If the IRS are setting the rules, then they should be supplying the software that complies with their rules, and open sourcing it while maintaining control of official builds would make a lot of sense.
Also, do any proprietary vendors actually guarantee their products? Most proprietary software comes with absolutely no warrantee, same as open source does, is tax software sold differently?
And what's to stop a third party auditing an open source tax program, and offering you a certified build of it with a guarantee against defects?
Some keyboard, especially Apple ones, have pass through connectors for usb mice, meaning they use the same as a single control pad... And there are always wireless options too, the wii has bluetooth for instance.
When it comes to group policy, what's to stop you simply deploying a different set of default configurations? Surely it's possible to roll out applications to machines with their own set of default config files as part of the install... Obviously users will be able to override the defaults, but it's trivially easy to override group policy defaults too, which is why they should never be relied upon for anything security related, and only used to provide default settings for users.
Someone needs to make a modular and/or skinnable interface for OO.o... That way you could choose between the existing interface, a ribbon clone (because hate it or not, people will start demanding it) and perhaps some better designed more logical interfaces for those who would appreciate them.
They don't need copyright assignment, they just need contributors to agree to license their code to sun under different terms... For that matter, all of the non sun proprietary code in staroffice should have been replaced by now, so they could just fully open it up, ie use the same code and just change the branding.
I would like a combination of the two actually... An online suite that i can run myself, on my own servers, and on which i can set appropriate permissions so third parties can read or edit files at will, and an offline suite that integrates with the online one such that any changes in the offline suite are immediately reflected in the online one, complete with version control and such.
Or you can use a LiveCD to fix your linux install... While it's rare to require the command line on windows, this is primarily because the cli isn't powerful enough to make it viable for most tasks. Most tasks in linux are possible without the CLI too, but when you ask an expert for advice they will often tell you the CLI way because it's usually easier to explain... Trying to baby someone through a gui where they might have changed the color scheme or moved things around is very difficult, telling someone "type this" or giving them some text to copy/paste is much easier, assuming they can read.
It's not uncommon to require registry editing to fix windows problems, a task which is more arcane and complicated than anything on linux... The CLI on linux has man pages and help flags for individual commands, and text files you might need to edit usually have helpful comments... What does the registry have? a bunch of arbitrary text strings and undocumented numbers?
Windows is much further away than linux, which is also far enough....
At the end of the day, both systems are far too complex for average joe, as are most devices people use... How many people know how to fix their cars or their tv etc?
People really need simple appliances that don't break, and do a small number or predefined tasks very well, games consoles are a good example of this, having one device that does everything results in a jack of all trades kind of device, it does everything poorly and nothing well, and it's too complicated for most people.
Most disturbing is the number of windows users, even people working in the it industry, who just continue using the generic (and extremely slow) drivers rather than installing proper ones... You don't even get a warning telling you that the proper drivers aren't installed.
Run multiple copies of Xnest at the same resolution as your physical screen within multiple virtual workspaces... You can run them as different users too.
If you have multiple physical screens you can run separate instances of X11 on them with their own window managers and potentially even their own input devices, instead of having one wm spanned over multiple screens...
I've never had a console game drag itself down to 10fps... Are you playing these games under emulation or something? If i received a console game that dropped below 25-30fps when running on the correct hardware i would return it as defective. Come to think of it, was it trying to stream video from scratched media or something?
The average monitor has a lot less resolution than a 1080p tv... Laptops especially are still being sold with 1024x768 screens at the low end, and 1280x1024 monitors are still common (marginally higher than the default resolution of early 90s sun workstations).
Perhaps it would make sense for games companies to put together a spec for a console, the spec can be rehashed every 5 years or so like current consoles, and multiple manufacturers can build hardware that conforms to the spec, with thorough tests to ensure compliance.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For my job i have to scan networks, fast scanning tools like synscan are not available for windows and run very slowly inside of a linux/bsd vm... I would be stuck with slower less efficient tools.
I have to do wifi sniffing, last i checked none of the wifi drivers for windows supported rfmon mode for sniffing...
I run a number of servers with no video support, windows at least needs a video card to install and if the os fails to boot for whatever reason you have to troubleshoot it from the local console, this is totally unacceptable for me since the servers are located far away. I could use graphical based lights out management cards, but they cost more and are much slower than the serial console based ones.
I need to install and remove a lot of tools, package management on linux makes that easy, cleanly removing something from windows can be difficult...
The interface is a lot more customizable, i can choose the window manager that suits my needs best, and i have multiple workspaces to arrange my applications on... windows can do this with third party hacks but none of them work very well since virtually no apps are designed to make use of them and will often open dialogs on the wrong workspaces (osx apps do this too, since spaces was only introduced with 10.5).. i find the default windows interface incredibly clunky and inflexible so it doesn't suit me at all.
Cut+paste in X11 is much easier than windows, and this makes a huge difference to my productivity - select with mouse, middle button pastes to wherever the pointer is.
Chroot - i can easily have multiple user lands installed, without the overhead of a vm and multiple copies of the kernel, which is incredibly useful for development.
security - vista achieves its out of the box level of security by having all the stupid msrpc services listening on the network and then filtering them (they're obviously not needed or filtering would break stuff, so why have them listening in the first place?) whereas linux simply wont have anything listening.
performance - linux outperforms windows on the same hardware for a similar level of functionality, and vista makes the gap bigger... linux has a lot more scope for performance tuning if you're so inclined.
While there are decent command line tools for windows, they aren't default and thus lots of apps are not designed to work with them, and you lose a lot of the flexibility offered by pipes and fifos... when something is default it can be relied upon by app developers, if its not default then app devs may never have even heard of it... how many windows apps let you write something to a pipe and process it by several other tools before streaming the output over an ssh connection to another box? For a real world example, i have a small atom based box with tv cards connected to the tv (its small and quiet), when it records tv it then pipes the video over ssh to a noisy quad core box that sits out of earshot which strips out commercials and transcodes the video before piping it back...
But by far my biggest gripe with windows is that it has it's own nonstandard way of doing or storing things... Linux is incredibly simple... everything is a file, configuration is stored in textfiles which are usually well commented and that you can edit with an editor of your choice or parse using standard commandline tools (or use gui config tools if thats what you like), and all your data files will be stored in standard documented formats that can be opened by multiple programs. Windows on the other hand is insanely complex, and likes to store data in binary blobs the format of which is known only to microsoft and no other programs can use.
And how many people know how to or want to do that? The biggest market is casual gamers, and you can't beat the convenience of a console - drop the media in and play...
The Amiga was the best gaming platform of it's day, because it had all the advantages of a console (relatively static hardware spec, insert media and play simplicity, connects to your tv) all the advantages of a pc (optional hard drive to install games, keyboard, mouse, ability to do other things than games - so parents bought them as educational tools, can also support a monitor instead of a tv, homebrew) and a few advantages of its own, like an os that gets out of the way and doesn't impact on gaming performance.
The amiga hardware wasnt entirely static, but there were a small enough number of gaming oriented models to target... You basically had the A500 and A1200 to target for gaming, the A500+ and A600 were close enough to the A500, while the A1200 was somewhat more powerful and often had its own version of games...
The A1200 would run most games designed for the A500 but not all of them, the difference in performance, age difference and mostly-compatible nature make the A500 to A1200 transition no different to PS2 - PS3.
The higher end models (A2000, A3000, A4000) were mostly compatible too, but not targeted at gamers.
So what we need is another system like the Amiga, or perhaps a revised PS3 which brings something similar...
You can't do it on consoles because it's not necessary... The console game is written specifically for the exact specification of console that you have, so someone has already done all the tweaking for you.
The pirates are the only people with powerful enough hardware, because they didn't spend all their budget on software and had more left to spend on the hardware.
Games for both consoles, and the ps3 especially have not been taking full advantage of the hardware... They use a lot of pre written code libraries rather than hitting the hardware directly, thus negating the performance advantages of a console, and i don't think many games make full use of the cell chip in the ps3...
When the hardware starts to age and coders are more familiar with it, you will get much tighter code being written, hitting the hardware directly and cutting out the middle layer of drivers and general purpose code libraries... On a PC you always have the overhead of an OS running, and the fact that things like graphics calls go through several layers before they hit the hardware.
What we do need badly tho, is for console games to support mouse and keyboard... All the current generation and most of the previous generation consoles support USB devices, there's no reason console games couldn't support the connection of usb keyboards and mice for those who want to play with them.
You could get him a 21" or 24" CRT, they are dirt cheap... On the other hand, running a low resolution is exactly the wrong way to have large text, you end up with large pixelated text...
Also on unix that won't even work if you have a semi decent monitor (which your old crt may not be) because it knows what size the text *should* be based on the size of the monitor (text size is measured in points, which are a real physical measurement and not related to pixels)... but if you force it to think the monitor has a higher dpi than it really does, then it will scale things up to what it thinks is the appropriate size... Useless if you're trying to do any precision design work, but fine for someone with weak eyesight.
Why does he need XP for what he does? it sounds like linux would be more than suitable for his needs, he would still have thunderbird and firefox, and you wouldn't need the onecare tools wasting resources, and you'd have ssh built in for remote admin which will be faster and almost certainly more secure than vnc...
Or just force X11 into thinking it has a higher DPI monitor, and it will scale things accordingly... Running a lower resolution is a bad idea since it will make things pixelated and thus harder to read.
Is the UI javascript? Or is it mostly static rendering... Will the improved javascript interpreter in newer firefox builds make the interface much snappier?
The v8 javascript engine seems to be about on a par with the one present in the webkit nightlies, is it the same engine or a separate one? The nightlies are a lot quicker than the released versions of safari.
Slashdot Mirror
If the IRS are setting the rules, then they should be supplying the software that complies with their rules, and open sourcing it while maintaining control of official builds would make a lot of sense.
Also, do any proprietary vendors actually guarantee their products? Most proprietary software comes with absolutely no warrantee, same as open source does, is tax software sold differently?
And what's to stop a third party auditing an open source tax program, and offering you a certified build of it with a guarantee against defects?
Some keyboard, especially Apple ones, have pass through connectors for usb mice, meaning they use the same as a single control pad... And there are always wireless options too, the wii has bluetooth for instance.
When it comes to group policy, what's to stop you simply deploying a different set of default configurations? Surely it's possible to roll out applications to machines with their own set of default config files as part of the install...
Obviously users will be able to override the defaults, but it's trivially easy to override group policy defaults too, which is why they should never be relied upon for anything security related, and only used to provide default settings for users.
Someone needs to make a modular and/or skinnable interface for OO.o...
That way you could choose between the existing interface, a ribbon clone (because hate it or not, people will start demanding it) and perhaps some better designed more logical interfaces for those who would appreciate them.
Is there not a printer icon on the ribbon? OO.o certainly has one on the default toolbar.
What could be more obviously related to printing than a word that originally referred to the act of storing paper in a cabinet
You say this in a sarcastic manner, but it's true, you have to print it out before you can file it away in a cabinet...
They don't need copyright assignment, they just need contributors to agree to license their code to sun under different terms...
For that matter, all of the non sun proprietary code in staroffice should have been replaced by now, so they could just fully open it up, ie use the same code and just change the branding.
I would like a combination of the two actually...
An online suite that i can run myself, on my own servers, and on which i can set appropriate permissions so third parties can read or edit files at will, and an offline suite that integrates with the online one such that any changes in the offline suite are immediately reflected in the online one, complete with version control and such.
Or you can use a LiveCD to fix your linux install...
While it's rare to require the command line on windows, this is primarily because the cli isn't powerful enough to make it viable for most tasks.
Most tasks in linux are possible without the CLI too, but when you ask an expert for advice they will often tell you the CLI way because it's usually easier to explain... Trying to baby someone through a gui where they might have changed the color scheme or moved things around is very difficult, telling someone "type this" or giving them some text to copy/paste is much easier, assuming they can read.
It's not uncommon to require registry editing to fix windows problems, a task which is more arcane and complicated than anything on linux... The CLI on linux has man pages and help flags for individual commands, and text files you might need to edit usually have helpful comments... What does the registry have? a bunch of arbitrary text strings and undocumented numbers?
Windows is much further away than linux, which is also far enough....
At the end of the day, both systems are far too complex for average joe, as are most devices people use... How many people know how to fix their cars or their tv etc?
People really need simple appliances that don't break, and do a small number or predefined tasks very well, games consoles are a good example of this, having one device that does everything results in a jack of all trades kind of device, it does everything poorly and nothing well, and it's too complicated for most people.
Most disturbing is the number of windows users, even people working in the it industry, who just continue using the generic (and extremely slow) drivers rather than installing proper ones...
You don't even get a warning telling you that the proper drivers aren't installed.
You can force it on system wide too, at the risk of glitches and in certain cases it can be slower.
Run multiple copies of Xnest at the same resolution as your physical screen within multiple virtual workspaces... You can run them as different users too.
If you have multiple physical screens you can run separate instances of X11 on them with their own window managers and potentially even their own input devices, instead of having one wm spanned over multiple screens...
I've never had a console game drag itself down to 10fps...
Are you playing these games under emulation or something?
If i received a console game that dropped below 25-30fps when running on the correct hardware i would return it as defective. Come to think of it, was it trying to stream video from scratched media or something?
The average monitor has a lot less resolution than a 1080p tv...
Laptops especially are still being sold with 1024x768 screens at the low end, and 1280x1024 monitors are still common (marginally higher than the default resolution of early 90s sun workstations).
Perhaps it would make sense for games companies to put together a spec for a console, the spec can be rehashed every 5 years or so like current consoles, and multiple manufacturers can build hardware that conforms to the spec, with thorough tests to ensure compliance.
For my job i have to scan networks, fast scanning tools like synscan are not available for windows and run very slowly inside of a linux/bsd vm... I would be stuck with slower less efficient tools.
I have to do wifi sniffing, last i checked none of the wifi drivers for windows supported rfmon mode for sniffing...
I run a number of servers with no video support, windows at least needs a video card to install and if the os fails to boot for whatever reason you have to troubleshoot it from the local console, this is totally unacceptable for me since the servers are located far away. I could use graphical based lights out management cards, but they cost more and are much slower than the serial console based ones.
I need to install and remove a lot of tools, package management on linux makes that easy, cleanly removing something from windows can be difficult...
The interface is a lot more customizable, i can choose the window manager that suits my needs best, and i have multiple workspaces to arrange my applications on... windows can do this with third party hacks but none of them work very well since virtually no apps are designed to make use of them and will often open dialogs on the wrong workspaces (osx apps do this too, since spaces was only introduced with 10.5).. i find the default windows interface incredibly clunky and inflexible so it doesn't suit me at all.
Cut+paste in X11 is much easier than windows, and this makes a huge difference to my productivity - select with mouse, middle button pastes to wherever the pointer is.
Chroot - i can easily have multiple user lands installed, without the overhead of a vm and multiple copies of the kernel, which is incredibly useful for development.
security - vista achieves its out of the box level of security by having all the stupid msrpc services listening on the network and then filtering them (they're obviously not needed or filtering would break stuff, so why have them listening in the first place?) whereas linux simply wont have anything listening.
performance - linux outperforms windows on the same hardware for a similar level of functionality, and vista makes the gap bigger... linux has a lot more scope for performance tuning if you're so inclined.
While there are decent command line tools for windows, they aren't default and thus lots of apps are not designed to work with them, and you lose a lot of the flexibility offered by pipes and fifos... when something is default it can be relied upon by app developers, if its not default then app devs may never have even heard of it... how many windows apps let you write something to a pipe and process it by several other tools before streaming the output over an ssh connection to another box?
For a real world example, i have a small atom based box with tv cards connected to the tv (its small and quiet), when it records tv it then pipes the video over ssh to a noisy quad core box that sits out of earshot which strips out commercials and transcodes the video before piping it back...
But by far my biggest gripe with windows is that it has it's own nonstandard way of doing or storing things... Linux is incredibly simple... everything is a file, configuration is stored in textfiles which are usually well commented and that you can edit with an editor of your choice or parse using standard commandline tools (or use gui config tools if thats what you like), and all your data files will be stored in standard documented formats that can be opened by multiple programs. Windows on the other hand is insanely complex, and likes to store data in binary blobs the format of which is known only to microsoft and no other programs can use.
And how many people know how to or want to do that?
The biggest market is casual gamers, and you can't beat the convenience of a console - drop the media in and play...
The Amiga was the best gaming platform of it's day, because it had all the advantages of a console (relatively static hardware spec, insert media and play simplicity, connects to your tv) all the advantages of a pc (optional hard drive to install games, keyboard, mouse, ability to do other things than games - so parents bought them as educational tools, can also support a monitor instead of a tv, homebrew) and a few advantages of its own, like an os that gets out of the way and doesn't impact on gaming performance.
The amiga hardware wasnt entirely static, but there were a small enough number of gaming oriented models to target... You basically had the A500 and A1200 to target for gaming, the A500+ and A600 were close enough to the A500, while the A1200 was somewhat more powerful and often had its own version of games...
The A1200 would run most games designed for the A500 but not all of them, the difference in performance, age difference and mostly-compatible nature make the A500 to A1200 transition no different to PS2 - PS3.
The higher end models (A2000, A3000, A4000) were mostly compatible too, but not targeted at gamers.
So what we need is another system like the Amiga, or perhaps a revised PS3 which brings something similar...
You can't do it on consoles because it's not necessary...
The console game is written specifically for the exact specification of console that you have, so someone has already done all the tweaking for you.
The pirates are the only people with powerful enough hardware, because they didn't spend all their budget on software and had more left to spend on the hardware.
Games for both consoles, and the ps3 especially have not been taking full advantage of the hardware...
They use a lot of pre written code libraries rather than hitting the hardware directly, thus negating the performance advantages of a console, and i don't think many games make full use of the cell chip in the ps3...
When the hardware starts to age and coders are more familiar with it, you will get much tighter code being written, hitting the hardware directly and cutting out the middle layer of drivers and general purpose code libraries... On a PC you always have the overhead of an OS running, and the fact that things like graphics calls go through several layers before they hit the hardware.
What we do need badly tho, is for console games to support mouse and keyboard... All the current generation and most of the previous generation consoles support USB devices, there's no reason console games couldn't support the connection of usb keyboards and mice for those who want to play with them.
You could get him a 21" or 24" CRT, they are dirt cheap...
On the other hand, running a low resolution is exactly the wrong way to have large text, you end up with large pixelated text...
Also on unix that won't even work if you have a semi decent monitor (which your old crt may not be) because it knows what size the text *should* be based on the size of the monitor (text size is measured in points, which are a real physical measurement and not related to pixels)... but if you force it to think the monitor has a higher dpi than it really does, then it will scale things up to what it thinks is the appropriate size... Useless if you're trying to do any precision design work, but fine for someone with weak eyesight.
Why does he need XP for what he does? it sounds like linux would be more than suitable for his needs, he would still have thunderbird and firefox, and you wouldn't need the onecare tools wasting resources, and you'd have ssh built in for remote admin which will be faster and almost certainly more secure than vnc...
A taxi.
Or just force X11 into thinking it has a higher DPI monitor, and it will scale things accordingly... Running a lower resolution is a bad idea since it will make things pixelated and thus harder to read.
Is the UI javascript? Or is it mostly static rendering... Will the improved javascript interpreter in newer firefox builds make the interface much snappier?
The v8 javascript engine seems to be about on a par with the one present in the webkit nightlies, is it the same engine or a separate one? The nightlies are a lot quicker than the released versions of safari.