Fair enough, but I'd like to point out that I don't see how you could notice any changes if you're only running "two or three windows applications."
I was referring to the changes in the OS and bundled utilities, not in the way applications behave (since, by and large, they behave the same).
Well the reason was 2000 was targeted at businesses, so they didn't put alot of effort in the DX for 2000. Conversely, XP was aimed at both home and business users, and because they wanted a single code base, its easy enough to to provide DX to both versions.
All of the games I ran under 2k worked just fine, and the people who hex-edit the games to noop the bit that checks whether you're running XP generally don't have any problems either. In any case, I think "we can't be arsed to test DX with windows 2000 even though we said DX was part of the OS" is an extremely lame cop-out and the whole thing smack of forced obsolescense IMHO.
Well, my experience was different (Mandriva with KDE). It got in my way so much I bought Windows.
Horses for courses I guess.
Hmm... the GUI is mostly the same, except there's lots more control panel items. So much so that I never knew quite which one would provide the customization I wanted. I could never get the K menu editing to work. Personally I have better things to do than customize my desktop, especially when Windows defaults work great for me.
If the defaults work for you, great.
I have never had problems with either on XP or Vista.
Then I guess I'd consider you lucky. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people have to reset their machines because it won't resume from suspend properly. the ACPI spec is a mess, but in doing so it seems to have made Linux's support for it all the more robust IME.
Hmm, I guess I'm not installing updates twice a day, so I don't care. I haven't had to wait for an update because it was required for me to do something I wanted. The updates have been security or reliablity, and I reboot when I'm done with my computer anyway. I find this argument pretty weak.
Wasn't aware I was installing updates twice a day either, but when I do they're also security or reliability updates and they don't get in the way of my work either. I've lost renders thanks to XP's and Vista's "automatically reboot if this button isn't pressed within 5 minutes of an update being installed" and have had to go hunting for the group policy settings to change the timeout value to something sane (because, as far as I'm aware, you can't turn it off entirely). If it's a fix for a 0-day, you have pretty much no option but to reboot - if you're in the middle of something big, this is annoying.
I guess you haven't tried Vista's Backup.
I have, and I don't trust a backup that I can't pull to pieces on another computer unless the tool is accompanied with a 24hr support SLA. Have they fixed the issue that's plagued NT for as long as I've been using it where you can't yank a hard drive, put it in a computer with a different chipset, and boot straight from it? That was usually a shortcut to BSOD city.
Activation which takes three seconds? Honestly I can't see why anyone cares.
Activation that never goes wrong? I object to it on principle even if it does work flawlessly, which it doesn't.
I'd rather a graphic remote desktop over command line. I realize that's just my preference though.
Linux gives me both. Good luck with RDP on a flaky GPRS conection.
Did you try Powershell?
Yup, and I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who can do useful things with it. I have difficulty getting my head around it.
Sometimes people change the rationalization they use. Not saying you're lying though, just saying you might want to think about that possiblity. Not liking Vista doesn't make you an MS hater, but not keeping an open mind when you evaluate it, which it doesn't sound like you really did, makes
I'd appreciate it if you'd follow your own advice and not take the conversation out of context and put words in my mouth. My point about things changing under the hood in that none of these changes were apparent to me when I used it.
The side-grade to XP from 2000 was entirely due to gaming, and the fact that lots of games will refuse to install and/or run on 2000 for no adequately explored reason other than "it's not XP".
What I like about Kubuntu is that it doesn't get in my way. The GUI is simpler and more customisable. Hibernate and suspend are more reliable. It keeps itself up to date without requiring reboots all the time (which, incidentally, are faster than Vista). The battery lasts longer than Vista. Cloning and backing up my partitions and/or home drive is easier than in Vista. No activation. Native support for SSH. A brilliant shell in the form of bash.
I gave up my "I use Linux cos only 733t HaXx0rz like me can use it" years ago, and now I just want something I can do my work in without any hassle. If not liking Vista makes me an MS-hater in your book... well, I don't care. I just want to get my work done.
I'm aware alot has changed under the hood, but 'fraid I still haven't noticed anything stunning about the way it behaves. Sorry. I'm content to use the infinitely inferior XP for the two or three windows apps I still find myself running.
Sssssh! If you tell people that you can use wireless on Linux without having to watch uber-733t text scroll across the screen, no-one here is going to want to use it. I'm sure most people here, like myself, reconfigure X so it only displays stuff in monochrome green and black after being piped through aalib.
The caveat is, of course, that you need a wireless controller with Linux friendly drivers - thankfully, Intel "got it" a long time ago and I've not found a wireless chipset of theirs which wasn't ungeekily simple to get working in Linux; it's companies like Broadcom that give wireless on Linux a bad name, as anyone who's been as frustrated as I have been with ndiswrapper will testify.
...which brings us back to his original point. Not enough has changed for the better to make it economically viable for him.
I also bought a laptop with Vista (it wasn't as powerful as an XPS but I didn't run in to any perf issues), and as much as I tried to get the "classic" UI to behave like XP (or, more ideally, my beloved 2000), I couldn't. Pretty much all the classic UI switch does as far as I can tell is change what the widgets looks like. I lost patience with it after playing with it for a few hours and proceded with my original plan to whack kubuntu on it. I left some space in case I ever feel the need to clone my XP install onto it as well.
Pretty much every previous windows upgrade I've experienced (with the possible exception of 2k > XP) has introduced significant improvements in several areas, but I know I'm not alone in thinking there's precious little to differentiate with in XP > Vista. If you like it, great.
Whilst I can't speak for Finland, call quality of GSM compared to landlines is at least equal if not superior to most POTS I've used in Europe (areas of crappy signal notwithstanding, but they're not usually served very well with copper either). It's only in VoIP setups where I've seen call quality sufficiently in advance of GSM.
Anyway, GP's point was that mobile phones happened to be the "killer app" in the right place at the right time to swiftly take over half the market (Nokia started out as a Finnish lumber company and got into the phone business by accident whilst they were developing a system with which their employees out in the forests could keep in touch with one another and that had a longer range than walkie talkies) - being the home country of one of the pioneers of the mobile phone revolution is a big advantage in getting the best new tech rolled out in your back garden - and it's generally easier to throw up another mast than bury or string up another thirty miles of wire. Aren't there entire towns in the states that re used as testing grounds for new cable technologies? It's the same principle at work, only more widespread.
The only reason I, and most of my friends, have landlines is for ADSL. I have a phone line, but it doesn't have a number attached to it, and there's nothing plugged in apart from a modem. Thanks to my contract, it's been cheaper for me just to keep my mobile for everything rather than pay for two numbers. I think that 80% penetration in the UK might be somewhat on the low side as well - I don't know a single person who doesn't have at least one (but I can't find any figures on it at the moment so I may be over-egging things somewhat).
Funny thing is, if the telcos would just focus on getting packets from point X to Y quickly and cheaply, and pass that speed and savings on to the customer, they would make more money and not have to consider going into businesses they're not suited to.
They might well make more money. But would they have as much power? I'd like to think that the ability to control a large section of a universal communication network is somewhat similar to the Catholic church buying out Gutenburg from the day he was (literally) hacking away at his first printing press in his parents' basement.
Opera fanboy here (hey, we just love to creep out of the woodwork) just piping up with the usual "you do know Opera's interface is pretty configurable, right?" comment. I was a bit weirded out with Operas interface (although when I started using it I'd only been using computers for about 3 months and had barely gotten to grips with IE, so learning another interface was slightly easier), but I can sympathise that the default opera interface is a bit odd to strangers, and they could make things like exposing the hidden panels easier (right-click a toolbar, customise, toolbars tab, tick show hidden toolbars when customising).
As it is, my opera setup resembles neither IE, FF, Safari or Opera because I've found out the way I like the interface arranged and have done so accordingly. FF or IE don't give me nearly as much flexibility where it counts as Opera does, especially the woefully static IE7.
Presumably this'll be fixed before it's out of beta? I don't consider "back up your profile and start a new one, and then imoprt your old stuff" to be a particularly pleasant upgrade path, especially for non-techies. Trying to find your profile (in %appdata%, hidden from users by default) on a windows box is usually enough to stump most people.
Compared to Opera, it's pretty slow. Opera can generally scale a page instantaneously whilst in FF there's a noticeable lag, at least on my current hardware.
Really, this comment should be +5 insightful by now. By having a caveat that basically says "if you're a corporation making money off Linux (hello Redhat!) and your distro happens to contain a nifty utility that some dude made based on stuff in our patents, we'll sue the hell out of you unless you pay us this protect... er, technology licensing fee", this is just yet another version of embrace, extend, extinguish.
When commercial distros (and community distros used commercially, like Debian) can't implement the tools needed to interoperate with Microsoft on a solid legal basis, distros will fail and Linux will once again be relgated to a) businesses outside of software patent control and b) yo' mommas basement. Like the Samba team say, stay away if you value using FOSS in the commercial world without being held to account by MS. It's a poisoned chalice.
Disclaimer: I'm in the EU and, since most of the patents don't apply over here (yet) we're hopefully in the clear for now. Until MS "lobbies" WIPO to "encourage" the EU to adopt a US software patent policy, or something similar. Yes, I wear my tinfoil hat shiny side out.
Dresden? Hiroshima? Vietnam? Never heard of any of those things, and none of them appear in any of my history textbooks. Are you trying to suggest that western civilisation isn't the holy grail of how to run a society? I don't much care for your tone, especially when you try and spread malicious lies. This is EXACTLY the sort of torrid information every right-thinking citizen should want censored from the net.
He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.
As the AC pointed out in his excellent post, not all methods of prefetch/preload are created equal. It's not just whether the OS caches certain bits of certain things into RAM, it's also about what it does with them later. Disclaimer: I've not used Vista, but in previous versions of NT (including XP which also used prefetch), the OS has a terrible habit of dropping apps (especially ones that are minimised) into swap to make room in memory for more file cache (try minimising a reasonably chunky FF, copying a few 100MB files about and then watch in horror as the machine grinds to a halt when you try to bring FF into focus again) - classic mis-allocation of resources.
As far as I'm aware, Vista gets its RAM-hogging moniker from populating the RAM with potentially useful stuff, but then not letting it go when something more useful (i.e. something that's actually being used) comes along. It's not so much a propblem with the idea itself (not using all your RAM = inefficient, using all RAM at maximum efficiency = good, using all RAM at low efficiency = utterly rubbish, worse than not using all your RAM), it's more a problem with the implementation. I've used Linux a helluva lot more than even XP, and from my limited understanding of the matter it just handles file caching and memory resources *so* much better - I can't remember the last time I've had to wait for an app to be pulled out of swap, because Linux doesn't use swap unless it's absolutely needed, whereas XP on the same 2GB RAM machine will happily swap out a ~250MB process to swap even if nothing else is being used. In Linux there are even tweaks you can do to enable the following: Write the dirty pages to swap when the disc is idle but keep them in memory as well - that way, if the pages do need to be swapped, it's effectively already been done so there's no lag as pages are written to disc so large mallocs can be done in a tenth of the time Read things that have been swapped back into memory when there are enough free pages - this is incredibly handy if, say, your machine runs a big, fat I/O or memory intensive task whilst you're not there (e.g. a nightly rsync of lots of files) - some or all your currently running apps may be written to swap. Once the job has finished, they're read back into memory so when you unlock your screen in the morning it's as if nothing happened. Sadly missed with the demise of the ck patchset.
I know Russinovich was quite positive about alot of the new I/O and VM improvements in Vista, but my (biased) outlook on the anecdata out there tells me MS weren't entirely successful and that there still seem to be an awful lot of niche cases out there.
Not to say Linux is perfect though - I've had the GUI freeze for seconds at a time under very heavy I/O loads, especially with ext3 filesystems IMHO. Get that damned scheduler or whatever it is fixed please...!
Dessert is the anti-spaghetti, to believe in it is Pastafarian heresy. Honestly, I'm surprised bigoted religious tripe like your post is allowed past the/. lameness filter! There are NO false idols before, or after, the divine Flying Spaghetti Monster. So you're going to leave your bolognese to make room for dessert? I'm amazed you're allowed to live. One Nation, Al Dente!
If the terrorists make us alter our lifestyle and force us to think, then the terrorists have already won. It'll be a sad day when we're forced to use our brains in order to stop dying - that's pinko commie talk. I, for one, am not going to change my lifestyle one jot, and I'm hoping to place better than an honourable mention in this years Darwin awards.
It's not exactly the right path, but I think it's a long way from the wrong one too. I look at it like this:
Google employs alot of smart people Google uses alot of Linux in it's back and front-end systems Google is a keen supporter of alot of FOSS projects, if even only for PR purposes There are probably people at google who tinker with things like WINE in their spare time and might even be allowed to use some work time to do it Improving WINE to the extent where they can run PS on Linux may result in them not having to pay MS (probably their biggest competitor) a small fortune in OS licenses. Anything that makes them less reliant on MS in the short, long and medium term is a win for them Google makes extensive use of white-box hardware and generic x86 kit, meaning that Macs + OSX might not exactly be there bag either Any changes they make to WINE are under the GPL (I think?) and therefore need to be made public if they distribute them Improving and distributing a better WINE might, in the long run, harm Microsoft (still probably their biggest competitor) An "Oi, Adobe! We want to run some of yout stuff on Linux!" from one of the worlds' biggest "brands" in IT might even spur Adobe to target that market, more so than the faceless unwashed geek masses like myself
I think people who think google are doing this solely for altruistic reasons may be being a bit naive - if you smoke enough crack you can often see an ulterior motive in alot of google's actions;)
NB: I generally hate Adobe software - I generally find it big, bloated and with interfaces I don't really get on with, but it doesn't alter the fact that professional imaging stuff usually equals Adobe. I'd love this to change, but it's not going to happen overnight. I'd love the GIMP to factor in better as well (who knows, maybe there's a few Google-fu's working on this as well? They're almost certain to use it), as soon as it gets an interface I can get on with as well;)
To sum up: thanks, google. I can see why you did it, you didn't have to make these changes public, but you had little to gain from keeping them secret. If you don't want to work on FOSS project XYZ because it's of little benefit to you, fair enough in my book, but releasing what work you do do is much appreciated.
How about the ability to use the de-facto standard/premiere image-editing application without having to pay one of your biggest competitors for the privilege of an OS to run it on?
How am I supposed to "police my internet connection"? Buy the same filtering kit that my ISP uses in order to detect infringements on my internet connection and expect me to give a shit that my flatmate is downloading Britney Spears? I don't give a shit what my flatmates are doing and they can fuck off if they expect me to police ANYTHING that isn't my data. You're saying I'm responsible for all data going across that network link. You are wrong.
Sorry to so infururiate you with saying "stazi", clearly this completely invalidates my point and means I obviously have an IQ of five or less. In fact, it's a wonder I can even string a sentence together without being aware how to spell the abbreviation of an "invented" word in a language I don't speak. Yeah, I could have googled it, apologies for not realising that such as heinous mistake would result in you suffereing an apoplectic fit.
And, as I'm sure you're aware (being a troll an' all) that copyright infringement is not stealing. Secondly, your "copyright infringement = police state" remark isn't so much a false dichotomy as an apparent complete lack of understanding of my whole point (but, like you say, my point is invalidated because I didn't spell "stasi" - I shudder to think how you'd react if I pointed out that I didn't even capitalise it) - if you REQUIRE every internet connection to be monitored, if you REQUIRE people accessing "unauthorised" content to be denied internet access, if you REQUIRE people to police other peoples computers for fear of being wrongfully accused themselves you have the perfect set of circumstances for implementing a totalitarian regime.
I feel like I should call you a cunt or something so as to tread more down the "Yeah! Ad hominem FTW!" road of things, but your argument is more pitiable than anything else I'm afraid, and I couldn't really insult you with any real conviction.
Pleased to be of service but please, realise that I was being entirely serious. I've not met anyone who's met with technical incompetence with people like BT (turns up that my phone line really was blocking DNS traffic because of a broken wire, and it wasn't just their DNS servers going down) and to think that such a law, as propsed, would be full of easily exploitable errors that leave paying customers without a service whilst having practically no recourse to have their service restored could never happen in the democracy we find ourselves in. Poorly thought out rules regarding imaginary property is someting only the yanks do... right?
If that happens, expect the ISP's to whine to the governments about their business model no longer bring profitable, so whilst the ISP's provide a shittier and shittier product for ever-escalating cost they'll bribe government officials to tax every citizen to subsidise their corrupr not-what-the-customer-wants business model.
Hmm, that sounds familiar... wonder who that behaviour reminds me of.
Interesting possibility: if they start blocking sections of the internet (BT protocol or HTTP requests to pirate bay for example), are they still an internet service provider, or merely another AOL-esque walled garden? Sorry kids, to me the internet is a bit more than HTTP and SMTP. Since I pay for the internet line coming into my house that my flatmates then pay me for, am I also an internet service provider? Am I going to be required by law to investigate my flatmates computers on pain of either fines or disconnection from my upstream ISP?
How much do you bet encrypted bittorrent will mark you down as a suspect? "We can't see what you're downloading but since 99% of P2P stuff is copyrighted* (source: my arse) you're probably a criminal". Heck, I use BT to nab those lovely, lovely Ubuntu ISO's and use encryption when available to hopefully evade throttles.
* Probably much mroe than 99% of stuff on P2P is copyrighted. The term they're looking for is *infringing* copyrighted content.
Why so cynical? To think that such established and technically competent companies as BT, Virgin and Tiscali would make such egregious errors is unthinkable. If you are a criminal, you are cut off. Therefore, if you're cut off, you're a criminal. Is it really so hard for all of you freeloading hippies to understand?
Bizarrely enough, I'm on Bulldog (now a subsidiary of Pipex) and after having HTTP traffic slow to diallup speeds for the past week (I'm on an 8Mb line), I tried a couple of torrents last night. HTTP still dog slow, torrents came down at 4Mb. Go figure.
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Fair enough, but I'd like to point out that I don't see how you could notice any changes if you're only running "two or three windows applications."
I was referring to the changes in the OS and bundled utilities, not in the way applications behave (since, by and large, they behave the same).
Well the reason was 2000 was targeted at businesses, so they didn't put alot of effort in the DX for 2000. Conversely, XP was aimed at both home and business users, and because they wanted a single code base, its easy enough to to provide DX to both versions.
All of the games I ran under 2k worked just fine, and the people who hex-edit the games to noop the bit that checks whether you're running XP generally don't have any problems either. In any case, I think "we can't be arsed to test DX with windows 2000 even though we said DX was part of the OS" is an extremely lame cop-out and the whole thing smack of forced obsolescense IMHO.
Well, my experience was different (Mandriva with KDE). It got in my way so much I bought Windows.
Horses for courses I guess.
Hmm... the GUI is mostly the same, except there's lots more control panel items. So much so that I never knew quite which one would provide the customization I wanted. I could never get the K menu editing to work. Personally I have better things to do than customize my desktop, especially when Windows defaults work great for me.
If the defaults work for you, great.
I have never had problems with either on XP or Vista.
Then I guess I'd consider you lucky. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people have to reset their machines because it won't resume from suspend properly. the ACPI spec is a mess, but in doing so it seems to have made Linux's support for it all the more robust IME.
Hmm, I guess I'm not installing updates twice a day, so I don't care. I haven't had to wait for an update because it was required for me to do something I wanted. The updates have been security or reliablity, and I reboot when I'm done with my computer anyway. I find this argument pretty weak.
Wasn't aware I was installing updates twice a day either, but when I do they're also security or reliability updates and they don't get in the way of my work either. I've lost renders thanks to XP's and Vista's "automatically reboot if this button isn't pressed within 5 minutes of an update being installed" and have had to go hunting for the group policy settings to change the timeout value to something sane (because, as far as I'm aware, you can't turn it off entirely). If it's a fix for a 0-day, you have pretty much no option but to reboot - if you're in the middle of something big, this is annoying.
I guess you haven't tried Vista's Backup.
I have, and I don't trust a backup that I can't pull to pieces on another computer unless the tool is accompanied with a 24hr support SLA. Have they fixed the issue that's plagued NT for as long as I've been using it where you can't yank a hard drive, put it in a computer with a different chipset, and boot straight from it? That was usually a shortcut to BSOD city.
Activation which takes three seconds? Honestly I can't see why anyone cares.
Activation that never goes wrong? I object to it on principle even if it does work flawlessly, which it doesn't.
I'd rather a graphic remote desktop over command line. I realize that's just my preference though.
Linux gives me both. Good luck with RDP on a flaky GPRS conection.
Did you try Powershell?
Yup, and I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who can do useful things with it. I have difficulty getting my head around it.
Sometimes people change the rationalization they use. Not saying you're lying though, just saying you might want to think about that possiblity. Not liking Vista doesn't make you an MS hater, but not keeping an open mind when you evaluate it, which it doesn't sound like you really did, makes
I'd appreciate it if you'd follow your own advice and not take the conversation out of context and put words in my mouth. My point about things changing under the hood in that none of these changes were apparent to me when I used it.
The side-grade to XP from 2000 was entirely due to gaming, and the fact that lots of games will refuse to install and/or run on 2000 for no adequately explored reason other than "it's not XP".
What I like about Kubuntu is that it doesn't get in my way. The GUI is simpler and more customisable. Hibernate and suspend are more reliable. It keeps itself up to date without requiring reboots all the time (which, incidentally, are faster than Vista). The battery lasts longer than Vista. Cloning and backing up my partitions and/or home drive is easier than in Vista. No activation. Native support for SSH. A brilliant shell in the form of bash.
I gave up my "I use Linux cos only 733t HaXx0rz like me can use it" years ago, and now I just want something I can do my work in without any hassle. If not liking Vista makes me an MS-hater in your book... well, I don't care. I just want to get my work done.
I'm aware alot has changed under the hood, but 'fraid I still haven't noticed anything stunning about the way it behaves. Sorry. I'm content to use the infinitely inferior XP for the two or three windows apps I still find myself running.
XP: Where do you want to go today?
;)
Vista: Where we're going, we're not going to need to go anywhere today. Ooh, shiny!
Sssssh! If you tell people that you can use wireless on Linux without having to watch uber-733t text scroll across the screen, no-one here is going to want to use it. I'm sure most people here, like myself, reconfigure X so it only displays stuff in monochrome green and black after being piped through aalib.
The caveat is, of course, that you need a wireless controller with Linux friendly drivers - thankfully, Intel "got it" a long time ago and I've not found a wireless chipset of theirs which wasn't ungeekily simple to get working in Linux; it's companies like Broadcom that give wireless on Linux a bad name, as anyone who's been as frustrated as I have been with ndiswrapper will testify.
There's a (hopefully) useful compatability matrix here: http://linux-wless.passys.nl/
...which brings us back to his original point. Not enough has changed for the better to make it economically viable for him.
I also bought a laptop with Vista (it wasn't as powerful as an XPS but I didn't run in to any perf issues), and as much as I tried to get the "classic" UI to behave like XP (or, more ideally, my beloved 2000), I couldn't. Pretty much all the classic UI switch does as far as I can tell is change what the widgets looks like. I lost patience with it after playing with it for a few hours and proceded with my original plan to whack kubuntu on it. I left some space in case I ever feel the need to clone my XP install onto it as well.
Pretty much every previous windows upgrade I've experienced (with the possible exception of 2k > XP) has introduced significant improvements in several areas, but I know I'm not alone in thinking there's precious little to differentiate with in XP > Vista. If you like it, great.
Shhh! Firefox doesn't have any bugs! It has functionality fragmentation!
Whilst I can't speak for Finland, call quality of GSM compared to landlines is at least equal if not superior to most POTS I've used in Europe (areas of crappy signal notwithstanding, but they're not usually served very well with copper either). It's only in VoIP setups where I've seen call quality sufficiently in advance of GSM.
Anyway, GP's point was that mobile phones happened to be the "killer app" in the right place at the right time to swiftly take over half the market (Nokia started out as a Finnish lumber company and got into the phone business by accident whilst they were developing a system with which their employees out in the forests could keep in touch with one another and that had a longer range than walkie talkies) - being the home country of one of the pioneers of the mobile phone revolution is a big advantage in getting the best new tech rolled out in your back garden - and it's generally easier to throw up another mast than bury or string up another thirty miles of wire. Aren't there entire towns in the states that re used as testing grounds for new cable technologies? It's the same principle at work, only more widespread.
The only reason I, and most of my friends, have landlines is for ADSL. I have a phone line, but it doesn't have a number attached to it, and there's nothing plugged in apart from a modem. Thanks to my contract, it's been cheaper for me just to keep my mobile for everything rather than pay for two numbers. I think that 80% penetration in the UK might be somewhat on the low side as well - I don't know a single person who doesn't have at least one (but I can't find any figures on it at the moment so I may be over-egging things somewhat).
Funny thing is, if the telcos would just focus on getting packets from point X to Y quickly and cheaply, and pass that speed and savings on to the customer, they would make more money and not have to consider going into businesses they're not suited to.
They might well make more money. But would they have as much power? I'd like to think that the ability to control a large section of a universal communication network is somewhat similar to the Catholic church buying out Gutenburg from the day he was (literally) hacking away at his first printing press in his parents' basement.
Opera fanboy here (hey, we just love to creep out of the woodwork) just piping up with the usual "you do know Opera's interface is pretty configurable, right?" comment. I was a bit weirded out with Operas interface (although when I started using it I'd only been using computers for about 3 months and had barely gotten to grips with IE, so learning another interface was slightly easier), but I can sympathise that the default opera interface is a bit odd to strangers, and they could make things like exposing the hidden panels easier (right-click a toolbar, customise, toolbars tab, tick show hidden toolbars when customising).
As it is, my opera setup resembles neither IE, FF, Safari or Opera because I've found out the way I like the interface arranged and have done so accordingly. FF or IE don't give me nearly as much flexibility where it counts as Opera does, especially the woefully static IE7.
Presumably this'll be fixed before it's out of beta? I don't consider "back up your profile and start a new one, and then imoprt your old stuff" to be a particularly pleasant upgrade path, especially for non-techies. Trying to find your profile (in %appdata%, hidden from users by default) on a windows box is usually enough to stump most people.
Compared to Opera, it's pretty slow. Opera can generally scale a page instantaneously whilst in FF there's a noticeable lag, at least on my current hardware.
Really, this comment should be +5 insightful by now. By having a caveat that basically says "if you're a corporation making money off Linux (hello Redhat!) and your distro happens to contain a nifty utility that some dude made based on stuff in our patents, we'll sue the hell out of you unless you pay us this protect... er, technology licensing fee", this is just yet another version of embrace, extend, extinguish.
When commercial distros (and community distros used commercially, like Debian) can't implement the tools needed to interoperate with Microsoft on a solid legal basis, distros will fail and Linux will once again be relgated to a) businesses outside of software patent control and b) yo' mommas basement. Like the Samba team say, stay away if you value using FOSS in the commercial world without being held to account by MS. It's a poisoned chalice.
Disclaimer: I'm in the EU and, since most of the patents don't apply over here (yet) we're hopefully in the clear for now. Until MS "lobbies" WIPO to "encourage" the EU to adopt a US software patent policy, or something similar. Yes, I wear my tinfoil hat shiny side out.
Dresden? Hiroshima? Vietnam? Never heard of any of those things, and none of them appear in any of my history textbooks. Are you trying to suggest that western civilisation isn't the holy grail of how to run a society? I don't much care for your tone, especially when you try and spread malicious lies. This is EXACTLY the sort of torrid information every right-thinking citizen should want censored from the net.
He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.
As the AC pointed out in his excellent post, not all methods of prefetch/preload are created equal. It's not just whether the OS caches certain bits of certain things into RAM, it's also about what it does with them later. Disclaimer: I've not used Vista, but in previous versions of NT (including XP which also used prefetch), the OS has a terrible habit of dropping apps (especially ones that are minimised) into swap to make room in memory for more file cache (try minimising a reasonably chunky FF, copying a few 100MB files about and then watch in horror as the machine grinds to a halt when you try to bring FF into focus again) - classic mis-allocation of resources.
As far as I'm aware, Vista gets its RAM-hogging moniker from populating the RAM with potentially useful stuff, but then not letting it go when something more useful (i.e. something that's actually being used) comes along. It's not so much a propblem with the idea itself (not using all your RAM = inefficient, using all RAM at maximum efficiency = good, using all RAM at low efficiency = utterly rubbish, worse than not using all your RAM), it's more a problem with the implementation. I've used Linux a helluva lot more than even XP, and from my limited understanding of the matter it just handles file caching and memory resources *so* much better - I can't remember the last time I've had to wait for an app to be pulled out of swap, because Linux doesn't use swap unless it's absolutely needed, whereas XP on the same 2GB RAM machine will happily swap out a ~250MB process to swap even if nothing else is being used. In Linux there are even tweaks you can do to enable the following:
Write the dirty pages to swap when the disc is idle but keep them in memory as well - that way, if the pages do need to be swapped, it's effectively already been done so there's no lag as pages are written to disc so large mallocs can be done in a tenth of the time
Read things that have been swapped back into memory when there are enough free pages - this is incredibly handy if, say, your machine runs a big, fat I/O or memory intensive task whilst you're not there (e.g. a nightly rsync of lots of files) - some or all your currently running apps may be written to swap. Once the job has finished, they're read back into memory so when you unlock your screen in the morning it's as if nothing happened. Sadly missed with the demise of the ck patchset.
I know Russinovich was quite positive about alot of the new I/O and VM improvements in Vista, but my (biased) outlook on the anecdata out there tells me MS weren't entirely successful and that there still seem to be an awful lot of niche cases out there.
Not to say Linux is perfect though - I've had the GUI freeze for seconds at a time under very heavy I/O loads, especially with ext3 filesystems IMHO. Get that damned scheduler or whatever it is fixed please...!
Dessert is the anti-spaghetti, to believe in it is Pastafarian heresy. Honestly, I'm surprised bigoted religious tripe like your post is allowed past the /. lameness filter! There are NO false idols before, or after, the divine Flying Spaghetti Monster. So you're going to leave your bolognese to make room for dessert? I'm amazed you're allowed to live. One Nation, Al Dente!
;)
If the terrorists make us alter our lifestyle and force us to think, then the terrorists have already won. It'll be a sad day when we're forced to use our brains in order to stop dying - that's pinko commie talk. I, for one, am not going to change my lifestyle one jot, and I'm hoping to place better than an honourable mention in this years Darwin awards.
It's not exactly the right path, but I think it's a long way from the wrong one too. I look at it like this:
;)
;)
Google employs alot of smart people
Google uses alot of Linux in it's back and front-end systems
Google is a keen supporter of alot of FOSS projects, if even only for PR purposes
There are probably people at google who tinker with things like WINE in their spare time and might even be allowed to use some work time to do it
Improving WINE to the extent where they can run PS on Linux may result in them not having to pay MS (probably their biggest competitor) a small fortune in OS licenses. Anything that makes them less reliant on MS in the short, long and medium term is a win for them
Google makes extensive use of white-box hardware and generic x86 kit, meaning that Macs + OSX might not exactly be there bag either
Any changes they make to WINE are under the GPL (I think?) and therefore need to be made public if they distribute them
Improving and distributing a better WINE might, in the long run, harm Microsoft (still probably their biggest competitor)
An "Oi, Adobe! We want to run some of yout stuff on Linux!" from one of the worlds' biggest "brands" in IT might even spur Adobe to target that market, more so than the faceless unwashed geek masses like myself
I think people who think google are doing this solely for altruistic reasons may be being a bit naive - if you smoke enough crack you can often see an ulterior motive in alot of google's actions
NB: I generally hate Adobe software - I generally find it big, bloated and with interfaces I don't really get on with, but it doesn't alter the fact that professional imaging stuff usually equals Adobe. I'd love this to change, but it's not going to happen overnight. I'd love the GIMP to factor in better as well (who knows, maybe there's a few Google-fu's working on this as well? They're almost certain to use it), as soon as it gets an interface I can get on with as well
To sum up: thanks, google. I can see why you did it, you didn't have to make these changes public, but you had little to gain from keeping them secret. If you don't want to work on FOSS project XYZ because it's of little benefit to you, fair enough in my book, but releasing what work you do do is much appreciated.
How about the ability to use the de-facto standard/premiere image-editing application without having to pay one of your biggest competitors for the privilege of an OS to run it on?
Dude, take your ritalin and calm down a bit.
How am I supposed to "police my internet connection"? Buy the same filtering kit that my ISP uses in order to detect infringements on my internet connection and expect me to give a shit that my flatmate is downloading Britney Spears? I don't give a shit what my flatmates are doing and they can fuck off if they expect me to police ANYTHING that isn't my data. You're saying I'm responsible for all data going across that network link. You are wrong.
Sorry to so infururiate you with saying "stazi", clearly this completely invalidates my point and means I obviously have an IQ of five or less. In fact, it's a wonder I can even string a sentence together without being aware how to spell the abbreviation of an "invented" word in a language I don't speak. Yeah, I could have googled it, apologies for not realising that such as heinous mistake would result in you suffereing an apoplectic fit.
And, as I'm sure you're aware (being a troll an' all) that copyright infringement is not stealing. Secondly, your "copyright infringement = police state" remark isn't so much a false dichotomy as an apparent complete lack of understanding of my whole point (but, like you say, my point is invalidated because I didn't spell "stasi" - I shudder to think how you'd react if I pointed out that I didn't even capitalise it) - if you REQUIRE every internet connection to be monitored, if you REQUIRE people accessing "unauthorised" content to be denied internet access, if you REQUIRE people to police other peoples computers for fear of being wrongfully accused themselves you have the perfect set of circumstances for implementing a totalitarian regime.
I feel like I should call you a cunt or something so as to tread more down the "Yeah! Ad hominem FTW!" road of things, but your argument is more pitiable than anything else I'm afraid, and I couldn't really insult you with any real conviction.
Pleased to be of service but please, realise that I was being entirely serious. I've not met anyone who's met with technical incompetence with people like BT (turns up that my phone line really was blocking DNS traffic because of a broken wire, and it wasn't just their DNS servers going down) and to think that such a law, as propsed, would be full of easily exploitable errors that leave paying customers without a service whilst having practically no recourse to have their service restored could never happen in the democracy we find ourselves in. Poorly thought out rules regarding imaginary property is someting only the yanks do... right?
;)
If that happens, expect the ISP's to whine to the governments about their business model no longer bring profitable, so whilst the ISP's provide a shittier and shittier product for ever-escalating cost they'll bribe government officials to tax every citizen to subsidise their corrupr not-what-the-customer-wants business model.
Hmm, that sounds familiar... wonder who that behaviour reminds me of.
Interesting possibility: if they start blocking sections of the internet (BT protocol or HTTP requests to pirate bay for example), are they still an internet service provider, or merely another AOL-esque walled garden? Sorry kids, to me the internet is a bit more than HTTP and SMTP. Since I pay for the internet line coming into my house that my flatmates then pay me for, am I also an internet service provider? Am I going to be required by law to investigate my flatmates computers on pain of either fines or disconnection from my upstream ISP?
How much do you bet encrypted bittorrent will mark you down as a suspect? "We can't see what you're downloading but since 99% of P2P stuff is copyrighted* (source: my arse) you're probably a criminal". Heck, I use BT to nab those lovely, lovely Ubuntu ISO's and use encryption when available to hopefully evade throttles.
* Probably much mroe than 99% of stuff on P2P is copyrighted. The term they're looking for is *infringing* copyrighted content.
Why so cynical? To think that such established and technically competent companies as BT, Virgin and Tiscali would make such egregious errors is unthinkable. If you are a criminal, you are cut off. Therefore, if you're cut off, you're a criminal. Is it really so hard for all of you freeloading hippies to understand?
Bizarrely enough, I'm on Bulldog (now a subsidiary of Pipex) and after having HTTP traffic slow to diallup speeds for the past week (I'm on an 8Mb line), I tried a couple of torrents last night. HTTP still dog slow, torrents came down at 4Mb. Go figure.