Every computer sold with Windows 2000 or Windows XP was sold with NTFS on it. That's pretty much every computer sold PERIOD after 2001. I doubt any Win32/NTFS computers have been sold since XP SP1 came out.
Of course that's because nobody runs Win32 anymore. WTF? Upgrade from Windows ME, dude, you'll enjoy joining the rest of us in the 21st century.
Re:Can someone please explain to me...
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
Obviously not. However, maybe it should happen, otherwise the open source community risks alienating people it depends on for acceptance. There's such a thing as "strategy" involved; you can't simply say "people who don't agree with us 100% all the time deserve no benefit from open source" and still be considered reasonable.
And sadly, OS X has worse usability than earlier versions. Notably, Mac OS 7 & 8 before Apple started on their whole "branding is more important than usability" kick they're on now.
Anybody who's tried to use Finder to actually organize and sort files will realize that OS X is not the epitome of UI design.
That said, it's still a lot better than Windows and a ton better than Linux.
Are you talking about Vino or Vncviewer or what? In what way is there slickness lacking?
Here's a partial list of things that make Microsoft Remote Desktop superior to VNC:
1) Remote Desktop can cope nicely with different screen resolutions without requiring stretching the remote computer's screen or using scroll-bars. This is especially nice when connecting to a desktop with a big screen from a laptop with a little screen.
2) It is capable of transmitting sound from the host computer. It's very low-quality, but when I'm in a bind and need to listen to my voicemail it's much, much appreciated. VNC can't do this.
3) It can copy and paste from the client computer to the host computer. VNC can't do this.
4) Remote Desktop does a much, much better job of correctly matching keyboards between the host and client computers. On my Mac, I was never able to get my Command and Control key to consistently and correctly map on a remote Windows/Linux computer. Remote Desktop just does this automatically without no configuration required. This might be a configuration issue with the VNC client/server combination I was using, but I tried many configurations and never got a really solid consistent behavior. (I also experienced 'stuck keys' quite often with VNC.)
5) Remote Desktop automatically locks the host computer when a client is connected to it. This makes the process more secure by preventing snooping on your computer while you're using it remotely.
6) On that note, Remote Desktop can connect to a logged-out Windows computer and automatically log it in and lock it while you use it remotely. If VNC supports this, I never was able to figure out how.
7) Encrypting Remote Desktop traffic is trivial. VNC sends everything in the clear by default, and has to be 'tunneled' to be encrypted... frankly, I'm not enough of a geek to figure that all out.
If you honestly don't think Microsoft Remote Desktop is superior than VNC, then you've not really used it. In addition to all the points above, it's also much faster with the ability to compress data in a logical way (i.e. "draw a button at 46x300 pixels") instead of having to send bitmaps all the time.
I'm a fan of open source programs, but this is one area in which the open source solutions are really lacking compared to Microsoft's solution.
Any decent system has standards in place defining exactly what libraries are available and what minimum functionality they have. Any decent system has a nice easy API you can use to query where your program should store its temporary per-machine files, its settings files, its roaming files, etc.
For systems like that, you don't need source code because compiled software works just fine. The only reason Linux users think source is so great is because their system is a hodge-podge of different technologies, none of which follow any sort of standards whatsoever.
Re:Can someone please explain to me...
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
Why should we care about companies already playing creative sidestepping games with the previous version of the GPL?
Just cope with it. You're not going to win 100% of the battles 100% of the time.
Re:Can someone please explain to me...
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
Not to mention that this clause in GPL 3 won't fix anything; The Next Tivo (TNT) will simply use GPL 2 or, even worse, be scared away from open source altogether and not release anything.
I guess he's hoping that TNT will want to use some existing GPL 3 project, and by incorporating it they will be forced to change the license, but I don't see that happening unless TNT is utterly retarded.
All it does is discourage companies that may be on the borderline from using GPL at all, IMO. Stupid move.
That doesn't answer part 2 of my question. What does the Consumer Electronics Association DO, exactly, and why does it matter what they think about MLB's stance on the Slingbox? Do they have power of the company that makes Slingbox in some way? Or do they have power over the MLB? I don't get it.
And no, I'm not going to look it up. This information should be in the summary. I don't know what's sadder, that the "editors" don't bother to make sure their stories make sense, or that the person who submitted this didn't even think about editing it themselves.
... except you can get a good reputation by being a shrill, annoying open source zealot/Microsoft hater on Slashdot. That would be a negative on the vast majority of discussion sites out there, and plain unwanted on discussions sites for (say) Microsoft software.
Slashdot's karma means nothing except on Slashdot, for no other community has the same biases Slashdot has. Hell, you can get your karma busted down here for saying you don't really like Nintendo games... that sure doesn't apply anywhere else on the Internet.
Plus we all know that all Turok does is wear psuedo-Native American garb and shoot dinosaurs with a crossbow. He's not exactly the type to theorize about the creation of the universe.
I used to play a HL mod that had a "commander" who saw things from top-down and did the RTS stuff while everyone else was in FPS-mode (think BF2, but SciFi).
I am perplexed as to why anyone wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro of any kind would choose Fedora as their base distro.
Anybody wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro doesn't know what a "Linux distro" is and doesn't want to learn. They'll install whatever their buddy hands them. (Then, most likely, give up and go back to Windows after a few days.)
By the time you start talking about distros, much less "dependancies," you're way beyond the user friendly stage.
1) Saying that the US government should never act because it's done wrong things in the past is stupid. By that logic, NOBODY should ever do ANYTHING since every person on earth has done something wrong before. In addition to that, airing your petty little civil war gripe is nothing except off-topic for this thread. Please stop it.
2) Taiwan is recognized as an independent nation by pretty much the entire world except China and perhaps North Korea. Why would Taiwan even possibly think they would need a document saying they have the right to secede? They've already done it! (I suppose you think it's ok for the UK to invade the US, since we don't have any agreement in place with the UK saying we have the right to gain independence, right?)
Will robots take over architecture?
on
Robotic Ecologies
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· Score: 1
Coughing into the microphone will also screw up a recording. I suppose that leads you believe that coughing is a major cause of brain damage as well, huh?
I kind of like the feature where you can "hear" your cell phone about to ring if you have it sitting next to your computer speakers, from the sudden buzzing that comes out. Not really a feature, per say, but it's still cool.
Physical interlocking keys have a max. number of combinations of about 700, IIRC. If you produce more than 700 different keys, you'll have keys that work in multiple cars. Go back a few decades, and GM/Ford/Dodge may only have made 50 unique keys for a specific car model-- there was a decent chance you could try your key in someone else's car and get in, start the engine, and drive off.
The keys that require a specific resistance have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different possible combinations. The keys they have microchips in them have a virtually unlimited amount of different combinations. This is a Good Thing.
Looks like a standard "UK is so much better than US" troll.
Except for the super, super low-end (Kia), every car in the US in the last 10 years has had an electronic ignition lock-out, or whatever they call it, so that the engine won't start unless the key authenticates itself in some way. My cheap PT Cruiser has this feature, and I bought it with zero extras.
This article is about RFID keys, keys you don't have to put in the ignition, the car just checks for the presence of the RFID chip then starts the engine. In the US, this feature is only available in high-end cars. I'm guessing the same is true of the UK.
If Microsoft made Best Buy, Circuit City, Comp USA, and every mom-and-pop electronics store in the nation report back actual sales, they'd be lambasted here for evil data mining.
Besides, from Microsoft's perspective, if they sell a Zune to a retailer, they've "sold" it. Right? So reporting 1 million sold makes perfect sense.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
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· Score: 1
You've actually tried one, though. And since you don't own an iPod already, you're relatively unbiased.
The majority of the people here have not used one, nor would they use one if they had the chance to try it out. They're just hating on Microsoft because it's Microsoft. (We saw the same thing happen when the original Xbox game out. The Xbox was a very good game console, and more than competitive with the Gamecube and PS2, yet you'd never hear anything positive about it on Slashdot just because of the brand name.)
It's ridiculous. It's become like a religion to bash Microsoft, regardless of what they do. Well I own an Xbox, Xbox 360, a MN-500 wireless router, and a Comfort Curve keyboard (plugged into my Mac of all things), all from Microsoft, and I think they're all excellent products. Especially the wireless router; most of those suck ass, from my experience, but this MN-500 just purrs along without any problems year after year. (Pity they don't make them anymore.)
I agree that people have the right to boycott the product, but I think it's intellectually dishonest to "spread the word" about a product you've never used.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
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· Score: 1
At the moment I'm posting this, the highest modded thread in this topic was started by a guy in the UK complaining that he's never seen a Zune in 'the wild', without mentioning what you just mentioned: they aren't released in the UK.
Which demonstrates the grandparent's "hatefest" point very well. Talk about FUD, Slashdot comments are expert.
Does that mean every retailer has to keep tabs on how many they've sold and then report that back to the manufacturer? I mean I agree that the GAAP rules here in the US that say something's "sold" when it's sold to a retailer might be a bit misleading, but I can't imagine the thousands of electronics stores out there having to comply with some system to report all their sales upstream... seems expensive and with little actual benefit.
Microsoft is doing the same thing with the Zune that they did with the Xbox. Sure the first version was ridiculed by fanboys (and of course the Slashdot hordes), but it's a solid machine that works as promised. The second version might be a killer machine, like the Xbox 360, if Microsoft's competitors are as careless and clueless as Sony was this console generation.
In any case, success for the Zune means my chances of getting a large-screen iPod go up every month. I like that. I have too much money invested in the Apple iTunes Music Store to switch personally, but I have no problem with the Zune existing and being successful.
Slashdot Mirror
Every computer sold with Windows 2000 or Windows XP was sold with NTFS on it. That's pretty much every computer sold PERIOD after 2001. I doubt any Win32/NTFS computers have been sold since XP SP1 came out.
Of course that's because nobody runs Win32 anymore. WTF? Upgrade from Windows ME, dude, you'll enjoy joining the rest of us in the 21st century.
Obviously not. However, maybe it should happen, otherwise the open source community risks alienating people it depends on for acceptance. There's such a thing as "strategy" involved; you can't simply say "people who don't agree with us 100% all the time deserve no benefit from open source" and still be considered reasonable.
And sadly, OS X has worse usability than earlier versions. Notably, Mac OS 7 & 8 before Apple started on their whole "branding is more important than usability" kick they're on now.
Anybody who's tried to use Finder to actually organize and sort files will realize that OS X is not the epitome of UI design.
That said, it's still a lot better than Windows and a ton better than Linux.
Are you talking about Vino or Vncviewer or what? In what way is there slickness lacking?
Here's a partial list of things that make Microsoft Remote Desktop superior to VNC:
1) Remote Desktop can cope nicely with different screen resolutions without requiring stretching the remote computer's screen or using scroll-bars. This is especially nice when connecting to a desktop with a big screen from a laptop with a little screen.
2) It is capable of transmitting sound from the host computer. It's very low-quality, but when I'm in a bind and need to listen to my voicemail it's much, much appreciated. VNC can't do this.
3) It can copy and paste from the client computer to the host computer. VNC can't do this.
4) Remote Desktop does a much, much better job of correctly matching keyboards between the host and client computers. On my Mac, I was never able to get my Command and Control key to consistently and correctly map on a remote Windows/Linux computer. Remote Desktop just does this automatically without no configuration required. This might be a configuration issue with the VNC client/server combination I was using, but I tried many configurations and never got a really solid consistent behavior. (I also experienced 'stuck keys' quite often with VNC.)
5) Remote Desktop automatically locks the host computer when a client is connected to it. This makes the process more secure by preventing snooping on your computer while you're using it remotely.
6) On that note, Remote Desktop can connect to a logged-out Windows computer and automatically log it in and lock it while you use it remotely. If VNC supports this, I never was able to figure out how.
7) Encrypting Remote Desktop traffic is trivial. VNC sends everything in the clear by default, and has to be 'tunneled' to be encrypted... frankly, I'm not enough of a geek to figure that all out.
If you honestly don't think Microsoft Remote Desktop is superior than VNC, then you've not really used it. In addition to all the points above, it's also much faster with the ability to compress data in a logical way (i.e. "draw a button at 46x300 pixels") instead of having to send bitmaps all the time.
I'm a fan of open source programs, but this is one area in which the open source solutions are really lacking compared to Microsoft's solution.
Why bother?
Any decent system has standards in place defining exactly what libraries are available and what minimum functionality they have. Any decent system has a nice easy API you can use to query where your program should store its temporary per-machine files, its settings files, its roaming files, etc.
For systems like that, you don't need source code because compiled software works just fine. The only reason Linux users think source is so great is because their system is a hodge-podge of different technologies, none of which follow any sort of standards whatsoever.
Why should we care about companies already playing creative sidestepping games with the previous version of the GPL?
Just cope with it. You're not going to win 100% of the battles 100% of the time.
Not to mention that this clause in GPL 3 won't fix anything; The Next Tivo (TNT) will simply use GPL 2 or, even worse, be scared away from open source altogether and not release anything.
I guess he's hoping that TNT will want to use some existing GPL 3 project, and by incorporating it they will be forced to change the license, but I don't see that happening unless TNT is utterly retarded.
All it does is discourage companies that may be on the borderline from using GPL at all, IMO. Stupid move.
That doesn't answer part 2 of my question. What does the Consumer Electronics Association DO, exactly, and why does it matter what they think about MLB's stance on the Slingbox? Do they have power of the company that makes Slingbox in some way? Or do they have power over the MLB? I don't get it.
And no, I'm not going to look it up. This information should be in the summary. I don't know what's sadder, that the "editors" don't bother to make sure their stories make sense, or that the person who submitted this didn't even think about editing it themselves.
Then there's the Bush factor, certainly a killer for any reputations.
Are you seriously claiming it's a good thing to ruin somebody online reputation because of their political beliefs? Holy crap, man.
... except you can get a good reputation by being a shrill, annoying open source zealot/Microsoft hater on Slashdot. That would be a negative on the vast majority of discussion sites out there, and plain unwanted on discussions sites for (say) Microsoft software.
Slashdot's karma means nothing except on Slashdot, for no other community has the same biases Slashdot has. Hell, you can get your karma busted down here for saying you don't really like Nintendo games... that sure doesn't apply anywhere else on the Internet.
Plus we all know that all Turok does is wear psuedo-Native American garb and shoot dinosaurs with a crossbow. He's not exactly the type to theorize about the creation of the universe.
What the heck is the "CEA" and why should I care what they think?
This summary is missing a critical piece of information.
I used to play a HL mod that had a "commander" who saw things from top-down and did the RTS stuff while everyone else was in FPS-mode (think BF2, but SciFi).
Tribes had this genre covered in 1998.
I am perplexed as to why anyone wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro of any kind would choose Fedora as their base distro.
Anybody wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro doesn't know what a "Linux distro" is and doesn't want to learn. They'll install whatever their buddy hands them. (Then, most likely, give up and go back to Windows after a few days.)
By the time you start talking about distros, much less "dependancies," you're way beyond the user friendly stage.
Ok,
1) Saying that the US government should never act because it's done wrong things in the past is stupid. By that logic, NOBODY should ever do ANYTHING since every person on earth has done something wrong before. In addition to that, airing your petty little civil war gripe is nothing except off-topic for this thread. Please stop it.
2) Taiwan is recognized as an independent nation by pretty much the entire world except China and perhaps North Korea. Why would Taiwan even possibly think they would need a document saying they have the right to secede? They've already done it! (I suppose you think it's ok for the UK to invade the US, since we don't have any agreement in place with the UK saying we have the right to gain independence, right?)
Short answer: No.
Long answer: That's a goddamned stupid question.
Coughing into the microphone will also screw up a recording. I suppose that leads you believe that coughing is a major cause of brain damage as well, huh?
I kind of like the feature where you can "hear" your cell phone about to ring if you have it sitting next to your computer speakers, from the sudden buzzing that comes out. Not really a feature, per say, but it's still cool.
Physical interlocking keys have a max. number of combinations of about 700, IIRC. If you produce more than 700 different keys, you'll have keys that work in multiple cars. Go back a few decades, and GM/Ford/Dodge may only have made 50 unique keys for a specific car model-- there was a decent chance you could try your key in someone else's car and get in, start the engine, and drive off.
The keys that require a specific resistance have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different possible combinations. The keys they have microchips in them have a virtually unlimited amount of different combinations. This is a Good Thing.
Looks like a standard "UK is so much better than US" troll.
Except for the super, super low-end (Kia), every car in the US in the last 10 years has had an electronic ignition lock-out, or whatever they call it, so that the engine won't start unless the key authenticates itself in some way. My cheap PT Cruiser has this feature, and I bought it with zero extras.
This article is about RFID keys, keys you don't have to put in the ignition, the car just checks for the presence of the RFID chip then starts the engine. In the US, this feature is only available in high-end cars. I'm guessing the same is true of the UK.
How else do you expect them to get the number?
If Microsoft made Best Buy, Circuit City, Comp USA, and every mom-and-pop electronics store in the nation report back actual sales, they'd be lambasted here for evil data mining.
Besides, from Microsoft's perspective, if they sell a Zune to a retailer, they've "sold" it. Right? So reporting 1 million sold makes perfect sense.
You've actually tried one, though. And since you don't own an iPod already, you're relatively unbiased.
The majority of the people here have not used one, nor would they use one if they had the chance to try it out. They're just hating on Microsoft because it's Microsoft. (We saw the same thing happen when the original Xbox game out. The Xbox was a very good game console, and more than competitive with the Gamecube and PS2, yet you'd never hear anything positive about it on Slashdot just because of the brand name.)
It's ridiculous. It's become like a religion to bash Microsoft, regardless of what they do. Well I own an Xbox, Xbox 360, a MN-500 wireless router, and a Comfort Curve keyboard (plugged into my Mac of all things), all from Microsoft, and I think they're all excellent products. Especially the wireless router; most of those suck ass, from my experience, but this MN-500 just purrs along without any problems year after year. (Pity they don't make them anymore.)
I agree that people have the right to boycott the product, but I think it's intellectually dishonest to "spread the word" about a product you've never used.
At the moment I'm posting this, the highest modded thread in this topic was started by a guy in the UK complaining that he's never seen a Zune in 'the wild', without mentioning what you just mentioned: they aren't released in the UK.
Which demonstrates the grandparent's "hatefest" point very well. Talk about FUD, Slashdot comments are expert.
Stupid question... how do they know that?
Does that mean every retailer has to keep tabs on how many they've sold and then report that back to the manufacturer? I mean I agree that the GAAP rules here in the US that say something's "sold" when it's sold to a retailer might be a bit misleading, but I can't imagine the thousands of electronics stores out there having to comply with some system to report all their sales upstream... seems expensive and with little actual benefit.
Ok, who mods this crap up? The Zune isn't even RELEASED in the UK. Of course you haven't seen any; it's not on sale there. Cripes.
I'm with you.
Microsoft is doing the same thing with the Zune that they did with the Xbox. Sure the first version was ridiculed by fanboys (and of course the Slashdot hordes), but it's a solid machine that works as promised. The second version might be a killer machine, like the Xbox 360, if Microsoft's competitors are as careless and clueless as Sony was this console generation.
In any case, success for the Zune means my chances of getting a large-screen iPod go up every month. I like that. I have too much money invested in the Apple iTunes Music Store to switch personally, but I have no problem with the Zune existing and being successful.