Of course, with all the auto update stuff enabled in SP2, how often do you really need to go to WindowsUpdate anymore?
Personally I never see ActiveX anymore, and never really saw it that much to begin with. Guess I'm just lucky that the sites I care about have never really used it.
Gotta disagree. Case in point, I've got VNC installed on some of my relatives' PCs so I can help them when they have problems. Now, these are willfully computer-ignorant people who forget what they're supposed to click so I can access their computer (the "VNC server" icon I put on their desktop). Chances are if Microsoft's program found the VNC executable and brought up a warning, they'd follow whatever action it said without thinking. And next time they have a problem, we spend hours trying to figure out what happened to VNC.
Oh, and I'll bet AntiSpyware doesn't even peep if you have XP's remote desktop "feature" enabled...
Definitely not the case in all companies. I know at least a few who are keeping their number of contractors arbitrarily high now so that they don't have to hit the fulltime people next time the market downturns.
> Assume for the moment you play an online game 1 hour a day on average.
I think a lot of the people who complain about pricing probably do so because they don't want to play that much. Personally, I'd probably average 2 hours a week, which is why I won't be buying this anytime soon.
> To further the study you could factor your inital $50 purchase of the game over, say 2 years to better tune this.
The people who complain about the pricing probably don't play the game for two years either, so that $50 upfront tends to be pretty painful. I won't even get into the present/future worth analysis.
You also fail to account for the cost of the computer itself in any way. Obviously a single game isn't solely responsible for the whole pricetag, but it definitely contributes.
Personally, I think the lesson here is that movies are too damn expensive.
I'm mostly talking about the rampant APIC issues, which were crashing people's systems all over the place up until maybe 4 months ago. And remember we're talking out of box install, so anything you got working with drivers from nVidia doesn't count. Not sure when they submitted their AGPGART patches, but their onboard NIC had to be reverse-engineered and that couldn't have been more than 9 months ago.
Now I'm not in the Intel camp anymore, so I don't know offhand how long it takes for their new chipsets to be supported. But as a nForce2 user, I can say that it took at least a year from the first boards being released to reasonably good support in the Linux kernel mainline.
Nforce boards do work OOB, its true... but AFAIK not any better than an Intel board. And up until relatively recently, the nForce's didn't work at all. Furthermore, since Nvidia's dumped soundstorm, I can't imagine why an Intel user would buy a nForce board over one of Intel's own.
> 2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
Haven't had crashing issues in years. Well, except for some flash stuff, but I'm pretty sure that has to do with my shady sound drivers.
> 3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Are you SURE about this? Mine seems completely responsive all the time. Maybe I just can't find a webpage that'll load slowly enough.
> Bad Idea for both: turning off the ability of javascripts to change the status bar text also turns off link previewing - ridiculous; those should be two entirely separate things.
Never, ever, seen that happen. Are you sure you're not smoking crack?
Admittedly, I'm still using 0.10.1 at home under Linux, but I've got 1.0 at work on Windows, and I'm pretty sure neither do any of the things yours does. One issue I do have is that for some reason the download manager comes up when I do a "Save Image As". I guess its not necessarily a bug, but its dumb and no browser should behave that way.
> A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of OSS though? The whole *point* of OSS is that you don't have to write every little thing, because chances are there's a perfectly good free library out there that already does it.
> even a basic stereo from Wal-Mart is going to sound better than even the best "computer speakers"
Such a profoundly untrue statement... I don't know where to begin.
Last time I went to Wal-Mart, they had *nothing* for speaker systems. Oh, they had speakers, but nothing anyone should ever pay money for. If you're comparing Wal-Mart stereo systems to Wal-mart PC speaker systems then maybe you have a point. Otherwise... just about anything Altec-Lansing will beat everything in Wal-mart. Nevermind the PC speakers put out by an actual speaker company, i.e. the Cambridge Soundworks systems from before Creative bought them, or the old Boston Acoustics sets, or hell even Klipsch.
> bigger speakers being driven by a real amp will almost ALWAYS sound better than any computer speakers
Gross oversimplification. "Bigger" speakers? There are plenty of very very large speakers that sound absolutely like crap. For examples, look at any of the floorstanding speakers you'll find in a place like Sears. I'm not sure what you'd call a "real" amp versus a "fake" amp, but there are plenty of computer speaker sets with builtin amplifiers that have very nice signal characteristics.
I'll agree with you that a nice stereo system with a nice separate amplifier will beat any pair of computer speakers you can buy. I guess my point is there are plenty of bad stereo systems and bad amplifiers out there that won't, and to imply otherwise is disingenuous.
But do you even need Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff? What are you trying to be backwards-compatible with? It's not like there's all these legacy Mac-x86 apps running around.
You can talk about "poor design decisions" all day, and I won't argue that Intel has made several. However, you have to look at the whole picture.
For instance, where Apple (or Motorola) put L3 on their later G4s, Intel built a faster FSB and faster memory interconnect. I'm not sure a giant 1/4 speed cache would have ever made sense for them.
For the early G4s... well, they were slow. I'm thinking Apple was using those models while Intel and AMD were breaking the 1000MHz barrier (with caches running at CPU speed, not bus speed). Adding 1MB L2 was a hack because Motorola couldn't ramp their clockspeed up. It wasn't a feature.
The G5's L2 cache is the same as any recent x86 processor.
But yes, PPC has many many more registers than x86. Of course, x86-64 is another matter.
I don't think you'll find anybody who'll disagree that the PPC instruction set spec is superior to the x86. However, thanks to decades of really clever engineering, the ISA hardly matters anymore in terms of performance. Nowadays, its all about the manufacturing process. And due to intense competition and economy of scale, x86 processors tend to be faster and cost less than PPC, at least in the consumer space. This has been true for years, and is still true today, and it blows my mind that people still don't believe it.
I don't follow this... If you're saying the counters could fabricate votes by adding preferences that weren't specified by the actual voter, well, at that point couldn't they just start throwing away people's ballots and replacing them with ones that vote for a different candidate? If you can't trust the people (machines?) handling the vote-tally, you can't have a reliable election, period. Doesn't matter what system you use.
Heh, even though I don't think it was your intention, you just completely sold me on this voting method.
It's awesome. It works great if you vote for what you really want, and if you don't it smacks you upside the head. A few election cycles like that and we might even start electing competent leaders.
Well... you also have to take into account that we're still (AFAIK) throwing away as much food as we grow, and paying farmers *not* to grow food. Add to that the list of places that won't accept food imported from the US because of genetic modification... Admittedly, I don't know how the numbers would work out in the end, but I think we grow more than enough food to feed everybody now. It just gets lost in the system so to speak.
More to the point, Allawi's comments were *clearly* taken right from previous Bush speeches. He so closely parroted Bush, of course the White House wrote it for him! I can't believe that anybody listened to his speech and thought otherwise.
Heck, the Daily Show did a bit on it... specifically the part where Allawi does the "we are safer, you are safer, the world is safer" bit. I can't even begin to imagine why the Iraqi president would come over here to inform us that we (the US) are "safer". So obviously the White House told him to say it. Can't believe this is even news...
Great question, but rephrase it. Otherwise they'll just talk about how two parties is better than one, therefore the system is great. Maybe "Do you think that the electoral system should be more supportive of third parties?". Or how about "Would you be willing to include the Libertarian and Green Party candidates in your debates, and if not, why?"
> This, of course, requires you to subscribe to the notion that our style of "freedom", i.e., free markets, free press, free flow of information, rule of law, some form of representative government, is inherently "good".
It also requires one to subscribe to the notion that our style of "freedom" can and should be forced upon a population that doesn't necessarily want it. Personally, I can't support imposing a government on the unconsenting.
Well... nothing is "necessary" if you really think about it. By that argument we ought to all go back to hunting/gathering, because really whats "necessary" beyond eating and reproducing?
As for whether or not the internet is a "good thing", I see plenty of concrete, tangible benefits to the internet, as shown by the OP and others. What I don't see is a list of concrete, tangible detriments. Usually the best people can come up with is that it makes people more "disconnected", or destroys the sense of "community", or some other wishy-washy unverifiable thing. Even the case one could make based on this article is pretty weak. I mean, find an activity or consumable that nobody will use to excess. You can't. I'd bet even some of our hunter/gatherer ancestors ate too many berries and suffered the consequences.
According to the article, there will still be security updates for all supported versions of IE and Windows. What they're saying is that Win2k and older will not get the pop-up blocker or any other such enhancements.
Still sucks for the Win2k users though... Its clearly nothing more than a ploy to make them upgrade.
I've always felt that Linux does a better job than Windows of staying responsive when things are going on in the background anyway... So perhaps what you're seeing is a deficiency of the Windows kernel being mitigated by HT.
> Normal windows popups when re-connecting, so if you are in the middle of typing, it gets the normal windows treatment of stealing focus. I hate focus stealing popup windows.
I believe the Auto-Reconnect plugin has had options to disable this behavior for at least a couple of releases now.
1. Add Germany to the "Axis of Evil" 2. "Liberate" the Germans from their "anti-American" (read:anti-corporate America) government 3. Write the DMCA into Germany's new constitution. 4. Accept suitcases of money from the RIAA.
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Of course, with all the auto update stuff enabled in SP2, how often do you really need to go to WindowsUpdate anymore?
Personally I never see ActiveX anymore, and never really saw it that much to begin with. Guess I'm just lucky that the sites I care about have never really used it.
Gotta disagree. Case in point, I've got VNC installed on some of my relatives' PCs so I can help them when they have problems. Now, these are willfully computer-ignorant people who forget what they're supposed to click so I can access their computer (the "VNC server" icon I put on their desktop). Chances are if Microsoft's program found the VNC executable and brought up a warning, they'd follow whatever action it said without thinking. And next time they have a problem, we spend hours trying to figure out what happened to VNC.
Oh, and I'll bet AntiSpyware doesn't even peep if you have XP's remote desktop "feature" enabled...
> X86 hardware tends to be loud
I guess, if by 'x86 hardware' you mean 'cheap case fans'.
> yes, I know you can buy special quiet liquid cooled systems
From Apple, no less. Or did you forget the dual-G5 monstrosities?
You can't call BS on somebody's opinion... sheesh.
Definitely not the case in all companies. I know at least a few who are keeping their number of contractors arbitrarily high now so that they don't have to hit the fulltime people next time the market downturns.
> Assume for the moment you play an online game 1 hour a day on average.
I think a lot of the people who complain about pricing probably do so because they don't want to play that much. Personally, I'd probably average 2 hours a week, which is why I won't be buying this anytime soon.
> To further the study you could factor your inital $50 purchase of the game over, say 2 years to better tune this.
The people who complain about the pricing probably don't play the game for two years either, so that $50 upfront tends to be pretty painful. I won't even get into the present/future worth analysis.
You also fail to account for the cost of the computer itself in any way. Obviously a single game isn't solely responsible for the whole pricetag, but it definitely contributes.
Personally, I think the lesson here is that movies are too damn expensive.
I'm mostly talking about the rampant APIC issues, which were crashing people's systems all over the place up until maybe 4 months ago. And remember we're talking out of box install, so anything you got working with drivers from nVidia doesn't count. Not sure when they submitted their AGPGART patches, but their onboard NIC had to be reverse-engineered and that couldn't have been more than 9 months ago.
Now I'm not in the Intel camp anymore, so I don't know offhand how long it takes for their new chipsets to be supported. But as a nForce2 user, I can say that it took at least a year from the first boards being released to reasonably good support in the Linux kernel mainline.
Nforce boards do work OOB, its true... but AFAIK not any better than an Intel board. And up until relatively recently, the nForce's didn't work at all. Furthermore, since Nvidia's dumped soundstorm, I can't imagine why an Intel user would buy a nForce board over one of Intel's own.
> 2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
Haven't had crashing issues in years. Well, except for some flash stuff, but I'm pretty sure that has to do with my shady sound drivers.
> 3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Are you SURE about this? Mine seems completely responsive all the time. Maybe I just can't find a webpage that'll load slowly enough.
> Bad Idea for both: turning off the ability of javascripts to change the status bar text also turns off link previewing - ridiculous; those should be two entirely separate things.
Never, ever, seen that happen. Are you sure you're not smoking crack?
Admittedly, I'm still using 0.10.1 at home under Linux, but I've got 1.0 at work on Windows, and I'm pretty sure neither do any of the things yours does. One issue I do have is that for some reason the download manager comes up when I do a "Save Image As". I guess its not necessarily a bug, but its dumb and no browser should behave that way.
> A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of OSS though? The whole *point* of OSS is that you don't have to write every little thing, because chances are there's a perfectly good free library out there that already does it.
Yeah maybe... and then they rewrote it all a few versions later. Can't get any source for that.
Its a weak point anyway. Microsoft's used BSD code before, doesn't mean they're in anyway affiliated with the "principle of open source".
> even a basic stereo from Wal-Mart is going to sound better than even the best "computer speakers"
Such a profoundly untrue statement... I don't know where to begin.
Last time I went to Wal-Mart, they had *nothing* for speaker systems. Oh, they had speakers, but nothing anyone should ever pay money for. If you're comparing Wal-Mart stereo systems to Wal-mart PC speaker systems then maybe you have a point. Otherwise... just about anything Altec-Lansing will beat everything in Wal-mart. Nevermind the PC speakers put out by an actual speaker company, i.e. the Cambridge Soundworks systems from before Creative bought them, or the old Boston Acoustics sets, or hell even Klipsch.
> bigger speakers being driven by a real amp will almost ALWAYS sound better than any computer speakers
Gross oversimplification. "Bigger" speakers? There are plenty of very very large speakers that sound absolutely like crap. For examples, look at any of the floorstanding speakers you'll find in a place like Sears. I'm not sure what you'd call a "real" amp versus a "fake" amp, but there are plenty of computer speaker sets with builtin amplifiers that have very nice signal characteristics.
I'll agree with you that a nice stereo system with a nice separate amplifier will beat any pair of computer speakers you can buy. I guess my point is there are plenty of bad stereo systems and bad amplifiers out there that won't, and to imply otherwise is disingenuous.
But do you even need Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff? What are you trying to be backwards-compatible with? It's not like there's all these legacy Mac-x86 apps running around.
You can talk about "poor design decisions" all day, and I won't argue that Intel has made several. However, you have to look at the whole picture.
For instance, where Apple (or Motorola) put L3 on their later G4s, Intel built a faster FSB and faster memory interconnect. I'm not sure a giant 1/4 speed cache would have ever made sense for them.
For the early G4s... well, they were slow. I'm thinking Apple was using those models while Intel and AMD were breaking the 1000MHz barrier (with caches running at CPU speed, not bus speed). Adding 1MB L2 was a hack because Motorola couldn't ramp their clockspeed up. It wasn't a feature.
The G5's L2 cache is the same as any recent x86 processor.
But yes, PPC has many many more registers than x86. Of course, x86-64 is another matter.
I don't think you'll find anybody who'll disagree that the PPC instruction set spec is superior to the x86. However, thanks to decades of really clever engineering, the ISA hardly matters anymore in terms of performance. Nowadays, its all about the manufacturing process. And due to intense competition and economy of scale, x86 processors tend to be faster and cost less than PPC, at least in the consumer space. This has been true for years, and is still true today, and it blows my mind that people still don't believe it.
I don't follow this... If you're saying the counters could fabricate votes by adding preferences that weren't specified by the actual voter, well, at that point couldn't they just start throwing away people's ballots and replacing them with ones that vote for a different candidate? If you can't trust the people (machines?) handling the vote-tally, you can't have a reliable election, period. Doesn't matter what system you use.
Heh, even though I don't think it was your intention, you just completely sold me on this voting method.
It's awesome. It works great if you vote for what you really want, and if you don't it smacks you upside the head. A few election cycles like that and we might even start electing competent leaders.
Well... you also have to take into account that we're still (AFAIK) throwing away as much food as we grow, and paying farmers *not* to grow food. Add to that the list of places that won't accept food imported from the US because of genetic modification... Admittedly, I don't know how the numbers would work out in the end, but I think we grow more than enough food to feed everybody now. It just gets lost in the system so to speak.
More to the point, Allawi's comments were *clearly* taken right from previous Bush speeches. He so closely parroted Bush, of course the White House wrote it for him! I can't believe that anybody listened to his speech and thought otherwise.
Heck, the Daily Show did a bit on it... specifically the part where Allawi does the "we are safer, you are safer, the world is safer" bit. I can't even begin to imagine why the Iraqi president would come over here to inform us that we (the US) are "safer". So obviously the White House told him to say it. Can't believe this is even news...
Great question, but rephrase it. Otherwise they'll just talk about how two parties is better than one, therefore the system is great. Maybe "Do you think that the electoral system should be more supportive of third parties?". Or how about "Would you be willing to include the Libertarian and Green Party candidates in your debates, and if not, why?"
> This, of course, requires you to subscribe to the notion that our style of "freedom", i.e., free markets, free press, free flow of information, rule of law, some form of representative government, is inherently "good".
It also requires one to subscribe to the notion that our style of "freedom" can and should be forced upon a population that doesn't necessarily want it. Personally, I can't support imposing a government on the unconsenting.
Well... nothing is "necessary" if you really think about it. By that argument we ought to all go back to hunting/gathering, because really whats "necessary" beyond eating and reproducing?
As for whether or not the internet is a "good thing", I see plenty of concrete, tangible benefits to the internet, as shown by the OP and others. What I don't see is a list of concrete, tangible detriments. Usually the best people can come up with is that it makes people more "disconnected", or destroys the sense of "community", or some other wishy-washy unverifiable thing. Even the case one could make based on this article is pretty weak. I mean, find an activity or consumable that nobody will use to excess. You can't. I'd bet even some of our hunter/gatherer ancestors ate too many berries and suffered the consequences.
According to the article, there will still be security updates for all supported versions of IE and Windows. What they're saying is that Win2k and older will not get the pop-up blocker or any other such enhancements.
Still sucks for the Win2k users though... Its clearly nothing more than a ploy to make them upgrade.
I've always felt that Linux does a better job than Windows of staying responsive when things are going on in the background anyway... So perhaps what you're seeing is a deficiency of the Windows kernel being mitigated by HT.
> Normal windows popups when re-connecting, so if you are in the middle of typing, it gets the normal windows treatment of stealing focus. I hate focus stealing popup windows.
I believe the Auto-Reconnect plugin has had options to disable this behavior for at least a couple of releases now.
Well obviously...
1. Add Germany to the "Axis of Evil"
2. "Liberate" the Germans from their "anti-American" (read:anti-corporate America) government
3. Write the DMCA into Germany's new constitution.
4. Accept suitcases of money from the RIAA.