The MacBook isn't edge-scroll, though - two fingers on the pad is scrolling. Having used edge-scroll before, the MacBook's gesture is much more convenient. And given how you get to Page Up/Down on the MacBook, it's generally more convenient than using them, although that's not really a feature...
But you can easily flick up and down through pages on the MacBook in a way that you can't on a PC with edge scroll. (I've used both.) Part of that is, as I said earlier, thanks to the MacBook's Trackpad being much larger than the standard PC touch pad. The other part is that you can almost instantly go from moving the cursor to scrolling. It's very convenient in a way you really can't appreciate until you try it.
If you're referring to the fact that the new MacBooks don't have those keys, it turns out that they do, they're just not documented anywhere. (Well, that I found.) Fn-Up and Fn-Down work as Page Up and Page Down. Likewise Fn-Left and Fn-Right produce Home and End. Fn-Backspace is Delete. (Verified with xev.)
I'm sure these are documented somewhere, but I found them by accident. Which is too bad, because Apple did a very nice job with the Trackpad System Preferences window in creating little videos that demonstrate exactly how to do each gesture and what they do.
You just can't beat a mouse with your finger ever under any circumstances with any touch technology.
Sure you can - in places where the mouse just isn't convenient to use, such as places where you'd use a laptop computer like a MacBook...
I have a little portable USB mouse. I agree completely, the mouse is much more accurate than the touch pad. I can't imagine using the touch pad for anything that requires real precision like graphics work or gaming.
However, for day-to-day browsing and email reading, it works wonderfully, to the point that in most cases I don't bother with the USB mouse because I simply don't need it. The touch pad works well enough.
Try the touch pad on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. It works amazingly well - and one of the reasons is that you don't "tap" to click, you click to click. As in, physically press down on it, and feel and hear a click. You can enable "tap" to click but it's off by default, and given the number of misclicks I've made on other touch pads, I rather like it being off.
Several things make this touch pad just work compared to other touch pads I've used:
It's giant, compared to the touch pad on most other laptops.
You "click" by pressing down on the entire touch pad (well, the part towards the front), meaning no room is lost to buttons.
You can perform "gestures" using multiple fingers. Four fingers slid down enters Exposé mode, four fingers slid up shows the desktop, sideways switches applications. Pinch to zoom (like on the iPhone), two fingers to scroll: it all works very nicely and seamlessly.
And, probably the most importantly, you're not touching the screen. You're touching a touch pad below the keyboard.
So you get tactile feedback when clicking, you get a large work area, and you get all those wonderful multi-finger gestures. It works amazingly well, to the point I was trying to use the gestures on my Windows laptop after less than a day of using the MacBook.
Of course, this isn't quite the same as the "touch computing" they're talking about where you touch the screen. And the touch pad is nowhere near as accurate as a mouse (although it's good enough for day-to-day use).
But it does show to me that touch-based gestures do have a future - I just don't think I'll be touching the screen on a full-sized computer any time soon.
I'm not sure how much of that applies to modules, though. Especially modules that rely on a native component. That FAQ leaves several questions unanswered:
Can Perl 6 code use a Perl 5 module?
Does the Perl 6 converter work on modules?
Given that the object system is getting an overhaul in Perl 6, does that break OO-based modules? (I would assume no, but they should be rewritten to use the new system.)
Is Perl 6 source-code compatible with the native code stubs that many modules, for example database drivers and GUI libraries, require?
That last question is the biggest question. Losing modules that require native code stubs would be a huge loss. Hopefully it's just a simple recompile, since I'm certain that Perl 6 isn't going to be binary compatible.
Being able to move my code to Perl 6 with a simple converter is great, but it's still unclear just how much of CPAN will still be usable in Perl 6. That FAQ doesn't really answer anything related to modules.
The biggest drawback to Ruby right now is that the availability of 3rd party libraries is nowhere near the level of what's in CPAN.
Unless I'm hugely mistaken, from the sound of it, Perl 6 will have that same flaw - it isn't backwards compatible with Perl 5 and so every Perl module will need to be rewritten.
I might be interested in watching movie trailers on my PS3.
Great, then head on over to the PlayStation Store, where you've been able to download HD movie trailers for the PS3 for ages! It does sort of make the Home movie theater seem kind of stupid when you think about it, though - it's a worse version of something that the PS3 has done since launch. But don't tell the marketers that, you know they're just salivating at the thought of being able to force us to watch the trailers they want us to watch rather than trailers for movies we're actually interested in.
Meanwhile, there's nothing to actually DO with anyone you would meet in Home, so the 'social MMO' aspect of Home is totally pointless.
I remember trying to enter a store in the "mall" area and getting a dialog informing me that there were no items in the store. I'd accept that for an alpha, but you'd think they'd get around to offering real content by open beta. Even better, after displaying the dialog, it dumped me into the store anyway, and then made me confirm that I really did want to exit the empty store.
You could, however, buy a new "apartment" area for $5 which you could then fill with the nothing that's available.
I get what they were trying to do with the "social MMO" part, but wow did they miss the mark on that one. There really is nothing to do in Home. I can't imagine that there's really anything Sony can do to fix it, either - it's just a dumb concept.
It's worth mentioning that the Vista defrag utility runs on a weekly schedule by default. Apparently Microsoft thinks it's worth actively keeping the drive defragged.
Of course, since there's no status indicator, I have no way of knowing if it actually did anything.:) But it is set to run weekly by default, so I guess Microsoft thinks it's still worthwhile to do regularly.
I know I have to defrag the hard drive on my work XP laptop regularly - although that's more of an issue with the retarded software IT requires. The full-disk encryption software will crash if the drive gets too fragmented - something I've seen firsthand on a coworker's laptop. On the up side, the IT-required automated backup software does, in fact, work...
Beats me, but Comcast is doing that here in the US too in response to Verizon building actual fiber to the home. They have this weird graphic of various colored lines springing up all across the US which I guess "proves" they have "the largest fiber optic network."
It's actually kind of pathetic. Granted I think Comcast's point is supposed to be that they do TV better than Verizon - thereby saving themselves from "truth in advertising" laws. Still, that has nothing to do with using a fiber optic network. And they certainly don't offer comparable Internet speeds.
I find it kind of funny that two companies are pulling the "but we use fiber optics somewhere in our network!" card.
In Comcast's case it may be more pathetic, since the ads are sort of like the Mac vs PC ads: you've got the "fiber optic" guy who's hopped up on "light" (he's glowing and flickering), and then you have the "down-to-earth" Comcast guy. After making fun of the fiber optic guy, Comcast then announces that they, too, use fiber optics. At best, I would think that makes them equal. But what do I know, I'm not the charismatic down-to-earth guy.
Lively wasn't like Second Life, though. It was much worse. Rather than have a large open world, they had individual rooms. Users created "rooms" which they could mark public and invite people over to.
These were, essentially, chat rooms with a useless 3D interface. And I really mean that, because your avatar didn't walk around, you essentially teleported all over the place by clicking and dragging your avatar. I don't think you could sit or anything like that. That may have changed, but that's the way it worked when I tried it.
Essentially, you weren't your avatar. You just sort of watched what avatars were doing, making the entire thing a little 3D window that was secondary to the chat interface. But a chat interface that no one was using, making it worthless.
Then there's the editor. When I tried Lively, you couldn't create custom objects. You couldn't create custom rooms. The most you could do was take an existing room and add existing furniture. You'd think they could have tied it in with Google Sketch-Up to allow more freedom, but they didn't. The FAQ explicitly said that users weren't allowed to create custom objects. It did say they were planning on allowing it eventually, so that may have changed, but when I tried it, there was basically no way to create your own space.
The theory appeared to be that people would embed a Lively room into their webpages. So a site like Slashdot could have a virtual "Slashdot lobby" embedded in their home page, and Slashdot visitors could talk amongst each other in a tiny 3D virtual world.
Gee. I wonder why that never took off...
So Lively never really suffered from the "ghost town effect" because there was no world to wander around in, just user-created chat rooms.
All in all, I can't say I'm surprised to see it go. It was essentially entirely useless.
I imagine the conversation went something like this: "This thing doesn't have a CD-ROM. I have three speeches in the next two days - could you figure out how to get Linux onto it while I'm packing?"
Oh, please. There's no way the conversation went like that.
More like "could you figure out how to get a GNU-based operating system onto it while I'm packing?" This is Stallman we're talking about.:)
The cold boot time on the laptop (and I've timed this) is about 5.5 minutes. I have no idea why it takes that long, but it does. I'm assuming that it's because of the corporate crap-ware installed on the machine, which is a longer list than I've given. (And thanks to the auto-update stuff, removing useless crap causes it to be reinstalled next time it runs.)
It wouldn't be quite as annoying if the wireless network card worked without requiring a reboot after suspend/hibernate or any change of configuration settings. Although that's a Dell problem.
Going through the startup services, I'm noticing that depressingly enough the printer has installed several services for some reason.
At one point I was dual-booting between Ubuntu and Windows XP on the laptop, and Ubuntu was still much faster. Sadly, corporate policy has changed to the point that Linux is effectively not allowed on laptops any more, so now it's Windows only.
Not my choice. It's a work laptop. All the software is IT required, and they check to make sure it's actually running. (Sorta... Because it's expected that laptops will be taken off the network, there's a rather long interval between required reports. The reporting service may have been switched to "Manual" in the services dialog. Ahem.)
The bottom line is that I don't actually have a choice in what software is installed. The laptop takes a pretty big performance hit because of it.
I'd say it's a fair "real world" comparison. The Ubuntu desktop has a bunch of extra software installed, and the Windows laptop is hobbled with IT-required software.
Just to chime in with the other people here, I have two systems on my desk at work. One is a two year old Dell laptop with an Intel Core Due processor with 2GB of RAM. It runs XP. The other is a four year old Dell desktop with a Pentium 4 and 1GB of RAM. It runs Ubuntu 8.10.
Guess which one is much, much faster?
The Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, of course.
Part of it is due to all the corporate crap-ware that gets installed on the machine. There's the virus scanner, the software firewall, and the automatic patch system. (And Adobe's automatic patch system, and Apple's automatic patch system, and Google's automatic patch system, and Sun's automatic patch system...)
But a greater part is that Ubuntu is just plain faster. It uses less RAM, it hits the disk less, and it just runs faster.
My general routine at the start of a day is to start the XP laptop booting, boot up the Ubuntu desktop, and then play around with the Ubuntu desktop while I wait for Windows to finally get to the point where it can slowly get Outlook up and going.
Out of curiosity, I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark under Firefox 3.0.3 on both systems. The Ubuntu system finished with a total of 4.4 seconds to run all tests. The XP machine finished in 11.4 seconds. The 95% confidence intervals for the XP machine seem to suggest that performance changed wildly on some test runs - presumably caused by random background activity.
Comparing PS3 + Sony Software to Dell box + Microsoft software doesn't tell you how each individual component performs, comparatively. That much is true. But it does tell you something about how each system as a whole performs, compared to the other.
And even then, the PS3 loses to IE7. Badly.
I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on my PS3 and on a work laptop that was purchased before the PS3 was released.
The full results are here, but the overall times are 98 seconds for the PS3 and 35.5 seconds for IE7.
And that's ignoring the fact that the IE7 time includes 12 seconds worth of tests that the PS3 couldn't run. Two of the tests triggered a JavaScript error on the PS3, and one actually crashed it!
I don't know how far back you'd have to go to find a PC slow enough to tip the scales in the favor of the PS3, but you'd have to be looking at a pretty slow PC.
Very good question. I was going to post the SunSpider benchmark results off my PS3 and compare them to a run on IE7 on my Vista machine, but after removing a benchmark that the PS3 couldn't handle (apparently bitwise-and several times in a row is a bit much for it - no joke), the benchmark crashed the PS3 browser.
So, uh, I'm going to have to give the edge to IE7.
I was going to say, hand injury is a pretty lame excuse for not being able to use a computer, since there are plenty of technological solutions for using a computer with minimal use of the arms and hands. I work with a few people who can't type for long periods of time (actually, one can't type at all), but they still read and write emails: they use voice recognition software.
From the article, it sounds like McCain has found a similar solution, he's just using voice recognition wetware.:)
Saying "he can't use a computer because of war injuries" is a lame response. The correct response "he does use a computer and has for at least the past eight years" is a much better response.
Bah, I hate political ads anyway. Praise TiVo for saving me from having to watch those stupid ads! I swear, each time I see an attack ad, it makes me want to vote against whoever's running it. That goes for McCain, Obama, and Apple.
If you mouse over it (and have JavaScript enabled), you'll be informed that it's the "type tag." I assume the concept is that it differentiates between journals, comments, bookmarks, feed entries, and other types of nodes that could, conceptually, appear in the firehose.
I have no idea why Slashdot feels the need to show these on the main page, though, considering that everything that currently shows on the main page is a story. But if you play with the firehose, it's what tells you what "thing" the entry is.
Vermont is the only New England state that isn't completely encompassed. There's a small southwestern corner that's more than 100 miles from the border. It's hard to tell, but according to the pop-up, all of Massachusetts is covered. (The "Syracuse" label could be covering up a small chunk of gray in Massachusetts, it comes near the little corner of Vermont.)
So the list of "completely covered" states is:
Connecticutt
Delaware
Florida
Hawaii
Maine
Massachusetts
Michigan
New Hampshire
New Jersey
Rhode Island
According to the popup, Maryland is not 100% covered, but it comes close.
On that note, it'd be great if Nintendo would fix up their save-game system.
I mean, seriously, save slots? Still? Sure, it made sense when using carts where there was a limited space tied to the cart. It kinda stopped making sense when you had memory cards and most certainly stopped making sense when the console has built-in storage.
I'm assuming it's some Nintendo requirement because even third-party games will have a limited number of save slots stored on the Wii. Based on the memory browser, it looks like Wii games are allowed to say "I need this much space for saving" and then get a single chunk of space, which then gets divided into save slots. Which is ridiculous.
While they're at it, poach the whole user profile thing that Sony has on the PS3. You can create multiple "users" on the console, and each "user" gets their own collection of save games. It's very nice to be able to share a console without worrying about accidentally overwriting someone else's save. I'd imagine the Xbox 360 has something similar (although I don't know).
'Course, presumably this is possible to do on the Wii, although it might require a firmware update or something...
There was a method to block, you had to press Space (PC version, obviously) when the enemy's name blinked or something like that.
Even so, the level/difficulty curve was a bit, uh, off. I remember going to the carnival area and having my ass kicked by enemies capable of killing a character in a single hit. After gaining two levels, they suddenly were only capable of doing single-digit damage.
The combat system could use some work, and they really need to add some way to "grind" items and experience, because you're right: it's not that hard to get yourself into a hopeless situation where your only way out is basically shear luck or reloading/starting over.
In fact - I believe you lost an achievement - if playing on Xbox Arcade version - if you die at all.
You lost an achievement if any of the characters died, at all, even if you revive them. Assuming the Steam achievements match the Xbox achievements, of course.
What? AWT - Depricated, SWT - 3rd party. Swing - Where the fun shit is.
Swing is AWT - or rather, built on top of it. And while Swing fixes a lot of issues with AWT widgets being essentially unusable (mostly by adding missing features - minor things like icon support, toolbars, tables...), it still suffers from the basic flaws that the AWT does.
So AWT most certainly isn't deprecated, even though no one uses it for GUI elements any more due to it's general crapiness.
SWT at least uses native widgets, but it's obvious they did Windows first and "everyone else" second. But it works fairly well and on a good number of platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
The MacBook isn't edge-scroll, though - two fingers on the pad is scrolling. Having used edge-scroll before, the MacBook's gesture is much more convenient. And given how you get to Page Up/Down on the MacBook, it's generally more convenient than using them, although that's not really a feature...
But you can easily flick up and down through pages on the MacBook in a way that you can't on a PC with edge scroll. (I've used both.) Part of that is, as I said earlier, thanks to the MacBook's Trackpad being much larger than the standard PC touch pad. The other part is that you can almost instantly go from moving the cursor to scrolling. It's very convenient in a way you really can't appreciate until you try it.
WTS page-up and page-down keys.
If you're referring to the fact that the new MacBooks don't have those keys, it turns out that they do, they're just not documented anywhere. (Well, that I found.) Fn-Up and Fn-Down work as Page Up and Page Down. Likewise Fn-Left and Fn-Right produce Home and End. Fn-Backspace is Delete. (Verified with xev.)
I'm sure these are documented somewhere, but I found them by accident. Which is too bad, because Apple did a very nice job with the Trackpad System Preferences window in creating little videos that demonstrate exactly how to do each gesture and what they do.
You just can't beat a mouse with your finger ever under any circumstances with any touch technology.
Sure you can - in places where the mouse just isn't convenient to use, such as places where you'd use a laptop computer like a MacBook...
I have a little portable USB mouse. I agree completely, the mouse is much more accurate than the touch pad. I can't imagine using the touch pad for anything that requires real precision like graphics work or gaming.
However, for day-to-day browsing and email reading, it works wonderfully, to the point that in most cases I don't bother with the USB mouse because I simply don't need it. The touch pad works well enough.
Try the touch pad on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. It works amazingly well - and one of the reasons is that you don't "tap" to click, you click to click. As in, physically press down on it, and feel and hear a click. You can enable "tap" to click but it's off by default, and given the number of misclicks I've made on other touch pads, I rather like it being off.
Several things make this touch pad just work compared to other touch pads I've used:
So you get tactile feedback when clicking, you get a large work area, and you get all those wonderful multi-finger gestures. It works amazingly well, to the point I was trying to use the gestures on my Windows laptop after less than a day of using the MacBook.
Of course, this isn't quite the same as the "touch computing" they're talking about where you touch the screen. And the touch pad is nowhere near as accurate as a mouse (although it's good enough for day-to-day use).
But it does show to me that touch-based gestures do have a future - I just don't think I'll be touching the screen on a full-sized computer any time soon.
I'm not sure how much of that applies to modules, though. Especially modules that rely on a native component. That FAQ leaves several questions unanswered:
That last question is the biggest question. Losing modules that require native code stubs would be a huge loss. Hopefully it's just a simple recompile, since I'm certain that Perl 6 isn't going to be binary compatible.
Being able to move my code to Perl 6 with a simple converter is great, but it's still unclear just how much of CPAN will still be usable in Perl 6. That FAQ doesn't really answer anything related to modules.
The biggest drawback to Ruby right now is that the availability of 3rd party libraries is nowhere near the level of what's in CPAN.
Unless I'm hugely mistaken, from the sound of it, Perl 6 will have that same flaw - it isn't backwards compatible with Perl 5 and so every Perl module will need to be rewritten.
I might be interested in watching movie trailers on my PS3.
Great, then head on over to the PlayStation Store, where you've been able to download HD movie trailers for the PS3 for ages! It does sort of make the Home movie theater seem kind of stupid when you think about it, though - it's a worse version of something that the PS3 has done since launch. But don't tell the marketers that, you know they're just salivating at the thought of being able to force us to watch the trailers they want us to watch rather than trailers for movies we're actually interested in.
Meanwhile, there's nothing to actually DO with anyone you would meet in Home, so the 'social MMO' aspect of Home is totally pointless.
I remember trying to enter a store in the "mall" area and getting a dialog informing me that there were no items in the store. I'd accept that for an alpha, but you'd think they'd get around to offering real content by open beta. Even better, after displaying the dialog, it dumped me into the store anyway, and then made me confirm that I really did want to exit the empty store.
You could, however, buy a new "apartment" area for $5 which you could then fill with the nothing that's available.
I get what they were trying to do with the "social MMO" part, but wow did they miss the mark on that one. There really is nothing to do in Home. I can't imagine that there's really anything Sony can do to fix it, either - it's just a dumb concept.
It's worth mentioning that the Vista defrag utility runs on a weekly schedule by default. Apparently Microsoft thinks it's worth actively keeping the drive defragged.
Of course, since there's no status indicator, I have no way of knowing if it actually did anything. :) But it is set to run weekly by default, so I guess Microsoft thinks it's still worthwhile to do regularly.
I know I have to defrag the hard drive on my work XP laptop regularly - although that's more of an issue with the retarded software IT requires. The full-disk encryption software will crash if the drive gets too fragmented - something I've seen firsthand on a coworker's laptop. On the up side, the IT-required automated backup software does, in fact, work...
Beats me, but Comcast is doing that here in the US too in response to Verizon building actual fiber to the home. They have this weird graphic of various colored lines springing up all across the US which I guess "proves" they have "the largest fiber optic network."
It's actually kind of pathetic. Granted I think Comcast's point is supposed to be that they do TV better than Verizon - thereby saving themselves from "truth in advertising" laws. Still, that has nothing to do with using a fiber optic network. And they certainly don't offer comparable Internet speeds.
I find it kind of funny that two companies are pulling the "but we use fiber optics somewhere in our network!" card.
In Comcast's case it may be more pathetic, since the ads are sort of like the Mac vs PC ads: you've got the "fiber optic" guy who's hopped up on "light" (he's glowing and flickering), and then you have the "down-to-earth" Comcast guy. After making fun of the fiber optic guy, Comcast then announces that they, too, use fiber optics. At best, I would think that makes them equal. But what do I know, I'm not the charismatic down-to-earth guy.
I got the same result (using Ubuntu) so I decided to try it on Mac OS X, and got the following:
$ grep -Eix '[qwertasdfgzxcvb]{13,}' /usr/share/dict/words
aftercataract
devertebrated
tesseradecade
Amazingly enough, Firefox lists them all as misspelled.
Lively wasn't like Second Life, though. It was much worse. Rather than have a large open world, they had individual rooms. Users created "rooms" which they could mark public and invite people over to.
These were, essentially, chat rooms with a useless 3D interface. And I really mean that, because your avatar didn't walk around, you essentially teleported all over the place by clicking and dragging your avatar. I don't think you could sit or anything like that. That may have changed, but that's the way it worked when I tried it.
Essentially, you weren't your avatar. You just sort of watched what avatars were doing, making the entire thing a little 3D window that was secondary to the chat interface. But a chat interface that no one was using, making it worthless.
Then there's the editor. When I tried Lively, you couldn't create custom objects. You couldn't create custom rooms. The most you could do was take an existing room and add existing furniture. You'd think they could have tied it in with Google Sketch-Up to allow more freedom, but they didn't. The FAQ explicitly said that users weren't allowed to create custom objects. It did say they were planning on allowing it eventually, so that may have changed, but when I tried it, there was basically no way to create your own space.
The theory appeared to be that people would embed a Lively room into their webpages. So a site like Slashdot could have a virtual "Slashdot lobby" embedded in their home page, and Slashdot visitors could talk amongst each other in a tiny 3D virtual world.
Gee. I wonder why that never took off...
So Lively never really suffered from the "ghost town effect" because there was no world to wander around in, just user-created chat rooms.
All in all, I can't say I'm surprised to see it go. It was essentially entirely useless.
I imagine the conversation went something like this: "This thing doesn't have a CD-ROM. I have three speeches in the next two days - could you figure out how to get Linux onto it while I'm packing?"
Oh, please. There's no way the conversation went like that.
More like "could you figure out how to get a GNU-based operating system onto it while I'm packing?" This is Stallman we're talking about. :)
The cold boot time on the laptop (and I've timed this) is about 5.5 minutes. I have no idea why it takes that long, but it does. I'm assuming that it's because of the corporate crap-ware installed on the machine, which is a longer list than I've given. (And thanks to the auto-update stuff, removing useless crap causes it to be reinstalled next time it runs.)
It wouldn't be quite as annoying if the wireless network card worked without requiring a reboot after suspend/hibernate or any change of configuration settings. Although that's a Dell problem.
Going through the startup services, I'm noticing that depressingly enough the printer has installed several services for some reason.
At one point I was dual-booting between Ubuntu and Windows XP on the laptop, and Ubuntu was still much faster. Sadly, corporate policy has changed to the point that Linux is effectively not allowed on laptops any more, so now it's Windows only.
Not my choice. It's a work laptop. All the software is IT required, and they check to make sure it's actually running. (Sorta... Because it's expected that laptops will be taken off the network, there's a rather long interval between required reports. The reporting service may have been switched to "Manual" in the services dialog. Ahem.)
The bottom line is that I don't actually have a choice in what software is installed. The laptop takes a pretty big performance hit because of it.
I'd say it's a fair "real world" comparison. The Ubuntu desktop has a bunch of extra software installed, and the Windows laptop is hobbled with IT-required software.
Just to chime in with the other people here, I have two systems on my desk at work. One is a two year old Dell laptop with an Intel Core Due processor with 2GB of RAM. It runs XP. The other is a four year old Dell desktop with a Pentium 4 and 1GB of RAM. It runs Ubuntu 8.10.
Guess which one is much, much faster?
The Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, of course.
Part of it is due to all the corporate crap-ware that gets installed on the machine. There's the virus scanner, the software firewall, and the automatic patch system. (And Adobe's automatic patch system, and Apple's automatic patch system, and Google's automatic patch system, and Sun's automatic patch system...)
But a greater part is that Ubuntu is just plain faster. It uses less RAM, it hits the disk less, and it just runs faster.
My general routine at the start of a day is to start the XP laptop booting, boot up the Ubuntu desktop, and then play around with the Ubuntu desktop while I wait for Windows to finally get to the point where it can slowly get Outlook up and going.
Out of curiosity, I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark under Firefox 3.0.3 on both systems. The Ubuntu system finished with a total of 4.4 seconds to run all tests. The XP machine finished in 11.4 seconds. The 95% confidence intervals for the XP machine seem to suggest that performance changed wildly on some test runs - presumably caused by random background activity.
Comparing PS3 + Sony Software to Dell box + Microsoft software doesn't tell you how each individual component performs, comparatively. That much is true. But it does tell you something about how each system as a whole performs, compared to the other.
And even then, the PS3 loses to IE7. Badly.
I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on my PS3 and on a work laptop that was purchased before the PS3 was released.
The full results are here, but the overall times are 98 seconds for the PS3 and 35.5 seconds for IE7.
And that's ignoring the fact that the IE7 time includes 12 seconds worth of tests that the PS3 couldn't run. Two of the tests triggered a JavaScript error on the PS3, and one actually crashed it!
I don't know how far back you'd have to go to find a PC slow enough to tip the scales in the favor of the PS3, but you'd have to be looking at a pretty slow PC.
Very good question. I was going to post the SunSpider benchmark results off my PS3 and compare them to a run on IE7 on my Vista machine, but after removing a benchmark that the PS3 couldn't handle (apparently bitwise-and several times in a row is a bit much for it - no joke), the benchmark crashed the PS3 browser.
So, uh, I'm going to have to give the edge to IE7.
I was going to say, hand injury is a pretty lame excuse for not being able to use a computer, since there are plenty of technological solutions for using a computer with minimal use of the arms and hands. I work with a few people who can't type for long periods of time (actually, one can't type at all), but they still read and write emails: they use voice recognition software.
From the article, it sounds like McCain has found a similar solution, he's just using voice recognition wetware. :)
Saying "he can't use a computer because of war injuries" is a lame response. The correct response "he does use a computer and has for at least the past eight years" is a much better response.
Bah, I hate political ads anyway. Praise TiVo for saving me from having to watch those stupid ads! I swear, each time I see an attack ad, it makes me want to vote against whoever's running it. That goes for McCain, Obama, and Apple.
i think posts of the "ask slashdot" "type" also currently appear.
There's an Ask Slashdot story on the main page, so, nope. "askslashdot" is a "system tag" and the "type tag" is still "story."
In fact, the only time I've ever seen anything not tagged "story" is in the Firehose.
why the hell is everything tagged "story"?
If you mouse over it (and have JavaScript enabled), you'll be informed that it's the "type tag." I assume the concept is that it differentiates between journals, comments, bookmarks, feed entries, and other types of nodes that could, conceptually, appear in the firehose.
I have no idea why Slashdot feels the need to show these on the main page, though, considering that everything that currently shows on the main page is a story. But if you play with the firehose, it's what tells you what "thing" the entry is.
Their own map disagrees with that.
According to the map, 100% of New Hampshire's population is covered, while "only" 94.13% of Vermont's is covered.
Vermont is the only New England state that isn't completely encompassed. There's a small southwestern corner that's more than 100 miles from the border. It's hard to tell, but according to the pop-up, all of Massachusetts is covered. (The "Syracuse" label could be covering up a small chunk of gray in Massachusetts, it comes near the little corner of Vermont.)
So the list of "completely covered" states is:
According to the popup, Maryland is not 100% covered, but it comes close.
On that note, it'd be great if Nintendo would fix up their save-game system.
I mean, seriously, save slots? Still? Sure, it made sense when using carts where there was a limited space tied to the cart. It kinda stopped making sense when you had memory cards and most certainly stopped making sense when the console has built-in storage.
I'm assuming it's some Nintendo requirement because even third-party games will have a limited number of save slots stored on the Wii. Based on the memory browser, it looks like Wii games are allowed to say "I need this much space for saving" and then get a single chunk of space, which then gets divided into save slots. Which is ridiculous.
While they're at it, poach the whole user profile thing that Sony has on the PS3. You can create multiple "users" on the console, and each "user" gets their own collection of save games. It's very nice to be able to share a console without worrying about accidentally overwriting someone else's save. I'd imagine the Xbox 360 has something similar (although I don't know).
'Course, presumably this is possible to do on the Wii, although it might require a firmware update or something...
There was a method to block, you had to press Space (PC version, obviously) when the enemy's name blinked or something like that.
Even so, the level/difficulty curve was a bit, uh, off. I remember going to the carnival area and having my ass kicked by enemies capable of killing a character in a single hit. After gaining two levels, they suddenly were only capable of doing single-digit damage.
The combat system could use some work, and they really need to add some way to "grind" items and experience, because you're right: it's not that hard to get yourself into a hopeless situation where your only way out is basically shear luck or reloading/starting over.
In fact - I believe you lost an achievement - if playing on Xbox Arcade version - if you die at all.
You lost an achievement if any of the characters died, at all, even if you revive them. Assuming the Steam achievements match the Xbox achievements, of course.
What? AWT - Depricated, SWT - 3rd party. Swing - Where the fun shit is.
Swing is AWT - or rather, built on top of it. And while Swing fixes a lot of issues with AWT widgets being essentially unusable (mostly by adding missing features - minor things like icon support, toolbars, tables...), it still suffers from the basic flaws that the AWT does.
So AWT most certainly isn't deprecated, even though no one uses it for GUI elements any more due to it's general crapiness.
SWT at least uses native widgets, but it's obvious they did Windows first and "everyone else" second. But it works fairly well and on a good number of platforms.