Temperature plays little role in errors - just as Google found with disk drives [...]
That's not what Google found at all. They found that in the temperature range typically seen an airconditioned datacentre, temperature is not a major influence on failure rates.. Their data shows that once the temperature rises above about 40 degrees C, failure rates start to increase. 40 degrees is pretty typical for the average home PC, and downright cool in cramped cases like iMacs.
Keep in mind, OS X has had consistantly declining operating requirements, [...]
Please indicate which version of OS X had lower requirements than the one preceding it.
Don't roll out the "but it was faster than the previous version", either. That's moot when the first two versions of OS X were so slow you literally couldn't buy a machine that ran them well, and the couple following them weren't a lot better. No version of Windows has *ever* had the poor performance on contemporary hardware than OS X 10.0 - 10.3 did.
Another thought: Macs seem to retain their value and to have longer useful lives.
There's no technical reason for this. At almost any point in time, you will get a more powerful PC at a given price point (the month or so after a new Mac model is released can be an exception), and for most of the last decade, Windows has been *much* friendly to lower-end machines than MacOS.
The main reason, in my opinion, is because of the much lower buy-in point of PCs. A decent, basic Mac setup (2Ghz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, 20" LCD, keyboard+mouse)is going to cost around US$800. For a PC, it's more like $500. When you pay significantly more for something - and particularly when you would to replace it - you make it last longer.
"Open Source" misses the point. Being able to *see* it is of little use if people that receive it are not also able to modify it, release the modified versions, use it for any purpose, and freely copy it.
This is simply not true. For most developers, probably 90% of the benefits of Open Source come from simply being able to see and modify it. For most users, probably 99% of the benefits come from it being free.
Oh, please. The collapse of the banking sector's not fraud. Recklessness, certainly, but don't attribute too much to malice when there's plenty of stupidity to go around.:P
In what way is convincing people who could never pay back a loan that they could, then dicing up those bad loans into little bits, and reselling them as good loans, not fraud ?
"Most people" only *do* pay about $50. Maybe $120-ish (comparable with the most well-known alternative) if they're upgrading rather than buying a new PC.
Very, very few people buy full retail copies of Windows.
I was not aware that continual hardware upgrades now cost one dollar. A US dollar, at that.
When you already have the hardware anyway - as most people do - then the difference in utilisation usually is that small.
It's not about intellectual masturbation. Far from it. What an insult. It's about efficiency over sloppiness.
But what measure of efficiency ? You are concentrating on trying to use as little hardware power as possible, which - given it's typically the cheapest aspect of any system - is rarely the best use of resources. Most people are far more interested in being "efficient" by having a product sooner, or making it easier to debug, or increasing its capabilities, or making it scale well, than they are about making it run on the slowest hardware possible, because all those things are a more efficient use of time and money.
I agree with you, but only because they didn't bother to steal what goes along with the dock now in OS X.
Meh. Expose is very pretty, but I don't find it especially functional once the scale is non-trivial. Particularly, when there are a lot of very similar windows open (eg: Terminals, mostly-text documents), it becomes nearly impossible to identify specific windows without "scrubbing" - combined with the propensity of the algorithm to move windows around in the zoomed out view, and in my experience it's measurably worse.
I have three screens and keep at least 40-50 windows open at once. I've tried Expose, and it just doesn't work. The good old Windows Taskbar, expanded to 3 levels high, with grouping (but not collapsing) enabled, parked on the centre screen, is the best task switching environment I've used.
I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price.
But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.
But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.
Because building and maintaining any remotely reliable IT infrastructure is expensive and requires expertise that is, for most companies, utterly irrelevant to their core business.
Who was it that has congratulated the software industry for consistently undoing all the amazing hardware advances of the past decades by responding to bigger memories and faster processors by making the software use more memory and cpu cycles?
That would be all the people for whom software is a tool, not intellectual masturbation. The people who consider "how soon can you deliver", "how much will it cost" and "how long can you maintain it" substantially more important than "will it run on my 10 year old computer".
SxS is a major step forward in this technique, and promises to lead to major increases in memory sales in the near future. And all it took was realizing that a practice that had been considered sloppy wastefulness of memory was actually a valuable new feature for backwards compatibility.
For the vast majority of people, backwards compatibility is far, far more useful than saving a dollar's worth of RAM and CPU cycles.
The new taskbar alone is a step forward. The old model with the labels just doesn't scale to more than a few windows.
Eh ? It's "new" version that scales poorly for multitasking, for the same reason that OS X's Dock does - it makes switching from one arbitrary window to another a slower and more tedious operation.
Fortunately you can still disable the productivity-killing "collapse all these windows into one button" UI misfeature that debuted with XP, but given where Windows 7 has started heading, I'm concerned that I won't be able to in the future.
It must, because no liberal has ever told a lie in the entire history of the world (and, of course, everyone everywhere is either a liberal or a (spit) conservative. There are no other possibilities).
Well, in Australia, the Liberals _are_ the conservatives...
A well made laptop needs a "port replicator" or "docking station" like a fish needs a bicycle.
Can you direct me towards a laptop capable of driving two 30" LCDs without a docking station ?
Can you explain to me why I should have to go through the annoyance of plugging in a half dozen cables every time I sit down at one of the three desks I regularly work at ?
A well made a laptop doesn't need a docking station ? Any laptop that _doesn't_ have an option for a docking station is a consumer toy.
You have to pay the CAs, though. How is a small one-man operation coding up some Windows-based free software going to afford the hundreds of dollars needed to fund such a signing?
Same way he afforded the "hundreds of dollars" needed to buy the hardware and software he's using ?
Microsoft doesn't even sell media playback devices. They sell an operating system.
...For playback devices (ie: Media Centre PCs).
I don't think they would sell any less copies if they couldn't play some new fangled high def video format.
They'd sell a hell of a lot fewer copies to people who were buying it to play back stuff sold in that "new fangled high def video format". Would *you* buy a playback device that couldn't play back the stuff you were buying ?
I think BluRay depends a lot more on Windows than the other way around.
You're kidding, right ? Probably 99% of Blu-ray players are either standalone appliances or PS3s, and you think Microsoft are going to be able to have an influence on the sellers of Blu-ray content ?
Oh, yeah, just like every other device. That's why Microsoft has this whole article on how DRM limits you. No more than any other device... I can rip my CD's on other systems. I rip it the Windows Media way? DRM.
Only if you choose to put it there. There's nothing stopping you ripping a CD on Windows - even with WMP - that doesn't use DRM.
Perfectly legal use, Microsoft just chose to block it because they respect the media companies more than you.
Microsoft aren't blocking anything. They're obeying the DRM restrictions that the person who created the content put there.
Microsoft has gone out of their way to add additional DRM that is NOT REQUIRED BY THE FUCKING SPECS.
On what planet does MS have aa meager presence in the market?
Microsoft are a practically nonexistant entity in the media playback device market. Unless you think the world's DVD players have all suddenly been replaced with Media Centre PCs.
I have read that Vista will disable digital sound output under some conditions. It should not be up to MS to decide how sound may be output under any conditions, assuming the hardware allows for it.
And it's not. It's up to the owner of the person who provided the media.
Frankly, if MS had told the MPAA to F-off, the MPAA would back down. Like it or not, Windows is the home PC market. If Blu-ray won't play on a Windows machine, it's a dead format.
Rubbish. The vast, vast majority of media is consumed via standalone appliances (settop boxes, Blu-ray players, etc) or consoles like the PS3, not PCs.
Without the DRM, you'd be able to do EVERYTHING with those formats.
Not if they're DRM-encumbered, you can't.
Windows imposes no more restrictions that you would have on any other playback device.
It has royally screwed up the infrastructure of Windows, and made your computer less of your computer and more one that's only allowed to do what some company says it can do. Even if you never play a single Blu-Ray disc, you still have to deal with the bullshit drivers that make Creative sound cards useless. Isn't that awesome?
It's made no meaningful difference to Window at all. Either you don't have DRM-encumbered media, in which case the DRM infrastructure in Windows is inactive and irrelevant, or you do have DRM-encumbered media, and the DRM infrastructure in Windows is doing exactly the same thing as the DRM infrastructure in your other $PLAYER is.
Here's a thought. What if MS refused to put in any DRM for BluRay.
Then people would go and buy a $200 Bluray player and Microsoft would have even less than the meagre presence in the market they do today.
Or, build some software BluRay player for windows that either used a USB dongle to do the decoding, so that they keys never existed in software at all, and Windows wouldn't need support for any special DRM modules in and of itself.
But the DRM support for Windows is irrelevant, unless you have DRM-encumbered media (at which point it becomes A Good Thing).
Did OpenSSH ever fix the performance limitation on fast networks (>100Mbps)?
This problem isn't relevant to high-speed networks, it's relevant to high-speed, high-latency networks (ie: 50Mb+ WANs). On a Gb LAN, it's not going to meaningfully bottleneck you.
(It affects us quite badly, since we shuffle around about 500GB/day between our US, Australian and Europe offices - though we actually get around it with dmscp2, not the patch linked above.)
This is why you don't allow privilege escalation without a root password, and you don't commonly have parts of the system that need it. Even stuff like installing out of repositories can be done without escalating the user.
Sorry, "type your password here to see porn" isn't going to make a meaningful difference.
If users only typed that in their root password once a month or less, users are unlikely to type it in in some random circumstance. You just have to have a moderately intelligent sort of 'sudo'.
Frequent escalation prompts are almost completely an application level issue.
Because local escalation exploits of vanishingly rare on Linux, and so common on Windows that they essentially cannot be called 'exploits' anymore, but actual features of the OS.
That's not what the advisories on secunia.com would suggest.
And many applications out there have to run as admin anyway, making any sort of 'exploit' pointless. Window's inability to actually practice any sort of account separation is the problem here. (No matter which is better or worse 'in theory'.)
It's an application problem, not a Windows problem.
Yes, if Linux got more popular, more malware would be written for it, but user malware is easy to fix. System malware is not. Thanks to the dominate OS making the first incredibly easy to become the latter, the PC security community has mostly failed to realize or understand these two entities are not the same thing. (Like your 'nuke the machine' recommendation.) Hence their constant statement of 'If Linux was popular, viruses would be targeted at it', which is true, but irrelevant...viruses are easy to fix when the antivirus is root, and the virus is not. Malware is easy to find when it's launching itself from.bashrc and is a normal process.
Except that won't be what happens, nor is there any reason to think it is.
Now, of course, privilege escalation exploits would, in fact, show up on Linux, and viruses would use them until they were fixed. That can't be stopped. But occasional weaknesses are not the same as Windows constant inability to get it right ever, along with, ironically as they fix that, their dumb new UAC system, which teaches users to allow processes to do whatever they want.
UAC behaves identically to sudo prompts in Linux distros like Ubuntu, and OS X. It prompts in the same scenarios and for the same reasons.
Congratulations. One example. Every vendor that I'm aware of has (at least) one.
Customers rejected Vista; here is one of the hundreds of articles about that: Corporate America's rejection of Vista: Many companies delay or denounce Microsoft's flagship product.
Except there was nothing particularly unusual in the actual reception for Vista (the media circus and FUD surrounding it is another matter). Essentially the same thing happened with Windows 2000 and XP - many companies skipped 2000 completely, and/or only moved to XP once SP2 was available (which could feasibly have been an independent release, not a Service Pack).
One magazine collected 210,000 signatures against adoption of Windows Vista and for keeping Windows XP: The campaign to save Windows XP.
Wow. 210,000 "signatures" in an online petition. Heady stuff indeed.
The fact is that we are not seeing the kind of weaknesses in Linux, OS X, or BSD that are commonly found in Windows. Windows XP was an expensive hassle for us until SP2.
The fact is that none of those OSes have neither the user demographic, nor profile, of Windows.
Here is an interesting fact: The latest version of Firefox, and all the versions before it, have a bug which causes Firefox to crash when there are too many windows and tabs. That bug corrupts Windows; sometimes Windows crashes, also. It is always necessary to re-start the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Temperature plays little role in errors - just as Google found with disk drives [...]
That's not what Google found at all. They found that in the temperature range typically seen an airconditioned datacentre, temperature is not a major influence on failure rates.. Their data shows that once the temperature rises above about 40 degrees C, failure rates start to increase. 40 degrees is pretty typical for the average home PC, and downright cool in cramped cases like iMacs.
Keep in mind, OS X has had consistantly declining operating requirements, [...]
Please indicate which version of OS X had lower requirements than the one preceding it.
Don't roll out the "but it was faster than the previous version", either. That's moot when the first two versions of OS X were so slow you literally couldn't buy a machine that ran them well, and the couple following them weren't a lot better. No version of Windows has *ever* had the poor performance on contemporary hardware than OS X 10.0 - 10.3 did.
Another thought: Macs seem to retain their value and to have longer useful lives.
There's no technical reason for this. At almost any point in time, you will get a more powerful PC at a given price point (the month or so after a new Mac model is released can be an exception), and for most of the last decade, Windows has been *much* friendly to lower-end machines than MacOS.
The main reason, in my opinion, is because of the much lower buy-in point of PCs. A decent, basic Mac setup (2Ghz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, 20" LCD, keyboard+mouse)is going to cost around US$800. For a PC, it's more like $500. When you pay significantly more for something - and particularly when you would to replace it - you make it last longer.
"Open Source" misses the point. Being able to *see* it is of little use if people that receive it are not also able to modify it, release the modified versions, use it for any purpose, and freely copy it.
This is simply not true. For most developers, probably 90% of the benefits of Open Source come from simply being able to see and modify it. For most users, probably 99% of the benefits come from it being free.
Oh, please. The collapse of the banking sector's not fraud. Recklessness, certainly, but don't attribute too much to malice when there's plenty of stupidity to go around. :P
In what way is convincing people who could never pay back a loan that they could, then dicing up those bad loans into little bits, and reselling them as good loans, not fraud ?
"Most people" only *do* pay about $50. Maybe $120-ish (comparable with the most well-known alternative) if they're upgrading rather than buying a new PC.
Very, very few people buy full retail copies of Windows.
Dell's machine are BTX. It's standard, just uncommon.
I was not aware that continual hardware upgrades now cost one dollar. A US dollar, at that.
When you already have the hardware anyway - as most people do - then the difference in utilisation usually is that small.
It's not about intellectual masturbation. Far from it. What an insult. It's about efficiency over sloppiness.
But what measure of efficiency ? You are concentrating on trying to use as little hardware power as possible, which - given it's typically the cheapest aspect of any system - is rarely the best use of resources. Most people are far more interested in being "efficient" by having a product sooner, or making it easier to debug, or increasing its capabilities, or making it scale well, than they are about making it run on the slowest hardware possible, because all those things are a more efficient use of time and money.
I agree with you, but only because they didn't bother to steal what goes along with the dock now in OS X.
Meh. Expose is very pretty, but I don't find it especially functional once the scale is non-trivial. Particularly, when there are a lot of very similar windows open (eg: Terminals, mostly-text documents), it becomes nearly impossible to identify specific windows without "scrubbing" - combined with the propensity of the algorithm to move windows around in the zoomed out view, and in my experience it's measurably worse.
I have three screens and keep at least 40-50 windows open at once. I've tried Expose, and it just doesn't work. The good old Windows Taskbar, expanded to 3 levels high, with grouping (but not collapsing) enabled, parked on the centre screen, is the best task switching environment I've used.
I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price.
But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.
But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.
Because building and maintaining any remotely reliable IT infrastructure is expensive and requires expertise that is, for most companies, utterly irrelevant to their core business.
Who was it that has congratulated the software industry for consistently undoing all the amazing hardware advances of the past decades by responding to bigger memories and faster processors by making the software use more memory and cpu cycles?
That would be all the people for whom software is a tool, not intellectual masturbation. The people who consider "how soon can you deliver", "how much will it cost" and "how long can you maintain it" substantially more important than "will it run on my 10 year old computer".
SxS is a major step forward in this technique, and promises to lead to major increases in memory sales in the near future. And all it took was realizing that a practice that had been considered sloppy wastefulness of memory was actually a valuable new feature for backwards compatibility.
For the vast majority of people, backwards compatibility is far, far more useful than saving a dollar's worth of RAM and CPU cycles.
The new taskbar alone is a step forward. The old model with the labels just doesn't scale to more than a few windows.
Eh ? It's "new" version that scales poorly for multitasking, for the same reason that OS X's Dock does - it makes switching from one arbitrary window to another a slower and more tedious operation.
Fortunately you can still disable the productivity-killing "collapse all these windows into one button" UI misfeature that debuted with XP, but given where Windows 7 has started heading, I'm concerned that I won't be able to in the future.
It must, because no liberal has ever told a lie in the entire history of the world (and, of course, everyone everywhere is either a liberal or a (spit) conservative. There are no other possibilities).
Well, in Australia, the Liberals _are_ the conservatives...
A well made laptop needs a "port replicator" or "docking station" like a fish needs a bicycle.
Can you direct me towards a laptop capable of driving two 30" LCDs without a docking station ?
Can you explain to me why I should have to go through the annoyance of plugging in a half dozen cables every time I sit down at one of the three desks I regularly work at ?
A well made a laptop doesn't need a docking station ? Any laptop that _doesn't_ have an option for a docking station is a consumer toy.
You have to pay the CAs, though. How is a small one-man operation coding up some Windows-based free software going to afford the hundreds of dollars needed to fund such a signing?
Same way he afforded the "hundreds of dollars" needed to buy the hardware and software he's using ?
Microsoft doesn't even sell media playback devices. They sell an operating system.
...For playback devices (ie: Media Centre PCs).
I don't think they would sell any less copies if they couldn't play some new fangled high def video format.
They'd sell a hell of a lot fewer copies to people who were buying it to play back stuff sold in that "new fangled high def video format". Would *you* buy a playback device that couldn't play back the stuff you were buying ?
I think BluRay depends a lot more on Windows than the other way around.
You're kidding, right ? Probably 99% of Blu-ray players are either standalone appliances or PS3s, and you think Microsoft are going to be able to have an influence on the sellers of Blu-ray content ?
Oh, yeah, just like every other device. That's why Microsoft has this whole article on how DRM limits you. No more than any other device... I can rip my CD's on other systems. I rip it the Windows Media way? DRM.
Only if you choose to put it there. There's nothing stopping you ripping a CD on Windows - even with WMP - that doesn't use DRM.
Perfectly legal use, Microsoft just chose to block it because they respect the media companies more than you.
Microsoft aren't blocking anything. They're obeying the DRM restrictions that the person who created the content put there.
Microsoft has gone out of their way to add additional DRM that is NOT REQUIRED BY THE FUCKING SPECS.
Like what ? List them.
On what planet does MS have aa meager presence in the market?
Microsoft are a practically nonexistant entity in the media playback device market. Unless you think the world's DVD players have all suddenly been replaced with Media Centre PCs.
I have read that Vista will disable digital sound output under some conditions. It should not be up to MS to decide how sound may be output under any conditions, assuming the hardware allows for it.
And it's not. It's up to the owner of the person who provided the media.
Frankly, if MS had told the MPAA to F-off, the MPAA would back down. Like it or not, Windows is the home PC market. If Blu-ray won't play on a Windows machine, it's a dead format.
Rubbish. The vast, vast majority of media is consumed via standalone appliances (settop boxes, Blu-ray players, etc) or consoles like the PS3, not PCs.
Without the DRM, you'd be able to do EVERYTHING with those formats.
Not if they're DRM-encumbered, you can't.
Windows imposes no more restrictions that you would have on any other playback device.
It has royally screwed up the infrastructure of Windows, and made your computer less of your computer and more one that's only allowed to do what some company says it can do. Even if you never play a single Blu-Ray disc, you still have to deal with the bullshit drivers that make Creative sound cards useless. Isn't that awesome?
It's made no meaningful difference to Window at all. Either you don't have DRM-encumbered media, in which case the DRM infrastructure in Windows is inactive and irrelevant, or you do have DRM-encumbered media, and the DRM infrastructure in Windows is doing exactly the same thing as the DRM infrastructure in your other $PLAYER is.
Here's a thought. What if MS refused to put in any DRM for BluRay.
Then people would go and buy a $200 Bluray player and Microsoft would have even less than the meagre presence in the market they do today.
Or, build some software BluRay player for windows that either used a USB dongle to do the decoding, so that they keys never existed in software at all, and Windows wouldn't need support for any special DRM modules in and of itself.
But the DRM support for Windows is irrelevant, unless you have DRM-encumbered media (at which point it becomes A Good Thing).
Did OpenSSH ever fix the performance limitation on fast networks (>100Mbps)?
This problem isn't relevant to high-speed networks, it's relevant to high-speed, high-latency networks (ie: 50Mb+ WANs). On a Gb LAN, it's not going to meaningfully bottleneck you.
(It affects us quite badly, since we shuffle around about 500GB/day between our US, Australian and Europe offices - though we actually get around it with dmscp2, not the patch linked above.)
This is why you don't allow privilege escalation without a root password, and you don't commonly have parts of the system that need it. Even stuff like installing out of repositories can be done without escalating the user.
Sorry, "type your password here to see porn" isn't going to make a meaningful difference.
If users only typed that in their root password once a month or less, users are unlikely to type it in in some random circumstance. You just have to have a moderately intelligent sort of 'sudo'.
Frequent escalation prompts are almost completely an application level issue.
Because local escalation exploits of vanishingly rare on Linux, and so common on Windows that they essentially cannot be called 'exploits' anymore, but actual features of the OS.
That's not what the advisories on secunia.com would suggest.
And many applications out there have to run as admin anyway, making any sort of 'exploit' pointless. Window's inability to actually practice any sort of account separation is the problem here. (No matter which is better or worse 'in theory'.)
It's an application problem, not a Windows problem.
Yes, if Linux got more popular, more malware would be written for it, but user malware is easy to fix. System malware is not. Thanks to the dominate OS making the first incredibly easy to become the latter, the PC security community has mostly failed to realize or understand these two entities are not the same thing. (Like your 'nuke the machine' recommendation.) Hence their constant statement of 'If Linux was popular, viruses would be targeted at it', which is true, but irrelevant...viruses are easy to fix when the antivirus is root, and the virus is not. Malware is easy to find when it's launching itself from .bashrc and is a normal process.
Except that won't be what happens, nor is there any reason to think it is.
Now, of course, privilege escalation exploits would, in fact, show up on Linux, and viruses would use them until they were fixed. That can't be stopped. But occasional weaknesses are not the same as Windows constant inability to get it right ever, along with, ironically as they fix that, their dumb new UAC system, which teaches users to allow processes to do whatever they want.
UAC behaves identically to sudo prompts in Linux distros like Ubuntu, and OS X. It prompts in the same scenarios and for the same reasons.
Unless there are viruses around that attack random IP's. There's no biology equivalent to that.
Huh ? What do you think happens when someone sneezes on a train ?
Windows Vista was released before it was ready.
Congratulations. One example. Every vendor that I'm aware of has (at least) one.
Customers rejected Vista; here is one of the hundreds of articles about that: Corporate America's rejection of Vista: Many companies delay or denounce Microsoft's flagship product.
Except there was nothing particularly unusual in the actual reception for Vista (the media circus and FUD surrounding it is another matter). Essentially the same thing happened with Windows 2000 and XP - many companies skipped 2000 completely, and/or only moved to XP once SP2 was available (which could feasibly have been an independent release, not a Service Pack).
One magazine collected 210,000 signatures against adoption of Windows Vista and for keeping Windows XP: The campaign to save Windows XP.
Wow. 210,000 "signatures" in an online petition. Heady stuff indeed.
The fact is that we are not seeing the kind of weaknesses in Linux, OS X, or BSD that are commonly found in Windows. Windows XP was an expensive hassle for us until SP2.
The fact is that none of those OSes have neither the user demographic, nor profile, of Windows.
Here is an interesting fact: The latest version of Firefox, and all the versions before it, have a bug which causes Firefox to crash when there are too many windows and tabs. That bug corrupts Windows; sometimes Windows crashes, also. It is always necessary to re-start the computer.
Link ?