In the mean time, try only to realize that hybrid cars are total boondoggles which consume vastly more energy in production to give you less mileage for more money than just buying a car with a small turbo diesel engine
Source, please? "Everyone knows" that hybrids are bad for the environment.
And, might I ask, where are these mythical mid-size cars with small turbo diesel engines? The Prius is not a small car; it's considerably bigger than a "minicar" (like the Yaris or Fit). And those are considerably bigger than a "microcar" (like the Smart).
Diesel also has higher NOx/SOx emissions (even with today's cleaner diesel engines) and higher CO2 emissions (per gallon).
Here are the typical mistakes you see when someone trashes hybrids:
Unrealistic lifetime estimates. Modern vehicles last much longer than 100k miles.
Comparing fuel economy of diesel and gasoline, when diesel has more energy and higher CO2 emissions per gallon.
Comparing a mid-sized hybrid (usually the Prius) with a considerably smaller diesel-powered vehicle (e.g. the Golf).
Comparing fuel economy using different standards. US fuel economy numbers are considerably more conservative than the UK or Japanese numbers (Prius NHW20 gets 54 mpg-US combined according to the UK, 46 mpg-US combined according to the US).
Comparing fuel economy numbers in US and UK gallons. The UK gallon is considerably larger.
Comparing lower-performance vehicles to higher-performance hybrids.
This is exactly what Vista does. The problem is that you can customize the icon for the "run" operation, and malware authors got clever and used the folder icon. If you weren't paying attention, you might click the wrong option and install the malware (although there's also a UAC prompt to get through on Vista).
What the hell can you do without an Internet connection? And when exactly do you run into this situation?
Internet goes down at my house? I can connect through my phone. Or go to one of hundreds of locations with free Wi-Fi. Need internet on the road? Phone or aircard.
About the only place where I can't access the Internet is during a flight. And that's changing quickly.
I am decidedly in the 'avid' category for WoW (I'm not sure I'd say 'hardcore'), since I average 15-20 hours per week. So I'm not representative. Neither are my friends, who all have over 2000 hours of playtime over the last 4 years.
That said, you can easily make 100g in a single hour. Icecrown dailies run ~13g each, and they take less than 5 minutes in most cases. Then there's WG, which is pretty much a guaranteed 40-50g in 30 minutes or less (typically more like 20 on my server).
So, yeah, at that rate, I don't see why anyone would need to buy gold. One hour a day for a month and a half and you have 5000g.
Now, if you want to argue that your time is worth more than the cost of the gold, that's possibly a decent argument. But it's not like the game is making it hard. There are plenty of casual WoW players who get their gold through quests and dailies, and they have access to the same stuff as everyone else - it just takes a bit longer.
It's not like you can buy good gear with gold anyway. Gold is basically for augments (enchants/inscriptions/thread/etc.), gems, and misc items like repairs, mounts, and respeccing.
Repeat after me : WoW is NOT casual gamer friendly!
To tell the truth, no multi-player game truly is. Either it's too easy/random (e.g. MarioKart Wii) or it's too challenging. Games that are too easy/random aren't rewarding long-term because there's little opportunity to improve. Games that are too challenging make it difficult for casual players to play.
You, as a casual player, are never going to beat my 2v2 team. We're not exactly "hot shit", but we just missed Deulist last season, which means that we are better than 97% of the arena teams in the game. You need to invest a significant amount of time and practice to get into the top 3%; we played over 600 games in Season 5 alone, and we've already played over 150 games in Season 6 (which started 3 days ago).
There are three options if you're a casual player. You can accept that you're not going to compete with hardcore (or even semi-hardcore) gamers and have fun. You can become a hardcore or semi-hardcore gamer. Or you can stop playing the game because you realize that it doesn't matter.
Buying gold (or even a character) isn't one of those options. It doesn't make you a better player, it doesn't really get you better gear, and it's not going to enable you to compete with hardcore gamers. To put it bluntly, it's blatantly obvious who belongs in high-end raid content and who doesn't. And it's just as obvious who bought their characters in arenas or BGs. Skill is not something that you can buy, and despite popular opinions, skill still plays a major role in WoW. The first season I ever played arenas seriously (Season 2), we ended at 1690. In Season 3 we ended at 1776. In Season 4 we ended at 1840. Despite the challenges in Season 5 (DK/Holy Paladins, Hunters), we still ended at 1940. And in Season 6 our MMR is already above 2100 (albeit largely because of balance changes).
Sidenote: For anyone who claims I play too much WoW, consider this: how much time do you spend watching TV every week? I spend about 2.5 hours per day on WoW, which is about as much time as the average American spends watching TV. I can't argue that playing WoW is a 'better' use of my time than watching TV, but I do find it more enjoyable than watching TV.
I haven't used Windows properly since I was a kid, and I didn't care about backups back then. Nowadays I use rsync every day to mirror files onto an external USB drive and over the network. Once a week I do an incremental backup with rdiff-backup.
Are there any basic, robust tools like these for Windows?
The "Backup and Restore Center" is built-in to Windows Vista, and it's pretty decent. You can also get rsync for Windows. Personally I use Live Mesh to sync my files to multiple PCs, so I'm covered in the event of a disk failure. Once in a while I do a backup to a USB hard drive.
Note that "Previous Versions" is on by default, and it offers some of the benefits of regular backups - specifically, you can recover deleted files or revert to a previous version. It snapshots once a day and is on by default (but it's only available in Vista Business/Enterprise/Ultimate). Of course, it won't protect from hardware failures, but since it's fully automatic and doesn't require external media, you'd be silly not to leave it on.
Also, what's the new "Power Shell" like? Is it like bash? Can you run curses programs yet, like mutt? Or would I have to learn a GUI like Thunderbird?
PS is not like bash. PS is an object-oriented command-line interface based on.NET. You can write scripts for it in a C#-like scripting language, and you can manipulate most.NET objects using PS. That means that you can do things like calling web services or accessing a database very easily. PS is more like the interactive mode of Python than it is like a traditional shell.
Most newer MS server applications (e.g. SQL Server, Exchange) actually build their management GUIs on top of PS. That means that you can manage everything from the CLI if you prefer.
I've been on Linux for so long, I'm actually finding it harder than I imagined to see how I can work with Windows again. I tried Vista and it was actually kinda slick, so I wouldn't mind it on my laptop. It seems like a Macbook would be easier though.
Vista for me is a pretty hassle-free OS. Yes, you need to throw hardware (particularly memory) at it to make it fast. My two main Vista boxes are a ThinkPad T61 (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB) and a home-built desktop (2.5GHz Core 2 Quad, 8GB). Both run Vista perfectly fine.
Some things about Vista piss me off. For example, sometimes it can take 30 seconds or more to shut down the system. Also, the network configuration UI is far too cumbersome. Windows updates take too long to install (generally several minutes, compared to ~30 seconds to install updates in Linux). It requires far too much disk space (~10GB).
But the reality is, I prefer Windows to just about any other platform. Take my EEE PC, for example. Under Ubuntu, I need to nuke the ElanTech kernel module or the cursor randomly moves around. I need to force the font DPI to a lower value to keep the fonts from being huge (and changing the GNOME setting doesn't affect Firefox). And I need to disable Compiz or Flash videos skip like crazy.
I'm not necessarily saying that Windows is better. But it does a pretty good job of blending in to the background. It seems that each new release of Linux or Mac OS X has more crap on the screen to annoy me. No, I don't need a popup notification every time I connect to a wireless network or plug in my notebook. I don't need the update manager to jump up and down over and over again. I don't need a 60 pixel tall dock taking up my limited screen space.
And you can get a basic Dell PC with 3GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and an Intel Pentium (Core 2-based) Dual-Core CPU for $500. It's enough for most people's needs.
$1000 is a "high-end" notebook in my opinion. My ThinkPad T61, complete with discrete NVIDIA graphics, DVD burner, WSXGA+ display (1440x900), 7200rpm HDD, and several other options was under $1000, and that was a year ago.
You might argue that the MacBook (non-Pro) is competitive with the T400, and you'd be right. There's a bit of a gap (T400 starts at around $700), but it's not so far off.
Where you run into a problem is at the low-end. You can get a perfectly capable PC for $500, complete with plenty of memory, a big disk, and a decent CPU.
Um. You realize, of course, that remote desktop is a lot less secure than ssh, right?
Remote Desktop uses TLS and X.509 certificates, so it's not exactly trivial to crack. It's easily as secure as SSH using password-based authentication. It's definitely *more* secure if your users never bother to actually check unknown server keys.
Now, compared to SSH using only key-based authentication, Remote Desktop isn't as secure. Unless you use smart cards for authentication with Remote Desktop, which are probably more secure than having your private key stored on your computer. Unless it's encrypted with a strong passphrase. Unless your computer has been rooted and has a keylogger.
Bottom line? Both systems can be plenty secure. It's all in how you configure and use them.
Who installs Windows? No one. They use the version that's pre-installed on their machine. If something goes wrong, they use a "restore CD" that effectively reimages the entire machine.
Yeah, Linux is easier to install than XP (at least Fedora and Ubuntu are). But it doesn't really matter.
By the way, Kubuntu 8.10 ran like crap out of the box on my EEE 900HA, mostly because KDE 4.1's graphical effects are such a dog on the GMA950. GNOME works fine with Compiz turned off; it's a bit sluggish with Compiz on.
XP is 8 years old. No one would run Red Hat 7.2 or Mac OS X 10.1. Why would you put up with XP?
I turn off my computer every night, when it isn't downloading something. It's about 6 hours of near-zero power consumption every day. If everyone did that it would make a difference in energy use. I could just suspend, but if it isn't going to do anything anyway, let's save a couple more joules, shall we?
The thing is, S3 suspend is damn near "soft-off" power usage anyway. On my Kill-A-Watt, both result in a power consumption of 3W. This is with an Antec EA-380 80+ PSU (Seasonic manufactured).
If you really want to save power, flip the switch and make your consumption zero. Better yet, kill your monitor, printer, speakers, and every other standby-consuming device at the same time by using the switch on your power supply.
The reality is, though, it's a bit stupid. If you really want to save power, use a notebook. My ThinkPad is around 26W at idle, compared with around 90W for my Core 2 Quad Q9300 / 8GB DDR2 / Radeon HD3850 desktop.
My power usage is around 220 kWh/mo. That's down from around 400kWh/mo (after I replaced a 1980s fridge with a new Energy Star fridge), but the refrigirator is still over a third of the total usage at 90kWh/mo. Add the electric dryer, electric range, and some lights, and you see that my power usage is dominated by heating, refrigeration, and lighting. Cutting the 20W or so of standby power usage that's around the house would only save 15kWh/mo, or less than 10%.
Well as much as you might label AMD a failure, and as much as you would like to believe that Intel can just pull the plug on AMD, there's one answer that proves you wrong on both counts:
AMD64
You can thank the "failure like AMD" for x86-64 and for integrated memory controllers. This at a time when Intel was dicking around with the failure that was Pentium 4.
You can call it IA-32e, EM64T, or Intel 64 if it makes you feel better. But the fact is that AMD64 is here to stay, and it's patented by AMD. Which means that Intel either keeps cross-licensing, or throws out all of its current designs and its current ISA.
So, yeah, let's pretend that Intel and Intel alone is responsible for their current designs. Or we could live in the real world. One where AMD depends on Intel patents and Intel depends on AMD patents. That's why the license was renewed in 2001.
Are you joking? You're comparing a 2.3 cubic inch device with a clunky 1-word "screen" to a 0.3 cubic inch device with a no-eyes-required audio interface.
Yes, he is. At some point there are diminishing returns regarding size.
over having a clunky device with a bad interface
You concluded that from, what, the fact that it's not an iPod? The Sansa clip actually has a pretty decent UI, as does the rest of the Sansa line. And you can load it without needing special software - it's a freaking mass storage device.
It certainly is not, unless you start with the assumption that size and interface are worthless.
Yes, it certainly is. It has more features (screen, FM radio, voice recording) for less dollars. It's not an evaluation of the quality of the Sansa or the iPod, it's just a fact.
I don't personally have a need for a tiny jogging-targeted music player
Apparently neither do any of the people buying the new Shuffle, because (according to Gizmodo) the tiny little headphone-cord cables are extremely tricky to use when jogging because they are too close to your head and too small (which makes them difficult to manipulate when you're bouncing around.
Look, I like the previous-gen Shuffle's design (I own one). But there's a point when things get absurd. Requiring proprietary headphones means I can't use it in my car and I can't use it with my Shure e2g canalphones. There will probably be a $30 adapter at some point, but then we're talking about a $110 music player, which is getting into iPod Nano territory.
TiVo HD. Two tuners, records digitally (and in HD). Transfer shows to your computer using the built-in Ethernet port.
I haven't had a one-tuner DVR in over 5 years. My Media Center box had 4 tuner cards, not because I really needed it but because analog tuners were $20.
You have the same problem that many theists have - you seem believe that your theology is above criticism. Dawkins may not be able to prove the non-existence of your God(s), but he can certainly criticize your religion in the context of the actions it promotes.
I'm sure you're one of the reasonable theists who would never try to repress science, harm public health, or oppress the rights of a minority. But the fact is that there are people who want to do those things in the name of their religion. And many of those people are in the highest levels of the US and other governments.
That's what Dawkins is criticizing. If you want to argue that Dawkins is wrong, that's valid. But Dawkins' arguments don't hinge on the belief that science can disprove religion.
I plan to buy a new LCD and I will choose something with DVI instead of HDMI just because DRM.
You can implement HDCP (DRM used with HDMI) on DVI, and most new monitors with DVI do implement HDCP.
It's also possible to implement HDMI without HDCP, but it's exceedingly rare.
FYI, the DRM features of Vista/7 only seem to come into play when: - Playing back DVDs with a "legit" DVD player (e.g. PowerDVD). VLC doesn't care about the DRM. - Playing back Blu-ray discs (without a program such as AnyDVD HD) - Playing back DRM-enabled Windows Media or Zune files
Basically, Vista DRM allows programs to query the audio/video devices and determine whether or not HDCP is enabled and whether or not unsigned drivers are being used. One easy way to "disable" the DRM features in Vista is to simply enable test mode (which allows unsigned drivers to be loaded). This, of course, will prevent WM-DRM, Blu-ray, and DVD playback - unless you use measures (such as VLC or AnyDVD) to circumvent the DRM.
The feet-dragging on this may have to do with the fact that ISO is the primary way to acquire a Linux distro. Making it easy for people to burn/mount an ISO is opening a gateway away from Microsoft products. They'd rather not do that, so you get no support for ISO.
Windows 7 has built-in support for burning ISOs. It's a new feature.
I don't think ISO mounting has anything to do with installing Linux. You're not going to be installing Linux from a CD mounted in Windows.
Honestly, though, I can't remember the last time I installed a Linux distro from CD. My EEE PC doesn't even have a CD, and now that I've learned to install from USB flash drives (unetbootin is quite good), there's no reason to use optical media anymore.
You might have a hard time telling which is which if you hear it in isolation, but side by side you'll have no problem figuring out which one is compressed.
See, this is what pisses me off about "audiophiles". The ONLY sane way to do comparisons between audio formats is with blind tests. And the blind tests that have been done continue to indicate that 160kbps MP3 encoded with a decent encoder (e.g. LAME or Helix) is basically indistinguishable from the original uncompressed music.
Are there detectable differences between MP3 and uncompressed? Absolutely. Anyone with a spectrum plot and 30 seconds can see them immediately. But people - at least the vast majority of people - just can't hear them.
If every new Britney Spears & Madonna disc had the production standards and "reach out and touch the music" clarity that the best Telarc discs had 20 years ago, people would STILL be buying them at stores, even if they intended to rip them to mp3 for convenience.
No, they wouldn't. People listen to music on their PC speakers, their cheapshit car stereo, or their iPod earbuds. None of which are anywhere near good enough for anyone to care how much their music is compressed. Millions of people subscribe to XM, which is 24-48kbps HE-AACv2. I think 24kbps HE-AACv2 sounds like ass (even a really efficient codec like HE-AACv2 can't produce quality output at such craptastic bitrates), but people don't seem to care.
Compared with FM, HD, or satellite radio, the 220kbps MP3s I get off of Amazon are dramatically better. They're better than LPs (and, no, let's not go down that road - not all of us have $5000 cartridges and $3000 turntables). They're vastly better than cassette tapes.
And, FYI, my Zune has no problems playing WMA lossless. The iPod/iPhone plays ALAC. My G1 plays FLAC. But no one cares. If they aren't going to bother to get better earphones than the pack-ins, why would you expect them to sacrifice most of their device's capacity for a questionable quality increase?
You're right about compression on CDs. It sucks. But people have never cared about audio quality. Or video quality. Our craptastic 9Mbps "HD" feed from the local NBC station proves that. So does YouTube video. So does satellite radio. So did the failure of LaserDisc.
But cables with excess capacitance and RF interference can still distort the clocking pulses inherent in a modulated signal.
You make the mistake of equating something that's technically correct but completely irrelevant. The fact is that ANY well made coaxial cable has sufficiently low capacitance and good enough shielding to send SPDIF 6 feet from your CD player to your receiver's DAC.
Of course, you could say "screw it" to the whole coaxial cable thing and use TOSLINK. That has the added benefit of eliminating the chance of a ground loop.
What about the hard drive? I will not turn over a laptop for service without removing the disk. On my ThinkPad, that takes removing one screw. Apparently it takes 13 on the new 17" MBP.
Things I can replace on the ThinkPad with 6 screws or less:
- Keyboard - Memory - Touchpad - Hard drive - Optical drive - WLAN card - WWAN card - Modem - Clock battery - DC power connector (it's on a separate PCB, not soldered to the system board) - Battery
Keyboards break when you dump Diet Coke on them. Hard drives crash. Clock batteries die. Batteries get recalled.
What do you do when your ThinkPad is out of warranty and something breaks? You buy the part for cheap on eBay, download the service manual for free, and spend 20 minutes replacing the part. Or, if you're not savvy, you pay someone to do it for you - and it's relatively cheap.
What about when your MacBook breaks and isn't under warranty?
Now, if you don't believe that deterrence works on criminals (Either it works or it doesn't, you can't say that "fear of jail" works but "fear of death" doesn't) then you shouldn't support the death penalty because it won't deter criminals.
Sure we can, because we understand the probabilities of death and incarceration.
The death penalty isn't an effective deterrent in the US because it's so rare. 37 people were put to death in the US in 2008, which means that even if you commit murder AND are caught and convicted, the odds of getting the death penalty are around 1 in 500.
If you want the death penalty to be an effective deterrent, we need to start executing more people.
And please, I'd like to see some evidence that they didn't do something they claimed they were going to do in Vista with.NET, because as far as I remember they did exactly what they said they would - nothing more and nothing less.
Major portions of Longhorn were rewritten using managed code. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't realize the compatibility and stability nightmare that replacing decade-old, well-debugged C++ routines with.NET would create.
This, combined with the fact that Longhorn devs were pulled off the project to work on XP SP2 caused the project to get hopelessly off course.
Things got so bad that Microsoft decided to effectively scrap the entire Longhorn userspace in 2005 and restart development using the Windows Server 2003 codebase.
Some might argue that it was because the managed portions of Longhorn were "too slow" or "buggy". This is true, but it's not really an indictment of.NET. Longhorn failed because it was too ambitious; developers tried to change too much, too quickly. Restarting from the mature Windows codebase that had been developed over the last 10 years allowed the project to get back on track..NET is alive and well. Anyone who thinks that Microsoft is abandoning.NET needs to look at the products that Microsoft is working on right now. PowerShell uses managed code. The Zune uses managed code. Media center uses managed code. VS is written in managed code. Silverlight runs managed code. Even the product I worked on, ILM, was written with managed code.
No, you're not going to see Windows written in.NET. There are no major desktop environments written in managed code, although mobile environments (like the Hiptop or Android) are surprisingly close. But for everything else, that's where the world is heading.
Slashdot Mirror
Source, please? "Everyone knows" that hybrids are bad for the environment.
The data says otherwise.
And, might I ask, where are these mythical mid-size cars with small turbo diesel engines? The Prius is not a small car; it's considerably bigger than a "minicar" (like the Yaris or Fit). And those are considerably bigger than a "microcar" (like the Smart).
Diesel also has higher NOx/SOx emissions (even with today's cleaner diesel engines) and higher CO2 emissions (per gallon).
Here are the typical mistakes you see when someone trashes hybrids:
This is exactly what Vista does. The problem is that you can customize the icon for the "run" operation, and malware authors got clever and used the folder icon. If you weren't paying attention, you might click the wrong option and install the malware (although there's also a UAC prompt to get through on Vista).
What the hell can you do without an Internet connection? And when exactly do you run into this situation?
Internet goes down at my house? I can connect through my phone. Or go to one of hundreds of locations with free Wi-Fi.
Need internet on the road? Phone or aircard.
About the only place where I can't access the Internet is during a flight. And that's changing quickly.
Show me the reason you need to buy gold.
I am decidedly in the 'avid' category for WoW (I'm not sure I'd say 'hardcore'), since I average 15-20 hours per week. So I'm not representative. Neither are my friends, who all have over 2000 hours of playtime over the last 4 years.
That said, you can easily make 100g in a single hour. Icecrown dailies run ~13g each, and they take less than 5 minutes in most cases. Then there's WG, which is pretty much a guaranteed 40-50g in 30 minutes or less (typically more like 20 on my server).
So, yeah, at that rate, I don't see why anyone would need to buy gold. One hour a day for a month and a half and you have 5000g.
Now, if you want to argue that your time is worth more than the cost of the gold, that's possibly a decent argument. But it's not like the game is making it hard. There are plenty of casual WoW players who get their gold through quests and dailies, and they have access to the same stuff as everyone else - it just takes a bit longer.
It's not like you can buy good gear with gold anyway. Gold is basically for augments (enchants/inscriptions/thread/etc.), gems, and misc items like repairs, mounts, and respeccing.
To tell the truth, no multi-player game truly is. Either it's too easy/random (e.g. MarioKart Wii) or it's too challenging. Games that are too easy/random aren't rewarding long-term because there's little opportunity to improve. Games that are too challenging make it difficult for casual players to play.
You, as a casual player, are never going to beat my 2v2 team. We're not exactly "hot shit", but we just missed Deulist last season, which means that we are better than 97% of the arena teams in the game. You need to invest a significant amount of time and practice to get into the top 3%; we played over 600 games in Season 5 alone, and we've already played over 150 games in Season 6 (which started 3 days ago).
There are three options if you're a casual player. You can accept that you're not going to compete with hardcore (or even semi-hardcore) gamers and have fun. You can become a hardcore or semi-hardcore gamer. Or you can stop playing the game because you realize that it doesn't matter.
Buying gold (or even a character) isn't one of those options. It doesn't make you a better player, it doesn't really get you better gear, and it's not going to enable you to compete with hardcore gamers. To put it bluntly, it's blatantly obvious who belongs in high-end raid content and who doesn't. And it's just as obvious who bought their characters in arenas or BGs. Skill is not something that you can buy, and despite popular opinions, skill still plays a major role in WoW. The first season I ever played arenas seriously (Season 2), we ended at 1690. In Season 3 we ended at 1776. In Season 4 we ended at 1840. Despite the challenges in Season 5 (DK/Holy Paladins, Hunters), we still ended at 1940. And in Season 6 our MMR is already above 2100 (albeit largely because of balance changes).
Sidenote: For anyone who claims I play too much WoW, consider this: how much time do you spend watching TV every week? I spend about 2.5 hours per day on WoW, which is about as much time as the average American spends watching TV. I can't argue that playing WoW is a 'better' use of my time than watching TV, but I do find it more enjoyable than watching TV.
Yes, it can be. And with far fewer nodes than you think.
The "Backup and Restore Center" is built-in to Windows Vista, and it's pretty decent. You can also get rsync for Windows. Personally I use Live Mesh to sync my files to multiple PCs, so I'm covered in the event of a disk failure. Once in a while I do a backup to a USB hard drive.
Note that "Previous Versions" is on by default, and it offers some of the benefits of regular backups - specifically, you can recover deleted files or revert to a previous version. It snapshots once a day and is on by default (but it's only available in Vista Business/Enterprise/Ultimate). Of course, it won't protect from hardware failures, but since it's fully automatic and doesn't require external media, you'd be silly not to leave it on.
PS is not like bash. PS is an object-oriented command-line interface based on .NET. You can write scripts for it in a C#-like scripting language, and you can manipulate most .NET objects using PS. That means that you can do things like calling web services or accessing a database very easily. PS is more like the interactive mode of Python than it is like a traditional shell.
Most newer MS server applications (e.g. SQL Server, Exchange) actually build their management GUIs on top of PS. That means that you can manage everything from the CLI if you prefer.
Vista for me is a pretty hassle-free OS. Yes, you need to throw hardware (particularly memory) at it to make it fast. My two main Vista boxes are a ThinkPad T61 (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB) and a home-built desktop (2.5GHz Core 2 Quad, 8GB). Both run Vista perfectly fine.
Some things about Vista piss me off. For example, sometimes it can take 30 seconds or more to shut down the system. Also, the network configuration UI is far too cumbersome. Windows updates take too long to install (generally several minutes, compared to ~30 seconds to install updates in Linux). It requires far too much disk space (~10GB).
But the reality is, I prefer Windows to just about any other platform. Take my EEE PC, for example. Under Ubuntu, I need to nuke the ElanTech kernel module or the cursor randomly moves around. I need to force the font DPI to a lower value to keep the fonts from being huge (and changing the GNOME setting doesn't affect Firefox). And I need to disable Compiz or Flash videos skip like crazy.
I'm not necessarily saying that Windows is better. But it does a pretty good job of blending in to the background. It seems that each new release of Linux or Mac OS X has more crap on the screen to annoy me. No, I don't need a popup notification every time I connect to a wireless network or plug in my notebook. I don't need the update manager to jump up and down over and over again. I don't need a 60 pixel tall dock taking up my limited screen space.
And you can get a basic Dell PC with 3GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and an Intel Pentium (Core 2-based) Dual-Core CPU for $500. It's enough for most people's needs.
$1000 is a "high-end" notebook in my opinion. My ThinkPad T61, complete with discrete NVIDIA graphics, DVD burner, WSXGA+ display (1440x900), 7200rpm HDD, and several other options was under $1000, and that was a year ago.
You might argue that the MacBook (non-Pro) is competitive with the T400, and you'd be right. There's a bit of a gap (T400 starts at around $700), but it's not so far off.
Where you run into a problem is at the low-end. You can get a perfectly capable PC for $500, complete with plenty of memory, a big disk, and a decent CPU.
Not everyone wants to buy a Lexus.
Remote Desktop uses TLS and X.509 certificates, so it's not exactly trivial to crack. It's easily as secure as SSH using password-based authentication. It's definitely *more* secure if your users never bother to actually check unknown server keys.
Now, compared to SSH using only key-based authentication, Remote Desktop isn't as secure. Unless you use smart cards for authentication with Remote Desktop, which are probably more secure than having your private key stored on your computer. Unless it's encrypted with a strong passphrase. Unless your computer has been rooted and has a keylogger.
Bottom line? Both systems can be plenty secure. It's all in how you configure and use them.
Who installs Windows? No one. They use the version that's pre-installed on their machine. If something goes wrong, they use a "restore CD" that effectively reimages the entire machine.
Yeah, Linux is easier to install than XP (at least Fedora and Ubuntu are). But it doesn't really matter.
By the way, Kubuntu 8.10 ran like crap out of the box on my EEE 900HA, mostly because KDE 4.1's graphical effects are such a dog on the GMA950. GNOME works fine with Compiz turned off; it's a bit sluggish with Compiz on.
XP is 8 years old. No one would run Red Hat 7.2 or Mac OS X 10.1. Why would you put up with XP?
The thing is, S3 suspend is damn near "soft-off" power usage anyway. On my Kill-A-Watt, both result in a power consumption of 3W. This is with an Antec EA-380 80+ PSU (Seasonic manufactured).
If you really want to save power, flip the switch and make your consumption zero. Better yet, kill your monitor, printer, speakers, and every other standby-consuming device at the same time by using the switch on your power supply.
The reality is, though, it's a bit stupid. If you really want to save power, use a notebook. My ThinkPad is around 26W at idle, compared with around 90W for my Core 2 Quad Q9300 / 8GB DDR2 / Radeon HD3850 desktop.
My power usage is around 220 kWh/mo. That's down from around 400kWh/mo (after I replaced a 1980s fridge with a new Energy Star fridge), but the refrigirator is still over a third of the total usage at 90kWh/mo. Add the electric dryer, electric range, and some lights, and you see that my power usage is dominated by heating, refrigeration, and lighting. Cutting the 20W or so of standby power usage that's around the house would only save 15kWh/mo, or less than 10%.
Well as much as you might label AMD a failure, and as much as you would like to believe that Intel can just pull the plug on AMD, there's one answer that proves you wrong on both counts:
AMD64
You can thank the "failure like AMD" for x86-64 and for integrated memory controllers. This at a time when Intel was dicking around with the failure that was Pentium 4.
You can call it IA-32e, EM64T, or Intel 64 if it makes you feel better. But the fact is that AMD64 is here to stay, and it's patented by AMD. Which means that Intel either keeps cross-licensing, or throws out all of its current designs and its current ISA.
So, yeah, let's pretend that Intel and Intel alone is responsible for their current designs. Or we could live in the real world. One where AMD depends on Intel patents and Intel depends on AMD patents. That's why the license was renewed in 2001.
Yes, he is. At some point there are diminishing returns regarding size.
You concluded that from, what, the fact that it's not an iPod? The Sansa clip actually has a pretty decent UI, as does the rest of the Sansa line. And you can load it without needing special software - it's a freaking mass storage device.
Yes, it certainly is. It has more features (screen, FM radio, voice recording) for less dollars. It's not an evaluation of the quality of the Sansa or the iPod, it's just a fact.
Apparently neither do any of the people buying the new Shuffle, because (according to Gizmodo) the tiny little headphone-cord cables are extremely tricky to use when jogging because they are too close to your head and too small (which makes them difficult to manipulate when you're bouncing around.
Look, I like the previous-gen Shuffle's design (I own one). But there's a point when things get absurd. Requiring proprietary headphones means I can't use it in my car and I can't use it with my Shure e2g canalphones. There will probably be a $30 adapter at some point, but then we're talking about a $110 music player, which is getting into iPod Nano territory.
TiVo HD. Two tuners, records digitally (and in HD). Transfer shows to your computer using the built-in Ethernet port.
I haven't had a one-tuner DVR in over 5 years. My Media Center box had 4 tuner cards, not because I really needed it but because analog tuners were $20.
Clearly you've never watched anything that Dawkins has done, or read anything that he's written.
Dawkins explicitly admits that he can't disprove the existence of God. He's said so many, many times.
He also admits that he can't disprove the existence of a teapot in orbit around the sun.
You have the same problem that many theists have - you seem believe that your theology is above criticism. Dawkins may not be able to prove the non-existence of your God(s), but he can certainly criticize your religion in the context of the actions it promotes.
I'm sure you're one of the reasonable theists who would never try to repress science, harm public health, or oppress the rights of a minority. But the fact is that there are people who want to do those things in the name of their religion. And many of those people are in the highest levels of the US and other governments.
That's what Dawkins is criticizing. If you want to argue that Dawkins is wrong, that's valid. But Dawkins' arguments don't hinge on the belief that science can disprove religion.
You can implement HDCP (DRM used with HDMI) on DVI, and most new monitors with DVI do implement HDCP.
It's also possible to implement HDMI without HDCP, but it's exceedingly rare.
FYI, the DRM features of Vista/7 only seem to come into play when:
- Playing back DVDs with a "legit" DVD player (e.g. PowerDVD). VLC doesn't care about the DRM.
- Playing back Blu-ray discs (without a program such as AnyDVD HD)
- Playing back DRM-enabled Windows Media or Zune files
Basically, Vista DRM allows programs to query the audio/video devices and determine whether or not HDCP is enabled and whether or not unsigned drivers are being used. One easy way to "disable" the DRM features in Vista is to simply enable test mode (which allows unsigned drivers to be loaded). This, of course, will prevent WM-DRM, Blu-ray, and DVD playback - unless you use measures (such as VLC or AnyDVD) to circumvent the DRM.
Frozen Throne runs fine on my stinking EEE PC 900HA. And it has a three-generation-old, under-clocked Intel GMA 950.
Frozen throne should run great on a GMA X4500. Even WoW runs OK on a GMA X4500.
I don't know about your MSDN subscription, but my MSDN subscription lets me generate some large number of unique keys (I think it's 10).
Windows 7 has built-in support for burning ISOs. It's a new feature.
I don't think ISO mounting has anything to do with installing Linux. You're not going to be installing Linux from a CD mounted in Windows.
Honestly, though, I can't remember the last time I installed a Linux distro from CD. My EEE PC doesn't even have a CD, and now that I've learned to install from USB flash drives (unetbootin is quite good), there's no reason to use optical media anymore.
See, this is what pisses me off about "audiophiles". The ONLY sane way to do comparisons between audio formats is with blind tests. And the blind tests that have been done continue to indicate that 160kbps MP3 encoded with a decent encoder (e.g. LAME or Helix) is basically indistinguishable from the original uncompressed music.
Are there detectable differences between MP3 and uncompressed? Absolutely. Anyone with a spectrum plot and 30 seconds can see them immediately. But people - at least the vast majority of people - just can't hear them.
No, they wouldn't. People listen to music on their PC speakers, their cheapshit car stereo, or their iPod earbuds. None of which are anywhere near good enough for anyone to care how much their music is compressed. Millions of people subscribe to XM, which is 24-48kbps HE-AACv2. I think 24kbps HE-AACv2 sounds like ass (even a really efficient codec like HE-AACv2 can't produce quality output at such craptastic bitrates), but people don't seem to care.
Compared with FM, HD, or satellite radio, the 220kbps MP3s I get off of Amazon are dramatically better. They're better than LPs (and, no, let's not go down that road - not all of us have $5000 cartridges and $3000 turntables). They're vastly better than cassette tapes.
And, FYI, my Zune has no problems playing WMA lossless. The iPod/iPhone plays ALAC. My G1 plays FLAC. But no one cares. If they aren't going to bother to get better earphones than the pack-ins, why would you expect them to sacrifice most of their device's capacity for a questionable quality increase?
You're right about compression on CDs. It sucks. But people have never cared about audio quality. Or video quality. Our craptastic 9Mbps "HD" feed from the local NBC station proves that. So does YouTube video. So does satellite radio. So did the failure of LaserDisc.
You make the mistake of equating something that's technically correct but completely irrelevant. The fact is that ANY well made coaxial cable has sufficiently low capacitance and good enough shielding to send SPDIF 6 feet from your CD player to your receiver's DAC.
Of course, you could say "screw it" to the whole coaxial cable thing and use TOSLINK. That has the added benefit of eliminating the chance of a ground loop.
UFDs and portable HDDs don't care what FS you put on them; they're just block devices and don't understand anything FS-level.
To my knowledge the iPhone/iPod no longer uses FAT32.
You might have a point with digital cameras.
What about the hard drive? I will not turn over a laptop for service without removing the disk. On my ThinkPad, that takes removing one screw. Apparently it takes 13 on the new 17" MBP.
Things I can replace on the ThinkPad with 6 screws or less:
- Keyboard
- Memory
- Touchpad
- Hard drive
- Optical drive
- WLAN card
- WWAN card
- Modem
- Clock battery
- DC power connector (it's on a separate PCB, not soldered to the system board)
- Battery
Keyboards break when you dump Diet Coke on them. Hard drives crash. Clock batteries die. Batteries get recalled.
What do you do when your ThinkPad is out of warranty and something breaks? You buy the part for cheap on eBay, download the service manual for free, and spend 20 minutes replacing the part. Or, if you're not savvy, you pay someone to do it for you - and it's relatively cheap.
What about when your MacBook breaks and isn't under warranty?
Sure we can, because we understand the probabilities of death and incarceration.
The death penalty isn't an effective deterrent in the US because it's so rare. 37 people were put to death in the US in 2008, which means that even if you commit murder AND are caught and convicted, the odds of getting the death penalty are around 1 in 500.
If you want the death penalty to be an effective deterrent, we need to start executing more people.
You mean, like, the Battery Charging Spec v1.0 Spec and Battery Charging Adopters Agreement.
USB-IF solved this one in 2007.
Major portions of Longhorn were rewritten using managed code. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't realize the compatibility and stability nightmare that replacing decade-old, well-debugged C++ routines with .NET would create.
This, combined with the fact that Longhorn devs were pulled off the project to work on XP SP2 caused the project to get hopelessly off course.
Things got so bad that Microsoft decided to effectively scrap the entire Longhorn userspace in 2005 and restart development using the Windows Server 2003 codebase.
Some might argue that it was because the managed portions of Longhorn were "too slow" or "buggy". This is true, but it's not really an indictment of .NET. Longhorn failed because it was too ambitious; developers tried to change too much, too quickly. Restarting from the mature Windows codebase that had been developed over the last 10 years allowed the project to get back on track. .NET is alive and well. Anyone who thinks that Microsoft is abandoning .NET needs to look at the products that Microsoft is working on right now. PowerShell uses managed code. The Zune uses managed code. Media center uses managed code. VS is written in managed code. Silverlight runs managed code. Even the product I worked on, ILM, was written with managed code.
No, you're not going to see Windows written in .NET. There are no major desktop environments written in managed code, although mobile environments (like the Hiptop or Android) are surprisingly close. But for everything else, that's where the world is heading.