Electronic stability control and ABS are hugely important to drive safely? Hahaha. Clearly nobody ever taught you how to drive.
If you take a moment and learn how to properly threshold brake, your braking times will be LESS than with an ABS car if you just panic stop and hold the pedal to the floor.
Traction control is just nanny shit...if you need a computer to cut throttle because you are losing traction obviously you can't drive for shit and should stay the fuck off of the road.
This whole engineer cars to the lowest common denominator is a shame....do we really need all of these thoughtless morons commanding 4,000 pound hunks of plastic, metal and glass? NO.
I disagree that it's this whole "what you're used to thing"..19 years old here, grew up listening to crap lossy, transcoded p2p audio (and radio before that).
Then one day I got a turntable. Blew me away. Much, much better (that is, assuming the stylus and record are clean and free of defects). I know over time vinyls quality degrades but if you take proper care it's much better.
I'll take a worn vinyl with pops over lossy audio ANY DAY OF THE WEEK.
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the if-it-aint-broke dept.
thefickler writes "A recent Harris Poll has found that while most online computers users are aware of Microsoft's Windows Vista, few are intending to switch over to the new operating system anytime soon. The Harris Poll of 2223 US online adults in early March found that 87% were aware of Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, only 12% of Vista-aware respondents were intending to upgrade to Vista in the next 12 months."
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the second-verse-same-as-the-first dept.
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the airing-the-dirty-laundry dept.
Overly Critical Guy writes to mention that more documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considered dumping the Mac Office Suite entirely in a move to harm Apple. "The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time. It describes dumping development of the product as: 'The strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately.' The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Recently Microsoft's open source software lab posted PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer. Postgres is one of the longest running open source databases — it has been around for nearly 11 years. The powerful object-relational database is a direct competitor to other OSS databases, as well as Microsoft's SQL Server 2005. So why is Microsoft promoting it? I get Redmond's interest in boosting anything that runs on Windows as a platform. Is this simply a case of left-hand, right-hand, or is something deeper going on?"
Makarand writes "The IRS thinks that many sellers on online auction sites are unaware of their obligation to declare their profits and pay their taxes to the IRS. Tax experts are now asking the IRS to require online auction sites like eBay, Yahoo, and Ubid to report the gross sales numbers for their sellers. Such a requirement will surely send a shock wave across the online trading world because it could drastically reduce the profits a seller would make on these sites. The IRS thinks it can collect an extra $2 billion in taxes from this requirement that auctioneers report sellers who complete 100 or transactions a year worth at least $5,000."
Posted
by
CowboyNeal
from the users-delete-software-to-defend-against-idiocy dept.
teamhasnoi writes "Back in 2004, we discussed a program that deleted your home directory on entry of a pirated serial number. Now, a new developer is using the same method to protect his software, aptly named Display Eater. In the developers's own words, 'There exist several illegal cd-keys that you can use to unlock the demo program. If Display Eater detects that you are using these, it will erase something. I don't know if this is going to become Display Eater policy. If this level of piracy continues, development will stop.'"
narramissic writes "After 13 years as a loyal Red Hat user, Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, is switching to the Ubuntu distribution. In a message distributed to Linux mailing lists and news organizations, Raymond cited technical issues with Red Hat, such as the way repositories are maintained, the submission process and 'stagnant' development of Red Hat's packaging technology, as well as governance problems, the failure to gain desktop market share and the failure to include proprietary media formats. 'Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige,' Raymond wrote. 'The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels.'"