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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...
Am I the only one who can't open the first link in a new tab in Firefox? It wants me to open it with "FirefoxHTML", which opens it in the current tab.
Who wants to waste all that power running virus software? I don't get it.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I am a linux fan, but I am not so blinded to know that over the last couple of years, Mac OS X has been the only operating system that has been getting consistently faster for general workstation usage. So I'd say if you really want extra performance that you can use, and won't get wasted by bloat, wait until a Macintosh is released with a dual-core processor.
Winamp, Seti@home, Einstein@home, Folding@home, NFSNET... you get the picture :)
really, it is that bad.. take a look at some of these power consumption figures for intel's "dual module chip."
3 89
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Insane.. 244watts under full load. Should be interesting to see amd's numbers in this regard.. (which should be out very soon, the release date is the 21st IIRC.) This would be an expensive upgrade if you choose Intel's dual-module chip. You'll need a new motherboard & a pretty hefty power supply.
Yeah, Windows users need the second core to run all that spyware. It'll probably help a lot!
...most of us are quite intentionally using multi-tasking OS's. A new chip comes along that helps that multi-tasking, and people are seeking reasons not to use it?
"Derp de derp."
It's like having a seperate harddrive for all your apps and essentials than all your media. That way the core you are really using can do 100% what you want (ie play games) I don't know enough about the technology to really say for sure, but this seems like it is just a more efficient division of labor, and you could get excellent performance out of it. An another note, though, I can't believe people have that much bloatware that they actually NEED an ENTIRE second core to run it all. I hate modern software. I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.
Good god. More seriously, just seeing people put ideas like that out makes me cringe, not because it's not necessary but because it seems to me that thinking like that will only lead companies like Microsoft to dedicate the second core to nothing but fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. I suppose it's inevitable, though. Programming, especially of the bad, lazy or bloated variety, always seems to expand to fill and tax whatever hardware is available to it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use. The story submitter really needs to get a grip. The article was just trying to make the point that general responsiveness of a dual core system in the face of multiple tasks should be better, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
Seriously, what in the world is this article about?
Amazing revelation: dual core processors can do two things at the same time?! You must be kidding me. Any properly threaded application can take advantage of dual cores--there's no need to dream up scenarios where someone could be *gasp* doing multiple things at once.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy.
But Windows really does have truly horrific levels of fug (in the Pratchettian sense of 'air so full of toxic waste you can cut it with a knife') in it.
What's worse, though, is the people who think that kind of fug is inevitable and somehow desirable, and don't believe that other systems are less messed up.
I can't imagine that spyware detection software is very CPU intensive, it seems like it would be more HD intensive. Maybe you would be better off partitioning a second drive, "Spyware," and hope that BonziBuddy is nice enough to stay on his half. Just a thought.
I don't do PC's anymore outside of work where we have everyone clamped down pretty tight so I had kind of lost touch with how bad it really was out there. Last week I had one of my users bring in his PC that was locking up on him and doing the usual "strange stuff" that users talk about. I really never did get around to trying to fix anything though.
I sat in awe as the thing, with no programs open and nobody touching it spent most of the day fighting it's own little virus/spyware battle. Between Symantec and the (easily) half a dozen anti-spyware programs he had installed the computer sent a constant stream of pop-up windows coming at me warning me about assorted files and registry keys it thought suspicious and busily scanning it's ass off.
I wondered how he got any work done on the thing with it spending so much in the way of resources on "self defense". This is the answer in Windows world, they're going to eventually sell you a PC that's really two in one with the first one dedicated to just running the OS and all this crap you have to buy to keep from being bent over by the virus writers and the other virus writers who create spyware/adware.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
One Core for me and one Core for all my dead homies.
[i]jesus get a mac[/i]
:).
Or get a router, their like $15 now for a four port ethernet model, and don't install bullshit software and unsigned binaries. Nothing stops viruses, worms and rootkits more effectively than stealthing your ports. And you can still play your videogames
Even though it's an Anon, I agree.
As long as enough people buy it for whatever reason, the price will go down, and that's always a good thing for all of us.
I run XP on a 850 MHz P3, with 384MB of RAM.
It can't run games, but that's not due to excess spyware and crap, but because it's old.
I honestly don't know why someone would want to run anti-spyware, anti-virus software all the time when a tiny bit of awareness about what runs on your system keeps it completely clean, much less buy a dual-core machine just to run the crap on.
But then this is PCMag. I bet they all run IE and Outlook...
Disable Javescript if you're running Firefox, or they will kick you back if you don't take their survey.
No sig for you!!
http://www.getfirefox.com/
If you want to use Wordperfect 5.1, go for it. But I like a word processor to do a little more for me now a days, and that includes all the nifty things OpenOffice and Microsoft Office can do for me.
Maybe you don't write system documentation or work with complicated spreadsheets, but I do, and I welcome the feature rich applications available today.
Stop spreading your FUD. You don't need a 2Ghz machine to run a word processor. A 350Mhz Pentium II will run Open/Microsoft Office just fine, assuming you have enough memory.
But since we HAVE 2Ghz+ machines, everything runs faster. I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
and how often do they have to check every single file on your hard disk??
First of all: there are systems out there that don't even suffer from viruses, as many other posters mentioned.
Secondly: if running a whatever tool in the background on your OS slows down the whole system, you know that your OS's scheduler sucks (especially if your system is 2+ GHz).
Thirdly: isn't it enough to check a file once and be done with it? If every file is checked as it is created or modified (like spotlight-indexing on Mac OS Tiger), then it shouldn't eat much CPU at all.
Slashdot: PR that's lame, stuff to sell.
It's no different performance wise from other SMP P4s, nothing new. No one is excited. Wow! Welcome to the NEW! world of multiprocessors brought to you for the first time! with Intel's NEW! two cores on one die! Wow! Just think about all of the never thought of or done things you can do with TWO! cpus! Gasp! Imagine a beowulf cluster of.. oh, wait.
Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.
Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.
Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
You make a good point. I'd go further, and say that it's stupid to be rendered bewildered by the concept of multiple cores or processors. You're able to run more than one thread simultaneously--that is, in a nutshell, the advantage of such a setup. It's nothing particularly new, or even newsworthy. There's nothing, really, to debate, unless you want to touch on how some developers don't like multi-threading their applications.
This article is essentially proclaiming, Two processors process two things! Pundits debate the value of simultaneous operations!
Windows XP is multi-threaded. Without this it would be much more painful to switch between multiple tasks running on your windows computer.
... "I won't let information get in the way of the fight against terrorism" .. a direct quote of Bush recently while he was trying to place the blame of his bad decisions on the intelligence agencies that he refused to listen to in the first place.
... "in the way of the fight against windows"
When hyper-threading came out, we all found out the benefits of multi-threaded windows with the virtual second CPU. Systems ran much smoother, I found it much easier to get more done at my GIS / CAD / programming job, where I no longer had to wait 10 minutes to switch between a large ACAD file, and a ArcMap application running at the same time.
Dual core turns that virtual second CPU into a real second CPU. The average computer user who multi-tasks constantly, probably without even realizing it will not only feel a much smoother system, but more of his applications will be getting real work done at the same time.
There's a great review and multi tasking test at www.anandtech.com which proves the advantages will be huge.
But, as always, its much more important for slashdot to twist any great new technology into some way to prove windows is the devil.
Me thinks slashdot now runs very much the way george bush runs
Or in slashdot's case
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
hint: web sites should not need instructions.
Since when is dual core so exciting? Dual processor machines do the same thing and they've been around forever...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
A lot of the systems folks that I've been hearing from and things that I've been reading have suggested that, like it or not, multi-core systems are the way of the future. The argument is that the clock-speed aspect of Moore's law has been slowing down for the past couple of years and that we've seen single processors that are as fast as they'll go with current chip design and fabrication technology. (Barring fundamental breakthroughs, of course.) Hence parallelism and multi-core systems.
I think the point is that it's not really a choice between clock speed and parallelism. You may still have a choice at the moment, but don't expect that to continue. Developers will have to start learning to deal with parallelism if they don't want to fall off the performance curve. I expect we'll start seeing methods, tools, languages and libraries to help developers manage it easily while avoid the common dangers of deadlock and inconsistency. There's some interesting research in the area and we may start seeing some of that find its way into production systems. And of course once developers start adopting parallelism, consumers will in turn begin to see the benefits of it.
In some ways its an obvious message if you look at supercomputers. No one's running serial code on petahertz machines! They're all just systems with large numbers of fairly pedestrian processors with custom fast, low-latency interconnects. As always, this is just the natural trickling down of that to the desktop level.
>> Or get a router
You can buy a router, and it is a really good idea, but most users will still click "yes" on whatever dialogue pops up on the screen. Your average user doesn't know what a "binary" is...
It might I think if you did devote a second core purely to spyware/virus/babysitting it would only reduce the problem but not remove it.
smarter PC usage is the answer, not more hardware...
http://request-header.info
I agree totaly, there is nothing new here. We've had motherboards with multiple CPUs for years. The fact that the two CPUs are on the same chip doesn't change much from the OS's or user's points of view.
l/2
Truly challenging Sudoku puzzles
Does a quad-core with hyper-threading constitute a beowulf cluster?
Dual cores don't add anything here. It's just what we've all seen from SMP machines for 10-15 or more years (depending on how lucky / needy we were).
If Antivirus is a single thread, then yes, the GUI can run all it wants on the other processor and maybe kick a few threads over to the Antivirus one. Now, if you have anti-spyware, anti-virus and a firewall all running, I think we can assume that they're each at least one thread. This means that they can, hypothetically, keep their own cores busy. Actually, none of them needs the power of a full core to itself, but I digress. Yes, dual cores will allow background threads (be they antivirus or what have you) to be relegated to a slave processor while another remains responsive to the GUI. It's silly to dedicate such a background task to a core and keep everything else off of it. Even if each task is mutithreaded, having multiple cores (be they multi-core die or multiple processors) means that the likelihood goes up that there's a slot for the thread on one of them.
What I'd like to see is better control of hard drive scheduling. Anti-virus is the least important thing my computer can be doing, but it's important. I want it to have the least priority on the hard drive. I want my OS to only read a file for scanning when it's the most important thing going on, but the hard drive scheduler on every OS I've used is unable to tell the difference between inefficient cache-thrashing anti-virus and my primary tasks that need to remain responsive and/or get more I/O attention.
I saw some news about Linux doing some work on drive schedule control, and then it kinda died. I've had several people tell me that drive scheduling is unimportant because you always want response from the programs you're running, but while that's true, each one may have a different level of importance.
What about gaming applications with both cores? Couldn't this allow things like more intense physics engines to run on the second core?
Anyone who thinks Dell sells Hotrod machines really needs to get an education.
...in a handbasket. Idiots abound in today's development communities. If they are given more power, they get lazier and use it all to do exactly the same thing it did before, but with a few new, shiny tailfins. I still ask the same question every time a new OS or new hardware comes out: Why can't I turn my computer on and off like a TV? We should "be there" by now! No... should have BEEN there eight years ago!! It still takes a modern Windows XP Pro box as much time as it took my floppy based Atari ST to boot of off of a single sided 3.5 inch diskette!
I want to see a system with all the functionality of a typical desktop environment (XPee, GNOME, KDE, Mac OS X) boot and run (ie. put you at a desktop with all apps running) in less than a second. The only way I've been able to approximate this is with my "terminal server" RedHat Linux box running GNOME, VNC and SSH. The terminal server never shuts down or turns off. My laptops act like thin clients. I just click an icon and BAM!!! I'm at my desktop with all apps running in less than a second. But this is NOT the awy it should be done. I shouldn't have to have a machine that is on 24x7 to do this. I should just hit the power button and just start working. I should also conversely be able to hit the power button and know that everything is off and exactly the way I left it awaiting my return for the next session. And no... turning my monitor off and leaving the computer on 24x7 is not the answer either!
The dual cores, should be used completely for tasks that the use wants to use them for. If anything, I think we'd be better of if the Windows jockeys just got add-on DSP cards that handled firewalling, anti-virus and other security hole patching that Windows requires. Fortunately I know nothing about this as I am a fiarly content Linux user. The very idea that someone would suggest using the second core for running software that is there to fix the mistakes of others is just more proof that the software industry doesn't care about quality in the least. Just profit. Only profit. If you want quality, go GNU. That's all I have to say.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...is the fact that XP Home is deliberately crippled so that it only supports one CPU / core. So if you try using XP Home on a dual-core CPU, you'll see worse performance than on a high-end single-core CPU.
XP Pro is limited to two CPUs / cores; however, the $100 price difference will make most customers buy the cheaper Home edition. (I'm talking about the type of people who actually buy pre-made computers in the store, not those who build computers themselves and can thus get the software for less.)
You could have been running 2 CPU's ever since a loooooonng time ago. This isn't bringing any new relief to those "poor suffering multi task constantly" fellows.
If this is relief and new to you, you need to be hit over the head with a clue stick.
Look, I fully agree that it's ridiculous to have such a huge requirement on processing power. But shouldn't we be analyzing whether this is an effective solution to a pre-existing problem? No good operating system should need that much anti-spyware/virus protection all the time, but if using a dual-core processor in such a way speeds up operations versus the status-quo, isn't it still a good thing.
Thank God for evolution.
I'm running Firefox 1.0.2 on FreeBSD and I get asked if I want to download an .html file. I've seen this before on a couple of occasions with Firefox - even on Windows. Their Apache is misconfigured.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
He probably has 25+ pieces of unnessesary crap running at startup.
Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?
The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Konqueror will load it
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The problem here is that anti-virus/spyware software isn't whats slowing the computer down so much. Those things mainly check a program once - when it's first launched, now while it's running. Basically this means your wasting a measly 2 clock cycles while they process something that looks like this:
while(no_new_program){}
Instead, the problem lies more in them sitting there, wasting RAM. Remember - programs that aren't in use aren't using the CPU. (for the most part - technically they do use some, but not enough to warrant a dual processor)
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
At $4k for the dell dual-core...it would be cheaper to buy two entire single-core computers. Play games on one computer while the other computer scans for viruses. Then switch seats to the second computer and play games while the first runs AV. Or use a KVM switch and don't even bother switching seats.
Good idea. Wrong price point.
Oh boy. Running housekeeping chores such as DRM, AV, a-spyware, ad nauseum has been one of the reported benefits of the cell processor as well. Oh boy dynamic DRM, just what I bought that shiny new processor for, lol.
But...each gig-E nic consumes the equivilent of a 1Ghz P3 processor, and a stateful inspection software firewall consumes another. So maybe there is a use after all.
Ironically, for most users the 2nd core will be throttled off to save power 90% of the time because most general purpose computing doesn't even sweat todays processors.
There is really nothing new in this post. It's not just not newsworthy, it's not NEWS. I mean, if posted in the form of a question (Ask Slashdot), maybe, but this? And on the front page?
I'm sure some mods will find this as flamebait but I'm posting as me because I don't need to hide.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
maybe it's just me, but I like having gaim start up when I login.
Seriously, why would you want to force one core to be occupied with certain application(s)?
It is the operating systems job to decide how to perform its concurrency (which Windows XP is reasonably good at), not the user.
The OS is the only part of the system which can ensure you make the most of both cores.
If you want to make sure an application is "lag free", give it a higher priority and let the OS do its job.
While RTFA, it looked like the pcmag article was going to be filled with content (based on the size of the draggy thing in the vertical scrollbar). Turns out that more than 75% of the page was filled with ads, top, right and bottom.
check pricewatch. Old dual p4 xeon mbs start at $95; newer ones $150-300; and they include built in u160 or 320 controllers. 3.2GHz p4's aren't prohibitably expensive so bascially a dual setup has been dooable for a long time. So why havn't people done so? Probably because they thought it was too expensive and didn't bother to check. So are two cores in one package exciting, new, and bringing new options/features? Only for the brain dead(moo/bleeheh) utterly lazy.
"Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders."
For whatever reason this part of the OP just makes it seem like a n00b was writing it. Seriously since when have hardware junkies been itching to buy new hardware from dell? True Hardware junkies would rather build their Uber machine.
smart users is something we don't have
it's easier to fix the hardware than to fix the user
also the user, being a dumb user, will just pay up for the new hardware anyway for the same reason he just couldn't help but click yes to that gator activex dialog to get to his porn faster (not because he can't think, but because he's too lazy too think)
I can't really testify myself, but a couple of friends of mine swear that having two CPUs on a Windows machine (that supports it, of course) makes a night/day difference for the GUI. It makes sense in a way, that those 100% CPU moments will not kill the swiftness of the GUI anymore, but can anyone else confirm it? If this is true, I really hope to see a similar boost with dual core.
Doesn't combining all of the compute-bound processes together onto one processor by definition almost create a bottleneck? Wouldn't it be better to balance your compute- and input-bound processes, so that when the input-bound processes are waiting for input, both processors are working on the compute-bound ones?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering whether this approach wouldn't create more wasted processor cycles than it prevented. However, even if it did that, if the product was a more responsive GUI and interface off of the same hardware, then I might be all for it, wasted cycles or no. (But this may be because I have a personal obsession with responsiveness, and despise any system that has any sort of perceptible lag.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
They have /never/ made a major change in cpu without changing the socket.
Wouldnt it be smarter just to have dynamic load balancing rather than dedicating an entire processor just to running minor, temporary processes? Thats just my take on it, anyway.
Ha! Top this - I just installed Core 3.
What was said was not FUD. FUD is what you try to instill in another's mind if you want to discourage them from choosing a competitor's product or service or point of view, even.
The original comment was about proper, concise coding. That doesn't happen often because programmers typically build upon older legacy code because there's no time, money or organizational will to start from scratch.
"As I've seen over the years, the more CPU(s) you throw at developers (myself included) the more difficult tasts suddenly fall into the realm of 'possible' because you simply couldn't without the extra resources. However... tools which were absolutely hideously slow suddenly look acceptable (where PHB's are concerned) because they're blind to how much faster and requiring less resources something actually developed efficiently could run."
When we all are working with large dataset, and information in new ways. Then we'll need that extra core.
I need one core for everyday stuff, and the other to determine who deserves a UFIA for the annoyance involved in doing everyday stuff.
In fact, Windows XP SP1 with AVG *and* a software firewall ran office and home apps faster on my old C433/256 than Mandrake 9.2 *or* FreeBSD 4.3 with no A/V or firewall. But, since I dare say so on Slashdot, I'm either a liar or a paid Microsoft shill.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
As far as I know, Windows certainly isn't advanced enough to let you chose what programs run on what processor, and I'm pretty sure Linux can't either (well, to some degree with 'nice').
Why do people think dual cores will be any different to dual processors or hyperthreading?
And you're gonna need XP Pro not Home, and multi-threaded applications (not fucking games!)
Personally I think it's all hype, like 64-Bit.
#include <sig.h>
I like to have my servers start up automatically, vsftpd, sshd, apache, etc.
Or do a serious clean up (spywares and all).
It's true that apps will take more juice now (not nearly as bad as he implies) but it is because we are trading cycles for convenience. Developers and users.
Developer's time is worth more than CPU's time.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
The guy in the PC Mag artical is on crack.
"he XPS Gen 5's TV tuners show steady pictures, even when the system is otherwise occupied (when it's also running a virus scan, for example), a benefit that can be directly attributed to the dual-core processor."
Give me a break. I had a P3 that did this just fine with a standard ATI tuner card. AND I could surf the internet at the same time. Wow!
What I want to know is if it is possible to set these
dual cores up to do something like a mainframe,
i.e. run the same load in parallel and compare
results. If they don't match, alert the user and
stop the calculation.
Could be very useful for scientific computing.
So, while one cpu is giving it pedal to the metal, the other is sitting there, predominately idle doing nothing and wasting its cpu cycles. .
Why not just utilise both processors for all the tasks. All they do is get operation - process operation, processors dont care if its a game or anything else.
if you have both processors working as fast as they can to get everything done between them there isnt as much wastage of cpu cycles and you should get more performance out of the game you were playing
That's for the 3.2 xeon 800 fsb. There's also the 3.0 for $260. and $55 for 512MB ecc ddr 3200 sticks.
Yes, a dually is in the dooable range.
I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?
Considering the speed limit on the freeway I take to work every day is 75mph... yes, I do need a car that can go above 65.
Also, running a car at its top speed isn't good for the engine. Running a processor at its top speed doesn't really affect it one way or another.
PCMag welcomes its old Redmond Overlords.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Another sensationalistic mis-representation of a story. OK it's true he no longer posts 1 or 2 dupe stories every day, but Timothy is still a poor editor, I feel Slashdot should get rid of him.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
About time someone said that.
"Almost every hardware junkie I know.."
The author must know some very uninformed hardware junkies. Every hardware junkie I know is looking forward to the AMD64 dual-cores, and none of them are into Dell.
Slashdot is becoming WEAK.
More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...
Using up all resources can be good, for example games will eventually want all of both cores. The second will have extra eye candy. For example extra smoke and dust particles in a racing game. Yes, that example was stolen from a GDC lecture. Here's another GDC example, single core: static sky clouds, dual core: procedurally generated sky, clouds forming and breaking up.
Is this post trolling much? Jesus Christ.
I think programming is going in two different directions simultaneously: using languages that define away most of the programming bugs, and fixing/monitoring of programming bugs.
Worried about using uninitialized pointers? Use a system that automatically initializes them to a safe location and can dump useful information for debugging - or better yet, one that doesn't have pointers.
Worried about data corruption? Use a copy-on-write system throughout, or use one that can at least spot the bug.
Both of these directions require more processor power and more memory. I think most everyone would be more interested in systems that are stable, resilient, and that can provide good information when they aren't than systems that are just faster.
If having a dual-core proc means I could switch over to using garbage collection everywhere but in the kernel, I would be all over that. If having a dual-core proc meant that I could run a model verification of the code in addition to the code itself, thus providing information about when the code is stuffed, I'd be ecstatic. If all this extra memory and proc could be used to always run code with debugging symbols to where a stack dump could be run with good output, it would be great!
If, on the other hand, all that is used to make sure the secretary's klondike program can have extra animation and noises...that doesn't really thrill me.
What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.
The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
Where do I download a 256MB RAM stick patch afterwards?
People bitch about the 20% or so worst case overhead for a secure microkernel, and then they want to tie up a processor running anti-virus software. This is like dealing with a roof leak by install a sump pump.
Rather than bitching, why not spend a little time figuring it out? It's pretty obvious, if you think about it. Here we go. First, choose the Tools menu, because Tools always contains configuration menu options. Next, choose Customize under tools, because Customize in is where you customize menus and toolbars in Office applications (and many other Microsoft apps as well). Click over to the Options tab, because you're looking for options (the other two, Toolbars and Commands, are obviously not what you want). Looky there! I see a checkbox for "Always show full menus"! I wonder what that could do?
Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products. (disclaimer: The above steps are for Word 2003. They may be different on older versions, but probably not.)
Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
Mainframes already do this and have for many years.
Why does your PC need this?
The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future!
I'm sorry, I just watched The Aviator; couldn't help myself:)
Oh, and show me the blueprints! The blueprints.. show me the blueprints!
My macintosh is getting quite old and it has dual g4s. Apple found that adding processors is sometimes a more cost-effective way to attain power than just ratcheting up clockrate a long time ago. If you look on store.apple.com you'll find that every single desktop apple sells right now except the iMacs and the lowest level desktop has dual processors.
There is not any really coherent reason to go to dual cores from this point. I am not a definative source on the subject, but from what I see dual core configs are generally a step down from dual proc configs because they must contend for whatever resources are shared instead of duplicated. The only reason to go with dual core over dual proc-- besides things like chip-to-chip communication that I haven't seen real-world use of yet and don't expect to see in significant ways-- is because it's cheaper, and it simplifies what is expected of the motherboard. Neither of these matter to Apple. They are not a low-cost solution and they design their own motherboards (and they get a lot of mileage out of this-- a big part of what makes the G5 so good is that it's got a fairly intelligently designed bus. Wouldn't a dual core G5 config force the cores to share the bus instead of getting their own lines? If so, that would be bad.).
If Apple wanted to sell multiple core computers they could have-- and would have-- done this years and years ago. There have been rumblings about multiple core PPCs working in the lab since before the G4; IBM has done multicore on the POWERs for awhile. Apple hasn't gone with this. I'm assuming at this point they just aren't interested. Maybe they'll decide to use dual core configs if they ever start to do multiprocessor laptops, but other than that, the only reason to care about dual core chips in a laptop is that they're more buzzword compatible.
Personally I'm just bemusedly looking at this dual core thing as the windows world discovering something that my old-ass mac has always had as if it's the most new and amazing thing in the world. (Of course, I'm not saying dual processor configs are at all new in the PC world either.)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is not the "answer in the windows world." Its user-error if there are multiple AV and anti-spyware apps running at the same time. What's next, "A user brought in a PC with a tiger inside and it killed the support staff! The lack of an MS anti-tiger program is killing the industry, literally!!!"
You are literally complaining about having choice it seems. Either its user error or there should only be one anti-spyware and AV app in the windows world. You tell me.
If someone compiled the libraries for both ipv4 and ipv6 for their mail server and the thing suddenly stopped responding I would say user error, not "Well, if this is how things work in the UNIX world then..." blah blah FUD.
"Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products."
I think it's also worth mentioning that one DOES need to learn to use software. It's really strange that people think the computer should know exactly what they need, display it on the screen, and nothing else.
And when they want to change something, they shouldn't need to learn to do it.
What happened there? Everything in life takes some learning, and software is certainly no exception.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Office 2003 runs just fine and non-laggy on one of my P3 500's.
The P166 came out around 1995, and Office 97 in 1997, that's 2 years lead time. The Pentium 500 came out in 1999, and Office 2003 in 2003 - that's four years lead time.
Considering those numbers, I still don't see where all this bloat is being factored in. Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997 that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.
As hardware gets better, new software utilizes it. Sure, the end result of a word processor is to put shit down on paper, usually. But that's a really simplistic way to view such a widely used and powerful peice of software.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Gives adware and spyware more resources to consume without effecting the client's speed. Only when the client notices a slowdown in the computer, adware and spyware detectors will be installed. More power does not help the knowledgebase.
He defines "fug" about halfway through the first sentence of his post. I think no number of juvenile insults can possibly sum up your stupidity in this matter. YHL. HAND.
FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. I don't see anything in there that says anything about discouraging products or services.
The original comment *eluded* to proper, consise coding but was put out there just like any other FUD, especially because it's simply not true.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I don't know which of these WP5.1 will do because I don't happen to have an installation sitting around, but here are some ideas. Probably a couple were supported, but I doubt most were, let alone all:
- Multiple versions saved in one document
- Track changes (which you'll still notice they are improving BTW; from 2000 to 2002 the deleted text marker became much less obtrusive and is much nicer)
- Master documents
- Outline view
- OLE embedding, for instance Microsoft Equation
- Floats
- Pictures (IIRC WP5.1 was console based, at least the version we had, so I don't know what it had in this area)
- Styles instead of just font specifications
Now, I usually use LaTeX for anything substantial, but these are all features I have used on at least a couple occasions, and often many.
I think it's reasonable. Ideally-abominable, but in reality, reasonable.
With each new virus or worm, the number of possible matches for AV software increases by 1. I don't run AV software, but last I checked when I saw a copy running, there were something like 60,000 definitions. That's a *lot* of CPU time (even if the software doesn't check against every definition, which, since most AV software uses heuristics, it doesn't).
So viruses have become a fact of life, like it or not. Same goes for adware, on 9x/ME/NT/2k/XP/2k3 boxes, and that seems like a similar problem to virus/worm checking. Firewall? With broadband speeds rising, you've got an increasing number of packets coming in to check. And then there's spam-filtering. And IPSEC and SSL encryption (particularly in business).
These are things that all have to run basically in the background, and which these days ought to be on every machine. We have a case of increasing complexity running in the background. This ain't the days of DOS anymore kids; love it or hate it, the battle against crapware and maliciousness on the 'net has become a fact of life, and CPU time now has to be devoted to it.
Didn't people complain about how inefficient game engine code must have been getting back in 1996 or so, when 3D accelerators started making their way into the consumer market? Well, same thing now, except that we're dealing with the human nature to produce crap and destroy things.
Adding a second core isn't an efficiency improvement, and nor is it good for anybody if we're using it to combat crap. Actually, it's almost a classic case of the broken window fallacy... And yet, the reality is that this stuff will exist, so we must deal with it...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I have a single processor, a P4 2.4ghz. Not slow, but certianly not top of the line and not dual core. Now at present my system has been turned on for about 4 days. In that time my virus software (AVG) has used a total of 17 seconds of CPU time between it's processes, and my firewall (Kerio) 118 seconds. Anti-spyware apps don't lurk in the background, at least not the ones I've seen.
So, for the virus scanner it's been about 0.00005% of my CPU time and for the firewall it's been about 0.0003%.
Ya, ok, I'm going to say the hysteria of needing a second core for that is all so much hype. That is a trivial amount of CPU time. I really, really doubt you could notice the difference between those running and not.
...virtual PC emulation at speeds as fast as the host? Surely programs like VMWare and friends will definately benefit from a second core. Run Windows and Linux at the same time without slowing each other down? Now who's not a little intrigued about that? Even if you're not into that, it could still add a snappier response for general use. If you're into saving power, just run with both barrels when you need to, and when you don't, just have it turn off one of the cores, and throttle back the clock rate and voltage kind of like AMD Cool and Quiet. And if you do Folding@Home and stuff like that, just have the program take one core and use the other core as normal, or let it have both cores at once. Why complain about how it will cause bloated software? Don't people remember when Windows 3.1 was considered bloatware way back in the day?
Well since Intel is throttling back to 3.2 for these things I guess we'll have to suffer marketting crappola for a while.
Amd is releasing at 2.4 (Their fastest) as well as a 2.6 and 2.8 dual core within weeks of their first announcement. So they will just be faster and dual core so um sweet!
Well, at least I know what you mean even if the other two people that replied have no clue.
I've installed a lot of software that insists on putting something in startup. Network tools that want to put a menu in the systray, adobe software (like photoshop) that puts all this Adobe stuff in startup, and even a video encoder I have (a very nice one too) drops something in startup. Most of the media players do it, too.
It's not necessary, for the most part. While some applications have an option to turn these features on and off, most don't. It's silly.
On my workstations it's not really a big deal, but it does make startup slower and you never know what kind of instability these programs can cause while using the computer.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
As far as I can tell, it's a problem that was created from both sides. Users are always lazy (for anything and everything -- for instance, if you didn't have to pass a test to get a driver's license, nobody would ever take driving lessons and learn how to drive properly), but the industry is just as much to blame for humoring such beliefs. For example, this menu-hiding functionality was spawned directly from the belief that, "The user shouldn't need to learn how to use the software." Menu items that a user never uses, or uses rarely, will get hidden in an attempt to simplify the interface (hide functionality from users that don't use that functionality). Of course, it then pisses off the user the one or two times they do need to use that hidden functionality. I wonder how often this causes a user to believe that the software can't do what they want (when it really can, but the option is hidden), so they switch to a different application? Probably not a big problem with Word or Excel, but if TurboTax hid the option to itemize how many people do you think would switch over to TaxCut? (obligatory tax-related example, given the time of year)
In my opinion, this mind set needs to change. If you don't know how to work on your car, and you don't want to learn, then you go pay a mechanic to do it for you. The same thing should apply to softare. If you don't know how to user Word and you don't want to learn, you should be able to pay someone to do what you need. If you're too cheap to pay, then you'd better be willing to learn.
On a related topic, we geeks need to stop doing free tech support for friends and family simply because we're the people they know who "know computers". If you must help your friends and family with their computer problems, charge them money. Even better, you should refuse to help unless they've exhausted all their options. Otherwise, they'll never learn and just keep coming back every time they get a popup window they don't understand. It's the age old, "Teach a man to fish," problem.
How about running my programs in one core and in the other there could be a permanent BSOD?
I work regularly on a real SMP system, I and consequently I've been drooling for dual core since I first heard the x86 CPU vendors were (finally) getting around to adding it.
SMP makes a massive difference on a system - if your workloads benefit. Mine do - I spend a lot of time compiling things, and the compiling (on the right codebase) tends to scale in an almost linear way with number of CPUs. Not only does SMP make this vastly faster, but it leaves your system so much more responsive that it's hard to believe.
Even if dual core CPUs have only half the benefits (I imagine the Intel ones will, given their memory bandwidth needs) I'd still be really tempted. The power consumption is a nasty issue though.
I don't necessarily agree about the menu-hiding thing (it's something of a love-hate kind of thing for me - I like it because it keeps my menus clean, but I hate it when there's an option that I use sometimes which is always hidden) since I don't believe that the intention was to hide things from people that don't know how to use the software.
But I do agree that the mindset needs to change. People should learn to use their computers to some degree. I guess there's a lot of people out there that just don't want to be bothered with anything of the sort - whereas I like to know how everything works computer or not.
I could never charge friends and family to fix their machines, though. My mom would probably slap me even though I'm 26 years old, and my friends wouldn't feel very obligated to help me when I need it. But when it comes to helping friends of friends and friends of family, I generally just avoid offering up any help.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Intel and Microsoft seem to be codependent on each others worst features. Windows contains many backward compatible 'thunk' layers that in turn depend on the idiosyncracies of the x86 architecture. On the other hand, the GNU/Linux totality of projects contain source codes that span multiple hardware configurations and software environments. With distributions free to come and go as architectures do, GNU/Linux is able to adapt to new and changing environments faster than the Wintel symbiosis can. Linux run's on everything, Windows is mired in x86 specific code and Intel is a victim of it's own success as backwards compatibility is the only reason the x86 set still exists.
Shh.
in a lightbulb?
There's a good joke in here somewhere.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I especially like the way that the words, "eluded" and "alluded" are often misused and interchanged. I suppose one could say that they are related though, and not only because they sort of sound the same. You can always tell a reader from a non-reader.
By this I mean that a reader will sometimes pronounce a word incorrectly (embarassment in person) whereas a non-reader will get the entire meaning of a written word wrong and not give a shit.
Maybe that's what's wrong with some programmers in the first place; they can't spell/type properly and don't have contextual knowledge, so they just copypaste mistakes into the next release.
Personally I'd rather see more innovation on the I/O side of the PC house. PCI-X is still only 133mhz. I'd rather see technology that would improve thing such as:
- If doing a large file transfer - requiring high disk I/O, my machine shouldn't make me walk away because it's unusable during the transfer.
I use a dual PII 300 MHz system at work, and even though other people also uss it as a dev server, it is still much snappier that most desktops this side of 1 GHz.
Dual core CPUs ought to be an easy way to put cheap SMP on everybody's desktop. As well as that, the connectivity between them ought to be much better than having the CPUs on two differemt chips.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
not to mention that many of the programs that allow you to turn them "off" at startup just add a switch to the registry key so that they are actually just hidden. or at the very least they still slow down start up so that they can at least start to run the program, only to be shut off by the switch...
"Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" -Homer Simpson
Yes, it's just you.
home
Speed LIMIT, not speed minimum!
You run vsftpd and sshd on your Windows box huh?
I don't know what IBM puts in those things (magic laptop pixie dust?), but they allways seem to be faster than other laptops with similar specs. I just set up nine P3-1Ghz thinkpads at work, and they "felt" as fast as a late model laptop with a 2ghz processor.
Thinkpads are nice.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Yet another lame this is a lame anti windows story... Welcome to slashdot , a site with a heavy vent against microsoft and with many good reasons ,, some of your points may be valid but trolling on the old "You guys are such lame windozs hatas" is boring.
Some of us strongly dislike windows , This is why we are at a site like slashdot not a massivly pro-windows site , of which many exist.
I am not saying "If you dont like it leave" i am saying "What do you expect" .
An old helldesk hacks opinion:
.exe's?) as the pure CPU.
The slowing effect of protection stuff is as much diskaccess, the growing size of binaries (ever entered a directory with a few 100MB self extracting
The main problem with protection stuff is that nowadays people seem to develop software to be able to run stand-alone on todays hardware. People that run a bit more, or use yesterdays computer are left in the cold.
However it is pretty much also the customers fault. They buy the new versions while pretty much nothing changed except the versionnumber, a new desktop theme, and something to make it up to date with buzzwords. (wifi/xml).
Stick to your old versions of aviri as long as the signatures are still on. Kill the firewall, it is useless anyway if you are patched correctly. I know that the avg user is paranoid and thinks every FW event is a threat averted, but in reality they are just a few scanning bots and nutters.
I'm only lukewarm to security (do my patches every so and so many months, and use the oldest still support McAfee engine), and no firewall, while I'm in a totally open university net. Despite that I had more dataloss and trouble from protection software than from actual malware.
Oh, and btw, if you reinstall your Windows, PLEASE disconnect the network, and install the SPs and a select few (worm) hotfixes from CD. Half of the hacked machines are hacked during install, not use.
The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.
If you're careful, why even the AV and the anti-spyware? So long as you don't open funky attachments and don't go around surfing pr0n in IE with all the ActiveX crap turned on...I'll run a virus- or spywarescan when I feel like it, the rest of the time I really have no desire whatsoever for an icon in my systray and chunks of resources going to waste. Granted, I'm damn happy mom has has both running in the background all the time though.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
...VNC does something X can't. It allows you to leave a complete desktop session running and connect to that same session from any other machine on the network. I did originally try using X as a terminal server for apps, then full desktops, but where it failed was that I couldn't move the sessions with me. Right now, I run my full desktop and access it from any laptop in the house, or from my desktop at work using OpenVPN. This is a feature that X really needs to adopt. If X could do this, I would use it that way. But as soon as you log into an X session, it's associated with the machine you logged in from. You can't attach to it from anywhere else (unless you use the x0vncserver or the vnc module for X). The main reason I prefer this functionality is that all machines in the house beomce thin clients that have the same exact functionality as a full desktop (with esd stuff being forwarded over an ssh tunnel for encryption [in addition to WEP] and compression). So my wife, or myself can just click a button, enter the unlock password for the X screensaver, and get the last session we were actively in . All apps running, documents open, etc...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I forgot to mention that VNC on Unix is definitely faster than on Windows. I can watch video with MPlayer or Xine using the VNC connection over a 100Mb wired line. The 802.11b wireless isn't quite fast enough for that though.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The idea that the first CPU runs the main application while the second one does stuff like antivrus, firewall and antispam is naive and doesn't refelect the way these programs really work.
Except for complete scans in the case of antivirus or blocking incoming connections for a firewall, most of the checking done by this kind of programs is done in line. E.g. Some application does some action like read a file, open a TCP connection, transfer some stuff from a web site. This action then passes the security program which validates it and only then the underlying OS actually executes the action. All this time, the application sits there waiting for the result. Whether the scanning of the action is done on the same processor as the application, or on a different processor doesn't make a difference here. The time it takes to do the scanning remains the same, and the application has to wait that time.
The onl way to gain from multiple processors in this case is if the application is multithreaded. E.g. if the applciation itself has different things it can do while waiting for the scanning to occur. However in this case, the taking advantage of multiple CPUs comes from the application itself. It's the appplciation that takes advantage of the fact that there are multiple CPUs, and this advantage is independent on whether there is security software ot not.
So all in all, the idea of the second CPU doing the security scanning in itself is naive. You only gain in speed if you have applications that are able to make use of multiple CPUs themselves, or if you are runnin dufferent (CPU hungry) programs at the same time. In that case, the second CPU does merely compensate for the loss of performance due to the scanning, but there is no real separation of tasks between the main application and the security scanning.
Marcel
Worse than the startup lnks and reg entries is the apps that have "Services", which very few users know how to stop because, well, they don't see them when they press ctrl-alt-del. My Windows installation was slowing down so much I was experimenting with running some stuff under wine on the Linux partition and getting better performance, until I found that a number of apps where running services that were hogging all the resources. Iomega, for example, installed three (!) services, presumably to help the tray app that syncs with my laptop in it's docking tray. I had thought I had got rid of it when I removed the tray app from the startup. Who needs a utility like that running, waiting to be clicked on? You only need it running when you actully tell it to copy files! I think some of this is to make their apps look fast by preloading or something...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
- Develop software. Building Mozilla will quite happily consume most of your CPU for the good part of an hour.
- Burn CDs or DVDs. Burners are very CPU sensitive. I've burned a DVDs before now, absent mindedly launched something like OpenOffice, and discovered the act has turned the DVD into an expensive coaster because the buffer was emptied.
- Run a virus / spyware / Norton system check. Damn, these things are slow on a modern OS with a large disk and drag down everything else while they running.
- Run a VMWare / QEMU / DOSBox / CoLinux session. By design these things simply eat the cycles while they're running.
- Run Seti or other distributed computing apps. Two CPUs mean these things are less frequently pre-empted.
- Play or rip music. Especially Ogg format, but it applies to anything else too.
- Recode DVDs. Another CPU intensive and very long operation.
- Play games. Yes, believe it or not games often spawn secondary threads for the background music, networking and housekeeping operations.
- Run any kind of multi-threaded intensive application whatsoever. If your machine runs a Firefox, a DB, Apache, Java for example. Even a seemingly innocuous Java app like Puzzle Pirates spawns 20+ threads and consumes > 100% CPU on my dual CPU mac.
If you do any of these things more than occasionally you would benefit from a second CPU or core. Does that mean I'd pay the prices that a dual core Intel costs now? No chance. The prices are a rip off. But once the cost becomes more realistic, I'd certainly pay some more if it effectively doubled the performance of my machine when doing any of the tasks above.A decent operating system can run multiple processes at once efficiently on the main processor (and if it's got multiprocessor support, either with discrete processor chips or just multiple cores, it can do a reasonable job of spreading the load.) Doing the job right includes managing the caches of user programs and user data and the caches of system-utility programs and data, and the right way to do that is to use an operating system that's good at managing such things. And if monitoring the user's application for safety takes as much horsepower as running the user's application, that's sometimes an indication that either the user is running really really simple applications, but more often an indication that the operating system is fundamentally not very good at protecting processes from each other and needs all the help it can get.
There may be occasional interesting research applications where it's worth wasting most of the horsepower of the second core or second processor having it monitoring the rest of the system by having it run as a trusted security monitor that's outside the primary operating system. Some of the DRM systems do things like that, though their trust-enforcement chip is a lot lower in horsepower than the main CPU, because it's basically just checking on file I/O and running checksums on the IOS and the operating system used to boot the machine.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Any self respecting nerd uses his/her machine for more than one thing at a time(multitasking any1??). So with dual cores my machine will actually will be able to keep up with my cowboy style shortcuts to issue commands. Anyway this is the course that will be taken for CPU evolution(read CPU limits on current silicon designs).So with all the competition in the CPU market heating up, This is actually good for us in the long run anyway. Its not a question of if and why...its just a matter of when...Remember the days when we used 486's and used to comment who needs a pentium for all the multimedia..hehehe...mpeg cards to play movies...:P
Ah, the Slashdot groupmind strikes again.
Good thing I've got Karma to burn.
(Go ahead, sap my Karma with punitive mods. I'll see you in metamoderation.)
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
I/O is still going to clobber it.
Two CPUs are nice, you get a very responsive machine - but there hasn't been a dual board that is easy to justify in price for that reason for a long time. The new intel chips have the potention al to be very cheap for what they do - they are replacing a couple of fast Xeons on very expensive boards.
I don't see any niftiness. I can do any document I need to using GEM office (using that as an example because it's now free). It was good enough 12 years ago, it's good enough now. I prefer running KDE for the prettiness and more internet stuff, but functionally for non-internet stuff I've never found anything more useful. And it zooms, even under emulation, which it seems I have to do since dos doesn't seem to work on my hardware. (No sound. It's soundblaster compatible, allegedly (via82c686b), enabled in the bios, but doesn't work. Works ok running from within win98, but then I lose most of the speed advantage)
I am trolling
I've installed a lot of software that insists on putting something in startup. Network tools that want to put a menu in the systray, adobe software (like photoshop) that puts all this Adobe stuff in startup, and even a video encoder I have (a very nice one too) drops something in startup. Most of the media players do it, too.
It's not necessary, for the most part. While some applications have an option to turn these features on and off, most don't. It's silly.
You can fix most of them with Startup from Mike Lin, I like the stand-alone.exe version and just stick it on the desktop. It's nice and small so it's handy to put on a floppy or keychain-usb as well. http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
You know, except for buying the system.
I got the opposite way - two displays, X sessions, mice and keyboards to my one machine - just to watch movies usually.
I'm tired of hearing the argument that no one NEEDS this much computing power. If we went by need, Intel would've stopped developing new chips about 3 years ago. Besides, the definition of "need" changes as people find new ways to use the extra power. Games get better looking. We can put more widgets on the desktop. We can quickly manipulate those LARGE uncompressed photos. And if we can do it all the same time? Why the hell NOT?!
Also, often times, technology progresses forward just because we CAN do it; we CAN create it. We'll figure out how to utilize that power later. But sometimes just having it is...fun! Do we really need a better reason?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
"Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason." That's because PCmag isn't worth the ink that's wasted on it. They're a kissass magazine, they kissass to every hardware, software, and os vendor willing to bare their butt for it. Oh for the record that goes for PCWorld as well and all the rest.
Running a virus checker slows down your computer because of the amount of disk accesses, not because it's using up your computer's CPU power. Adding an extra core isn't going to help.
Mod someone else up , someone who can make an argument without trying to inflame everyone
We're a small ISV. Most of our clients use Windows (certainly not because it provides a "damn good out of the box experience", it most definintely doesn't, half of our clients' machines are so screwed up with spyware that they often can't even use them anymore, half of our support calls are related to spyware in some way. They use XP because they honestly and literally don't know any better, it's absolutely the only thing they know about, it just 'comes with the computer when they buy it', and 'everyone else uses it'). I would love to work on, and develop our software for, better platforms such as OS X. However, we would not sell enough to cover our costs, because the market is too small. Thus we are effectively forced to either go out of business, or develop for Windows. If that isn't forced, I don't know what is. And so I'm still stuck using Windows most of my time, battling with crappy APIs and a rubbishy OS that's full of, as the OP said, "fug".
Of course this is the core of the real reason for the OS monoculture. People use Windows because ISVs write software for it. ISVs write software for it because most people use it. Chicken and egg.
Fortunately there are now some good cross-platform APIs, like wxWidgets, that allow a significant reduction in the costs of targetting multiple platforms. But it still ultimately costs some money to target another platform, and the sales on that platform must bring in enough income to cover those costs. In a mainstream software market this might happen, but in niche markets it's tough.
When your input-bound processes are waiting for input, they aren't taking up CPU time anyway.
What a flamebait article.
To what are you alluding? The meaning of your comment eludes me.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I thank you sir , Too often do people mistake a distro with a freeDesktop as linux , or one particular set up of KDE as what KDE is.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run
Delete anything you don't like apart from anti-virus. All that crap that runs on startup isn't necessary, and the software will run without it.
i have no idea what i'm talkign about, but i just ... why not say put 4 cores on one ...*sigh*
read the other day, that ramping up the MHz or
GHz just makes the cpu run hotter, so i just had
this idea
"chip" run each at a moderate 2 GHz and interlace
them, so get like 4 x 2 GHz = 8 GHz ???
i guess that's not possible
anyway it's cool, now at least the computer doesn't
freeze anymore when reading from a scratched CD-ROM
or from a floppy drive! this must be a technology
leap a-la being able to format a floppy -WHILE-
doing something else (OS/2), yeah-ha!
A quick peek at the task manager in Windows XP shows that when AVG anti-virus is running, even on this old 600 MHz box, the CPU is only about 27% busy. The real slowdown is due to the disk cache getting flushed by all the anti-virus disk activity. So anotehr CPU isnt going to help. It would be nice if AVG could ask the OS to not fill up the fisk cache with files that are going to be read just once. AVG, are you listening? :)
its nice when stuff doesn't by default but gives you the option. personally i have all the following things come up on startup (just from kde, lots more from the boot sequence) and i like it there:
, km ail
klipper,korganiser,kmix,amarok,akregator,kopete
As for spreadsheets, I see them more as a rapid prototyping tool (if even that). When I want to get anything done that involves large lists of data, I write a Perl script to do the job. Mind you, Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.
Of course, every (wo)man has his/her own preferences, and I don't write this to encourage everyone to use emacs/LaTeX/perl, but rather to spread the fact that you don't need even a 350 MHz PII or even 64 MBs of RAM to be productive, and that it is most certainly program design that makes Open/Microsoft Office take much more resources than really necessary. While you may not need a 2 GHz machine like the GP said, you do certainly need a lot more because of the fancy GUIs and stuff.
This aphorism leads to poor software quality in a mass market. 1 second of developer time is not worth more than 1 second of user cpu time times millions of users.
Oh, to be really accurate it's $3,999.00. Under $4000, right. Sheesh. . .
The most powerful -- and expensive -- Power Mac that Apple list is "under $3000" in its default configuration. So. . . This Dell is actually $1000 more. You know, I'm going to remember this next time one of my friends insists he won't get a Mac "because I can't afford to spend twice as much as a PC costs".
Bitch.
I find the time wasting usually ends when I get the hell off Slashdot.
...just to make Windows' shortcomings tolerable, you might as well just get a G5.
The easiest way to tolerate Windows' shortcomings is to not use Windows at all.
IF you have to effectivly buy 2 chips just to function.
Having to dedicate one entire core for 'security' reasons is sad.
May be a fact of 'internet life' today, but tha doesnt make it any more 'right'. Nor is this going to *solve* the problem. Allowing the *problem* to continue to exist will only make it grow.
What is next, 3 cores? 2 dedicated to protection and one left to run the overly bloated apps of the day?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One way to free up the second core would simply be to run the antivirus on the GPU!
Slap in a second video card, and run anti-spyware on its GPU.
Then, you'd have both cores available for gaming, and you'd get maximum frame rates when playing Zork or Planetfall.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
If you want a generic x86 CPU on which to run such things as virus scanning then it just needs to be able to keep up with the memory bus speed. It doesn't need to be a Pentium 4 at multiple Ghz. Imagine a Pentium 1 (or less) with non-locking read only access to all system memory and a little bit of its own scratch space memory. It could scan constantly and send a signal to a small routine on the main CPU to trigger a cleanup program or it could shut down the machine and reboot itself as the CPU using its own OS to run a cleaner on the main disks, etc.
This is exactly why Microsoft continues to clean up in the software business, and Apple is chugging along, while FOSS can't seem to get any grip. Microsoft caters especially to this market because this market is abso-fucking-lutely massive. Computer elitists make up a tiny niche side segment of a market, enough so to be largely irrelevant.
The Intel dual-core setup looks a LOT like the old dual-cpu systems but just without the second cpu socket. Intel even uses two dies for the two cores. Those smp systems have been around for years but haven't set the world on fire because they don't speed up single-threaded stuff. They do have some benefits for software that specifically takes advantage of the second cpu but those benefits have historically not been enough to entice many people to pay the extra money for a dual-cpu system. The new Intel cpu will probably make the dualie a little more 'mainstream' so the software support for it will eventually increase but it still doesn't look especially attractive, given the power and heat overhead that it adds.
AMD, OTOH, has gone beyond the old dual-cpu approach with their new system that have said they will release this Thursday. AMD puts both cores on one die. More importantly, the L2 cache of both cpus is shared via something AMD calls the "system request interface". Both cores share a common memory controller (that is also on-die) and access to hypertransport. What all of this means is that the AMD design has the potential to speed up even single-threaded stuff as well as offering two cores for multi-threaded software.
I'm sure those games will have _no_ slowdown what so ever running an intensive virus scanner on all the files on disk while playing your games. ah yes, that is why you should have an extra disk for games only and exclude it from your scanner, well of course!
Or, or when you are surfing the web, the spyware detector _needs_ to be running on a 2nd cpu, because, well you know browsing is very very cpu intensive...
Dual cores are cool, but not for the examples given above. The people who will benefit from them are using dual cpu systems already.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Windows is a bloated, sluggish, virus and spyware-prone piece of crap. Switching to linux was the best thing I've ever done in my life. I just wish I would have switched much sooner. Oh, and the linux SMP rocks!
Does anyone listen to PC Mag, you know and I know PC Mag is just an extension of the Dell and Intel marketing machines.
What a whore.
It may also be worth noting that MS Office will stop hiding menu items that have been recently used so it probably shouldn't be hidden after the first time he used the feature. Almost my entire file menu is shown in Word every time I click it.
I'm not much for conspiracies, but it does seem bad editorial policy for PC Mag to be reviewing and selling these machines at the same time that Dell is giving away subscriptions to PC Mag? (I went through the signup process for the Gen 4 on their site out of curiosity). Not trying to troll here, just seems a step too far.
Boy, doesn't one long for the day when a program fit on a floppy disk...lol Hard drives became bigger, programmers got lazy and quit optimizing code....that and the marketing guys want the software out the door, before it is truely ready... One hand washes the other. Faster processors and bigger hard drives cause programmers to add "features" and then the marketing group tells the public the software will be ready by XXX, then the programmers are handstrung to get it out the door, regardless whether or not the software has been optimized, or ready. I pretty much do my upgrades based on Adobe releasing a new photoshop version. With each version, they add more and more bloat(features) which suck the life out of a PC, requiring me to upgrade to something faster.
Well I think it's best for the cars that can't stay at the speed limit to stick to the slowest lane.
That way the impatient folk who want to get somewhere fast legally can pick the middle/fast lane.
And the really impatient folk can pick the fastest lane.
Meh, I regularly make spreadsheets that are full of calculated cells that depend on another spreadhseet. . . the idea being that since I generally only need to perform XXX analysis on a spreadsheet once, I can set up a system where I give the original some pre-defined name, open the analysis spreadhseet, wait for it to do the calculations, then copy and paste the analysis to save it.
Only problem is, to do, say, seven calculations per row (simple ones, like "=B2-C2" and "=LEFT(D4, 10)" ) on an external spreadsheet that has maybe 500 rows can literally take a full minute.
I shudder to think what the formula-evaluating routines in Excel must look like in order to make such a small number of calculations take so long on a computer that can theoretically perform ~three billion operations per second with the pipelines full.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
A dual core PC, runs linux, the linux uses one core solely to jun Windows, with wrappers round it that let it protect it from all the nastiness out there.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
if you have a CPU-intensive thread with a large working set that you don't want moved in and out of a CPU's cache, then it makes sense to "dedicate" a CPU to that task.
OTH it'd be nice if the operating system scheduler could figure stuff like that out automatically by looking a thread's resource usage history, but I think that most multitasking OSs can do this anyway.
Right?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Well, I can say that in Hero's Journey (our upcomming MMPOG) a second core will make a difference. We use worker threads for some difficult tasks (such as dynamic texture compositing). Works good on a hyperthreaded CPU, should work fantastic on a dual core though we've yet to try it.
:)
There are many things in games that would benefit from pervasive multi-core machines. It is harder to quantify than say a GPU's tri throughput, but it can be as dramatic. When dual or more cores are common-place, there is going to be tons of neat applications for the game developer crowd.
The biggest problem we face are people with older Pentiums with neither. So, make sure everyone upgrades!
David Whatley
1.) The new color scheme for this topic with the weird light background on white is painful to read.
2.) The poster seems to trollingly intimate that Windows is slow, by the use of "chugging along".
Perhaps less zealous story contributors should be accepted. At least until Linux has some semblance of a faster graphics stack, and some semblance of a much faster network stack (currently, on average, it seems as though linux is only slightly faster than Windows 2003).
The chief reason for PC Magazine's existance is to goad computer users into buying more software and more hardware, mainly from the big players (Microsoft, Intel, IBM) and the little toadie companies that play well with the big players without getting squashed by them. Microsoft is so big and so influential that they can sell their customers their own shirts time and again. And Microsoft isn't the only company out there that writes software so awful and yet so popular that that even the bugs and poor functionality only generate more revenue for them and their toadies, not less. PC Magazine is one of those toadies that helps them get away with it. Want to learn about computers? Learn to program in a non-Microsoft language and learn how to get work done with non-Microsoft apps and O.S.'s. And don't waste your time and your money reading PC Magazine.
Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?
Mostly for two reasons, both objectionable.
First, there's commercial reason. Apps like to advertise themselves to the user, and the best way is to be in your face, by putting up a banner during system startup. Many also like to be in your face the whole time, by residing in your system tray.
The second reason, is the percieved app startup time. If you load all your libraries and initialise executables at system startup, then the user percieves it as system starup time. Then, when you start the app, it can be ready faster it's already half-loaded.
Both practices waste resources (screen, RAM and startup time), and programs that insist on them without the option of disabling, should be considered Evil(tm).
I would add a firewall in there, unless you are running sp2.
:q!
I find it very, very strange that some people do really believe that buying a second processor just to make an operating system work around its security problems and it's inefficience is a reasonable decision.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Maybe you don't write system documentation
Jebus F. Cripes!
I've seen the kind of broken garbage that people like you create because you're 'empowered' with Microsoft Turd. The outlining and hierarchical layout of that program (and it's poor imitators) is so fragile it actually interferes with the freedom of the user to outline ideas (any experienced user knows to be very, very careful about moving stuff around)
A few months, stuck on a desert island with only FrameMaker would do you a lot of good.
Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements
It has more shiney buttons, broken features, and bullshit adventures for the user to wander off into.
An excellent opportunity for desk jockeys to prove their worth to the less alert PHBs.
yup.
and you know what. Office 97 is STILL the office suite we use at work. we have copies of O2K and XP and O2K3 but the added "features" do not warrant the problems of deploying them, retraining all employees and adding yet another app suite in our support list.
there are NO features that any office suite above office 97 offer that can even start a desire to change to it... BTW, we are under orders in the IT department to set all copies of word to save as RTF, and that is all we will accept from customers and vendors.
some IT depts. are not morons and upgrade for the sake of upgrading... that metric assload of new features are 100% useless to almost 90% ofall users.
"User: "So, uh, why did you decide to make a word processor that uses 80 megs of RAM and bogs down anything less than a 2 GHz machine?"
... Hey, stop dissing Emacs. Did I insult YOUR text editor?!
Programmer: "Why? Why? Muahahha.... BECAUSE I CAN."
Using more resources than necessary to complete a task doesn't demonstrate any sort of talent. "
Hopefully we start seeing some dual-core chips with a pairing of a fast core and a slow core. Most home users don't run two heavy apps at once (there are exceptions, of course, but most don't), but have lots of little apps running in the background. If there were a slower, but sufficient, core to handle all of these background tasks, the fast core could take care of the rest.
Unfortunately, the market for this type of chip might disappear, as apps become more and more multithreaded. However, I can't help but think that this would significantly help power consumption and heat dissapation.
I feel the same way about office, but have found the "open and repair" option in Word/Excel 2003 to be extremely useful.
People always seem to be getting corrupt documents in Word/Excel 97, so I just take the file into Word/Excel 2003, do an open and repair, save, then have them try it again in Word/Excel 97. This almost always corrects the problem. The only other option is usually to hope we can restore a working copy (if stored on a file server) or hope they have an other copy, which is never the case.
Run virus on one core, anti-virus on the second core, and watch them duke it out.
Some applications further bloat other programs by installing plug-ins.
Word, Photoshop, and many other programs can take up much more RAM and require longer loading times just for plug-ins that may or may not be used that session.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
A metric assload? Is that really a standardly defined unit of measurement? Is there an official reference assload kept underground in some secured facility that the rest of the world uses to ensure the accuracy of their metric assloads?
Or maybe an atomic assload is the ideal path to perfectly defining the metric assload?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Don't forget about Windows' effectively single-threaded name resolver that everything from Internet Explorer to the Explorer desktop and file dialog boxes depend upon to resolve names from internet hosts to the C: drive itself.
With a single CPU, one bad name resolution request will hang EVERYTHING that touches the name resolver. I think that just about every Windows user has seen this happen at some point. In fact, I think it's the major reason why some spyware/trojan apps hang Windows so badly (the hosts the trojan tries to phone home to get their DNS killed by the ISP after a few hundred thousand complaints, but the millions of infected computers keep hammering away trying to reach it anyway).
I don't remember the exact chain of events, but it basically occurs when a hostname Windows thinks SHOULD be a straightforward instantaneous DNS resolution attempt turns into an epic saga that ends with a timeout 30+ seconds later. In the meantime, all the other requests just stack up while Windows waits for the first one to finish or time out. The catch is, there are almost ALWAYS threads running in the background under Windows trying to repeatedly touch files and reassure themselves that distant network shares still exist. When the first one hangs, it's like a 50-car pileup on an icy Interstate. Except that everything eventually sorts itself out, but for 30 seconds to several minutes, apps and the user interface itself just progressively hang until the whole computer appears to be frozen.
It's not just limited to Internet Explorer, either. Moz/Firefox is just as vulnerable (it relies on the Windows DNS client, which relies on the same braindead subsystem), as is the command prompt itself if you're trying to access anything over a network (cmd.exe still does its own resolution for drive letters, thank god).
Faster how?
In particular, how did you measure "run faster"? Time to respond to a keypress? In an empty office document or one with 100 pages that need to be reformatted? Were you running with only one application active at a time, was it full screen mode?
Not that I don't believe that Windows runs MS Office faster than FreeBSD. Or even that Windows runs Open Office faster. I'm just curious as to how you measured this. Mostly because I suspect that given any particular set of criteria, any given application, and any given pair of OSs, someone could tweak the OSs to make one system run the application faster than the other.
"I would add a firewall in there, unless you are running sp2."
Why "..unless you are running sp2."? From what I understand, the firewall in xp is overall not very good, and at that, only blocks incoming connections, not outbound. I would have stopped at "I would add a firewall in there." I'm not trying to be obtuse, as I have never installed/ran xp. My last MS OS was 98SE, and have switched to linux/FreeBSD on all my machines, so I may be wrong on this.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
In my simplistic view, a word processor should process words. I haven't noticed any inrcease in quality of writing over what was done back in the 80s with Wordstar, and no faster (in words/day) today. It reminds me of parents who think that giving their kids a more powerful computer will help them with school reports.
I'm still laying out books in GEM Ventura (DOS box under Win98). A nice boost on how it ran on the old PCXT -- output 300 pages print file in 2 seconds.
"a smoother looking interface" - aka it's own widget set which is different from every other program on your computer.
I don't think that users are stupid, they are trying to use VERY complicated products that they haven't had any real training on, and 99.9% of the time there is no printed manual to help them. (On line help isn't much good when your computer flashes the blue screen.) SPAM is not the fault of stupid users. If e-mail recipients had a reliable way to identify the sender much of it would go away. ( I know you can get authenticated /encrypted e-mail, but it's never the default.)
Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface
By smoother you mean...? If you mean that the graphics are more stylish, I can't see why that should signficantly affect the speed of the application. If you mean smoother fades and so forth, I can't see how that impacts my productivity.
it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997
Great. You have my permission to name the 10 or so that you use every day. If you prefer the softball version, you can just name the ones that make you 20% more productive day-to-day (to cover for the productivity lost to performance issues).
that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.
Hmmm. I can see why the latest video game requires a more powerful machine. I'm still having trouble rationalizing why this should apply to an overgrown typewriter.
All that said, Word is the least of my complaints.I am forced to use Outlook at work. That puppy takes (I kid you not) 10 minutes to start during which my system is unusable. Due to security at work and a bug with the way it handles online vs offline, I often have to start it twice in the morning and maybe once again in the afternoon when it crashes. That means that it costs, on average, $400/month in wages just to stop and start Outlook on my desk.
Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.
.doc, .rtf .abw files. (read: corrupted text files are far more recoverable than corrupted binary files).
And if a script written for perl 5 is broken on perl 6, it is fixable (via text editor).
A file created on Office_Suit_X that breaks on some later version of Office_Suite_X can be a severe nuisance. It may be fixable but usually not at a single point. All the broken files have to be discovered and fixed.
Corrupted perl scripts are far more recoverable than corrupted
Text compresses better than binary.
HOWEVER....
Most Community Colleges have Word, Excel, or some other Office Suite courses. They don't usually have CIS 128U -- "Creative Perl Programming", and thus most folks never realize that perl and others can often trump expensive, bloated software suites.
Hmm,
Add firewall, P2P, Skype, IM (if you use it), hotsync (or whatever removable device detection turns your crank), filesharing (Samba/WinFS), remove mobo, video, sound.
Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products. (disclaimer: The above steps are for Word 2003. They may be different on older versions, but probably not.)
Yeah, you tell it: It's buried in an obvious place as long as you are familiar with the particular version of the particular vendor's products.
Remember "Tools, Customize" is where you want to look unless it's under "File, Properties" or "Edit, Options" or "Windows, Preferences" or "Tools, Configuration, Settings, Advanced". You would be much better to just click on "Help, Word Help". Oops, I mean "Help, Show the Office Assistant". Now that's obvious!
Actually I have five steady users. Myself, my wife, both of my parents via DSL and a friend via DSL. But it still works well. Each session is managed by GDM and I disable VNC authentication for that reason. When users disconnect from their sessions, they just click on a disconnect icon which locks the screen with Xscreensaver, and uses ssh to remotely kill the remote vncviewer from the server end.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
What's telling is that these failures aren't even treated as a source of embarrassment any more: they're a growth industry! $4,000 for a Dell dual core in an age of $400 computers... The crazy aunt in the attic has been promoted to a striptease attraction, and PC Mag is selling tickets. Try not to barf. ;-)
So, yea. We should all drive around 12 year old cars wearing 12 year old clothes. We'll drive right home and use 12 year old computers while watching 12 year old TV's, and re-runs of 12 year old shows, while we wait for a 1MB file to take 20 minutes to download on our 2400 baud modems.
Because if it was good enough 12 years ago, it MUST be good enough now. Nevermind the fact that there's been just a little improvement in things... just a little..
You apparently don't need anything more then a basic word processor, and that's fine. But just because you don't - don't assume nobody else does either.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Well no shit, but why should this be necessary? And what about users that aren't too savy with these things to know that some random .exe in the startup configuration is okay to delete?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Well, that's a bit restrictive - but I'm probably biased, because I wrote an post-it note app that installs itself in the startup group. Mainly because it's always supposed to be there (and originally it didn't install itself in startup, and I got loads of emails asking me to make it do that).
I know what you mean though - I once got a new laptop at work, and the first time I booted it up, there were 14 icons in the system tray.
Suffice it to say, most of those had no reason to be there.
No, it certainly should not be necessary, but it's becoming a more and more increasing trend with Windows to write applications which take over the whole OS. For example, why does Quicktime, a movie player need a system tray icon? Don't even get me started on RealPlayer.
Interestingly enough though, the same companies create Linux software in a totally different way. Try using RealPlayer on Linux. It's a minimal, sensible application which adheres to the look and feel of Gnome. Is it that people who use Windows don't want that, or that they can't get away with it on Linux? A bit of both I'd imagine.
I feel so sorry for Windows users. When I want to surf the web, I just open up my Powerbook. No anti-virus needed now for a year. No anti-spyware necessary. The firewall... I think about it about as much as I think about the process scheduler or the disk I/O queue (ie: never.)
Why waste your valuable time with a broken OS?
Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?
The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.
Network services -- e.g. I have a POP3 proxy server that does junk filtering run at startup. The program for my wireless network card that scans for available networks and connects to them also runs at startup. These are things that I'm likely to need and don't want to have to start up independently of the applications that use them.
But, you're right, there's a lot of junk that gets put on at startup. A friend recently bought an IBM ThinkPad, and it takes about 3 minutes to get to a usable desktop on it. And that's just the default shit that IBM installed on it!
Your average user shouldn't have to know what a binary is. That's stupid. Your average user just wants to get something done (the quickest and easiest way possible).
The main problem is the programmers not understanding this fundamental aspect. As programmers, it's up to US to provide services that people want to use (so we can get paid!). It's not up to the user to figure out our world. We need to mold our applications to fit into their world.
Okay people, does Linux do:
-hyperthreading and
-dual cores and
-dual processors
competently or not? Maybe Gentoo users would know; maybe GCC experts are the best ones to ask.
I do think it is nice if Microsoft has managed to update the low-level stuff in their operating system to take advantage of more than just the megahertz of the latest machinery. Good for them; they did take long enough back in the 16- to 32-bit upgrade era. Now lets make sure those same features are available to the cash-impaired, the freedom-loving, and the technologically curious among us.
I have a firewall in my router (netgear). Would never consider one from M$ as it's likely to have as many holes as Winblows.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Isn't that the problem, that virus writers mold their viruses to fit their users?
Perhaps it's not the calculations that slow it down, but the subroutines that grab data from the other spreadsheet. Not that it's a great excuse, but there's a lot of factors to be considered when loading up parts of other files.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
How do you assume I create garbage? I use properly formatted documents that don't break when I move things around. If you actually use the software like you should, you don't run into these kinds of problems.
Word is good for whipping up something quick, but it can also do a lot for 100+ page documents with table of contents and indexes.
If I want to change the way my document looks, all I need to do is change a few of the templates and voila, it's formatted differently.
I'm sorry if you can't figure out Microsoft Word, man, but I did. And because OpenOffice is so similar, I can create nice documents with that too. You probably can't, though.
I've used FrameMaker in the past, and it's very nice. But it's not necessary when I can do everything I want to do with Word/Writer.
Of course, I shouldn't have even wasted my time with someone that insists on using phrases like "Microsoft Turd." I'm surprised you didn't say "M$ Turd."
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Again, like a lot of the kids replying to my post here, you obviously don't utilize the more powerful features of the software. That's totally fine, but there's a lot of folks that do use the stuff.
There's a lot there that Word and OpenOffice Writer can do for you - advanced formatting, template based styles, automaticlly adjusting contents and indexes, liking to other documents, linking to other applications... plus a whole crap load of other things.
A modern word processor has a lot more features that you'd find in a desktop publishing application, and one of the great things is that you can seperate the content from the formatting.
Do you think that these people spend money and/or time to add features to the software that absolutely nobody wants?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Yea, kinda like how MacOS does it. Brushed metal? Sure, we'll put that on the finder and Quicktime. But we'll put plastic on other parts, with a little pinstripe theme mixed in.
But it's not just the widget, with Office 2003. They changed the way a lot of the UI elements fit onto the screen in a good way.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I think a lot of times they have a different crew writing the Linux apps then they do the Windows apps.
In the Windows world, I'd have to guess that people like the oddball interfaces you see all the time (I hate 'em all.) But in the unix world, I'd have to guess that with all the different widgets and toolkits out there, a "selling" point might be that the application actually fits in.
And with the current crowd that generally uses a linux system, I think you're right that they couldn't get away with it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'm not a kid; I've been using computers since 1977. I edit and do DTP for a living, so your assumption is wrong, and I'll thank you not to be so patronising.
There's a lot there that Word and OpenOffice Writer can do for you - advanced formatting, template based styles, automaticlly adjusting contents and indexes, liking to other documents, linking to other applications... plus a whole crap load of other things.
I know how to do all that. But when I need to, I use a real DTP app. One that does them right, not in the fucked up way Word does.
Tables of contents and indices aren't advanced; the were standard in DOS word processors.
That's totally fine, but there's a lot of folks that do use the stuff.
No one I've ever met in the last 10 years. I get dozens of Word files every year that I have to edit and turn into books. The style feature alone is impossibly fucked up. Because some users found the concept difficult, it's been made "friendly" and "intuitive", so that style definitions change automatically, when Word thinks you might want to WITHOUT ASKING YOU. Maybe you know how to turn this off, but it's certainly not the default behaviour. I spend hours removing the cruft before I can expose the structure in a file and export it to a sensible format when I can forget about Word till the next time someone sends me a file.
Thus my deep hatred for Word. I use it, I know how to, but I do so only from necessity.
A modern word processor has a lot more features that you'd find in a desktop publishing application, and one of the great things is that you can seperate the content from the formatting.
I've been doing that with Ventura and PageMaker snce about 1989.
And while theoretically you can separate content from presentation, in Word it gets harder every year. I also see the awful results when people actually do use Word for publishing.
Do you think that these people spend money and/or time to add features to the software that absolutely nobody wants?
They add features that look good in the reviews. Not in real life. It's a truism (I think Gates said it) that features sell, not fewer bugs and more efficiency. And I'll say that the quality of writing and the documents produced has not improved one iota despite all these vaunted improvements.
I'm sure it has to be. The only way I can imagine that Excel would be that slow in those calculations is if, for every cell access in the source spreadsheet, it opens the file, find the data for the cell, reads it, and closes the file. If I do the same thing, but with the source data in another sheet in the same spreadsheet rather than in another file, things go much faster.
Ok, and then? 99% of the software that puts crap in the Run key will check when you run it that it's hooks are still there and puts them back. YOu know, for your own good.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997 that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.
then why has every office release since office '97 gotten progressively harder to use productively?
outlook seems to me to be the only part of office that gets noticeably better with each release. everything else seems to get incrementally worse...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
With a single-core machine, programmers who create a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU should be tazered, and programmers who create an OS so crippled that you can't kill said app should be shot.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think that Word/Excel XP were both just a little too much when it came to all the toolbar icons up there by default - I see no reason to put mail merge and equation editor up there ad default menu items.
But I think they improved both products quite a bit with 2003, along with the UI improvements in Outlook 2003 (I think the right-side preview pane was a really good idea, and cached exchange mode is SO much better then old offline mode.)
The default screen layout on Word/Excel 2003 is a lot less cluttered and everything seems just a little more organized. While functionally O2k3 didn't add much, they're just more enjoyable to use.
I don't find this software difficult to use productively at all. While I would agree that you can sure dig yourself into a mess with Word if you don't set things up correctly, if you DO use templates and formatting correctly these things just don't happen.
It takes a fair amount of time and plenty of hours logged in the software to begin using it properly, like most other full applications - same as Adobe stuff like Photoshop and Premiere.
You have the ability to type some stuff and put out a decent looking document or spreadsheet without knowing much about the software, but until you really get into it, you'll find yourself frustrated if you try to do more advanced layout.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
This tells me that at best, it's a fixed resolution (one of the things Flash was supposed to eliminate), and such fixed-resolution things are rarely big enough to avoid looking like total CRAP on my 1600x1200 monitor.
So, when I say that gmail has already done this, it's based entirely on your description. Gmail has a system, powered by JavaScript (I assume it's dhtml), which runs on something like 7 or 8 different browsers without problems, and scales nicely on others so I can get some (limited) functionality with a text browser as well.
The specific feature that I think you're referring to is being able to grab specific text and insert it into a part of the page. That's called FRAMES, for the uninformed, but gmail doesn't even use that -- just straight javascript and http.
No, most uses of flash could/should be replaced with some combination of:
The only use of flash that doesn't fit here is flash games. I actually like flash games staying flash games, because the only thing people seem to want to use instead is Java or Windows executables. It'd be much better if Perl or Python or even Ruby or
But for now, the only thing I hate more than a chunk of flash in a web page is a chunk of Java.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
it's nice to have skype running at start up, so that incoming calls will be received.
http://www.lexez.com/
I like to consider them speed suggestions. Give or take 20 mph, usually on the plus side.
so you're saying your mom is surfing pr0n in IE with all the ActiveX crap turned on!?!
Perhaps it truly demonstrates that your average virus writer understands users more than your average Windows or OSS hacker.
So who's fault is it? I'd point my finger at the designer of the original dialog box. After living in a windows world for so long, users have been trained to ignore all this cryptic information and just say OK to get their jobs done. The real problem is that users have picked up this pavlovian response to dialogs at all.
That's a poor argument. Cars and clothes wear down a lot, I'm happy wearing t-shirts just like the ones I wore 12 years ago. There's a TV in my house that's older than I am (not the main one, but that's only because that broke fairly recently. We use them until they wear out). Shows are often topical and related to the current interest, news from 12 years ago makes no sense. Shows I've already seen are also no good, because shows are a one-off entertainment item, usually. But those shows that aren't topical are just as satisfying *the first time you see them* if they're 12 years old as if they're new. As for the internet, we knew our modems weren't good enough back then, and were always complaining.
I am trolling
"As for the internet, we knew our modems weren't good enough back then, and were always complaining."
So you make the arguement that you speak for everyone when you say that cablemodems and DSL are good enough?
Files have gotten bigger, media is higher quality, and it takes longer and longer to download things now. CD images take 20 minutes.
I could send an e-mail just fine with my 2400 baud modem, but forget any kind of media. Today, I can sent a photo just fine but forget any kind of video.
12 years ago, there was complaining that the word processors were difficult to use because you'd have to print your document to see what it would really look like on paper. They wanted advanced template editing, WYSIWYG editing and previewing, high resolution graphics, integration with other applications..
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
No, but I haven't heard anyone complaining about them. My friends with dsl are happy with it, my friends with dialup are mostly unhappy. I remember back when we used 2400 baud everyone was unhappy with it. I'm sure there are people who are unhappy with modern bandwidth, but I think they're in the minority now. I can't remember anyone complaining about their word processor 12 years ago. That's not to say there weren't such people, but by and large people were happy with it. If you were happy with it then you should be happy with it now, and I think over 90% of people were, and most people who want new word processes because of their features are just keeping up with the joneses, scared to admit that they don't need anything fancy because it makes them seem less advanced users.
I am trolling
I subscribe to that same belief but damn it's hard. And unfortunately, even when you charge (unless you're really mercenary) it's still far cheaper than what a consultant/shop would charge so most of the time friends/family just go "Cool. Here's your cash now fix it."
Interestingly enough the one person who I've been "teaching to fish" and has actually been absorbing it is a mechanic. I believe they have the logical mindset needed to memorize instructions and follow procedures - unlike the family who are housewives, clerks, dogwashers, managers, chemists etc.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run
Many people forget that there are TWO locations in the registry where programs store their auto-startup strings. Sneaky bastards...