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How did the man die, anyway?

Above, and on ZDNet say he died due to a digestive tract virus that lead to a high fever and other complications.

RIP

Actually I will. His reporting improved significantly from his early blogging days, so much so that I often did not notice that the story submitted here on Slashdot was from Roland unless the "oh no its Roland" tag appeared. I think this became more of a good natured ribbing rather than slighting him personally. I also subscribed to the nascent "oh yeah it's Roland" tag movement a couple of months back. Now that he is gone, I really do miss him. Rest in peace, friend.

Here is more details about his death, which appears to be a fast moving gastrointestinal virus.

Oh, no, Roland is no more...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1138

It is with great sadness to tell you that our Emerging Technologies blogger Roland Piquepaille has passed away suddenly. His wife Suzanne just confirmed his passing.

Roland, 62, was one of our most passionate bloggers and his ability to explain complex science well was something to behold. Roland spent most of his career in software, mainly for high performance computing and visualization companies, working for example for Cray Research and Silicon Graphics. He left the corporate world in 2001 after 33 years and jumped into blogging.

Roland passed away Monday in Paris. He was hit with a digestive virus that lead to a high fever and health complications beyond that. Suzanne said that the doctors are still trying to quantify how Roland got the virus and the exact details. We spent the last few hours confirming Roland's passing as word began to spread. It has been a rough year for the ZDNet family.

There will be a ceremony held on Monday. Rest in peace Roland, we'll miss you. Suzanne said that Roland had a few posts in the pipeline and wanted them published. If she is able to pull them from Roland's PC we'll put them on his blog to complete his record.

This is new? Many DLP TVs support this even though not many probably care (I have one and I don't).

It took over 20 years to come out with what looks like the same technology as the Sega Master System's 3D Glasses?

I also think I saw Captain EO with the same glasses back when Michael Jackson was loved by most.

here . Read the other parts and articles at the bottom of the article too.

Nah, Vista is selling better than XP was: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=352

A 200$ netbook is coming soon and it will run Ubuntu.

And yeah, 200$ not 400$ via "buy two donate one".

But he could have benchmarked Vista and XP, then given an above/below rating for Windows 7.

And in fact, he HAS performed that test in the past and come to the conclusion that XP outperformed Vista.

The fact that his results are reversed this time must throw serious doubt on his credibility.

So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there's only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw.

Beyond that, I have yet to see any conclusive benchmarks posted by the defenders of Vista on this thread showing any proof that Vista is faster than XP, just empty assertions. What I do see is a bunch of Microsoft fanboys comforting themselves that their favorite brand released an OS that has turned out to be a flop.

Let me qualify my positions here though. I have Vista installed on an old hard drive on a brand new PC -- my own conclusion is that Vista is not as bad as everyone makes out, but you all need to stop pretending that Vista is fast. It isn't. It's not terribly slow on nice hardware, and it looks very nice and it has some nice features, e.g., the DX10 features on new games, but it's not fast.

Here's the exact wording from the Windows 7 EULA:

"You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=624

That kind of says the exact opposite of what you wrote. Hmmph.

No, those points were from a ZDNET article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=420

What he mean is that the main reason for windows domination is piracy, please scroll down a little bit further.

And no, I won't get into 'even my mother can use Ubuntu' argument (though both my parent can use linux just fine)

My mistake.

Compressed air is another means of storing wind energy that is getting looked at again. The CAES schemes need large geological structures such as salt mines or depleted gas fields, but there are quite a lot of viable structures in places like Texas and Ontario where there is also interest in wind energy. It is not economical on a small scale since a large part of the compression cost is independent of the reservoir size.

According to the US Department of Energy "nearly two-thirds of the natural gas in a conventional power plant is consumed by a typical natural gas turbine because the gas is used to drive the machine's compressor. In contrast, a compressed-air storage plant uses low-cost heated compressed air to power the turbines and create off-peak electricity, conserving some natural gas."

In the last 20 years only two facilities have ever been built - a 110-megawatt plant in Alabama and a 290-megawatt plant in Germany. Iowa is building a new plant "expected to cost $200 million and operate by 2011 with the capacity to store 200 megawatts of power, enough for several days. Both the Iowa and Alabama installations can draw air to make power within 15 minutes and make a gas turbine roughly 40 percent more efficient. "

http://www.eere.energy.gov/de/compressed_air.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081224-full-of-powerful-wind-bury-it-in-the-ground-for-later.html
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/553702
http://www.isepa.com/index.asp Iowa Stored Energy Park
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-178929.html

I'm guessing from the "Ultimate" legend on many of the screenshots, the pricing structure hasn't changed. We can expect to wade through at least 3 differing releases with various capabilities turned on and off, while "Ultimate" is dangled over our heads for over $300.

Windows also can't seem to shake the Windows 2000/95 desktop style. The style in XP seems like a thin skin painted over this 13-year-old design (read: hack). But I thought Vista offered a complete redesign of the display infrastructure. Instead, Vista surprised me that if you don't like Aero's color choices and over-sized widgets, you're only choice is to downgrade to the old Windows 2000 look, which is apparently still around for the ride. My guess is Windows 7 is the same?

I'm guessing from the "Ultimate" legend on many of the screenshots, the pricing structure hasn't changed. We can expect to wade through at least 3 differing releases with various capabilities turned on and off, while "Ultimate" is dangled over our heads for over $300.

Windows also can't seem to shake the Windows 2000/95 desktop style. The style in XP seems like a thin skin painted over this 13-year-old design (read: hack). But I thought Vista offered a complete redesign of the display infrastructure. Instead, Vista surprised me that if you don't like Aero's color choices and over-sized widgets, you're only choice is to downgrade to the old Windows 2000 look, which is apparently still around for the ride. My guess is Windows 7 is the same?

I'm guessing from the "Ultimate" legend on many of the screenshots, the pricing structure hasn't changed. We can expect to wade through at least 3 differing releases with various capabilities turned on and off, while "Ultimate" is dangled over our heads for over $300.

Windows also can't seem to shake the Windows 2000/95 desktop style. The style in XP seems like a thin skin painted over this 13-year-old design (read: hack). But I thought Vista offered a complete redesign of the display infrastructure. Instead, Vista surprised me that if you don't like Aero's color choices and over-sized widgets, you're only choice is to downgrade to the old Windows 2000 look, which is apparently still around for the ride. My guess is Windows 7 is the same?

If you read the rest of the sentence, they're referring to no new features since the M3 builds and the pre-beta from PDC. Also, that's based on the guy's limited playing around with the build. If you want to see the full review with a list-out of new features you can see it here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3223

The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.

It also looks suspiciously like Mac OS X's Dock. Hmm, single icon per application, where I have I seen that before?...

For further confirmation that this is Window's take on the Dock, take a peek at this screenshot. Hmm, "Unpin this program from the taskbar"... Seems a bit like dragging the application onto the Dock, thereby "pinning" it. (Although at least Window 7's little "launched border" is easier to see than the glowing dot on the Dock.)

Of course, I'd have to use it to see if it actually works. Mac OS X's Dock works the way it does due to the way Mac handles applications - each application gets a single instance and has a single menu bar but can have multiple windows. Windows does it differently - each window is essentially its own application. So directly ripping off the Dock probably won't work.

Still, it's nice to see that Microsoft's stance on innovation hasn't changed. :)

Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images.

I don't - Slashdot seems to have found a way to load ads via Web 2.0 in the new discussion view; I'm sure ZDnet and their advertisers can come up with a way to rotate ads using Web 2.0 techniques...

Here's a performance comparison. Seven beats XP in each of the tests: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3187

Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.

There was one set of benchmarks that showed no improvement: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_1.html/. There was another set of benchmarks done on a later build that showed improvements: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3182&page=1/.

As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?

Cynicism, conspiracy and an ad hominem attacks all in one. You're going all the way to +5 insightful!

The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.

It also looks like Aero wasn't turned on for these screen shots. Probably a driver thing. Vista without the glass doesn't look nearly as good.

I think like Vista, this version will be a lot of little things that improve the OS not huge ones. Then you'll go back from Windows 7 to Vista and go "jeez... how did I live without this Windows 7 feature" just like when you go back to XP and get pissed how crappy the taskbar is, how "in your face" the windows were, how crappy the file dialogs were, how crappy taskman.exe was, or how generally insecure the default setup was. Vista is a huge improvement over XP but it is hard to describe what improved. Just a lot of little annoyances are gone or smoothed out. Windows 7 will probably be the same.

And can I rant for a second? Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images. But like I said, I know why they do require a page-load.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=175

Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access.

Please explain to me how, *exactly*, malware can execute and then control the system in user mode in OSX or Linux.

Until you accept the incontrovertible fact, as they are, out there for all to see, that UAC IS NOT sudo.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=175

Here's just one of many salient quotes "Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access."

Sadly, I'm modded troll for decimating the perception of security in Vista when it's out there for all to see.

At the moment there is no evidence of openness that I can find.

you either didn't look very hard or don't have much in the way of researching skills.

http://www.roku.com/community/gpl_nfp.php

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2932

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/30/1645200&from=rss

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10050649-93.html

http://hackaday.com/2008/07/02/netflix-player-source-code-released/

http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=17046&highlight=&sid=1bea026fdae6ddaace484e70273f2d0d

I'm not saying much has become of it, but Roku has already released all GPL code and is hosting forums for their users where they allow talk about hacking it at least. They publicly state their intentions to allow any content provider to use their box to distribute content, and mention the release of a software development kit to help people do that.

I don't know if you are claiming there is no evidence of "open" as in FOSS or "open" as in allowing other companies to use the platform, but there seems to be plenty of evidence of both.

Explain to me how the Aero GUI becomes a load on the GPU when you are running Crysis full screen and with F/X cranked up to the max --- which is, after all, the reason why you lay out the big bucks for a high performance gaming system.

How Do I ... tweak Vista indexing options for better performance [Dec 15, 2008]
The Great Vista/Mac Showdown: Goodbye, WinRot [Feb 21, 2007]

There were a bunch of articles a few months ago about the same sort of thing:

Like this one which includes a link to a paper from 2005 with the same idea.

There's an interesting ZDNet article on the cable intercept submarines. I think it was actually on Slashdot years ago..ah yes, here we go.

Here they are, are these based on these "new ideas" from this scientist and if not who got there first? http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1030

That worked out real well for them huh?

The point is you said users couldn't be sued and I showed a recent and relevant counter-example. No doubt SCO and Chrysler spent considerable money dealing with these nuisance suits. So we can settle the point that users can't be sued for using patented software, right?

You are so completely clueless

First the rapture thing and then this? Do you know how to engage in civil debate?

Not providing a patented capability would weaken the interoperability, but it would still provide the free software / open source software community with good development tools, which is the primary reason for developing Mono.

OK, right... are you stating with certainty that Mono implements nothing that Microsoft claims patent rights on? Because Microsoft hasn't disclosed their patent concerns and has signed a deal with Novell to specifically indemnify Novell's customers against their lawsuits. Why would they do that if it were valueless?

GNOME GTK applications don't use Windows.Forms or other microsoft technologies. The .NET libraries are there for compatiblity if needed but none of the GNOME applications use them. They all use libraries created specifically for GNOME, which are NOT provided by Microsoft.

GNOME has a stated policy of not using any non-ECMA libraries in their development? That would be welcome news but I haven't seen it announced.

Ballmer was referring to his "Linux violates 235 patents" bullshit which includes the Linux kernel and OpenOffice specifically (no mention of Mono)

Um, no, there are at least 83 alleged undisclosed violations in OSS that's not Linux or OpenOffice.

By your logic we should all just stop using Linux and OpenOffice.

Nope, those are independently developed works. The patent case is considerably harder to prosecute than a re-implementation. Samba is in roughly the same boat, except they're probably grandfathered under the DOJ terms.

What is so stupid about your argument is that C# is specifically licensed royalty free, while most of the claimed patent infringements in the Linux kernel and OpenOffice are not.

Yes, C#, but not the .NET libraries. If you have information that .NET is licensed under a royalty-free Open Source-style license (ala CDDL or GPL3) then please post a cite.

This is especially strange news in light of an article from zdnet, http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2304, saying that firefox is the top bad example from a list of 12 programs with the worst security record. More interestingly, they don't even mention Internet Explorer as having bad security problems, despite news like this. Does Microsoft just pay journalists to write things like this on the day before they know they have bad news to release in hopes that people won't notice their security problems?

No, I am not just making things up.

I don't know why I was marked a troll. I keep trying Vista as the updates come out and it still seems slower than XP for all the stuff I do.

And my original point still stands. The benchmarks from the referenced article compare real world of the initial release of Vista with the current performance including updates (at least to SP1). In the "PCMark" test, which attempts to replicate common usage, the original release of Vista performs better than the SP1 version, by 45 points.

You posted some benchmarks about gaming performance. I guess that's one place a lot of people use Windows, since most recent popular computer games won't run on anything else. But if you use a computer for what most people use it for (photos, video, music, communication, productivity, etc.), the overall performance is worse.

I guess I'm a troll for pointing out the truth.

i don't know about CUDA, but when Microsoft discusses the number of "processors" a single instance of their OS supports they are generally referring to logical processors, which they define as:
# of physical processors * # of cores * # of threads

that's why Microsoft claims Windows 7 will scale up to 256 processors. in reality that's 64 physical processors * 2 cores * 2 threads, or 32 physical processors * 4 cores * 2 threads, etc.

Actually, it looks like it's a "talkback" post in reply to this, which is a reply to this gem. Classic stuff.

Actually, it looks like it's a "talkback" post in reply to this, which is a reply to this gem. Classic stuff.

This page contains all the test results (including XP test) instead of spreading it to 6 pages. It does not have the specification of the system used or a brief description of each test though.

This additional test by the same guy shows that it performs better than XP.

Don't you know that Linux runs on top of Windows? Someone mentioned it yesterday. It should be easy to install!

(ok... are you for real? OpenOffice HAS a Powerpoint replacement)

Her student's passing out software that to her mind must inherently include stolen Windows code

That sounds like JerryLeeCooper of ZDNet Talkback fame. :)

How about linking to the actual article instead of Digg?

Itâ(TM)s not a genetic algorithm. It's a stochastic hill-climber.

No recombination is done, the population size is one, so the genotype-phenotype mapping is not really important. Nor was step 0 carried out.

Looking at the number of steps it did take to produce that drawing, the convergence speed is not very impressive.

In short, it's the Mono Guard trying to sucker gullible Slashdot visitors into nailing their own nuts to a brick

In short, MS is hiring new advertising firms to try to gain a toehold in Java's market.

I keep pointing out that Apple didn't file against Psystar until the pro-EULA decision in the WoW Glider case came through.

Too bad you are wrong then. Yes, the news of Apple's suit came out on July 15th, a day after the Glider decision. However Apple filed its suit on July 3

Perhaps the biggest drawback of the algorithm, and the one that has caused many Vista users to complain, is that for copies involving a large group of files between 256KB and tens of MB in size, the perceived performance of the copy can be significantly worse than on Windows XP. That's because the previous algorithm's use of cached file I/O lets Explorer finish writing destination files to memory and dismiss the copy dialog long before the Cache Manager's write-behind thread has actually committed the data to disk; with Vista's non-cached implementation, Explorer is forced to wait for each write operation to complete before issuing more, and ultimately for all copied data to be on disk before indicating a copy's completion. In Vista, Explorer also waits 12 seconds before making an estimate of the copy's duration and the estimation algorithm is sensitive to fluctuations in the copy speed, both of which exacerbate user frustration with slower copies.

Levi has made over 3.5 billion pairs of jeans, here is what I am basing that on. And since MSFT claims that 100 million copies of Vista sold I wouldn't be surprised that if you added up all the sales of Windows, from 1.0 to Vista, you would reach over 1 billion. After all look at how many years the 3 year upgrade cycle held up.

What good does FOSS adoption mean if there's no money exchanging hands? If a provider of software can't take a huge profit, then no one (outside of technology enthusiasts) really cares. Having 1m downloads and zero revenue gives you bragging rights and a large bandwidth bill -- you're not going to be driving the economy or paying for your kids' college education on that basis.

RedHat on the other hand, shows you can make a viable, profitable, large business on FOSS -- it is possible. Just not common.

The point is that, if you don't have a business model, you don't have a software industry -- you might have software being supported by other industries, but there still is a very sizeable sector of our economy that just. makes.... software. And wants you to pay for it, and would prefer to prevent you from using it if you don't.

By one (flawed) measure, such software made $450 billion in 2007, though that doesn't measure the whole industry, and it conflates services & hardware revenues at times. So let's go pessimistic, split the difference and say commercial software is around $250 billion in annual global revenue.

Open source revenues were 1.8 billion in 2006, and I would guestimate probably were $2.3 billion in 2007 given IDC's growth projection of 26% compounded.

In other words, open source revenues currently account for around 1% of the software industry's revenues. At a very optimistic growth rate, in 5 years, they'll be somewhere between 3 and 5%, mostly through growing at a faster rate (26% vs. 14%), though it's not clear how the recession will impact either number (you can be guaranteed some FOSS companies will go bankrupt or get bought ; though FOSS demand may increase to lower prices).

In any case, given these numbers, would you really bet on FOSS as a better *business* model? Certainly it's got nowhere to go but up, so it's growing. And yes, free/cheap is a good selling point. But it has a long, long way to go before you honestly can say it's going to draw investors, talented employees, etc., that all want to make a lot of money for their futures.

Office costs $400ish retail.
A MacBook costs retail.

If Microsoft sells 70 million copies of office and it costs $5 (that's high) to package and ship and $700 million to produce (that also likely high), then they are spending $15 per package (making $385), which gives them a 96% profit margin. Apple would need a 65% profit margin to match that, and even though they do probably have a relatively high profit margin, that's ridiculous for a hardware company.

I'm sorry, but Peter Gutmann is not a reputable source for accurate information on Vista graphics, or anything related to Vista at all. Several of his claims have been widely proven to be exaggerated or downright false, and when asked to provide proof, he has refused. His claims have been picked apart on numerous sites both directly and indirectly through the sourcing of benchmarks.

I suggest you read these articles for instance, which provide a good overview:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=718

Some of his points are admittedly valid, there are genuine flaws in the new graphics driver device spec., but he's clearly most concerned with pushing an anti-Vista agenda, even if that requires resorting to FUD.

Choose your "experts" carefully.

I'm sorry, but Peter Gutmann is not a reputable source for accurate information on Vista graphics, or anything related to Vista at all. Several of his claims have been widely proven to be exaggerated or downright false, and when asked to provide proof, he has refused. His claims have been picked apart on numerous sites both directly and indirectly through the sourcing of benchmarks.

I suggest you read these articles for instance, which provide a good overview:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=718

Some of his points are admittedly valid, there are genuine flaws in the new graphics driver device spec., but he's clearly most concerned with pushing an anti-Vista agenda, even if that requires resorting to FUD.

Choose your "experts" carefully.

You also should read a story published 4 days ago about this camera by ZDNet. Here is a link to this article, which contains several pictures not included in the Technology Review article.

Nesson argues that the [act] is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group . . . carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. Source.

So why is it a criminal law rather than a civil law if it provides for 3rd party, rather than government enforcement?

Nesson charges that the federal law is essentially a criminal statute in that it seeks to punish violators with minimum statutory penalties far in excess of actual damages. Source.

So he's arguing that steep penalties convert civil law into criminal law based on the 5th and 8th Amendments. The 8th amendment argument will be based around excessive fines. Maybe a judge will look at the piracy "loss" figures, and realize they're garbage and buy the argument.

Converting the statute into a criminal one will trigger the 5th amendment to ensure due process - meaning substantive rights for accused infringers. That'd be things like public defenders, a heavier burden of proof on the prosecution, and some other goodies. All of which are good.

Perhaps it'll work. He is a brilliant law professor. Maybe he'll get an appellate court, or maybe even SCOTUS to go along with it. So lets say he wins and SCOTUS overturns the statutory damage statute. What will be the remedy congress comes up with?

If Congress wants to do anything (and the lobbyists will make sure they do), Congress has two choices. Either reduce the fines to return to civil law OR put in place federal enforcement of copyright infringement. Any guesses which way congress will go? I've got one. Free federal enforcement for the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and others - this time with all the power of the federal government.

Yuck. Lets just hope federal prosecutors don't think charging a pimply faced youth with copying Star Wars is worth their time.

Didn't take long to find these...

http://davisfreeberg.com/2008/01/03/bad-copp-no-netflix/
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1865
http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-074.htm
http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/vista.pdf