Gaim, however requires the use of gtk, and gtk doesn't work all that nicely with Windows, even with the gtk-wimp theme.
I disagree. GTK apps on Windows doen't quite feel like a native Windows application (non Windows-standard file dialogs, etc) I wouldn't say GTK "doesn't work all that nicely with Windows". It's still very nice and usable and I use GAIM all the time on WindowsXP. It's excellent.
The only real GAIM/Windows gripe I have is a window positioning issue with my three-monitor setup. But this is a pretty nonstandard config so I'm not complaining. (I don't know if it's a GAIM or a GTK issue. I suspect GTK but I'm not sure)
I've never had a problem with mouse/trackpad drivers on Windows, in the 10+ years I've used it personally and professionally. In fact, I've never even heard of this happening. I'm sure you can Google and find examples of problems but I assure you this is rare.
"Of course, running his lappie on Linux would both stop the apparently regular self-immolation"
If you read the original post, you'd see the problems with this laptop were hardware-related, not OS-related: "and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair."
Linux is a great OS, but would you care to tell us how it's going to keep his trackpad and USB ports from failing? You must be using that experimental 2.9 kernel with self-healing hardware features - the year 2020 sounds great, but remember some of us are living in 2005.
Yes, I didn't understand the title.. it had nothing to do with the story that was linked. The story was pretty positive on Netflix, it wasn't predicting that they would get "left in the dust" or anything like that.
Ah. Maybe it's just missing a comma, then.
"Netflix Pioneers, Industry Left In Dust" means that Netflix is pioneering and the industry (presumably the brick-and-mortar rental industry) is being left in the dust.
I didn't read the linked story (I have no idea what it's about, based on the story title) but a differently-placed comma would result in "Netflix Pioneers Industry, Left In Dust" which would mean that Netflix pioneered the video-rental-by-mail industry but is now getting left in the dust by heavyweights like Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, etc.
Reminds me of that "Eats Shoots and Leaves" book about the power of misused punctuation.:)
"Netflix Pioneers Industry To Get Left in the Dust?"
W... w... what? I can't even parse the grammar there. What does that mean? Who's getting left in the dust... Netflix? Industry? Pioneers? Typos in stories are one thing, but at least try to have the story titles make sense, okay?
That just goes to show you really, really, don't know what you're talking about. You can't have a profit margin greater than 100%, duh.
If your total cost for something is $1, and you sell it for $100, that's a 99% profit margin. If it was FREE to you, then it would be a 100% profit margin.
How on Earth could it be greater than 100%? You're plugging these numbers into your buggy 900000000% profit-margin piece of software known as Excel, aren't you?:)
First of all, no Microsoft-lover here. I primarily use Windows, it's true, but I think Linux is awesome. I basically use Windows because it's what I know best and it's what the companies I've worked for have used. Each OS has its strengths.
Anyway, your questions are silly.
1)If you went to a car dealer and bought a car for $30,000 and you found out it only cost the dealer $3,000 would you feel ripped off? If yes - isn't that what MS does with MS Office?
That analogy is completely broken. Do you really think that Microsoft has a 90% profit margin on Office? If you have a philosophical objection to commercial closed-source software ala the FSF, fine, that's a valid viewpoint although there's clearly room for debate. But your analogy is broken to the point of hurting whatever point you were trying to make. What point were you trying to make, exactly?
2) How do you feel about governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software in countries where a large percent of the population is homeless and hungry (eg Brazil). Wouldn't the governments be better off spending the money locally on support than importing software from the US?
Interesting point, but remember that the price of software is insignificant compared to the other costs. That $100 WindowsXP license is peanuts compared to the $800 computer it's running on, or the annual salaries of the employees, or even the cost of the office space that computer is sitting on. Hell, the cost of electicity for that computer might be over $100 a year alone. The numbers are going to be different in different countries (like Brazil) but the same principles apply. Waste is waste, no matter if it's 1% or 50% of your total costs, but try to keep some perspective.
Besides, you could apply that "argument" to any form of spending, ever. Should they run Linux on eBay'd 386s instead of buying new computers? Why not walk into a post office, pick up a stapler, and start screaming about how the $5 they spent on the stapler could have fed some kid in Africa? Should government spend absolutely zero dollars on anything as long as there's one homeless person somewhere?
What it boils down to, regardless of any rhetorical pathos about THE STARVING CHILDREN PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN, is whether or not the cost of Windows is worth it. And I think this is a valid discussion and there are lots of cases where the cost of Windows isn't worth it, but your histrionics aren't going to bring anybody closer to a sensible answer... and the optimal answer varies on a case-by-case basis anyway.
3) What companies/products are highest on the MS radar? Oracle/IBM/SAP. If you could grind one competitor into the dust which would it be?
Yeah, he'd really be willing to answer that. You don't need truth serum and an interrogation room to figure out the answer, though. Just look at the competitors that Microsoft's ads target. Obviously Linux is extremely high on their radar.
Game programming, and programming in other resource-constrained, performance-critical situations, is quite a different beast than other kinds of programming.
If you're writing some mundane database software for your office, you want to focus on code maintainability / extensibility which are OOP's alleged strong points.
If you're coding a game, though, you have an entirely different set of priorities. Code maintainability / extensibility are still great things to have (as you'll surely be developing this code over a long period of time) but they quite often must take a backseat to performance.
Are you seriously suggesting that hours upon hours of horrible monotone text-to-speech voice samples would be REMOTELY pleasurable to listen to?
Even the best text-to-speech stuff I've heard is, uh, not something I'd want to listen to for hours on end. What you've descrived sounds like a particularly excruiating version of pure hell.
Man criticises employer in public.
Employer fires man.
This is fascinating... why, exactly?
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "fascinating", but it's an interesting case. Google is enjoying unprecedented good will from end-users and investors. They also have a famously relaxed workplace, with all sorts of perks and even a policy which allows employees to spend one day a week pursuing their own interests on the job.
So it's interesting to see how they handle public criticism from an employee. The fact that it's Google is key. If this was Ford Motor Company or H&R Block it wouldn't be very interesting.
I find that sage is the perfect way to view 10-30 sites using firefox.
It allows you to see articles, summaries, or just titles in a simple and easy to use way.
That looks really slick. I'll have to give that a shot. Thanks!
I run about ten RSS feeds on my Firefox browser that run the day's headlines and whatnot from leading news outlets and niche content providers of interest to me.
[snip]...I feel like I've immediately OD'ed, badly, on information when I pull down the home feed for PRWeb.
I find that a good RSS integrator like BlogLines actually helps cut down on information overload. I use Firefox's RSS for several frequently-accessed sites that I like to have right on my bookmarks toolbar... such as some news sites, and my own site so I can see when people have posted articles on it.
Then I have about 30 other sites that I subscribe to on BlogLines. Since Bloglines actually shows the article summary (as opposed to Firefox, which only shows the article titles) I can use BlogLines to quickly scan a large number of feeds. With article summaries I don't have to actually click the article to see if its relevant to me; I can just look at the summary and predict with high accuracy if it's something I want to read.
I find that Bloglines has replaced all my aimless surfing. Instead of visiting 10 or so sites on a regular basis, I can efficiently scan 30 or so of them and therefore find much more useful/interesting stuff in less time. It's a much better use of my time. No, I don't work for Bloglines or AskJeeves.:)
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet
It's funny how they're talking about radically changing another world but thing that astonished me the most was the proper use of "affected" instead of "effected" in a Slashdot post.
One reason lots of other companies that emerged as PC makers in the 80s went on to massively outgrow Apple (think, Compaq...) is that they managed their transition from the 8/16 bit IBM PC through lots of architecture and CPU generations without suddenly dropping support for their existing customer base or alientating them completely.
As a IIGS owner, I agree and feel your pain there. I waited twelve years for my parents to buy me a computer and when I finally did, it was an evolutionary dead-end. I had a lot of fun with it, but the dead-end aspect was kind of a bummer.
Would you say that Apple has improved on that aspect since then, though? They went to great lengths to retain backwards compatibility during the 68K-->PPC transition (fat binaries!) and during the OS9-->OSX transition (a complete Classic emulation layer which isn't perfect, but how could it be?).
I also think that the Mac wouldn't have been as special if it wasn't a total clean break from the AppleII. It was pretty much a marvel of engineering created by a small semi-secret team inside Apple. Its graphics power and other aspects were pretty revolutionary. I can't help but think that it would have been quite a bit less revolutionary if it maintained backwards compatibility.
That's not to say the decision to maroon AppleII users was right or wrong. There's never justification for abandoning customers. But at least something good (a pretty special new personal computer) was born of it.
...wait, was I trying to make a point? Because I really failed, I think.
They say loudly that they are only willing to accept developers to the project that they have vetted themselves, no one need apply. And with this attitude in front of them, they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
I don't think this is "elitist", I think it's practical. With every new developer on board, the task of managing the project grows. See: "The Mythical Man-Month" or any text ever written on the subject, ever.
It's a well-proven fact that adding too many developers to a project has negative effects on productivity due to the added overheads of communication, familiarization, duplication of effort, etc etc.
And it's not like the Firefox team is really shutting anybody out entirely- the source is open, after all. You're allowed to download the source and start hacking away. In fact, in a world where thousands of developers want to be part of Firefox, that might be one of the surest ways to get noticed...
The newer Via C3 CPU's has special instructions for AES encryption (they call it PadLock), and will outperform a P4 3.0GHz. It will, of course, also outpeform a G4. In a gateway this hardware encryption is valuable. For instance, OpenBSD will transparently use Via encryption instructions.
Yeah, if you're doing AES encryption (and your software supports it). For everything else... no performance boost.
Sorry for coming down so hard. I guess I was feeling cranky. And I overclock too.::looks around to see if anybody's looking:: Mobile Barton 2500 oc'd from 1.8-->2.3ghz @ 1.6v.:)
This post is so completely inaccurate, I don't know where to start. I can't believe it was modded "Informative"... oh wait, yes I can. I'll tackle a few points....
"Building a computer resilient to cold weather should not be a problem in the slightest. In fact, many computers would run effectively much much better in a cold climate. A big factor in the overall heat that the CPU gives off has to do with the ambient temperature"
The CPU will work fine in the cold, but you're missing the point. The things that will be most affected by the cold are moving parts... fans, and hard drives in particular. When it's really cold, those hard drives might not spin too well. There's also the moisture issue which is going to have bad short term (possible shorts) and long term (corrosion) effects on everything.
"If you buy slightly new hardware, chances are they are going to give off an immense amount of heat...which is a problem facing microprocessor makers in general, the rising heat problems. Trust me, a Pentium 4 or AMD64 would love a cold climate."
The AMD64s are renowed for their low heat dissipation. They run at an even lower voltage (and often at a lower clockspeed!) than AMD's previous CPU generation, the AthlonXPs. They also have laptop-like ability to throttle their clockspeed when the CPU is idle, reducing heat output even further.
"the only thing that the cold will aversely affect is the initial bootup of the machine. Like a car, a computer requires the most energy in the first moments of startup. If you are booting up a computer in a cold environment (a cold cold boot hehe), you may have some problems"
No, you're totally wrong. A computer does have an initial spike in power draw during bootup (because it's spinning up the drives and fans) but this is less than the power it draws under full load (100% CPU and video usage - ie, gaming).
And the car battery analogy is totally inappropriate. A car battery can have problems cranking out power in the cold because the chemical reactions in the battery that produce electricity happen more slowly in the cold. That's absolutely not what happens in a computer, where the power supply is simply transforming power from AC to DC. Get it? It's not producing power; it's taking it from the outlet in the wall, transforming it, and sending it to the motherboard and other peripherals. The effect of cold temperatures on the PSU is minimal, if anything.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing something. The problem is not knowing that you don't know something. I don't know Python or Perl, but that's okay... I don't try and hand out advice on those topics.
"Although the computer will run fantastic (i wish my room was freezing cold!) in a cold climate"
Let me guess: you're an "avid" overclocker. That tells me a lot. I'm surprised you don't have your system specs listed in your sig.
This book seems to leave off when Steve Jobs left after Sculley took over the company and misses the whole revolution
Well, it's a recollection of Andy Hertzfeld's personal experiences at Apple. Considering that he left around the time that Jobs left, of course the book leaves off there. It's not a comprehensive history of Apple and doesn't claim to be. Would that even fit into a single book? It's collection of one man's personal experiences during the creation of the original Macintosh.
I haven't read the book, but I'm a huge fan of the stories that Andy has published over at Folklore.org. They are entertaining and inspirational to a programmer like me. I'm not an "Apple fanatic" and haven't used one since my Apple IIgs, but the stories are fantastic and should have a universal appeal to those who care passionately about computing.
Isn't this just a general feature of journaling filesystems, you can always go back and get the previous disk drive state.
No. You're confusing "journaling" and "versioning" filesystems.
A journaling filsystem guarantees (or tries to, anyway) that you can roll back to a consistent version of the filesystem. In other words, if you yank the power cord out halfway through a file-writing operation... the file might be toast, but the filesystem's allocation tables will all be in order and the partition will not be corrupted at a filesystem level.
A journaling filesystem does not guarantee that you can roll back to an arbitrary, previous version of a file or filsystem itself. That's the domain of a versioning filesystem.
For example, on VMS, suppose you save "foo.text". Next time you save it, it would automatically be saved as "foo.text.1", and then "foo.text.2". So if you've just finished saving "foo.text.42", and decide you want to use "foo.text.33" again... you can go back to that version unless you've specifically deleted it. Or something like that... I only had very brief experience on VMS.:)
Blocking out noise is easy. I just do a lot of typing on my IBM Model-M keyboard. I can't even hear myself talk over the satisfying clickity-clack of the keys, much less anything else.
This only becomes a problem when I don't hear the fire alarms, but that's an edge scenario.
(As a side note, I'd like to see the same for tabbed windows a la firefox - it would be nice if an app could signal the WM to make tabs for itself, or even if one could attach different applications to each other)
I really agree. Tabbed instances of application windows make a boatload of sense. Microsoft (and other desktops) have somewhat tackled this by grouping an application's windows in the taskbar (or "dock") or whatever your WM calls them) but this isn't very useful in my opinion. I'd like to see tabs implemented by the WM in some standard way within the application itself...
30 minutes later i say f*** it, i don't konw how to burn a cd in xp. oh, third party software. are you freakin serious. what od doesn't have cd burning software, even basic shit?
XP does have built-in CD burning support. It's built right into Explorer. If you have CD insert notification enabled (aka "AutoPlay", enabled by default) it will even helpfully suggest it to you when you insert a blank CD.
I don't know about your wireless issues, because I don't use wireless myself. But wouldn't any issues be the fault of the vendors creating the drivers, not XP itself? Most wireless stuff is made by who... Belkin? Linksys? Not exactly shining names synonymous with "quality". Some of their stuff is really good (love my Linksys router) but as a whole it's basically cheap consumer crap with razor-thin profit margins so quality is not a given.
By the way, I think Linux and OSX are great OSs as well. I'm primarily a Windows user but I'm not pushing an "agenda" here. But I've been using XP on a variety of computers (personal workstations, personal gaming machines, computers at work, computers of friends and family that I maintain) since its release, with generally positive results when it comes to ease-of-use, compatibility, and stability.
isn't a haven for malware, looks identical to how IE renders pages,
Right away, I can tell you that's not going to happen. IE's rendering engine is buggy, quirky, broken. Furthermore, the bugs, quirks, and breaks are often specific to each version of IE (5.0, 5.5, 0.0, 6.01, etc)
Therefore you're not going to get anything that renders "identical to IE" unless you embed IE's rendering engine itself. Which is obviously do-able, but there goes your "isn't a haven for malware" requirement.
Either you live with IE's fucked-up "unique" rendering and malware facilitation, or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose. Sorry, that's the way IE is.
The only possible solution I see is to have some kind of constantly-updated web proxy that scans all web traffic and removes any known exploits or malware from the HTTP traffic before it reaches IE. Then perhaps you could have your broken IE rendering engine with "safety" from malware... but when you tack on the proxy server, there goes your "no bloat" requirement.
Are you understanding how IE (and its rendering engine) is simply a shitty, broken, answer yet...?
If you are willing to give up your insistance on IE's broken rendering engine, you have a couple of possibilties. One, you could try K-Meleon, a Windows-native Gecko-based browser that's "slimmer" for those of you without monster amounts of RAM.
Another option, if your primary objection to Firefox is the memory usage, is to give Firefox another shot and reduce the amount of pages it caches in RAM. It's still kind of high, but you can restrict it to around 30-40MB usage this way.
I don't really get your other objections to Firefox. Mouse gestures are an optional component, you don't have to use the tabbed windows or themes if you don't want to, and I'm baffled by your insistence on a browser with no bookmarks... it's not like browsers MAKE you use them, and why on Earth wouldn't you want them? You *like* typing in huge URLs?
Slashdot Mirror
Gaim, however requires the use of gtk, and gtk doesn't work all that nicely with Windows, even with the gtk-wimp theme.
I disagree. GTK apps on Windows doen't quite feel like a native Windows application (non Windows-standard file dialogs, etc) I wouldn't say GTK "doesn't work all that nicely with Windows". It's still very nice and usable and I use GAIM all the time on WindowsXP. It's excellent.
The only real GAIM/Windows gripe I have is a window positioning issue with my three-monitor setup. But this is a pretty nonstandard config so I'm not complaining. (I don't know if it's a GAIM or a GTK issue. I suspect GTK but I'm not sure)
...voided the warranty on his laptop, or on his tree?
I've never had a problem with mouse/trackpad drivers on Windows, in the 10+ years I've used it personally and professionally. In fact, I've never even heard of this happening. I'm sure you can Google and find examples of problems but I assure you this is rare.
"Of course, running his lappie on Linux would both stop the apparently regular self-immolation"
If you read the original post, you'd see the problems with this laptop were hardware-related, not OS-related: "and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair."
Linux is a great OS, but would you care to tell us how it's going to keep his trackpad and USB ports from failing? You must be using that experimental 2.9 kernel with self-healing hardware features - the year 2020 sounds great, but remember some of us are living in 2005.
Yes, I didn't understand the title.. it had nothing to do with the story that was linked. The story was pretty positive on Netflix, it wasn't predicting that they would get "left in the dust" or anything like that.
:)
Ah. Maybe it's just missing a comma, then.
"Netflix Pioneers, Industry Left In Dust" means that Netflix is pioneering and the industry (presumably the brick-and-mortar rental industry) is being left in the dust.
I didn't read the linked story (I have no idea what it's about, based on the story title) but a differently-placed comma would result in "Netflix Pioneers Industry, Left In Dust" which would mean that Netflix pioneered the video-rental-by-mail industry but is now getting left in the dust by heavyweights like Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, etc.
Reminds me of that "Eats Shoots and Leaves" book about the power of misused punctuation.
"Netflix Pioneers Industry To Get Left in the Dust?"
W... w... what? I can't even parse the grammar there. What does that mean? Who's getting left in the dust... Netflix? Industry? Pioneers? Typos in stories are one thing, but at least try to have the story titles make sense, okay?
That just goes to show you really, really, don't know what you're talking about. You can't have a profit margin greater than 100%, duh.
:)
If your total cost for something is $1, and you sell it for $100, that's a 99% profit margin. If it was FREE to you, then it would be a 100% profit margin.
How on Earth could it be greater than 100%? You're plugging these numbers into your buggy 900000000% profit-margin piece of software known as Excel, aren't you?
First of all, no Microsoft-lover here. I primarily use Windows, it's true, but I think Linux is awesome. I basically use Windows because it's what I know best and it's what the companies I've worked for have used. Each OS has its strengths.
Anyway, your questions are silly.
1)If you went to a car dealer and bought a car for $30,000 and you found out it only cost the dealer $3,000 would you feel ripped off? If yes - isn't that what MS does with MS Office?
That analogy is completely broken. Do you really think that Microsoft has a 90% profit margin on Office? If you have a philosophical objection to commercial closed-source software ala the FSF, fine, that's a valid viewpoint although there's clearly room for debate. But your analogy is broken to the point of hurting whatever point you were trying to make. What point were you trying to make, exactly?
2) How do you feel about governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software in countries where a large percent of the population is homeless and hungry (eg Brazil). Wouldn't the governments be better off spending the money locally on support than importing software from the US?
Interesting point, but remember that the price of software is insignificant compared to the other costs. That $100 WindowsXP license is peanuts compared to the $800 computer it's running on, or the annual salaries of the employees, or even the cost of the office space that computer is sitting on. Hell, the cost of electicity for that computer might be over $100 a year alone. The numbers are going to be different in different countries (like Brazil) but the same principles apply. Waste is waste, no matter if it's 1% or 50% of your total costs, but try to keep some perspective.
Besides, you could apply that "argument" to any form of spending, ever. Should they run Linux on eBay'd 386s instead of buying new computers? Why not walk into a post office, pick up a stapler, and start screaming about how the $5 they spent on the stapler could have fed some kid in Africa? Should government spend absolutely zero dollars on anything as long as there's one homeless person somewhere?
What it boils down to, regardless of any rhetorical pathos about THE STARVING CHILDREN PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN, is whether or not the cost of Windows is worth it. And I think this is a valid discussion and there are lots of cases where the cost of Windows isn't worth it, but your histrionics aren't going to bring anybody closer to a sensible answer... and the optimal answer varies on a case-by-case basis anyway.
3) What companies/products are highest on the MS radar? Oracle/IBM/SAP. If you could grind one competitor into the dust which would it be?
Yeah, he'd really be willing to answer that. You don't need truth serum and an interrogation room to figure out the answer, though. Just look at the competitors that Microsoft's ads target. Obviously Linux is extremely high on their radar.
Game programming, and programming in other resource-constrained, performance-critical situations, is quite a different beast than other kinds of programming.
If you're writing some mundane database software for your office, you want to focus on code maintainability / extensibility which are OOP's alleged strong points.
If you're coding a game, though, you have an entirely different set of priorities. Code maintainability / extensibility are still great things to have (as you'll surely be developing this code over a long period of time) but they quite often must take a backseat to performance.
Are you seriously suggesting that hours upon hours of horrible monotone text-to-speech voice samples would be REMOTELY pleasurable to listen to?
Even the best text-to-speech stuff I've heard is, uh, not something I'd want to listen to for hours on end. What you've descrived sounds like a particularly excruiating version of pure hell.
Man criticises employer in public. Employer fires man. This is fascinating ... why, exactly?
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "fascinating", but it's an interesting case. Google is enjoying unprecedented good will from end-users and investors. They also have a famously relaxed workplace, with all sorts of perks and even a policy which allows employees to spend one day a week pursuing their own interests on the job.
So it's interesting to see how they handle public criticism from an employee. The fact that it's Google is key. If this was Ford Motor Company or H&R Block it wouldn't be very interesting.
I find that sage is the perfect way to view 10-30 sites using firefox. It allows you to see articles, summaries, or just titles in a simple and easy to use way.
That looks really slick. I'll have to give that a shot. Thanks!
I run about ten RSS feeds on my Firefox browser that run the day's headlines and whatnot from leading news outlets and niche content providers of interest to me.
...I feel like I've immediately OD'ed, badly, on information when I pull down the home feed for PRWeb.
:)
[snip]
I find that a good RSS integrator like BlogLines actually helps cut down on information overload. I use Firefox's RSS for several frequently-accessed sites that I like to have right on my bookmarks toolbar... such as some news sites, and my own site so I can see when people have posted articles on it.
Then I have about 30 other sites that I subscribe to on BlogLines. Since Bloglines actually shows the article summary (as opposed to Firefox, which only shows the article titles) I can use BlogLines to quickly scan a large number of feeds. With article summaries I don't have to actually click the article to see if its relevant to me; I can just look at the summary and predict with high accuracy if it's something I want to read.
I find that Bloglines has replaced all my aimless surfing. Instead of visiting 10 or so sites on a regular basis, I can efficiently scan 30 or so of them and therefore find much more useful/interesting stuff in less time. It's a much better use of my time. No, I don't work for Bloglines or AskJeeves.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet
It's funny how they're talking about radically changing another world but thing that astonished me the most was the proper use of "affected" instead of "effected" in a Slashdot post.
One reason lots of other companies that emerged as PC makers in the 80s went on to massively outgrow Apple (think, Compaq...) is that they managed their transition from the 8/16 bit IBM PC through lots of architecture and CPU generations without suddenly dropping support for their existing customer base or alientating them completely.
...wait, was I trying to make a point? Because I really failed, I think.
As a IIGS owner, I agree and feel your pain there. I waited twelve years for my parents to buy me a computer and when I finally did, it was an evolutionary dead-end. I had a lot of fun with it, but the dead-end aspect was kind of a bummer.
Would you say that Apple has improved on that aspect since then, though? They went to great lengths to retain backwards compatibility during the 68K-->PPC transition (fat binaries!) and during the OS9-->OSX transition (a complete Classic emulation layer which isn't perfect, but how could it be?).
I also think that the Mac wouldn't have been as special if it wasn't a total clean break from the AppleII. It was pretty much a marvel of engineering created by a small semi-secret team inside Apple. Its graphics power and other aspects were pretty revolutionary. I can't help but think that it would have been quite a bit less revolutionary if it maintained backwards compatibility.
That's not to say the decision to maroon AppleII users was right or wrong. There's never justification for abandoning customers. But at least something good (a pretty special new personal computer) was born of it.
They say loudly that they are only willing to accept developers to the project that they have vetted themselves, no one need apply. And with this attitude in front of them, they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
I don't think this is "elitist", I think it's practical. With every new developer on board, the task of managing the project grows. See: "The Mythical Man-Month" or any text ever written on the subject, ever.
It's a well-proven fact that adding too many developers to a project has negative effects on productivity due to the added overheads of communication, familiarization, duplication of effort, etc etc.
And it's not like the Firefox team is really shutting anybody out entirely- the source is open, after all. You're allowed to download the source and start hacking away. In fact, in a world where thousands of developers want to be part of Firefox, that might be one of the surest ways to get noticed...
The newer Via C3 CPU's has special instructions for AES encryption (they call it PadLock), and will outperform a P4 3.0GHz. It will, of course, also outpeform a G4. In a gateway this hardware encryption is valuable. For instance, OpenBSD will transparently use Via encryption instructions.
Yeah, if you're doing AES encryption (and your software supports it). For everything else... no performance boost.
Sorry for coming down so hard. I guess I was feeling cranky. And I overclock too. ::looks around to see if anybody's looking:: Mobile Barton 2500 oc'd from 1.8-->2.3ghz @ 1.6v. :)
This post is so completely inaccurate, I don't know where to start. I can't believe it was modded "Informative"... oh wait, yes I can. I'll tackle a few points....
"Building a computer resilient to cold weather should not be a problem in the slightest. In fact, many computers would run effectively much much better in a cold climate. A big factor in the overall heat that the CPU gives off has to do with the ambient temperature"
The CPU will work fine in the cold, but you're missing the point. The things that will be most affected by the cold are moving parts... fans, and hard drives in particular. When it's really cold, those hard drives might not spin too well. There's also the moisture issue which is going to have bad short term (possible shorts) and long term (corrosion) effects on everything.
"If you buy slightly new hardware, chances are they are going to give off an immense amount of heat...which is a problem facing microprocessor makers in general, the rising heat problems. Trust me, a Pentium 4 or AMD64 would love a cold climate."
The AMD64s are renowed for their low heat dissipation. They run at an even lower voltage (and often at a lower clockspeed!) than AMD's previous CPU generation, the AthlonXPs. They also have laptop-like ability to throttle their clockspeed when the CPU is idle, reducing heat output even further.
"the only thing that the cold will aversely affect is the initial bootup of the machine. Like a car, a computer requires the most energy in the first moments of startup. If you are booting up a computer in a cold environment (a cold cold boot hehe), you may have some problems"
No, you're totally wrong. A computer does have an initial spike in power draw during bootup (because it's spinning up the drives and fans) but this is less than the power it draws under full load (100% CPU and video usage - ie, gaming).
And the car battery analogy is totally inappropriate. A car battery can have problems cranking out power in the cold because the chemical reactions in the battery that produce electricity happen more slowly in the cold. That's absolutely not what happens in a computer, where the power supply is simply transforming power from AC to DC. Get it? It's not producing power; it's taking it from the outlet in the wall, transforming it, and sending it to the motherboard and other peripherals. The effect of cold temperatures on the PSU is minimal, if anything.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing something. The problem is not knowing that you don't know something. I don't know Python or Perl, but that's okay... I don't try and hand out advice on those topics.
"Although the computer will run fantastic (i wish my room was freezing cold!) in a cold climate"
Let me guess: you're an "avid" overclocker. That tells me a lot. I'm surprised you don't have your system specs listed in your sig.
This book seems to leave off when Steve Jobs left after Sculley took over the company and misses the whole revolution
Well, it's a recollection of Andy Hertzfeld's personal experiences at Apple. Considering that he left around the time that Jobs left, of course the book leaves off there. It's not a comprehensive history of Apple and doesn't claim to be. Would that even fit into a single book? It's collection of one man's personal experiences during the creation of the original Macintosh.
I haven't read the book, but I'm a huge fan of the stories that Andy has published over at Folklore.org. They are entertaining and inspirational to a programmer like me. I'm not an "Apple fanatic" and haven't used one since my Apple IIgs, but the stories are fantastic and should have a universal appeal to those who care passionately about computing.
Isn't this just a general feature of journaling filesystems, you can always go back and get the previous disk drive state.
:)
No. You're confusing "journaling" and "versioning" filesystems.
A journaling filsystem guarantees (or tries to, anyway) that you can roll back to a consistent version of the filesystem. In other words, if you yank the power cord out halfway through a file-writing operation... the file might be toast, but the filesystem's allocation tables will all be in order and the partition will not be corrupted at a filesystem level.
A journaling filesystem does not guarantee that you can roll back to an arbitrary, previous version of a file or filsystem itself. That's the domain of a versioning filesystem.
For example, on VMS, suppose you save "foo.text". Next time you save it, it would automatically be saved as "foo.text.1", and then "foo.text.2". So if you've just finished saving "foo.text.42", and decide you want to use "foo.text.33" again... you can go back to that version unless you've specifically deleted it. Or something like that... I only had very brief experience on VMS.
Blocking out noise is easy. I just do a lot of typing on my IBM Model-M keyboard. I can't even hear myself talk over the satisfying clickity-clack of the keys, much less anything else.
This only becomes a problem when I don't hear the fire alarms, but that's an edge scenario.
(As a side note, I'd like to see the same for tabbed windows a la firefox - it would be nice if an app could signal the WM to make tabs for itself, or even if one could attach different applications to each other)
I really agree. Tabbed instances of application windows make a boatload of sense. Microsoft (and other desktops) have somewhat tackled this by grouping an application's windows in the taskbar (or "dock") or whatever your WM calls them) but this isn't very useful in my opinion. I'd like to see tabs implemented by the WM in some standard way within the application itself...
30 minutes later i say f*** it, i don't konw how to burn a cd in xp. oh, third party software. are you freakin serious. what od doesn't have cd burning software, even basic shit?
XP does have built-in CD burning support. It's built right into Explorer. If you have CD insert notification enabled (aka "AutoPlay", enabled by default) it will even helpfully suggest it to you when you insert a blank CD.
I don't know about your wireless issues, because I don't use wireless myself. But wouldn't any issues be the fault of the vendors creating the drivers, not XP itself? Most wireless stuff is made by who... Belkin? Linksys? Not exactly shining names synonymous with "quality". Some of their stuff is really good (love my Linksys router) but as a whole it's basically cheap consumer crap with razor-thin profit margins so quality is not a given.
By the way, I think Linux and OSX are great OSs as well. I'm primarily a Windows user but I'm not pushing an "agenda" here. But I've been using XP on a variety of computers (personal workstations, personal gaming machines, computers at work, computers of friends and family that I maintain) since its release, with generally positive results when it comes to ease-of-use, compatibility, and stability.
isn't a haven for malware, looks identical to how IE renders pages,
Right away, I can tell you that's not going to happen. IE's rendering engine is buggy, quirky, broken. Furthermore, the bugs, quirks, and breaks are often specific to each version of IE (5.0, 5.5, 0.0, 6.01, etc)
Therefore you're not going to get anything that renders "identical to IE" unless you embed IE's rendering engine itself. Which is obviously do-able, but there goes your "isn't a haven for malware" requirement. Either you live with IE's fucked-up "unique" rendering and malware facilitation, or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose. Sorry, that's the way IE is.
The only possible solution I see is to have some kind of constantly-updated web proxy that scans all web traffic and removes any known exploits or malware from the HTTP traffic before it reaches IE. Then perhaps you could have your broken IE rendering engine with "safety" from malware... but when you tack on the proxy server, there goes your "no bloat" requirement.
Are you understanding how IE (and its rendering engine) is simply a shitty, broken, answer yet...?
If you are willing to give up your insistance on IE's broken rendering engine, you have a couple of possibilties. One, you could try K-Meleon, a Windows-native Gecko-based browser that's "slimmer" for those of you without monster amounts of RAM.
Another option, if your primary objection to Firefox is the memory usage, is to give Firefox another shot and reduce the amount of pages it caches in RAM. It's still kind of high, but you can restrict it to around 30-40MB usage this way.
I don't really get your other objections to Firefox. Mouse gestures are an optional component, you don't have to use the tabbed windows or themes if you don't want to, and I'm baffled by your insistence on a browser with no bookmarks... it's not like browsers MAKE you use them, and why on Earth wouldn't you want them? You *like* typing in huge URLs?