Brings resolution-independence to the GUI with vector-based controls and icons, plus resampling for legacy applications.
Brings 3D acceleration into the GUI, making it easy to use 3D in desktop applications without having to use OpenGL or Direct3D.
Updated kernel, memory manager, etc.
Reduced user permissions (ala Mac OS X or Linux) to increase security.
New network stack.
New printing system with commom document format.
New power management features.
Desktop search.
Vritual folders (e.g. "Music" can organize all music on your computer by artist).
New shell UI (Explorer).
New command shell (MSH).
Completely new install system.
Faster bootup, shutdown, standby, and resume.
Support for external LCD displays on notebooks.
New features for eHome (Media Center) and Tablet PC.
New networking paridigm ("Castle") replaces the outdated "Workgroup" (WINS).
New graphics driver model (LDM) that will serve as the basis for the desktop and the next version of DirectX.
New DRM technologies (ugh) - 'secure' graphics path and 'secure' audio path.
Parental controls for DVDs, games, and potentially TV (eHome) built-in.
Antispyware built-in.
New update mechanism that allows in-memory patching of libraries without requiring a reload or restart.
New Windows Update and automatic update mechanism.
New protection against security exploits through extensive security audits and code-quality tests.
Fewer bugs and crashes through increased regression testing, improved error reporting, and tighter code requirements.
No, Vista isn't going to be Mac OS X. Too many people expect Microsoft to go and duplicate everything that Apple has done. They expect Vista to be the "non-Windows Windows".
That's not going to happen. Vista is still very much the Windows you know. But it is the most significant change since Windows 2000. It will be better in ways that aren't apparent by looking at screenshots - a better network stack, easier patching, and improved security aren't necessarily the kinds of things that are apparent from the UI. But they matter to the user. And they matter to Microsoft.
Expect Vista to deliver in a big way. Not through "150 new features" like every release of Mac OS X, but through a general improvement in security, stability, and performance. And, of course, a much improved platform for developers.
"You realize that means that PS2 games on Blu-Ray discs will blow Xbox360 games out of the water in terms of graphics and features, right? I'm sure Sony will make sure something really stunning is available at launch just to make Xbox owners cry.
Hilarious. MS is shooting themselves in the foot on features, Sony is shooting themselves in the foot on price, and Nintendo suddenly looks like the little engine that could, or the tortoise racing two hares."
You aren't making any sense at all. No modern game requires more than the 8GB of space that a dual-layer DVD can provide. Few console games even need more than the 1.5GB provided by Gamecube's discs.
"MS is shooting themselves in the foot on features, Sony is shooting themselves in the foot on price, and Nintendo suddenly looks like the little engine that could, or the tortoise racing two hares."
Microsoft has a console under production.
Sony has hype, rumor, and speculation. Nintendo doesn't even have a firm launch date.
Nintendo, quite frankly, is a non-contender for the next generation of home consoles. As of yet, they have shown *nothing*. We have a concept design and a few vague specifications.
"In addition Joe Average User would care if he knew how much money companies, like his bank, spent on web developers writing work arounds because IE is broken."
Not much. If you've ever actually done CSS development, you learn that IE's "broken" CSS support isn't as "broken" as everyone likes to claim.
Yeah, there are some nasty bugs - but they generally only occur in specific and limited situations. And, no, IE doesn't support all of CSS2, but the stuff that it doesn't support isn't exactly die-hard-essential to create a page.
The web existed before CSS. As much as I'd like to see full and correct CSS2.1 support in IE7, I know that it's not going to happen. And I'm going to keep developing applications that work - not by working around IE bugs, but by coding tight, coding smart, and avoiding the CSS2 features that I don't really need.
You can write a functional page without background-attach support, full selector support, and !important. Not using what IE doesn't support affects the development cycle very little.
Oh, and, by the way, any "who much money spent by doing foo" quotes are always bullshit. Imagine how much US businesses lose to *people going to the bathroom*. My god, it must be BILLIONS.
"My experience says things are different. Most people DO have an old PC, because they aren't geeks and don't care about getting the latest ATI card so they can play GTA:XXX."
Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong. Most people don't have the latest high end ATI card, but they *do* have a PC that was made later than 2002. The #1 OS, by a landslide, on my website (shortify.com) is Windows XP (65%), followed by Windows 2000 (21%), Windows 98 (6%), Mac OS X (4%), and "Everything Else" (4%, primarily Windows NT4, Windows 95, and Linux).
"Most" businesses are not stuck on Windows 2000. Yes, Windows 2000 still has a huge install base, but the majority of businesses have switched to XP, if only because mainstream support has ended for Windows 2000.
No, seriously. Vista apparently has a completely rewritten network stack that's supposed to build on the work done with Windows Server 2003 (offloading work to network hardware, primarily) and was designed for IPv6 from the ground up.
Spotlight is neither particularly unique nor particularly remarkable.
But, hey, it's Apple. When they duplicate functionality that was already implemented elsewhere (fast user switching, dashboard, spotlight), it's "innovating". When Microsoft does it, it's "copying".
Give it a rest. It's a little different when you have to support a platform with over a billion users.
"I want to know what happened to WinFS, Avalon, Indigo and all the other revolutionary tech that Long... Vista supposedly would offer."
Avalon is very much alive and kicking, and it has even been backported to XP. You can download an SDK and try it out if you want to.
Indigo isn't going anywhere either.
"Let's hope Vista is more than a new color scheme and fancy GUI components."
It will be. Whether anyone will actually care about those features is another matter, but:
- Users no longer run as Administrator by default - Hotpatching (fewer reboots for patches) - Driver upgrades without rebooting - Single-image for AMD/Intel (no more reinstalling) - Avalon / XAML - Indigo - End of "Workgroups" (WINS) - Fast Search (like "Spotlight")
As for what else is coming down the pipe, I do not know. We'll have to wait and see.
"Windows Eyecandy and DRM", more like - that appears to be the only thing it offers over XP."
Funny to hear this when the consensus is that Apple will be using TCPA features in the next version of OS X to prevent it from being run on commodity hardware.
Secure audio path and Windows Media DRM are *already* a part of XP.
I never got the Slashdot paranoia over DRM. It should be the laws that mandate DRM or make circumvention illegal that we should be against.
Of course, this is Microsoft, so, here goes:
MICROSOFT WINDOWS VISTA IS SUCH A SHITTY NAME. THERE DRM ENCUMBERED CRAPPERONI WONT FOOL US. MAC OS TURBOLIZARD WILL BE SO MUCH BETTER. REDOMOND IS JUST COPYING APPLE. DRM DRM DRM. LOOK AT ME - DRM DRM DRM!!!!!!!
Once again, Sony has produced a system that is difficult to develop for. Once again, they have over-hyped their system.
There's a problem with Sony's strategy, though: no one believes them anymore. The PS3 is like Windows Longhorn - far off, almost "mythical" in nature.
The XBOX 360 is real. It's hitting in time for the Christmas shopping season. It has strong online features. It integrates with Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Microsoft established "street cred" with the XBOX. Everyone now believes that Microsoft can deliver a game system that will offer a serious lineup of games and a real online component.
Sony has added tons of features to their console that push the price higher. Blu-Ray. Multiple HDMI connections. Multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections. Bluetooth. Wi-Fi. XDR DRAM. All of these features push the price higher. Right now, Sony is looking at a $400+ console. And all of them create the possibility of shortage.
On December 25, millions of people will be opening up an XBOX 360. Sony will have slides and promises.
"Indeed. But there are many remote places that the Internet has not reached and may never reach."
No, there aren't. If you can see the sky, you can get the internet. Services like Iridium and Globalstar have made that possible.
Now, Iridum and Globalstar are low-bitrate (2400/9600 baud, respectively), but that's fine for email and IM. Even that limitation will some day be a thing of the past.
"Vapour phase airconditioning uses direct power from the engine, which often has an output of 100+ Kilowatts. More in a recent design."
Not necessarily. The Toyota Prius, for example, uses an electric (144V AC) A/C compressor. Of course, it's the exception, not the rule. The Prius has a high-voltage battery system and a powerful inverter.
"A 12 amp peltier device consumes a LOT of power... About 150 watts Not all cars can spare that much. And it doesn't cool much either."
True. 150W is a lot to ask of a typical car. But a hybrid vehicle, like the Prius, can put out 5+ KW continuously without breaking a sweat.
"Good on them though for experimenting:)"
Well, if they have developed a peltier system that rivals an electric-powered vapor-phase system in efficency, their technology could very well find its way into future hybrid vehicles.
If you are counting security patches (which is all that Firefox 1.01-1.05 really were), then the last release of IE was on June 14, 2005.
If not, then the Mozilla foundation has not relased *anything* of note in the last 6 months. Firefox 1.06 and Thunderbird 1.06 are virtually identical to Firefox 1.00/Thunderbird 1.00.
Firefox 1.1 won't be that different either, from the looks of things.
Probably not. But anyone who says it takes 10 minutes for Windows 2000 to boot is an idiot. Windows 2000 took just under two minutes to boot on a PII-300 system with a Quantum Bigfoot drive (ugh) and 64MB of memory. Hell, it booted in under three minutes on a Pentium MMX 166MHz notebook with 48MB of memory.
A 10 minute boot time indicates that your copy of 2000 is screwed. Maybe you should try to fix your system rather than spreading misinformation on Slashdot about how Windows 2000 performs on old hardware. Your results are not typical. Don't present them as if they are.
"Name oe thing I can't run on a dual PII 450 (with the exception of Windows XP)."
Well:
- Any modern game - High-resolution photo editing (e.g. 8megapixel) - PVR - Video editing - Gentoo
Of course, your "exception" actually runs fine on a PII-450. I ran XP for over two years on a Celeron 300A (@450MHz) with 256MB of SDRAM. It ran fine.
"Sorry, but I don't have $2,000 to shell out every 4-5 years for a midrange server."
WTF are you buying servers when you aren't an enterprise? A typical desktop system should more than meet your needs. If you need the managability and reliability of an enterprise-class server, you wouldn't be running it anywhere but a real datacenter with redundant HVAC and power.
"Yes. Servers ARE standard home equipment these days."
Well, maybe for you, but remember, we're talking about "everyone else". Very few people have servers (the $2000 kind, at least) sitting around their house.
"system I bought in 1997 was $1999. I expect it to last me another two years minimum."
Go for it. But no business is (and very few home users are) going to try to stretch the life of their hardware to 7+ years. *You* may, but everyone else realizes that that 5-year-old dual PII system could be replaced by a bottom-of-the-line Sempron system for under $400 - a system that likely has more memory, more disk space, is far faster, and far quieter. How much have you spent on disks, memory, and CPUs on your PII system over the past 5 years?
"No. "Bloated" is geek slang for spreadsheet programs whos programmers decide to add a flight simulator game as a secret feature because it doesn't increase program size or resource usage much, relatively speaking."
Office 2000 SP1 removed the flight simulator from Excel. It is not present in Excel XP or Excel 2003.
"Bloated" also means delivering help texts in the word balloons of an animated paperclip (and providing a programming API for making additional helpfull characters)."
Agreed. Office assistant sucks. You don't have to install it, though. Microsoft Agent has essentially been dead for years.
"It means having a spellcheck running in the background constantly, giving the program a vaguely heavy and unresponsive feel."
That's the stupidest comment I've ever heard about Word. Wavy-underline-spell-check is one of the most useful features to *ever* be added to Word. I don't know what you're talking about with "unresponsiveness", but Word 2003 uses about 14MB on my system and uses less than 5% of the CPU while I type.
"It means setting parts of the program to be loaded during operating system boot, since starting the program would otherwise take too long."
Not true since Word XP.
"And it means integrating a Web Browser with both kernel and shell just because you can."
Trident ("Internet Explorer") has not, is not, and - to the best of my knowledge - will never be a part of the Windows kernel. It is a series of libraries (mshtml.dll, showdocvw.dll, and some others) - not unlike Gecko ("Mozilla"), KHTML ("Konqueror") or WebCore ("Safari").
"And supporting automatically executing scripts embedding in text documents"
Word documents are not text documents, first of all. And, second of all, macros have not executed by default since Word 2000, and in Word 2003, you have to go through a multi-step process to even see the dialog that lets you execute them. Macro viruses are essentially dead.
You're an idiot, then. My Celeron 300A (@450MHz) booted Windows XP in about 45 seconds.
"Machines really should last closer to 10-15 years before having to buy a new one. The idea of the disposable machine is moronic."
No, they shouldn't. Expecting a 7+ year-old PC to run today's apps is moronic.
Maintenence costs money. At some point, it's just cheaper to buy a new machine. It doesn't matter how well the system is built: at some point, a component *will* fail.
Current PC lifecycles are in the 5-year range. That's not bad at all.
"You put in the "Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2" CD from your Dell, reboot, and it shows this weird blue screen that takes forever. It then comes up with some weird confusing stuff. If you get past that, then there's even more confusing stuff - stuff about NTFS, FAT, and partitions"
No, you don't. Most OEM PCs don't come with an install CD - they come with a "restore" CD that puts the disk back the way it was "out of the box". It's generally pretty easy to use, actually.
"Linux has surpassed Windows in ease of installation..."
Yes and no. Fedora is easier to install than Windows, but most people never install Windows. It's hard to make installation easier than not doing it at all...
"At least with Firefox I know two things -- first, the bugs are likely to be found more quickly, and second, it's beyond doubt that the bugs that are found are fixed much, much faster."
And, might I add, that there are a *lot* of them.
I'm going to come out and say it: Firefox has an AWFUL security record. Since 1.0, there have been no fewer than four seperate releases to fix security flaws.
Now, IE has also had it's share of patches. Considerably more than Firefox, in fact. But Firefox disappoints me:
- Why are there so many vulnerabilities in Firefox? Isn't the much-vaunted "many eyes" theory supposed to root out bugs *before* they become vulnerabilities? Why weren't these issues caught in the numerous Firefox betas?
- Why does Mozilla Foundation keep flaws secret? Microsoft is panned for doing this, and rightfully so. The information *will* get out. Pretending that the flaw doesn't exist won't make it go away.
- Why is Firefox's patch mechanism so broken? Did the Firefox developers not envision the need for security patches?
I recommended Firefox to my clients because it was - in theory - more secure than IE. Now I have to explain why I'm reinstalling Firefox for the 4th time on their systems.
Like it or not, Microsoft *can* put out secure code. Audits, cross-checking, testing - Microsoft has the manpower and the money to write bulletproof code. More importantly, they have now recognized that security is important to their customers.
Don't be fooled. Remember when we were all laughing about how unstable Windows 98 was? Windows 2000 changed that. No one is laughing anymore.
Unless designing - and coding - for securtiy becomes standard practice in open-source software, Microsoft's products will soon be more secure than their open-source counterparts.
"Yes, but they could if they wanted to. They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used. This is like a web hosting company overselling its resources, and counting on the fact that the customers won't all decide to use what they bought."
Every webhosting company and ISP does this. The power company does this. Roads are designed this way. Airlines do it. Even the memory subsystem in most modern operating systems does this.
I believe that the comment limit only applies to first-level comments, not replies. In articles with 1000+ comments, the number of replies at 4+ is substantial (I show everything 4+), so you can get a substantial number of comments on a page (in nested tables, none the less).
It's not 1000 comments on one page, of course. But it is enough to fring FF on Linux to its knees.
FF/Windows does OK, and, interestingly, Trident seems to chew threw nested tables.
"Hi. 1998 called. They want their DRM paranoia back.
Windows Media Player already prevents DRMed content from being output to a digital source.
That's why Windows Media Player doesn't get used by a lot of people."
Bullshit. Windows Media Player is used by more people than Quicktime. More people than RealPlayer. It is *the* de-facto standard for web streaming video.
Just because *you* don't use it doesn't mean no one else does.
"My greatest fear is that I have trouble picking up all the major networks right smack in the middle of Silicon Valley with rabbit ears. There are networks where I can only pick them up as a sideband of another TV station because their main tower's ATSC feed doesn't have enough power to reach here. The NTSC feeds reach me for those stations just fine, albeit with some multipath distortion and/or other noise. Basically, ATSC requires an exceptionally clean signal (at least with my tuner hardware) to be able to resolve a signal."
I've found that ATSC goes considerably *farther* than analog TV with the same power. Here's the problem, though: many ATSC stations are at half or less of their licensed power.
KWGN-DT, for example, is at 1/3 power. I have no problem picking them up with rabbit ears, almost 65 miles away.
Slashdot Mirror
Brings resolution-independence to the GUI with vector-based controls and icons, plus resampling for legacy applications.
Brings 3D acceleration into the GUI, making it easy to use 3D in desktop applications without having to use OpenGL or Direct3D.
Updated kernel, memory manager, etc.
Reduced user permissions (ala Mac OS X or Linux) to increase security.
New network stack.
New printing system with commom document format.
New power management features.
Desktop search.
Vritual folders (e.g. "Music" can organize all music on your computer by artist).
New shell UI (Explorer).
New command shell (MSH).
Completely new install system.
Faster bootup, shutdown, standby, and resume.
Support for external LCD displays on notebooks.
New features for eHome (Media Center) and Tablet PC.
New networking paridigm ("Castle") replaces the outdated "Workgroup" (WINS).
New graphics driver model (LDM) that will serve as the basis for the desktop and the next version of DirectX.
New DRM technologies (ugh) - 'secure' graphics path and 'secure' audio path.
Parental controls for DVDs, games, and potentially TV (eHome) built-in.
Antispyware built-in.
New update mechanism that allows in-memory patching of libraries without requiring a reload or restart.
New Windows Update and automatic update mechanism.
New protection against security exploits through extensive security audits and code-quality tests.
Fewer bugs and crashes through increased regression testing, improved error reporting, and tighter code requirements.
No, Vista isn't going to be Mac OS X. Too many people expect Microsoft to go and duplicate everything that Apple has done. They expect Vista to be the "non-Windows Windows".
That's not going to happen. Vista is still very much the Windows you know. But it is the most significant change since Windows 2000. It will be better in ways that aren't apparent by looking at screenshots - a better network stack, easier patching, and improved security aren't necessarily the kinds of things that are apparent from the UI. But they matter to the user. And they matter to Microsoft.
Expect Vista to deliver in a big way. Not through "150 new features" like every release of Mac OS X, but through a general improvement in security, stability, and performance. And, of course, a much improved platform for developers.
"You realize that means that PS2 games on Blu-Ray discs will blow Xbox360 games out of the water in terms of graphics and features, right? I'm sure Sony will make sure something really stunning is available at launch just to make Xbox owners cry.
Hilarious. MS is shooting themselves in the foot on features, Sony is shooting themselves in the foot on price, and Nintendo suddenly looks like the little engine that could, or the tortoise racing two hares."
You aren't making any sense at all. No modern game requires more than the 8GB of space that a dual-layer DVD can provide. Few console games even need more than the 1.5GB provided by Gamecube's discs.
"MS is shooting themselves in the foot on features, Sony is shooting themselves in the foot on price, and Nintendo suddenly looks like the little engine that could, or the tortoise racing two hares."
Microsoft has a console under production.
Sony has hype, rumor, and speculation. Nintendo doesn't even have a firm launch date.
Nintendo, quite frankly, is a non-contender for the next generation of home consoles. As of yet, they have shown *nothing*. We have a concept design and a few vague specifications.
You can't sell a product that doesn't exist yet.
"In addition Joe Average User would care if he knew how much money companies, like his bank, spent on web developers writing work arounds because IE is broken."
Not much. If you've ever actually done CSS development, you learn that IE's "broken" CSS support isn't as "broken" as everyone likes to claim.
Yeah, there are some nasty bugs - but they generally only occur in specific and limited situations. And, no, IE doesn't support all of CSS2, but the stuff that it doesn't support isn't exactly die-hard-essential to create a page.
The web existed before CSS. As much as I'd like to see full and correct CSS2.1 support in IE7, I know that it's not going to happen. And I'm going to keep developing applications that work - not by working around IE bugs, but by coding tight, coding smart, and avoiding the CSS2 features that I don't really need.
You can write a functional page without background-attach support, full selector support, and !important. Not using what IE doesn't support affects the development cycle very little.
Oh, and, by the way, any "who much money spent by doing foo" quotes are always bullshit. Imagine how much US businesses lose to *people going to the bathroom*. My god, it must be BILLIONS.
"My experience says things are different. Most people DO have an old PC, because they aren't geeks and don't care about getting the latest ATI card so they can play GTA:XXX."
Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong. Most people don't have the latest high end ATI card, but they *do* have a PC that was made later than 2002. The #1 OS, by a landslide, on my website (shortify.com) is Windows XP (65%), followed by Windows 2000 (21%), Windows 98 (6%), Mac OS X (4%), and "Everything Else" (4%, primarily Windows NT4, Windows 95, and Linux).
"Most" businesses are not stuck on Windows 2000. Yes, Windows 2000 still has a huge install base, but the majority of businesses have switched to XP, if only because mainstream support has ended for Windows 2000.
No, seriously. Vista apparently has a completely rewritten network stack that's supposed to build on the work done with Windows Server 2003 (offloading work to network hardware, primarily) and was designed for IPv6 from the ground up.
That day is today. Well, actually, several weeks ago:
http://desktop.msn.com/
Spotlight is neither particularly unique nor particularly remarkable.
But, hey, it's Apple. When they duplicate functionality that was already implemented elsewhere (fast user switching, dashboard, spotlight), it's "innovating". When Microsoft does it, it's "copying".
Give it a rest. It's a little different when you have to support a platform with over a billion users.
2004 called:
http://newsbot.msn.com/
And, thanks to a loophole, we don't pay sales tax on items purchased from other states unless they have a location in your state.
For example, Newegg has no warehouse in Colorado - so I don't pay any tax at all.
You're supposed to pay the "use tax", but no one does.
And Republicans in the House and Senate.
Your point?
"I want to know what happened to WinFS, Avalon, Indigo and all the other revolutionary tech that Long... Vista supposedly would offer."
Avalon is very much alive and kicking, and it has even been backported to XP. You can download an SDK and try it out if you want to.
Indigo isn't going anywhere either.
"Let's hope Vista is more than a new color scheme and fancy GUI components."
It will be. Whether anyone will actually care about those features is another matter, but:
- Users no longer run as Administrator by default
- Hotpatching (fewer reboots for patches)
- Driver upgrades without rebooting
- Single-image for AMD/Intel (no more reinstalling)
- Avalon / XAML
- Indigo
- End of "Workgroups" (WINS)
- Fast Search (like "Spotlight")
As for what else is coming down the pipe, I do not know. We'll have to wait and see.
"Windows Eyecandy and DRM", more like - that appears to be the only thing it offers over XP."
Funny to hear this when the consensus is that Apple will be using TCPA features in the next version of OS X to prevent it from being run on commodity hardware.
Secure audio path and Windows Media DRM are *already* a part of XP.
I never got the Slashdot paranoia over DRM. It should be the laws that mandate DRM or make circumvention illegal that we should be against.
Of course, this is Microsoft, so, here goes:
MICROSOFT WINDOWS VISTA IS SUCH A SHITTY NAME. THERE DRM ENCUMBERED CRAPPERONI WONT FOOL US. MAC OS TURBOLIZARD WILL BE SO MUCH BETTER. REDOMOND IS JUST COPYING APPLE. DRM DRM DRM. LOOK AT ME - DRM DRM DRM!!!!!!!
Once again, Sony has produced a system that is difficult to develop for. Once again, they have over-hyped their system.
There's a problem with Sony's strategy, though: no one believes them anymore. The PS3 is like Windows Longhorn - far off, almost "mythical" in nature.
The XBOX 360 is real. It's hitting in time for the Christmas shopping season. It has strong online features. It integrates with Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Microsoft established "street cred" with the XBOX. Everyone now believes that Microsoft can deliver a game system that will offer a serious lineup of games and a real online component.
Sony has added tons of features to their console that push the price higher. Blu-Ray. Multiple HDMI connections. Multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections. Bluetooth. Wi-Fi. XDR DRAM. All of these features push the price higher. Right now, Sony is looking at a $400+ console. And all of them create the possibility of shortage.
On December 25, millions of people will be opening up an XBOX 360. Sony will have slides and promises.
"Indeed. But there are many remote places that the Internet has not reached and may never reach."
No, there aren't. If you can see the sky, you can get the internet. Services like Iridium and Globalstar have made that possible.
Now, Iridum and Globalstar are low-bitrate (2400/9600 baud, respectively), but that's fine for email and IM. Even that limitation will some day be a thing of the past.
"Vapour phase airconditioning uses direct power from the engine, which often has an output of 100+ Kilowatts. More in a recent design."
:)"
Not necessarily. The Toyota Prius, for example, uses an electric (144V AC) A/C compressor. Of course, it's the exception, not the rule. The Prius has a high-voltage battery system and a powerful inverter.
"A 12 amp peltier device consumes a LOT of power... About 150 watts Not all cars can spare that much. And it doesn't cool much either."
True. 150W is a lot to ask of a typical car. But a hybrid vehicle, like the Prius, can put out 5+ KW continuously without breaking a sweat.
"Good on them though for experimenting
Well, if they have developed a peltier system that rivals an electric-powered vapor-phase system in efficency, their technology could very well find its way into future hybrid vehicles.
"When was the last release of MS IE?"
If you are counting security patches (which is all that Firefox 1.01-1.05 really were), then the last release of IE was on June 14, 2005.
If not, then the Mozilla foundation has not relased *anything* of note in the last 6 months. Firefox 1.06 and Thunderbird 1.06 are virtually identical to Firefox 1.00/Thunderbird 1.00.
Firefox 1.1 won't be that different either, from the looks of things.
"You're an idiot, then.
;P"
Wow. Such hostility. Have we met before?
Probably not. But anyone who says it takes 10 minutes for Windows 2000 to boot is an idiot. Windows 2000 took just under two minutes to boot on a PII-300 system with a Quantum Bigfoot drive (ugh) and 64MB of memory. Hell, it booted in under three minutes on a Pentium MMX 166MHz notebook with 48MB of memory.
A 10 minute boot time indicates that your copy of 2000 is screwed. Maybe you should try to fix your system rather than spreading misinformation on Slashdot about how Windows 2000 performs on old hardware. Your results are not typical. Don't present them as if they are.
"Name oe thing I can't run on a dual PII 450 (with the exception of Windows XP)."
Well:
- Any modern game
- High-resolution photo editing (e.g. 8megapixel)
- PVR
- Video editing
- Gentoo
Of course, your "exception" actually runs fine on a PII-450. I ran XP for over two years on a Celeron 300A (@450MHz) with 256MB of SDRAM. It ran fine.
"Sorry, but I don't have $2,000 to shell out every 4-5 years for a midrange server."
WTF are you buying servers when you aren't an enterprise? A typical desktop system should more than meet your needs. If you need the managability and reliability of an enterprise-class server, you wouldn't be running it anywhere but a real datacenter with redundant HVAC and power.
"Yes. Servers ARE standard home equipment these days."
Well, maybe for you, but remember, we're talking about "everyone else". Very few people have servers (the $2000 kind, at least) sitting around their house.
"system I bought in 1997 was $1999. I expect it to last me another two years minimum."
Go for it. But no business is (and very few home users are) going to try to stretch the life of their hardware to 7+ years. *You* may, but everyone else realizes that that 5-year-old dual PII system could be replaced by a bottom-of-the-line Sempron system for under $400 - a system that likely has more memory, more disk space, is far faster, and far quieter. How much have you spent on disks, memory, and CPUs on your PII system over the past 5 years?
"No. "Bloated" is geek slang for spreadsheet programs whos programmers decide to add a flight simulator game as a secret feature because it doesn't increase program size or resource usage much, relatively speaking."
Office 2000 SP1 removed the flight simulator from Excel. It is not present in Excel XP or Excel 2003.
"Bloated" also means delivering help texts in the word balloons of an animated paperclip (and providing a programming API for making additional helpfull characters)."
Agreed. Office assistant sucks. You don't have to install it, though. Microsoft Agent has essentially been dead for years.
"It means having a spellcheck running in the background constantly, giving the program a vaguely heavy and unresponsive feel."
That's the stupidest comment I've ever heard about Word. Wavy-underline-spell-check is one of the most useful features to *ever* be added to Word. I don't know what you're talking about with "unresponsiveness", but Word 2003 uses about 14MB on my system and uses less than 5% of the CPU while I type.
"It means setting parts of the program to be loaded during operating system boot, since starting the program would otherwise take too long."
Not true since Word XP.
"And it means integrating a Web Browser with both kernel and shell just because you can."
Trident ("Internet Explorer") has not, is not, and - to the best of my knowledge - will never be a part of the Windows kernel. It is a series of libraries (mshtml.dll, showdocvw.dll, and some others) - not unlike Gecko ("Mozilla"), KHTML ("Konqueror") or WebCore ("Safari").
"And supporting automatically executing scripts embedding in text documents"
Word documents are not text documents, first of all. And, second of all, macros have not executed by default since Word 2000, and in Word 2003, you have to go through a multi-step process to even see the dialog that lets you execute them. Macro viruses are essentially dead.
You're an idiot, then. My Celeron 300A (@450MHz) booted Windows XP in about 45 seconds.
"Machines really should last closer to 10-15 years before having to buy a new one. The idea of the disposable machine is moronic."
No, they shouldn't. Expecting a 7+ year-old PC to run today's apps is moronic.
Maintenence costs money. At some point, it's just cheaper to buy a new machine. It doesn't matter how well the system is built: at some point, a component *will* fail.
Current PC lifecycles are in the 5-year range. That's not bad at all.
"You put in the "Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2" CD from your Dell, reboot, and it shows this weird blue screen that takes forever. It then comes up with some weird confusing stuff. If you get past that, then there's even more confusing stuff - stuff about NTFS, FAT, and partitions"
No, you don't. Most OEM PCs don't come with an install CD - they come with a "restore" CD that puts the disk back the way it was "out of the box". It's generally pretty easy to use, actually.
"Linux has surpassed Windows in ease of installation..."
Yes and no. Fedora is easier to install than Windows, but most people never install Windows. It's hard to make installation easier than not doing it at all...
"At least with Firefox I know two things -- first, the bugs are likely to be found more quickly, and second, it's beyond doubt that the bugs that are found are fixed much, much faster."
And, might I add, that there are a *lot* of them.
I'm going to come out and say it: Firefox has an AWFUL security record. Since 1.0, there have been no fewer than four seperate releases to fix security flaws.
Now, IE has also had it's share of patches. Considerably more than Firefox, in fact. But Firefox disappoints me:
- Why are there so many vulnerabilities in Firefox? Isn't the much-vaunted "many eyes" theory supposed to root out bugs *before* they become vulnerabilities? Why weren't these issues caught in the numerous Firefox betas?
- Why does Mozilla Foundation keep flaws secret? Microsoft is panned for doing this, and rightfully so. The information *will* get out. Pretending that the flaw doesn't exist won't make it go away.
- Why is Firefox's patch mechanism so broken? Did the Firefox developers not envision the need for security patches?
I recommended Firefox to my clients because it was - in theory - more secure than IE. Now I have to explain why I'm reinstalling Firefox for the 4th time on their systems.
Like it or not, Microsoft *can* put out secure code. Audits, cross-checking, testing - Microsoft has the manpower and the money to write bulletproof code. More importantly, they have now recognized that security is important to their customers.
Don't be fooled. Remember when we were all laughing about how unstable Windows 98 was? Windows 2000 changed that. No one is laughing anymore.
Unless designing - and coding - for securtiy becomes standard practice in open-source software, Microsoft's products will soon be more secure than their open-source counterparts.
Or, in the case of IIS 6.0, they already are.
"Yes, but they could if they wanted to. They shouldn't sell shit like that if they're counting on it not being used. This is like a web hosting company overselling its resources, and counting on the fact that the customers won't all decide to use what they bought."
Every webhosting company and ISP does this. The power company does this. Roads are designed this way. Airlines do it. Even the memory subsystem in most modern operating systems does this.
Overcommitting is a fact of life. Get used to it.
I believe that the comment limit only applies to first-level comments, not replies. In articles with 1000+ comments, the number of replies at 4+ is substantial (I show everything 4+), so you can get a substantial number of comments on a page (in nested tables, none the less).
It's not 1000 comments on one page, of course. But it is enough to fring FF on Linux to its knees.
FF/Windows does OK, and, interestingly, Trident seems to chew threw nested tables.
"Hi. 1998 called. They want their DRM paranoia back.
Windows Media Player already prevents DRMed content from being output to a digital source.
That's why Windows Media Player doesn't get used by a lot of people."
Bullshit. Windows Media Player is used by more people than Quicktime. More people than RealPlayer. It is *the* de-facto standard for web streaming video.
Just because *you* don't use it doesn't mean no one else does.
"The argument that a larger target leads to a more vulernable system is flawed. Apache has > 60% marketshare, yet IIS has more vulernabilities."
Bullshit. IIS6 has fewer vulnerabilities than Apache2.
IIS6:
http://secunia.com/product/1438/
(3 Vulnerabilities since 2003)
Apache2:
http://secunia.com/product/73/
(22 Vulnerabilities since 2003)
STOP SPREADING THIS LIE. Apache *does* have more security problems than IIS6.
"My greatest fear is that I have trouble picking up all the major networks right smack in the middle of Silicon Valley with rabbit ears. There are networks where I can only pick them up as a sideband of another TV station because their main tower's ATSC feed doesn't have enough power to reach here. The NTSC feeds reach me for those stations just fine, albeit with some multipath distortion and/or other noise. Basically, ATSC requires an exceptionally clean signal (at least with my tuner hardware) to be able to resolve a signal."
I've found that ATSC goes considerably *farther* than analog TV with the same power. Here's the problem, though: many ATSC stations are at half or less of their licensed power.
KWGN-DT, for example, is at 1/3 power. I have no problem picking them up with rabbit ears, almost 65 miles away.