Depends... on some things, it was 3.0X the performance of that $200 card. Also, with nVidia's steady driver improvements, I'd expect to see another 25% out of this card in a year. Not to mention, it's currently clocked at 400MHz (lower than the others) so it might have some growing room left for future versions.
From actually RTAs, most reviewers say that the card is surprisingly quiet and has acceptable noise levels, in spite of the large, scary heatsink/fan/heatpipe.
Intel says Rambus. AMD says DDR. The industry uses DDR.
Rambus was expensive and new, DDR was already getting cheap because of its use in graphics cards. AMD decided to take the cheap road (and DDR is cheap in every sense of the word). Consumer market likes cheap.
Intel says "no one needs 64-bits". AMD says "here, have 64-bits". People buy AMD, so Intel says "wait for me!"
While you make it sound like a huge shift in the market, it isn't. AMD did get to see a profit, finally, after all these years of money loss because of their Athlon XPs and Athlon64 XPs but the market hasn't, like, reversed. Intel still has 80% of the market (not much different than a year ago). I'd say that the G5 Macs have gained as much ground for Apple as the Athlon64 has for AMD. For those who cry "Marketting foul!" so much, x86-64 right now is almost nothing but marketing. Windows doesn't do x86-64 yet and the sum total of Linux is still a small segment (but growing).
Intel makes MMX, AMD makes 3DNow! and it spanks MMX, so Intel has to make SSE.
Two different things. MMX was integer only. AMD followed by making 3DNow! which almost no one supports. Intel makes SSE and SSE2 (with SSE2 finally covers most of the ground that folks wanted) and AMD follows with SSE and SSE2 as well. I haven't seen a 3DNow2!, have you?
Intel says "faster processors (ghz) are faster, performance ratings confuse people". AMD says "faster processors (ghz) aren't always faster, performance ratings help people see past speeds". AMD's chips are faster than Intel's and Intel has to admit it won't keep pumping up clockspeeds. Result? Intel says "faster processors (ghz) aren't always faster, performance ratings help people see past speeds".
So? Other than a few things like heat complications, it doesn't matter if a processor has to run at 85THz to be fast. Performance figures are what matter. Not clockspeed. If the 85THz processor is 10% faster than a 10MHz processor, it is still faster. It's all design decision compromises. The P4s achieve performance from high clock speeds. Athlons get it from being "wide".
AMD released the Opteron and Athlon 64 which races past the P4. Intel has to release the P4 Emergency Edition just to stay competitive at the top end. How did they improve the processor? They didn't, they just added cache. They're 3ghz processor needs extra cache to keep up with a 2ghz one from their compeditor that runs cooler and has 64-bits.
I guess "races past" is a subjective phrase. Even 20% faster is just a speed bump. "Races past" to me is at least an integral factor.
There are tons more. I saw an article on it the other day. Intel is not on sure footing, if you ask me. Between the problems above, the trend to sub $500 computers, and just AMDs gaining reputation, Intel could be in trouble. It has recently admitted that it can't continue to use the P4 and is going to build it's future chips off of it's mobile chip because they can't keep speeding up the P4, it's not worth it.
Just means more competition, which means more competitive pricing, which is good for consumers. Intel charges what it thinks it can make off its processors. I'm sure they can lower prices if they want. As far as switching technologies, this happens every so often... it switched each time in the line of 386, 486, Pentium, P6 core, and P4 (Netburst) core, and the Banias core. P4 has been out a while, it's probably time to revamp when it reaches the end of its usefulness. I would fault Intel more if they continued to use something past its usefulness just because they wanted to keep it alive, rather than switching to something newer/better when the time was right. I don't necessarily view it as a bad thing. We will see AMD switch again when their time is right for a revamp of the Athlon64 core, I'm sure. Will you be claiming that this will mean AMD is "not on sure footing" or will you praise this move as being insightful and a great thing?
There is no excuse that validates "road rage". Road rage is the inability of the "sufferer" to control themselves and it is that person's fault. It is not the fault of anyone else any more than I could say "your political views *caused* me beat you up" and be justified.
I could care less what window manager I'm using. I don't care to make the choice as long as it can give me windows, graphics, and is snappy enough to use. All the choices are wasted on me.
I could care less about the Linux desktop as long as it works consistently and reliably (neither of which it currently does using KDE).
I could care less how my window manager looks. I usually turn the background to a uniform black and use few icons on the desktop anyway.
I've yet to see any desktop on Linux that is faster than Windows. I've yet to see real applications (non-server based stuff) on Linux that works faster than my Windows counterparts in actual usage. If you have links to benchmarks proving otherwise, please post.
As far as applications go, I prefer consistency among them in the way they behave (menus are in the same places and contain similar/same things). I don't care what it looks like as long as it is consistent. I'm not going to change it because I spend time on lots of other machines that I cannot customize. Using the defaults (for the apps and the window manager) is a huge time saver for me. When I sit down at another machine, nothing is more frustrating than when the current user has remapped everything and I can't get anything done or show them how to do it. I'm relegated to talking over their shoulders and telling them what to type. It's a complete waste of our time.
So far, rpms have been as problematic over the past years as the Windows95 Registry. Developing software and creating rpms is non-trivial. Our software has a lot of dependencies and simply finding existing rpms of the dependencies is hard enough, in many cases, we've had to make our own rpms of our dependencies.
To relate a recent experience with rpms and bad deliveries. I downloaded a security update that caused me to install the latest glibc from the vendor. Unfortunately, it was the wrong glibc and it caused my whole machine to be trashed. Eventually, I had to reinstall the distribution. So... it isn't that hard to royally screw up Linux. The only difference is that most people don't log in as root by default, where in Windows it is the default. Once you are able to log in as root, you can screw Linux up just as easily as Windows.
People have hated Microsoft just as rabidly as they do now long before any court cases were filed against them. For example, I remember back in the very early 90s laughing about Microsoft making an OS that would run on an R4000 machine but not allow multiple logins simultaneously and not having remote graphics capability (like XWindows). A lot of the folks I worked with back then hated Microsoft already simply because they weren't Un*x and they were being an upstart and wanting to push into the "Workstation" market with their upcoming 32-bit OS Windows NT 3.1.
I'm not sure why the hatred existed back then, really, other than it was something "new" and folks are typically afraid of the unknown.
In fact, I could see the IRS converting the laws into some form of a markup language, that any program could read to get the current tax laws.
Yes, but that would require something that converts a tax law (written in Lawyer-ese) into a programatic series of statements that can calculate, in the end, a number. With the convoluted tax laws that we have, I can envision if-then-else chains a mile long! And if they did this, they might as well put a GUI on top of it because they will be writing really 90% or more of the program anyway. Unless, of course, they will just be an HTML document of all the current tax laws hyperlinked.
and a quick email to the developer's mailing list ... will usually get you ridicule and derision because you aren't a programmer yourself or your idea doesn't fit with what the folks on the mailing list see as a "real" Linux issue or some "bloat" or superfluous feature to them. Most frequently you'll be told to fix it yourself if you don't like it... but then make sure you contribute it back to them for free.
Other games, particularly the MMORPG types, continue to be popular because you can actually type in multiple channels and chat back and forth about any subject you want. I've yet to see a console game that does much more than allow you to either select from a set of canned messages or offer an unwieldy "typewriter" that you use the joystick to select letters and fire button to use the letter. "Typing" arbitrary messages this way is extremely slow and "unnatural" (in that it takes concentration to do it, rather than touch-typing style ease).
Console interaction (without a keyboard) will pretty much end the "social" aspect of gaming, IMO.
99.9% of people do now want: - an OS - a MediaPlayer - a Browser - a Word processor - etc.
They want: - a system that does the things they want
They do not want something that they buy that doesn't do much, then have to go out and buy/download a ton of other stuff just to do the basic tasks they want to do.
What Microsoft is guilty of is developing the OS and bundling all the functionality in with it so that it becomes a system. Have no doubt, I agree that they used bad business practices to achieve this, but this type of integration will, and needs to, come about eventually anyway. It just needs to be done in a fair way.
What we consider Personal Computers today will eventually evolve to be set top boxes that have all the functionality built into them or systems that are integrated and will interface with lots of components that simply "plug into it". The odds are that the consumer won't necessarily know what hardware is inside or what OS it runs - and the fact is that most consumers don't care what it is as long as it does the stuff they want it to do: plays certain games, check email, browse the web, play music/video, etc. When that time comes, you won't have a choice other than what brand of set-top box you will buy and it will contain *everything* integrated and bundled.
Today's PCs (talking about Apple, Windows boxes, Linux boxes, etc.) are like flint knives and stone axes in the scheme of things. In time, some have predicted that an integrated computer will simply be another part of things you buy/build, such as a house, that is simply included in the price like central air/heat. It will just "be there" and "do stuff" like turn the lights on/off, watch the stove, monitor what's in your refridgerator and make orders to the local grocery when you run low on certain items, perform functions like a DVR, and other "mundane" tasks.
Consumers want systems, they don't want a "big box full of parts" that they have to shoehorn together to get something done.
That being said, I believe there will always be a number of us who do want the "big box full of parts" because we like to shoehorn it together to get something done because we enjoy it, but we are in the vast, vast minority.
You can't say this either. You cannot say that "because sales went up, downloading doesn't hurt CD sales" with any degree of certainty. Maybe the sales would have gone up even more if it hadn't been for downloading.
Basically, without a lot more specific data, you cannot draw any correlation between downloading and the health of the CD sales figures.
He said they don't want to allow PERSONAL cell phones. He said nothing about company issued cell phones or beepers. For example, when I was on pager duty, they handed me a pager to carry around with me. The company owned the pager and the number. It's also common for companies to issue cell phones for work related communications.
The one singular thing I hate most about C (and is actually one of the biggest problems with worms and the like) is the lack of a string (I love C, though, on the whole). Programmers habitually use strcpy and such when they shouldn't and this creates buffer overruns which leads to all kinds of other junk. Not only that but dealing with passing strings/buffers down layers through libraries suck. You have to determine who will do the allocation/deallocation and, if the passed in buffer isn't big enough, somehow let the caller know to call you again sometime later when they have a big enough buffer. These things lead to complex code which leads to bugs and lots more development time. Having a decent string "class" (which folks tend to write a lot, over and over in C - reinventing the wheel many times) would solve lots of problems.
So... why is it OK for Linux to do this and not OK for Microsoft to do this?
My experience:
Install: Both install easily.
Desktop: Both are OK except that rarely on Windows will one app hang the entire window manager (IE is an exception here).
Apps: Apps for both covering most areas that I use a computer for except games which are practically nonexistant on Linux. The apps that are on Linux are usually at best 90% of the functionality of those on Windows. User interface consistency and usability are simply nonexistant for the most part on Linux. GUIs are designed by people who are either intimately familiar with their field or by computer geeks with practically no thought toward "commoners". This is my single largest gripe about OSS. Linux for development is pretty powerful, even if documentation is practically junk about a lot of things.
Development tools come in two varieties: So simple as to not be useful or so complicated that you'll never use over 10% of the functionality. Emacs is great but it is far too complex and full of bloat. (Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping is one of the old jokes back when a machine typically had 8M in it). VI is great but is also just as wierd with all the cryptic keystrokes. Graphical editors are like trying to use Notepad on Windows for code development (pure junk). make is great but will fry the mind of casual programmers. gcc is great for making an executable but it has 1000 command line options and few graphical interfaces that use simple check boxes to tell it to "optimize" or "debug". Debuggers are there but I crash the debuggers as often as not when I have code that crashes. The few graphical programming environments I've ever been tortured to use are massively slow and/or buggy as hell (Java IDEs are good examples of this).
Beyond this... the commandline commands from the Un*x world are cryptic. "cron", "ls", "mv", "rm", "cp", "ln", "grep" (and egrep and fgrep), "df", "ps", etc. "find" comes close, but it doesn't find just anything, it finds only files.
Anyway, I could go on and on about what's missing and/or broken from Windows and Linux. Niether are even close to being the "only" OS that I need.
Heh... just now, I noticed that on my Mandrake installation, the 10 pt Fixed font for my Konsole is LARGER than the 12 pt Fixed font.
...the fact that some of his points are just wrong and many are simply opinion based on pure speculation on his part.
For example:
Another of the ways in which the preference for technical choices that favor a small number of core processes is expressed in the Windows kernel is in the fact that it runs nonthreaded internally. This choice avoids "object blockage" to trade off concurrency and context switching in favor of increased efficiency for, and better control of, a small number of key processes.
So... I guess my TaskManager is lying to me right now in that I have 28 processes and 294 threads running on my machine (by my count, that's 10:1 threads/process). Granted, this doesn't tell me how many are in the kernel at any one time but past research has proven to me that the Windows kernel is more threaded than the Linux kernel. Solaris is more threaded than Windows though.
Also, he actually states that he has never seen the source to Windows but assures us that their method of page management works a certain way and is somehow detrimental to this other behavior that he thinks is important (is it really important even or is this just one way that the two kernels are different and since he likes Linux more then the Linux way is somehow obviously better?)
Just another advocacy article it looks like to me.
We never hear from her about viruses, broken apps, shortcuts that don't work, blahbitty blah. My brother remotely administers the box and holds her hand thru that which needs handholding, but the vast majority of what she does is point and click. The difference being, she can click on NOTHING that gets her into trouble,
What does she do on it? email and browse the web?
becasuse the interface is infinitely customiseable, and locked down with an honest to goodness multi-user environment.
Actually, it doesn't matter to me much how customizable the interface is because I use the defaults all the time. The reason why is that I spend time with other folks a bit. When folks customize their interface, I usually can't do jack and have to spell out everything they must do over their shoulder which is the ultimate in inefficiency. By sticking to the defaults, I'm able to move around to *any* other user's login with little/no hinderance. Customizable interfaces are nice if you are the only one who will ever do anything on your account and no one will ever have to sit down to show you anything.
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Depends... on some things, it was 3.0X the performance of that $200 card. Also, with nVidia's steady driver improvements, I'd expect to see another 25% out of this card in a year. Not to mention, it's currently clocked at 400MHz (lower than the others) so it might have some growing room left for future versions.
From actually RTAs, most reviewers say that the card is surprisingly quiet and has acceptable noise levels, in spite of the large, scary heatsink/fan/heatpipe.
Heh... the world through the eyes of a zealot.
Intel says Rambus. AMD says DDR. The industry uses DDR.
Rambus was expensive and new, DDR was already getting cheap because of its use in graphics cards. AMD decided to take the cheap road (and DDR is cheap in every sense of the word). Consumer market likes cheap.
Intel says "no one needs 64-bits". AMD says "here, have 64-bits". People buy AMD, so Intel says "wait for me!"
While you make it sound like a huge shift in the market, it isn't. AMD did get to see a profit, finally, after all these years of money loss because of their Athlon XPs and Athlon64 XPs but the market hasn't, like, reversed. Intel still has 80% of the market (not much different than a year ago). I'd say that the G5 Macs have gained as much ground for Apple as the Athlon64 has for AMD. For those who cry "Marketting foul!" so much, x86-64 right now is almost nothing but marketing. Windows doesn't do x86-64 yet and the sum total of Linux is still a small segment (but growing).
Intel makes MMX, AMD makes 3DNow! and it spanks MMX, so Intel has to make SSE.
Two different things. MMX was integer only. AMD followed by making 3DNow! which almost no one supports. Intel makes SSE and SSE2 (with SSE2 finally covers most of the ground that folks wanted) and AMD follows with SSE and SSE2 as well. I haven't seen a 3DNow2!, have you?
Intel says "faster processors (ghz) are faster, performance ratings confuse people". AMD says "faster processors (ghz) aren't always faster, performance ratings help people see past speeds". AMD's chips are faster than Intel's and Intel has to admit it won't keep pumping up clockspeeds. Result? Intel says "faster processors (ghz) aren't always faster, performance ratings help people see past speeds".
So? Other than a few things like heat complications, it doesn't matter if a processor has to run at 85THz to be fast. Performance figures are what matter. Not clockspeed. If the 85THz processor is 10% faster than a 10MHz processor, it is still faster. It's all design decision compromises. The P4s achieve performance from high clock speeds. Athlons get it from being "wide".
AMD released the Opteron and Athlon 64 which races past the P4. Intel has to release the P4 Emergency Edition just to stay competitive at the top end. How did they improve the processor? They didn't, they just added cache. They're 3ghz processor needs extra cache to keep up with a 2ghz one from their compeditor that runs cooler and has 64-bits.
I guess "races past" is a subjective phrase. Even 20% faster is just a speed bump. "Races past" to me is at least an integral factor.
There are tons more. I saw an article on it the other day. Intel is not on sure footing, if you ask me. Between the problems above, the trend to sub $500 computers, and just AMDs gaining reputation, Intel could be in trouble. It has recently admitted that it can't continue to use the P4 and is going to build it's future chips off of it's mobile chip because they can't keep speeding up the P4, it's not worth it.
Just means more competition, which means more competitive pricing, which is good for consumers. Intel charges what it thinks it can make off its processors. I'm sure they can lower prices if they want. As far as switching technologies, this happens every so often... it switched each time in the line of 386, 486, Pentium, P6 core, and P4 (Netburst) core, and the Banias core. P4 has been out a while, it's probably time to revamp when it reaches the end of its usefulness. I would fault Intel more if they continued to use something past its usefulness just because they wanted to keep it alive, rather than switching to something newer/better when the time was right. I don't necessarily view it as a bad thing. We will see AMD switch again when their time is right for a revamp of the Athlon64 core, I'm sure. Will you be claiming that this will mean AMD is "not on sure footing" or will you praise this move as being insightful and a great thing?
Reverse engineering is legal. What's the big deal? Why did this even get posted?
There is no excuse that validates "road rage". Road rage is the inability of the "sufferer" to control themselves and it is that person's fault. It is not the fault of anyone else any more than I could say "your political views *caused* me beat you up" and be justified.
Funny.... 'which apt-get' says that no such thing is in my path...
I could care less what window manager I'm using. I don't care to make the choice as long as it can give me windows, graphics, and is snappy enough to use. All the choices are wasted on me.
I could care less about the Linux desktop as long as it works consistently and reliably (neither of which it currently does using KDE).
I could care less how my window manager looks. I usually turn the background to a uniform black and use few icons on the desktop anyway.
I've yet to see any desktop on Linux that is faster than Windows. I've yet to see real applications (non-server based stuff) on Linux that works faster than my Windows counterparts in actual usage. If you have links to benchmarks proving otherwise, please post.
As far as applications go, I prefer consistency among them in the way they behave (menus are in the same places and contain similar/same things). I don't care what it looks like as long as it is consistent. I'm not going to change it because I spend time on lots of other machines that I cannot customize. Using the defaults (for the apps and the window manager) is a huge time saver for me. When I sit down at another machine, nothing is more frustrating than when the current user has remapped everything and I can't get anything done or show them how to do it. I'm relegated to talking over their shoulders and telling them what to type. It's a complete waste of our time.
So far, rpms have been as problematic over the past years as the Windows95 Registry. Developing software and creating rpms is non-trivial. Our software has a lot of dependencies and simply finding existing rpms of the dependencies is hard enough, in many cases, we've had to make our own rpms of our dependencies.
To relate a recent experience with rpms and bad deliveries. I downloaded a security update that caused me to install the latest glibc from the vendor. Unfortunately, it was the wrong glibc and it caused my whole machine to be trashed. Eventually, I had to reinstall the distribution. So... it isn't that hard to royally screw up Linux. The only difference is that most people don't log in as root by default, where in Windows it is the default. Once you are able to log in as root, you can screw Linux up just as easily as Windows.
People have hated Microsoft just as rabidly as they do now long before any court cases were filed against them. For example, I remember back in the very early 90s laughing about Microsoft making an OS that would run on an R4000 machine but not allow multiple logins simultaneously and not having remote graphics capability (like XWindows). A lot of the folks I worked with back then hated Microsoft already simply because they weren't Un*x and they were being an upstart and wanting to push into the "Workstation" market with their upcoming 32-bit OS Windows NT 3.1.
I'm not sure why the hatred existed back then, really, other than it was something "new" and folks are typically afraid of the unknown.
I saw on the news a few weeks ago where some guy named his son something like John Smith 2.0 instead of John Smith, Jr.
So.... no one else asked... Why exactly did you do this?
Except that the 640K limit was a hardware limitation of the IBM PC.
In fact, I could see the IRS converting the laws into some form of a markup language, that any program could read to get the current tax laws.
Yes, but that would require something that converts a tax law (written in Lawyer-ese) into a programatic series of statements that can calculate, in the end, a number. With the convoluted tax laws that we have, I can envision if-then-else chains a mile long! And if they did this, they might as well put a GUI on top of it because they will be writing really 90% or more of the program anyway. Unless, of course, they will just be an HTML document of all the current tax laws hyperlinked.
Software, once written,
Ah... and therein lies the issue...
and a quick email to the developer's mailing list ... will usually get you ridicule and derision because you aren't a programmer yourself or your idea doesn't fit with what the folks on the mailing list see as a "real" Linux issue or some "bloat" or superfluous feature to them. Most frequently you'll be told to fix it yourself if you don't like it... but then make sure you contribute it back to them for free.
Other games, particularly the MMORPG types, continue to be popular because you can actually type in multiple channels and chat back and forth about any subject you want. I've yet to see a console game that does much more than allow you to either select from a set of canned messages or offer an unwieldy "typewriter" that you use the joystick to select letters and fire button to use the letter. "Typing" arbitrary messages this way is extremely slow and "unnatural" (in that it takes concentration to do it, rather than touch-typing style ease).
Console interaction (without a keyboard) will pretty much end the "social" aspect of gaming, IMO.
99.9% of people do now want:
- an OS
- a MediaPlayer
- a Browser
- a Word processor
- etc.
They want:
- a system that does the things they want
They do not want something that they buy that doesn't do much, then have to go out and buy/download a ton of other stuff just to do the basic tasks they want to do.
What Microsoft is guilty of is developing the OS and bundling all the functionality in with it so that it becomes a system. Have no doubt, I agree that they used bad business practices to achieve this, but this type of integration will, and needs to, come about eventually anyway. It just needs to be done in a fair way.
What we consider Personal Computers today will eventually evolve to be set top boxes that have all the functionality built into them or systems that are integrated and will interface with lots of components that simply "plug into it". The odds are that the consumer won't necessarily know what hardware is inside or what OS it runs - and the fact is that most consumers don't care what it is as long as it does the stuff they want it to do: plays certain games, check email, browse the web, play music/video, etc. When that time comes, you won't have a choice other than what brand of set-top box you will buy and it will contain *everything* integrated and bundled.
Today's PCs (talking about Apple, Windows boxes, Linux boxes, etc.) are like flint knives and stone axes in the scheme of things. In time, some have predicted that an integrated computer will simply be another part of things you buy/build, such as a house, that is simply included in the price like central air/heat. It will just "be there" and "do stuff" like turn the lights on/off, watch the stove, monitor what's in your refridgerator and make orders to the local grocery when you run low on certain items, perform functions like a DVR, and other "mundane" tasks.
Consumers want systems, they don't want a "big box full of parts" that they have to shoehorn together to get something done.
That being said, I believe there will always be a number of us who do want the "big box full of parts" because we like to shoehorn it together to get something done because we enjoy it, but we are in the vast, vast minority.
You'd be surprised at how much other stuff you buy supports the same things.
You can't say this either. You cannot say that "because sales went up, downloading doesn't hurt CD sales" with any degree of certainty. Maybe the sales would have gone up even more if it hadn't been for downloading.
Basically, without a lot more specific data, you cannot draw any correlation between downloading and the health of the CD sales figures.
Heh.. that sounds liek them wantign the OSS kind of workforce without payign the price...
And what price is that?
He said they don't want to allow PERSONAL cell phones. He said nothing about company issued cell phones or beepers. For example, when I was on pager duty, they handed me a pager to carry around with me. The company owned the pager and the number. It's also common for companies to issue cell phones for work related communications.
One word: strings
The one singular thing I hate most about C (and is actually one of the biggest problems with worms and the like) is the lack of a string (I love C, though, on the whole). Programmers habitually use strcpy and such when they shouldn't and this creates buffer overruns which leads to all kinds of other junk. Not only that but dealing with passing strings/buffers down layers through libraries suck. You have to determine who will do the allocation/deallocation and, if the passed in buffer isn't big enough, somehow let the caller know to call you again sometime later when they have a big enough buffer. These things lead to complex code which leads to bugs and lots more development time. Having a decent string "class" (which folks tend to write a lot, over and over in C - reinventing the wheel many times) would solve lots of problems.
I still play TA from time to time.
Linux: Loads of apps installed with OS,
So... why is it OK for Linux to do this and not OK for Microsoft to do this?
My experience:
Install:
Both install easily.
Desktop:
Both are OK except that rarely on Windows will one app hang the entire window manager (IE is an exception here).
Apps:
Apps for both covering most areas that I use a computer for except games which are practically nonexistant on Linux. The apps that are on Linux are usually at best 90% of the functionality of those on Windows. User interface consistency and usability are simply nonexistant for the most part on Linux. GUIs are designed by people who are either intimately familiar with their field or by computer geeks with practically no thought toward "commoners". This is my single largest gripe about OSS. Linux for development is pretty powerful, even if documentation is practically junk about a lot of things.
Development tools come in two varieties: So simple as to not be useful or so complicated that you'll never use over 10% of the functionality. Emacs is great but it is far too complex and full of bloat. (Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping is one of the old jokes back when a machine typically had 8M in it). VI is great but is also just as wierd with all the cryptic keystrokes. Graphical editors are like trying to use Notepad on Windows for code development (pure junk). make is great but will fry the mind of casual programmers. gcc is great for making an executable but it has 1000 command line options and few graphical interfaces that use simple check boxes to tell it to "optimize" or "debug". Debuggers are there but I crash the debuggers as often as not when I have code that crashes. The few graphical programming environments I've ever been tortured to use are massively slow and/or buggy as hell (Java IDEs are good examples of this).
Beyond this... the commandline commands from the Un*x world are cryptic. "cron", "ls", "mv", "rm", "cp", "ln", "grep" (and egrep and fgrep), "df", "ps", etc. "find" comes close, but it doesn't find just anything, it finds only files.
Anyway, I could go on and on about what's missing and/or broken from Windows and Linux. Niether are even close to being the "only" OS that I need.
Heh... just now, I noticed that on my Mandrake installation, the 10 pt Fixed font for my Konsole is LARGER than the 12 pt Fixed font.
...the fact that some of his points are just wrong and many are simply opinion based on pure speculation on his part.
For example:
Another of the ways in which the preference for technical choices that favor a small number of core processes is expressed in the Windows kernel is in the fact that it runs nonthreaded internally. This choice avoids "object blockage" to trade off concurrency and context switching in favor of increased efficiency for, and better control of, a small number of key processes.
So... I guess my TaskManager is lying to me right now in that I have 28 processes and 294 threads running on my machine (by my count, that's 10:1 threads/process). Granted, this doesn't tell me how many are in the kernel at any one time but past research has proven to me that the Windows kernel is more threaded than the Linux kernel. Solaris is more threaded than Windows though.
Also, he actually states that he has never seen the source to Windows but assures us that their method of page management works a certain way and is somehow detrimental to this other behavior that he thinks is important (is it really important even or is this just one way that the two kernels are different and since he likes Linux more then the Linux way is somehow obviously better?)
Just another advocacy article it looks like to me.
We never hear from her about viruses, broken apps, shortcuts that don't work, blahbitty blah. My brother remotely administers the box and holds her hand thru that which needs handholding, but the vast majority of what she does is point and click. The difference being, she can click on NOTHING that gets her into trouble,
What does she do on it? email and browse the web?
becasuse the interface is infinitely customiseable, and locked down with an honest to goodness multi-user environment.
Actually, it doesn't matter to me much how customizable the interface is because I use the defaults all the time. The reason why is that I spend time with other folks a bit. When folks customize their interface, I usually can't do jack and have to spell out everything they must do over their shoulder which is the ultimate in inefficiency. By sticking to the defaults, I'm able to move around to *any* other user's login with little/no hinderance. Customizable interfaces are nice if you are the only one who will ever do anything on your account and no one will ever have to sit down to show you anything.