Posts by jwenting

Precisely what I've been saying about open source in general for years.
There is no quality control worth speaking of, hardly any bugfixing.
When you rely solely on people doing it for the kick, you're going to accumulate a group of people who are uninterested in maintaining existing code, especially if it's code they didn't write themselves.

And when someone reports a bug he's shouted down with statements like "it's free, you get what you pay for", "just fix it and submit a patch" (never mind those get ignored if not from the core clique), "if you donate to our team you may get some time".
If there's any response at all that is, and not total silence from the developers who are basking in the light of their own glory.

if it goes towards fighting the Google world domination scheme, I'll put in some.

Google have finally realised that Microsoft is fair game if you need some money, whether you have a real case or not (see the EU case, which is a total fraud intended only to extort money from Microsoft to pay some more EU kleptocrats and their million Euro villas on the rivierra).
File a claim against them and any politically correct judge will rule in your favour and there's nothing Microsoft can do against it.

Maybe Microsoft should file a counterclaim against Google stating that Google is offering unfair competition in linking all their services and products together and is preventing competitors from entering their market by not linking to say Hotmail from Google.com...
Few billion in reparations seem in order there.

In contrast to Apple Microsoft has never told people they can't run their products except on hardware of brand X :)

As is well known Apple does just that, they explicitly state that their operating system is not allowed to be used on any hardware not supplied by them (which is what killed the plans to create Mac clones in the early/mid 1990s quite effectively).

Apple still holds to that policy, so you indeed need to buy an Intel powered Mac to get Mac OS/X for Intel and are then not allowed to use it on any other Intel powered computer (if it would even work, I rather think it will be hardwired to run only on very specific motherboards and other hardware components which Apple won't license to anyone else).

"Remember, since all software has bugs and security holes, becoming infected with a virus or some other malware, is a user problem, not a system problem"

Well said. I've been using PCs for something like 15 years now and only ever had a virus infection once that wasn't caught by my anti virus software, and that was because I'd failed to keep my virus definitions up to date (this was in the days when you had to buy a floppy with updated definitions regularly and manually install those, something almost noone did more than once every few months).
Out of those years I've been on the internet for almost a decade, and using floppies …

Features like compilers and stuff were left out for the same reason root access is blocked: security and foolproofing the system.

The intended primary audience doesn't need those features and would only put themselves into trouble having them.

Those people use it in lue of (or next to) a Windows or Mac machine which doesn't come with compilers as standard either and will never miss them.

As I only really work in Java and sometimes Python I don't need them either (and install those languages directly from their own developers to make sure I have the most current versions available and set up as I want them).

I quite agree with you. Ubuntu is the first ever Linux distribution that installed on my 7 year old Toshiba Satellite without major problems (only had to edit a few lines in the X config to get rid of some minor screen corruption).

Everything else (even current distributions of Debian on which it is based) has major problems, some (like Mandrake) even refusing to install because the installers won't work on it.

hmm, you're rather limiting yourself to a narrow type of certification.
You're only considering sysadmin certs, and even then only PC specific ones.

Why did you ignore Sun for example? They have some of the best education/certification programs in the business both for software developers and sysadmins.

Do you ever think of anything else but what to think up next as the latest Microsoft related conspiracy theory?

No, Microsoft is leaving the market instead of giving in to blackmail. Had I been Microsoft I'd have done that in Europe too, and immediately revoked all licenses issued to Euro government agencies.

Most likely (giving the attitude in many Asian countries towards piracy) sales are already low there with 99% pirated versions in use so the loss in sales would be minimal.

As to Microsoft requiring IE for Windows Update, it's because of the way it works.
WU uses a rather large ActiveX control to calculate what updates to get, and no other browser supports that.
I've not seen an option to autoupdate FireFox through IE either...

I lost my trust in Symantec (and especially their Norton line) back in 1995 and ever since have only been reinforced in my decision to avoid them whereever possible.

Programs that corrupt your OS during installation.
Programs that just don't work.
Worst detection ratio of all commercial AV products I tested (so bad in fact that a 1 hour old copy at one point failed to detect a virus that had been detected by a 3 week old copy of McAfee...).
Programs that corrupt your OS during deinstallation.
Programs that fail to uninstall.

the list goes on.

hmm, not here. Base model's gone up by a hundred Euro.

And the price? Was planning/contemplating to purchase one spring next year (if my profit share payout will cover it), but if they're getting a lot more expensive that plan won't go ahead.

Again the US is lagging behind. This move is almost complete in Europe already.
Of course most users aren't opting for the more expensive "digital" packages, so receive the "old" analogue package over the digital signal.

Who needs 100 channels of crap instead of 35 channels of crap after all?

I've no need for a computer to control my life away from my computer...

But then I'm an oldfashioned kind of person. My fridge doesn't order my dinner for me, my TV doesn't tell my VCR there's a movie I might like on channel 5342 at 23:40 and to tell the household robot to feed a new tape because the old one is likely full.

While I own a digicam it's not hooked up to the internet (and in fact spends most of its time rather lonely in my car just in case I need it on the road or at the office).

I've in fact seriously thought about cancelling my cable TV and would have cancelled my phone already if the line weren't needed for my DSL connection.

I see a company bent on global hegemony over all information, a company doing its utmost to destroy all competition where it comes to the spreading and collection of data with the ultimate goal of being able to control all thought and thereby the actions of all mankind.

If they think that'll take them another 300 years to achieve I can breathe a little easier as I do plan to not be around by then, or else so pissed off that I no longer want to have any information and started living as a recluse in a mountain cabin somewhere :)

http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/ the future if Google have their way...

AMDs come overclocked out of the factory (or used to, not sure if they still do that).
Many of them are marginal for the speed they're sold for, while Intel incorporates far higher tollerances in their system of classing CPUs for a specific speed.

The system is (simplified) as follows:
A production batch is tested for the maximum speed they can hold without failing (or overheating). That's the speed the batch is then sold as. A different batch will have slightly different material properties affecting their maximum speed.
Intel sets their margins wider than does AMD, so their CPUs are less likely to fail at the published speed.
This test is within a speed range of course, determined by the design speed limits of the CPU core.

This system of determining CPU speed causes shifts in available supplies of course.
As Intel gets better at creating their wafers, the average speed of the produced CPUs of each design goes up and thus the supply of lower speed CPUs drops.

Where is longevity in the equation?
AMDs on average don't last nearly as long as do Intels, inducing a far higher lifetime cost for a system that's not built to be replaced as soon as the next fad hits the market.

Intels can last 5-10 years, AMDs often don't go strong for more than 2-3.
Fine if you're looking to replace your system after 1-2 years, not so nice if you want it to run reliably for 5 years or more.
Same with stability. AMDs have a tendency to run hot (which is a large contributing factor to their shorter MTBF) which also makes them more prone to causing the system to hang or crash under heavy load.
Again not so much a problem if you run the machine for only a few hours a day, but if it has to stay up for weeks or months at a time you want something more reliable.

Of course people wanting such reliability will typically not choose entry level CPUs.

hmm, are you serious?

Nothing will happen for years, that's how long it will take to reach the next (and probably last) barrier separating us from interstellar space.
By the time any adverse effects get to influence earth it will be years later (maybe decades) and by that time we'll be better off dead anyway given the way things are going on this dirtball.

That's even slower than PPPP (Postal Pigeon Ping Protocol).

Let's hope the beancounters don't terminate the project prematurely to save a few thousand dollars (I think the entire yearly budget is now under $50K) like they tried to do last year...

Note to self: install longer lasting powersources and more powerful radios on my interstellar conquest probes next time.

Not the only reason. The performance of the AGP bus is also a limiting factor.
Unless an AGP-16x standard came around the current crop is pretty much as fast as they can get.

And also remember that the card manufacturers often also make mobos. Unless more PCI-E cards hit the market in lue of AGP cards, the uptake of PCI-E (which has been kinda slow because of the higher cost) won't really happen for a while yet.

Now if they only were economically priced... Add a screen, keyboard, and mouse and you're looking at €1500+ for a system that can't be expanded and is low on harddisk space.

What we're starting to see is market saturation as more and more people are content with the access speed they have and don't see a need for anything faster.
To get a far higher percentage of connected households adopting broadband the price would have to drop dramatically at this stage, as many people adopting broadband at the moment are doing so mainly because it is more cost effective given their internet access patterns and not because they have a business requirement for the higher performance (e.g. many older people browse around a bit and read/send some email, maybe hang around in a few IRC boxes and read some newsgroups. None of that requires a speed that's as high as many broadband services can offer, but if you do it a lot it does get costly especially if you pay for access by the minute when using dialup.
As many in the US pay a flat fee for phone use no matter their usage pattern the breakeven point for broadband (with its higher subscription fees) is even harder to reach for many Americans than it is for Europeans (who in general do pay by the minute).

The problem is apparently that they didn't intend the PCs to stay infectious after leaving the game area.
This is totally justified in an online environment where PK'ing (player killing) is by rule only ever to be consentual (killing others outside a formal duel is considered murder, killing players well below your own skill level is unsportsmanlike, both will get you a bad reputation).
As mainly lowlevel characters are killed off, this bug if left unchecked will soon make the game impossible to play for all but the existing group of veteran characters. Some of those won't mind that so much (there are groups of high ranking players in all MMORPGs who consider beginners to be useless annoyances that the game would be better off without) but that can't be the purpose of a game (especially economically as it will quickly mean noone is left playing it).

Interesting. So even Blizzard aren't immune from the phenomenon of forgetting to test sideeffects of changes outside the immediate context of those changes.

yes, the requirement that mods cannot introduce adult or violent content (which is effectively what they're saying) effectively means that modding capabilities will have to be either removed or extremely limited.

Take a game like Morrowind. Nothing adult in it, nor extreme gore and violence (except for a red haze when you're hurt sometimes there's not even any blood).
But modders have added nudity, prostitution, severed limbs, etc. etc.
Under these new rules that game would have to be classes as R simply because it is there is the theoretical capability (which in this case was acted upon outside of and without approval from the game publisher) to add content which changes the mode of the game to something it was never intended to be.

While I may not agree with Rockstar/Take2 and don't like their games, I do understand why they do what they do.
They feel (correctly so) that they're being villified and kick the responsible persons where it hurts in the only way they can, by mocking them.

Maybe that's actually a good thing as they might well get their day in court (or the court of public opinion) to expose the nanny culture in the ESRB and how they're effectively trying to restrict games to politically correct Barbie meets her mother adventures.

And do those support that document format to any reasonable degree? Didn't think so...

Anti-competitive measure in the extreme. Effectively reduces the choice of software to a single package, OpenOffice.
And that's of course what it's designed to do, the Demokratik Peoples' Republik of Massachessets has set out on an anti-Microsoft fatwah several years ago and this is the culmination.

yup, that's of similar scope to what I'm working on (though for a completely different industry).
Of course many such applications are never seen by most people as they're used mainly internally with customers (or at most a small piece is the public interface that's accessible by the outside world through the net).

Such applications require far more skills than your average "webmaster" brings.
Java (or Perl, CGI, etc.), XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, user interface theory, etc. etc.

Well said Thomas. The deluge of people calling themselves "web designers" and "web developers" after having read "build your own website in 24 hours" has destroyed what value the name had.
At the moment it's precisely that sort of person who's expected to turn up at a job interview, while at the same time the talents of the REAL professionals get ignored.
Many companies expect people to know it all, do it all, but don't appreciate it when they actually can deliver.
We're sending people without any experience in user interface design on a 1 week HTML/Javascript course and expect them to be top web designers after that week. At the same time professional programmers are pushed into creating their own user interface designs because the people who are supposed to do it are incapable (being the before-mentioned group).
That's the state of the industry today, because the image of our profession has been so diluted over the years by the flood of wannabees who call themselves web designers after creating a personal homepage at AOL or Geocities awash with scrolling text, impossible to read because of the terrible use of colours and background graphics (dark blue text on a purple and light blue textured background anyone? I've seen it), and with half the links dead.

SBE and Pro are not server products now.
They're clientside products, with SBE being essentially a pack of several Pro licenses bundled with a server license and some other software (Exchange, MS SQL Server, etc).

Nothing really new there, except the names.
The plans to introduce a stripped lowcost version for the 3rd world have been known for at least a year.
The other versions (except maybe "ultimate") seem simply equivalent to similar products already in existence for XP.
Home, Media Center, Pro, SBE, and 2003 Server.

If they did not even think of other browsers they'd not have included a browsercheck...
So they did think of other browsers and decided it was either not worth the effort or they didn't have the time to make the effort to allow for them.
The latter is the more likely explanation though of course the anti-Microsoft and anti-Bush fanatics will argue otherwise.

There is no inferior browser or operating system, you're just repeating the anti-Microsoft party line.
And this isn't the time or place for religious wars.

Like I stated they most likely didn't have the time and/or resources to test the application for proper functionality on other platforms and don't want to have to face massive liability lawsuits (which are the favourite American passtime, even more fun than flaming Microsoft or the president it seems) if someone does use another browser and sees something in the wrong place on her screen causing severe mental distress (or however the lawyers would describe it).

Quite simple. They set up a site in no time and targeted that site at the largest possible market.
They didn't have time to test whether it worked according to expectations anywhere else so can't support that.
That's not to say they deliberately wrote it to not work on other browsers, just that they didn't have the time to make sure it worked.

Personally I'm sick of the constant battering against the people trying to help out in disaster relief.
If you want to blame someone for the disaster unfolding in Louisiana, blame the state government and the city council of New Orleans.

They CAN be used for single documents. In that case the document is effectively cut up into paragraphs or short chapters with each becoming a page.
Of course we're talking about rather large documents here, such as scientific research project results which can run into hundreds of pages.

Effectively a wiki is a reader-editable e-book when used as such.

Games not yet, but expect games released late by late 2006 or early 2007 to have minimum hardware requirements beyond that.

High end CAD and videoprocessing software already makes use of resources beyond that if you have them.
I've a friend who recently purchased a dual CPU Apple G5 with 2 250GB harddisks just for that for example.
Remember the world isn't made up out of games...

See, what did I tell you?

Smart move. Microsoft was frequently scolded for not writing XP to make optimal use of new and upcoming hardware at time of release.
Of course I foresee a lot of criticism now about "Microsoft forcing people to buy new PCs to use Vista", but that's simply because there's a group out there who are very vocal and will find fault at anything the people in Redmond can come up with.

ah, those too are regional. They don't seem to offer any loans here, or at least don't mention them before you click a purchase button (which I'm not doing yet).

Never saw any offer like that here (and I was in the Amsterdam Apple store yesterday to get some advise on the things for possible future purchase), must have been local to your country :)

It's not really any different from running DX7 games on a DX9 installation.
The calls are different so there's another entry into the HAL that's used.
I doubt another software layer needs to be added, and if it is I doubt you'd notice the difference unless your system is already marginal at playing the game in question as the added calls would be CPU calls rather than GPU calls and most games nowadays are far heavier on the GPU than they are on the CPU.
As an example: I noticed no performance improvement on most of my games when switching from a 1.6 to a 2.4 GHz CPU while keeping the same videocard, only when upgrading that as well did I see a marginal improvement and that mainly in display quality rather than speed.

The whole thing sounds to me like a prelude to another round of Microsoft bashing, preparing for the claim that "Microsoft is trying to drive game manufacturers out of business by preventing their games from running on Vista".

Tay, a lot quicker? You save 2 characters in a single sentence of maybe 200 characters, when you can type at 60 strokes per minute (that's not all that fast) you're talking about saving 2 seconds off 200 seconds.
That's 1% of all non-whitespace characters, at 5 characters per word on average it's even less.

That's no savings at all, it's just stupidity, laziness, and trying to make yourself look 1337 k3w1 to your hax0r fr13ndz.

Well said Thomas. Personally I've resolved myself to not answer any question from people who type like that, instead mocking them for their laziness.

English isn't my first language either, in fact when first learning it I was extremely bad at it.
It took me 5 years to reach basic proficiency in reading and writing English, 5 more to become (nearly) fluent. But I made the effort because I realised that fluent communication in English is vital if you're to work efficiently in science and IT (IT was just about starting at the time to really take off and it wasn't my goal at all to get involved in it at any level other than as a consumer).

When you analyse the scrabbles of people prevailing themselves of such monstrosities you'll notice they save in general less than 10% on the number of keystrokes they need to type their message.

Acronyms and abbreviations generally recognised in the context they're used in (which means that they're most likely in a formal dictionary or are product or company names) are fine, anyone in the industry will know those if he has a reason to.

and a hefty legal bill (but then, they'd likely not pay for that themselves...).

I'd consider their actions at most to be a civil offense, except for the snooping (which may have been illegal).
If the uni was stupid enough to write down a root password in cleartext on the case of the machine and then expect students (considered the smartest people around in general though I sometimes have doubts) to not figure out what it is I'd say they have to face the consequences themselves.
If I write the PIN to my bankcard on the card and then give the card to someone else telling them they can do whatever they want with it except get money from my bank account it's me who's responsible when they take the money anyway. This is similar.

What nagscreen?
I've never had a nagscreen as I've always had a licensed version :)

Was wondering when they'd start asking money for upgrades, can't blame them.
After using Winzip as a licensed user for 10 years on an almost daily basis the cost to me is now so low per use that one almost feels guilty.
$35 (at the time) makes $3.50 per year or less than a cent a day.

What you fail to mention is that a service pack will not just integrate hotfixes, it will also contain thoroughly tested versions of them.
So if a hotfix fixes the problem but introduces a smaller problem elsewhere which isn't critical, the service pack will address that problem by replacing the hotfix by something else (or an improved version of itself) that does not have that flaw.

The SP will also be available for a one-off installation to systems that were installed after it becomes available.
If it would not include those hotfixes people will have to install them all separately, which many will not do or fail to do properly causing problems further down the line.

There's many reasons to make a service pack all-inclusive, going even so far as to have it include all previous service packs.
Knowing the history of Windowsupdate functionality, those installing the SP through that will get only those things they really need and not things they already installed earlier and didn't change since.

Cat, the vast majority of looters are looting not food and other essentials but televisions, jewelry, and other luxury items.
There can be no excuse for shooting up a childrens' hospital to get at the morphine in order to get high.

The city was ordered evacuated before the huricane struck. Those who ignored the evacuation order should have taken it as a warning to be prepared and stocked up on food and stuff.
They had quite enough time, the entire area knew a major hurricane was coming a week in advance after all.

If there were still no relief effort underway a week or two after the hurricane struck, maybe by then there'd be justification for breaking open stores to get at canned food and drink, sturdy shoes (to walk out) and camping supplies (like gaspowered stoves and firemaking tools).
But relief efforts are underway, and people still in the area can get help if they want it.
That means there's no excuse for them to go looting.

Just saw some video from Mississipi. The devastation is complete (and I mean complete, like almost nothing left standing and what is standing structurally damaged to the point of having to be torn down), no different from what hit Atjeh or Thailand in December last year.

An area the size of a small country is effectively gone. No more local economy, no more infrastructure.
Even news organisations are sending their helicopters to help in the relief effort rather than (as they usually do) hover over the area in search of a story.

Looting is inexcusable for whichever reason.
And most of the looters won't stop at stealing some food from a store, they'll concentrate on electronics, jewelry, and other expensive yet portable luxuries (as has been shown time and again in the past).

What disgusts me is that there's no large international call for sending emergency aid to the stricken area.
Far smaller disasters elsewhere generate such calls immediately from aid organisations, but I guess the USA is too rich for the people there to warrant the sympathy of the rest of the world.

Good luck to all who are hit by this, may you be able to restore your life to some sense of normalcy and may your losses be limited.

Not knowing the history of the case I'd not be surprised if this is a last step the FCC takes after customers and VOIP providers refused to acknowledge more friendly things like that.

Maybe the FCC proposed a system like that but the providers refused to implement it because it would "inconvenience" their customers?