E-Mail clients seem to be heading in the same direction. T-Bird has some great features and rationales for using. It does stuff that can only really be done from a fixed location (private mail, etc), and yes, it can integrate with desktop apps. But... I rarely use those extra features. I've switched to webmail knowing that I'm trading off some features, but the payoff of being able to actually GET to it wherever I am has paid off many more times than not having integration into MS Word or something.
People assume desktop clients mean POP3, probably because that's all that GMail offers. Well, of course that's what GMail offers - because they don't want you to know about IMAP.
My provider offers webmail AND IMAP support. I can view my mail on my computers using Thunderbird. Or, if I don't have Thunderbird available or configured, I can just log into webmail. All my mail is synchronized between the server and the client. If I delete something in webmail, it's deleted in Thunderbird - and vice versa.
Oh, and I can view my mail on my PDA, too - without using the crappy Google client. And with IDLE support, I get new messages the instant they arrive - on both my PC and my PDA. And I can set up rules on the server to filter mailing lists and other emails into folders.
People think GMail is the end-all of mail because the only other thing they have used is some ISP's crappy POP3 mail.
Thunderbird displays all 6500 messages in my inbox at the same time, on the same screen. Which webmail can do that? Thunderbird downloads mail to my local system, so I can access it offline. Which webmail does that? Thunderbird supports S/MIME encryption and signatures.
The real best-kept secret in the CPU world today is the X2 3600+. It's selling on Newegg for $65 right now, and while a dual-core 1.9GHz Athlon 64 isn't going to make Intel tremble, $65 is pretty darn close to Celeron price territory. Apparently the 3600+ overclocks well, too. Really well.
My girlfriend's '02 VW Polo gets 55mpg without particularly trying.
It's also a two-door compact car. The Prius is considerably larger - perhaps you should be comparing the VW Polo to the Honda Insight, which gets 65-70mpg.
'93 Citroën AX 1.5D
Your Citroën AX is a 650kg 2-door supermini that would be a deathtrap in a collision with anything of any size. Why the hell you would compare it to a 1400kg Prius (which is a 4-door "large family car") is completely beyond me.
at least 80mpg from its dinky little 50bhp diesel engine
You said two things there - 50bhp and diesel. Diesel contains 15% more energy per gallon than gasoline, making any "MPG" comparisons entirely pointless from a carbon-emission standpoint.
Moreover, you also said 50bhp. That's redicolously underpowerd, even for your 650kg Citroën. Forget about having an automatic transmission on a vehicle like that, and you'd better be easy on the clutch or you're going to be in stall city.
Forget hybrids and their environmentally-disasterous batteries and overcomplicated drive trains and electronics, get a diesel.
Ah, more hybrid misnomers. If you don't understand the battery technologies involved (Ni-Mh in current models), don't comment. Ni-Mh is not "environmentally-disasterous" - in fact, the Ni in the battery is so valuable that Toyota pays a $500 per pack bounty for recycling.
As for the "overcomplicated drive train", the Prius transmission has 12 moving parts, not one of which is a friction or wear component. In the past 5 years, I have never read a single account of a Prius transmission failing mechanically. The same cannot be said for manual or automatic transmissions, which fail all the time because they incorporate wear components (clutches/clutchpacks, syncromeshes, etc) and (in the case of an automatic transmission), high-pressure hydraulics.
This is the typical European Slashdot hybrid idiot post. I've seen it far, far too many times. The post points out how a much smaller, much less powerful diesel-powered vehicle can achieive results similar to a hybrid. Then they top it off with some nice myths about how hybrids are complicated (they aren't - Toyota's Prius is in fact mechanically simpler and far more reliable than a conventional vehicle), bad for the environment (somehow, 80% fewer smog-forming emissions and excellent fuel economy are "bad" because you have to recycle a battery 15 years down the road), or dangerous.
Here's a hint: don't compare a 3000lb 4-door large family vehicle (mid-size in the US) to a 2-door diesel subcompact. It makes you look stupid.
Re:aerodynamics and rolling friction, not engine t
on
Japanese Mileage Maniacs
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you completely switched off the hybrid system in a Prius
Do note that this is entirely impossible. The Prius transmission is the hybrid system. It neither resembles nor behaves like a conventional transmission - it is far more mechanically simple and has far more electronic control.
Note that the Prius hybrid system also replaces the starter and the alternator as well, and (from the 2004 model onwards) also runs the air conditioning.
The overwhelming factors for highway mileage are aerodynamics and rolling friction (tires, bearings, drivetrain components.)
Yes, although engine efficency also plays a big part. The Prius uses a small engine running on the more efficent Atkinson/Miller cycle. The 72HP 1NZ-FXE in the Prius would be undersized for a car of its size, but it's fine with the electric assist.
Writing the billionth bubblesort surely will not add anything meaningful to the world's codebase, but it's a good way to improve yours.
Bubblesort is absolutely the opposite of what new programmers should be doing. The problem with today's powerful computers is that even a bad algorithm appears fast for a sufficently small data set. Unfortunately, this teaches programmers that "bad algorithms are OK" - when they try to sort a lot of items, or a few items many times, suddenly their code is horribly slow. What's their reaction? They try to "optimize" their code with hacks that are often counterproductive.
New programmers need to understand how to use the resources they have been given. They should write a hashtable-based associative array, but they should also understand how to use the standard library.
Students need to understand Big O notation and how different algorithms react to different input sizes. Understanding that insertion sort is often faster than mergesort or quicksort for very small data sets is just as important as understanding that it's inapproprate for large data sets. The problem with bubble sort is that it performs poorly relative to nearly any other algorithm for any data size - it is NEVER the best algorithm. Instead of implementing a bubble sort, students should learn how recursion works, then write a mergesort or radix sort - it's no more difficult to understand, and it's far more useful in the real world.
Neither Computer Science nor Software Engineering are about writing code.
Yah, I'm still clueless why everyone wants Sony to loose
Hubris. Telling us that we should want to work longer to buy their overpriced console didn't help. Nor did trashing the 360's emulation-mode compatibility and then releasing the European PS3 with emulated PS2 compatibility. Nor did lying about why vibration wasn't in the controller.
Having actually used one for several hours, I can say The PS3 is a pretty damned nice console. It's decently quiet (though not as quiet as many say,it's still quieter than the 360), has a cool UI with some nice features (decent browser, keyboard/mouse support), runs Linux (and Folding@Home), has good graphics, plays Blu-Ray movies, and (in the US/Japan) has virtually 100% PS2 compatibility.
The PS3 could have been a home run for Sony. It's a damn fine console. But $500 is too expensive for a mass-market device. There's nothing in the $500 PS3 that's not in the $400 XBOX - except for a Blu-Ray drive. With the format war and high-priced content, most of us aren't all that interested in Blu-Ray - at least not yet.
The 360 has plenty of awesome titles, HD TV episode downloads (including South Park and Star Trek: TOS, which, to my knowledge, have never been broadcast or released in HD elsewhere), music streaming (Windows Media Connect) - even while you are playing a game, Live Arcade (flow is cool, but so is Lumines, Hexic, Small Arms, and lots of other titles on Live), Media Center Extender (in HD), and a lot more.
The PS3 can't just be "as good as the 360". Linux, a web browser, and keyboard/mouse support are cool features, but they aren't what most people buy a console for. The people who want such features probably ALREADY have a PC hooked up to their TV.
It's not that the PS3 is bad. But it's late, overpriced, and Sony has been pissing everyone off. Slashdot doesn't like hubris.
(FYI - I own none of the three "next-gen" consoles)
Compared to C++, yes, it typically is. But it's usually within 20-30%, sometimes a bit worse, sometiems a bit better. In some rare cases, Java can even beat machine-code compiled languages.
All Perl is unreadable
Absolutely not. But Perl culture encourages the kind of programming which leads to unreadable code. And Perl syntax certainly doesn't help either.
I would much, much rather work on Java code that someone else wrote. It's not that you can't write horrible Java code, it's just that the language syntax and culture discourages it.
All PHP is insecure
Certainly not, but as someone who works with PHP code on a daily basis, I think it's fair to say that most PHP code is insecure. Even well-recognized projects like PHPbb frequently experience breaches because of SQL injection or some other stupid vulnerability that shouldn't exist in a decent language.
Part of it is the language, part of it is the culture. PHP is an absolutely wonderful language in many ways - it's easy to pick up, easy to set up, and remarkably fast for what it is. But it's not J2EE.
All JavaScript is a useless intrusion into your browser
You have this point. JavaScript (and Flash) are far too often the targets of scorn. You don't blame C++/C/Assembly for allowing a virus creator to write a virus - why should you blame JavaScript for allowing marketers to make more annoying ads?
vThe availability of music, movies, and TV shows has been around as long as computers have been capable of displaying them, though the technologies used have changed many times. Software much longer.
There's a big difference between downloading crappy MPEG1 video clips from USENET or FTP sites and downloading an entire movie from iTunes. There's a big difference between RealVideo clips and YouTube.
I remember waiting HOURS to download the "high-quality" (VHS-like resolution) Star Wars Episode I teaser trailer. That was 1999. Yesterday, I downloaded a 1080p trailer in about two minutes.
Just because it exists doesn't mean that it's useful. Internet video is now useful.
The margin on computer gear isn't large enough to bear shipping costs. Non speciality gear can be had for much lower than online prices in any major city.
This is just flat-out wrong. If you've ever tried to procure a GPU, some DDR2, or a CPU locally, you know just how bogus this claim is.
Perhaps Denver isn't a "major city".
Online banking isn't much younger than the web, but that might be a Canadian/US difference. Usian banking technology has always lagged way, way behind.
Yes, it is. SSL didn't even exist until 1996, and you sure as hell aren't going to be doing online banking with cleartext HTTP.
One of my EE TAs is an IIT Bombay grad. Based on his experience as an engineer, I have no doubt that IIT Bombay provides a first-class education.
However - despite the fact that my TA has a 4-year EE degree, he as never used a graphing calculator, nor has he ever used a computer algebra system (Maple, Mathematica).
This surprised me (and my fellow lab students) a great deal - while it is expected that we should be able to do computations without a calculator (indeed, calculators are banned on all Applied Mathematics exams and some EE exams), it's also expected that you will understand how to use the resources that you have. MATLAB is a wonderful tool (which my TA is quite proficient in), but it is NOT a CAS, nor is it indended to be one.
The attitude at IIT is, "you should work it by hand". Want to solve a system of 4-variable s-domain mesh-current equations? You're going to be using Cramer's Rule and a LOT of recursion to find the determinants. Want to do inverse Laplace transforms on a 2nd-order system function? You had better get good at partial fraction expansion.
You can have this kind of academic rigor at an institute that's as elite as IIT. It's the same kind of thing that goes on at our military academies. When you are among the best of the best, more can be demanded of you.
As a taxpayer I expect that my state funded schools exist to serve the purpose of education. Since that appears to be your goal as well I think we should form a coalition to achieve this purpose. Our platform can be:
Don't be stupid. State-funded schools serve a variety of purposes. Education is only one of those purposes. Are you going to get pissed that your tax dollars are paying a professor to perform research? Or being used to fund a whole variety of clubs? What about athletics? We should eliminate those too. Student services? Do the students really need a student center? Should student government get funding?
There are over 40,000 people who work for or attend my university. That's the size of a small town. You can't claim that the university exists "to serve the purpose of education". There's a hell of a lot more going on.
Perhaps you want smaller universities? Ones that are more focused on meeting more specific objectives? There are universities like that - most are fine schools. But to claim that a large university is solely about education is to miss the point entirely - it's about research, relationship building, personal development, career success, community outreach, and a hell of a lot more.
Maybe you don't want to fund all of that stuff. But when you consider the amount you are actually paying to fund such universities (surprisingly little) compared to what they provide (surprisingly much), you're getting a pretty damn good deal.
You're the kind of ass who, as an IT manager, would deny all web access except a few whitelisted sites. You're well within your rights to do so. And, if you're in an environment that demands that, so be it - I don't want CIA employees to have unrestricted Internet access (or any access at all, for that matter). But the majority of positions don't demand that. Perhaps you should consider that we are all human, that we can't be "focused" 100% of the time, and that denying a student the ability to check their personal mail for 5 minutes between lectures accomplishes nothing but breeding discontent and malice towards IT.
Yes, educational/research use is the primary purpose for the network. There should NEVER be a situation where some student's movie piracy steps on the toes of a professor trying to upload their lecture notes. But such technology already exists, and is already in use at my university.
I'm working in a lab on campus right now, adding features to a digital logic project. Xilinx ISE software sucks and takes forever to compile a design (even on our 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo HP xw4400s). It's not multithreaded. My choices for what to do while the project is compiling are:
- Nothing - Slashdot
Maybe I should bring my notebook and EDGE modem so that I don't have to use school resources. But I'm still using their building, and quite possibly their power.
But honestly, you've NEVER used company resources for personal purposes? You've never made a call home with the landline phone you probably have? You've never printed a map to a party on a company printer? You've never checked your mail, your eBay account, or your bank balance with company computers?
Why do you think it's fair to expect such purity of government employees? Guess what? Your tax dollars pay for a lot of waste. In the grand scheme of things, personal use - provided that it is limited and appropriate - doesn't amount to jack squat compared to what you are paying in taxes.
Despite what you may think, the taxpayers don't run state-sponsored universities. They have a right to expect excellence in academics. But it's just stupid to expect that all expenses will trace directly back to education.
Lets see, 8.5 million WoW subscribers * ~$12/month * 12 months = ~$1.2 Billion.
Most WOW subscribers (~3.5 million in China alone) don't pay $12 a month - they pay on an hourly basis, and at a much lower rate. I'd buy $600 million, but $1.2 billion is probably a bit high.
Note that Europe does have higher subscription prices, though - although they are a fraction of the game's market.
More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
What the hell does Aero have to do with business use? You can disable it if you don't want to use it in a business environment, which I'm sure that many businesses will do for hardare reasons anyway (Intel's Extreme Graphics / GMA900 can't run it anyway).
Would you claim that Mac OS X's "glitzy" UI makes it inappropriate for business use? Or that Beryl makes Linux inappropriate for business use?
You're blaming the wrong people; try complaining to the people who made the broken websites and didn't test or at least validate them.
Considering that you can't even run Safari on Windows, it's kind of difficult to test them.
Oh, and there are plenty of pages which validate yet give Safari/Firefox nightmares. And there are plenty of noncompliant pages (slashdot.org, anyone?) which work fine. Validation is like making sure that your code doesn't generate warnings - it's something that you should do, but it doesn't ensure that your app isn't a buggy piece of crap.
It's easy to blame the developers. At the end of the day, you might even be right to do so. But, at the end of the day, developers (like myself) far too often have garbage legacy code and far too little time to be concerned about Safari.
Most of the "Professionals" I know:
Use tables for layout
Use inline CSS
Write code that doesn't validate
You don't understand how difficult it can be to refactor crappy HTML until you've had to work on a page made with Dreamweaver 3.x. 10 levels of nested tables, nonsencially named styles, and bizzare indentation are just the start.
I write code that validates (or, at least, fails with very few errors - somtimes I have to use metrics code which cannot be modified), target Firefox, and patch for IE6 (and sometimes IE7) using conditional comments. I don't use tables for layout, I don't nest a bunch of
tags, and I look at the page without the stylesheet.
You know what? Sometimes things still break in Safari. But I really can't test that. I don't have a Mac (nor do I have the desire to spend $600 on one), and my clients don't care about Firefox as is - let alone Safari (I have to phrase the whole "why are you spending time on compliance" argument in terms of maintainability).
okay. So Vista didn't destroy your computing experience. Great.
'Vista is the next version of the OS with the broadest hardware and software compatibility. $109 is a pretty cheap price for that.'
Can you think of any compelling reason why you should be paying $109 for a new version of the OS instead of receiving a free service pack that updates the driver database with new drivers?
Presumably you are referring to Mac OS X, because in Windows, you don't need a "service pack" to get new drivers - they come on a CD with the hardware you buy, or you get them of the Internet. That's why XP is still clicking with hardware that was released 5 years after it.
And, yes, I can think of some compelling reasons:
New UI. Crap on Aero Glass all you want, but I think that it looks pretty damn nice. Taskbar thumbnails are nice, flip 3D is handy (though not as nice as Expose, which is why I have a third-party Expose ripoff installed on Vista), and the animations look cool without being annoying.
Hybrid suspend. This is a big deal on my notebook, because S3 Suspend drains the battery in 3-4 days, and with 1.25GB of memory, it takes ~20s to resume from hibernation. Now my notebook sleeps for 6 hours and then hibernates. I have to resume from disk about once a day, rather than 5-6 times. Oh, and I can switch batteries, too, without worrying about losing data.
New networking stack. Vista roams better on wireless networks, it doesn't make you enter the WEP/WPA key twice, and I can customize the firewall/discovery options for various different networks (so no one is screwing with my file shares unless I'm on my WPA home network).
Search, search, search. I can search by pressing a single key, launch programs without looking through the Start menu, and filter the control panel and folders easily.
New Explorer. Thumbnails that actually seem to work (e.g. the video thumbnailer doesn't stupidly choose the first frame, which is usually black). Network file operations that don't cause Explorer to lock up. A places sidebar that I can customize.
New audio stack. I can mute Firefox so that stupid Flash ads and Quicktime movies don't make noise (and, no, I don't want to disable Flash or have to click to load Flash files). Input settings that actually make sense. Control over audio effects and channel levels without using the crappy proprietary Realtek UI.
New GDI subsystem. Video drivers don't crash the system anymore
SMB 2.0. Network transfers don't fail just because the network had blip. I can start a transfer on the wireless, switch to the wired connection, and continue right where I left off. Very useful when screwing with the network topology at LAN parties.
Presentation mode. Stops notifications ("Windows updates are available!") from coming up during presentations.
Windows Update. No longer a website that takes forever to load and breaks often.
malloc that no longer sucks. 40% faster in my informal testing.
New setup routine. Takes about 1/2 the time, and you can run it without having to be prompted 5 times during the install.
Those are some of the things that I think are pretty compelling. No, there isn't an "uberfeature". But, then again, such a thing cannot exist in a relatively mature OS. Vista, like the latest release of Mac OS X, is a little better in a lot of ways. There are hundreds of changes that I could list which each make the OS work just a bit better.
But, hey, it's not like anyone on Slashdot has actually used Vista.
All the DRM made direct access to the DSP 'illegal', so it can't be used anymore in vista, nor will it likely ever be
Please understand what the hell you are talking about. Vista's user-mode audio framework no longer allows DirectSound3D to run directly on the hardware. This has to do with the fact that the audio subsystem is no longer in kernel space, not DRM.
Creative is advising every game creator to use OpenAL, to bypass this piece of crap situation DRM has brought us, so much for 'vista the ultimate gaming platform':-)
Creative has been advising the use of OpenAL for years. Under Vista, they have an application that translates DirectSound3D EAX calls to OpenAL calls so that you can use your hardware accelerated audio.
But, hey, it's not like you should read Creative's FAQ or their well-written forum post.
Elevated processes can't return to a limited token either, which causes much grief for setup programs - there's a horrid work around involving scheduling a new task, just so it runs as a normal user with a filtered token again!
Agreed - this is a significant problem with UAC. Of course, I have always thought that a "launch this application after setup completes" option was kind of a bad idea anyway.
I don't know how this works with MSI packages, either, because elevation doesn't occur in the same way.
The text editor could still support it, but it would need to launch a separate helper application just for saving (and loading?).
EMEditor already has a helper application (EEAdmin.exe) that it uses for certain operations (e.g. changing file association) which require elevation.
When I was working on a wireless connection manager for Linux (GTKWifi), this is exactly what I did, except that I used sudo instead of UAC. If only more Linux apps did this - why should I have to run Synaptic as root if I'm just browsing packages - it's a better idea to split out the UI and browsing functionality from the part of the code that actually installs packages, and create a well-defined interface between the two.
If only the elevation could be done per-thread, it would be so much easier...
This would be a huge security problem. Threads do not have their own protected memory space, so it is impossible to prevent a lower-privileged thread from screwing with the code or data of an elevated thread.
Now, you could argue that we should create thread with its own protected memory space, file resources, and other handles. Guess what? That's excatly what a process is.
Maybe we could come up with something in the middle, but you're talking about an entirely type of construct. That makes migration and backwards compatibility even harder.
What the hell is the point of all of these articles? Linux users aren't going to switch to Vista. Mac users are already convinced that their OS is Job's gift to man. And Windows users are going to switch to Vista when they buy a new computer.
Vista is here. The DRM features don't stop me from playing my MP3s, XVID videos, or from running FairUse4WM. It doesn't bring my modest 1.8GHz single-core Athlon 64 box to its knees, even with the Aero Glass UI (of course, my $40 Radeon X1300 helped that - the GeForce 6100 IGP was kind of sluggish. It hasn't stopped me from installing Ubuntu, ripping DVDs, using Daemon Tools, installing unsigned drivers, or doing anything else that I would do to a Windows system.
UAC hasn't prompted me for anything in the past 4 hours. I see - maybe - 1 or 2 prompts per day. Perhaps that's because I don't go trying to put files in "C:\windows" or screw with system DLLs.
Firefox works. So does Thunderbird, Office 2003, Visual Studio, Paint Shop Pro, VMWare, Virtual PC, Maple, EMEditor, WinSCP, PuTTY, AVG, SmartFTP, Microangelo, iTunes, Quicktime, Daemon Tools, TI Connect, WinRAR, ATITool, SpeedFan, RMClock, PowerStrip, Prime95, Paint.NET, uTorrent, Opera, NSIS, Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, 3DMark, Warcraft III, Steam, and WoW.
Oh, and all of my hardware works. On both of my desktops and my notebook.
So what doesn't work? Display aspect ratio selection doesn't work with NVIDIA's shitty drivers (one reason my desktop has an ATI card now). PDFCreator refuses to work, as does VNC.
Vista is the next version of the OS with the broadest hardware and software compatibility. $109 is a pretty cheap price for that.
Vista does make editing the HOSTS file more complex. I've done it five times today on my Vista box (migrating a server and testing before DNS updates). It's kind of a pain. But it's not nearly as bad as the article implies.
My procedure: Start -> Right click on EMEditor (my text editor, it's pinned to the menu so it's always there) -> Choose "Run as Administrator" Click "Continue" File -> Open -> C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts Edit File Save
On XP: Start -> Run Type: "notepad C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" Click "OK" Edit File Save
Basically, you can't write to the hosts file by default, so you have to elevate an application (text editor, notepad, cmd.exe) to edit it. This is similar to Linux, where you have to use "sudo" or "su", except that there are better/more text-mode editors on Linux (although Vim/Nano/EMACS do run on Windows, you have to install them first).
Now, EMEditor is Vista compatible (certified even), but it would be nice if it could elevate when a write operation fails due to incorrect permissions. Then you could just edit the file as usual, and elevate when you save.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: UAC is going to get better over time. Lots of applications require elevation now (even some games), but as developers update their programs, we'll see fewer and fewer UAC prompts. VMWare, for example, used to require elevation in the 6.0 betas, but it doesn't anymore. Give it a year or two. Apps will stop requiring elevation except for the things that really do affect the system.
UAC means that software developers will write software that doesn't need elevation. That can only be a good thing in the long run.
Frankly, I'm glad that they made the distinction between an application and a window, unlike the Windows world. It makes a lot more sense, IMO.
Why? I don't think in terms of "I'm going to open Word so that I can edit my document", I think in terms of "Let's double-click on this document and it will open in Word".
For the most part, people are viewing, creating, or editing files of some kind. Web pages, Excel sheets, Email messages, MP3s, Videos, or any of the vast other types of data that your computer can process.
We need to move beyond this concept of "Applications". BeOS had this right in so many regards - mail was just a part of the filesystem, for example.
Orthogonality is what separates the M68000 from the 8086. It's something that's sorely lacking in today's desktop. The same basic operations should work the same way in as many ways as possible. And it shouldn't be up to programmers to implement these operations.
Konqueror has the right idea here. Not Mac OS X. Why, precisely, would I want to leave Word open when I don't have any active documents? Why should Safari be open when I'm not viewing any websites? And, before you say, "It takes less time to start up", realize that application startup time is a flaw in the applications and the OS. Word 2003 starts in ~2s on my Vista box. IE starts in less than one. Firefox and Thunderbird take about 1.5 seconds, as does Windows Media Player.
Because it takes up a lot of space providing features which have better UI implementations (cut/paste/drag&drop) anyway?
Thanks for removing the UP button too, you've made my life all the more easier.
Yeah, because clicking the breadcrumb bar is so hard. Or you could just press ALT+UP ARROW, the exact same shortcut that XP used.
The new Explorer lets me customize the links used in the left pane. It picks thumbnails for movie files that aren't braindead (XP picks the first frame, which is usually black). It has a search feature without a stupid animated puppy.
And they wonder why sales are off.
As with all versions of Windows since 98, most of the revenue comes from OEM copies. And OEM copies of Vista are doing just fine.
No, it's a horrible OS for the reasons you state. It fails to provide any advancement in this particular area. It's a debunking of Microsoft's lie that Vista is more responsive. Why are you opposed to that?
Vista's I/O subsystem can keep media streaming off the disk even while you are doing tasks like defragging. Vista's malloc is dramatically better (40%+ in my informal benchmarks). Vista's I/O operations can be canceled, so applications don't mysteriously become zombies because of I/O blocking. Vista's disk caching is significantly improved.
You can't expect to run Vista on a 512MB system and get XP-like performance. But if you have 1GB or more, Vista is often actually much faster than XP.
No, Vista can't make your virus scanner scan any faster. It's not going to make your XVID encoder encode faster. But, let's be honest - no OS can do that. It can, however, make launching applications, allocating memory, and disk I/O much more responsive. Which is exactly what it does.
But, hey, you don't actually need to use Vista to decide that it's "terrible".
Slashdot Mirror
People assume desktop clients mean POP3, probably because that's all that GMail offers. Well, of course that's what GMail offers - because they don't want you to know about IMAP.
My provider offers webmail AND IMAP support. I can view my mail on my computers using Thunderbird. Or, if I don't have Thunderbird available or configured, I can just log into webmail. All my mail is synchronized between the server and the client. If I delete something in webmail, it's deleted in Thunderbird - and vice versa.
Oh, and I can view my mail on my PDA, too - without using the crappy Google client. And with IDLE support, I get new messages the instant they arrive - on both my PC and my PDA. And I can set up rules on the server to filter mailing lists and other emails into folders.
People think GMail is the end-all of mail because the only other thing they have used is some ISP's crappy POP3 mail.
Thunderbird displays all 6500 messages in my inbox at the same time, on the same screen. Which webmail can do that? Thunderbird downloads mail to my local system, so I can access it offline. Which webmail does that? Thunderbird supports S/MIME encryption and signatures.
The real best-kept secret in the CPU world today is the X2 3600+. It's selling on Newegg for $65 right now, and while a dual-core 1.9GHz Athlon 64 isn't going to make Intel tremble, $65 is pretty darn close to Celeron price territory. Apparently the 3600+ overclocks well, too. Really well.
It's also a two-door compact car. The Prius is considerably larger - perhaps you should be comparing the VW Polo to the Honda Insight, which gets 65-70mpg.
Your Citroën AX is a 650kg 2-door supermini that would be a deathtrap in a collision with anything of any size. Why the hell you would compare it to a 1400kg Prius (which is a 4-door "large family car") is completely beyond me.
You said two things there - 50bhp and diesel. Diesel contains 15% more energy per gallon than gasoline, making any "MPG" comparisons entirely pointless from a carbon-emission standpoint.
Moreover, you also said 50bhp. That's redicolously underpowerd, even for your 650kg Citroën. Forget about having an automatic transmission on a vehicle like that, and you'd better be easy on the clutch or you're going to be in stall city.
Ah, more hybrid misnomers. If you don't understand the battery technologies involved (Ni-Mh in current models), don't comment. Ni-Mh is not "environmentally-disasterous" - in fact, the Ni in the battery is so valuable that Toyota pays a $500 per pack bounty for recycling.
As for the "overcomplicated drive train", the Prius transmission has 12 moving parts, not one of which is a friction or wear component. In the past 5 years, I have never read a single account of a Prius transmission failing mechanically. The same cannot be said for manual or automatic transmissions, which fail all the time because they incorporate wear components (clutches/clutchpacks, syncromeshes, etc) and (in the case of an automatic transmission), high-pressure hydraulics.
This is the typical European Slashdot hybrid idiot post. I've seen it far, far too many times. The post points out how a much smaller, much less powerful diesel-powered vehicle can achieive results similar to a hybrid. Then they top it off with some nice myths about how hybrids are complicated (they aren't - Toyota's Prius is in fact mechanically simpler and far more reliable than a conventional vehicle), bad for the environment (somehow, 80% fewer smog-forming emissions and excellent fuel economy are "bad" because you have to recycle a battery 15 years down the road), or dangerous.
Here's a hint: don't compare a 3000lb 4-door large family vehicle (mid-size in the US) to a 2-door diesel subcompact. It makes you look stupid.
Do note that this is entirely impossible. The Prius transmission is the hybrid system. It neither resembles nor behaves like a conventional transmission - it is far more mechanically simple and has far more electronic control.
Note that the Prius hybrid system also replaces the starter and the alternator as well, and (from the 2004 model onwards) also runs the air conditioning.
Yes, although engine efficency also plays a big part. The Prius uses a small engine running on the more efficent Atkinson/Miller cycle. The 72HP 1NZ-FXE in the Prius would be undersized for a car of its size, but it's fine with the electric assist.
Bubblesort is absolutely the opposite of what new programmers should be doing. The problem with today's powerful computers is that even a bad algorithm appears fast for a sufficently small data set. Unfortunately, this teaches programmers that "bad algorithms are OK" - when they try to sort a lot of items, or a few items many times, suddenly their code is horribly slow. What's their reaction? They try to "optimize" their code with hacks that are often counterproductive.
New programmers need to understand how to use the resources they have been given. They should write a hashtable-based associative array, but they should also understand how to use the standard library.
Students need to understand Big O notation and how different algorithms react to different input sizes. Understanding that insertion sort is often faster than mergesort or quicksort for very small data sets is just as important as understanding that it's inapproprate for large data sets. The problem with bubble sort is that it performs poorly relative to nearly any other algorithm for any data size - it is NEVER the best algorithm. Instead of implementing a bubble sort, students should learn how recursion works, then write a mergesort or radix sort - it's no more difficult to understand, and it's far more useful in the real world.
Neither Computer Science nor Software Engineering are about writing code.
Try $69. On Newegg. Right now. With free shipping.
The cheapest Core 2 Duo is 2.5x as expensive.
Welcome back AMD. We remember cheapshit Athlon XP CPUs. And we'll remember this.
Hubris. Telling us that we should want to work longer to buy their overpriced console didn't help. Nor did trashing the 360's emulation-mode compatibility and then releasing the European PS3 with emulated PS2 compatibility. Nor did lying about why vibration wasn't in the controller.
Having actually used one for several hours, I can say The PS3 is a pretty damned nice console. It's decently quiet (though not as quiet as many say,it's still quieter than the 360), has a cool UI with some nice features (decent browser, keyboard/mouse support), runs Linux (and Folding@Home), has good graphics, plays Blu-Ray movies, and (in the US/Japan) has virtually 100% PS2 compatibility.
The PS3 could have been a home run for Sony. It's a damn fine console. But $500 is too expensive for a mass-market device. There's nothing in the $500 PS3 that's not in the $400 XBOX - except for a Blu-Ray drive. With the format war and high-priced content, most of us aren't all that interested in Blu-Ray - at least not yet.
The 360 has plenty of awesome titles, HD TV episode downloads (including South Park and Star Trek: TOS, which, to my knowledge, have never been broadcast or released in HD elsewhere), music streaming (Windows Media Connect) - even while you are playing a game, Live Arcade (flow is cool, but so is Lumines, Hexic, Small Arms, and lots of other titles on Live), Media Center Extender (in HD), and a lot more.
The PS3 can't just be "as good as the 360". Linux, a web browser, and keyboard/mouse support are cool features, but they aren't what most people buy a console for. The people who want such features probably ALREADY have a PC hooked up to their TV.
It's not that the PS3 is bad. But it's late, overpriced, and Sony has been pissing everyone off. Slashdot doesn't like hubris.
(FYI - I own none of the three "next-gen" consoles)
Compared to C++, yes, it typically is. But it's usually within 20-30%, sometimes a bit worse, sometiems a bit better. In some rare cases, Java can even beat machine-code compiled languages.
Absolutely not. But Perl culture encourages the kind of programming which leads to unreadable code. And Perl syntax certainly doesn't help either.
I would much, much rather work on Java code that someone else wrote. It's not that you can't write horrible Java code, it's just that the language syntax and culture discourages it.
Certainly not, but as someone who works with PHP code on a daily basis, I think it's fair to say that most PHP code is insecure. Even well-recognized projects like PHPbb frequently experience breaches because of SQL injection or some other stupid vulnerability that shouldn't exist in a decent language.
Part of it is the language, part of it is the culture. PHP is an absolutely wonderful language in many ways - it's easy to pick up, easy to set up, and remarkably fast for what it is. But it's not J2EE.
You have this point. JavaScript (and Flash) are far too often the targets of scorn. You don't blame C++/C/Assembly for allowing a virus creator to write a virus - why should you blame JavaScript for allowing marketers to make more annoying ads?
There's a big difference between downloading crappy MPEG1 video clips from USENET or FTP sites and downloading an entire movie from iTunes. There's a big difference between RealVideo clips and YouTube.
I remember waiting HOURS to download the "high-quality" (VHS-like resolution) Star Wars Episode I teaser trailer. That was 1999. Yesterday, I downloaded a 1080p trailer in about two minutes.
Just because it exists doesn't mean that it's useful. Internet video is now useful.
This is just flat-out wrong. If you've ever tried to procure a GPU, some DDR2, or a CPU locally, you know just how bogus this claim is.
Perhaps Denver isn't a "major city".
Yes, it is. SSL didn't even exist until 1996, and you sure as hell aren't going to be doing online banking with cleartext HTTP.
One of my EE TAs is an IIT Bombay grad. Based on his experience as an engineer, I have no doubt that IIT Bombay provides a first-class education.
However - despite the fact that my TA has a 4-year EE degree, he as never used a graphing calculator, nor has he ever used a computer algebra system (Maple, Mathematica).
This surprised me (and my fellow lab students) a great deal - while it is expected that we should be able to do computations without a calculator (indeed, calculators are banned on all Applied Mathematics exams and some EE exams), it's also expected that you will understand how to use the resources that you have. MATLAB is a wonderful tool (which my TA is quite proficient in), but it is NOT a CAS, nor is it indended to be one.
The attitude at IIT is, "you should work it by hand". Want to solve a system of 4-variable s-domain mesh-current equations? You're going to be using Cramer's Rule and a LOT of recursion to find the determinants. Want to do inverse Laplace transforms on a 2nd-order system function? You had better get good at partial fraction expansion.
You can have this kind of academic rigor at an institute that's as elite as IIT. It's the same kind of thing that goes on at our military academies. When you are among the best of the best, more can be demanded of you.
Don't be stupid. State-funded schools serve a variety of purposes. Education is only one of those purposes. Are you going to get pissed that your tax dollars are paying a professor to perform research? Or being used to fund a whole variety of clubs? What about athletics? We should eliminate those too. Student services? Do the students really need a student center? Should student government get funding?
There are over 40,000 people who work for or attend my university. That's the size of a small town. You can't claim that the university exists "to serve the purpose of education". There's a hell of a lot more going on.
Perhaps you want smaller universities? Ones that are more focused on meeting more specific objectives? There are universities like that - most are fine schools. But to claim that a large university is solely about education is to miss the point entirely - it's about research, relationship building, personal development, career success, community outreach, and a hell of a lot more.
Maybe you don't want to fund all of that stuff. But when you consider the amount you are actually paying to fund such universities (surprisingly little) compared to what they provide (surprisingly much), you're getting a pretty damn good deal.
You're the kind of ass who, as an IT manager, would deny all web access except a few whitelisted sites. You're well within your rights to do so. And, if you're in an environment that demands that, so be it - I don't want CIA employees to have unrestricted Internet access (or any access at all, for that matter). But the majority of positions don't demand that. Perhaps you should consider that we are all human, that we can't be "focused" 100% of the time, and that denying a student the ability to check their personal mail for 5 minutes between lectures accomplishes nothing but breeding discontent and malice towards IT.
Yes, educational/research use is the primary purpose for the network. There should NEVER be a situation where some student's movie piracy steps on the toes of a professor trying to upload their lecture notes. But such technology already exists, and is already in use at my university.
I'm working in a lab on campus right now, adding features to a digital logic project. Xilinx ISE software sucks and takes forever to compile a design (even on our 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo HP xw4400s). It's not multithreaded. My choices for what to do while the project is compiling are:
- Nothing
- Slashdot
Maybe I should bring my notebook and EDGE modem so that I don't have to use school resources. But I'm still using their building, and quite possibly their power.
But honestly, you've NEVER used company resources for personal purposes? You've never made a call home with the landline phone you probably have? You've never printed a map to a party on a company printer? You've never checked your mail, your eBay account, or your bank balance with company computers?
Why do you think it's fair to expect such purity of government employees? Guess what? Your tax dollars pay for a lot of waste. In the grand scheme of things, personal use - provided that it is limited and appropriate - doesn't amount to jack squat compared to what you are paying in taxes.
Despite what you may think, the taxpayers don't run state-sponsored universities. They have a right to expect excellence in academics. But it's just stupid to expect that all expenses will trace directly back to education.
Thank god you're not running this university.
Most WOW subscribers (~3.5 million in China alone) don't pay $12 a month - they pay on an hourly basis, and at a much lower rate. I'd buy $600 million, but $1.2 billion is probably a bit high.
Note that Europe does have higher subscription prices, though - although they are a fraction of the game's market.
My source indicates otherwise. So does this article.
But, hey, why should the facts get in the way of your elitism?
Different to is British English. It's entirely rational for an American to find it odd.
We can't prove that there isn't a teapot orbiting around the sun. That doesn't mean that there is.
Yeah, because it's just so much harder to say interracial dating.
What the hell does Aero have to do with business use? You can disable it if you don't want to use it in a business environment, which I'm sure that many businesses will do for hardare reasons anyway (Intel's Extreme Graphics / GMA900 can't run it anyway).
Would you claim that Mac OS X's "glitzy" UI makes it inappropriate for business use? Or that Beryl makes Linux inappropriate for business use?
Considering that you can't even run Safari on Windows, it's kind of difficult to test them.
Oh, and there are plenty of pages which validate yet give Safari/Firefox nightmares. And there are plenty of noncompliant pages (slashdot.org, anyone?) which work fine. Validation is like making sure that your code doesn't generate warnings - it's something that you should do, but it doesn't ensure that your app isn't a buggy piece of crap.
It's easy to blame the developers. At the end of the day, you might even be right to do so. But, at the end of the day, developers (like myself) far too often have garbage legacy code and far too little time to be concerned about Safari.
Most of the "Professionals" I know:
You don't understand how difficult it can be to refactor crappy HTML until you've had to work on a page made with Dreamweaver 3.x. 10 levels of nested tables, nonsencially named styles, and bizzare indentation are just the start.
I write code that validates (or, at least, fails with very few errors - somtimes I have to use metrics code which cannot be modified), target Firefox, and patch for IE6 (and sometimes IE7) using conditional comments. I don't use tables for layout, I don't nest a bunch of tags, and I look at the page without the stylesheet.
You know what? Sometimes things still break in Safari. But I really can't test that. I don't have a Mac (nor do I have the desire to spend $600 on one), and my clients don't care about Firefox as is - let alone Safari (I have to phrase the whole "why are you spending time on compliance" argument in terms of maintainability).
Presumably you are referring to Mac OS X, because in Windows, you don't need a "service pack" to get new drivers - they come on a CD with the hardware you buy, or you get them of the Internet. That's why XP is still clicking with hardware that was released 5 years after it.
And, yes, I can think of some compelling reasons:
Those are some of the things that I think are pretty compelling. No, there isn't an "uberfeature". But, then again, such a thing cannot exist in a relatively mature OS. Vista, like the latest release of Mac OS X, is a little better in a lot of ways. There are hundreds of changes that I could list which each make the OS work just a bit better.
But, hey, it's not like anyone on Slashdot has actually used Vista.
Please understand what the hell you are talking about. Vista's user-mode audio framework no longer allows DirectSound3D to run directly on the hardware. This has to do with the fact that the audio subsystem is no longer in kernel space, not DRM.
Creative has been advising the use of OpenAL for years. Under Vista, they have an application that translates DirectSound3D EAX calls to OpenAL calls so that you can use your hardware accelerated audio.
But, hey, it's not like you should read Creative's FAQ or their well-written forum post.
Agreed - this is a significant problem with UAC. Of course, I have always thought that a "launch this application after setup completes" option was kind of a bad idea anyway.
I don't know how this works with MSI packages, either, because elevation doesn't occur in the same way.
EMEditor already has a helper application (EEAdmin.exe) that it uses for certain operations (e.g. changing file association) which require elevation.
When I was working on a wireless connection manager for Linux (GTKWifi), this is exactly what I did, except that I used sudo instead of UAC. If only more Linux apps did this - why should I have to run Synaptic as root if I'm just browsing packages - it's a better idea to split out the UI and browsing functionality from the part of the code that actually installs packages, and create a well-defined interface between the two.
This would be a huge security problem. Threads do not have their own protected memory space, so it is impossible to prevent a lower-privileged thread from screwing with the code or data of an elevated thread.
Now, you could argue that we should create thread with its own protected memory space, file resources, and other handles. Guess what? That's excatly what a process is.
Maybe we could come up with something in the middle, but you're talking about an entirely type of construct. That makes migration and backwards compatibility even harder.
What the hell is the point of all of these articles? Linux users aren't going to switch to Vista. Mac users are already convinced that their OS is Job's gift to man. And Windows users are going to switch to Vista when they buy a new computer.
Vista is here. The DRM features don't stop me from playing my MP3s, XVID videos, or from running FairUse4WM. It doesn't bring my modest 1.8GHz single-core Athlon 64 box to its knees, even with the Aero Glass UI (of course, my $40 Radeon X1300 helped that - the GeForce 6100 IGP was kind of sluggish. It hasn't stopped me from installing Ubuntu, ripping DVDs, using Daemon Tools, installing unsigned drivers, or doing anything else that I would do to a Windows system.
UAC hasn't prompted me for anything in the past 4 hours. I see - maybe - 1 or 2 prompts per day. Perhaps that's because I don't go trying to put files in "C:\windows" or screw with system DLLs.
Firefox works. So does Thunderbird, Office 2003, Visual Studio, Paint Shop Pro, VMWare, Virtual PC, Maple, EMEditor, WinSCP, PuTTY, AVG, SmartFTP, Microangelo, iTunes, Quicktime, Daemon Tools, TI Connect, WinRAR, ATITool, SpeedFan, RMClock, PowerStrip, Prime95, Paint.NET, uTorrent, Opera, NSIS, Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, 3DMark, Warcraft III, Steam, and WoW.
Oh, and all of my hardware works. On both of my desktops and my notebook.
So what doesn't work? Display aspect ratio selection doesn't work with NVIDIA's shitty drivers (one reason my desktop has an ATI card now). PDFCreator refuses to work, as does VNC.
Vista is the next version of the OS with the broadest hardware and software compatibility. $109 is a pretty cheap price for that.
Vista does make editing the HOSTS file more complex. I've done it five times today on my Vista box (migrating a server and testing before DNS updates). It's kind of a pain. But it's not nearly as bad as the article implies.
My procedure:
Start -> Right click on EMEditor (my text editor, it's pinned to the menu so it's always there) -> Choose "Run as Administrator"
Click "Continue"
File -> Open -> C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Edit File
Save
On XP:
Start -> Run
Type: "notepad C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Click "OK"
Edit File
Save
Basically, you can't write to the hosts file by default, so you have to elevate an application (text editor, notepad, cmd.exe) to edit it. This is similar to Linux, where you have to use "sudo" or "su", except that there are better/more text-mode editors on Linux (although Vim/Nano/EMACS do run on Windows, you have to install them first).
Now, EMEditor is Vista compatible (certified even), but it would be nice if it could elevate when a write operation fails due to incorrect permissions. Then you could just edit the file as usual, and elevate when you save.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: UAC is going to get better over time. Lots of applications require elevation now (even some games), but as developers update their programs, we'll see fewer and fewer UAC prompts. VMWare, for example, used to require elevation in the 6.0 betas, but it doesn't anymore. Give it a year or two. Apps will stop requiring elevation except for the things that really do affect the system.
UAC means that software developers will write software that doesn't need elevation. That can only be a good thing in the long run.
Why? I don't think in terms of "I'm going to open Word so that I can edit my document", I think in terms of "Let's double-click on this document and it will open in Word".
For the most part, people are viewing, creating, or editing files of some kind. Web pages, Excel sheets, Email messages, MP3s, Videos, or any of the vast other types of data that your computer can process.
We need to move beyond this concept of "Applications". BeOS had this right in so many regards - mail was just a part of the filesystem, for example.
Orthogonality is what separates the M68000 from the 8086. It's something that's sorely lacking in today's desktop. The same basic operations should work the same way in as many ways as possible. And it shouldn't be up to programmers to implement these operations.
Konqueror has the right idea here. Not Mac OS X. Why, precisely, would I want to leave Word open when I don't have any active documents? Why should Safari be open when I'm not viewing any websites? And, before you say, "It takes less time to start up", realize that application startup time is a flaw in the applications and the OS. Word 2003 starts in ~2s on my Vista box. IE starts in less than one. Firefox and Thunderbird take about 1.5 seconds, as does Windows Media Player.
Installing Firefox changes your homepage by default. Distro specific packages may not, but the official installer certainly does.
Not that your post makes any sense anyway. Which browser are you using, Konqueror, Firefox, or Iceweasel?
When you "Make a typo in Konqueror", "Firefox gives the following:" "Icewaesel can't..."
Because it takes up a lot of space providing features which have better UI implementations (cut/paste/drag&drop) anyway?
Yeah, because clicking the breadcrumb bar is so hard. Or you could just press ALT+UP ARROW, the exact same shortcut that XP used.
The new Explorer lets me customize the links used in the left pane. It picks thumbnails for movie files that aren't braindead (XP picks the first frame, which is usually black). It has a search feature without a stupid animated puppy.
As with all versions of Windows since 98, most of the revenue comes from OEM copies. And OEM copies of Vista are doing just fine.
Vista's I/O subsystem can keep media streaming off the disk even while you are doing tasks like defragging. Vista's malloc is dramatically better (40%+ in my informal benchmarks). Vista's I/O operations can be canceled, so applications don't mysteriously become zombies because of I/O blocking. Vista's disk caching is significantly improved.
You can't expect to run Vista on a 512MB system and get XP-like performance. But if you have 1GB or more, Vista is often actually much faster than XP.
No, Vista can't make your virus scanner scan any faster. It's not going to make your XVID encoder encode faster. But, let's be honest - no OS can do that. It can, however, make launching applications, allocating memory, and disk I/O much more responsive. Which is exactly what it does.
But, hey, you don't actually need to use Vista to decide that it's "terrible".