Well, the most obvious things that a clueless user would notice are Integrated search (available for XP, but not quite as well integrated), New games, the sidebar gadgets, Built-in DVD maker, Built-in Media Center (though some people bought XP with Media center, most didn't and the most common version of Vista sold is Home Premium that has Media Center), Vastly improved email client, Snippng tool, etc.. All those things are pretty obvious to anyone who's non-technical even.
I agree, which is why I said Microsoft may be to blame for that. But that doesn't change the fact the UAC is doing what it's supposed to, preventing one user from interfering with another.
The All Users function was always a bit of a hack anyways, but it makes a lot of sense from a locked down desktop perspective where users do not get administrative privs. It's just bad when you have multiple users with admin privs using the same machine (or even a single user with admin privs and apps that are installed as 'all users").
You have to understand the history as well. Microsoft grew up as a single-user OS and slowly morphed into a multi-user OS. They didn't grow up with the culture that unix-like systems have where the system was assumed to be multi-user.
Perhaps you should go back to history class. one of Microsoft's first non-lanugage products was Microsoft Xenix, a System V based OS that was later sold to some company nobody ever heard of called SCO. Microsoft was doing multi-user before Apple even had a GUI or Linux even existed.
UAC pops up asking you to elevate to delete a shortcut on the desktop, and then annoys you a SECOND time, asking if you're really sure you want to delete it. In Linux, you don't need root to delete a shortcut from your desktop.
You misunderstand why the UAC dialog pops up. It's not the act of deleting the icon from your desktop. That doesn't require admin privs. What you fail to realize is that is a side effect of a feature of Windows called a "common desktop". Icons in the common desktop are shared with all accounts, they are meged with the icons in the users profile to create a single view.
If you delete an icon from only your set of icons, no elevation is required. If you delete an icon from the shared desktop elevation is required because it affects multiple user accounts. The same feature exists for the start menu, in which you can have "shared" and "non-shared" shortcuts. You can delete the non-shared ones without elevation, but you can't delete the shared ones.
I find the majority of people are like you. They simply don't understand why the UAC prompt is coming up. Perhaps that's a failure of Microsoft's, but one user should not be able to affect other users without elevating privilegs. It's working the way it's supposed to.
Ahh yes, typical Mac fanboi "They copied Mac" reaction.
This funcionality hasn't changed since Windows 98. Before the Dock existed. It just looks different because of the theming. It's just the same old standard quicklaunch bar.
"Contrary to what you might expect from Word's supposedly WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") interface, a document produced with Word on one computer may, in fact, end up with radically different formatting and pagination even when viewed with the same version of Word on another computer! The reason for this is that Microsoft Word will silently reformat a document based on the user's printer settings. This is bad news for certain kinds of documents, such as forms, which rely on elements precisely positioned on a page."
"My pet Word hate is when you transfer a large document to a computer that has a different default printer from the one the document was created on and Word decides to reformat the entire document to suit the new printer's default settings. This invariably means fucking up all the margins and pagination and occasionally inserting random styles that never existed in the first place."
It's not the page size that's the issue, it's the printers page metrics. These include DPI and Printable surface area. For instance, some printers can print to the very edge of the page, others have an area where they can't print to.
The biggest benefit is that it's XML, which makes it insanely easy to write tools to manipulate it, archive it, index it, etc... It was designed to work well with their search technology built into Vista, and for use with Sharepoint. PDF is much harder to extract content out of, and includes a lot of encoded binary data, making it compress less than XPS does.
Also, Microsoft intends to make the entire printer subsystem run on XPS (which is a variant of XAML, the UI markup language used in Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation). The idea is that anyone can write directly to the printer just by sending it a properly formatted XPS file.
Microsoft is submitting the format to Ecma as well, so it will be standardized.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how word processing works.
Word processors are designed to be WYSIWYG with the "Get" being the printed page and the "See" being the displayed page, and therefore they format the page based on the printer definitions. You move the file from one computer to another and they have different printers, then the page is reformatted to fit that printer.
Most people don't understand this, and expect the document to look the same. It won't. That's why Adobe created Acrobat, to provide a "It always looks the same" format.
There are ways to minimize the effects of printers, but again most people don't know how to do that.
"Windows" means the OS and Applications, such as Office.
But, be that as it may, many many people can only seem to learn computers by rote memorization of the functions. Like it or not, you can't assume they will extrapolate.
Actually, let me modify that. 90% of the computers they encounter will not run Windows. 100% of the computers 90% of them will encounter will run Windows.
Posix is not an OS. If you're programming, then yeah. But if you're learning to become computer literate, Posix means nothing.
Fact of the matter is, 90% of computers have Windows. It doesn't make a lot of sense to teach basic computer literacy on Linux when 90% of the computers they will encounter are Windows.
It's like 20 years ago, they used to teach programming by teaching Pascal. It's a great learning language, but it assumed that people wanted to learn the concepts and then apply them to other languages. Most people didn't. Eventually they wisened up and started teaching C/C++ then Java. Languages people actually used in the business environment.
It's not really that confusing if you understand the tradeoffs for performance. Often times in order to get better performance, you need more resources (memory, typically, but also taking advantage of new CPU instructions or co-processors). So, it's quite possible that an old version of software will run slower on new hardware than a new piece of software, but the new software will run slower on the older hardware than the old software.
I used the TeX example just because it was the first thing I thought of. In many ways this is the primary issue of standards. They're slow to adapt. HTML, for example, takes years to rev.. That's why Apple created Canvas, which is non-standard but being adopted by most of the major browsers. Apple eventually submitted it to Whatwg, and it's part of a draft standard for HTML5, but standards have this issue.
I disagree. Let's say I want to create a word processor that includes TeX format codes. I need to now add elements to store the TeX codes, because it's unlikely that the format doesn't currently support that.
But, I can't do that, because doing so would make my program incompatible with ODF. See the point? The problem is not what we can think of now, though.. it's what we haven't thought of that's the problem.
It takes a lot of hubris to think that there's nothing that anyone will ever come up with that's new.
If word processors saved their data as bitmaps, you might have a point. After all, if you can manipulate the low-level bitmap format you can do anything you like (to a point).
However, text documents are stored as higher level data objects, more similar to Photoshop PSD files with layers, and various objects. However, PSD is not a standard format, so it nullifies your argument.
That's why there was such a big push for ODF. Once the file format is standardized, ANYONE can write a word processor and compete on quality and support instead of lock-in.
Don't you think it's a little hard to come up with something new and interesting if you're restricted to the elements defined by the standard? It would mean extending it, and then you lose compatibility again. And, since OASIS seems to move at a snails pace (version 1.2 has been almost 4 years coming now, 1.1 was more of a bug fix, 1.2 adds new features), it means you can't hope to come out with a new product that is compatible with everyone else.
Basically, it means that Office programs are stuck with a fixed feature set for the foreseeable future, unless they choose to become incompatible.
Actually, i think you're confusing cores with nodes. NUMA is multi-processor architecture, and I believe the Linux kernel can support up to 4096 NUMA nodes (that is NUMA processors). Theoretically, those processors could also be multi-core.
My understanding is that 256 is the largest number of cores Intel and AMD have "defined" for the architecture, so I don't see how any OS could claim support for more than 256 cores.
Actually, Flash is interpreted,.NET isn't (it's JIT compiled). But that's irrelevant since Silverlight is not.NET, it's a subset of.NET that has heavy sandboxing. You can't do, for instance, unsafe native calls in it.
Basically, this is the same thing that happened with XP. Windows 2000 took 4 years get out the door, and had lots of compatibility and other issues, then XP came along a mere 2 years later and was an order of magnitude more usable for home and desktop users.
This is reflected in the way XP was 5.1, and 7 is 6.1.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say Pidgin crashes on me constantly, it does seem to pick rather inoportune moments to do so. Also, there are a number of known bugs in the MSN plug-in, particularly when relating to users who are hiding (shown as offline). You can recieve messages from them, but if you wait too long to answer back then Pidgin thinks they're offline and won't even try ot send a reply.
What's more, Pidgin doesn't do video, and VOIP is very difficult to configure and usually doesn't work.
It might help you to read the parent posts and not just consider a post in a vacuum. That's called context.
I didn't say corporate sponsor was a minus, I was responding to someone claiming that Linux doesn't need corporate sponsorship and would be just fine without out. I disagreed, corporate sponsorship is what has made linux come as far as it has in the last few years. Without it, Linux goes back to a snails pace. That's not a "minus".
And I wouldn't consider netbooks to be "linux on the desktop", most of those use very specialized distro's that make them more like appliances than general purpose computers. And while Dell and others are selling general purpose Linux desktops, they're a pretty tiny fraction of their market. I don't even consider Netbooks with Windows to be the same as a general purpose laptop because netbooks are so limited in functionality. They're really more like large PDA's.
Linux can be considered a success on the desktop when you can walk into any fortune 500 company and see any appreciable number of Linux desktops. How many is appreciable? Enough so that it doesn't seem like a miracle when you discover one.
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Well, the most obvious things that a clueless user would notice are Integrated search (available for XP, but not quite as well integrated), New games, the sidebar gadgets, Built-in DVD maker, Built-in Media Center (though some people bought XP with Media center, most didn't and the most common version of Vista sold is Home Premium that has Media Center), Vastly improved email client, Snippng tool, etc.. All those things are pretty obvious to anyone who's non-technical even.
I agree, which is why I said Microsoft may be to blame for that. But that doesn't change the fact the UAC is doing what it's supposed to, preventing one user from interfering with another.
The All Users function was always a bit of a hack anyways, but it makes a lot of sense from a locked down desktop perspective where users do not get administrative privs. It's just bad when you have multiple users with admin privs using the same machine (or even a single user with admin privs and apps that are installed as 'all users").
You have to understand the history as well. Microsoft grew up as a single-user OS and slowly morphed into a multi-user OS. They didn't grow up with the culture that unix-like systems have where the system was assumed to be multi-user.
Perhaps you should go back to history class. one of Microsoft's first non-lanugage products was Microsoft Xenix, a System V based OS that was later sold to some company nobody ever heard of called SCO. Microsoft was doing multi-user before Apple even had a GUI or Linux even existed.
UAC pops up asking you to elevate to delete a shortcut on the desktop, and then annoys you a SECOND time, asking if you're really sure you want to delete it. In Linux, you don't need root to delete a shortcut from your desktop.
You misunderstand why the UAC dialog pops up. It's not the act of deleting the icon from your desktop. That doesn't require admin privs. What you fail to realize is that is a side effect of a feature of Windows called a "common desktop". Icons in the common desktop are shared with all accounts, they are meged with the icons in the users profile to create a single view.
If you delete an icon from only your set of icons, no elevation is required. If you delete an icon from the shared desktop elevation is required because it affects multiple user accounts. The same feature exists for the start menu, in which you can have "shared" and "non-shared" shortcuts. You can delete the non-shared ones without elevation, but you can't delete the shared ones.
I find the majority of people are like you. They simply don't understand why the UAC prompt is coming up. Perhaps that's a failure of Microsoft's, but one user should not be able to affect other users without elevating privilegs. It's working the way it's supposed to.
Ahh yes, typical Mac fanboi "They copied Mac" reaction.
This funcionality hasn't changed since Windows 98. Before the Dock existed. It just looks different because of the theming. It's just the same old standard quicklaunch bar.
Most likely, the images were taken as VMWare snapshots, and since you can't do Aero on VMWare, that's why there's no glass.
Don't take my word for it, here's others:
http://en.nothingisreal.com/wiki/Please_don't_send_me_Microsoft_Word_documents
"Contrary to what you might expect from Word's supposedly WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") interface, a document produced with Word on one computer may, in fact, end up with radically different formatting and pagination even when viewed with the same version of Word on another computer! The reason for this is that Microsoft Word will silently reformat a document based on the user's printer settings. This is bad news for certain kinds of documents, such as forms, which rely on elements precisely positioned on a page."
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=87&boardid=40&threadid=51415
"My pet Word hate is when you transfer a large document to a computer that has a different default printer from the one the document was created on and Word decides to reformat the entire document to suit the new printer's default settings. This invariably means fucking up all the margins and pagination and occasionally inserting random styles that never existed in the first place."
and so on...
It's not the page size that's the issue, it's the printers page metrics. These include DPI and Printable surface area. For instance, some printers can print to the very edge of the page, others have an area where they can't print to.
The biggest benefit is that it's XML, which makes it insanely easy to write tools to manipulate it, archive it, index it, etc... It was designed to work well with their search technology built into Vista, and for use with Sharepoint. PDF is much harder to extract content out of, and includes a lot of encoded binary data, making it compress less than XPS does.
Also, Microsoft intends to make the entire printer subsystem run on XPS (which is a variant of XAML, the UI markup language used in Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation). The idea is that anyone can write directly to the printer just by sending it a properly formatted XPS file.
Microsoft is submitting the format to Ecma as well, so it will be standardized.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how word processing works.
Word processors are designed to be WYSIWYG with the "Get" being the printed page and the "See" being the displayed page, and therefore they format the page based on the printer definitions. You move the file from one computer to another and they have different printers, then the page is reformatted to fit that printer.
Most people don't understand this, and expect the document to look the same. It won't. That's why Adobe created Acrobat, to provide a "It always looks the same" format.
There are ways to minimize the effects of printers, but again most people don't know how to do that.
"Windows" means the OS and Applications, such as Office.
But, be that as it may, many many people can only seem to learn computers by rote memorization of the functions. Like it or not, you can't assume they will extrapolate.
Actually, let me modify that. 90% of the computers they encounter will not run Windows. 100% of the computers 90% of them will encounter will run Windows.
Posix is not an OS. If you're programming, then yeah. But if you're learning to become computer literate, Posix means nothing.
Fact of the matter is, 90% of computers have Windows. It doesn't make a lot of sense to teach basic computer literacy on Linux when 90% of the computers they will encounter are Windows.
It's like 20 years ago, they used to teach programming by teaching Pascal. It's a great learning language, but it assumed that people wanted to learn the concepts and then apply them to other languages. Most people didn't. Eventually they wisened up and started teaching C/C++ then Java. Languages people actually used in the business environment.
And you can run Vista Aero in a VM..
Now, if only someone would come up with a similar system for Linux to run Compiz/Beryl in a VM.
It's not really that confusing if you understand the tradeoffs for performance. Often times in order to get better performance, you need more resources (memory, typically, but also taking advantage of new CPU instructions or co-processors). So, it's quite possible that an old version of software will run slower on new hardware than a new piece of software, but the new software will run slower on the older hardware than the old software.
I used the TeX example just because it was the first thing I thought of. In many ways this is the primary issue of standards. They're slow to adapt. HTML, for example, takes years to rev.. That's why Apple created Canvas, which is non-standard but being adopted by most of the major browsers. Apple eventually submitted it to Whatwg, and it's part of a draft standard for HTML5, but standards have this issue.
I disagree. Let's say I want to create a word processor that includes TeX format codes. I need to now add elements to store the TeX codes, because it's unlikely that the format doesn't currently support that.
But, I can't do that, because doing so would make my program incompatible with ODF. See the point? The problem is not what we can think of now, though.. it's what we haven't thought of that's the problem.
It takes a lot of hubris to think that there's nothing that anyone will ever come up with that's new.
Oh, please.
If word processors saved their data as bitmaps, you might have a point. After all, if you can manipulate the low-level bitmap format you can do anything you like (to a point).
However, text documents are stored as higher level data objects, more similar to Photoshop PSD files with layers, and various objects. However, PSD is not a standard format, so it nullifies your argument.
That's why there was such a big push for ODF. Once the file format is standardized, ANYONE can write a word processor and compete on quality and support instead of lock-in.
Don't you think it's a little hard to come up with something new and interesting if you're restricted to the elements defined by the standard? It would mean extending it, and then you lose compatibility again. And, since OASIS seems to move at a snails pace (version 1.2 has been almost 4 years coming now, 1.1 was more of a bug fix, 1.2 adds new features), it means you can't hope to come out with a new product that is compatible with everyone else.
Basically, it means that Office programs are stuck with a fixed feature set for the foreseeable future, unless they choose to become incompatible.
Actually, i think you're confusing cores with nodes. NUMA is multi-processor architecture, and I believe the Linux kernel can support up to 4096 NUMA nodes (that is NUMA processors). Theoretically, those processors could also be multi-core.
My understanding is that 256 is the largest number of cores Intel and AMD have "defined" for the architecture, so I don't see how any OS could claim support for more than 256 cores.
Actually, Flash is interpreted, .NET isn't (it's JIT compiled). But that's irrelevant since Silverlight is not .NET, it's a subset of .NET that has heavy sandboxing. You can't do, for instance, unsafe native calls in it.
Basically, this is the same thing that happened with XP. Windows 2000 took 4 years get out the door, and had lots of compatibility and other issues, then XP came along a mere 2 years later and was an order of magnitude more usable for home and desktop users.
This is reflected in the way XP was 5.1, and 7 is 6.1.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say Pidgin crashes on me constantly, it does seem to pick rather inoportune moments to do so. Also, there are a number of known bugs in the MSN plug-in, particularly when relating to users who are hiding (shown as offline). You can recieve messages from them, but if you wait too long to answer back then Pidgin thinks they're offline and won't even try ot send a reply.
What's more, Pidgin doesn't do video, and VOIP is very difficult to configure and usually doesn't work.
You've heard wrong, and that simply ridiculous.
All versions of XP can use 2 physical CPU's, and each physical CPU can have as man cores as can fit in it and XP will use them all just fine.
It might help you to read the parent posts and not just consider a post in a vacuum. That's called context.
I didn't say corporate sponsor was a minus, I was responding to someone claiming that Linux doesn't need corporate sponsorship and would be just fine without out. I disagreed, corporate sponsorship is what has made linux come as far as it has in the last few years. Without it, Linux goes back to a snails pace. That's not a "minus".
And I wouldn't consider netbooks to be "linux on the desktop", most of those use very specialized distro's that make them more like appliances than general purpose computers. And while Dell and others are selling general purpose Linux desktops, they're a pretty tiny fraction of their market. I don't even consider Netbooks with Windows to be the same as a general purpose laptop because netbooks are so limited in functionality. They're really more like large PDA's.
Linux can be considered a success on the desktop when you can walk into any fortune 500 company and see any appreciable number of Linux desktops. How many is appreciable? Enough so that it doesn't seem like a miracle when you discover one.