Except PC world are selling Vista PCs as "media centers"
Do you not see the difference between a "media center" (which aggregates/plays media) and a "television channel" (which is media)? Just because they both have the word "media" in them does not make them competitors.
Microsoft is presenting Vista as the answer to your media worries as well - UPnP out of the box etc. Claiming it's "only software" seems a bit narrow thinking.
There is a significant difference between a media player and the distribution and actual content of the media.
Given that he registered the trademark a different category and could have a hard time arguing his case because of it, this sounds like a publicity stunt to garner some attention to his service before launch. After all, his complaint is that MS Vista is hogging the limelight; this will get him some of that limelight.
When I built my house, I put low-voltage boxes in the walls, and ran PVC pipes to both the basement and attic from each box. It makes it very easy to run cable. OTOH, it is somewhat time consuming (drilling holes above and below, gluing ends on to each pipe, screwing nuts onto each pipe, etc).
The result isn't as useful without knowing how those that didn't pick the high bit rate were split up. Out of the 4 that didn't pick high bit rate with Shure headphones, how many picked low bit rate, and how many couldn't tell the difference?
The number of times XP has to be rebooted in an average day, with an average user's setup is not negligible. It's miserable. MS has done a lousy job of making a modern operating system work properly.
Bullshit. XP is perfectly capable of running without reboots. I maintain a lot of Linux and Windows systems, and while Linux's uptime is far higher, the XP machines generally only need a reboot after updates.
System 6.0.8 had support for external hard drives, optical drives, shared network drives, and email. Don't know where you're getting your misinformation.
You're probably right on this (I don't know much about the Mac Plus). But I doubt it did them as well as a modern machine, and I don't think it could burn a CD or DVD.
In that case, the Mac Plus would be up and running much faster than any XP machine, and the person could get back to work immediately.
The point of that was to point out the ridiculousness of the example the OP was making. It'd be like requiring both computers to find prime numbers in the background. The modern machine would win, but so what? It's a silly requirement.
The article had a lot of good points, and was meant to be taken with a light heart. It sounds as though you just can't stand your precious XP appearing bloated.
On the contrary, it was filled with a lot meaningless comparisons carefully selected to favor the older machine. And yes, I do know XP is bloated. However, XP (and modern software in general) is capable of much much more than the older machine, which the article dismisses offhand. My first machine was an 8088, so I understand the nostalgia associated with an old machine. That doesn't blind me to the stupidity of this article.
Software generally expands to take advantage of all available hardware. Why?
1. Especially in regards to UI, turning a 10 millisecond action into a 10 microsecond action will not be appreciated by the user. Doing more things with the same 10 milliseconds will.
2. As software becomes more complex, it gets harder to develop. Trade-offs can be made between developer time and CPU time to keep costs down. This isn't an argument for being needlessly wasteful, but programming a large project in a HLL is much easier than in assembly. Would you pay an extra $50 for a program that shaved 1 second off of its startup time, especially if you only started it a couple times a day?
First off, I don't have to sit in front of the computer, and I can make it automatically log on if I want to. If I'm waiting for a spot in a parking lot, I can't just get out of the car and start working on something else. Secondly, you're ignoring all the advantages of a modern machine and the various areas where it can work faster. A graphing calculator turns on pretty much instantly, but it can't do everything a computer does, nor as quickly.
not in well designed software: dynamic libraries and modules/drivers don't have to be loaded nor even installed to hard disk.
Sure, but having all the hooks available for DLLs to take over is extra work. The software has to be more generalized. Old software was often tied to the specifics of the hardware. Newer software is much better about this since the details are abstracted. However, this incurs overhead.
That software is largely not well designed these days is the point.
That may be true in many cases, but larger and slower software does not imply poor design. It may just mean the requirements have become more complex.
It isn't faster because apparently people are satisfied with the process taking a second. The document structure is probably far more complex. I can count words nearly instantly in my text editor. Try comparing the word count time with a huge file. There are so many explanations for this, but the bottom line is that no one cared to make it faster for word processors. If you need it to run in a microsecond, just run the software in a virtual environment. The lack of a speed-up is not because of the hardware, but because of the software.
What you don't seem to understand is that merely adding the capability of turning on a feature like multi-language spell check, or voice recognition, or alternate input methods, or right-to-left typing, or alternate input methods, etc, increases the complexity (and resource usage) of software, regardless of whether _you_ use them or not.
Unless you you have a reboot in the middle of the day from a power outage, Update, System Crash
Make that twice a day on a bad day then. Still negligible.
or you are just late and you need to get a file off your system which was powered down.
Well, you're out of luck there if you can't wait a couple minutes. But once I do, I can do more than put it on a floppy (if it'll even fit). I could put it on an external hard drive, a thumb drive, a CD or DVD, or put it on a shared network drive or email it. The Mac Plus doesn't offer most of those options.
Unless you want to be sure it goes back up properly after bootup. Say you were altering the S99Sendmail file for different options and while you tested it and it workes fine without the reboot.
You should be modifying sendmail.cf or init.d/sendmail, not S99sendmail. This is completely irrelevant anyway. Are you saying the Mac Plus would always boot quickly even with a bad configuration?
It could also be Once a day to many times a day. Say you have a Nazi Security Adminsitratior who for the last couple of weeks has been perfecting his security policy and forces a reboot after every attempt. So 2 or 3 times a day gets annoying and waiting for it to reboot for a couple of minutes makes it worse.
As opposed to the Mac Plus, where network security doesn't exist and security policies (what security?) are not enforceable over the network (what network?). What if there was a Nazi Security Administrator standing next to your Mac Plus pushing the power button every 20 minutes? What then? This is all irrelevant.
Yes but a lot of people/companies upgrade weither they need it or not.
No one is disputing this. The dispute is the stupidity of the arguments laid out in the article, and defended by you.
Who said anything about loading it into RAM? But the mere ability to support these things does increases the complexity of a program greatly, and thus increases resource usage.
Thing is, how come a Dual-2.4Ghz Athlon can't count words in a Word document faster than a 8Mhz M68000?
If you read the article, it does count words faster. And according to his "benchmark", the Mac Plus was twice as laggy when typing (I use scare quotes because of the poor quality of the article, even results that favor the XP machine are suspect).
Although a GUI can aid in productivity, you don't need a GUI to be productive. Besides, DOS had ASCII based GUIs. Also, although the author claims to be comparing productivity, he's not. To compare productivity, you need to compare tasks, not feature X in each of these two programs.
Don't know for sure, but to start, you could try going to Control Panel: Administrative Tools: Services, and stopping the iPod service and setting it to Disabled.
So bootup time is quite useful in measuring productivity.
Not really, when it's a cost you pay once a day, which you can spend doing something other than staring at the machine.
In Linux if you misconfigure say sendmail in Red Hat when you boot up you are waiting for minutes for it to load and fail. Making Linux Boot time painfully slow. This effects productivity (say your job is to insure Sendmail works properly at bootup)
You don't need to reboot a machine to configure sendmail. And who has a job watching sendmail boot? This doesn't make any sense.
For windows reboots are frequent when you have updates so you are working on you job and you get an automatic update you need to reboot and wait 2 minutes when you get everything back you need to refresh were you left off.
2 minutes, once or twice a month? I think that's negligible for a desktop machine.
The point of the article is that as computers get faster the software get proportionally slower so you tend to get a 0 net gain in productivity in the common jobs you do on your system now.
If you ignore all the jobs you couldn't even do on the old system.
spell checking, formatting and fonts are useful and can be done with the 20+ year old software as well as the new (and faster on the old).
What if you need to work in Swedish and Japanese documents? Oh wait, only English matters.
But to anyone who types at a reasonable rate, predictive text is a huge annoyance (and often causes wrong values to be input into fields and just slows the typing of documents. Good typists turn that crap off, it IS bloat. Voice recognition is much slower and much less accurate than typing, I wouldn't even consider using it to create a document.
I guess disabled people shouldn't be using computers then?
The constant blather about comparing it to "AMD" really speaks volumes about the author. Apparently AMD determines your user experience on a modern PC running XP.
Oh, and browsing the web plays no part in the modern user experience. None at all. Don't even think about it. If most people weren't doing it in '86, it's not important.
Why didn't he compare the Mac Plus against an OS X machine, or the XP machine against a DOS 6 machine?
Also nice how everything that the Mac Plus (and old machines in general) sucked at or couldn't do were left out. Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too.
here are 2 ways of producing the < glyph: you can use character code x8B or xFF1C.
Shouldn't that be x3C?
I'm not sure if that's right or wrong, if there is a right and wrong way to handle this issue (I suppose that means it's excellent grounds for a religious war)--it's just important that it be handled consistently.
I thought about this a little more, and I think the difference will be in what it is used for. In HTML, the "<" glyph has a special meaning, so it makes sense that a different version (in this case, full-width) of the character should have a different meaning. From an application perspective, perhaps they should be the same. IIS translates the full-width version to the regular version, probably reasoning that if a full-width angle bracket was submitted to the webserver, such as in "<something@somewhere.com>", a regular one was intended. However, this isn't a safe assumption, which leads me to another question -- anyone know if this is optional behavior in IIS, and if so, is it defaulted to on or off?
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Given that he registered the trademark a different category and could have a hard time arguing his case because of it, this sounds like a publicity stunt to garner some attention to his service before launch. After all, his complaint is that MS Vista is hogging the limelight; this will get him some of that limelight.
That said, RAID is not a replacement for proper backup. RAID is just a first line of defense to avoid downtime.
When I built my house, I put low-voltage boxes in the walls, and ran PVC pipes to both the basement and attic from each box. It makes it very easy to run cable. OTOH, it is somewhat time consuming (drilling holes above and below, gluing ends on to each pipe, screwing nuts onto each pipe, etc).
The result isn't as useful without knowing how those that didn't pick the high bit rate were split up. Out of the 4 that didn't pick high bit rate with Shure headphones, how many picked low bit rate, and how many couldn't tell the difference?
Software generally expands to take advantage of all available hardware. Why?
1. Especially in regards to UI, turning a 10 millisecond action into a 10 microsecond action will not be appreciated by the user. Doing more things with the same 10 milliseconds will.
2. As software becomes more complex, it gets harder to develop. Trade-offs can be made between developer time and CPU time to keep costs down. This isn't an argument for being needlessly wasteful, but programming a large project in a HLL is much easier than in assembly. Would you pay an extra $50 for a program that shaved 1 second off of its startup time, especially if you only started it a couple times a day?
First off, I don't have to sit in front of the computer, and I can make it automatically log on if I want to. If I'm waiting for a spot in a parking lot, I can't just get out of the car and start working on something else. Secondly, you're ignoring all the advantages of a modern machine and the various areas where it can work faster. A graphing calculator turns on pretty much instantly, but it can't do everything a computer does, nor as quickly.
Why is parent modded troll? Price is a valid area to ask for equality in the comparison.
What you don't seem to understand is that merely adding the capability of turning on a feature like multi-language spell check, or voice recognition, or alternate input methods, or right-to-left typing, or alternate input methods, etc, increases the complexity (and resource usage) of software, regardless of whether _you_ use them or not.
Who said anything about loading it into RAM? But the mere ability to support these things does increases the complexity of a program greatly, and thus increases resource usage.
Although a GUI can aid in productivity, you don't need a GUI to be productive. Besides, DOS had ASCII based GUIs. Also, although the author claims to be comparing productivity, he's not. To compare productivity, you need to compare tasks, not feature X in each of these two programs.
Don't know for sure, but to start, you could try going to Control Panel: Administrative Tools: Services, and stopping the iPod service and setting it to Disabled.
He also drags out the biggest CRT he can find and complains about its weight instead of just using an LCD like everyone does in 2007.
The constant blather about comparing it to "AMD" really speaks volumes about the author. Apparently AMD determines your user experience on a modern PC running XP.
Oh, and browsing the web plays no part in the modern user experience. None at all. Don't even think about it. If most people weren't doing it in '86, it's not important.
Why didn't he compare the Mac Plus against an OS X machine, or the XP machine against a DOS 6 machine?
Also nice how everything that the Mac Plus (and old machines in general) sucked at or couldn't do were left out. Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too.