The vast majority of MS-haters do it because it is fashionable. Most people here on/. have nothing more than vague notions of why they hate MS. Sure, they could rattle off a few half-baked justifications, such as the laughable claim that MS doesn't innovate.
But that's as far as it goes. There is no debate here. For every one person that tries to defend MS with a rational argument, there are 20 people waiting to mod them down.
Yes, I am an individual! Yes, MS is evil! Ooh, can I be a cool anti-establishment hax0r like you guys? If I bash MS too, can I fit in?
The whole thing disgusts me. I'm tempted to be pro-MS just so I can be different from the ignorant masses. Anti-anti-establishment. Not because I like the establishment, but because I hate the idiotic mindless protesters.
I disagree. It seems that the OLD "smart houses" to which you are referring were predicated on the concept that people were lazy, and wanted automatic robots to do all of their chores. From automatic food dispensers, to robots doing the laundry, to closed-circuit video channels between rooms of the house to obviate physically walking from room to room, these technologies look like they came from the Jetsons cartoon. And none of the technologies were even close to being consumer-ready.
The NEW "smart homes" are based on a fundamentally different paradigm: the use of widely available bandwidth in information/data networks and processing power to make our lives more enjoyable and efficient. For instance, I should be able to tell my house before I leave in the morning to record the Cardinals baseball game and save it for me. My mom should be able to SPEAK commands to the entertainment system rather than trying to figure out a hopelessly complicated remote control. If I'm in the bathroom and someone rings the doorbell or walks up my driveway, I should be able to see who's at the door on a display mounted on my bathroom wall. If I forgot to set the sprinkler system timer when I leave for vacation, I should be able to log into my house's web page and do it remotely.
Basically, effective command and control of a home environment can utilize the enormous leap in information networks computer systems have achieved in the past decade unlike ever before. And this technology is available today, and that is why this is so exciting.
The HP Windows Media Center PC 854 (currently $1199 from hp.com) has some pretty high-end features that would never wind up on an Xbox:
512 megs RAM
GeForce4 MX440 with 128 megs of DDR RAM and Tv-out
a P4 2.53 Ghz "Northwood" cpu
eMuzed TV tuner with built-in Mpeg2 hardware encoder
120 gigabyte hard drive
DVD Burner
cool Media Center remote control
5.1 channel digital audio
Firewire and USB2.0 for all your peripherals, video or otherwise
Plus, you get Windows XP Media Center edition with the Media Center app and its "10-foot" UI experience, Windows MovieMaker 2, and video drivers that have been extensively tested for this particular hardware configuration. In fact, it seems the primary reason MS isn't releasing MCE as a retail OS product is that they want to ensure a higher quality standard for Media Center PCs by doing extensive in-house driver and hardware testing before OEM deployment approval.
Steve Ballmer's recent memo to the troops admits as much.
Memo to the troops? Do you actually KNOW any MS employees? I know many developers there, and frankly it's exactly this kind of rhetoric that gives them a bad name. These people are gentle, kind-hearted folks who are passionate about bringing technology to the masses and improving users' computer experience, both of which are noble goals.
I've heard people on/. call them "Storm Troopers" and other names ("troops" in this instance, as though they are hired soldiers in some kind of make-believe battle), and it's simply unjustified. Please keep your rhetoric in check. There are no MS employees running around like minions of the Devil trying to steal from the poor to give money to Uncle Bill. The whole notion is preposterous and laughable.
I would caution those who follow investment advice from Slashdot posters... In the following few paragraphs, I have attempted to highlight how an investor might look at the current state of the market.
At ONE point in time, I owned Corel stock just before they announced they were coming out with a Linux distribution. Their stock shot up from about 2.5 to 25, or something around that number. I sold at 17. But those times are long over, and thankfully so are the illusions that adding GNU/Linux to a product lineup will automagically make companies oodles of cash profits.
In fact, not only are those times over, but real business models have started to make a comeback with investors before they buy stock. What a concept!
Even if Linux were to take hold of a market in Peru, India, and Germany, this does not mean that GNU/Linux companies will necessarily be able to capitalize on these new users. They would need a business plan to do so, and I haven't seen one yet that makes any sense. It's much more likely that these governments aren't willing to spend money on computer software, and they're looking for a cheaper alternative to MSFT.
And just as corporations outsource jobs to increasingly cheap labor markets in less developed countries, governments who switch from MSFT contracts to (insert company name) GNU/Linux contracts will continue to demand price undercuts until in the scramble to compete for the crumbs leftover, only a handful of GNU/Linux companies remain, none of them very (if at all) profitable.
GNU/Linux support solutions and services will become highly commoditized in such a competitive market, and attempting to profit from such commoditized contracts is unlikely EVER to be a fruitful endeavor. I would seriously re-consider any thought of investing in a company who aggressively pursues such opportunities.
...reputation for releasing patches that break as much as they fix...
Really? So you'd take a Win2k clean install over Win2k Sp3? What about NT4 Sp1 over Sp6a? And before you say, "I wasn't talking about service packs!" realize that service packs are not much more than a slew of updates applied at once.
It seems like this so-called "reputation" for bad patches is nothing more than a vocal minority who have an axe to grind with Microsoft. I'm sure that a few legitimate users ARE affected by mistakes in patches. But on the whole, Microsoft's patches work, are remarkably easy to apply given the complexity of the underlying software, and fix MANY TIMES more bugs than they create.
You might come up with a handful of counter-examples, but that would be the extent of your evidence. Considering the sheer number of QFE's and SP's that Microsoft ships across all their products, can you condemn all Microsoft patches based on such anecdotal evidence?
...it stifles sales to shops that use mixed products.
Why does it do this? Are you suggesting that shops that use mixed products cannot simply download and install Mozilla? Or whatever browser they want to use?
And why would they want to avoid Windows just because it has IE integrated (vs. standalone)? Does the presence of IE somehow ruin their business?
WE still pump the most funds into designing NEW ways to kill people. How are we any better?
The US is better because these new ways to kill people are better ways to kill people, ways that inflict less "collateral" damage than at any time in the history of the world. GPS guidance, terrain contour mapping, infrared signature targeting: all of these are funded because they make weapons more lethal to those being targeted, not innocent bystanders. And in some cases, these new weapons don't even kill people! (Check out the U.S. Army's new various non-lethal weapons technology here.)
No matter what you say, improving weapons is a noble goal, because force is still regrettably necessary to maintain some semblance of order and security in this world, and crude force is becoming altogether intolerable now that media attention makes even small conflicts front-page news around the globe. New weapons must be more precise than ever before, and must do their jobs more reliably and thoroughly than ever before.
Investing money into gross tonnage nuclear bombs with dirty radioactive residue and crude delivery vehicles is the OPPOSITE of the US plan. Attempts by non-superpower countries to create strategic nuclear weapons are completely illogical on several levels. Most importantly, it shows that such countries do not understand the prerequisite for strategic deterrence and its stabilizing corollary, Mutually Assured Destruction: only balanced nuclear arsenals are MAD-deterred. The crude nuclear weapons under construction throughout the world today are not strategic in nature (yet), because they lack delivery vehicles. The only thing they have succeeded to accomplish is destabilizing the world's nuclear balance, and creating incentive for the world's remaining superpower to actually deploy a missile shield system!
If you want to "win" in today's world, win with your economy, not strategic weapons. Don't waste your time and national resources developing weapons that won't be used and have no strategic deterrence value. President Kalam seems to understand this now, which is why I think he is advocating technology education and has great concern for students in India. I hope his message is heeded.
If you'll notice, most service packs are NOT force-fed through Windows Update. It is up to you to select them, since they are not considered "critical updates." They are optional.
For that matter, even the critical updates (which Automatic Updates pester you about all the time) are "optional" in the sense that you can tell the update wizard not to install them...
However, could x86-64 applications that have no need for that much memory still run in the lower 4gigs of ram while using the new registers?
This is an odd question, but the answer can be split into 3 cases.
First, you have 64-bit apps running on a 64-bit OS. In order for AMD64 processes to run at all, they obviously need to run in a 64-bit OS. So AMD64 processes have available to them the large 64-bit virtual address space as well as the 8 new AMD64 general purpose registers.
Next you might have 32-bit processes (old code) running in a 64-bit OS in what is known as Compatibility Mode. These old apps will get true 4-gigabyte address spaces (no 3gig user/1gig system split like current systems), but they will NOT have access to the 8 new 64-bit GPRs. This makes sense, because the new GPRs can only be used if the applications were compiled for AMD64 to begin with (i.e., the compiler knew to use them). If you recompile these apps for AMD-64, they would automatically run in Native 64-bit mode discussed earlier.
The last situation that you might have is a 32-bit OS running 32-bit apps, in which case none of the 64-bit features apply at all. This is known as Legacy Mode, and is what you would get if you ran Windows 2000 on your Opteron.
According to reports I've read, the new Opteron actually outperforms the current Athlon clock-for-clock in 32-bit Legacy mode (32-bit OS running 32-bit code) because at base, the decode paths and functional unit pipelines are similar to the present generation processor. There are some additional tricks they have pulled to get some more speed, like a "smart" TLB that only flushes its cache of page table entries when truly necessary (not at every context switch).
In 64-bit Mode (where a 64-bit OS runs 64-bit code), average instruction length has increased because of the addition of a preface byte to every 64-bit instruction, but overall code size has DECREASED because 8 additional general purpose registers have been added (reducing compiler generated load/store code). This decrease in code size compensates for the larger average instruction length and enables performance to remain on-par with 32-bit.
However, I will feel much better about these claims once I have seen some true performance comparisons at an independent reviewer's site!:)
I was just in Macy's before Christmas doing some shopping, and I happened by these Fossil Kaleido watches, whose faces change colors either on command or in an oscillating fashion. Surely this is a good example? (I know, don't call you Surely...)
It is interesting that I JUST did a project on this subject for a Ubiquitous Computing class... My project was called "Distributed Speech Recognition." Here is a link:
I also have heard it through the grapevine that the big voice recognition companies are working on exactly this technology... I wouldn't be surprised if Speech.NET includes support for something like this in the near future. I believe I read on some website that support for Speech API on PocketPC was coming soon...
No offense, but I trust my dermatologist friend (who has been to specialist school) much more than the anecdotal evidence of an online web forum. He recommends soap and water daily.
but on the other hand you won't have to wait to fill a 32-byte cache line each time you read a single item.
Please forgive my failing memory, but isn't the functional unit requesting the load notified immediately when the requested word is available from the load/store unit? Unless I am imagining things, I seem to remember this procedure:
word load is encountered in the code
all functional units requiring the result of this load wait for load/store unit to succeed
load/store unit fires off request to cache controller, which continues the request up the memory hierarchy until word is found
requested word is returned immediately down the hierarchy to the load/store unit where it is directed to the appropriate file register (or data bus a la Tomasulo)
functional units waiting for load to finish proceed, while simultaneously the cache hierarchy loads the rest of the cache line for that word into the cache
Wouldn't it be a silly implementation that forces the load/store unit to wait for the entire cache line to be read before returning the requested word?? In other words, doesn't the memory hierarchy bring the cache lines in "in the background" while the requested data is returned to the load/store unit? And wouldn't this mean that turning the cache off doesn't solve "cache line latency" since it doesn't really exist to begin with?
Re:Fritz Hollings out as commerce committee chair!
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 1
Stone Age judiciary GWB can appoint without opposition review
Actually, I'd like to see the day that a judicial appointee doesn't get dragged through the mud. The way these good people are treated is horrendous, by ALL parties. It represents the worst part of politics, and this partisan mudslinging is a recent addition to federal judical nominees.
Besides, have you forgotten about the filibuster? Senator Leahy was able to bottle up nominees so far this year in committee (republicans never got the chance to vote), but with new committee power the nominees will clear committe and go up for senate vote.
This, of course, clears the way for some spectacular filibuster action. I'm gonna buy a six-pack and gear up for some scintillating afternoons of CSPAN!
I wouldn't worry about the U.S. not playing a significant role in open source. After all, open source software started in the U.S., right? Where would the movement be without BSD 4.4? Open source is continuing strong at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and several other universities in the academic scene, and at companies like Red Hat, which is still the dominant distribution in the business sector the last time I checked. Red Hat in particular continues to innovate and push Linux in its own unique direction. Some may complain about its particular choices, but most silently approve.
The world has a long way to go to catch up with U.S. technology. Mostly it stems from defense research, which continues to provide innovations and truly original ideas such as the world has never before witnessed. You probably saw some impressive things at Boeing, depending on which part of the company you were with.
The U.S. invented software (along with the digital computer, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the compiler, the internet, and too many other things to mention). I just don't see the U.S. (as a whole) losing sight of what is software state-of-the-art anytime soon.
I just don't agree with you that the U.S. is somehow "isolating" itself by using Microsoft technology.
If you're referring to the government somehow standardizing on Microsoft-only technology, you're simply not right. It is true that the U.S. Government is Microsoft's top client, but that's probably more of a result of the more than 4 million federal employees and budget that dwarfs that of any private U.S. company. If you were familiar with the Department of Defense, you would know that the DoD purchases technology from any vendor that does the job as inexpensively as possible, as long as standards are met. Microsoft meets them. Try to name another enterprise-level GUI-based operating system that complies with Orange Book security standards and you'll understand my point.
But if you're talking about U.S. companies overwhelmingly using Microsoft technology, I'm not sure exactly why you think there is a problem. Companies (in the U.S. at least) are free to use whatever operating system or software they like. Some companies are proudly Apple-based, others (like Yahoo) use open source technology. But they're free to make that choice. How is this "isolationist?" Isolationism connotes forced restriction of choice; nothing like that is happening here.
I don't think its fair to say that those countries are against Microsoft, or the US for that matter
I think you are wrong here. The post-Cold War world order is one of competition. Former allies are no longer "allies" in the friendly traditional sense; they are fierce competitors in a global economy. Countries do whatever they can to keep their own businesses competitive, and this includes refusing to use competitors' products. Just look at all of the subsidies and preferential treatment that Airbus Industrie gets from the EU in an attempt to compete with Boeing. Income tax breaks, land grants, and excise tax cuts. Does our government do these things for Boeing? No. And the same thing is true with Microsoft.
See, the old Sherman Anti-trust Act is hopelessly out of date. It makes no concessions whatsoever for global competition. I have NO problems in making large companies "play fair." But just because the companies are large is NO LONGER good enough reason for our government to punish them. In fact, expecting our government to punish Microsoft is similar to expecting the EU to punish Airbus, were they to start beating Boeing on every front. There's just no way it's going to happen!
As it is, there is only competition within the US among software companies that don't inconvenience Microsoft. Once a company shows up on their radar screen they have a choice of being acquired or singled out for special treatment (having products similar to theirs given away by Microsoft until their market share is marginalized).
I don't believe this for a second. The ONLY time that Microsoft supposedly did this was in the web browser wars. IE vs. Netscape. But just try to name another product that Microsoft killed in this manner. It's just not how Microsoft typically works.
Microsoft works by steadily, continuously chipping away at your market share by improving its products relentlessly. Microsoft Office killed off strong, incumbent competition from Corel and Lotus by consistently making a superior product. Office has NEVER been free, or even inexpensive relative to the competition.
And there are counter-examples that show that Microsoft isn't always the "competition killer" that you're trying to make it out to be. Microsoft Money has utterly failed to kill off Intuit's Quicken, which has developed a veritable financial software empire. Adobe Photoshop trounces anything MS has to offer, and MS FrontPage is hardly a killer in the HTML editing market. MS has yet to make inroads amongst the gaming market. I could spout off more MS product failures, but I think you get my point.
I agree with you that the US shouldn't back itself into a corner, locking itself into technology. But that is NOT what is happening! The US (and I'm not talking about the government here) is extremely fast and flexible at adopting new technologies. Is there anything to suggest that this will not continue in the future?
FRANCE locked itself into technology by forcing the Minitel computer network down its citizens' throats. French computer technology has not recovered yet. THAT'S what I call isolationism.
What do YOU care what the rest of the world thinks? They have their own agendas, their own reasons to select technologies, and they aren't merit-based decisions. Make no mistake about it: the primary reason that other countries are rushing to adopt open source solutions is that they hate depending upon a US company (i.e., Microsoft) to supply something as essential to their computing infrastructure as the primary operating system on the planet. If Microsoft were French (or from some other EU nation), would not the French government and the EU nations adopt its operating system immediately, celebrating its success? You bet they would! They *love* to support their own.
Instead, EU nations resent Microsoft's success and see an opportunity to forcibly change their computing landscape by pushing open source technologies that their own people have much more of a hand in creating. They can further push this agenda by suing Microsoft in EU courts. These actions are entirely self-interested. I would bet that the vast majority of people in those countries (members of the Slashdot community notwithstanding) are perfectly happy with their Windows computers and would much rather use Windows than an open source alternative.
Keep in mind that the entire reason the EU was created was to better compete with the US and Asia in the world economy. And what better way to begin than to start chipping away at the world's #1 software company, which just happens to reside in the USA?
You're absolutely fooling yourself if you believe that EU nations (and the rest of the world) are fighting "the good fight" to protect their citizens from Microsoft exploitation. They fight to channel some of the software money away from Microsoft's coffers and back into their own!
Just because his name is Nissan doesn't mean that he has the exclusive rights to any property with "Nissan" attached to it. He already owns nissan.net as well. Let's look at it from an independent judge's perspective:
Both sides want nissan.com. Why? They either feel that: A. nissan.com will get more traffic and thus generate more revenue than some alternative, or B. nissan.com is more representative of their company's name
As for A, what would cause nissan.com to get more traffic than "nissanmotors.com" or "nissancomputer.com"? People around the world recognize the Nissan brand name. Common sense would dictate that an overwhelming percentage of traffic seen to nissan.com [i]stems from that recognition, which Nissan (the car company) has carefully cultivated and paid for since 1933 when Nissan was incorporated in Japan[/i]. To continue to grant Mr. Uzi Nissan a monopoly on the domain "nissan.com" to promote his own company would be to allow his company to capitalize on the name recognition he did not establish. This fact does not seem to be in dispute. (Mr. Nissan would add, however, that the coincidence of his name should not be held against him.)
As for B, both sides feel THEY have the right to use the name Nissan, and they do. As it happens, Mr. Nissan was first to claim nissan.com. Nissan Motors, however, was clearly the first to stake out recognition of "Nissan" as a brand name. Which one should legally be priority?
It is fair to say that Mr. Nissan knew that registering nissan.com would be disputed by Nissan Motors. He chose to register nissan.com anyway, and it must be assumed that he did so because he felt he would be better served by nissan.com than nissancomputers.com or something else. It is also fair to say that he knew that by picking nissan.com he would receive more traffic to his address than a small computer store in North Carolina would normally receive, and that this traffic is a result of the name conflict with Nissan Motors.
Nissan Motors clearly has more at stake in its name than Mr. Nissan has in his company. Forcing Mr. Nissan to relocate to a different address will have some cost, but this cost is small compared to the potential commerce that is being impeded by the naming mismatch. Clearly, the public does not expect to get Nissan Computer Corp of Raleigh, NC when they type "www.nissan.com" into their web browsers.
The cost to commerce as a whole must be taken into consideration, and weighed against the cost to Mr. Nissan for relocation.
Judgment? plaintiff [Nissan Motors] may use nissan.com, but must pay a reasonable fee for costs of relocating Mr. Nissan's site.
I like to see this sort of competition in the aircraft industry. Why buy a Cessna Caravan turboprop for $1.4 million when you can get a 6-seat Eclipse jet for $850k?
The Eclipse 500 is fuel-efficient, quiet, and inexpensive. Not to mention it has already flown! In short, it appears to be a superior aircraft (I have not personally seen one and have certainly not flown one).
But it doesn't run on electricity, so it isn't sexy to the ecologists and it won't turn heads on/.
But in my opinion the first flight of the Eclipse 500 is much more of an aviation milestone than the first taxi of a battery-powered plane that will have a 100-mile range.
Yes, and looking back, I should not have gotten excited about it in the first place.
All I meant to imply is that a TRUE aviation milestone requires flight. Not taxiing.
Obviously taxiing must come first, but how interesting is it? Show me that this plane will fly (which is the question), and then it becomes very exciting news.
As a private pilot, I saw the headline and became excited. But alas, when I actually READ the article, I learned that this fancy all-electric airplane has not actually FLOWN yet!
Taxiing is hardly a proof of concept when the point of the vehicle is to FLY!
I don't see how this could possibly represent a first in aviation history until the thing actually flies...
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority of MS-haters do it because it is fashionable. Most people here on /. have nothing more than vague notions of why they hate MS. Sure, they could rattle off a few half-baked justifications, such as the laughable claim that MS doesn't innovate.
But that's as far as it goes. There is no debate here. For every one person that tries to defend MS with a rational argument, there are 20 people waiting to mod them down.
Yes, I am an individual! Yes, MS is evil! Ooh, can I be a cool anti-establishment hax0r like you guys? If I bash MS too, can I fit in?
The whole thing disgusts me. I'm tempted to be pro-MS just so I can be different from the ignorant masses. Anti-anti-establishment. Not because I like the establishment, but because I hate the idiotic mindless protesters.
MOOOOOO.
I disagree. It seems that the OLD "smart houses" to which you are referring were predicated on the concept that people were lazy, and wanted automatic robots to do all of their chores. From automatic food dispensers, to robots doing the laundry, to closed-circuit video channels between rooms of the house to obviate physically walking from room to room, these technologies look like they came from the Jetsons cartoon. And none of the technologies were even close to being consumer-ready.
The NEW "smart homes" are based on a fundamentally different paradigm: the use of widely available bandwidth in information/data networks and processing power to make our lives more enjoyable and efficient. For instance, I should be able to tell my house before I leave in the morning to record the Cardinals baseball game and save it for me. My mom should be able to SPEAK commands to the entertainment system rather than trying to figure out a hopelessly complicated remote control. If I'm in the bathroom and someone rings the doorbell or walks up my driveway, I should be able to see who's at the door on a display mounted on my bathroom wall. If I forgot to set the sprinkler system timer when I leave for vacation, I should be able to log into my house's web page and do it remotely.
Basically, effective command and control of a home environment can utilize the enormous leap in information networks computer systems have achieved in the past decade unlike ever before. And this technology is available today, and that is why this is so exciting.
The HP Windows Media Center PC 854 (currently $1199 from hp.com) has some pretty high-end features that would never wind up on an Xbox:
Plus, you get Windows XP Media Center edition with the Media Center app and its "10-foot" UI experience, Windows MovieMaker 2, and video drivers that have been extensively tested for this particular hardware configuration. In fact, it seems the primary reason MS isn't releasing MCE as a retail OS product is that they want to ensure a higher quality standard for Media Center PCs by doing extensive in-house driver and hardware testing before OEM deployment approval.
Memo to the troops? Do you actually KNOW any MS employees? I know many developers there, and frankly it's exactly this kind of rhetoric that gives them a bad name. These people are gentle, kind-hearted folks who are passionate about bringing technology to the masses and improving users' computer experience, both of which are noble goals.
I've heard people on /. call them "Storm Troopers" and other names ("troops" in this instance, as though they are hired soldiers in some kind of make-believe battle), and it's simply unjustified. Please keep your rhetoric in check. There are no MS employees running around like minions of the Devil trying to steal from the poor to give money to Uncle Bill. The whole notion is preposterous and laughable.
I would caution those who follow investment advice from Slashdot posters... In the following few paragraphs, I have attempted to highlight how an investor might look at the current state of the market.
At ONE point in time, I owned Corel stock just before they announced they were coming out with a Linux distribution. Their stock shot up from about 2.5 to 25, or something around that number. I sold at 17. But those times are long over, and thankfully so are the illusions that adding GNU/Linux to a product lineup will automagically make companies oodles of cash profits.
In fact, not only are those times over, but real business models have started to make a comeback with investors before they buy stock. What a concept!
Even if Linux were to take hold of a market in Peru, India, and Germany, this does not mean that GNU/Linux companies will necessarily be able to capitalize on these new users. They would need a business plan to do so, and I haven't seen one yet that makes any sense. It's much more likely that these governments aren't willing to spend money on computer software, and they're looking for a cheaper alternative to MSFT.
And just as corporations outsource jobs to increasingly cheap labor markets in less developed countries, governments who switch from MSFT contracts to (insert company name) GNU/Linux contracts will continue to demand price undercuts until in the scramble to compete for the crumbs leftover, only a handful of GNU/Linux companies remain, none of them very (if at all) profitable.
GNU/Linux support solutions and services will become highly commoditized in such a competitive market, and attempting to profit from such commoditized contracts is unlikely EVER to be a fruitful endeavor. I would seriously re-consider any thought of investing in a company who aggressively pursues such opportunities.
Really? So you'd take a Win2k clean install over Win2k Sp3? What about NT4 Sp1 over Sp6a? And before you say, "I wasn't talking about service packs!" realize that service packs are not much more than a slew of updates applied at once.
It seems like this so-called "reputation" for bad patches is nothing more than a vocal minority who have an axe to grind with Microsoft. I'm sure that a few legitimate users ARE affected by mistakes in patches. But on the whole, Microsoft's patches work, are remarkably easy to apply given the complexity of the underlying software, and fix MANY TIMES more bugs than they create.
You might come up with a handful of counter-examples, but that would be the extent of your evidence. Considering the sheer number of QFE's and SP's that Microsoft ships across all their products, can you condemn all Microsoft patches based on such anecdotal evidence?
Why does it do this? Are you suggesting that shops that use mixed products cannot simply download and install Mozilla? Or whatever browser they want to use?
And why would they want to avoid Windows just because it has IE integrated (vs. standalone)? Does the presence of IE somehow ruin their business?
I just don't understand the logic here...
I don't understand your logic here. What part of "no more standalone Internet Explorer" means that innovation in the browser is over?
Please explain why you've made this logical jump, as I see no obvious justification...
The US is better because these new ways to kill people are better ways to kill people, ways that inflict less "collateral" damage than at any time in the history of the world. GPS guidance, terrain contour mapping, infrared signature targeting: all of these are funded because they make weapons more lethal to those being targeted, not innocent bystanders. And in some cases, these new weapons don't even kill people! (Check out the U.S. Army's new various non-lethal weapons technology here.)
No matter what you say, improving weapons is a noble goal, because force is still regrettably necessary to maintain some semblance of order and security in this world, and crude force is becoming altogether intolerable now that media attention makes even small conflicts front-page news around the globe. New weapons must be more precise than ever before, and must do their jobs more reliably and thoroughly than ever before.
Investing money into gross tonnage nuclear bombs with dirty radioactive residue and crude delivery vehicles is the OPPOSITE of the US plan. Attempts by non-superpower countries to create strategic nuclear weapons are completely illogical on several levels. Most importantly, it shows that such countries do not understand the prerequisite for strategic deterrence and its stabilizing corollary, Mutually Assured Destruction: only balanced nuclear arsenals are MAD-deterred. The crude nuclear weapons under construction throughout the world today are not strategic in nature (yet), because they lack delivery vehicles. The only thing they have succeeded to accomplish is destabilizing the world's nuclear balance, and creating incentive for the world's remaining superpower to actually deploy a missile shield system!
If you want to "win" in today's world, win with your economy, not strategic weapons. Don't waste your time and national resources developing weapons that won't be used and have no strategic deterrence value. President Kalam seems to understand this now, which is why I think he is advocating technology education and has great concern for students in India. I hope his message is heeded.
If you'll notice, most service packs are NOT force-fed through Windows Update. It is up to you to select them, since they are not considered "critical updates." They are optional.
For that matter, even the critical updates (which Automatic Updates pester you about all the time) are "optional" in the sense that you can tell the update wizard not to install them...
This is an odd question, but the answer can be split into 3 cases.
First, you have 64-bit apps running on a 64-bit OS. In order for AMD64 processes to run at all, they obviously need to run in a 64-bit OS. So AMD64 processes have available to them the large 64-bit virtual address space as well as the 8 new AMD64 general purpose registers.
Next you might have 32-bit processes (old code) running in a 64-bit OS in what is known as Compatibility Mode. These old apps will get true 4-gigabyte address spaces (no 3gig user/1gig system split like current systems), but they will NOT have access to the 8 new 64-bit GPRs. This makes sense, because the new GPRs can only be used if the applications were compiled for AMD64 to begin with (i.e., the compiler knew to use them). If you recompile these apps for AMD-64, they would automatically run in Native 64-bit mode discussed earlier.
The last situation that you might have is a 32-bit OS running 32-bit apps, in which case none of the 64-bit features apply at all. This is known as Legacy Mode, and is what you would get if you ran Windows 2000 on your Opteron.
Hope that helps clarify things.
According to reports I've read, the new Opteron actually outperforms the current Athlon clock-for-clock in 32-bit Legacy mode (32-bit OS running 32-bit code) because at base, the decode paths and functional unit pipelines are similar to the present generation processor. There are some additional tricks they have pulled to get some more speed, like a "smart" TLB that only flushes its cache of page table entries when truly necessary (not at every context switch).
In 64-bit Mode (where a 64-bit OS runs 64-bit code), average instruction length has increased because of the addition of a preface byte to every 64-bit instruction, but overall code size has DECREASED because 8 additional general purpose registers have been added (reducing compiler generated load/store code). This decrease in code size compensates for the larger average instruction length and enables performance to remain on-par with 32-bit.
However, I will feel much better about these claims once I have seen some true performance comparisons at an independent reviewer's site! :)
Ah, but people already HAVE done it!
I was just in Macy's before Christmas doing some shopping, and I happened by these Fossil Kaleido watches, whose faces change colors either on command or in an oscillating fashion. Surely this is a good example? (I know, don't call you Surely...)
It is interesting that I JUST did a project on this subject for a Ubiquitous Computing class... My project was called "Distributed Speech Recognition." Here is a link:
Distributed Speech Recognition ProjectI also have heard it through the grapevine that the big voice recognition companies are working on exactly this technology... I wouldn't be surprised if Speech .NET includes support for something like this in the near future. I believe I read on some website that support for Speech API on PocketPC was coming soon...
No offense, but I trust my dermatologist friend (who has been to specialist school) much more than the anecdotal evidence of an online web forum. He recommends soap and water daily.
Please forgive my failing memory, but isn't the functional unit requesting the load notified immediately when the requested word is available from the load/store unit? Unless I am imagining things, I seem to remember this procedure:
Wouldn't it be a silly implementation that forces the load/store unit to wait for the entire cache line to be read before returning the requested word?? In other words, doesn't the memory hierarchy bring the cache lines in "in the background" while the requested data is returned to the load/store unit? And wouldn't this mean that turning the cache off doesn't solve "cache line latency" since it doesn't really exist to begin with?
Actually, I'd like to see the day that a judicial appointee doesn't get dragged through the mud. The way these good people are treated is horrendous, by ALL parties. It represents the worst part of politics, and this partisan mudslinging is a recent addition to federal judical nominees.
Besides, have you forgotten about the filibuster? Senator Leahy was able to bottle up nominees so far this year in committee (republicans never got the chance to vote), but with new committee power the nominees will clear committe and go up for senate vote.
This, of course, clears the way for some spectacular filibuster action. I'm gonna buy a six-pack and gear up for some scintillating afternoons of CSPAN!
I wouldn't worry about the U.S. not playing a significant role in open source. After all, open source software started in the U.S., right? Where would the movement be without BSD 4.4? Open source is continuing strong at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and several other universities in the academic scene, and at companies like Red Hat, which is still the dominant distribution in the business sector the last time I checked. Red Hat in particular continues to innovate and push Linux in its own unique direction. Some may complain about its particular choices, but most silently approve.
The world has a long way to go to catch up with U.S. technology. Mostly it stems from defense research, which continues to provide innovations and truly original ideas such as the world has never before witnessed. You probably saw some impressive things at Boeing, depending on which part of the company you were with.
The U.S. invented software (along with the digital computer, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the compiler, the internet, and too many other things to mention). I just don't see the U.S. (as a whole) losing sight of what is software state-of-the-art anytime soon.
I just don't agree with you that the U.S. is somehow "isolating" itself by using Microsoft technology.
If you're referring to the government somehow standardizing on Microsoft-only technology, you're simply not right. It is true that the U.S. Government is Microsoft's top client, but that's probably more of a result of the more than 4 million federal employees and budget that dwarfs that of any private U.S. company. If you were familiar with the Department of Defense, you would know that the DoD purchases technology from any vendor that does the job as inexpensively as possible, as long as standards are met. Microsoft meets them. Try to name another enterprise-level GUI-based operating system that complies with Orange Book security standards and you'll understand my point.
But if you're talking about U.S. companies overwhelmingly using Microsoft technology, I'm not sure exactly why you think there is a problem. Companies (in the U.S. at least) are free to use whatever operating system or software they like. Some companies are proudly Apple-based, others (like Yahoo) use open source technology. But they're free to make that choice. How is this "isolationist?" Isolationism connotes forced restriction of choice; nothing like that is happening here.
I think you are wrong here. The post-Cold War world order is one of competition. Former allies are no longer "allies" in the friendly traditional sense; they are fierce competitors in a global economy. Countries do whatever they can to keep their own businesses competitive, and this includes refusing to use competitors' products. Just look at all of the subsidies and preferential treatment that Airbus Industrie gets from the EU in an attempt to compete with Boeing. Income tax breaks, land grants, and excise tax cuts. Does our government do these things for Boeing? No. And the same thing is true with Microsoft.
See, the old Sherman Anti-trust Act is hopelessly out of date. It makes no concessions whatsoever for global competition. I have NO problems in making large companies "play fair." But just because the companies are large is NO LONGER good enough reason for our government to punish them. In fact, expecting our government to punish Microsoft is similar to expecting the EU to punish Airbus, were they to start beating Boeing on every front. There's just no way it's going to happen!
I don't believe this for a second. The ONLY time that Microsoft supposedly did this was in the web browser wars. IE vs. Netscape. But just try to name another product that Microsoft killed in this manner. It's just not how Microsoft typically works.
Microsoft works by steadily, continuously chipping away at your market share by improving its products relentlessly. Microsoft Office killed off strong, incumbent competition from Corel and Lotus by consistently making a superior product. Office has NEVER been free, or even inexpensive relative to the competition.
And there are counter-examples that show that Microsoft isn't always the "competition killer" that you're trying to make it out to be. Microsoft Money has utterly failed to kill off Intuit's Quicken, which has developed a veritable financial software empire. Adobe Photoshop trounces anything MS has to offer, and MS FrontPage is hardly a killer in the HTML editing market. MS has yet to make inroads amongst the gaming market. I could spout off more MS product failures, but I think you get my point.
I agree with you that the US shouldn't back itself into a corner, locking itself into technology. But that is NOT what is happening! The US (and I'm not talking about the government here) is extremely fast and flexible at adopting new technologies. Is there anything to suggest that this will not continue in the future?
FRANCE locked itself into technology by forcing the Minitel computer network down its citizens' throats. French computer technology has not recovered yet. THAT'S what I call isolationism.
Ummm... the screenshots are still there. Aren't we just a little quick to blame Microsoft for everything?
What do YOU care what the rest of the world thinks? They have their own agendas, their own reasons to select technologies, and they aren't merit-based decisions. Make no mistake about it: the primary reason that other countries are rushing to adopt open source solutions is that they hate depending upon a US company (i.e., Microsoft) to supply something as essential to their computing infrastructure as the primary operating system on the planet. If Microsoft were French (or from some other EU nation), would not the French government and the EU nations adopt its operating system immediately, celebrating its success? You bet they would! They *love* to support their own.
Instead, EU nations resent Microsoft's success and see an opportunity to forcibly change their computing landscape by pushing open source technologies that their own people have much more of a hand in creating. They can further push this agenda by suing Microsoft in EU courts. These actions are entirely self-interested. I would bet that the vast majority of people in those countries (members of the Slashdot community notwithstanding) are perfectly happy with their Windows computers and would much rather use Windows than an open source alternative.
Keep in mind that the entire reason the EU was created was to better compete with the US and Asia in the world economy. And what better way to begin than to start chipping away at the world's #1 software company, which just happens to reside in the USA?
You're absolutely fooling yourself if you believe that EU nations (and the rest of the world) are fighting "the good fight" to protect their citizens from Microsoft exploitation. They fight to channel some of the software money away from Microsoft's coffers and back into their own!
Just because his name is Nissan doesn't mean that he has the exclusive rights to any property with "Nissan" attached to it. He already owns nissan.net as well. Let's look at it from an independent judge's perspective:
Both sides want nissan.com. Why? They either feel that:
A. nissan.com will get more traffic and thus generate more revenue than some alternative, or
B. nissan.com is more representative of their company's name
As for A, what would cause nissan.com to get more traffic than "nissanmotors.com" or "nissancomputer.com"? People around the world recognize the Nissan brand name. Common sense would dictate that an overwhelming percentage of traffic seen to nissan.com [i]stems from that recognition, which Nissan (the car company) has carefully cultivated and paid for since 1933 when Nissan was incorporated in Japan[/i]. To continue to grant Mr. Uzi Nissan a monopoly on the domain "nissan.com" to promote his own company would be to allow his company to capitalize on the name recognition he did not establish. This fact does not seem to be in dispute. (Mr. Nissan would add, however, that the coincidence of his name should not be held against him.)
As for B, both sides feel THEY have the right to use the name Nissan, and they do. As it happens, Mr. Nissan was first to claim nissan.com. Nissan Motors, however, was clearly the first to stake out recognition of "Nissan" as a brand name. Which one should legally be priority?
It is fair to say that Mr. Nissan knew that registering nissan.com would be disputed by Nissan Motors. He chose to register nissan.com anyway, and it must be assumed that he did so because he felt he would be better served by nissan.com than nissancomputers.com or something else. It is also fair to say that he knew that by picking nissan.com he would receive more traffic to his address than a small computer store in North Carolina would normally receive, and that this traffic is a result of the name conflict with Nissan Motors.
Nissan Motors clearly has more at stake in its name than Mr. Nissan has in his company. Forcing Mr. Nissan to relocate to a different address will have some cost, but this cost is small compared to the potential commerce that is being impeded by the naming mismatch. Clearly, the public does not expect to get Nissan Computer Corp of Raleigh, NC when they type "www.nissan.com" into their web browsers.
The cost to commerce as a whole must be taken into consideration, and weighed against the cost to Mr. Nissan for relocation.
Judgment? plaintiff [Nissan Motors] may use nissan.com, but must pay a reasonable fee for costs of relocating Mr. Nissan's site.
I like to see this sort of competition in the aircraft industry. Why buy a Cessna Caravan turboprop for $1.4 million when you can get a 6-seat Eclipse jet for $850k?
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The Eclipse 500 is fuel-efficient, quiet, and inexpensive. Not to mention it has already flown! In short, it appears to be a superior aircraft (I have not personally seen one and have certainly not flown one).
But it doesn't run on electricity, so it isn't sexy to the ecologists and it won't turn heads on
But in my opinion the first flight of the Eclipse 500 is much more of an aviation milestone than the first taxi of a battery-powered plane that will have a 100-mile range.
Yes, and looking back, I should not have gotten excited about it in the first place.
All I meant to imply is that a TRUE aviation milestone requires flight. Not taxiing.
Obviously taxiing must come first, but how interesting is it? Show me that this plane will fly (which is the question), and then it becomes very exciting news.
As a private pilot, I saw the headline and became excited. But alas, when I actually READ the article, I learned that this fancy all-electric airplane has not actually FLOWN yet!
Taxiing is hardly a proof of concept when the point of the vehicle is to FLY!
I don't see how this could possibly represent a first in aviation history until the thing actually flies...