Vista x64 for example shoves two 32bit chunks into one 64bit call or memory space, hence not wasting RAM as other 64bit OSes often do, and this also speeds things up since two 32bit chunks are processed at once
Huh? Application code is application code. Unless it's doing some sort of dynamic recompilation, I don't really see what it's going to do for 32bit apps. Yes, the code behind the APIs an application uses might take advantage of 64bit stuff, but applications themselves will not. Either way, I'm not really sure what you're really talking about here, "two 32bit chunks into one 64bit call or memory space"? "not wasting RAM"?
What? How is that even remotely relevent to not abusing prisoners, and wanting prisons to be more than somewhere small time criminals learn to be bigger time criminals?
Shame he's in a country where punishment is seen as more important than rehabilitation. Never mind trying to find why he went wrong and trying to fix it, let's just hope his cellmate rapes him every night for the rest of his life, ho ho ho.
Not really. I've seen the numbers steadily creep up until they're mostly on par, and occasionally better, and occasionally worse, sometimes much worse. Considering it's something that costs over £300 retail, it's not really something that I think anyone is moving towards very rapidly.
let alone watching everything from games to photoshop launch 10x or more faster on Vista than they do on XP
OK, now this is what you should provide concrete numbers on. 15% better on some vague "PC Mark" benchmark is pretty meaningless, frankly -5% in games is too. But 10x load time improvement? Where are the really impressive looking charts showing, e.g, TF2 loading in 6s instead of 60s? The numbers I've seen are nowhere near that impressive, aside from some heavy apps I don't use anyway.
Ok, so you admit by proxy you know nothing about DX10
Oh, I know about it being able to do "more", but nobody is really doing much with it, certainly not to an extent that's worth spending £120+ on an OS to get, especially when by doing more you get reduced performance; bit of a concern when you like to run in 2560*1600.
The Vista APIs are more about developers and development than the 'pretty'
Right, but I'm not a Windows developer, and no Windows developers are going to be doing things only supported by Vista for a long time, so why should I, or any other user, care? An OS is there to run apps, and those apps run just fine on XP.
Again you are proving you don't use Vista or know much about it either. More memory, ya it does like 1GB to outperform XP and 2GB is even better.
Performance can be measured. I've seen such measurements, none of them show Vista appreciably outperforming XP. If it's so much better, demonstrate it, don't just call me an idiot, cite something.
Just like Vista itself, the Flip3D is crap in comparison to the technology actually setting underneath that makes it happen.
Yes, the fancy GPU pipeline/virtualization/etc stuff is very impressive, and hardware compositing is one of the main reasons I might consider Vista, but it could be powered by fairies from the 10th dimension for all the difference it makes to me.
However, running Vista WDDM drivers (which every card made since the Geforce 5200 years ago has), not only runs mainly in User Mode, but Vista has several layers of video Crash recovery that you can't even get in another OS at this time.
Yes, and isn't it nice when your video card crashes and doesn't take out the OS, but it still crashes, and it doesn't necessarily always recover. What difference does it make if I hear it happening from a friend who's using it instead of on my own machine, where I haven't seen an nvidia.sys crash in about 18 months?
Yes, Vista has some very impressive aspects, it's very advanced in some areas, but I'll buy it when it actually provides a reasonable amount of benefit to me, thanks, not before.
Where $function is something like www, or db, or stats, or admin, or backend, or whatever; $num is a numeric identifier (0 for a master, 1+ for interchangable spares/slaves); $tag is an optional tag indicating, e.g. the internal management network (-mgt) or a LOM (-lom), and $location is an abbreviation for the location; e.g. www3-mgt.thdo.newzbin.com is a webserver via the LAN at Telehouse Docklands.
It's nice because you can tell at a glance vaguely what a machine will be doing, where it is, how it's being accessed, and roughly how critical it is (db0 better not die, but db9 can probably burn). Friendlier ad-hoc names can be made up and pointed at appropriate machines, of course.
It is more stable than XP, more secure than XP, easier for business to deploy (mind numbing easy even), and unless you are trying to get it to run on 512mb, outperforms XP.
More stable, unless you're running certain very common drivers. Funnily enough they're the main thing which take out XP too. I've also seen vanishingly few benchmarks where Vista outperforms XP, even with SP1; their +5% performance gains after a year of tweaking have merely served to achieve a vague parity in most situations, and in some cases they needed way more than that. And woe betide you if you have any applications which actually used all your 2GB; game memory requirements don't shoot up for Vista just for the sake of it.
Vista has a new gaming API, and even in the non-DX10 area included things needed for Windows Live out of the newer networking APIs (i.e. Halo2 Vista only 'originally' release).
Heh, did you really mention Halo 2 just there? The game which looks like it came out of the early DirectX 8 era and who's Vista requirement was quickly evaded by a small third party loader application? You don't need a new OS for a couple of networking APIs.
which is sad because game makers have pulled back full DirectX10 support
Sorry, but what did Microsoft think was going to happen? That people would flock to Vista in their tens of millions because, oh, never mind all the DRM bollocks and increased system requirements for less real world performance, it actually has a decent IO system (which you probably won't see the benefit of with a single 7200RPM drive, especially with the hilariously slow file copying for the first 13 months), more userspace drivers and a really fancy hardware compositing graphics pipeline? Lets face it, anyone who would even slightly understand what any of that means will mostly stop at "DRM bollocks".
OpenGL has no OS dependance it can rely on, and can be both good and bad. We know the good side of this, but on the bad side, the level of features or performance it can offer is limited as it can't expect anything from the OS in new technologies
Erm, it sure can depend on OS features -- in case you hadn't noticed, OpenGL is a graphics API, and the way it's implemented can take advantage of whatever OS capabilities you like. The only difference with Vista is the driver developers have to work out how to make use of the new OS GPU stuff instead of being able to deal with it all themselves. And let's not forget, this is probably the number one source of system instability on Vista. I guess it's lucky (and fairly impressive) that at least some of the crashes are all in userspace and recoverable.
don't be pissed because a new game requires the new system.
Why not? I'm not "upgrading" for one game, especially when it's not doing anything it couldn't do in DX9. I'm especially not upgrading when Microsoft try to force the issue by artificially limiting crappy games like they did with Halo 2. Sure, feel free to go make your DX10-specific wondergame, just don't be pissed when it bombs because you cut out 90% of your target market.
Vista is a much larger shove forward in new technologies and APIs than KDE.
Sure, some of it looks rather nice, and it sounds good on paper, but from a user standpoint most of that's irrelevent even if it did translate into real world improvements (much of it, seemingly, does not). About the biggest thing most people will notice is slightly smoother window handling, the need for more memory and, oh, look, another video driver crash.
Vista, to me, feels something like the Windows version of FreeBSD 5; lots of things have changed, it's been ages since the previous release, things aren't really tuned especially well, and some stuff which looked awesome on paper is turning out to be more trouble than it's worth. Whether the same applies to KDE4, I can't say; I've never really cared for the big DE's:)
Unfortunately, for the money you've already paid, you're probably going to have to see a lawyer
Nope; dispute the charges, the card company will issue chargebacks unless they can give proof of delivery. Good luck doing that with a service.
Of course you shouldn't do this unless you've exhausted other channels, but it's exactly the right thing to do if you keep getting billed and customer services won't help.
I've never accidently hit it on my Cherry CyMotion; it's ramped to the right so there's a good few mm between it and the A key, and the key itself is heavier weighted so you need to really want to enable it.
This, of course, sucks if you remap it to something useful, because it's awkward to hit when you do want it.
I doubt those games even hit 1Mbps up and down sustained for more than even 1 minute:).
So, just like normal peer to peer services then?;)
I think the most opponents SupCom supports are 8; those 8 can be on a very large map, with thousands of units each, and each round from each unit tracked, though.
So far with most multiplayer online games, one machine is the server and the rest are the clients.
Go look at the traffic if you don't believe me. I've monitored the traffic on my connection as I play various online games - but not Xbox Live though.
Sure, FPS's typically keep the game world state in a single server, but RTS games commonly use peer to peer network topology; e.g. Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire.
Forum threads I'm following, long articles I'm reading, will read, or want to show someone, sites I visit regularly. If I follow a link, it'll typically be in a new tab so it can load in the background and I can switch back and forth easily. They're easier to manage than bookmarks, and opening new tabs is easier than closing old ones.
They don't really use a significant amount of space on a 30" display.
Erm, ZFS is layered; you can put UFS or ext2 or.. whatever, on top of a zpool, complete with RAID, checksumming, copy on write, etc (features which all fit well together in that layer). I don't really see how it's any different from LVM, except zvol's happen to be able to do a bit more between the devices they consume and the devices they provide.
I thought both Linux and BSD's (and Windows for that matter) defaulted to a 2GB split? And if it has to be mapped into kernel space like that how would 64bit help? You still have seperate areas for kernel and user space, they're just much bigger?
My question about Jython was not rhetorical; I keep hearing people saying it needs more love. And no, I wouldn't give Java the time of day, but it is perhaps quite relevent to those who worry about wobbly concepts like "maturity" in decade-old languages.
I have seen the sequential disk read throughput of an old SATA box jump by +30-40% with a 64-bit kernel, because of the paging overhead of a 32-bit kernel required to access high-memory (ie. memory between 1GB and 4GB).
Huh? Why does Linux have to use bounce buffers to get into "high" memory? Don't all even slightly modern devices support at least 32bit DMA?
Indeed, plenty of things max out at 32bit, so you need to use bounce buffers to DMA above 4GB.
64-bit can be faster than 32-bit if the application was using data structures larger than 32-bit to begin with Or if the application can benefit from having more than a small handful of registers, which plenty can. Doubling the size of pointers can have a negative effect, but it's typically negligible.
Also, fuck having 4GB of address space to play with, and fuck struggling to even get 3GB of it into userspace; more typically you only get 2 without jumping through hoops. By the time you've mmapped a few data files and fragmented memory a bit that's *nothing*.
PHP had extremely similar holes fairly recently; integer overflows, string length fuckups, etc. In code that was far more obviously hilariously bad; e.g. using float to track string length, and checking an int for > MAX_INT to detect overflow. The initial fixes were similarly hilarious too.
In the mean time, until a couple of days ago half my Ruby services have been up for on the order of 14 months, and will likely do the same for the next 14, though by then there will probably be three or four different VM's to deploy it on instead of just two. Also, our PHP's will probably continue to go into weird unbusy loops, and occasionally crash for no apparant reason.
So, um, how's jPHP and Jython coming along? Would you deploy a real life application on Jython?
The buttons there will do it; e.g. "Toggle the Menu & Personal bar on/off AND dropdown the main menu" (I would link it, but the comments system doesn't like them). On Unix you can also use Alt-F11; look in Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> Keyboard Setup, search for "Disable Menu". Delete "Platform Unix" and it'll work in other OS's, or make your own keybinding to "Enable Menu Bar | Disable Menu Bar".
It would be nice if more of these were provided by default, rather than having to go out and find/create buttons yourself.
I was annoyed that I couldn't cram the Home-Reload-Back buttons, URL bar, and google search box onto the same line with the "File Edit View... Help" menus. This is a very useful capability on older laptops with small screens. I just now installed 9.5, and guess what: you still can't use that dead space between "Help" and the right edge of the screen. IE was the first to allow that. Firefox wisely "copied" IE to allow the same. What did the Opera guys do? Nothing. They apparently don't like anything they didn't come up with. Fuck them. Bitch much? Turn off the menu bar, replace it with a button, all done. Yes, by default it uses the OS standard menu bar, which doesn't do anything special; didums, it's trivially replacable, and has been for donkeys years. So, no, fuck you.
Excluding the Menu Bar (Opera uses the standard/forced top one) Including it. It's certainly not "forced"; I have it disabled, with a Menu, Feeds, Bookmarks and Closed buttons and the status bar where the menu used to be.
On the other hand, the UK education system is without doubt on a slide. You can dress up the exam results and league tables as much as you like... we have examination questions appearing on first year university CS course papers that are almost verbatim copies of questions previously set on A-level papers Quite. The first year of my computer science degree barely covered what my computing A-level did; the second year barely covered what I'd done on my own during my A-level just by being interested in the subject. We had people who'd supposedly done 8 months of C programming courses, in addition to Visual Basic and Java, who didn't understand what a pointer was, and struggled with basic data structures, yet were otherwise doing ok.
I've heard similar stories repeatedly, from students, ex-students and professors; courses are basically being optimized for passing people who arrive at the course having never even touched a computer, and who mostly want to spend their time getting drunk. If you actually know anything and went into higher education to deepen your knowledge, you might as well ignore as much of the course as you can get away with and treat it as an expensive excuse to spend a lot of time in a hopefully decent library.
Of course, my own experience and that of most of my friends were years ago; possibly things have improved since then. Somehow, I doubt it.
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Vista x64 for example shoves two 32bit chunks into one 64bit call or memory space, hence not wasting RAM as other 64bit OSes often do, and this also speeds things up since two 32bit chunks are processed at once
Huh? Application code is application code. Unless it's doing some sort of dynamic recompilation, I don't really see what it's going to do for 32bit apps. Yes, the code behind the APIs an application uses might take advantage of 64bit stuff, but applications themselves will not. Either way, I'm not really sure what you're really talking about here, "two 32bit chunks into one 64bit call or memory space"? "not wasting RAM"?
What? How is that even remotely relevent to not abusing prisoners, and wanting prisons to be more than somewhere small time criminals learn to be bigger time criminals?
Shame he's in a country where punishment is seen as more important than rehabilitation. Never mind trying to find why he went wrong and trying to fix it, let's just hope his cellmate rapes him every night for the rest of his life, ho ho ho.
OK, so you missed most of the Vista reviews
Not really. I've seen the numbers steadily creep up until they're mostly on par, and occasionally better, and occasionally worse, sometimes much worse. Considering it's something that costs over £300 retail, it's not really something that I think anyone is moving towards very rapidly.
let alone watching everything from games to photoshop launch 10x or more faster on Vista than they do on XP
OK, now this is what you should provide concrete numbers on. 15% better on some vague "PC Mark" benchmark is pretty meaningless, frankly -5% in games is too. But 10x load time improvement? Where are the really impressive looking charts showing, e.g, TF2 loading in 6s instead of 60s? The numbers I've seen are nowhere near that impressive, aside from some heavy apps I don't use anyway.
Really? Vista suppports 99.9% of the XP drivers, in addition to Vista drivers. And you think Vista is more unstable than XP or has driver issues?
Yes: NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007.
Ok, so you admit by proxy you know nothing about DX10
Oh, I know about it being able to do "more", but nobody is really doing much with it, certainly not to an extent that's worth spending £120+ on an OS to get, especially when by doing more you get reduced performance; bit of a concern when you like to run in 2560*1600.
The Vista APIs are more about developers and development than the 'pretty'
Right, but I'm not a Windows developer, and no Windows developers are going to be doing things only supported by Vista for a long time, so why should I, or any other user, care? An OS is there to run apps, and those apps run just fine on XP.
Again you are proving you don't use Vista or know much about it either. More memory, ya it does like 1GB to outperform XP and 2GB is even better.
Performance can be measured. I've seen such measurements, none of them show Vista appreciably outperforming XP. If it's so much better, demonstrate it, don't just call me an idiot, cite something.
Just like Vista itself, the Flip3D is crap in comparison to the technology actually setting underneath that makes it happen.
Yes, the fancy GPU pipeline/virtualization/etc stuff is very impressive, and hardware compositing is one of the main reasons I might consider Vista, but it could be powered by fairies from the 10th dimension for all the difference it makes to me.
However, running Vista WDDM drivers (which every card made since the Geforce 5200 years ago has), not only runs mainly in User Mode, but Vista has several layers of video Crash recovery that you can't even get in another OS at this time.
Yes, and isn't it nice when your video card crashes and doesn't take out the OS, but it still crashes, and it doesn't necessarily always recover. What difference does it make if I hear it happening from a friend who's using it instead of on my own machine, where I haven't seen an nvidia.sys crash in about 18 months?
Yes, Vista has some very impressive aspects, it's very advanced in some areas, but I'll buy it when it actually provides a reasonable amount of benefit to me, thanks, not before.
$function$num{-$tag}.$location.domain.com
Where $function is something like www, or db, or stats, or admin, or backend, or whatever; $num is a numeric identifier (0 for a master, 1+ for interchangable spares/slaves); $tag is an optional tag indicating, e.g. the internal management network (-mgt) or a LOM (-lom), and $location is an abbreviation for the location; e.g. www3-mgt.thdo.newzbin.com is a webserver via the LAN at Telehouse Docklands.
It's nice because you can tell at a glance vaguely what a machine will be doing, where it is, how it's being accessed, and roughly how critical it is (db0 better not die, but db9 can probably burn). Friendlier ad-hoc names can be made up and pointed at appropriate machines, of course.
It is more stable than XP, more secure than XP, easier for business to deploy (mind numbing easy even), and unless you are trying to get it to run on 512mb, outperforms XP.
More stable, unless you're running certain very common drivers. Funnily enough they're the main thing which take out XP too. I've also seen vanishingly few benchmarks where Vista outperforms XP, even with SP1; their +5% performance gains after a year of tweaking have merely served to achieve a vague parity in most situations, and in some cases they needed way more than that. And woe betide you if you have any applications which actually used all your 2GB; game memory requirements don't shoot up for Vista just for the sake of it.
Vista has a new gaming API, and even in the non-DX10 area included things needed for Windows Live out of the newer networking APIs (i.e. Halo2 Vista only 'originally' release).
Heh, did you really mention Halo 2 just there? The game which looks like it came out of the early DirectX 8 era and who's Vista requirement was quickly evaded by a small third party loader application? You don't need a new OS for a couple of networking APIs.
which is sad because game makers have pulled back full DirectX10 support
Sorry, but what did Microsoft think was going to happen? That people would flock to Vista in their tens of millions because, oh, never mind all the DRM bollocks and increased system requirements for less real world performance, it actually has a decent IO system (which you probably won't see the benefit of with a single 7200RPM drive, especially with the hilariously slow file copying for the first 13 months), more userspace drivers and a really fancy hardware compositing graphics pipeline? Lets face it, anyone who would even slightly understand what any of that means will mostly stop at "DRM bollocks".
OpenGL has no OS dependance it can rely on, and can be both good and bad. We know the good side of this, but on the bad side, the level of features or performance it can offer is limited as it can't expect anything from the OS in new technologies
Erm, it sure can depend on OS features -- in case you hadn't noticed, OpenGL is a graphics API, and the way it's implemented can take advantage of whatever OS capabilities you like. The only difference with Vista is the driver developers have to work out how to make use of the new OS GPU stuff instead of being able to deal with it all themselves. And let's not forget, this is probably the number one source of system instability on Vista. I guess it's lucky (and fairly impressive) that at least some of the crashes are all in userspace and recoverable.
don't be pissed because a new game requires the new system.
Why not? I'm not "upgrading" for one game, especially when it's not doing anything it couldn't do in DX9. I'm especially not upgrading when Microsoft try to force the issue by artificially limiting crappy games like they did with Halo 2. Sure, feel free to go make your DX10-specific wondergame, just don't be pissed when it bombs because you cut out 90% of your target market.
Vista is a much larger shove forward in new technologies and APIs than KDE.
Sure, some of it looks rather nice, and it sounds good on paper, but from a user standpoint most of that's irrelevent even if it did translate into real world improvements (much of it, seemingly, does not). About the biggest thing most people will notice is slightly smoother window handling, the need for more memory and, oh, look, another video driver crash.
Vista, to me, feels something like the Windows version of FreeBSD 5; lots of things have changed, it's been ages since the previous release, things aren't really tuned especially well, and some stuff which looked awesome on paper is turning out to be more trouble than it's worth. Whether the same applies to KDE4, I can't say; I've never really cared for the big DE's :)
Unfortunately, for the money you've already paid, you're probably going to have to see a lawyer
Nope; dispute the charges, the card company will issue chargebacks unless they can give proof of delivery. Good luck doing that with a service.
Of course you shouldn't do this unless you've exhausted other channels, but it's exactly the right thing to do if you keep getting billed and customer services won't help.
I've never accidently hit it on my Cherry CyMotion; it's ramped to the right so there's a good few mm between it and the A key, and the key itself is heavier weighted so you need to really want to enable it.
This, of course, sucks if you remap it to something useful, because it's awkward to hit when you do want it.
I doubt those games even hit 1Mbps up and down sustained for more than even 1 minute :).
So, just like normal peer to peer services then? ;)
I think the most opponents SupCom supports are 8; those 8 can be on a very large map, with thousands of units each, and each round from each unit tracked, though.
So far with most multiplayer online games, one machine is the server and the rest are the clients.
Go look at the traffic if you don't believe me. I've monitored the traffic on my connection as I play various online games - but not Xbox Live though.
Sure, FPS's typically keep the game world state in a single server, but RTS games commonly use peer to peer network topology; e.g. Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire.
Forum threads I'm following, long articles I'm reading, will read, or want to show someone, sites I visit regularly. If I follow a link, it'll typically be in a new tab so it can load in the background and I can switch back and forth easily. They're easier to manage than bookmarks, and opening new tabs is easier than closing old ones.
They don't really use a significant amount of space on a 30" display.
How many more? My Opera 9.50 is currently using 270MB with 67 tabs, and I just closed about 50 (and emptied the closed tab list).
Sun already have ZFS in Solaris, Nexenta, FreeBSD, OS X, and FUSE, I don't think they're in much danger of it fading into obscurity just yet.
In other news, HAMMER is shaping up nicely, and neatly sidesteps pretty much all license concerns.
Erm, ZFS is layered; you can put UFS or ext2 or.. whatever, on top of a zpool, complete with RAID, checksumming, copy on write, etc (features which all fit well together in that layer). I don't really see how it's any different from LVM, except zvol's happen to be able to do a bit more between the devices they consume and the devices they provide.
I thought both Linux and BSD's (and Windows for that matter) defaulted to a 2GB split? And if it has to be mapped into kernel space like that how would 64bit help? You still have seperate areas for kernel and user space, they're just much bigger?
What? Does your compiler drop you into vi foo.s for the optimization stage or something?
My question about Jython was not rhetorical; I keep hearing people saying it needs more love. And no, I wouldn't give Java the time of day, but it is perhaps quite relevent to those who worry about wobbly concepts like "maturity" in decade-old languages.
Indeed, plenty of things max out at 32bit, so you need to use bounce buffers to DMA above 4GB.
Also, fuck having 4GB of address space to play with, and fuck struggling to even get 3GB of it into userspace; more typically you only get 2 without jumping through hoops. By the time you've mmapped a few data files and fragmented memory a bit that's *nothing*.
PHP had extremely similar holes fairly recently; integer overflows, string length fuckups, etc. In code that was far more obviously hilariously bad; e.g. using float to track string length, and checking an int for > MAX_INT to detect overflow. The initial fixes were similarly hilarious too.
In the mean time, until a couple of days ago half my Ruby services have been up for on the order of 14 months, and will likely do the same for the next 14, though by then there will probably be three or four different VM's to deploy it on instead of just two. Also, our PHP's will probably continue to go into weird unbusy loops, and occasionally crash for no apparant reason.
So, um, how's jPHP and Jython coming along? Would you deploy a real life application on Jython?
The buttons there will do it; e.g. "Toggle the Menu & Personal bar on/off AND dropdown the main menu" (I would link it, but the comments system doesn't like them). On Unix you can also use Alt-F11; look in Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> Keyboard Setup, search for "Disable Menu". Delete "Platform Unix" and it'll work in other OS's, or make your own keybinding to "Enable Menu Bar | Disable Menu Bar".
It would be nice if more of these were provided by default, rather than having to go out and find/create buttons yourself.
I've heard similar stories repeatedly, from students, ex-students and professors; courses are basically being optimized for passing people who arrive at the course having never even touched a computer, and who mostly want to spend their time getting drunk. If you actually know anything and went into higher education to deepen your knowledge, you might as well ignore as much of the course as you can get away with and treat it as an expensive excuse to spend a lot of time in a hopefully decent library.
Of course, my own experience and that of most of my friends were years ago; possibly things have improved since then. Somehow, I doubt it.