Or maybe there was nothing wrong with it, they just changed it arbitrarily to make it look like a new product when it's just the old one with a couple of tweaks, ever thought of that?
The massive amount of money spent on usability testing for the new interface pretty much rules that out.
Apple has shown however, that this can be done with relatively safety.
Only when Apple has penetrated a meaningful chunk of the market - say 20% or more - can this conclusion be drawn.
There are millions of Macs connected, but AFAIK there still is no way an out of the box Mac can be messed with by the mere fact of its being connected to the Internet.
Neither can a large chunk of Windows PCs, by virtue of them being stuck behind a firewall and/or NATing router. But that doesn't stop them doing nasty things if, for example, they run some piece of malware on their machines.
Most machines aren't compromised by remote attacks.
There will never be a technological way of protecting users from socially engineered foolishness that can damage any computer or at least some parts thereof. We protect our Mac users machines by simply NOT giving them the administrative password. This can of course still allow sensitive user data to escape to unwanted places, but by simply creating a new user account and then erasing the old, messed up one, the computer is still useable, without a HD wipe.
The "administrative password" is mostly snake oil (it's useful, but its impact is great overestimated). For just about everything malicious code might want to do, elevated privileges are gravy, not necessity.
It's still a major issue for me. You're right, I'm not an average joe when it comes to storage needs, but does that mean that nobody should produce a product that fills my need? My 1.2 Terabyte RAID array is full, and I am currently wondering how the hell to add more storage and migrate the data without simply building a whole new machine.
Shouldn't be *that* difficult. What's your existing configuration ?
I just got myself a new fileserver at home to play movies off of and to serve files.
I certainly hope you're doing more with that machine than just serving files. I do so hate to see hardware going to waste...
On a less philosophical note, if you're using Linux, go with software RAID6 over hardware RAID1. For all practical purposes the performance and reliability will be just as good (better in some cases) and you get about a TB more space. You also have the benefit of not having to track down another one of those controller cards if it breaks.
Oh, and the beast eats 750Watts of electricity.
No it doesn't. You might have a 750W PSU in there, but I doubt it's using more than 250 (if that), even at peak load.
Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these? In my experience, PC hard disks are already way too big. A friend of mine uses his 100 gig drive for some emailing, websurfing, playing a few games, and music playback. Last time I checked his PC it was over 85% empty. And most of the space that was consumed was the O/S.
I'm predicting an explosion in HTPC "back ends" drive by the Xbox 360 and Apple's "iTV" thingamabob over the next 1 - 2 years. Once people get discover they can put all their "media" into a single place with quick, easy and instant access, they'll go crazy for it.
Heck, I've already got 4TB (raw - about 3.2TB usable - 16*250GB) in my server at home, and between DVDs, TV recordings, music and software, it's only got a few hundred gigs free. I expect to fill it before the middle of the year and extend with another 5 or 6 500G drives then.
I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:
That 500G drive will be substantially faster than your 80G drive, if nothing else.
Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK)
Seek Time
Cost
Power consumption from hard disks is not much - practically zero compared to the CPU, video card and monitor. Increasing data density *does* improve seek times, and the only other way is to increase rotational speed, which subsequently drives up power consumption, heat output, noise levels and cost (due to tighter manufacturing tolerances). As for price... Drives are already dirt cheap anyway - I think I saw a coupon on dealnews only last week selling 500G drives for US$130.
Capacity is increasing because that's what is driving the industry. Less so at the typical consumer level, I'll agree, but business is generating mind-boggling amounts of data and they want to keep more and more of it online.
Datacenters don't necessarily want larger disks. Frequently, they are performance oriented and are more interested in spreading their dataset across a larger number of spindles for increased performance. They end up using terabytes of capacity for gigabytes of data. Seagate in particular has shifted their roadmap from capacity to performance in their enterprise and business class products. High capacity is reserved mostly for end users.
Datacentres are making more and more use of these huge, "consumer level" drives in "nearline" storage arrays that are used to hold less frequently accessed data.
Datacentres most assuredly *do* want larger disks, it's just the manufacturers aren't delivering them in the 10k and 15k RPM packing they'd like to.
NT took so long to mass market (Win2K sort of, XP did it, almost 10 years), because when NT 3.1 shipped, it wanted 16 MB of RAM on the x86, and 32MB of RAM on the other systems, but going above 8 MB required specialized RAM because the RAM Chips (you plugged chips into sockets then, not chips on cards with standardized interfaces) were mass produced for 1 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB, but going to 16 MB required using VERY expensive (relative to normal RAM) chips.
I think your memory's a bit faulty there, mate. Even my old 386SX/16 (ca. 1990) used SIMMs. NT 3.1 wasn't released until 1993, shortly after the first Pentium CPU and just as 486s were hitting the point of affordability for the average consumer.
WinXP will run in 256MB, and run decently on 512MB, but 1GB or 2GB of RAM is reasonable for a decent system, and 512MB is not reasonable for a budget system.
WTF ? XP will "run" in 64 - 96MB, is usable in 128 - 192, is "decent" in 256 - 512 and >512 is well and truly sufficient for the average user.
Up until this point, it wasn't clear that x86 was the winner, it was the release of Windows 95 on the Pentium chips when Microsoft "won" the market, up until then, Windows was niche, OS/2 looked promising, Apple was a contender, and everyone just ran DOS/WP5.1 and NetWare 2.0. Up until 1995, it was anybody's game.
Again, I have to say your timeline is off. Windows 3.0 (1990) and then 3.1 (1992) had pretty much sealed the deal for Microsoft. By 1993-94, "everyone" was running Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Office and only using DOS for games. It's vaguely possible that OS/2 might have clawed some of the market back, had Windows 95 been a disastrous flop, but by the end of 1995 it was pretty obvious the future of the PC was Microsoft Windows and the only real competitor was going to be Apple.
The really important one didn't. Every generation of Mac since the PowerPC switch has had faster processors than x86-land could produce.
Uh, what ? Certainly there have been brief periods of time when the fastest Macs were faster than the fastest PCs, but they never lasted for long and weren't particularly frequent (typically the first few months after a new Gx platform was introduced, but it never lasted).
Now, there have certainly been corner cases where PPC has been consistently faster, but they weren't particularly applicable to the general pupose computing performance that most people were/are interested in.
The G5 was faster than everything in x86-land except the Opteron, and that only for some workloads.
No, there were a handful of workloads where the G5 was the faster CPU, but in the general case it wasn't, and even that situation didn't last long.
Unless you're measuring per-clock... But you couldn't possibly be that stupid, could you ?
Macs have used PowerPC cores ever since the first (albeit an initial failure at launch) PowerPC Mac. Strides since that era have produced the G3 and G4 platforms; some of the fastest processors at the time.
But still only faster than x86 for - relatively speaking - the blink of an eye.
What if Windows didn't determine the prevailing platform anymore? What direction would we take as a market if Linux became the norm?
x86. Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy world (or doesn't have much experience with Linux on a non-x86 platform).
A good emulator setup makes a transition possible.
Possible != desirable. Most of the world isn't interested in technology for the sake of it.
Apple has does it TWO TIMEs both working probably better than windows running natively.
Indeed. Had Apple chosen their platform more wisely they wouldn't have had to deal with the overheads of a second architecture migration.
Microsoft just can't handle it and that keeps us STUCK on x86.
Of course they can - Microsoft have a portable OS and have had for well over a decade - but why would they do anything so monumentally stupid as alienating their entire customer base with a migration to another hardware platform when x86 has - and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future - provided the best performance/$ in the consumer market ?
Changing architectures is a massive, massive undertaking. No sane business would embark on such a path without a very good, very solid reason for doing so. "Because it's cool" is not such a reason.
Because in the case of teachers, bad teachers are supported by the unions and the rank and file of all teachers. Apart from major transgressions, teachers close ranks on any percieved threat.
Teachers "close ranks" when people whose last interaction with a teacher was probably as an angsty teenager, try and tell them how they should be doing their jobs, or try to tell them their performance is going to evaluated based on factors outside of their control.
Once again, when all you're trying to say is "teaching, like other professions, has both good and bad representatives", painting them all as incompetent failures is grossly offensive (not to mention incredibly lazy).
Think about the worst example of someone in your profession you've ever met. Do you think everyone else is remotely justified in writing off everyone else in your profession because of their behaviour ?
The problem is that we've all been confronted with the stereotype far too often in our lives.
I had my share of bad teachers over the years. However, I never even came close to seeing enough of them to write off everyone who endeavours to pass on knowledge as an incompetent failure.
It's these kind of people that fit the "those who can, do..." stereotype, and sadly they're the ones you'll asociate with the job "teacher" lateron in life.
Uh, "later on in life" ? I feel pretty confident in saying there won't be any more interactions with "teachers" (at least, in the context of schooling) in my future.
You realise you are saying that "discrimination" -lol- against teachers (not any kind of ethnic minority last time I checked) is breathtakingly more importantly than racism against people of dark skin?
No, you illiterate moron, I said it encompasses a vastly greater scope and, in doing so, scales racism against black into relative insignificance.
Had you spent more time in school paying attention, instead of smugly telling yourself how much cleverer you were than the teacher, you would probably not only have been able to grasp that point, but also comprehend that "discrimination" is dependent on neither a) ethnicity nor b) proportion.
This is exactly the kind of Jesus complex I'd expect from a civil service lifer who such as yourself, regardless of whatever fairy tale you make up as a life story next.
Here's a heads-up, you presumptuous twat - I've never held a public service job in my life. I just have some respect for an endeavour that is one of the foundations of civilisation (and even more now I know they had to put up with an arrogant arsehole like you - assuming you've even made it out of school yet).
(Do the creators and associates of www.lireland.com know the contempt you have for them and what they do, or do you lack the courage to call them incompetent failures to their faces ?)
Seriously, though, there's some kind of marketing idea that dropping laptops is a huge problem.
That's because it *is*.
Apple's solution was one of the biggest gimmicks I've ever heard of.
It's an excellent idea. I've already witnessed it save my GF's MacBook Pro from damage twice and she's only owned the thing for 2 - 3 weeks (admittedly she's on a clumsier end of the scale, but still...).
Do people constantly drop their cell phones, Blackberrys, PDAs, etc.?
Yes. They also leave them in taxis, in hotel rooms, on restaurant tables, put them through the wash in their pants, etc, etc.
Do they not back up the "valuable data" to another location in case it's stolen?
No.
In fact, it's amazing how many people who say "my life is on this device" are incredibly cavalier with its safety and security, considering they frequently haven't got a copy of the data on it anywhere else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the productivity losses from PDAs and phones "going missing" or being damaged, resulting in 100% loss of the data on them noticably exceed the productivity gains resulting in their users having them in the first place.
Separated from the consequences of failing to compete, ANY entity will quickly devolve into laziness and mediocrity. This is seen anywhere the government goes and funds programs directly with taxpayer dollars.
Public schools *do* have to compete. School results are widely reported and focused on, and parents do not send their children to schools that they perceive as consistently performing badly. Even public schools, when their enrolments start plummeting, have to face up to a "please explain" and/or possible closure.
The solution to this problem is to only fund the parents of the children and let them choose how to spend it. If the public schools cant attract students and their dollars, then they will simply wither and die. Tenure kills value, so tenure would be the first to go.
Your "solution" would very quickly reduce higher education to the domain of the rich. The middle classes would be able to just barely afford schooling to the middle-secondary level of today and the poor would be lucky if they were shown how to read and write.
More importantly (yes, there is actually something more important than widespread accessibility to education) any semblance of balance and objectivity in education would fly straight out the window. Every subsequent educational "institution" would focus almost solely on turning out the kind of "students" that suited the agenda of its funder(s), be they creationist-preaching religious zealots or naive libertarian dreamers who think the "free market" always provides the best solution to every problem.
What country do you live in where the money that parents pay for public schools, are refunded to let the parents pay for private schools?
That is an entirely different argument than "government has a monopoly on schooling".
If you are forced to pay for a public education, even if you choose to go to a private school, it makes it cost prohibitive to all the but wealthy who can afford to pay for an education twice. In nearly all countries, you are required to purchase an education from the government, no matter if you decide to use it or not.
Here in Australia, there has been a massive boom in private schooling - and it sure as hell isn't the statistically insiginficant "rich" who are the ones driving it. Added to that, private schools in Australia receive the same amount of public funding as public schools (although that situation probably varies from country to countr), so your complaint does not apply here.
Finally, I'm not sure what delusion you're channeling to conclude that poor people would suddenly be able to afford private schooling if public schooling disappeared (even if that portion of taxation was refunded), because it's a highly unlikely outcome, at best. Almost certainly, what would *actually* happen if public schooling were abolished would be a return to the good old days of poor people not even being able to read and write, the middle class getting just enough education to make them useful and the rich being the only ones who received the schooling (upper secondary and tertiary) that 30% - 80% of the population gets today (and, effectively, closer to 100% have the opportunity to).
This is an slanderous and discriminatory statement, breathtaking in its scope that, quite frankly, any normal person should find deeply offensive. Literally, it makes something like "all blacks are lazy" - itself a singularly racist and small-minded insult - little more than a mildly critical observation. Yet it is frequently bandied about as nigh-on "common sense".
And remember we aren't talking about "karate kid" style mentors here, we're talking about civil service lifers who for the most part have never had a job where they were required to be productive and / or competitive. In other words, a real job.
Why attack not only an entire profession but, indeed, anyone who has ever passed on the knowledge and experience they have to another, when all you really mean is "just like any profession, teaching has some bad apples" ?
Where as the schools are a government monopoly. Public incompetence is forced on you with a gun to your head! Don't like a public school teacher? FUCK OFF! You are dealing with the government and they don't have to give a shit what you think! Hows them apples!?
What country do you live in that doesn't have private schools ?
To this day, I remain amazed Apple didn't take the obvious path and differentiate the black MacBook with (at least) a dedicated video card as a replacement for the 12" PB.
Let me re-cast it for you to make it more apparent: (1) MS implements restrictions on content duplication and display that, for example, prevent people from using their current widescreen monitors to view hi-def content (no HDMI means deliberately degraded video). (2) Content companies come out with content intended to be used with Microsoft's DRM technology. (3) You say Microsoft is giving customers what they want because their OS allows their customers to watch DRM'd content.
The options - and this has ZERO to do with Microsoft, because the restrictions are dictated by the content "owners" - are:
* HD video (DRM capable OS and hardware)
* degraded video (DRM capable OS, DRM incapable hardware)
* no video (DRM incapable OS and hardware).
Which do you think the people who want to watch the video are going to prefer ?
Your rage is being directed at the wrong target. You don't seem to understand that there is no "full-quality DRM-encumbered content without DRM capable software and hardware" option (at least until someone cracks it, in which case the whole issue becomes moot). Microsoft (and Apple) are delivering their customers the ability to *choose* whether to watch DRM-encumbered media, or not. A platform without any DRM support at all, does not deliver that choice, because it cannot access DRM encumbered content at all, even in a degraded fashion.
I'll say that again, because it doesn't seem to be sinking in: if your platform doesn't support DRM, you won't be able to access future high-def content at all, because the people producing that content will not allow you to, as is their "right" based on copyright law.
You seem to have bought into the content industry line that "We won't distribute our content without these restrictions." That's a bunch of nonsense, about equivalent to "We will shoot ourselves in the head unless you agree to our demands." (I recognize that I'm fudging some details here.)
I haven't "bought into" anything. The simple fact is the medium term future of media - both video and audio - is that major distribution sources (RIAA, MPAA, et al - and I fully expect game developers to start locking off higher resolutions with DRM as well) are only going to be releasing their "high definition" content in DRM encumbered formats. Thus, the only people who are going to be able to view such media are those with suitably DRM-capable hardware and software. The alternative for such content - as I point out above - is either degraded media or none at all. This is inescapable, it's going to happen no matter how many outraged posts you put on Slashdot or letters you write to your representatives (and the fundamental problem is copyright itself - DRM is just a symptom).
They will be wildly successful, as well, as the vast majority of people will - at least in the short term - notice nothing different or any problems. It's only going to be years after DRM is entrenched, when the content providers really start tightening the screws with enforced pay-per-view and the like, that consumers *might* start revolting (and I say "might" quite seriously - if the economy is performing sufficiently well that disposables incomes are high, it's unlikely they'll care).
Ultimately, the situation (vis-a-vis Microsoft and Vista) is trivially simple to understand (which is presumably why some many on Slashdot try to spread FUD with contrived examples and overcomplicated explanation full of "what ifs"): if you don't want DRM-encumbered media, don't buy it. Do this and you'll never even know it exists.
As to your second point -- exactly what contemporaries are you comparing Vista to?
OS X and certain configurations of Linux (although it's hard to argue "Linux" is at feature parity, given the flakiness of its various "3D accelerated" layers like Beryl, et al).
Vista runs usably on hardware up to about 6-7 years old, perhaps requiring a memory and/or video card upgrade to
But you must agree that Clinton presided over 1.2Million Iraqi deaths. He could have stopped it at any point, but didnt.
The bloke running Iraq could have stopped it as well, resulting in something significantly closer to a win-win scenario. Why aren't you putting the blame where it belongs ? Why are you assuming if the sactions hadn't have existed, those same Iraqis would have survived ?
The difference between killing 1.2Million Iraqi's via sanctions or killing iraqi via an invasion and inevitable civil war are not different in my book.
Then your book needs revising. There is a vast gulf of difference between people killed in a poorly planned, poorly executed, selfish, short-sighted *invasion* and people killed because their dictatorial ruler wouldn't give them food that he already had or could easily (and legally) have obtained.
I will not argue the relative uselessness of "sanctions", but to suggest they are not a vastly more humane approach than war is just ridiculous. Sanctions, at least, have the _possibility_ (however slim it might be) of reaching a solution without needless death, destruction and mind boggling amounts of wasted money. That both war and sanctions are bad alternatives, does not make them equal.
(And before you go off on some politically partisan rant, bear in mind I'm not American, so attacking me with American-centric political ad hominems is going to be a complete waste of your time.)
MS has done this twice: (1) adding obscenely restrictive multimedia DRM when the very large majority of their customers do not want it;
The "very large majority" of their customers to be able to download and watch movies, listen to audio, etc. Since they're not going to be able to do this with protected media if the OS *doesn't* support DRM, it's difficult to see how Microsoft are not following their customer's wishes by offering the *choice* of using DRM.
[...] and (2) staying in bed with the hardware manufacturers by failing to control OS-bloat, which forces new computer purchases. It may be that Window's dominant market position is enough to drive this through, for now. Or, it may be that Vista starts a shift to Macintoshes. It's just a matter of time -- no company survives forever by not giving customers what they want.
Your presumption is false. Vista is no more "bloated" than its contemporaries.
You seem to assert a lot of knowledge concerning Windows and OSes in general and you don't know about the message queue bug?
I have to assume you are referring to the so-called "Shatter Attack", which generated a lot of hoopla back in 2002.
This vulnerability is nowhere near as serious as you seem to think it is. Firstly, it requires local access to the machine. Secondly, it requires a suitable process running with elevated privileges to funnel its attack through. Thirdly, it's main vectors (within Windows itself) were fixed by Microsoft quite promptly and several third-party tools subsequently appeared to further mitigate its effectiveness. Finally, Vista adds more protection from possible exploitation (as outlined in the prior link).
It appears you don't really understand the problem, as it has nothing to do with "drivers running at ring-0" (a question you don't appear to have the technical knowledge to be asking anyway) and *certainly* doesn't "turn just about every vulnerability into a critical vulnerability".
It's ironic that you champion OS X (for many reasons, but this is probably the most pertinent), which has *at least* as big a "design flaw" (bigger, IMHO) by virtue of its unix heritage with things like the SUID bit (and, indeed, the whole concept of a superuser).
And finally, as has also been deeply discussed, [...]
You should not rely on Slashdot discussions for objective, technical information about Windows. The vast majority of posters here are utterly ignorant of how Windows works[0], outside of gaming folklore and the various kludges they have come up with to work around problems that may or may not actually exist. Further, many of them revel in that ignorance and express zero interest in - if not outright hostility towards - actually learning about the system (an embarrassment to geeks everywhere).
This is not to say all posts here are valueless, not by a long shot. But you should certainly take any criticism here supposedly about how Windows works or "critical design flaws" with a grain of salt, as 9/10 times the person posting is ignorant[1], if not flat-out making things up[2]. I would suggest similar advice regarding posts about business and management processes, as well.
If Microsoft were to rework their next OS to "ideal" standards and then create a legacy sandbox for any and all Win32 apps (let's call it Win-Classic since it worked for Apple and CocaCola) then Microsoft could have a newer, fresher, cleaner OS without all the garbage from the past to clean up.
Except they would still have the "garbage", just in a different place. To retain any sort of transparency and real-life usability, a "sandbox" needs to interact with the rest of the system at a privilege level *at least* as high as the user running it, which eliminates most of any security benefit it might deliver. It's been a long time since I've looked, and I don't have a suitably old Mac handy to actually check now, but the Classic environment in OS X certainly used to run SUID root, allowing it essentially unfettered access to the entire system.
These kind of legacy problems you are talking about affect *all* platforms that haven't been (relatively) recently built from scratch and, in the real world where migrating between OSes is a monumentally huge task, are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. They're simply more noticable in Windows because it's so much more commonly used.
To re-iterate, there is little architecturally wrong with Windows NT and, subsequently, little need for Microsoft to replace it (at least in the medium term). In particular, migrating to Yet Another Unix would be nothing more than a massive (and incredibly expensive) step sideways (and that's being generous).
[0] Exhibit A: posters who believe IE is somehow tied into the Windows kernel, or inherently runs with elevated privileges.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe there was nothing wrong with it, they just changed it arbitrarily to make it look like a new product when it's just the old one with a couple of tweaks, ever thought of that?
The massive amount of money spent on usability testing for the new interface pretty much rules that out.
Apple has shown however, that this can be done with relatively safety.
Only when Apple has penetrated a meaningful chunk of the market - say 20% or more - can this conclusion be drawn.
There are millions of Macs connected, but AFAIK there still is no way an out of the box Mac can be messed with by the mere fact of its being connected to the Internet.
Neither can a large chunk of Windows PCs, by virtue of them being stuck behind a firewall and/or NATing router. But that doesn't stop them doing nasty things if, for example, they run some piece of malware on their machines.
Most machines aren't compromised by remote attacks.
There will never be a technological way of protecting users from socially engineered foolishness that can damage any computer or at least some parts thereof. We protect our Mac users machines by simply NOT giving them the administrative password. This can of course still allow sensitive user data to escape to unwanted places, but by simply creating a new user account and then erasing the old, messed up one, the computer is still useable, without a HD wipe.
The "administrative password" is mostly snake oil (it's useful, but its impact is great overestimated). For just about everything malicious code might want to do, elevated privileges are gravy, not necessity.
It's still a major issue for me. You're right, I'm not an average joe when it comes to storage needs, but does that mean that nobody should produce a product that fills my need? My 1.2 Terabyte RAID array is full, and I am currently wondering how the hell to add more storage and migrate the data without simply building a whole new machine.
Shouldn't be *that* difficult. What's your existing configuration ?
I just got myself a new fileserver at home to play movies off of and to serve files.
I certainly hope you're doing more with that machine than just serving files. I do so hate to see hardware going to waste...
On a less philosophical note, if you're using Linux, go with software RAID6 over hardware RAID1. For all practical purposes the performance and reliability will be just as good (better in some cases) and you get about a TB more space. You also have the benefit of not having to track down another one of those controller cards if it breaks.
Oh, and the beast eats 750Watts of electricity.
No it doesn't. You might have a 750W PSU in there, but I doubt it's using more than 250 (if that), even at peak load.
Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these? In my experience, PC hard disks are already way too big. A friend of mine uses his 100 gig drive for some emailing, websurfing, playing a few games, and music playback. Last time I checked his PC it was over 85% empty. And most of the space that was consumed was the O/S.
I'm predicting an explosion in HTPC "back ends" drive by the Xbox 360 and Apple's "iTV" thingamabob over the next 1 - 2 years. Once people get discover they can put all their "media" into a single place with quick, easy and instant access, they'll go crazy for it.
Heck, I've already got 4TB (raw - about 3.2TB usable - 16*250GB) in my server at home, and between DVDs, TV recordings, music and software, it's only got a few hundred gigs free. I expect to fill it before the middle of the year and extend with another 5 or 6 500G drives then.
I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:
That 500G drive will be substantially faster than your 80G drive, if nothing else.
Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK)
Seek Time
Cost
Power consumption from hard disks is not much - practically zero compared to the CPU, video card and monitor. Increasing data density *does* improve seek times, and the only other way is to increase rotational speed, which subsequently drives up power consumption, heat output, noise levels and cost (due to tighter manufacturing tolerances). As for price... Drives are already dirt cheap anyway - I think I saw a coupon on dealnews only last week selling 500G drives for US$130.
Capacity is increasing because that's what is driving the industry. Less so at the typical consumer level, I'll agree, but business is generating mind-boggling amounts of data and they want to keep more and more of it online.
Datacenters don't necessarily want larger disks. Frequently, they are performance oriented and are more interested in spreading their dataset across a larger number of spindles for increased performance. They end up using terabytes of capacity for gigabytes of data. Seagate in particular has shifted their roadmap from capacity to performance in their enterprise and business class products. High capacity is reserved mostly for end users.
Datacentres are making more and more use of these huge, "consumer level" drives in "nearline" storage arrays that are used to hold less frequently accessed data.
Datacentres most assuredly *do* want larger disks, it's just the manufacturers aren't delivering them in the 10k and 15k RPM packing they'd like to.
NT took so long to mass market (Win2K sort of, XP did it, almost 10 years), because when NT 3.1 shipped, it wanted 16 MB of RAM on the x86, and 32MB of RAM on the other systems, but going above 8 MB required specialized RAM because the RAM Chips (you plugged chips into sockets then, not chips on cards with standardized interfaces) were mass produced for 1 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB, but going to 16 MB required using VERY expensive (relative to normal RAM) chips.
I think your memory's a bit faulty there, mate. Even my old 386SX/16 (ca. 1990) used SIMMs. NT 3.1 wasn't released until 1993, shortly after the first Pentium CPU and just as 486s were hitting the point of affordability for the average consumer.
WinXP will run in 256MB, and run decently on 512MB, but 1GB or 2GB of RAM is reasonable for a decent system, and 512MB is not reasonable for a budget system.
WTF ? XP will "run" in 64 - 96MB, is usable in 128 - 192, is "decent" in 256 - 512 and >512 is well and truly sufficient for the average user.
Up until this point, it wasn't clear that x86 was the winner, it was the release of Windows 95 on the Pentium chips when Microsoft "won" the market, up until then, Windows was niche, OS/2 looked promising, Apple was a contender, and everyone just ran DOS/WP5.1 and NetWare 2.0. Up until 1995, it was anybody's game.
Again, I have to say your timeline is off. Windows 3.0 (1990) and then 3.1 (1992) had pretty much sealed the deal for Microsoft. By 1993-94, "everyone" was running Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Office and only using DOS for games. It's vaguely possible that OS/2 might have clawed some of the market back, had Windows 95 been a disastrous flop, but by the end of 1995 it was pretty obvious the future of the PC was Microsoft Windows and the only real competitor was going to be Apple.
The really important one didn't. Every generation of Mac since the PowerPC switch has had faster processors than x86-land could produce.
Uh, what ? Certainly there have been brief periods of time when the fastest Macs were faster than the fastest PCs, but they never lasted for long and weren't particularly frequent (typically the first few months after a new Gx platform was introduced, but it never lasted).
Now, there have certainly been corner cases where PPC has been consistently faster, but they weren't particularly applicable to the general pupose computing performance that most people were/are interested in.
The G5 was faster than everything in x86-land except the Opteron, and that only for some workloads.
No, there were a handful of workloads where the G5 was the faster CPU, but in the general case it wasn't, and even that situation didn't last long.
Unless you're measuring per-clock... But you couldn't possibly be that stupid, could you ?
Macs have used PowerPC cores ever since the first (albeit an initial failure at launch) PowerPC Mac. Strides since that era have produced the G3 and G4 platforms; some of the fastest processors at the time.
But still only faster than x86 for - relatively speaking - the blink of an eye.
What if Windows didn't determine the prevailing platform anymore? What direction would we take as a market if Linux became the norm?
x86. Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy world (or doesn't have much experience with Linux on a non-x86 platform).
A good emulator setup makes a transition possible.
Possible != desirable. Most of the world isn't interested in technology for the sake of it.
Apple has does it TWO TIMEs both working probably better than windows running natively.
Indeed. Had Apple chosen their platform more wisely they wouldn't have had to deal with the overheads of a second architecture migration.
Microsoft just can't handle it and that keeps us STUCK on x86.
Of course they can - Microsoft have a portable OS and have had for well over a decade - but why would they do anything so monumentally stupid as alienating their entire customer base with a migration to another hardware platform when x86 has - and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future - provided the best performance/$ in the consumer market ?
Changing architectures is a massive, massive undertaking. No sane business would embark on such a path without a very good, very solid reason for doing so. "Because it's cool" is not such a reason.
Because in the case of teachers, bad teachers are supported by the unions and the rank and file of all teachers. Apart from major transgressions, teachers close ranks on any percieved threat.
Teachers "close ranks" when people whose last interaction with a teacher was probably as an angsty teenager, try and tell them how they should be doing their jobs, or try to tell them their performance is going to evaluated based on factors outside of their control.
Once again, when all you're trying to say is "teaching, like other professions, has both good and bad representatives", painting them all as incompetent failures is grossly offensive (not to mention incredibly lazy).
Think about the worst example of someone in your profession you've ever met. Do you think everyone else is remotely justified in writing off everyone else in your profession because of their behaviour ?
The problem is that we've all been confronted with the stereotype far too often in our lives.
I had my share of bad teachers over the years. However, I never even came close to seeing enough of them to write off everyone who endeavours to pass on knowledge as an incompetent failure.
It's these kind of people that fit the "those who can, do..." stereotype, and sadly they're the ones you'll asociate with the job "teacher" lateron in life.
Uh, "later on in life" ? I feel pretty confident in saying there won't be any more interactions with "teachers" (at least, in the context of schooling) in my future.
You realise you are saying that "discrimination" -lol- against teachers (not any kind of ethnic minority last time I checked) is breathtakingly more importantly than racism against people of dark skin?
No, you illiterate moron, I said it encompasses a vastly greater scope and, in doing so, scales racism against black into relative insignificance.
Had you spent more time in school paying attention, instead of smugly telling yourself how much cleverer you were than the teacher, you would probably not only have been able to grasp that point, but also comprehend that "discrimination" is dependent on neither a) ethnicity nor b) proportion.
This is exactly the kind of Jesus complex I'd expect from a civil service lifer who such as yourself, regardless of whatever fairy tale you make up as a life story next.
Here's a heads-up, you presumptuous twat - I've never held a public service job in my life. I just have some respect for an endeavour that is one of the foundations of civilisation (and even more now I know they had to put up with an arrogant arsehole like you - assuming you've even made it out of school yet).
(Do the creators and associates of www.lireland.com know the contempt you have for them and what they do, or do you lack the courage to call them incompetent failures to their faces ?)
Seriously, though, there's some kind of marketing idea that dropping laptops is a huge problem.
That's because it *is*.
Apple's solution was one of the biggest gimmicks I've ever heard of.
It's an excellent idea. I've already witnessed it save my GF's MacBook Pro from damage twice and she's only owned the thing for 2 - 3 weeks (admittedly she's on a clumsier end of the scale, but still...).
Do people constantly drop their cell phones, Blackberrys, PDAs, etc.?
Yes. They also leave them in taxis, in hotel rooms, on restaurant tables, put them through the wash in their pants, etc, etc.
Do they not back up the "valuable data" to another location in case it's stolen?
No.
In fact, it's amazing how many people who say "my life is on this device" are incredibly cavalier with its safety and security, considering they frequently haven't got a copy of the data on it anywhere else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the productivity losses from PDAs and phones "going missing" or being damaged, resulting in 100% loss of the data on them noticably exceed the productivity gains resulting in their users having them in the first place.
I have read articles wherein he crucifies Linux and another where he praises it.
Possibly because there are some situations where Linux deserves praise and others where it deserves scathing criticism ?
Separated from the consequences of failing to compete, ANY entity will quickly devolve into laziness and mediocrity. This is seen anywhere the government goes and funds programs directly with taxpayer dollars.
Public schools *do* have to compete. School results are widely reported and focused on, and parents do not send their children to schools that they perceive as consistently performing badly. Even public schools, when their enrolments start plummeting, have to face up to a "please explain" and/or possible closure.
The solution to this problem is to only fund the parents of the children and let them choose how to spend it. If the public schools cant attract students and their dollars, then they will simply wither and die. Tenure kills value, so tenure would be the first to go.
Your "solution" would very quickly reduce higher education to the domain of the rich. The middle classes would be able to just barely afford schooling to the middle-secondary level of today and the poor would be lucky if they were shown how to read and write.
More importantly (yes, there is actually something more important than widespread accessibility to education) any semblance of balance and objectivity in education would fly straight out the window. Every subsequent educational "institution" would focus almost solely on turning out the kind of "students" that suited the agenda of its funder(s), be they creationist-preaching religious zealots or naive libertarian dreamers who think the "free market" always provides the best solution to every problem.
What country do you live in where the money that parents pay for public schools, are refunded to let the parents pay for private schools?
That is an entirely different argument than "government has a monopoly on schooling".
If you are forced to pay for a public education, even if you choose to go to a private school, it makes it cost prohibitive to all the but wealthy who can afford to pay for an education twice. In nearly all countries, you are required to purchase an education from the government, no matter if you decide to use it or not.
Here in Australia, there has been a massive boom in private schooling - and it sure as hell isn't the statistically insiginficant "rich" who are the ones driving it. Added to that, private schools in Australia receive the same amount of public funding as public schools (although that situation probably varies from country to countr), so your complaint does not apply here.
Finally, I'm not sure what delusion you're channeling to conclude that poor people would suddenly be able to afford private schooling if public schooling disappeared (even if that portion of taxation was refunded), because it's a highly unlikely outcome, at best. Almost certainly, what would *actually* happen if public schooling were abolished would be a return to the good old days of poor people not even being able to read and write, the middle class getting just enough education to make them useful and the rich being the only ones who received the schooling (upper secondary and tertiary) that 30% - 80% of the population gets today (and, effectively, closer to 100% have the opportunity to).
Those who can, do, those who can't, teach.
This is an slanderous and discriminatory statement, breathtaking in its scope that, quite frankly, any normal person should find deeply offensive. Literally, it makes something like "all blacks are lazy" - itself a singularly racist and small-minded insult - little more than a mildly critical observation. Yet it is frequently bandied about as nigh-on "common sense".
And remember we aren't talking about "karate kid" style mentors here, we're talking about civil service lifers who for the most part have never had a job where they were required to be productive and / or competitive. In other words, a real job.
Why attack not only an entire profession but, indeed, anyone who has ever passed on the knowledge and experience they have to another, when all you really mean is "just like any profession, teaching has some bad apples" ?
Where as the schools are a government monopoly. Public incompetence is forced on you with a gun to your head! Don't like a public school teacher? FUCK OFF! You are dealing with the government and they don't have to give a shit what you think! Hows them apples!?
What country do you live in that doesn't have private schools ?
To this day, I remain amazed Apple didn't take the obvious path and differentiate the black MacBook with (at least) a dedicated video card as a replacement for the 12" PB.
Let me re-cast it for you to make it more apparent: (1) MS implements restrictions on content duplication and display that, for example, prevent people from using their current widescreen monitors to view hi-def content (no HDMI means deliberately degraded video). (2) Content companies come out with content intended to be used with Microsoft's DRM technology. (3) You say Microsoft is giving customers what they want because their OS allows their customers to watch DRM'd content.
The options - and this has ZERO to do with Microsoft, because the restrictions are dictated by the content "owners" - are:
* HD video (DRM capable OS and hardware)
* degraded video (DRM capable OS, DRM incapable hardware)
* no video (DRM incapable OS and hardware).
Which do you think the people who want to watch the video are going to prefer ?
Your rage is being directed at the wrong target. You don't seem to understand that there is no "full-quality DRM-encumbered content without DRM capable software and hardware" option (at least until someone cracks it, in which case the whole issue becomes moot). Microsoft (and Apple) are delivering their customers the ability to *choose* whether to watch DRM-encumbered media, or not. A platform without any DRM support at all, does not deliver that choice, because it cannot access DRM encumbered content at all, even in a degraded fashion.
I'll say that again, because it doesn't seem to be sinking in: if your platform doesn't support DRM, you won't be able to access future high-def content at all, because the people producing that content will not allow you to, as is their "right" based on copyright law.
You seem to have bought into the content industry line that "We won't distribute our content without these restrictions." That's a bunch of nonsense, about equivalent to "We will shoot ourselves in the head unless you agree to our demands." (I recognize that I'm fudging some details here.)
I haven't "bought into" anything. The simple fact is the medium term future of media - both video and audio - is that major distribution sources (RIAA, MPAA, et al - and I fully expect game developers to start locking off higher resolutions with DRM as well) are only going to be releasing their "high definition" content in DRM encumbered formats. Thus, the only people who are going to be able to view such media are those with suitably DRM-capable hardware and software. The alternative for such content - as I point out above - is either degraded media or none at all. This is inescapable, it's going to happen no matter how many outraged posts you put on Slashdot or letters you write to your representatives (and the fundamental problem is copyright itself - DRM is just a symptom).
They will be wildly successful, as well, as the vast majority of people will - at least in the short term - notice nothing different or any problems. It's only going to be years after DRM is entrenched, when the content providers really start tightening the screws with enforced pay-per-view and the like, that consumers *might* start revolting (and I say "might" quite seriously - if the economy is performing sufficiently well that disposables incomes are high, it's unlikely they'll care).
Ultimately, the situation (vis-a-vis Microsoft and Vista) is trivially simple to understand (which is presumably why some many on Slashdot try to spread FUD with contrived examples and overcomplicated explanation full of "what ifs"): if you don't want DRM-encumbered media, don't buy it. Do this and you'll never even know it exists.
As to your second point -- exactly what contemporaries are you comparing Vista to?
OS X and certain configurations of Linux (although it's hard to argue "Linux" is at feature parity, given the flakiness of its various "3D accelerated" layers like Beryl, et al).
Vista runs usably on hardware up to about 6-7 years old, perhaps requiring a memory and/or video card upgrade to
But you must agree that Clinton presided over 1.2Million Iraqi deaths. He could have stopped it at any point, but didnt.
The bloke running Iraq could have stopped it as well, resulting in something significantly closer to a win-win scenario. Why aren't you putting the blame where it belongs ? Why are you assuming if the sactions hadn't have existed, those same Iraqis would have survived ?
The difference between killing 1.2Million Iraqi's via sanctions or killing iraqi via an invasion and inevitable civil war are not different in my book.
Then your book needs revising. There is a vast gulf of difference between people killed in a poorly planned, poorly executed, selfish, short-sighted *invasion* and people killed because their dictatorial ruler wouldn't give them food that he already had or could easily (and legally) have obtained.
I will not argue the relative uselessness of "sanctions", but to suggest they are not a vastly more humane approach than war is just ridiculous. Sanctions, at least, have the _possibility_ (however slim it might be) of reaching a solution without needless death, destruction and mind boggling amounts of wasted money. That both war and sanctions are bad alternatives, does not make them equal.
(And before you go off on some politically partisan rant, bear in mind I'm not American, so attacking me with American-centric political ad hominems is going to be a complete waste of your time.)
MS has done this twice: (1) adding obscenely restrictive multimedia DRM when the very large majority of their customers do not want it;
The "very large majority" of their customers to be able to download and watch movies, listen to audio, etc. Since they're not going to be able to do this with protected media if the OS *doesn't* support DRM, it's difficult to see how Microsoft are not following their customer's wishes by offering the *choice* of using DRM.
[...] and (2) staying in bed with the hardware manufacturers by failing to control OS-bloat, which forces new computer purchases. It may be that Window's dominant market position is enough to drive this through, for now. Or, it may be that Vista starts a shift to Macintoshes. It's just a matter of time -- no company survives forever by not giving customers what they want.
Your presumption is false. Vista is no more "bloated" than its contemporaries.
Is windows easy enough for anyone to set up and administer, [...]
Yes.
[...] or does it take a windows expert to do these things properly?
Yes.
You seem to assert a lot of knowledge concerning Windows and OSes in general and you don't know about the message queue bug?
I have to assume you are referring to the so-called "Shatter Attack", which generated a lot of hoopla back in 2002.
This vulnerability is nowhere near as serious as you seem to think it is. Firstly, it requires local access to the machine. Secondly, it requires a suitable process running with elevated privileges to funnel its attack through. Thirdly, it's main vectors (within Windows itself) were fixed by Microsoft quite promptly and several third-party tools subsequently appeared to further mitigate its effectiveness. Finally, Vista adds more protection from possible exploitation (as outlined in the prior link).
It appears you don't really understand the problem, as it has nothing to do with "drivers running at ring-0" (a question you don't appear to have the technical knowledge to be asking anyway) and *certainly* doesn't "turn just about every vulnerability into a critical vulnerability".
It's ironic that you champion OS X (for many reasons, but this is probably the most pertinent), which has *at least* as big a "design flaw" (bigger, IMHO) by virtue of its unix heritage with things like the SUID bit (and, indeed, the whole concept of a superuser).
And finally, as has also been deeply discussed, [...]
You should not rely on Slashdot discussions for objective, technical information about Windows. The vast majority of posters here are utterly ignorant of how Windows works[0], outside of gaming folklore and the various kludges they have come up with to work around problems that may or may not actually exist. Further, many of them revel in that ignorance and express zero interest in - if not outright hostility towards - actually learning about the system (an embarrassment to geeks everywhere).
This is not to say all posts here are valueless, not by a long shot. But you should certainly take any criticism here supposedly about how Windows works or "critical design flaws" with a grain of salt, as 9/10 times the person posting is ignorant[1], if not flat-out making things up[2]. I would suggest similar advice regarding posts about business and management processes, as well.
If Microsoft were to rework their next OS to "ideal" standards and then create a legacy sandbox for any and all Win32 apps (let's call it Win-Classic since it worked for Apple and CocaCola) then Microsoft could have a newer, fresher, cleaner OS without all the garbage from the past to clean up.
Except they would still have the "garbage", just in a different place. To retain any sort of transparency and real-life usability, a "sandbox" needs to interact with the rest of the system at a privilege level *at least* as high as the user running it, which eliminates most of any security benefit it might deliver. It's been a long time since I've looked, and I don't have a suitably old Mac handy to actually check now, but the Classic environment in OS X certainly used to run SUID root, allowing it essentially unfettered access to the entire system.
These kind of legacy problems you are talking about affect *all* platforms that haven't been (relatively) recently built from scratch and, in the real world where migrating between OSes is a monumentally huge task, are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. They're simply more noticable in Windows because it's so much more commonly used.
To re-iterate, there is little architecturally wrong with Windows NT and, subsequently, little need for Microsoft to replace it (at least in the medium term). In particular, migrating to Yet Another Unix would be nothing more than a massive (and incredibly expensive) step sideways (and that's being generous).
[0] Exhibit A: posters who believe IE is somehow tied into the Windows kernel, or inherently runs with elevated privileges.
[1] Exhibit B: posters who call a defa