Oh I can certainly drop to terminal window when I need to, and I did with ubuntu. a lot. a whole lot.
That's part of what I didn't like about ubuntu, that I had to dick around with a lot of stuff on a nitty gritty level to get it working. It reminded me sometimes of the old days manually editing config.sys to get IRQs and DMA channels playing nicely between different hardware. To be fair, Ubuntu wrapped a whole lot into gui, a far and away better experience than when I first tried slackware in 1995, but ubuntu gui config was always hit or miss. Wine's gui config worked quite well for instance, but 9.04 never truly liked my video card, and I'd have to manually update my xconfig file half the time, etc (hell, I had to install the video driver from a command prompt more often than not). The repositories rarely had the most updated version of non-big-name software, etc, so I spent a good amount of ubuntu time at a prompt. Now, I'm certainly capable of doing so, but as I said... I just don't want to anymore. I still used dos to do most of my file management even into the win98 era, but eventually GUI interaction won me out, and I prefer it to this day for most tasks. Say what you like, I'm just not that hardcore geek anymore. At least not on my home machine anyway.
I have nothing bad to say about people who like that level of intimacy with their OS. 10 years ago I might have been into it too. I just have other stuff to do now.
my physical desktop currently contains two monitors, a keyboard, two mice, a laptop in a docking bay, a laptop sitting on it's own, a desk phone, a fan, my smartphone, a cup of water, a picture of my wife, a can of canned air, a box of tissues, some ibuprofin, a few packages of peanut butter crackers, a sharpie, a bunch of pens, a ton of flash drives, my android tablet, a pile of various documentation books and CD/DVDs, the office's hot spare computer, and various other bits of computers I'm working on at any given moment.
Why should my computer desktop have any less clutter?
I find Windows 7 to be a better overall computing experience than XP, Vista, and Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04, which were the 4 operating systems I had running across various systems at the time I tried out 7. I made 7 one of my dual boot options on my primary system not long after that, and recently I reformatted the HD as I wanted to reclaim the full space into a single partition as I found I was only booting into the other OS about once every few months.
I don't know where you got the Idea that there exists any OS without several pages of google results for "OS problems". I've never used one, and I started with dos 3.2, and have used almost everything since, including such outlier gems as NT 4. Windows 7 has fewer problems for me on a day to day basis than any other OS I've ever used compared to the amount I use it. maybe some other OS marketing team coined the phrase "it just works", but that really is my experience with win7. Nothing's crashing. nothing's blue screening. no programs are doing weird shit for no reason. nothing's claiming security problems or rights issues. no malware or viruses. it detects hardware and auto-configures absurdly well. I could chalk it up to being lucky, but I've got two different systems (a desktop and a laptop) that both run very well on the OS, no matter what I throw at it. Hell it usually runs older software better than older OSes!
perhaps your experience is different than mine, but everybody I talk to seems to share the same opinion. This post may sound like MS fanboyism, but I assure you that I was unhappy enough with MS's offerings to go to linux as my main OS for a good period of time. They've done a lot of backwards shit in the past, but I've got nothing but praise for Windows 7. The worst thing I can say about it is it's UNC file sharing is difficult to get working correctly.
Apple didn't come up with the idea of a centralized repository of software to choose from with a single market browser application. They just came up with the idea of charging money for it.
Seeing as I'm not at the keynote, I have to go by the article. The article says "I used it. it's horrible." I have nothing other to gauge an opinion on at this time. Perhaps the author was using an earlier release than what's currently onstage.
It's even easier than that (assuming you're talking about installing the OS yourself).
I used to work at a software dev company that didn't officially support windows7 or any 64-bit version of windows really (They eventually managed to patch up their crappy software to work with win7 at least, although they still don't support 64-bit OSes last I checked). Because of this, they still recommended XP to everybody who called in asking what to purchase. Our standard response was "Call up dell, ask them to put XP on your new computer. they don't advertise it, but they'll do it". When I left that company, Dell was still doing it. I assume they still do.
which should be the next good version, and if MS keeps to their historic release schedule, we should see sometime in 2014 to 2015. Not that long to wait really, since I'm sure Windows 7, which I find to be excellent, will tide me over while I wait.
They have jobs, you freaking moron. Do you think it's easy making money in the music business? Do you think it doesn't involve hard work?
You mean just like every other job in the world?
Perhaps you also think that being a professional musician would be as simple as recording a garage album and then kicking back while members of the public send you checks for millions of dollars
Sure, as long as you get Butch Vig to produce it.
-- if only it weren't for those greedy fatcat record labels that provide no worthwhile or necessary services and do nothing but leech?
You mean just like every other corporation in the world?
Somehow, other people who work horrific hours for low pay for a company that is raping them blind have still managed to invest for a comfortable retirement after a lifetime of work. Why can't musical artists do the same?
I'm not sure what hardware you're using windows 7 on... but Windows 7 on my 3 year old Desktop PC is a hell of a lot more responsive and snappier than Android 2.2 on my 2 year old phone.
Android 2.3 on my 1 year old tablet is better, but still not as good as the desktop.
I love me some Android, but consistently instant-reponse it is not.
Well, I was including laptops with stationary workstations in my "desktop" vs "smartphone/tablet" discussion, but if you want to separate laptops and desktop workstations, I'll oblige.
The day that Ati or Nvidia comes up with a portable version of their upper-mainstream chipset that does some trickery where it runs at full desktop speed while your laptop is docked, and deactivates something like 75% of the cores when the laptop is running off of battery, AND pulls it in at a mainstream price... that'll be the day that I retire my desktop. Until that day, my desktop days are very much alive. It doesn't hurt my decision either that desktop components are still cheaper. Maybe you can get a $400 laptop that's pretty close in specs to a $400 PC (more likely a $250 or $300 PC), but you show me a $1200 laptop, and unless there is some overstock price reduction trickery going on, you can probably build a comparable desktop for $600 or $700. A year or so ago I tried to price a laptop comparable to my desktop, and it came in at more than -twice- what my desktop cost.
The "mobility" advantage of a laptop is highly overrated in the era of the smartphone and tablet. My wife and I just got back from vacation in Florida two days ago. I brought the laptop with us, and we didn't even take it out of the bag the entire week. Smartphones and tablets sufficed for us the entire time. We both agreed that it was a waste to bring it, and it won't be coming with us on the next trip.
The laptop tried to straddle the difference between "portable" and "powerful", and either failed at one of those two or succeeded but at the cost of a very high price tag. I think that the computing consumer public is moving to "keep the powerful computer at home, and bring the light duty smart device on the road". Note I said consumer. The business community is different of course, as it asks different tasks of computers.
Per Statcounter.com, The most recent monthly data shows that windows currently commands an overall share of the PC market of 91.39% when XP, Vista, and 7 are combined. OSX weighs in at 6.28%, and iOS has a whopping 0.9%. there is a remaining 1.43% of the market running something else.
per electronista.com, data from the second quarter of the year shows that intel currently has 79.3% of the overall PC market, with AMD covering 20.4%, leaving a titanic 0.3% to the rest of the market.
So yes, if you have an x86 CPU, it's quite likely you have an intel cpu, and a virtual lock that you have intel or amd (be real, the "wintel" platform includes amd cpus. they are 100% compatible and compete only on price vs performance, not on feature differences anymore).
Similarly, if you have an x86 cpu, there is a 91.39% chance you are running some flavor of windows NT based OS.
No, it's not. The form a personal computer takes may change slightly, but it's not going anywhere. I think you'll just find an atrix/bionic or EEE Transformer style computing experience coming, where your phone/tablet becomes your computer, and when you bring it home you just plug it into a docking bay with a good ole fashioned keyboard and large LCD screen. and maybe even a mouse, cause there's no way that you're going to want to play quake 6 with touchscreen. That's mid-to-long term though. in the short term, nothing portable is powerful enough to replace a real desktop for real computing work. sending an email or reading a pdf is not the kind of work I'm talking about either.
The average person is increasingly moving to smartphones an iPads to get away from the viruses, driver problems, malware, and other crap that infests Windows desktops.
smartphones already have viruses and malware. try again. most phones even ship with bloatware already.
It's too late for MS. To paraphrase B5, the avalanch has started, and it's too late for the pebbles to vote. The world had a few decades of Wintel, and it doesn't want to have more.
You writing this on your iphone? or are you man (or woman) enough to admit you've got an x86 cpu on/under the desk?
you need to revisit microsoft's historic OS release schedule. 2 years after the previous OS is the -norm-. the XP to Vista gap is the exception, not the rule.
Ahh, but that will be solved with step 0.1: Wait until said car is about 4 or 5 years old at which point the power antenna breaks and no longer retracts more than about 1/3 of the way, like my 98 Trans Am.
1. At least remember what vague part of the lot you parked in. That will help.
2. (to actually be done before step 1) Purchase and place one of those antenna ball things, a fairly uncommon one in a striking color (yellow, orange, or neon pink all work well), and look for that.
Assuming you didn't park next to a van or an H2, that thing should stick out like a sore thumb.
My wife's old car had a bright yellow winnie-the-pooh antenna ball and that thing was always easy to spot no matter how crowded the lot.
the stats I saw listed were pretty much identical to the Samsung Galaxy tab (the original) released like a year ago... Which now sells for about $200. I cant' figure out who the hell lenovo expects to buy this thing, especially after they themselves pointed out that nobody bought this product when their competitor introduced it.
I was surprised that the original date when it was planned to be released back than would have made it way ahead of the curve predicted by Gordon Moore. I was saying that it should be delayed some time so it actually is more accurate to the prediction and it has been delayed, however I will never know whether it had been done for that reason.
So... If I'm reading you correctly... the reason that they should have delayed the hardware wasn't because of something like it being too expensive to produce for expected market, too difficult to produce in sufficient yields, or any other technical or business reasons that might exist, but because the number of transistors involved didn't match up to a prediction made 30-some-odd years ago?
You realize that prediction has only "come true" when you average the graph over a very long period, and there are significant statistical outliers (that represent significantly successful chips in their day) along that plot?
Wait, wait... you're trolling right? I admit, you got me!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I can certainly drop to terminal window when I need to, and I did with ubuntu. a lot. a whole lot.
That's part of what I didn't like about ubuntu, that I had to dick around with a lot of stuff on a nitty gritty level to get it working. It reminded me sometimes of the old days manually editing config.sys to get IRQs and DMA channels playing nicely between different hardware. To be fair, Ubuntu wrapped a whole lot into gui, a far and away better experience than when I first tried slackware in 1995, but ubuntu gui config was always hit or miss. Wine's gui config worked quite well for instance, but 9.04 never truly liked my video card, and I'd have to manually update my xconfig file half the time, etc (hell, I had to install the video driver from a command prompt more often than not). The repositories rarely had the most updated version of non-big-name software, etc, so I spent a good amount of ubuntu time at a prompt. Now, I'm certainly capable of doing so, but as I said... I just don't want to anymore. I still used dos to do most of my file management even into the win98 era, but eventually GUI interaction won me out, and I prefer it to this day for most tasks. Say what you like, I'm just not that hardcore geek anymore. At least not on my home machine anyway.
I have nothing bad to say about people who like that level of intimacy with their OS. 10 years ago I might have been into it too. I just have other stuff to do now.
my physical desktop currently contains two monitors, a keyboard, two mice, a laptop in a docking bay, a laptop sitting on it's own, a desk phone, a fan, my smartphone, a cup of water, a picture of my wife, a can of canned air, a box of tissues, some ibuprofin, a few packages of peanut butter crackers, a sharpie, a bunch of pens, a ton of flash drives, my android tablet, a pile of various documentation books and CD/DVDs, the office's hot spare computer, and various other bits of computers I'm working on at any given moment.
Why should my computer desktop have any less clutter?
I find Windows 7 to be a better overall computing experience than XP, Vista, and Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04, which were the 4 operating systems I had running across various systems at the time I tried out 7. I made 7 one of my dual boot options on my primary system not long after that, and recently I reformatted the HD as I wanted to reclaim the full space into a single partition as I found I was only booting into the other OS about once every few months.
I don't know where you got the Idea that there exists any OS without several pages of google results for "OS problems". I've never used one, and I started with dos 3.2, and have used almost everything since, including such outlier gems as NT 4. Windows 7 has fewer problems for me on a day to day basis than any other OS I've ever used compared to the amount I use it. maybe some other OS marketing team coined the phrase "it just works", but that really is my experience with win7. Nothing's crashing. nothing's blue screening. no programs are doing weird shit for no reason. nothing's claiming security problems or rights issues. no malware or viruses. it detects hardware and auto-configures absurdly well. I could chalk it up to being lucky, but I've got two different systems (a desktop and a laptop) that both run very well on the OS, no matter what I throw at it. Hell it usually runs older software better than older OSes!
perhaps your experience is different than mine, but everybody I talk to seems to share the same opinion. This post may sound like MS fanboyism, but I assure you that I was unhappy enough with MS's offerings to go to linux as my main OS for a good period of time. They've done a lot of backwards shit in the past, but I've got nothing but praise for Windows 7. The worst thing I can say about it is it's UNC file sharing is difficult to get working correctly.
Apple didn't come up with the idea of a centralized repository of software to choose from with a single market browser application. They just came up with the idea of charging money for it.
Seeing as I'm not at the keynote, I have to go by the article. The article says "I used it. it's horrible." I have nothing other to gauge an opinion on at this time. Perhaps the author was using an earlier release than what's currently onstage.
It's even easier than that (assuming you're talking about installing the OS yourself).
I used to work at a software dev company that didn't officially support windows7 or any 64-bit version of windows really (They eventually managed to patch up their crappy software to work with win7 at least, although they still don't support 64-bit OSes last I checked). Because of this, they still recommended XP to everybody who called in asking what to purchase. Our standard response was "Call up dell, ask them to put XP on your new computer. they don't advertise it, but they'll do it". When I left that company, Dell was still doing it. I assume they still do.
You don't have OS install discs for your OS of choice squirreled away somewhere? I thought every slashdotter did...
"no problems"?
read TFA. there are all sorts of problems, mostly related to the start menu's new horribleness even in the "win7 desktop".
which should be the next good version, and if MS keeps to their historic release schedule, we should see sometime in 2014 to 2015. Not that long to wait really, since I'm sure Windows 7, which I find to be excellent, will tide me over while I wait.
Scans of other planets so you know where to build that base on mars will come in pretty handy when the next giant asteroid comes by.
Don't think I'm anti-pizza though. I'm ok with there being a pizza joint on-base.
Bob you're good, you almost got me to reply taking you seriously!
1st reply to dr trollbob!
way to fail science yet again Dr Bob, probably no less than 3 times in this one post!
They have jobs, you freaking moron. Do you think it's easy making money in the music business? Do you think it doesn't involve hard work?
You mean just like every other job in the world?
Perhaps you also think that being a professional musician would be as simple as recording a garage album and then kicking back while members of the public send you checks for millions of dollars
Sure, as long as you get Butch Vig to produce it.
-- if only it weren't for those greedy fatcat record labels that provide no worthwhile or necessary services and do nothing but leech?
You mean just like every other corporation in the world?
Somehow, other people who work horrific hours for low pay for a company that is raping them blind have still managed to invest for a comfortable retirement after a lifetime of work. Why can't musical artists do the same?
I'm not sure what hardware you're using windows 7 on... but Windows 7 on my 3 year old Desktop PC is a hell of a lot more responsive and snappier than Android 2.2 on my 2 year old phone.
Android 2.3 on my 1 year old tablet is better, but still not as good as the desktop.
I love me some Android, but consistently instant-reponse it is not.
Well, I was including laptops with stationary workstations in my "desktop" vs "smartphone/tablet" discussion, but if you want to separate laptops and desktop workstations, I'll oblige.
The day that Ati or Nvidia comes up with a portable version of their upper-mainstream chipset that does some trickery where it runs at full desktop speed while your laptop is docked, and deactivates something like 75% of the cores when the laptop is running off of battery, AND pulls it in at a mainstream price... that'll be the day that I retire my desktop. Until that day, my desktop days are very much alive. It doesn't hurt my decision either that desktop components are still cheaper. Maybe you can get a $400 laptop that's pretty close in specs to a $400 PC (more likely a $250 or $300 PC), but you show me a $1200 laptop, and unless there is some overstock price reduction trickery going on, you can probably build a comparable desktop for $600 or $700. A year or so ago I tried to price a laptop comparable to my desktop, and it came in at more than -twice- what my desktop cost.
The "mobility" advantage of a laptop is highly overrated in the era of the smartphone and tablet. My wife and I just got back from vacation in Florida two days ago. I brought the laptop with us, and we didn't even take it out of the bag the entire week. Smartphones and tablets sufficed for us the entire time. We both agreed that it was a waste to bring it, and it won't be coming with us on the next trip.
The laptop tried to straddle the difference between "portable" and "powerful", and either failed at one of those two or succeeded but at the cost of a very high price tag. I think that the computing consumer public is moving to "keep the powerful computer at home, and bring the light duty smart device on the road". Note I said consumer. The business community is different of course, as it asks different tasks of computers.
Per Statcounter.com, The most recent monthly data shows that windows currently commands an overall share of the PC market of 91.39% when XP, Vista, and 7 are combined. OSX weighs in at 6.28%, and iOS has a whopping 0.9%. there is a remaining 1.43% of the market running something else.
per electronista.com, data from the second quarter of the year shows that intel currently has 79.3% of the overall PC market, with AMD covering 20.4%, leaving a titanic 0.3% to the rest of the market.
So yes, if you have an x86 CPU, it's quite likely you have an intel cpu, and a virtual lock that you have intel or amd (be real, the "wintel" platform includes amd cpus. they are 100% compatible and compete only on price vs performance, not on feature differences anymore).
Similarly, if you have an x86 cpu, there is a 91.39% chance you are running some flavor of windows NT based OS.
The desktop PC Is a dying platform.
No, it's not. The form a personal computer takes may change slightly, but it's not going anywhere. I think you'll just find an atrix/bionic or EEE Transformer style computing experience coming, where your phone/tablet becomes your computer, and when you bring it home you just plug it into a docking bay with a good ole fashioned keyboard and large LCD screen. and maybe even a mouse, cause there's no way that you're going to want to play quake 6 with touchscreen. That's mid-to-long term though. in the short term, nothing portable is powerful enough to replace a real desktop for real computing work. sending an email or reading a pdf is not the kind of work I'm talking about either.
The average person is increasingly moving to smartphones an iPads to get away from the viruses, driver problems, malware, and other crap that infests Windows desktops.
smartphones already have viruses and malware. try again. most phones even ship with bloatware already.
It's too late for MS. To paraphrase B5, the avalanch has started, and it's too late for the pebbles to vote. The world had a few decades of Wintel, and it doesn't want to have more.
You writing this on your iphone? or are you man (or woman) enough to admit you've got an x86 cpu on/under the desk?
you need to revisit microsoft's historic OS release schedule. 2 years after the previous OS is the -norm-. the XP to Vista gap is the exception, not the rule.
Ahh, but that will be solved with step 0.1: Wait until said car is about 4 or 5 years old at which point the power antenna breaks and no longer retracts more than about 1/3 of the way, like my 98 Trans Am.
1. At least remember what vague part of the lot you parked in. That will help.
2. (to actually be done before step 1) Purchase and place one of those antenna ball things, a fairly uncommon one in a striking color (yellow, orange, or neon pink all work well), and look for that.
Assuming you didn't park next to a van or an H2, that thing should stick out like a sore thumb.
My wife's old car had a bright yellow winnie-the-pooh antenna ball and that thing was always easy to spot no matter how crowded the lot.
So, for comparison's sake, I just pulled a novel off the shelf.
49 characters per line, 28 lines per page.
I then pulled up the book I'm reading on my nook.
53 character per line, 32 lines per page.
Not a whole heck of a huge difference there.
and then they introduced their own tablet which is damn near an identical copy of the tablet they're bashing, spec-wise at least.
the stats I saw listed were pretty much identical to the Samsung Galaxy tab (the original) released like a year ago... Which now sells for about $200. I cant' figure out who the hell lenovo expects to buy this thing, especially after they themselves pointed out that nobody bought this product when their competitor introduced it.
I rather like my nook color with it's 600x1024 ratio for reading in portrait mode.
have people forgotten what the aspect ratio on actual book pages were? they actually were rather thin and tall.
I was surprised that the original date when it was planned to be released back than would have made it way ahead of the curve predicted by Gordon Moore. I was saying that it should be delayed some time so it actually is more accurate to the prediction and it has been delayed, however I will never know whether it had been done for that reason.
So... If I'm reading you correctly... the reason that they should have delayed the hardware wasn't because of something like it being too expensive to produce for expected market, too difficult to produce in sufficient yields, or any other technical or business reasons that might exist, but because the number of transistors involved didn't match up to a prediction made 30-some-odd years ago?
You realize that prediction has only "come true" when you average the graph over a very long period, and there are significant statistical outliers (that represent significantly successful chips in their day) along that plot?
Wait, wait... you're trolling right? I admit, you got me!