That's absurd. Microsoft cannot put just anything they like in the license agreements. They have to keep it nearly reasonable or companies will stop paying for software licenses.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah hah ha ha..... ha ha... ha.
Not wanting to be objectionable... but... i've actually found mplayer to be slower than xine. I've got both on my 500MHZ K6-2 laptop and I can (just about) watch a DVD with xine. With Mplayer the CPU pegs and i get frame drops. To be fair I didn't try very hard to make mplayer work; but then again neither did I try very hard to make xine work. Anyone got any idea why this would be? I assume that I am incorrect in my assesment that xine is faster as the oft reported benefit of mplayer is its incredible speed...
Xine recently seems to have taken a few leaps and bounds as well. The DVD nav stuff is working very nicely. There are a lot less crashes, the GUI is a lot more stable.
I doubt whether competition is a bad thing anyway. At all other times in the OSS world competition has been beneficial, not least because they can steal each others code.
The survey was asking people what they will be using next year. There is a point in asking students their future plans if the question is "what do you plan to do"
We've finally found the cause of all of Microsoft's security woes. I knew they'd do it, there investigative procedures are second to none. Microsoft's security audit has found that the problem with Windows is CS students.
My point is that for applications that don't require it they will be the same size. For applications that do require it - well they didn't exist on your 32-bit platform anyway so they can't have got any bigger.
Not neccessarily. There is no reason why there can't be a PUSH ; POP instruction. I don't know whether there is or not, but it means there is no immutable law about it.
Also, I read that AMD's x86-64 chip will allow you to set the default register size to 32-bits for an executing memory segment. This means that you can compile your app to run exactly as it was if you don't need the extra width. Note that this is different from its compatibility mode for literally running your old 32-bit apps.
It means 40% of the developers Evans surveyed, and those developers were pre-selected by their use of Linux.
The question was - is Linux taking more market share away from Unix or Windows. In what way does asking people who already use Linux answer that question?
The correct people to ask where the Unix developers and the Windows developers. Presumably as we are talking Unix we are only interested in enterprise apps so we only ask the Windows users who work in the enterprise. Then we ask an equal quantity of both. Now we've got some statistics we can use to answer one very simple question.
We could look at the trend over the last two years - let's go and ask all the Linux developers who only became Linux developers last year. Ask them what platform they used two years ago.
There are plenty of questions that can be asked that would tell us something; so why did Evans waste all that effort finding out nothing?
It sounds to me like they need to get someone who's a bit more rigorous with their statistics in future. Get a statistician in here and give them a laugh. None of these figures are either meaningful or conclusive.
If that were true every byte of a string would require 4 bytes at present and 8 bytes in 64-bit computers. This is obviously not the case. A 64-bit register set does not mean you can only store 64 bit values in memory.
Repeat after me... 32-bits will fit inside 64-bits.
On what basis do you advance that? If you mean 99.9% of consumers do not use their CPU's at 100% all the time then I'll agree. However, most consumers are still not happy with the speed of their computer. The TV still starts working faster, the washing machine just goes, the PC does not. Stick a CPU meter on your desktop and work away for an hour. The day it never hits 100% then we've reached computing nirvana.
The CPU is used to it's fullest level by everyone. Being able to cope with the spike in demand is why we need the fast CPU's.
Also, everyone should bear in mind that there is no inherant speed increase involved with 64-bit computing. Read this for a good explaination of 64-bit computing.
I don't remember American aid during that war having been conditional on agreeing with America on every subject from then until the end of time.
It is fairly awful to expect that because you help someone they then are your slave forever. Your help may not be required if those are the conditions.
erm... yes. it's quite conceivable that a GPS satellite could use GPS satellites to find it's position. If they didn't know where they where how could they tell you where you are?
Strangely, I find that you have some valid points. You have extracted some more reasoned commentary from her article. I was making no judgement in my comment about which particular desktop is good/bad. My point was more that Eugenia's methodology for reviewing pretty much anything is flawed.
If the review had been titled "my opinion of some leading desktop environments" and the constant opinion==fact tone had been removed then I would have no problem. However, it would then be better to call the site OSblogs.
For any engineering task to advance a metric must be established so performance can be measured. This is particularly difficult in the case of subjective areas like user interface design. I would like to suggest that the metric should not be "Whether Eugenia likes it" though.
Addressing your points more directly and adopting an IMHO everywhere...
Menus should be improved/simplified - true; the defaults are awful; I think the distribution should take more responsibility for that though.
KDE seems to me to be fine as long as you have more than 128M RAM. And the startup time is very annoying.
I'm not sure I agree on your OpenOffice points - the fact that it's not themed, although making it stand out as wrong, doesn't affect it's ease of use, merely its beauty. Although it is by no means perfect, I (and everyone I've got using it) has mentioned that they find it a lot friendlier than Office (word in particular).
Mozilla on the other hand I have trouble with. I can find everything I want in the end but it's never where I think it should be. I think they should drop the historical attachment to netscape's preferences boxes and rethink some of the options. Again, the theme doesn't make it unusable it just makes it ugly.
me too - i hate all this stuff in books where the writing all assumes that you are going to start reading at the top left of the page, and that i'm going to open the book on the right hand side and that the pages are numbered starting from 1.
Get over it. There are conventions in everthing, it's not some conspiracy against you. At least in the case of your desktop if you don't like the icons on the left you can put them on the right. How is this a defficiency of the WM?
What we are comparing here is the overall user experience
I decided to include in this test only operating systems that I can reboot at any time
the way things work in a way most people expect
The translation
What we are comparing here is my overall user experience
I decided to include in this test only operating systems that I can reboot at any time, thus rejecting any scientific methodology or averaging effects which may significant when determining membership of a particularly fuzzy data set
the way things work in a way I expect as a long time user of $MYFAVOURITE desktop environment
I'm not going to go on, all of Eugenia articles are like this. Stating opinions as if they were facts does not make them facts. "The buttons are overwhelming" is not the same as "the temparature of the solution was 26 degrees". None of this is helpful - I (as a random member of the computing community) do not care what Eugenia's preferences for colour, widget style and theme are. I care whether these environments can be made to work the way I want them to. I (as the adminstrator for other desktops) care whether these environments have the ability to make my users happier; if their particular preferences can be accommodated.
This brings me to what these sorts of reviews should focus on... absolutes only. e.g.
features of WinXP: themeable, log multiple users on simultaneously, clean fonts, ability to choose classic style or luna
features of KDE: virtual desktops, themeable, transparent menus, adjustable levels of eye candy, full featured keyboard shortcut editors
etc.
Writing those lists just now I noticed how hard it is to keep my own opinions out of it, but it can be done and a journalist should certainly be doing that. If a personal opinion were required, it would be preferable that a third party was used as the source of opinions as we are more likely to hear a balanced view than the rantings of one particular user.
In such a subjective area - more care must be taken to remain objective. It is not sufficient to simply write at the top of the article "I realise this is subjective but...."; I'm sure what she meant, as a professional journalist, was "I realise this is subjective so I have taken the following steps to minimize any influence my own opinions may have on this review"
This is a difficult task, articles such as these must by definition include some element of opinion; comments like "The menus were slow to respond" are acceptable even though "slow" is a subjective term; but one I would be willing to allow under the assumption that an experienced computer used could assign fuzzy terms like "slow" and "fast" with the same skill that we can all use terms like "hot" and "cold". This is not an excuse to decend into the completely unquantifiable "I want my UI pixel perfect".
All these environments will gain equally from a more balanced review process and as such we will all gain.
Can't be represented exactly in base two. Whoops. Similarly for a whole series of other numbers. Just as 1/3 cannot be represented exactly in base ten.
This is still an argument for the open source method, but I think that the code quality should be attributed to a different source. Perhaps it is not about an inherently good or inherently bad method. What if age is the key factor?
The Linux networking code has been in for a long time. Not in it's present form, obviously, but each change builds on the last; as it must in open source - it would be foolish to start afresh when you have something that works. So a cylcle develops and at each stage the code gets better. Compare this with proprietary; can they look at a competitors code? No. They must start afresh and so their code is effectively younger.
Further, if we measure software age not in units of time but in units of updates, open source has the advantage that there are many updates, there is always someone new to look at the code. No company can compete with the sheer quantity of viewings and therefore updates that occur in open source developments.
And I want mine to be the same size regardless of my screen resolution. So I'll be happy and you can still use bitmaps.
Bloody hell - there is "the glass is half empty" and then there's "I hate glasses and really don't see what use they are to me or the rest of the planet".
Slashdot Mirror
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah hah ha ha
Good one.
Not wanting to be objectionable ... but ... i've actually found mplayer to be slower than xine. I've got both on my 500MHZ K6-2 laptop and I can (just about) watch a DVD with xine. With Mplayer the CPU pegs and i get frame drops. To be fair I didn't try very hard to make mplayer work; but then again neither did I try very hard to make xine work. Anyone got any idea why this would be? I assume that I am incorrect in my assesment that xine is faster as the oft reported benefit of mplayer is its incredible speed...
Xine recently seems to have taken a few leaps and bounds as well. The DVD nav stuff is working very nicely. There are a lot less crashes, the GUI is a lot more stable.
I doubt whether competition is a bad thing anyway. At all other times in the OSS world competition has been beneficial, not least because they can steal each others code.
I belive the bottleneck in CD's is the access time not the transfer speed. Once they get going, the transfer speed from a CD is fairly respectable.
A 1x CD does = 150k/s
So a 56x does 8400k/s
Unfortunately they doing get 56x across the whole disk but you get the idea....
I'd take your same stance as well, except that you can dual boot into non-Palladium mode....in this version
The survey was asking people what they will be using next year. There is a point in asking students their future plans if the question is "what do you plan to do"
Erm, no... The study was asking developers what they would be using next year, so asking people who aren't using Linux now was kind of the point.
To use your example, to find out which people are planning to move to Phoenix you wouldn't bother asking people who had already moved to Phoenix.
We've finally found the cause of all of Microsoft's security woes. I knew they'd do it, there investigative procedures are second to none. Microsoft's security audit has found that the problem with Windows is CS students.
My point is that for applications that don't require it they will be the same size. For applications that do require it - well they didn't exist on your 32-bit platform anyway so they can't have got any bigger.
Not neccessarily. There is no reason why there can't be a PUSH ; POP instruction. I don't know whether there is or not, but it means there is no immutable law about it.
Also, I read that AMD's x86-64 chip will allow you to set the default register size to 32-bits for an executing memory segment. This means that you can compile your app to run exactly as it was if you don't need the extra width. Note that this is different from its compatibility mode for literally running your old 32-bit apps.
It means 40% of the developers Evans surveyed, and those developers were pre-selected by their use of Linux.
The question was - is Linux taking more market share away from Unix or Windows. In what way does asking people who already use Linux answer that question?
The correct people to ask where the Unix developers and the Windows developers. Presumably as we are talking Unix we are only interested in enterprise apps so we only ask the Windows users who work in the enterprise. Then we ask an equal quantity of both. Now we've got some statistics we can use to answer one very simple question.
We could look at the trend over the last two years - let's go and ask all the Linux developers who only became Linux developers last year. Ask them what platform they used two years ago.
There are plenty of questions that can be asked that would tell us something; so why did Evans waste all that effort finding out nothing?
It sounds to me like they need to get someone who's a bit more rigorous with their statistics in future. Get a statistician in here and give them a laugh. None of these figures are either meaningful or conclusive.
If that were true every byte of a string would require 4 bytes at present and 8 bytes in 64-bit computers. This is obviously not the case. A 64-bit register set does not mean you can only store 64 bit values in memory.
Repeat after me... 32-bits will fit inside 64-bits.
On what basis do you advance that? If you mean 99.9% of consumers do not use their CPU's at 100% all the time then I'll agree. However, most consumers are still not happy with the speed of their computer. The TV still starts working faster, the washing machine just goes, the PC does not. Stick a CPU meter on your desktop and work away for an hour. The day it never hits 100% then we've reached computing nirvana.
The CPU is used to it's fullest level by everyone. Being able to cope with the spike in demand is why we need the fast CPU's.
Also, everyone should bear in mind that there is no inherant speed increase involved with 64-bit computing. Read this for a good explaination of 64-bit computing.
Except they're talking about their previous look, not this one. Read the rest of the article.
The performance of this drive is raved about and their only complaint seemed to be the one year warranty instead of three.
Heh - i've mapped Ctrl-S to :wq in gvim because my reflex wasn't getting caught and I was filling files with ^S without even knowing :-)
I don't remember American aid during that war having been conditional on agreeing with America on every subject from then until the end of time.
It is fairly awful to expect that because you help someone they then are your slave forever. Your help may not be required if those are the conditions.
erm... yes. it's quite conceivable that a GPS satellite could use GPS satellites to find it's position. If they didn't know where they where how could they tell you where you are?
Of course - I forgot that the American chiefs of staff have a strict policy of inform and consult with the German auto club.
Strangely, I find that you have some valid points. You have extracted some more reasoned commentary from her article. I was making no judgement in my comment about which particular desktop is good/bad. My point was more that Eugenia's methodology for reviewing pretty much anything is flawed.
If the review had been titled "my opinion of some leading desktop environments" and the constant opinion==fact tone had been removed then I would have no problem. However, it would then be better to call the site OSblogs.
For any engineering task to advance a metric must be established so performance can be measured. This is particularly difficult in the case of subjective areas like user interface design. I would like to suggest that the metric should not be "Whether Eugenia likes it" though.
Addressing your points more directly and adopting an IMHO everywhere...
Menus should be improved/simplified - true; the defaults are awful; I think the distribution should take more responsibility for that though.
KDE seems to me to be fine as long as you have more than 128M RAM. And the startup time is very annoying.
I'm not sure I agree on your OpenOffice points - the fact that it's not themed, although making it stand out as wrong, doesn't affect it's ease of use, merely its beauty. Although it is by no means perfect, I (and everyone I've got using it) has mentioned that they find it a lot friendlier than Office (word in particular).
Mozilla on the other hand I have trouble with. I can find everything I want in the end but it's never where I think it should be. I think they should drop the historical attachment to netscape's preferences boxes and rethink some of the options. Again, the theme doesn't make it unusable it just makes it ugly.
I give KDE a 4.2 in the "sexiness" section because it is too sexy.
What the hell does that mean? I give it an 8 because it was so flexible that it should have had a 12 and that was outside my arbitrary rating system.
apt-get install ytree
is based on xtree and does a pretty decent job of it...
me too - i hate all this stuff in books where the writing all assumes that you are going to start reading at the top left of the page, and that i'm going to open the book on the right hand side and that the pages are numbered starting from 1.
Get over it. There are conventions in everthing, it's not some conspiracy against you. At least in the case of your desktop if you don't like the icons on the left you can put them on the right. How is this a defficiency of the WM?
The translation
I'm not going to go on, all of Eugenia articles are like this. Stating opinions as if they were facts does not make them facts. "The buttons are overwhelming" is not the same as "the temparature of the solution was 26 degrees". None of this is helpful - I (as a random member of the computing community) do not care what Eugenia's preferences for colour, widget style and theme are. I care whether these environments can be made to work the way I want them to. I (as the adminstrator for other desktops) care whether these environments have the ability to make my users happier; if their particular preferences can be accommodated.
This brings me to what these sorts of reviews should focus on... absolutes only. e.g.
features of WinXP: themeable, log multiple users on simultaneously, clean fonts, ability to choose classic style or luna
features of KDE: virtual desktops, themeable, transparent menus, adjustable levels of eye candy, full featured keyboard shortcut editors
etc.
Writing those lists just now I noticed how hard it is to keep my own opinions out of it, but it can be done and a journalist should certainly be doing that. If a personal opinion were required, it would be preferable that a third party was used as the source of opinions as we are more likely to hear a balanced view than the rantings of one particular user.
In such a subjective area - more care must be taken to remain objective. It is not sufficient to simply write at the top of the article "I realise this is subjective but...."; I'm sure what she meant, as a professional journalist, was "I realise this is subjective so I have taken the following steps to minimize any influence my own opinions may have on this review"
This is a difficult task, articles such as these must by definition include some element of opinion; comments like "The menus were slow to respond" are acceptable even though "slow" is a subjective term; but one I would be willing to allow under the assumption that an experienced computer used could assign fuzzy terms like "slow" and "fast" with the same skill that we can all use terms like "hot" and "cold". This is not an excuse to decend into the completely unquantifiable "I want my UI pixel perfect".
All these environments will gain equally from a more balanced review process and as such we will all gain.
</rant>
'Fraid not. Here's a calculation for you:
0.2
Can't be represented exactly in base two. Whoops. Similarly for a whole series of other numbers. Just as 1/3 cannot be represented exactly in base ten.
This is still an argument for the open source method, but I think that the code quality should be attributed to a different source. Perhaps it is not about an inherently good or inherently bad method. What if age is the key factor?
The Linux networking code has been in for a long time. Not in it's present form, obviously, but each change builds on the last; as it must in open source - it would be foolish to start afresh when you have something that works. So a cylcle develops and at each stage the code gets better. Compare this with proprietary; can they look at a competitors code? No. They must start afresh and so their code is effectively younger.
Further, if we measure software age not in units of time but in units of updates, open source has the advantage that there are many updates, there is always someone new to look at the code. No company can compete with the sheer quantity of viewings and therefore updates that occur in open source developments.
And I want mine to be the same size regardless of my screen resolution. So I'll be happy and you can still use bitmaps.
Bloody hell - there is "the glass is half empty" and then there's "I hate glasses and really don't see what use they are to me or the rest of the planet".