Could you not be bothered to read the link you quoted?
Because it in no way, shape, or form supports your statement that:
Scheduler in Vista also performs worse than on XP (so MS had to resort to such hacks
The throttling bug between MMCSS and the NDIS stack had nothing whatsoever to do with a slower scheduler. It had to do with a bad developer using a 'magic number' to hardcode the throttling ratio, that turned out to be a really bad idea. Use of magic numbers usually do.
In other words, it was a bug.
The same concept didnt even exist in XP, that playback should trump all on a desktop, and not be interrupted by anything. This is just semi-intelligent manipulation of scheduler priorities, based on a limited class of use (ie, multimedia desktop machines).
For example, its audio stack is just HORRIBLE. Some functions work more than 100 _times_ slower than on XP ('protected' audio path and all that...).
Which API functions are those?
Because to get PAP you have to call a very specific API...
When an operating system requires that old drivers be re-written and that many applications fail to work for their 64 bit versions of their operating systems; to the point that people still prefer their 32 bit operating systems, what do you call that? People in glass-(windows) houses shouldn't throw stones.;-)
Are you trying to imply in a very roundabout way that there are significant application compatibilities on x64 versions of windows?
There arent. We've got a mix of both in our office, on both servers and desktops.
All drivers need to be re-done for 64-bit, but thats par for the course in all operating systems.
Other than that, the only apps that have compatibility issues are the very rare VPN client and very low level stuff like firewalls or anti-virus.
The vast, vast majority of old apps work just fine on x64 windows, because they're running in an x86 compatibility layer.
UAC blocks you from running programs at system startup on your own computer.
No, it doesnt. You simply set up a Scheduled Task entry to run on startup, and have it run as SYSTEM or an account with the right privileges. This is trivial stuff.
There _may_ be some software that cant run without an interactive desktop, which you wouldnt be able to run this way, but thats a conscious design choice by the 3rd party software makers.
How do you think all the anti-virus, windows update, and other things run at startup without someone logging in? It's not magic.
It helpfully says that your administrator has set up a system policy to disallow it (lies).
I'm not sure what you're doing to see this, but its likely to be technically true, if possibly misleading. You may be (somehow) tripping over a default group policy setting that is blocking what you're trying to do. So if you're the administrator, just change it.
You're in complete control over those kinds of settings. You may not automatically be magically granted the knowledge of how to change it, but thats no different than any other complex system on the planet.
Add to that the pissing annoying virtual store technology that silently redirects activity aimed at files under Program Files to a directory under the user's private data area, without telling/warning/stopping anyone and screwing up multi-user uses of the machine (other users see a different version of the file).
This isnt enabled by default. Just dont turn it on.
If they wanted to have restricted areas maybe they should investigate some goddamn file permissions.
They do have restricted areas, and they are restricted by the use of file permissions. I dont know what you're trying to say here.
Why in the ever loving fuck would you need PERMISSION to move a file from one directory to another?
Because the account you're running as doesnt have permissions to either the source or target of hte move? Seems pretty straightforward.
Same reason why the bank requires permission to move money from another person's account to yours.
You should not have access to other users on the machine's profiles, they may have personal stuff there.
I have yet to read about ANY 'improvements' that didn't involve that bloody "areo" interface or how "ooo shinyprettylookitthat!" it is.
As I've said about 400-million times here, go read about the technical improvements to Vista on wikipedia.
Lots of improvements to the kernel, scheduler, io scheduler, default permissions, security, etc etc etc. They did some really neat stuff under the hood.
So amongst other things, what you should notice quickly is how much longer Vista will run stably than XP would, as long as you arent stuck with some piece of crap with buggy drivers that you buy from Best Buy.
Why are we so concerned about eye-candy? How about the actual system underneath?
Is it stable, scalable, administrable?
Compared to XP? Hugely.
It saddens me when all the supposed 'techies' here on slashdot can only focus on the flash and shiny bits, and dont even look to see what kind of under the hood kernel, scheduler, security, reliability improvements, etc have been made.
Vista is a massive improvement to the NT kernel and win32.
The reliability is hugely improved compared to XP. It's scalability at higher end equipment is noticeably better. It deals with weeks or months of standbys & hibernates much more stably than XP did.
And thats not even getting into the nitty gritty details. I'm tired of repeating them here ad nauseum. Go read wikipedia's entry on technical improvements to Vista. It's quite enlightening.
This is stuff that MS should have done to the NT line 5-10 years ago, and its good to see them finally doing it.
Your usage patterns may indicate that x64 versions of desktop isnt useful for you, but to generalize your personal experience to the entire world and say no one has any reason to use it is absurd.
Pretty much any modern developer in certain environments can use it. For example, for some of the development work I do, I'm running Oracle Enterprise DB, Tomcat w/ 3 apps running, and Eclipse. Oracle and Eclipse both get allocated 1GB of memory on startup, tomcat gets 1.5gb.
Just right there if you're also running firefox and other apps, you're well over 4GB of memory. So you want a 6GB or 8GB box, which you cant do on x86 Vista or XP.
And thats not even including engineering folks who can easily use >= 8GB of memory on their desktops.
It's not mainstream, but there are many many legitimate uses of x64 on the desktop.
In addition, if you're using Vista, and you dont have any specialty software that wont run on x64, then you probably should consider using it. This is because of the driver quality.
Many 32-bit vista machines (especially in the consumer hardware space) ship with drivers that are minimally functional patches of old xp-era drivers. In other words, they're terrible. Buggy, crash-prone, leaky.
However, x64 drivers are much more likely to have been written from scratch or been given more attention.
The net result is that the hardware and drivers on Vista x64 tend to be much higher quality on average.
Lastly, there's no reason NOT to run x64 on your desktops and laptops. All equipment you buy nowadays (ie, cpus) are x64 enabled. So its not like running a 10% utilization x64 desktop is any more wasteful than a 10% utilization x86 desktop. It's exactly as wasteful in both cases.
Vista is hated. Weather it is a technical failure or a PR failure is moot. No one wants it. And XP64 is not really functional at all.
LOL thats whats called hand-waving to distract from any facts.
Out of the tiny percentage of the world's population who has any emotional opinion about operating systems, or even knows what an operating system is, some minority population subset hates vista.
XP64 has been in use by engineering shops for many years, quite successfully. The situations (long before Vista) where they needed/wanted to be on windows, but 4GB wasnt enough memory.
Just because you havent seen it doesnt mean it hasnt been done quite broadly and successfully.
Same for Vista, the x64 version is quite nice and solid. Light years ahead of XP in performance (at the higher end of hardware, where you need 4+ processors and 8+ GB of memory) and reliability.
I hate Vista, but had been reading good things about the performance and stability of Windows Server 2008 when converted to a workstation, so I gave it a try. I downloaded an evaluation copy and installed it on the only free space on my drive, which is the slowest inner 25GB. After following all the instructions available on the Internet, I had an OS that outperformed my XP Pro installation on everything except startup time--even with Aero fully enabled.
Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are the same OS.
If you are experiencing differences in reliability, speed, etc, then it is either:
1. Hardware 2. Drivers 3. Configuration
If its the same hardware, then you're probably dealing with driver issues or mis-configuration.
Now mind you, most manufacturers terribly misconfigure Vista out of the box, so thats definitely part of it.
But they're the same OS, or can be with configuration changes to Vista to make it configured like the server version.
There are middle-grounds between the default home-user-targeted UAC configuration and completely turning it off.
You can configure it so if you're logged in as an admin, you get no uac prompts at all, but regular non-priv'd users get prompted for credentials (ie, they have to put in a user/pass).
You can configure it so that it prompts for a password, rather than just a 'confirm' button.
There are other options as well.
It's not nearly as fancy as sudo in that there's no configurable sudoers list. But other than that, it can be configured to work very similarly.
For example, on our domain, we have it configured to prompt for credentials for non-admin users, and no prompt at all for admin users. So just like logging in as a regular user and using sudo, or just logging in as root. Works almost exactly the same.
The biggest lack, in my mind, is that there's no way to launch an app from the command line with elevation. Ie, no runas functionality, its only available through the GUI with a right-click and 'Run as Administrator'.
To deal with that, what we tend to do is fire up one command-line shell as admin, but run the rest of the system as a non-priv'd user (on our desktops and laptops, I mean).
EXACTLY! I tried Server 2K8 and I was like "Why? Why in the hell can't you just add a basic GUI on top of this and sell it to business users for the desktop? Why?" It is low resource,doesn't have tons of bloated multimedia junk that has NO business being in a business OS, and runs solid as a rock. So why can't those of use who just want to get our work done buy this on a machine without shelling out insane money for a server license? Why?
You realize that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are the same OS, right? The packaging is a little different, the default installed apps and services are different, etc.
But its no trouble to make Vista act just like 2008.
Once you have configurations the same, the only difference is drivers. I think this is where most folks see the difference. Drivers for server equipment tend to be much better, and the drivers for Vista for consumer level equipment are still not where they should be.
Compound this by the fact that people are buying these garbage second-rate consumer class sytems from BestBuy and such, and they're surprised why their pretty $400 laptop from Toshiba doesnt work half the time? It's because its a terribly designed piece of hardware, with terribly written drivers, and shipped in a configuration that has tons of adware and unnecessary garbage turned on.
The fact that people like yourself say how great 2k8 is but then complain about Vista is speaking to the resellers (Dell, HP, etc) and the packaging from the resellers, not the underlying OS.
And in fact, business users of Vista machines DO set it up like you describe. They make custom builds of the OS that include only what their business needs, and they run it locked down with UAC configured exactly the way they like it, etc.
That slow-down you're seeing has nothing to do with drawing/rendering.
It has to do with windows reading all the control panel entries off disk (which seem to get flushed out of the disk cache quite easily) and pulling all the icons and such. If you watch your disk or resource manager while its happening it becomes clear.
If you're on a domain, and you're the domain admin, and you dont like how UAC is configured out of the box, why dont you change it?
You're basically running UAC in the non-domain home-user focused mode. If you dont like it that way, why do you insist on using it that way? Takes 2 minutes to change.
The kind of thing you describe is the default settings targeted for a non-domain, non-corporate audience (ie, home users).
If you want to not be prompted when you're explicitly logged in as an administrative user, then take the 60 seconds it takes to change it to that setting.
You seem to be complaining about something that you dont really understand, and havent taken the short amount of time to figure it out.
I agree that there are lots of gotchas in your first few deployments before you learn all the unwritten rules.
Nowadays though, its not much different than deploying a PHP app, using mod_rails/passenger.
svn up your changes (or capistrano or whatever you like), then touch tmp/restart.txt and thats it.
It's not quite to the level of simplicity of PHP, but it wont take long.
For real fun, try running a Rails app where it's deployed to an NFS filesystem and then try to run the app via CGI. You can see how well it's 'optimized'.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, other than you're obviously frustrated with the platform.
I've never tried to run a rails server with the app content on a network-mounted filesystem, but I have done that with assets (images, etc). And I'm not sure why you would ever run Rails via CGI, unless this was several years ago, predating mongrel.
I could see that its possible certain parts of the app folder structure may not play well with NFS, but you could keep those on a local fs (ie, everything under log/ and tmp/).
Were you running a cluster for example, with all of them mounting the same app filesystem for simplicity? If that were the case, each server would almost certainly need their own local tmp/ and log/.
Ridiculously fast development time. It's insanely productive for the 80-90% cases that you run into.
Really nice schema/db migrations system built in.
Ridiculously simple to take a web app built with it using standard postbacks, and make it all super-fancy ajax, in-place-editing, and lightbox goodness.
Ridiculously easy to turn the whole thing into a REST engine for some other front-end or machine-to-machine usage.
My (un-quantified) perception is that its running about 1/3 the size (lines of code) of a similar php app, and even a smaller percentage compared against asp.net/java.
For a certain segment of app development needs, its really quite compelling.
Like your comments, PJs are nothing but philosophical hand-waving.
In no way does her posts nor your reply support your assertion that OpenSUSE is somehow magically 'unsafe'.
It still looks like GPL to me.
Your comment about MS suing you is even more far-fatched.
The concept of MS suing linux users is pretty darn far-fetched. But if you're really worried about it, then you WANT to be using Novell, as then you are specifically and quite effectively covered by Novell's indemnification program.
Hear it now. I use to work at a digital invoicing company which used ext2 on linux. We were seeing extremely slow reads and writes to the disk. Now, in this environment, we were writing upwards of 10 gigs of data a day(spread amongst thousands of files). We would also delete 9 gigs of that daily. Compound this behavior over a couple of years and we were left with a heavily fragmented disk. The solution was simple... we re-wrote all the data.
Your anecdote in no way supports your claim that fragmentation has an effect on data integrity. All you showed with your story is that it may have an effect on performance in some scenarios.
Wrong again, fragmentation makes the disk have to work harder. Think about it... the disk could read 10 bytes incrementing a byte at a time or it could be required to skip 20 gigs to read each byte(this is an over-simplification). This will increase wear and tear on the moving parts as well as extra heat. So, extreme fragmentation will likely decrease the life of your disks.
As above, your hypothetical in no way supports your claim that fragmentation has an effect on data integrity. All you showed with your hypothetical is that if your unstated assumptions about load and usage patterns impacting hardware failure rates are true, then fragmentation may have an effect on hardware failure rates.
The bottom line is that fragmentation has nothing to do with data integrity. The two issues are completely orthoganal.
32-bit desktop windows versions ignore PAE settings.
This wasnt always the case, but apparently (according to MS) many many consumer-hardware drivers are not written to deal with PAE and the extra level of indirection, and so will crash or blue-screen frequently. So they disabled the whole thing at some point around XP sp2 (iirc).
32-bit server versions do not, and 64-bit versions of either dont need it.
Be careful when turning to amateurs like lifehacker for stuff like this. They really dont know what they're talking about.
Turning off the auto-tuning here will only be a good thing if the network equip between you and your servers cant handle receive window scaling. Which means they're semi-broken.
So step 1, before turning it off on Vista, is to see if you can upgrade the firmware/ios on the network equipment, so that it properly supports the window scaling.
If that isnt possible, and only after experimenting did you determine that its the real problem, should you even consider turning it off in Vista permanently.
Receive window scaling will increase your throughput in many cases, or do nothing, in other cases. The only time it makes things worse is if your network equip is busted and doesnt properly support the spec.
Particularly in a case of a high-bandwidth, high-latency, the receive window scaling _really_ shines. Considering how common this is, with vpn connections to office, or home internet, etc, you dont want to just go disabling it willy nilly. Do your research first.
LifeHacker is not an IT professional, you cant assume they have a clue what they are talking about.
Then those businesses will eventually die out. Sorry.
I hope you're joking here.
If you really think that the tiny, nearly insignificant and definitely non-material marginal cost to put a windows desktop per person up will drive a small business down the drain, then you have a very poor understanding of the situation.
Call it an extra $100 (ie, marginal cost of windows xp-pro/vista-business) per desktop once every 3-5 years.
This is so small as to not even be statistical noise. It's just nothing.
If the business is running things so fine that that figure is material then they're already on their way out of business and it has nothing to do with technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The single player mode shouldnt have even been included, other than as a tutorial.
The game solely exists for LAN-party style multiplayer sessions.
That makes very little sense.
Battlefront is a multiplayer battle game, Commandos was a single-player game. You cant really compare the two.
The former is a LAN party game (one of the best ever, IMO), the latter is a play at home by yourself game.
Could you not be bothered to read the link you quoted?
Because it in no way, shape, or form supports your statement that:
Scheduler in Vista also performs worse than on XP (so MS had to resort to such hacks
The throttling bug between MMCSS and the NDIS stack had nothing whatsoever to do with a slower scheduler. It had to do with a bad developer using a 'magic number' to hardcode the throttling ratio, that turned out to be a really bad idea. Use of magic numbers usually do.
In other words, it was a bug.
The same concept didnt even exist in XP, that playback should trump all on a desktop, and not be interrupted by anything. This is just semi-intelligent manipulation of scheduler priorities, based on a limited class of use (ie, multimedia desktop machines).
For example, its audio stack is just HORRIBLE. Some functions work more than 100 _times_ slower than on XP ('protected' audio path and all that...).
Which API functions are those?
Because to get PAP you have to call a very specific API ...
When an operating system requires that old drivers be re-written and that many applications fail to work for their 64 bit versions of their operating systems; to the point that people still prefer their 32 bit operating systems, what do you call that? People in glass-(windows) houses shouldn't throw stones. ;-)
Are you trying to imply in a very roundabout way that there are significant application compatibilities on x64 versions of windows?
There arent. We've got a mix of both in our office, on both servers and desktops.
All drivers need to be re-done for 64-bit, but thats par for the course in all operating systems.
Other than that, the only apps that have compatibility issues are the very rare VPN client and very low level stuff like firewalls or anti-virus.
The vast, vast majority of old apps work just fine on x64 windows, because they're running in an x86 compatibility layer.
UAC blocks you from running programs at system startup on your own computer.
No, it doesnt. You simply set up a Scheduled Task entry to run on startup, and have it run as SYSTEM or an account with the right privileges. This is trivial stuff.
There _may_ be some software that cant run without an interactive desktop, which you wouldnt be able to run this way, but thats a conscious design choice by the 3rd party software makers.
How do you think all the anti-virus, windows update, and other things run at startup without someone logging in? It's not magic.
It helpfully says that your administrator has set up a system policy to disallow it (lies).
I'm not sure what you're doing to see this, but its likely to be technically true, if possibly misleading. You may be (somehow) tripping over a default group policy setting that is blocking what you're trying to do. So if you're the administrator, just change it.
You're in complete control over those kinds of settings. You may not automatically be magically granted the knowledge of how to change it, but thats no different than any other complex system on the planet.
Add to that the pissing annoying virtual store technology that silently redirects activity aimed at files under Program Files to a directory under the user's private data area, without telling/warning/stopping anyone and screwing up multi-user uses of the machine (other users see a different version of the file).
This isnt enabled by default. Just dont turn it on.
If they wanted to have restricted areas maybe they should investigate some goddamn file permissions.
They do have restricted areas, and they are restricted by the use of file permissions. I dont know what you're trying to say here.
Why in the ever loving fuck would you need PERMISSION to move a file from one directory to another?
Because the account you're running as doesnt have permissions to either the source or target of hte move? Seems pretty straightforward.
Same reason why the bank requires permission to move money from another person's account to yours.
You should not have access to other users on the machine's profiles, they may have personal stuff there.
I have yet to read about ANY 'improvements' that didn't involve that bloody "areo" interface or how "ooo shinyprettylookitthat!" it is.
As I've said about 400-million times here, go read about the technical improvements to Vista on wikipedia.
Lots of improvements to the kernel, scheduler, io scheduler, default permissions, security, etc etc etc. They did some really neat stuff under the hood.
So amongst other things, what you should notice quickly is how much longer Vista will run stably than XP would, as long as you arent stuck with some piece of crap with buggy drivers that you buy from Best Buy.
Why are we so concerned about eye-candy? How about the actual system underneath?
Is it stable, scalable, administrable?
Compared to XP? Hugely.
It saddens me when all the supposed 'techies' here on slashdot can only focus on the flash and shiny bits, and dont even look to see what kind of under the hood kernel, scheduler, security, reliability improvements, etc have been made.
Vista is a massive improvement to the NT kernel and win32.
The reliability is hugely improved compared to XP. It's scalability at higher end equipment is noticeably better. It deals with weeks or months of standbys & hibernates much more stably than XP did.
And thats not even getting into the nitty gritty details. I'm tired of repeating them here ad nauseum. Go read wikipedia's entry on technical improvements to Vista. It's quite enlightening.
This is stuff that MS should have done to the NT line 5-10 years ago, and its good to see them finally doing it.
Your usage patterns may indicate that x64 versions of desktop isnt useful for you, but to generalize your personal experience to the entire world and say no one has any reason to use it is absurd.
Pretty much any modern developer in certain environments can use it. For example, for some of the development work I do, I'm running Oracle Enterprise DB, Tomcat w/ 3 apps running, and Eclipse. Oracle and Eclipse both get allocated 1GB of memory on startup, tomcat gets 1.5gb.
Just right there if you're also running firefox and other apps, you're well over 4GB of memory. So you want a 6GB or 8GB box, which you cant do on x86 Vista or XP.
And thats not even including engineering folks who can easily use >= 8GB of memory on their desktops.
It's not mainstream, but there are many many legitimate uses of x64 on the desktop.
In addition, if you're using Vista, and you dont have any specialty software that wont run on x64, then you probably should consider using it. This is because of the driver quality.
Many 32-bit vista machines (especially in the consumer hardware space) ship with drivers that are minimally functional patches of old xp-era drivers. In other words, they're terrible. Buggy, crash-prone, leaky.
However, x64 drivers are much more likely to have been written from scratch or been given more attention.
The net result is that the hardware and drivers on Vista x64 tend to be much higher quality on average.
Lastly, there's no reason NOT to run x64 on your desktops and laptops. All equipment you buy nowadays (ie, cpus) are x64 enabled. So its not like running a 10% utilization x64 desktop is any more wasteful than a 10% utilization x86 desktop. It's exactly as wasteful in both cases.
Vista is hated. Weather it is a technical failure or a PR failure is moot. No one wants it. And XP64 is not really functional at all.
LOL thats whats called hand-waving to distract from any facts.
Out of the tiny percentage of the world's population who has any emotional opinion about operating systems, or even knows what an operating system is, some minority population subset hates vista.
XP64 has been in use by engineering shops for many years, quite successfully. The situations (long before Vista) where they needed/wanted to be on windows, but 4GB wasnt enough memory.
Just because you havent seen it doesnt mean it hasnt been done quite broadly and successfully.
Same for Vista, the x64 version is quite nice and solid. Light years ahead of XP in performance (at the higher end of hardware, where you need 4+ processors and 8+ GB of memory) and reliability.
I hate Vista, but had been reading good things about the performance and stability of Windows Server 2008 when converted to a workstation, so I gave it a try. I downloaded an evaluation copy and installed it on the only free space on my drive, which is the slowest inner 25GB. After following all the instructions available on the Internet, I had an OS that outperformed my XP Pro installation on everything except startup time--even with Aero fully enabled.
Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are the same OS.
If you are experiencing differences in reliability, speed, etc, then it is either:
1. Hardware
2. Drivers
3. Configuration
If its the same hardware, then you're probably dealing with driver issues or mis-configuration.
Now mind you, most manufacturers terribly misconfigure Vista out of the box, so thats definitely part of it.
But they're the same OS, or can be with configuration changes to Vista to make it configured like the server version.
There are middle-grounds between the default home-user-targeted UAC configuration and completely turning it off.
You can configure it so if you're logged in as an admin, you get no uac prompts at all, but regular non-priv'd users get prompted for credentials (ie, they have to put in a user/pass).
You can configure it so that it prompts for a password, rather than just a 'confirm' button.
There are other options as well.
It's not nearly as fancy as sudo in that there's no configurable sudoers list. But other than that, it can be configured to work very similarly.
For example, on our domain, we have it configured to prompt for credentials for non-admin users, and no prompt at all for admin users. So just like logging in as a regular user and using sudo, or just logging in as root. Works almost exactly the same.
The biggest lack, in my mind, is that there's no way to launch an app from the command line with elevation. Ie, no runas functionality, its only available through the GUI with a right-click and 'Run as Administrator'.
To deal with that, what we tend to do is fire up one command-line shell as admin, but run the rest of the system as a non-priv'd user (on our desktops and laptops, I mean).
EXACTLY! I tried Server 2K8 and I was like "Why? Why in the hell can't you just add a basic GUI on top of this and sell it to business users for the desktop? Why?" It is low resource,doesn't have tons of bloated multimedia junk that has NO business being in a business OS, and runs solid as a rock. So why can't those of use who just want to get our work done buy this on a machine without shelling out insane money for a server license? Why?
You realize that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are the same OS, right? The packaging is a little different, the default installed apps and services are different, etc.
But its no trouble to make Vista act just like 2008.
Once you have configurations the same, the only difference is drivers. I think this is where most folks see the difference. Drivers for server equipment tend to be much better, and the drivers for Vista for consumer level equipment are still not where they should be.
Compound this by the fact that people are buying these garbage second-rate consumer class sytems from BestBuy and such, and they're surprised why their pretty $400 laptop from Toshiba doesnt work half the time? It's because its a terribly designed piece of hardware, with terribly written drivers, and shipped in a configuration that has tons of adware and unnecessary garbage turned on.
The fact that people like yourself say how great 2k8 is but then complain about Vista is speaking to the resellers (Dell, HP, etc) and the packaging from the resellers, not the underlying OS.
And in fact, business users of Vista machines DO set it up like you describe. They make custom builds of the OS that include only what their business needs, and they run it locked down with UAC configured exactly the way they like it, etc.
That slow-down you're seeing has nothing to do with drawing/rendering.
It has to do with windows reading all the control panel entries off disk (which seem to get flushed out of the disk cache quite easily) and pulling all the icons and such. If you watch your disk or resource manager while its happening it becomes clear.
When you turn aero off, you turn off the compositing window manager, which is what works as you describe.
So you're back to the bad old XP and before days of tearing and such.
If you're on a domain, and you're the domain admin, and you dont like how UAC is configured out of the box, why dont you change it?
You're basically running UAC in the non-domain home-user focused mode. If you dont like it that way, why do you insist on using it that way? Takes 2 minutes to change.
The kind of thing you describe is the default settings targeted for a non-domain, non-corporate audience (ie, home users).
If you want to not be prompted when you're explicitly logged in as an administrative user, then take the 60 seconds it takes to change it to that setting.
You seem to be complaining about something that you dont really understand, and havent taken the short amount of time to figure it out.
I agree that there are lots of gotchas in your first few deployments before you learn all the unwritten rules.
Nowadays though, its not much different than deploying a PHP app, using mod_rails/passenger.
svn up your changes (or capistrano or whatever you like), then touch tmp/restart.txt and thats it.
It's not quite to the level of simplicity of PHP, but it wont take long.
For real fun, try running a Rails app where it's deployed to an NFS filesystem and then try to run the app via CGI. You can see how well it's 'optimized'.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, other than you're obviously frustrated with the platform.
I've never tried to run a rails server with the app content on a network-mounted filesystem, but I have done that with assets (images, etc). And I'm not sure why you would ever run Rails via CGI, unless this was several years ago, predating mongrel.
I could see that its possible certain parts of the app folder structure may not play well with NFS, but you could keep those on a local fs (ie, everything under log/ and tmp/).
Were you running a cluster for example, with all of them mounting the same app filesystem for simplicity? If that were the case, each server would almost certainly need their own local tmp/ and log/.
Ridiculously fast development time. It's insanely productive for the 80-90% cases that you run into.
Really nice schema/db migrations system built in.
Ridiculously simple to take a web app built with it using standard postbacks, and make it all super-fancy ajax, in-place-editing, and lightbox goodness.
Ridiculously easy to turn the whole thing into a REST engine for some other front-end or machine-to-machine usage.
My (un-quantified) perception is that its running about 1/3 the size (lines of code) of a similar php app, and even a smaller percentage compared against asp.net/java.
For a certain segment of app development needs, its really quite compelling.
Like your comments, PJs are nothing but philosophical hand-waving.
In no way does her posts nor your reply support your assertion that OpenSUSE is somehow magically 'unsafe'.
It still looks like GPL to me.
Your comment about MS suing you is even more far-fatched.
The concept of MS suing linux users is pretty darn far-fetched. But if you're really worried about it, then you WANT to be using Novell, as then you are specifically and quite effectively covered by Novell's indemnification program.
http://www.novell.com/licensing/ntap/
Hear it now. I use to work at a digital invoicing company which used ext2 on linux. We were seeing extremely slow reads and writes to the disk. Now, in this environment, we were writing upwards of 10 gigs of data a day(spread amongst thousands of files). We would also delete 9 gigs of that daily. Compound this behavior over a couple of years and we were left with a heavily fragmented disk. The solution was simple... we re-wrote all the data.
Your anecdote in no way supports your claim that fragmentation has an effect on data integrity. All you showed with your story is that it may have an effect on performance in some scenarios.
Wrong again, fragmentation makes the disk have to work harder. Think about it... the disk could read 10 bytes incrementing a byte at a time or it could be required to skip 20 gigs to read each byte(this is an over-simplification). This will increase wear and tear on the moving parts as well as extra heat. So, extreme fragmentation will likely decrease the life of your disks.
As above, your hypothetical in no way supports your claim that fragmentation has an effect on data integrity. All you showed with your hypothetical is that if your unstated assumptions about load and usage patterns impacting hardware failure rates are true, then fragmentation may have an effect on hardware failure rates.
The bottom line is that fragmentation has nothing to do with data integrity. The two issues are completely orthoganal.
32-bit desktop windows versions ignore PAE settings.
This wasnt always the case, but apparently (according to MS) many many consumer-hardware drivers are not written to deal with PAE and the extra level of indirection, and so will crash or blue-screen frequently. So they disabled the whole thing at some point around XP sp2 (iirc).
32-bit server versions do not, and 64-bit versions of either dont need it.
XP doesnt have a 'ram fragmentation problem'.
XP has a bug whereby you (at one point in time) couldnt hibernate reliably if you had more than 1GB of ram.
It was fixed with a patch and then in a service pack long ago.
The solution to this was always to install the patch (prior to it being in the service pack), and never to install a 'ram defragmenter'.
Be careful when turning to amateurs like lifehacker for stuff like this. They really dont know what they're talking about.
Turning off the auto-tuning here will only be a good thing if the network equip between you and your servers cant handle receive window scaling. Which means they're semi-broken.
So step 1, before turning it off on Vista, is to see if you can upgrade the firmware/ios on the network equipment, so that it properly supports the window scaling.
If that isnt possible, and only after experimenting did you determine that its the real problem, should you even consider turning it off in Vista permanently.
Receive window scaling will increase your throughput in many cases, or do nothing, in other cases. The only time it makes things worse is if your network equip is busted and doesnt properly support the spec.
Particularly in a case of a high-bandwidth, high-latency, the receive window scaling _really_ shines. Considering how common this is, with vpn connections to office, or home internet, etc, you dont want to just go disabling it willy nilly. Do your research first.
LifeHacker is not an IT professional, you cant assume they have a clue what they are talking about.
Are you the IT department for this company?
Did you do any real research as to _what_ was causing the slowdown, or did you just assume that 'its M$ fault'.
I say that because I've never even heard of behavior like that, in our offices or any of our clients.
Nor have I heard of it happening generally in the greater world.
All this suggests that its something to your specific setup, network, group-policy, domain, etc.
It might be a warning indicator, it might be nothing.
Slowing growth could be due to:
- approaching saturation in market, so growth is plateauing
- general economic downturn
- other unrelated structural changes in the markets
MS still makes an obscene profit each quarter. Is it less than it was at its peak, sure.
Does it face some real risks due to structural changes in the industry? Sure.
But 'bleeding money' is grossly inaccurate.
The sort of profit margins they run for a business their size is amazing. Most businesses wish they did that well.
Then those businesses will eventually die out. Sorry.
I hope you're joking here.
If you really think that the tiny, nearly insignificant and definitely non-material marginal cost to put a windows desktop per person up will drive a small business down the drain, then you have a very poor understanding of the situation.
Call it an extra $100 (ie, marginal cost of windows xp-pro/vista-business) per desktop once every 3-5 years.
This is so small as to not even be statistical noise. It's just nothing.
If the business is running things so fine that that figure is material then they're already on their way out of business and it has nothing to do with technology.