Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
> 
> sigh.

Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?
> 
> Linux is cheap but doesn't run Windows software or ports of major 
> popular commercial software like Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft 
> without Wine and crashes.

And this is why MS is a monopoly. Because they maintained backwards 
compatibility.

> The issue is that any word processor coming by should handle doc format 
> perfectly -- no matter how good it is at an open format like ODF -- 
> because that's what people send you and expect from you. 

MS made their money entirely on compatibility. Even MS-DOS was 
kinda-sorta-compatible with CP/M originally.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> It's not Linux's fault that they don't run.

I'm not really sure why people worry about "fault" when discussing such 
things. It doesn't run on Linux. Linux doesn't run them. What does 
"fault" have to do with your purchasing decision if you want to run 
those programs?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to
>> interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB
>> driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days
>> of trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.

What driver? What kernel does the system have?

I'm being curious. Yes, it can be a buggy driver. OTOH, USB is pretty
standardized system and AFAIK there hasn't been a lot of changes is USB
host systems, so I think I should have heard of such a problem, but I
never have.

> I understand that Linux just install everything automatically.  

Certain distributions install 'bout everything automatically. Yes, they
are the distributions normally hinted to people to be tried as "first
distribution", but I still don't think it should be generalized to be a
*Linux* -feature.

> Under
> Windows, you install the basic OS and then go on manually inserting
> driver CDs or downloading them and installing for yourself, with any
> luck.  There are pros and cons for each method.

Nope, you install NIC drivers and download the rest from the Internet ;).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Warp wrote:
>   You simply refuse to let go of the old myth, don't you?

They got a lot cheaper after they stared using more commodity hardware. 
I think my next machine is going to be one of the maxed-out 64-bit Macs.

It's funny - I go into the Apple stores around here and ask to see their 
64-bit machines, and the salesmen look at me like I have three heads or 
something. You'd think someone selling something even as user-friendly 
as Macs would know what that expression means.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Warp wrote:
>   It's really scary that one company can have this kind of power.

indeed.  makes everyone blind and willing to defend and champion M$ from 
any criticism.

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> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>>> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
>>
>> sigh.
> 
> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P
> 

I live in South America (Argentina). I have probably been to Walmart 
*once*, since it's not exactly the most popular store (heck maybe 
there's only one Walmart in the whole country). But I know what it is...

Wikipedia says: "In North America, Wal-Mart's primary competition 
includes department stores like Kmart, Target, ShopKo, Meijer, and 
Canada's Zellers, Winners, and Giant Tiger." I have never heard *any* of 
those.

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"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b2038c$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Right. So is it that cursors are inherantly evil? Or just that people
> tend to misuse them to do row-based processing when they could and
> should do set-based?

In order, no, yes.

They have their place. I often use them for mainenance stuff (run through
all the user databases on the server and do a consistency check on each)
It's when people use cursors for things that are better set based (run
through all rows in the table and update one column of each) that there's a
problem.

> I was under the vague impression that a cursor is a thing that allows
> you to, say, show 1 page of results, and then fetch the next page a bit
> later...

Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 
>> Right. And the fact that the design of Unix is overly complex and 
>> incorporates several decades of backwards compatibility is unrelated? ;-)
> 
>   It's not like Windows is any better in that regard.

Hey come on, everything simply straight in the registry, so how hard can
it be?

Oh, wait...

>   At least Apple dares to break backwards compatibility with ancient
> software and architectures. It hasn't slowed them down much.

Yes. But one reason for that is that Apple was almost dying some years
ago and the userbase was *small*, so breaking backward compatibility
didn't piss of a lot of users (it couldn't, 'cause there wasn't).

Vista's getting a lot of angry comments now and it hasn't got it's
footprint out (yet). If MS broke backward compatibility totally now, how
would you think Vista would be selling?

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Gail Shaw escribió:
> Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
> implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
> 

Like the LIMIT clause?

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