In a world where hardware that is a success is simple, sleek and nice to look at, why oh why would someone want one of the hideous things from Alienware.
So what gaming rig is it you want everybody to buy? A Mac Mini?
Lots of blame to go around, but the bottom line is that the product was never going to make its shipdate.
I agree you can't write product specs, then pick a number out of the air and think you'll ship by then.
On the other hand, you also can't just aimlessly work along on something without any milestones or deadlines until you think it's perfect. You seem to think the only problem here is that Microft's original schedule was too tight and arbitrary, but I question that. The original Longhorn shipping date was to be in 2003, now it's 2007. That overrun is longer than an entire product cycle should be!
This is a clear sign that Microsoft's process, whatever it may be, has broken down. Simply extending the deadline is not the solution. Having to repeatedly rip out and restart vast swaths of code is bad, bad, bad. Infusing the OS team with X-Box developers sounds alarming too, like they're panicking.
That said, Microsoft can coast along reaping huge profits on XP for a long, long time.
It's been said before, but if you're going to steal, create a company first and make sure to steal millions so you don't get punished. You think anybody served jail time when the music industry was convicted of price fixing? Of course not. You think anybody from Sony will serve jailtime under hacking laws for the rootkit fiasco? Of course not, unthinkable.
I see it as a good thing that theaters charge so much for food and drinks. They need to make money.
You can't necessarily make more money simply by charging more. People don't like getting ripped off, even the "stupid masses" we love to deride here on/.
Left or right isn't the problem; the problem with URLs is that they're inconsistent. Reading from left to right, the hostname goes from most specific to most general, while the rest of the path is just the opposite.
It's annoying that laptop and desktop benchmarks are usually separate. Makes it hard to know how much performance penalty there really is with a laptop.
Those SLI results are quite impressive, almost double speedup. I have to wonder if a laptop might make a decent gaming rig. I could even put up with short battery life for gaming, so long as battery life for simple word processing / movie watching was decent.
Seriously, though. A voice command from your cellphone to check email? What are these guys smoking?
The sad part is, it really doesn't matter when Vista is delivered or how pointless the features are.
I used to say that Microsoft was so entrenched, the whole company could go on vacation for 3 years and still make windfall profits every year. And now, that's exactly what has happened (except they squandered those years working instead of partying). As far as I know, none of the Microsoft software on my computer is less than 3 years old (except for patches), yet the company where I work still pays Microsoft every year. Nobody cares, because a few hundred bucks per user every few years isn't much, and switching everything over to another platform is inconceivable, regardless of whether it's better and/or cheaper.
This may be the weakest position Microsoft's desktop business will ever be in, but do you see Apple or Linux storming the gates? I don't. MSFT stock plummeting? Nope. Microsoft is really in the perfect business, it's like a movie people will pay to see over and over, forever.
I think this whole discussion is limited to "basic office users," whatever that means. Developers, anybody who uses media encoding, gamers, scientific apps... there are plenty of applications for more processing speed. I know I want a new dual core T60 laptop.
Obviously, few (if any) business users need anything more than a Pentium III running at 500 MHz. That processor is perfectly acceptable for business applications like OpenOffice.
Are you sure you aren't thinking of Word 97? Loading a long.doc with OpenOffice takes a loooong time.
i ended up showing that i have almost 50 backround apps running,
Resident in memory, sure, but I doubt they were actually in the "run" state at that moment. Most of them were waiting for a timer to expire, or for a Windows message, a network packet, a keypress, etc.
The number of resident processes really doesn't matter. What does matter is to look at your CPU utilization when you're not actively doing anything. Even with all those "running" processes, it probably isn't over 5%. That's how much you'll benefit from a dual processor.
That's not good enough. I can't speak directly to Treos, but Palms have really outgrown the toy OS phase. They direly need a real OS with memory protection, and a rich enough API so that system utilities don't have to be written as "hacks."
Because photoshop is one of the few applications out there that is actually designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs by splitting up the work.
Mac benchmarks have always been Photoshop-centric, going back for years. (decades?) Long before Macs were dual core, anyways.
In reality, using a single application to benchmark is ridiculous. I think they do it because the Photoshop product is historically tied to the Mac, and the Mac version is always carefully optimized for it.
I was disappointed when I saw it was a one-application benchmark, and moreso that it's Photoshop. For years I tried to determine how fast Macs really were, and all I could find were Photoshop benchmarks... a program which I have never used.
Anyways, now that Macs and PCs are the same hardware, running a hardware comparo test seems pointless to me. CPU-bound apps will be the same on both, other than when one manufacturer gets the jump on another in shipping the latest Intel processor or third party graphics card.
Benchmarking OSX against Windows XP and Linux will be easier now, due to the common hardware platform. But personally I think OS decisions hardly ever swing on raw performance; it's all about integration, software compatibility, features, in-house expertise, and price.
Your bill would have been $16,800 for that infinite loop.
As it stands, the mistake may have cost his company more or less than that; we don't know (and probably neither do they). The only real question is whether you can provide CPU time cheaper than Sun will sell it to you.
Personally, I think $1/CPU hour is a reasonable place to start. Maybe they'll let the price float with demand in the future.
I don't know abut you, but I've seen hard drives in this price range offering up to 500GB
Not in a laptop form factor. 80 GB was the max on laptops for several years. Just recently they bumped up to 120. They certainly are lagging desktop drives.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, user-generated content is garbage, and anybody who would visit, much less post messages on such sites is an utter fool.
"At least Microsoft isn't shipping before Longhorn is ready" is besides the point. By now, it should be ready, and that is the point.
On the other hand, you also can't just aimlessly work along on something without any milestones or deadlines until you think it's perfect. You seem to think the only problem here is that Microft's original schedule was too tight and arbitrary, but I question that. The original Longhorn shipping date was to be in 2003, now it's 2007. That overrun is longer than an entire product cycle should be!
This is a clear sign that Microsoft's process, whatever it may be, has broken down. Simply extending the deadline is not the solution. Having to repeatedly rip out and restart vast swaths of code is bad, bad, bad. Infusing the OS team with X-Box developers sounds alarming too, like they're panicking.
That said, Microsoft can coast along reaping huge profits on XP for a long, long time.
It's been said before, but if you're going to steal, create a company first and make sure to steal millions so you don't get punished. You think anybody served jail time when the music industry was convicted of price fixing? Of course not. You think anybody from Sony will serve jailtime under hacking laws for the rootkit fiasco? Of course not, unthinkable.
Oh yeah, and tag spam.
Left or right isn't the problem; the problem with URLs is that they're inconsistent. Reading from left to right, the hostname goes from most specific to most general, while the rest of the path is just the opposite.
Pretty much the same way NASA knows the true risk of a shuttle mission... they don't.
Therefore... what? Everything is possible? It doesn't follow.
Those SLI results are quite impressive, almost double speedup. I have to wonder if a laptop might make a decent gaming rig. I could even put up with short battery life for gaming, so long as battery life for simple word processing / movie watching was decent.
I hereby grant my unused Windows Licenses to Linspire "customers."
I used to say that Microsoft was so entrenched, the whole company could go on vacation for 3 years and still make windfall profits every year. And now, that's exactly what has happened (except they squandered those years working instead of partying). As far as I know, none of the Microsoft software on my computer is less than 3 years old (except for patches), yet the company where I work still pays Microsoft every year. Nobody cares, because a few hundred bucks per user every few years isn't much, and switching everything over to another platform is inconceivable, regardless of whether it's better and/or cheaper.
This may be the weakest position Microsoft's desktop business will ever be in, but do you see Apple or Linux storming the gates? I don't. MSFT stock plummeting? Nope. Microsoft is really in the perfect business, it's like a movie people will pay to see over and over, forever.
I think this whole discussion is limited to "basic office users," whatever that means. Developers, anybody who uses media encoding, gamers, scientific apps... there are plenty of applications for more processing speed. I know I want a new dual core T60 laptop.
The number of resident processes really doesn't matter. What does matter is to look at your CPU utilization when you're not actively doing anything. Even with all those "running" processes, it probably isn't over 5%. That's how much you'll benefit from a dual processor.
In reality, using a single application to benchmark is ridiculous. I think they do it because the Photoshop product is historically tied to the Mac, and the Mac version is always carefully optimized for it.
Anyways, now that Macs and PCs are the same hardware, running a hardware comparo test seems pointless to me. CPU-bound apps will be the same on both, other than when one manufacturer gets the jump on another in shipping the latest Intel processor or third party graphics card.
Benchmarking OSX against Windows XP and Linux will be easier now, due to the common hardware platform. But personally I think OS decisions hardly ever swing on raw performance; it's all about integration, software compatibility, features, in-house expertise, and price.
Personally, I think $1/CPU hour is a reasonable place to start. Maybe they'll let the price float with demand in the future.
I'm surprised at the anti-dell tone of the comments... it will be interesting to check back in 2 years and see how things have changed.
Yup, I'll never feel bad for RedHat. Without Gnu and Linux, RedHat wouldn't even be BeOS.
Since a flash drive will consume no power while idle (without a 2-3 second spinup hit like a suspended disk), I can believe it.