You can find a complete list of Steve's patents here. For what it's worth, I find Jobs listed on 100 patents or patent applications and Bill Gates listed on two as the inventor.
Probably a fair indication of what kind of leader you have on your hands... definitely marketing/business for Gates.
I'm not sure about that. I don't know a lot about Gates' role, but Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with almost all of those patents other than being CEO at the time they were submitted, and in most cases having the opportunity to torpedo the invention but choosing not to do so.
I can't speak to what it's like on Vista, but on XP two things are true:
Indexing beats your system up, and the indexer is NOT good about letting you have it back.
I have Vista SP1 installed for playing games the hard drive was thrashing so much it was actually causing stutter in my fps games sometimes until I turned the indexer and the superfetch services off (I actually had to turn off superfetch twice as it ignored me the first time). I don't seem to remember ever having to deal with that sort of issue on XP, so my guess is vista is probably worse for this sort of thing. It would be nice if SP2 alleviated this, but I'm not holding my breath. Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer. On the other hand, with any fresh linux install I also go around removing a lot of the default desktop packages that I don't want, only it seems a lot easier and more transparent in linux, but maybe I'm just used to the linux way and not the windows way.
The funny thing is that Vista is slow on a fresh install, but the hard drive thrashing stops after you've used it for a day and it's populated superfetch and the index. It's fine to turn it off if you don't want to do indexed searches and don't want instant load on a few programs at the expense of a day of slowness, but it's also fine to leave them on, because they absolutely stop slowing anything down after that time.
As a Canadian, my first reaction to reading this story on/. was "what is the prestigious Conference Board of Canada?" I mean, I know what the "Ontario government" is and the "US copyright lobby" and "Canadian copyright lobby" are self-explanatory terms, but I'm not familiar with the Conference Board of Canada. When I read it here, I thought maybe it was an agency of the federal government.
Anyway, I little digging turns up that the Conference Board of Canada is basically a non-profit think-tank, that is funded on a per-service basis. So private groups and governments will pay it to research a topic and publish a paper on it. It also holds conferences and does research reports on its own. According to their official website, their areas of expertise are "running conferences", "conducting, publishing, and disseminating research", "economic trends", and "public policy issues". It is affiliated, but legally separate from, the U.S./international "The Conference Board, Inc. of New York".
They state: "Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests."
A "think tank" is just a group of non-experts who organize expert-produced information despite their lack of qualifications and understanding of the topics they discuss. They can dig up sources satisfactorily, but they get into serious trouble when they try to draw conclusions. Friends don't let friends believe a word written in a think tank.
As a Windows desktop user who has considerable experience with Linux (I run a bunch of Linux servers and spent some months exclusively with Linux on the desktop), I believe this is the wrong crowd to try to get to switch to Linux. Experienced Windows users simply don't have the problems about which everyone complains about Windows. Windows just works for experienced users who don't install viruses and ad/spyware. Windows hasn't crashed on me since before XP. Ever. Never frozen... nothing. I'm currently on 7, spent a year and a half on Vista, and the rest of the decade on XP (after it was released).
Technically inclined people who aren't programmers simply don't need linux, and programmers will already know about it.
That's my 2 cents.
You're exactly right. Those of us in this situation, whether we're on Windows, OSX, Linux, or whatever, have a rock solid, lightning fast, powerful and adaptable OS experience. We don't get any malware, we don't have problems configuring our hardware, and we have all the applications we want and what we need very efficiently. In my experience, we're also not the fanboys. They seem to be the much less experienced users who primarily relate to their own and other operating systems through the lens of marketing (or anti-MS holy wars from the Linux brigade).
"give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."
What generosity? The city owns the land they're using, not you.
We need more private money in elections. We should be able to give whatever amount we damn well please to candidates and causes as long as a donor's list is publicly available.
What's that supposed to achieve? I can already see a lot of publicly available information about who donated what to whom, and when that same whom turns around and bends the rules or entirely breaks them in order to benefit the who, no one does anything about it. We already have huge amounts of very open corruption. I don't see why we want, as you say, more.
Or quite possibly he really is an irrelevant blowhard with a stupid website. Just because someone may (or may not) be jealous doesn't mean their statement is any less true.
The wide impact the GP cites shows that he's not irrelevant. The blowhard part is generally a matter of opinion, so we can't prove much. Most members of the RIAA and NSA probably agree that he's a blowhard, and most EFF members probably don't think that's true. Stupid website? Eh, I don't care enough to look.
The API may not be robust enough and the detail may not be comprehensive enough to do this yet, but it seems like it could be done in short time if Google so wished.
Why Google? Are they supposed to benefit from leveraging their terribly slow, inefficient, clunky-control-laden graphics engine or the freely available public satellite and height data?
FTA: "when was the last time we had a blockbuster summer movie of any genre as downright entertaining as this one?"
Iron Man last year. IMHO, Iron Man spent a bit too much time focused on taking on and off the suit. Other than that, the special effects were great and fit in with the movie. I especially loved him getting out of captivity using the original suit.
Ironman had nice special effects, but the lack of an interesting character hurt its overall appeal. Special effects alone can't make a boring movie interesting, at least not for those
Please. Researchers ignore data that break their theories all the time.
It may be worst in the medical world. For example, why do you think that cholesterol is targeted as enemy number one for heart health? There is no study that has ever demonstrated causality; 50% of people with heart disease have "normal" cholesterol; nearly all studies on the subject show that all-cause mortality is higher with low cholesterol; much better working theories exist.
So why is that hypothesis still treated as correct? Because reputations and huge amounts of money would be lost. Prominent people and institutions may even be found liable. Good science goes out the window in the face of that.
Regarding the subject at hand, you might want to look at what an ad hoc hypothesis is.
Nutritionism is only pseudo-science. Go read In Defense of Food for a really nice metanarrative of nutrional memes, and the most respected nutrionists pointing out that the entire field has still basically determined nothing practically useful so far.
"The 25 watt CFL you are discussing actually uses 50 watts total power. 25 watts at the bulb, and another 25 at the power company as they try to balance the reactive load."
Please read up on your electronics. It doesn't "use" another 25 watts at the power company. At the most, it uses a very little bit of power due to the extra current flowing in the transmission lines. Maybe a watt or two. This has been discussed here before.
Also, a 60 W equivalent CFL uses about 10 W, not 25 W.
"Almost all experts agree that the primary reasons [for the obesity epidemic] are increased consumption of larger quantities of high calorie foods, snacks and sugar sweetened beverages... and lack of physical activity"
So wait...you're trying to tell me that the first law of thermodynamics is true? Lies!
Javascript performance still doesn't matter for most users, and power users largely have Javascript disabled or blocked. Maybe Google needs to release a killer app that relies on Javascript and has borderline performance on anything slower than Chrome.
When we're just talking about loading web pages, no one is yet within shouting distance of FF with a good Adblock filter list.
JS benchmarks seem somewhat pointless for now. 99% of what we do on the web happens instantly (if you have a low latency connection) on all browsers if we stop the ads from loading.
I don't think that the number of flaws patched is ever a really useful fact. I assume you're trying to imply that Apple is somehow worse for having more flaws, or maybe you're trying to show that they're better for fixing more. Either way, I don't think it's very useful.
Or maybe you're just being informative for the curious among us, in which case that's fine.
I wish Google had the ability to search for regular expressions and exact word matching. Searching for exact words or things that contain other symbols than letters is unfortunately very hard with Google and so sometimes it's useless in situations where it could have been so powerful.
Search options may finally make Google the best search engine on the internet. The Algorithm has never impressed me very much, but getting some of the these options that I used in Lexis Nexis since the mid 90s into a web search would definitely make me switch search sites. I'd particularly like to be able to search for a word within N words of another word, and to be able to specify which word comes first, or give multiple combinations or variations on each word. When I want to find opinions on a TV show, The Algorithm works fine, but Google has never been the best when it comes to just searching for specific phrases that need to be ON THE RESULT PAGE, not on ten pages that link to the result page.
I to love how people have no problem with police videotaping you/preventing you from videotaping with an excuse of terrorism just to cover their asses while everyone panics over a google streetview of a public area.
Pretty much everyone has a problem with both. The article mentions Google's usual argument that they're not showing anything that can't be seen by taking a walk down the street. Similarly, there's nothing that can be seen by 10 hovering cameras surrounded every person's head recording every visual and audio detail of his public time for permanent display on the internet that can't be seen by walking down the street while watching and listening.
Is there a dispute resolution mechanism if I happen to be a Frenchman who's been falsely accused three times (I'm not French, and I haven't been accused of filesharing, I'm just curious).
You could take it to the courts, but AFAIK there's no built-in tribunal for disputes. You might have trouble once you're there, since the law gives authority to cut your connection after three accusations by the industry, not three proven cases of infringement. If, for instance, you were to write publicly about the issue in a critical tone, the industry could say, "I don't like you" three times fast and you'd be disconnected with no clear means of recourse. They don't even have to tell you you've been accused - the warning notes are optional.
Can one automagically revert to the legal Windows (if any) they had installed before they installed Windows 7? Of course not, this would make sense. And provide an easy way out of migration.
...
Sure you can. If you want to revert to your old OS, then don't delete the old OS when you install the RC. Add the RC as a second bootable OS. When you're done with it, remove it. Why are computers so confusing for people on Slashdot?
When I installed Vista on a used laptop it didn't recognize the Vista CD Key on the laptop and wouldn't let me log in to the system. Only thing it would display is "YOUR KEY IS INVALID. PLEASE ENTER A VALID KEY OR CALL... (etc)". Safe mode didn't work either.
I ended up calling the manufacture and paying $30 for restore DVDs, but it put the laptop completely out of commission for a week.
You don't need a valid key to boot. You can use Vista for 30 days before you need one. Maybe you were in a parallel universe?
Once again I'm shocked by how terrible Slashdot is for anything hardware related. Just as has been said every time anyone has mentioned these pathetic articles from magazines like Computerworld (!), THIS ISN'T NEWS - ANANDTECH EXPLAINED IT VERY CLEARLY MONTHS AGO.
Even without reading an article, I'm surprised this isn't intuitively obvious to most Slashdot users. I'm also surprised that the majority of hardware articles posted here come from jokes like Computerworld. There needs to be a Shouldhavecheckedanandtech tag for stories.
Windows 7 actually eliminates this degradation for all SSDs through inclusion of the TRIM command, but the necessary cost is shorter device lifetime, which is why the TRIM command won't run automatically. Likely, other operating systems will include it within a couple years.
The summary says that 7 isn't much faster than Vista, and then says that Vista is much slower than XP. The implication is that 7 is slower than XP, which a lot of people seem to be commenting on here. However, the summary is very deceptive. Notice the lack of a link to a direct XP to 7 comparison (there are plenty). Now notice that the "Vista is slow" article is from 2006, back when Vista was slow.
If you want to look at a comparison that isn't sadly out of date or intentionally obfuscating the relative performance of these operating systems, look here:
Click through all the performance pages. As usual, Anandtech does it right and is ignored by Slashdot, while some silly article by technically challenged people is featured. To summarize the direct comparison between 7, XP, and Vista:
Vista is usually slower than XP - by about 2%. 7 is usually faster than XP - by 2-10%. Everyone who is posting the "I hate MS as much as every other weirdo Slashdot fanatic but it makes sense than XP is the fastest" should cut it out and note instead that 7 is the fastest OS that Microsoft has produced since at least Win2k.
Slashdot Mirror
His name is also on a patent for the earphones/iPod lanyard and that patent references 47 other patents.
You can find a complete list of Steve's patents here. For what it's worth, I find Jobs listed on 100 patents or patent applications and Bill Gates listed on two as the inventor.
Probably a fair indication of what kind of leader you have on your hands ... definitely marketing/business for Gates.
I'm not sure about that. I don't know a lot about Gates' role, but Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with almost all of those patents other than being CEO at the time they were submitted, and in most cases having the opportunity to torpedo the invention but choosing not to do so.
I have Vista SP1 installed for playing games the hard drive was thrashing so much it was actually causing stutter in my fps games sometimes until I turned the indexer and the superfetch services off (I actually had to turn off superfetch twice as it ignored me the first time). I don't seem to remember ever having to deal with that sort of issue on XP, so my guess is vista is probably worse for this sort of thing. It would be nice if SP2 alleviated this, but I'm not holding my breath. Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer. On the other hand, with any fresh linux install I also go around removing a lot of the default desktop packages that I don't want, only it seems a lot easier and more transparent in linux, but maybe I'm just used to the linux way and not the windows way.
The funny thing is that Vista is slow on a fresh install, but the hard drive thrashing stops after you've used it for a day and it's populated superfetch and the index. It's fine to turn it off if you don't want to do indexed searches and don't want instant load on a few programs at the expense of a day of slowness, but it's also fine to leave them on, because they absolutely stop slowing anything down after that time.
As a Canadian, my first reaction to reading this story on /. was "what is the prestigious Conference Board of Canada?" I mean, I know what the "Ontario government" is and the "US copyright lobby" and "Canadian copyright lobby" are self-explanatory terms, but I'm not familiar with the Conference Board of Canada. When I read it here, I thought maybe it was an agency of the federal government.
Anyway, I little digging turns up that the Conference Board of Canada is basically a non-profit think-tank, that is funded on a per-service basis. So private groups and governments will pay it to research a topic and publish a paper on it. It also holds conferences and does research reports on its own. According to their official website, their areas of expertise are "running conferences", "conducting, publishing, and disseminating research", "economic trends", and "public policy issues". It is affiliated, but legally separate from, the U.S./international "The Conference Board, Inc. of New York".
They state: "Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests."
A "think tank" is just a group of non-experts who organize expert-produced information despite their lack of qualifications and understanding of the topics they discuss. They can dig up sources satisfactorily, but they get into serious trouble when they try to draw conclusions. Friends don't let friends believe a word written in a think tank.
As a Windows desktop user who has considerable experience with Linux (I run a bunch of Linux servers and spent some months exclusively with Linux on the desktop), I believe this is the wrong crowd to try to get to switch to Linux. Experienced Windows users simply don't have the problems about which everyone complains about Windows. Windows just works for experienced users who don't install viruses and ad/spyware. Windows hasn't crashed on me since before XP. Ever. Never frozen... nothing. I'm currently on 7, spent a year and a half on Vista, and the rest of the decade on XP (after it was released).
Technically inclined people who aren't programmers simply don't need linux, and programmers will already know about it.
That's my 2 cents.
You're exactly right. Those of us in this situation, whether we're on Windows, OSX, Linux, or whatever, have a rock solid, lightning fast, powerful and adaptable OS experience. We don't get any malware, we don't have problems configuring our hardware, and we have all the applications we want and what we need very efficiently. In my experience, we're also not the fanboys. They seem to be the much less experienced users who primarily relate to their own and other operating systems through the lens of marketing (or anti-MS holy wars from the Linux brigade).
"give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."
What generosity? The city owns the land they're using, not you.
And collectively, we own the city.
We need more private money in elections. We should be able to give whatever amount we damn well please to candidates and causes as long as a donor's list is publicly available.
What's that supposed to achieve? I can already see a lot of publicly available information about who donated what to whom, and when that same whom turns around and bends the rules or entirely breaks them in order to benefit the who, no one does anything about it. We already have huge amounts of very open corruption. I don't see why we want, as you say, more.
Or quite possibly he really is an irrelevant blowhard with a stupid website. Just because someone may (or may not) be jealous doesn't mean their statement is any less true.
The wide impact the GP cites shows that he's not irrelevant. The blowhard part is generally a matter of opinion, so we can't prove much. Most members of the RIAA and NSA probably agree that he's a blowhard, and most EFF members probably don't think that's true. Stupid website? Eh, I don't care enough to look.
The API may not be robust enough and the detail may not be comprehensive enough to do this yet, but it seems like it could be done in short time if Google so wished.
Why Google? Are they supposed to benefit from leveraging their terribly slow, inefficient, clunky-control-laden graphics engine or the freely available public satellite and height data?
FTA: "when was the last time we had a blockbuster summer movie of any genre as downright entertaining as this one?"
Iron Man last year. IMHO, Iron Man spent a bit too much time focused on taking on and off the suit. Other than that, the special effects were great and fit in with the movie. I especially loved him getting out of captivity using the original suit.
Ironman had nice special effects, but the lack of an interesting character hurt its overall appeal. Special effects alone can't make a boring movie interesting, at least not for those
Please. Researchers ignore data that break their theories all the time.
It may be worst in the medical world. For example, why do you think that cholesterol is targeted as enemy number one for heart health? There is no study that has ever demonstrated causality; 50% of people with heart disease have "normal" cholesterol; nearly all studies on the subject show that all-cause mortality is higher with low cholesterol; much better working theories exist.
So why is that hypothesis still treated as correct? Because reputations and huge amounts of money would be lost. Prominent people and institutions may even be found liable. Good science goes out the window in the face of that.
Regarding the subject at hand, you might want to look at what an ad hoc hypothesis is.
Nutritionism is only pseudo-science. Go read In Defense of Food for a really nice metanarrative of nutrional memes, and the most respected nutrionists pointing out that the entire field has still basically determined nothing practically useful so far.
"The 25 watt CFL you are discussing actually uses 50 watts total power. 25 watts at the bulb, and another 25 at the power company as they try to balance the reactive load."
Please read up on your electronics. It doesn't "use" another 25 watts at the power company. At the most, it uses a very little bit of power due to the extra current flowing in the transmission lines. Maybe a watt or two. This has been discussed here before.
Also, a 60 W equivalent CFL uses about 10 W, not 25 W.
"Almost all experts agree that the primary reasons [for the obesity epidemic] are increased consumption of larger quantities of high calorie foods, snacks and sugar sweetened beverages... and lack of physical activity"
So wait...you're trying to tell me that the first law of thermodynamics is true? Lies!
Javascript performance still doesn't matter for most users, and power users largely have Javascript disabled or blocked. Maybe Google needs to release a killer app that relies on Javascript and has borderline performance on anything slower than Chrome.
When we're just talking about loading web pages, no one is yet within shouting distance of FF with a good Adblock filter list.
JS benchmarks seem somewhat pointless for now. 99% of what we do on the web happens instantly (if you have a low latency connection) on all browsers if we stop the ads from loading.
Toys in the Attic:
"So what was the real lesson? Don't leave things in the fridge."
I was just about to post the same thing. I wonder whether the hazmat team included a kid to just eat the offending rot.
I am calling bullshit on this. I love firefox but it's definitely a memory hog.7 tabs open and it's at 400mb. Granted I have 9GB of RAM but still.
I have 7 tabs open (7 different /. stories) and am using 90.1 MB. Maybe you should get FF 3.
Now I have 12 tabs open. 7 /. tabs, 2 gmail tabs, and 3 Yahoo News pages. 95.7 MB used. Honestly, your FF is the problem, not FF in general.
There are nearly 70 security flaws OS X is patching. The 14 for MS is prominently displayed...
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217400595&subSection=Macintosh+Platform
I don't think that the number of flaws patched is ever a really useful fact. I assume you're trying to imply that Apple is somehow worse for having more flaws, or maybe you're trying to show that they're better for fixing more. Either way, I don't think it's very useful.
Or maybe you're just being informative for the curious among us, in which case that's fine.
I wish Google had the ability to search for regular expressions and exact word matching. Searching for exact words or things that contain other symbols than letters is unfortunately very hard with Google and so sometimes it's useless in situations where it could have been so powerful.
Search options may finally make Google the best search engine on the internet. The Algorithm has never impressed me very much, but getting some of the these options that I used in Lexis Nexis since the mid 90s into a web search would definitely make me switch search sites. I'd particularly like to be able to search for a word within N words of another word, and to be able to specify which word comes first, or give multiple combinations or variations on each word. When I want to find opinions on a TV show, The Algorithm works fine, but Google has never been the best when it comes to just searching for specific phrases that need to be ON THE RESULT PAGE, not on ten pages that link to the result page.
I to love how people have no problem with police videotaping you/preventing you from videotaping with an excuse of terrorism just to cover their asses while everyone panics over a google streetview of a public area.
Pretty much everyone has a problem with both. The article mentions Google's usual argument that they're not showing anything that can't be seen by taking a walk down the street. Similarly, there's nothing that can be seen by 10 hovering cameras surrounded every person's head recording every visual and audio detail of his public time for permanent display on the internet that can't be seen by walking down the street while watching and listening.
I don't think their argument works.
Step 1: Find a large wealthy company.
Step 2: Fine them for anti-competitive behaviour.
That puts you further into a recession unless that money then goes back to people who can spend it.
Or perhaps Ogdenville?
I didn't RTFA.
Is there a dispute resolution mechanism if I happen to be a Frenchman who's been falsely accused three times (I'm not French, and I haven't been accused of filesharing, I'm just curious).
You could take it to the courts, but AFAIK there's no built-in tribunal for disputes. You might have trouble once you're there, since the law gives authority to cut your connection after three accusations by the industry, not three proven cases of infringement. If, for instance, you were to write publicly about the issue in a critical tone, the industry could say, "I don't like you" three times fast and you'd be disconnected with no clear means of recourse. They don't even have to tell you you've been accused - the warning notes are optional.
Can one automagically revert to the legal Windows (if any) they had installed before they installed Windows 7? Of course not, this would make sense. And provide an easy way out of migration.
...
Sure you can. If you want to revert to your old OS, then don't delete the old OS when you install the RC. Add the RC as a second bootable OS. When you're done with it, remove it. Why are computers so confusing for people on Slashdot?
I hope that's all it does!
When I installed Vista on a used laptop it didn't recognize the Vista CD Key on the laptop and wouldn't let me log in to the system. Only thing it would display is "YOUR KEY IS INVALID. PLEASE ENTER A VALID KEY OR CALL... (etc)". Safe mode didn't work either.
I ended up calling the manufacture and paying $30 for restore DVDs, but it put the laptop completely out of commission for a week.
You don't need a valid key to boot. You can use Vista for 30 days before you need one. Maybe you were in a parallel universe?
Once again I'm shocked by how terrible Slashdot is for anything hardware related. Just as has been said every time anyone has mentioned these pathetic articles from magazines like Computerworld (!), THIS ISN'T NEWS - ANANDTECH EXPLAINED IT VERY CLEARLY MONTHS AGO.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
Even without reading an article, I'm surprised this isn't intuitively obvious to most Slashdot users. I'm also surprised that the majority of hardware articles posted here come from jokes like Computerworld. There needs to be a Shouldhavecheckedanandtech tag for stories.
Windows 7 actually eliminates this degradation for all SSDs through inclusion of the TRIM command, but the necessary cost is shorter device lifetime, which is why the TRIM command won't run automatically. Likely, other operating systems will include it within a couple years.
The summary says that 7 isn't much faster than Vista, and then says that Vista is much slower than XP. The implication is that 7 is slower than XP, which a lot of people seem to be commenting on here. However, the summary is very deceptive. Notice the lack of a link to a direct XP to 7 comparison (there are plenty). Now notice that the "Vista is slow" article is from 2006, back when Vista was slow.
If you want to look at a comparison that isn't sadly out of date or intentionally obfuscating the relative performance of these operating systems, look here:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3557&p=15
Click through all the performance pages. As usual, Anandtech does it right and is ignored by Slashdot, while some silly article by technically challenged people is featured. To summarize the direct comparison between 7, XP, and Vista:
Vista is usually slower than XP - by about 2%. 7 is usually faster than XP - by 2-10%. Everyone who is posting the "I hate MS as much as every other weirdo Slashdot fanatic but it makes sense than XP is the fastest" should cut it out and note instead that 7 is the fastest OS that Microsoft has produced since at least Win2k.