I found I often needed to change my user agent in Firefox to report that I was using IE on Windows to use a particular site that "required it" (IE, developer didn't want to test it on other platforms but it worked just fine). I told it to report I was using Windows and IE when I was actually using Ubuntu and Firefox. There are a lot of times I forgot to change it back for months or more.
I'm sure that OSX/Safari and OSX/Firefox people experience the same thing. Now there's now way for me to know the actual impact this would have on the numbers, but I'd like to point out that it could possibly be significant. May not even be 1%, may be higher - I know people that just change their user agent whenever they install on a box so they don't get annoyed by IE-only sites.
It's funny that you talk about Microsoft's credibility here, given that your slaughter of intelligent discourse also eliminates most of yours. I don't think an AC has any business challenging someone else's credibility. If you're not afraid of the consequences your words will have on you, show us by posting with your account.
I'm up in arms about it because I don't have to disable it in any other OS, and I didn't ask for it in this one. I don't want it, and I don't want to have to learn how to disable it before I can just use my system as normal. Easy? Yes. Intuitive? No way.
I can't tell you how many PC users have watched over my shoulder as I used Beryl and said "Wow... looks like Vista is worth the switch afterall, that's amazing."
While I prefer 32-bit Ubuntu I've installed the 64-bit version on the side for every version since Breezy. This is on an HP ZV6130us - a very linux-unfriendly laptop. I've had little problems with it, and it always booted into the liveCD without issue. Odd that you've had issues.
You never know where you'll find a great idea that will change it all. Yep. In one job I stepped onto the scene and in my first week made a lot of progress fo them, but I had to do a lot of research in the mean time. I mentioned to my boss that it'd be a good idea, in light of a few of the advancements I introduced that week, to encourage developers to spend a half-hour to an hour a day just doing research.
"That's fine - just do it on your own time. Work when you're here"
Honestly only an idiot would buy a MacBook and run Windows instead of OS X. Gaming?
Windows in general is all over the place and working just fine. That's a matter of opinion. It doesn't have ports of most of the stuff I like to use (FreeNX, Amarok, Kuake, Beryl, Kate) and the Windows alternatives seem klunky and annoying to me.
That's the reason you see Apple gaining ground. Cool points never entered into it for me. I've never bought a mac product before I bought a mac mini. I bought it because it was small, silent, and had all the power necessary to be the server I need it to be. I found nothing as small and silent with anywhere near the power in the PC market, especially with built-in wireless, bluetooth, and infrared remote. I slapped Linux on it and made a great server/occasional workstation out of it. It's now my ssh/remote desktop server, code repository, file server, media jukebox, SNES wannabe, and web server. Apple gained ground in my case because they were the only company offering what I needed.
Apple has one hell of a package Totally out of context quote, but I thought it sounded funny.
Yeah it was hard to get Ubuntu Dapper on my mac mini, easier to get Edgy on there. Feisty was a breeze. Best part - the thing is rock solid, I haven't rebooted it for literally 6 months at least. It's some decent hardware, really. And getting the remote control working was pretty easy - I just wrote a little Ruby script to control Amarok - I shared it and now there are people all over the place running Linux on Apple machines and using their remotes like they never could in Windows:-)
Disclaimer: I tend to agree with Twitter on things, and he's on my friend list.
I think it's important to let people decide who to listen to and who not listen to for themselves. If they can't convince you by the actual words they say, the words someone says about them shouldn't be necessary.
I don't always agree with Twitter. I often roll my eyes when he refers to Microsoft as M$ or Windows as "Winblows", but as a whole I think he's generally on target. I would not have listened to him with an open mind if I saw posts like yours when I first got to/. That seems to me like an indication of unfairness. Twitter's words should be judged by themselves. You'll notice he got a flaimbait mod for that post - and it was probably deserving this time, but posts like yours will influence mods. Be careful to be fair.
Hey Twitter - normally I agree with you, but I have to say it doesn't help anything calling this guy a liar because he claims his Windows install is still clean after a year. Geeks can keep Windows clean for a pretty long time in a row, sometimes 2-3 years before they re-install, and I don't mean the "2-3" as an insult, yes there are people that could keep it going longer, but I don't know geek that's lasted longer than 3 with a clean install.
Now I agree with the main point of your post (hell, you're on my friends list man, I think a lot of what you say is very right) that computers should last very long and it's a bummer that 1 year is something to brag about these days, but calling the dude a liar wasn't productive.
Also, calling it Winblows tends to detract from credibility. More people will listen to you if you stop that.
Most of us manage to run Windows on the net confidently. Yep. My college roommate did too, but not competently. His win2k3 server got jacked by a spam botnet and he confidently installed the exact same OS on it, patched it fully and started serving again. Can you guess what the result was? Jacked again.
As for writing code for Vista, identifying the inevitable and accepting it are very different things. I have not written and will not write Windows-only software, much less Vista. Vista's success is only inevitable as long as people keep accepting that.
Now I'll concede that wrong is wrong, and I think it's important to point out - I'm glad you did, because without making sure that's on the table my post would have been just plain wrong. So, yes - you're right.
I have a few details that I want to point out though. For one - it's much easier to make an unfounded claim against a Microsoft product without knowing it, because I honestly don't know how it works inside. All I can do is go off results, and a lot of the time it's the user that causes those results. You honestly don't know which, so you just have to guess. However, making an unfounded claim against Open Source stuff is much harder to do accidentally - you have the ability and right to investigate exactly where the problem came from and verify that it's there. You have the ability to tell who exactly is at fault.
Second, if the punishment is to fit the crime the crime must be measured by consequence. In that regard, Microsoft has the money to make sure their words are correct and the power and influence that mandates responsibility to do so. A lie from a king is much more damaging than a lie from a normal citizen, so a king should be very careful to choose his words.
So yes. FUD from a random dude and FUD from Microsoft are both still FUD - but it's easier to accidentally FUD Microsoft than it is to accidentally FUD Open Source stuff, and Microsoft should be held more responsible to be accurate and truthful because what they say is more influential.
I'll gladly feed the troll here. DRM inherently limits access to the public. It is, by definition, a restriction on allowed distribution. The GPL can also be said to be a restriction of allowed distribution but there is a huge difference.
One restricts against distribution, the other mandates distribution. One is inherently silencing the voice, the other is inherently requiring you have to free it. One will consistently disallow users to share for the common good, the other ensures that they will.
Tell me how you can throw those under the same umbrella. They have one similarity - they determine the rights of distribution. They are diametrically opposed in the way in which they do so and what that means to the end users. Don't pretend you don't know the difference. I can guarantee any average user could.
However, when considering HD video and Audio, the 'demands' on even modern hardware is fairly high if you want to pull off glitch free 1080p video.
Vista's real-time media scheduler was designed specifically for these demands and allows Vista to run these threads in real-time, and is why even non-assisted HD Video will run ok on Vista, and it WILL NOT run well on XP or even Linux or OSX without hardware specific decoding, no matter what everyone here thinks. That's fine and dandy, even congrats to them, except I don't use hi-def content. At all. I never will with the 2 machines I own now, I never would on a machine I bought tomorrow, because I don't even own a hi-def TV and my monitor is not large enough to offer me any real benefit from a hi-def video.
Regardless, Microsoft will not allow the sales of anything but this special purpose OS aimed at exactly what I don't do on 99% of machines being sold these days. THAT is what I'm bitching about.
I'm the guy that gets stuck with lower bandwidth in my huge file transfers while I listen to music and code. I have been able to do that under every OS since 1995 given at least a 200 mhtz processor. It's not too much to ask in 2007.
I love how people here simplify this issue, yet have very little understanding of the actually numbers of performance factor in, nor even look at the OSS OSes that can't even do some of the things they are 'bitching' about Vista not doing 'well enough'. Name something that is actually related to technical (read: not "the software was designed and written for the other system only but you can't run it!!!111!!!111!cos(0)" ) that vista can do that can't be done in an open source OS. Other than decode their DRM - we didn't want that in the first place.
Frankly, I don't know why Windows is considered the best business OS. 1. Because end-users don't know how to use everything else and are taught to fear and alienate everything else. I was one of those until around... Jr. High.
2. Because it's had a monopoly for a long enough time to develop a HUGE base of 3rd party apps that run on it exclusively.
3. Because people don't realize that it's not "them vs. Microsoft", it is "them and everyone else that dissents", and thus - they don't dissent.
Thank God for Vista. It's finally become uncomfortable enough that the cattle notice. Thank God for Ubuntu. It's finally become comfortable enough to switch that most people are really glad once they do. Linux (and not just Ubuntu) - Thanks.
'm so impressed. Thank you for blessing us with your knowledge and presence. I feel so touched and enlightened by the number of books you read and the number of women you've abused.
I also like your personality. I wish we had someone like you in our development group so we could be more productive and follow your insight. I'm sure we could take over the world with your leadership. Everyone would like us because we were so wonderful to work with. It would have been humorous to leave it at that, and wonder if he ever really understood if you were joking or not.
Clearly, you see education as something one gets from the academic sections only. This alone shows your lack of insight and knowledge about how the real world actually works. Yeah, in the real world we actually read what people say, not what we wished they said. He never mentioned preference on where the education comes from. He definitely made no mention of the education being academic. Now I'm not saying you're an idiot ( I did before which I'll say again wasn't mature of me), but you should try not to assume others are stupid. It really won't get you anywhere. You should try not to get so angry, too - it tends to destroy your credibility because it will cause you to say rash things.
If you've got a distinguished and influential guest addressing your class, you need to show him respect. Bullshit. Castro, Hitler, etc are all distinguished and influential. They do not deserve respect. I think someone deserves respect when they show evident character like selflessness and maturity.
You are not in the business of making or financing motion pictures or record albums, so you have no real stake in the argument An additional bullshit. There are many things that you just must experience to really speak of with credibility. Financing a movie or album is not one of them, sorry.
My brother couldn't stay out of my space. He was impulsive, ADHD, had an inferiority complex, and was 2 years older than me.
When I was 15 he committed first degree murder while breaking into a house to steal the owner's stuff. Now I don't know what all you learned from your brother, but I wouldn't want anyone to be subject to what I learned from mine through years of annoyance and abuse. Sure, he got into my stuff a lot, but that doesn't mean I was right or not to defend the boundaries too much or too little - he did the theft.
You are obviously very intelligent and I definitely agree with 90% of your post. But I'd like to bring up the following quote:
intellectual property right holders do suffer losses from the unrestricted copying of their property. It's really not true in many cases. When I started pirating music, my CD purchases rose literally more than 500%. I could hear a whole album before I bought it, I could burn individual tracks to CD... it was what CD and the music industry never gave me but what I always wanted.
I've bought hundreds of CDs since. Before Napster, I owned literally 5 CDs.
punishing people like you is important. Now I'm going to withhold judgment and ask you to clarify what you meant by "punishing people like you". I mean, to me it really sounds like you're insinuating that just because he drew the distinction between "the illegal use of a protocol" and "the use of a protocol" you're calling him a criminal. I really hope that's not what you meant, because that would be short-sighted, ignorant, and just plain wrong. It's a very damaging assumption that holds back progress. I'd love for you to clarify if that's really what you meant.
sure as hell haven't seen much more than FUD coming from the groups of people who would be the most affected once Vista gains traction. I don't have a problem with people doing that so much - Microsoft is known for those types of tactic as well. The problem is that the same people doing all this are the ones that have repeatedly claimed they own the moral high ground. The ones that claim Microsoft is not "honest". FUD always works both ways. It erodes your credibility when people realize you've been feeding them soup to undercut your competitors. That was definitely the most powerful, potent, and insightful point of your post. Now let me leverage it against your main point. There is nothing wrong with having a monopoly... there is lots wrong with ABUSING IT. It's abuse because lots of people HAVE TO agree with Microsoft. It's not a choice. Random people throw FUD at MS and may have some effect. Microsoft shouts? Everyone has to listen, FUD or not, and many are too uneducated to know the difference.
This is not hypocrisy. FUD is a completely different thing when you have a monopoly to back it.
Slashdot Mirror
I found I often needed to change my user agent in Firefox to report that I was using IE on Windows to use a particular site that "required it" (IE, developer didn't want to test it on other platforms but it worked just fine). I told it to report I was using Windows and IE when I was actually using Ubuntu and Firefox. There are a lot of times I forgot to change it back for months or more.
I'm sure that OSX/Safari and OSX/Firefox people experience the same thing. Now there's now way for me to know the actual impact this would have on the numbers, but I'd like to point out that it could possibly be significant. May not even be 1%, may be higher - I know people that just change their user agent whenever they install on a box so they don't get annoyed by IE-only sites.
I'm up in arms about it because I don't have to disable it in any other OS, and I didn't ask for it in this one. I don't want it, and I don't want to have to learn how to disable it before I can just use my system as normal. Easy? Yes. Intuitive? No way.
I can't tell you how many PC users have watched over my shoulder as I used Beryl and said "Wow... looks like Vista is worth the switch afterall, that's amazing."
While I prefer 32-bit Ubuntu I've installed the 64-bit version on the side for every version since Breezy. This is on an HP ZV6130us - a very linux-unfriendly laptop. I've had little problems with it, and it always booted into the liveCD without issue. Odd that you've had issues.
"That's fine - just do it on your own time. Work when you're here"
I ended up leaving there pretty soon after.
Windows in general is all over the place and working just fine. That's a matter of opinion. It doesn't have ports of most of the stuff I like to use (FreeNX, Amarok, Kuake, Beryl, Kate) and the Windows alternatives seem klunky and annoying to me.
That's the reason you see Apple gaining ground. Cool points never entered into it for me. I've never bought a mac product before I bought a mac mini. I bought it because it was small, silent, and had all the power necessary to be the server I need it to be. I found nothing as small and silent with anywhere near the power in the PC market, especially with built-in wireless, bluetooth, and infrared remote. I slapped Linux on it and made a great server/occasional workstation out of it. It's now my ssh/remote desktop server, code repository, file server, media jukebox, SNES wannabe, and web server. Apple gained ground in my case because they were the only company offering what I needed.
Apple has one hell of a package Totally out of context quote, but I thought it sounded funny.
Yeah it was hard to get Ubuntu Dapper on my mac mini, easier to get Edgy on there. Feisty was a breeze. Best part - the thing is rock solid, I haven't rebooted it for literally 6 months at least. It's some decent hardware, really. And getting the remote control working was pretty easy - I just wrote a little Ruby script to control Amarok - I shared it and now there are people all over the place running Linux on Apple machines and using their remotes like they never could in Windows :-)
What are you talking about? I can totally open mspaint in mine.
Disclaimer: I tend to agree with Twitter on things, and he's on my friend list.
/. That seems to me like an indication of unfairness. Twitter's words should be judged by themselves. You'll notice he got a flaimbait mod for that post - and it was probably deserving this time, but posts like yours will influence mods. Be careful to be fair.
I think it's important to let people decide who to listen to and who not listen to for themselves. If they can't convince you by the actual words they say, the words someone says about them shouldn't be necessary.
I don't always agree with Twitter. I often roll my eyes when he refers to Microsoft as M$ or Windows as "Winblows", but as a whole I think he's generally on target. I would not have listened to him with an open mind if I saw posts like yours when I first got to
Hey Twitter - normally I agree with you, but I have to say it doesn't help anything calling this guy a liar because he claims his Windows install is still clean after a year. Geeks can keep Windows clean for a pretty long time in a row, sometimes 2-3 years before they re-install, and I don't mean the "2-3" as an insult, yes there are people that could keep it going longer, but I don't know geek that's lasted longer than 3 with a clean install.
Now I agree with the main point of your post (hell, you're on my friends list man, I think a lot of what you say is very right) that computers should last very long and it's a bummer that 1 year is something to brag about these days, but calling the dude a liar wasn't productive.
Also, calling it Winblows tends to detract from credibility. More people will listen to you if you stop that.
As for writing code for Vista, identifying the inevitable and accepting it are very different things. I have not written and will not write Windows-only software, much less Vista. Vista's success is only inevitable as long as people keep accepting that.
Now I'll concede that wrong is wrong, and I think it's important to point out - I'm glad you did, because without making sure that's on the table my post would have been just plain wrong. So, yes - you're right.
I have a few details that I want to point out though. For one - it's much easier to make an unfounded claim against a Microsoft product without knowing it, because I honestly don't know how it works inside. All I can do is go off results, and a lot of the time it's the user that causes those results. You honestly don't know which, so you just have to guess. However, making an unfounded claim against Open Source stuff is much harder to do accidentally - you have the ability and right to investigate exactly where the problem came from and verify that it's there. You have the ability to tell who exactly is at fault.
Second, if the punishment is to fit the crime the crime must be measured by consequence. In that regard, Microsoft has the money to make sure their words are correct and the power and influence that mandates responsibility to do so. A lie from a king is much more damaging than a lie from a normal citizen, so a king should be very careful to choose his words.
So yes. FUD from a random dude and FUD from Microsoft are both still FUD - but it's easier to accidentally FUD Microsoft than it is to accidentally FUD Open Source stuff, and Microsoft should be held more responsible to be accurate and truthful because what they say is more influential.
I'll gladly feed the troll here. DRM inherently limits access to the public. It is, by definition, a restriction on allowed distribution. The GPL can also be said to be a restriction of allowed distribution but there is a huge difference.
One restricts against distribution, the other mandates distribution. One is inherently silencing the voice, the other is inherently requiring you have to free it. One will consistently disallow users to share for the common good, the other ensures that they will.
Tell me how you can throw those under the same umbrella. They have one similarity - they determine the rights of distribution. They are diametrically opposed in the way in which they do so and what that means to the end users. Don't pretend you don't know the difference. I can guarantee any average user could.
Vista's real-time media scheduler was designed specifically for these demands and allows Vista to run these threads in real-time, and is why even non-assisted HD Video will run ok on Vista, and it WILL NOT run well on XP or even Linux or OSX without hardware specific decoding, no matter what everyone here thinks. That's fine and dandy, even congrats to them, except I don't use hi-def content. At all. I never will with the 2 machines I own now, I never would on a machine I bought tomorrow, because I don't even own a hi-def TV and my monitor is not large enough to offer me any real benefit from a hi-def video.
Regardless, Microsoft will not allow the sales of anything but this special purpose OS aimed at exactly what I don't do on 99% of machines being sold these days. THAT is what I'm bitching about.
I'm the guy that gets stuck with lower bandwidth in my huge file transfers while I listen to music and code. I have been able to do that under every OS since 1995 given at least a 200 mhtz processor. It's not too much to ask in 2007.
I love how people here simplify this issue, yet have very little understanding of the actually numbers of performance factor in, nor even look at the OSS OSes that can't even do some of the things they are 'bitching' about Vista not doing 'well enough'. Name something that is actually related to technical (read: not "the software was designed and written for the other system only but you can't run it!!!111!!!111!cos(0)" ) that vista can do that can't be done in an open source OS. Other than decode their DRM - we didn't want that in the first place.
2. Because it's had a monopoly for a long enough time to develop a HUGE base of 3rd party apps that run on it exclusively.
3. Because people don't realize that it's not "them vs. Microsoft", it is "them and everyone else that dissents", and thus - they don't dissent.
Thank God for Vista. It's finally become uncomfortable enough that the cattle notice. Thank God for Ubuntu. It's finally become comfortable enough to switch that most people are really glad once they do. Linux (and not just Ubuntu) - Thanks.
I also like your personality. I wish we had someone like you in our development group so we could be more productive and follow your insight. I'm sure we could take over the world with your leadership. Everyone would like us because we were so wonderful to work with. It would have been humorous to leave it at that, and wonder if he ever really understood if you were joking or not.
No, I don't think he knew that you could 'downgrade' the pro and ultimate versions.
You are not in the business of making or financing motion pictures or record albums, so you have no real stake in the argument An additional bullshit. There are many things that you just must experience to really speak of with credibility. Financing a movie or album is not one of them, sorry.
My brother couldn't stay out of my space. He was impulsive, ADHD, had an inferiority complex, and was 2 years older than me.
When I was 15 he committed first degree murder while breaking into a house to steal the owner's stuff. Now I don't know what all you learned from your brother, but I wouldn't want anyone to be subject to what I learned from mine through years of annoyance and abuse. Sure, he got into my stuff a lot, but that doesn't mean I was right or not to defend the boundaries too much or too little - he did the theft.
3. Ron Paul.
I am not a lobbyist and I hate politics, but he's the first candidate I've actually been excited about in 10 years. And I'm 25.
intellectual property right holders do suffer losses from the unrestricted copying of their property.
It's really not true in many cases. When I started pirating music, my CD purchases rose literally more than 500%. I could hear a whole album before I bought it, I could burn individual tracks to CD... it was what CD and the music industry never gave me but what I always wanted.
I've bought hundreds of CDs since. Before Napster, I owned literally 5 CDs.
This is not hypocrisy. FUD is a completely different thing when you have a monopoly to back it.