I have recently returned to college and I have encountered a lot of waste in modern education. Almost universally the books are of poor quality and massively overpriced with companies spending more on marketing then on having the textbook be accurate and complete.
What we should do is create at least a national textbook standard and have those books available to all students. So we would have one organic chemistry 1 textbook, 1 calc 3 textbook etc as part of a national standard. These standards would all be in ebook format and free for any student. I suspect this would save a few hundred million per year and it would be a fairly easy process to do.
Right now though colleges tell you that you can use an ebook but they don't allow them on exams while physical textbooks are allowed. With a national standard we could have approved ereaders and no longer have this problem. We could eliminate a lot of environmental damage and energy usage by using electronic textbooks instead.
In the end tax dollars are paying for most of the books anyways and a single textbook costs more than a kindle does and a kindle can hold many books. Each student could just be given a kindle and use it for college and we would save a lot of money and could get better textbooks or at least no worse then we have now.
Mostly though the problem is that education is still firmly in the pen and paper world where teachers look at chalkboards and write down information for students to parrot back in an exam. Very little is done for actual understanding since testing memorization is far simpler. Until we move on to the idea that any fact you need can be looked up at any moment and instead test and teach to understanding education is going to continue to be pretty poor and turn out poor results.
The AMD llano chips are better then just competent for MMO games. A laptop llano chip will run EQ1, EQ2, WoW, The Old Republic etc without any discrete GPU. They even handle things like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas + lots of mods without needing a discrete card.
The llano chips also do GPGPU without crushing your battery power. So if you are on battery power you can do calculations hundreds of times faster then an intel chip can if you can do GPGPU and not kill your battery doing it.
For me I run into more and more things where the CPU is good enough but more GPU power would be better. For me llano hit a great sweet spot for a laptop.
I read a study a while ago that the brain learns based on what we do with it and it physically adapts to the usages we have. As a result people have been declining in memory while increasing in reasoning since the brain is putting more physical structure into processing instead of remembering since facts can be looked up.
Maybe this study is showing that once people are out of school the brain has learned that remembering is pretty much a waste of effort and processing is more important so the physical structure changes and memory is not as effective anymore. I know for some engineering work that doing stuff from memory can end up with criminal negligence charges if you screw up so there is a bias to look everything up all the time regardless of your memory. In a situation like that you will select against memory and for processing and as a result do poorly on a test like this without any decline in actual brain power.
Cheating is massive at university, the design encourages it. Most classes are done as pure memorization classes and not on understanding. What this means is that cheating is actually encouraged behavior and cramming for tests works. I find this a truly horrible situation that needs to be fixed and even DARPA has commented on it but I don't see the universities changing.
However a lot of businesses require that piece of paper to do the work. DARPA recently did a study for STEM fields and what they found is that basically anyone that was capable of doing the required work after graduating college was also capable of doing the work on their own before starting. Very little learning actually happened but no company will hire as as an engineer without that piece of paper regardless of how good you are. Your resume will not even be looked at.
The result is that colleges are essentially gatekeepers for many jobs and they do a poor job of preparing you for those jobs or much of anything else really. Colleges are still massively focused on memorization instead of understanding. Facts can be looked up and should be, understanding can not.
Not only each year but for each subject. There are some subjects that are probably better online at all years or many years and others that are almost always better with a physical presence.
Many in-person university classes are exactly what you said is wrong with online classes. Look at Organic Chemistry for instance, that one was even criticized by DARPA recently. Organic Chemistry classes in USA university are pretty much universally taught as memorization classes and tested that way also. Doing them online is no different then doing them in person.
Last semester I had a class which did extensive online homework and it was not multiple choice at all. It was for a chemical engineering class on material and energy balances and we used something called sapling. For that you had to actually figure out the answer and enter them into the system and it was right or wrong based on how close it was to the actual answer. It worked extremely well and it helped learning since if you got it wrong it told you why it was wrong and you could try again.
On the flip side I had a math class on differential equations and in that class maybe 1/3 of the homework or less was graded and many people ended up doing a certain type of problem wrong until an exam came since that type of problem had never been graded so they had no idea they had it wrong.
Online courses and homework that are instantly computer graded offer a lot of advantages over poor university courses since you get instant feedback and so you don't learn the wrong way of solving the problem. Also you have to admit these online courses don't have to be better then good university courses they have to be better then poor university courses and that is a very low bar to meet since most university courses are poor.
I would take good videos and online homework and tests based on understanding not memorization and not multiple choice any day over most university courses. If they where cheaper I would probably just do them for all courses since the odds of getting a good class is fairly low and at least these online classes would have a pretty standard level of quality.
Also don't knock the khan academy until you have used it. I found it pretty essential on my differential equations class since it was done so poorly. The book did a poor job of teaching the materials and so did the instructor so without those online screencasts that class would have been vastly more difficult.
Zope 3 is dead. It is a discontinued project. Zope 2 is the branch that is going forward. Bluebream is a sucessor to zope 3 but it is not an upgrade to zope 2. It was actually discussed that zope 2 should be renamed zope 4 to make that more clear but it was decided not to do that since it would confuse people.
A lot of the games are not pay to win though. For example in DDO you buy content packs but theoretically you could also earn every one of them eventually if you tried. Champions Online you also don't pay to win, you can buy new costumes, powers and content.
There is a huge difference among free to play games. The western free to play games are very very rarely pay to win games.
1) It encourages users to just get software from the repositories which is very unlikely to have malware in it.
2) It discourages people from using it that are likely to fall for these kinds of things.
So it does not have real protection beyond what osx has other then the culture that goes with it. On Windows and OSX it is FAR more common to download and install software from random locations.
The material they banned was industrial hemp. They made it illegal to grow it under the guise of going after marijuana. Even though you could set an entire field of industrial hemp on fire and not get high they still managed to get it and marijuana covered under the same law and banned.
For instance question 12 rates you very low on empathy if you don't agree that questions have only two possibilities.
12. I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both.
If you believe that questions have many possible answers and you need to weigh those answers then you will score low on that question. So looking at a wider view actually makes you less empathetic on their test.
My experience is that good coding does not work in large blocks over long periods of time. Productivity takes a nosedive pretty quickly at more then 4 hours or so in a day. I have run many tests on my code and others and so far my experience is that while you can keep writing code all day the code ends up buggier the longer you work on it and nastier to maintain later. Many times if I have a hard problem to solve I will just leave it for the next day since overnight almost 100% of the time I will dream up a better solution that will be simpler, faster, easier to write and easier to maintain. I have had to work with so many systems that where built by someone staying late and kept working on it that where so darn nasty to work with later and massively buggy.
Mental activities are just not well suited to extended effort. There are too many things to go wrong as you start to get tired or can't see the entire picture of what you need to get the code working right. I also try to follow rules of keeping functions very short with well defined inputs and output and no tricks to speed things up unless actually required. Lots of functions where the output only depends on the input where possible are easier to debug later, easier to replace, easier to maintain and easier to make faster later then giant balls of code. I am not suggesting functional programming but some aspects of functional programming are good ideas for maintenance.
Actually for Everquest and Everquest 2 this is incorrect. For the last 5 years or so the expansions have been inclusive. So if you buy whatever the most recent one it then you get all the content from everything previous. They have also been making it much easier to catch up with bonus experience until you get closer to where most of the players are. It actually is not as hard to catchup as you would think. When EQ1 first came out it took months to hit 50, you can now hit it in a week or two of fairly relaxed play. The mercenary system makes it much easier to solo and form groups. There are still 85 levels though and probably a thousand AA for EQ1 but I just recently went back and started on a new server and catching up has not really been hard at all.
I think that all the older MMO will have to something like what everquest does to make it easier to come back.
There is nothing the kernel developers can do about this. On my machine which is a dual 2218 opteron with Dual nvidia 8800gts video cards running 4 monitors just playing flash a single screen will bring one cpu core to its knees. Normal sized flash videos will bring one cpu core to its knees and will sometimes drop frames. The same video if saved to a local file and played with xine/mplayer etc will use up 1-2% cpu power at the lowest cpu freq (1 ghz).
Linux is perfectly capable of smooth video playback at low cpu usage. It is flash that is not capable of that and nothing we can do about it. Flash is proprietary and only adobe can really fix it. If they don't choose to fix it then nothing we do is going to make those videos play any better. I am running the latest version of the flash player and it still does not play any better. Flash is a massive cpu hog.
Kernel developers should work on solving problems they can actually solve. The Xorg and desktop developers should solve problems they can solve. All they can do is try and provide tools that flash can use to play videos better but since those tools already exist I don't see much that can really be done. Even on windows flash is a dog, netflix is a good demonstration of that. I am not like silverlight but it is massively faster at playing and at higher quality then flash is. An older system that could not play flash fullscreened at 800x600 from netflix can stream hd streams at 1600x1200 with no slowdowns at all with the silverlight player and low cpu usage.
Adobe needs to fix it. Nobody else is to blame for it and nobody else can fix it.
I may dislike IE8 for a lot of reasons but I would not be so quick to pin this one on IE8. The slashdot code base is HORRIBLE. Just look at the html that is being written, I have had problems with this site in konqueror at various times, webkit and opera. Mostly I think they just hack this site until it works in IE6,7 and Firefox and then call it done and don't worry about all the simple bugs in it that should be fixed that would make it work in far more browers.
Actually I even started blocking some of the javascript on the page because it was slowing it down so much. Sometimes up to 3 seconds before the page would draw because it was waiting on one of those javascript tracking scripts.
Slashdot is definitely not an example of a remotely well written site. Just test that yourself and validate it.
I have an audigy 2 ZS right now and the drivers under Vista BITE HARD. EAX and other stuff get disabled if you have more then 3GB or so of ram. I couldn't even install SP1 because creative has not updated the drivers in over a year. The card has mostly been trouble free under linux but I have run into a few issues with it every now and then. It is only because of the drivers that daniel put out that I could update to SP1 which did fix some issues.
The newest alsa version added support for the CMI8788 cards which includes the Xonar. I am planning on picking up a Xonar D2X and then not having to worry about this stuff anymore. The Xonar even has a nice DTS out so you can take a feed directly off the card and plug it into your receiver/decoder etc. Based on what I Have read on it the Xonar and other CMI8788 cards certainly have the Creative cards beat in the most important ways.... drivers that work.
Don't try it, there are demons lurking there and they want your soul.:)
Seriously it depends on how fast the audio stream you are trying to get is. If you are playing really high bandwidth audio it would start skipping since you would not be receiving the data fast enough, however that is very unlikely since audio is very very low bandwidth. The vista problem degrades hundred megabit cards down to a few megabits which is still way more then audio streaming needs. So it should work just fine, just don't try to transfer a few gigs of files over the network to your fileserver since that will take a long time while audio is open.
I definitely don't agree with you about zope. I have seen nothing under any platform that can hold a candle to the zope security system. I have tried to work with other "superior" systems and they always ended up taking more time and losing a lot of features that are just part of zope. However until you have actually worked with a more secure system you won't understand how useful it is. Every request running under its own security credentials, every function, object, attribute etc touched is fully security checked. That means if you have a code screwup that would someone try to hand someone information they should not have the system will still not allow it.
I didn't mention old games, I mentioned any game. On vista 64 and xp64 I found that many games don't work right or at all. XP64 is better at it but both are pretty bad. I can not run a 32bit version of windows, 32bit xp won't even install. It is great that stuff works for you but for many others it does not work at all. Maybe my box is just too high end for windows, that easily could be the case from what I have seen.
You think that multimedia is an improvement over xp? Audio in vista is all done in software now, all those soundcards with hardware capabilities don't do squat anymore under vista. Things like hardware mixing, sample conversion, speaker upmix (2 -> 7.1 signal) etc don't work in vista and can't because of how ms changed things. Yeah multimedia sure is great now that it runs takes far more cpu power to do it with worse audio quality.
Also it long since stopped being the case that you could pick up a random windows game and expect it to work under windows. Go check out the forums for all the compatibility issues that various games have under even xp32. If you run xp64 or vista64 many games won't work right, long ago I stopped buying any game for windows that I could not get a demo for first to test it. I have better odds of getting a random linux game to work under linux then a random windows game under windows. Overall though vista convinced me that consoles are a much better option and I have not regretted it. I got a wii earlier and that has been great and more recently I got a 360 and so far every game works flawlessly in both systems which is far from true for windows.
Well great for you because my luck with vista has been abysmal. I have spent at least 30 hours trying to get it to work and currently it won't even boot anymore after an update it automatically applied. I even told it to boot to the last known good configuration and it still locks up on boot. I have been trying to run vista business 64 on a tyan S2915 board with dual opteron 2218, dual 8800GTS, audigy2 zs and 8G of ram and it has been abysmal. XP64 works ok but not great, linux works flawlessly and vista does not work at all. I have used every windows os since DOS 5 or so and I think that windows ME is a better os then vista is. 64bit windows is a joke but linux works great. Vista convinced me to drop windows for games entirely and so I got an x360 to complement the wii I already got. I definitely don't regret that decision, the 360 and wii and vastly easier to play games on then windows is especially when windows does not work. Most good games for windows come out on the consoles also and lots of very good games comes out for the consoles that don't come out for the pc. I figure I will try vista again in another 9 months or so and see how things have improved but I am not holding my breath. I have been using linux for 10 years now for all of my work and have had only minor problems with it.
I know I am a very very tiny percent of the population. I suspect that over time laptops will be able to do more and more things however desktops will stay around since there are some things that no matter what you are going to need more hardware for. Even if we could make computers with 1024 cpus operating at 2 terrahertz and 16TB of ram in a laptop we would have invented new problems that need a desktop worth of that hardware and even bigger servers.
Laptops are the future though for most people and even those will give way over time to even smaller systems that do what these people need.
Well I do database development and my current box has 2 opteron 2218s and 8G of ram with 4 19inch monitors I plan to upgrade them to 4 30inch monitors and will replace the opterons with the new amd quad cores later also. I can't see how laptops are going to get to that point in even 5 years. The more computing power we get the larger the data sets we work with and the more ways we need to analyze it. For development it helps a lot to have very powerful machines so that you can run tests much faster on fairly good chunks of data to make sure things are performing as expected. My current machine has had to swap a fair number of times when I have been running full tests on it and so my next machine will probably have 16G to 32G of ram. The reason for the 4 monitors is I can see the code I am working on, the test results as they come in, the logging output from the system etc at the same time. It has made a huge productivity gain to be able to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I have recently returned to college and I have encountered a lot of waste in modern education. Almost universally the books are of poor quality and massively overpriced with companies spending more on marketing then on having the textbook be accurate and complete.
What we should do is create at least a national textbook standard and have those books available to all students. So we would have one organic chemistry 1 textbook, 1 calc 3 textbook etc as part of a national standard. These standards would all be in ebook format and free for any student. I suspect this would save a few hundred million per year and it would be a fairly easy process to do.
Right now though colleges tell you that you can use an ebook but they don't allow them on exams while physical textbooks are allowed. With a national standard we could have approved ereaders and no longer have this problem. We could eliminate a lot of environmental damage and energy usage by using electronic textbooks instead.
In the end tax dollars are paying for most of the books anyways and a single textbook costs more than a kindle does and a kindle can hold many books. Each student could just be given a kindle and use it for college and we would save a lot of money and could get better textbooks or at least no worse then we have now.
Mostly though the problem is that education is still firmly in the pen and paper world where teachers look at chalkboards and write down information for students to parrot back in an exam. Very little is done for actual understanding since testing memorization is far simpler. Until we move on to the idea that any fact you need can be looked up at any moment and instead test and teach to understanding education is going to continue to be pretty poor and turn out poor results.
The AMD llano chips are better then just competent for MMO games. A laptop llano chip will run EQ1, EQ2, WoW, The Old Republic etc without any discrete GPU.
They even handle things like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas + lots of mods without needing a discrete card.
The llano chips also do GPGPU without crushing your battery power. So if you are on battery power you can do calculations hundreds of times faster then an intel chip can if you can do GPGPU and not kill your battery doing it.
For me I run into more and more things where the CPU is good enough but more GPU power would be better. For me llano hit a great sweet spot for a laptop.
I read a study a while ago that the brain learns based on what we do with it and it physically adapts to the usages we have. As a result people have been declining in memory while increasing in reasoning since the brain is putting more physical structure into processing instead of remembering since facts can be looked up.
Maybe this study is showing that once people are out of school the brain has learned that remembering is pretty much a waste of effort and processing is more important so the physical structure changes and memory is not as effective anymore. I know for some engineering work that doing stuff from memory can end up with criminal negligence charges if you screw up so there is a bias to look everything up all the time regardless of your memory. In a situation like that you will select against memory and for processing and as a result do poorly on a test like this without any decline in actual brain power.
Cheating is massive at university, the design encourages it. Most classes are done as pure memorization classes and not on understanding. What this means is that cheating is actually encouraged behavior and cramming for tests works. I find this a truly horrible situation that needs to be fixed and even DARPA has commented on it but I don't see the universities changing.
However a lot of businesses require that piece of paper to do the work. DARPA recently did a study for STEM fields and what they found is that basically anyone that was capable of doing the required work after graduating college was also capable of doing the work on their own before starting. Very little learning actually happened but no company will hire as as an engineer without that piece of paper regardless of how good you are. Your resume will not even be looked at.
The result is that colleges are essentially gatekeepers for many jobs and they do a poor job of preparing you for those jobs or much of anything else really. Colleges are still massively focused on memorization instead of understanding. Facts can be looked up and should be, understanding can not.
Not only each year but for each subject. There are some subjects that are probably better online at all years or many years and others that are almost always better with a physical presence.
Many in-person university classes are exactly what you said is wrong with online classes. Look at Organic Chemistry for instance, that one was even criticized by DARPA recently. Organic Chemistry classes in USA university are pretty much universally taught as memorization classes and tested that way also. Doing them online is no different then doing them in person.
Last semester I had a class which did extensive online homework and it was not multiple choice at all. It was for a chemical engineering class on material and energy balances and we used something called sapling. For that you had to actually figure out the answer and enter them into the system and it was right or wrong based on how close it was to the actual answer. It worked extremely well and it helped learning since if you got it wrong it told you why it was wrong and you could try again.
On the flip side I had a math class on differential equations and in that class maybe 1/3 of the homework or less was graded and many people ended up doing a certain type of problem wrong until an exam came since that type of problem had never been graded so they had no idea they had it wrong.
Online courses and homework that are instantly computer graded offer a lot of advantages over poor university courses since you get instant feedback and so you don't learn the wrong way of solving the problem. Also you have to admit these online courses don't have to be better then good university courses they have to be better then poor university courses and that is a very low bar to meet since most university courses are poor.
I would take good videos and online homework and tests based on understanding not memorization and not multiple choice any day over most university courses. If they where cheaper I would probably just do them for all courses since the odds of getting a good class is fairly low and at least these online classes would have a pretty standard level of quality.
Also don't knock the khan academy until you have used it. I found it pretty essential on my differential equations class since it was done so poorly. The book did a poor job of teaching the materials and so did the instructor so without those online screencasts that class would have been vastly more difficult.
Zope 3 is dead. It is a discontinued project. Zope 2 is the branch that is going forward. Bluebream is a sucessor to zope 3 but it is not an upgrade to zope 2. It was actually discussed that zope 2 should be renamed zope 4 to make that more clear but it was decided not to do that since it would confuse people.
Why would mixing audio be CPU bound? Wouldn't mixing audio be latency and IO bound?
A lot of the games are not pay to win though. For example in DDO you buy content packs but theoretically you could also earn every one of them eventually if you tried. Champions Online you also don't pay to win, you can buy new costumes, powers and content.
There is a huge difference among free to play games. The western free to play games are very very rarely pay to win games.
1) It encourages users to just get software from the repositories which is very unlikely to have malware in it.
2) It discourages people from using it that are likely to fall for these kinds of things.
So it does not have real protection beyond what osx has other then the culture that goes with it. On Windows and OSX it is FAR more common to download and install software from random locations.
The material they banned was industrial hemp. They made it illegal to grow it under the guise of going after marijuana. Even though you could set an entire field of industrial hemp on fire and not get high they still managed to get it and marijuana covered under the same law and banned.
For instance question 12 rates you very low on empathy if you don't agree that questions have only two
possibilities.
12. I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both.
If you believe that questions have many possible answers and you need to weigh those answers
then you will score low on that question. So looking at a wider view actually makes you less
empathetic on their test.
My experience is that good coding does not work in large blocks over long periods of time. Productivity takes a nosedive pretty quickly at more then 4 hours or so in a day. I have run many tests on my code and others and so far my experience is that while you can keep writing code all day the code ends up buggier the longer you work on it and nastier to maintain later. Many times if I have a hard problem to solve I will just leave it for the next day since overnight almost 100% of the time I will dream up a better solution that will be simpler, faster, easier to write and easier to maintain. I have had to work with so many systems that where built by someone staying late and kept working on it that where so darn nasty to work with later and massively buggy.
Mental activities are just not well suited to extended effort. There are too many things to go wrong as you start to get tired or can't see the entire picture of what you need to get the code working right. I also try to follow rules of keeping functions very short with well defined inputs and output and no tricks to speed things up unless actually required. Lots of functions where the output only depends on the input where possible are easier to debug later, easier to replace, easier to maintain and easier to make faster later then giant balls of code. I am not suggesting functional programming but some aspects of functional programming are good ideas for maintenance.
Actually for Everquest and Everquest 2 this is incorrect. For the last 5 years or so the expansions have been inclusive. So if you buy whatever the most recent one it then you get all the content from everything previous. They have also been making it much easier to catch up with bonus experience until you get closer to where most of the players are. It actually is not as hard to catchup as you would think. When EQ1 first came out it took months to hit 50, you can now hit it in a week or two of fairly relaxed play. The mercenary system makes it much easier to solo and form groups. There are still 85 levels though and probably a thousand AA for EQ1 but I just recently went back and started on a new server and catching up has not really been hard at all.
I think that all the older MMO will have to something like what everquest does to make it easier to come back.
There is nothing the kernel developers can do about this. On my machine which is a dual 2218 opteron with Dual nvidia 8800gts video cards running 4 monitors just playing flash a single screen will bring one cpu core to its knees. Normal sized flash videos will bring one cpu core to its knees and will sometimes drop frames. The same video if saved to a local file and played with xine/mplayer etc will use up 1-2% cpu power at the lowest cpu freq (1 ghz).
Linux is perfectly capable of smooth video playback at low cpu usage. It is flash that is not capable of that and nothing we can do about it. Flash is proprietary and only adobe can really fix it. If they don't choose to fix it then nothing we do is going to make those videos play any better. I am running the latest version of the flash player and it still does not play any better. Flash is a massive cpu hog.
Kernel developers should work on solving problems they can actually solve. The Xorg and desktop developers should solve problems they can solve. All they can do is try and provide tools that flash can use to play videos better but since those tools already exist I don't see much that can really be done. Even on windows flash is a dog, netflix is a good demonstration of that. I am not like silverlight but it is massively faster at playing and at higher quality then flash is. An older system that could not play flash fullscreened at 800x600 from netflix can stream hd streams at 1600x1200 with no slowdowns at all with the silverlight player and low cpu usage.
Adobe needs to fix it. Nobody else is to blame for it and nobody else can fix it.
I may dislike IE8 for a lot of reasons but I would not be so quick to pin this one on IE8. The slashdot code base is HORRIBLE. Just look at the html that is being written, I have had problems with this site in konqueror at various times, webkit and opera. Mostly I think they just hack this site until it works in IE6,7 and Firefox and then call it done and don't worry about all the simple bugs in it that should be fixed that would make it work in far more browers.
Actually I even started blocking some of the javascript on the page because it was slowing it down so much. Sometimes up to 3 seconds before the page would draw because it was waiting on one of those javascript tracking scripts.
Slashdot is definitely not an example of a remotely well written site. Just test that yourself and validate it.
I have an audigy 2 ZS right now and the drivers under Vista BITE HARD. EAX and other stuff get disabled if you have more then 3GB or so of ram. I couldn't even install SP1 because creative has not updated the drivers in over a year. The card has mostly been trouble free under linux but I have run into a few issues with it every now and then. It is only because of the drivers that daniel put out that I could update to SP1 which did fix some issues.
.... drivers that work.
The newest alsa version added support for the CMI8788 cards which includes the Xonar. I am planning on picking up a Xonar D2X and then not having to worry about this stuff anymore. The Xonar even has a nice DTS out so you can take a feed directly off the card and plug it into your receiver/decoder etc. Based on what I Have read on it the Xonar and other CMI8788 cards certainly have the Creative cards beat in the most important ways
Don't try it, there are demons lurking there and they want your soul. :)
Seriously it depends on how fast the audio stream you are trying to get is. If you are playing really high bandwidth audio it would start skipping since you would not be receiving the data fast enough, however that is very unlikely since audio is very very low bandwidth. The vista problem degrades hundred megabit cards down to a few megabits which is still way more then audio streaming needs. So it should work just fine, just don't try to transfer a few gigs of files over the network to your fileserver since that will take a long time while audio is open.
I definitely don't agree with you about zope. I have seen nothing under any platform that can hold a candle to the zope security system. I have tried to work with other "superior" systems and they always ended up taking more time and losing a lot of features that are just part of zope. However until you have actually worked with a more secure system you won't understand how useful it is. Every request running under its own security credentials, every function, object, attribute etc touched is fully security checked. That means if you have a code screwup that would someone try to hand someone information they should not have the system will still not allow it.
I didn't mention old games, I mentioned any game. On vista 64 and xp64 I found that many games don't work right or at all. XP64 is better at it but both are pretty bad. I can not run a 32bit version of windows, 32bit xp won't even install. It is great that stuff works for you but for many others it does not work at all. Maybe my box is just too high end for windows, that easily could be the case from what I have seen.
You think that multimedia is an improvement over xp? Audio in vista is all done in software now, all those soundcards with hardware capabilities don't do squat anymore under vista. Things like hardware mixing, sample conversion, speaker upmix (2 -> 7.1 signal) etc don't work in vista and can't because of how ms changed things. Yeah multimedia sure is great now that it runs takes far more cpu power to do it with worse audio quality.
Also it long since stopped being the case that you could pick up a random windows game and expect it to work under windows. Go check out the forums for all the compatibility issues that various games have under even xp32. If you run xp64 or vista64 many games won't work right, long ago I stopped buying any game for windows that I could not get a demo for first to test it. I have better odds of getting a random linux game to work under linux then a random windows game under windows. Overall though vista convinced me that consoles are a much better option and I have not regretted it. I got a wii earlier and that has been great and more recently I got a 360 and so far every game works flawlessly in both systems which is far from true for windows.
Well great for you because my luck with vista has been abysmal. I have spent at least 30 hours trying to get it to work and currently it won't even boot anymore after an update it automatically applied. I even told it to boot to the last known good configuration and it still locks up on boot. I have been trying to run vista business 64 on a tyan S2915 board with dual opteron 2218, dual 8800GTS, audigy2 zs and 8G of ram and it has been abysmal. XP64 works ok but not great, linux works flawlessly and vista does not work at all. I have used every windows os since DOS 5 or so and I think that windows ME is a better os then vista is. 64bit windows is a joke but linux works great. Vista convinced me to drop windows for games entirely and so I got an x360 to complement the wii I already got. I definitely don't regret that decision, the 360 and wii and vastly easier to play games on then windows is especially when windows does not work. Most good games for windows come out on the consoles also and lots of very good games comes out for the consoles that don't come out for the pc. I figure I will try vista again in another 9 months or so and see how things have improved but I am not holding my breath. I have been using linux for 10 years now for all of my work and have had only minor problems with it.
I know I am a very very tiny percent of the population. I suspect that over time laptops will be able to do more and more things however desktops will stay around since there are some things that no matter what you are going to need more hardware for. Even if we could make computers with 1024 cpus operating at 2 terrahertz and 16TB of ram in a laptop we would have invented new problems that need a desktop worth of that hardware and even bigger servers.
Laptops are the future though for most people and even those will give way over time to even smaller systems that do what these people need.
Well I do database development and my current box has 2 opteron 2218s and 8G of ram with 4 19inch monitors I plan to upgrade them to 4 30inch monitors and will replace the opterons with the new amd quad cores later also. I can't see how laptops are going to get to that point in even 5 years. The more computing power we get the larger the data sets we work with and the more ways we need to analyze it. For development it helps a lot to have very powerful machines so that you can run tests much faster on fairly good chunks of data to make sure things are performing as expected. My current machine has had to swap a fair number of times when I have been running full tests on it and so my next machine will probably have 16G to 32G of ram. The reason for the 4 monitors is I can see the code I am working on, the test results as they come in, the logging output from the system etc at the same time. It has made a huge productivity gain to be able to do that.