But that would be too sensible, just like the notion of.xxx to enable easy filtering.
My reaction, being an aussie, to all this is "meh". They have enough problems classifying movies in time for release, they sure as fuck aren't going to manage to rate the internet.
Killer app for vista? Previous versions. Just two days ago, that would have saved a few thousand dollars worth of data for one of my users - and a few hours of my staff's time checking backups for the data. UAC (like it not, its not that different to entering the root password to run system utilities in Ubuntu or whatever).
If you lot are bitching about performance, get the fuck over it. In 6 months, it will be irrelevant, just as the performance differences between 95/98/2k and XP are. I currently run games on vista with no performance problems - if you have a machine built with vista in mind, it's all good.
If you *don't* have a machine built with vista in mind, then why are you shocked and surprised that the user experience sucks? Yes, it's built for new hardware. Given that 90% of the time, all that cpu and memory is sitting idle on most people's machines, it makes sense to try and utilise it for useful purposes - for example, previous versions, search indexing, etc.
Most of that background crap can be turned off if you're really anal about it, but sooner or later you'll (or rather, perhaps one of your users will) do something stupid, like delete a whole heap of crap you don't need or whatever, and wish you hadn't.
No. Windows 2000 runs fantastically well with 2GB of RAM. Windows Vista becomes tolerably sluggish.
*cough*
I've gone from Win2k to WinXP to Vista with 2gb of ram and noticed no performance problems. Put it this way, I'm running vista on a Q6600 with 2gb and do not feel the need to upgrade RAM at all. Gaming, VMware sessons, etc...
Not sure what setup you're running vista on to have performance problems with 2gb... my bet is that you *aren't* and are just talking out of your arse...
You need to install and use Vista on a 2GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM and something the equivalent of a GeForce 5000-series card. The do the same with XP. Big difference in performance.
News flash... vista is not intended to be run on a 5 year old 2ghz p4 with 512mb of ram...
Yes, it sucks that you need to buy a new machine, but given the hardware its intended to run on, there's no major showstopper performance problems to speak of.
I've been running it since march and have no complaints, other than a few gaming compatibility issues...
Truth is, they cost too much. The number of man-hours put into Falcon AF (much of it is a culmination of community-generated realism patches, amongst other stuff) is staggering.
Why would EA/etc bother to spend that much development time on a hardcore sim, when they can spend a couple of months re-skinning some generic 3d shooter, tacking a year onto the end of the generic NHL or Madden game, and releasing that?
It's just not (as) profitable.
Then again, who knows. Now falcon is at least somewhat stable, hopefully someone takes ownership of it properly and releases (at least) graphic/sound updates, new theatres, planes, etc... much of the hard work has been done - it's already SMP aware apparently:)
Alternatively, you could... you know... install the relevant applications to provide the missing features? Like back in the stone-age (oh, i dunno, say 4 years ago or more?)
Not to go off on a rant but my #1 pet peeve with software, especially anything from Microsoft, is all the hardware gains of the past 20 years are lost of bad software. Whether due to bad design (feature bloat) or bad execution, Vista and MS Office on current consumer hardware aren't any more responsive than Win 3 and Word or AmiPRO or whatever was running back in the day.
Granted, somewhat. However, we now have a lot more featureful software now. And yes, some of the features may seem like cruft that is not required, but i think the software library we now have would be a lot more barren without it.
The user interface is "fast enough". I click start, and within 1/2 sec, i get a start menu. I don't have any appreciable wait.
What counts is what the software can do, and in that respect, we're still far beyond what was possible in the 1990s with 386s running Windows 3. Go try and encode (hell, even play) dvds with a box running hardware and software from 1990.
If everyone was still coding in hand optimised assembler, without any libraries provided in the OS for common tasks, you would simply not have the software we have today.
Wave goodbye to your 3d games - there would be no standard way of talking to the hardware. Hell, back in 1993, before DirectX, even superVGA games were rare, because there was no reliable way of even doing such simple things as setting screen resolution to say 640x480 256 colour, without resorting to VESA which not every card supported properly, and was a pain in the arse to program. Sure, I guess you could have tried to program an SVGA game with Windows 3.1, but really - the performance just wasn't there.
The old argument applies - hardware is cheap, and gets cheaper. Programmer time is expensive, and gets more so with inflation. If you're wasting programmer time on re-writing and optimising in a low level language (as opposed to just using a good algorithm) you better have a good business case for it.
Do you think it would provide acceptable performance for lets say FreeBSD, where compilation is the name of the game?
Yes. Given that I have run "make buildworld" on way crappier machines, and still have a couple of Pentium 2s running FreeBSD for various tasks (yes, they're out of date and will be replaced when they fail - they've been up without maintenance since 2002, when i left the company. I'm going back in 2 weeks tho, so will be good to see them again:D), I see no issue.
From memory, make buildworld took an hour or more to complete on that class of machine, but it's not like you have to take the machine offline to run that.
And, you don't need to run make buildworld anyway with FreeBSD. In fact, you don't need to compile at all really. You may need to compile the kernel if there's an obscure networking feature you need (for a server), but for desktop use, just load the appropriate kernel modules, and install packages with pkg_add -r (a large number of the ports are available precompiled as packages:))
A lot of people assume that because FreeBSD has ports that they're an essential part of the system. They're not - you can quite happily live with extremely minimal compilation, if any.
If you want to compare window managers, compare E to KWM (kde's window manager component)or whatever WM it is that gnome ships with now (i've lost track to be honest, last time i remember what it was, was sawfish).
Gnome/KDE include a hell of a lot more than just a window manager.
Sure, it's probably less resource intensive than KDE or Gnome, but given that most of the actual usable apps out there are Gnome/GTK or KDE based anyway... you may as well run the desktop environment to go with it.
512MB of ram is enough to run KDE or Gnome pretty comfortably. I know this, because i've been doing it for the past 12 months - even fedora 6 + compiz and the funky 3d cube desktop ran fine. On a 2002 vintage (Dell C640 to be precise) laptop. Sure it won't be uber-fast when dealing with large data files, but that's not the point of a $200 machine.
Not to take anything away from enlightenment, but all this is doing is giving users a "non-standard" (yes, yes, there is no "standard" linux desktop, but at least one of the major desktop environments would be a start) configuration to deal with.
I reckon the machine would be far more useful if they stuck another 512mb (for the $30-$50 or whatever that pitiful amount of ram costs these days) in it and shipped with KDE or Gnome.
... whilst I don't like paying more than I have to, games are not necessarily too expensive, imho.
With the caveat on that, that it has to be a decent game.
Even a decent game with flaws - for example, Neverwinter Nights 2. Is it perfect? No. However it has kept me occupied for probably 100+ hours so far. I think it was about $90 australian (tangent: now the $AU is up >90c US, why the hell are we paying so much??:D), and if you work out the entertainment cost, it's near enough to $1/hr or less.
Try going to the movies, the pub or renting a new release DVD for that.
Other examples would be baldurs gate 1/2, Falcon: Allied Force, Ghost Recon 2, etc.
If the game will provide a decent duration of entertainment, i have no problem paying for it.
However, if (such as EA often does) they're going to release shitty games with perhaps 20 hours of play/replay value (yes, there are exceptions - eg Battlefield 1942) then I agree.
I just can't see any type of significant market for vapor cooled PCs, since the bottle neck is going to be the graphics cards rather than the CPUs at that high of a frequency for gaming, and computational intensive applications will probably be better off with cluster computing since it's more power and price efficient to have multiple machines, rather than squeeze every last drop of performance out of one.
I *personally* can't see any significant market for Crays either, but they clearly exist and are worth big $.
There comes a point where price/$ becomes insignificant, and you're more interested in MIPS/sqr metre. A cluster of pcs with less expensive processors will be outperformed by a cluster of vapour cooled machines - just like a cluster of Pentium 90s is outperformed by a cluster of Core2s. Technology marches on - what's expensive today is cheap tomorrow.
Besides, the cost of the cooling system will drop. When i can buy a vapour cooling system (i.e. A/C) to fit to a room in my house for $1k there's no technical reason that the same sort of system for my PC should be exceedingly expensive.
If you're into flight sims, get Falcon: Allied Force.
Was released to very little fanfare last year some time (other than within the dedicated hardcore sim crowd), but it's awesome. It's (finally) what Falcon 4 should have been - crashes are rare, the dynamic campaign works well and the graphics and sound are good enough.:)
The point is that this is the sort of behavior Microsoft would actually test for, and have
You'd think... but you'd be wrong. There was a particular patch (can look up the patch number in a few days when i get home) that causes excessive hd activity (sounded like parking, to me - whilst running games, etc), and in my case, i reckon killed my 320gb SATA drive within a month or two of 50% power-on time.
Sorry, that came across a bit more aggressive than I intended. I meant to have a go at the Gnome Foundation, not yourself.
No offense taken dude, I got the gist of what you were intending (ie, aggravation with gnome) - but still, my choice of "amusing" was probably the wrong word - i just have a rather twisted/black sense of humor.
With regards to GNUstep, i'm just amazed we have something that has been proven to work well, is lean and mean, based on open standards, will be largely compatible for development with OS/X - and it's shunned. Finding a distribution with decent "out of the box" packages for OpenStep that actually work is tricky, let alone one that presents it as a desktop choice.
For those perhaps reading and wondering what the hell is so impressive about openstep, go look for the "gorm tutorial" video, and have a little bit of a read up on Objective-C and some of the OpenStep documentation.
The makings of a great environment are all there - it's NOT just another re-implementation of many of the flawed windows-esqe ideas, it just needs a decent push into the main-stream so it can gather some momentum...
I agree with the notion that Kubuntu should be the default Ubuntu though. Sure, some of the KDE ui could do with de-cluttering a little, but in terms of getting work done, it's miles ahead.
for a while i was running a patch on vista (i forget which one, don't have the box here) that supposedly "improved performance" and resulted in extremely excessive hard disk clicking/power saving.
Within 2-3 weeks i had a drive failure - drive still has near on 3 years of warranty left...
Now, not to blame vista in particular, but i don't think this problem is likely limited to ubuntu...
Yeah, perhaps "amusing" was the wrong word. I'd have used "disturbing" if I actually gave a crap about the direction of gnome, but for the past 2-3 years, all i've seen in terms of Gnome usability has been going backwards.
I'd suggest forking and following a direction more aligned to getting work done than wanking around with "usability" at the expense of that - but we already have plenty of other desktop environments out there.
KDE is what I use, but I'm really bummed that more progress doesn't seem to be getting made on GNUStep. Having read a decent amount about OpenStep and objective C, and played with GORM a bit, I reckon its very elegant and there's a lot of potential there to be *better* than either gnome or KDE - and perhaps somewhat compatible with OS/X a the source level...
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My reaction, being an aussie, to all this is "meh". They have enough problems classifying movies in time for release, they sure as fuck aren't going to manage to rate the internet.
If you lot are bitching about performance, get the fuck over it. In 6 months, it will be irrelevant, just as the performance differences between 95/98/2k and XP are. I currently run games on vista with no performance problems - if you have a machine built with vista in mind, it's all good.
If you *don't* have a machine built with vista in mind, then why are you shocked and surprised that the user experience sucks? Yes, it's built for new hardware. Given that 90% of the time, all that cpu and memory is sitting idle on most people's machines, it makes sense to try and utilise it for useful purposes - for example, previous versions, search indexing, etc.
Most of that background crap can be turned off if you're really anal about it, but sooner or later you'll (or rather, perhaps one of your users will) do something stupid, like delete a whole heap of crap you don't need or whatever, and wish you hadn't.
*cough*
I've gone from Win2k to WinXP to Vista with 2gb of ram and noticed no performance problems. Put it this way, I'm running vista on a Q6600 with 2gb and do not feel the need to upgrade RAM at all. Gaming, VMware sessons, etc...
Not sure what setup you're running vista on to have performance problems with 2gb... my bet is that you *aren't* and are just talking out of your arse...
News flash... vista is not intended to be run on a 5 year old 2ghz p4 with 512mb of ram...
Yes, it sucks that you need to buy a new machine, but given the hardware its intended to run on, there's no major showstopper performance problems to speak of.
I've been running it since march and have no complaints, other than a few gaming compatibility issues...
Hah.
2k was better than XP. I see vista and Windows 7 being a similar situaton...
Why would EA/etc bother to spend that much development time on a hardcore sim, when they can spend a couple of months re-skinning some generic 3d shooter, tacking a year onto the end of the generic NHL or Madden game, and releasing that?
It's just not (as) profitable.
Then again, who knows. Now falcon is at least somewhat stable, hopefully someone takes ownership of it properly and releases (at least) graphic/sound updates, new theatres, planes, etc... much of the hard work has been done - it's already SMP aware apparently :)
Alternatively, you could... you know... install the relevant applications to provide the missing features? Like back in the stone-age (oh, i dunno, say 4 years ago or more?)
Granted, somewhat. However, we now have a lot more featureful software now. And yes, some of the features may seem like cruft that is not required, but i think the software library we now have would be a lot more barren without it.
The user interface is "fast enough". I click start, and within 1/2 sec, i get a start menu. I don't have any appreciable wait.
What counts is what the software can do, and in that respect, we're still far beyond what was possible in the 1990s with 386s running Windows 3. Go try and encode (hell, even play) dvds with a box running hardware and software from 1990.
If everyone was still coding in hand optimised assembler, without any libraries provided in the OS for common tasks, you would simply not have the software we have today.
Wave goodbye to your 3d games - there would be no standard way of talking to the hardware. Hell, back in 1993, before DirectX, even superVGA games were rare, because there was no reliable way of even doing such simple things as setting screen resolution to say 640x480 256 colour, without resorting to VESA which not every card supported properly, and was a pain in the arse to program. Sure, I guess you could have tried to program an SVGA game with Windows 3.1, but really - the performance just wasn't there.
The old argument applies - hardware is cheap, and gets cheaper. Programmer time is expensive, and gets more so with inflation. If you're wasting programmer time on re-writing and optimising in a low level language (as opposed to just using a good algorithm) you better have a good business case for it.
From memory, make buildworld took an hour or more to complete on that class of machine, but it's not like you have to take the machine offline to run that.
And, you don't need to run make buildworld anyway with FreeBSD. In fact, you don't need to compile at all really. You may need to compile the kernel if there's an obscure networking feature you need (for a server), but for desktop use, just load the appropriate kernel modules, and install packages with pkg_add -r (a large number of the ports are available precompiled as packages :))
A lot of people assume that because FreeBSD has ports that they're an essential part of the system. They're not - you can quite happily live with extremely minimal compilation, if any.
Gnome/KDE include a hell of a lot more than just a window manager.
No, i wasn't one of those users, but I dealt with them. And for fairly low end work, they used to deal with it just fine.
512MB of ram is enough to run KDE or Gnome pretty comfortably. I know this, because i've been doing it for the past 12 months - even fedora 6 + compiz and the funky 3d cube desktop ran fine. On a 2002 vintage (Dell C640 to be precise) laptop. Sure it won't be uber-fast when dealing with large data files, but that's not the point of a $200 machine.
Not to take anything away from enlightenment, but all this is doing is giving users a "non-standard" (yes, yes, there is no "standard" linux desktop, but at least one of the major desktop environments would be a start) configuration to deal with.
I reckon the machine would be far more useful if they stuck another 512mb (for the $30-$50 or whatever that pitiful amount of ram costs these days) in it and shipped with KDE or Gnome.
With the caveat on that, that it has to be a decent game.
Even a decent game with flaws - for example, Neverwinter Nights 2. Is it perfect? No. However it has kept me occupied for probably 100+ hours so far. I think it was about $90 australian (tangent: now the $AU is up >90c US, why the hell are we paying so much?? :D), and if you work out the entertainment cost, it's near enough to $1/hr or less.
Try going to the movies, the pub or renting a new release DVD for that.
Other examples would be baldurs gate 1/2, Falcon: Allied Force, Ghost Recon 2, etc.
If the game will provide a decent duration of entertainment, i have no problem paying for it.
However, if (such as EA often does) they're going to release shitty games with perhaps 20 hours of play/replay value (yes, there are exceptions - eg Battlefield 1942) then I agree.
err.. by price/$ i meant mips/$.
I *personally* can't see any significant market for Crays either, but they clearly exist and are worth big $.
There comes a point where price/$ becomes insignificant, and you're more interested in MIPS/sqr metre. A cluster of pcs with less expensive processors will be outperformed by a cluster of vapour cooled machines - just like a cluster of Pentium 90s is outperformed by a cluster of Core2s. Technology marches on - what's expensive today is cheap tomorrow.
Besides, the cost of the cooling system will drop. When i can buy a vapour cooling system (i.e. A/C) to fit to a room in my house for $1k there's no technical reason that the same sort of system for my PC should be exceedingly expensive.
Was released to very little fanfare last year some time (other than within the dedicated hardcore sim crowd), but it's awesome. It's (finally) what Falcon 4 should have been - crashes are rare, the dynamic campaign works well and the graphics and sound are good enough. :)
You'd think... but you'd be wrong. There was a particular patch (can look up the patch number in a few days when i get home) that causes excessive hd activity (sounded like parking, to me - whilst running games, etc), and in my case, i reckon killed my 320gb SATA drive within a month or two of 50% power-on time.
Err... replace "OpenStep" with GNUstep as appropriate in the above post :D
No offense taken dude, I got the gist of what you were intending (ie, aggravation with gnome) - but still, my choice of "amusing" was probably the wrong word - i just have a rather twisted/black sense of humor.
With regards to GNUstep, i'm just amazed we have something that has been proven to work well, is lean and mean, based on open standards, will be largely compatible for development with OS/X - and it's shunned. Finding a distribution with decent "out of the box" packages for OpenStep that actually work is tricky, let alone one that presents it as a desktop choice.
For those perhaps reading and wondering what the hell is so impressive about openstep, go look for the "gorm tutorial" video, and have a little bit of a read up on Objective-C and some of the OpenStep documentation.
The makings of a great environment are all there - it's NOT just another re-implementation of many of the flawed windows-esqe ideas, it just needs a decent push into the main-stream so it can gather some momentum...
I agree with the notion that Kubuntu should be the default Ubuntu though. Sure, some of the KDE ui could do with de-cluttering a little, but in terms of getting work done, it's miles ahead.
Within 2-3 weeks i had a drive failure - drive still has near on 3 years of warranty left...
Now, not to blame vista in particular, but i don't think this problem is likely limited to ubuntu...
actually yes i do. zero.
There's certainly no performance problems with KDE under freebsd in my experience.
I'd suggest forking and following a direction more aligned to getting work done than wanking around with "usability" at the expense of that - but we already have plenty of other desktop environments out there.
KDE is what I use, but I'm really bummed that more progress doesn't seem to be getting made on GNUStep. Having read a decent amount about OpenStep and objective C, and played with GORM a bit, I reckon its very elegant and there's a lot of potential there to be *better* than either gnome or KDE - and perhaps somewhat compatible with OS/X a the source level...
Actually... people expect their 500gb porn collection (as reported by windows) to fit on a 500gb disk (as sold by the hd manufacturer)...