Now, I personally don't have a huge issue with smokers (my dad smokes, I occasionally smoke a cigar and I have many friends that smoke), however, smokers have a direct, measurable, negative effect on people around them simply by lighting up a cigarette (this is in contrast to some other drugs like, say, alcohol or ecstacy). When that goes away, you can argue that smoking bans are some sort of "property" issue.
Or, as the saying goes, your right to swing your arms around ends at my face.
(Still waiting for the first "assault by second hand smoke" charge to be laid).
The registry is a real point of failure; despite your attempts to deny it.
I never said it wasn't a point of failure, I said it wasn't as common a point of failure as some posters on Slashdot would have everyone believe.
If you haven't seen any examples of registry problems then I assure you you will be surprised at the horrors it can bring.
Oh, I've seen Registry problems caused by errant software or stupid users, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish to the spontaneous combustion that should apparently be happening to every Windows machine I've ever seen at least once a year.
*All* platforms are vulnerable to some program or user with elevated privileges going berko and writing rubbish to places in the system it shouldn't. To try and pretend otherwise is nothing more than sophistry.
You see, the problem is not with the idea of the centralized registry itself but with the fact that the operating system (in this case MSWin) assumes that whatever program modifies the registry will modify it in such a way that it is still left in a consistent state.
What platform are you thinking of where this isn't the case (or even possible) ?
Incidentally, a registry transaction - barring uncorrectable problems like memory corruption or physical media errors - *will* leave the Registry in a consistent state (being a transactional database and all). It may not leave the data in it in a *correct* state, but that's a different matter.
Please read that again so you may understand. In other words, MSWin assumes that all installed software will play nice and that programmers have taken great care to ensure the safety and consistency of the registry.
Just like every other platform, you mean ?
What happens when a user decides to click on the cancel button in the middle of an installation and the program conveniently forgets that it has already modified the registry and thus should roll back whatever changes it has made?
The same thing that happens when you click cancel halfway through installing a poorly written program that might have written to system areas on any other platform.
What do you think will happen to the registry now?
The Registry will be fine. The errant program may have written incorrect data, but that's a problem on any platform. It's also why the system keeps backups of the Registry files.
Ever wondered why Windows advises users to exit all other running programs before installing new software?
Probably the same reason OS X does (although at least it's not as bad as MacOS was, quitting everything for you).
What happens when program A modifies the registry but before it was able to save the changes, program B modifies and saves its changes to the same central registry?
Exactly the same thing that happens in any other database when you have two processes trying to change the same value.
What happens to the changes made by program B when program A now saves its changes? This is called the concurrency problem and it is a real problem when two or more processes access and modify the same resource.
The Registry was designed to be accessed by hundreds - if not thousands - of processes at once as part of a multiuser OS. Somehow I think they took "the concurrency problem" into account.
Look, the Registry isn't like some pissant little text file that gets loaded as one big block into an "editor" process, modifed as a single monolithic entity and then written back out. It's a fully fledged transactional database that performs atomic operations on only the values that need to be touched.
What if an installed program decides to insert information in the centralized registry that is specifically discouraged by Microsoft but which a lazy programmer decides is actually quite safe because it doesn't seem to have any deleterious effects in his system? Of course his system has very little installed software since it
All critical system information stored in an easily corrupted proprietary binary database, that's what's wrong.
You seem to be talking an awful lot there about implementation there. Not to mention irrelevancies like "critical system information".
Even on NT-based Windowses, the registry is fragile, [...]
Amazing how with the registry being so "fragile", I've yet to see a single example of an actual Registry corruption in the wild, despite having been a sysadmin for many years.
About the only thing that is likely to corrupt the Registry is a physical hardware error of some sort (memory, disk, etc). I hate the break it to you, but that sort of thing is going to cause problems on any OS.
[...] and if something happens to it the system is utterly hosed; it won't even boot to a command line in safe mode.
You make it sound like this doesn't happen to other OSes.
Now, if all you mean by the "idea" of the registry is a standard preferences management system, [...]
The "idea" of the Registry is actually a system-wide database. "Preferences management" is but one of many functions it performs.
But the Windows implementation is horribly flawed.
Hm. Yet still I've never had any major problems with the Registry, out of hundreds (if not thousands) of Windows machines.
Seems to me "Registry problems" are like "major XP SP2 problems". Rare, but widely referred to as being commonplace.
If that is a good example of what a microkernel can do in the real world...
OS X isn't a microkernel. It's the same sort of "microkernel-based" thing that Windows NT is. Which is to say it's probably architecturally designed mostly like a microkernel, but since everything runs in kernel space there's no stability benefit.
In the (non-Windows) server world, rebooting is a big no-no.
There are several reasons why regular (though not necessarily frequent) reboots are a good idea. Not least to make sure the machine will actually restart into a usable (and accessible) state.
If you have a 24/7 environment, and a proper architecture to support that requirement, individual machine restarts are irrelevant.
If you don't have a 24/7 environment, machine restarts can be scheduled outside of production hours - daily if need be - again making them irrelevant.
If you're a home user, chances are extremely high your PC is turned off at least once a week, if not every night. Even if it isn't, rebooting occasionally is hardly a problem.
Reboots only really matter to two types of people - a) those whose ego depends on the number returned by uptime(1) and b) those who are trying to run a 24/7 environment where they shouldn't be.
No producer of high quality goods should listen to cheapskate NewEgg buyers who don't care for quality and future development.
I'd feel quite confident in saying that about 80% of the components in those new x86 Macs will be identical to the ones "cheapskate NewEgg buyers" pick up every day.
It's not like most of the components in the current Macs are anything that isn't also available off the shelf at places like NewEgg - I see no reason to believe x86 Macs will be any different.
This whole "Apple uses higher quality hardware" meme really has to die. It's not even remotely true. Shit, you can't even buy a Mac with SCSI.
You get what you deserve and all in a world where it's possible for an immigrant to this country to become one of its richest men.
It's important to remember the difference between "possible" and "probable".
It's *possible* a poor immigrant might become rich & famous.
It's *probable* a poor immigrant will have to work 3 jobs, 14 hour days and 7 day weeks - and/or turn to crime - to scrape together enough money to feed himself every day.
"Being employed" is not the be-all and end-all of society.
"distributing money" through taxes (in) and social and other support (out) is the very most un-effective way (LOT of money is "lost" and whole process tends to be very very expensive (lot of buerocracy))
Capitalism is exactly the same. It's just that the money gets "lost" in a smaller circle of people.
That sounds like charity -- because you can decide who you give money to. Charity is a good thing. Unfortunately, in welfare-state socialist systems you can't stop giving money to bums and leeches who game the system, because no one trusts the bureaucracy to figure out who the real needy are. This in turn creates a cycle where people figure out it's okay to not work for a living (or not work unless the wages are high) because they are going to get the dole anyway.
Wow. Why not just take out the hard disk, stick it in another computer, copy the disk to an image, put the suspect's hard drive back, and let him out as early as day 1, taking your sweet time to decrypt the hard drive?
Because if he really *is* a bad guy, he might decide "shit, they're on to me" and go and blow something up if all that happens is he gets taken into custody and his hard drive is imaged.
This is also ignoring requirements for physical evidence, data that might only be found from low-level data recovery efforts (that an image won't copy), etc.
In any event, undoubtedly imaging and then dealing with the image is where they *start*.
IMO, if the only evidence they have is "maybe there's something on his disk drive", they shouldn't be arresting him in the first place.
It's worth noting that "evidence sufficient to know he's doing something" and "evidence that can convince a judge he's doing something" are typically worlds apart.
Holding a suspect allows those who have the former sufficient time to acquire the latter.
(Which is not to say I support the idea of holding suspects indefinitely, but it's nowhere near as simple as "if you know enough to look, you know enough to send them to gaol").
The only people who really care about a processor's specifics (bus speeds, cache sizes, clock speed, etc) are techies. Techies don't just walk into a store, grab a CPU off the shelf and pay for it. They actually research what they're buying and decide on what they want to buy *long* before they actually begin th purchasing process. So, since it's easy to find out which marketing names match up with which processor features, it doesn't really matter what their marketing names are.
Added to that, any techie for which it's a matter of importance (eg: the bloke at your local computer fixit shop, 14 year old gamerz) will have memorised which marketing name has which processor features within hours of them being released, lest they not appear to be l33t enough.
Everyone else just picks a price point and then buys whichever machine is at that price point the salesman tells them is best.
A quick survey of benchmarking sites shows that the g4s (which peak at 1.67 Ghz on mac) are roughly comparable to the contemporary Pentium Ms (1.6 and 1.7);
Ah. So they don't really "kick the crap out of 'em at comparable speeds", like you said earlier ? (Incidentally, I really wish people wouldn't say "speed" when they really mean "clock speed".)
Without knowing what particular benchmark sites you're referring to, it's difficult to really respond. But with a pretty much identical IPC, anywhere from ~2.4 to ~3.2 times the memory bandwidth and 2x or 4x as much L2, the Pentium M should be a noticably faster chip if you're actually doing something that doesn't fit in the CPU's L1 cache and/or isn't I/O limited (and assuming that CPU performance is something that actually matters to you).
Then then there's the fact that Pentium Ms are available at up to 2.26Ghz, or about 25% higher clock speed - so the 1.7Ghz Pentium M that stacks up quite well against a top of the line 1.67Ghz G4 is relatively slow, by Pentium M standard. This is not something that can just be waved away, as you Mac fans like to try and do.
The bandwidth of the current gen Pentium M's IS higher - I would certainly HOPE so, since the g4s are at least a full processor gen older.
Actually, by the measure you make a Pentium M "current gen", the G4 is as well, as it still receives updates (like that boost to a 167Mhz FSB - whoa, hold onto your hats - and a reduction in process size). Particularly since a Pentium M isn't really much more than a P3 sitting on a P4 bus.
yet based on a very limited performance advantage, you're willing to pronounce the G4 "trounced"
KDE doesn't need patches nor leaves massive vulnerabilities for others to exploit, for one.
KDE doesn't get patched ? Bullshit.
Making IEtie in with outlook/messenger and other things was just ignorant.
Just like the khtml or WebCore modules can be reused in other KDE or OS X apps, you mean ?
IE is the equivalent of a shared library. Of *course* other applications are going to use its functionality - that's the whole reason it was designed the way it is. Do you similarly blame "the OS" when a glibc vulnerability affects a wide range of Linux software ?
If so, you could've simply explained things to me, instead of being a dickhead off the bat like some typical 14 year old from WoW
You're the one who started criticising from a position of ignorance. It's pretty clear you don't understand that IE's architecture is just like khtml, WebCore, or dozens of other reusable components.
Or, to put it another way, you're saying something sucks, when you don't actually know anything about it and it has since been emulated by both the two major Linux GUIs and OS X.
Now, if this was a recent development in IE's history, I'd be inclined to consider your ignorance to be an innocent mistake. However, since IE has been designed like this for *nearly 10 fucking years*, and that design has since be imitated by KDE, GNOME and OS X, it's pretty obvious you're just mindlessly regurgitating typical Slashbot anti-Microsoft FUD of "Windows sucks because IE is 'part of the OS'". That is why I responded as I did.
There is nothing special about IE. It's just a bunch of shared COM components. It runs in user space. It runs with the privileges of the user. It doesn't hook into the kernel. It doesn't have any special abilities. "Part of the OS" just means it comes by default and other applications can depend on it being there, like the widget set. It's simply implementing one of the basic tenets of good software design - reusable code.
If you really feel the need to criticise IE, at least learn enough about it to criticise it from a position of non-ignorance, and pick some of the things that need to be fixed, like ActiveX or coding bugs.
No, I'm one of those dimwits that KNEW integrating the application into the OS itself, would create more problems. Did I mention KERNEL anywhere in that post? No. Modular OSes tend to be a bit more secure than something that has everything built-in. It's harder to exploit holes when crap isn't directly tied to and dependent upon everything else.
So what makes you think IE is any different to khtml in KDE and WebCore in OS X ?
Yeah, but they're not as good as those one you guys have. We have to turn our monitors upside down to get a decent picture, for example, and all the electrons flow around the machine backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
And so rarely is the question asked if they're learning...
Now, I personally don't have a huge issue with smokers (my dad smokes, I occasionally smoke a cigar and I have many friends that smoke), however, smokers have a direct, measurable, negative effect on people around them simply by lighting up a cigarette (this is in contrast to some other drugs like, say, alcohol or ecstacy). When that goes away, you can argue that smoking bans are some sort of "property" issue.
Or, as the saying goes, your right to swing your arms around ends at my face.
(Still waiting for the first "assault by second hand smoke" charge to be laid).
Unless, of course, you're a politician (or rich, but the two tend to go hand in hand).
I never said it wasn't a point of failure, I said it wasn't as common a point of failure as some posters on Slashdot would have everyone believe.
If you haven't seen any examples of registry problems then I assure you you will be surprised at the horrors it can bring.
Oh, I've seen Registry problems caused by errant software or stupid users, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish to the spontaneous combustion that should apparently be happening to every Windows machine I've ever seen at least once a year.
*All* platforms are vulnerable to some program or user with elevated privileges going berko and writing rubbish to places in the system it shouldn't. To try and pretend otherwise is nothing more than sophistry.
You see, the problem is not with the idea of the centralized registry itself but with the fact that the operating system (in this case MSWin) assumes that whatever program modifies the registry will modify it in such a way that it is still left in a consistent state.
What platform are you thinking of where this isn't the case (or even possible) ?
Incidentally, a registry transaction - barring uncorrectable problems like memory corruption or physical media errors - *will* leave the Registry in a consistent state (being a transactional database and all). It may not leave the data in it in a *correct* state, but that's a different matter.
Please read that again so you may understand. In other words, MSWin assumes that all installed software will play nice and that programmers have taken great care to ensure the safety and consistency of the registry.
Just like every other platform, you mean ?
What happens when a user decides to click on the cancel button in the middle of an installation and the program conveniently forgets that it has already modified the registry and thus should roll back whatever changes it has made?
The same thing that happens when you click cancel halfway through installing a poorly written program that might have written to system areas on any other platform.
What do you think will happen to the registry now?
The Registry will be fine. The errant program may have written incorrect data, but that's a problem on any platform. It's also why the system keeps backups of the Registry files.
Ever wondered why Windows advises users to exit all other running programs before installing new software?
Probably the same reason OS X does (although at least it's not as bad as MacOS was, quitting everything for you).
What happens when program A modifies the registry but before it was able to save the changes, program B modifies and saves its changes to the same central registry?
Exactly the same thing that happens in any other database when you have two processes trying to change the same value.
What happens to the changes made by program B when program A now saves its changes? This is called the concurrency problem and it is a real problem when two or more processes access and modify the same resource.
The Registry was designed to be accessed by hundreds - if not thousands - of processes at once as part of a multiuser OS. Somehow I think they took "the concurrency problem" into account.
Look, the Registry isn't like some pissant little text file that gets loaded as one big block into an "editor" process, modifed as a single monolithic entity and then written back out. It's a fully fledged transactional database that performs atomic operations on only the values that need to be touched.
What if an installed program decides to insert information in the centralized registry that is specifically discouraged by Microsoft but which a lazy programmer decides is actually quite safe because it doesn't seem to have any deleterious effects in his system? Of course his system has very little installed software since it
Have you stopped beating your wife yet ?
You seem to be talking an awful lot there about implementation there. Not to mention irrelevancies like "critical system information".
Even on NT-based Windowses, the registry is fragile, [...]
Amazing how with the registry being so "fragile", I've yet to see a single example of an actual Registry corruption in the wild, despite having been a sysadmin for many years.
About the only thing that is likely to corrupt the Registry is a physical hardware error of some sort (memory, disk, etc). I hate the break it to you, but that sort of thing is going to cause problems on any OS.
[...] and if something happens to it the system is utterly hosed; it won't even boot to a command line in safe mode.
You make it sound like this doesn't happen to other OSes.
Now, if all you mean by the "idea" of the registry is a standard preferences management system, [...]
The "idea" of the Registry is actually a system-wide database. "Preferences management" is but one of many functions it performs.
But the Windows implementation is horribly flawed.
Hm. Yet still I've never had any major problems with the Registry, out of hundreds (if not thousands) of Windows machines.
Seems to me "Registry problems" are like "major XP SP2 problems". Rare, but widely referred to as being commonplace.
Somehow I doubt the bottleneck there is the OS...
What's wrong with the *idea* of the Registry ?
OS X isn't a microkernel. It's the same sort of "microkernel-based" thing that Windows NT is. Which is to say it's probably architecturally designed mostly like a microkernel, but since everything runs in kernel space there's no stability benefit.
There are several reasons why regular (though not necessarily frequent) reboots are a good idea. Not least to make sure the machine will actually restart into a usable (and accessible) state.
If you have a 24/7 environment, and a proper architecture to support that requirement, individual machine restarts are irrelevant.
If you don't have a 24/7 environment, machine restarts can be scheduled outside of production hours - daily if need be - again making them irrelevant.
If you're a home user, chances are extremely high your PC is turned off at least once a week, if not every night. Even if it isn't, rebooting occasionally is hardly a problem.
Reboots only really matter to two types of people - a) those whose ego depends on the number returned by uptime(1) and b) those who are trying to run a 24/7 environment where they shouldn't be.
Desktop PowerPC-compatible Operating Systems.
I'd feel quite confident in saying that about 80% of the components in those new x86 Macs will be identical to the ones "cheapskate NewEgg buyers" pick up every day.
It's not like most of the components in the current Macs are anything that isn't also available off the shelf at places like NewEgg - I see no reason to believe x86 Macs will be any different.
This whole "Apple uses higher quality hardware" meme really has to die. It's not even remotely true. Shit, you can't even buy a Mac with SCSI.
Only the unimportant parts.
It's important to remember the difference between "possible" and "probable".
It's *possible* a poor immigrant might become rich & famous.
It's *probable* a poor immigrant will have to work 3 jobs, 14 hour days and 7 day weeks - and/or turn to crime - to scrape together enough money to feed himself every day.
"Being employed" is not the be-all and end-all of society.
Capitalism is exactly the same. It's just that the money gets "lost" in a smaller circle of people.
How is non-Government charity any different ?
Comes standard with every unix install.
man 1 cat
Because if he really *is* a bad guy, he might decide "shit, they're on to me" and go and blow something up if all that happens is he gets taken into custody and his hard drive is imaged.
This is also ignoring requirements for physical evidence, data that might only be found from low-level data recovery efforts (that an image won't copy), etc.
In any event, undoubtedly imaging and then dealing with the image is where they *start*.
It's worth noting that "evidence sufficient to know he's doing something" and "evidence that can convince a judge he's doing something" are typically worlds apart.
Holding a suspect allows those who have the former sufficient time to acquire the latter.
(Which is not to say I support the idea of holding suspects indefinitely, but it's nowhere near as simple as "if you know enough to look, you know enough to send them to gaol").
Added to that, any techie for which it's a matter of importance (eg: the bloke at your local computer fixit shop, 14 year old gamerz) will have memorised which marketing name has which processor features within hours of them being released, lest they not appear to be l33t enough.
Everyone else just picks a price point and then buys whichever machine is at that price point the salesman tells them is best.
That's because the winner in that game is the casino.
Ah. So they don't really "kick the crap out of 'em at comparable speeds", like you said earlier ? (Incidentally, I really wish people wouldn't say "speed" when they really mean "clock speed".)
Without knowing what particular benchmark sites you're referring to, it's difficult to really respond. But with a pretty much identical IPC, anywhere from ~2.4 to ~3.2 times the memory bandwidth and 2x or 4x as much L2, the Pentium M should be a noticably faster chip if you're actually doing something that doesn't fit in the CPU's L1 cache and/or isn't I/O limited (and assuming that CPU performance is something that actually matters to you).
Then then there's the fact that Pentium Ms are available at up to 2.26Ghz, or about 25% higher clock speed - so the 1.7Ghz Pentium M that stacks up quite well against a top of the line 1.67Ghz G4 is relatively slow, by Pentium M standard. This is not something that can just be waved away, as you Mac fans like to try and do.
The bandwidth of the current gen Pentium M's IS higher - I would certainly HOPE so, since the g4s are at least a full processor gen older.
Actually, by the measure you make a Pentium M "current gen", the G4 is as well, as it still receives updates (like that boost to a 167Mhz FSB - whoa, hold onto your hats - and a reduction in process size). Particularly since a Pentium M isn't really much more than a P3 sitting on a P4 bus.
yet based on a very limited performance advantage, you're willing to pronounce the G4 "trounced"
Much like you were, you mean ?
KDE doesn't get patched ? Bullshit.
Making IEtie in with outlook/messenger and other things was just ignorant.
Just like the khtml or WebCore modules can be reused in other KDE or OS X apps, you mean ?
IE is the equivalent of a shared library. Of *course* other applications are going to use its functionality - that's the whole reason it was designed the way it is. Do you similarly blame "the OS" when a glibc vulnerability affects a wide range of Linux software ?
If so, you could've simply explained things to me, instead of being a dickhead off the bat like some typical 14 year old from WoW
You're the one who started criticising from a position of ignorance. It's pretty clear you don't understand that IE's architecture is just like khtml, WebCore, or dozens of other reusable components.
Or, to put it another way, you're saying something sucks, when you don't actually know anything about it and it has since been emulated by both the two major Linux GUIs and OS X.
Now, if this was a recent development in IE's history, I'd be inclined to consider your ignorance to be an innocent mistake. However, since IE has been designed like this for *nearly 10 fucking years*, and that design has since be imitated by KDE, GNOME and OS X, it's pretty obvious you're just mindlessly regurgitating typical Slashbot anti-Microsoft FUD of "Windows sucks because IE is 'part of the OS'". That is why I responded as I did.
There is nothing special about IE. It's just a bunch of shared COM components. It runs in user space. It runs with the privileges of the user. It doesn't hook into the kernel. It doesn't have any special abilities. "Part of the OS" just means it comes by default and other applications can depend on it being there, like the widget set. It's simply implementing one of the basic tenets of good software design - reusable code.
If you really feel the need to criticise IE, at least learn enough about it to criticise it from a position of non-ignorance, and pick some of the things that need to be fixed, like ActiveX or coding bugs.
So what makes you think IE is any different to khtml in KDE and WebCore in OS X ?
Yeah, but they're not as good as those one you guys have. We have to turn our monitors upside down to get a decent picture, for example, and all the electrons flow around the machine backwards.