I had a PII 400, it could play winamp, while surfing the web, with a copy of outlook, trillian, and word open in Windows 2000. (It did have 512mb of ram)
Windows XP is full of bloat, live OS backups, live OS file protection, background automatic patches, the look and feel service to make your menus pretty, all the drm hooks, dumprep to catch your programs crashing and give you meaning to the madness. I'm not saying all these things aren't usefull, just that they don't directly contribute to the music listening, web browsing, productivity portion of my day and I don't need them to make my pc more workable.
Bloat is nothing new and it's definately not just usability increases. As PCs get faster, deveopers stop worrying about efficency and pay more attention to deadlines. I keep my OS on it's own partition so it has less of a chance of screwing up my data. The OS partition on my windows machine constantly runs out of space, it's 4GB! You might be thinking, so what, you have an 80GB hardrive, but where does it end. When I have a 1TB hard drive, it windows just going to stop deleting anything. They've not gone through significant pains to compress service pack files or archived dlls. (think diskspace or stacker ppl) There's nothing in XP they couldn't be doing in half the space, at four times the speed, it's just not necessary for them to do it that quickly or that efficiently because people keep buying new hardware so they settle for getting it on the shelf faster.
So if I see all this inherant waste, why would I run XP? I have XP purely to keep up with the times. (Since I have to support XP/2003 stations/servers, a little Gaming doesn't hurt either). If I could get away with it, I'd keep linux on everything running ICE-WM. Let the hardware advance to run the lastest 3d game or rendering package. Why should my operating system be more resource intensive than my applications? Isn't it's whole purpose to let me run my apps?
XP does appear to be reasonably stable, and generally causes me less maintenance time per week, but if I wanted to run on a slower machine, there's aboslutely no reason I couldn't drop back just a little and still get everything done as quickly today as I did in '99. (and as quickly if not faster than I can today)
Honestly save playing 3d games, and real time video encoding there's not a lot that a dual 1GHz box can't do. I had a 400MHz celeron laptop that did a bang up job playing DVD's. (though it's battery died at around 100 minutes with all the stress)
As a side note, The breaking point I found for running winamp 2.x (pre directX 8) in the background was 100MHz pentium I. A pentium 100 could handle mp3 and a web browser, the 75 would break up a little-> a lot in most apps. (windows 95, 64mb ram)
Yes, more or less they did. Then again if a quarter of my emails in a day came from one irate user trying to be the squeeky wheel, I can't say that I wouldn't tell them the same thing.
If it's an open source initiative, isn't the user in question entitled to contribute their own code?
I don't feel the 99 cents a song is too bad for a hit song, given that the average album only has 1-2 songs on it that I really want. The problem I see is that the album is still around $10-$15 and still fails to provide you with any of the ammenities of the real package.
99 cents for a hit song = ok, 99 cents for the rest of the crap on the album = bunk.
I'd be happy to pay 99 cents for the feature track (the one you see as a single) 25 cents for each of the other tracks or $4.99 for the whole album, in 160, with art and cd face jpg. You have to keep prices up at least a little, they have to pay for the bandwidth somehow.
This is used many places already. Most mmorpgs only give you loading screens when you first connect and then every time they need to throw you to a different server. (instance,dungeon,world,expansion) The thing is, on an MMO there's usually an acceptable period of downtime allowed. When you're tossed in a location change without a loading screen, you're generally in a safe area for a second to allow for all the textures in your area to load where slow pcs can chug along safely. The texture quality and size in those areas is also usually slightly lesser. You don't want people on slow pcs to get really laggy for a few seconds when your're in an FPS.
Games as far back as doom rendered out the room you were in as well as any point that could be seen from the room you were in. Doom even had hint brushes that would tell the game to start pre-rendering the next room. (in case their alogrythm wasn't doing the job well enough on it's own) The big problem was you still needed to load all the textures. With realism getting increasingly better, those texture packs are getting in to the hundreds of megs catagory. Loading them out of the fly isn't a good solution, loading them all ahead of time makes the game require higher minimum memory just to play. As always, software is forging ahead of hardware. If everyone had 4GB of ram, the games could load all the textures up front and you could have uninterrupted play. Google only has to preload a few hundred K of images to get it's magic done:)
Of all the things they could open, this is one I'm pretty happy they've have the caps on.
SQL server is the only product to my knowledge that preforms reasonably well, is incredibly stable and is probably the least affected by malicious attacks. (yes I know that's still a lot of attacks, just less than windows/iis/ie)
It's so touchy opening a product up that's in use already in the market. At least in opensource, there's a public alpha and beta and people have a chance to work out some of the bugs/exploits before the product hits peoples production environments.
Microsoft takes Linux, somehow redesigns all driver needs to work perfectly with modular close sourced windows drivers...well there goes preformance, security and reliability. They're obviously not going to release it for free, there goes cheap. It's Microsoft doing the code work, there's no way it's going to be secure or relatively stable. It's linux, so it's going to be alien to the common desktop user, there goes easy.
So M$ is going to make a slow, buggy, insecure version of linux that is going to trash the opensource community because it has better driver support....
Umm okay, When is this guy starting his own talkshow? Is he training to be a Maury Povich replacement?
"It isn't free you dolts, nothing the government gives you is free, you pay for it all. "
Yes, not conventionally free, but free in the sense that if they're going to waste the money somewhere anyway, you might as well benefit from it.
You can argue seven ways to sunday that the money would go to school books or needy families or repaving the street in front of your house. The cost of implimenting this will probably be a little steep, but I really don't see them slashing important programs to make money for this.
The government is going to waste the majority of your tax money anyway, at least this way you can hope to actually get some personal benefit out of your cash.
Well, there's ehough anticipation through the years you'd think someone would have bought up the rights and made it just for whatever profit is available.
Sadly, after all these years of waiting and hype, there's no way in heck it could live up to expectations.
You have a guy that's working hard to provide links to infringing material. (for free no less) If they were smart they would have just been watching this guys page and stamping out the owner of every link he finds. As it sits now, they stopped his linking but the files will remain.
Now it's just a matter of time untill another site does the same thing. This puts them on the offensive paying people to go hunt down more linkers.
Don's sue Google for linking to a page with your copy on it, thank them for helping you find it and shut down the source.... armatures.
"distracted if there is some sort of emergency" I'm not sure I buy that. Any emergency serious enough to require your attention (read: situation where there's anything you can do about it) is likely going to make you forget about using your cell.
If the plane is going down in a ball of flames making or not making a phonecall seems moot to me. You're in the pilot's and airports hands. If anything it might distract someone who would otherwise be hysterical.
The downside is 150 people chatting with 150 people not in the cabin will probably be a horrendous racket, then you have the loud talkers that think they have to scream in to the phone. It'll be a social inconvenience to be certain, but I might be able to get slashdot on my opera browser if I'm quick about it!
My big question is can the cell systems handle thousands of people switching towers every 12 seconds? at 600mph that's a mile every 6 seconds. I figure the average tower can't span but a mile or two. Can their network switch fast enough to keep you and 500 other people passing through that airspace connected? Will it affect switching on the ground around major flight paths?
1Gig on the phone, (mostly 15fps converted xvid moveis, mp3's and video capture from the phone) 1Gb on the Istick USB Drive in my wallet (DSLinux/Qemu, all my pgp keys/apps, a blowfish encrypted iso drive, lastes win SP, spyware remover, antivirus, boot disk iso's) 40GB on the ipod, (lots and lots and lots and lots of music)
Having several full length movies on the cell is just far too useful for waiting on oil changes, mva work, doctors offices.
The Mp3's play in the car and at my desk. It's not unlike carrying around a binder of CD's which a lot of people did before the mp3 days. I don't think carrying a binder of music CD's was ever considered hoarding even if you had 100 discs on you.
If you wanted to stop there, is that really hoarding? You're carring around entertainment. If so people have been hoarding for a long long time and who are we to break tracdition? Would it be any different if you were listening to the radio or watching a portable tv? It could deliver the same content you're just accessing remotely.
Now the crypt data and linux distro has a use in my daily life..ok weekly life.. but I'm willing to grant that's hoarding. But that's also well out of the scope of the article.
When it became feasable to store a few thousand characterd in a magnetic strip, Drivers licenses (some states) and credit cards jumped on the bandwagon. When smartchips appeared on the scene, the financial community was in a rush to embed them in thier credit cards. It's now feasable to carry a small harddrive and battery with you. If a couple of gigs of portable music freak these guys out, just wait till 80GB video players become mainstream.
I played around with Dragon and Kurzweil back in the day and man were they horrible. You practically had to read the thing an entire novel to get it to 95%.
Sometime in the post Pentium revolution, algorithms got a shot in the arm and dictation software started getting significantly better even before training.
The biggest problem I've had is that reading a predetermined text to a computer doesn't sound anything like my causal style speech I'm going to use for voice input. Anything I read over turned out reasonably well (an error a page or so, that's much better than my typing)
Yeah it seems to draw parallels to common Speech recognition problems. I could see the training moving at a much faster pace though. They could probably flash up pictures of things and read your reactions.
Thoughts or words might be a chore, but I'm certain they'll be able to eventually tell your mood from a distance using this idea. Just imagine the targeted ads: A guy walks through the mall with his girl, on the wall two displays light up. One with a wedding ring and the other with a pack of condoms.
So they have calculations to read the impulses and move a cursor in the desired direction. Too bad the article is a little light on details. Wonder how long before they're able to decode simple thoughts, perhaps letters or even words. It's understandably a pretty long jump.
If they could pick up the Medulla Oblongata's output and pass it along to electrodes the diaphram of a tetrapalegic, or from motor control to their arms to allow gross movement.
Imagine typing at 400 words per minute. Of course this tech might suffer from the same class of problems as speech recognition but there's certainly hope.
Would be interesting to be around to see the day that they fully understand what comes out and how to put stuff in to a brain. Those will be exciting. (and potentially dangerous times)
While understanding "Content" itself might be sufficiently represented by "conceptual understanding of text", the errors in the story are really a combination of grammar and content.
"Grammar" benefits from a "conceptual understanding of text" but does not absolutely require it. A "conceptual understanding of text" does not dictate "Grammar", good bad or otherwise.
A=Content B=Grammar C=Conceptual understanding of text
Your agrument appears to be that A=C, A->B so C=B. This is a fallacy. (Denying the Antecedent I believe X->Y != X=Y) Furthermore, I don't believe that A begets B in the case.
The author had a conceptual understanding of their work, they just failed to edit it afterward.
Besides If google would have written the story, I doubt it would have escaped their clutches without copy editing.
Yes I understand it was a debunking the debunker joke, try harder!
"Spelling: Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does. The amount of computing power available at the company means it can afford to begin teaching the system which words are related -- for instance "Imperial", "College" and "London". It's a job that many CPU years, and which would not have been possible without these thousands of machines. "When you have tons of data and tons of computation you can make things work that don't work on smaller systems," said Hölzle. One goal of the company now is to develop a better conceptual understanding of text, to get from the text string to a concept. "
I have a 6620 and a belkin adapter on my pc. ATT/Cingular GSM Edge isn't wonderful but it's the best thing I've had since riccochet dropped Baltimore coverage.
I do seem to get around the 40Kb / second they advertise with the edge service if I'm not driving. My pings are consistant with dialup.
The ATT/Cingular coverage is a shade better than T-Mobile in my neck of the woods. (I started with T-Mobile and had no service in my appartment)
It's not replacing my cablemodem anytime soon for the house but it's incredibly useful on the move. My next project is to put a bluetooth linux box in the car and play around with some GPS, net wired crosshair on a map i'm over here kinda fun.
Not to meantion content upgrades, 24x7 in game support, server upgrades as necessary. You have to consider they're providing more of an online service/community like *shudder* AOL than just a game.
When ID was done with Doom3 they released some patches perhaps kept an eye on it, but here able to move on with their lives. Blizzard will be heavily working on/supporting WoW for years to come assuming it becomes as popular as Dark Age of Camelot / EverQuest. (yeah it's not like it'll catch up to EQ)
I agree that's still entirely too much to pay for a subscription, but they have a limited fanbase and they're going to milk them for all they can.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm,
I had a PII 400, it could play winamp, while surfing the web, with a copy of outlook, trillian, and word open in Windows 2000. (It did have 512mb of ram)
Windows XP is full of bloat, live OS backups, live OS file protection, background automatic patches, the look and feel service to make your menus pretty, all the drm hooks, dumprep to catch your programs crashing and give you meaning to the madness. I'm not saying all these things aren't usefull, just that they don't directly contribute to the music listening, web browsing, productivity portion of my day and I don't need them to make my pc more workable.
Bloat is nothing new and it's definately not just usability increases. As PCs get faster, deveopers stop worrying about efficency and pay more attention to deadlines. I keep my OS on it's own partition so it has less of a chance of screwing up my data. The OS partition on my windows machine constantly runs out of space, it's 4GB! You might be thinking, so what, you have an 80GB hardrive, but where does it end. When I have a 1TB hard drive, it windows just going to stop deleting anything. They've not gone through significant pains to compress service pack files or archived dlls. (think diskspace or stacker ppl) There's nothing in XP they couldn't be doing in half the space, at four times the speed, it's just not necessary for them to do it that quickly or that efficiently because people keep buying new hardware so they settle for getting it on the shelf faster.
So if I see all this inherant waste, why would I run XP? I have XP purely to keep up with the times. (Since I have to support XP/2003 stations/servers, a little Gaming doesn't hurt either). If I could get away with it, I'd keep linux on everything running ICE-WM. Let the hardware advance to run the lastest 3d game or rendering package. Why should my operating system be more resource intensive than my applications? Isn't it's whole purpose to let me run my apps?
XP does appear to be reasonably stable, and generally causes me less maintenance time per week, but if I wanted to run on a slower machine, there's aboslutely no reason I couldn't drop back just a little and still get everything done as quickly today as I did in '99. (and as quickly if not faster than I can today)
Honestly save playing 3d games, and real time video encoding there's not a lot that a dual 1GHz box can't do. I had a 400MHz celeron laptop that did a bang up job playing DVD's. (though it's battery died at around 100 minutes with all the stress)
As a side note, The breaking point I found for running winamp 2.x (pre directX 8) in the background was 100MHz pentium I. A pentium 100 could handle mp3 and a web browser, the 75 would break up a little-> a lot in most apps. (windows 95, 64mb ram)
Yes, more or less they did. Then again if a quarter of my emails in a day came from one irate user trying to be the squeeky wheel, I can't say that I wouldn't tell them the same thing.
If it's an open source initiative, isn't the user in question entitled to contribute their own code?
I don't feel the 99 cents a song is too bad for a hit song, given that the average album only has 1-2 songs on it that I really want. The problem I see is that the album is still around $10-$15 and still fails to provide you with any of the ammenities of the real package.
99 cents for a hit song = ok,
99 cents for the rest of the crap on the album = bunk.
I'd be happy to pay 99 cents for the feature track (the one you see as a single) 25 cents for each of the other tracks or $4.99 for the whole album, in 160, with art and cd face jpg. You have to keep prices up at least a little, they have to pay for the bandwidth somehow.
So how long until they set up vertical mag lev tracks?
This is used many places already. Most mmorpgs only give you loading screens when you first connect and then every time they need to throw you to a different server. (instance,dungeon,world,expansion) The thing is, on an MMO there's usually an acceptable period of downtime allowed. When you're tossed in a location change without a loading screen, you're generally in a safe area for a second to allow for all the textures in your area to load where slow pcs can chug along safely. The texture quality and size in those areas is also usually slightly lesser. You don't want people on slow pcs to get really laggy for a few seconds when your're in an FPS.
:)
Games as far back as doom rendered out the room you were in as well as any point that could be seen from the room you were in. Doom even had hint brushes that would tell the game to start pre-rendering the next room. (in case their alogrythm wasn't doing the job well enough on it's own) The big problem was you still needed to load all the textures. With realism getting increasingly better, those texture packs are getting in to the hundreds of megs catagory. Loading them out of the fly isn't a good solution, loading them all ahead of time makes the game require higher minimum memory just to play. As always, software is forging ahead of hardware. If everyone had 4GB of ram, the games could load all the textures up front and you could have uninterrupted play. Google only has to preload a few hundred K of images to get it's magic done
Of all the things they could open, this is one I'm pretty happy they've have the caps on.
SQL server is the only product to my knowledge that preforms reasonably well, is incredibly stable and is probably the least affected by malicious attacks. (yes I know that's still a lot of attacks, just less than windows/iis/ie)
It's so touchy opening a product up that's in use already in the market. At least in opensource, there's a public alpha and beta and people have a chance to work out some of the bugs/exploits before the product hits peoples production environments.
OK,
Microsoft takes Linux, somehow redesigns all driver needs to work perfectly with modular close sourced windows drivers...well there goes preformance, security and reliability. They're obviously not going to release it for free, there goes cheap. It's Microsoft doing the code work, there's no way it's going to be secure or relatively stable. It's linux, so it's going to be alien to the common desktop user, there goes easy.
So M$ is going to make a slow, buggy, insecure version of linux that is going to trash the opensource community because it has better driver support....
Umm okay, When is this guy starting his own talkshow? Is he training to be a Maury Povich replacement?
"It isn't free you dolts, nothing the government gives you is free, you pay for it all. "
Yes, not conventionally free, but free in the sense that if they're going to waste the money somewhere anyway, you might as well benefit from it.
You can argue seven ways to sunday that the money would go to school books or needy families or repaving the street in front of your house. The cost of implimenting this will probably be a little steep, but I really don't see them slashing important programs to make money for this.
The government is going to waste the majority of your tax money anyway, at least this way you can hope to actually get some personal benefit out of your cash.
I fear they're mutually exclusive.
Well, there's ehough anticipation through the years you'd think someone would have bought up the rights and made it just for whatever profit is available.
Sadly, after all these years of waiting and hype, there's no way in heck it could live up to expectations.
Big Mistake
You have a guy that's working hard to provide links to infringing material. (for free no less) If they were smart they would have just been watching this guys page and stamping out the owner of every link he finds. As it sits now, they stopped his linking but the files will remain.
Now it's just a matter of time untill another site does the same thing. This puts them on the offensive paying people to go hunt down more linkers.
Don's sue Google for linking to a page with your copy on it, thank them for helping you find it and shut down the source.... armatures.
But what I want to know is can I run ethernet over power on top of power over ethernet?
"distracted if there is some sort of emergency" I'm not sure I buy that. Any emergency serious enough to require your attention (read: situation where there's anything you can do about it) is likely going to make you forget about using your cell.
If the plane is going down in a ball of flames making or not making a phonecall seems moot to me. You're in the pilot's and airports hands. If anything it might distract someone who would otherwise be hysterical.
The downside is 150 people chatting with 150 people not in the cabin will probably be a horrendous racket, then you have the loud talkers that think they have to scream in to the phone. It'll be a social inconvenience to be certain, but I might be able to get slashdot on my opera browser if I'm quick about it!
My big question is can the cell systems handle thousands of people switching towers every 12 seconds? at 600mph that's a mile every 6 seconds. I figure the average tower can't span but a mile or two. Can their network switch fast enough to keep you and 500 other people passing through that airspace connected? Will it affect switching on the ground around major flight paths?
Master Fnog: 'Very well. But I have the will of the warrior, so the battle is already over, the winner? Me!'
How about a webserver that can stand up to a good slashdotting comprised completely of legos?
1Gig on the phone, (mostly 15fps converted xvid moveis, mp3's and video capture from the phone)
1Gb on the Istick USB Drive in my wallet
(DSLinux/Qemu, all my pgp keys/apps, a blowfish encrypted iso drive, lastes win SP, spyware remover, antivirus, boot disk iso's)
40GB on the ipod, (lots and lots and lots and lots of music)
Having several full length movies on the cell is just far too useful for waiting on oil changes, mva work, doctors offices.
The Mp3's play in the car and at my desk. It's not unlike carrying around a binder of CD's which a lot of people did before the mp3 days. I don't think carrying a binder of music CD's was ever considered hoarding even if you had 100 discs on you.
If you wanted to stop there, is that really hoarding? You're carring around entertainment. If so people have been hoarding for a long long time and who are we to break tracdition? Would it be any different if you were listening to the radio or watching a portable tv? It could deliver the same content you're just accessing remotely.
Now the crypt data and linux distro has a use in my daily life..ok weekly life.. but I'm willing to grant that's hoarding. But that's also well out of the scope of the article.
When it became feasable to store a few thousand characterd in a magnetic strip, Drivers licenses (some states) and credit cards jumped on the bandwagon. When smartchips appeared on the scene, the financial community was in a rush to embed them in thier credit cards. It's now feasable to carry a small harddrive and battery with you. If a couple of gigs of portable music freak these guys out, just wait till 80GB video players become mainstream.
I played around with Dragon and Kurzweil back in the day and man were they horrible. You practically had to read the thing an entire novel to get it to 95%.
Sometime in the post Pentium revolution, algorithms got a shot in the arm and dictation software started getting significantly better even before training.
The biggest problem I've had is that reading a predetermined text to a computer doesn't sound anything like my causal style speech I'm going to use for voice input. Anything I read over turned out reasonably well (an error a page or so, that's much better than my typing)
Yeah it seems to draw parallels to common Speech recognition problems. I could see the training moving at a much faster pace though. They could probably flash up pictures of things and read your reactions.
Thoughts or words might be a chore, but I'm certain they'll be able to eventually tell your mood from a distance using this idea. Just imagine the targeted ads: A guy walks through the mall with his girl, on the wall two displays light up. One with a wedding ring and the other with a pack of condoms.
So they have calculations to read the impulses and move a cursor in the desired direction. Too bad the article is a little light on details. Wonder how long before they're able to decode simple thoughts, perhaps letters or even words. It's understandably a pretty long jump.
If they could pick up the Medulla Oblongata's output and pass it along to electrodes the diaphram of a tetrapalegic, or from motor control to their arms to allow gross movement.
Imagine typing at 400 words per minute. Of course this tech might suffer from the same class of problems as speech recognition but there's certainly hope.
Would be interesting to be around to see the day that they fully understand what comes out and how to put stuff in to a brain. Those will be exciting. (and potentially dangerous times)
ERROR: Cannot send Instant Message(R). Last Message did not contain "So easy no wonder it's number one. I'm going to get a Coke."
I'm afraid I don't fully agree.
While understanding "Content" itself might be sufficiently represented by "conceptual understanding of text", the errors in the story are really a combination of grammar and content.
"Grammar" benefits from a "conceptual understanding of text" but does not absolutely require it. A "conceptual understanding of text" does not dictate "Grammar", good bad or otherwise.
A=Content B=Grammar C=Conceptual understanding of text
Your agrument appears to be that A=C, A->B so C=B. This is a fallacy. (Denying the Antecedent I believe X->Y != X=Y) Furthermore, I don't believe that A begets B in the case.
The author had a conceptual understanding of their work, they just failed to edit it afterward.
Besides If google would have written the story, I doubt it would have escaped their clutches without copy editing.
Yes I understand it was a debunking the debunker joke, try harder!
"Spelling: Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does. The amount of computing power available at the company means it can afford to begin teaching the system which words are related -- for instance "Imperial", "College" and "London". It's a job that many CPU years, and which would not have been possible without these thousands of machines. "When you have tons of data and tons of computation you can make things work that don't work on smaller systems," said Hölzle. One goal of the company now is to develop a better conceptual understanding of text, to get from the text string to a concept. "
Next up: Grammar and Content
Those were canadian TB's.....
umm yeah...
I have a 6620 and a belkin adapter on my pc. ATT/Cingular GSM Edge isn't wonderful but it's the best thing I've had since riccochet dropped Baltimore coverage.
I do seem to get around the 40Kb / second they advertise with the edge service if I'm not driving. My pings are consistant with dialup.
The ATT/Cingular coverage is a shade better than T-Mobile in my neck of the woods. (I started with T-Mobile and had no service in my appartment)
It's not replacing my cablemodem anytime soon for the house but it's incredibly useful on the move. My next project is to put a bluetooth linux box in the car and play around with some GPS, net wired crosshair on a map i'm over here kinda fun.
Not to meantion content upgrades, 24x7 in game support, server upgrades as necessary. You have to consider they're providing more of an online service/community like *shudder* AOL than just a game.
When ID was done with Doom3 they released some patches perhaps kept an eye on it, but here able to move on with their lives. Blizzard will be heavily working on/supporting WoW for years to come assuming it becomes as popular as Dark Age of Camelot / EverQuest. (yeah it's not like it'll catch up to EQ)
I agree that's still entirely too much to pay for a subscription, but they have a limited fanbase and they're going to milk them for all they can.