Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed. I just upgraded to the latest KDE and a bunch of other updates, and got another performance jump. Once they shake the bugs out of the Radeon drivers for X.org, I'll get accelerated X, and another big speed boost.
In fact, of the major OSs, it's pretty much only Windows that keeps getting slower.
What you need to remember is that Windows is the largest software product ever created, when measured in lines of code. Bigger than the previous record holder, IBM's MVS. Bigger than the Star Wars missile shield defense software that nobody could ever get to work.
To compare, RedHat 7 was only 30 Mloc, including sendmail, Apache, and so on. So saying Microsoft are going to rewrite 60% of Vista by January, is like saying they could start now and have the whole of RedHat 7 completely rewritten by January.
Or to pick another data point: it's like saying Microsoft are going to start from scratch now, and write another Windows NT 5.0 by January, and have plenty of time for debugging--because NT 5.0 was only 20 Mloc.
Now do you see why software engineers reading the announcement are more than a little skeptical?
If it's really true that they need to rewrite 60% of Vista, then my professional opinion is that there's absolutely no way in hell they'll have something good enough to ship in 2007.
Even if it's out by a factor of 2 or 3, they're still in big trouble. The original Windows NT was only 4 Mloc, and there was a 5 year gap between Windows 95 and the actual release of NT.
IE 6: only 1 month in the last 3 years when it hasn't had an unpatched vulnerability; 15% of holes "extremely" critical; 30% give system access; currently 4 unpatched holes.
Mozilla 1.0: no unpatched vulnerabilities about half the time; 4% of holes "extremely" critical; 20% give system access; currently 0 unpatched holes.
It was done with hard drives too. Back around 1986 I was working in data recovery. Tandon computers used to sell MS-DOS machines with 1KiB sectors. They ran a specially modified version of DOS.
The problem, of course, was that people wanted to upgrade to the latest MS-DOS from Microsoft. So they would replace Tandon DOS with MS-DOS, and suddenly their entire hard drive would be scrambled.
It's basically the same concept as the Java sandbox... except Microsoft is applying it to the entire browser, rather than just the bit that executes code. That's likely because they don't have much choice--doing it the Java way would break too many ActiveX components and applications.
I remember hearing that ActiveX would only allow privileged operations if the code was digitally signed and verified as trustworthy, and hence would be as safe as Java... so you know what? I'll believe IE 7 is secure when it has been out for 6-12 months and hasn't had a major vulnerability reported.
Sure, Microsoft probably has a convincing sounding explanation for why this time, their system will be secure. But they had a convincing sounding explanation many times in the past, and it never made a damn bit of difference. Sooner or later, you have to look at their track record, assess their credibility, and examine their claims with a skeptical frame of mind.
Look, if you can't afford $600 for a computer, that's fine, but you're going to be stuck with crap whether you buy a PC or a Mac. Apple has decided it doesn't want to compete in the "cheap crap" market, so your only hope would be to get a second hand machine.
Alternatively, pick up a $99 barebones system from Tiger Direct, or a cheap PC from Walmart, and run Linux on it. Linux isn't so bad, I use it every day.
First off, I don't see anyone proposing an 85% penalty on anything.
If rich people renounce their citizenship and move abroad, so what? It's not like the US has any shortage of ambitious businessmen wanting to move here to take their place.
Probably parted out their assets to people not in such a high tax bracket.
Sounds good to me. In fact, if they take the money and spend it in some poor nation they've moved to to avoid tax, that's good too.
But where are these people hypothetically going to move, that doesn't have tax?
I'm not sure if you realize just what I said. EVERYBODY gets the refund. Bill gates, the bum on the street both get it.
Right, so effectively you've just removed the sales tax from a certain amount of spending. After that, everyone pays the same sales tax. If we assume that the poor don't have the cash to spend significantly more, then the average middle class person ends up losing proportionately more of their available money as tax than the average rich person. In other words, I may spend $10,000 a year on stuff I pay sales tax on. Bill Gates may have 10,000 times the income I have, but it's a safe bet he isn't going to be spending $100m a year on goods that have sales tax on. Hence, regressive.
There are people out there that, because of the progressive tax codes, stop bothering to make money and either relax or spend effort on avoiding taxes.
I don't see any evidence of that; quite the opposite. In 1982 the average CEO made 42x what the average worker made; today the average CEO makes 431x what the average worker makes. If the income of poor and middle class people had risen as quickly as the income of the megarich, minimum wage would be over $20 an hour.
I mean, name one corporation that's had trouble finding a rich white guy to do the CEO job because they're all slacking off to avoid tax.
You're basically espousing trickle-down economics. You should look at how well it worked. Yes, it sounds plausible, but a lot of things sound plausible until you look at the statistics.
My experience is that web sites end up inaccessible because the people who create them simply don't think about the problem. As the developer on my team who actually thinks about such things, I have to remind other people why we can't have information only available coded with red vs green images in a table, why we shouldn't use JavaScript for navigational links unless we need to, why we shouldn't have organization structure only available as a big GIF org chart, and so on.
A multi-million dollar judgement against Target would get attention, and ensure that more web developers paid attention.
I can't remember the name of the test, but basically it was very loud low frequency drum-like sounds followed by high frequency clicks. Turns out, this was really problematic for MP3 encoders. Well because they had such trouble with it, it was seized upon as a good test, and work was done into improving performance on it... Except it turned out that often happened at the expense of normal music encoding.
Yeah, but I listen mostly to techno.
And no, that's not just a joke. Some techno is extremely hard to MP3-encode well--pure square waves cause havoc. In fact, the work on LAME that went on on r3mix.net is probably why Warp ended up encoding their catalog with LAME to get the quality they needed for bleep.com.
The way I look at it is: I only have a certain lifespan in which to read books, and the quantity of great books is already such that I can't read them all.
Hence, I tend not to re-read books, and I tend not to keep books unless they are truly first class, and I'm confident that I really will read them more than once.
It's not quite the same in the US as it was in the UK in the 70s.
In the US, you're still legally liable to pay US tax no matter where your income occurs. You are required to report all income, from every country in the world. (I know this as a US resident with overseas income.)
Furthermore, if you are a US citizen, you are legally required to file a US tax return even if you aren't resident in the US.
Now, in practice many rich people (and corporations) don't report all their income, and don't pay taxes on it. They get away with it because they squirrel away their money in countries that don't have financial reporting laws and won't disclose information to the US IRS. And many Americans who move overseas don't bother to file their tax returns. But as I understand it, they are breaking the law.
So increasing US income tax rates isn't going to incent law abiding people to move their money overseas. It may lead to increased law breaking, and that law-breaking may be hard to police, but the same argument could be made against any system of taxation. I mean, look at the nightmare Italy has trying to police sales tax.
Slashdot Mirror
More fool you, then. It's dubious enough relying on the US media to report US news, let alone world news.
The best example has to be K&R. It's a very slim book, all B&W, hasn't really gone out of date, yet it has always been very expensive.
Linux gets faster too.
Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed. I just upgraded to the latest KDE and a bunch of other updates, and got another performance jump. Once they shake the bugs out of the Radeon drivers for X.org, I'll get accelerated X, and another big speed boost.
In fact, of the major OSs, it's pretty much only Windows that keeps getting slower.
I'd say Windows is more like a Ford Mustang, Ford Crown Vic, or Ford Pinto. (What is it with Ford cars and bursting into flames?)
Oh, or maybe like a Ford Explorer. Because, you know, it's all the device drivers' fault, not the OS itself, as the Windows apologists tell us.
What you need to remember is that Windows is the largest software product ever created, when measured in lines of code. Bigger than the previous record holder, IBM's MVS. Bigger than the Star Wars missile shield defense software that nobody could ever get to work.
Specifically, Vista is 50 million lines of code (Mloc). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code
To compare, RedHat 7 was only 30 Mloc, including sendmail, Apache, and so on. So saying Microsoft are going to rewrite 60% of Vista by January, is like saying they could start now and have the whole of RedHat 7 completely rewritten by January.
Or to pick another data point: it's like saying Microsoft are going to start from scratch now, and write another Windows NT 5.0 by January, and have plenty of time for debugging--because NT 5.0 was only 20 Mloc.
Now do you see why software engineers reading the announcement are more than a little skeptical?
If it's really true that they need to rewrite 60% of Vista, then my professional opinion is that there's absolutely no way in hell they'll have something good enough to ship in 2007.
Even if it's out by a factor of 2 or 3, they're still in big trouble. The original Windows NT was only 4 Mloc, and there was a 5 year gap between Windows 95 and the actual release of NT.
IE 6: only 1 month in the last 3 years when it hasn't had an unpatched vulnerability; 15% of holes "extremely" critical; 30% give system access; currently 4 unpatched holes.
Mozilla 1.0: no unpatched vulnerabilities about half the time; 4% of holes "extremely" critical; 20% give system access; currently 0 unpatched holes.
I know which I'd rather use.
Yes, but are either of them dumb enough to make it the normal MTA installed?
I mean, Debian *comes with* sendmail, but nobody will have it unless they're dumb enough to explicitly request that it be installed.
It was done with hard drives too. Back around 1986 I was working in data recovery. Tandon computers used to sell MS-DOS machines with 1KiB sectors. They ran a specially modified version of DOS.
The problem, of course, was that people wanted to upgrade to the latest MS-DOS from Microsoft. So they would replace Tandon DOS with MS-DOS, and suddenly their entire hard drive would be scrambled.
And then they'd call us.
Are you saying FC5 still has sendmail as default MTA?
It's basically the same concept as the Java sandbox... except Microsoft is applying it to the entire browser, rather than just the bit that executes code. That's likely because they don't have much choice--doing it the Java way would break too many ActiveX components and applications.
The problem is the cost of making a 3 ton chocolate bar.
I remember hearing that ActiveX would only allow privileged operations if the code was digitally signed and verified as trustworthy, and hence would be as safe as Java... so you know what? I'll believe IE 7 is secure when it has been out for 6-12 months and hasn't had a major vulnerability reported.
Sure, Microsoft probably has a convincing sounding explanation for why this time, their system will be secure. But they had a convincing sounding explanation many times in the past, and it never made a damn bit of difference. Sooner or later, you have to look at their track record, assess their credibility, and examine their claims with a skeptical frame of mind.
Look, if you can't afford $600 for a computer, that's fine, but you're going to be stuck with crap whether you buy a PC or a Mac. Apple has decided it doesn't want to compete in the "cheap crap" market, so your only hope would be to get a second hand machine.
Alternatively, pick up a $99 barebones system from Tiger Direct, or a cheap PC from Walmart, and run Linux on it. Linux isn't so bad, I use it every day.
Believe it or not, OS X, Windows XP and Photoshop are all different pieces of software.
The GPL SPARC thing was a story a couple of days ago, just FYI.
So basically:
- All the domains that are empty (parked awaiting content) will be served from Windows servers
- All the domains that have content, that somebody cares about, will be served from Linux as before
Gosh, what a victory for Microsoft.
Yeah, well, if I had a million or 2 in the bank, I'd quit my job and work on free software all the time.
First off, I don't see anyone proposing an 85% penalty on anything.
If rich people renounce their citizenship and move abroad, so what? It's not like the US has any shortage of ambitious businessmen wanting to move here to take their place.
Sounds good to me. In fact, if they take the money and spend it in some poor nation they've moved to to avoid tax, that's good too.
But where are these people hypothetically going to move, that doesn't have tax?
Right, so effectively you've just removed the sales tax from a certain amount of spending. After that, everyone pays the same sales tax. If we assume that the poor don't have the cash to spend significantly more, then the average middle class person ends up losing proportionately more of their available money as tax than the average rich person. In other words, I may spend $10,000 a year on stuff I pay sales tax on. Bill Gates may have 10,000 times the income I have, but it's a safe bet he isn't going to be spending $100m a year on goods that have sales tax on. Hence, regressive.
I don't see any evidence of that; quite the opposite. In 1982 the average CEO made 42x what the average worker made; today the average CEO makes 431x what the average worker makes. If the income of poor and middle class people had risen as quickly as the income of the megarich, minimum wage would be over $20 an hour.
I mean, name one corporation that's had trouble finding a rich white guy to do the CEO job because they're all slacking off to avoid tax.
You're basically espousing trickle-down economics. You should look at how well it worked. Yes, it sounds plausible, but a lot of things sound plausible until you look at the statistics.
My experience is that web sites end up inaccessible because the people who create them simply don't think about the problem. As the developer on my team who actually thinks about such things, I have to remind other people why we can't have information only available coded with red vs green images in a table, why we shouldn't use JavaScript for navigational links unless we need to, why we shouldn't have organization structure only available as a big GIF org chart, and so on.
A multi-million dollar judgement against Target would get attention, and ensure that more web developers paid attention.
Sounds to me like you should have a content management system, rather than expecting everyone to play web developer.
I agree with the parent. Wanting to use a web browser as a file manager? Yeeeesh.
Yeah, but I listen mostly to techno.
And no, that's not just a joke. Some techno is extremely hard to MP3-encode well--pure square waves cause havoc. In fact, the work on LAME that went on on r3mix.net is probably why Warp ended up encoding their catalog with LAME to get the quality they needed for bleep.com.
The way I look at it is: I only have a certain lifespan in which to read books, and the quantity of great books is already such that I can't read them all.
Hence, I tend not to re-read books, and I tend not to keep books unless they are truly first class, and I'm confident that I really will read them more than once.
It's not quite the same in the US as it was in the UK in the 70s.
In the US, you're still legally liable to pay US tax no matter where your income occurs. You are required to report all income, from every country in the world. (I know this as a US resident with overseas income.)
Furthermore, if you are a US citizen, you are legally required to file a US tax return even if you aren't resident in the US.
Now, in practice many rich people (and corporations) don't report all their income, and don't pay taxes on it. They get away with it because they squirrel away their money in countries that don't have financial reporting laws and won't disclose information to the US IRS. And many Americans who move overseas don't bother to file their tax returns. But as I understand it, they are breaking the law.
So increasing US income tax rates isn't going to incent law abiding people to move their money overseas. It may lead to increased law breaking, and that law-breaking may be hard to police, but the same argument could be made against any system of taxation. I mean, look at the nightmare Italy has trying to police sales tax.