(I'm sitting here considering upgrading from 768Mb on the laptop to 1Gb in the next month or two... I keep hitting 700Mb in use. And the fact that Firefox 0.8 seems to eat twice the memory as Firebird 0.7 did isn't helping matters.)
What exactly are you running? Under Windows 2000, on a 512MB machine, I typically use Visual Studio.net, Internet Explorer, Outlook, a couple of command shells, Word, an interpreted language I use as a calculator, and the usual always-resident stuff (virus scanner, etc.) My memory usage never goes above 350MB or so.
Anyone have any idea on what the refresh rate on these things is? I've always imagined the whole e-paper thing must be fairly slow at scrolling/turning the page - but I hope I'm wrong!
Sure, I've used UNIX/Linux and they have many good attributes. But stories like this are, well, kinda dumb. Does it really matter if the Linux *kernel* ends up in a phone or a cash register? Really, we're just talking about the kernel here, not a window manager, not a desktop, not applications. There are dozens of realtime OSes out there to choose from, and from a consumer's point of view it's irrelevant. (And most techies can't even name any operating systems designed for embedded use.)
I was a huge Simpsons fan, until I got tired of 50% of all the writing being a parody of something else. But it was a great show, regardless. Futurama...well, I tried to watch it a couple of times, and I didn't get it. I saw how it was trying to be funny, but it was so forced.
Now King of the Hill...there's a slickly written and funny show. It has lines which are completely brilliant, without just being throwaways or parodies of other shows or movies.
It's more secure in some ways. We know. But let's put that aside.
As I see it, there's no clear reason why anyone should bother switching to Linux. Seriously. It's open, yes, but that doesn't matter except to very small minority of people (remember, Windows software can also be Open Source, even though the kernel is closed). Other than that...not much. Both Linux and Windows are equally complex and confusing. People who argue that Linux is a beautiful gem either (a) don't really know what they're talking about, or (b) are talking about the raw kernel and not the 10x more stuff that needs to stack on top of it to make a Windows-equivalent system.
If an alternative operating system had some huge and obvious benefits to the user, then I'd be all over it. Linux and Windows are more similar than different.
To me, geeks are now people who are obsessed with a particular field or endeavor because they like being obsessed with it. Like people who drool over 2% increases in benchmarks, or make crazy case mods, or overclock their PCs, or fantically advocate open source.
Other people aren't geeks. People who own and use a digital camera or PC or scanner or keychain drive...those are every day people! They have tools, then use them. It's when you get obsessed with your tools that you're a geek.
In short: Don't use the RIAA as a scapegoat for everything. There are hundreds of little CD labels out there. Hundreds. Featuring thousands of bands. Similarly, there are many musicians who produce and sell their own CDs. So:
1. Don't say that all new music is crap, because that just means you don't have a clue what's out there. You can say "much of the stuff played on some top 40 stations is crap," which has always been true. Look around. Go to smaller labels. Look for independent bands. There's much great music to discover!
2. Now really, even if 95% of all music you hear on the radio is crap, then there's still good stuff--five percent--out there. You can't just apply blanket opinions about Creed and Britney Spears to everything. There *is* a substantial amount of really good music on RIAA labels. Don't oversimplify things.
3. Remember that we're not just talking about new music here, but music produced in the last fifty years. So you don't like Nickelback? Fine! So you think all new music stinks? Fine! But surely there's music from five or ten or twenty or thirty years ago that you treasure. Does that music now suck because the RIAA is involved?
4. Be careful with the price fixing arguments, because they can apply to everything. Why do hardback novels cost $25? Why do "Learn PHP in 24 hours" books always cost $50? Why do videogames cost $50? The RIAA is not behind all of these conspiracies.
Then someone (OK, Intel) produced a poor imitation of the PDP/11 on a chip. The 8086 was basically a PDP/11 clone, even down to the lame memory management.
That's not at all true. Just look at the instruction sets. Four of the addressing modes on the PDP-11 have increments or decrements included. The x86 has none. Instead, the 8086 has special-purpose auto-incrementing (or decrementing) string operations. Otherwise, the 8086 has more complex addressing modes than the PDP-11. The PDP-11 did not allow misaligned 16-bit loads and stores. The PDP-11 had bit setting and clearing instructions; the 8086 does not (they were added in a later processor generation). The PDP-11 has general purpose register usage; the 8086 has hard-coded registers for many operations. The 8086 has explicit stack pushing and popping. The PDP-11 used moves with increments/decrements. And so on and so on.
Look at it this way: the 48K Apple II was introduced in the US at $1795. Now, a typical bottom-end cell phone has much more computing power. You could put the entire Apple II on a $20 FPGA, or make it an ASIC and the price would be $1 or less in quantity.
I bought a 333MHZ Pentium II based PC in 1998. For software development and everything else I did, it was fine for the following five years. I finally upgraded to a 3GHz P4, just because it was cheaper than upgrading the OS and various parts individually. In my timings, this PC is roughly 15x faster than the old one, plus the video card is at least 10x faster than the one I bought in 2000. This is a lot of power, and it's the least I've ever spent on a PC.
Or consider game consoles. A $150 game system is more powerful, in all ways except memory, than a computer from 5-6 years ago. Video-wise, they're much more powerful. Next generation consoles are going to outrun current desktops...for $200.
The short version is that computers get more powerful, then they get cheap. At some point power ceases to matter, especially if you have a GPU or video compression chip to offload lots of work to. Imagine if a 2 or 3GHz chip could be made to run at 10 watts of power and cost $5. For a 65nm PowerPC, this is reasonable. What's needed is economy of scale. An alternate approach is that "low end" processors in cell phones and digital cameras get to where they're fast enough to usurp a desktop. Then put a video compression chip in there, or other custom hardware to the bulk of the work. At $20 for a complete system, that's a big deal.
Or even consider alternate, custom CPUs. An x86 desktop CPU is expensive because it includes all sorts of junk, like MMX support and 16-bit mode and legacy instructions and SSE2 and all this other marginalized stuff. And still they're too general purpose. C++ doesn't matter any more. Well, it matters because it's "fast," but not because people really like it. C++ doesn't make you happy the way Haskell or Python or Smalltalk do. Take a minimal instruction set designed to support one of those languages, then implement a simulator for it, then an FPGA, then an ASIC. Keep it simple, keep it fast. You could easily have a 20MHz part pacing high-end desktop processors for most tasks. Again, combine this with an ASIC for doing heavy lifting like graphics and compression.
This is a simple, fundamental principle. Every option you give the user means that you dodged a design decision. Sometimes this is fine, but it can be tremendously overdone. In a great many cases, what you're doing is forcing the *user* to make design decisions: which fonts look good together, which icons are the clearest, which keys work best for various features, and so on. Have some spine! Keep things simple and clean!
With Linux things are worse, because the decisions forced on the user run much deeper. Now you don't just wade through pages of configuration settings in KDE, you have to choose which window manager to use in the first place. Bleah. I'm a techie, a programmer, and I don't want to mess with this stuff. Just give me something reliable and WELL THOUGHT OUT, and I'll use it.
But then again, very few plumbers have to deal with users who consistently download BonziBuddy, blindly click on suspicious email attachments and use their cd trays as cupholders.
Plumbers have to deal with people who flush super balls down the toilet and turn off the heat during winter break, causing pipes to freeze and burst. Do plumbers complain about this? No! That's how they make a living!
Yes, the Linux kernel and associated parts of the system are open source. That's not what I mean. I mean the persistant equating of "open source" and "Linux," especially on Slashdot. That is, "open source success" is immediately assumed to mean "Linux success." This is the root of the problem, I think.
Open source is good. Linux is...well, it's good but it's not really what's needed for desktops. It's a modern incarnation of old thinking, something one notch below an OS for heavy iron mainframes, much too complex and awkward to really want on my desk. I live with it because it's better than Windows in some ways, but I've used UNIX professionally, and UNIX on my desktop and notebook is categorically what I don't want. And if I don't want it, just think about people who don't know much at all about computers.
Now if Linux were drastically simpler to understand and configure than Windows, then we'd have something here.
Yes, you can't go by raw clockspeed alone, but in this case its close enough. In short, 3.4GHz P4 is THIRTEEN PERCENT faster in raw clockspeed than the 3.0GHz P4. The actual performance increase is less than that. At the same time, BOTH PRICE AND POWER DISSIPATION have gone up by MUCH MORE THAN THIRTEEN PERCENT.
Bottom line: This is a completely uninteresting processor at the current time.
Intel and AMD are floundering at the moment. AMD is roaring ahead with 64-bits, but not in terms of performance. Arguably, we don't need a whole lot more performance on the desktop right now, but that's another topic. Over a year ago, Intel was at the 3GHz mark. Now they've moved up to 3.4GHz, at the expense of significantly higher power consumption. They're dropping to a 90nm process (Prescott), and have somehow managed to drastically increase power consumption at the same time. What!? This doesn't bode well for notebooks and small form factor boxes.
But IBM is on track to hit 3GHz this summer and cut power consumption by ~50% at the same time. The roadmap goes out to much higher clock rates, and includes multiple cores on one chip. If this happens, and in a few years we're looking at dual core 4GHz PPCs that use less power than single-core Intel/AMD CPUs, then that's a big deal.
As opposed to auto logging in as adminsitrator by default as almost all Windows XP machines come loaded from OEM's?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and justify this. With XP Home, there are only two real differences between normal and aministrator access. The former prevents write access to the "Windows" and "Program Files" directories, plus the root of C:\, and you cannot install or uninstall software.
Let's say you have a new program you want to install. You switch to an admin account and install it. Then you go back to your normal account. Then you run it and all is fine, so you think. You spend twenty minutes setting the preferences to how you'd like them, and quit. The next day you fire up the program and none of your preferences are there? Why? Most people are going to have no clue. What happened is that the program was trying to write preferences to its directory, and not to "Documents and Settings\usename\Application Data." But you have no way of knowing which programs do this and which ones don't, until you install them and experiment. Once you find a problem, you have to uninstall, then reinstall to a folder that doesn't start with the string "Program Files," like "c:\Unsafe Programs." This is all a huge pain. I've been there, I've done this.
Additionally, most settings are not shared between user and admin accounts, so you essentially need to configure things twice. Overall, it's another layer that just adds even more confusion to the complexity of owning a PC. Microsoft really screwed things up by semi-copying the UNIX-style here. It would have been better to have a simple "enter a password to install or remove software" layer, then only allow installers and uninstallers to touch c:\windows. Protect it the rest of the time. And it should be perfectly fine for an application to write into its *own* directory (but not other directories).
So far, this has all been about usability, but really all you're protecting against is a program writing to c:\windows, as with most virii. If you're running a firewall, avoid Outlook, and run an up-to-date anti-virus package, then you're fine. You're always vulnerable to a trojan that simply deletes parts of c:\windows, but that's the case with an admin account to, because you switch to admin to install software anyway!
The bottom line is that I think this adds more confusion than real protection. Some protection is obviously needed, but multiple accounts is not the way to go for home use.
There's a fundamental difference between computers and these things. Computers are interacted with on a low level. I've used locks my whole life and will never have to open one up. A computer is so complex that even the simplest tasks can cause problems.
I know, I know, these silly review sites love to have these "longer bar is better" graphics, but let's look at this rationally.
Take the SysMark 2004 benchmark. The commodity priced Northwood 3GHz P4 clocks in at 176. This new Athlon gets a 199. Ooooh, longer bar! But what does it really mean? I means that the Athlon is ELEVEN PERCENT FASTER than the processor that's one notch above the absolute bottom end you can get in a Dell PC (3GHz, the bottom end is 2.8GHz). And the price is over THREE TIMES HIGHER. Is this worth it? Does it make sense?
The answer is no, *unless* you are simply looking at the 64-bit capabilities. If that's the case, then great. Otherwise I don't see why anyone would care about these benchmarks.
Personally I would wait a year, so they are cheaper. Certainly socket 939 is a "must", but I always take the view that where computers are concerned, if you wait till the last possible moment before you really must have something, you save a lot of money.
And if you had done that for the 3GHz P4, then you'd be buying one right about now, when the prices have finally dropped to mainstream prices. But then you'd see some fancy new processor on the horizon, like the latest Athlon 64, and decide to wait for that one to become cheaper...
This is all so bizarre. Now, several years after Microsoft started promoting C#/.net as the way to write new Windows applications, Linux desktop developers are getting into a debate about whether to switch to C#. Why? What's the real win here? C# is a good language, but it is a far cry from Python, for example. Little, me-too babysteps is not the way to approach this. You need to be bold. Choose something with big wins and big advantages.
Note #1: I am not a Python zealot. I have some criticisms of that language, but I'll still admit that it's a huge win over C#. Huge. Period. For starters, just being able to interactively test can double your productivity.
Note #2: There will be the usual claims about performance and how you really should write everything in raw machine code, blah, blah, blah. The first rule of engineering is make it work. The second rule is make it reliable. Then you worry about making it fast. There are many options for speeding up Python, the simplest of which is simply profiling and restructuring the code. After that you have specializing compilers like Psyco, and as a distant third you have C extensions.
How could the free software resurgence of Unix be "much to the surprise" of Stallman when he made it his life's work to create a free software replacement for Unix?
UNIX (all caps!) was fading quickly. Everyone could see that in the late 80s. Stallman was working toward a free UNIX, yes, but he wasn't anywhere near that goal in 1991. When Linux was released I'm sure it came as a huge surprise to him. Remember, for a long time (and to some extent even today), Stallman was viewing Linux as a stopgap measure until GNU Hurd could be complete.
The Amiga was originally a hallmark of innovation. We all know that. There's no reason to rehash it all. But this bizarre ten year saga of attempting to revitalize the Amiga...well, it's somewhere between sad and pointless. "Amiga" doesn't even mean anything any more. It's an OS without hardware? It's a PC-like box that uses the PowerPC? The interest level here is zero.
If the people involved in all of this have passion and drive and a burning desire to innovate, then by all means do so! The world needs a new home computer! The world needs a computer that's several orders of magnitude simpler overall than a typical Linux or Windows box, one that fosters creativity and doesn't suck your soul dry like everything else out there. But PLEASE, let's stop pouring time and money down the Amiga hole. It's dead and gone.
(Aside: To be fair, many UNIX hackers were thinking the same thing about their pet OS back in the late 1980s. UNIX was getting a reputation as a dinosaur, a bloated relic from the 70s. At the time, it looked like it wouldn't take much to boost much simpler perating systems, such as that of the Mac, which had a major edge in usability at the time, and extend them enough to subsume traditional heavy iron OSes. But then much to the surprise of old hackers like Stallman and Raymond, the web--and to a lesser extent Linux--brought UNIX back into the limelight. Imagine if all of a sudden the C64 made a huge comeback. Just think of all the old C64 hackers that would be dancing in the aisle. When I see such people evangelizing Linux, I always keep this in mind.)
I have to disagree on that: The Amiga proved to be on the forefront of many interesting game (genre) we have today/had yesterday. Just think about Lemmings,
I was thinking about the later years of the Amiga, post Lemmings. Actually, Lemmings was quite the breath of fresh air at the time, with so many Amiga games being SEGA Genesis platformer-wanabees.
Slashdot Mirror
of course failed to find an agent
Why "of course"? Some kind of conspiracy theory?
(I'm sitting here considering upgrading from 768Mb on the laptop to 1Gb in the next month or two... I keep hitting 700Mb in use. And the fact that Firefox 0.8 seems to eat twice the memory as Firebird 0.7 did isn't helping matters.)
.net, Internet Explorer, Outlook, a couple of command shells, Word, an interpreted language I use as a calculator, and the usual always-resident stuff (virus scanner, etc.) My memory usage never goes above 350MB or so.
What exactly are you running? Under Windows 2000, on a 512MB machine, I typically use Visual Studio
Anyone have any idea on what the refresh rate on these things is? I've always imagined the whole e-paper thing must be fairly slow at scrolling/turning the page - but I hope I'm wrong!
And you imagine this *why* exactly?
Sure, I've used UNIX/Linux and they have many good attributes. But stories like this are, well, kinda dumb. Does it really matter if the Linux *kernel* ends up in a phone or a cash register? Really, we're just talking about the kernel here, not a window manager, not a desktop, not applications. There are dozens of realtime OSes out there to choose from, and from a consumer's point of view it's irrelevant. (And most techies can't even name any operating systems designed for embedded use.)
I was a huge Simpsons fan, until I got tired of 50% of all the writing being a parody of something else. But it was a great show, regardless. Futurama...well, I tried to watch it a couple of times, and I didn't get it. I saw how it was trying to be funny, but it was so forced.
Now King of the Hill...there's a slickly written and funny show. It has lines which are completely brilliant, without just being throwaways or parodies of other shows or movies.
It's more secure in some ways. We know. But let's put that aside.
As I see it, there's no clear reason why anyone should bother switching to Linux. Seriously. It's open, yes, but that doesn't matter except to very small minority of people (remember, Windows software can also be Open Source, even though the kernel is closed). Other than that...not much. Both Linux and Windows are equally complex and confusing. People who argue that Linux is a beautiful gem either (a) don't really know what they're talking about, or (b) are talking about the raw kernel and not the 10x more stuff that needs to stack on top of it to make a Windows-equivalent system.
If an alternative operating system had some huge and obvious benefits to the user, then I'd be all over it. Linux and Windows are more similar than different.
To me, geeks are now people who are obsessed with a particular field or endeavor because they like being obsessed with it. Like people who drool over 2% increases in benchmarks, or make crazy case mods, or overclock their PCs, or fantically advocate open source.
Other people aren't geeks. People who own and use a digital camera or PC or scanner or keychain drive...those are every day people! They have tools, then use them. It's when you get obsessed with your tools that you're a geek.
In short: Don't use the RIAA as a scapegoat for everything. There are hundreds of little CD labels out there. Hundreds. Featuring thousands of bands. Similarly, there are many musicians who produce and sell their own CDs. So:
1. Don't say that all new music is crap, because that just means you don't have a clue what's out there. You can say "much of the stuff played on some top 40 stations is crap," which has always been true. Look around. Go to smaller labels. Look for independent bands. There's much great music to discover!
2. Now really, even if 95% of all music you hear on the radio is crap, then there's still good stuff--five percent--out there. You can't just apply blanket opinions about Creed and Britney Spears to everything. There *is* a substantial amount of really good music on RIAA labels. Don't oversimplify things.
3. Remember that we're not just talking about new music here, but music produced in the last fifty years. So you don't like Nickelback? Fine! So you think all new music stinks? Fine! But surely there's music from five or ten or twenty or thirty years ago that you treasure. Does that music now suck because the RIAA is involved?
4. Be careful with the price fixing arguments, because they can apply to everything. Why do hardback novels cost $25? Why do "Learn PHP in 24 hours" books always cost $50? Why do videogames cost $50? The RIAA is not behind all of these conspiracies.
Then someone (OK, Intel) produced a poor imitation of the PDP/11 on a chip. The 8086 was basically a PDP/11 clone, even down to the lame memory management.
That's not at all true. Just look at the instruction sets. Four of the addressing modes on the PDP-11 have increments or decrements included. The x86 has none. Instead, the 8086 has special-purpose auto-incrementing (or decrementing) string operations. Otherwise, the 8086 has more complex addressing modes than the PDP-11. The PDP-11 did not allow misaligned 16-bit loads and stores. The PDP-11 had bit setting and clearing instructions; the 8086 does not (they were added in a later processor generation). The PDP-11 has general purpose register usage; the 8086 has hard-coded registers for many operations. The 8086 has explicit stack pushing and popping. The PDP-11 used moves with increments/decrements. And so on and so on.
Look at it this way: the 48K Apple II was introduced in the US at $1795. Now, a typical bottom-end cell phone has much more computing power. You could put the entire Apple II on a $20 FPGA, or make it an ASIC and the price would be $1 or less in quantity.
I bought a 333MHZ Pentium II based PC in 1998. For software development and everything else I did, it was fine for the following five years. I finally upgraded to a 3GHz P4, just because it was cheaper than upgrading the OS and various parts individually. In my timings, this PC is roughly 15x faster than the old one, plus the video card is at least 10x faster than the one I bought in 2000. This is a lot of power, and it's the least I've ever spent on a PC.
Or consider game consoles. A $150 game system is more powerful, in all ways except memory, than a computer from 5-6 years ago. Video-wise, they're much more powerful. Next generation consoles are going to outrun current desktops...for $200.
The short version is that computers get more powerful, then they get cheap. At some point power ceases to matter, especially if you have a GPU or video compression chip to offload lots of work to. Imagine if a 2 or 3GHz chip could be made to run at 10 watts of power and cost $5. For a 65nm PowerPC, this is reasonable. What's needed is economy of scale. An alternate approach is that "low end" processors in cell phones and digital cameras get to where they're fast enough to usurp a desktop. Then put a video compression chip in there, or other custom hardware to the bulk of the work. At $20 for a complete system, that's a big deal.
Or even consider alternate, custom CPUs. An x86 desktop CPU is expensive because it includes all sorts of junk, like MMX support and 16-bit mode and legacy instructions and SSE2 and all this other marginalized stuff. And still they're too general purpose. C++ doesn't matter any more. Well, it matters because it's "fast," but not because people really like it. C++ doesn't make you happy the way Haskell or Python or Smalltalk do. Take a minimal instruction set designed to support one of those languages, then implement a simulator for it, then an FPGA, then an ASIC. Keep it simple, keep it fast. You could easily have a 20MHz part pacing high-end desktop processors for most tasks. Again, combine this with an ASIC for doing heavy lifting like graphics and compression.
This is a simple, fundamental principle. Every option you give the user means that you dodged a design decision. Sometimes this is fine, but it can be tremendously overdone. In a great many cases, what you're doing is forcing the *user* to make design decisions: which fonts look good together, which icons are the clearest, which keys work best for various features, and so on. Have some spine! Keep things simple and clean!
With Linux things are worse, because the decisions forced on the user run much deeper. Now you don't just wade through pages of configuration settings in KDE, you have to choose which window manager to use in the first place. Bleah. I'm a techie, a programmer, and I don't want to mess with this stuff. Just give me something reliable and WELL THOUGHT OUT, and I'll use it.
But then again, very few plumbers have to deal with users who consistently download BonziBuddy, blindly click on suspicious email attachments and use their cd trays as cupholders.
Plumbers have to deal with people who flush super balls down the toilet and turn off the heat during winter break, causing pipes to freeze and burst. Do plumbers complain about this? No! That's how they make a living!
Yes, the Linux kernel and associated parts of the system are open source. That's not what I mean. I mean the persistant equating of "open source" and "Linux," especially on Slashdot. That is, "open source success" is immediately assumed to mean "Linux success." This is the root of the problem, I think.
Open source is good. Linux is...well, it's good but it's not really what's needed for desktops. It's a modern incarnation of old thinking, something one notch below an OS for heavy iron mainframes, much too complex and awkward to really want on my desk. I live with it because it's better than Windows in some ways, but I've used UNIX professionally, and UNIX on my desktop and notebook is categorically what I don't want. And if I don't want it, just think about people who don't know much at all about computers.
Now if Linux were drastically simpler to understand and configure than Windows, then we'd have something here.
Note: I'm not trolling, nor am I an AMD zealot.
Yes, you can't go by raw clockspeed alone, but in this case its close enough. In short, 3.4GHz P4 is THIRTEEN PERCENT faster in raw clockspeed than the 3.0GHz P4. The actual performance increase is less than that. At the same time, BOTH PRICE AND POWER DISSIPATION have gone up by MUCH MORE THAN THIRTEEN PERCENT.
Bottom line: This is a completely uninteresting processor at the current time.
Intel and AMD are floundering at the moment. AMD is roaring ahead with 64-bits, but not in terms of performance. Arguably, we don't need a whole lot more performance on the desktop right now, but that's another topic. Over a year ago, Intel was at the 3GHz mark. Now they've moved up to 3.4GHz, at the expense of significantly higher power consumption. They're dropping to a 90nm process (Prescott), and have somehow managed to drastically increase power consumption at the same time. What!? This doesn't bode well for notebooks and small form factor boxes.
But IBM is on track to hit 3GHz this summer and cut power consumption by ~50% at the same time. The roadmap goes out to much higher clock rates, and includes multiple cores on one chip. If this happens, and in a few years we're looking at dual core 4GHz PPCs that use less power than single-core Intel/AMD CPUs, then that's a big deal.
As opposed to auto logging in as adminsitrator by default as almost all Windows XP machines come loaded from OEM's?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and justify this. With XP Home, there are only two real differences between normal and aministrator access. The former prevents write access to the "Windows" and "Program Files" directories, plus the root of C:\, and you cannot install or uninstall software.
Let's say you have a new program you want to install. You switch to an admin account and install it. Then you go back to your normal account. Then you run it and all is fine, so you think. You spend twenty minutes setting the preferences to how you'd like them, and quit. The next day you fire up the program and none of your preferences are there? Why? Most people are going to have no clue. What happened is that the program was trying to write preferences to its directory, and not to "Documents and Settings\usename\Application Data." But you have no way of knowing which programs do this and which ones don't, until you install them and experiment. Once you find a problem, you have to uninstall, then reinstall to a folder that doesn't start with the string "Program Files," like "c:\Unsafe Programs." This is all a huge pain. I've been there, I've done this.
Additionally, most settings are not shared between user and admin accounts, so you essentially need to configure things twice. Overall, it's another layer that just adds even more confusion to the complexity of owning a PC. Microsoft really screwed things up by semi-copying the UNIX-style here. It would have been better to have a simple "enter a password to install or remove software" layer, then only allow installers and uninstallers to touch c:\windows. Protect it the rest of the time. And it should be perfectly fine for an application to write into its *own* directory (but not other directories).
So far, this has all been about usability, but really all you're protecting against is a program writing to c:\windows, as with most virii. If you're running a firewall, avoid Outlook, and run an up-to-date anti-virus package, then you're fine. You're always vulnerable to a trojan that simply deletes parts of c:\windows, but that's the case with an admin account to, because you switch to admin to install software anyway!
The bottom line is that I think this adds more confusion than real protection. Some protection is obviously needed, but multiple accounts is not the way to go for home use.
There's a fundamental difference between computers and these things. Computers are interacted with on a low level. I've used locks my whole life and will never have to open one up. A computer is so complex that even the simplest tasks can cause problems.
And should it be like that? No.
I don't know where you come up with that crap, but Dell sells tons of machines slower than 2.8 GHz.
You are right. The bottom end 2400 has options for 2.4 and 2.6GHz. Every other desktop starts at 2.8GHz.
I know, I know, these silly review sites love to have these "longer bar is better" graphics, but let's look at this rationally.
Take the SysMark 2004 benchmark. The commodity priced Northwood 3GHz P4 clocks in at 176. This new Athlon gets a 199. Ooooh, longer bar! But what does it really mean? I means that the Athlon is ELEVEN PERCENT FASTER than the processor that's one notch above the absolute bottom end you can get in a Dell PC (3GHz, the bottom end is 2.8GHz). And the price is over THREE TIMES HIGHER. Is this worth it? Does it make sense?
The answer is no, *unless* you are simply looking at the 64-bit capabilities. If that's the case, then great. Otherwise I don't see why anyone would care about these benchmarks.
Personally I would wait a year, so they are cheaper. Certainly socket 939 is a "must", but I always take the view that where computers are concerned, if you wait till the last possible moment before you really must have something, you save a lot of money.
And if you had done that for the 3GHz P4, then you'd be buying one right about now, when the prices have finally dropped to mainstream prices. But then you'd see some fancy new processor on the horizon, like the latest Athlon 64, and decide to wait for that one to become cheaper...
This is all so bizarre. Now, several years after Microsoft started promoting C#/.net as the way to write new Windows applications, Linux desktop developers are getting into a debate about whether to switch to C#. Why? What's the real win here? C# is a good language, but it is a far cry from Python, for example. Little, me-too babysteps is not the way to approach this. You need to be bold. Choose something with big wins and big advantages.
Note #1: I am not a Python zealot. I have some criticisms of that language, but I'll still admit that it's a huge win over C#. Huge. Period. For starters, just being able to interactively test can double your productivity.
Note #2: There will be the usual claims about performance and how you really should write everything in raw machine code, blah, blah, blah. The first rule of engineering is make it work. The second rule is make it reliable. Then you worry about making it fast. There are many options for speeding up Python, the simplest of which is simply profiling and restructuring the code. After that you have specializing compilers like Psyco, and as a distant third you have C extensions.
How could the free software resurgence of Unix be "much to the surprise" of Stallman when he made it his life's work to create a free software replacement for Unix?
UNIX (all caps!) was fading quickly. Everyone could see that in the late 80s. Stallman was working toward a free UNIX, yes, but he wasn't anywhere near that goal in 1991. When Linux was released I'm sure it came as a huge surprise to him. Remember, for a long time (and to some extent even today), Stallman was viewing Linux as a stopgap measure until GNU Hurd could be complete.
I'd guess because implementing recursive programs on a CPU isn't very efficient.
A naive seat-of-the-pants answer. I assume you're basing this on some old saw you've heard repeated somewhere>
The Amiga was originally a hallmark of innovation. We all know that. There's no reason to rehash it all. But this bizarre ten year saga of attempting to revitalize the Amiga...well, it's somewhere between sad and pointless. "Amiga" doesn't even mean anything any more. It's an OS without hardware? It's a PC-like box that uses the PowerPC? The interest level here is zero.
If the people involved in all of this have passion and drive and a burning desire to innovate, then by all means do so! The world needs a new home computer! The world needs a computer that's several orders of magnitude simpler overall than a typical Linux or Windows box, one that fosters creativity and doesn't suck your soul dry like everything else out there. But PLEASE, let's stop pouring time and money down the Amiga hole. It's dead and gone.
(Aside: To be fair, many UNIX hackers were thinking the same thing about their pet OS back in the late 1980s. UNIX was getting a reputation as a dinosaur, a bloated relic from the 70s. At the time, it looked like it wouldn't take much to boost much simpler perating systems, such as that of the Mac, which had a major edge in usability at the time, and extend them enough to subsume traditional heavy iron OSes. But then much to the surprise of old hackers like Stallman and Raymond, the web--and to a lesser extent Linux--brought UNIX back into the limelight. Imagine if all of a sudden the C64 made a huge comeback. Just think of all the old C64 hackers that would be dancing in the aisle. When I see such people evangelizing Linux, I always keep this in mind.)
I have to disagree on that: The Amiga proved to be on the forefront of many interesting game (genre) we have today/had yesterday. Just think about Lemmings,
I was thinking about the later years of the Amiga, post Lemmings. Actually, Lemmings was quite the breath of fresh air at the time, with so many Amiga games being SEGA Genesis platformer-wanabees.