Moore's Law will kill them over this. A year from now 160GB drives will cost what 80GB cost today, and if this manufacturer isn't producing larger, higher resolution screen laptops at the same price, someone else will be doing it and eating their lunch.
A year from now these machines will happily run Vista, so Microsoft don't have anything to worry about there.
The Mac's smoked the PCs in pretty much everything, despite the PCs having more RAM. More telling was that the Macs ran Vista faster under Bootcamp than the PCs did.
Thus identifying that the problem wasn't Vista and the PCs weren't as "similar" as they implied.
When will MS begin to put the interests of their customers first?
When their customers' interests start losing them sales, same as every other company.
If a linux community can do that, why can't they? Are they admitting that the open-source community which they deride so is capable of something they are not?
Because "a Linux community" doesn't have to worry about things like profitability.
No, it's correct. PAE support is disabled in certain versions of Windows , purely to avoid problematic hardware and software.
Meanwhile that exact same hardware works properly in several other operating systems that support PAE.
But not using the same drivers, obviously. Amazing how when you take out the component where the problem is, the problem disappears, isn't it ?
It is poorly written software in terms of how the operating system interfaces with that hardware.
Microsoft generally don't control how the operating system interfaces with the hardware, because they don't write the drivers.
Microsoft define how the parameters of how the drivers must work even if third parties write them.
However, they have no way of preventing the third parties from "doing it wrong".
They have had over a decade to get it right. It is not the IBM PC anymore and Microsoft define the platform themselves.
Oh, bullshit. The idea that Microsoft have some sort of overbearing influence on the PC architecture as a whole is so stupid, it doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Although it's not quite as idiotic as the suggestion that Microsoft (paraphrasing) 'doesn't get it' about PAE when they have several products that support it. Simple fact is that home PCs with 4G or more of RAM are still uncommon, even today. By the time they are common enough for it to matter, people will be using 64 bit Windows and the problem simply won't exist.
Claiming Slashdot has an irrational hatred of Microsoft is very facile and for some reason seems to be a rather popular thing to do nowadays (there's generally at least three comments to that effect on every MS-related article), but have you ever stopped to think that maybe people have a real *reason* for their dislike?
The vast majority of criticism of Vista is nothing more than ignorance. Most of what's left is flat-out lying, and a tiny, tiny minority of criticism found on Slashdot is actually valid (and usually an issue being actively worked on, if it hasn't been fixed already).
There is no reason software companies, especially one as large and as rich as Microsoft can't get it right on the first go.
Sure there is. Fundamentally, their product depends on third-party hardware and software to work. Since they have next to no control over the quality of said hardware and software and since the typically ignorant end user will simply blame the OS (if not the whole computer), then the perception is everything that goes wrong when using a Windows PC is Microsoft's fault.
One of the most obvious examples of this is the historical blaming of "Windows" for application General Protection Faults.
The real point where 32 bit Vista annoys me is that the minimum RAM is so close to the maximum RAM. People will point the blame elsewhere but it really comes down to Micorsofts incomplete support of every x86 processor since the Pentium Pro.
No, it comes down to buggy hardware and software. All "non home" versions of Windows support PAE just fine. However, since "home" machines are typically saddled with shitty hardware, accompanied by even shittier software, that simply breaks when something crazy like PAE comes along, the option is disabled on those versions.
XP was considered bloat and XP doubled the minimum requirements from 2000 Pro.
Time between Windows 2000 and Windows XP: 18 months. Or, roughly, the time it takes computer power to double.
Vista quadruples the minimum XP processing requirement, octuples XP minimum RAM, decuples the minimum HDD free space, and adds a new requirement for video cards.
Time from XP to Vista: 6 years or 72 months. Approximately 4 iterations of the "doubling" principle. Hardware today is on the order of 10-15x faster and bigger than it was when XP was released, not to mention cheaper (ie: price points have reduced).
You can run Vista well on a PC that costs less than US$500. With relatively minor upgrades, it will run useably on PCs up to about 7 years old. How, in any way, is that unreasonable ?
But as a computer science graduate and a UNIX user who cares a lot about operating system design, I think Vista is a huge step up.
The "design" of Vista doesn't differ significantly from the design of Windows NT 3.1 when it was released 15 years ago. Especially from a security perspective.
Something I would expect a "computer science graduate" to be well aware of.
By design it fuzzes your video if not on HDCP compliant hardware and it detects media of a fairly broad type.
It does nothing of the sort.
I will never understand why people just flat-out _lie_ about this sort of thing. What's the point ? Why do you care so much about what OS *other people* use that you want to lie in a pointless attempt to try and dissuade them ?
Vista likely runs fine an a $2000 desktop. Perhaps even a $1000 one. (I made a amd X2 6000 with 4 GB of memory for that.) However, a typical consumer unit is one your mother bought for $500 and thinks should be fine. If she waited a year or two to buy a vista computer: it would meet the real-world requirements.
Bullshit.
US$450 buys you dual cores and 2G of RAM. That runs Vista fine.
No, it's not. Vista is Windows NT 6.0. XP was Windows NT 5.1. It's no different than going from some Linux 2.4 based distro to some Linux 2.6 based distro.
There's still NOTHING in XP I can't also do in Visa [...]
Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it.
No, you won't. A US$450 PC runs Vista fine.
Seriously, when the most important factor in Vista's (like OS X's) performance is RAM, and 2G of RAM costs under US$50, in no way do you need "a pretty good system". The PC necessary to run Vista well hasn't been "pretty good" for years.
Better to investigate than not to investigate and have the entire internet be shut down.
Investigate what ?
The "entire internet" isn't going to get shut down, no matter what - and especially not over something as petty and irrelevant as minors and adults hanging around in the same forums.
As to x86, the major software vendor's complete failure to move platforms (something which that other, different, company managed twice) [...]
What an idiotic comparison. What would the business benefit of moving to another architecture have been ?
(We'll ignore for a second that the "major software vendor's" product has been sold for five or six different architectures (depending on how you count) and internally ported to several others.)
Why would an adult want to access the kiddie intraweb?
Two immediately obvious examples, from both ends of the spectrum:
* Paedophiles
* Helicopter parents
Any adult who is trying to access these sorts of site should be investigated immediately.
Indeed. Heaven forbid parents be able to check up on what their children are doing (or, even crazier, offer some parental guidance), grandparents keep in contact with their grandchildren and an 18 year old date a 17 year old. Imagine the horrifyingly chaotic society that would spawn.
A safe internet, designed for minors to access. This internet should require adult verification from their parents allowing their children to access the sites.
How do we stop the bad people accessing the kiddies' intarwebs ?
Something has to be done.
Indeed. Parents need to start taking some fucking responsibility.
That's fine! Why? If file sharing becomes legal, then we wouldn't need the GPL anymore because closed-source would cease to be economically feasible anyway.
Sure it would. Software vendors would just resort to implementing more effective anti-copying facilities in hardware (dongles, TPM).
Basic tasks like mastering a cd require examining whatever shiny looking and unusable GUI they came up with.
As opposed to examining some unusable GUI an OSS developer slapped together with what last week's trendy widget library was ? Or having to figure out the cryptic commandline switches to some CLI app (assuming you can even figure out what the app even is in the first place) ?
The Eee has been "successful" in small circles. I sincerely doubt that the Eee has even remotely penetrated the notebook market worldwide, in terms of marketshare percentage.
The Eee accounts for about 1% of worldwide laptop sales - so bugger all.
At the moment, Microsoft are freaking out about Apple. The Eee isn't (yet) worth their time to worry.
More importantly, by the time it is, it will have sufficient power to run Vista without a problem, thus negating one of Linux's supposed major advantages. By the end of this year - halfway through next at the latest - I expect to see an Eee shipping with a dual core CPU, capable of taking up to 4G of RAM, and with a 32G SSD, for about the same price as it is today.
If "the people" are clamouring for Linux machines, as Slashbots would have us believe, then why would vendors care about relatively high Windows OEM prices when their Linux machines would be marching out the door in droves ?
I didn't half-ass it, I took my time to learn how it works, [...]
Then I received a hard lesson in what it means to say that JBOD has a failure rate multiplicatively proportional to that of each individual drive. And, surprise surprise, LVM amounts to nothing more than fancy OS-level JBOD, without even the performance boost of a proper RAID controller.
To take speed limits as your example, speed limits aren't there because they really expect everyone to drive below that speed. However, if the speed limit is 55 and people are driving faster than is safe, lowering it to 45 will lower their average speed.
Studies have generally found the posted speed limit has very little impact on how fast most people drive, unless it's a) extremely inappropriate for the location and b) brutally enforced.
Speed "limits" should be advisory and exceeding them should never be an offense in and of itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Moore's Law will kill them over this. A year from now 160GB drives will cost what 80GB cost today, and if this manufacturer isn't producing larger, higher resolution screen laptops at the same price, someone else will be doing it and eating their lunch.
A year from now these machines will happily run Vista, so Microsoft don't have anything to worry about there.
The Mac's smoked the PCs in pretty much everything, despite the PCs having more RAM. More telling was that the Macs ran Vista faster under Bootcamp than the PCs did.
Thus identifying that the problem wasn't Vista and the PCs weren't as "similar" as they implied.
When will MS begin to put the interests of their customers first?
When their customers' interests start losing them sales, same as every other company.
If a linux community can do that, why can't they? Are they admitting that the open-source community which they deride so is capable of something they are not?
Because "a Linux community" doesn't have to worry about things like profitability.
Incorrect.
No, it's correct. PAE support is disabled in certain versions of Windows , purely to avoid problematic hardware and software.
Meanwhile that exact same hardware works properly in several other operating systems that support PAE.
But not using the same drivers, obviously. Amazing how when you take out the component where the problem is, the problem disappears, isn't it ?
It is poorly written software in terms of how the operating system interfaces with that hardware.
Microsoft generally don't control how the operating system interfaces with the hardware, because they don't write the drivers.
Microsoft define how the parameters of how the drivers must work even if third parties write them.
However, they have no way of preventing the third parties from "doing it wrong".
They have had over a decade to get it right. It is not the IBM PC anymore and Microsoft define the platform themselves.
Oh, bullshit. The idea that Microsoft have some sort of overbearing influence on the PC architecture as a whole is so stupid, it doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Although it's not quite as idiotic as the suggestion that Microsoft (paraphrasing) 'doesn't get it' about PAE when they have several products that support it. Simple fact is that home PCs with 4G or more of RAM are still uncommon, even today. By the time they are common enough for it to matter, people will be using 64 bit Windows and the problem simply won't exist.
Claiming Slashdot has an irrational hatred of Microsoft is very facile and for some reason seems to be a rather popular thing to do nowadays (there's generally at least three comments to that effect on every MS-related article), but have you ever stopped to think that maybe people have a real *reason* for their dislike?
The vast majority of criticism of Vista is nothing more than ignorance. Most of what's left is flat-out lying, and a tiny, tiny minority of criticism found on Slashdot is actually valid (and usually an issue being actively worked on, if it hasn't been fixed already).
There is no reason software companies, especially one as large and as rich as Microsoft can't get it right on the first go.
Sure there is. Fundamentally, their product depends on third-party hardware and software to work. Since they have next to no control over the quality of said hardware and software and since the typically ignorant end user will simply blame the OS (if not the whole computer), then the perception is everything that goes wrong when using a Windows PC is Microsoft's fault.
One of the most obvious examples of this is the historical blaming of "Windows" for application General Protection Faults.
The real point where 32 bit Vista annoys me is that the minimum RAM is so close to the maximum RAM. People will point the blame elsewhere but it really comes down to Micorsofts incomplete support of every x86 processor since the Pentium Pro.
No, it comes down to buggy hardware and software. All "non home" versions of Windows support PAE just fine. However, since "home" machines are typically saddled with shitty hardware, accompanied by even shittier software, that simply breaks when something crazy like PAE comes along, the option is disabled on those versions.
XP was considered bloat and XP doubled the minimum requirements from 2000 Pro.
Time between Windows 2000 and Windows XP: 18 months. Or, roughly, the time it takes computer power to double.
Vista quadruples the minimum XP processing requirement, octuples XP minimum RAM, decuples the minimum HDD free space, and adds a new requirement for video cards.
Time from XP to Vista: 6 years or 72 months. Approximately 4 iterations of the "doubling" principle. Hardware today is on the order of 10-15x faster and bigger than it was when XP was released, not to mention cheaper (ie: price points have reduced).
You can run Vista well on a PC that costs less than US$500. With relatively minor upgrades, it will run useably on PCs up to about 7 years old. How, in any way, is that unreasonable ?
But as a computer science graduate and a UNIX user who cares a lot about operating system design, I think Vista is a huge step up.
The "design" of Vista doesn't differ significantly from the design of Windows NT 3.1 when it was released 15 years ago. Especially from a security perspective.
Something I would expect a "computer science graduate" to be well aware of.
Just my thoughts...
For those who have ever wondered what a "strawman argument" is, those "thoughts" are a textbook example.
By design it fuzzes your video if not on HDCP compliant hardware and it detects media of a fairly broad type.
It does nothing of the sort.
I will never understand why people just flat-out _lie_ about this sort of thing. What's the point ? Why do you care so much about what OS *other people* use that you want to lie in a pointless attempt to try and dissuade them ?
Vista likely runs fine an a $2000 desktop. Perhaps even a $1000 one. (I made a amd X2 6000 with 4 GB of memory for that.) However, a typical consumer unit is one your mother bought for $500 and thinks should be fine. If she waited a year or two to buy a vista computer: it would meet the real-world requirements.
Bullshit.
US$450 buys you dual cores and 2G of RAM. That runs Vista fine.
Vista is a whole new, from the ground up OS.
No, it's not. Vista is Windows NT 6.0. XP was Windows NT 5.1. It's no different than going from some Linux 2.4 based distro to some Linux 2.6 based distro.
There's still NOTHING in XP I can't also do in Visa [...]
Easily run as a non-Admin user.
Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it.
No, you won't. A US$450 PC runs Vista fine.
Seriously, when the most important factor in Vista's (like OS X's) performance is RAM, and 2G of RAM costs under US$50, in no way do you need "a pretty good system". The PC necessary to run Vista well hasn't been "pretty good" for years.
Better to investigate than not to investigate and have the entire internet be shut down.
Investigate what ?
The "entire internet" isn't going to get shut down, no matter what - and especially not over something as petty and irrelevant as minors and adults hanging around in the same forums.
As to x86, the major software vendor's complete failure to move platforms (something which that other, different, company managed twice) [...]
What an idiotic comparison. What would the business benefit of moving to another architecture have been ?
(We'll ignore for a second that the "major software vendor's" product has been sold for five or six different architectures (depending on how you count) and internally ported to several others.)
Why would an adult want to access the kiddie intraweb?
Two immediately obvious examples, from both ends of the spectrum:
* Paedophiles
* Helicopter parents
Any adult who is trying to access these sorts of site should be investigated immediately.
Indeed. Heaven forbid parents be able to check up on what their children are doing (or, even crazier, offer some parental guidance), grandparents keep in contact with their grandchildren and an 18 year old date a 17 year old. Imagine the horrifyingly chaotic society that would spawn.
A safe internet, designed for minors to access. This internet should require adult verification from their parents allowing their children to access the sites.
How do we stop the bad people accessing the kiddies' intarwebs ?
Something has to be done.
Indeed. Parents need to start taking some fucking responsibility.
That's fine! Why? If file sharing becomes legal, then we wouldn't need the GPL anymore because closed-source would cease to be economically feasible anyway.
Sure it would. Software vendors would just resort to implementing more effective anti-copying facilities in hardware (dongles, TPM).
[...] you're completely right that the GPL would immediately become as worthless as every other license, BUT it also wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Of course it would. Without copyright, the GPL becomes equivalent to the BSDL.
Basic tasks like mastering a cd require examining whatever shiny looking and unusable GUI they came up with.
As opposed to examining some unusable GUI an OSS developer slapped together with what last week's trendy widget library was ? Or having to figure out the cryptic commandline switches to some CLI app (assuming you can even figure out what the app even is in the first place) ?
The Eee has been "successful" in small circles. I sincerely doubt that the Eee has even remotely penetrated the notebook market worldwide, in terms of marketshare percentage.
The Eee accounts for about 1% of worldwide laptop sales - so bugger all.
At the moment, Microsoft are freaking out about Apple. The Eee isn't (yet) worth their time to worry.
More importantly, by the time it is, it will have sufficient power to run Vista without a problem, thus negating one of Linux's supposed major advantages. By the end of this year - halfway through next at the latest - I expect to see an Eee shipping with a dual core CPU, capable of taking up to 4G of RAM, and with a 32G SSD, for about the same price as it is today.
If "the people" are clamouring for Linux machines, as Slashbots would have us believe, then why would vendors care about relatively high Windows OEM prices when their Linux machines would be marching out the door in droves ?
I didn't half-ass it, I took my time to learn how it works, [...]
Then I received a hard lesson in what it means to say that JBOD has a failure rate multiplicatively proportional to that of each individual drive. And, surprise surprise, LVM amounts to nothing more than fancy OS-level JBOD, without even the performance boost of a proper RAID controller.
These two statements are in conflict.
To take speed limits as your example, speed limits aren't there because they really expect everyone to drive below that speed. However, if the speed limit is 55 and people are driving faster than is safe, lowering it to 45 will lower their average speed.
Studies have generally found the posted speed limit has very little impact on how fast most people drive, unless it's a) extremely inappropriate for the location and b) brutally enforced.
Speed "limits" should be advisory and exceeding them should never be an offense in and of itself.