Think about it: 20 years ago, computer science taught you to write good programs in relatively low-level languages; now they teach you to program in languages like Java with virtually no regard for efficiency. Programs could be written much, much more efficiently, and most of what we use today could easily be made to run on hardware over ten years old if more effort was put into optimizing it.
20 years ago we weren't doing what we do now with computers. Pull out a word processor from 20 years ago and tell me that it looks like a "good program" today.
More to the point, Java isn't slow! In many cases, it even beats C++.
My cellphone runs what is probably the closest thing to a production Java OS that exists today. The Danger Hiptop runs an entire OS on top of a Java VM, and while certain key functions are written in assembly (graphics functions, mostly), the OS manages to fare remarkably well considering that it's running on a 24MHz ARM with 4MB of memory. Neither Palm OS, nor Windows CE, nor embedded Linux would run as well on a system that is so limited.
the programmers take up every ounce of system resources they can now by being lazy
That's quite frankly crap. I remember a time when PCs struggled to play MP3s and run a word processor at the same time. Now I have no trouble playing a DVD while streaming media accross the network and recording two channels of TV.
None of the software on my system is "taking up every ounce of system resources". Right now, I'm using 4% of my CPU and have over 800MB of free physical memory (which is being used for disk cache at the moment). Is my PC high-end? Not in the least. I have an Athlon 64 2800+ system with 1GB of DDR400 running Windows XP.
and most of what we use today could easily be made to run on hardware over ten years old if more effort was put into optimizing it
A GPU from ten years ago wouldn't even be able to run today's games, let alone at a decent framerate. Forget about encoding XVID captures of DVDs, either - look at this chart (the bottom one) and note that a $150 2.4GHz Athlon 64 "Newcastle" does in 2 minutes what takes the fastest CPU from 10 years ago (the Pentium MMX 233, which is actually only 8.5 years old) 20 times as long.
Remember how problematic it used to be to print a large document? Remember how long PDF files took to open? Remember how long it used to take Flash animations to load? Remember how crappy video used to look?
The problem with people like you is that you forget what it was really like just 15 years ago. Mac OS was a dog on the computers of 1991, as was Windows. HP-UX took minutes to boot up. Even 10 years ago, the only reason that we didn't notice how slowly webpages rendered was because most of us were using modems. Pull out a copy of Netscape 2.0 and an old 68040 Mac to run it on, then tell me that we're not doing better. Fire up Word 7.0 on a 33MHz 486 with 16MB of memory and Windows 95, then tell me that applications aren't faster today.
Microsoft Word starts in 3 seconds on my system. Less if it's disk cached. I can resize it without a wireframe mode because the system is fast enough to redraw the application as I resize it.
Software uses more memory today because it does more. No one would think of working with 50MB photographs in 1996. No one would think about editing DV footage without expensive hardware.
GSM phones make a very characteristic kind of interference. It's rhythmic, brief, and I find it interesting to listen to. The obvious solution is to move your phone away from the speakers; about 1 foot is enough for me.
it is because system design makes their impact minimal
Deleting everything in my home directory is anything but minimal.
Potentially exploting local privilage elevation exploits to get root is anything but minimal.
Infecting software after it has been compiled is anything but minimal.
Using social engineering to get root is anything but minimal. How many users do you know who would enter their superuser password to "get free screensavers"? Too many.
Pretending that you're protected by design to the problem indicates that you don't understand how viruses really work. Guess what? You can run as a non-root user in Windows, too. But you can still do a ton of damage as a normal user. Spam relays and DDOs botnets don't need root access, just the ability to send data over the network. How about modifying your GNOME or KDE menu to point to a fake terminal entry or fake admin tools? How do you know that the "gnome-terminal-emulator" you're now typing your password into (through sudo) isn't actually stealing it?
This is the real world. Attackers are smart, they are motivated by profit (because of the spambot racket), and they have plenty of time to find the next buffer overrun.
Now, of course, there's a ton of overlap here. As MySQL becomes more feature-rich, it begins to enter the "business-class"; MSSQL is beginning to see some success in the "enterprise class" as well.
The bottom line is simple: you're not going to run your bank's accounting system on MySQL, but you're not going to run a PHP forum on Oracle either.
What a database is has changed - thanks to the Internet, we are now using databases for applications that were never though of before. If you think that MySQL is all you'll ever need, you may very well be right - most people will never need the kinds of features that Oracle offers. Of course, if all you think you'll ever need is MySQL, you're not a DBA and you probably won't be hiring one anytime soon.
I don't believe that I'll ever need to own a semi or a 777. Clearly, my Toyota Prius can't do everything. But it meets my needs well enough, and it does so without the overhead of a larger vehicle.
You're thinking about OpenGL, not Direct3D. Unfortunately, OpenGL took a long time to standardize newer graphical features, which, combined with its ability to have vendor-specific addons, ensured that we would see a plethora of different "optimized" paths.
Direct3D has maintained a much higher degree of compatibility. Now, games will not render exactly the same on different cards, but there is a high degree of baseline functionality there.
The simple face is, Apache vs IIS does prove the simple argument that the ratio of users to exploits is higher relative to other competitors doesn't work.
No, it doesn't! This crap argument is made on Slashdot all the time, but it is wrong for one very simple reason: IIS 6 has fewer security vulnerabilities than Apache2!
Apache has 28 advisories since 2003, including 2 that have no current resolution. IIS 6.0 has 2 advisories since 2003, none of which have not been fixed.
Your argument works because Slashdot users assume that Apache is more secure than IIS. This is not necessarily the case - IIS 6 is a very secure web server by default, as is Apache.
This is good for security, but helps a lot with stability too. In theory, you won't have to reboot if you install a driver, as I understand it.
This is actually already true in XP. Excluding some system-level drivers (chipset, graphics), XP already allows drivers to be loaded and unloaded without rebooting.
I can confirm that WDDM display drivers can be installed, uninstalled, and upgraded on Vista witout rebooting the system.
No, don't go for it. Unless you are seriously going to get into the OEM market, you're best off only building PCs for yourself. When something breaks, when the user gets spyware - guess who they're going to come looking for to get help. If you're prepared to offer tecnical services (perhaps for a substantial fee) and a warranty, that's great - it will ensure repeat business. But you can't just build a few systems and expect that to be the end of it.
And you're saying in your own smug, elitist way that you're an asshole. The average person on the street could care less if they satisfy your desire to hear the idiom the way that you believe it should be used.
These newer theatres keep the sound cranked so high that the everyone around me was automatically sticking their fingers in their ears when they thought an explosion or other loud sound was coming.
Why did you not tell the staff? This happens once in a while, but if you bother to tell a staff member, they are almost always happy to correct the issue.
Lets assume that Vista is as few as a 1000KLoc - (I'd bet another order of magnatude personally) That implies 600KLoc of new code written, tested debugged, etc. in 6 months. Uh - NO operating system development isn't that fast. I am not even sure I would buy the line that the current Vista codebase is 60% new/changed from XP (RTM - not SP2, patched to heck)
Vista is proportadly around 50 million lines of code. Rewriting 30 million lines of code in 9 months is, quite frankly, impossible. You can't just throw people at the problem - in a project of this scale, just getting a single line of code written, checked in, and debugged takes a massive amount of work.
I always found the Slashdot attitude about graphics to be strange - more of a reaction against the common wisdom than anything really thought out. Every time a new NVIDIA card comes out, there are 200 comments about how it's unnecessary. About how the old card was just fine.
Let me say this - graphics are important. Of course gameplay is more important, but there's no reason that we can't have both. I want a system that can push an HDTV. I want a system that can push loads of special effects and maintain a constant 60fps. I want more realistic characters, larger environments, and smarter AI.
The Gamecube is a fine system. I one one myself. When the Revolution ships, I'll probably get one - I like the idea of playing 20 years of games on a system. I think that the controller will be cool, and while I'm not sure if it will be practical, I'm willing to bet taht the Big-N will come up with some cool applications. But I do not for a second believe that the Revolution is a replacement for the XBOX 360 or the PS3. I'm glad that Microsoft and Sony are pushing graphics forward. And I'm disappointed that Nintendo isn't doing the same. Having an affordable system is important, but why is the Revolution limited to 83MB of memory? How much does 256M of DRAM really cost? And why can't it output at least 480p? Even my Gamecube could output 480p.
It's looking more and more like the Revolution is just an updated Gamecube. But by the time the Revolution ships, the 'Cube will be more than 5 years old. Can't Nintendo do a little better?
regional distribution center for a Swedish-owned multinational
Was it IKEA?
Wait, nevermind. It's narrow-sighted of me to think that IKEA is the only Sweedish-owned multinational corporation that might have regional distribution centers in the United States.
The difference is you dont notice most crashes since nothing tells you the darn crap has crashed.
Have you ever bothered to check the event log, or to disable rebooting after a stop error?
More to the point, if you're getting stop errors, SOMETHING IS SCREWED UP. Usually, it's crappy drivers, but everything from an overheating CPU or GPU to bad RAM can cause a stop error. In six years of working with Windows 2000 and XP, I have not once seen a stop error that cannot be linked to crappy drivers or broken hardware.
If your XP system is randomly rebooting, it's broken.
Related, F-Secure posts: "Microsoft has put out a warning on a new, nasty, unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Proof-of-concept exploits are already out. Disable IE's active scripting or switch to any other browser. Not necessarily Firefox - just any other browser. " It's sad when the solution is "Any other browser".
No, it's not sad at all. Apparently, you don't understand the basic fact that when an attack targets a particular product, other separate products are not inherently vulnerable.
Of course other browsers aren't vulnerable to an attack that specifically targets a bug in Internet Explorer!
The other problem here is the crazy North American idea of having cell phone numbers in the same area codes as landlines, but requiring the receiver to pay for incoming calls. If all mobile providers were on their own recognizable area codes, and the caller knew that calling a mobile number was expensive, there'd be a lot fewer of these wrong numbers.
The advantage of this, of course, is that it costs the same to call a landline as it does to call a cellphone. In Europe, for example, it generally costs more to call a cellphone.
Also, if you compare per-minute rates, we still pay less for cellular service, even when you consider that the call is billed twice (once for each party).
Your solution of "make cellphones more expensive to call" does nothing. Few people intentionally misdial a call, and when you consider that in the future, most calls will be to cellphones, misdialed calls will continue to be a problem for some time.
Of course, many of us don't have this problem - I have recieved perhaps one misdialed call on my cell in the past 3 months. Certain numbers, however, are more vulnerable to digit transposition and other common mistakes - particularly considering that numbers are not assigned in a uniform manner.
150GB is nothing to an organization as large as Google. It's like $7 per day! Hell, that's less than lunch at Subway!
Right now, Valve's Steam content servers are piping out 2.31Gbps. They transfer as much in 8 minutes as Google "saves" by using invalid HTML in a whole day.
Bandwidth is a tiny part of Google's cost structure.
that means that Google saves almost 144 GB of data transfer EVERY DAY
Google's logo alone is more than 10x that; and the advertisment for the Google toolbar is more than 3x that. At almost 16KB each, the homepage views alone are almost 3.2TB per day. Even a single query rarely produces a results page under 32K (add it up), which, added to the homepage views, means that Google is transferring over 9.6TB per day in searches alone.
Because, as you know, 148GB of data transfer per day costs so much. 2000GB of data transfer runs around $40-$100, depending on who you buy it from, and Google certainly pays much less than we would. Even assuming the high figure, that works out to around $8 per day.
I'm pretty sure Google can afford $8 per day. The W3C abuse isn't for bandwidth concerns. It may help the page load a little faster on slow connections, but even on a modem, 2KB of extra data only takes a second to load. Especially if you have GZIP compression enabled on the server side.
MSN Search, unfortunately, is on the other extreme. It's W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict and validates without errors, but at over 40K it's on the large side for a simple page. Now, 40K loads in around 8 seconds on a 56K modem (less with compression), but when you consider that 30K+ of that transfer is Javascript, it becomes clear that the page isn't exactly "lean and mean". Particularly when you consider that a search page shouldn't need any scripting at all.
I found the comment about "instant-on" sleep to be amusing.
Yes, we're fully aware that Apple systems can shut down everything execept the components necessary to refresh the DRAM.
The author of the article, apparently, has never used a PC notebook or desktop. Practically every well-behaved system made in the past 5 years, from the $150 eMachines desktops to my generic Compal notebook, supports the ACPI S3 state, which does exactly what Apple's "sleep" mode.
What's really slick about Windows is that the system can wake from S3 suspend and hibernate itself after a certain period of time. My system is set for 6 hours, which means that I don't have to wait for the system to restore during the day, but if I leave my system overnight or longer, I don't have to worry about suspend draining my battery (approx. 20% per day). I can even have different settings if the system is plugged in.
I can't tell if I'm just biased, but to me it seems like there are more criticisms and chronic delays and fewer real usable features that are coming with Microsoft's latest and greatest.
No, you're not. Vista is late, very late. Microsoft didn't have clear goals on what to do after Windows XP - at first, there was very little to put into Longhorn and it was going to be essentially a Windows ME type upgrade. Sometime in 2003, however, Microsoft dramatically changed course as they realized that security was a real problem in Windows XP. In 2004, development started over (using the Windows Server 2003 codebase), and Microsoft esentially threw away what they had been working on for the last three years.
As the project grew in scope, Microsoft promised more than they could deliver. What we're seeing now is a natural part of any project - when you realize that you can't meet all of your goals and you have to decide what's really important.
If you want to know what's really going on with Vista, download one of the CTPs (from Microsoft Connect or MSDN - downloading it from BitTorrent is illegal). You'll find an OS that is full of bugs but also full of promise. You begin to look at what you know about Windows, and you discover that Vista is - in many ways - an entirely different OS. Then you fire up Steam and play Half-Life 2, and you realize that it's still Windows.
Every CTP has had better hardware support, better performance, better stability, more features, and more polish than the previous CTP. Assuming that this continues until October, Vista might just be a success after all.
Personally, I believe Microsoft should be ashamed for not even attempting the WinFS thing.
Why do people keep saying this? WinFS is alive and well, it's still in active development, and a beta has been shipped. WinFS will be shipped as an add-on for Vista, just like the.NET CLR was for Windows XP.
No, this isn't the case. Recent Vista builds have had both Solitaire and Minesweeper, both new versions that take advantage of Direct3D and were written by a 3rd-party developer.
No, actually you we're talking about whether DRM was right, which, in fact, is rather foolish - excluding bullshit like the DMCA (which I believe is unconstitutional), DRM isn't a law. Indeed, DRM is like the rules at an amusement park - something enforced artificially rather than legally.
Whether or not I accept DRM has to do with how it is implemented. If the price is fair and the restrictions are fair, I don't have any problem with DRM. DVDs have DRM, but it doesn't prevent me from playing my DVDs anywhere and anytime that I want to. My DirecTV service has DRM, but I can still record programs and keep them for as long as I want.
The grandparent's example is particularly objectionable to me because it makes the same error that the RIAA so loves to make - it compares copyright with physical property. Copyright infringement is not theft, copyright doesn't create property, and physical property is not trivially copyable. Whether or not you agree with copyright (in general, I do - but I believe that it should be 28 years maximum and have greater protections for fair use), it's important to understand that DRM is just an application of encryption - one that can be circumvented. If a company wants to make their work hard to copy throgh technological means, they should have the right to do so. Similarly, if I want to try to break that protection, I should have the right to do so.
When I'm running a meeting and someone decides it's more important to take a call or answer an email, I stop the meeting and stare at them. Works every time.
Yes, it does a great job of making you look like a retentive nutcase. Which is what you are.
I never assume that my presentation will hold the attention of 100% of the audience 100% of the time. I understand that it's entirely possible that:
- The audience member has something more important to attend to (I know this first hand as a Linux sysadmin - sometimes you have to jump on things) - The audience member already understands or knows that part of the presentation
If a lot of people seem to be inattentive, guess what? It's my fault. As a presenter, it is your job to make your presentation interesting and valuable enough to hold the attention of the audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it: 20 years ago, computer science taught you to write good programs in relatively low-level languages; now they teach you to program in languages like Java with virtually no regard for efficiency. Programs could be written much, much more efficiently, and most of what we use today could easily be made to run on hardware over ten years old if more effort was put into optimizing it.
20 years ago we weren't doing what we do now with computers. Pull out a word processor from 20 years ago and tell me that it looks like a "good program" today.
More to the point, Java isn't slow! In many cases, it even beats C++.
My cellphone runs what is probably the closest thing to a production Java OS that exists today. The Danger Hiptop runs an entire OS on top of a Java VM, and while certain key functions are written in assembly (graphics functions, mostly), the OS manages to fare remarkably well considering that it's running on a 24MHz ARM with 4MB of memory. Neither Palm OS, nor Windows CE, nor embedded Linux would run as well on a system that is so limited.
the programmers take up every ounce of system resources they can now by being lazy
That's quite frankly crap. I remember a time when PCs struggled to play MP3s and run a word processor at the same time. Now I have no trouble playing a DVD while streaming media accross the network and recording two channels of TV.
None of the software on my system is "taking up every ounce of system resources". Right now, I'm using 4% of my CPU and have over 800MB of free physical memory (which is being used for disk cache at the moment). Is my PC high-end? Not in the least. I have an Athlon 64 2800+ system with 1GB of DDR400 running Windows XP.
and most of what we use today could easily be made to run on hardware over ten years old if more effort was put into optimizing it
A GPU from ten years ago wouldn't even be able to run today's games, let alone at a decent framerate. Forget about encoding XVID captures of DVDs, either - look at this chart (the bottom one) and note that a $150 2.4GHz Athlon 64 "Newcastle" does in 2 minutes what takes the fastest CPU from 10 years ago (the Pentium MMX 233, which is actually only 8.5 years old) 20 times as long.
Remember how problematic it used to be to print a large document? Remember how long PDF files took to open? Remember how long it used to take Flash animations to load? Remember how crappy video used to look?
The problem with people like you is that you forget what it was really like just 15 years ago. Mac OS was a dog on the computers of 1991, as was Windows. HP-UX took minutes to boot up. Even 10 years ago, the only reason that we didn't notice how slowly webpages rendered was because most of us were using modems. Pull out a copy of Netscape 2.0 and an old 68040 Mac to run it on, then tell me that we're not doing better. Fire up Word 7.0 on a 33MHz 486 with 16MB of memory and Windows 95, then tell me that applications aren't faster today.
Microsoft Word starts in 3 seconds on my system. Less if it's disk cached. I can resize it without a wireframe mode because the system is fast enough to redraw the application as I resize it.
Software uses more memory today because it does more. No one would think of working with 50MB photographs in 1996. No one would think about editing DV footage without expensive hardware.
GSM phones make a very characteristic kind of interference. It's rhythmic, brief, and I find it interesting to listen to. The obvious solution is to move your phone away from the speakers; about 1 foot is enough for me.
it is because system design makes their impact minimal
Deleting everything in my home directory is anything but minimal.
Potentially exploting local privilage elevation exploits to get root is anything but minimal.
Infecting software after it has been compiled is anything but minimal.
Using social engineering to get root is anything but minimal. How many users do you know who would enter their superuser password to "get free screensavers"? Too many.
Pretending that you're protected by design to the problem indicates that you don't understand how viruses really work. Guess what? You can run as a non-root user in Windows, too. But you can still do a ton of damage as a normal user. Spam relays and DDOs botnets don't need root access, just the ability to send data over the network. How about modifying your GNOME or KDE menu to point to a fake terminal entry or fake admin tools? How do you know that the "gnome-terminal-emulator" you're now typing your password into (through sudo) isn't actually stealing it?
This is the real world. Attackers are smart, they are motivated by profit (because of the spambot racket), and they have plenty of time to find the next buffer overrun.
Or perhaps you're not in the field at all. There are really three classes of databases today:
Now, of course, there's a ton of overlap here. As MySQL becomes more feature-rich, it begins to enter the "business-class"; MSSQL is beginning to see some success in the "enterprise class" as well.
The bottom line is simple: you're not going to run your bank's accounting system on MySQL, but you're not going to run a PHP forum on Oracle either.
What a database is has changed - thanks to the Internet, we are now using databases for applications that were never though of before. If you think that MySQL is all you'll ever need, you may very well be right - most people will never need the kinds of features that Oracle offers. Of course, if all you think you'll ever need is MySQL, you're not a DBA and you probably won't be hiring one anytime soon.
I don't believe that I'll ever need to own a semi or a 777. Clearly, my Toyota Prius can't do everything. But it meets my needs well enough, and it does so without the overhead of a larger vehicle.
You're thinking about OpenGL, not Direct3D. Unfortunately, OpenGL took a long time to standardize newer graphical features, which, combined with its ability to have vendor-specific addons, ensured that we would see a plethora of different "optimized" paths.
Direct3D has maintained a much higher degree of compatibility. Now, games will not render exactly the same on different cards, but there is a high degree of baseline functionality there.
Most people don't know what a distributor cap is either, so why should they care. Oh yeah, because without it, your car wouldn't go anywhere.
Actually, many recent engines now have direct coil-on-plug ignition, which eliminates the need for a distributor.
The simple face is, Apache vs IIS does prove the simple argument that the ratio of users to exploits is higher relative to other competitors doesn't work.
No, it doesn't! This crap argument is made on Slashdot all the time, but it is wrong for one very simple reason: IIS 6 has fewer security vulnerabilities than Apache2!
IIS 6.0 Vulnerabilities
Apache 2.x Vulnerabilities
Apache has 28 advisories since 2003, including 2 that have no current resolution.
IIS 6.0 has 2 advisories since 2003, none of which have not been fixed.
Your argument works because Slashdot users assume that Apache is more secure than IIS. This is not necessarily the case - IIS 6 is a very secure web server by default, as is Apache.
This is good for security, but helps a lot with stability too. In theory, you won't have to reboot if you install a driver, as I understand it.
This is actually already true in XP. Excluding some system-level drivers (chipset, graphics), XP already allows drivers to be loaded and unloaded without rebooting.
I can confirm that WDDM display drivers can be installed, uninstalled, and upgraded on Vista witout rebooting the system.
No, don't go for it. Unless you are seriously going to get into the OEM market, you're best off only building PCs for yourself. When something breaks, when the user gets spyware - guess who they're going to come looking for to get help. If you're prepared to offer tecnical services (perhaps for a substantial fee) and a warranty, that's great - it will ensure repeat business. But you can't just build a few systems and expect that to be the end of it.
And you're saying in your own smug, elitist way that you're an asshole. The average person on the street could care less if they satisfy your desire to hear the idiom the way that you believe it should be used.
These newer theatres keep the sound cranked so high that the everyone around me was automatically sticking their fingers in their ears when they thought an explosion or other loud sound was coming.
Why did you not tell the staff? This happens once in a while, but if you bother to tell a staff member, they are almost always happy to correct the issue.
Lets assume that Vista is as few as a 1000KLoc - (I'd bet another order of magnatude personally) That implies 600KLoc of new code written, tested debugged, etc. in 6 months. Uh - NO operating system development isn't that fast. I am not even sure I would buy the line that the current Vista codebase is 60% new/changed from XP (RTM - not SP2, patched to heck)
Vista is proportadly around 50 million lines of code. Rewriting 30 million lines of code in 9 months is, quite frankly, impossible. You can't just throw people at the problem - in a project of this scale, just getting a single line of code written, checked in, and debugged takes a massive amount of work.
I always found the Slashdot attitude about graphics to be strange - more of a reaction against the common wisdom than anything really thought out. Every time a new NVIDIA card comes out, there are 200 comments about how it's unnecessary. About how the old card was just fine.
Let me say this - graphics are important. Of course gameplay is more important, but there's no reason that we can't have both. I want a system that can push an HDTV. I want a system that can push loads of special effects and maintain a constant 60fps. I want more realistic characters, larger environments, and smarter AI.
The Gamecube is a fine system. I one one myself. When the Revolution ships, I'll probably get one - I like the idea of playing 20 years of games on a system. I think that the controller will be cool, and while I'm not sure if it will be practical, I'm willing to bet taht the Big-N will come up with some cool applications. But I do not for a second believe that the Revolution is a replacement for the XBOX 360 or the PS3. I'm glad that Microsoft and Sony are pushing graphics forward. And I'm disappointed that Nintendo isn't doing the same. Having an affordable system is important, but why is the Revolution limited to 83MB of memory? How much does 256M of DRAM really cost? And why can't it output at least 480p? Even my Gamecube could output 480p.
It's looking more and more like the Revolution is just an updated Gamecube. But by the time the Revolution ships, the 'Cube will be more than 5 years old. Can't Nintendo do a little better?
Use instead of
regional distribution center for a Swedish-owned multinational
Was it IKEA?
Wait, nevermind. It's narrow-sighted of me to think that IKEA is the only Sweedish-owned multinational corporation that might have regional distribution centers in the United States.
But, seriously, was it IKEA?
The difference is you dont notice most crashes since nothing tells you the darn crap has crashed.
Have you ever bothered to check the event log, or to disable rebooting after a stop error?
More to the point, if you're getting stop errors, SOMETHING IS SCREWED UP. Usually, it's crappy drivers, but everything from an overheating CPU or GPU to bad RAM can cause a stop error. In six years of working with Windows 2000 and XP, I have not once seen a stop error that cannot be linked to crappy drivers or broken hardware.
If your XP system is randomly rebooting, it's broken.
Related, F-Secure posts: "Microsoft has put out a warning on a new, nasty, unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Proof-of-concept exploits are already out. Disable IE's active scripting or switch to any other browser. Not necessarily Firefox - just any other browser. " It's sad when the solution is "Any other browser".
No, it's not sad at all. Apparently, you don't understand the basic fact that when an attack targets a particular product, other separate products are not inherently vulnerable.
Of course other browsers aren't vulnerable to an attack that specifically targets a bug in Internet Explorer!
The other problem here is the crazy North American idea of having cell phone numbers in the same area codes as landlines, but requiring the receiver to pay for incoming calls. If all mobile providers were on their own recognizable area codes, and the caller knew that calling a mobile number was expensive, there'd be a lot fewer of these wrong numbers.
The advantage of this, of course, is that it costs the same to call a landline as it does to call a cellphone. In Europe, for example, it generally costs more to call a cellphone.
Also, if you compare per-minute rates, we still pay less for cellular service, even when you consider that the call is billed twice (once for each party).
Your solution of "make cellphones more expensive to call" does nothing. Few people intentionally misdial a call, and when you consider that in the future, most calls will be to cellphones, misdialed calls will continue to be a problem for some time.
Of course, many of us don't have this problem - I have recieved perhaps one misdialed call on my cell in the past 3 months. Certain numbers, however, are more vulnerable to digit transposition and other common mistakes - particularly considering that numbers are not assigned in a uniform manner.
150GB is nothing to an organization as large as Google. It's like $7 per day! Hell, that's less than lunch at Subway!
Right now, Valve's Steam content servers are piping out 2.31Gbps. They transfer as much in 8 minutes as Google "saves" by using invalid HTML in a whole day.
Bandwidth is a tiny part of Google's cost structure.
that means that Google saves almost 144 GB of data transfer EVERY DAY
Google's logo alone is more than 10x that; and the advertisment for the Google toolbar is more than 3x that. At almost 16KB each, the homepage views alone are almost 3.2TB per day. Even a single query rarely produces a results page under 32K (add it up), which, added to the homepage views, means that Google is transferring over 9.6TB per day in searches alone.
Because, as you know, 148GB of data transfer per day costs so much. 2000GB of data transfer runs around $40-$100, depending on who you buy it from, and Google certainly pays much less than we would. Even assuming the high figure, that works out to around $8 per day.
I'm pretty sure Google can afford $8 per day. The W3C abuse isn't for bandwidth concerns. It may help the page load a little faster on slow connections, but even on a modem, 2KB of extra data only takes a second to load. Especially if you have GZIP compression enabled on the server side.
MSN Search, unfortunately, is on the other extreme. It's W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict and validates without errors, but at over 40K it's on the large side for a simple page. Now, 40K loads in around 8 seconds on a 56K modem (less with compression), but when you consider that 30K+ of that transfer is Javascript, it becomes clear that the page isn't exactly "lean and mean". Particularly when you consider that a search page shouldn't need any scripting at all.
I found the comment about "instant-on" sleep to be amusing.
Yes, we're fully aware that Apple systems can shut down everything execept the components necessary to refresh the DRAM.
The author of the article, apparently, has never used a PC notebook or desktop. Practically every well-behaved system made in the past 5 years, from the $150 eMachines desktops to my generic Compal notebook, supports the ACPI S3 state, which does exactly what Apple's "sleep" mode.
What's really slick about Windows is that the system can wake from S3 suspend and hibernate itself after a certain period of time. My system is set for 6 hours, which means that I don't have to wait for the system to restore during the day, but if I leave my system overnight or longer, I don't have to worry about suspend draining my battery (approx. 20% per day). I can even have different settings if the system is plugged in.
I can't tell if I'm just biased, but to me it seems like there are more criticisms and chronic delays and fewer real usable features that are coming with Microsoft's latest and greatest.
.NET CLR was for Windows XP.
No, you're not. Vista is late, very late. Microsoft didn't have clear goals on what to do after Windows XP - at first, there was very little to put into Longhorn and it was going to be essentially a Windows ME type upgrade. Sometime in 2003, however, Microsoft dramatically changed course as they realized that security was a real problem in Windows XP. In 2004, development started over (using the Windows Server 2003 codebase), and Microsoft esentially threw away what they had been working on for the last three years.
As the project grew in scope, Microsoft promised more than they could deliver. What we're seeing now is a natural part of any project - when you realize that you can't meet all of your goals and you have to decide what's really important.
If you want to know what's really going on with Vista, download one of the CTPs (from Microsoft Connect or MSDN - downloading it from BitTorrent is illegal). You'll find an OS that is full of bugs but also full of promise. You begin to look at what you know about Windows, and you discover that Vista is - in many ways - an entirely different OS. Then you fire up Steam and play Half-Life 2, and you realize that it's still Windows.
Every CTP has had better hardware support, better performance, better stability, more features, and more polish than the previous CTP. Assuming that this continues until October, Vista might just be a success after all.
Personally, I believe Microsoft should be ashamed for not even attempting the WinFS thing.
Why do people keep saying this? WinFS is alive and well, it's still in active development, and a beta has been shipped. WinFS will be shipped as an add-on for Vista, just like the
No, this isn't the case. Recent Vista builds have had both Solitaire and Minesweeper, both new versions that take advantage of Direct3D and were written by a 3rd-party developer.
No, actually you we're talking about whether DRM was right, which, in fact, is rather foolish - excluding bullshit like the DMCA (which I believe is unconstitutional), DRM isn't a law. Indeed, DRM is like the rules at an amusement park - something enforced artificially rather than legally.
Whether or not I accept DRM has to do with how it is implemented. If the price is fair and the restrictions are fair, I don't have any problem with DRM. DVDs have DRM, but it doesn't prevent me from playing my DVDs anywhere and anytime that I want to. My DirecTV service has DRM, but I can still record programs and keep them for as long as I want.
The grandparent's example is particularly objectionable to me because it makes the same error that the RIAA so loves to make - it compares copyright with physical property. Copyright infringement is not theft, copyright doesn't create property, and physical property is not trivially copyable. Whether or not you agree with copyright (in general, I do - but I believe that it should be 28 years maximum and have greater protections for fair use), it's important to understand that DRM is just an application of encryption - one that can be circumvented. If a company wants to make their work hard to copy throgh technological means, they should have the right to do so. Similarly, if I want to try to break that protection, I should have the right to do so.
When I'm running a meeting and someone decides it's more important to take a call or answer an email, I stop the meeting and stare at them.
Works every time.
Yes, it does a great job of making you look like a retentive nutcase. Which is what you are.
I never assume that my presentation will hold the attention of 100% of the audience 100% of the time. I understand that it's entirely possible that:
- The audience member has something more important to attend to (I know this first hand as a Linux sysadmin - sometimes you have to jump on things)
- The audience member already understands or knows that part of the presentation
If a lot of people seem to be inattentive, guess what? It's my fault. As a presenter, it is your job to make your presentation interesting and valuable enough to hold the attention of the audience.