It has got down to the point for me now the only thing I have Windows for is MS written applications. Everything else I use is available on Linux, OS X and Win32/64. I'm going to try and get MS Office Communicator to work in WINE, (not holding out much hope for this though) but this is the only thing I use now provided by Redmond.
Ius my computers for work, and I have two games console for games. My preferred macin is my Mac Mini, I also have an HP tablet (running openSuSE 11.1) and an old desktop as a server running openSuse 10.0) and an Acer Aspire One for real portability (Ubuntu 8.04). I'd love to upgrade my mini, but as I already have a 24" screen, and an Apple cordless KB and mouse, I don't need to spring for an iMac and I dont need a laptop, so a faster Mini would be my preferred machine, but a mini pro would be much better 8) The mini makes a great media centre though.
I was also hoping for a new Mini, but DRM free music is a big step. Now if they would only offer the option of downloading in a free/open codec. At least I can now convert the tunes to MP3 in iTunes, but I'm now working out which of my players will handle.m4a files 8)
Truecrypt allows you to make a crypt folder with two different keys, that unlock different containers. No way to tell if it has been set up with one or two containers 8)
A friend of mine had his life ruined and all of his PC gear confiscated when a jilted X girlfriend (we presume) "dobbed him in" to the cops for Kiddie Porn. There was nothing on his PC, but that didn't stop the cops taking all of his PC gear for over a year, then dropping all charges just weeks before the court date was set. The only suspicion they seemed to need was one un-corroborated complaint.
I thought they were going to start a pay-as-you-go office suite. But also remember IBM, they are still around but 20 years ago, who would have thought you'd never buy a business computer from anyone but them?
I agree, I predict that as Vista and Windows 7 get harder to pirate or copy, the user base of WIndows will shrink to the point where Linux becomes much more popular. I know for me having my legit version of XP and having to phone activate my Vista everytime I reinstall drove me to try linux, and now I'm hooked 8)
Just a stupid question, what on the desktop are you doing that requires 64-bit desktop OS? On a server with a big database app, yes, 64 bit and huge memory access mkes sense, maybe some video editing/rendering, but nothing I do or any of my clients even stresses their current systems except running vista 8) We are onll looking at 64 bit on server that will be running Exchange 2007. Most big apps should offload their workload to servers which tend to have faster drives and system busses, and can be kept busy for more of their run time. A 64 bit desktop runnign mostly at less than 10% utilisation 95% of the time is just wasted resource.
But the sort of people who would upgrade their own memry rather than paying the upgrade cost through the customisation wizard would probably just be better off with Vista and more memory rather than futzing around with XP and trying to make it safe.
I agree completely with this. A standard Dell my brother bought was loaded with rubbish and all the candy. His system was a 2.6GHz with 2GB RAM. My 2Ghz Mac Mini with 2GB RAM flt much faster running Vista and the only thing I can put it down to is the straightforward default minumum fuss install you get with Bootcamp. This was the easiest bare metal Vista install I have ever done BTW. (I only need it for access to our Office Communicator system for work) I would have installed XP instead, but could not get a local retailer to sell me an XP licence 8( Just to note though Ubuntu running in VMWare fusion under OS X runs much faster than Vista when I limit the memory available to the guest 1GB and this I put down to disk access, Vista is paging like crazy while the ubuntu install just sits and waits for something to do. (Anything hitting the disk in VMWare slows things down, and more so on a mini with a slow laptop style harddrive.) However the virtualised Ubuntu feels just like a bare metal install (apart from no access to the 3D features, but the Vista install runs without aero too as the crappy intel card won't support DirectX when virtualised.
The main thing is that Dell now sell most of their hardware at a spec that will run Vista acceptably, as long as you make sure you spec 1 or 2GB ram, and the memory upgrade is only slightly more than the XP cross-grade.
What I still want it to be able to spec a full Linux desktop with all the hardware supported fully. Why is this still so hard for them when the commmunity has 99% of all the issues sorted already?
My goodness, electric thrusters, space stations, private spaceflight and the Martin jetpack. You could almost start believing we are finally living in the 21st century! But where is my flying car damnit!
The classic case is the Dell mini 9. This costs more to buy fully loaded hardware and linux than it does after the cashback offer with the xp version. but then I guess you are only getting an 8 year old obsolete os with xp but a fully supported and modern os with Uuntu 8) maybee that should cost more as the premium OS choice.
The last game I ever bought for my PC until recoedntly was Red Baron - wasted $100 on that puppy and if never played right, crashing after very short periods of time, patches came out ad made it better, but still hopeless. After that I gave up with PC games and bought consoles for games, because I need my PC to work 8)
I have just bought world of goo though, and mainly because of their DRM policy - none. They found their non drm games sold better than the DRM ones and were not copied significantly more. Also after paying for the download, I could get it for mac and PC, so I downloaded both 8). I'm a happy customer and will buy their stuff again. Never again from EA though.
One of the best things I learnt in Polytech studying Software engineering is that all languages try to do very similar things in different ways with differnet syntax. Also that no matter what, machine code was the fastest. One week our project was to use the pascal syntax reference to compile a list of commands (about a dozen or so) into a working binary. From this we learnt string handling, expression parsing, error trapping, IO, memory handling etc. When I graduated I could code competantly in 2 highlevel languages, and knew enough to understand the manuals for others, and knew how to optimise for Motorolla and Intel CPUs, etc but I got a good foundation just by messing around with my ZX81 and Spectrum at home well before I left college for University. Considering how expensive computers were when I was growing up, I am continually impressed at how brave my father was in letting me open up our speccy and messing around with it's innards. Yes I blew up a RAM pack once and one of the first things I did with our IBM PC was to try and delete the . file, and the.. file too "Why were they still in the directory I just deleted?" *) And then I think would I let my son/daughter mess around with the innards of my $3000 pc? Shudder! Thank god for Asus and the eeebox! Oh, and my two old x-boxes - they are great little machines just waiting for a bigger hard drive.
I look at the current shool curriculim for computer studies and dispair - they lean how to use MS Office (not just wordprocessing in general) and how to create a wiki or a blog (not how to craft html and use a scripting language) and almost nothing on networking protocols or security.
Once my kids are old enough, I'll try to get them to help build their own computer from parts, just like my father helped me build my first car. I still have fond memories of that hunk of junk even though a Toyota corolla would have been faster and more reliable 8). I mourn the passing of VW air cooled engines and simple easy to build computers as I guess my kids will probably never want to look under the hood of either. They will just want it to work and play their MP3s
I did mine with two robots in a ring, and the interface allowed a list of operations on each robot, and the winner was the last one still in the circle when done 8)
At college (about thirteen years old) we also wrote scripts in logo, but as in my first lab I whad already gotten in early and modified the autoexec.bat file to include: myroutine: echo "Hamish is a dick!" goto myroutine
What if the ISPs became massive seeds for the content. They could deliver packets to their local subscibers very easily, and reduce the load on the international data channels 8) Oh, That would be "bad" I guess 8(
The other advantage is I don't have to wait for the local broadcaster to pich up a show and decide to screen it when I am not home. The downloads I get are better quality than the terrestrial coverage I can get, and I download over night and watch when I want to in the week, or on my phone when catching the train to work, etc.
This way I never have to worry about accidentally catching an episode of Suvivor when what I was really looking for was Mythbusters. 8)
In NZ, the ISPs have started sellings plans with 20GB caps and ASL rates advertised as "As Fast As Your Line Will Allow" Damn cheeky as I am paying the same as everyone else on my plan but can only get 2.5Mbs out of my DSL line, while my sister who happens to live closer to the DSLAM gets 7Mbs. We are both on the same plan with the same ISP.
The ISP could throttle the traffic wherever they want and just say, " its as fast as you can get where you live."
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It has got down to the point for me now the only thing I have Windows for is MS written applications. Everything else I use is available on Linux, OS X and Win32/64. I'm going to try and get MS Office Communicator to work in WINE, (not holding out much hope for this though) but this is the only thing I use now provided by Redmond.
You just need more powerful netbooks 8)
Ius my computers for work, and I have two games console for games. My preferred macin is my Mac Mini, I also have an HP tablet (running openSuSE 11.1) and an old desktop as a server running openSuse 10.0) and an Acer Aspire One for real portability (Ubuntu 8.04).
I'd love to upgrade my mini, but as I already have a 24" screen, and an Apple cordless KB and mouse, I don't need to spring for an iMac and I dont need a laptop, so a faster Mini would be my preferred machine, but a mini pro would be much better 8) The mini makes a great media centre though.
I was also hoping for a new Mini, but DRM free music is a big step. Now if they would only offer the option of downloading in a free/open codec. At least I can now convert the tunes to MP3 in iTunes, but I'm now working out which of my players will handle .m4a files 8)
Truecrypt allows you to make a crypt folder with two different keys, that unlock different containers. No way to tell if it has been set up with one or two containers 8)
A friend of mine had his life ruined and all of his PC gear confiscated when a jilted X girlfriend (we presume) "dobbed him in" to the cops for Kiddie Porn. There was nothing on his PC, but that didn't stop the cops taking all of his PC gear for over a year, then dropping all charges just weeks before the court date was set.
The only suspicion they seemed to need was one un-corroborated complaint.
It makes you think, the UK as protrayed in V for Vendeta isn't that far away really 8)
I thought they were going to start a pay-as-you-go office suite.
But also remember IBM, they are still around but 20 years ago, who would have thought you'd never buy a business computer from anyone but them?
I agree, I predict that as Vista and Windows 7 get harder to pirate or copy, the user base of WIndows will shrink to the point where Linux becomes much more popular.
I know for me having my legit version of XP and having to phone activate my Vista everytime I reinstall drove me to try linux, and now I'm hooked 8)
Yeah, I saw the screenshots and said, "hey, looks like KDE4!"
Just a stupid question, what on the desktop are you doing that requires 64-bit desktop OS? On a server with a big database app, yes, 64 bit and huge memory access mkes sense, maybe some video editing/rendering, but nothing I do or any of my clients even stresses their current systems except running vista 8)
We are onll looking at 64 bit on server that will be running Exchange 2007. Most big apps should offload their workload to servers which tend to have faster drives and system busses, and can be kept busy for more of their run time.
A 64 bit desktop runnign mostly at less than 10% utilisation 95% of the time is just wasted resource.
I just use RocketDock and avoid the startmenu for all my day to day applications. only going there for something I use one in a blue moon.
But the sort of people who would upgrade their own memry rather than paying the upgrade cost through the customisation wizard would probably just be better off with Vista and more memory rather than futzing around with XP and trying to make it safe.
Th mn thng is dat Dell nw sll mst hrdwre at specification tht wl rn MSVista .....
I agree completely with this. A standard Dell my brother bought was loaded with rubbish and all the candy. His system was a 2.6GHz with 2GB RAM. My 2Ghz Mac Mini with 2GB RAM flt much faster running Vista and the only thing I can put it down to is the straightforward default minumum fuss install you get with Bootcamp. This was the easiest bare metal Vista install I have ever done BTW. (I only need it for access to our Office Communicator system for work) I would have installed XP instead, but could not get a local retailer to sell me an XP licence 8(
Just to note though Ubuntu running in VMWare fusion under OS X runs much faster than Vista when I limit the memory available to the guest 1GB and this I put down to disk access, Vista is paging like crazy while the ubuntu install just sits and waits for something to do. (Anything hitting the disk in VMWare slows things down, and more so on a mini with a slow laptop style harddrive.) However the virtualised Ubuntu feels just like a bare metal install (apart from no access to the 3D features, but the Vista install runs without aero too as the crappy intel card won't support DirectX when virtualised.
The main thing is that Dell now sell most of their hardware at a spec that will run Vista acceptably, as long as you make sure you spec 1 or 2GB ram, and the memory upgrade is only slightly more than the XP cross-grade.
What I still want it to be able to spec a full Linux desktop with all the hardware supported fully. Why is this still so hard for them when the commmunity has 99% of all the issues sorted already?
My goodness, electric thrusters, space stations, private spaceflight and the Martin jetpack. You could almost start believing we are finally living in the 21st century! But where is my flying car damnit!
MS will litteraly give XP away to the vendors now ratherthan risk having people/customers break free of the win32 app stack.
The classic case is the Dell mini 9. This costs more to buy fully loaded hardware and linux than it does after the cashback offer with the xp version. but then I guess you are only getting an 8 year old obsolete os with xp but a fully supported and modern os with Uuntu 8) maybee that should cost more as the premium OS choice.
The last game I ever bought for my PC until recoedntly was Red Baron - wasted $100 on that puppy and if never played right, crashing after very short periods of time, patches came out ad made it better, but still hopeless.
After that I gave up with PC games and bought consoles for games, because I need my PC to work 8)
I have just bought world of goo though, and mainly because of their DRM policy - none. They found their non drm games sold better than the DRM ones and were not copied significantly more.
Also after paying for the download, I could get it for mac and PC, so I downloaded both 8).
I'm a happy customer and will buy their stuff again. Never again from EA though.
One of the best things I learnt in Polytech studying Software engineering is that all languages try to do very similar things in different ways with differnet syntax. .. file too "Why were they still in the directory I just deleted?" *)
Also that no matter what, machine code was the fastest.
One week our project was to use the pascal syntax reference to compile a list of commands (about a dozen or so) into a working binary.
From this we learnt string handling, expression parsing, error trapping, IO, memory handling etc.
When I graduated I could code competantly in 2 highlevel languages, and knew enough to understand the manuals for others, and knew how to optimise for Motorolla and Intel CPUs, etc but I got a good foundation just by messing around with my ZX81 and Spectrum at home well before I left college for University.
Considering how expensive computers were when I was growing up, I am continually impressed at how brave my father was in letting me open up our speccy and messing around with it's innards. Yes I blew up a RAM pack once and one of the first things I did with our IBM PC was to try and delete the . file, and the
And then I think would I let my son/daughter mess around with the innards of my $3000 pc? Shudder! Thank god for Asus and the eeebox! Oh, and my two old x-boxes - they are great little machines just waiting for a bigger hard drive.
I look at the current shool curriculim for computer studies and dispair - they lean how to use MS Office (not just wordprocessing in general) and how to create a wiki or a blog (not how to craft html and use a scripting language) and almost nothing on networking protocols or security.
Once my kids are old enough, I'll try to get them to help build their own computer from parts, just like my father helped me build my first car. I still have fond memories of that hunk of junk even though a Toyota corolla would have been faster and more reliable 8). I mourn the passing of VW air cooled engines and simple easy to build computers as I guess my kids will probably never want to look under the hood of either. They will just want it to work and play their MP3s
I did mine with two robots in a ring, and the interface allowed a list of operations on each robot, and the winner was the last one still in the circle when done 8)
At college (about thirteen years old) we also wrote scripts in logo, but as in my first lab I whad already gotten in early and modified the autoexec.bat file to include:
myroutine:
echo "Hamish is a dick!"
goto myroutine
I thought logo was a little dull 8)
What if the ISPs became massive seeds for the content. They could deliver packets to their local subscibers very easily, and reduce the load on the international data channels 8)
Oh, That would be "bad" I guess 8(
The other advantage is I don't have to wait for the local broadcaster to pich up a show and decide to screen it when I am not home.
The downloads I get are better quality than the terrestrial coverage I can get, and I download over night and watch when I want to in the week, or on my phone when catching the train to work, etc.
This way I never have to worry about accidentally catching an episode of Suvivor when what I was really looking for was Mythbusters. 8)
In NZ, the ISPs have started sellings plans with 20GB caps and ASL rates advertised as "As Fast As Your Line Will Allow" Damn cheeky as I am paying the same as everyone else on my plan but can only get 2.5Mbs out of my DSL line, while my sister who happens to live closer to the DSLAM gets 7Mbs. We are both on the same plan with the same ISP.
The ISP could throttle the traffic wherever they want and just say, " its as fast as you can get where you live."