The worst thing that I noticed once I switched to SP2 (also updates to IE for win2k3 cause the same issue so its an IE change that did it) is that IE will freeze up until it loads the page and often until it loads the images from that page. I've got the bug reports in so hopefully it gets fixed, annoys the heck out of me.
Thats 3 out 5 five with a pool of 5 machines tested if I remember correctly. If I gave my success stats (4 out of 4 successfully booted) it would look like SP2 was a perfect patch. I think either the guys that tried it had bad hardware or bad software or something else wrong. Not that it justfies the fact they were broken by the patch but its a bad stat to keep using.
Because its a 15% fuel effciency gain which is not bad at all. Heck why not get the crazy people that drive military grade vehicles to commute to work to use less gas? Better than building some little thing that rarely anyone will drive. If noone drives the effcient cars then what does it matter that they get 75mpg when people would rather drive 15mpg monsters. At least if those monsters get 19mpg (thats aboutw what they should be at if I remember) we still save that 4mpg and since maybe more people would drive them its more savings than the non driven models.
I have no problem with linux, use it a lot of the time. I'd never put it on my parents computer. My thoughts were from experience. My mom managed to drag an icon off the start menu and onto the desktop and they couldn't use the program for 3 months until I stopped by home and "found" it again. Just imagine how screwed they would be if the window manager got changed. I won't even get into trying to have them install new hardware on windows.
It wasn't that brutal on my machines. I installed it without my wife knowning and she has not complained of a single application being unable to work. Not that apps won't be broken by the new security, but I haven't seen any apps broken by my install of sp2. This includes the network software I have installed (all clients, no servers so far) and wierd hardware things (my printer driver seems to be somewhat like a video driver and we all know how security and abstraction beats up cd burning software) that my computer has seem unaffected.
On the other end of all of this you can see why MS took so long to close some of this stuff off. Its a massive PR hit to have many applications quit working because the developers assumed that it was ok to do admin only tasks in user software or open unsecured ports. MS had to wait until the bad PR from poor security was worse than the bad PR that would be generated from securing the OS. From what I've seen though the fixes are not that bad to deal with and I'd like to hear more specifics on particular situations where things were broken.
The interface may not be as nice but it's a lot more capable.
That says it all, people expect the interface to be as easy to use and nice looking and everything as the windows software. Until developers realize they have to make linux work and look as well or better than windows. Also there needs to be less choice, or at least less differences by default. Windows has an advantage over linux because my neighbors windows machine will look and operate virtually like mine and programs will be in about the same place and work the same. On linux its hard to say how your neighbors machine will be configured. Its hard to believe but installing an icon in a different location from normal or installing an application in a different location than normal is enough to confused MOST computer users.
Linux is ready for the computer savy users desktop, I'll 100% agree, but it is not ready for my mom's desktop and until it is then you won't claim many of windows desktop users. Until you claim windows desktop users you won't claim much driver support from manufacturers.
I wasn't trying to say that hunt & peck type typing (non "standard touch typing") won't get you by. Just puts you at higher risk of injury and usually has a far lower speed (30 to 40wpm vs 60 to 90wpm for touch typing).
One important part of touch typing is proper ergonomics. Hunting and pecking at the speed you are going is far more likely to cause a repetative motion injury.
That said typing proficiency is necessary for computer work whether its data entry or programming. I want to see the voice recognition or handwriting recognition that lets you enter words at 85wpm (my typing speed with reasonable accuracy).
I've never used XP home much. XP Pro works much like a workstation version of win2k. The video driver and printer driver problems I mentioned happened to me under win2k pro as well so really no difference between the two for me.
I'll admit right now however that XP home does lots of magic and leaves out useful tools just so that its more "home" like.
There were some defragging schemes that profiled your disk use and then defragged the hard drive in such a way that your heavily accessed disk areas were in easy to access areas of the disk. It would also order files in such a way to maximize hard disk cache hits based on the profiled usage. It worked pretty well when I tried it but mainly it took too much time re-defragging your disk to keep optimal perf on it when you installed and removed programs.
I've seen lots of BSOD's on windows XP and so have the people I know that work at MS. They were all caused by my video driver (yay ATI and NVidia) or my printer driver (yay Samsung). None were directly caused by windows or any application software running under windows.
Oh, I had a bunch of BSOD on that same machine when the memory I had in it went really flakey but mostly the box just rebooted itself and trashed NTFS partition indexes.
I sort of wish I had the floating point comparison library that I had to write for my university C course. Every comparison function took in a left operand, right operand and "fudge factor" to do proper comarisons of floats.
So then aren't they guilty of microsoft-esque bundling? What I'm getting at is that apple is fighting the same fight as other major corporate entities or sectors and you commend them for it while you bashed the hell out of the other people. I think that in this case Apple is wrong and that they shouldn't be able to keep other services music from playing on the ipod. Given thier marketshare Apple is a near monopoly in the online music -> portable player business and using software tactics like this to bar others from entering the market should be blatently wrong. Real needs to stand up and fight apple the same way the states fought Microsoft for keeping other browsers off the desktop.
There is a very high chance that only a small part of the source code was released abroad. I bet they only released the parts that were absolutely required to develop the modules that the contractors are required to develop.
That said I have always wondered why the US condones having foreign nationals work with our most valued IT assets and learn all the secrets that go into developing it.
Consdering that the employment level at MS stayed close to flat (a few lay offs and "reallocations") these are probably new jobs. It sucks that american workers aren't getting them, but being in a position where I'm trying to hire competent people right now, its easy to see why they might be looking to other countries for workers. We have looked through hundreds of resumes and there aren't any qualified to do the work we have at the level we need.
Not that this fixes the underlying problem or is it necessarily a great solution, but here goes anyway.
Why doesn't the community exploit the wonders of open source modifyability to add an option to have an IE compatible mode in firefox. Where basically if you hit a page that doesn't not render right using the W3C standards you allow a menu option that re-renders the page in IE compat mode and keeps in IE compat mode until you ask to be out of it. This would allow firefox to work either way.
None of the versions I've installed have real on them. There are a few (many?) stupid OEM's that distribute computers with real on them but I soon re-install the OS sans real because I can't stand it.
This is funny because its really a repeat of the DeCSS case where the DVD cartel sued an outsider for breaking thier code to use DVD's in an unauthorized player. Now real is the outsider and Apple is playing the DVD cartel. Now I am not at all for apple as far as this goes, I figure why should Apple even care if someone else sells music for the ipod when apple isn't making any money on the computer and more choice will make more reason for people to buy ipods.
Considering that 2.8ghz pc with Geforce FX video is considered an "economy" computer these days that may not be so far out of line as you seem to think. I don't have any 1080i mpeg4 video to attempt to play here right now or I'd give it a swing on this pc. (Its a dual 1ghz so if you are right the computer will struggle with the video).
The part of it that makes it not cool to me is that you need a PocketPC which we all know can act as an IR remote with the right software (and in this case I guess hardware). Would have looked way cooler if they had said "Use your ipod to control your pocketPC remotely" since thats the sort of interesting part of this. I don't know, I think I'm with you on the "big deal" front. Now if they had interfaced the IR directly with the ipod and hacked the ipod software to run it that would be far cooler in my book.
Thats really all I have to say. I think it would be far easier for terroists to steal another airplane and run into something than to build a clever bug into linux that will be accepted, not caught, and go off at just the right time to cause a govt disaster.
That said I think its equally likely that any of linux's competitors have the same thing happen to them. OSS I don't think is any extra security hazard other than it might be slightly easier for the enemy to find a bug since they have source. Chances are if a bug is found however, that it gets fixed pretty darn quick and the benefit of having source goes as far as finding bugs is concerned isn't that great as you can probably decompile the windows modules and play with that source to find holes.
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The worst thing that I noticed once I switched to SP2 (also updates to IE for win2k3 cause the same issue so its an IE change that did it) is that IE will freeze up until it loads the page and often until it loads the images from that page. I've got the bug reports in so hopefully it gets fixed, annoys the heck out of me.
Thats 3 out 5 five with a pool of 5 machines tested if I remember correctly. If I gave my success stats (4 out of 4 successfully booted) it would look like SP2 was a perfect patch. I think either the guys that tried it had bad hardware or bad software or something else wrong. Not that it justfies the fact they were broken by the patch but its a bad stat to keep using.
Are we the message?
Didn't Douglas Adams already answer that question?
Because its a 15% fuel effciency gain which is not bad at all. Heck why not get the crazy people that drive military grade vehicles to commute to work to use less gas? Better than building some little thing that rarely anyone will drive. If noone drives the effcient cars then what does it matter that they get 75mpg when people would rather drive 15mpg monsters. At least if those monsters get 19mpg (thats aboutw what they should be at if I remember) we still save that 4mpg and since maybe more people would drive them its more savings than the non driven models.
I have no problem with linux, use it a lot of the time. I'd never put it on my parents computer. My thoughts were from experience. My mom managed to drag an icon off the start menu and onto the desktop and they couldn't use the program for 3 months until I stopped by home and "found" it again. Just imagine how screwed they would be if the window manager got changed. I won't even get into trying to have them install new hardware on windows.
On the other end of all of this you can see why MS took so long to close some of this stuff off. Its a massive PR hit to have many applications quit working because the developers assumed that it was ok to do admin only tasks in user software or open unsecured ports. MS had to wait until the bad PR from poor security was worse than the bad PR that would be generated from securing the OS. From what I've seen though the fixes are not that bad to deal with and I'd like to hear more specifics on particular situations where things were broken.
The interface may not be as nice but it's a lot more capable.
That says it all, people expect the interface to be as easy to use and nice looking and everything as the windows software. Until developers realize they have to make linux work and look as well or better than windows. Also there needs to be less choice, or at least less differences by default. Windows has an advantage over linux because my neighbors windows machine will look and operate virtually like mine and programs will be in about the same place and work the same. On linux its hard to say how your neighbors machine will be configured. Its hard to believe but installing an icon in a different location from normal or installing an application in a different location than normal is enough to confused MOST computer users.
Linux is ready for the computer savy users desktop, I'll 100% agree, but it is not ready for my mom's desktop and until it is then you won't claim many of windows desktop users. Until you claim windows desktop users you won't claim much driver support from manufacturers.
I wasn't trying to say that hunt & peck type typing (non "standard touch typing") won't get you by. Just puts you at higher risk of injury and usually has a far lower speed (30 to 40wpm vs 60 to 90wpm for touch typing).
That said typing proficiency is necessary for computer work whether its data entry or programming. I want to see the voice recognition or handwriting recognition that lets you enter words at 85wpm (my typing speed with reasonable accuracy).
I'll admit right now however that XP home does lots of magic and leaves out useful tools just so that its more "home" like.
There were some defragging schemes that profiled your disk use and then defragged the hard drive in such a way that your heavily accessed disk areas were in easy to access areas of the disk. It would also order files in such a way to maximize hard disk cache hits based on the profiled usage. It worked pretty well when I tried it but mainly it took too much time re-defragging your disk to keep optimal perf on it when you installed and removed programs.
Oh, I had a bunch of BSOD on that same machine when the memory I had in it went really flakey but mostly the box just rebooted itself and trashed NTFS partition indexes.
I sort of wish I had the floating point comparison library that I had to write for my university C course. Every comparison function took in a left operand, right operand and "fudge factor" to do proper comarisons of floats.
So then aren't they guilty of microsoft-esque bundling? What I'm getting at is that apple is fighting the same fight as other major corporate entities or sectors and you commend them for it while you bashed the hell out of the other people. I think that in this case Apple is wrong and that they shouldn't be able to keep other services music from playing on the ipod. Given thier marketshare Apple is a near monopoly in the online music -> portable player business and using software tactics like this to bar others from entering the market should be blatently wrong. Real needs to stand up and fight apple the same way the states fought Microsoft for keeping other browsers off the desktop.
There are MS owned patents on incorrectly rendering html that forces other browsers to correctly render it and get bad results?
That said I have always wondered why the US condones having foreign nationals work with our most valued IT assets and learn all the secrets that go into developing it.
Consdering that the employment level at MS stayed close to flat (a few lay offs and "reallocations") these are probably new jobs. It sucks that american workers aren't getting them, but being in a position where I'm trying to hire competent people right now, its easy to see why they might be looking to other countries for workers. We have looked through hundreds of resumes and there aren't any qualified to do the work we have at the level we need.
Why doesn't the community exploit the wonders of open source modifyability to add an option to have an IE compatible mode in firefox. Where basically if you hit a page that doesn't not render right using the W3C standards you allow a menu option that re-renders the page in IE compat mode and keeps in IE compat mode until you ask to be out of it. This would allow firefox to work either way.
None of the versions I've installed have real on them. There are a few (many?) stupid OEM's that distribute computers with real on them but I soon re-install the OS sans real because I can't stand it.
This is funny because its really a repeat of the DeCSS case where the DVD cartel sued an outsider for breaking thier code to use DVD's in an unauthorized player. Now real is the outsider and Apple is playing the DVD cartel. Now I am not at all for apple as far as this goes, I figure why should Apple even care if someone else sells music for the ipod when apple isn't making any money on the computer and more choice will make more reason for people to buy ipods.
My two favorite gadgets are my tivo and my xbox and I think I like my tivo slightly more.
Considering that 2.8ghz pc with Geforce FX video is considered an "economy" computer these days that may not be so far out of line as you seem to think. I don't have any 1080i mpeg4 video to attempt to play here right now or I'd give it a swing on this pc. (Its a dual 1ghz so if you are right the computer will struggle with the video).
The part of it that makes it not cool to me is that you need a PocketPC which we all know can act as an IR remote with the right software (and in this case I guess hardware). Would have looked way cooler if they had said "Use your ipod to control your pocketPC remotely" since thats the sort of interesting part of this. I don't know, I think I'm with you on the "big deal" front. Now if they had interfaced the IR directly with the ipod and hacked the ipod software to run it that would be far cooler in my book.
That said I think its equally likely that any of linux's competitors have the same thing happen to them. OSS I don't think is any extra security hazard other than it might be slightly easier for the enemy to find a bug since they have source. Chances are if a bug is found however, that it gets fixed pretty darn quick and the benefit of having source goes as far as finding bugs is concerned isn't that great as you can probably decompile the windows modules and play with that source to find holes.
If its patented then its publically documented. You do understand what you need to do to get a patent don't you?
Anyways, I thought HD-DVD was using microsofts implementation of the Mpeg4 standard which is just as open as Mpeg2 and owned by the same organization.