IE is sandboxed, it's safer than most other browsers.
The real problem you're missing, though, is browser plug-ins-- Java or Adobe Reader can open wide holes in your computer no matter what browser you're running.
AdBlock users are the most annoyingly gabby of all subcultures. Anytime an ad is mentioned, in *any context*, you can count on a dozen super arrogant, "oh, you see ads? I don't even remember what ads look like, because I use AdBlock, and I'm so much better than you. You should probably just bow down and worship me right now."
Yes, we all get it. You use AdBlock. NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP SO WE CAN DISCUSS THE TOPIC.
Well, yeah, but the point of the grandparent is that this "damning" photo doesn't show any of that. All this photo shows is a half dozen workers taking a nap on a table with half-packaged Microsoft mouses. There's no whips, no cut-off fingers, no signs saying "headphones banned" etc.
The caption could just as easily read: "mis-managed factory pays workers to nap on the job!" and the same photo would fit.
Google learned this lesson back when every other search provider were doing banner ads, and this is one reason why Google has leapfrogged ahead of the pack and stayed ahead so long. Text ads are fine. Ads which require 5 megabyte.swf files are just plain unacceptable.
Google serves those, same as everybody. They just do it using their DoubleClick brand. Oh, I'm sorry... did I distract you from your worship of the Holy Google? All bow down before it?
Look, if you actually learned something about the ad serving business, you'd realize that Google is no better than any other ad servers, and substantially worse than some. Stop listening to their feel-good bullshit and start learning about the industry so you can make real judgments.
Hell, I'd actually prefer to do business with a company that serves the Flash ads, but doesn't do the feel-good bullshit like Google does-- at least they're not bullshitting me.
To be fair, given how goddamned annoying AdBlock users are on this site, I'd consider banning them to get them to shut up as well. It might have nothing at all to do with losing revenue from blocked ads.
"Oh! You see ads? I don't see ads because I use AdBlock! I'm so much better than you! In fact, you should probably just bow down and worship me right now. Man you stupid primitives always give me a chuckle! Ha ha ha!"
No, it's one of those idioms that confuses Americans in the UK and gets Britons in the US into a lot of trouble; a fag is a cigarette, thus a fag end is a cigarette end,
Ok...
thus they are indeed referring to the tail end of the PS2's life.
Wha-huh? How did you get from A to B there?
In the US, we don't say "cigarette end" to mean "tail end." You seem to take it for granted that we do, which is really the weirdest part.
Seriously. Quake (especially CPMA) is pretty much the perfect shooter.
So says those who have not played Tribes.
Your claim seems especially odd since Unreal Tournament completely annihilated Quake when it came out.
You can't improve the pure shooter aspect anymore.
Sure you can.
What's your opinion of Unreal 3, for example? Do you consider it note a "pure shooter?" How do you feel about any of the recent Battlefield releases? Or does having classes and some complexity make them not "pure shooters?" How about the new Wolfenstein release, or Quake IV (since you're such a fan of id?)
Or, and much more likely, have you never played it because you're an aging grump who hasn't touched any new games since 2005, but feels perfectly justified saying that they all suck?
And if you want to talk about other aspects, let's talk about System Shock (1)
Except System Shock wasn't that good of a game. System Shock 2, however, is a masterpiece.
ZIP codes isn't nearly granular enough. The City of Snohomish has a different tax rate than unincorporated Snohomish County, but the city's ZIP code also includes a lot of county residents.
ZIP codes designate mailing destinations, not tax regions. If they ever match up 1:1, it's only by accident.
The other 10% is World of Warcraft's auto-updater.
But seriously, I'd say closer to 95% is piracy. This is the same argument about modding game consoles, "oh we just want to do homebrew!" Riiiiight, for every person doing homebrew, there's 150 people using the mod to pirate games.
Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple. Steve Jobs Apple Apple Apple iPad. Apple Apple iPhone Apple Apple Apple Apple. Apple Apple Apple Cupertino Apple Steve Jobs Apple Apple Apple iPad. Apple.
The fact that most OSs tolerate spaces gridgingly (did any one say %20?) we geeks of the world should unite and guide users away from using the space as an integral part of a file name.
No, "we" (and by which I mean "you", since I already actually care about usability) should bend computers to meet human behavior, not to futilely attempt to get humans to emulate computer behavior. Especially since the latter course will inevitably fail.
If computer don't take into account that users like to separate words with spaces, then the computer is the flawed party, not the user. And if you're defending the computer, and thus making life harder for users, you're a gigantic asshat.
Shakespeare directed and acted in plays, he didn't just write.
I mean, you could have made a compelling argument here if you had, for example, used Edgar Allen Poe as an example-- to the best of my knowledge, he only wrote. But you didn't, so I dismiss it out-of-hand.
(try opening a DOS shell on XP and typing in a command using a filename with spaces, without quotes).
Yah! Now try typing a command without using the letter 'R' or 'C'!!
Oh wait, you're introducing a ridiculous handicap to demonstrate your retarded point. Turns out, here in the real world, keyboards actually *do* have a key for typing quotes-- so it doesn't fucking matter if the command requires quotes.
Look, regardless of your "special" way of naming files, the point is that *other people* who don't share your retarded opinion are going to put spaces in the filenames sooner or later-- so you need to be able to cope with it!
If you've ever had to crop a large number of photos, convert a library of music, or clean up a directory, then you've probably written a script to do it in batch, instead of doing it by hand in the GUI.
No, I use a tool like Graphic Converter which does that much, much better than anything on the CLI. Well, I used to... not sure what I'd use now, Graphic Converter is getting pretty creaky. But that's not the point-- the point is there are GUI apps that do batch image processes better than anything in the CLI. You might be ignorant of them, but that doesn't mean using the CLI to do that task is a good idea.
Besides, we're talking about programmers, who mostly manipulate text files. Regardless of whether it is a sad life, or not.
Yes, but I do it from within an IDE, which uses GUI features to make the process a shitload less painful.
Normally, I'd recommend using Sysprep to add your company's required apps/utilities/drivers/etc to the Windows 7 image. But in this case, since there's only 20 machines, he's probably better off just keeping a couple machines ready to roll out by doing manual installs. It'll take less time than the sysprep image.
That is, unless he has the least reliable 20 machines in history. But, I mean, he's looking at a max of replacing 10 boxes a year... right? One every 5 weeks on average? Just run the fucking installers.
So, you can get away with just maintaining 6 images, 1 with GNU/Linux, and 5 different XP images. It still sucks, but it's better than nothing.
Or he could upgrade to Windows 7 and need (maybe) 2 images. I mean, if you're using an almost-decade-old OS, you can't expect it to have drivers for the newer workstations you're buying-- heck, even SP2 came out in freakin' 2004.
So far, Windows 7 has handled every piece of hardware I've thrown at it-- it either has the drivers on the disk, or it downloads them after first boot. (Or both.)
Will Windows 7 and VS2010 even run on a P4 2.5 ghz natively? I mean, it's going to try to run, but it certainly wouldn't be pleasant... that amount of RAM is far too piddly for VS, and the fact that your host OS is going to suck a lot of it down means it'll be a swapfest.
Hey Grandpa, why not spend the $400 on a new Dell? It'll come with 4 GB and 4 times the CPU power.
Also: as a stupid question, what are you using for development now? I don't know of any IDEs that run comfortably in a gig of RAM, unless you're using a 5-year-old one.
First of all, the easiest solution: buy consistent hardware. Get a bid from your systems vendor for a workstation build and a laptop build, and buy them in lots of 10 or so. (The bigger your order, the better rates you can get, natch.) You can either stick with the OS (and drivers) the vendor provides and just install your own crap on top, or make a Windows image with all of the necessary drivers slip-streamed in. This is how most companies do it-- it's easier on you, and it's cheaper on the company.
If that's not possible, just make a Windows image with all of the drivers for all of your hardware slip-streamed in... extra drivers can't hurt, they just use up a bit of disk space nobody will miss.
Note, however, you really should just switch to Windows 7, as it has built-in drivers for 99.9% of what you'll encounter day-to-day, unless you're running some very weird custom hardware. I'm guessing that you're still using an old XP SP2 or SP3 disk, otherwise you wouldn't be running into this issue in the first place.
Of course, it also sounds like you guys aren't really that big an operation. You could just keep a USB key handy with all of your drivers on it, and reinstall boxes as they come in/are needed.
Look, what I'm saying is that stating "the CLI is a superior interface" is kind of a dumb thing to say when it only applies to the network administration-type tasks it's actually superior for, and not the vast majority of things the average normal user wants to do with their computer.
It only makes sense when qualified. "The CLI is a superior interface *for X*."
Unqualified, is like saying, "the F-18 is a superior aircraft." Well, sure, it's superior for some small set of tasks-- dropping bombs on someone, or going really fast upside-down. But I wouldn't want to cross the Pacific on one, and you sure as hell can't use it to haul the space shuttle back to Florida from Texas. (To name two of the millions of tasks an F-17 is incapable of doing.)
I don't compose music. I listen to it via MPD with key-combo's set to change the song, seek, set random, etc. etc.
Ok... how is this relevant at all?
I don't edit photos, only to resize/scale them to fit my digital picture frame better, which I do via batch command line. I run it once on a directory and it does all the photo's in one run. Try doing that in pure GUI in GIMP (not using script-fu or python-fu).
There are a hundred photo tools that do that using a GUI. GIMP just doesn't happen to be one of them.
And if you did anything even slightly more advanced than cropping and/or scaling, you'd need a GUI tool. Maybe you could do them using some retarded CLI abomination, but what would be the point?
I do layout pages as I develop websites/web applications/software in my spare time. I write that all in code to form the visual-goodness. I don't use a WYSIWYG to build it. I rarely use anything like OpenOffice or AbiWord (although I have both installed).
Ok so you waste a lot of fucking time using inferior tools. That's your prerogative, but it's a stupid way to do work.
I guess I was technically wrong when I said it *couldn't* be done, so let me modify it to: it's fucking stupid to do it.
I do not edit video. I do transcode it from time to time when I rip movies for playing on my Media Center (which also runs Gentoo).. of which I have a set of tools written in bash that do that all for me.
Yes, I get you, but you're still better off making the entire solution functional before spending even one nanosecond on optimization. I'm sure everybody can agree with that.
And the Alan Cox OS team wouldn't be doing that, which is exactly the problem.
I can do so many more things in a lot less time at the command line than with a GUI - even web browsing (love links).
1) You can do a tiny subset of the things you can with a GUI in less time 2) But the things the GUI can do that the CLI can't, you can't do at all 3) And the things you can do on the CLI faster, you can still do in the GUI pretty damned fast (assuming you're adept at using one)
When people say "oh the CLI is great, it's all I need", that's a good way to tell that that person doesn't compose music, edit photos, layout pages, edit video, etc etc etc. If all you do with your life is copy and rename text files, then sure: use the CLI. But that's a pretty sad life.
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The fact that they will not be charging less even though they are providing less service hits the nail on the head.
For 99% of their customers, they're *already* not providing that service.
IE is sandboxed, it's safer than most other browsers.
The real problem you're missing, though, is browser plug-ins-- Java or Adobe Reader can open wide holes in your computer no matter what browser you're running.
If only!
AdBlock users are the most annoyingly gabby of all subcultures. Anytime an ad is mentioned, in *any context*, you can count on a dozen super arrogant, "oh, you see ads? I don't even remember what ads look like, because I use AdBlock, and I'm so much better than you. You should probably just bow down and worship me right now."
Yes, we all get it. You use AdBlock. NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP SO WE CAN DISCUSS THE TOPIC.
Sorry. Huge pet peeve of mine.
Well, yeah, but the point of the grandparent is that this "damning" photo doesn't show any of that. All this photo shows is a half dozen workers taking a nap on a table with half-packaged Microsoft mouses. There's no whips, no cut-off fingers, no signs saying "headphones banned" etc.
The caption could just as easily read: "mis-managed factory pays workers to nap on the job!" and the same photo would fit.
Google learned this lesson back when every other search provider were doing banner ads, and this is one reason why Google has leapfrogged ahead of the pack and stayed ahead so long. Text ads are fine. Ads which require 5 megabyte .swf files are just plain unacceptable.
Google serves those, same as everybody. They just do it using their DoubleClick brand. Oh, I'm sorry... did I distract you from your worship of the Holy Google? All bow down before it?
Look, if you actually learned something about the ad serving business, you'd realize that Google is no better than any other ad servers, and substantially worse than some. Stop listening to their feel-good bullshit and start learning about the industry so you can make real judgments.
Hell, I'd actually prefer to do business with a company that serves the Flash ads, but doesn't do the feel-good bullshit like Google does-- at least they're not bullshitting me.
To be fair, given how goddamned annoying AdBlock users are on this site, I'd consider banning them to get them to shut up as well. It might have nothing at all to do with losing revenue from blocked ads.
"Oh! You see ads? I don't see ads because I use AdBlock! I'm so much better than you! In fact, you should probably just bow down and worship me right now. Man you stupid primitives always give me a chuckle! Ha ha ha!"
Assholes.
No, it's one of those idioms that confuses Americans in the UK and gets Britons in the US into a lot of trouble; a fag is a cigarette, thus a fag end is a cigarette end,
Ok...
thus they are indeed referring to the tail end of the PS2's life.
Wha-huh? How did you get from A to B there?
In the US, we don't say "cigarette end" to mean "tail end." You seem to take it for granted that we do, which is really the weirdest part.
Seriously. Quake (especially CPMA) is pretty much the perfect shooter.
So says those who have not played Tribes.
Your claim seems especially odd since Unreal Tournament completely annihilated Quake when it came out.
You can't improve the pure shooter aspect anymore.
Sure you can.
What's your opinion of Unreal 3, for example? Do you consider it note a "pure shooter?" How do you feel about any of the recent Battlefield releases? Or does having classes and some complexity make them not "pure shooters?" How about the new Wolfenstein release, or Quake IV (since you're such a fan of id?)
Or, and much more likely, have you never played it because you're an aging grump who hasn't touched any new games since 2005, but feels perfectly justified saying that they all suck?
And if you want to talk about other aspects, let's talk about System Shock (1)
Except System Shock wasn't that good of a game. System Shock 2, however, is a masterpiece.
even down to individual ZIP Codes.
ZIP codes isn't nearly granular enough. The City of Snohomish has a different tax rate than unincorporated Snohomish County, but the city's ZIP code also includes a lot of county residents.
ZIP codes designate mailing destinations, not tax regions. If they ever match up 1:1, it's only by accident.
The other 10% is World of Warcraft's auto-updater.
But seriously, I'd say closer to 95% is piracy. This is the same argument about modding game consoles, "oh we just want to do homebrew!" Riiiiight, for every person doing homebrew, there's 150 people using the mod to pirate games.
Just to sum up Slashdot so far today:
Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple. Steve Jobs Apple Apple Apple iPad. Apple Apple iPhone Apple Apple Apple Apple. Apple Apple Apple Cupertino Apple Steve Jobs Apple Apple Apple iPad. Apple.
The fact that most OSs tolerate spaces gridgingly (did any one say %20?) we geeks of the world should unite and guide users away from using the space as an integral part of a file name.
No, "we" (and by which I mean "you", since I already actually care about usability) should bend computers to meet human behavior, not to futilely attempt to get humans to emulate computer behavior. Especially since the latter course will inevitably fail.
If computer don't take into account that users like to separate words with spaces, then the computer is the flawed party, not the user. And if you're defending the computer, and thus making life harder for users, you're a gigantic asshat.
Shakespeare directed and acted in plays, he didn't just write.
I mean, you could have made a compelling argument here if you had, for example, used Edgar Allen Poe as an example-- to the best of my knowledge, he only wrote. But you didn't, so I dismiss it out-of-hand.
(try opening a DOS shell on XP and typing in a command using a filename with spaces, without quotes).
Yah! Now try typing a command without using the letter 'R' or 'C'!!
Oh wait, you're introducing a ridiculous handicap to demonstrate your retarded point. Turns out, here in the real world, keyboards actually *do* have a key for typing quotes-- so it doesn't fucking matter if the command requires quotes.
Look, regardless of your "special" way of naming files, the point is that *other people* who don't share your retarded opinion are going to put spaces in the filenames sooner or later-- so you need to be able to cope with it!
Their noisy fanbois certainly do. I don't know how many thousands of times I've read, "but the iPhone runs OS X, same as your laptop!" on Slashdot.
But yah, I'm not sure I've ever seen that claim from Apple themselves.
If you've ever had to crop a large number of photos, convert a library of music, or clean up a directory, then you've probably written a script to do it in batch, instead of doing it by hand in the GUI.
No, I use a tool like Graphic Converter which does that much, much better than anything on the CLI. Well, I used to... not sure what I'd use now, Graphic Converter is getting pretty creaky. But that's not the point-- the point is there are GUI apps that do batch image processes better than anything in the CLI. You might be ignorant of them, but that doesn't mean using the CLI to do that task is a good idea.
Besides, we're talking about programmers, who mostly manipulate text files. Regardless of whether it is a sad life, or not.
Yes, but I do it from within an IDE, which uses GUI features to make the process a shitload less painful.
And it's also not the *only* thing I do.
Well, then... he should not do that.
Normally, I'd recommend using Sysprep to add your company's required apps/utilities/drivers/etc to the Windows 7 image. But in this case, since there's only 20 machines, he's probably better off just keeping a couple machines ready to roll out by doing manual installs. It'll take less time than the sysprep image.
That is, unless he has the least reliable 20 machines in history. But, I mean, he's looking at a max of replacing 10 boxes a year... right? One every 5 weeks on average? Just run the fucking installers.
So, you can get away with just maintaining 6 images, 1 with GNU/Linux, and 5 different XP images. It still sucks, but it's better than nothing.
Or he could upgrade to Windows 7 and need (maybe) 2 images. I mean, if you're using an almost-decade-old OS, you can't expect it to have drivers for the newer workstations you're buying-- heck, even SP2 came out in freakin' 2004.
So far, Windows 7 has handled every piece of hardware I've thrown at it-- it either has the drivers on the disk, or it downloads them after first boot. (Or both.)
Will Windows 7 and VS2010 even run on a P4 2.5 ghz natively? I mean, it's going to try to run, but it certainly wouldn't be pleasant... that amount of RAM is far too piddly for VS, and the fact that your host OS is going to suck a lot of it down means it'll be a swapfest.
Hey Grandpa, why not spend the $400 on a new Dell? It'll come with 4 GB and 4 times the CPU power.
Also: as a stupid question, what are you using for development now? I don't know of any IDEs that run comfortably in a gig of RAM, unless you're using a 5-year-old one.
First of all, the easiest solution: buy consistent hardware. Get a bid from your systems vendor for a workstation build and a laptop build, and buy them in lots of 10 or so. (The bigger your order, the better rates you can get, natch.) You can either stick with the OS (and drivers) the vendor provides and just install your own crap on top, or make a Windows image with all of the necessary drivers slip-streamed in. This is how most companies do it-- it's easier on you, and it's cheaper on the company.
If that's not possible, just make a Windows image with all of the drivers for all of your hardware slip-streamed in... extra drivers can't hurt, they just use up a bit of disk space nobody will miss.
Note, however, you really should just switch to Windows 7, as it has built-in drivers for 99.9% of what you'll encounter day-to-day, unless you're running some very weird custom hardware. I'm guessing that you're still using an old XP SP2 or SP3 disk, otherwise you wouldn't be running into this issue in the first place.
Of course, it also sounds like you guys aren't really that big an operation. You could just keep a USB key handy with all of your drivers on it, and reinstall boxes as they come in/are needed.
Look, what I'm saying is that stating "the CLI is a superior interface" is kind of a dumb thing to say when it only applies to the network administration-type tasks it's actually superior for, and not the vast majority of things the average normal user wants to do with their computer.
It only makes sense when qualified. "The CLI is a superior interface *for X*."
Unqualified, is like saying, "the F-18 is a superior aircraft." Well, sure, it's superior for some small set of tasks-- dropping bombs on someone, or going really fast upside-down. But I wouldn't want to cross the Pacific on one, and you sure as hell can't use it to haul the space shuttle back to Florida from Texas. (To name two of the millions of tasks an F-17 is incapable of doing.)
I don't compose music. I listen to it via MPD with key-combo's set to change the song, seek, set random, etc. etc.
Ok... how is this relevant at all?
I don't edit photos, only to resize/scale them to fit my digital picture frame better, which I do via batch command line. I run it once on a directory and it does all the photo's in one run. Try doing that in pure GUI in GIMP (not using script-fu or python-fu).
There are a hundred photo tools that do that using a GUI. GIMP just doesn't happen to be one of them.
And if you did anything even slightly more advanced than cropping and/or scaling, you'd need a GUI tool. Maybe you could do them using some retarded CLI abomination, but what would be the point?
I do layout pages as I develop websites/web applications/software in my spare time. I write that all in code to form the visual-goodness. I don't use a WYSIWYG to build it. I rarely use anything like OpenOffice or AbiWord (although I have both installed).
Ok so you waste a lot of fucking time using inferior tools. That's your prerogative, but it's a stupid way to do work.
I guess I was technically wrong when I said it *couldn't* be done, so let me modify it to: it's fucking stupid to do it.
I do not edit video. I do transcode it from time to time when I rip movies for playing on my Media Center (which also runs Gentoo).. of which I have a set of tools written in bash that do that all for me.
Ok... how is this relevant at all?
Yes, I get you, but you're still better off making the entire solution functional before spending even one nanosecond on optimization. I'm sure everybody can agree with that.
And the Alan Cox OS team wouldn't be doing that, which is exactly the problem.
If you compare Windows 7 to its predecessor Vista, it's actually the biggest reduction in bloat I think I've ever experienced in an upgrade. :)
I can do so many more things in a lot less time at the command line than with a GUI - even web browsing (love links).
1) You can do a tiny subset of the things you can with a GUI in less time
2) But the things the GUI can do that the CLI can't, you can't do at all
3) And the things you can do on the CLI faster, you can still do in the GUI pretty damned fast (assuming you're adept at using one)
When people say "oh the CLI is great, it's all I need", that's a good way to tell that that person doesn't compose music, edit photos, layout pages, edit video, etc etc etc. If all you do with your life is copy and rename text files, then sure: use the CLI. But that's a pretty sad life.