Comment Re:11% fuel efficiency improvement (Score 2) 138
There's also the people who think they "need" an SUV but get upset about how much they have to pay for fuel. It's a stupid market, but that market exists.
There's also the people who think they "need" an SUV but get upset about how much they have to pay for fuel. It's a stupid market, but that market exists.
MSDOS also worked perfectly adequately as the centerpiece of Windows 95 and 98.
On the contrary, Win9x crashed all the damn time (and mostly due to the reasons I mentioned: lack of memory protection, etc.) and caught viruses more easily than an immune-compromised crack whore. NT was much better, if you were lucky enough that all your software and hardware was compatible with it.
Oddly enough Microsoft's stock price stopped rising about the time that NT started to replace Windows 9. And the rather widespread dislike of Microsoft started about that time. Just coincidence, I'm sure
Yeah, actually, it was! The stock quit rising and everybody started to hate Microsoft because of everything they did except Windows NT:
Even at the time, Windows 2000 was considered to be the greatest thing (or at least, least-terrible thing) Microsoft had ever made. If you ask people today, they'd say XP is best, mostly because fewer people used 2000 (because it didn't get marketed to home users) and because people started appreciating XP more once they had Vista to compare it to.
You're the only person I've ever heard of who liked DOS-based Windows better than NT.
All other things being equal, I would probably go with NT. But all other things don't seem to be so equal. MSDOS was simple and ran well on minimal hardware. NT isn't simple and doesn't seem to run all that well on slow CPUs.
MSDOS certainly was simple: it was 16-bit, it lacked preemptive multitasking, and each program was limited to 64kB of memory (that other processes were not prevented from overwriting)!
We have a couple of EEE PCs around the house running XT and Windows 7. They are both terminally slow.
Before, you were talking about the mid-90s (i.e., NT vs Windows 3.1 or 95). Other than compatibility with legacy DOS stuff, it's hard to argue that 3.1 or 95 was better than NT 3.5 or 4.0 in any way whatsoever.
Your problems with Windows XP or 7 on EEE PCs is not due to the NT architecture, but rather all the shit Microsoft piled on top of it. If Windows 2000 had the drivers, your EEE PCs would do better with it.
Do you really expect the average user to know about IPs, ports, TCP/UDP etc.? That's not very realistic.
No, I expect users who want to run services that listen on ports (which makes them not "average!") to know about those things.
I don't agree that a safe alternative is impossible - there's no magic power that packets have to hack a computer. Any failings are due to poorly written software.
It's even less realistic to expect software -- especially the crap software the "average user" uses by default -- to become any less poorly written in the near future.
The problem with that is how many home users know how to configure the firewall? There are legitimate reasons to have incoming connections.
And if your use case includes one of those legitimate reasons, then it's your responsibility to know enough about security to configure the firewall. It is fundamentally impossible for there to be a safe alternative to this!
Even as (currently) a business web app programmer, the more mathematical/theoretical parts of my CS education come in handy from time to time for things like understanding why our decimal and/or floating-point calculations were coming out wrong or rounding funny when such things mystified my much more experienced coworkers.
Okay, I'll concede that if you have an old keyboard (like a Model M) it's possible that it could be good and not have a Windows(ish) key. However, even new Model M reproductions have one these days.
I work in a Windows-based shop where it's an important rule to lock your computer whenever you walk away from your desk, so I've gotten into the habit of using winkey + L to do it... otherwise, I only tend to hit that key on accident.
(pro-tip: not all keyboards have Windows keys!)
Actually, all decent ones do, but the key might be labeled "Meta" or "Cmd" or a funky icon something.
Don't worry, I have faith that you can get fat enough to fill a Rolls without too much effort!
This hasn't been my experience. It's hard to find qualified people - they've all got decent jobs already.
You know what that means? It means THE JOB YOU'RE OFFERING ISN'T DECENT!
Your problem is entirely due to your unwillingness or inability to make your company an attractive prospect. Fix that instead of whining about how people aren't stupid enough to accept your shit pay/conditions/etc.
Maybe if Microsoft had made different decisions in the mid-1990s when they had a compact real mode OS with a usable GUI running atop it, they could have ended up with something unified or unifiable. But that was then and this is now and the intervening two decades are water under the bridge or over the dam or something.
Wait a second, are you actually trying to argue that keeping DOS-based Windows instead of switching to the NT kernel would have been a good thing? That's just crazy talk!
Now, I can agree that they should have kept the UI decoupled from the rest of the OS, but there's no way I'd trade NT for DOS.
Oh, how I wish I hadn't used my modpoints up earlier today!
Of course, if you try to solve the problem of "damaged personalities" you end up with a situation out of a bad sci-fi movie (e.g. the one with 'gun kata').
Of course the NSA illegally acquires data from most all email providers, ISPs, etc. Even the services that are explicitly based in privacy get NSLs, so to avoid that I could avoid using the internet at all. I'm going to use the internet, so the NSA will be able to snoop until that problem is handled using the three boxes - soap box, ballot box, and if absolutely necessary ammo box.
There are four boxes: soap, ballot, jury and ammo.
If you were careful, you MIGHT be able to get away from everything using cyanogenmod and opting to NOT install ANY google services but then you'd have a mostly useless overpowered dumb phone...
Maybe you could get one of these Firefox phones.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn
