When you take back something that was unfairly taken from you (i.e. high prices due to monopolies), that isn't ripping someone off. It's called justice.
1) People use P2P to get free movies, music, and pirated software. None of this stuff was "taken from you." You have the option to buy it at many locations nationwide for reasonable prices. There's no monopoly on movies, music or software at the moment.
2) Yes, you are ripping people off. We all agree the MPAA and RIAA exaggerate the damages, but it's also not a victimless crime, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Illegal? Maybe, but don't forget a lot of laws were made only to benefit the rich and powerful.
Then get off your lazy ass and change the law. The Civil Rights Movement didn't succeed because Martin Luthor King, Jr sat on his ass all day, then occasionally stole a candy bar from the corner store under the guise of "justice."
If I should ever encounter an entity with god-like powers I'll treat them with a sensible amount of respect, either to gain their favour or avoid their wrath. But god-like powers aren't proof of being creator of the universe. Quite simply I can't conceive of any kind of proof that would make this evident to anyone within the universe. It's an impossibility.
Ah, the James Kirk "What does God need with a spaceship?" argument!
Ok, it's obvious you're so much in love with Apple products that you're simply not seeing the forest for the trees here.
The cheapest pro is $2249. A refurb is $1900. (Refurb does not mean used). Refurbs come with the same warranty, and actually, since they have all been hand scrutinized, typically have higher reliability than new systems. I have not bought anything but a refurb for years.
2) $1900 is *still* far too expensive for a home desktop computer, by about $500. It's completely out of my price range, but of course I'm also not a computer snob willing to pay a full grand more to run OS X instead of Windows Vista like you, apparently, are. If you were using it to run Photoshop at a successful business, it might be a different situation, but for home use it's completely out-of-the-question.
3) Refurb doesn't mean "used," it usually means "defective, but we think we might have fixed the defective part maybe." That's worse than used.
Why not lease it? You can't afford that much now, but over 2 years, if you bought a Pro, all you'd have to add is a better graphics card, maybe some RAM. No CPU upgrades for you for YEARS with a 8 core Xeon...
Why would I lease a $2800 Mac when I could buy a $1200 Dell that does everything I need? I don't like entering into debt agreements for trivial things.
I don't need an 8-core Xeon. I don't need a 1-core Xeon. A normal 2.whatever ghz Core Duo, the kind of CPU that comes in that $1200 Dell, is more than sufficient for all of my computer needs. I can't even imagine a task which would require an 8-core Xeon in a home machine.
If you're into swapping graphics cars anyway, then you're a gamer, and need a PC to go side by side with your mac like I have...
Or I could do everything on the PC and save $2800. So far all I've learned about you is that you love to throw money in the trash, by signing up for crazy-expensive lease programs and owning twice as many computers as you actually need.
For the record, I'm not much of a gamer and the games I do play are on Xbox 360. I play WOW every so often, in spurts of a couple months each before I get bored, but you can run WOW on pretty low-end hardware at this point.
Since Vista and OS X both use the video card for standard window rendering, you can give your computer performance a noticeable boost by upgrading to a video card with more memory, even if you never play video games. It really did give new life to my G5 by replacing the video card.
Until at least 75% of the top 50 games are released for mac at the same time as windows, I'll have a PC around...
75% of the top 50 games are released to Xbox (well, ok, maybe exaggerating some), and it only costs $400. Again, all I've learned about you is that you love to throw money in the trash. Also, you hate using a single period to end a sentence.
Others into high detail rendering, audio production, high res photoshop, etc, you need a different type of vid card, one for CAD, that can't play most games anyway... All of those people need the power of the Pro.
Possibly, but: 1) The cheap Pro comes with crappy video anyway, a Radeon 2600xt. So those professionals will still need to pay more to upgrade the video.
2) I'm not talking about professional use in the first place, I'm talking about home use. If you can justify $2800 for a "professional" computer for your business, then knock you
I actually read the first book, too. I just forgot there was more than one sentient species on Mars. (Read the series decades ago.) Other than that little detail, I don't think I said anything fundamentally disagreeing with the book itself?
The novels also had an interesting perspective on the "created in God's image" thing, too, IIRC. It was an iterative process, not an all-at-once process. Thus the Martian inhabitants looked less human because they were created before those of Earth. Jesus of Earth was such a good representation of God's image, that later-created creatures looked mostly like him (i.e. the Venusians, who were virtually identical in appearance to humans except green-skinned.)
I never made it through the third book, though. I remember it being very, very dull.
It basically covers all the bulletpoints you just brought up. Of course, it's just C.S. Lewis' personal opinion, but he opines that every planet has its own Garden of Eden, every planet has its 'main species' tempted by some version of the devil, but most planets do not 'fall' like Earth did.
In the novel, two humans are sent to Venus, one by Satan and one by the angel in charge of the planet. The one sent by Satan attempts to tempt the Venusian version of Eve, on that planet he's the snake.
If you're worried about slots for adding replacement parts, that's what the warranty is for... I've had 27 different macs, and all I've ever needed to replace (short of electrical damage or a dropped laptop, or the occasional yanked power cord which apple has forever fixed) are HDDs, optical drives, and peripherals.
I think he's worried about slots for increased ability. For instance, to add an advanced video card or sound card, something which is currently impossible on every Apple model except the $2800 Mac Pro. I added RAM, a Radeon 9800, and custom cooler for it to my G5 tower, for instance, which made a huge difference in the performance of the machine when it was a couple years old, and enabled me to hold-off on buying a new machine for much longer.
HDDs, optical drives, and peripherals anything can support, even a $500 dirt-bottom PC from Wal-Mart.
You can use an expresscard slot for firewire on most new macs now too. If you really want expandability, RAID, and other advanced features, if you can't do it externally, a Map Pro is likely cheaper.
BS. When I bought my Mac G5, I got a decent configuration (dual-1.8ghz) for $2100. That was the extreme, extreme high-end of what I'm willing to pay for a home machine, and I only plunked down the cash because I could upgrade it in the future and would therefore have a long lifetime. (It's now my media server, for example.) It was expensive for a desktop, but not out-of-consideration expensive.
Now the cheapest Mac Pro is $2800. A third more expensive, which now puts it quite clearly out-of-consideration for any home use (and most office use, for that matter!) It's now priced for "professionals" only, whoever that is.
Virtually every desktop computer over $600 (except some of Apple's models, or Shuttle-type form factors) does RAID and has expandability. And I don't know what "advanced features" the Mac Pro has that a $1000 Windows PC doesn't. I seriously doubt they're worth $1000, whatever they are.
Don't be fooled by the $2400 sticker, you can configure one for as little as $1900...
I just checked Apple's website. Mac Pro: From $2799. I don't know where you got your $1900 figure from. When I bought my G5, $1900 would buy the dirt-cheapest G5 Apple sold, now there's nothing in that form factor under $2800. Mac G5/Mac Pro prices have skyrocketed in the last few years as Apple retires affordable models in preference to models with more and more overkill. (I don't need 4 Xeon CPUs for my home computer, Apple.)
I had the same problem as the grandparent, I wanted to replace my G5 with another Mac, but Apple didn't make any models with the same featureset that I could afford to buy. I solved it by spending half as much on a Dell, and I've never been happier. Of course, the G5 pricing was marginal in the first place, and if I had it to do over again, I would have bought a Dell instead of it back then, too.
1) No it hasn't, it's been pretty steady once they were past the bubble burst.
2) The only big fall is there because you cherry-picked a timeframe that included the last-gasp of the tech bubble, thereby ensuring it'll show a huge drop. Any other tech company's stock price graph will look the exact same way. Bump your graph forward to 2001, and suddenly it looks... pretty steady.
Cherry-picking values to show what you want to see != "roller coaster decline."
Please explain to me how this change from ASUS could possibly affect the number of Windows licenses sold. I'm savvy with the chair-throwing "joke", but it has to at least slightly make sense in context.
No it doesn't. It has a bar that says "you've been disconnected from X", and when you click it you get a dialog box that asks it you want to reconnect to X.
You're thinking of every other IM program ever made ever, which will reconnect with a single click. For some idiotic reason, Pidgin has a confirmation dialog there.
My dad is like you, constantly griping about the number of commercials on TV. But the weird thing is, he listens to political talk radio.
Have you ever listened to political talk radio stations? They have three commercial breaks *between every caller!* It's crazy.
"Yes, hello caller." "Hi Bob, I wanted to talk--" "Let me cut you off there, we need to break." "And we're back, talking about Obama's slip of 59 states, I have caller Dan on the phone. Hello Dan." "Hi Bob, I just wanted to say that people are taking this way too seriously, I mean everyone makes --" "Sorry Dan, we need to break."
I'm exaggerating, but not much. I don't understand how he can gripe about TV commercials, and yet listens to radio stations that play 40 minutes of commercials an hour. Someone explain this to me.
(BTW, personally, I'm in the "TV as background noise" school. I'm never *just* watching TV.)
I hate the annoying dialog when it loses connection to an IM service. Would be nice if I could just re-connect in a single click, like almost every other IM program on earth.
That said, it's not a bad interface, it's just not that exceptional either. For an open source project, I'd say it's above average.
Uh, "breeding like mosquitos" was a direct quote from an Imam, Mullah Krekar in Oslo. It wasn't Steyn's words. Steyn is going before a tribunal because he accurately quoted an Imam talking about his own religion. And you seriously think there's nothing wrong with this?
I know, I did this strange and unusual thing called "reading the book." In fact I'm holding it in my hand; it's right here between page 39 and 40. (Of the hardcover, ISBN 0-89526-078-6.) People who call for censorship never seem to actually do that, do they?
Their young people, and particularly those who have grown up in Europe, Britain, and the United States, have the same basic desires and after exposure to western culture and ideas with all of the sports, sex, drugs, fast food, movies, and other influences they will become just as corrupted and apathetic as young people everywhere. They can be as religious as they want to be, but how many of them will fall to the temptations and decedent pleasures of western culture when they are away from their group?
Actually, in the book this whole issue is about, Steyn argues that Islamic immigrant groups are much, much more tightly cohesive than other immigrant groups, and therefore governments should take specific action to ensure they are being integrated with other groups wherever they emigrate to.
For example, if you're Mexican and you enter the US to live in the Los Angeles area, you can do so without making any changes whatsoever to your culture or way of life. There are Mexican grocery stores, TV and Radio stations in Spanish, etc. If, however, you're Mexican and move to (to use the Napoleon Dynamite example) Idaho, you'll be a lot more likely to change your culture to more closely match the culture of Idaho.
If the son resorted to violence first, before any other action, then whether or not he lacks self-confidence he's in the wrong. Self-confidence isn't the issue in your example, the issue is the son's violent nature. More-violent people are, simply put, less desirable to everybody than less-violent people.
Given, I'm not a Muslim, but I don't see it as being offensive. I don't agree with Steyn's opinions, but it's obvious to me that he's no racist, and it's even more obvious that the book is... his opinion.
I dunno, I live in the US. Maybe having an opinion and sharing it is illegal in Canada.
The Silverlight released a year ago was the 1.0 version, which frankly was mostly a prototype of the basic animation system and the Javascript/AJAX integration. You couldn't build YouTube on Silverlight 1.0.
The 1.1/2.0 Alpha release isn't officially released yet, it's still an alpha/developer preview version. 2.0 is due to be released "late summer."
Frankly, Microsoft can't even really begin to develop Silverlight applications, except the most basic, at this point. This article is just normal Slashdot flamebait.
(part of me wonders how much open source microsoft is using for inspiration, not that I think that's a bad thing)
Good ideas get passed all ways in all combinations. From Solaris to OS X, from OS X to Windows, from Linux to Windows, from Windows to Solaris, etc, etc. Bad ideas generally don't.
Yes, relative experience levels _do_ come into it, and I probably come across as utterly snobbish when I say I've met Solaris admins who have been able to keep servers online almost indefinitely, barring 'systems maintenance' and Windows systems that get 'fixed' by slapping the reset switch every couple of weeks.
I think it's pretty true that it's easier to keep a Solaris server running for years on end than it is a Windows server.
But there's a lot of other factors... I think it's safe to say every server installation in this day and age should have some level of redundancy so that you can bring one down and keep running your service on the others, and in that case the difference simply means that Windows servers "exercise" this redundancy more than Solaris ones do.
Plus, it could be 5 times cheaper to run Windows servers instead of Solaris servers, considering hardware, staffing, software, etc. In that case, you could double the number of Windows servers and still end up way ahead. For some reason a lot of techies don't recognize the power of the dollar.
Read the white paper, look at the load Vista puts on all hardware operations to enforce DRM. Everything you do on Vista is slower so that MS can "protect" DRM files, even when you are using them, or have no intention to do so.
Yada, yada, jibber, jabber. That's not a specific example, and nothing I can reproduce in a casual living room environment, and therefore I don't care. You're trying to convince me, remember? Convince me! Show me! Hell, I want to be shown! And yet nobody on Slashdot can provide a single concrete example of it.
Sure, the DRM infestation on Vista doesn't break things if you personally have no DRM "equipped" media- no itunes, no netflicks, etc. But you still get the overhead and consequent slowdown.
I have iTunes with DRMed tracks in it, and Vista hasn't prevented me from doing anything with them. Including burning them to CD and re-ripping them to remove the DRM.
I'm not going to respond to "overhead", because it's a non-argument. And I don't have the equipment or lab to test a "slowdown" because of that, although maybe if you provided a single example that makes the slowdown blatantly obvious I could. Just a Slashdot urban legend.
The change in sound API (Application Programming Interface) and the underlying sound models means that the older sound cards won't work without updated drivers. Creative sound card owners get screwed as the sound hardware (DSP) on the card that they already paid for isn't utilized, because the DRM on Vista can't trust it.
Yes, we already discussed the driver problem.
But you used the word "broken." It's not broken. It works fine. It works better than the sound in XP did, by having more features. Face it, you blatantly lied to me, and everybody on this site, when even the dimmest bulb can witness sound coming from Vista computers.
Sorry, I should have been more clear- Vista is useless on older hardware that only supports 512 MB of ram. You know, those 3 & 4 year old systems most people are using. Yes, I've used vista on low end Dell with just 512 of ram, and it took minutes just to open menus. Completely unuseable.
I didn't have that experience on a 3-year-old computer. It strikes me that it's probably more due to Vista's somewhat sketchy driver support than anything fundamentally wrong with Vista's design... my guess would be your older computer had some piece of hardware with an extremely flakey driver, a piece of hardware that my otherwise-similar computer didn't have.
In any case, "unusable on one specific low-end Dell" is a far, far cry from "unusable on all computers with 512 MB of RAM" which is what you were quite clearly asserting. Another blatant lie, BTW.
You're joking right? Microsoft has cash reserves of over $40 billion, and in today's IT world, that's as close to infinite as it gets. If MS felt the need to so, hiring enough people to do more SP releases for XP would have been trivial.
You can't hire good people by waving cash at them. And, frankly, Microsoft's all hired-out here in the Seattle area... I work at a tech company here that's been trying to recruit for ages, and we can't get any decent candidates, I presume Microsoft's suffering from the exact same problem. You're talking about three months at the very minimum from a new hire to putting them on your flagship OS product.
You're also talking about multiplying the massive amount of hardware required for OS QA by two, including more hiring for all the IT staff required to install and maintain that hardware. (I'd imagine it takes a full year just to get a decent hardware lab up and running, but I could be way off there.)
Trivial? Seriously? Are you even in this industry? (God, I hope not, if you consider tasks like that 'trivial'.)
To paraphrase the old saying, you can't pay a pregnant woman $40 billion and expect her to produce the baby in three months.
I'm not claiming that the specific group of packages, updates, & changes k
If those people really cared, they could quite easily have found computers running Windows XP. If Vista was as terrible as people on this site thinks it was, then vendors who 'hide' their XP options would be losing business because of it.
I think it's much, much more likely that Vista isn't nearly as bad as Slashdotters think.
I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it. I've had quite a few varying degrees of 'fubar' but invariably the problem's I've had have either been fixed by software (in most cases, not even needing a reboot) or have been a hardware fault (which in some case _have_ needed to take the system down).
The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.
Yeah, but you have to concede that may only say something about your own level of familiarity with the two products, and have absolutely nothing to do with how the products are actually constructed.
For instance, if I have a DNS problem in Solaris, I'd have no clue how to tackle and resolve it. But if I had the same problem in Windows, I'd type "ipconfig/flushdns" and more than likely the problem's solved.
Then a week later it comes up on Slashdot, and I write a post exactly like yours but the opposite. I was able to fix Windows much easier than reinstalling it, but that damned Solaris is so difficult I had to reinstall it! And of course that would apply regardless of what the product is; I'd always find the one I'm more familiar with easier to fix than reinstall, and the one I'm less familiar with harder to fix than reinstall.
In short, I don't find your argument compelling. At least, not without more information about your background.
Admittedly I haven't read those links, but so far I've not encountered any DRM in Vista apart from the normal product activation that was also in XP. Since every time I ask for details about the DRM, I get modded down by someone, I'm inclined just to dismiss the "Vista has loads of DRM!" crap as just another Slashdot myth, like "Microsoft Shills".
Please reply with a *specific* example of a task I can't accomplish with Vista because of DRM. Something I can reproduce on my own. And I might start believing these claims.
broken sound API's (change for change sake)
It's so broken that all of my software works just fine! It's so horribly broken that it has a lot more features than the old sound system (like allowing me to change volume per-program)!
I think you need to look up "broken" in a dictionary.
Lack of drivers for older hardware
That one I'll give you.
Useless on older machines with just 512 MB of RAM
Have you tried it? It works fine on machines with 512 MB of RAM. I would recommend switching the theme to the Classic theme, since your 512 MB computer probably doesn't have much video RAM either. But that has nothing to do with Vista being useless. Perhaps "slightly less useful."
In fact, you should also look up "useless" in a dictionary.
too many versions
The problem isn't that there's too many, it's how Microsoft delineated them.
For example, I want to use Media Center, and I want to use Remote Desktop. Because of the way the versions are set out, the *only* way to get that combination is to buy Ultimate edition.
Another example: for some strange reason, the best advanced backup tools (shadow copy and the new backup tool) are in the Business edition, and not available in the Home editions. But businesses are (generally speaking) a lot more likely to have good backup tools in place compared to home users. I don't know Microsoft's rationale behind that decision, but it seems completely backwards.
Microsoft either needed to go all the way and make all the features "ala cart", or produce a single edition with everything in it.
SP1 released just last month
And...?
As someone already mentioned, MS has 2 OS's in competition, and the newer one is losing.
Only on Slashdot. If you look at adoption rates, you'll see Vista is doing just fine. It's already 10% of the market (as told by website logs), and growing. That means Vista has gone from nothing, to the number 2 most popular OS in a year and a half. If Linux or the next release of OS X had managed that feat, they wouldn't be called "losing."
Why is it surprising that they would provide a "fix" to XP that makes it less desirable?
Because service packs have never done that in the past. XP SP1 and SP2 both added much improved security features and numerous bug fixes, and nothing that would make XP less desirable.
Let's face it- they could have put out SP3 at any time in the last three years, and should have.
Last three years might be exaggerating a bit, but it definitely could have come out a year ago. I think that Microsoft was keeping their QA and release staffs on Vista until it was completely out the door before switching them to working on XP SP3, or having them work on both simultaneously. Microsoft has a lot of staff, but they don't have infinite resources.
In short, unless you're in the Microsoft Windows group and have a lot of insider knowledge the rest of us don't, I don't see how you can possibly decree that Microsoft "could have" put SP3 out years ago. (Most likely, this being Slashdot, you're simply making it up.)
They took the time to pull SP3 last week when it was conflicting with some MS Point of Sale software, but they don't have the resources to test it on any HP systems with AMD cpus's?
Don't make the mistake of confusing a few whiny users with a significant proportion of the HP/AMD-using population. These scary stories come out for every Service Pack, every time they come out, and it always amounts to just a couple of people.
While we're at it, don't make the mistake of taking any Slashdot posting at face value, especially Slashdot postings about Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all:
When you take back something that was unfairly taken from you (i.e. high prices due to monopolies), that isn't ripping someone off. It's called justice.
1) People use P2P to get free movies, music, and pirated software. None of this stuff was "taken from you." You have the option to buy it at many locations nationwide for reasonable prices. There's no monopoly on movies, music or software at the moment.
2) Yes, you are ripping people off. We all agree the MPAA and RIAA exaggerate the damages, but it's also not a victimless crime, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Illegal? Maybe, but don't forget a lot of laws were made only to benefit the rich and powerful.
Then get off your lazy ass and change the law. The Civil Rights Movement didn't succeed because Martin Luthor King, Jr sat on his ass all day, then occasionally stole a candy bar from the corner store under the guise of "justice."
If you think the law is wrong, change the law.
That pattern fits Star Wars pretty well.
For Aliens, it's more like:
1: Great
2: Better
3: WTF!!
4: Passable
5: Just pretend it doesn't exist.
For Godzilla movies it's kind of like:
1) Groundbreaking
2) Good
3) What's going on?
4) The hell!?
5) WTF!
6) Is he actually fighting SMOG!? The evil monster is SMOG?!
etc.
If I should ever encounter an entity with god-like powers I'll treat them with a sensible amount of respect, either to gain their favour or avoid their wrath. But god-like powers aren't proof of being creator of the universe. Quite simply I can't conceive of any kind of proof that would make this evident to anyone within the universe. It's an impossibility.
Ah, the James Kirk "What does God need with a spaceship?" argument!
Ok, it's obvious you're so much in love with Apple products that you're simply not seeing the forest for the trees here.
The cheapest pro is $2249. A refurb is $1900. (Refurb does not mean used). Refurbs come with the same warranty, and actually, since they have all been hand scrutinized, typically have higher reliability than new systems. I have not bought anything but a refurb for years.
That's great, but:
1) Apple's web site says it's $2800. I'm not making this up: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?nnmm=browse&node=home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro&sf=wHF2F2PHCCCX72KDY
I have no idea where you're getting your prices from (admittedly I didn't look at refurbs, but your 'new' price is way off-base also.), but Apple says they cost a minimum of $2800.
2) $1900 is *still* far too expensive for a home desktop computer, by about $500. It's completely out of my price range, but of course I'm also not a computer snob willing to pay a full grand more to run OS X instead of Windows Vista like you, apparently, are. If you were using it to run Photoshop at a successful business, it might be a different situation, but for home use it's completely out-of-the-question.
3) Refurb doesn't mean "used," it usually means "defective, but we think we might have fixed the defective part maybe." That's worse than used.
Why not lease it? You can't afford that much now, but over 2 years, if you bought a Pro, all you'd have to add is a better graphics card, maybe some RAM. No CPU upgrades for you for YEARS with a 8 core Xeon...
Why would I lease a $2800 Mac when I could buy a $1200 Dell that does everything I need? I don't like entering into debt agreements for trivial things.
I don't need an 8-core Xeon. I don't need a 1-core Xeon. A normal 2.whatever ghz Core Duo, the kind of CPU that comes in that $1200 Dell, is more than sufficient for all of my computer needs. I can't even imagine a task which would require an 8-core Xeon in a home machine.
If you're into swapping graphics cars anyway, then you're a gamer, and need a PC to go side by side with your mac like I have...
Or I could do everything on the PC and save $2800. So far all I've learned about you is that you love to throw money in the trash, by signing up for crazy-expensive lease programs and owning twice as many computers as you actually need.
For the record, I'm not much of a gamer and the games I do play are on Xbox 360. I play WOW every so often, in spurts of a couple months each before I get bored, but you can run WOW on pretty low-end hardware at this point.
Since Vista and OS X both use the video card for standard window rendering, you can give your computer performance a noticeable boost by upgrading to a video card with more memory, even if you never play video games. It really did give new life to my G5 by replacing the video card.
Until at least 75% of the top 50 games are released for mac at the same time as windows, I'll have a PC around...
75% of the top 50 games are released to Xbox (well, ok, maybe exaggerating some), and it only costs $400. Again, all I've learned about you is that you love to throw money in the trash. Also, you hate using a single period to end a sentence.
Others into high detail rendering, audio production, high res photoshop, etc, you need a different type of vid card, one for CAD, that can't play most games anyway... All of those people need the power of the Pro.
Possibly, but:
1) The cheap Pro comes with crappy video anyway, a Radeon 2600xt. So those professionals will still need to pay more to upgrade the video.
2) I'm not talking about professional use in the first place, I'm talking about home use. If you can justify $2800 for a "professional" computer for your business, then knock you
I actually read the first book, too. I just forgot there was more than one sentient species on Mars. (Read the series decades ago.) Other than that little detail, I don't think I said anything fundamentally disagreeing with the book itself?
The novels also had an interesting perspective on the "created in God's image" thing, too, IIRC. It was an iterative process, not an all-at-once process. Thus the Martian inhabitants looked less human because they were created before those of Earth. Jesus of Earth was such a good representation of God's image, that later-created creatures looked mostly like him (i.e. the Venusians, who were virtually identical in appearance to humans except green-skinned.)
I never made it through the third book, though. I remember it being very, very dull.
Like in G.I. Joe: The Movie!!!
Read this book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perelandra
It basically covers all the bulletpoints you just brought up. Of course, it's just C.S. Lewis' personal opinion, but he opines that every planet has its own Garden of Eden, every planet has its 'main species' tempted by some version of the devil, but most planets do not 'fall' like Earth did.
In the novel, two humans are sent to Venus, one by Satan and one by the angel in charge of the planet. The one sent by Satan attempts to tempt the Venusian version of Eve, on that planet he's the snake.
If you're worried about slots for adding replacement parts, that's what the warranty is for... I've had 27 different macs, and all I've ever needed to replace (short of electrical damage or a dropped laptop, or the occasional yanked power cord which apple has forever fixed) are HDDs, optical drives, and peripherals.
I think he's worried about slots for increased ability. For instance, to add an advanced video card or sound card, something which is currently impossible on every Apple model except the $2800 Mac Pro. I added RAM, a Radeon 9800, and custom cooler for it to my G5 tower, for instance, which made a huge difference in the performance of the machine when it was a couple years old, and enabled me to hold-off on buying a new machine for much longer.
HDDs, optical drives, and peripherals anything can support, even a $500 dirt-bottom PC from Wal-Mart.
You can use an expresscard slot for firewire on most new macs now too. If you really want expandability, RAID, and other advanced features, if you can't do it externally, a Map Pro is likely cheaper.
BS. When I bought my Mac G5, I got a decent configuration (dual-1.8ghz) for $2100. That was the extreme, extreme high-end of what I'm willing to pay for a home machine, and I only plunked down the cash because I could upgrade it in the future and would therefore have a long lifetime. (It's now my media server, for example.) It was expensive for a desktop, but not out-of-consideration expensive.
Now the cheapest Mac Pro is $2800. A third more expensive, which now puts it quite clearly out-of-consideration for any home use (and most office use, for that matter!) It's now priced for "professionals" only, whoever that is.
Virtually every desktop computer over $600 (except some of Apple's models, or Shuttle-type form factors) does RAID and has expandability. And I don't know what "advanced features" the Mac Pro has that a $1000 Windows PC doesn't. I seriously doubt they're worth $1000, whatever they are.
Don't be fooled by the $2400 sticker, you can configure one for as little as $1900...
I just checked Apple's website. Mac Pro: From $2799. I don't know where you got your $1900 figure from. When I bought my G5, $1900 would buy the dirt-cheapest G5 Apple sold, now there's nothing in that form factor under $2800. Mac G5/Mac Pro prices have skyrocketed in the last few years as Apple retires affordable models in preference to models with more and more overkill. (I don't need 4 Xeon CPUs for my home computer, Apple.)
I had the same problem as the grandparent, I wanted to replace my G5 with another Mac, but Apple didn't make any models with the same featureset that I could afford to buy. I solved it by spending half as much on a Dell, and I've never been happier. Of course, the G5 pricing was marginal in the first place, and if I had it to do over again, I would have bought a Dell instead of it back then, too.
1) No it hasn't, it's been pretty steady once they were past the bubble burst.
2) The only big fall is there because you cherry-picked a timeframe that included the last-gasp of the tech bubble, thereby ensuring it'll show a huge drop. Any other tech company's stock price graph will look the exact same way. Bump your graph forward to 2001, and suddenly it looks... pretty steady.
Cherry-picking values to show what you want to see != "roller coaster decline."
Please explain to me how this change from ASUS could possibly affect the number of Windows licenses sold. I'm savvy with the chair-throwing "joke", but it has to at least slightly make sense in context.
No it doesn't. It has a bar that says "you've been disconnected from X", and when you click it you get a dialog box that asks it you want to reconnect to X.
You're thinking of every other IM program ever made ever, which will reconnect with a single click. For some idiotic reason, Pidgin has a confirmation dialog there.
My dad is like you, constantly griping about the number of commercials on TV. But the weird thing is, he listens to political talk radio.
Have you ever listened to political talk radio stations? They have three commercial breaks *between every caller!* It's crazy.
"Yes, hello caller." "Hi Bob, I wanted to talk--" "Let me cut you off there, we need to break." "And we're back, talking about Obama's slip of 59 states, I have caller Dan on the phone. Hello Dan." "Hi Bob, I just wanted to say that people are taking this way too seriously, I mean everyone makes --" "Sorry Dan, we need to break."
I'm exaggerating, but not much. I don't understand how he can gripe about TV commercials, and yet listens to radio stations that play 40 minutes of commercials an hour. Someone explain this to me.
(BTW, personally, I'm in the "TV as background noise" school. I'm never *just* watching TV.)
I hate the annoying dialog when it loses connection to an IM service. Would be nice if I could just re-connect in a single click, like almost every other IM program on earth.
That said, it's not a bad interface, it's just not that exceptional either. For an open source project, I'd say it's above average.
Crap, sorry, managed to post in the wrong thread. :(
Uh, "breeding like mosquitos" was a direct quote from an Imam, Mullah Krekar in Oslo. It wasn't Steyn's words. Steyn is going before a tribunal because he accurately quoted an Imam talking about his own religion. And you seriously think there's nothing wrong with this?
I know, I did this strange and unusual thing called "reading the book." In fact I'm holding it in my hand; it's right here between page 39 and 40. (Of the hardcover, ISBN 0-89526-078-6.) People who call for censorship never seem to actually do that, do they?
Possibly off-topic, but since this is Slashdot... it's also impossible to criticize Linux for something that Windows is also weak at.
The only reply you'll get is, "Windows is just as bad!" With the implication that Linux developers don't need to bother fixing the problem.
It's amazing to me how many people apparently think this is an appropriate response.
Their young people, and particularly those who have grown up in Europe, Britain, and the United States, have the same basic desires and after exposure to western culture and ideas with all of the sports, sex, drugs, fast food, movies, and other influences they will become just as corrupted and apathetic as young people everywhere. They can be as religious as they want to be, but how many of them will fall to the temptations and decedent pleasures of western culture when they are away from their group?
Actually, in the book this whole issue is about, Steyn argues that Islamic immigrant groups are much, much more tightly cohesive than other immigrant groups, and therefore governments should take specific action to ensure they are being integrated with other groups wherever they emigrate to.
For example, if you're Mexican and you enter the US to live in the Los Angeles area, you can do so without making any changes whatsoever to your culture or way of life. There are Mexican grocery stores, TV and Radio stations in Spanish, etc. If, however, you're Mexican and move to (to use the Napoleon Dynamite example) Idaho, you'll be a lot more likely to change your culture to more closely match the culture of Idaho.
If the son resorted to violence first, before any other action, then whether or not he lacks self-confidence he's in the wrong. Self-confidence isn't the issue in your example, the issue is the son's violent nature. More-violent people are, simply put, less desirable to everybody than less-violent people.
Given, I'm not a Muslim, but I don't see it as being offensive. I don't agree with Steyn's opinions, but it's obvious to me that he's no racist, and it's even more obvious that the book is... his opinion.
I dunno, I live in the US. Maybe having an opinion and sharing it is illegal in Canada.
The Silverlight released a year ago was the 1.0 version, which frankly was mostly a prototype of the basic animation system and the Javascript/AJAX integration. You couldn't build YouTube on Silverlight 1.0.
The 1.1/2.0 Alpha release isn't officially released yet, it's still an alpha/developer preview version. 2.0 is due to be released "late summer."
Frankly, Microsoft can't even really begin to develop Silverlight applications, except the most basic, at this point. This article is just normal Slashdot flamebait.
(part of me wonders how much open source microsoft is using for inspiration, not that I think that's a bad thing)
Good ideas get passed all ways in all combinations. From Solaris to OS X, from OS X to Windows, from Linux to Windows, from Windows to Solaris, etc, etc. Bad ideas generally don't.
Yes, relative experience levels _do_ come into it, and I probably come across as utterly snobbish when I say I've met Solaris admins who have been able to keep servers online almost indefinitely, barring 'systems maintenance' and Windows systems that get 'fixed' by slapping the reset switch every couple of weeks.
I think it's pretty true that it's easier to keep a Solaris server running for years on end than it is a Windows server.
But there's a lot of other factors... I think it's safe to say every server installation in this day and age should have some level of redundancy so that you can bring one down and keep running your service on the others, and in that case the difference simply means that Windows servers "exercise" this redundancy more than Solaris ones do.
Plus, it could be 5 times cheaper to run Windows servers instead of Solaris servers, considering hardware, staffing, software, etc. In that case, you could double the number of Windows servers and still end up way ahead. For some reason a lot of techies don't recognize the power of the dollar.
Anyway, thanks for your honest reply.
Read the white paper, look at the load Vista puts on all hardware operations to enforce DRM. Everything you do on Vista is slower so that MS can "protect" DRM files, even when you are using them, or have no intention to do so.
Yada, yada, jibber, jabber. That's not a specific example, and nothing I can reproduce in a casual living room environment, and therefore I don't care. You're trying to convince me, remember? Convince me! Show me! Hell, I want to be shown! And yet nobody on Slashdot can provide a single concrete example of it.
Sure, the DRM infestation on Vista doesn't break things if you personally have no DRM "equipped" media- no itunes, no netflicks, etc. But you still get the overhead and consequent slowdown.
I have iTunes with DRMed tracks in it, and Vista hasn't prevented me from doing anything with them. Including burning them to CD and re-ripping them to remove the DRM.
I'm not going to respond to "overhead", because it's a non-argument. And I don't have the equipment or lab to test a "slowdown" because of that, although maybe if you provided a single example that makes the slowdown blatantly obvious I could. Just a Slashdot urban legend.
The change in sound API (Application Programming Interface) and the underlying sound models means that the older sound cards won't work without updated drivers. Creative sound card owners get screwed as the sound hardware (DSP) on the card that they already paid for isn't utilized, because the DRM on Vista can't trust it.
Yes, we already discussed the driver problem.
But you used the word "broken." It's not broken. It works fine. It works better than the sound in XP did, by having more features. Face it, you blatantly lied to me, and everybody on this site, when even the dimmest bulb can witness sound coming from Vista computers.
Sorry, I should have been more clear- Vista is useless on older hardware that only supports 512 MB of ram. You know, those 3 & 4 year old systems most people are using. Yes, I've used vista on low end Dell with just 512 of ram, and it took minutes just to open menus. Completely unuseable.
I didn't have that experience on a 3-year-old computer. It strikes me that it's probably more due to Vista's somewhat sketchy driver support than anything fundamentally wrong with Vista's design... my guess would be your older computer had some piece of hardware with an extremely flakey driver, a piece of hardware that my otherwise-similar computer didn't have.
In any case, "unusable on one specific low-end Dell" is a far, far cry from "unusable on all computers with 512 MB of RAM" which is what you were quite clearly asserting. Another blatant lie, BTW.
You're joking right? Microsoft has cash reserves of over $40 billion, and in today's IT world, that's as close to infinite as it gets. If MS felt the need to so, hiring enough people to do more SP releases for XP would have been trivial.
You can't hire good people by waving cash at them. And, frankly, Microsoft's all hired-out here in the Seattle area... I work at a tech company here that's been trying to recruit for ages, and we can't get any decent candidates, I presume Microsoft's suffering from the exact same problem. You're talking about three months at the very minimum from a new hire to putting them on your flagship OS product.
You're also talking about multiplying the massive amount of hardware required for OS QA by two, including more hiring for all the IT staff required to install and maintain that hardware. (I'd imagine it takes a full year just to get a decent hardware lab up and running, but I could be way off there.)
Trivial? Seriously? Are you even in this industry? (God, I hope not, if you consider tasks like that 'trivial'.)
To paraphrase the old saying, you can't pay a pregnant woman $40 billion and expect her to produce the baby in three months.
I'm not claiming that the specific group of packages, updates, & changes k
If those people really cared, they could quite easily have found computers running Windows XP. If Vista was as terrible as people on this site thinks it was, then vendors who 'hide' their XP options would be losing business because of it.
I think it's much, much more likely that Vista isn't nearly as bad as Slashdotters think.
I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it. I've had quite a few varying degrees of 'fubar' but invariably the problem's I've had have either been fixed by software (in most cases, not even needing a reboot) or have been a hardware fault (which in some case _have_ needed to take the system down).
/flushdns" and more than likely the problem's solved.
The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.
Yeah, but you have to concede that may only say something about your own level of familiarity with the two products, and have absolutely nothing to do with how the products are actually constructed.
For instance, if I have a DNS problem in Solaris, I'd have no clue how to tackle and resolve it. But if I had the same problem in Windows, I'd type "ipconfig
Then a week later it comes up on Slashdot, and I write a post exactly like yours but the opposite. I was able to fix Windows much easier than reinstalling it, but that damned Solaris is so difficult I had to reinstall it! And of course that would apply regardless of what the product is; I'd always find the one I'm more familiar with easier to fix than reinstall, and the one I'm less familiar with harder to fix than reinstall.
In short, I don't find your argument compelling. At least, not without more information about your background.
Admittedly I haven't read those links, but so far I've not encountered any DRM in Vista apart from the normal product activation that was also in XP. Since every time I ask for details about the DRM, I get modded down by someone, I'm inclined just to dismiss the "Vista has loads of DRM!" crap as just another Slashdot myth, like "Microsoft Shills".
Please reply with a *specific* example of a task I can't accomplish with Vista because of DRM. Something I can reproduce on my own. And I might start believing these claims.
broken sound API's (change for change sake)
It's so broken that all of my software works just fine! It's so horribly broken that it has a lot more features than the old sound system (like allowing me to change volume per-program)!
I think you need to look up "broken" in a dictionary.
Lack of drivers for older hardware
That one I'll give you.
Useless on older machines with just 512 MB of RAM
Have you tried it? It works fine on machines with 512 MB of RAM. I would recommend switching the theme to the Classic theme, since your 512 MB computer probably doesn't have much video RAM either. But that has nothing to do with Vista being useless. Perhaps "slightly less useful."
In fact, you should also look up "useless" in a dictionary.
too many versions
The problem isn't that there's too many, it's how Microsoft delineated them.
For example, I want to use Media Center, and I want to use Remote Desktop. Because of the way the versions are set out, the *only* way to get that combination is to buy Ultimate edition.
Another example: for some strange reason, the best advanced backup tools (shadow copy and the new backup tool) are in the Business edition, and not available in the Home editions. But businesses are (generally speaking) a lot more likely to have good backup tools in place compared to home users. I don't know Microsoft's rationale behind that decision, but it seems completely backwards.
Microsoft either needed to go all the way and make all the features "ala cart", or produce a single edition with everything in it.
SP1 released just last month
And...?
As someone already mentioned, MS has 2 OS's in competition, and the newer one is losing.
Only on Slashdot. If you look at adoption rates, you'll see Vista is doing just fine. It's already 10% of the market (as told by website logs), and growing. That means Vista has gone from nothing, to the number 2 most popular OS in a year and a half. If Linux or the next release of OS X had managed that feat, they wouldn't be called "losing."
Why is it surprising that they would provide a "fix" to XP that makes it less desirable?
Because service packs have never done that in the past. XP SP1 and SP2 both added much improved security features and numerous bug fixes, and nothing that would make XP less desirable.
Let's face it- they could have put out SP3 at any time in the last three years, and should have.
Last three years might be exaggerating a bit, but it definitely could have come out a year ago. I think that Microsoft was keeping their QA and release staffs on Vista until it was completely out the door before switching them to working on XP SP3, or having them work on both simultaneously. Microsoft has a lot of staff, but they don't have infinite resources.
In short, unless you're in the Microsoft Windows group and have a lot of insider knowledge the rest of us don't, I don't see how you can possibly decree that Microsoft "could have" put SP3 out years ago. (Most likely, this being Slashdot, you're simply making it up.)
They took the time to pull SP3 last week when it was conflicting with some MS Point of Sale software, but they don't have the resources to test it on any HP systems with AMD cpus's?
Don't make the mistake of confusing a few whiny users with a significant proportion of the HP/AMD-using population. These scary stories come out for every Service Pack, every time they come out, and it always amounts to just a couple of people.
While we're at it, don't make the mistake of taking any Slashdot posting at face value, especially Slashdot postings about Microsoft.