> What you're asking for sounds great -- on the web. The simple > truth is it is no longer profitable.
Where I live the CD shop sells single albums for sometimes as high as $39 each.
It's only the older, more popular albums from the '60s & the '70s that seem to be at a much more reasonable price.
The CDs that are being presented as "new" is mostly stuff that I find to be, frankly, rubbish that is just not worth buying - or downloading for that matter.
Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I prefer to listen to music that I can sing along to, and that has rhythm (I'm mostly not interested in beat music), and that can be played by good ordinary musicians who don't need to know how to program a digital sequencer in order to make the "music" performable.
>> Like all Microsoft products, it will blow chunks until 3.0 so >> keep waiting. > > That's completely untrue. > > Word blew chunks until 6.0
And MS Windows for DOS blew chunks until the second to last released version - Win4.1.2000 (aka Win98). But then they got it wrong again with Win4.9 (aka WinME).
The most recent version of WindowsNT (Vi$ta) *still* blows chunks - its full of DRM rubbish and is a resource hog.
The bottom line is that M$ cannot recognise quality, and does not understand what people genuinely find useful.
The only thing that M$ recognises is... its bottom line as protected by its lawyers and its marketing department.
To be fair, M$'s marketing department is probably that company's single biggest strength.
> You mean DirectX 10? Sure, DX10 could run on XP if MS wanted it to, but > then nobody would need to buy Vista.
DirectX? I've heard of that.
Why would I need to buy DirectX - I've not used anything that needs DirectX for years.
Come to think of it, I see no need to buy Micro$oft Windows Vi$ta - the Windows box I have spends most of it's life turned off - I hardly ever use it any more.
If you want a good reliable system use *nix. Even Apple knows this. This is why RedHat is doing so very nicely.
> "Each device maker... has a different sense of how small an ultra-mobile > can get before it becomes impossible to use. For instance, Microsoft > thinks the tiniest screen possible measures 7 inches diagonally, but > FlipStart Labs settled on 5.6 inches."
Wouldn't that be because Micro$oft's software takes up so much screen real estate that below 7 inches there really isn't much space left for users to work with?
> The Microsoft corporation are running scared? I are appalled at > your poor grammar.
Many persons seem to think that if the whole (such as a "group") has constituent parts then the whole should be referred to in the plural (as in "the group are")
Of course this is completely illogical and flies in the face of standard English grammar which uses the plural verbal form when the subject is in the plural form (ie ends with "s", "es", or "en").
> If this were implemented, I bet it would just set off hundreds of > useless warnings which would be ignored and turned off.
That would be true if designed and configured by Microsoft.
But if properly designed and implemented, carefully configured and throughly tested then such a thing could actually be very useful - especially when it comes to such things as traffic congestion, accidents, etc.
> If people didn't comply, the government might step > in and limit Net usage.
Why do so many news articles published on websites with an international domain, such as.com or.org or.net (etc) assume people will know, for example, which version of dollar when quoting a price in dollars, or which time of year when saying "spring", or which government when saying "the government"?
I am throughly sick of articles on tech news sites that appear to be totally clueless as to who reads their articles!
Meanwhile, addressing a point in this article, how can the government in your country "limit" the internet connectivity available in my country?
... those who are utterly enslaved to Microsoft will meekly bend over and lube up while forking over all that dosh AGAIN merely for the (dubious) pleasure of running the latest, greatest re-release of Microsoft WindowsNT.
There is no good reason why anyone should buy Windows Vista, and plenty of good reasons why people should NOT buy Windows Vista - all of which have been discussed at length elsewhere.
If they want to run Vi$ta in a VM using MacOSX, then that is their choice. But more fool them!
> Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now > that a significant proportion of it is legit?
Yes!
After all, from an ISP's perspective nothing has changed - they still do not have sufficiently large pipes and still have excessive contention ratios for the new Broadband era.
> What really astonishes me is that open source has made such > great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent > replacement for Outlook & Exchange.
Actually there ARE replacements for MS Outlook.
It's called Novell Evolution. And it can connect to the MS Exchange server.
Also, there IS at least one replacement for MS Exchange. It's called Open Exchange.
Why should Open Source software be blamed for the lock-in caused by Microsoft's anti-competitive practises?
This may potentially mean that the user that upgraded from Win3.11 to Win95 to Win98 to WinMe to Win2000 to WinXP and then wants to upgrade to WinVista, but in the meantime had done several hardware upgrades, may in fact need to reinstall each and every version of MS Windows that they'd ever installed if they get a crash of the PC that requires re-installation of the OS onto a new HDD.:o|
> I believe it's a British / American thing. As a Brit, I tend to treat > a company as plural, whereas Americans seem to prefer to consider > them single entities. I don't think there's a formal answer.
There is a formal answer. See my response to the comment above.
If the noun is in singular FORM (ie "group" rather than "groups"), then it takes a singular verb.
Thus if you're talking about Microsoft's staff as a whole - "staff" is singular and therefore takes the singular form of the verb (ie "is"). This is no different from any other usage of the word "staff". A staff is something relied upon for support whether it be constituted of persons or of wood.
But if you're referring to many *individual* persons who are employed as Microsoft's staff - "persons" is a noun in plural form and thus takes the plural form of the verb.
Now, the word "group" also always properly takes a singular verb, because it is singular in form, and its plural ("groups") is the form which takes the plural verb.
Thus "The group is developing a new product" vs "The groups work together to develop a new product".
When making an indicative statement of fact (as opposed to a subjunctive statement of intent or result) the singular/plural form of the verb always agrees with the singular/plural form of the noun.
What this means in practise is that if the subject ends with "s", "es", or "en" (ie is plural in form) but not "'s" (which is singular genitive) then the verb regularly does not end with "s"; and if the noun is singular and is being used in the third person (ie a form of the noun that can be replaced by only "he", "she", or "it") then the associated verb regularly ends with either "s", or "eth" (archaic).
The one only exception to this is when the author is making a subjunctive statement of intention or result, in which case the verb never takes the "s" or "eth".
Anything different from this cannot really be called good English usage.
Thus it's all about the form that the word takes, and the place that it has in the sentence, and whether it is indicative (normal usage today) or subjunctive (moribund today - usually only used in minutes of meetings in the wording of resolutions or motions. This could be very much more elaborated upon, but I won't).
> Or you can simply block all outbound port 25 except to very specific > mail servers. Cox does this. At first I was a little miffed but then > I realized it makes sense.
That makes no sense at all!
The best way is for the ISP to simply prevent the rogue connection from connecting to the Internet until either:
1/ the user rings the ISP and confirms that they are running legitimate mailing software. OR:
2/ the user provides proof that the machine is clear of spyware, viruses, trogans, and keylogging software, and the attempted outbound traffic on port 25 on that machine either completely stops, or is reduced to the levels that most persons would use on an averaged daily basis.
It's simply inane for an ISP to block all port 25 traffic.
Users frequently do not know even the most basic of things like, for example, needing to type in their password twice when changing it.
Moreover, the culture amongst users is such that they don't think they need to know basic things to do with using their computer - and they don't want to know.
Then they contact helpdesks with the most inane of fault descriptions, such as:
"It won't work".
Well... WHAT is not working!!!
Computer users should be issued "certified user" licenses, specifying which applications they are certified to use BEFORE they are allowed to use a computer by themselves, and they should be required to re-certify every time their software is upgraded!
> Well, yes and no. Settlements have appeared and disappeared in the area > we call London during that time, but it hasn't really been consistently > "there" in the same way as somewhere like Rome, and it certainly wasn't > anything like as big for most of that time.
Are you suggesting that the settlement currently known as "London" has not been continuously inhabited for more than 2000 years?
Slashdot Mirror
> What you're asking for sounds great -- on the web. The simple
> truth is it is no longer profitable.
Where I live the CD shop sells single albums for sometimes as high as $39 each.
It's only the older, more popular albums from the '60s & the '70s that seem to be at a much more reasonable price.
The CDs that are being presented as "new" is mostly stuff that I find to be, frankly, rubbish that is just not worth buying - or downloading for that matter.
Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I prefer to listen to music that I can sing along to, and that has rhythm (I'm mostly not interested in beat music), and that can be played by good ordinary musicians who don't need to know how to program a digital sequencer in order to make the "music" performable.
>> Like all Microsoft products, it will blow chunks until 3.0 so
>> keep waiting.
>
> That's completely untrue.
>
> Word blew chunks until 6.0
And MS Windows for DOS blew chunks until the second to last released version - Win4.1.2000 (aka Win98). But then they got it wrong again with Win4.9 (aka WinME).
The most recent version of WindowsNT (Vi$ta) *still* blows chunks - its full of DRM rubbish and is a resource hog.
The bottom line is that M$ cannot recognise quality, and does not understand what people genuinely find useful.
The only thing that M$ recognises is... its bottom line as protected by its lawyers and its marketing department.
To be fair, M$'s marketing department is probably that company's single biggest strength.
> You mean DirectX 10? Sure, DX10 could run on XP if MS wanted it to, but
> then nobody would need to buy Vista.
DirectX? I've heard of that.
Why would I need to buy DirectX - I've not used anything that needs DirectX for years.
Come to think of it, I see no need to buy Micro$oft Windows Vi$ta - the Windows box I have spends most of it's life turned off - I hardly ever use it any more.
If you want a good reliable system use *nix. Even Apple knows this. This is why RedHat is doing so very nicely.
> "Each device maker... has a different sense of how small an ultra-mobile
> can get before it becomes impossible to use. For instance, Microsoft
> thinks the tiniest screen possible measures 7 inches diagonally, but
> FlipStart Labs settled on 5.6 inches."
Wouldn't that be because Micro$oft's software takes up so much screen real estate that below 7 inches there really isn't much space left for users to work with?
> The Microsoft corporation are running scared? I are appalled at
> your poor grammar.
Many persons seem to think that if the whole (such as a "group") has constituent parts then the whole should be referred to in the plural (as in "the group are")
Of course this is completely illogical and flies in the face of standard English grammar which uses the plural verbal form when the subject is in the plural form (ie ends with "s", "es", or "en").
Have you considered asking for the games manufacturers to release a version of their games that id compiled to run with the Linux Standard Base 2.0?
> IBM does not really benefit is suing. SCO is broke.
> What are they going to get?
IBM gets the satisfaction of throughly kicking SCO's but into oblivion.
> If this were implemented, I bet it would just set off hundreds of
> useless warnings which would be ignored and turned off.
That would be true if designed and configured by Microsoft.
But if properly designed and implemented, carefully configured and throughly tested then such a thing could actually be very useful - especially when it comes to such things as traffic congestion, accidents, etc.
> Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
> The entire population of New Zealand is only
> around 4 Million.
4 millions of persons are more than enough. Any more than that and it will start to get crowded.
It is nice to be able to walk down a main street in a town and find the car (sic) stopping because you look like you want to cross the street.
That was my experience in Greymouth (on the West Coast of the South Island).
> If people didn't comply, the government might step
.com or .org or .net (etc) assume people will know, for example, which version of dollar when quoting a price in dollars, or which time of year when saying "spring", or which government when saying "the government"?
> in and limit Net usage.
Why do so many news articles published on websites with an international domain, such as
I am throughly sick of articles on tech news sites that appear to be totally clueless as to who reads their articles!
Meanwhile, addressing a point in this article, how can the government in your country "limit" the internet connectivity available in my country?
There is no good reason why anyone should buy Windows Vista, and plenty of good reasons why people should NOT buy Windows Vista - all of which have been discussed at length elsewhere.
If they want to run Vi$ta in a VM using MacOSX, then that is their choice. But more fool them!
> Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now
> that a significant proportion of it is legit?
Yes!
After all, from an ISP's perspective nothing has changed - they still do not have sufficiently large pipes and still have excessive contention ratios for the new Broadband era.
> What really astonishes me is that open source has made such
> great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent
> replacement for Outlook & Exchange.
Actually there ARE replacements for MS Outlook.
It's called Novell Evolution. And it can connect to the MS Exchange server.
Also, there IS at least one replacement for MS Exchange. It's called Open Exchange.
Why should Open Source software be blamed for the lock-in caused by Microsoft's anti-competitive practises?
This may potentially mean that the user that upgraded from Win3.11 to Win95 to Win98 to WinMe to Win2000 to WinXP and then wants to upgrade to WinVista, but in the meantime had done several hardware upgrades, may in fact need to reinstall each and every version of MS Windows that they'd ever installed if they get a crash of the PC that requires re-installation of the OS onto a new HDD. :o|
> I believe it's a British / American thing. As a Brit, I tend to treat
> a company as plural, whereas Americans seem to prefer to consider
> them single entities. I don't think there's a formal answer.
There is a formal answer. See my response to the comment above.
The rule is:
If the noun is in singular FORM (ie "group" rather than "groups"), then it takes a singular verb.
Thus if you're talking about Microsoft's staff as a whole - "staff" is singular and therefore takes the singular form of the verb (ie "is"). This is no different from any other usage of the word "staff". A staff is something relied upon for support whether it be constituted of persons or of wood.
But if you're referring to many *individual* persons who are employed as Microsoft's staff - "persons" is a noun in plural form and thus takes the plural form of the verb.
Now, the word "group" also always properly takes a singular verb, because it is singular in form, and its plural ("groups") is the form which takes the plural verb.
Thus "The group is developing a new product" vs "The groups work together to develop a new product".
When making an indicative statement of fact (as opposed to a subjunctive statement of intent or result) the singular/plural form of the verb always agrees with the singular/plural form of the noun.
What this means in practise is that if the subject ends with "s", "es", or "en" (ie is plural in form) but not "'s" (which is singular genitive) then the verb regularly does not end with "s"; and if the noun is singular and is being used in the third person (ie a form of the noun that can be replaced by only "he", "she", or "it") then the associated verb regularly ends with either "s", or "eth" (archaic).
The one only exception to this is when the author is making a subjunctive statement of intention or result, in which case the verb never takes the "s" or "eth".
Anything different from this cannot really be called good English usage.
Thus it's all about the form that the word takes, and the place that it has in the sentence, and whether it is indicative (normal usage today) or subjunctive (moribund today - usually only used in minutes of meetings in the wording of resolutions or motions. This could be very much more elaborated upon, but I won't).
Service pak 1 - Vista as it should have been at initial release.
Sounds like Vista is the new Win95a
> Or you can simply block all outbound port 25 except to very specific
> mail servers. Cox does this. At first I was a little miffed but then
> I realized it makes sense.
That makes no sense at all!
The best way is for the ISP to simply prevent the rogue connection from connecting to the Internet until either:
1/ the user rings the ISP and confirms that they are running legitimate mailing software. OR:
2/ the user provides proof that the machine is clear of spyware, viruses, trogans, and keylogging software, and the attempted outbound traffic on port 25 on that machine either completely stops, or is reduced to the levels that most persons would use on an averaged daily basis.
It's simply inane for an ISP to block all port 25 traffic.
Expensive, difficult to use, and incompatible with applications from other companies.
Sounds very much like normal Microsoft software to me.
> "... He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the 'first
> ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.'"
So what were all those medieval body-suits of metal armour?
Absolutely yes!
Users frequently do not know even the most basic of things like, for example, needing to type in their password twice when changing it.
Moreover, the culture amongst users is such that they don't think they need to know basic things to do with using their computer - and they don't want to know.
Then they contact helpdesks with the most inane of fault descriptions, such as:
"It won't work".
Well... WHAT is not working!!!
Computer users should be issued "certified user" licenses, specifying which applications they are certified to use BEFORE they are allowed to use a computer by themselves, and they should be required to re-certify every time their software is upgraded!
> Well, yes and no. Settlements have appeared and disappeared in the area
> we call London during that time, but it hasn't really been consistently
> "there" in the same way as somewhere like Rome, and it certainly wasn't
> anything like as big for most of that time.
Are you suggesting that the settlement currently known as "London" has not been continuously inhabited for more than 2000 years?
If so, please cite your references.
> BTW: Ever notice how really ancient cities are mostly inland
> while recent constructions are mostly on the coast?
London has been around for more than 2 thousand years, and is built on the tidal part of the Thames river.
How does that fit into your framework of "really ancient cities" and coastal construction?
... then he wouldn't have any money invested in Microsoft.
If the MPAA is deliberately uploading files for others to download from MPAA computers, isn't that what is otherwise known as "Entrapment"?