The only difference there is spindle speed, 1.2:1 difference to be exact, DVD+R to DVD-R. The underlying technology and interface are exactly the same beyond that.
Wrong. There are significant differences in tracking, linking, and error management.
HD-DVD uses a standard red laser operating at a much lower wavelength of light
Swing and a miss. Both Bul-ray and HD-DVD use a 405nm blue laser.
Beyond the cost for a blue laser system, you then have to support two dual chip sets for processing HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs because of the completely different DRM standards being used.
Nope. Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD use AACS.
And yes, this is hardware decoded in consumer devices so you're talking about quite a cost if you wanted to build custom ASICs to do both in one chipset, in licensing fees alone!
You clearly don't understand the IC market very well. There are ASICs that handle the vast majority of the needs for a DVD player, including drive servo / spindle control, MPEG2 decoding, multiple different audio formats (MP2/AC3/DTS, often MP3 and WMA as well), video scaling, OSD generation, and, in many cases, even incorporate a microcontroller.
Extreme integration is very common for a market this size.
Actually, Blu-ray Disc is the format everyone should be hoping wins if you have any interest in data backup to optical media.
Most people don't. 50GB still means burning 6 discs to back up my (not unusually large) 300GB drive. Are you going to want to blow 15 discs to back up one of those new Seagate 750GB drives? What about when we have 1TB drives? 2TB?
And don't get me started on the kind of extras we'll see on BD that we'll never see on HD DVD simply due to the capacity issue
Yeah, because 30GB is totally not enough for any extras, particularly not if you use an efficent codec like VC-1 or H.264.
or that longish movies like The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King Extended Edition will probably work fine on a single 50 GB BD disc, but will likely have problems with an HD DVD disc
What are you even smoking? LOTR:ROTK EE is 251 minutes (15060s). Assuming 5GB for audio, that leaves 25GB on a 30GB HD-DVD for the movie. That leaves an overall bitrate of 13.3Mbps, which is more than enough for high-quality HD video using H.264 or VC-1.
I'd hate to see HD DVD be the one we're stuck with for that duration
God forbid we get "stuck" with a format that is extremely similar in most regards!
This is exactly what to do. When our landscaping company (who was also mowing the lawn) screwed up massively and we decided to fire them, we send a letter indicating that we were discontinuing service and that their personnel were no longer authorized to be on our property.
Keep a copy for yourself and send the letter certified mail (in the US) to prove that the letter was mailed and recieved. See if they can weasel out of that one.
Seriously, Microsoft simply doesn't have the infrastructure that Google has. They're SPECIALIZED in searching. Microsoft can't just beat that.
I'd agree with you except for the fact that Google sucks in so many ways. Google is usually superior to MSN and Yahoo, but:
- MSN is more resistant to spam pages than Google (e.g. the "pricegrabber" sites and fake blogs that often dominate Google) - MSN's index seems to be more up-to-date than Google (On my sites, it indexes deeper and more often, usually daily) - Google seems to be incapable of handling certain multi-word quoted queries
It is foolish to assume that Google cannot be surpassed. Where is the innovtion in their search? How is it fundamentally better than it was three years ago? MSN search is still garbage compared to Google, but it has improved substantially since launch.
Google's business isn't search - it's advertising. The vast majority of their revenue comes from AdWords/AdSense, and they know it.
And no, I'm not trolling. Most of IE's problems are due to its engine.
While it's true that third-party browsers using Trident are vulnerable to the same security flaws as IE (and, of course, share the same CSS and other rendering bugs), there are a number of flaws in IE that are corrected by third-party browsers.
Because third-party browsers don't support IE toolbars, they aren't as affected by spyware. Third-party browsers generally have search boxes, tabs, and other features that IE lack.
And, quite frankly, saying that IE "sucks" ignores the reality of the situation.
From a developer's perspective, IE "sucks" because it means that I have to bend over backwards to support IE's broken CSS implementation (although, to be honest, the CSS standard sucks in many ways anyway). But even if IE stopped "sucking" in this regard tomorrow, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me - as a user, IE's crappy CSS support doesn't really affect me (because developers work around it), and as a developer, I'm still going to have to develop for IE6 because it will represent a significant portion of my users for years to come.
But from a user's perspective, IE isn't really that bad. From a security perspective, it's subpar, but IE has greatly improved in that regard since SP2. Users neither know nor care whether their browser has decent CSS2 support.
To a large degree, insurance rates are equitable. I'm a male, age 16-25. Statistically speaking, I'm significantly more likely to get in an accident than any other demographic group. Therefore, my rates shoud be higher. That's just common sense - that the highest risk drivers should pay the most. It's both fair and just.
Why is this even a real question? The Mac Mini is nothing but an Intel Yonah (Core Solo / Duo) CPU system with an Intel 945 Express chipset (and integrated Intel GMA950 GPU), and EFI instead of a BIOS. Hardware wise, it's an exceptionally common Intel system.
That's a little harsh don't you think? The point was that these energy leaks are totally unnecessary.
Wrong. If you want a device that can be turned on remotely (using a controller or IR remote), you need to keep at least the IR/RF reciever on all the time. If you don't want two power supplies, that means that your power supply must be able to provide standby power, and, unfortunately, high-wattage power supplies are laughably inefficent at low power levels.
Keeping a 360 on and in standby for an entire year uses about 63MJ of energy. That's about 1/2 a gallon of gas worth of energy. Notable, but probably not a huge concern.
Like Windows XP to Windows 2000, this is largely a GUI re-design.
Well, first of all, 2000 to XP was way more than a GUI redesign. I could go enumerate features, but I think that it would be easier if you just looked them up. There are a lot of changes that you might not notice, but system administrators and developers usually do. Also consider that XP came out in 2001, about one year after Windows 2000.
Did you believe this 'new operating system' shtick when Windows 95 came out? 98? ME? NT3.51? NT4? W2K, XP? W2K3?
Did you believe that Mac OS X was anything more than a rehash of NEXTSTEP? Or that FC5 is anything more than a rehash of RedHat 8? Software evolves over time - only rarely does development "start over", and particularly not for an OS as widely deployed as Windows.
I recommend that you go and actually look at what's new in Vista. Read MSDN blogs or watch Channel9 videos. You'll see that there are major changes from top to bottom - from a completely new network stack to a transactional filesystem (think the "A" and "I" parts of "ACID") to moving USB and other drivers into userspace. Or perhaps you'd be more interested in the entirely new print system, vector-based widget toolkit (WPF), audio system, or color management system. Maybe you're interested in whole-disk encryption, new search features, two-way firewall, parental controls, SideShow, antispyware, or, yes, even the new GUI.
"Try to run AB without an epic mount. Speed in AB is more critical than anything else in AB since the winning strategy involves being able to reinforcing your positions before the other team can cap."
You know what? It took me around 10-20 hours of grinding in Silithus to get an epic mount. Considering what I make for doing real work, it would have made more sense (from an opportunity cost standpoint) to simply buy the gold. But, you know what? It's a game. People need to understand that they are simply not going to have the same "status" as the every-day-raid players unless they are willing to invest the time. Getting an epic mount doesn't mean as much if it doesn't take any effort.
Clearly, most WOW players understand and accept that they will never have the gear that hardcore players do. Yet they still have fun. Interestingly, that's why I'm no longer playing WOW - I got my rare set, my 1/2 set, and my epic mount. What was left? PvP and raiding. I'm not too fond of being ranked against hardcore players on a weekly basis (anything where I consistently have to invest time to maintain rank seems a bit too much like work), and I'm not too fond of spending 4-5 hours listening to the directions of raid leaders to get DKP that I may never get to spend. That's WOW's real failure - once you hit 60, unless you're a hardcore player, there's really very little content. Casual players (like myself, though I was certainly on the high end of "casual" with 24 days of playtime) enjoy being able to jump in anytime. Casual players like doing a 45-minute quest and seeing a cool reward. Casual players like exploring, like discovering new areas and seeing the plot develop. They like helping out other casual players without having to spend time micro-planning strategy. They like the one-off battles with enemy players (except, of course, when they are rediculously unfair). Most of all, they like the fact that they can leave at any time to get back to the real world - without significant penalty. Battlegrounds take that ability away (stay until the end or you don't get the reward). So do raid instances (some guilds enforce this with DKP penalties; others simply silently condemn it). High-level play in WOW means investing time on a regular basis. For most players, that's just not fun. To all of the raid players out there, I ask this: are you having fun? If you truly are, then great. If you see your duties as a chore, however, then it's time to say goodbye.
There's no logical path through the User Interface because Microsoft has no strong conceptual model of the document or the application functionality. Therefore functions are placed almost at random within the menus, toolbars and task panes.
If you had actually bothered to find out what the real problem with Office 2003 was, you would have found one simple fact that explains all of the UI problems in Office:
There are over 1500 commands that you can perform in Word. Excel and PowerPoint aren't much better.
There's just no way around it. Either Microsoft removes functionality (or makes it harder to access by disabling it by default), or they come up with a new UI that exposes the necessary commands. Menus just don't scale beyond 100 or so commands.
Passwords suck. They always have, and they always will. Unlike smartcards, they don't protect against man-in-the-middle atttacks. They are easy to forget, easy to guess (in many cases), and, with a bit of social engineering, easy to steal. Many sites (Slashdot included) don't even bother to use SSL for logins. That's just sloppy.
Kill off Active X and add a simple yet effective file seperating on the Filesystem layer and the majority of windows viruses problem will vanish.
Statements like this indicate that you don't undersand how viruses work. A virus can do plenty of damage running as a normal user. Your home directory is probably far harder to replace than the rest of your OS, but no special privileges are required to wipe it out. You don't need root to become a spam zombie, to install extensions or plugins in Firefox, or to steal all of the confidential information that is invariably lurking in your cookies, bookmarks, web cache, and personal documents.
At no point does an email virus require root access. And if it did, it could just ask for the root password - you can bet that at least 50% of users would give it up without a second thought.
Believing that permissions solve the virus problem indicates that you don't understand the amount of damage that can be done even with a limited user account.
. CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com] should stand as solid proof that CSS works
No, it doesn't. Seeing as web programming is my job, I can tell yout that tables - horrible as they may be - make a better layout tool than CSS. I can't tell you how many times I have to tell graphic designers that one of the elements of their design (like equal length columns) is a major pain in the neck to implement in CSS. Of course, IE's horribly buggy CSS2 support doesn't help, but there are so many things in CSS that seem - well - stupid. CSS was designed around an idealistic view of the web - a web where pages were designed by web developers. In the real world, this is rarely the case - it is the graphic designers who lay out the page, and the web programmers get stuck trying to implement their design. CSS utterly fails in that regard.
Sure, you can make a design that works well using CSS - zen garden and countless other sites prove this. But there are so many things that were simple with tables that become unnecessarily complex with CSS.
Most developers simply give up and resort to absolute positioning or nesting
tags. Neither is substantially better than the tables that they replaced - and in many cases, they are substantially worse.
There are other elements of CSS that are utterly stupid. Why should padding be excluded from "width"? Or, for that matter, the border? Why is it so hard to make equal-height columns?
Is CSS better than what it replaced? In terms of element style - borders, fonts, colors, etc. - it's substantially better. But CSS sucks at layout.
Old age don't exclude OS from getting proper support.
No, but being a steaming pile of garbage should. 98 should never have been released. USB support and a few other features don't make it a better OS than 95, which is 11 years old at this point. 98 has no real users, no file permissions, shoddy memory protection, an awful TCP/IP stack (you can't even change your IP without rebooting), and horrible stability.
98 should have died long ago. Microsoft has had a better alternative for 6 years (Windows 2000), more if you count Windows NT. Most businesses have moved on. Those who haven't should.
Windows 2000 is getting a full 10 years of support, as is XP Pro.
How to upgrade Debian, released circa 1998: Install your aged CDs. (Potato? I forget.) dselect update dselect select dselect install Repeat previous step until there's nothing left to install. I should try this sometime on a stable install.
BAD idea. Trying to upgrade Debian accross different kernel/glibc/gnome/kde/etc. versions will more likely than not result in a bunch of broken packages and dependency hell - not to mention that it will take quite a bit of work to sort out the configuration changes.
The key difference, at least between Debian and Windows, is open ports. You toss on a potato or woody install, and there are no open ports. You toss on an XP install, and the stupid thing leaves a bunch of ports open, including freaking NETBIOS.
Windows Firewall is enabled by default in XP SP2; this provides a measure of protection, though I agree that it's still not as good as having the services disabled in the first place (as is the case to a greater extent with Windows Server 2003 and Vista).
This is the worst part of Dashboard! There's no standardized widget options interface, and, worse yet, the widgets are constrained to a tiny space for preferences. What is wrong with popping up a standard-size configuration dialog like everything else in the OS?
First the Centrino is not a CPU. It is a chip set.
WRONG. Centrino is a marketing term that indicates that the system includes the follwing: - Intel CPU (Pentium-M "Banias" or "Dothan", or Core Solo/Duo "Yonah") - Intel Mobile chipset (855, 915, or 945) - Intel PRO/Wireless (2100 / 2200BG / 2915ABG / 3945ABG)
Second the PentiumM and the CoreDuo are a step back to the PentiumIII.
Incorrect. There are many architecture changes between the PIII and even the first generation P-M. P-M uses the P4 bus, has SSE2, way more cache (2MB L2 in Dothan), improved instruction decoding/issuing, improved branch prediction, and numerous power-saving enhancements. P-M is also clocked way higher than PIII ever was.
Yonah has many new features as well, including a shared L2 cache, SSE3, NX bit support, a new multi-zone digital thermal monitoring system, and a lot more.
Yea the Core Duo may be a new winner for Intel but it all seems to point to one thing. Intel is a one trick pony. Every time they try and replace the X86 line it turns out to be a total failure.
Intel has continuously improved and developed x86 for the past 28 years. Pentium 4 is the best selling desktop CPU ever. Intel is not alone in trying to replace the x86 arch - many have tried.
Slashdot Mirror
help a statistically insignificant portion of humanity with a terrible and incurable disease
46 million people live with HIV. That's only 0.7% of the world population, but it's hardly "staistically insignificant".
And calling it incurable shows your lack of vision. I bet that people thought that landing on the moon was impossible in 1960, too.
I really don't see a dual format drive hitting the market any time soon
Oh, by the way, you're already wrong.
Broadcom Rolls Out Combined HD-DVD, Blu-ray Chip
Boy, are you misinformed.
The only difference there is spindle speed, 1.2:1 difference to be exact, DVD+R to DVD-R. The underlying technology and interface are exactly the same beyond that.
Wrong. There are significant differences in tracking, linking, and error management.
HD-DVD uses a standard red laser operating at a much lower wavelength of light
Swing and a miss. Both Bul-ray and HD-DVD use a 405nm blue laser.
Beyond the cost for a blue laser system, you then have to support two dual chip sets for processing HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs because of the completely different DRM standards being used.
Nope. Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD use AACS.
And yes, this is hardware decoded in consumer devices so you're talking about quite a cost if you wanted to build custom ASICs to do both in one chipset, in licensing fees alone!
You clearly don't understand the IC market very well. There are ASICs that handle the vast majority of the needs for a DVD player, including drive servo / spindle control, MPEG2 decoding, multiple different audio formats (MP2/AC3/DTS, often MP3 and WMA as well), video scaling, OSD generation, and, in many cases, even incorporate a microcontroller.
Extreme integration is very common for a market this size.
Note i said SIM NUMBER.. not SIM ;)
Don't you mean IMSI?
Actually, Blu-ray Disc is the format everyone should be hoping wins if you have any interest in data backup to optical media.
Most people don't. 50GB still means burning 6 discs to back up my (not unusually large) 300GB drive. Are you going to want to blow 15 discs to back up one of those new Seagate 750GB drives? What about when we have 1TB drives? 2TB?
And don't get me started on the kind of extras we'll see on BD that we'll never see on HD DVD simply due to the capacity issue
Yeah, because 30GB is totally not enough for any extras, particularly not if you use an efficent codec like VC-1 or H.264.
or that longish movies like The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King Extended Edition will probably work fine on a single 50 GB BD disc, but will likely have problems with an HD DVD disc
What are you even smoking? LOTR:ROTK EE is 251 minutes (15060s). Assuming 5GB for audio, that leaves 25GB on a 30GB HD-DVD for the movie. That leaves an overall bitrate of 13.3Mbps, which is more than enough for high-quality HD video using H.264 or VC-1.
I'd hate to see HD DVD be the one we're stuck with for that duration
God forbid we get "stuck" with a format that is extremely similar in most regards!
In my city, you can actually file a police report online.
This is exactly what to do. When our landscaping company (who was also mowing the lawn) screwed up massively and we decided to fire them, we send a letter indicating that we were discontinuing service and that their personnel were no longer authorized to be on our property.
Keep a copy for yourself and send the letter certified mail (in the US) to prove that the letter was mailed and recieved. See if they can weasel out of that one.
Seriously, Microsoft simply doesn't have the infrastructure that Google has. They're SPECIALIZED in searching. Microsoft can't just beat that.
I'd agree with you except for the fact that Google sucks in so many ways. Google is usually superior to MSN and Yahoo, but:
- MSN is more resistant to spam pages than Google (e.g. the "pricegrabber" sites and fake blogs that often dominate Google)
- MSN's index seems to be more up-to-date than Google (On my sites, it indexes deeper and more often, usually daily)
- Google seems to be incapable of handling certain multi-word quoted queries
It is foolish to assume that Google cannot be surpassed. Where is the innovtion in their search? How is it fundamentally better than it was three years ago? MSN search is still garbage compared to Google, but it has improved substantially since launch.
Google's business isn't search - it's advertising. The vast majority of their revenue comes from AdWords/AdSense, and they know it.
Mod parent oxymoronic.
And no, I'm not trolling. Most of IE's problems are due to its engine.
While it's true that third-party browsers using Trident are vulnerable to the same security flaws as IE (and, of course, share the same CSS and other rendering bugs), there are a number of flaws in IE that are corrected by third-party browsers.
Because third-party browsers don't support IE toolbars, they aren't as affected by spyware. Third-party browsers generally have search boxes, tabs, and other features that IE lack.
And, quite frankly, saying that IE "sucks" ignores the reality of the situation.
From a developer's perspective, IE "sucks" because it means that I have to bend over backwards to support IE's broken CSS implementation (although, to be honest, the CSS standard sucks in many ways anyway). But even if IE stopped "sucking" in this regard tomorrow, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me - as a user, IE's crappy CSS support doesn't really affect me (because developers work around it), and as a developer, I'm still going to have to develop for IE6 because it will represent a significant portion of my users for years to come.
But from a user's perspective, IE isn't really that bad. From a security perspective, it's subpar, but IE has greatly improved in that regard since SP2. Users neither know nor care whether their browser has decent CSS2 support.
Insurance rates would be equitable
To a large degree, insurance rates are equitable. I'm a male, age 16-25. Statistically speaking, I'm significantly more likely to get in an accident than any other demographic group. Therefore, my rates shoud be higher. That's just common sense - that the highest risk drivers should pay the most. It's both fair and just.
Does it run succesfully on a Mac Mini?
Why is this even a real question? The Mac Mini is nothing but an Intel Yonah (Core Solo / Duo) CPU system with an Intel 945 Express chipset (and integrated Intel GMA950 GPU), and EFI instead of a BIOS. Hardware wise, it's an exceptionally common Intel system.
That's a little harsh don't you think? The point was that these energy leaks are totally unnecessary.
Wrong. If you want a device that can be turned on remotely (using a controller or IR remote), you need to keep at least the IR/RF reciever on all the time. If you don't want two power supplies, that means that your power supply must be able to provide standby power, and, unfortunately, high-wattage power supplies are laughably inefficent at low power levels.
Keeping a 360 on and in standby for an entire year uses about 63MJ of energy. That's about 1/2 a gallon of gas worth of energy. Notable, but probably not a huge concern.
Blu-ray, one of two much-hyped high-definition DVD formats
WRONG. There is only one high definition DVD format, HD-DVD. Blu-Ray discs are not DVDs.
Like Windows XP to Windows 2000, this is largely a GUI re-design.
Well, first of all, 2000 to XP was way more than a GUI redesign. I could go enumerate features, but I think that it would be easier if you just looked them up. There are a lot of changes that you might not notice, but system administrators and developers usually do. Also consider that XP came out in 2001, about one year after Windows 2000.
Did you believe this 'new operating system' shtick when Windows 95 came out? 98? ME? NT3.51? NT4? W2K, XP? W2K3?
Did you believe that Mac OS X was anything more than a rehash of NEXTSTEP? Or that FC5 is anything more than a rehash of RedHat 8? Software evolves over time - only rarely does development "start over", and particularly not for an OS as widely deployed as Windows.
I recommend that you go and actually look at what's new in Vista. Read MSDN blogs or watch Channel9 videos. You'll see that there are major changes from top to bottom - from a completely new network stack to a transactional filesystem (think the "A" and "I" parts of "ACID") to moving USB and other drivers into userspace. Or perhaps you'd be more interested in the entirely new print system, vector-based widget toolkit (WPF), audio system, or color management system. Maybe you're interested in whole-disk encryption, new search features, two-way firewall, parental controls, SideShow, antispyware, or, yes, even the new GUI.
If you don't think Vista is a major change, look at the list of new features.
"Try to run AB without an epic mount. Speed in AB is more critical than anything else in AB since the winning strategy involves being able to reinforcing your positions before the other team can cap."
You know what? It took me around 10-20 hours of grinding in Silithus to get an epic mount. Considering what I make for doing real work, it would have made more sense (from an opportunity cost standpoint) to simply buy the gold. But, you know what? It's a game. People need to understand that they are simply not going to have the same "status" as the every-day-raid players unless they are willing to invest the time. Getting an epic mount doesn't mean as much if it doesn't take any effort.
Clearly, most WOW players understand and accept that they will never have the gear that hardcore players do. Yet they still have fun. Interestingly, that's why I'm no longer playing WOW - I got my rare set, my 1/2 set, and my epic mount. What was left? PvP and raiding. I'm not too fond of being ranked against hardcore players on a weekly basis (anything where I consistently have to invest time to maintain rank seems a bit too much like work), and I'm not too fond of spending 4-5 hours listening to the directions of raid leaders to get DKP that I may never get to spend. That's WOW's real failure - once you hit 60, unless you're a hardcore player, there's really very little content. Casual players (like myself, though I was certainly on the high end of "casual" with 24 days of playtime) enjoy being able to jump in anytime. Casual players like doing a 45-minute quest and seeing a cool reward. Casual players like exploring, like discovering new areas and seeing the plot develop. They like helping out other casual players without having to spend time micro-planning strategy. They like the one-off battles with enemy players (except, of course, when they are rediculously unfair). Most of all, they like the fact that they can leave at any time to get back to the real world - without significant penalty. Battlegrounds take that ability away (stay until the end or you don't get the reward). So do raid instances (some guilds enforce this with DKP penalties; others simply silently condemn it). High-level play in WOW means investing time on a regular basis. For most players, that's just not fun. To all of the raid players out there, I ask this: are you having fun? If you truly are, then great. If you see your duties as a chore, however, then it's time to say goodbye.
as their architecture was never intended to be multicore
AMD K8 was designed to be multicore from the start.
There's no logical path through the User Interface because Microsoft has no strong conceptual model of the document or the application functionality. Therefore functions are placed almost at random within the menus, toolbars and task panes.
If you had actually bothered to find out what the real problem with Office 2003 was, you would have found one simple fact that explains all of the UI problems in Office:
There are over 1500 commands that you can perform in Word. Excel and PowerPoint aren't much better.
There's just no way around it. Either Microsoft removes functionality (or makes it harder to access by disabling it by default), or they come up with a new UI that exposes the necessary commands. Menus just don't scale beyond 100 or so commands.
Passwords suck. They always have, and they always will. Unlike smartcards, they don't protect against man-in-the-middle atttacks. They are easy to forget, easy to guess (in many cases), and, with a bit of social engineering, easy to steal. Many sites (Slashdot included) don't even bother to use SSL for logins. That's just sloppy.
Kill off Active X and add a simple yet effective file seperating on the Filesystem layer and the majority of windows viruses problem will vanish.
Statements like this indicate that you don't undersand how viruses work. A virus can do plenty of damage running as a normal user. Your home directory is probably far harder to replace than the rest of your OS, but no special privileges are required to wipe it out. You don't need root to become a spam zombie, to install extensions or plugins in Firefox, or to steal all of the confidential information that is invariably lurking in your cookies, bookmarks, web cache, and personal documents.
At no point does an email virus require root access. And if it did, it could just ask for the root password - you can bet that at least 50% of users would give it up without a second thought.
Believing that permissions solve the virus problem indicates that you don't understand the amount of damage that can be done even with a limited user account.
. CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com] should stand as solid proof that CSS works
No, it doesn't. Seeing as web programming is my job, I can tell yout that tables - horrible as they may be - make a better layout tool than CSS. I can't tell you how many times I have to tell graphic designers that one of the elements of their design (like equal length columns) is a major pain in the neck to implement in CSS. Of course, IE's horribly buggy CSS2 support doesn't help, but there are so many things in CSS that seem - well - stupid. CSS was designed around an idealistic view of the web - a web where pages were designed by web developers. In the real world, this is rarely the case - it is the graphic designers who lay out the page, and the web programmers get stuck trying to implement their design. CSS utterly fails in that regard.
Sure, you can make a design that works well using CSS - zen garden and countless other sites prove this. But there are so many things that were simple with tables that become unnecessarily complex with CSS.
Most developers simply give up and resort to absolute positioning or nesting tags. Neither is substantially better than the tables that they replaced - and in many cases, they are substantially worse.
There are other elements of CSS that are utterly stupid. Why should padding be excluded from "width"? Or, for that matter, the border? Why is it so hard to make equal-height columns?
Is CSS better than what it replaced? In terms of element style - borders, fonts, colors, etc. - it's substantially better. But CSS sucks at layout.
Old age don't exclude OS from getting proper support.
No, but being a steaming pile of garbage should. 98 should never have been released. USB support and a few other features don't make it a better OS than 95, which is 11 years old at this point. 98 has no real users, no file permissions, shoddy memory protection, an awful TCP/IP stack (you can't even change your IP without rebooting), and horrible stability.
98 should have died long ago. Microsoft has had a better alternative for 6 years (Windows 2000), more if you count Windows NT. Most businesses have moved on. Those who haven't should.
Windows 2000 is getting a full 10 years of support, as is XP Pro.
The Operating system core was built on DOS
Not quite correct. Windows 95 isn't really "based on" DOS so much as it uses DOS as a bootloader and "recovery" console.
Of course, it still sucked.
How to upgrade Debian, released circa 1998:
Install your aged CDs. (Potato? I forget.)
dselect update
dselect select
dselect install
Repeat previous step until there's nothing left to install.
I should try this sometime on a stable install.
BAD idea. Trying to upgrade Debian accross different kernel/glibc/gnome/kde/etc. versions will more likely than not result in a bunch of broken packages and dependency hell - not to mention that it will take quite a bit of work to sort out the configuration changes.
The key difference, at least between Debian and Windows, is open ports. You toss on a potato or woody install, and there are no open ports. You toss on an XP install, and the stupid thing leaves a bunch of ports open, including freaking NETBIOS.
Windows Firewall is enabled by default in XP SP2; this provides a measure of protection, though I agree that it's still not as good as having the services disabled in the first place (as is the case to a greater extent with Windows Server 2003 and Vista).
The prefrences are on the back of the widget.
This is the worst part of Dashboard! There's no standardized widget options interface, and, worse yet, the widgets are constrained to a tiny space for preferences. What is wrong with popping up a standard-size configuration dialog like everything else in the OS?
First the Centrino is not a CPU. It is a chip set.
WRONG. Centrino is a marketing term that indicates that the system includes the follwing:
- Intel CPU (Pentium-M "Banias" or "Dothan", or Core Solo/Duo "Yonah")
- Intel Mobile chipset (855, 915, or 945)
- Intel PRO/Wireless (2100 / 2200BG / 2915ABG / 3945ABG)
Second the PentiumM and the CoreDuo are a step back to the PentiumIII.
Incorrect. There are many architecture changes between the PIII and even the first generation P-M. P-M uses the P4 bus, has SSE2, way more cache (2MB L2 in Dothan), improved instruction decoding/issuing, improved branch prediction, and numerous power-saving enhancements. P-M is also clocked way higher than PIII ever was.
Yonah has many new features as well, including a shared L2 cache, SSE3, NX bit support, a new multi-zone digital thermal monitoring system, and a lot more.
Yea the Core Duo may be a new winner for Intel but it all seems to point to one thing. Intel is a one trick pony. Every time they try and replace the X86 line it turns out to be a total failure.
Intel has continuously improved and developed x86 for the past 28 years. Pentium 4 is the best selling desktop CPU ever. Intel is not alone in trying to replace the x86 arch - many have tried.