Has anyone else noticed how SLOW Firefox is on Linux?
On Win32, on my Athlon 64 3200+ system, Firefox takes about a second and a half to render a 1000-comment Slashdot page (IE takes about half a second, interestingly - Trident seems to be very good with nested tables).
On the same box, under Ubuntu Linux (and Fedora as well), Firefox takes over NINE SECONDS of 100% CPU to render the page. Konqueror, in comparison, takes under two seconds.
What's wrong here? Why is Firefox on Windows nearly six times faster than it is on Linux?
No one at the LUG seems to believe me until I *show them* the difference - and demonstrate it on *their* system to show that it's not a config problem.
"Really? Why not the same as a auto manufacturer who's defect in a car contributed to an accident? Perhaps car makers should include a EULA that absolves them of all liability too."
GM's Montanta platform had a poor design that caused it to be particularly vulnerable to front-end collisions. It was not a specific design flaw, simply a poor overall design that produced an unsafe vehicle.
Under US law, this is not illegal. GM's Montana passed US crash tests, and because there was no specific flaw that could be addressed, there was nothing that GM could be sued over.
So, no, car manufacturers really aren't liable unless there is a specific issue that causes accidents.
"I dunno about that... My 2 year old P4 laptop is on the verge of expiring after being dropped, slopped and overheated on a regular basis. Looking around at both the Wintel and Apple offerings, not much has changed in two years. Hard disks are a bigger, video chips are a faster. A few more bells and whistles which I would likely strip out as soon as a I brought the machine home."
Not the case. Pentium-M has drastically changed the PC notebook landscape in the past two years. You were probably lucky to get 2.5 hours of battery life out of that notebook. With today's Pentium-M notebooks, you should get more than 4 hours of battery life - with performance that is better than your P4 notebook.
Two years ago, the fastest notebook had Radeon 9000 graphics and a P4 - and it weighed 10+ lbs, with 1.5 hour battery life. You were damn glad to have it, though.
Today, there are notebooks that are under 5lbs, have fast Pentium-M processors, excellent GeForce 6600 graphics, *and* get 4.5 hours on a charge. Half the weight, 3x the battery life, and better performance. Seems like a win to me.
Bullshit. Developing cross-platform apps is *very* difficult. For one, you need to deal with multiple UI systems (GTK+/Aqua/GDI), and then you have different standard libraries, different filesystem layouts, and a whole mess of other differences.
One way to mitigate these issues is to use a cross-platform development toolkit, like QT. But QT is not free, and it's more difficult to set up than the Microsoft IDEs.
Another method is to use Java, or create a webapp. But, again, Java adds 20MB to the size of most apps (and a sizeable memory overhead), and webapps are notoriously hard to get right (Mozilla, IE, and KHTML/WebCore support at a minimum).
Any shop can develop a simple Windows app. You really have to look to find a shop that can develop successful cross-platform apps.
There are some great success stories. Intuit, for example, has an excellent online tax system that works with both IE and Firefox. But it's not trivial. Claiming that it is ignores the real issues created by cross-platform development.
"My bet is that 2006-7 will be a Microsoft vs. Microsoft competition: 98/2000/XP/2003 vs. Longhorn. My bet is that Longhorn will pull forward less users than XP did."
This "XP was a flop" garbage is getting old. No, it didn't sell as well as Windows 95 did, but that's because Windows 95 was replacing the awful Windows 3.11.
Hint: Most Microsoft OS sales aren't to users. Yes, getting users to upgrade is important, but not nearly as important as getting OEMs to adopt the new OS. That's what Microsoft is good at, and that's why Apple can't win the marketshare war - HP, Dell, IBM (Lenovo), Gateway, Sony, and hundreds of other OEMs ship Windows on nearly every computer they sell.
That alone will garuntee Longhorn's success. It cannot flop because it is the next version of Windows. Whether or not it is a significant upgrade, Longhorn will be successful because OEMs will *make* it successful.
Microsoft could delay Longhorn until 2010 if they wanted - and in 2009, OEMs would still be shipping XP. XP is the single longest-lived Windows release ever.
Firefox is also considrably slower on Linux / GTK than it is on Windows. So slow, in fact, that it can take 10+ seconds of 100% CPU usage on my Athlon 64 system with 1GB of DDR to render a long Slashdot comments page.
That's outrageous. Yet no one seems to believe me. Give it a try - it happens on Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distros.
"Now, the day someone puts out a Debian laptop that is a great piece of hardware with full and robust linux operation that just works, I'll be all over it."
Good news. HP is working with the Ubuntu project to produce a notebook that works with Ubuntu "out of the box".
Oh, and there are many notebooks that work well with Ubuntu "out of the box". My Toshiba M200, for example, required no configuration and now tweaking. Everything - from suspend to the wireless - worked out of the box.
"Corporate politics has nothing to do with my choice of laptop."
Probably not, but in most companies, you *don't* choose your notebook. Sun employees have Apple notebooks because of corporate politics, not because there's something "magic" about Apple notebooks.
"Other than a green "start" button, what's the difference in terms of *user experience*? Where's the innovation? I can't find it."
You're not looking. Here's what's improved from Windows 2000 to XP (Pro):
- WIA (common interface for scanners/cameras) - UPnP - Remote Desktop - Remote Assistance - Welcome screen - Fast User Switching - 32-bit (RGBA) Icons - Tiles View - ID3 support in shell - Grouping in shell - Two-column start menu - NX-bit support - System File Protection - System Restore - Help & Support Center - Internet Connection Sharing - Windows Compatibility Mode - Files & Settings Transfer Wizard - Search Assistant - IE 6.0 - Outlook Express 6.0 - Windows Movie Maker - Windows Media Player 8.0 - Automatic Updates - WiFi support - Bluetooth Support - Safe removal of removable devices without unmounting - Driver rollback - Driver signatures - Resultant Set of Policy - Effective Permissions - Tab-completion in command line - Windows Picture & Fax Viewer - Photo printing in Shell - Themes - MSConfig - New EFS Features (EFS over WebDAV, etc) - Windows Messenger - Passport integration - Taskbar Button grouping - System tray icon hiding - Clock syncronization - 1000s of new devices supported out of the box
Now, you can argue that these features aren't significant, or that they aren't useful. But millions of people use them every day, and I find many of them particularly useful:
- WIA frees me from having to use whatever crappy software comes with my camera. I can now drag-and-drop the photos off my camera using the standard Windows interface. - UPnP lets me open ports on my Linksys firewall without having to mess with the web interface. Smarter applications (games, mostly) will open the proper ports automatically. - Remote Desktop is a feature that I use on a daily basis. It's faster than VNC and far more useful. - Remote Assistance comes in handy when you have family or friends who could use a hand - but you don't want to walk them through setting up VNC / setting a password / giving you an IP address. - The Welcome Screen is a great boon if you have more than one person who uses a computer. Our "kitchen" computer uses the welcome screen so everyone can have a logon without remembering a username. - Fast User Switching helps as well. I can leave the 23 IE windows (and 2-3 Word documents) open and switch to my account. - 32-bit (RGBA) icons make the UI considerably cleaner and more attractive. - Tiles view is nice for icons with long names. You also get the filetype and size. It's more compact than "details" but more verbose than "icons". - ID3 support in shell is great for organizing my music folder. - Grouping in shell works particularly well with ID3 support (group by artist), or when I have a folder with multiple document types (e.g. PDFs and Excel documents) with similar names. - Two-column start menu allows me to have my favorite programs on the left (Firefox/Thunderbird/GAIM/Media Center) and all of the things I commonly use on the right (Control Panel, Network Connections, Printers, Run) - NX-bit support helps stop buffer overruns from creating exploits - System File Protection is nice when a virus or spyware screws your system files. Put in your Windows CD, delete the files, and watch as fresh copies are written to the disk. - System Restore has saved important documents on more than one occasion. - The Help & Support Center is much improved over Windows 2000. - Internet Connection Sharing is a necessity when you want to share WiFi at a LAN party (or any other time). - Windows Compatibility Mode can help with stubborn applications that hardcode for a specific Windows version. - IE 6.0 finally has half-working CSS support in standards-compliance mode - Outlook Express 6.0 has better virus protection, web-bug elimination, and a number of other new features. - Windows Movie Maker is a n
Do you know what the engineers around me use? IBMs and HPs. IBMs because they are durable and have nice keyboards, and HPs because many of them work for HP (HP is a large employer in my city - nearly 6500 employees).
The only reason Sun employees are running around with PowerBooks is the fact that Sun doesn't have a decent notebook (at least not one that's reasonably priced with good battery life) and the fact that everyone else is seen as a competitor to Sun. HP, IBM, and Dell all have server lines that compete with Sun directly. Apple is seen as a non-threat.
It's the same reason that HP is selling the iPod. HP doesn't see Apple as a threat, so it's "OK" to partner with them.
That's why you have PowerBooks. Corporate politics.
"A wide, three dimensional sound stage with clear separation of instruments and fine detail puts a smile on your face. Being able to get that for much less than above (and have the second pleasure of do it yourself) is well worth it."
And, if you're using the digital outputs that NEARLY EVERY DVD player has, NOTHING you do to the DVD player will affect sound quality AT ALL.
Dolby Digital (AC3) and DTS (Coherent Acoustics) are both error-corrected, psychoacoustically compressed codecs. If you exceed the FEC threshold, you'll know about it right away. Otherwise, the original bitsteram is getting to the decoder.
If you use optical cables, you've eliminated the possibility of the player introducing noise into the system. At this point, all the fancy components in the world won't make a bit of difference.
Now, as for video, you might have a case. But even that can be elimiated with DVI/HDMI.
Oh, come on. Windows is, and has been for several years, a true multiuser-OS with a strong permission model.
"the directory structure is a cobbled together hodgepodge with little apparent cohesive design. In my opinion it is an incredibly "designed by committee" hack. "
Not true. Essentially, there are three directories, "Documents and Settings" (/home), "Program Files" (/bin), and "Windows" (no direct UNIQ equivilent).
The problem is not the directory structure, it is stupid applications that write to the root directory or the Windows folder.
"any whiff of multi-user directory structure aside from not really being well designed is a cobbled hack on top of old directory structures and paradigms. "
That doesn't even make sense. Like Linux and most other multiuser operating systems, individual users get their own home directories. In Windows, they also get their own registry branch.
"while there certainly isn't any requirement a computer have mulitple users, the notion of multiple users logged into a Windows machine is completely foreign without third party add-ons (terminal servers, et. al.)."
Bullshit. Try fast user switching in Windows sometime. Or, for that matter, log onto a server running Windows Server 2003. Just because *you* don't use the functionaltiy doesn't mean that it's not there. It's built into XP (though locked down) and into Windows Server 2000 and 2003.
"the multilevel kernel architecture and hardware abstraction (HAL) early on were compromised to give direct access to hardware because HAL didn't allow for good enough performance for gaming."
Also wrong. While there have been some compromises, such as moving the GDI into kernel-space, the HAL is still very much used in Windows 2000/XP/2003. DirectX uses the HAL. Indeed, Windows has much *more* hardware isolation than systems with a monolithic kernel, such as Linux.
"many programs because of buggy behavior (this is not necessarily Microsoft's fault, but it's still true) require(d) conditional code in NT/XP to run thus propogating buggy design right back into the "new" product."
This is not limited to Microsoft alone. Even CPUs must maintain bug-compatibility. Trying to run old code on a new platform is not an easy task, and the fact that 10-year-old appplications run at all is impressive.
Your information is out of date. Windows XP is not Windows 98, and it's not Windows NT4. Microsoft has made some poor design choices in the past, and those choices continue to impact their product today. But Windows XP is not the "inherently insecure" OS that you would have us believe. Its architecture is no less secure than Linux - indeed, Linux is a hodgepodge of code.
Do not sell Microsoft short. They didn't take 95% of the desktop OS market by being stupid. They did it by understanding what their customers would buy. In the end, people want their games to run. They want their copy of Acrobat 3.0 to run. To many of Microsoft's customers, that's more important than having a "pure" OS. To most users, loose permissions and open ports are a small price to pay for that functionality.
Re:.pad is what we need.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Also, you SHOULD NOT server XHTML-1.1 as text/html."
Note that the W3 specifies "SHOULD NOT", with the exception of maintaining compaibility with existing user-agents. Indeed, this is exactly what Shortify does - if your user-agent specifies that it accepts application/xhtml+xml, Shortify will serve it. If not, Shortify serves text/html for compatibility purposes.
Also note that I never claimed to have valid XHTML/CSS. Of course, the website *does* have valid XHTML (1.1, none the less), and now it *does* have valid CSS, and it is table free, so you don't have a lot of complaints.
"There's a *lot* of scope for compressing that code further..."
Yes, but it's already under 1.5K, and, more importantly, it's readable. It doesn't make any sense to nuke linebreaks and indentation to save a couple of extra bytes.
"Also, you SHOULD NOT server XHTML-1.1 as text/html."
Try it in Firefox (or any other browser sending proper HTTP headers) - you should get the correct content-type. IE freaks on application/xhtml+xml.
"Oh, and your CSS doesn't validate."
Indeed. It would seem that "DarkBlue" is not technically a CSS color, even though Trident/Gecko/KHTML/WebCore/Presto support it. The issue was solved.
Re:.pad is what we need.
on
.tel Coming Soon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"I imagine it being something like tinyurl for browsing from phones."
It's already happening. I operate a TinyURL-equivilent-website, http://shortify.com/, and I just registered the numerical equivilent of that URL (http://74678439.com/). As soon as the DNS comes up, you'll be able to use the service from your web-enabled mobile phone. The website is basic HTML/CSS (no tables, no images), so it should have no problem rendering in most phone browsers.
Note also that, unlike TinyURL, Shortify uses 100% numbers for shortened URLs, so they are more phone friendly. And the homepage is only 1583 bytes, almost 1/2 the size of Google (and about 8 times smaller if you include Google's logo).
"Think about all the movies that you really like and then imagine them without surround sound at all. Just simple stereo sound. Does it really diminish the movies?"
Yes, absolutely.
I saw LOTR: ROTK three times, twice in the normal theather and once in the "budget" theather. The budget theather doesn't have a DD or DTS decoder, so they play the stereo soundtrack. It wasn't the same.
Movies like LOTR and Star Wars just don't have the same "punch" without good multichannel sound.
One thing you *really* notice is how much clearer the dialogue is with the center channel. It separates it from the music and sound effects, making it much easier to make out.
It's like going from SD to HD. You can certainly watch an SD video, but it's not at all the same experience as watching it in HD. Or, for that matter, well-projected cellulose.
"Now add the cost for a decent quality (e.g. Asus, Intel, Gigabyte, Tyan) motherboard (and basic VGA card if one isn't included onboard) and RAM. The last time I did this (for Xeon vs. Opteron) the Opteron system turned out to be more expensive."
Well, first of all, Opteron is not Athlon 64. There are lots of affordable, high-quality Athlon 64 motherboards (my personal favorite is an MSI board with the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset - $89, and it has decent onboard graphics).
And second of all, if you're running Xeon, you probably want lots of memory. And if you want lots of memory, you'll soon learn that large DDR2 modules required by Intel's platform are considerably more expensive than large DDR modules.
"ou can see them all over the GSM world (which is everywhere except the U.S.)"
Well, other than the fact that the largest wireless company in the US is GSM (Cingular), and the fact that nearly half of cellular users in the US use GSM, and the fact that the US is T-Mobile's 2nd largest market, I guess you're right. Having more GSM users than any European nation certainly doesn't qualify the US as part of the "GSM World".
"stone-age american market"
Are you talking about the "stone age" American market where there are two national 3G networks (CDMA2000)? Or are you talking about the one which has national EDGE coverage? Or the one which will be CDMA2000 1xEV-DO covered nationally by the end of 2005?
"To terminate international calls on a mobile phone, the GSM provider tends to charge a huge amount of money, like US$0.75 per minute."
That's why no one does this in the US - because we pay to recieve calls, the provider doesn't charge anything at all to terminate calls. It's like calling a normal phone.
Not to mention that it's considerably easier to call within the country when you have states that are larger than most European nations. The US isn't as big as the EU, but it's considerably larger than any of the EU's member nations.
Economics seems to be a good reason not to deploy a rediculously circuitous system, but what the hell - maybe we don't do it because we use "stone-age" GSM system that Europe uses.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone else noticed how SLOW Firefox is on Linux?
On Win32, on my Athlon 64 3200+ system, Firefox takes about a second and a half to render a 1000-comment Slashdot page (IE takes about half a second, interestingly - Trident seems to be very good with nested tables).
On the same box, under Ubuntu Linux (and Fedora as well), Firefox takes over NINE SECONDS of 100% CPU to render the page. Konqueror, in comparison, takes under two seconds.
What's wrong here? Why is Firefox on Windows nearly six times faster than it is on Linux?
No one at the LUG seems to believe me until I *show them* the difference - and demonstrate it on *their* system to show that it's not a config problem.
Try it yourself.
You can always use Shortify to access websites from a mobile phone. It's like TinyURL, but the part after the slash is entirely numeric.
More importantly, you can access Shortify by typing the address out using the numbers on your phone.
From a PC:
http://shortify.com/
From a Phone:
http://74678439.com/
(SHORTIFY on the number pad)
Examples:
http://74678439.com/1187
(Yahoo! Mobile)
http://74678439.com/1188
(Slashdot Mobile)
It's not an ideal solution, but it's considerably easier than typing out the full URL using multitap.
"Really? Why not the same as a auto manufacturer who's defect in a car contributed to an accident? Perhaps car makers should include a EULA that absolves them of all liability too."
GM's Montanta platform had a poor design that caused it to be particularly vulnerable to front-end collisions. It was not a specific design flaw, simply a poor overall design that produced an unsafe vehicle.
Under US law, this is not illegal. GM's Montana passed US crash tests, and because there was no specific flaw that could be addressed, there was nothing that GM could be sued over.
So, no, car manufacturers really aren't liable unless there is a specific issue that causes accidents.
"I dunno about that... My 2 year old P4 laptop is on the verge of expiring after being dropped, slopped and overheated on a regular basis. Looking around at both the Wintel and Apple offerings, not much has changed in two years. Hard disks are a bigger, video chips are a faster. A few more bells and whistles which I would likely strip out as soon as a I brought the machine home."
Not the case. Pentium-M has drastically changed the PC notebook landscape in the past two years. You were probably lucky to get 2.5 hours of battery life out of that notebook. With today's Pentium-M notebooks, you should get more than 4 hours of battery life - with performance that is better than your P4 notebook.
Two years ago, the fastest notebook had Radeon 9000 graphics and a P4 - and it weighed 10+ lbs, with 1.5 hour battery life. You were damn glad to have it, though.
Today, there are notebooks that are under 5lbs, have fast Pentium-M processors, excellent GeForce 6600 graphics, *and* get 4.5 hours on a charge. Half the weight, 3x the battery life, and better performance. Seems like a win to me.
Bullshit. Developing cross-platform apps is *very* difficult. For one, you need to deal with multiple UI systems (GTK+/Aqua/GDI), and then you have different standard libraries, different filesystem layouts, and a whole mess of other differences.
One way to mitigate these issues is to use a cross-platform development toolkit, like QT. But QT is not free, and it's more difficult to set up than the Microsoft IDEs.
Another method is to use Java, or create a webapp. But, again, Java adds 20MB to the size of most apps (and a sizeable memory overhead), and webapps are notoriously hard to get right (Mozilla, IE, and KHTML/WebCore support at a minimum).
Any shop can develop a simple Windows app. You really have to look to find a shop that can develop successful cross-platform apps.
There are some great success stories. Intuit, for example, has an excellent online tax system that works with both IE and Firefox. But it's not trivial. Claiming that it is ignores the real issues created by cross-platform development.
"My bet is that 2006-7 will be a Microsoft vs. Microsoft competition: 98/2000/XP/2003 vs. Longhorn. My bet is that Longhorn will pull forward less users than XP did."
This "XP was a flop" garbage is getting old. No, it didn't sell as well as Windows 95 did, but that's because Windows 95 was replacing the awful Windows 3.11.
Hint: Most Microsoft OS sales aren't to users. Yes, getting users to upgrade is important, but not nearly as important as getting OEMs to adopt the new OS. That's what Microsoft is good at, and that's why Apple can't win the marketshare war - HP, Dell, IBM (Lenovo), Gateway, Sony, and hundreds of other OEMs ship Windows on nearly every computer they sell.
That alone will garuntee Longhorn's success. It cannot flop because it is the next version of Windows. Whether or not it is a significant upgrade, Longhorn will be successful because OEMs will *make* it successful.
Microsoft could delay Longhorn until 2010 if they wanted - and in 2009, OEMs would still be shipping XP. XP is the single longest-lived Windows release ever.
"Since you're looking for a laptop with tablet input features, I should recommend to you some of the newer Toshiba laptops."
I have the Toshiba M200 and I can confirm that it does an excellent job with both XP Tablet and Ubuntu. Nice keyboard, too.
VirtualDub 4 is free, and it works. Most systems come with DVD decoders already, though, as do many graphics cards.
I use NVIDIA DVD Decoder myself because it's hardware acceleated.
Firefox is also considrably slower on Linux / GTK than it is on Windows. So slow, in fact, that it can take 10+ seconds of 100% CPU usage on my Athlon 64 system with 1GB of DDR to render a long Slashdot comments page.
That's outrageous. Yet no one seems to believe me. Give it a try - it happens on Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distros.
"Now, the day someone puts out a Debian laptop that is a great piece of hardware with full and robust linux operation that just works, I'll be all over it."
Good news. HP is working with the Ubuntu project to produce a notebook that works with Ubuntu "out of the box".
Oh, and there are many notebooks that work well with Ubuntu "out of the box". My Toshiba M200, for example, required no configuration and now tweaking. Everything - from suspend to the wireless - worked out of the box.
"Corporate politics has nothing to do with my choice of laptop."
Probably not, but in most companies, you *don't* choose your notebook. Sun employees have Apple notebooks because of corporate politics, not because there's something "magic" about Apple notebooks.
"Other than a green "start" button, what's the difference in terms of *user experience*? Where's the innovation? I can't find it."
You're not looking. Here's what's improved from Windows 2000 to XP (Pro):
- WIA (common interface for scanners/cameras)
- UPnP
- Remote Desktop
- Remote Assistance
- Welcome screen
- Fast User Switching
- 32-bit (RGBA) Icons
- Tiles View
- ID3 support in shell
- Grouping in shell
- Two-column start menu
- NX-bit support
- System File Protection
- System Restore
- Help & Support Center
- Internet Connection Sharing
- Windows Compatibility Mode
- Files & Settings Transfer Wizard
- Search Assistant
- IE 6.0
- Outlook Express 6.0
- Windows Movie Maker
- Windows Media Player 8.0
- Automatic Updates
- WiFi support
- Bluetooth Support
- Safe removal of removable devices without unmounting
- Driver rollback
- Driver signatures
- Resultant Set of Policy
- Effective Permissions
- Tab-completion in command line
- Windows Picture & Fax Viewer
- Photo printing in Shell
- Themes
- MSConfig
- New EFS Features (EFS over WebDAV, etc)
- Windows Messenger
- Passport integration
- Taskbar Button grouping
- System tray icon hiding
- Clock syncronization
- 1000s of new devices supported out of the box
Now, you can argue that these features aren't significant, or that they aren't useful. But millions of people use them every day, and I find many of them particularly useful:
- WIA frees me from having to use whatever crappy software comes with my camera. I can now drag-and-drop the photos off my camera using the standard Windows interface.
- UPnP lets me open ports on my Linksys firewall without having to mess with the web interface. Smarter applications (games, mostly) will open the proper ports automatically.
- Remote Desktop is a feature that I use on a daily basis. It's faster than VNC and far more useful.
- Remote Assistance comes in handy when you have family or friends who could use a hand - but you don't want to walk them through setting up VNC / setting a password / giving you an IP address.
- The Welcome Screen is a great boon if you have more than one person who uses a computer. Our "kitchen" computer uses the welcome screen so everyone can have a logon without remembering a username.
- Fast User Switching helps as well. I can leave the 23 IE windows (and 2-3 Word documents) open and switch to my account.
- 32-bit (RGBA) icons make the UI considerably cleaner and more attractive.
- Tiles view is nice for icons with long names. You also get the filetype and size. It's more compact than "details" but more verbose than "icons".
- ID3 support in shell is great for organizing my music folder.
- Grouping in shell works particularly well with ID3 support (group by artist), or when I have a folder with multiple document types (e.g. PDFs and Excel documents) with similar names.
- Two-column start menu allows me to have my favorite programs on the left (Firefox/Thunderbird/GAIM/Media Center) and all of the things I commonly use on the right (Control Panel, Network Connections, Printers, Run)
- NX-bit support helps stop buffer overruns from creating exploits
- System File Protection is nice when a virus or spyware screws your system files. Put in your Windows CD, delete the files, and watch as fresh copies are written to the disk.
- System Restore has saved important documents on more than one occasion.
- The Help & Support Center is much improved over Windows 2000.
- Internet Connection Sharing is a necessity when you want to share WiFi at a LAN party (or any other time).
- Windows Compatibility Mode can help with stubborn applications that hardcode for a specific Windows version.
- IE 6.0 finally has half-working CSS support in standards-compliance mode
- Outlook Express 6.0 has better virus protection, web-bug elimination, and a number of other new features.
- Windows Movie Maker is a n
I believe BF2 installs an ugly-hacked CD driver as part of the copy protection. That's probably what's causing the problem.
WTF was this modded insightful? I hate to break it to you, but I don't want to trust Linux or BSD with my life.
QNX, maybe. But not Windows, Linux, or BSD.
Do you know what the engineers around me use? IBMs and HPs. IBMs because they are durable and have nice keyboards, and HPs because many of them work for HP (HP is a large employer in my city - nearly 6500 employees).
The only reason Sun employees are running around with PowerBooks is the fact that Sun doesn't have a decent notebook (at least not one that's reasonably priced with good battery life) and the fact that everyone else is seen as a competitor to Sun. HP, IBM, and Dell all have server lines that compete with Sun directly. Apple is seen as a non-threat.
It's the same reason that HP is selling the iPod. HP doesn't see Apple as a threat, so it's "OK" to partner with them.
That's why you have PowerBooks. Corporate politics.
"Memorizing PI is key to understanding what PI means. If you can't remember what PI is... how can you calculate the circumference of a circle?"
You use a resource. Just as I don't need to know the exact date and time of the attack on Pearl Harbor to understand its significance.
Of course, it's helpful to know a few digits of Pi - but 3.14159 is about all you need for most applications.
"A wide, three dimensional sound stage with clear separation of instruments and fine detail puts a smile on your face. Being able to get that for much less than above (and have the second pleasure of do it yourself) is well worth it."
And, if you're using the digital outputs that NEARLY EVERY DVD player has, NOTHING you do to the DVD player will affect sound quality AT ALL.
Dolby Digital (AC3) and DTS (Coherent Acoustics) are both error-corrected, psychoacoustically compressed codecs. If you exceed the FEC threshold, you'll know about it right away. Otherwise, the original bitsteram is getting to the decoder.
If you use optical cables, you've eliminated the possibility of the player introducing noise into the system. At this point, all the fancy components in the world won't make a bit of difference.
Now, as for video, you might have a case. But even that can be elimiated with DVI/HDMI.
Keep digital signals digital.
I never got why it was somehow considered 'insightful' to trash popular culture.
Seinfeld and Friends can be damn funny. Go and actually *watch* a few episodes before you go making unfounded criticisms.
The problem is attitude. Sometimes, a five-course meal is good. But it doesn't make the $6.50 1/2lb burger special "bad". There is room for both.
Oh, come on. Windows is, and has been for several years, a true multiuser-OS with a strong permission model.
"the directory structure is a cobbled together hodgepodge with little apparent cohesive design. In my opinion it is an incredibly "designed by committee" hack. "
Not true. Essentially, there are three directories, "Documents and Settings" (/home), "Program Files" (/bin), and "Windows" (no direct UNIQ equivilent).
The problem is not the directory structure, it is stupid applications that write to the root directory or the Windows folder.
"any whiff of multi-user directory structure aside from not really being well designed is a cobbled hack on top of old directory structures and paradigms. "
That doesn't even make sense. Like Linux and most other multiuser operating systems, individual users get their own home directories. In Windows, they also get their own registry branch.
"while there certainly isn't any requirement a computer have mulitple users, the notion of multiple users logged into a Windows machine is completely foreign without third party add-ons (terminal servers, et. al.)."
Bullshit. Try fast user switching in Windows sometime. Or, for that matter, log onto a server running Windows Server 2003. Just because *you* don't use the functionaltiy doesn't mean that it's not there. It's built into XP (though locked down) and into Windows Server 2000 and 2003.
"the multilevel kernel architecture and hardware abstraction (HAL) early on were compromised to give direct access to hardware because HAL didn't allow for good enough performance for gaming."
Also wrong. While there have been some compromises, such as moving the GDI into kernel-space, the HAL is still very much used in Windows 2000/XP/2003. DirectX uses the HAL. Indeed, Windows has much *more* hardware isolation than systems with a monolithic kernel, such as Linux.
"many programs because of buggy behavior (this is not necessarily Microsoft's fault, but it's still true) require(d) conditional code in NT/XP to run thus propogating buggy design right back into the "new" product."
This is not limited to Microsoft alone. Even CPUs must maintain bug-compatibility. Trying to run old code on a new platform is not an easy task, and the fact that 10-year-old appplications run at all is impressive.
Your information is out of date. Windows XP is not Windows 98, and it's not Windows NT4. Microsoft has made some poor design choices in the past, and those choices continue to impact their product today. But Windows XP is not the "inherently insecure" OS that you would have us believe. Its architecture is no less secure than Linux - indeed, Linux is a hodgepodge of code.
Do not sell Microsoft short. They didn't take 95% of the desktop OS market by being stupid. They did it by understanding what their customers would buy. In the end, people want their games to run. They want their copy of Acrobat 3.0 to run. To many of Microsoft's customers, that's more important than having a "pure" OS. To most users, loose permissions and open ports are a small price to pay for that functionality.
"Also, you SHOULD NOT server XHTML-1.1 as text/html."
Note that the W3 specifies "SHOULD NOT", with the exception of maintaining compaibility with existing user-agents. Indeed, this is exactly what Shortify does - if your user-agent specifies that it accepts application/xhtml+xml, Shortify will serve it. If not, Shortify serves text/html for compatibility purposes.
Also note that I never claimed to have valid XHTML/CSS. Of course, the website *does* have valid XHTML (1.1, none the less), and now it *does* have valid CSS, and it is table free, so you don't have a lot of complaints.
Hell, even the W3's homepage isn't XHTML 1.1.
"There's a *lot* of scope for compressing that code further..."
Yes, but it's already under 1.5K, and, more importantly, it's readable. It doesn't make any sense to nuke linebreaks and indentation to save a couple of extra bytes.
"Also, you SHOULD NOT server XHTML-1.1 as text/html."
Try it in Firefox (or any other browser sending proper HTTP headers) - you should get the correct content-type. IE freaks on application/xhtml+xml.
"Oh, and your CSS doesn't validate."
Indeed. It would seem that "DarkBlue" is not technically a CSS color, even though Trident/Gecko/KHTML/WebCore/Presto support it. The issue was solved.
"I imagine it being something like tinyurl for browsing from phones."
It's already happening. I operate a TinyURL-equivilent-website, http://shortify.com/, and I just registered the numerical equivilent of that URL (http://74678439.com/). As soon as the DNS comes up, you'll be able to use the service from your web-enabled mobile phone. The website is basic HTML/CSS (no tables, no images), so it should have no problem rendering in most phone browsers.
Note also that, unlike TinyURL, Shortify uses 100% numbers for shortened URLs, so they are more phone friendly. And the homepage is only 1583 bytes, almost 1/2 the size of Google (and about 8 times smaller if you include Google's logo).
Give it a spin.
"Think about all the movies that you really like and then imagine them without surround sound at all. Just simple stereo sound. Does it really diminish the movies?"
Yes, absolutely.
I saw LOTR: ROTK three times, twice in the normal theather and once in the "budget" theather. The budget theather doesn't have a DD or DTS decoder, so they play the stereo soundtrack. It wasn't the same.
Movies like LOTR and Star Wars just don't have the same "punch" without good multichannel sound.
One thing you *really* notice is how much clearer the dialogue is with the center channel. It separates it from the music and sound effects, making it much easier to make out.
It's like going from SD to HD. You can certainly watch an SD video, but it's not at all the same experience as watching it in HD. Or, for that matter, well-projected cellulose.
"Now add the cost for a decent quality (e.g. Asus, Intel, Gigabyte, Tyan) motherboard (and basic VGA card if one isn't included onboard) and RAM. The last time I did this (for Xeon vs. Opteron) the Opteron system turned out to be more expensive."
Well, first of all, Opteron is not Athlon 64. There are lots of affordable, high-quality Athlon 64 motherboards (my personal favorite is an MSI board with the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset - $89, and it has decent onboard graphics).
And second of all, if you're running Xeon, you probably want lots of memory. And if you want lots of memory, you'll soon learn that large DDR2 modules required by Intel's platform are considerably more expensive than large DDR modules.
"ou can see them all over the GSM world (which is everywhere except the U.S.)"
Well, other than the fact that the largest wireless company in the US is GSM (Cingular), and the fact that nearly half of cellular users in the US use GSM, and the fact that the US is T-Mobile's 2nd largest market, I guess you're right. Having more GSM users than any European nation certainly doesn't qualify the US as part of the "GSM World".
"stone-age american market"
Are you talking about the "stone age" American market where there are two national 3G networks (CDMA2000)? Or are you talking about the one which has national EDGE coverage? Or the one which will be CDMA2000 1xEV-DO covered nationally by the end of 2005?
"To terminate international calls on a mobile phone, the GSM provider tends to charge a huge amount of money, like US$0.75 per minute."
That's why no one does this in the US - because we pay to recieve calls, the provider doesn't charge anything at all to terminate calls. It's like calling a normal phone.
Not to mention that it's considerably easier to call within the country when you have states that are larger than most European nations. The US isn't as big as the EU, but it's considerably larger than any of the EU's member nations.
Economics seems to be a good reason not to deploy a rediculously circuitous system, but what the hell - maybe we don't do it because we use "stone-age" GSM system that Europe uses.
" In the US, you'd more likely be using one of the CDMA voice codecs instead of GSM, which are usually higher bitrate as well as higher quality."
GSM EFR (used by T-Mobile USA) is actually quite good, on par with or better than the CDMA voice codec used by Verizon.