The betas have been pretty stable for me... That said, if you're sick of firefox there are much better choices than saddling yourself with ie, chrome is pretty good or build chromium if you don't like google.
I believe there is a setting to force enable the hardware acceleration, but i forget what its called... My linux box with an nvidia card and binary drivers seems to run the mozilla hardware acceleration stress test very quickly, while osx running firefox 4 is extremely slow (4fps)... Is it not using hardware acceleration on osx? (i couldnt get decent performance out of any other browser on osx either, not safari, chrome etc).
Part of the problem is that windows phone 7 is still marketed as windows, and that's really not a good thing...
Very few people like windows, most people think it's an integral part of a desktop/laptop computer and can't see what it has to do with phones... Windows mobile 6.x left a bad taste in many peoples mouths, it was extremely bad and people hated it, the new version might be better but users have been put off. Many people associate windows with crashing and instability, not a desirable feature on phones... A lot of people think there is no alternative on desktops/laptops, but they know better alternatives exist for phones.
That update which is coming "soon" was previously scheduled to be available in january... Saying something is coming just doesn't cut it, the proof is when its actually delivered. They might not even release updates at all, the Kin was due to be updated and that never happened.
Linux marketshare is huge everywhere but the desktop...
Supercomputers - 80-90% linux, who wouldnt want to hack into a top500 supercomputer? Phones - android linux, iphone running an osx derivative.. Servers - linux is pretty big in the server market, servers make far more attractive targets for hackers since they're usually more powerful and have more bandwidth. Embedded - linux is pretty big in the embedded market too, lots of networking equipment runs linux, lots of pvr devices too, ip telephony handsets, all kinds of stuff.
In terms of overall installs, i wouldn't be surprised to find that linux actually outnumbers windows quite considerably.
Make cut down systems with limited functions aimed at end users (eg ipad), this will serve end users much better since they no longer have to worry about the complexity of a general purpose os...
Advanced users can still use more complex computers, on the basis that advanced users are far less likely to fall for social engineering tricks, you don't see many such attacks aimed at people using a cli based unix system.
Sure, you cannot change stupid people but you can make it more difficult for their stupidity to be exploited... Similarly windows 7 may be better than previous versions, but it's no magic bullet and does nothing to remove all the existing old versions out there either...
MS are directly responsible for many insecure design decisions and technologies which make it easier for malware, such things as hiding file extensions by default while relying on file extensions to determine executability, activex, allowing/encouraging users to run with admin privileges by default, having extremely complex network services (msrpc, netbios etc) running by default even on standalone workstations, making it simple to execute email attachments, using obfuscated file formats which make it easier for malicious code to hide, automatically executing programs when removable media is inserted, no centralised way to update third party applications... not to mention an os which is insanely complex and containing years and years worth of cruft giving huge numbers of places for bugs to hide and often making it more difficult to fix them.
Sure, malware would still exist if linux or macos were the most common end user platform, but i don't believe the problem would be as serious as it is with windows.
I haven't "hacked" my console... All i have done is fixed it..
When i bought it, it was sold to me on the basis that i can play games on it *and* run linux. I don't play a lot of games (i have 5 for it) but i did want to play gran turismo 5, despite that game saying it's for "ps3", by default i can't play it on the ps3 without sacrificing the ability to run linux... It doesn't state anywhere on the box that i would have to sacrifice one of the functions i bought the ps3 for in order to continue using another...
I don't play games online with it, but if i wanted to that would be even more ridiculous...
So in the end i have to install a hacked firmware so that i can continue using linux on the ps3 and still play legitimately purchased newer games...
I am probably going to sell my legitimately purchased copy of GT5 and continue playing a pirate copy out of principle - and pirate any future games i want to play, sony don't deserve any more of my money if this is how they treat paying customers.
And yet, piracy is rampant on the xbox 360 thanks to the ability to flash the dvd reader...
In fact, there is very little reason for piracy on the ps3, most games are available for the 360 so anyone serious about pirated games will have already gone down that route years ago. It's not really worth the cost of a ps3 for the very limited number of exclusives, even if you save the price of the games themselves by pirating them.
What are the consequences for not paying the water bills? Won't they eventually take you to court for not paying the bills, even tho they have to keep providing you service?
I do agree with your comment about denial of service attacks, being attacked can become extremely expensive and its not uncommon for moderate strength attacks to be launched, eg enough to push up your costs but not enough to take you offline. It should not be possible for a third party criminal to directly cause you costs in this way.
Sure, a world dominated by Apple and Google would be a bad thing... But is a world dominated by MS any better?
MS already have a stranglehold over various areas and they are way ahead of Apple or Google in that respect... Apple and Google may have significant market share in their respective areas, but they have not leveraged that share to keep people locked in nor have they used it to try and strong arm their way into other areas of the market, similarly they have not achieved dominance in a particular only to let that area stagnate for years. MS have done, and continue to do all of these things.
So sure, Google/Apple domination would be bad, but based on past form i'd much prefer that to MS domination even tho neither situation is ideal.
Most people just want to pick up a game to play casually, and $50 is far too much to invest for something like that... Many games are also not worth anything close to that price, a lot of games today are just minor tweaks to other games, and yet they expect you to splash out a full $50 again?
And how much of the lack of spam on bing is down to the spammers simply not bothering with it? All the search engine optimization sites target google, trying to influence bing results wouldn't get you many extra hits.
Some of us like to see what's inside, having the information available means we now have less reason to open it up (which voids warranty and risks damage. I have often been disappointed to find that rather expensive products often contain extremely cheap components inside, open up some midend commercial networking appliances someday if you want a good laugh.
As you say, people are used to using dead tree books... MS recently published a story about cloud computing, and using horseless carriage metaphors... I think the same applies here.
A tablet is a new form factor not really been pushed before, trying to use it like a book or like a desktop computer is wrong, and is very much like fitting a fake horse head on the front of your car. Apple seem to understand this, while MS keep trying to shoehorn existing ideas into incompatible form factors.
You are able to enjoy a sunset more because an arbitrary device now has a higher number displayed on it?
The sunset doesn't occur any later, it occurs at the exact same time, they only difference is what that time is called. What's to stop you just getting up earlier?
Intel and AMD are hampered by having to provide legacy compatibility, MIPS is a much newer designed architecture that should impose less bottlenecks on processor advancement.
Benchmarks are usually entirely synthetic, that is virtually all of their code consists of functions which are either never used, which calculate a static result or which calculate a result which is never used... Real world applications generally make use of the data that they compute, so the benchmark results will not be terribly indicative.
Optimizing C compilers have been doing this for years, thats why you can't just use a static loop for a benchmark - the compiler will precompute the resulting value and insert it as a static.
And the fact it installs on top of windows, its just another piece of bloatware that will annoy users...
A fast booting splashtop like environment would be useful, or what Dell did where there's a separate low power ARM cpu inside which runs an instant-on os for browsing and media playback with much better battery life etc...
Yeah, AmIRC being a graphical client it couldn't display ANSI codes either... I believe they implemented the proprietary mirc codes in version 3.x tho... I really Also it was the first client that irc newbies used, and such people are more likely to use color codes (and ridiculous scripts full of simple point and click functions to generate floods of colored ascii art) than more experienced users...
I always found it amusing that most mirc users wouldn't even consider using the client without loading a huge pack of addon scripts to make it usable either.
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The betas have been pretty stable for me...
That said, if you're sick of firefox there are much better choices than saddling yourself with ie, chrome is pretty good or build chromium if you don't like google.
I believe there is a setting to force enable the hardware acceleration, but i forget what its called...
My linux box with an nvidia card and binary drivers seems to run the mozilla hardware acceleration stress test very quickly, while osx running firefox 4 is extremely slow (4fps)... Is it not using hardware acceleration on osx? (i couldnt get decent performance out of any other browser on osx either, not safari, chrome etc).
A lot of networking/telco gear can run on DC, but very few servers seem to have that option...
Part of the problem is that windows phone 7 is still marketed as windows, and that's really not a good thing...
Very few people like windows, most people think it's an integral part of a desktop/laptop computer and can't see what it has to do with phones...
Windows mobile 6.x left a bad taste in many peoples mouths, it was extremely bad and people hated it, the new version might be better but users have been put off.
Many people associate windows with crashing and instability, not a desirable feature on phones... A lot of people think there is no alternative on desktops/laptops, but they know better alternatives exist for phones.
That update which is coming "soon" was previously scheduled to be available in january... Saying something is coming just doesn't cut it, the proof is when its actually delivered.
They might not even release updates at all, the Kin was due to be updated and that never happened.
Linux marketshare is huge everywhere but the desktop...
Supercomputers - 80-90% linux, who wouldnt want to hack into a top500 supercomputer?
Phones - android linux, iphone running an osx derivative..
Servers - linux is pretty big in the server market, servers make far more attractive targets for hackers since they're usually more powerful and have more bandwidth.
Embedded - linux is pretty big in the embedded market too, lots of networking equipment runs linux, lots of pvr devices too, ip telephony handsets, all kinds of stuff.
In terms of overall installs, i wouldn't be surprised to find that linux actually outnumbers windows quite considerably.
Make cut down systems with limited functions aimed at end users (eg ipad), this will serve end users much better since they no longer have to worry about the complexity of a general purpose os...
Advanced users can still use more complex computers, on the basis that advanced users are far less likely to fall for social engineering tricks, you don't see many such attacks aimed at people using a cli based unix system.
Sure, you cannot change stupid people but you can make it more difficult for their stupidity to be exploited...
Similarly windows 7 may be better than previous versions, but it's no magic bullet and does nothing to remove all the existing old versions out there either...
MS are directly responsible for many insecure design decisions and technologies which make it easier for malware, such things as hiding file extensions by default while relying on file extensions to determine executability, activex, allowing/encouraging users to run with admin privileges by default, having extremely complex network services (msrpc, netbios etc) running by default even on standalone workstations, making it simple to execute email attachments, using obfuscated file formats which make it easier for malicious code to hide, automatically executing programs when removable media is inserted, no centralised way to update third party applications... not to mention an os which is insanely complex and containing years and years worth of cruft giving huge numbers of places for bugs to hide and often making it more difficult to fix them.
Sure, malware would still exist if linux or macos were the most common end user platform, but i don't believe the problem would be as serious as it is with windows.
I haven't "hacked" my console...
All i have done is fixed it..
When i bought it, it was sold to me on the basis that i can play games on it *and* run linux. I don't play a lot of games (i have 5 for it) but i did want to play gran turismo 5, despite that game saying it's for "ps3", by default i can't play it on the ps3 without sacrificing the ability to run linux...
It doesn't state anywhere on the box that i would have to sacrifice one of the functions i bought the ps3 for in order to continue using another...
I don't play games online with it, but if i wanted to that would be even more ridiculous...
So in the end i have to install a hacked firmware so that i can continue using linux on the ps3 and still play legitimately purchased newer games...
I am probably going to sell my legitimately purchased copy of GT5 and continue playing a pirate copy out of principle - and pirate any future games i want to play, sony don't deserve any more of my money if this is how they treat paying customers.
And yet, piracy is rampant on the xbox 360 thanks to the ability to flash the dvd reader...
In fact, there is very little reason for piracy on the ps3, most games are available for the 360 so anyone serious about pirated games will have already gone down that route years ago. It's not really worth the cost of a ps3 for the very limited number of exclusives, even if you save the price of the games themselves by pirating them.
What are the consequences for not paying the water bills? Won't they eventually take you to court for not paying the bills, even tho they have to keep providing you service?
I do agree with your comment about denial of service attacks, being attacked can become extremely expensive and its not uncommon for moderate strength attacks to be launched, eg enough to push up your costs but not enough to take you offline. It should not be possible for a third party criminal to directly cause you costs in this way.
Also, bandwidth that is not used is wasted...
Water that is not used can be stored and used later.
Sure, a world dominated by Apple and Google would be a bad thing...
But is a world dominated by MS any better?
MS already have a stranglehold over various areas and they are way ahead of Apple or Google in that respect...
Apple and Google may have significant market share in their respective areas, but they have not leveraged that share to keep people locked in nor have they used it to try and strong arm their way into other areas of the market, similarly they have not achieved dominance in a particular only to let that area stagnate for years. MS have done, and continue to do all of these things.
So sure, Google/Apple domination would be bad, but based on past form i'd much prefer that to MS domination even tho neither situation is ideal.
Most people just want to pick up a game to play casually, and $50 is far too much to invest for something like that...
Many games are also not worth anything close to that price, a lot of games today are just minor tweaks to other games, and yet they expect you to splash out a full $50 again?
And how much of the lack of spam on bing is down to the spammers simply not bothering with it?
All the search engine optimization sites target google, trying to influence bing results wouldn't get you many extra hits.
That is the benefit of arm, the threshold for how many chips you can have is much higher because each individual chip uses less power.
Some of us like to see what's inside, having the information available means we now have less reason to open it up (which voids warranty and risks damage. I have often been disappointed to find that rather expensive products often contain extremely cheap components inside, open up some midend commercial networking appliances someday if you want a good laugh.
As you say, people are used to using dead tree books...
MS recently published a story about cloud computing, and using horseless carriage metaphors... I think the same applies here.
A tablet is a new form factor not really been pushed before, trying to use it like a book or like a desktop computer is wrong, and is very much like fitting a fake horse head on the front of your car. Apple seem to understand this, while MS keep trying to shoehorn existing ideas into incompatible form factors.
You are able to enjoy a sunset more because an arbitrary device now has a higher number displayed on it?
The sunset doesn't occur any later, it occurs at the exact same time, they only difference is what that time is called. What's to stop you just getting up earlier?
I would like to buy a small (perhaps 1U) server based on these chips if such a thing exists...
Why not? SGI were building supercomputers from MIPS chips 10 years ago...
Intel and AMD are hampered by having to provide legacy compatibility, MIPS is a much newer designed architecture that should impose less bottlenecks on processor advancement.
Benchmarks are usually entirely synthetic, that is virtually all of their code consists of functions which are either never used, which calculate a static result or which calculate a result which is never used... Real world applications generally make use of the data that they compute, so the benchmark results will not be terribly indicative.
Optimizing C compilers have been doing this for years, thats why you can't just use a static loop for a benchmark - the compiler will precompute the resulting value and insert it as a static.
And the fact it installs on top of windows, its just another piece of bloatware that will annoy users...
A fast booting splashtop like environment would be useful, or what Dell did where there's a separate low power ARM cpu inside which runs an instant-on os for browsing and media playback with much better battery life etc...
Yeah, AmIRC being a graphical client it couldn't display ANSI codes either... I believe they implemented the proprietary mirc codes in version 3.x tho... I really
Also it was the first client that irc newbies used, and such people are more likely to use color codes (and ridiculous scripts full of simple point and click functions to generate floods of colored ascii art) than more experienced users...
I always found it amusing that most mirc users wouldn't even consider using the client without loading a huge pack of addon scripts to make it usable either.