I'd strongly recommend that you find a local university that has a master's program in Computer Science. Get yourself a couple of students to write the thing for you.
I strongly recommend against this. Although I'm majoring in ECE (Basically EE+CS), I've met far too many CS grads who have no idea how to follow specifications or actually define and program a system.
Web programming is as much about design as it is about programming. I work for a small company, the Kombine group, as a PHP developer. While my job is certainly important, the reality is that programming is only a small part of the actual work.
A successful web application needs: - Graphic design - Human factors testing / engineering - Markup, layout, and general UI design - Technical writing (help system, page text, etc.) - Programming - Testing - Maintenence
CS students are generally pretty adept at programming, but they have generally had little experience with any of the other requirements.
Industry experience is key. Throw CS students at the problem, and all you'll end up with is a poorly defined, poorly documented system that no one can use.
I've seen it far too many times in my job.
Sidenote: Be careful with the "web 2.0" concept. Ask yourself if your idea is really novel and define your market. Do research to determine if your concept is actually useful. The hardest part of my job is explaining to customers that they don't really need an AJAX web application for their 5-page business website.
You, sir, are a troll, plain and simple. This article was not anti-French, it had nothing to do with Iraq, yet you decided to bring it up anyway. I opposed the Iraq war, as did nearly half of my nation, but it is irrelivent to the matter at hand.
And, as for "protecting freedom", it would seem that you didn't read the article a t all. If "protecting freedom" means adding a mandatory tax to pay for media that I may or may not want, you have a very strange definition of "protecting freedom".
What about Creative Commons? Now the license is completely pointless - just pay your tax and you are free to copy all you want! What if you're an unsigned band? Will you get paid for the copies that can be legally distributed under this law?
What if the government decided to enact a blanket "graffiti tax" and legalize graffiti? Why should we pay for damage that we have not caused?
Those who download copyrighted material without permission are guilty of copyright infringement. Most individuals understand the necessity of the limited monopoly that copyright provides, yet many are quick to defend illicit downloading.
Should we bring back 14 year copyright terms? I think so. Should we enact cultural socialism by eliminating copyright as we know it? No. Authors and artists should have the freedom to restrict the distribution of their works, to a limited degree. It's not up to the government to value their works.
Yeah, T-Mobile's data service plans rock. With EDGE, the bandwidth is decent (180kbps with a good card), but the latency is still pretty bad (400-600ms).
The $20 plan was rumored to be going away, but AFAIK they can still add it.
It's a good idea to use a PC card instead of a phone, too - most phones only have class 3, 4, or 8 EDGE and won't get the maximum bandwidth of the system; in addition, most phones add 100-200ms of extra latency. The PC cards are under $100 on eBay, so the only concern is swapping your SIM between the two devices.
Indeed. Just remember rule #1 of Stargate: All species other than the Tau'ri (Humans from Earth) are stupid.
Think about it. How could a small secret organization become a major player in the universe in a matter of years? Why do Goa'uld soldiers walk around in big noisy metal uniforms that make them easy to locate and easy to see, yet provide no protection against even handguns? How come no one else has an iris?
The answer is simple: everyone else is stupid! After that, the absurdly predictable behavior of the Goa'uld becomes perfectly clear.
There's simply no evidence that computers are capable of handling the number of variables in play when driving on busy roads with people
There's plenty of evidence that humans are pathetically bad at it. Quite simply, you overestimate the number of variables in play.
To really drive safely you need to be monitoring the environment and anticipating what every person near you is going to do. This requires basically running multiple people simulators simultaneously and monitoring for emerging solutions that represent a threat.
That's a load of crap. Other than the obvious indications (turn signals, brake lights), we are absolutely awful at doing this. How many times have you seen someone: - Pulle out in front of you - Stop abruptly - Change lanes without signaling - Run a red-light - Fail to yield 100s? 1000s? How many times have you been caught completely off guard? If you're like most drivers, it's probably too many to remember. Rule number one of driving is that other people are unpredictable and stupid. That's why it's important to keep a safe following distance, to check carefully at 4-way stops, and to do the 100s of other "checks" that we do to avoid accidents. If we really could tell what everyone else was going to do, then why would we need delayed lights, stop signs, or turn signals at all?
In addition computers and robots have absolutely no sense of self-preservation. If you give a computer a wrong instruction it will follow it, to its own destruction even, without hesitation. There's no billion-year-old base programming that checks every single action for self-danger. A sense of self-preservation has little to do with safe driving. Most accidents occur because we are unable to anticipate danger, unable to react to danger quickly enough, or are unable to make the right decision. Self-preservation is irrelivent because we don't *know* what's dangerous, or because we make choices that are bad. The autopilot on a 777 has no sense of self-preservation either, yet 700+ flights per day confirm the safety of the system. The 777 autopilot isn't concerned with "saving lives", it's running the numbers and doing what is necessary to keep the aircraft on-course and flying properly.
I wonder how you go through each day without being terrified that the computers are going to kill us all. Every time you push on the brakes in your car (if it has ABS), you are relying on the ABS computer to function properly. Every time you fly in an aircraft, you are relying on the computers to fly the aircraft properly (even in "manual" mode, the controls are just another input to the system).
Your car could care less about whether you live or die. Fortunately, it doesn't have to care. All the ABS computer has to do is behave within the specifications, and the system will function.
Box Model Most of the quirksmode bugs are fixed, and while the box model still leaves a lot to be desired, it is, on the whole, a lot better Float Model Again, not 100%, but much closer. PNG transparency Fixed position: fixed Also fixed Mime type: application/xml+html Explicitly not fixed. The argument is that you shouldn't be rendering XHTML served with application/xml+html with an HTML parser anyway. It's a semantic thing anyway, no one is going to go bananas because they have to use text/html. Well, no one except W3 zealots.
And yet, those three titles have drawn nearly as many players to Nintendo WiFi in a few months as it has taken Xbox Live years to. Kinda makes you think, no?
Not for a second. Considering that XBOX Live is $60 a year and Nintendo WFC is free, it's not surprising that Nintendo has more subscribers at all.
More importantly, the Nintendo statistics are frankly bull - they count "unique" users, not "active" users - even a person who has only screwed around with WFC once is counted.
Most hardware makers absoloutly refuse to create drivers for linux
Often, it's not the hardware manufacturers that are at fault - if you want a driver to have continued support in Linux, you either need to:
- Continue to maintain it as the kernel changes (as there is no stable ABI) - Have it included in the kernel source tree (so that it is oficially supported) - Hope that the community keeps the module up to date
Quite simply, drivers written six years ago for Windows continue to function just fine in Windows XP, and most continue to work fine in Vista as well. The same cannot be said for Linux.
Getting a driver included in the kernel tree is a political uphill battle - Broadcomm can attest to that. Their BCM5700 NIC, popular in OEM systems and servers, already had an (extreemely buggy) module, so when Broadcomm tried to get their much-better-supported, GPL module (tg3) included, it simply wasn't going to happen.
RedHat still does not ship the tg3 driver out of the box, and the end result is that everyone with a BCM5700 NIC can't properly change duplex settings (many businesses force to 100 full because of buggy autonegotiation) or have the fun of random NIC lockups (a notable bug in the kernel driver resulted in locking the hardware, only solved by removing power from the system; the bug stood unresolved for almost 9 months).
Indeed, in terms of friendlyness to outside driver development, Windows is actually far more open than Linux. Simply read some of the statements that Linus has made about not wanting to keep a stable ABI to prevent binary modules (and similarly prevent open-source modules that compile accross a wide range of kernels), and you'll understand that this is very much an "exclusive" club, not the open environment that it proports to be.
2D "quality" is now largely unimportant. If you want the best quality display, you use a good LCD display with DVI - and the Silicon Image TDMS transcoders that NVIDIA cards use are just fine.
Seriously though, since you might not know much about Mac OS X, and may doubt my words that MacOS X has already implemented all these, just ask me which feature you need more info on, and I (and others) will try to help.
OK, so what's OS X's implementation of a fully vector-based, 3D graphical UI that is DPI independant?
And is the UI layout an XML file?
And does OS X support LCD displays externally (e.g. on notebooks) even while the notebook is sleeping?
How about suspend to disk?
Does Apple even plan support for tablets?
Media Center recorded TV in 2002. When will Front Row be able to?
Saying that Vista is "catching up to OS X" completely misses what Windows really is. Microsoft has the challenge of bringing 600 million users and years of legacy hardware, software, and drivers with them - and there are a lot of new features in Vista that aren't in OS X. Certainly, things like UAP and desktop search are "catch up" to OS X, but it is misleading to label Vista as a "spiritual clone" of Tiger - or any other Mac OS release, for that matter.
First of all, I don't know how you can call WVDDM + WPF + DCE 'not a new graphics engine'. New driver model, new GUI system, and a new window manager - seems new enough to me.
Second, Vista has a number of big new features: - Brand new networking stack that is 100% IPv6 internally - New ACPI subsystem including a hybrid STR/STD support, faster suspend/resume, and a more robust mechanism for dealing with bad drivers - New audio subsystem with per-application mixing - UAP support (not running as admin all the time) with automatic privelage elevation (with user approval) for installers and other programs that need admin access - Major memory manager tweaks - Kernel tweaks to improve streaming performance - New programming framework (WinFX) based on.NET 2.0, WPF, and a host of other new technologies - 3D accelerated UI / window manager - New Media Center and Tablet PC features - Fast User Switching on AD Domains - Integrated AntiSpyware - Integrated indexing / search (ala Spotlight) including extensive metadata and tagging support - New Windows Media Player - New version of IE with CSS fixes, phishing filter, tabbed browsing, native XMLHTTP, freform resize (ala Opera), and many security enhancements - Support for auxiliry LCD displays (windows SideShow) - New, faster install system (no more text-mode 'copying files') - New Windows Installer version - New printing system / PDF alternative (Metro)
So, in response to your question, basically everything.
S3 (aka. suspend) is the damn-good one. It only uses about 0.5 watts more power than your computer being completely off (I suppose it might be different with a more effecient power supply like a Seasonic). However, it's damn near impossible to get it to work. Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD. Tried on dozens of completely different machines, and I've never seen it work, once. The drivers for pretty much ALL the hardware need to be written with APCI in-mind
Nearly every notebook supports S3 just fine, as do most commercial desktops. Even my DFI/Athlon 64 custom-built system works fine with S3.
If you're using Windows, make sure that your drivers are WHQL tested - part of the testing includes handling suspend properly.
Disclaimer: I'm not hyping Northern Colorado as being "the next Silicon Valley". Intel is taking over the old Celestica plant next to the HP campus in Ft. Collins, Colorado, and AMD is looking to open up about 200 jobs in the same area (being Ft. Collins). Interesting move... http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/2709/ 94/
Ft. Collins has certainly seen a lot of high-tech in the last few years. Itanium was largely developed at HP Fort Collins, and now most of those engineers are Intel engineers. There's LSI Logic, Agilent/Agavo, HP, Intel, and of course all of the research that comes from a major university (CSU).
Colorado could very well become the tech center of the mountain region - in the Boulder area alone, there's IBM (Niwot), StorageTek (Broomfield), Xilinx (Longmont), Sun (Broomfield), Level3 (Broomfield), Ball Aerospace (Superior/Louisville), NIST, NOAA, and quite a bit more. There's also Qwest, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Qualcomm, Kyocera, and a number of other companies with significant operations in the area.
Interestingly, one of my friends worked at the former Celestica facility in Fort Collins; another works at HP in the Linux division.
Major University + Low Taxes / Land = High Tech. That's why AMD is in Dresden.
Unfortunately not. Mal turned from someone who deeply respected and cared for his crew in the series (and who finally came to accept Simon and River as members of said crew) to an asshole who had alienated his friends and was on the brink of disaster.
It's rather like the change from Anakin to Vader in Episode III - it was too brief and two dramatic to be compelling.
The rest of the crew carried over pretty well, though.
Windows tends to swap memory not based on the lack of it, but the lack of access
Yes, that is by design. Linux does the same thing, although it is much less aggressive. Remember, the memory is always being used by something. Better to use the free memory as additional disk cache rather than wasting it on memory that hasn't been accessed in a long time.
World of Warcraft, for example, takes over 1GB of total memory on my system - note that I only have 1GB of memory. But ~700MB of that is swapped out at any one time. That leaves room for disk cache and other applications, which is particularly important when Media Center is recording two programs and Azureus is thrashing the disk.
Far too often, though, libertarians interpret "leave you alone" as "do nothing of importance at all".
That's the problem with libertarians: unlike the other parties, when they say that they are for small government, they mean it - in a very extreme sense.
Do we want the government to run an air-traffic-control system? To test drugs and medical devices? To fund the development and production of influenza vaccines? To enforce environmental standards?
If the government doesn't do it, who will? Clearly, market forces can work in some cases - UL helps ensure the safety of many devices without government intervention; new drugs are developed with minimal government assistance. But even private development of drugs relies on the protection of the government - patent law. And few are foolish enough to believe that most companies give a damn about the environment; we have 50+ years of history that show that.
Where does the government belong? It's a difficult question to answer. But few people believe that it should be as limited as libertarians believe.
the Mac OS X license agreement specifically states that Mac OS X can only be installed on a single Apple-branded computer
That particular provision is likely unenforcable. However, Mac OS X for x86 has DRM restrictions that must be circumvented to install it on a non-Mac system, which may be a violation of the DMCA (or it may not be - Lexmark attempted to claim that the DMCA should make modifying their cartridges illegal; it was ruled that the DMCA only relates to cases involving copyright infringement).
So, basically, it's unclear at this point. Except of course if you're downloading Mac OS X from Bittorrent, in which case it's pretty clear that there is infringement.
I keep hearing arguments about how textures for "HD" games will take a lot more memory. But remember, PCs have supported HD (or even greater) resolutions for many years now. Games like Half-Life 2 or Unreal Tournament 2004 already have high-resolution textures (certainly enough for the 1680x1050 resolution of my LCD) and they certainly don't require an insane amount of space. UT2004, for example, with its 100+ maps, is still only 5.2GB. That's about 1/2 the space of a DVD-9.
Most PS3 games will be released on DVD. DVDs will remain cheaper than Blu-Ray discs for most of the PS3's lifecycle, and fitting a game in 9GB of space just isn't that hard, "HD" textures or not.
Microsoft's choice of DVD was the right one. The XBOX 360 is out there, right now, capturing marketshare and selling games. Microsoft is fixing bugs in the hardware, improving the online software, and gaining momentum in the 3rd-party development world. Meanwhile, PS3 is nowhere to be seen. The samples presented at CES and E3 are identified as "Conceptual Designs", meaning that the hardware isn't finalized or even in the prototype stage. Blu-Ray drives are beginning to appear, but they are extremely expensive and the media is nowhere to be found.
Building a system around a technology that doesn't exist is a foolish move. NEXT tried it with a Magneto-Optical drive, and when the technology was late, expensive, and buggy, NEXT took it on the chin.
That's why I'd like Blizzard to make a few "hardcore" servers. If you die, you're dead. Make a new character. Instead of seeing about half of the population at level 60, we'd see fewer and fewer high level characters. Travelling alone or unprepared would be death. Just one or two servers like that. Please?
That is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. Forget PVP on a server like that - you just know that a group of asshats would team up to prevent any progress at all. And forget the challenge of instances/zones/mobs that stand a chance of killing you - everyone would just grind on characters that are 5 levels low and don't pull.
A good player still takes at least 4-5 days of playtime (or more) to hit level 60. Try playing that long while avoiding situations that could involve death. Eliminating the huge penalty for mistakes is what allows rock climbers to push themselves to the limit. And it's what allows you to challenge yourself in WoW. In a game where death is catastrophic, no one will take risks. How challenging is that?
The secret is to go to a university that has Pepsi products (if you're not already on one). Find a social area where there are pop machines (in the case of the University of Colorado, the "Real McCoy Grill" in the engineering center served nicely). Go through the recycling bins and take all the tops (in the Mountain Dew contest, they were colored orange which made them easy to identify).
I collected about 400 caps with less than an hour of effort. I would have had more if another person hadn't already "farmed" most of the bins.
Not all of those 400-cap entries were from obsessive Mountain Dew drinkers.
It's more like SetAbortProc was never removed from the common code-base that Vista inherited from XP. Saying it was "ported" would lead one to believe that MS actually re-writes the entire OS with every major release. They do not. They simply tack on some new stuff.
Windows Vista is actually based on Windows Server 2003. The NT kernel is solid and large parts of the OS actually have been rewritten (Explorer, the shell, is now managed code, the networking stack is all-new, the display subsystem is mostly new code). What remains has been modified extensively, including the audio subsystem, memory manager, and quite a bit more. There's a new version of DirectX, new versions of IE and Windows Installer, a replacement for GDI based on XML (Windows Presentation Framework), extensive changes to ACPI, major changes to WMI, and a lot more.
Make no mistake, Windows Vista is as big of a change from Windows XP as Windows 2000 was from NT 4.0.
If it were me, I'd take advantage of equipment I had in place at critical infrastructure points to conduct MITM attacks between a PC and Windows Update servers
Unless the NSA/CIA/Whatever has compromised VeriSign (which is certainly possible), a MITM attack would be implausible against Windows Update because all of the updates are signed with X.509 certificates (Authenticode).
Windows won't run simply because of technological advancements. Windows was created far before EFI's inception/implementation and thus is completely incompatible.
Wow, someone didn't bother to do their research. Windows XP ran fine on Intel Itanium, which uses EFI exclusively, more than three years ago. They cancelled the product because no one wanted to run Windows XP on an expensive Intel server CPU (Windows Server 2003 is still sold for Itanium).
EFI is one of those questionably-useful Intel "advancements". While it's certainly nice to ditch the legacy BIOS, and while EFI does offer some nice new fetures, it is, by and large, unnecessary. That's why it never caught on in the x86 world.
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I'd strongly recommend that you find a local university that has a master's program in Computer Science. Get yourself a couple of students to write the thing for you.
I strongly recommend against this. Although I'm majoring in ECE (Basically EE+CS), I've met far too many CS grads who have no idea how to follow specifications or actually define and program a system.
Web programming is as much about design as it is about programming. I work for a small company, the Kombine group, as a PHP developer. While my job is certainly important, the reality is that programming is only a small part of the actual work.
A successful web application needs:
- Graphic design
- Human factors testing / engineering
- Markup, layout, and general UI design
- Technical writing (help system, page text, etc.)
- Programming
- Testing
- Maintenence
CS students are generally pretty adept at programming, but they have generally had little experience with any of the other requirements.
Industry experience is key. Throw CS students at the problem, and all you'll end up with is a poorly defined, poorly documented system that no one can use.
I've seen it far too many times in my job.
Sidenote: Be careful with the "web 2.0" concept. Ask yourself if your idea is really novel and define your market. Do research to determine if your concept is actually useful. The hardest part of my job is explaining to customers that they don't really need an AJAX web application for their 5-page business website.
You, sir, are a troll, plain and simple. This article was not anti-French, it had nothing to do with Iraq, yet you decided to bring it up anyway. I opposed the Iraq war, as did nearly half of my nation, but it is irrelivent to the matter at hand.
And, as for "protecting freedom", it would seem that you didn't read the article a t all. If "protecting freedom" means adding a mandatory tax to pay for media that I may or may not want, you have a very strange definition of "protecting freedom".
What about Creative Commons? Now the license is completely pointless - just pay your tax and you are free to copy all you want! What if you're an unsigned band? Will you get paid for the copies that can be legally distributed under this law?
What if the government decided to enact a blanket "graffiti tax" and legalize graffiti? Why should we pay for damage that we have not caused?
Those who download copyrighted material without permission are guilty of copyright infringement. Most individuals understand the necessity of the limited monopoly that copyright provides, yet many are quick to defend illicit downloading.
Should we bring back 14 year copyright terms? I think so. Should we enact cultural socialism by eliminating copyright as we know it? No. Authors and artists should have the freedom to restrict the distribution of their works, to a limited degree. It's not up to the government to value their works.
Yeah, T-Mobile's data service plans rock. With EDGE, the bandwidth is decent (180kbps with a good card), but the latency is still pretty bad (400-600ms).
The $20 plan was rumored to be going away, but AFAIK they can still add it.
It's a good idea to use a PC card instead of a phone, too - most phones only have class 3, 4, or 8 EDGE and won't get the maximum bandwidth of the system; in addition, most phones add 100-200ms of extra latency. The PC cards are under $100 on eBay, so the only concern is swapping your SIM between the two devices.
No.
Indeed. Just remember rule #1 of Stargate:
All species other than the Tau'ri (Humans from Earth) are stupid.
Think about it. How could a small secret organization become a major player in the universe in a matter of years? Why do Goa'uld soldiers walk around in big noisy metal uniforms that make them easy to locate and easy to see, yet provide no protection against even handguns? How come no one else has an iris?
The answer is simple: everyone else is stupid! After that, the absurdly predictable behavior of the Goa'uld becomes perfectly clear.
There's simply no evidence that computers are capable of handling the number of variables in play when driving on busy roads with people
There's plenty of evidence that humans are pathetically bad at it. Quite simply, you overestimate the number of variables in play.
To really drive safely you need to be monitoring the environment and anticipating what every person near you is going to do. This requires basically running multiple people simulators simultaneously and monitoring for emerging solutions that represent a threat.
That's a load of crap. Other than the obvious indications (turn signals, brake lights), we are absolutely awful at doing this. How many times have you seen someone:
- Pulle out in front of you
- Stop abruptly
- Change lanes without signaling
- Run a red-light
- Fail to yield
100s? 1000s? How many times have you been caught completely off guard? If you're like most drivers, it's probably too many to remember. Rule number one of driving is that other people are unpredictable and stupid. That's why it's important to keep a safe following distance, to check carefully at 4-way stops, and to do the 100s of other "checks" that we do to avoid accidents. If we really could tell what everyone else was going to do, then why would we need delayed lights, stop signs, or turn signals at all?
In addition computers and robots have absolutely no sense of self-preservation. If you give a computer a wrong instruction it will follow it, to its own destruction even, without hesitation. There's no billion-year-old base programming that checks every single action for self-danger.
A sense of self-preservation has little to do with safe driving. Most accidents occur because we are unable to anticipate danger, unable to react to danger quickly enough, or are unable to make the right decision. Self-preservation is irrelivent because we don't *know* what's dangerous, or because we make choices that are bad. The autopilot on a 777 has no sense of self-preservation either, yet 700+ flights per day confirm the safety of the system. The 777 autopilot isn't concerned with "saving lives", it's running the numbers and doing what is necessary to keep the aircraft on-course and flying properly.
I wonder how you go through each day without being terrified that the computers are going to kill us all. Every time you push on the brakes in your car (if it has ABS), you are relying on the ABS computer to function properly. Every time you fly in an aircraft, you are relying on the computers to fly the aircraft properly (even in "manual" mode, the controls are just another input to the system).
Your car could care less about whether you live or die. Fortunately, it doesn't have to care. All the ABS computer has to do is behave within the specifications, and the system will function.
Box Model
Most of the quirksmode bugs are fixed, and while the box model still leaves a lot to be desired, it is, on the whole, a lot better
Float Model
Again, not 100%, but much closer.
PNG transparency
Fixed
position: fixed
Also fixed
Mime type: application/xml+html
Explicitly not fixed. The argument is that you shouldn't be rendering XHTML served with application/xml+html with an HTML parser anyway. It's a semantic thing anyway, no one is going to go bananas because they have to use text/html. Well, no one except W3 zealots.
And yet, those three titles have drawn nearly as many players to Nintendo WiFi in a few months as it has taken Xbox Live years to. Kinda makes you think, no?
Not for a second. Considering that XBOX Live is $60 a year and Nintendo WFC is free, it's not surprising that Nintendo has more subscribers at all.
More importantly, the Nintendo statistics are frankly bull - they count "unique" users, not "active" users - even a person who has only screwed around with WFC once is counted.
Most hardware makers absoloutly refuse to create drivers for linux
Often, it's not the hardware manufacturers that are at fault - if you want a driver to have continued support in Linux, you either need to:
- Continue to maintain it as the kernel changes (as there is no stable ABI)
- Have it included in the kernel source tree (so that it is oficially supported)
- Hope that the community keeps the module up to date
Quite simply, drivers written six years ago for Windows continue to function just fine in Windows XP, and most continue to work fine in Vista as well. The same cannot be said for Linux.
Getting a driver included in the kernel tree is a political uphill battle - Broadcomm can attest to that. Their BCM5700 NIC, popular in OEM systems and servers, already had an (extreemely buggy) module, so when Broadcomm tried to get their much-better-supported, GPL module (tg3) included, it simply wasn't going to happen.
RedHat still does not ship the tg3 driver out of the box, and the end result is that everyone with a BCM5700 NIC can't properly change duplex settings (many businesses force to 100 full because of buggy autonegotiation) or have the fun of random NIC lockups (a notable bug in the kernel driver resulted in locking the hardware, only solved by removing power from the system; the bug stood unresolved for almost 9 months).
Indeed, in terms of friendlyness to outside driver development, Windows is actually far more open than Linux. Simply read some of the statements that Linus has made about not wanting to keep a stable ABI to prevent binary modules (and similarly prevent open-source modules that compile accross a wide range of kernels), and you'll understand that this is very much an "exclusive" club, not the open environment that it proports to be.
2D "quality" is now largely unimportant. If you want the best quality display, you use a good LCD display with DVI - and the Silicon Image TDMS transcoders that NVIDIA cards use are just fine.
Seriously though, since you might not know much about Mac OS X, and may doubt my words that MacOS X has already implemented all these, just ask me which feature you need more info on, and I (and others) will try to help.
OK, so what's OS X's implementation of a fully vector-based, 3D graphical UI that is DPI independant?
And is the UI layout an XML file?
And does OS X support LCD displays externally (e.g. on notebooks) even while the notebook is sleeping?
How about suspend to disk?
Does Apple even plan support for tablets?
Media Center recorded TV in 2002. When will Front Row be able to?
Saying that Vista is "catching up to OS X" completely misses what Windows really is. Microsoft has the challenge of bringing 600 million users and years of legacy hardware, software, and drivers with them - and there are a lot of new features in Vista that aren't in OS X. Certainly, things like UAP and desktop search are "catch up" to OS X, but it is misleading to label Vista as a "spiritual clone" of Tiger - or any other Mac OS release, for that matter.
First of all, I don't know how you can call WVDDM + WPF + DCE 'not a new graphics engine'. New driver model, new GUI system, and a new window manager - seems new enough to me.
.NET 2.0, WPF, and a host of other new technologies
Second, Vista has a number of big new features:
- Brand new networking stack that is 100% IPv6 internally
- New ACPI subsystem including a hybrid STR/STD support, faster suspend/resume, and a more robust mechanism for dealing with bad drivers
- New audio subsystem with per-application mixing
- UAP support (not running as admin all the time) with automatic privelage elevation (with user approval) for installers and other programs that need admin access
- Major memory manager tweaks
- Kernel tweaks to improve streaming performance
- New programming framework (WinFX) based on
- 3D accelerated UI / window manager
- New Media Center and Tablet PC features
- Fast User Switching on AD Domains
- Integrated AntiSpyware
- Integrated indexing / search (ala Spotlight) including extensive metadata and tagging support
- New Windows Media Player
- New version of IE with CSS fixes, phishing filter, tabbed browsing, native XMLHTTP, freform resize (ala Opera), and many security enhancements
- Support for auxiliry LCD displays (windows SideShow)
- New, faster install system (no more text-mode 'copying files')
- New Windows Installer version
- New printing system / PDF alternative (Metro)
So, in response to your question, basically everything.
Pamela Anderson's private home sex video stolen and sold is legal to sell because it's public interest a judge ruled.
Microsoft source code stolen and sold is industrial espionage with 3 year sentence.
Pamela's sex video isn't trade secret. The source code to Windows is.
But, hey, why let facts get in the way of a nice anti-corporate comment?
S3 (aka. suspend) is the damn-good one. It only uses about 0.5 watts more power than your computer being completely off (I suppose it might be different with a more effecient power supply like a Seasonic). However, it's damn near impossible to get it to work. Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD. Tried on dozens of completely different machines, and I've never seen it work, once. The drivers for pretty much ALL the hardware need to be written with APCI in-mind
Nearly every notebook supports S3 just fine, as do most commercial desktops. Even my DFI/Athlon 64 custom-built system works fine with S3.
If you're using Windows, make sure that your drivers are WHQL tested - part of the testing includes handling suspend properly.
Disclaimer: I'm not hyping Northern Colorado as being "the next Silicon Valley". Intel is taking over the old Celestica plant next to the HP campus in Ft. Collins, Colorado, and AMD is looking to open up about 200 jobs in the same area (being Ft. Collins). Interesting move... http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/2709/ 94/
Ft. Collins has certainly seen a lot of high-tech in the last few years. Itanium was largely developed at HP Fort Collins, and now most of those engineers are Intel engineers. There's LSI Logic, Agilent/Agavo, HP, Intel, and of course all of the research that comes from a major university (CSU).
Colorado could very well become the tech center of the mountain region - in the Boulder area alone, there's IBM (Niwot), StorageTek (Broomfield), Xilinx (Longmont), Sun (Broomfield), Level3 (Broomfield), Ball Aerospace (Superior/Louisville), NIST, NOAA, and quite a bit more. There's also Qwest, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Qualcomm, Kyocera, and a number of other companies with significant operations in the area.
Interestingly, one of my friends worked at the former Celestica facility in Fort Collins; another works at HP in the Linux division.
Major University + Low Taxes / Land = High Tech. That's why AMD is in Dresden.
And will the chemistry be the same?
Unfortunately not. Mal turned from someone who deeply respected and cared for his crew in the series (and who finally came to accept Simon and River as members of said crew) to an asshole who had alienated his friends and was on the brink of disaster.
It's rather like the change from Anakin to Vader in Episode III - it was too brief and two dramatic to be compelling.
The rest of the crew carried over pretty well, though.
Windows tends to swap memory not based on the lack of it, but the lack of access
Yes, that is by design. Linux does the same thing, although it is much less aggressive. Remember, the memory is always being used by something. Better to use the free memory as additional disk cache rather than wasting it on memory that hasn't been accessed in a long time.
World of Warcraft, for example, takes over 1GB of total memory on my system - note that I only have 1GB of memory. But ~700MB of that is swapped out at any one time. That leaves room for disk cache and other applications, which is particularly important when Media Center is recording two programs and Azureus is thrashing the disk.
Far too often, though, libertarians interpret "leave you alone" as "do nothing of importance at all".
That's the problem with libertarians: unlike the other parties, when they say that they are for small government, they mean it - in a very extreme sense.
Do we want the government to run an air-traffic-control system? To test drugs and medical devices? To fund the development and production of influenza vaccines? To enforce environmental standards?
If the government doesn't do it, who will? Clearly, market forces can work in some cases - UL helps ensure the safety of many devices without government intervention; new drugs are developed with minimal government assistance. But even private development of drugs relies on the protection of the government - patent law. And few are foolish enough to believe that most companies give a damn about the environment; we have 50+ years of history that show that.
Where does the government belong? It's a difficult question to answer. But few people believe that it should be as limited as libertarians believe.
the Mac OS X license agreement specifically states that Mac OS X can only be installed on a single Apple-branded computer
That particular provision is likely unenforcable. However, Mac OS X for x86 has DRM restrictions that must be circumvented to install it on a non-Mac system, which may be a violation of the DMCA (or it may not be - Lexmark attempted to claim that the DMCA should make modifying their cartridges illegal; it was ruled that the DMCA only relates to cases involving copyright infringement).
So, basically, it's unclear at this point. Except of course if you're downloading Mac OS X from Bittorrent, in which case it's pretty clear that there is infringement.
I keep hearing arguments about how textures for "HD" games will take a lot more memory. But remember, PCs have supported HD (or even greater) resolutions for many years now. Games like Half-Life 2 or Unreal Tournament 2004 already have high-resolution textures (certainly enough for the 1680x1050 resolution of my LCD) and they certainly don't require an insane amount of space. UT2004, for example, with its 100+ maps, is still only 5.2GB. That's about 1/2 the space of a DVD-9.
Most PS3 games will be released on DVD. DVDs will remain cheaper than Blu-Ray discs for most of the PS3's lifecycle, and fitting a game in 9GB of space just isn't that hard, "HD" textures or not.
Microsoft's choice of DVD was the right one. The XBOX 360 is out there, right now, capturing marketshare and selling games. Microsoft is fixing bugs in the hardware, improving the online software, and gaining momentum in the 3rd-party development world. Meanwhile, PS3 is nowhere to be seen. The samples presented at CES and E3 are identified as "Conceptual Designs", meaning that the hardware isn't finalized or even in the prototype stage. Blu-Ray drives are beginning to appear, but they are extremely expensive and the media is nowhere to be found.
Building a system around a technology that doesn't exist is a foolish move. NEXT tried it with a Magneto-Optical drive, and when the technology was late, expensive, and buggy, NEXT took it on the chin.
That's why I'd like Blizzard to make a few "hardcore" servers. If you die, you're dead. Make a new character. Instead of seeing about half of the population at level 60, we'd see fewer and fewer high level characters. Travelling alone or unprepared would be death. Just one or two servers like that. Please?
That is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. Forget PVP on a server like that - you just know that a group of asshats would team up to prevent any progress at all. And forget the challenge of instances/zones/mobs that stand a chance of killing you - everyone would just grind on characters that are 5 levels low and don't pull.
A good player still takes at least 4-5 days of playtime (or more) to hit level 60. Try playing that long while avoiding situations that could involve death. Eliminating the huge penalty for mistakes is what allows rock climbers to push themselves to the limit. And it's what allows you to challenge yourself in WoW. In a game where death is catastrophic, no one will take risks. How challenging is that?
-- 53 Night Elf Shadow Priest, 11 days playtime
The secret is to go to a university that has Pepsi products (if you're not already on one). Find a social area where there are pop machines (in the case of the University of Colorado, the "Real McCoy Grill" in the engineering center served nicely). Go through the recycling bins and take all the tops (in the Mountain Dew contest, they were colored orange which made them easy to identify).
I collected about 400 caps with less than an hour of effort. I would have had more if another person hadn't already "farmed" most of the bins.
Not all of those 400-cap entries were from obsessive Mountain Dew drinkers.
It's more like SetAbortProc was never removed from the common code-base that Vista inherited from XP. Saying it was "ported" would lead one to believe that MS actually re-writes the entire OS with every major release. They do not. They simply tack on some new stuff.
Windows Vista is actually based on Windows Server 2003. The NT kernel is solid and large parts of the OS actually have been rewritten (Explorer, the shell, is now managed code, the networking stack is all-new, the display subsystem is mostly new code). What remains has been modified extensively, including the audio subsystem, memory manager, and quite a bit more. There's a new version of DirectX, new versions of IE and Windows Installer, a replacement for GDI based on XML (Windows Presentation Framework), extensive changes to ACPI, major changes to WMI, and a lot more.
Make no mistake, Windows Vista is as big of a change from Windows XP as Windows 2000 was from NT 4.0.
If it were me, I'd take advantage of equipment I had in place at critical infrastructure points to conduct MITM attacks between a PC and Windows Update servers
Unless the NSA/CIA/Whatever has compromised VeriSign (which is certainly possible), a MITM attack would be implausible against Windows Update because all of the updates are signed with X.509 certificates (Authenticode).
Windows won't run simply because of technological advancements. Windows was created far before EFI's inception/implementation and thus is completely incompatible.
Wow, someone didn't bother to do their research. Windows XP ran fine on Intel Itanium, which uses EFI exclusively, more than three years ago. They cancelled the product because no one wanted to run Windows XP on an expensive Intel server CPU (Windows Server 2003 is still sold for Itanium).
EFI is one of those questionably-useful Intel "advancements". While it's certainly nice to ditch the legacy BIOS, and while EFI does offer some nice new fetures, it is, by and large, unnecessary. That's why it never caught on in the x86 world.