Drivers in the kernel tend to work really well... As do the default open source drivers present in Xorg... Nvidia drivers cause crashes occasionally, but ATI's drivers are really terrible and cause all kinds of problems. It seems primarily to be closed source components that cause problems on linux, i used to have big stability problems with netscape (consuming all my ram and lagging the rest of the machine) and issues with vmware (not so much crashes, more leaving the keyboard in an unusable state).
Surely this would depend on the complexity of the page, and how much it needs to render as it scrolls up/down... You can't really compare you're cpu usage to the other guys without knowing what pages he had open, as well as what extensions he had, what screen resolution he was using, etc etc...
Probably because the actual rendering side is pretty unimportant at this stage...
Firefox is already massively ahead of IE, and most websites are designed to be compatible with IE, therefore all the effort safari/opera developers are expending implementing new CSS features is largely wasted, as noone will actually use them until a majority of their audience can see them.
Firefox already supports a lot of features that never get used on websites, simply because no version of IE supports them. Adding more won't help them improve performance, reduce memory usage or win over any new users. The devs are concentrating on features that are actually useful right now.
IE has been stifling the web for years, it has done more harm to innovation on the web than anything else, and the sooner it dies off the better.
Economies of scale work very well with software, aside from the initial development cost, the ongoing costs to produce and distribute copies can easily be zero. Also the initial development costs can be severely reduced by reusing existing code... And some people will develop code for free, if they have a need for that code themselves (they are getting other benefits than money from it).
Because of the fairly unique properties of software from a business perspective, it can be very cheap to develop and free to distribute.. Thus in a free market it makes very little sense to make selling software your primary business, as it is easy to competition to start up and compete against you. However, software can be a loss leader that's used to help sell other products/services such as hardware and consultancy.
It's also more efficient, as you don't get multiple companies writing their own code to do the same job.
Look at IBM and Sun as good examples, or RedHat, who would never have been able to develop their current software on their own without reusing existing code. They make money from selling support/consultancy around their linux distribution which is made primarily of code from other sources.
I wouldn't say IE caught up... Firefox 3 betas have supported Acid2 for a while, IE8 betas only recently... And i believe FF3 is much closer to a release version. Also, FF3 is still scoring much higher in Acid3 than IE8 (so does FF2 for that matter). FF3 has made a lot of improvements from 2, but standards compliance is on the back burner simply because it's not terrible important to end users... FF2 is already a lot better than IE, but web developers will never bother taking advantage of these features until a majority of their audience can see them.
Sadly, you need IE to catch up (or get supplanted) before any of this standards compliance will actually be useful in the real world.
I doubt it's students in control of those.edu systems... They are probably being used as jump boxes by hackers operating elsewhere, including those government sponsored ones.
Home connections still have fairly poor upstream compared to their downstream... People who root boxes want upstream, so they can scan for more boxes to hack, ddos things or distribute malware. They typically have very little need for downstream bandwidth to the compromised boxes.
Well, i would suggest you buy better quality servers to colo... I have seen the cheap nasty garbage some people put into datacenters, poor cooling, poor airflow design (like a 1u case where the fan on the cpu can blow to either side (heating the northbridge or the psu), but not backwards (out through the vents). If you stick with high quality servers, there's usually much less of a problem. I have some HP DL145 systems for instance, and the drives in them run quite cool and have a steady flow of air over them.
Be wary of colo centers where you rent a server, they will typically use the cheapest crap they can find since you'll never see it. Best to supply your own hardware, or find out exactly what the colo company is supplying.
Well said... You have to keep innovating to stay ahead, once a product become a commodity the cheap knockoffs can catch up.
The problem is that companies want to maintain a monopoly on areas that long ago should have been commoditized, without doing any new innovation, and they have the money and power to force this to happen.
People also keep patents secret, in the hope that someone will implement them without realizing and open themselves up to a lawsuit, or they demand ridiculous levels of royalties for it effectively burying the tech and preventing all but the richest players from even considering it. Quite often they won't... Look at Microsoft, they rarely try anything new, they just move aggressively into an already established market.
Holding a patent closed can stifle a technology, such that only large companies could afford to license it, and they are too conservative to take that risk on something new.
Faster than all its competition. Wordperfect is faster, older versions of msoffice are faster, openoffice is faster, koffice is faster... Some of these things are subjective (ie openoffice gets very slow with huge documents, but word crashes with the same files on the same system)...
bloated
Nope. When 95% of users use 5% of features that's bloat. The vast majority of users could get along just fine with a much smaller application.
ugly
Matter of opinion, I guess. I think you're thinking of Office 2003, which was most certainly ugly. True, matter of opinion... functionality is more important than appearance.
difficult to use
Nope, Office 2007 has a new interface that's easier to use than any Office version before it. Thus the innovation. Ease of use is subjective... To a new user who has never used such applications before, 2007 would be easier to pick up... To a new user KDE or OSX are also much easier to pick up than windows... However most people already have experience with windows and office 2003 and earlier and are familiar with it. People hate change, anything different is perceived as hard and will meet resistance. This is a significant factor helping keep microsoft in business.
and buggy
Nope. How can you dismiss this? It is undeniable that all software has bugs, and especially something as large as msoffice is absolutely full of them. Ask anyone who uses it on a daily basis, and they will have stories of strange behavior and weird things they need to do to make supposedly simple things work. Most people seem to accept such things as normal, they think it's normal for a computer to crash and need to be rebooted on a regular basis, or to have to do strange things to get round problems.
You don't need patents to make money... Many companies make a lot of money and pay large numbers of staff without having any patents. Patents grant an artificial monopoly in a small area, which causes companies to sit back and rest on their laurels, they hire less programmers because there is less need to improve their products as there are no competitors. And since there are no competitors, then there won't be any programmers being hired to write competing applications either. Patents benefit a single company (the patent holder) at the expense of the rest of the industry and consumers.
As for getting software for "free", there are plenty of other ways to make money, and a lot of them require (or are made more efficient by) software... For instance, companies that produce hardware (which cannot be given away free, as it has an ongoing unit cost) need software to make their hardware useful, and are more than willing to employ programmers to write it. Similarly consultancy companies will hire programmers to implement custom applications for their clients, and provide bugfixes to existing applications if they have the source. There are plenty of examples of successful companies using both these business models.
Software is a logical component to be given away for free, it only has up front costs, no ongoing costs of continued distribution. Also with open source the up front costs become considerably lower as a large amount of code is already available, so even new applications can reuse some parts and don't need to be written entirely from scratch. It's a lot cheaper for a company to give away software than it is to give away physical goods, and yet many companies give away costly physical goods as a method of drumming up business. Obviously the goods given away must be worth considerably less than the goods sold, but this is the case with software.
Programmers don't need to rely on sales of shrinkwrap software, you're clinging to a very shaky business model that is almost certain to get relegated to small niche markets eventually.
Being able to call native libraries is hardly a modern feature, alpha's x86 emulation could do that many years ago, it also did dynamic recompilation and was fairly quick for what it was...
Sparc is also hardly a legacy product, new sparc chips are still being produced and selling quite well (see the ultrasparc-t1 line).
But to clarify, although it would be possible to buy a high end power6 based ibm server, and run multiple emulated x86 machines on it, that would be a stupid thing to do, emulation is not much use in the virtualization arena.
I'm sure there were external MMUs available for the 68000, at least very early sun workstations and others ran unix on such processors... It could easily have been an option on version 2 of amigaos, which came out on the A3000 that shipped with an MMU and hard drive by default.
Microsoft products have almost always been inferior, they don't operate by making better products, they operate by marketing and leveraging monopolies in other areas. A few years from now, what are the odds that all the better virtualization tech has been eliminated or relegated to niche markets, and microsoft's half assed implementation is widely deployed and completely stagnant, having not been improved since they attained a dominant position.
What good is an x86 emulator these days? Emulation is slow, why would you buy expensive non x86 hardware and use it to emulate a slow x86, when a real fast x86 system would cost a fraction of the price?
The people making the decisions will usually not understand that... If the people in positions of power did understand the importance of open standards, then microsoft would never have got to where they are today in the first place.
Re:autoSpaceLikeWord95 and useWord97LineBreakRules
on
India Votes Against OOXML
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They're going about it completely the wrong way, why not just make the existing markup describing spacing and line breaking flexible enough to cater to the bugs in these old apps, and then have the conversion process handle it accordingly. No need to enshrine these old bugs in a new format at all.
DRM only makes copying fiddly as you put it, to discourage casual copying. People who make casual copies for friends, family or personal use might be gullible enough to buy additional copies, or replacement copies for damaged media etc. All it does is squeeze a few more cents out of existing paying customers.
Pirates will always work out a way to make copies, or simply do without, or make do with a lower quality version.
As for the size of downloading movies, give it time... Music used to be too big to download, as did standard definition movies. A few years down the line, connection speeds will be faster, hard drives will be bigger, and compression schemes will be better with faster processors to run on. So downloading a 30gb file will no longer be considered time consuming, and that file may now only be 20GB for the same quality.
Because copy protection stops me doing several perfectly reasonable things with my purchased movies...
I can't copy it to my ipod to play on the move... I can't create a duplicate of the media to play (keeping the original safe incase it gets damaged), especially if kids are going to be handling the media. I can't play the movie on my laptop. I can't copy the movie into my media player (its far more convenient having a library of movies on a large HD than having to swap discs around). I can't even play the movie in the drive of the above media player.
All perfectly reasonable things, that i could always do with VHS, and could do with DVD easily once it had been cracked.
Aside from that, copy protection makes the players more complicated, thus making them both more expensive and more prone to failure. Copy protection is very much anti-consumer.
It's also not a new idea... High end RAID controllers have large amounts of volatile ram for read/write caching. They also have battery backups, so that the write cache doesn't get lost during a power outage (it stores it, and commits the write to physical disk when the power is restored, the host system can continue working long before the actual disk write finishes).
I liked the Amiga/MacOS approach, where desktop os's didn't use swap... If you didn't have enough ram, you just closed down apps you weren't using. Swap is bad for desktop systems, as it encourages inefficient use of memory, encourages people to run more than their system is really capable of handling, and causes noticeable latency when swapping. Windows 3.1 was much faster if you turned swap off, and Amiga/MacOS was much faster and more responsive still.
Slashdot Mirror
Drivers in the kernel tend to work really well... As do the default open source drivers present in Xorg...
Nvidia drivers cause crashes occasionally, but ATI's drivers are really terrible and cause all kinds of problems.
It seems primarily to be closed source components that cause problems on linux, i used to have big stability problems with netscape (consuming all my ram and lagging the rest of the machine) and issues with vmware (not so much crashes, more leaving the keyboard in an unusable state).
Surely this would depend on the complexity of the page, and how much it needs to render as it scrolls up/down... You can't really compare you're cpu usage to the other guys without knowing what pages he had open, as well as what extensions he had, what screen resolution he was using, etc etc...
Probably because the actual rendering side is pretty unimportant at this stage...
Firefox is already massively ahead of IE, and most websites are designed to be compatible with IE, therefore all the effort safari/opera developers are expending implementing new CSS features is largely wasted, as noone will actually use them until a majority of their audience can see them.
Firefox already supports a lot of features that never get used on websites, simply because no version of IE supports them. Adding more won't help them improve performance, reduce memory usage or win over any new users. The devs are concentrating on features that are actually useful right now.
IE has been stifling the web for years, it has done more harm to innovation on the web than anything else, and the sooner it dies off the better.
Economies of scale work very well with software, aside from the initial development cost, the ongoing costs to produce and distribute copies can easily be zero.
Also the initial development costs can be severely reduced by reusing existing code... And some people will develop code for free, if they have a need for that code themselves (they are getting other benefits than money from it).
Because of the fairly unique properties of software from a business perspective, it can be very cheap to develop and free to distribute.. Thus in a free market it makes very little sense to make selling software your primary business, as it is easy to competition to start up and compete against you. However, software can be a loss leader that's used to help sell other products/services such as hardware and consultancy.
It's also more efficient, as you don't get multiple companies writing their own code to do the same job.
Look at IBM and Sun as good examples, or RedHat, who would never have been able to develop their current software on their own without reusing existing code. They make money from selling support/consultancy around their linux distribution which is made primarily of code from other sources.
It's had regex find/replace by default for years... Not sure if 1.x had it, but the beta builds of 2.x and everything since has.
I wouldn't say IE caught up... Firefox 3 betas have supported Acid2 for a while, IE8 betas only recently... And i believe FF3 is much closer to a release version.
Also, FF3 is still scoring much higher in Acid3 than IE8 (so does FF2 for that matter). FF3 has made a lot of improvements from 2, but standards compliance is on the back burner simply because it's not terrible important to end users... FF2 is already a lot better than IE, but web developers will never bother taking advantage of these features until a majority of their audience can see them.
Sadly, you need IE to catch up (or get supplanted) before any of this standards compliance will actually be useful in the real world.
I doubt it's students in control of those .edu systems...
They are probably being used as jump boxes by hackers operating elsewhere, including those government sponsored ones.
Home connections still have fairly poor upstream compared to their downstream...
People who root boxes want upstream, so they can scan for more boxes to hack, ddos things or distribute malware. They typically have very little need for downstream bandwidth to the compromised boxes.
Especially when you consider IE, also closed source, which is still barely passing acid2 in beta versions, and still gets less than 20% on acid3.
Well, i would suggest you buy better quality servers to colo...
I have seen the cheap nasty garbage some people put into datacenters, poor cooling, poor airflow design (like a 1u case where the fan on the cpu can blow to either side (heating the northbridge or the psu), but not backwards (out through the vents).
If you stick with high quality servers, there's usually much less of a problem. I have some HP DL145 systems for instance, and the drives in them run quite cool and have a steady flow of air over them.
Be wary of colo centers where you rent a server, they will typically use the cheapest crap they can find since you'll never see it. Best to supply your own hardware, or find out exactly what the colo company is supplying.
Well said...
You have to keep innovating to stay ahead, once a product become a commodity the cheap knockoffs can catch up.
The problem is that companies want to maintain a monopoly on areas that long ago should have been commoditized, without doing any new innovation, and they have the money and power to force this to happen.
People also keep patents secret, in the hope that someone will implement them without realizing and open themselves up to a lawsuit, or they demand ridiculous levels of royalties for it effectively burying the tech and preventing all but the richest players from even considering it. Quite often they won't... Look at Microsoft, they rarely try anything new, they just move aggressively into an already established market.
Holding a patent closed can stifle a technology, such that only large companies could afford to license it, and they are too conservative to take that risk on something new.
Faster than all its competition. Wordperfect is faster, older versions of msoffice are faster, openoffice is faster, koffice is faster... Some of these things are subjective (ie openoffice gets very slow with huge documents, but word crashes with the same files on the same system)... bloated
Nope. When 95% of users use 5% of features that's bloat. The vast majority of users could get along just fine with a much smaller application. ugly
Matter of opinion, I guess. I think you're thinking of Office 2003, which was most certainly ugly. True, matter of opinion... functionality is more important than appearance. difficult to use
Nope, Office 2007 has a new interface that's easier to use than any Office version before it. Thus the innovation. Ease of use is subjective...
To a new user who has never used such applications before, 2007 would be easier to pick up...
To a new user KDE or OSX are also much easier to pick up than windows...
However most people already have experience with windows and office 2003 and earlier and are familiar with it. People hate change, anything different is perceived as hard and will meet resistance. This is a significant factor helping keep microsoft in business. and buggy
Nope. How can you dismiss this? It is undeniable that all software has bugs, and especially something as large as msoffice is absolutely full of them. Ask anyone who uses it on a daily basis, and they will have stories of strange behavior and weird things they need to do to make supposedly simple things work. Most people seem to accept such things as normal, they think it's normal for a computer to crash and need to be rebooted on a regular basis, or to have to do strange things to get round problems.
That website is hosted in canada tho...
You don't need patents to make money... Many companies make a lot of money and pay large numbers of staff without having any patents.
Patents grant an artificial monopoly in a small area, which causes companies to sit back and rest on their laurels, they hire less programmers because there is less need to improve their products as there are no competitors. And since there are no competitors, then there won't be any programmers being hired to write competing applications either.
Patents benefit a single company (the patent holder) at the expense of the rest of the industry and consumers.
As for getting software for "free", there are plenty of other ways to make money, and a lot of them require (or are made more efficient by) software... For instance, companies that produce hardware (which cannot be given away free, as it has an ongoing unit cost) need software to make their hardware useful, and are more than willing to employ programmers to write it. Similarly consultancy companies will hire programmers to implement custom applications for their clients, and provide bugfixes to existing applications if they have the source. There are plenty of examples of successful companies using both these business models.
Software is a logical component to be given away for free, it only has up front costs, no ongoing costs of continued distribution. Also with open source the up front costs become considerably lower as a large amount of code is already available, so even new applications can reuse some parts and don't need to be written entirely from scratch.
It's a lot cheaper for a company to give away software than it is to give away physical goods, and yet many companies give away costly physical goods as a method of drumming up business. Obviously the goods given away must be worth considerably less than the goods sold, but this is the case with software.
Programmers don't need to rely on sales of shrinkwrap software, you're clinging to a very shaky business model that is almost certain to get relegated to small niche markets eventually.
Being able to call native libraries is hardly a modern feature, alpha's x86 emulation could do that many years ago, it also did dynamic recompilation and was fairly quick for what it was...
Sparc is also hardly a legacy product, new sparc chips are still being produced and selling quite well (see the ultrasparc-t1 line).
But to clarify, although it would be possible to buy a high end power6 based ibm server, and run multiple emulated x86 machines on it, that would be a stupid thing to do, emulation is not much use in the virtualization arena.
I'm sure there were external MMUs available for the 68000, at least very early sun workstations and others ran unix on such processors...
It could easily have been an option on version 2 of amigaos, which came out on the A3000 that shipped with an MMU and hard drive by default.
Microsoft products have almost always been inferior, they don't operate by making better products, they operate by marketing and leveraging monopolies in other areas.
A few years from now, what are the odds that all the better virtualization tech has been eliminated or relegated to niche markets, and microsoft's half assed implementation is widely deployed and completely stagnant, having not been improved since they attained a dominant position.
What good is an x86 emulator these days?
Emulation is slow, why would you buy expensive non x86 hardware and use it to emulate a slow x86, when a real fast x86 system would cost a fraction of the price?
The people making the decisions will usually not understand that...
If the people in positions of power did understand the importance of open standards, then microsoft would never have got to where they are today in the first place.
They're going about it completely the wrong way, why not just make the existing markup describing spacing and line breaking flexible enough to cater to the bugs in these old apps, and then have the conversion process handle it accordingly. No need to enshrine these old bugs in a new format at all.
DRM only makes copying fiddly as you put it, to discourage casual copying. People who make casual copies for friends, family or personal use might be gullible enough to buy additional copies, or replacement copies for damaged media etc. All it does is squeeze a few more cents out of existing paying customers.
Pirates will always work out a way to make copies, or simply do without, or make do with a lower quality version.
As for the size of downloading movies, give it time... Music used to be too big to download, as did standard definition movies. A few years down the line, connection speeds will be faster, hard drives will be bigger, and compression schemes will be better with faster processors to run on. So downloading a 30gb file will no longer be considered time consuming, and that file may now only be 20GB for the same quality.
Because copy protection stops me doing several perfectly reasonable things with my purchased movies...
I can't copy it to my ipod to play on the move...
I can't create a duplicate of the media to play (keeping the original safe incase it gets damaged), especially if kids are going to be handling the media.
I can't play the movie on my laptop.
I can't copy the movie into my media player (its far more convenient having a library of movies on a large HD than having to swap discs around).
I can't even play the movie in the drive of the above media player.
All perfectly reasonable things, that i could always do with VHS, and could do with DVD easily once it had been cracked.
Aside from that, copy protection makes the players more complicated, thus making them both more expensive and more prone to failure. Copy protection is very much anti-consumer.
It's also not a new idea...
High end RAID controllers have large amounts of volatile ram for read/write caching. They also have battery backups, so that the write cache doesn't get lost during a power outage (it stores it, and commits the write to physical disk when the power is restored, the host system can continue working long before the actual disk write finishes).
I liked the Amiga/MacOS approach, where desktop os's didn't use swap... If you didn't have enough ram, you just closed down apps you weren't using. Swap is bad for desktop systems, as it encourages inefficient use of memory, encourages people to run more than their system is really capable of handling, and causes noticeable latency when swapping. Windows 3.1 was much faster if you turned swap off, and Amiga/MacOS was much faster and more responsive still.