Slap your exchange administrator around a bit until he fixes things. If people are waiting that long to use their machines, it is costing the company $$$.
I'm on an Exchange server with 10k+ users on it, and my Vista machine boots quickly.
Battery life went from 1h 40min to 2h 30minutes. The system now boots to usable state in 3 minutes. With vista, it took 28 minutes to actually get to login screen. Wow, umm, dude. You have something wrong with whatever crappy apps are getting installed on your system. My Vista box starts up in less than 30 seconds. Even my corporate Vista machine takes less than 3 minutes. I get annoyed if Outlook takes more than 20 seconds to load, most of the time it is instant.
What do you have installed on your machine, BDSM2.0?
One of the underlying goals of Agile software is to get away from the "big number release" type of mentality that leads to unhealthy software development practices (why worry about memory consumption when the product isn't go to ship for another 2 years?...) and instead move developers into a mindset that their software should almost constantly be of ship quality.
Agile development also allows the quality of the software to be under constant incremental improvement. But this has a downside as well: it becomes very hard to pick a point in time to stop releasing patches and instead tell customers "now you have to buy a new version", especially since the next version that the company releases is "just" another incremental improvement over the previous release.
So basically agile development practices can spell death for the "Shiny New Version" business model, and thus an alternative revenue stream needs to be found.
Agile software allows developers to consistently and continuously release incrementally improved versions of an application. It therefore makes sense for companies to continuously pay incremental amounts for use of that software.
Selling the concept of "it will get better over time" to who ever is making business purchasing decisions may not be easy, but in the end, if some sales person can pull it off, it will be to everyone's benefit.
Customers will be able to have a more direct and immediate interaction with software companies, and software companies will be able to practice the software development methodologies that they KNOW they should be practicing.
Note in my defense: Some people may take offense that agile software means no more big new versions, but I'd argue that it feels intuitively 'wrong' to fix a software bug that is annoying many users, but is too low priority to make the cut for a service pack, and then sit around knowing that users will not get to see this trivial fix for years, just because of the common business model that is used to sell big box software.
Disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee (been on/. a lot longer than @ MS!), everything I say is my own opinion and does not reflect the opinions of Microsoft.
(Besides, I've been here under a year and I work in mobile compilers!)
A server of any OS has the potential for sporadically breaking out into inanity from time to time, especially if it is under constant heavy load. Not to say that you can't get a server up and running stable for 10 years that gets dry walled in to place, but the majority of servers (and software) is not that reliable.
It is up to Sysadmins to know how to fix the machine when the sh!t does hit the fan, because sooner or later it indeed will.
A good admin would have fired up Sysinternal's Process Monitor and found out who in the hell was writing to disk. Looking at IO by process would have pointed to the culprit pretty quickly. Of course you won't find step by step instructions on doing that by Googling, one would have to show some initiative, but a good sysadmin has a virtual swiss army knife of tools that they use to keep things taped together.
Hell, if the emergencies didn't pop up at the worst possible moment, what fun would be left to have?
I've worked both in the server room keeping things patched up and out front with the people who write the stuff that breaks. The server room is almost always more fun, every day is a new emergency, but that is what you sign up for!
(Besides, sysadmins with systems which never break may find themselves out of a job! )
Quite true, WM has a wide variety of browsers available for it, Skype works just fine, and I have even seen people use their phone as a WiFi access point connected to the net using EVDO or UTMS.
Versus the piece of crap plastic junk designed by some "Product Engineer" and verified by a "Plastics Manufacturing Engineer" that doesn't even work the first time it is taken out of the box?
If you want software that has verifiable reliability (and the hardware to run it on), there are companies that will sell it to you. You will pay through the nose for it, and as IBM found out quite some time ago, the market for such hardware and software can shrink quite rapidly when compared against "good enough" kit that costs a small fraction of the price.
The Washington state government operates at an epic level of stupidity. Microsoft pours tons into the local economy in a variety of ways, from funding local school programs to tens of millions of dollars of donations to area charities each year. And yah, they are helping to pay for improved roads in the area.
Washington state can't handle money worth a crap though, I was born and raised in Seattle and I would prefer not to hand over money to the (at times openly corrupt) bastards. I love this state dearly, but I have no idea how all the pricks managed to get government jobs.
All the higher level public servants should be made to live where there is "affordable" housing that the average person can afford, and have to drive to work during the worst of rush hour both ways. I think the Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond government could be split between Tacoma and Marysville, while those in Olympia can be put up on Renton.
I'd bet after a few months of that we would see some real transportation reform bills passing through both the city and state level governemnts.
Also, can someone explain to me why there is almost no[1] bus service from Juanita to MS/Nintendo/Digipen? If I don't have 800k to buy a house close to civilization, am I supposed to "be an American(tm)" and buy an SUV to drive to work instead? Screw that.
[1] 1 bus, runs three times each direction at none tech-company friendly hours and goes down some of the most useless streets.
Claiming that you're under an NDA made me think you were completely BSing and trying to raise your e-coolness level.
Then I saw your sig and realized you must be a college student studying engineering/networking/compsci. Sorry I ever doubted you.
My sig hasn't updated in ~2.5 years
I graduated last spring actually
If I wasn't in college how would I have an internship?
Also, realize that Boeing has this competitor called Airbus. Boeing carefully controls what information it releases about the design and capabilities of its airplanes (as does Airbus) in hopes of pulling off some sort of marketing kung-fu. While I'm not going to comment on marketing people's games, I will say that every presentation I attended at Boeing had "Boeing Confidential" stamped on the bottom of it.
Companies with competitors would rather that their competitors not gain knowledge of engineering information that has millions of dollars of human intellectual labor behind it.
Now imagine an entire avionics system, something that determines the capabilities of an airplane for literally decades to come (excusing expensive after market modifications to the less critical portions of the plane's infrastructure). So yes, I had to sign an NDA. Since I've been out of touch for a year I don't exactly have the list from legal about what can be talked about right now.
Actually, a dumb simple router that drops all packets not from source X Y or Z is pretty simple to implement, not really even router at that point, more like a consumer of packets!
My first reaction when I learned about the interconnected networks was "oh great, just what we need al-Qaeda to start crashing our airplanes with laptops", but once I learned about avionics systems more, and the extra steps that had been taken specifically for the 787, I realized that it wasn't that simple.
This article is FUD. I worked on the 787 avionics during my internship in summer 2006 on the exact system the article is talking about. It has been awhile so I don't know what is still under NDA and what isn't, but anyone who has taken a basic networking class and who knows how the network is setup will have no worries at all.
X.org and XWin do not compete; X.org is just the reference implementation of the X Window System. I don't know what you mean here; perhaps you're referring to XFree86 but for the most part X.org and XFree86 development were in serial. XFree86 became untouchable, so almost everyone moved to X.org and then everyone else moved to X.org. That's surely the kind of development you want. I don't even known if XFree86 exists any more! if it does, I certainly don't care.
KDE and Gnome don't compete against X.org, XWin or XFree86; in fact, they depend on the X Window System (however it's implemented.)
No, but the paradigm creates an additional layer of abstraction that complicates matters for both developers and users.
Want a single graphics API to write against? Nope. Want a single UI standard? Nope. Want simple agreement on basic UX principles? Not going to get it.
KDE and Gnome (and everyone else) have made different trade offs, but trade offs are necessary, and damnit people need to realize that and stop trying to make their own "Gee wiz ultimate extreme" version of Foo component.
How many damn beta media players does Linux have at any one point in time?
If each dev teams spends their time refining a different aspect of their own app's UI, you end up with 10 apps each with (different) bits and pieces of it polished and workable.
e.g. Amarok has an awesome media library but is missing other features (I can't recall right now which features, been awhile since I used it) that I wanted. Other media players had those features (in varying quanities and qualities) but lacked the kicking media library features of Amarok.
The thing to bear in mind here is that the web browser is not part of the operating system when you take into account what an operating system actually is. The web browser is an application that runs on the operating system; it is not a part of the OS itself.
Quite correct. Technically one can consider the entire UI of an OS to be "optional".
I will now point to the myriads of UI fiascos, efforts, flame wars, holy wars, and bottom up redesigns that have gone on in the (GUI) KDE/Gnome/XWin/X.Org projects or the (audio) ALSA/OSS/ESound/aRts/JACK projects.
Sure all of the above projects had their reasons (most of those reasons well natured, and an few of them devious), but in some cases the sheer amount of rework that has gone on is just pointless. How many times does the wheel need to be reinvented?
Imagine if the various major projects had been coordinated and run efficiently. Maybe Linux would even have had sound working out of the box (out of the torrent?;) seamlessly and with no user effort 7 or 8 years ago! The fact I have to mention this is sad, though I do wish I had a buck for every time I had to manually go and select ALSA/OSS/JACK inside of an application.
Just restricting ourselves to browsers for a moment, if all the development effort that has been spent fighting had instead been used to make just one awesome browser, FF 3 would have been released last year, be fully complainant with HTML 5, have its CSS bugs long since worked out, support the entire SVG standard (right now all browsers with SVG support have only partial support). If some of those other projects mentioned above were unified then FF would also have had 100% working audio/video streaming in every format under the sun running on Linux to such an extent as to make Windows and Mac users jealous.
But just in terms of Gecko development, effort has been spent on Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Mozilla, and Firefox, and I'm sure I've forgotten a few as well!
Now think about how much of a hassle it has been to get all the various Linux browser configurations setup to work with all the various sound systems and media players. Streaming video working instead of a web page? Well that may depend on which of the 4 included browsers is being used!
Yes, choice is good. But when it is a matter of 5 choices, none of which do all that needs to be done, then the user is stuck choosing what they "least need to work" want rather than what they want to use, and that is not a good choice to force the user to make.
Any one given approach has its draw backs, a common complaint about FF is that abstracting away the UI (XUL et all) is resource intensive. As everyone who bothered to make a FF "native API spin off" eventually figured out, in 2 years no one really cares anymore and there is not much perf diff between native APIs and XUL.
This is sort of getting off track. Well not really. The final statement was:
"Microsoft has gotten away with IE bundling primarily because they claimed it isn't feasible to remove IE from the OS. That is a load of BS, but they fooled the courts once.
Well of course it is technically POSSIBLE. But feasible? Not if you take into consideration the end user experience.
On a more grounded level, I'll note that Microsoft's HTML renderer is used all over the damn place in Windows XP and Vista. Looking at Vista's control panel, it sure as heck looks like nothing more than a fancy HTML page. One could easy argue that putting a thin wrapper on top of a basic OS level component then shoving in Favorites, History, and Cookies is such a minimal effort in comparison to writing an actual HTML renderer (just look above at the slew of Gecko front ends!) that the vast majority of the "web browser" code is fundamental to the end user functionality of the OS.
That is from a complete shutdown. From hibernate it boots in under 25 (under 20 sometimes, depends on how much crap I was doing before I went away;) ), and restores from standby almost instantly.
3+ minutes to boot a computer? What sort of mandatory crap-ware does that guy's company require? Granted I have seen companies get overzealous with security (or rather "over-stupid" in some instances...) and install 10+ background apps, but it isn't any given OSs fault if a company's IT department stinks!
Work computer, same thing (but it is an almost fully loaded new computer).
My 900mhz UMPC doesn't exactly jump back to responsiveness from hibernate, but I would chalk that up more to the slow HD than anything else. Going into and restoring from hibernate are mostly disk IO intensive activities.
If hibernate is behaving poorly, then there are two likely culprits. Either the disk is under performing (I've once saw a laptop HD that omitted cache altogether, took forever to boot anything!) or there is some driver misbehaving.
The author did a sample size N = 1 comparison too, and concluded that Vista sucks because of one machine he saw it installed on.
I've seen laptops that have been setup (or just built!) so bad by the manufacturer that ANY OS would run slow on them. Sometimse it is just the requirement for some bizarre proprietary drivers without which the machine runs like a dog (both Windows and Linux can suffer from this), other times it is a case where the manufacturer was cheap with one specific portion of the machine (slow CPU, sub-par video card even for a laptop, etc).
Ultimately it sucks that customers of either OS (Linux or Windows) have to deal with all this crap. I've had to jump through hoops on numerous machines when installing Linux or Windows, and it really should not be considered acceptable that an average user might have to go through the same trouble.
Not being able to set my monitor resolution correctly (especially for an LCD) is an instant deal breaker. He decides not to bother with XORG.CONF configuration and just what, left it that way?
Every video card made in the last 5 or 6 (or 10...) years is capable of outputting every sane resolution possible. Even Windows (most of the time) lets me override its "For Your Protection" results, tell it to screw off, and just select arbitrary settings.
And his problems about restoring from sleep and hibernation are NOT Vista. I have a brand new Vista box at home that comes out of hibernation in less than 20 seconds, boots in less than 40, and both of those numbers how long until I have a fully usable desktop environment (HD has quieted down, etc).
In fact that is one of two features that has made me change my mind on Vista. Originally I went with the "it sucks!!!" crowd, having only tried out the betas on a few underpowered machines, but after using it on something decently new (I dropped all of $600 on a discounted Dell system, integrated video, 1GB RAM, AMD CPU, not exactly a powerhouse), I am quite happy with it.
And yes, Vista did break a few of my apps, and it has some mind numbingly stupid bugs (as does all software), but when it works, it works really well.
I wonder what idiot had the idea to fund this project of Viacoms?
Even if they ended up cash positive, it would have been more efficient (not to mention more user friendly!) to have been integrated with a pre-existing online video distribution system.
Of course if YouTube was just unwilling to talk to Viacom, then it is Google who needs to beat someone on the head.
I also hope that when the country has universal health care it will be be possible to abort fetuses with these cognitive disabilities, just like we do for babies with other developmental defects.
Hah, now wouldn't that be interesting? A genetic test to determine one's political party.
The only issue being that political parties keep shifting. I seem to remember 10 years ago a Republican party that was in favor of citizen's rights!
How does this change the dynamics? Is there an upper limit placed on max reading speed, I read faster than most people do, but I know that the few people read faster than I do dramatically overshoot any speeds I could hope to achieve.
2GB SD cards are still a better band for your buck, typically. In the very least, compatibility is better.:)
You can get them pretty easily for $20 a pop.
Amazingly enough Amazon has 2GB SD cards cheaper than Newegg. $15 a pop (no free shipping though!)
That is $30 for 4GB, or $60 for 8GB.
Not quite enough to get Vista up and running, but it should do fine for a stand alone Linux box.:-D
I wonder what the throughput would be if a proper hardware controller was put in place and you had 50 of those things in parallel.
Thanks for testing out the crappy ones
on
Smartphone Shootout
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Heaven forbid anyone ever compare Apple's $500 wonder to a like-priced device from another manufacturer. Why does everyone coo over the cruddy screen, when I can get 640x480 and 800x480 screens on other smart phones?
T-Mobile Ameo, 640x480 screen and real 3G broadband speeds.
Or wait awhile and pick up a phone in the I-Mate Ultra line. They all look sexy, and they all have a screen that blows the iPhone out of the water. And of course they all support real 3G speeds as well.
All those prices by the way? Unlocked phones. If you are going to sign up for a contract, why pay $500 for a phone, when you can get a high quality (albeit not top of the line) Windows Mobile phone for under $100.
Hell, don't like Windows Mobile? Go with Symbian. They have some high-res devices that are a lot cheaper than $500.
For $500 you could almost BUILD your own cell phone and get something far more capable then what Apple is dishing out. Does anybody know of an after market supplier of GSM or CDMA chips?:-D
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Slap your exchange administrator around a bit until he fixes things. If people are waiting that long to use their machines, it is costing the company $$$.
I'm on an Exchange server with 10k+ users on it, and my Vista machine boots quickly.
The system now boots to usable state in 3 minutes. With vista, it took 28 minutes to actually get to login screen. Wow, umm, dude. You have something wrong with whatever crappy apps are getting installed on your system. My Vista box starts up in less than 30 seconds. Even my corporate Vista machine takes less than 3 minutes. I get annoyed if Outlook takes more than 20 seconds to load, most of the time it is instant.
What do you have installed on your machine, BDSM2.0?
One of the underlying goals of Agile software is to get away from the "big number release" type of mentality that leads to unhealthy software development practices (why worry about memory consumption when the product isn't go to ship for another 2 years? ...) and instead move developers into a mindset that their software should almost constantly be of ship quality.
/. a lot longer than @ MS!), everything I say is my own opinion and does not reflect the opinions of Microsoft.
Agile development also allows the quality of the software to be under constant incremental improvement. But this has a downside as well: it becomes very hard to pick a point in time to stop releasing patches and instead tell customers "now you have to buy a new version", especially since the next version that the company releases is "just" another incremental improvement over the previous release.
So basically agile development practices can spell death for the "Shiny New Version" business model, and thus an alternative revenue stream needs to be found.
Agile software allows developers to consistently and continuously release incrementally improved versions of an application. It therefore makes sense for companies to continuously pay incremental amounts for use of that software.
Selling the concept of "it will get better over time" to who ever is making business purchasing decisions may not be easy, but in the end, if some sales person can pull it off, it will be to everyone's benefit.
Customers will be able to have a more direct and immediate interaction with software companies, and software companies will be able to practice the software development methodologies that they KNOW they should be practicing.
Note in my defense:
Some people may take offense that agile software means no more big new versions, but I'd argue that it feels intuitively 'wrong' to fix a software bug that is annoying many users, but is too low priority to make the cut for a service pack, and then sit around knowing that users will not get to see this trivial fix for years, just because of the common business model that is used to sell big box software.
Disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee (been on
(Besides, I've been here under a year and I work in mobile compilers!)
A server of any OS has the potential for sporadically breaking out into inanity from time to time, especially if it is under constant heavy load. Not to say that you can't get a server up and running stable for 10 years that gets dry walled in to place, but the majority of servers (and software) is not that reliable.
It is up to Sysadmins to know how to fix the machine when the sh!t does hit the fan, because sooner or later it indeed will.
A good admin would have fired up Sysinternal's Process Monitor and found out who in the hell was writing to disk. Looking at IO by process would have pointed to the culprit pretty quickly. Of course you won't find step by step instructions on doing that by Googling, one would have to show some initiative, but a good sysadmin has a virtual swiss army knife of tools that they use to keep things taped together.
Hell, if the emergencies didn't pop up at the worst possible moment, what fun would be left to have?
I've worked both in the server room keeping things patched up and out front with the people who write the stuff that breaks. The server room is almost always more fun, every day is a new emergency, but that is what you sign up for!
(Besides, sysadmins with systems which never break may find themselves out of a job! )
Quite true, WM has a wide variety of browsers available for it, Skype works just fine, and I have even seen people use their phone as a WiFi access point connected to the net using EVDO or UTMS.
Versus the piece of crap plastic junk designed by some "Product Engineer" and verified by a "Plastics Manufacturing Engineer" that doesn't even work the first time it is taken out of the box?
If you want software that has verifiable reliability (and the hardware to run it on), there are companies that will sell it to you. You will pay through the nose for it, and as IBM found out quite some time ago, the market for such hardware and software can shrink quite rapidly when compared against "good enough" kit that costs a small fraction of the price.
The Washington state government operates at an epic level of stupidity. Microsoft pours tons into the local economy in a variety of ways, from funding local school programs to tens of millions of dollars of donations to area charities each year. And yah, they are helping to pay for improved roads in the area.
Washington state can't handle money worth a crap though, I was born and raised in Seattle and I would prefer not to hand over money to the (at times openly corrupt) bastards. I love this state dearly, but I have no idea how all the pricks managed to get government jobs.
All the higher level public servants should be made to live where there is "affordable" housing that the average person can afford, and have to drive to work during the worst of rush hour both ways. I think the Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond government could be split between Tacoma and Marysville, while those in Olympia can be put up on Renton.
I'd bet after a few months of that we would see some real transportation reform bills passing through both the city and state level governemnts.
Also, can someone explain to me why there is almost no[1] bus service from Juanita to MS/Nintendo/Digipen? If I don't have 800k to buy a house close to civilization,
am I supposed to "be an American(tm)" and buy an SUV to drive to work instead? Screw that.
[1] 1 bus, runs three times each direction at none tech-company friendly hours and goes down some of the most useless streets.
Also, realize that Boeing has this competitor called Airbus. Boeing carefully controls what information it releases about the design and capabilities of its airplanes (as does Airbus) in hopes of pulling off some sort of marketing kung-fu. While I'm not going to comment on marketing people's games, I will say that every presentation I attended at Boeing had "Boeing Confidential" stamped on the bottom of it.
Companies with competitors would rather that their competitors not gain knowledge of engineering information that has millions of dollars of human intellectual labor behind it.
Now imagine an entire avionics system, something that determines the capabilities of an airplane for literally decades to come (excusing expensive after market modifications to the less critical portions of the plane's infrastructure). So yes, I had to sign an NDA. Since I've been out of touch for a year I don't exactly have the list from legal about what can be talked about right now.
Actually, a dumb simple router that drops all packets not from source X Y or Z is pretty simple to implement, not really even router at that point, more like a consumer of packets!
My first reaction when I learned about the interconnected networks was "oh great, just what we need al-Qaeda to start crashing our airplanes with laptops", but once I learned about avionics systems more, and the extra steps that had been taken specifically for the 787, I realized that it wasn't that simple.
Nope, Everett. Enough of my co-workers flew down to Phoenix time and time again though. :)
This article is FUD. I worked on the 787 avionics during my internship in summer 2006 on the exact system the article is talking about. It has been awhile so I don't know what is still under NDA and what isn't, but anyone who has taken a basic networking class and who knows how the network is setup will have no worries at all.
(stupid NDA...)
KDE and Gnome don't compete against X.org, XWin or XFree86; in fact, they depend on the X Window System (however it's implemented.)
No, but the paradigm creates an additional layer of abstraction that complicates matters for both developers and users.
Want a single graphics API to write against? Nope. Want a single UI standard? Nope. Want simple agreement on basic UX principles? Not going to get it.
KDE and Gnome (and everyone else) have made different trade offs, but trade offs are necessary, and damnit people need to realize that and stop trying to make their own "Gee wiz ultimate extreme" version of Foo component.
How many damn beta media players does Linux have at any one point in time?
If each dev teams spends their time refining a different aspect of their own app's UI, you end up with 10 apps each with (different) bits and pieces of it polished and workable.
e.g. Amarok has an awesome media library but is missing other features (I can't recall right now which features, been awhile since I used it) that I wanted. Other media players had those features (in varying quanities and qualities) but lacked the kicking media library features of Amarok.
Quite correct. Technically one can consider the entire UI of an OS to be "optional".
I will now point to the myriads of UI fiascos, efforts, flame wars, holy wars, and bottom up redesigns that have gone on in the (GUI) KDE/Gnome/XWin/X.Org projects or the (audio) ALSA/OSS/ESound/aRts/JACK projects.
I am not even going to list out all the various , especially since Wikipedia has them nicely summarized.
Sure all of the above projects had their reasons (most of those reasons well natured, and an few of them devious), but in some cases the sheer amount of rework that has gone on is just pointless. How many times does the wheel need to be reinvented?
Imagine if the various major projects had been coordinated and run efficiently. Maybe Linux would even have had sound working out of the box (out of the torrent?
Just restricting ourselves to browsers for a moment, if all the development effort that has been spent fighting had instead been used to make just one awesome browser, FF 3 would have been released last year, be fully complainant with HTML 5, have its CSS bugs long since worked out, support the entire SVG standard (right now all browsers with SVG support have only partial support). If some of those other projects mentioned above were unified then FF would also have had 100% working audio/video streaming in every format under the sun running on Linux to such an extent as to make Windows and Mac users jealous.
But just in terms of Gecko development, effort has been spent on Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Mozilla, and Firefox, and I'm sure I've forgotten a few as well!
Now think about how much of a hassle it has been to get all the various Linux browser configurations setup to work with all the various sound systems and media players. Streaming video working instead of a web page? Well that may depend on which of the 4 included browsers is being used!
Yes, choice is good. But when it is a matter of 5 choices, none of which do all that needs to be done, then the user is stuck choosing what they "least need to work" want rather than what they want to use, and that is not a good choice to force the user to make.
Any one given approach has its draw backs, a common complaint about FF is that abstracting away the UI (XUL et all) is resource intensive. As everyone who bothered to make a FF "native API spin off" eventually figured out, in 2 years no one really cares anymore and there is not much perf diff between native APIs and XUL.
This is sort of getting off track. Well not really. The final statement was:
Well of course it is technically POSSIBLE. But feasible? Not if you take into consideration the end user experience.
On a more grounded level, I'll note that Microsoft's HTML renderer is used all over the damn place in Windows XP and Vista. Looking at Vista's control panel, it sure as heck looks like nothing more than a fancy HTML page. One could easy argue that putting a thin wrapper on top of a basic OS level component then shoving in Favorites, History, and Cookies is such a minimal effort in comparison to writing an actual HTML renderer (just look above at the slew of Gecko front ends!) that the vast majority of the "web browser" code is fundamental to the end user functionality of the OS.
That is from a complete shutdown. From hibernate it boots in under 25 (under 20 sometimes, depends on how much crap I was doing before I went away ;) ), and restores from standby almost instantly.
3+ minutes to boot a computer? What sort of mandatory crap-ware does that guy's company require? Granted I have seen companies get overzealous with security (or rather "over-stupid" in some instances...) and install 10+ background apps, but it isn't any given OSs fault if a company's IT department stinks!
I'm making a statement based on over a decade and a half of experience using Windows platforms.
The #1 cause of Hibernation problems is third party drivers, either the lack, or poor quality, of.
Work computer, same thing (but it is an almost fully loaded new computer).
My 900mhz UMPC doesn't exactly jump back to responsiveness from hibernate, but I would chalk that up more to the slow HD than anything else. Going into and restoring from hibernate are mostly disk IO intensive activities.
If hibernate is behaving poorly, then there are two likely culprits. Either the disk is under performing (I've once saw a laptop HD that omitted cache altogether, took forever to boot anything!) or there is some driver misbehaving.
The author did a sample size N = 1 comparison too, and concluded that Vista sucks because of one machine he saw it installed on.
I've seen laptops that have been setup (or just built!) so bad by the manufacturer that ANY OS would run slow on them. Sometimse it is just the requirement for some bizarre proprietary drivers without which the machine runs like a dog (both Windows and Linux can suffer from this), other times it is a case where the manufacturer was cheap with one specific portion of the machine (slow CPU, sub-par video card even for a laptop, etc).
Ultimately it sucks that customers of either OS (Linux or Windows) have to deal with all this crap. I've had to jump through hoops on numerous machines when installing Linux or Windows, and it really should not be considered acceptable that an average user might have to go through the same trouble.
Not being able to set my monitor resolution correctly (especially for an LCD) is an instant deal breaker. He decides not to bother with XORG.CONF configuration and just what, left it that way?
Every video card made in the last 5 or 6 (or 10...) years is capable of outputting every sane resolution possible. Even Windows (most of the time) lets me override its "For Your Protection" results, tell it to screw off, and just select arbitrary settings.
And his problems about restoring from sleep and hibernation are NOT Vista. I have a brand new Vista box at home that comes out of hibernation in less than 20 seconds, boots in less than 40, and both of those numbers how long until I have a fully usable desktop environment (HD has quieted down, etc).
In fact that is one of two features that has made me change my mind on Vista. Originally I went with the "it sucks!!!" crowd, having only tried out the betas on a few underpowered machines, but after using it on something decently new (I dropped all of $600 on a discounted Dell system, integrated video, 1GB RAM, AMD CPU, not exactly a powerhouse), I am quite happy with it.
And yes, Vista did break a few of my apps, and it has some mind numbingly stupid bugs (as does all software), but when it works, it works really well.
I wonder what idiot had the idea to fund this project of Viacoms?
Even if they ended up cash positive, it would have been more efficient (not to mention more user friendly!) to have been integrated with a pre-existing online video distribution system.
Of course if YouTube was just unwilling to talk to Viacom, then it is Google who needs to beat someone on the head.
To be fair, HD TV sets are good for one thing: :)
- Serving as giant PC monitors.
A good number of them even come with RGB plugs (a few have DVI, and DVI->HDMI adapters are simple + cheap)
I'd be one of them then. Never gotten a ticket, but I've also never seen text on the loading/unloading signs that say "permit required".
Hah, now wouldn't that be interesting? A genetic test to determine one's political party.
The only issue being that political parties keep shifting. I seem to remember 10 years ago a Republican party that was in favor of citizen's rights!
How does this change the dynamics? Is there an upper limit placed on max reading speed, I read faster than most people do, but I know that the few people read faster than I do dramatically overshoot any speeds I could hope to achieve.
2GB SD cards are still a better band for your buck, typically. In the very least, compatibility is better. :)
:-D
You can get them pretty easily for $20 a pop.
Amazingly enough Amazon has 2GB SD cards cheaper than Newegg. $15 a pop (no free shipping though!)
That is $30 for 4GB, or $60 for 8GB.
Not quite enough to get Vista up and running, but it should do fine for a stand alone Linux box.
I wonder what the throughput would be if a proper hardware controller was put in place and you had 50 of those things in parallel.
Heaven forbid anyone ever compare Apple's $500 wonder to a like-priced device from another manufacturer. Why does everyone coo over the cruddy screen, when I can get 640x480 and 800x480 screens on other smart phones?
:-D
T-Mobile Ameo, 640x480 screen and real 3G broadband speeds.
Or wait awhile and pick up a phone in the I-Mate Ultra line. They all look sexy, and they all have a screen that blows the iPhone out of the water. And of course they all support real 3G speeds as well.
Or heck, just never get lost again.
All those prices by the way? Unlocked phones. If you are going to sign up for a contract, why pay $500 for a phone, when you can get a high quality (albeit not top of the line) Windows Mobile phone for under $100.
Hell, don't like Windows Mobile? Go with Symbian. They have some high-res devices that are a lot cheaper than $500.
For $500 you could almost BUILD your own cell phone and get something far more capable then what Apple is dishing out. Does anybody know of an after market supplier of GSM or CDMA chips?