I dunno, it depends on what criteria they are using to sort video files. If by file name, then yeah, not so impressive, but if their sorting based on a measure of relevance of the contained contents, my jaw would drop and my eyes would pop out.
The question is though, does that paid researcher have to know-how or motivation to devote to the drudgery to build something like matlab from scratch. As long as the answer is 'no', and I think you'd agree with me that in many cases it is (i.e. insufficient technical knowledge, or would rather spend time doing actual research instead of designing a tool to let him research), there will be a market for proprietary software. Its the classic case of specialization. A research specializes in his problem domain, while others specialize in their problem domain (writing mathematical software). As long as this is the case, there is a need for proprietary software to build the tools that people find useful.
I think a case on the far end of the spectrum would be Blender. While I applaud the work of their development team (I use Blender whenever I'm in an artistic mood and feel like tinkering), the development was started based on an established code base that was bought from a company. 9.99997/10 graphic artists would lack the necessary ability to sit down and write their own 3-d modelling tool today, and that is largely why the the professional graphics industry is dominated by proprietary solutions (though fortunately there are lots of linux render farms).
Some plugins are still in beta/alpha/eat your babies revision. They make you register to download those, so you can't bitch at them when it gobbles up all your bookmarks or something.
UAC is a necessary evil. No matter how much people rail against it, I would support it being permanently enabled on all Vista machines. The world would be a better place, when Vista joins every other OS I can think of in being able to have functional non-admin user accounts.
He gets the 50% from the fact that human intelligence, like all attributes spread across human populations follow a bell shaped distribution. There is a nominal difference between the mean and median in a bell shaped distribution.
I think you meant Software for the for Developers, by a not Wholly Disjoint Subset of Developers. I seem to remember all kinds of bitterness in several projects that the users would just shut up and deal with the software they chose to use. 2 cases in point that I can think of are Pidgin and KDE.
Pidgin in particular was very guilty of this, I remember reading some of those comments in the thread and some of the devs basically came down on the side of "If you don't like it, tough, we write this for ourselves, not you."
I think on the whole there is absolutely no reason why an open source project should have to support users at all. I say that cynically, but support doesn't magically occur. Unless you have specifically contributed to a project you have no reason to even expect some kind of support, and even then, its kind of iffy, unless you've contributed code, at which point it becomes pointless, because if you can hack on a project, it's unlikely you need any support.
Realistically though, how could a change in operating system really affect the speed of video encoding, unless the process scheduler is absolutely abysmal (which I'd think it wouldn't be by this point). Since the tasks listed aren't part of vista. As someone who isn't flabbergasted by the concept that a CPU can't crunch numbers faster than itself, this isn't particularly interesting. It just shows that the Windows team is actually optimizing the important parts of the system they have control over.
I'm sure they are now going through the process of cleaning out their own junk. Just because Mozilla had what, 6 years of lead time doesn't mean the the IE team are incapable of getting on the ball. I look forward to an IE that actually works correctly, much in the way I look forward to Windows 7 now that it looks like MS is finally back on the ball.
Where have you been...
Ubuntu is the tantamount to the second coming, to save us from the encroaching darkness of t3h m1cR0$h@f][.
All Ubuntu actually has are some good "community managers" that managed to get a whole bunch of people super worked up about an average distribution that leeches off of debian.
Seriously, dude, Obama is not a socialist, and Bush put an end to more liberties than Obama would ever have any inclination to end.
News flash... socialism has little to do with liberties. I think the word you're looking for is communist, and to the best of my knowledge that one hasn't been flung around since the height of the cold war.
Oh, you could... spend your own money and pay the people doing less honorable and underpayed jobs around you for services rendered. That also has the added benefit that 47% of that 50% you talked about isn't getting sucked into the governmental void.
Yeah, but I think FF has an interesting use case in that if there is something on the page, but not in the page title, I can add it as a tag, and viola, I can auto complete based on important page content.
No, its got the funny encryption schemes. The thing is, I have no interest in making it work correctly, when Windows XP/Vista and OS X(.2-5) work with it correctly (even if they have to deviate from the spec). Its an unfortunate side effect of real world engineering that tons of things deviate from the specification ever so slightly, and unless you can handle that, you stuff doesn't get used. Granted, I've also seen a few of the EEEs around that can use the wireless (stock and with ubuntu), so my hunch is its a driver interaction.
While, I'm all for that, maybe they should work on an integrated "Recent Files" that will actually work for any file opened by any application (I'd think OpenOffice would qualify as one that would be good here) before they go for hard stuff like integrated search whatever.
But did you know that if you have a wireless router that supports multiple types of encryption, you can not all use them simultaniously with most routers?
Not my router. I would assume that my university is smart enough to know that when they post directions for Windows and Mac that assume WEP with 802.1x. Yes, I know WEP is weak security, but its an old system that they just never upgraded.
Yes,
since the people funding military adventures and bailing out wall street shouldn't really be funding operating system development.
Besides, how much money is SELinux worth by these metrics? The NSA funded that.
Linux could ofcourse let them be stored in a single entiety and load it at startup but then you will get Windows regitry hell and longer boot times.
I would think that is up to the application, as I don't think there is any reliable way for the kernel to decide whether a client application is writing lots of unrelated files (transcoding media formats) or if there are lots of related files (mailbox folders). Oh well, it doesn't begin to approach the level of retardedness of whatever the Windows (FS in a File) format is called (maybe OLE?)
I don't actually think boot time is dominated completely by I/O activity. I think a comparable portion is done by probing/initializing hardware, which I figure can probably only be done by better by faster buses/smarter drivers.
Yes indeed, but it's Windows who indexes (that means a background process or something in userland) NTFS and not NTFS indexing... well NTFS. The whole thing about the new FS that should have come with Vista (something MS promised to deliver ever since Windows 95 or maybe even earlyer... I can't remember when exactly (Google yellow road to Cairo)) is that it indexes itself by nature, or is some sort of database which you can crawl through (not really sure what it actually is).
WinFS I think. Never read much about it. The indexing I was referring to was more that indexing is built in rather than bolted on externally, which can result in the gaps I described.
If you don't have physicall acces to the hardware it's much harder though...
If my computer is stolen, I would consider everything on it compromised. Life is safe that way.
As for the wireless, I cannot, for the life of me, get anything to connect to WEP with 802.1x authentication. It just won't do it. This is 2 seperate laptops with different chipsets in both Ubuntu 8.04 and openSUSE 11. Fun times...
IE 7 does suck, but your English is quite good regardless.
Its the reason I can answer 98% of all computer related questions I receive, even if I have a nominal amount of whats going on. Then again, I understand a bunch about the underlying system.
Program X replaces DLL that program Y needs, etc.
Have you noticed how in more recent versions of Windows most programs ship local copies of dlls. Also the.NET global assembly cache actual enforces versioning, so that installed applications can fall back on the.dll that they themselves installed/require. Linux suffers from a the related problem of slightly different versions of lots of important libraries on different distros, which kind of amounts to reverse dll hell, as programs have to cope with oddities in the system dll's instead of their own.
In time the Windows registry starts becoming a mess.
I'm a bum that actually goes through my registry from time to time and remove things that I'm positive shouldn't be there. GConf and whatever the ksetting thing is called are the same thing though. Merging of system level configurations with user configurations for consumption by runtime programs. Which makes me wonder about the disk access profiles for reading GConf vs building the Registry Hive especially since I know that GConf can fill up with keys too (does nm-applet still store every wireless profile in gconf?). I've seen a GConf cleaner (I'm not sure about kdes settings implementation, I think the unused files might just sit on the disk). bringing me to my next point.
NTFS fragments heavily (there are defrag options, but they still suck). A Linux FS like ext3 fore example only start fragmentation when your partition is full for 80 percent or more.
Fragmentation is my favorite pro-linux argument.
I'm not really sure how a de-fragmentation option can suck if everything is working properly. Btw, Vista has an online de-fragmenter which I've never actually noticed running. Also, with the exception of maybe mail programs and the new firefox which seems to stuff everything into a single large sqlite file, what programs have a common use case of repeatedly needing to perform I/O on a file that spans a large number of blocks repeatedly. The fragmentation argument doesn't make sense to me either, since (beware incoming broad generalization) every linux program I've seen seems to store its data in tons of tiny files anyway. Hooray for artificial simulation of fragmentation. So, props to ext for not fragmenting, now if only those pesky user-land programs didn't conspire against it.
Windows indexes NTFS by keeping a record of all changes that you make
This is actually one of my big gripes with how I understand most of the linux indexing apps work. Indexing at the file system seems to make much more sense than at the application level. Take for instance the odd chance when I just start a remote terminal on one of my machines remotely. Oops... tracker isn't guaranteed to be running because there isn't an active gnome session. All the changes I make don't necessarily get picked up. I believe that OS X also had a great deal of kernel level changes to effectively support Spotlight, though I may be wrong.
Futhermore: to have a more secure system you are required to have all sorts of scanning apps that slow down your WIndows install(Windows Defender, Hitman Pro, McAfee, etc)
Yeah, that sucks, but McAfee only runs once a week, so I just leave my laptop on at night. It doesn't really inconvenience me. Certainly less so than randomly not being able to connect to wireless access points.
Fingerprint master passwords are very insecure.
Are they? I guess there is a risk that the fingerprints are stored somewhere on disk. But on the other hand, there is an option on the UPEK reader to store them in the reade
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I dunno, it depends on what criteria they are using to sort video files. If by file name, then yeah, not so impressive, but if their sorting based on a measure of relevance of the contained contents, my jaw would drop and my eyes would pop out.
The question is though, does that paid researcher have to know-how or motivation to devote to the drudgery to build something like matlab from scratch. As long as the answer is 'no', and I think you'd agree with me that in many cases it is (i.e. insufficient technical knowledge, or would rather spend time doing actual research instead of designing a tool to let him research), there will be a market for proprietary software. Its the classic case of specialization. A research specializes in his problem domain, while others specialize in their problem domain (writing mathematical software). As long as this is the case, there is a need for proprietary software to build the tools that people find useful.
I think a case on the far end of the spectrum would be Blender. While I applaud the work of their development team (I use Blender whenever I'm in an artistic mood and feel like tinkering), the development was started based on an established code base that was bought from a company. 9.99997/10 graphic artists would lack the necessary ability to sit down and write their own 3-d modelling tool today, and that is largely why the the professional graphics industry is dominated by proprietary solutions (though fortunately there are lots of linux render farms).
I claim that it is you who has drunk the kool-aid. GPL is not the be-all-end-all of free software.
I guess they figure fewer people are willing to automatically click through a multi-stage registration page, than to read 1 bold line.
Some plugins are still in beta/alpha/eat your babies revision. They make you register to download those, so you can't bitch at them when it gobbles up all your bookmarks or something.
Yeah, but that's the fault of whoever coded the player, not necessarily Silverlight.
UAC is a necessary evil. No matter how much people rail against it, I would support it being permanently enabled on all Vista machines. The world would be a better place, when Vista joins every other OS I can think of in being able to have functional non-admin user accounts.
He gets the 50% from the fact that human intelligence, like all attributes spread across human populations follow a bell shaped distribution. There is a nominal difference between the mean and median in a bell shaped distribution.
I think you meant Software for the for Developers, by a not Wholly Disjoint Subset of Developers. I seem to remember all kinds of bitterness in several projects that the users would just shut up and deal with the software they chose to use. 2 cases in point that I can think of are Pidgin and KDE.
Pidgin in particular was very guilty of this, I remember reading some of those comments in the thread and some of the devs basically came down on the side of "If you don't like it, tough, we write this for ourselves, not you." I think on the whole there is absolutely no reason why an open source project should have to support users at all. I say that cynically, but support doesn't magically occur. Unless you have specifically contributed to a project you have no reason to even expect some kind of support, and even then, its kind of iffy, unless you've contributed code, at which point it becomes pointless, because if you can hack on a project, it's unlikely you need any support.
Realistically though, how could a change in operating system really affect the speed of video encoding, unless the process scheduler is absolutely abysmal (which I'd think it wouldn't be by this point). Since the tasks listed aren't part of vista. As someone who isn't flabbergasted by the concept that a CPU can't crunch numbers faster than itself, this isn't particularly interesting. It just shows that the Windows team is actually optimizing the important parts of the system they have control over.
And here I thought it was because the Japanese launched an unprovoked attack on an American military base.
I'm sure they are now going through the process of cleaning out their own junk. Just because Mozilla had what, 6 years of lead time doesn't mean the the IE team are incapable of getting on the ball. I look forward to an IE that actually works correctly, much in the way I look forward to Windows 7 now that it looks like MS is finally back on the ball.
Where have you been... Ubuntu is the tantamount to the second coming, to save us from the encroaching darkness of t3h m1cR0$h@f][.
All Ubuntu actually has are some good "community managers" that managed to get a whole bunch of people super worked up about an average distribution that leeches off of debian.
Seriously, dude, Obama is not a socialist, and Bush put an end to more liberties than Obama would ever have any inclination to end.
News flash... socialism has little to do with liberties. I think the word you're looking for is communist, and to the best of my knowledge that one hasn't been flung around since the height of the cold war.
The purpose of taxes are to fund the running of a government for general societal benefit, not to redistribute wealth.
Oh, you could... spend your own money and pay the people doing less honorable and underpayed jobs around you for services rendered. That also has the added benefit that 47% of that 50% you talked about isn't getting sucked into the governmental void.
I'm reasonably certain this is actual diesel. There is a difference.
Yeah, but I think FF has an interesting use case in that if there is something on the page, but not in the page title, I can add it as a tag, and viola, I can auto complete based on important page content.
No, its got the funny encryption schemes. The thing is, I have no interest in making it work correctly, when Windows XP/Vista and OS X(.2-5) work with it correctly (even if they have to deviate from the spec). Its an unfortunate side effect of real world engineering that tons of things deviate from the specification ever so slightly, and unless you can handle that, you stuff doesn't get used. Granted, I've also seen a few of the EEEs around that can use the wireless (stock and with ubuntu), so my hunch is its a driver interaction.
While, I'm all for that, maybe they should work on an integrated "Recent Files" that will actually work for any file opened by any application (I'd think OpenOffice would qualify as one that would be good here) before they go for hard stuff like integrated search whatever.
But did you know that if you have a wireless router that supports multiple types of encryption, you can not all use them simultaniously with most routers?
Not my router. I would assume that my university is smart enough to know that when they post directions for Windows and Mac that assume WEP with 802.1x. Yes, I know WEP is weak security, but its an old system that they just never upgraded.
Yes,
since the people funding military adventures and bailing out wall street shouldn't really be funding operating system development. Besides, how much money is SELinux worth by these metrics? The NSA funded that.
Linux could ofcourse let them be stored in a single entiety and load it at startup but then you will get Windows regitry hell and longer boot times.
I would think that is up to the application, as I don't think there is any reliable way for the kernel to decide whether a client application is writing lots of unrelated files (transcoding media formats) or if there are lots of related files (mailbox folders). Oh well, it doesn't begin to approach the level of retardedness of whatever the Windows (FS in a File) format is called (maybe OLE?) I don't actually think boot time is dominated completely by I/O activity. I think a comparable portion is done by probing/initializing hardware, which I figure can probably only be done by better by faster buses/smarter drivers.
Yes indeed, but it's Windows who indexes (that means a background process or something in userland) NTFS and not NTFS indexing... well NTFS. The whole thing about the new FS that should have come with Vista (something MS promised to deliver ever since Windows 95 or maybe even earlyer... I can't remember when exactly (Google yellow road to Cairo)) is that it indexes itself by nature, or is some sort of database which you can crawl through (not really sure what it actually is).
WinFS I think. Never read much about it. The indexing I was referring to was more that indexing is built in rather than bolted on externally, which can result in the gaps I described.
If you don't have physicall acces to the hardware it's much harder though...
If my computer is stolen, I would consider everything on it compromised. Life is safe that way. As for the wireless, I cannot, for the life of me, get anything to connect to WEP with 802.1x authentication. It just won't do it. This is 2 seperate laptops with different chipsets in both Ubuntu 8.04 and openSUSE 11. Fun times... IE 7 does suck, but your English is quite good regardless.
RingTFM isn't going to get anyone anywhere
Its the reason I can answer 98% of all computer related questions I receive, even if I have a nominal amount of whats going on. Then again, I understand a bunch about the underlying system.
Program X replaces DLL that program Y needs, etc.
Have you noticed how in more recent versions of Windows most programs ship local copies of dlls. Also the .NET global assembly cache actual enforces versioning, so that installed applications can fall back on the .dll that they themselves installed/require. Linux suffers from a the related problem of slightly different versions of lots of important libraries on different distros, which kind of amounts to reverse dll hell, as programs have to cope with oddities in the system dll's instead of their own.
In time the Windows registry starts becoming a mess.
I'm a bum that actually goes through my registry from time to time and remove things that I'm positive shouldn't be there. GConf and whatever the ksetting thing is called are the same thing though. Merging of system level configurations with user configurations for consumption by runtime programs. Which makes me wonder about the disk access profiles for reading GConf vs building the Registry Hive especially since I know that GConf can fill up with keys too (does nm-applet still store every wireless profile in gconf?). I've seen a GConf cleaner (I'm not sure about kdes settings implementation, I think the unused files might just sit on the disk). bringing me to my next point.
NTFS fragments heavily (there are defrag options, but they still suck). A Linux FS like ext3 fore example only start fragmentation when your partition is full for 80 percent or more.
Fragmentation is my favorite pro-linux argument. I'm not really sure how a de-fragmentation option can suck if everything is working properly. Btw, Vista has an online de-fragmenter which I've never actually noticed running. Also, with the exception of maybe mail programs and the new firefox which seems to stuff everything into a single large sqlite file, what programs have a common use case of repeatedly needing to perform I/O on a file that spans a large number of blocks repeatedly. The fragmentation argument doesn't make sense to me either, since (beware incoming broad generalization) every linux program I've seen seems to store its data in tons of tiny files anyway. Hooray for artificial simulation of fragmentation. So, props to ext for not fragmenting, now if only those pesky user-land programs didn't conspire against it.
Windows indexes NTFS by keeping a record of all changes that you make
This is actually one of my big gripes with how I understand most of the linux indexing apps work. Indexing at the file system seems to make much more sense than at the application level. Take for instance the odd chance when I just start a remote terminal on one of my machines remotely. Oops... tracker isn't guaranteed to be running because there isn't an active gnome session. All the changes I make don't necessarily get picked up. I believe that OS X also had a great deal of kernel level changes to effectively support Spotlight, though I may be wrong.
Futhermore: to have a more secure system you are required to have all sorts of scanning apps that slow down your WIndows install(Windows Defender, Hitman Pro, McAfee, etc)
Yeah, that sucks, but McAfee only runs once a week, so I just leave my laptop on at night. It doesn't really inconvenience me. Certainly less so than randomly not being able to connect to wireless access points.
Fingerprint master passwords are very insecure.
Are they? I guess there is a risk that the fingerprints are stored somewhere on disk. But on the other hand, there is an option on the UPEK reader to store them in the reade
p.s. now I'm just trying to learn about such options, as my linux foo has been demonstrated inferior to yours.