Didn't I pay for an XP license already? Wouldn't that be a reasonable percentage of users who wanted a naked PC, they already have a valid XP?
as i understand it, the OEM license is non-transferable - so no, you can't. even if you paid for it. (just try to install XP on 2 computers. you can't. even if you can prove the first computer no longer runs it.)
I don't see the anti-competition side, still. Microsoft is enforcing their contracts as agreed by the customer who signed them, right? Are we saying that those contracts should be invalid because consumers are too lazy to research their options?
you do have a point. there are other retailers and i'm quite aware of that. many of us are. but there are still people who buy from the big OEMs because they're unaware there are any others or, more likely, because the support services available are supposedly so good from big OEMs. people have reasons for choosing them, and it's certainly not because their boxes come preinstalled with Windows.
go call Dell. ask them for a commodity desktop PC with a warranty and hardware support. then ask them to not include windows. they can't. they're bound by contract. tell them to not install windows. they may agree, but you'll likely get your computer with windows installed, a non-transferable windows license, and only a recovery disk. no windows media. you can't even return it for a refund like that (as i understand the EULA).
this is what we're talking about. is this kind of thing OK with you? stripped of your choices because your OEM signed a non-compete contract?
I build all my own machines from scratch, but what about laptop and notebooks? I've never seen a laptop or notebook that could be purchased without a Microsoft operating system pre-installed.
Is it wrong for Microsoft to tell their customers the same, if the customers are willing to accept the contract in order to get better pricing or service or whatever it is they get?
It seems to me that if someone accepts a contract or an agreement, there shouldn't be a problem. If people didn't love Microsoft products so much, the free market of competition would replace Windows and Office with whatever better preferred product is out there.
you're right. normally it isn't a problem.
the problem is that Microsoft has been giving incentives for OEMs to sign such a contract, harming their customers by leaving them with no choices. it's dangerous because the customer is forced ot pay for a software product he may not necessarily want, but it came with the computer, so there's nothing he can do - he's already paid for it - whether he wanted to or not.
(that said, many people do realize that you can return the Windows copy for a full refund, but you can return it only to the OEM that sold it to you. few OEMs actually abide by that part of the contract that they signed, and if you try to talk to MS about it, they just send you to the OEM - after charging $45 USD just for the informational phone call.)
do you want to buy a new PC and have products forced on you? do you want your new PC to have Windows or Linspire or an archaic UNIX? or do you actually want the opportunity to choose what you want to install?
that is the issue here, and that is the problem with Microsoft's actions. this is non-compete, and it is against the law.
setting aisde the fact that your statement is ironically irrelevant, i do understand your question and will answer.
so now I have question, what do you prefer a car that will run from 0 to 60 in 3 sec but this car is only good for one run, after that you have to replace engine, or a car that will do from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds?
neither. the maintenance may be higher, but i much prefer a maglev train engine that can pull 100,000 metric tons to a car that can push maybe 0-60 in 4 seconds. might take longer to get to 60, but it sure pulls its weight.
let me explain: performance isn't my concern. performance under heavy load is. Mac OS X has severe performance problems with multithreading and multiple processes that bog down databases and processor-intensive applications. Linux (and more recent FreeBSD releases) doesn't have that problem, and maintains a high level of performance through a heavy load of intensive IPC and multithreading that would bring a Mac OS X system to its knees. my typical workload involves a number of multithreaded applications (including MySQL) and real-time or low-latency processes (like audio and video playback) and extremely resource-intensive unthreaded applications (games, for example). my Linux system handles that quite well with Con Kolivas' wonderful staircase scheduler, remaining usable and responsive even with system load averages as high as 30.0. audio applications don't suffer under the pressure of processor-intensive games, and MySQL performs quite well under typical usage patterns.
would i be able to do this under Mac OS X? doubtfully. is it harder to use? probably. is maintenance a larger problem? definitely - i won't deny that.
would i use Mac OS X on a server? you'd have to be utterly insane to think it's a good idea. running Mac OS X for a high-traffic web server makes about as much sense as running unpatched Windows on an unsecured network. it's stupid.
if you want to use Mac OS X, fine. that's your choice. i certainly won't use it. it doesn't meet my needs, and it certainly doesn't meet my performance expectations.
urxvt-tabbed is cool, too, yeah. but its tabs are a little... klunky. only tabbed term i've ever really liked is Konsole, and i'm only beginning to use it again. never really did before.... it was too... fat. 3.5 has improved a lot tho.
here's what i think Microsoft should do: (at least, what i'd do in their shoes.)
scrap MFC. drop ActiveX. remove GDI+. get rid of everything. rewrite the kernel. or, maybe use the Linux kernel - for the irony.
port Wine and use that for the compatibility layer. they're good at making things easy to use, so they should be able to figure that out - and improve its support for more windows programs. it'd be nice if they contributed to Wine in return, but no matter.
design a whole new API from scratch: gear it toward simplicity and scalability. POSIX has worked for a long time, so maybe that?
retool DirectX to operate lower-level. more on terms with OpenGL. slim, light, programmable pipeline, lowest common denominator, but extensible.
...
ah, hell. fuck that shit. they should just contribute to the Linux kernel, X.org, Wine, and write their own DM. that'd be easier.
But even when you're not running legacy code, OS X is still slow. As I've reported in my blog recent article on Ars Technica showed that Mac OS X, running on the same hardware as Windows XP, is substantially slower at doing the same software tasks.
Johan De Gelas reported that the main cause for a lot of Mac OSX's speed problems is due to its extremely coarse thread locking. benchmarks show that thread latencies are extremely high, and this causes severe problems for highly multi-threaded applications, especially software like Apache and MySQL. it all stems from the massive wrapper bolted onto the Mach kernel for its IPC and threading mechanisms. it's very unlike FreeBSD's userthreads model, but seems ot be just as slow.
the A6k is unavailable in the US, as far as i can tell, and vendors with the Z92km are few, far between, and don't stock it.
i've been looking for something like this myself, and although the Z92km is the only thing i can actually find, i'd really prefer something smaller - like 14" or so.
is there anything else on the US market, or am i stuck with building a Z92km myself?
Eterm with the rxvt theme - which uses less memory than the standard rxvt usage, but I'm not sure how it compares to what you've described above.
i'll have to try it out. i've not played with Eterm's themes much, but i'm well aware of its memory efficiency. in fact, i stopped using Eterm because it used more memory with the default theme than 3 rxvt windows.
that said, Eterm fits better in my desktop's WM: e17.:)
> i only use rxvt-unicode. it's the only thing that will properly display the unicode text in the filenames of my Japanese music collection.:)
are you sure that those are japanese music collection:)
yeah, i'm sure. i've been converting all the S-JIS and CP439 filenames to UTF-8 when i figure out what they're supposed to be, and doing the same to all the ID3 tags.
what sucks, though, is that i need them in CP439 for my portable player. grr.
i stopped using it long ago because it would eat 100MB of memory just for one torrent. add in my usual downloading practices and it balloons to over 600MB.
at least rtorrent keeps itself down to 35MB even with two dozen torrents running....
i only use rxvt-unicode. it's the only thing that will properly display the unicode text in the filenames of my Japanese music collection.:)
also, rxvt has another cool feature. aside from its shockingly minimalistic memory usage, run urxvtd and then urxvtc for every term you need open and it uses even less memory. what could possibly be better than that?
Ever filled out census information? Because, if you have, your information is available to anyone via a number of sites. That's right, for as cheap as an $8-$10 fee, people can find out what income range you are in along with a variety of other facts about you. They can also find out where you live for free!
wouldn't you prefer a tab-separated values document (plain ASCII) or excel spreadsheeds instead? it's much easier to process! and free! and it's well-organized for ease-of-use!
disclosure: in one of my previous jobs, i used publicly-available Census 2000 data imported directly in MS Access '97 to generate detailed maps and datasets appropriate for detailed population analysis. it made possible a blitzkrieg FM translator application process possible. we had well over 17,000 applications prepared, and submitted 4,221! guess who we were!
i did say it's a terminal lockup. video freezes, and it's unresponsive to keyboard input. and, as i said, i SSH in to reset.
however, it only happens rarely, if at all on any of the drivers from the 70- and 80-series. that said, when i take care to not let it happen, it doesn't. switching between TTYs and X sessions rapidly will lock it up fast and hard. it might just be the fact that i use vesafb-tng, but i dunno.
Re:My experience with Cedega
on
Cedega 5.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
the binary nVidia driver isn't bug-free, either. i've had some major terminal lockups (requiring that i either SSH in and reboot or simply reset or it's just effectively headless) due to that driver. though i do with they'd open-source it so we could get these terminal driver problems fixed.:\
Re:WoW, Amd 64, Via Chipset, ATI Radeon 9200
on
Cedega 5.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
many people, including myself (GeForce FX 5900, non-ultra) have been playing WoW nearly bug-free for a long time. in fact, i heard most of the texture problems have been resolved, but most of those that remain are due to the ATi drivers. there are numerous known (and acknowledged) issues with ATi cards and drivers in particular, and the forums are rife with people complaining about their Ati stuff not working as expected.
that said, support improves every month with every new release, and with your subscription, you can vote for what matters to you. (and, since ATi issues come up every voting cycle, VOTE, DAMNIT.) (note, i typically vote -1 on most ATi issues, but i'll stop that if you agree to start voting.)
also, read the forums. it's a bitch, i know, but really, there is a lot of helpful information there if you just take the time to find it. the really big things get stickied (0x10000000 mem loc. fix for mouse in WoW, for example) and everything else will come up from time to time. and don't rule out your distro's forums, either. the official Gentoo gamer forum has threads for all sorts of problems that come up in Cedega, with tips on getting other games to work in vanilla Wine.
they claim it's out-of-the-box compatibility, but as with anything on linux, you have to care enough to fiddle with it a little.
indeed. and further, Cedega's cost is roughly $60/yr., which is about the same cost as a new off-the-shelf game or two. well worth the price over Windows itself, IMHO.
just need to stop looking at it like a monthly fee... more like a new license every year... for the price of a new game.:)
Is there some method of setting up some sort of qos-like bandwith limiter to the HD for niced processes?
(or anything else?)
have you looked at Con Kolivas' patchset? it sets the CFQ I/O scheduler as default and implements a process scheduler tooled specifically toward responsiveness and interactivity.
i've been running it for some months and have found that even under severe I/O traffic, the system remains usable overall. (the only catch is that the CFQ scheduler is still feature-incomplete and doesn't schedule I/O traffic by niceness properly yet.) i've had a Java app (Eclipse and Azureus both) push my load average up past 30.0 because of I/O and the system still remained as usable and responsive as ever (even though anything that did I/O would halt painfully, including starting new apps).
it's worth a try in any case. -ck kernels just "feel" better, IMO, and there are a lot of other people who seem to agree.
(also, you can set your scheduler to CFQ or whatever whenever you please: echo cfq >/sys/block/hda/queue/elevator)
speaking of which... has anyone ported a text editor to it yet? it would seem EMACS is a good OS, but with no VI, i just can't figure out how it's useful...
Best thing to do is just ignore them, or if it makes you feel better, write an email explaining in exhaustive detail just how much of an idiot they are for ignoring your resume. Even more fun if they send back a response.
yeah, i like to think of myself as a cynical asshole, but i'm not that mean. i just ignored them.:\
that's exactly what i did. the next morning, i found an email from a national insurance company offering me an entry-level position in sales management.
i know i need a job, but, seriously, WTF? that's just one step up from being a SCO lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
as i understand it, the OEM license is non-transferable - so no, you can't. even if you paid for it. (just try to install XP on 2 computers. you can't. even if you can prove the first computer no longer runs it.)
you do have a point. there are other retailers and i'm quite aware of that. many of us are. but there are still people who buy from the big OEMs because they're unaware there are any others or, more likely, because the support services available are supposedly so good from big OEMs. people have reasons for choosing them, and it's certainly not because their boxes come preinstalled with Windows.
go call Dell. ask them for a commodity desktop PC with a warranty and hardware support. then ask them to not include windows. they can't. they're bound by contract. tell them to not install windows. they may agree, but you'll likely get your computer with windows installed, a non-transferable windows license, and only a recovery disk. no windows media. you can't even return it for a refund like that (as i understand the EULA).
this is what we're talking about. is this kind of thing OK with you? stripped of your choices because your OEM signed a non-compete contract?
o rly?
you're right. normally it isn't a problem.
the problem is that Microsoft has been giving incentives for OEMs to sign such a contract, harming their customers by leaving them with no choices. it's dangerous because the customer is forced ot pay for a software product he may not necessarily want, but it came with the computer, so there's nothing he can do - he's already paid for it - whether he wanted to or not.
(that said, many people do realize that you can return the Windows copy for a full refund, but you can return it only to the OEM that sold it to you. few OEMs actually abide by that part of the contract that they signed, and if you try to talk to MS about it, they just send you to the OEM - after charging $45 USD just for the informational phone call.)
do you want to buy a new PC and have products forced on you? do you want your new PC to have Windows or Linspire or an archaic UNIX? or do you actually want the opportunity to choose what you want to install?
that is the issue here, and that is the problem with Microsoft's actions. this is non-compete, and it is against the law.
setting aisde the fact that your statement is ironically irrelevant, i do understand your question and will answer.
neither. the maintenance may be higher, but i much prefer a maglev train engine that can pull 100,000 metric tons to a car that can push maybe 0-60 in 4 seconds. might take longer to get to 60, but it sure pulls its weight.
let me explain: performance isn't my concern. performance under heavy load is. Mac OS X has severe performance problems with multithreading and multiple processes that bog down databases and processor-intensive applications. Linux (and more recent FreeBSD releases) doesn't have that problem, and maintains a high level of performance through a heavy load of intensive IPC and multithreading that would bring a Mac OS X system to its knees. my typical workload involves a number of multithreaded applications (including MySQL) and real-time or low-latency processes (like audio and video playback) and extremely resource-intensive unthreaded applications (games, for example). my Linux system handles that quite well with Con Kolivas' wonderful staircase scheduler, remaining usable and responsive even with system load averages as high as 30.0. audio applications don't suffer under the pressure of processor-intensive games, and MySQL performs quite well under typical usage patterns.
would i be able to do this under Mac OS X? doubtfully. is it harder to use? probably. is maintenance a larger problem? definitely - i won't deny that.
would i use Mac OS X on a server? you'd have to be utterly insane to think it's a good idea. running Mac OS X for a high-traffic web server makes about as much sense as running unpatched Windows on an unsecured network. it's stupid.
if you want to use Mac OS X, fine. that's your choice. i certainly won't use it. it doesn't meet my needs, and it certainly doesn't meet my performance expectations.
urxvt-tabbed is cool, too, yeah. but its tabs are a little... klunky. only tabbed term i've ever really liked is Konsole, and i'm only beginning to use it again. never really did before.... it was too ... fat. 3.5 has improved a lot tho.
here's what i think Microsoft should do: (at least, what i'd do in their shoes.)
scrap MFC. drop ActiveX. remove GDI+. get rid of everything. rewrite the kernel. or, maybe use the Linux kernel - for the irony.
port Wine and use that for the compatibility layer. they're good at making things easy to use, so they should be able to figure that out - and improve its support for more windows programs. it'd be nice if they contributed to Wine in return, but no matter.
design a whole new API from scratch: gear it toward simplicity and scalability. POSIX has worked for a long time, so maybe that?
retool DirectX to operate lower-level. more on terms with OpenGL. slim, light, programmable pipeline, lowest common denominator, but extensible.
...
ah, hell. fuck that shit. they should just contribute to the Linux kernel, X.org, Wine, and write their own DM. that'd be easier.
Johan De Gelas reported that the main cause for a lot of Mac OSX's speed problems is due to its extremely coarse thread locking. benchmarks show that thread latencies are extremely high, and this causes severe problems for highly multi-threaded applications, especially software like Apache and MySQL. it all stems from the massive wrapper bolted onto the Mach kernel for its IPC and threading mechanisms. it's very unlike FreeBSD's userthreads model, but seems ot be just as slow.
this is whay i don't own a mac.
the A6k is unavailable in the US, as far as i can tell, and vendors with the Z92km are few, far between, and don't stock it.
i've been looking for something like this myself, and although the Z92km is the only thing i can actually find, i'd really prefer something smaller - like 14" or so.
is there anything else on the US market, or am i stuck with building a Z92km myself?
i'll have to try it out. i've not played with Eterm's themes much, but i'm well aware of its memory efficiency. in fact, i stopped using Eterm because it used more memory with the default theme than 3 rxvt windows.
that said, Eterm fits better in my desktop's WM: e17. :)
yeah, i'm sure. i've been converting all the S-JIS and CP439 filenames to UTF-8 when i figure out what they're supposed to be, and doing the same to all the ID3 tags.
what sucks, though, is that i need them in CP439 for my portable player. grr.
but can it stop using so damn much memory?
i stopped using it long ago because it would eat 100MB of memory just for one torrent. add in my usual downloading practices and it balloons to over 600MB.
at least rtorrent keeps itself down to 35MB even with two dozen torrents running....
i only use rxvt-unicode. it's the only thing that will properly display the unicode text in the filenames of my Japanese music collection. :)
also, rxvt has another cool feature. aside from its shockingly minimalistic memory usage, run urxvtd and then urxvtc for every term you need open and it uses even less memory. what could possibly be better than that?
wouldn't you prefer a tab-separated values document (plain ASCII) or excel spreadsheeds instead? it's much easier to process! and free! and it's well-organized for ease-of-use!
disclosure: in one of my previous jobs, i used publicly-available Census 2000 data imported directly in MS Access '97 to generate detailed maps and datasets appropriate for detailed population analysis. it made possible a blitzkrieg FM translator application process possible. we had well over 17,000 applications prepared, and submitted 4,221! guess who we were!
i did say it's a terminal lockup. video freezes, and it's unresponsive to keyboard input. and, as i said, i SSH in to reset.
however, it only happens rarely, if at all on any of the drivers from the 70- and 80-series. that said, when i take care to not let it happen, it doesn't. switching between TTYs and X sessions rapidly will lock it up fast and hard. it might just be the fact that i use vesafb-tng, but i dunno.
the binary nVidia driver isn't bug-free, either. i've had some major terminal lockups (requiring that i either SSH in and reboot or simply reset or it's just effectively headless) due to that driver. though i do with they'd open-source it so we could get these terminal driver problems fixed. :\
many people, including myself (GeForce FX 5900, non-ultra) have been playing WoW nearly bug-free for a long time. in fact, i heard most of the texture problems have been resolved, but most of those that remain are due to the ATi drivers. there are numerous known (and acknowledged) issues with ATi cards and drivers in particular, and the forums are rife with people complaining about their Ati stuff not working as expected.
that said, support improves every month with every new release, and with your subscription, you can vote for what matters to you. (and, since ATi issues come up every voting cycle, VOTE, DAMNIT.) (note, i typically vote -1 on most ATi issues, but i'll stop that if you agree to start voting.)
also, read the forums. it's a bitch, i know, but really, there is a lot of helpful information there if you just take the time to find it. the really big things get stickied (0x10000000 mem loc. fix for mouse in WoW, for example) and everything else will come up from time to time. and don't rule out your distro's forums, either. the official Gentoo gamer forum has threads for all sorts of problems that come up in Cedega, with tips on getting other games to work in vanilla Wine.
they claim it's out-of-the-box compatibility, but as with anything on linux, you have to care enough to fiddle with it a little.
indeed. and further, Cedega's cost is roughly $60/yr., which is about the same cost as a new off-the-shelf game or two. well worth the price over Windows itself, IMHO.
:)
just need to stop looking at it like a monthly fee... more like a new license every year... for the price of a new game.
yep, a C=64 in 1985. i remember i started programming straight away.
i was born in 1981.
have you looked at Con Kolivas' patchset? it sets the CFQ I/O scheduler as default and implements a process scheduler tooled specifically toward responsiveness and interactivity.
i've been running it for some months and have found that even under severe I/O traffic, the system remains usable overall. (the only catch is that the CFQ scheduler is still feature-incomplete and doesn't schedule I/O traffic by niceness properly yet.) i've had a Java app (Eclipse and Azureus both) push my load average up past 30.0 because of I/O and the system still remained as usable and responsive as ever (even though anything that did I/O would halt painfully, including starting new apps).
it's worth a try in any case. -ck kernels just "feel" better, IMO, and there are a lot of other people who seem to agree.
(also, you can set your scheduler to CFQ or whatever whenever you please: echo cfq > /sys/block/hda/queue/elevator)
i had 38kB all to myself on a 1.023MHz processor. it felt like the whole world belonged to me.
i was a 6-year-old king.
i guess i'm slow. it took me a minute to remember who Steve was. all i could think of was Matthew.
speaking of which... has anyone ported a text editor to it yet? it would seem EMACS is a good OS, but with no VI, i just can't figure out how it's useful...
yeah, i like to think of myself as a cynical asshole, but i'm not that mean. i just ignored them. :\
that's exactly what i did. the next morning, i found an email from a national insurance company offering me an entry-level position in sales management.
i know i need a job, but, seriously, WTF? that's just one step up from being a SCO lawyer.