Someone explain. Apparently Microsoft has oodles of it and [Net|Free|Open]BSD, Linux (by virtue of the fact they are free) and Sun, AIX, HP-UX (by virtue of the fact they are more obscure and they don't teach those kinds support in MCSE courses) have none or at least less of it and it is more expensive.
But what is support? Someone explain to me how and in what ways they get more "support" from Microsoft and less from say Red Hat in a corporate setting in whcih support contracts wiht. If one is downloading
I have used registered Microsoft products and never quite understood what "support" meant in the context of off the shelf software. How exactly does one get "supported"? I at all the workplaces I've been at (and let's face it Microsoft is run at ~ 100% of workplaces) I hae never noticed any "support" going on. If something goes wrong it's the local crew or the user that have to fix it: eg. you're on your own. In fact most commercial software licenses stipulate to this - so I can't see how they're much different than "no warrantee" free software licenses. Microsoft software - take IIS - in particular doesn't seem to have any more or less attention to quality control than say Apache.
I really don't know what support is and the aove queries are *not* facetious. I really do want someone to quantify and clarify what is meant by the nebulous term "support". The IIS vs. Apache example is a good one. Let's start there and use that product space to explain the term "support".
... where the toolkit can be "free"... but on the "real" platforms (OS/X and NT) developping apps costs money. Blah lbah blah it's well designed etc. etc. So was NeXT and it's developper workstation and license was $uper expen$ive too...
"Anyways named pipes is being deprecated, as of SQL Server 7, in lieu of TCP/IP Sockets".
Wow another new invention by Microsoft!
Of course I have no problem with MS adopting standard approaches to problems that other RDBMS makers (and MySQL and Postgresql) have had for years. But I just **know** it's gonna bug me when I hear this bumpf spewed back at me in the industry press as "innovation".
The same stories will then get clipped and mailed to senators and legislators by lobbyists to support the argument that MS can't be touched or the economy will crumble and we won't be innovative and have MS TCP-IP any more....
The irony is that he wants to fight assaults designed to change the purpose of government by changing laws in direct response to a terrorist attack.
Irony for *us* because we are aware, sentient, intelligent. Ashcroft is a worrisome example of the idiocy that rules in high places in almost every sphere of endeavor. Sometimes I wonder if it actually *helps* to be inordinately stupid in order to succeed today. And before it happens let me BEG people to please not give Bill Gates as an example of a smart person who succeeded. It hurts my brain to hear that kind of thing.
... and I did too. The 2.2.* kernels were awesome. Now however Linux - despite it's promise - is a failure.
</gist>
That was some tricky trolling there... I was almost lulled by your compliments into believing your FUD. Only thing is 2.4.* shows a vast overall improvement in performance for me... har har...
Anyway don't panic or anything, nothing has changed, XP will come pre-installed on 99.9999% of computers and manufacturers will continue to cherish and suck up to Microsoft for decades to come. Linus' remark about "world domination" for Linux is a **joke**... do you get it? Mind you that was way back in the days when irony ruled so...
Anyway it sounds like you need to stick with what you know, but be polite enough not to spread FUD under the age old guise of pitting one's competitors against one another. The [(solaris vs. freebsd vs. linux)] vs. XP is a dubious analysis at best since loads of linux boxen were once running NT.
10 years from now maybe there'll be a kernel debug trace and auto-mail of oopses "talkback" style with Artificial Intelligence Enhanced bugzilla version 5 for fixing them and the kernel could be under source control overseen by a committee of the UN...
Or of course we could all be fried to a crisp in a nuclear war.
... because when microsoft reinvents the wheel they make it EVEN ROUNDER.
Seriously though... port some ultra popular language to plan9 if you need to (perl python java haha) and then uhh what's the point of MS's less mature experimental distributed OS?
Err oh yeah I just remembered it will be a "better plan9 than plan9":-P
First the gays and feminists and now this ...
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 1
... how many other people were behind this ?
</sarcasm>
Sorry, I guess I shouldn't be facetious about this, but people who blame Zimmerman are sickos every bit as out to lunch as Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson. Is there time yet to try to get some perspective rather than blindly mindlessly lashing out? Think about the guys who trained them how to fly - they have much more reason to feel bad. But are likely reasonable enough to know *they* did not kill those people and are not *guilty of anything*. They and Zimmerman are MUCH LESS responsible for this than the people who seem to think it is their job to spread *MAYHEM* in the middle east [The Independent] - and a sizeable number of those people are American politicians, security experts and cabinet secretaries. It is they who will dig the US deeper into doodoo while idiotic people run about blaming Philip Zimmerman.
Dear Phil, in comparison you have *nothing* to feel guilty about. Please instead feel proud and thank you.
I will look favourably upon handhelds laptops etc that are branded Redhat. BTW I will be buying some RedHat stock and buying (not d'ling) a copy of whichever RedHat 8.* "boxed set" that comes with:
* kernel 2.4.12
* solid ext3/XFS/reiserfs fs support
* XFree 4.2 (looking forward to better DPS/Xdgs capability... heheh)
* Apache 2.0
* Gnome 2.0
* KDE 3.0
* glibc 2.4 (improved C/ObjC/C++ dll.so loading speed with maybe "wired" memory locations so apps load faster and do less "mapping" of memory)
* gcc 3.1 (able to compile kernel *and* userland please and ditto load)
* Out of the box USB and Firewire support easy enough to use for a *dog*!! Yes a DOG!
With all the important projects that are housed a SF it would be nice to think that there was an easy way to migrate or reestablish it in the event of closure, bankruptcy, etc. There's FSF's "Savanah" site but it might not be able to take the load and could possibly restrict projects to those using the GPL. Sometimes plugs on bandwidth get pulled very abruptly with little warning.
I mean if you write an e-mail from one address acquired under a fake name and fake userID that you have at a provider which you only access from an account that you have with *another* provider, which you pay by credit card registered to your fake identity (you know like use "John Smith" instead "Osama bin Laden"). Then the e-mails consist of:
"Do you rmember the time me and your nieces went to the park - about 3 years ago. I think you have 4 nieces right? Well I remember I bought each one an ice cream...."
blah blah blah... BUT the seeminly boring messages when accumulated over a period of 6 weeks reveal (in every 4th word if ROT13'ed and then utransliterated twice from English to Cyrillic/Russian and then again to Arabic) a series of numbers. The numbers of course contain all the "instructions". Add more layers as needed: communicate in hard to understand dialects, etc. Another cool thing to do is to create an entire fake network of "communicators" who may or may not be communicating in code. Plant lots of fake information, etc.
How can any of this be stopped by snooping or banning cryptography? If one wants to prevent terrorism on aircraft it would be much more effective to ban air travel than to "crack down on the Internet". The country can probably function quite well without air travel (yes it can) - as long as the Internet is working well!
Carnivore and its ilk seems like yet another silly techno-fix to the lack of real intelligence information in the CIA, FBI and NSA. With no contacts on the ground and no reliable information these agencies instead decide to spy on the e-mail of their own citizens. And elected representatives seem to think it's OK since the Internet was how the terrorists communicated: in the eyes of legislators what evil will the Internet be responsible for next? I mean Charles Manson used the postal system for goodness sake...
... they need to be ignored or better yet destroyed. Exchange is expensive and requires several people to baby it constantly and vast 100 gig RAID arrays to store data. I can't think of a single mail server application that is anything near as expensive to run and maintain.
It's time for natural selection to take its toll..
Hehe... with such a powerful machine you should do yourself a favour and GET MORE RAM!! (256megs?? My *Mom* has 256 Megs and she uses her computer for "electronic mail" and "recipes").
This release takes 17 seconds to start up on a pII-233 (about 1 second less if you use a reall small bookmark file). Sure, that's a bit slow (given the Netscape 4 takes ~ 12 seonds and Opera takes ~ 7 seconds. But 0.9.3 took 24 seconds (constistantly) so thats about a **30% start up time improvement*** and there's more to come. I'm not sure what the estimates are but I heard 4 seonds faster on my machine is a very likely possible and that's without the BRUTAL_SHARING stuff in mozilla yet (which will make it faster) or improvements in gcc, glibc and ld which will likely get startup to ~10 seconds or less on a machine like mine.
Mabye I'm dreaming but it seems to me that rendering pages is *extremely FAST*. It's only creating windows opening dialogas etc that is SLOW. The main hitch I see now is on new window creation (which takes a long time to do). For example on a test page that uses javascript to open and close 75 windows one at a time (see the super simple code at this URL and either copy and make you own test or click on the link on that page):
http://206.191.52.79/MozTester/pagebanger.html
on a P233 running Linux (you likely want to try this on a faster machin it's the relative comparisons that are interesting).
* Netscape 4.7.* takes about a minute
* Opera takes about 15 seconds
* Mozilla takes about 5 minutes !! (actually I stopped timing it's so slow)
* KFM/Konqueror ?? (old version doesn't work try it with KDE 2.0)
* Galeon ??? (not timed recently - the sort of more "native" GTK GUI might be faster??)
* Embedded Moz etc.
* Other browsers??
On MS Windows the Mozilla GUI is likely faster (haven't tested) and IE of course is very fast (does the above in ~ 15-20 seconds)... However IE 5.0 seems SLOWER on rendering pages and only really flies better on creating new windows.
Some of the slowness on a test page like the one above is due to the server so I encourage you to create your own javascript tests that just open and close blank windows or something...
If the main slowness in Mozilla comes in drawing its own GUI this seems like a GOOD thing since opitimzing on that part of the beast hasn't even really started in earnest. It makes sense to me that the GUI would be the last thing to be sped up since rendering speed and correctness are the first job.
This release takes 17 seconds to start up on a pII-233 (about 1 second less if you use a reall small bookmark file). Sure, that's a bit slow (given the Netscape 4 takes ~ 12 seonds and Opera takes ~ 7 seconds. But 0.9.3 took 24 seconds (constistantly) so thats about a 30% start up time improvement and there's more to come. I'm not sure what the estimates are but 4 seonds faster on my machine is likey possible and that's without the BRUTAL_SHARING stuff in mozilla yet (which will make it faster) or improvements in gcc, glibc and ld which will likely get startup to ~10 seconds or less on a machine like mine.
Rendering pages is extremely FAST but creating windows is SLOW. The main hitch I have right now is on new window creation (which takes a long time to do). For example on a test page that uses javascript to open and close 75 windows one at a time (see the super simple code at this URL and either copy and make you own test or click on the link on that page):
On a P233 running Linux I get the following (you'll likely want to try this on a faster machine - it's the relative comparisons that are interesting).
* Netscape 4.7.* takes about a minute
* Opera takes about 15 seconds
* Mozilla takes about 5 minutes !! (actually I stopped timing it's so slow)
* KFM/Konqueror ?? (old version doesn't work try it with KDE 2.0)
* Galeon ??? (not timed recently - the sort of more "native" GTK GUI might be faster??)
* Embedded Moz etc.
* Other browsers??
On MS Windows the Mozilla GUI is likely faster (haven't tested) and IE of course is very fast... However IE 5.0 seems SLOWER on rendering pages and only really flies better on creating new windows.
Some of the slowness is due to the server so I engourage you to create your own javascript tests that just openm and close blank windows or something... but the main slowness in Mozilla comes in drawing its own GUI... Other than that the performance and speed of Moz is pleasantly peppy even on old machines (though lots RAM is recommended).
Microsoft gives pretty much equal amounts of money to both parties. Do you really think they would give money to only one party and take the chance that they are left without influence if they lose?
OK thanks for that explanation. It's real good they (and huge oil companies, arms manufacturers etc.) give *equally* to "both" parties. That make's it more ethical I guess.
Luckily Americans have agreed to reduce the "choice" of parties = 2 or influence could get expensive to buy... Of course the third viable choice for more and more Americans (a group that is getting closer and closer to constituting the majority) is to simply not vote at all.
Of course just because you don't vote doesn't mean you don't *pay* for the election in reduced tax revenues (contributions are deductions of course) and constant mind-numbing uninformative sound bites from campaign ads on TV and unintelligent pundits of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or whoever his current equivalent is...
Of course the media will uncover a potential candidate's every single instance of oral sex and teenage masturbation before they even bother to criticize or intelligently discuss campaign finance. And why is that? Because the ads that are bought and paid for... uhh, well gues who gets the money?
Slashdot should take political ads next campaign - a bit of perl could tailor the personal attack ads per constituency based on the guesstimate geographical location of the incoming IP connection. Just be sure to give 10% of the dough to open source projects.
Boycott is perhaps too strong a word - ignore would be more kindly. Besides, you probably can't boycott it indefinitely without significant effort. If you buy consumer computer equipment in the next few years (especially laptops) it will be *forced* upon you whether you like it or not. If the boycott means "give me the choice to not consume this product" and it shakes up suppliers then I'm all for it. I can certainly think of better ways to spend 299$ (US$.. larger number up here in Canada). Ways that don't involve technology even... or at least what passes for "technology" in these days of hype.
Hey I'm all for technology, being sort of a geek and all, but it's time for this fascination with truly mediocre and overpriced software to end... and perhaps with ITC and computers in general. We need to be geeky and technophilic about *REAL* important technology. Shift Magazine's article "Why technology is failing us [and how we can fix it]" will explain:
http://www.shift.com/mag/9.3mag_toc.asp
The stupendous waste of money and capital that was poured into IT/dot.com and that could have gone into more thoroughly revolutionary technology is staggering when you stop to think of it. In reading the Shift piece about Silcon Valley's "non-revolutionary" landscape (traffic jams, malls, SUV's, etc), Ivan Illich's "Ideology of the automobile" and "Tools for conviviality" come to mind: at least there's a place to start grounding technology in human needs...
In that context Microsoft is not an innovator - it's been proven over and over again; and that just in the area of the IT industry alone. In fact a huge chunk of the IT industry *itself* is more hype than anything else so this makes it even more compelling to avoid spending even more on MS products. Taking into account the fact that, for what we *do* need computers for the free OSes are now more than "good enough" for anything and everything the utter irrelevance of MS as a "technology leader" is clearer than ever.
What Microsoft **is** significant for is its vast pool of capital - which is most likely going to be **horribly wasted** reinventing the wheel, slowly, in a way that benefits shareholders. They are like a huge bank that doesn't have enough loans in play... IMNSHO the most useful thing they could do now is exit the market intact and redeploy that capital in other sectors (Bill? time to retire!) because there is really nowhere to go but down for a good long while otherwise. But hey, yah gotta love the "free" market: it can't be "free" without vast waste, irrationality, duplication and utterly pointless uses of resources going along with that freedom. We all need to remember *that* the next time some analyst on CNN says "the market" or "the economy" (like they are discrete describable objects) is "adjusting" or that some kind of rational "equilibrium" is being established...
All the other reasons for "boycotting" MS can be found detailed here http://www.vcnet.com/bms/ - yup, all the bad stuff MS did and then denied while what it really should have been doing was truly innovating. Sorry,.NET and C# are too little too late. It has been proven MS can't play nice and it seems high time to me for them to go sit in the corner for a really long long time.
Meanwhile perhaps someone could buy their cash pool in a breakup firesale and put it to use...
Yahoo uses FreeBSD in droves and droves of servers. Perhaps their priority is to have a good optimized uniprocessor system running on clusters of boxes which has it's own efficiencies and benefits.
Given that many of the improvements they release don't get included into distributors' realeases and that they've release "patched" ISO versions of RH 7.1 etc. already.
How long 'til an official SGI-Linux distro? Or how logn 'til SGI buys a Linux distro company - (assuming they have the cash).
This is the "new economy"
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 1
.... based on knowledge and technology.
It is not the same as other "old economies" so therefore MS is not a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone explain. Apparently Microsoft has oodles of it and [Net|Free|Open]BSD, Linux (by virtue of the fact they are free) and Sun, AIX, HP-UX (by virtue of the fact they are more obscure and they don't teach those kinds support in MCSE courses) have none or at least less of it and it is more expensive.
But what is support? Someone explain to me how and in what ways they get more "support" from Microsoft and less from say Red Hat in a corporate setting in whcih support contracts wiht. If one is downloading
I have used registered Microsoft products and never quite understood what "support" meant in the context of off the shelf software. How exactly does one get "supported"? I at all the workplaces I've been at (and let's face it Microsoft is run at ~ 100% of workplaces) I hae never noticed any "support" going on. If something goes wrong it's the local crew or the user that have to fix it: eg. you're on your own. In fact most commercial software licenses stipulate to this - so I can't see how they're much different than "no warrantee" free software licenses. Microsoft software - take IIS - in particular doesn't seem to have any more or less attention to quality control than say Apache.
I really don't know what support is and the aove queries are *not* facetious. I really do want someone to quantify and clarify what is meant by the nebulous term "support". The IIS vs. Apache example is a good one. Let's start there and use that product space to explain the term "support".
... where the toolkit can be "free" ... but on the "real" platforms (OS/X and NT) developping apps costs money. Blah lbah blah it's well designed etc. etc. So was NeXT and it's developper workstation and license was $uper expen$ive too ...
... cooked and delivered to my door. I could save a lot of time that way.
"Anyways named pipes is being deprecated, as of SQL Server 7, in lieu of TCP/IP Sockets".
....
Wow another new invention by Microsoft!
Of course I have no problem with MS adopting standard approaches to problems that other RDBMS makers (and MySQL and Postgresql) have had for years. But I just **know** it's gonna bug me when I hear this bumpf spewed back at me in the industry press as "innovation".
The same stories will then get clipped and mailed to senators and legislators by lobbyists to support the argument that MS can't be touched or the economy will crumble and we won't be innovative and have MS TCP-IP any more
sigh
phreak them right out .. make their long distance bills so large even bin Laden can't pay.
Irony for *us* because we are aware, sentient, intelligent. Ashcroft is a worrisome example of the idiocy that rules in high places in almost every sphere of endeavor. Sometimes I wonder if it actually *helps* to be inordinately stupid in order to succeed today. And before it happens let me BEG people to please not give Bill Gates as an example of a smart person who succeeded. It hurts my brain to hear that kind of thing.
That was some tricky trolling there ... I was almost lulled by your compliments into believing your FUD. Only thing is 2.4.* shows a vast overall improvement in performance for me ... har har ...
Anyway don't panic or anything, nothing has changed, XP will come pre-installed on 99.9999% of computers and manufacturers will continue to cherish and suck up to Microsoft for decades to come. Linus' remark about "world domination" for Linux is a **joke** ... do you get it? Mind you that was way back in the days when irony ruled so ...
Anyway it sounds like you need to stick with what you know, but be polite enough not to spread FUD under the age old guise of pitting one's competitors against one another. The [(solaris vs. freebsd vs. linux)] vs. XP is a dubious analysis at best since loads of linux boxen were once running NT.
10 years from now maybe there'll be a kernel debug trace and auto-mail of oopses "talkback" style with Artificial Intelligence Enhanced bugzilla version 5 for fixing them and the kernel could be under source control overseen by a committee of the UN ...
Or of course we could all be fried to a crisp in a nuclear war.
Use an s390 machine and you can just create a new virtual hardware device to install the new kernel on leaving the other to gather uptime.
... ;)
Mind you with os/400 400 days uptime isn't that much
It works fine on several architectures why isn't it in the default kernel?
... because when microsoft reinvents the wheel they make it EVEN ROUNDER.
... port some ultra popular language to plan9 if you need to (perl python java haha) and then uhh what's the point of MS's less mature experimental distributed OS?
:-P
Seriously though
Err oh yeah I just remembered it will be a "better plan9 than plan9"
... how many other people were behind this ?
</sarcasm>
Sorry, I guess I shouldn't be facetious about this, but people who blame Zimmerman are sickos every bit as out to lunch as Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson. Is there time yet to try to get some perspective rather than blindly mindlessly lashing out? Think about the guys who trained them how to fly - they have much more reason to feel bad. But are likely reasonable enough to know *they* did not kill those people and are not *guilty of anything*. They and Zimmerman are MUCH LESS responsible for this than the people who seem to think it is their job to spread *MAYHEM* in the middle east [The Independent] - and a sizeable number of those people are American politicians, security experts and cabinet secretaries. It is they who will dig the US deeper into doodoo while idiotic people run about blaming Philip Zimmerman.
Dear Phil, in comparison you have *nothing* to feel guilty about. Please instead feel proud and thank you.
.... I have to use Mozilla and post to an Apache webserver running perl based application ....
....
Like this: thwaaaaacccckkk:
So to say MS products are crap and that MS is evil I have to use Mozilla and post to an Apache webserver running perl based application
Like this:
(... recurse infinitely)
I will look favourably upon handhelds laptops etc that are branded Redhat. BTW I will be buying some RedHat stock and buying (not d'ling) a copy of whichever RedHat 8.* "boxed set" that comes with:
... heheh)
:-P
;-)
* kernel 2.4.12
* solid ext3/XFS/reiserfs fs support
* XFree 4.2 (looking forward to better DPS/Xdgs capability
* Apache 2.0
* Gnome 2.0
* KDE 3.0
* glibc 2.4 (improved C/ObjC/C++ dll.so loading speed with maybe "wired" memory locations so apps load faster and do less "mapping" of memory)
* gcc 3.1 (able to compile kernel *and* userland please and ditto load)
* Out of the box USB and Firewire support easy enough to use for a *dog*!! Yes a DOG!
Just another datapoint for your marketing dept
thank you for your attention
With all the important projects that are housed a SF it would be nice to think that there was an easy way to migrate or reestablish it in the event of closure, bankruptcy, etc. There's FSF's "Savanah" site but it might not be able to take the load and could possibly restrict projects to those using the GPL. Sometimes plugs on bandwidth get pulled very abruptly with little warning.
I mean if you write an e-mail from one address acquired under a fake name and fake userID that you have at a provider which you only access from an account that you have with *another* provider, which you pay by credit card registered to your fake identity (you know like use "John Smith" instead "Osama bin Laden"). Then the e-mails consist of:
...."
... BUT the seeminly boring messages when accumulated over a period of 6 weeks reveal (in every 4th word if ROT13'ed and then utransliterated twice from English to Cyrillic/Russian and then again to Arabic) a series of numbers. The numbers of course contain all the "instructions". Add more layers as needed: communicate in hard to understand dialects, etc. Another cool thing to do is to create an entire fake network of "communicators" who may or may not be communicating in code. Plant lots of fake information, etc.
...
"Do you rmember the time me and your nieces went to the park - about 3 years ago. I think you have 4 nieces right? Well I remember I bought each one an ice cream
blah blah blah
How can any of this be stopped by snooping or banning cryptography? If one wants to prevent terrorism on aircraft it would be much more effective to ban air travel than to "crack down on the Internet". The country can probably function quite well without air travel (yes it can) - as long as the Internet is working well!
Carnivore and its ilk seems like yet another silly techno-fix to the lack of real intelligence information in the CIA, FBI and NSA. With no contacts on the ground and no reliable information these agencies instead decide to spy on the e-mail of their own citizens. And elected representatives seem to think it's OK since the Internet was how the terrorists communicated: in the eyes of legislators what evil will the Internet be responsible for next? I mean Charles Manson used the postal system for goodness sake
... they need to be ignored or better yet destroyed. Exchange is expensive and requires several people to baby it constantly and vast 100 gig RAID arrays to store data. I can't think of a single mail server application that is anything near as expensive to run and maintain.
..
It's time for natural selection to take its toll
Hehe ... with such a powerful machine you should do yourself a favour and GET MORE RAM!! (256megs?? My *Mom* has 256 Megs and she uses her computer for "electronic mail" and "recipes").
:-P
Also do yourself a favour and install FreeBSD
Mabye I'm dreaming but it seems to me that rendering pages is *extremely FAST*. It's only creating windows opening dialogas etc that is SLOW. The main hitch I see now is on new window creation (which takes a long time to do). For example on a test page that uses javascript to open and close 75 windows one at a time (see the super simple code at this URL and either copy and make you own test or click on the link on that page):
http://206.191.52.79/MozTester/pagebanger.html
on a P233 running Linux (you likely want to try this on a faster machin it's the relative comparisons that are interesting).
* Netscape 4.7.* takes about a minute
* Opera takes about 15 seconds
* Mozilla takes about 5 minutes !! (actually I stopped timing it's so slow)
* KFM/Konqueror ?? (old version doesn't work try it with KDE 2.0)
* Galeon ??? (not timed recently - the sort of more "native" GTK GUI might be faster??)
* Embedded Moz etc.
* Other browsers??
On MS Windows the Mozilla GUI is likely faster (haven't tested) and IE of course is very fast (does the above in ~ 15-20 seconds)
Some of the slowness on a test page like the one above is due to the server so I encourage you to create your own javascript tests that just open and close blank windows or something
If the main slowness in Mozilla comes in drawing its own GUI this seems like a GOOD thing since opitimzing on that part of the beast hasn't even really started in earnest. It makes sense to me that the GUI would be the last thing to be sped up since rendering speed and correctness are the first job.
Rendering pages is extremely FAST but creating windows is SLOW. The main hitch I have right now is on new window creation (which takes a long time to do). For example on a test page that uses javascript to open and close 75 windows one at a time (see the super simple code at this URL and either copy and make you own test or click on the link on that page):
http://206.191.52.79/MozTester/pagebanger.html
On a P233 running Linux I get the following (you'll likely want to try this on a faster machine - it's the relative comparisons that are interesting).
* Netscape 4.7.* takes about a minute
* Opera takes about 15 seconds
* Mozilla takes about 5 minutes !! (actually I stopped timing it's so slow)
* KFM/Konqueror ?? (old version doesn't work try it with KDE 2.0)
* Galeon ??? (not timed recently - the sort of more "native" GTK GUI might be faster??)
* Embedded Moz etc.
* Other browsers??
On MS Windows the Mozilla GUI is likely faster (haven't tested) and IE of course is very fast
Some of the slowness is due to the server so I engourage you to create your own javascript tests that just openm and close blank windows or something
OK thanks for that explanation. It's real good they (and huge oil companies, arms manufacturers etc.) give *equally* to "both" parties. That make's it more ethical I guess.
Luckily Americans have agreed to reduce the "choice" of parties = 2 or influence could get expensive to buy ... Of course the third viable choice for more and more Americans (a group that is getting closer and closer to constituting the majority) is to simply not vote at all.
Of course just because you don't vote doesn't mean you don't *pay* for the election in reduced tax revenues (contributions are deductions of course) and constant mind-numbing uninformative sound bites from campaign ads on TV and unintelligent pundits of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or whoever his current equivalent is ...
Of course the media will uncover a potential candidate's every single instance of oral sex and teenage masturbation before they even bother to criticize or intelligently discuss campaign finance. And why is that? Because the ads that are bought and paid for ... uhh, well gues who gets the money?
Slashdot should take political ads next campaign - a bit of perl could tailor the personal attack ads per constituency based on the guesstimate geographical location of the incoming IP connection. Just be sure to give 10% of the dough to open source projects.
Boycott is perhaps too strong a word - ignore would be more kindly. Besides, you probably can't boycott it indefinitely without significant effort. If you buy consumer computer equipment in the next few years (especially laptops) it will be *forced* upon you whether you like it or not. If the boycott means "give me the choice to not consume this product" and it shakes up suppliers then I'm all for it. I can certainly think of better ways to spend 299$ (US$ .. larger number up here in Canada). Ways that don't involve technology even ... or at least what passes for "technology" in these days of hype.
... and perhaps with ITC and computers in general. We need to be geeky and technophilic about *REAL* important technology. Shift Magazine's article "Why technology is failing us [and how we can fix it]" will explain:
...
... IMNSHO the most useful thing they could do now is exit the market intact and redeploy that capital in other sectors (Bill? time to retire!) because there is really nowhere to go but down for a good long while otherwise. But hey, yah gotta love the "free" market: it can't be "free" without vast waste, irrationality, duplication and utterly pointless uses of resources going along with that freedom. We all need to remember *that* the next time some analyst on CNN says "the market" or "the economy" (like they are discrete describable objects) is "adjusting" or that some kind of rational "equilibrium" is being established ...
...
Hey I'm all for technology, being sort of a geek and all, but it's time for this fascination with truly mediocre and overpriced software to end
http://www.shift.com/mag/9.3mag_toc.asp
The stupendous waste of money and capital that was poured into IT/dot.com and that could have gone into more thoroughly revolutionary technology is staggering when you stop to think of it. In reading the Shift piece about Silcon Valley's "non-revolutionary" landscape (traffic jams, malls, SUV's, etc), Ivan Illich's "Ideology of the automobile" and "Tools for conviviality" come to mind: at least there's a place to start grounding technology in human needs
In that context Microsoft is not an innovator - it's been proven over and over again; and that just in the area of the IT industry alone. In fact a huge chunk of the IT industry *itself* is more hype than anything else so this makes it even more compelling to avoid spending even more on MS products. Taking into account the fact that, for what we *do* need computers for the free OSes are now more than "good enough" for anything and everything the utter irrelevance of MS as a "technology leader" is clearer than ever.
What Microsoft **is** significant for is its vast pool of capital - which is most likely going to be **horribly wasted** reinventing the wheel, slowly, in a way that benefits shareholders. They are like a huge bank that doesn't have enough loans in play
All the other reasons for "boycotting" MS can be found detailed here http://www.vcnet.com/bms/ - yup, all the bad stuff MS did and then denied while what it really should have been doing was truly innovating. Sorry,.NET and C# are too little too late. It has been proven MS can't play nice and it seems high time to me for them to go sit in the corner for a really long long time.
Meanwhile perhaps someone could buy their cash pool in a breakup firesale and put it to use
Yahoo uses FreeBSD in droves and droves of servers. Perhaps their priority is to have a good optimized uniprocessor system running on clusters of boxes which has it's own efficiencies and benefits.
Not everyone needs or will benefit from SMP.
Given that many of the improvements they release don't get included into distributors' realeases and that they've release "patched" ISO versions of RH 7.1 etc. already.
How long 'til an official SGI-Linux distro? Or how logn 'til SGI buys a Linux distro company - (assuming they have the cash).
.... based on knowledge and technology.
It is not the same as other "old economies" so therefore MS is not a monopoly.
Ipso facto.
<sarcasm/>