Your point about "minimum spec" vista machines says it all... Minimum spec will mean it limps along, its using all its resources to run the OS... Minimum spec to run any other OS will be equally poor, does linux still run on a 386 with 2mb?
That really depends on wether your soundcard has it's own internal buffer, or wether it can DMA the sound data itself. If you have a really cheap nasty soundcard, it might not be able to DMA and thus your CPU has to send data to it in realtime. That said, i can't imagine any sound cards being made like that anymore.
A 50mhz Motorola 68060 (680x0 being the range that was obsoleted by PPC) can play 128kbit MP3s in realtime, I have an Amiga that does just that. I've never had a 66MHz PPC, but I can't imagine it being slower than a 50MHz 68060. A P75 could decode MP3s in realtime too, and i believe the PPC always had much better floating point performance than Intel in those days.
I coule get MP3 files playing perfectly well on a DX2/66 and a 50mhz Amiga... I had them playing on a 33mhz Amiga too, but i had to reduce the output quality... This was ofcourse 128kbit mp3s, commonplace in those days. I would have thought a DX4/100 would have no issues whatsoever playing mp3 files, maybe something else in your machine was letting it down, slow memory, slow/nondma ide controller, slow soundcard etc.
In this case it's the software which is broken, not the hardware... Google at least runs software that they have full control over, on their commodity hardware. However, google simply use a large number of commodity servers, so that if one fails it has no effect on the overall operation. The really critical bits are the bits binding all those thousands of servers together, and i doubt they run on cheap lowend kit.
And why would they release such a patch? You continuing to use old versions doesn't generate any profit for microsoft, they would prefer you to buy the latest version. By using xp in the first place you accepted that it used activation, and thus accepted the risk of the activation servers ceasing to exist. If you end up with a perfectly good machine rendered useless because it's software refuses to run, and are faced with buying a whole new machine and new os, you have noone to blame but yourself. It's very much within microsoft's interests for old versions to become useless, forcing you to buy upgrades. Their own biggest competitor is their own old versions, people who are quite happy with old versions and consider the cost of upgrading pointless.
So he's allowed to go back to *his* home, but he's not allowed to use his os of choice? And expected to purchase additional software to use his already perfectly working computer... If anything, the prison service should supply a modified locked down linux installation *as* the monitoring software, and not give him root access. It's not gonna be hard to circumvent windows based monitoring software when you have full admin rights.
You usually get at least 1 spare with the car... The battery will typically last a couple of years, and gets changed by the garage when you service it, which presumeably you do more often than every couple of years so you should never notice it going flat. Even so, the manufacturer keeps a record of the codes allocated to each car and can produce you more keys easily enough.
As for copying these proximity systems, all you need is somewhere that people are likely to be in one place for more than an hour (restaurant, cinema etc) and your set...
There are plenty of older cars with fun toys and reasonable performance... They tend to be very cheap nowadays, because: They guzzle gas, people dont want gas guzzlers anymore They were posh cars for rich people, rich people will buy new cars not drive old ones
Thus, there are plenty of old cars from the likes of rolls royce, jaguar, mercedes etc available very cheaply, and most of them have sizeable engines and lots of goodies to play with.
I do similar, but i buy an older car (one that has already lost all of its value) that is still legally roadworthy... Then i do the absolute minimal servicing on it, and insure it third party only (the minimum legal level of insurance) and drive it around until it either stops working, or becomes unroadworthy... Then it gets scrapped. Ofcourse, i am also a member of a breakdown organization! A side effect of driving a junk car, is that noone will want to steal it. One of the cars i had didn't even lock, and yet it still didnt get stolen because it was dirty, dented and rusty.
The point is profit will always come before anything else... Companies would still be dumping toxic industrial waste into rivers if it wasn't illegal (and thus unprofitable) to do so. Even if companies may be doing some good, you must never lose sight of the true motives behind it. Sure they will try to spin it as something good, but it's nothing more than another drive to increase profits.
And have you considered why they are "going green" ?
It's good PR, but virtually no company will compromise their level of profit for the sake of going green... Saving energy benefits companies financially, energy costs money. Government regulations are getting tighter, soon companies won't have any choice in the matter so it makes sense to get a head start on the competition.
There are thousands of other things companies could be doing to "go green", like encouraging home working and operating much smaller offices, and cutting down on a lot of the ridiculous packaging on purchased goods (companies only tend to use "green" packaging if its actually cheaper). They could stop buying new PCs (and other equipment) every 3 years, most machines last a lot longer than that and even one that's 10+ years old is more than sufficient for the average user. They could move out of the centers of large cities, and encourage people to live closer (theres nowhere near enough housing close to business centers for all the staff) They could teleconference more, and stop travelling around for meetings.
This would actually prevent microsoft from bundling any of these programs with windows or other apps... They would need to include these bundled programs in seperate files, and couldnt distribute windows in the form of iso images with such programs bundled. Similarly, they couldnt be bundled in a zip file or the same archive as an installer for something else, you would need to download and install these apps seperately.
Actually, if an adult in the back of the car doesnt wear his seatbelt, in a crash he could come smashing into the back of the front seat and smash his head against whoever was sat in the front seat... If i'm sat in the front of a car, i damn well do want people behind me wearing their seatbelts to reduce the risk of them killing me. I dont really care if they choose to kill themselves.
They wouldn't put AMD out of business, it would simply relegate AMD to the low end bargain producer... Even a few years old chip is more than adequate for 95% of what people use them for today, priced attractively such a chip would sell perfectly well. Also, i believe Intel chips still don't scale as well as AMD do, so AMD still have a market for larger systems, (It wasnt so long ago that SGI were still selling 512 processor MIPS based systems running at 600mhz, and IBMs blue gene supercomputers were running around 700mhz) AMD's architecture gives them much better memory bandwidth in a system with lots of CPUs, and that is the bottleneck for most HPC workloads.
Well, if transgaming were to release cider for linux and osx simultaneously and based on the same code, it would be very easy to make games available for both linux and osx at the same time with minimal changes.
Also the more companies that use cider, the more of a development push there will be, and the more wine-friendly the source games will be. Still, would be better to see games written for opengl instead of directx.
Being distributed as source code is no problem... The distro includes the src, and part of the install process compiles it in the background. The user chooses wether they want to compile it or not, but the distro is only distributing src.
It's not citrix that's insecure, it's the basic design of windows that was always intended to be single user. Thus, a lot of design choices were made which may have seemed sensible in a single user system, but aren't suitable for a system where several users are going to be using it at once.
Because microsoft has conned their userbase into thinking this is normal... So users simply accept it. When you introduce an unknown third party into the mix, they receive the blame regardless of wether it's deserved or not.
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Your point about "minimum spec" vista machines says it all...
Minimum spec will mean it limps along, its using all its resources to run the OS...
Minimum spec to run any other OS will be equally poor, does linux still run on a 386 with 2mb?
That really depends on wether your soundcard has it's own internal buffer, or wether it can DMA the sound data itself. If you have a really cheap nasty soundcard, it might not be able to DMA and thus your CPU has to send data to it in realtime.
That said, i can't imagine any sound cards being made like that anymore.
A 50mhz Motorola 68060 (680x0 being the range that was obsoleted by PPC) can play 128kbit MP3s in realtime, I have an Amiga that does just that.
I've never had a 66MHz PPC, but I can't imagine it being slower than a 50MHz 68060. A P75 could decode MP3s in realtime too, and i believe the PPC always had much better floating point performance than Intel in those days.
I coule get MP3 files playing perfectly well on a DX2/66 and a 50mhz Amiga... I had them playing on a 33mhz Amiga too, but i had to reduce the output quality...
This was ofcourse 128kbit mp3s, commonplace in those days.
I would have thought a DX4/100 would have no issues whatsoever playing mp3 files, maybe something else in your machine was letting it down, slow memory, slow/nondma ide controller, slow soundcard etc.
I always figured that, since an ODF file is basically zipped, an encrypted ODF is just an encrypted ZIP.
In this case it's the software which is broken, not the hardware...
Google at least runs software that they have full control over, on their commodity hardware.
However, google simply use a large number of commodity servers, so that if one fails it has no effect on the overall operation. The really critical bits are the bits binding all those thousands of servers together, and i doubt they run on cheap lowend kit.
And why would they release such a patch?
You continuing to use old versions doesn't generate any profit for microsoft, they would prefer you to buy the latest version. By using xp in the first place you accepted that it used activation, and thus accepted the risk of the activation servers ceasing to exist. If you end up with a perfectly good machine rendered useless because it's software refuses to run, and are faced with buying a whole new machine and new os, you have noone to blame but yourself.
It's very much within microsoft's interests for old versions to become useless, forcing you to buy upgrades. Their own biggest competitor is their own old versions, people who are quite happy with old versions and consider the cost of upgrading pointless.
So he's allowed to go back to *his* home, but he's not allowed to use his os of choice?
And expected to purchase additional software to use his already perfectly working computer...
If anything, the prison service should supply a modified locked down linux installation *as* the monitoring software, and not give him root access. It's not gonna be hard to circumvent windows based monitoring software when you have full admin rights.
You usually get at least 1 spare with the car...
The battery will typically last a couple of years, and gets changed by the garage when you service it, which presumeably you do more often than every couple of years so you should never notice it going flat.
Even so, the manufacturer keeps a record of the codes allocated to each car and can produce you more keys easily enough.
As for copying these proximity systems, all you need is somewhere that people are likely to be in one place for more than an hour (restaurant, cinema etc) and your set...
There are plenty of older cars with fun toys and reasonable performance...
They tend to be very cheap nowadays, because:
They guzzle gas, people dont want gas guzzlers anymore
They were posh cars for rich people, rich people will buy new cars not drive old ones
Thus, there are plenty of old cars from the likes of rolls royce, jaguar, mercedes etc available very cheaply, and most of them have sizeable engines and lots of goodies to play with.
I do similar, but i buy an older car (one that has already lost all of its value) that is still legally roadworthy...
Then i do the absolute minimal servicing on it, and insure it third party only (the minimum legal level of insurance) and drive it around until it either stops working, or becomes unroadworthy... Then it gets scrapped.
Ofcourse, i am also a member of a breakdown organization!
A side effect of driving a junk car, is that noone will want to steal it. One of the cars i had didn't even lock, and yet it still didnt get stolen because it was dirty, dented and rusty.
The point is profit will always come before anything else...
Companies would still be dumping toxic industrial waste into rivers if it wasn't illegal (and thus unprofitable) to do so.
Even if companies may be doing some good, you must never lose sight of the true motives behind it. Sure they will try to spin it as something good, but it's nothing more than another drive to increase profits.
And have you considered why they are "going green" ?
It's good PR, but virtually no company will compromise their level of profit for the sake of going green...
Saving energy benefits companies financially, energy costs money.
Government regulations are getting tighter, soon companies won't have any choice in the matter so it makes sense to get a head start on the competition.
There are thousands of other things companies could be doing to "go green", like encouraging home working and operating much smaller offices, and cutting down on a lot of the ridiculous packaging on purchased goods (companies only tend to use "green" packaging if its actually cheaper).
They could stop buying new PCs (and other equipment) every 3 years, most machines last a lot longer than that and even one that's 10+ years old is more than sufficient for the average user.
They could move out of the centers of large cities, and encourage people to live closer (theres nowhere near enough housing close to business centers for all the staff)
They could teleconference more, and stop travelling around for meetings.
This would actually prevent microsoft from bundling any of these programs with windows or other apps...
They would need to include these bundled programs in seperate files, and couldnt distribute windows in the form of iso images with such programs bundled. Similarly, they couldnt be bundled in a zip file or the same archive as an installer for something else, you would need to download and install these apps seperately.
Because obviously anyone who is in posession of non-DRMed audio files is a pirate!
Actually, if an adult in the back of the car doesnt wear his seatbelt, in a crash he could come smashing into the back of the front seat and smash his head against whoever was sat in the front seat...
If i'm sat in the front of a car, i damn well do want people behind me wearing their seatbelts to reduce the risk of them killing me. I dont really care if they choose to kill themselves.
ROT13 was not an effective copy protection measure anyway, and look how that turned out.
They wouldn't put AMD out of business, it would simply relegate AMD to the low end bargain producer...
Even a few years old chip is more than adequate for 95% of what people use them for today, priced attractively such a chip would sell perfectly well.
Also, i believe Intel chips still don't scale as well as AMD do, so AMD still have a market for larger systems, (It wasnt so long ago that SGI were still selling 512 processor MIPS based systems running at 600mhz, and IBMs blue gene supercomputers were running around 700mhz) AMD's architecture gives them much better memory bandwidth in a system with lots of CPUs, and that is the bottleneck for most HPC workloads.
You needed a P75 to play warcraft?
I used to run the mac version, on a 33mhz 68040 based Amiga that was emulating a mac.
Well, if transgaming were to release cider for linux and osx simultaneously and based on the same code, it would be very easy to make games available for both linux and osx at the same time with minimal changes.
Also the more companies that use cider, the more of a development push there will be, and the more wine-friendly the source games will be. Still, would be better to see games written for opengl instead of directx.
Being distributed as source code is no problem...
The distro includes the src, and part of the install process compiles it in the background. The user chooses wether they want to compile it or not, but the distro is only distributing src.
It's not citrix that's insecure, it's the basic design of windows that was always intended to be single user. Thus, a lot of design choices were made which may have seemed sensible in a single user system, but aren't suitable for a system where several users are going to be using it at once.
There is always NX (www.nomachine.com for a commercial version, free ones are available) which does much the same thing - accelerated X11.
Strange, i ran a 64bit linux instance under xen 3.x a while ago with no issues...
Because microsoft has conned their userbase into thinking this is normal... So users simply accept it.
When you introduce an unknown third party into the mix, they receive the blame regardless of wether it's deserved or not.