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OS Comparisons From the BBC
igb writes "As part of their coverage of the launch of Vista, the BBC last week asked people to submit descriptions of the benefits and drawbacks of their chosen system, and today they've posted responses from two Vista users, a Linux user, and an OS X user. There's nothing earth-shattering here, but it's interesting to see the operating systems compared on a level playing field, and good that the BBC has given equal time to the major alternatives."
To be fair, they spend just as much time with Linux's prime features (Package Manager, Free Software, etc) and OSX's (Stability, ease of use, etc).
Agreed, like how AIGLX+Beryl isn't covered. However that is still considered beta currently, despite of that, I use it and it does more than what Windows Vista does in terms of eye-candy usability, and it hasn't quite crashed on me once yet if I don't push it (VT-switching causes it to blackscreen for me, but the desktop can be restored by restarting Beryl (try restarting just the windows manager on Windows - you can't).
For those who don't know, AIGLX+Beryl has the window thumbnail and alt-tab zoom like OS X, yet the alt-tab has a live thumbnail of what the window is currently showing unlike OS X (not sure about the latest version of OS X). AIGLX+Beryl also has 3D window stack similar to Vista when the desktop cube is under rotation. I don't think it would be hard to implement that window stacking feature without the Desktop cube. Also multiple workspaces on the 4 sides of the cube, which I don't think neither supports natively.
Please direct all bug reports to
Windows: Eye candy, eye candy, and you're gonna have to upgrade.
Linux: Secure stable, and I swear it's got software you can run! I mean, people give it away for free.
Mac OS: I use my machine for things and I really like it. And it's pretty
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Unique? That's Virtual Memory. Sure, the fact that it's easy (may be) a good thing (though how many people are going to keep an empty flash drive around for this? Easier to get the kid down the street to install more ram for you and be done with it if you cant do it yourself. However, unique? I can put a swap file on flash drive and itd do the same thing...
Will the swap be encrypted so taking away the stick can't reveal confidential data? No.
Will taking the swap out in the middle of the OS running lock it up? Yes.
Will the OS benchmark the Flash for you and determine which pieces of data are best stored there and which not for best performance? No.
So when you say "it's the same" you're stretching truth quite a lot.
You don't necessarily need an empty flash drive. You can allocate a portion of the drive for ReadyBoost use. On my 4GB Flash drive, I have allocated 1GB for Readyboost use, and the remainder is free for file storage.
Zing!
Sounds like a good way to wear out a flash drive.
Ever hear of the hybrid hard drive?
Using ReadyBoost-capable flash memory devices for caching allows Windows Vista to service random disk reads with performance that is typically 8-10 times faster than random reads from traditional hard drives. This caching is applied to all disk content, not just the page file or system DLLs. Flash devices are typically slower than the hard drive for sequential I/O, so to maximize performance, ReadyBoost includes logic to recognize large, sequential read requests and then allows these requests to be serviced by the hard drive. When a compatible device is plugged in, the Windows AutoPlay dialog offers an additional option to use it to speed up the system; an additional "ReadyBoost" tab is added to the drive's properties dialog where the amount of space to be used can be configured. ReadyBoost may also be able to use spare RAM on other networked Vista PCs in a future release. ReadyBoost
Q: Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk?
A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.
Q: Won't this wear out the drive?
A: Nope. We're aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Our research shows that we will get at least 10+ years out of flash devices that we support.
Q: How much of a speed increase are we talking about?
A: Well, that depends. On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticeable. ReadyBoost Q&A
try restarting just the windows manager on Windows - you can't
Yes you can - usually. In Task Manager, find process "Explorer.exe" and kill it. If it doesn't restart right away, go to File -> New Task, and run Explorer.exe.
At least, that's the way it works in XP...
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Explorer is NOT a window manager, its only a file manager with desktop abilities. It dosent manage windows, notice that if you kill Explorer, window bars/titles are still drawn? You can still move windows? Yes? Thanks.
Yes you can - usually. In Task Manager, find process "Explorer.exe" and kill it. If it doesn't restart right away, go to File -> New Task, and run Explorer.exe.
That is one way, yes. A much cleaner way that very few people are aware of is this:
Go to Start > Shutdown. When the dialog appears, hold CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and press Cancel. Explorer will cleanly unload all of it's resources and shutdown. To start it back up, open Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is one way) and go to File > New Task and run 'explorer'.
This method was designed for people writing plugins and handlers for Explorer who needed to be able to unload it all and start fresh without rebooting or uncleanly killing Explorer's process. Can be nice to know.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Explorer isn't a window manager, it's a desktop shell and file manager (equivalent to Nautilus in Gnome, Konqueror in KDE, or the Finder in Mac OS). In Windows, the tasks that would be performed by a window manager under X are in the graphics system and the standard library.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Actually the BBC micro and its cut-down counterpart the Acorn Electron preceded RISC processors and ran a 'basic' OS, (MOS/BASIC) that was little more than a tape filing system and a BASIC command line.
A pretty good one for its day, I have to admit.
It was followed by a disc filing system they simply called "DFS", and then later progressed to a directory-tree system called "ADFS"
It was Acorn, the manufacturer of these computers, who went on to develop what I believe is the first RISC processor, the ARM, and made a line of computers based on these with RISCOS for many years
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Wait, are you saying that you can just rip out the USB stick and nothing bad will happen?
Yes.
That doesn't make any sense.
Yes, it does, as soon as you realise the flash drive isn't being used as virtual memory, but as a read caching mechanism for the hard disk.
The Beeb was made by Acorn. It was based on the 6502 processor, and didn't really have an OS as such - really, just a ROM monitor much in the way that other 8 bit computers of the era had. Acorn went on to design the ARM CPU (now ubiquitous in handheld devices). When the ARM was new, it did appear in the last model of BBC Microcomputer (the Archimedes with the BBC branding). Again, it was Acorn's OS (Arthur, renamed to RiscOS).
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This is the first I've heard of this feature. What are they smoking at MS that they though allowing users to dump virtual memory to a USB thumb drive would be a good idea?
Exactly the same stuff those guys who think sticking flash RAM onto a hard disk is a good idea are.
It's not going to be any faster than storing virtual memory on a SATA connected HDD [...]
Yes, it is.
[...] and it is going to eat the flash memory.
No, it's not.
Don't people know those things wear out? They're going to learn the hard way.
Indeed. Particularly persistent ones might find their flash drives lasts only 5 - 7 years instead of 8 - 10.
I've had no problems at all with several large labs and cloning a single install to run all machines. You can use the free Carbon Copy Cloner or just use the tools that Apple provides, it's fairly simple and works nearly flawlessly in my experience.
Sapere aude!
In the "ServerLayout" section of your xorg.cfg, add
Option "DontZap" "True"
That should disable that key shortcut.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I switched to Linux on the desktop about two or three years ago. I got an iBook maybe 8 months ago. For me the UI was not particularly intuitive, and after about six months I went back to using primarily Linux and windows.
I think I am similar in a few ways: I am a power Excel user, and I found that Mac Excel was no easier to use than Open Office, primarily because all the keystrokes are different, and I use Excel by muscle memory. So I don't think Mac Excel is really a solution; I expect you'll have plugin problems too. One other thing to watch out for: there are sometimes big performance hits on OSX for number crunching versus either windows or linux. E.g: for a computation in R (statistics program) I run, some timings were: 4yr old P4 with 256 ram running Fedora: 145s, iBook G4 with 1gig ram: 455s, core 2 duo 7200 windows laptop: 63s, xeon 5130 workstation: 75sec (FB-DIMM cost I'd guess). So watch out on that (there are some references about why this happens with Macs with R, too lazy to google).
My solution (a bit expensive): I have a windows laptop (dual boot to ubuntu) primarily to run excel with plugins (vnc or synergy to use the keyboard/mouse from big rig). The big rig is a dual xeon 5130 running Ubuntu for serious research computations and programming (even the big banks run a lot of quant stuff on linux), and general desktop work not requiring excel. The mac has the advantage of waking instantly from sleep: it is the internet terminal and plays iTunes (too slow for crunching, too weird, for me, for office apps).
Good luck!
Encryption and decryption are faster than hard disk access, and flash access, by a considerable margin. AES-128 is really quite a fast cipher. (Oddly, performs quite slow on the Core 2 Duo compared to the AMD chips. Encryption performance is one of the Core's only weaker points; I expect Penryn, Yorkfield and Wolfdale to address that in microarchitecture tweaks.)
Encrypted system volumes are available on Windows too (in Vista, natively, using BitLocker; in XP and 2000, using third-party encryption applications such as PGP Desktop Professional). Encrypted swap using a similar technique is commonplace on Linux, as well, and if you have the kernel configured appropriately, doesn't really take anything more than adding encryption=AES128 to the end of the swap mount line.
The encryption isn't the performance killer. The swapping, that's the performance killer. However, if you're prefetching, it's likely to have overall little impact, and a broadly positive one depending on how well it's implemented.
I'm still iffy on the ReadyBoost idea though. It's something that could always be done better by just adding more RAM (and Vista likes a lot, big surprise - 2GB to 4GB might be the next sweet spot to aim for). Hybrids in laptops, yeah, I can understand, that's a good idea that's been coming for a while. Just sticking a pendrive in and using that just sounds far too unreliable.
"I believe this to be false, and I am assuming it is coming from someone who has never used OS X. I just looked in System Preferences, and they are indeed there under International (you need to look under its native name, e.g. "Cymraeg" for Welsh -- it's hidden under the "Edit" button). OS X was built with Unicode in mind."
It is not about font support or Unicode, although both are part of the solution, but about the ability to switch the language of the entire system. By changing a setting, KDE speaks Irish or Welsh to me, after recently speaking Swedish. (in the menus, dialogs and stuff.) The same is true of Gnome. Searching for an Irish or Welsh version of OS X gives me no helpful results.
Lemon curry???
Explorer is not the window manager...
You can still manage windows when explorer is not running, compare that to X without a window manager where you can't move windows around... Explorer is just a file manager and launch bar.
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You can see a demo of Spaces in action on Apple's Leopard website.
Apparently any bias in the BBC presentation isn't affecting the readers who comment on their "have your say" pages. As I write this, Vista is having a pretty rough time there...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.