I'd say there's a fair number of people who are satisfied or prefer WindowsXP/Windows 7 but use Chrome or Firefox. In fact I think the internal statistics of Microsoft employees places IE usage low. As well as a high penetration of iPhone.
Funny thing was it all started with the Original EeePC. 4GB SSD made it impossible to fit a complete Vista install, and the crappy GPU was an intel 910 which is notable for NOT supporting WDDM drivers required for Aero. That's the simple machine for which XP was resurrected. (I have an EeePC 701 running XP and I love it)
Then Atom netbooks with Intel 950 and 160GB hard drives rolled out. These machines could run Vista no problem. These machines can run Win7 no problem. Yet they all sold with XP until Windows 7 came out.
Now with Windows 7 I think starter edition is a little too gimped. It would have been better to push the equivalent of "Vista home basic" in this market. eg: Still able to set your background and use 2 monitors. As well the 1GB RAM limit (for licencing) is starting to get lame. The performance in the netbook market hasn't really gone up in the past couple years.
Re:What is my overriding reason to migrate off XP?
on
10 Years of Windows XP
·
· Score: 1
My company uses IE6 for intranet apps, and only this year officially released FF3.6 as the supported and recommended browser for internet use. Seconds before Mozilla decided on 30 second release times.
MS would be in a better situation if it made it easy to run different versions of IE side by side (like you can office applications). Configure it so crappy proprietary Intranet apps use IE6, and internet access uses IE 8 (latest supported on XP)
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
I've found AutoIT to be good enough for my limited interest in programming. Simple enough to get it to accept input and display output via msgbox's, or you could dump output to console. Additionally you can make it "do useful stuff" by simply having it drive the GUI in other programs: http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
You have (courage?) to deride open source on Slashdot? It wasn't Linux that sank the OLPC it was price.
The project is still going, but the problems stem from the rudderless direction of the organization, not the OS.
As far as operating system I think for a project like OLPC Linux is an obvious answer, however OLPC effed it up. I think they would have done well to build it around a more or less standard environment that ran standard Linux applications. Instead they came up with sugar. Run entirely scripted applications on PII power. Brilliant! Run a sugar image in a VM sometime. RAM usage is mind boggling and performance is terrible. The idea of running everything scripted is the flawed assumption that everyone wants to tinker with the poorly documented code. And the availibleapps seem primarily based around programming and not building other skills.
I am not saying that you can't find a laptop, but it is truly becoming like pulling teeth. The entire industry outside of Apple has decided to jump on the Windows bandwagon.
I'm not sure what mythical age you're referring to when PCs didn't come pre-bundled with Windows.
What does seem to have changed, though, is that laptops now seem almost completely homogeneous. You can pick from just a few screen sizes -- 14" and 15.6" seemingly being the two most popular. But guess what? Whichever size you pick, they all have the same resolution: 1366x768. For the majority of models, the graphics will be powered by Intel onboard graphics -- which, by the way, are now actually integrated into the CPU dies. You can pick from a few different hard drive sizes -- 320GB, 500GB, and now 640GB being typical. Those will be 5400rpm drives, BTW. And the drive sizes will be closely tied to the CPU speed for pricing reasons -- so you might find a Core i3 with a 500GB drive, but if you want a Core i5 for just $50 more or so, it will come with a smaller drive. If you want the whole shebang, you'll have to pay more, plus they'll throw in something extra you didn't want (like WiMax or something).
Basically it's just an all-out price war, where all the manufacturers are producing virtually identical models while trying everything in their power to undersell the other guys. That means most of them are cutting a lot of corners. One reasonable shopping strategy is to find a configuration you like, list all the specific models that have those exact specs, and decide which brand you trust not to build a complete piece of shit -- but you can't even rely on brands these days, it seems.
If you want an AMD notebook it will either be C-50 on the low end, or E-350 in the midrange, and those are the only models you'll find. Of course AMD/ATI graphics.
Netbooks are the most obvious case of homogeneous models. Atom N270/1GB/160GB / 10", then N450, N455, N550, with Windows 7 hard drive started bumping up to 250GB, otherwise the same.
I'm hanging onto my 900Mhz cordless phone for dear life. I can talk on the phone while surfing the net and using the microwave! Such advanced technology.
While I agree that Computers are a distraction and do not aid learning in many subjects, I think this takes a good idea too far. Kids today do need to understand how to use computers - it is a needed skill for almost any and all jobs, from a Lawyer, to a Doctor, to an Engineer. While I agree that computers should be kept in the computer lab, let's not keep them out of schools entirely.
While computers are important, and used in many jobs, I don't agree necessarily that the earlier the better. For one thing in lower grade levels, rote training of applications will be obsolete by the time students enter the workforce. My elementary school had Apple II's. Lot of good that did. The only thing the same is the qwerty keyboard, which people successfully learn at any stage of life. A lot of people here would argue that if they didn’t play with Apple BASIC in grade 3 they’d never have gone into CS, and they think it’s so great and want to share it with everyone. Whatever. Most people don’t enter CS.
I think that the basics should be mastered at a low level, then start integrating technology as appropriate. Calculators are a good example. Calculators (and computer computation software) are a tremendous help to solving complicated problems, but only if you understand the basics. That means you understand the concepts the calculator is using to solve the problem, and that you can solve basic problems or do estimates when there’s no calculator around. All my calculus courses in university were done without a calculator (and appropriately simple coefficients). I understand the concepts, so in a complex calculation I may use a calculator, but at least I understand what the calculator is doing. But these days calculators are introduced so early that basic mental math such as multiplication tables is lost on the current generation. Likewise spellcheck has lost the art of proper spelling. I think it’d at least be a step in the right direction if spell check forced you to type in the correct spelling.
There’s a force to push as much technology as possible, whether or not it’s effective. Tremendous amounts of education dollars are spent on technology, whether or not it’s even used effectively. Look at school boards that buy fleets of laptops or tablets, only to have them sit idle most of the time. This has been happening for decades. Tablets, computers, TVs, videos. All the while showing no real improvement. Is that the best use of those education dollars? Sometimes technology simply isn’t appropriate for the application. Look at the automobile. Certainly an important technology used in society today, but we don’t insist that it be integrated into grade 2 curriculum.
Look at OLPC. Big rush to deploy the hardware, then “hey the content will follow”. Guess what? No content or deployment plans, so many of these machines sit idle.
While I don’t agree with the complete Luddite approach, I think technology should be integrated in education where appropriate, and effective. Rather than buy large fleets of tablets or laptops hoping the content will follow, develop the complete system (preferably based around free content), prove it, then deploy it.
I say free content because the last thing cash strapped school boards need is constant fighting with DRM and licensing. Obviously place to start is textbooks. Basic math hasn’t changed in decades (centuries). Pay someone to develop the book, then the ownership lies with the school board. They can print copies as needed, or deploy it for e-readers or whatever.
Be sure to tell them that the gaming industry is the worst possible CS career path. Expected 100 hour work weeks for peanuts, and usually not working on fun stuff either. And that testing isn't fun either because it doesn't mean you're playing the game for fun, but instead trying to break it.
Great, yet another terrible fake English accent to look forward to. Why does Hollywood always hire British actors to portray the villains, yet never hires British actors to portray British characters?
It will probably have a fake gay lisp as well, adding to a completely unbelievable character.
Isn't it ironic that a Jew and a homosexual helped end the war with such monumental scientific contributions? (Einstein with atomic bombs, Turing with cryptanalysis.):)
Anyway, would love to see an unflinching movie on this great man's life! A true hero and my most favorite computer scientist ever. Tragic what happened to him later in life...
Except that at the end of the war Jews were given some stolen land, while the homos continued to be persecuted to the point of driving the father of Computer Science to commit suicide. The homos that were in nazi camps were transferred to traditional prisons.
Somewhere in China there's a factory that makes the internals for ALL cheap printers and depending on incoming orders puts them in a slightly different case and slaps a different sticker on the box. Ditto the laptops, clothes, etc.
While companies like Quanta and Foxconn make products for competing companies off the same assembly equipment, they build to spec/designs they're given. That's why rolling off the same lines you can end up with one brand / model of product with a lot of defects, and another that's rock solid. They just build what they're given.
I'm not terribly interested in their PCs and was stung by two of their notebooks
Were they notebooks with defective nVidia chipsets that delaminated from the motherboard, starting with Wifi failure and resulting in complete PC failure?
I recall people complaining that their Vista system with 8GB of RAM had no free memory. This was true of systems running with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB RAM. This tells me that much of that was cache but that didn't stop people from claiming that Vista was a memory hog.
One thing is cache, leaving things in memory after you've used them. But early Vista had a very aggressive idea of SuperFetch, pre-caching applications and other resources it thought you might need in best Clippy-style. So no matter how much RAM you had, Vista would churn on your disk. I think most people mistakenly identified this as swapping because Vista was out of memory. From what I understand later SPs and Win7 dialed it back to far more reasonable levels.
Generally I don't have any problems with SuperFetch, but a problem I run into is when I close a large program (such as a misbehaving Flash plugin that's bloated to 1.5GB RAM usage) Superfetch will thrash the disk to try and fill up all that empty RAM, to the detriment of memory pages being swapped back into RAM, file browsing performance in Windows explorer, etc. A shortcut to "sc stop sysmain" is useful to try and restore system response at this point.
This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening. The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up. That's something that seems to be really hard for people to understand, as the same thing always happens in every browser story or story about memory management.
I generally agree, except I've discovered the true pig in browser memory consumption is Flash plug in. It can use hundreds of MBs of memory, and retain that even if no tabs are open with flash content. Occasionally it will really bloat up and use over 1GB of RAM, approaching 2GB of RAM, which on my computer with 2GB RAM starts slowing down a lot.
When Vista first came out all sorts of people were noticing battery life decreased substantially.
Yeah but Linux hasn't just come out and it isn't suddenly requiring new drivers from everybody because it broke the old model. Linux is supposed to be working by now. This is the year of Linux, remember?
Linux requires new drivers all the time. The kernel APIs/ABIs for drivers change all the time causing all sorts of breakage. Meanwhile in Windows 7 I can load Windows 2000 device drivers.
On Windows un-allocated memory, and disk cache memory are discarded. The remaining memory is compressed before being written to disk. The hibernation file reserves an amount equal to RAM for the worst case scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
The AC would have said more in his post, but the PSU/AC Adapter in his hp went out...
again...
Are you sure it wasn't the defective nVidia chipset blowing out again after being sent in twice already for repair?
I'd say there's a fair number of people who are satisfied or prefer WindowsXP/Windows 7 but use Chrome or Firefox. In fact I think the internal statistics of Microsoft employees places IE usage low. As well as a high penetration of iPhone.
Funny thing was it all started with the Original EeePC. 4GB SSD made it impossible to fit a complete Vista install, and the crappy GPU was an intel 910 which is notable for NOT supporting WDDM drivers required for Aero. That's the simple machine for which XP was resurrected. (I have an EeePC 701 running XP and I love it)
Then Atom netbooks with Intel 950 and 160GB hard drives rolled out. These machines could run Vista no problem. These machines can run Win7 no problem. Yet they all sold with XP until Windows 7 came out.
Now with Windows 7 I think starter edition is a little too gimped. It would have been better to push the equivalent of "Vista home basic" in this market. eg: Still able to set your background and use 2 monitors. As well the 1GB RAM limit (for licencing) is starting to get lame. The performance in the netbook market hasn't really gone up in the past couple years.
My company uses IE6 for intranet apps, and only this year officially released FF3.6 as the supported and recommended browser for internet use. Seconds before Mozilla decided on 30 second release times.
MS would be in a better situation if it made it easy to run different versions of IE side by side (like you can office applications). Configure it so crappy proprietary Intranet apps use IE6, and internet access uses IE 8 (latest supported on XP)
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
I've found AutoIT to be good enough for my limited interest in programming. Simple enough to get it to accept input and display output via msgbox's, or you could dump output to console. Additionally you can make it "do useful stuff" by simply having it drive the GUI in other programs:
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
"Anyone can" with a conventional distro.
You have (courage?) to deride open source on Slashdot?
It wasn't Linux that sank the OLPC it was price.
The project is still going, but the problems stem from the rudderless direction of the organization, not the OS.
As far as operating system I think for a project like OLPC Linux is an obvious answer, however OLPC effed it up. I think they would have done well to build it around a more or less standard environment that ran standard Linux applications. Instead they came up with sugar. Run entirely scripted applications on PII power. Brilliant! Run a sugar image in a VM sometime. RAM usage is mind boggling and performance is terrible. The idea of running everything scripted is the flawed assumption that everyone wants to tinker with the poorly documented code. And the availibleapps seem primarily based around programming and not building other skills.
What? Who's paying $50-$75 for PIII systems? I have PIII systems I'm trying to give away and I can't find any takers.
Did you click any of the links there? I only see IBM selling refurbished Lenovos...
Model name T766112U
Description Lenovo ThinkPad® T61 (12U)
IBM Web Price* $340.00"
I am not saying that you can't find a laptop, but it is truly becoming like pulling teeth. The entire industry outside of Apple has decided to jump on the Windows bandwagon.
I'm not sure what mythical age you're referring to when PCs didn't come pre-bundled with Windows.
What does seem to have changed, though, is that laptops now seem almost completely homogeneous. You can pick from just a few screen sizes -- 14" and 15.6" seemingly being the two most popular. But guess what? Whichever size you pick, they all have the same resolution: 1366x768. For the majority of models, the graphics will be powered by Intel onboard graphics -- which, by the way, are now actually integrated into the CPU dies. You can pick from a few different hard drive sizes -- 320GB, 500GB, and now 640GB being typical. Those will be 5400rpm drives, BTW. And the drive sizes will be closely tied to the CPU speed for pricing reasons -- so you might find a Core i3 with a 500GB drive, but if you want a Core i5 for just $50 more or so, it will come with a smaller drive. If you want the whole shebang, you'll have to pay more, plus they'll throw in something extra you didn't want (like WiMax or something).
Basically it's just an all-out price war, where all the manufacturers are producing virtually identical models while trying everything in their power to undersell the other guys. That means most of them are cutting a lot of corners. One reasonable shopping strategy is to find a configuration you like, list all the specific models that have those exact specs, and decide which brand you trust not to build a complete piece of shit -- but you can't even rely on brands these days, it seems.
If you want an AMD notebook it will either be C-50 on the low end, or E-350 in the midrange, and those are the only models you'll find. Of course AMD/ATI graphics.
Netbooks are the most obvious case of homogeneous models. Atom N270/1GB/160GB / 10", then
N450, N455, N550, with Windows 7 hard drive started bumping up to 250GB, otherwise the same.
Are you not aware of the 5GHz unlicensed bands?
I'm hanging onto my 900Mhz cordless phone for dear life. I can talk on the phone while surfing the net and using the microwave! Such advanced technology.
While I agree that Computers are a distraction and do not aid learning in many subjects, I think this takes a good idea too far. Kids today do need to understand how to use computers - it is a needed skill for almost any and all jobs, from a Lawyer, to a Doctor, to an Engineer. While I agree that computers should be kept in the computer lab, let's not keep them out of schools entirely.
While computers are important, and used in many jobs, I don't agree necessarily that the earlier the better. For one thing in lower grade levels, rote training of applications will be obsolete by the time students enter the workforce. My elementary school had Apple II's. Lot of good that did. The only thing the same is the qwerty keyboard, which people successfully learn at any stage of life. A lot of people here would argue that if they didn’t play with Apple BASIC in grade 3 they’d never have gone into CS, and they think it’s so great and want to share it with everyone. Whatever. Most people don’t enter CS.
I think that the basics should be mastered at a low level, then start integrating technology as appropriate. Calculators are a good example. Calculators (and computer computation software) are a tremendous help to solving complicated problems, but only if you understand the basics. That means you understand the concepts the calculator is using to solve the problem, and that you can solve basic problems or do estimates when there’s no calculator around. All my calculus courses in university were done without a calculator (and appropriately simple coefficients). I understand the concepts, so in a complex calculation I may use a calculator, but at least I understand what the calculator is doing. But these days calculators are introduced so early that basic mental math such as multiplication tables is lost on the current generation. Likewise spellcheck has lost the art of proper spelling. I think it’d at least be a step in the right direction if spell check forced you to type in the correct spelling.
There’s a force to push as much technology as possible, whether or not it’s effective. Tremendous amounts of education dollars are spent on technology, whether or not it’s even used effectively. Look at school boards that buy fleets of laptops or tablets, only to have them sit idle most of the time. This has been happening for decades. Tablets, computers, TVs, videos. All the while showing no real improvement. Is that the best use of those education dollars? Sometimes technology simply isn’t appropriate for the application. Look at the automobile. Certainly an important technology used in society today, but we don’t insist that it be integrated into grade 2 curriculum.
Look at OLPC. Big rush to deploy the hardware, then “hey the content will follow”. Guess what? No content or deployment plans, so many of these machines sit idle.
While I don’t agree with the complete Luddite approach, I think technology should be integrated in education where appropriate, and effective. Rather than buy large fleets of tablets or laptops hoping the content will follow, develop the complete system (preferably based around free content), prove it, then deploy it.
I say free content because the last thing cash strapped school boards need is constant fighting with DRM and licensing. Obviously place to start is textbooks. Basic math hasn’t changed in decades (centuries). Pay someone to develop the book, then the ownership lies with the school board. They can print copies as needed, or deploy it for e-readers or whatever.
who uses it anymore? anybody with a lick of sense twitters, facebooks and buzzes their status & important messages to friends.
I prefer to twitter, facebook and buzz confidential business information to my co-workers, suppliers, and customers.
Be sure to tell them that the gaming industry is the worst possible CS career path. Expected 100 hour work weeks for peanuts, and usually not working on fun stuff either. And that testing isn't fun either because it doesn't mean you're playing the game for fun, but instead trying to break it.
Great, yet another terrible fake English accent to look forward to. Why does Hollywood always hire British actors to portray the villains, yet never hires British actors to portray British characters?
It will probably have a fake gay lisp as well, adding to a completely unbelievable character.
Isn't it ironic that a Jew and a homosexual helped end the war with such monumental scientific contributions? (Einstein with atomic bombs, Turing with cryptanalysis.) :)
Anyway, would love to see an unflinching movie on this great man's life! A true hero and my most favorite computer scientist ever. Tragic what happened to him later in life...
Except that at the end of the war Jews were given some stolen land, while the homos continued to be persecuted to the point of driving the father of Computer Science to commit suicide. The homos that were in nazi camps were transferred to traditional prisons.
It's kind of frightening that in the context of a school, people's first reaction was shower-cams...
Somewhere in China there's a factory that makes the internals for ALL cheap printers and depending on incoming orders puts them in a slightly different case and slaps a different sticker on the box. Ditto the laptops, clothes, etc.
While companies like Quanta and Foxconn make products for competing companies off the same assembly equipment, they build to spec/designs they're given. That's why rolling off the same lines you can end up with one brand / model of product with a lot of defects, and another that's rock solid. They just build what they're given.
I'm not terribly interested in their PCs and was stung by two of their notebooks
Were they notebooks with defective nVidia chipsets that delaminated from the motherboard, starting with Wifi failure and resulting in complete PC failure?
I recall people complaining that their Vista system with 8GB of RAM had no free memory. This was true of systems running with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB RAM. This tells me that much of that was cache but that didn't stop people from claiming that Vista was a memory hog.
One thing is cache, leaving things in memory after you've used them. But early Vista had a very aggressive idea of SuperFetch, pre-caching applications and other resources it thought you might need in best Clippy-style. So no matter how much RAM you had, Vista would churn on your disk. I think most people mistakenly identified this as swapping because Vista was out of memory. From what I understand later SPs and Win7 dialed it back to far more reasonable levels.
Generally I don't have any problems with SuperFetch, but a problem I run into is when I close a large program (such as a misbehaving Flash plugin that's bloated to 1.5GB RAM usage) Superfetch will thrash the disk to try and fill up all that empty RAM, to the detriment of memory pages being swapped back into RAM, file browsing performance in Windows explorer, etc. A shortcut to "sc stop sysmain" is useful to try and restore system response at this point.
This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening. The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up. That's something that seems to be really hard for people to understand, as the same thing always happens in every browser story or story about memory management.
I generally agree, except I've discovered the true pig in browser memory consumption is Flash plug in. It can use hundreds of MBs of memory, and retain that even if no tabs are open with flash content. Occasionally it will really bloat up and use over 1GB of RAM, approaching 2GB of RAM, which on my computer with 2GB RAM starts slowing down a lot.
When Vista first came out all sorts of people were noticing battery life decreased substantially.
Yeah but Linux hasn't just come out and it isn't suddenly requiring new drivers from everybody because it broke the old model. Linux is supposed to be working by now. This is the year of Linux, remember?
Linux requires new drivers all the time. The kernel APIs/ABIs for drivers change all the time causing all sorts of breakage. Meanwhile in Windows 7 I can load Windows 2000 device drivers.
Chrome 14.0.835.202m
Firefox 3.6.18
IE 8.0.7600.16385
Two of the 3 posting methods in the preferences do not require HTML for newlines.
To bad Preferences doesn't work on Chrome, Firefox or IE. The page dims and I get a slashdot logo and an "X".
On Windows un-allocated memory, and disk cache memory are discarded. The remaining memory is compressed before being written to disk. The hibernation file reserves an amount equal to RAM for the worst case scenario.