For what it's worth, when you click the maximize button on Windows on a window that is already maximizes, it too shrinks back--the button symbol doesn't reflect this, either. I can't really see a meaningful difference.
Actually, when you maximise a window in Windows, the button icon changes to reflect a different action will occur when you click it again. This has been true since at least Windows 3.0.
Although the license fail to explicitly state it, it appears to be Apple's policy to allow downgrades.
Generally speaking, it is not possible to install a version of MacOS on a Mac older than the one it came with. Apple don't provide the necessary hardware drivers.
I only have a rough idea of how the US system works, so I'm kind of curious - how many of those does the President even have the ability to "change" ? Are they not things that need to work through layers of politicians before they can be enacted as legislation ?
Vista, on 2GB of RAM and a dual-core Athlon, runs like a paralyzed pig on molasses.
Nope, runs fine (unless you've got some broken hardware somewhere). Indeed, it's mostly about RAM - even on a single core, with 2G of RAM and a non-crap video card, it's quite usable.
Win7, on 4GB and a quad-core i5 (just under a grand, all in all), is in a completely different class.
As it should be, regardless - that hardware is probably around twice as fast.
If they start doing AACS, and forcing encryption over HDMI, then if I buy a new component that meets the new standard; I either need to buy a very expensive receiver, or just watch video's in my room with the wonderful craptacular speakers built into my TV.
Huh ? Cheap, low-end receivers with HDMI support have been around for years.
It would seem like a good option, except that even now people in the educational field disagree whether current tests really do measure accurately what they intend or not. Is a grade of 100/100 an indication that you actually understand, or just that you can parrot the answers? Is an IQ score of 90 an indication of your intellectual prowess or just of your (lack of) ability to fit in the cultural frame where you took the test? There are studies that have shown how otherwise highly intelligent and high performing Asians score low on certain western intelligence tests because they simply look at some problems with a completely different mindset.
Talk about shooting off on a tangent. We're not talking about end of school exams, we're talking about whether worker A can produce product B.
How about a tech-related example. Take two individuals, one with an MSCE and one without. The most you can say about them is that one passed the knowledge test and the other hasn't. It doesn't tell you if the certified individual understands or can apply the concepts. Maybe he is just good at memorizing stuff while the other could have extensive hands-on experience.
If the benchmark is some end result, and that end result is reached, why is the methodology relevant ?
My point is that there is no simple way of evaluating labour quality.
There are very simple ways of evaluating nearly all labour quality. The vast majority of jobs do not require creativity, initiative, advanced skills, or deep thought. They require a typical, easily measurable end result.
I guess the word inherent is causing me trouble. Suppose that you do use material that is brittle for the case. Suppose that it has less space than a nomad and no wireless. You can still come up with a superior product based on factors other than the raw ingredients, i.e. design (intellectual labour) and production (technical/manual labour). Its just not a "black-and-white" issue, there are great many shades involved so to speak. What is "inherently" lower quality materials? Cardboard because it gets wet and becomes useless? Its also lighter, recyclable, cheaper. Dried compost because making products out of literal shit is disgusting? Not everybody will share that value judgement so then you would have to come up with some other 'objective' way of evaluating. See where I'm going with this?
It's irrelevant. The purpose is to assign an objective value to a finished product that does X, not come up with new products to do F, P, Q and Y.
Really? How would you propose to identify lower quality labour? Based on the education level of the workers? On some sort of XBOX live-like ranking? on the country of origin (would German craftsmanship be always more expensive than American)? on the conformance to specs of the end-product?
Uh, how about the most obvious one - by testing them before they're allowed to make anything ?
If the latter, wouldn't it actually be a better quality product if its made with cheaper materials but it still complies with the specs?
No, since with a centralised model those cheaper materials could only be cheaper if they weren't as "good" (for whatever reason). Ie: quality must be inherently lower.
With a well-designed multi-tasking system and cache, you're probably right (although 50ms is 1/20 of a second, not half a second), although with hard disk seek times of 10-15ms (for real-world average hard drives), 50ms might be a low estimate.
Actually I thought 50ms was a pretty high estimate, and that I was being conservative. Certainly, I would expect any delay to be dominated by disk seek time, which itself should never be more than the worst case of 10-15ms for a typical drive. I can't really see why it would be significantly slower than that, as all the other operations that would need to be completed should be around an order of magnitude quicker.
But the experience that people had with Vista SuperFetch is that it thrashed the disk constantly (which it shouldn't...once RAM is loaded, the disk should idle), [...]
No, the disk would pretty much always be active, as the "predictive" part kept "predicting" what would be best to (pre-)cache.
[...] and seemed to do stupid things like write out pages to the page file in favor of loading that RAM with "predictive cache". You can see how this would really slow things down.
I could, but I've seen little evidence to suggest it was actually happening.
But, even without this, a "predictive" cache should still put more weight to recently used pages from the active application, especially if there hasn't been any change of foreground app in a while (which is likely with a game). This would result in a user experience which is better by being more responsive, even if it's only skipping a few delays of 100ms.
An in-use foreground app should never be shuffled out of active RAM at all (assuming there's enough of it in the first place) - and, again, I've seen no evidence this actually happens, other than people on Slashdot (and other sites) divining what their computers were doing by watching the hard disk light flicker, or other similarly irrelevant metrics.
Care to enlighten me with your superior knowledge (or just a link to a good article that documents what I'm assuming wrong)? I'm always willing to learn and/or correct existing understanding.
*Any* documentation about UAC would have shown you that your "admin by default and adding blockers" assumption was incorrect, which is how I know you've never bothered to do any research on the topic (outside of maybe reading Slashdot). The Wikipedia page is as good a source as any for an overview.
I know my statement of "trying to do sudo" is a gross over-simplification as the family of features UAC belongs to tries to do more than just that specific sort of privilege management, but a more detailed discussion didn't seem relevant to pointing out that UAC (as most end users see it, which is just the prompts on the "secure desktop") was far from the top sticking point that stopped people and companies upgrading to Vista if they would otherwise have put the time/money down for the upgrade.
UAC is as close to sudo as is possible within the constraints of the (more functional) Windows security system architecture. Probably the biggest difference is that the user's own privileges are elevated, rather than the user assuming the ID and capabilities of a different account.
The point, however, is that they both start from a position of low privileges.
Likewise, a Chinese knockoff of an iPhone would be worth exactly the same as the genuine article, even though it's complete crap. Your system makes no allowance for depreciation, or differences in quality.
While I'm not supporting a centralised model, this is not true - depreciation can be accounted for. Further, quality differences are _inherently_ identifiable because an end product with lower quality must, by definition, have been made with cheaper (=lower quality) parts and/or labour and therefore would cost proportionally less. Indeed, it would be a far superior model for identifying product quality than the free market system, which is little better than "cross your fingers and hope for the best".
I bet AERO did not run very well (or at all?) on that under a grand computer.
Sure it did. Aero's minimum requirements were for a video card about 3-4 years old at the time, and video card technology in the PC world moves quickly and cheaply.
Eliminating AERO is how the speed is achieved.
Incorrect. Using Aero improves performance by offloading the graphics subsystem to the video card.
There lies the true comparison. Macs have always had a resource hungry graphics layer, but the history, even with Mac Classic, is successive releases always improved speed
Here's a question though, for the second part of your comment. You say that you would clarify that US Single Payer would only apply to lawful residents. What about tourists?
Tourists should be covered by their travel insurance. I know that I've never travelled anywhere expecting that country's "Universal Healthcare" to be available to me, and I'm _from_ a country that has such a system.
And how would a tourist go about proving they were here legally? And would the ER still be bound by law (not to mention the physician's ethics) to treat everyone who walked through the door?
One would hope so. The question, is where to send the bill.
UAC is not a bad idea, though it is not IMO particularly well implemented. They tried to so sudo but for the traditional Windows way of working (i.e. admin by default and adding blockers, where the sudo way starts unprivelaged).
If you don't understand how UAC works, you shouldn't try and criticise it.
The problem with Vista, however, is that in 2006 even on a high-end machine it ran like a freaking pig.
Utter rubbish. For under a grand you could get a machine that would run Vista well (really all you needed was 2GB RAM, though dual core helped as well). That wasn't even _close_ to "high end" at the time.
funny that is exactly what happened between OS X releases 10.2, 10.3 10.4, and 10.5 though the amount of speed increase was slightly less.
The difference being that OS X's performance was so dismally bad even on blazingly fast hardware it didn't have anywhere to go but up.
The same was not true of Vista. On the day it was released, you could buy a machine for under a grand that would run it well - something you could most certainly not say about OS X.
Depending on your viewpoint, the software was either vastly bloated because it needed 1024 to run properly (in contrast the Mac OS released that same year ran great on only 256 MB) [...]
If you think *any* version of OS X runs "great" with 256MB of RAM, it's hard to take you seriously complaining about Vista's performance with 512MB.
Superfetch doesn't *sound* terribly impressive, but more thought went into it than you might realize.I'm certainly not saying it can't be duplicated on Linux, but there's obviously a reason it hasn't been, and it's obviously not because the feature is useless. I'm not sure how relevant it is to servers, but from a user perspective, the difference between five seconds and under one second to open a particularly large program is extremely noticeable. Given enough RAM (4GB on my system, of which Superfetch typically is using upwards of 3) you can easily achieve speedups like that.
You've pretty much answered your own question. SuperFetch primarily benefits interactive desktop users, a market Linux does not play a significant part in.
It was only a couple of years ago that one of the biggest criticisms of OS X by Windowsers was "it's a memory hog". Explanations about pre-caching fell on deaf ears.
OSX was not doing this in 2003 as far as I know (and if it was, it was doing it terribly given its dismal overall performance). Do you have some supporting documentation ?
So, when then game went to load the next level and again asked for some temporary extra memory, Vista would have to stop filling the cache, zero out the memory, and seek the hard disk to the right place.
This would account for maybe 50ms of time. Are you seriously trying to suggest half a second would meaningfully impact how quickly the next level in a modern game loads, when it probably has to pull dozens or hundreds of MB of data off a disk at ~20-30MB/sec ?
For a worst case scenario, where there are no optimizations, an average dual-channel DDR3 1600mhz PC would take ~170ms (excluding OS overhead) to free 2GB of RAM.
Where is the data going to come from to fill that 2GB, such that ~170ms is a meaningful delay ?
I prefer the more natural feel of less pointy 1s and less defined 0s
Ever since I got this special BeastlyCable(tm), I've found the colours to be incredibly natural and the sound so much warmer. I attribute this to its special design actually allowing the 2s through, rather than clipping them off because they're "undetectable". Well, I can detect them, just like I could hear how much better my CDs sounded after getting that green marker.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, when you click the maximize button on Windows on a window that is already maximizes, it too shrinks back--the button symbol doesn't reflect this, either. I can't really see a meaningful difference.
Actually, when you maximise a window in Windows, the button icon changes to reflect a different action will occur when you click it again. This has been true since at least Windows 3.0.
Although the license fail to explicitly state it, it appears to be Apple's policy to allow downgrades.
Generally speaking, it is not possible to install a version of MacOS on a Mac older than the one it came with. Apple don't provide the necessary hardware drivers.
A cup of... WHAT?
It's English slang. That it refers to a cup of tea should be both obvious and inescapable.
When someone says they're heading down the pub for a pint, do you get distressed because they don't tack "of beer" on the end ?
Tell me what Obama has changed.
I only have a rough idea of how the US system works, so I'm kind of curious - how many of those does the President even have the ability to "change" ? Are they not things that need to work through layers of politicians before they can be enacted as legislation ?
Vista, on 2GB of RAM and a dual-core Athlon, runs like a paralyzed pig on molasses.
Nope, runs fine (unless you've got some broken hardware somewhere). Indeed, it's mostly about RAM - even on a single core, with 2G of RAM and a non-crap video card, it's quite usable.
Win7, on 4GB and a quad-core i5 (just under a grand, all in all), is in a completely different class.
As it should be, regardless - that hardware is probably around twice as fast.
If they start doing AACS, and forcing encryption over HDMI, then if I buy a new component that meets the new standard; I either need to buy a very expensive receiver, or just watch video's in my room with the wonderful craptacular speakers built into my TV.
Huh ? Cheap, low-end receivers with HDMI support have been around for years.
It would seem like a good option, except that even now people in the educational field disagree whether current tests really do measure accurately what they intend or not. Is a grade of 100/100 an indication that you actually understand, or just that you can parrot the answers? Is an IQ score of 90 an indication of your intellectual prowess or just of your (lack of) ability to fit in the cultural frame where you took the test? There are studies that have shown how otherwise highly intelligent and high performing Asians score low on certain western intelligence tests because they simply look at some problems with a completely different mindset.
Talk about shooting off on a tangent. We're not talking about end of school exams, we're talking about whether worker A can produce product B.
How about a tech-related example. Take two individuals, one with an MSCE and one without. The most you can say about them is that one passed the knowledge test and the other hasn't. It doesn't tell you if the certified individual understands or can apply the concepts. Maybe he is just good at memorizing stuff while the other could have extensive hands-on experience.
If the benchmark is some end result, and that end result is reached, why is the methodology relevant ?
My point is that there is no simple way of evaluating labour quality.
There are very simple ways of evaluating nearly all labour quality. The vast majority of jobs do not require creativity, initiative, advanced skills, or deep thought. They require a typical, easily measurable end result.
I guess the word inherent is causing me trouble. Suppose that you do use material that is brittle for the case. Suppose that it has less space than a nomad and no wireless. You can still come up with a superior product based on factors other than the raw ingredients, i.e. design (intellectual labour) and production (technical/manual labour). Its just not a "black-and-white" issue, there are great many shades involved so to speak. What is "inherently" lower quality materials? Cardboard because it gets wet and becomes useless? Its also lighter, recyclable, cheaper. Dried compost because making products out of literal shit is disgusting? Not everybody will share that value judgement so then you would have to come up with some other 'objective' way of evaluating. See where I'm going with this?
It's irrelevant. The purpose is to assign an objective value to a finished product that does X, not come up with new products to do F, P, Q and Y.
Really? How would you propose to identify lower quality labour? Based on the education level of the workers? On some sort of XBOX live-like ranking? on the country of origin (would German craftsmanship be always more expensive than American)? on the conformance to specs of the end-product?
Uh, how about the most obvious one - by testing them before they're allowed to make anything ?
If the latter, wouldn't it actually be a better quality product if its made with cheaper materials but it still complies with the specs?
No, since with a centralised model those cheaper materials could only be cheaper if they weren't as "good" (for whatever reason). Ie: quality must be inherently lower.
With a well-designed multi-tasking system and cache, you're probably right (although 50ms is 1/20 of a second, not half a second), although with hard disk seek times of 10-15ms (for real-world average hard drives), 50ms might be a low estimate.
Actually I thought 50ms was a pretty high estimate, and that I was being conservative. Certainly, I would expect any delay to be dominated by disk seek time, which itself should never be more than the worst case of 10-15ms for a typical drive. I can't really see why it would be significantly slower than that, as all the other operations that would need to be completed should be around an order of magnitude quicker.
But the experience that people had with Vista SuperFetch is that it thrashed the disk constantly (which it shouldn't...once RAM is loaded, the disk should idle), [...]
No, the disk would pretty much always be active, as the "predictive" part kept "predicting" what would be best to (pre-)cache.
[...] and seemed to do stupid things like write out pages to the page file in favor of loading that RAM with "predictive cache". You can see how this would really slow things down.
I could, but I've seen little evidence to suggest it was actually happening.
But, even without this, a "predictive" cache should still put more weight to recently used pages from the active application, especially if there hasn't been any change of foreground app in a while (which is likely with a game). This would result in a user experience which is better by being more responsive, even if it's only skipping a few delays of 100ms.
An in-use foreground app should never be shuffled out of active RAM at all (assuming there's enough of it in the first place) - and, again, I've seen no evidence this actually happens, other than people on Slashdot (and other sites) divining what their computers were doing by watching the hard disk light flicker, or other similarly irrelevant metrics.
Care to enlighten me with your superior knowledge (or just a link to a good article that documents what I'm assuming wrong)? I'm always willing to learn and/or correct existing understanding.
*Any* documentation about UAC would have shown you that your "admin by default and adding blockers" assumption was incorrect, which is how I know you've never bothered to do any research on the topic (outside of maybe reading Slashdot). The Wikipedia page is as good a source as any for an overview.
I know my statement of "trying to do sudo" is a gross over-simplification as the family of features UAC belongs to tries to do more than just that specific sort of privilege management, but a more detailed discussion didn't seem relevant to pointing out that UAC (as most end users see it, which is just the prompts on the "secure desktop") was far from the top sticking point that stopped people and companies upgrading to Vista if they would otherwise have put the time/money down for the upgrade.
UAC is as close to sudo as is possible within the constraints of the (more functional) Windows security system architecture. Probably the biggest difference is that the user's own privileges are elevated, rather than the user assuming the ID and capabilities of a different account.
The point, however, is that they both start from a position of low privileges.
Likewise, a Chinese knockoff of an iPhone would be worth exactly the same as the genuine article, even though it's complete crap. Your system makes no allowance for depreciation, or differences in quality.
While I'm not supporting a centralised model, this is not true - depreciation can be accounted for. Further, quality differences are _inherently_ identifiable because an end product with lower quality must, by definition, have been made with cheaper (=lower quality) parts and/or labour and therefore would cost proportionally less. Indeed, it would be a far superior model for identifying product quality than the free market system, which is little better than "cross your fingers and hope for the best".
I bet AERO did not run very well (or at all?) on that under a grand computer.
Sure it did. Aero's minimum requirements were for a video card about 3-4 years old at the time, and video card technology in the PC world moves quickly and cheaply.
Eliminating AERO is how the speed is achieved.
Incorrect. Using Aero improves performance by offloading the graphics subsystem to the video card.
There lies the true comparison. Macs have always had a resource hungry graphics layer, but the history, even with Mac Classic, is successive releases always improved speed
This is also not correct.
Here's a question though, for the second part of your comment. You say that you would clarify that US Single Payer would only apply to lawful residents. What about tourists?
Tourists should be covered by their travel insurance. I know that I've never travelled anywhere expecting that country's "Universal Healthcare" to be available to me, and I'm _from_ a country that has such a system.
And how would a tourist go about proving they were here legally? And would the ER still be bound by law (not to mention the physician's ethics) to treat everyone who walked through the door?
One would hope so. The question, is where to send the bill.
UAC is not a bad idea, though it is not IMO particularly well implemented. They tried to so sudo but for the traditional Windows way of working (i.e. admin by default and adding blockers, where the sudo way starts unprivelaged).
If you don't understand how UAC works, you shouldn't try and criticise it.
The problem with Vista, however, is that in 2006 even on a high-end machine it ran like a freaking pig.
Utter rubbish. For under a grand you could get a machine that would run Vista well (really all you needed was 2GB RAM, though dual core helped as well). That wasn't even _close_ to "high end" at the time.
funny that is exactly what happened between OS X releases 10.2, 10.3 10.4, and 10.5 though the amount of speed increase was slightly less.
The difference being that OS X's performance was so dismally bad even on blazingly fast hardware it didn't have anywhere to go but up.
The same was not true of Vista. On the day it was released, you could buy a machine for under a grand that would run it well - something you could most certainly not say about OS X.
Depending on your viewpoint, the software was either vastly bloated because it needed 1024 to run properly (in contrast the Mac OS released that same year ran great on only 256 MB) [...]
If you think *any* version of OS X runs "great" with 256MB of RAM, it's hard to take you seriously complaining about Vista's performance with 512MB.
Superfetch doesn't *sound* terribly impressive, but more thought went into it than you might realize.I'm certainly not saying it can't be duplicated on Linux, but there's obviously a reason it hasn't been, and it's obviously not because the feature is useless. I'm not sure how relevant it is to servers, but from a user perspective, the difference between five seconds and under one second to open a particularly large program is extremely noticeable. Given enough RAM (4GB on my system, of which Superfetch typically is using upwards of 3) you can easily achieve speedups like that.
You've pretty much answered your own question. SuperFetch primarily benefits interactive desktop users, a market Linux does not play a significant part in.
It was only a couple of years ago that one of the biggest criticisms of OS X by Windowsers was "it's a memory hog". Explanations about pre-caching fell on deaf ears.
OSX was not doing this in 2003 as far as I know (and if it was, it was doing it terribly given its dismal overall performance). Do you have some supporting documentation ?
So, when then game went to load the next level and again asked for some temporary extra memory, Vista would have to stop filling the cache, zero out the memory, and seek the hard disk to the right place.
This would account for maybe 50ms of time. Are you seriously trying to suggest half a second would meaningfully impact how quickly the next level in a modern game loads, when it probably has to pull dozens or hundreds of MB of data off a disk at ~20-30MB/sec ?
For a worst case scenario, where there are no optimizations, an average dual-channel DDR3 1600mhz PC would take ~170ms (excluding OS overhead) to free 2GB of RAM.
Where is the data going to come from to fill that 2GB, such that ~170ms is a meaningful delay ?
Mission accomplished?
Sure. Content like movies and songs probably make 95% of their profit in the first few months (and probably 80% in the first few weeks).
I prefer the more natural feel of less pointy 1s and less defined 0s
Ever since I got this special BeastlyCable(tm), I've found the colours to be incredibly natural and the sound so much warmer. I attribute this to its special design actually allowing the 2s through, rather than clipping them off because they're "undetectable". Well, I can detect them, just like I could hear how much better my CDs sounded after getting that green marker.
All it takes is 1 person to figure out how to get around it and it's out on the internet.
If it takes 6 months for that 1 person to figure it out, then the DRM has done its work.
BeOS and Haiku did/do this, but I don't think any other OS has implemented total RAM usage to such a degree.
Er, what ? Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, even OS X have been doing this for over a decade.