Posts by Fran Taylor 26 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
Why would any manufacturer use software like this in their phone? It is explicitly dictated by MS that you can't do a thing to differentiate your phone from the others.
Why even bother producing a phone unless you can make it different from your competitors? The only reason to make a clone phone is that you are shooting for the lowest price. But you can't do that on a phone that has the Microsoft tax, you will phone will drown in a sea of $20 clones.
"So if you're a Mac Pro user still using a Power PC G5, sorry, time to add some more to Mr Jobs pension fund."
If you are still using a G5 at this point, you are probably on the dole and not contributing to anyone's pension fund. Anyone whose time is worth money got a new machine LONG ago.
Do you have ANY idea how many Oracle customers are using mature Java applications? It is a LOT. These are big money customers and Oracle is going to do everything possible to keep them happy and writing out those yearly checks, which means that they MUST keep Java out in front of .NET and every other competing app platform.
Why don't you just COUNT the number of JAR files that are in your Oracle install. Java is the lifeblood of Oracle. They bought Sun precisely so that they could have control over its destiny.
And besides, your fear-mongering about Java is just as wrong as the same crap about mySQL. It is free software and it will take care of itself.
"That's because their measurements show Open Office is still four times slower than MS Office"
Who these days does anything with an office suite that uses any CPU? Modern systems do everything instantly. I can load up documents of hundreds of pages in OO and it's as close to instant as I can perceive.
So indeed MS Office takes 2 ms to render my spreadsheet while OpenOffice takes 8 ms. Who cares?
Well indeed let's try this benchmark: install both packages on a Linux system and see which one boots up faster.
If they did not have anything to replace it with WHEN it was found to be insufficient.
Man you software people are beyond the pale, saying '20 years is a good run'
The modern world be a total shambles if 20 years were the expected lifetime of our infrastructure.
Imagine the Hoover Dam collapsing after 20 years and the engineers saying 'hey it was a good run'.
They certainly lost money on me. I bought 20 7200.12 drives last year, 19 of them failed immediately and 3 of the replacements failed too. I've gone a couple of months now without a drive failure, fingers crossed. I REALLY don't trust the one remaining original, but it refuses to die.
Really it's UPS that is the big winner here. They must be making millions from Seagate's mistakes.
Meanwhile the ancient 10K SCSI drives in my servers continue to run year after year without fail.
I am a very happy VMware Workstation customer. I don't even remember why I bought it. It doesn't matter, I find new uses for it every day. I can try out that new Linux distribution without messing with hardware. I can run apps requiring RHEL 4 on my computer. I can emulate a server and its clients. I can connect the network port on a virtual machine to a physical ethernet card and test new hardware without setting up a separate network. I could go on and on. All this and no bugs! 100% of the software cost on my Linux machine went to VMware. This is a company with a bright future.
to make your site accessible. As is pointed out above, it goes hand-in-hand with better compatibility and better searching. A proper web site works well with Firefox, lynx, and IE with JAWS (the blind person's only real choice at this point).
If you are looking for info about this, a great place to start is the w3c. They are very involved with the folks who make screen readers, and the browser developers who touch this functionality.
If you are blind, and you have had good web-surfing experience with anything besides IE and JAWS, please speak up! My blind friend is really sick of Windows, but nothing else seems to work. Gnome/Linux and OSX are getting close, but there are still daunting issues.
This is a GUI patent. The GUI stuff in Linux is not Linux-specific; it also appears in other OS's like BSD and Solaris. This lawsuit threatens a lot more than just RedHat. Expect RedHat to collect some high-powered friends to counter this.
This patent is also particularly weak. it's very old, unenforced so far, and apparently there is a lot of prior art.
I bet this is the trial balloon to see how people are going to respond. Microsoft is too chickenshit to file any lawsuits itself, it will use proxies to avoid bad press and blowback.
This kain preacher is something else, must have been doing some serious drinking. Vonage was easy picking, they are young, flush with IPO cash for the taking, and don't have a big patent portfolio to fight back with. Obviously the big plan for the telecoms is to go after the easiest victim to establish legal precedent, then go after the others.
Dude, I would worry about my job if I were you.
Who needs to look at source code? If the documentation is proper, there is literally no need. Of course, Microsoft cannot write proper documentation.
Microsoft is not doing anything new here. The MFC source code has been available for years and years under similar conditions.
My definition of open source is that I can take the source, mess with it, share it with others, and they can do the same. Please explain what is unreasonable about this definition.
Yeah, just try to do something interesting with their source. You will get smacked down so hard you won't even know what hit you.
If you even look at it, you are poison and you can't work on Free Software any more. Microsoft will do like SCO and sue your ass for stealing their ideas. Except you aren't IBM and you can't hire the nazgul.
Typical results for yet another Microsoft math bug:
- they have a large hole in their QA testing
- leaves many users scratching their heads until they figure it out
- world + dog writes their regression test for them
- they make a quick fix without addressing the systemic problem of not doing proper math testing
- they have been making mistakes just like this one for years and you'd think by now that they'd actually test the math in their products.
6.111 will get under your skin and haunt you every minute until your final project is signed off. Every significant object in your life has a proto board stuck to it. You sniff frantically for burning plastic every time you turn on a power switch. But when in Rome, you must do as the Romans do.
Buy a used laptop. Heck, you can buy a big pile of used laptops for the price of a new one. Look them over carefully and avoid ones with dents or cracks. Make sure they boot up, make sure there are no burning smells.
Used machines are burned in, if they are still alive, they will probably continue to live. Upgrade the RAM and the hard disk.
Three year old laptops can be had for $300. They have Pentium-4 M processors and are not that much slower than new ones. Keep the original hard disk with its copy of Windows in case you need to upgrade the BIOS or the like, and install Linux on the new drive. Linux on a three year old machine feels as fast as Windows on a new machine.
You can't run the latest 3-D stuff on it, but those fancy GPUs chew up batteries like mad, and run much better on a desktop anyway. You didn't need it three years ago, you don't need it now.
Apple software is nice, but their hardware is problematic. Not worth the trouble.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
