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Why is Microsoft Patching XP?
akkarin noted a story about a new Service patch for XP. Dubbed SP2c, the new service patch contains no bug fixes or features. Instead, this exciting patch exists only to add new valid active product registration keys. Oops.
Why is this labeled a service patch?
So if hackers figure out how to patch in some new "valid" keys with this mechanism, does that mean that no one will need to hack out a key anymore?
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There are 2 red flags on this that would concern me. One that Microsoft would secretly bundle more rights restrictions into XP (admit it, it's certainly tempting, and it's not like they haven't done it before), and two, that this SP would seemingly make it easier to crack windows keys - I mean, here's all the necessary components, isolated and laid out for you to decipher. Well, that's just my 2 cents.
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The thing that gets me is how much less responsive new hardware is running Vista.
My neighbor got a couple of new laptops a couple of months ago. Naturally, they run Vista. He asked me to set them up on his network, and I was amazed at how much slower they are than my laptop (which I got in 2004) that runs XP.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Actually, it was a while back that I've done this, but I ran SO 7, and I think it was OOo 1.2 on the same machine.
SO 7 was blazing fast.
OOo 1.2? Dog slow.
Same machine. Same codebase.
It is perceived as slow to load, but MS Office amortizes some of its load time into Windows' startup.
Like any Java program, lots of components are lazy-initialized, and with most JRE's these are also slow.
But once you're operating, it's not slow.
What are you comparing? Computationally intensive resolution of spreadsheets? OO Spreadsheet isn't bad. When does a measure of "speed" enter into a Word Processor program, aside from the perception of font rendering, reflow formatting, preparation for printing, and that sort of thing? OO Writer is pretty good on these points as well.
My gripes about OO are also gripes about Excel. Reporting scientific research and don't like the scatter plots? Need to constrain error bars? These programs can be quite lacking, but it's not as though Excel surpasses OO in many areas. When I need something that Writer won't do, I'd be doing it in LaTeX anyway. I wouldn't bother with a spreadsheet for anything but the most simple calculation, since I use Matlab day in and day out.
Maybe I'm not qualified to speak on the virtues of spreadsheets, since I'm a scientist and those things are made for financial analysts who have entirely different use cases. Even so, I have yet to see a spreadsheet sans macro programming, that could not have been done on the 2.1 version of Lotus 1-2-3. If "speed" was really the concern, I am quite confident that 1-2-3 running in dosemu on a current machine will beat anything out there. Probably has a Y2K showstopper or something.
I just don't see the argument that it's "slow". And yes, I do run NeoOffice on a Macbook Pro. Takes a while to startup. So does MS Office, but it takes advantage of tight integration and hides it from you.
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