I think "no performance hit at all" is stretching it a bit. After all, its pretty much impossible to completely remove the hard disk and CPU from the equation. I bet main memory gets involved a bit as well. Oh, not to mention bus bandwidth (south bridge -> north bridge at the very least, if not PCI bandwidth as well).
Very small performance hit, sure. But bottom line is if its doing more of anything, you are losing some performance.
> Highlighting having the side-effect of copying is just unintuitive and often the wrong behavior
I don't see how its unintuitive, other than that Windows doesn't do it. Its a shortcut.
> c'mon... i'm lazy. why do 3 things when i can do 2?
How are you ever going to do just 2 things? Not with CTRL+C/CTRL+V. That would be "highlight new URL, copy, highlight old URL, paste". 4 things. The X copy-on-highlight behavior is basically getting an action for free, no matter how you slice it. That action's not always useful, but anyone who's accustomed to it will tell you that it helps more than it hinders.
Eh, maybe... even then based on what I've read the European gas price *without* taxes is about the same as the US's *with* taxes. Though obviously I'll take our 30% gas tax over their 70% any day.
Well I'm sure we're all glad to have you here to tell everybody what is REASONABLE! Heaven forbid if we don't all agree with your assessment.
Want cheaper entertainment than the movies or CD's? How about TV? Duh. $200 for a TV set and you can watch all the shows you want until it breaks. Only cost is electricity. Now, if you insist on paying for cable/sattelite/whatever thats your own business. Even still, depending on how much you watch TV could still easily come out ahead. And yeah, most TV shows are crap, but so are most CDs and movies, so its not relevant.
Don't like TV? How about books? Buy a paperback for $8 and you can be easily entertained for 10-20 hours depending on how fast you read. How can movies compete with that? You can resell the book too, so it likely beats CDs in terms of cost/benefit as well.
Movies and CDs are essentially monopoly markets. As such, the price of such goods can be (and is) set artificially high. Just because you can afford it doesn't mean its a fair price. *I* would say that a fair price is one which is say, maybe 20% over cost of production, at most. I'm not sure how a movie price will compare to that, its probably fine. But we all know that CDs are priced for a much higher profit.
> Oh, I suppose theres no harm trying is there - if they get caught, they only pay double what they could have scammed.
Well also I'm going to bet they don't get any more shots at government contracts. Depending on how many they usually do (I have no idea), that could easily be more expensive for NEC than the $20mil.
Nobody's saying China is a great place to live and we should all try to be like them (at least, I hope nobody's saying that, except maybe in jest). What people who make those comparisons you seem to deride are doing is pointing out that we're not perfect either, and that we should be concerned that we're not perfect, and that furthermore we shouldn't think that just because we're "not as bad as China" its ok to commit the atrocities that we do. For instance, if you think about it for a second, you can probably come up with numerous 'wrong things' you can say in the US that will most likely land you in jail. Particularly these days.
The point is not that we're 'as bad as China'. We're not. The point is that we have the capability to be that bad if we're not careful. Self examination is a good thing.
Firefox is also quite unfinished, and makes that fact quite obvious. Admittedly AOL/Netscape is going nowhere anyway, but they'd still be fools to take a half-finished browser and commercialize it. Now, if they were to bother to clean up Firefox...
The open source vs open standards distinction is a nice one to make, and I agree with you in theory. In practice, of course, its damn hard to find closed source software that adheres to good open standards.
Of course, as the consumer, its nice for these governments to be able to look at the code and modify it to suit their specific needs, rather than living with the 'our software is perfect for us, so its good enough for you' mentality. Though I suppose the larger governments could probably get Microsoft to work with them a bit on featureset.
Well to be fair, IBM is a frickin' HUGE company. I'm sure their various divisions have all sorts of different software requirements. To shift everyone off of MS just for the sake of PR... I don't know. Maybe a commitment to not make any new MS purchases would be one thing... even then, its not like selling Linux is IBM's major goal as a company. Its ONE goal of ONE division of the company. Heck, they've got divisons that develop and market Windows software!
Make no mistake, Linux/OSS is part of IBM's corporate strategy. But they don't even sell it directly. Its not part of their business the same way Powerbooks are to Apple.
Ok, sure there are lots of weird clusters out there now. But who, I have to ask, is going to be building a SPARC cluster, or a PA-RISC cluster, in the near future? Nowadays you build Opteron, Itanium, or PowerPC. Thats pretty much it. And Windows supports 2 out of 3 of those. Obviously, if x86 performance and reliability goes all to hell in the next few years, Windows will be thoroughly screwed as a HPC OS. Seems unlikely though.
The point that there ARE lots of non-x86 clusters is pretty irrelevant. Its not like anybody in their right mind would decide to change out the OS they're already running on their big expensive cluster. What exists doesn't matter. What is likely to be used in the future does.
Thats just not true. Most HPC clusters you see built nowadays are Opterons or Itaniums, or maybe Xeons in some places. All bits of hardware that will run Windows just fine. And I'm sure getting drivers for all the funky uber-fast network adapters they use in clusters won't be a problem either, if they don't already exist.
Obviously, theres no need for big fancy GUIs in HPC. But its well known that XP embedded lets you strip a lot out of Windows. However, it seems unlikely that you'll be able to get Windows compile-time optimized for your hardware. And that *is* a big deal for clusters.
Just think how much more it would be if Mao hadn't killed 30-60 million of his own people during "The Great Leap Forward" (plus another million or so during the "Cultural Revolution"), and if the current regime didn't perform forced abortions for population control.
Funny how people tend to die in revolutions, isn't it?
As for population control, when you can figure out how to feed >1 billion Chinese with the resources they have, I'm sure they'd love to hear about it.
A few years back, I built a PC for my uncle's family out of mostly leftover components I had laying around. In return he did some bodywork on my car for free, basically fixing the damage from a recent front-end collision and removing some random rust to boot. I was happy with the deal.
Well obviously we'd love Linux to be better than Windows and OSX in every way. Thats pretty unrealistic though. You can't honestly say that either Windows or OSX is definitively better than the other in every way, and for that matter I'd argue that there are ways in which Linux is already clearly better than both. But no OS will ever be all things to all people.
I'd also add that the kernel lacks nothing that would allow good hardware detection, as thats not really the kernel's job. Device drivers... well, we could go on about that forever, but thats a matter of convincing hardware manufacturers to play nice with Linux. And yeah, some of that falls on the kernel developers, but they're not even remotely the whole problem.
The way I read it, this 'process improvement' is just to provide more precise accountability for changes. Sounds good as far as resolving future legal issues, but I doubt if it'll result in a better kernel.
Fourth, getting patents is EXPENSIVE! It would be tough for me to invent something in my basement and get it patented, because I don't have a couple hundred thousand dollars laying around. Hence big companies patent everything under the sun, while the little guy gets nothing out of the system.
Haha, yes, hate that thing. In fact, I hate just about all the things the download manager does in 0.80. Like not showing up for small files, or defaulting to close on completion of all downloads. Whats the point of having a download manager if you can't use it to open the files once they're downloaded? I was using Mozilla 1.6 for a while, and its download manager had very nice default behavior (that I got used to), but for some reason Firefox is completely different...
Funny... never had any problems with spam on my Verizon Wireless phone (3 years, same number). Not from them, not from anybody. I keep *wanting* to hate them because they're a big evil phone company, but the bastards just won't do anything sufficiently dastardly. Though I hear their land line stuff is a bit shadier.
> In the prequels, he added a story line, political complexities, and actual character development - all of which was completely abscent in the originals.
WTF?! Okay, I'll admit the "Evil Galactic Empire" is not a complicated political concept. But as for the rest... character development? What character development? The fact that Anakin gets older does not constitute character development! And as for story line, other than the political overtones (the ONLY good thing about the prequels), there is no more story in the new trilogy than the old. Heck, I'd argue there's less. I can hardly remember the reasons for all the various action scenes in episodes 1 & 2, particularly 2.
I don't mind a simple movie as long as its entertaining. The prequels just aren't. And I don't think age has much to do with it.
Exactly! I thought that was a well delivered line. Han's backing out of the fight, and he already feels dumb, but he has to say *something*, right? So he does, and he sounds completely unconvincing doing it, because he doesn't buy into it at all. Its a completely awkward, thoroughly relatable situation. Scenes like that are what made the original trilogy great.
To be fair, there was some dumb dialog in the original trilogy. Its been years since I've seen it though, so I can't think of a good example.
Makes sense. Thats the same basic metric you use to determine if you're on a collision course while boating. Of course, the goal in that case is usually to make sure the other boat *doesn't* always appear in the same spot.
Two things you miss: the awful acting, and the awful writing. I'd agree that the overriding plot seems fine, if uninteresting because you're not compelled to care too much about anything thats going on. Thats a little true of the originals though. The trouble with the writing is that its just not clever. Old Star Wars had a few good lines in every movie. Theres nothing like that in either of the prequels. In fact, most of the dialog seems forced and unnatural, like they're reciting Shakespeare. Couple all that with the entirely-too-overt use of CGI, and a few Lucas lets-sell-merchandise(tm) characters, and you have a shitty set of movies.
Not true! Jabba's palace was great! So was the space battle over Endor. Luke's scenes from when he surrenders to Vader thru the death of the Emperor are quite possibly my favorite section in the series.
Ewoks are dumb, but don't forget all the good stuff that happened when they weren't around.
Agreed, that scene made Episode 6. Though if I ever meet the director, I want to know why the hell Vader just falls down and grabs the rail while Luke chops his hand off. So anticlimactic! But regardless...
I agree with everything you said about lava surfing. Being near lava I could buy. Falling into it? Sure, jedi do nothing if not fall into stuff. But why surf? What does that add, a clip to stick in the trailer? Does Lucas really think that ANYBODY is going to come see this movie because they saw a clip of a surfing lightsaber duel? If so, perhaps he should cast Vin Diesel in it somewhere, because thats his new target audience.
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I think "no performance hit at all" is stretching it a bit. After all, its pretty much impossible to completely remove the hard disk and CPU from the equation. I bet main memory gets involved a bit as well. Oh, not to mention bus bandwidth (south bridge -> north bridge at the very least, if not PCI bandwidth as well).
Very small performance hit, sure. But bottom line is if its doing more of anything, you are losing some performance.
> Highlighting having the side-effect of copying is just unintuitive and often the wrong behavior
I don't see how its unintuitive, other than that Windows doesn't do it. Its a shortcut.
> c'mon... i'm lazy. why do 3 things when i can do 2?
How are you ever going to do just 2 things? Not with CTRL+C/CTRL+V. That would be "highlight new URL, copy, highlight old URL, paste". 4 things. The X copy-on-highlight behavior is basically getting an action for free, no matter how you slice it. That action's not always useful, but anyone who's accustomed to it will tell you that it helps more than it hinders.
Eh, maybe... even then based on what I've read the European gas price *without* taxes is about the same as the US's *with* taxes. Though obviously I'll take our 30% gas tax over their 70% any day.
Well I'm sure we're all glad to have you here to tell everybody what is REASONABLE! Heaven forbid if we don't all agree with your assessment.
Want cheaper entertainment than the movies or CD's? How about TV? Duh. $200 for a TV set and you can watch all the shows you want until it breaks. Only cost is electricity. Now, if you insist on paying for cable/sattelite/whatever thats your own business. Even still, depending on how much you watch TV could still easily come out ahead. And yeah, most TV shows are crap, but so are most CDs and movies, so its not relevant.
Don't like TV? How about books? Buy a paperback for $8 and you can be easily entertained for 10-20 hours depending on how fast you read. How can movies compete with that? You can resell the book too, so it likely beats CDs in terms of cost/benefit as well.
Movies and CDs are essentially monopoly markets. As such, the price of such goods can be (and is) set artificially high. Just because you can afford it doesn't mean its a fair price. *I* would say that a fair price is one which is say, maybe 20% over cost of production, at most. I'm not sure how a movie price will compare to that, its probably fine. But we all know that CDs are priced for a much higher profit.
> Oh, I suppose theres no harm trying is there - if they get caught, they only pay double what they could have scammed.
Well also I'm going to bet they don't get any more shots at government contracts. Depending on how many they usually do (I have no idea), that could easily be more expensive for NEC than the $20mil.
Nobody's saying China is a great place to live and we should all try to be like them (at least, I hope nobody's saying that, except maybe in jest). What people who make those comparisons you seem to deride are doing is pointing out that we're not perfect either, and that we should be concerned that we're not perfect, and that furthermore we shouldn't think that just because we're "not as bad as China" its ok to commit the atrocities that we do. For instance, if you think about it for a second, you can probably come up with numerous 'wrong things' you can say in the US that will most likely land you in jail. Particularly these days.
The point is not that we're 'as bad as China'. We're not. The point is that we have the capability to be that bad if we're not careful. Self examination is a good thing.
Firefox is also quite unfinished, and makes that fact quite obvious. Admittedly AOL/Netscape is going nowhere anyway, but they'd still be fools to take a half-finished browser and commercialize it. Now, if they were to bother to clean up Firefox...
And don't forget that Mandrake doesn't have 90% marketshare. They couldn't control the market if they wanted to.
The open source vs open standards distinction is a nice one to make, and I agree with you in theory. In practice, of course, its damn hard to find closed source software that adheres to good open standards.
Of course, as the consumer, its nice for these governments to be able to look at the code and modify it to suit their specific needs, rather than living with the 'our software is perfect for us, so its good enough for you' mentality. Though I suppose the larger governments could probably get Microsoft to work with them a bit on featureset.
Well to be fair, IBM is a frickin' HUGE company. I'm sure their various divisions have all sorts of different software requirements. To shift everyone off of MS just for the sake of PR... I don't know. Maybe a commitment to not make any new MS purchases would be one thing... even then, its not like selling Linux is IBM's major goal as a company. Its ONE goal of ONE division of the company. Heck, they've got divisons that develop and market Windows software!
Make no mistake, Linux/OSS is part of IBM's corporate strategy. But they don't even sell it directly. Its not part of their business the same way Powerbooks are to Apple.
Ok, sure there are lots of weird clusters out there now. But who, I have to ask, is going to be building a SPARC cluster, or a PA-RISC cluster, in the near future? Nowadays you build Opteron, Itanium, or PowerPC. Thats pretty much it. And Windows supports 2 out of 3 of those. Obviously, if x86 performance and reliability goes all to hell in the next few years, Windows will be thoroughly screwed as a HPC OS. Seems unlikely though.
The point that there ARE lots of non-x86 clusters is pretty irrelevant. Its not like anybody in their right mind would decide to change out the OS they're already running on their big expensive cluster. What exists doesn't matter. What is likely to be used in the future does.
Thats just not true. Most HPC clusters you see built nowadays are Opterons or Itaniums, or maybe Xeons in some places. All bits of hardware that will run Windows just fine. And I'm sure getting drivers for all the funky uber-fast network adapters they use in clusters won't be a problem either, if they don't already exist.
Obviously, theres no need for big fancy GUIs in HPC. But its well known that XP embedded lets you strip a lot out of Windows. However, it seems unlikely that you'll be able to get Windows compile-time optimized for your hardware. And that *is* a big deal for clusters.
Funny how people tend to die in revolutions, isn't it?
As for population control, when you can figure out how to feed >1 billion Chinese with the resources they have, I'm sure they'd love to hear about it.
A few years back, I built a PC for my uncle's family out of mostly leftover components I had laying around. In return he did some bodywork on my car for free, basically fixing the damage from a recent front-end collision and removing some random rust to boot. I was happy with the deal.
Well obviously we'd love Linux to be better than Windows and OSX in every way. Thats pretty unrealistic though. You can't honestly say that either Windows or OSX is definitively better than the other in every way, and for that matter I'd argue that there are ways in which Linux is already clearly better than both. But no OS will ever be all things to all people.
I'd also add that the kernel lacks nothing that would allow good hardware detection, as thats not really the kernel's job. Device drivers... well, we could go on about that forever, but thats a matter of convincing hardware manufacturers to play nice with Linux. And yeah, some of that falls on the kernel developers, but they're not even remotely the whole problem.
The way I read it, this 'process improvement' is just to provide more precise accountability for changes. Sounds good as far as resolving future legal issues, but I doubt if it'll result in a better kernel.
Fourth, getting patents is EXPENSIVE! It would be tough for me to invent something in my basement and get it patented, because I don't have a couple hundred thousand dollars laying around. Hence big companies patent everything under the sun, while the little guy gets nothing out of the system.
For the most part... Every time I go back to Windows that horizontal gradient on the titlebars makes me shudder.
Haha, yes, hate that thing. In fact, I hate just about all the things the download manager does in 0.80. Like not showing up for small files, or defaulting to close on completion of all downloads. Whats the point of having a download manager if you can't use it to open the files once they're downloaded? I was using Mozilla 1.6 for a while, and its download manager had very nice default behavior (that I got used to), but for some reason Firefox is completely different...
Funny... never had any problems with spam on my Verizon Wireless phone (3 years, same number). Not from them, not from anybody. I keep *wanting* to hate them because they're a big evil phone company, but the bastards just won't do anything sufficiently dastardly. Though I hear their land line stuff is a bit shadier.
> In the prequels, he added a story line, political complexities, and actual character development - all of which was completely abscent in the originals.
WTF?! Okay, I'll admit the "Evil Galactic Empire" is not a complicated political concept. But as for the rest... character development? What character development? The fact that Anakin gets older does not constitute character development! And as for story line, other than the political overtones (the ONLY good thing about the prequels), there is no more story in the new trilogy than the old. Heck, I'd argue there's less. I can hardly remember the reasons for all the various action scenes in episodes 1 & 2, particularly 2.
I don't mind a simple movie as long as its entertaining. The prequels just aren't. And I don't think age has much to do with it.
Exactly! I thought that was a well delivered line. Han's backing out of the fight, and he already feels dumb, but he has to say *something*, right? So he does, and he sounds completely unconvincing doing it, because he doesn't buy into it at all. Its a completely awkward, thoroughly relatable situation. Scenes like that are what made the original trilogy great.
To be fair, there was some dumb dialog in the original trilogy. Its been years since I've seen it though, so I can't think of a good example.
Makes sense. Thats the same basic metric you use to determine if you're on a collision course while boating. Of course, the goal in that case is usually to make sure the other boat *doesn't* always appear in the same spot.
Two things you miss: the awful acting, and the awful writing. I'd agree that the overriding plot seems fine, if uninteresting because you're not compelled to care too much about anything thats going on. Thats a little true of the originals though. The trouble with the writing is that its just not clever. Old Star Wars had a few good lines in every movie. Theres nothing like that in either of the prequels. In fact, most of the dialog seems forced and unnatural, like they're reciting Shakespeare. Couple all that with the entirely-too-overt use of CGI, and a few Lucas lets-sell-merchandise(tm) characters, and you have a shitty set of movies.
Not true! Jabba's palace was great! So was the space battle over Endor. Luke's scenes from when he surrenders to Vader thru the death of the Emperor are quite possibly my favorite section in the series.
Ewoks are dumb, but don't forget all the good stuff that happened when they weren't around.
Agreed, that scene made Episode 6. Though if I ever meet the director, I want to know why the hell Vader just falls down and grabs the rail while Luke chops his hand off. So anticlimactic! But regardless...
I agree with everything you said about lava surfing. Being near lava I could buy. Falling into it? Sure, jedi do nothing if not fall into stuff. But why surf? What does that add, a clip to stick in the trailer? Does Lucas really think that ANYBODY is going to come see this movie because they saw a clip of a surfing lightsaber duel? If so, perhaps he should cast Vin Diesel in it somewhere, because thats his new target audience.