GP said you should try, specifically: "If you want to run QuickBooks under Crossover, try it. If it has a problem, then tell them about it."
If you had, it would either (1) you would have no problems, and not be complaining here, or (2) there would be reported issues.
How are people in rural areas going to get network connections?
Quite likely they won't on an always-on basis; one of the reasons for wireless networking built-in is to be able to use several of the units in an ad hoc network in the absence of permanent infrastructure. OTOH, a private firm is donating satellite time and has developed a satellite earthstation designed for rural villages that will be sold to accompany the OLPC, which one would expect some of the national governments buying the OLPC might purchase to provide content-delivery infrastructure.
The BBC is reporting that the OLPC will be available to the public early next year on a buy-2-get-1 basis through eBay.
Er, no, the BBC is not reporting that. From TFA (emphasis added):
The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project are looking at the possibility of selling the machine to the public. One idea would be for customers to have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world. . . . Michalis Bletsas, chief connectivity officer for the project, said eBay could be a partner to sell the laptop. . . . Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the OLPC group, emphasised that the launch to the poorest parts of the world was the organisation's main task.
Of plans to sell the machine, he said: "Many commercial schemes have been considered and proposed that may surface in 2008 or beyond, one of which is 'buy 2 and get 1'."
So, rewriting the first sentence of the summary to be accurate: "The BBC is reporting that the OLPC might be available to the public, either next year or later, and if so that it might be on a buy-2-get-1 basis, and eBay might be involved in some way."
I don't care how much training you have: crazy arab gets a box cutter, I get a.45 == I win.
While the popular impression of 9/11 has focussed heavily on "boxcutters", the actual phone calls and other reports from onboard the aircraft which provide the only real evidence for how the terrorists were armed referred to (IIRC) boxcutters, large knives, guns, and explosives.
I can see why we would want to prevent explosives, but I fail to see why banning guns actually helps us. If the passangers aboard the planes on 9/11 had guns, the attacks could not have happened.
And, OTOH, if the passengers in general had had guns in any of the no-actual-terrorist false alarms and airborne scares after 9/11, a number of a minor scuffles and other incidents could have turned into major tragedies.
Yet they didn't make it possible to open the door from inside.
Right, exactly. And, in a lawsuit, they'll claim that doing so would have (because of the expense added to the product with such a functional change) would not have been economically practical, and maybe even would have caused the product to fail in the market against the competition because of price. They'll claim that the warning, which was far cheaper, was all that was practical for them to do given market realities.
The foundation does a good job and vaccinates people against diseases and lots of other things and they are being bitched about because they can't fix *all* the problems.
No, they are bitched about because they actively contribute to the problems. Plenty of charities do good without doing the kind of harm that is described here, either because they manage any investments consistently with their charitable mission rather than largely independently of it, or because they simply operate on their current donations and don't have large investment portfolios in the first place.
Yes, it's a real risk, but putting a label on it in no way reduces that risk.
Putting a label on it enables the manufacturer to claim that they did what was practical to warn people of the risk, and thus presents some defense against lawsuits based on their being aware of the risk but concealing it. Now, its unlikely that most such lawsuits would succeed, and its not all that clear that such a warning would necessary actually adequately protect them against any that would. But its extremely cheap to put the warning on, and it might have some utility in either discouraging lawsuits from being filed or in defeating ones that are filed, so they'll do it.
Whether it actually reduces risk to other people is about the last thing manufacturers care about.
A lot of people are and should be 'accused war criminals.'
No doubt. I was not condemning John Yoo by saying "accused war criminal" (had I wanted to do that, I would have called him simply a "war criminal"), merely differentiating him from Christopher Yoo, who has not had war crimes charges levelled against him (at least, to my knowledge; if my effort to differentiate was ineffective, I will welcome any correction and apologize.)
Fidel Castro, for example, shipped Cuban troops all over Africa in the 70's and 80's.
Shipping troops all over Africa is not, in and of itself, a war crime. Though if you are trying to argue that John Yoo is no worse then Fidel Castro by saying that...well, sure. But except to a Cuban Communist, that's a pretty feeble defense.
The internet is group of people/corporations/ISPs/phone companies that had agreed to pass traffic back and forth (peer agreements etc). However, they now see the traffic that is going through them going up and not necessarily being payed for (to them). One and/or the others get an idea, everything that passes through me should pay.
Except it is being paid for. Peering agreements are reciprocal, and constitute in-kind payments.
Hence the call for network neutrality so we don't have to pay twice for the same thing.
Three times, actually. Every bit sent over the network is already paid for at each end: someone pays to send it, someone pays to receive it, which every intermediary between the endpoint ISPs "paid" in-kind via peering agreements by both endpoint ISPs (or by intermediaries between them and the endpoint ISPs).
The extra toll charge that intermediaries now want to charge directly to one end or the other for prompt delivery would be a third charge, not a second.
However, people don't seem to get the fact that the bandwidth should be accounted for, which up until recently now really hasn't been considered.
No, that's not true either. Bandwidth is already accounted for in differential charges for different bandwidth at each ISP, so is total transfer volume for certain types of accounts (and, really, for accounts with "unlimited" transfer volume, as well, as transferring too much will get you dinged under ToS allowing the ISP to take action for "overuse" of the service, generally.)
Though i think it might be nice for this (the internet) to become a public utility so the network neutrality issue goes away by everyone paying to access it. It would however have to deal with the real cost. i.e. connection AND bandwidth like most other finite resources.
Again, connection and bandwidth and transfer volume are charged for now.
The problem with the "Save" button is that it exists at all. My desk does not have a save button, neither does my notebook. The "Save" button exposes the nastiness of computer architecture - that of multi-level storage.
Bingo. What really should happen is you should create a friendly handle for your document when you open a new file/document/whatever, and the application should handle persistent storage with change history without bugging you. You should only need to intervene if you want to fork off a new version under a different name, clear out the change history and freeze the current contents, toss the whole document and start over, or something else.
You occasionally find database-backed applications that work like this, but its otherwise unfortunately rare. Rather than rearranging how I find the buttons to push to execute the same set of commands as always the way, say, Office 2007's "Ribbon" UI apparently does, this is the kind of thing I'd like to see in the way of improving user interface paradigms.
So Net Neutrality is something of a strawman - what we really need to be doing is fighting for the classification of data services as common carriers.
You seem to be misusing the term "strawman" to mean "something that isn't precisely what we should be seeking though it is very much the focus of the debate" rather than "a position set up to argue against though the opponent never argued for it".
Also, "net neutrality" is largely seeking to have certain components of common carrier regulation restored to data service providers by law (though, IIRC, net neutrality is, in part, currently imposed by regulation), its not like the two ideas are particularly divergent.
Unfortunately, because of what he said about TCP, it's easy to miss the other point he was trying to make. If we mandate protocols, QoS, etc., we are likely stiffling future innovations in this area.
OTOH, since net neutrality isn't about "mandating protocols", I'm not sure what even his legitimate points (like "Akamai is useful!") have to do with the thesis his piece is nominally addressing, to wit, why we should be worried by net neutrality.
No, the John Yoo that is an accused war criminal and noted proponent of the idea that the President is above the law is shaping future lawyers at Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, not the University of California, Los Angeles.
But, in any case, you are correct that he is not the Christopher Yoo that wrote TFA.
Akamai is a distributed hosting service, not a common carrier.
This guy is seriously a professor?
He is a law professor that's an opponent of neutrality. Whether his distortions of the technology are because he knows the law better than the technology, or because he is expounding an ideologically-based viewpoint and trying to snow people over with FUD, or because of some other reasons is, I suppose, something you'll need to form your own opinion about.
Aside from the obvious problems with the sentence "pioneering work being done by educators in the e-learning 2.0 space", how does banning myspace et. al. prevent learning? Are teachers seriously encouraging kids to get on myspace during class time for educational purposes?
No, probably not on MySpace, per se. OTOH, yes, social networking websites and internet chat rooms are used for educational purposes, and the proposed law covered "commercial social networking websites" and "internet chat rooms", generally, not just MySpace.
I seriously doubt banning MySpace in schools would hamper learning.
Yes, and if the law would have applied only to MySpace, that might be relevant. In the real world, the proposed language applied more generally to restrict access to "commercial social networking websites" and "internet chat rooms", which are a rather broader class of websites than just MySpace.
Banning MySpace is undermining much of the pioneering work of what?
I must be missing something.
It would have banned, by particular feature sets, social networking sites. MySpace, of course, is one of the more well-known ones that would have been affected, but there is a lot more to social networking than MySpace, and there are certainly applications of similar technology that have been applied in education that would have been banned by the act.
Claiming the conclusion is "scientific" would seem to imply that scientists have been able to make accurate, statistically signfiicant predictions of climate change, given existing C02 etc. emission measurements. That's *future* predictions, not curve-fitting the past.
Actually, you can do a valid scientific test if the predictions aren't the material you derived the hypothesized relationship from, whether or not the measurements are of events from the past. Otherwise, all of paleontology would be non-scientific.
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Since the crash message is provided by Windows, if users are likely to confuse the crash message presented when an application crashes with a Windows crash, isn't that the fault of MS for designing error feedback that isn't sufficiently understandable?
...is that large government agencies that analyze and drive policies are recognizing this as a risk with substantial potential costs.
So, you aren't willing to properly report issues, but you are upset that the issues you have noticed don't get fixed? Seems to me you've got every right not to use the product if it doesn't do what you want, but little ground to complain that the problems you can't be bothered to report properly aren't getting fixed.
Gadafi, though perhaps best known in the west for his regimes connection to Cold War anti-Western terrorism, has for quite some time been rather heavily interested in promoting development throughout Africa and using his regimes position to advance that goal (that's particulary been true since the end of the Cold War.) He's long been more interested in building his personal legacy that way than securing some kind of durable, generational dictatorship in Libya. This is hardly out of character for Gadafi (either in signing Libya on or in his regime's exploration of the possibility of sponsoring even poorer African countries that can't afford to buy into the project themselves.)
If no one runs it, how can anyone know that it doesn't run?
But if you did run it and experienced these issues, why are there no known issues? Is it possible that maybe you didn't report the issues, and are complaining because no one has addressed the unreported issues?
Clearly, the problem isn't just no one trying to run it that is why there are no reported issues, its that the people who do run it—people like you—don't report their issues in order to get them addressed.
One reason that games probably get more attention is because people are more willing to experiment with games. Which means, issues get reported and, therefore, can be fixed.
But it doesn't seem to me that you have tried what the GP said you should try, specifically: "If you want to run QuickBooks under Crossover, try it. If it has a problem, then tell them about it."
If you had, it would either (1) you would have no problems, and not be complaining here, or (2) there would be reported issues.
Quite likely they won't on an always-on basis; one of the reasons for wireless networking built-in is to be able to use several of the units in an ad hoc network in the absence of permanent infrastructure. OTOH, a private firm is donating satellite time and has developed a satellite earthstation designed for rural villages that will be sold to accompany the OLPC, which one would expect some of the national governments buying the OLPC might purchase to provide content-delivery infrastructure.
Er, no, the BBC is not reporting that. From TFA (emphasis added):
So, rewriting the first sentence of the summary to be accurate: "The BBC is reporting that the OLPC might be available to the public, either next year or later, and if so that it might be on a buy-2-get-1 basis, and eBay might be involved in some way."
While the popular impression of 9/11 has focussed heavily on "boxcutters", the actual phone calls and other reports from onboard the aircraft which provide the only real evidence for how the terrorists were armed referred to (IIRC) boxcutters, large knives, guns, and explosives.
And, OTOH, if the passengers in general had had guns in any of the no-actual-terrorist false alarms and airborne scares after 9/11, a number of a minor scuffles and other incidents could have turned into major tragedies.
Right, exactly. And, in a lawsuit, they'll claim that doing so would have (because of the expense added to the product with such a functional change) would not have been economically practical, and maybe even would have caused the product to fail in the market against the competition because of price. They'll claim that the warning, which was far cheaper, was all that was practical for them to do given market realities.
No, they are bitched about because they actively contribute to the problems. Plenty of charities do good without doing the kind of harm that is described here, either because they manage any investments consistently with their charitable mission rather than largely independently of it, or because they simply operate on their current donations and don't have large investment portfolios in the first place.
Putting a label on it enables the manufacturer to claim that they did what was practical to warn people of the risk, and thus presents some defense against lawsuits based on their being aware of the risk but concealing it. Now, its unlikely that most such lawsuits would succeed, and its not all that clear that such a warning would necessary actually adequately protect them against any that would. But its extremely cheap to put the warning on, and it might have some utility in either discouraging lawsuits from being filed or in defeating ones that are filed, so they'll do it.
Whether it actually reduces risk to other people is about the last thing manufacturers care about.
I read it as mass, though I suppose it might be volume within or diameter of the event horizon. Or something else. "Size" isn't really clear here.
No doubt. I was not condemning John Yoo by saying "accused war criminal" (had I wanted to do that, I would have called him simply a "war criminal"), merely differentiating him from Christopher Yoo, who has not had war crimes charges levelled against him (at least, to my knowledge; if my effort to differentiate was ineffective, I will welcome any correction and apologize.)
Shipping troops all over Africa is not, in and of itself, a war crime. Though if you are trying to argue that John Yoo is no worse then Fidel Castro by saying that...well, sure. But except to a Cuban Communist, that's a pretty feeble defense.
Except it is being paid for. Peering agreements are reciprocal, and constitute in-kind payments.
Three times, actually. Every bit sent over the network is already paid for at each end: someone pays to send it, someone pays to receive it, which every intermediary between the endpoint ISPs "paid" in-kind via peering agreements by both endpoint ISPs (or by intermediaries between them and the endpoint ISPs).
The extra toll charge that intermediaries now want to charge directly to one end or the other for prompt delivery would be a third charge, not a second.
No, that's not true either. Bandwidth is already accounted for in differential charges for different bandwidth at each ISP, so is total transfer volume for certain types of accounts (and, really, for accounts with "unlimited" transfer volume, as well, as transferring too much will get you dinged under ToS allowing the ISP to take action for "overuse" of the service, generally.)
Again, connection and bandwidth and transfer volume are charged for now.
Bingo. What really should happen is you should create a friendly handle for your document when you open a new file/document/whatever, and the application should handle persistent storage with change history without bugging you. You should only need to intervene if you want to fork off a new version under a different name, clear out the change history and freeze the current contents, toss the whole document and start over, or something else.
You occasionally find database-backed applications that work like this, but its otherwise unfortunately rare. Rather than rearranging how I find the buttons to push to execute the same set of commands as always the way, say, Office 2007's "Ribbon" UI apparently does, this is the kind of thing I'd like to see in the way of improving user interface paradigms.
OTOH, since net neutrality isn't about "mandating protocols", I'm not sure what even his legitimate points (like "Akamai is useful!") have to do with the thesis his piece is nominally addressing, to wit, why we should be worried by net neutrality.
No, the John Yoo that is an accused war criminal and noted proponent of the idea that the President is above the law is shaping future lawyers at Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, not the University of California, Los Angeles.
But, in any case, you are correct that he is not the Christopher Yoo that wrote TFA.
He is a law professor that's an opponent of neutrality. Whether his distortions of the technology are because he knows the law better than the technology, or because he is expounding an ideologically-based viewpoint and trying to snow people over with FUD, or because of some other reasons is, I suppose, something you'll need to form your own opinion about.
The whole Akamai argument is a great argument for a non-neutral except for the minor point that Akamai doesn't in any way violate net neutrality.
No, probably not on MySpace, per se. OTOH, yes, social networking websites and internet chat rooms are used for educational purposes, and the proposed law covered "commercial social networking websites" and "internet chat rooms", generally, not just MySpace.
Yes, and if the law would have applied only to MySpace, that might be relevant. In the real world, the proposed language applied more generally to restrict access to "commercial social networking websites" and "internet chat rooms", which are a rather broader class of websites than just MySpace.
It would have banned, by particular feature sets, social networking sites. MySpace, of course, is one of the more well-known ones that would have been affected, but there is a lot more to social networking than MySpace, and there are certainly applications of similar technology that have been applied in education that would have been banned by the act.
Actually, you can do a valid scientific test if the predictions aren't the material you derived the hypothesized relationship from, whether or not the measurements are of events from the past. Otherwise, all of paleontology would be non-scientific.