Much faster than selecting the desired search provider in the box at the right.
Faster, maybe, but easier for grandma to use to find something on Ebay instead of doing a google, probably not, especially when IE 7 supports the Open Search specifications and all that makes it pretty easy for grandma to type test and add any search to her dropdown.
Since you threw in a good tip, I thought I would pass one on to you, as this is something you would use more than the average person.
Do yourself a favor and go look up Start++ for Vista.
Then, hit the Windows Key and type "goo donkey", or "weather 99999" to show the weather in 99999. It taps into web, applets, or even acts based on results of a search or Vista virtual search folders.
So like "pa Madoona" plays all the Madonna on your system or "p fire" plays all the songs or groups with "fire" in their name. And if you like the "wp [keywords]" stuff in Firefox you will fall in love with this, as you don't even have to open the browser and results can return in the browser or inside the Vista Start Pane as you like.
It also does all the dictionary stuff that every new Leopard user thinks makes Jobs a god, and also several users have taken the pictures and movies and map concepts that are fashionable web applets/pages and threw them in as well.
It is kind of a cool idea, especially since it is just using off the shelf search, applet, and/or scripting capabilities of Vista. Basic idea, but clever levels of extensibility. It was written by a MS developer in his spare time, but is something MS should seriously looking at making a Vista standard feature.
What restrictions? Not being able to (legally) copy a +20gig hard drive to my file for just the movie content alone?
I had people yell almost the exact same crap at me back in 1995 when I suggested that CDs would also move to this model. Do you still think I was wrong about that too?
I already have 30 movies on the Creative Zen 30gb, in DVD quality - in addition to 200 audio books and thousands of songs. These are NOT huge numbers in terms of HD space available today.
As for the 'restrictions' - Yes Sony was foolish, and criticized by all 'open' advocates for keeping the 'media' restricitons on Blu-Ray, to the point they were willing to give up the support of MS and any alliance with Toshiba at the time, not based on the technology/format, but on how it could be used.
Now that things have finalized, Sony is adding these features to their products, but not allowing others to do this. Fair uh? Glad Blu-Ray won uh? The biggest Movie Studio DRM whores of the century (Sony) and their DRMed up the ass Blu-Ray won. And they did it by selling it to OSS idiots as be 'anti-MS'. And it is the PS3 and SlashDot crowds that bought into it, despite it was against everything they stand for. LOL
You all wish online hd content will be a big thing soon. It's not. the ISPs aren't going to look to kindly on that.
Um, what you don't see to realize is that cable companies are ALREADY providing high capacity bandwidth. Do you think that QAM HDTV or MPEG4 or VC1 cable boxes shoving 1080i to people's TVs is any lighter on bandwidth? There are cable companies ready to shove over 90 Channels in HD in the next year.
One download stream for a user's data modem is going to be negligible compared to the HD content they are already going to be providing.
Another thing you don't seem to get is the size of HD content.
720p in VC1 for a 2hr Movie is around 4GB in size. This is another reason MS said HDDVD and BluRAY were not movie content technologies, but should be pushed as data content technologies. As current DVDs could already host HD Content. (Go look up the WMV HD Version of Terminator 2 from about 5 years ago. HD Content, using WMV/VC1 on a regular DVD.)
So a HD 720p movie can ALREADY fit on a regular DVD, it is the interactivity and additional features of HD content that requires the 25GB disk space. (Just like regular DVDs that don't usually use more than 4GB of space for the older MPEG2 movie Content.)
Next you are missing the point that ISPs in the US are behind the rest of the world. Go visit several countries in Europe, their cell phones are faster than our home connections, let alone most people have 20GB bandwidth to their homes in many countries as 'base'.
(The Telcos were subsidized to provide Fiber to all homes, got their money and tax credits, and didn't ever do this in the United States, the government will eventually force this to happen if the US gets a competent administration.)
The last point you are missing is that HD online distribution is already happening. There are 1000s of HD movie and TV show downloads daily off of XBox Live alone. Let alone the other online Video stores like Vongo and such that are adding HD download content as well. This isn't something that 'will' happen, it is something that is 'happening' , even on 1.5mbps DSL connections, for a lot of consumers, and just because you aren't one of them, doesn't mean it don't already exist and work well.
Spoken like a true window user. If something doesn't work on the first click it must be broken
Spoken like a true *nix developer. Assume the users are willing to edit tons of text configuration files, set permissions themselves, and then provide them with an application that's UI guidelines were outdated in 1995. Oh, and remmove any intelligence from the application or any allowance of intelligence to the OS, because if the OS is smart and improves the abilites of the application, that is bad.
There is nothing wrong with 'pushing the envelope' and making software as automatic and self-repairing as possible.
Sadly as Apple moved to OS X, they didn't spend much time taking their old school System 1-9 ideals an fully incorporating them in OS X. This is why administrating a Windows box or Windows server the need for a CLI or editing esoteric settings/files in various locations no longer exists. The only true GUI based OS that implemented even 'tough' and complex tools management in the GUI is Windows now, and there is nothing wrong with this.
This reminds me of people bitching about NT4.0 leaving the GUI running on Servers, it consumed less than 250kb of RAM and 0 CPU resources, and still was faster than Novell and *nix solutions from the time.
Having easy to use and 'intelligent' software does not always have a performance or usability penalty. Once the *nix developers get this through their heads, and actually take 5 minutes to understand the 'modern' usability concepts that companies like Microsoft are implementing, maybe we can see some good OSS again that does 'rival' commerical software.
As long as we are left with the horrid non-intelligence of software installation, inability to self-repair, and old interface ideas, people will continue to mock OSS software in large scale or consumer environments.
Even the freaking firefox UI is based on 1990s UI principles, and this is the first thing people new to it notice, and go, what the hell is wrong with this company... (Even freaking tabbed browsing form Opera and Firefox was a ripoff of the taskbar 'tab' concept of Windows 95, and since IE opened each browser in a separate window, tabbed browsing looked like old MDI concpets to cutting edge UI designers). People didn't get it, still don't get it, and MS added tabs for these people, sadly reverting UI design back 10 years.
Plus if I want to try a new version and keep the old version that is allowed even encouraged. Try that with IE6, 7, or 8
OS level applications have been the only expection, so your argument is cherry picked, and to this day there are easy ways to install all versions at the same time, even though they are considered OS components.
In comparison, you can have every version of Office installed on a single system at the same time, so to define stuff like this as a 'problem with Windows' is misleading at best.
Most of them just involve deleting the directory they are installed in and unzipping or untaring a new version
And leaving the OS with no knowledge of the application, is a major flaw. The OS should know about applications for document associations, accounting of installed content, interoperability, etc.
The Applications should also not limit themselves to their directory when dealing with settings. This is why OSS software breaks in multi-user and roaming environments. If my user profile can't even keep my settings, bookmarks, etc when moving to another computer in the office, or at a remote office half way around the world, the application is worthless in the business world.
There are levels of automation and intelligence that an OS can and does provide, and yet a lot of OSS developers reject this, and then wonder why corporations pick MS again and again.
Look at Windows 2008 Server and Vista, and how they intelligently work together. There has never been a more simplistic yet rich stuctured client/server pairing in history, and this is why Business will roll them out together
Nice modding... Obscured racism and sexism gets +5 Insightful.
Nice to see the stereotypes still live on in the SlashDot world as well. Anyone that asserts as fact that women or non-white Americans are automatically 'victim groups' is perpetuating both sexism and racism, and this oddly gets modded up?
Are the readers here really in agreement with this, or do they not 'get' what the person is saying, even though the poster didn't directly come out and use derogatory words beyond 'victim groups'?
the HDi interface for HD-DVD had *nothing* to do with it.
Remember though, this was late in the game. Long after Sony told MS they would not allow off media standardized use of Blu-Ray format. (Which Sony is now going back on for their own products)
Sadly, even to this day, Blu-Ray's interface and specifications are not even finailized or fully implemented, where HD-DVD and HDi by Microsoft were complete years ago now, with predictable and elegant pathways for future features. Blu-Ray looks like a kludge in comparison. Sony is NOT A GOOD software company and even as hated as MS can be, they are a good software company, even if all their products are not perfect.
Sony would have been smarter to 'play along' with the rest of the industry in the FIRST PLACE, and allow off media Blu-Ray licensing and usage. If they don't then Blu-Ray gets completely taken out of the online HD equation, that MS begged and warned them about years ago.
People will have home Video Jukeboxes, just like we do for Music; however, unless Sony drastically changes Blu-Ray licensing and opens the format to allow for 'storage' chances are our Jukebox Video content will be filled with online sources, not Blu-Ray.
What seems to be missed in the HDDVD/BluRay and BluRay winning is that the studios 'liked' the closed licensing of BluRay so content had to stay on the Media, and this is what won the format war, DRM greed from the Media industry, not anything about the format itself. HDDVD was the open format and allowed for backups and non-optical storage, etc...
And strangely, MS's fight for the reduction of DRM is what made them choose HDDVD because Sony wouldn't open BluRay. MS was actually fighting for the consumers on this one, and the industry still shoved them out, and idiots around the world thought BluRay was great because MS didn't want to support it, when it is the DRM of BluRay that MS hated in the first place.
So the industry and DRM and idiots that didn't know better got what they wanted - BluRay won. So now to avoid the Blu-Ray restrictions, your only other option is to buy HD content online. PERIOD.
1) MS Stated YEARS ago that HD Media probably would not be market successful because online accessible content would prevail instead. Today this rings true, as HD sales and Rental on XBox Live is very lucrative and most XBox 360 owners didn't give a crap about HD-DVD because they could already access HD Movie content even before you could easily buy an HD-DVD player.
2) MS specifically SUPPORTED HD-DVD based on both jukebox archiving and online concepts that Sony rejected - BluRay would not add to their specification licensing that would allow content to be used 'off the media' - Strangely this is exactly what Sony is now proposing to do with their PSP converter for BluRay so people can take BluRay content on their PSP. If Sony would have open this licensing in the first place MS would never have supported only one of the HD media formats.
3) MS and Sony are competitors, but MS is NOT HD DVD. If MS wanted BluRay they would put in BluRay, as they already provide and license VC1 to Sony because it is a HD Standard that is preferred even in BluRay content distribution.
4) MS now is going forward with its plans for online content distribution.
This is really not news for anyone that has been paying attention.
Agreed, but I never said that people don't honestly disagree with Hillary or dislike her for other reasons. My assessments were not in just the results of the elections, but also how issues that are purely sexist by nature are handled in the media as if they were 'ok'.
Also, take Texas, she wins the state in private primaries, but in the caucuses she loses considerably, even though they are made up of the same segments of society, near each other. For this large of a discrepancy it would have to be a massive statistical anomaly at best.
When put in a room where you have to pick your candidate in front of your spouse and neighbors, societal pressures and accepted stereotypical attachments come into play. I strongly think caucuses are antiquated and anti-American in their inception, as they force public proof of support, which is strictly forbidden, to the point we can't even film or have witness to our votes in main elections so we can't 'prove' who we voted for to showboat or 'pay back' interests outside of our own.
I'm not even saying the statistical anomaly in Texas is a pure sexist issue, as many of the people in the caucus may have voted for Barack when they were on the fence between the two and didn't want to appear racist. But see again here, people would be more afraid of being painted racist than sexist. It may be as much passion and plain peer pressure as well.
I know growing up as a white male in middle America (Iowa even) that racism and sexism is programmed into a tremendous amount of our basic lives and influences that shape our thoughts that are still as old as slavery or 'rule of thumb' thinking and persist in sly ways. I detest racism and sexism both on principle, but honestly can't say I am free from them, as I don't even fully understand the levels that my life has been indoctrinated by them.
I try to seek them out and identify them, and this makes me a bit more sensitive or aware of these issues, but no more free from them than anyone else raised in this generation.
Generational differences were the topic of Barack's Speech last week, and he was very much on target that many of these issues feather out but don't disappear and it still doesn't break down the divide of generational differences in views. But this applies to sexism as much as it does race, but that aspect of the conversation is being left out, and I think we should be openly addressing it as well while we have the courage.
I guess my main point is that sexism was a larger part of this election cycle than I expected it to be, and back room 'guys' talk even emerged into the mainstream media as 'ok', which I don't understand how they could either A) Be so blind or ignorant to not realize it. or B) Know it is there and not care.
Thanks for the intelligent input on the subject, it is something that is complicated and the more collective thought always helps.
PS As for your preference against a 'Clinton', I have a lot of friends like that feel the same way, although I personally tend to put my support into people that get results and have respectable intelligence, and even if I don't like Hillary or Bill, I would choose their intelligence over a idealist or idiot with set beliefs that their low level of intelligence can't challenge or change. (Barack is also brilliant, so it makes the Democratic primary tough for a lot of people that respect intelligence.)
I don't know enough about Cynthia McKinney to make a comment (I would have to do a Google or wiki to even catch up or remember who she is for sure, and won't discredit this conversation with my admitted lack of knowledge.)
Smart people are more apt to change their minds, or even do the right thing against their personal interests. Bill Clinton was a good example of this on a number of issues, and other 'intelligent' leaders have also represented the power intelligence plays in policy and decision making.
This is why I wasn't a big fan of Gore personally or on many issues, but I respected his intelligence, especially in comparison to Dubya. And Dubya has more than lived up to 'his' level of intelligence and it is still painful to watch.
Poll after poll has one consistent trend; people still find passive sexism normal and acceptable.
If you want the media, from the SNL skit to even hard topics the past weeks, the media is very afraid of walking the racism line (except FOX that might as well wear white hoods).
However the media isn't as afraid of walking the sexism line and even pander to sexist tendencies that are instilled in Americans to the point they disappear from perception.
The media shouldn't be as afraid of race as they are, even Barack pushes this issue and says we need a more open dialogue to help in breaking down the latent fences that are still left in portions of the country and in portions of people's minds that have been indoctrinated by it their entire.
We need the media to realize this about sexism as well, and reopen that dialogue as well. I met a student on her way to becoming a constitutional lawyer just last year, and she even had sexist ideals that made her believe Hillary being a woman disqualified her. And in other aspects of life this person is smart, liberal even, and wants to be a federal judge. Anyone else find that mouth dropping that conflicted 'beliefs' like this still exist?
Sadly though, if you are sensitive to sexist tones, remarks, etc - you like me would be horrified with the current election cycle and how little progress has been made in this regard.
There are an enormous amount of items from this primary that I take issue with from the press to the other presidential candidates regarding sexism. We are still in the 60s and 70s with regard to sexism, and sadly people are more PC so it is just more hidden.
From the press pointing out how 'emotional' Hillary is, but when other canidates did the same thing, it was candor and 'emotional' was never used. There are too many of these examples to note.
Anyway, I truly had hoped Americans had come further with regard to sexism, and the ignorance associated, and sadly the IT world isn't any better. You would think that the IT world would respect Intelligence and stop to realize on average Woman run 20% smarter than men, and the highest IQ goes to women, beating the highest male IQ by almost 40 points. But I guess if geeks like to look at dumb blondes and boobs, maybe this is all they will think of when crossing the issue of the gender differences.
In contrast to the Democratic candidates, McCain is a tool. McCain lost all conservative respect when he started supporting the Bush admin economic policies, even though he had voted against most of them.
McCain may be from Arizona, but he doesn't have the disciplined principles that Goldwater did. (This is where I recommend any of the last 3 John Dean books for Republicans/Conservatives/Anyone to read that think the current party is either conservative or believes in smaller government. In addition to being in the middle of the Nixon administration, Dean was a friend of Goldwater and Conservatives WIHTOUT a Conscience is a book they started together, as a direct response to the movement of the party from Reagan to Newt and how horribly off track Goldwater felt they were.)
I like both Hillary and Barack, they have some real principles and 'new' ideas from the horrifying Bush legacy. At this point, I would seriously vote for Colbert before I would Republican for President or Congress. At lesat he knows he's joking. They had 6 years of all Republican controlled government with rubberstamp everything, and it was the largest spending and worst policy period in American History. No more chances for Republicans until their party finds it ideals and real conservatism at its core.
When Intel contributes something beyond a mainboard chipset or a NON IGP based video card, get back to me, until then, they are sucking the life out of the PC gaming market for their own financial interests and are directly hurting consumers by not being honest with them or OEMs being honest about the horrid level of Intel GPU performance.
And then X and Intel's Open-ness keeps getting brought up. WTH?
I don't care how much effort they put into X, as even X itself is being replaced with more modern non-bitmap based versions already, and Intel is DOING NOTHING in these areas that are the future of the X protocol.
Intel = Crap Gaming Intel = Crap Performance GPUs
IBM was the first company to push accelerated video in the PC market, followed up by low cost solutions from ATI. It was then ATI and S3 that introduced the FIRST 3D acceleration hardware for consumer PCs, NOT INTEL, NOT 3DFX...
The same crap keeps being repeated about how 'helpful' Intel is in the GPU arena, and yet nothing new is provided to support this, other than, 'they have been good to us before, blah blah.'
Go look up Moore's 'Law', Intel Processor release schedules, and collusion... Then come back and explain how wonderful Intel is to the computing world.
Sorry. Some of us had 3dFX cards with fully Open 3D a really long time ago, and we didn't like the way that 3dFX got murdered by nVidia, and we're worried about the same happening - through some back-room deal - to Intel's 3D division and ATI's efforts to go open.
Bruce
And you think Intel is your savior? Inventor of HDCP? Inventor of CPUID?
Now I've heard everything...
OpenGL is going to keep 3D open, not Intel. Even Microsoft's DirectX is going to keep GPU manufacturers agnostic when it comes to provided features, not Intel.
Instead of Intel providing at least quality entry level graphics, they have been milking the business and onboard market for years now with more than sub par GPU chipsets.
This is WHAT has continued to make gaming a problem for PCs. Even all Intel chipsets were abolished and every computer had a 'real' dedicated GPU (even an entry level Geforce 6100LE), then gaming could me far more lucrative and standardized on the PC platform.
This has nothing to do with being OPEN, OSes or any other aspect. This is about a hardware company being allowed to cripple a market, along with OEMs that try to makea buck off of computer buyers that don't know better.
Microsoft even has been fighting against this crap for years with OEMs and Intel (Intel don't like MS over this issue, see lawsuits). This is also why MS decided to go ahead with the new WDDM in Vista to shove low level gaming level hardware even into the hands of ALL computer users, sadly Intel pushed back on this and made their crap 950 and newer chipsets that are continuing to water down the market, even though at least they have full hardware PS 2.0 support in the 3100 series FINALLY.
Also when did 3dFX become the Open 3D hero of gaming or the industry? Did I miss the memo back then? Sure NVidia screwed over 3dFX, but its technology was horrid at best in comparison to today's 3D technology. In the timeframe 3DFX died, ATI was aleady getting ready to kick ass.
Remember 3dFX and NVidia said that users didn't need anything more than 16bit 3D bit depth, and performance would not be able to handle 24bit or 32bit Alpha. Then less than two months later ATI introduces their Rage series which not only did full 32bit Alpha bit depth but was several times faster than 3dFX and NVidia technologies. If we would have been left to the 'awesome' 3dFX, who knows how limited gaming technology would be, especially if they were willing to insist on secondary acceleration and 16bit level bit depth technologies. Holy Cow...
You can't get much more open than OpenGL, and their support is virtually on par with DirectX and NVidia's code engine. NVidia isn't going to strong arm anyone here, as they no longer have to deal with just ATI or Intel, but the OpenGL group AND Microsoft.
Again, this is scary. Intel has a horrible track record when it comes to standards, horrible track record when it comes to consumers, and a horrible track record when it comes to GPU technology.
CPUs they do fine, but keep everything artificially in the economic Moore's law, GPUs on the other hand they suck the life out of the PC industry... (Even Apple has fallen for their idiotic standards with SSE2/SSE2 video optimizations in the Core of Leopard, which completely suck in terms of comparative performance. Apple would have been smarter to use OpenGL at core level instead, but no, they lock themselves to Intel and deliver crap video performance in return for Quartz Desktop.)
Don't forget that several generations of Intel GPU chipsets use CPU operations to function fully.
Even the big Intel argument for 915 chipset to be 'Vista Ready' and promising Aero(WDDM) drivers, and then realizing there was no way technically to implement this since the 915 chipset shoved too many of the DirectX features though the CPU/SSE instead of handling the opertions inherently.
Intel's bastard stepchildren from the 915 to the current x3100 STILL shove operations though the CPU and use SSE optimization to try to get real GPU performance, and then people wonder why their gaming performance with an Intel base Video card is 10x slower than the cheapest native GPU technolog from ATI and NVidia.
To the GP...... I'm sure Intel does give good X support, but this is because they are a business class company providing business class GPU products that perform horribly outside of an X protocol bitmap world, you know, like with gaming...
Anyone that would argue that Intel GPUs are good for gaming or only perceived as bad because they have good X support and MS doesn't like that, is 'really' digging for a reason to hate MS beyond the normal SlashDot kneejerk response. GP, Microsoft's like of the Intel GPU has nothing to do with how much the Intel GPU technologies SUCK!
I can't believe someone would really be out to defend intel's graphics technology, this is just a bit scary...
1) He claims to be a 3D expert, but for some reason he only worked on the 2D aspects of DirectX while he was at Microsoft. (DirectDraw, etc)
2) His current software and games are very much NOT 3D, so he is commenting on the 3D market why again?
3) His argument about PCs not being good gaming platforms is that they don't contain enough DRM? Truly, go back and read this again. What the hell does he want, a gun pointing a peoples faces if their mouse gets near the rip or copy button?
4) Throughout the article they keep talking about WildTangent Orb, which is a program that competes DIRECTLY with Windows Vista & Windows Marketplace & Games for Windows, in Rating games based on system performance, and providing a consistent expectation for the gamer.
5) WildTangent huh... Ok, anyone that installed this software or has removed it from a friends computer would shudder to think that this guy has any insight when it comes to programming at all, let alone 3D gaming. (WildTangent is borderline Spyware, and the games are kludges, slow, etc.)
6) He thinks DirectX is bad and Vista is bad, but argue that they the best that can be done with 3D gaming. Hmm..
7) He talks about the DirectX hardware abstraction levels and implies DirectX 10 is further from the hardware than previous versions. This is really really inaccurate, as DirectX even opens a new diret pipeline for shoving calculations and physics to the GPU. The only place DirectX 10 is 'further' from hardware is the removal of DirectSound, but this has been replaced in 10.1 with a new hardware layer that is compatible with the new Vista sound subsystem. This stuff makes me think the guy is insane, has a chip or both.
8) His argues about current 3D technology is tricks, but raytracing is real 3D? Um, raytracing is also freaking tricks, especially if you work to get any performance out of it. (And this is just in studio level rendering we are talking about, let alone gaming). Moving raytracing to games or adding it to current 3D technologies would be great, but it is going to take more 'tricks' for good performance and STILL WILL NOT BE REAL 3D, any more than current gaming technologies. He is an expert and yet doesn't understand this? Holy cow...
9) The only thing I can agree with in the article is the portion about onboard Video being a bane to the gaming industry, and Intel being a horrible proponent of bad entry level 3D chipsets that can't even run Flight Sim 98, let alone a current game with more than 15fps.
I think this guys needs to be taken with the grain of salt he deserves.
You realize the whole PC vs Console argument for HIM is because PCs don't have enough DRM to ensure games don't get pirated. His viewpoint on DRM makes Microsoft look like the anti-DRM corporation.
PS Anyone that installed Wild Tangent knows to just run from anything this guy touches. The best thing that happened to Microsoft and DirectX was this guy leaving.
BTW HE DID NOT WORK ON THE 3D ASPECTS of DirectX as much as he would like people to believe, he worked with Direct Draw the 2D portion of DirectX. Strange uh?
Great. So if I'm a gamer, will it be unusably slow when I go to organise my photos once every month or so? Or if I use it mainly for music processing, the odd time I have for gaming will be pointless, because I need to play games for two days before it's acceptable?
No...
You won't notice the system performance when indexing, unless you dump 1,000,000 new documents/photos in your User directory, then you might see your HD light a little bit... Moving or organizing index items is INSTANT in Vista, as changes are applied at the time of NTFS operations. This is why Vista's indexing system is considerably faster than Windows Desktop in XP and CONSIDERABLY faster than OS X's search/index system. (Even on my freaking laptop with an 'INDEXED' 500GB hard drive full of documents and photos (about 3 million INDEXED items) there is never any performance lag, ever, and searching is instant. Try throwing this amount of data at OS X and watch it choke...
Let me get this straight: The OS doesn't perform well when it's installed. It gets better at some things when it figures out what things the user does on a regular basis?
No...
The system will run just fine on first installation, just like XP. However part of the technology in Vista 'LEARNS' how applications ask for data, what data they use, how the user loads applications, etc. In this regard, the system DOES GET FASTER by a considerable margin. This is what makes Vista a performance contender.
Go look up PRELOAD for Linux - it is a generic variant of SuperFetch and something the *nix community wants for their OSes too. Still think Superfetch is bad or marketing hype, if so you better tell the Linux community how stupid they are too...
Geesh, go read about caching technology, and the theorical advances that 'need' to be made, and notice that many of the OS engineers talking about 'theorical' ideas are things MS added to Vista, being the first consumer OS with these technologies. And then there are people like you that are slamming these technologies? I suppose you are the same person that would disable Smartdrv on a DOS computer?
A vanilla Vista installation is going to run like a vanilla XP installation, but with the VIsta services overhead. So all the 'performance' optimizing technology does nothing until you at least run the application or game ONE FREAKING time.
Vista also does intelligent asset and texture managemnet in the WDDM via VRAM virtualization, in addition to basic Superfetch HD caching based asset management. There are several layers of what is happening in Vista in addition to SuperFetch, do a Google search and find out for yourself.
I love how you can twist a new technology that can improve application performance 6x on AVERAGE to somehow be a bad thing...
After installing SP1, performance will initially be reset as all prefetch and superfetch optimizations are recalculated after installing SP1. To properly evaluate SP1 performance of Vista, the system must be used for a day or two so that Vista can once again assess the user's habits and software's data and load sequences.
So just like Vista RTM, if you try to benchmark the improved caching, load times, application performance, etc you need to actually USE the system for a day or two so that Vista can learn how to optimize applications that gives Vista the application and load time performance increases over a day one install or a standard XP installation. The same is true for SP1, as this information is discarded to work with the updated code in SP1 so it created new again.
This information was provided by Microsoft during the SP1 beta, and sadly, many of the review sites and people performance testing SP1 have NOT done this.
Sadly most Vista RTM or SP1 reviews are of a day one installation of Vista with no real world usage to optimize the applications with regard to prefetch, cachcing, and memory allocation (which now even includes GPU performance because of the GPU virtualization in Vista).
So as you read any reviews of Vista RTM or Vista SP1 performance reviews, check to see if they are using 'clean' day one installs, or have been using the machine for a couple of days so that it is able to use the intelligence in the caching and prefetching systems to speed up the OS and applications.
A day one Vista install with newly loaded benchmark software or applications compared to a Vista system running for a few days and the user actually running the benchmarks or applications during that time frame is up to a 20x performance difference in load and application performance times, and at the very least Vista's application and performace times are usually about 6x XP or a Day One Vista install.
Additional side note: SP1 also has many multi-user improvements that are not widely known or mainstream issues, so people that use Vista in Domains/Workgroups, or even at home with multi-users on the same system will see shared resources used more efficiently.
Most of us can say phpBB or even the 1000s of php based 'pre-packaged' web sites out there are disasters waiting to happen. Either being poorly coded, not keeping up to date with the latest patches or able to use the current secure versions of PHP, etc.
The problem here is most of the people using this software has limited HTML/Web programming skills and find these as easy solutions to what they want, a site for their MMO Clan, their band, etc.
These packages are not only presented as free and easy, but safe because they are built on non-MS technologies, which is where the anti-MS FUD actually hurts the Web and consumers.
In contrast, if these projects were built on ASP for pre-processing instead of PHP, they wouldn't break with each security update as often happens in PHP land, and unlike PHP, ASP stays updated and has proven to be highly secure. The kicker with mainstream ASP is it requires an IIS server and Windows server is not always cheap or the cheapest hosting solution for these same users.
I am hoping that MS's interest in help PHP to play nice with Windows 2008 IIS even better, that as MS is able to quality check PHP code used through IIS, that MS's automation security investments will pay back to even the PHP world, as potential security risks would be something that is now also in Microsoft's interest to publish back to the PHP group.
I know this isn't saying PHP is inherently insecure, we are talking about phpBB and similar products, but if they can get into a cycle of consistent security minded models and staying current with PHP updates without having to worry about applications breaking it will make a big difference.
Developing for PHP and/or working with pre-built PHP applicaitons, I have watched developers spend the majority of their time working around bugs in the applications or in PHP itself. Where an ASP developer there are very few known problems that have to be coded around and they also don't have the hours of ensuring version matching to make the application work like you end up doing with PHP pre-built apps.
This is one area where ASP gets a nod, as keeping the versions up to date is seamless, and applications and sites designed around ASP simply don't break even with the most massive updates.
I am probably the only one on slashdot who uses Vista AND likes it.
Probably not...
SlashDot was a great place of news and commentary from 1997 to about 2001. You could comment with industry movers in the FOSS world and discuss high minded concepts.
Sadly, then like when the Web was invaded by AOL, so was SlashDot by everyone's computer genius child that had just ripped WinME off their parents computer and managed finally to get a version of Linux to load successfuly. Welcome to the 98% of the new SlashDot crowd.
Sadly, most of them have grown up and still don't realize that WinME was considered crap even by Microsoft, and there is a huge technilogical difference between DOS with a 32bit Environment and NT. Heck, most don't even realize that Vista is NT or why that is a good thing.
Sadly what you find here is an interesting article or two and the rest is pretty much M$ Sucks and *nix pwns all now. But that doesn't mean that some of us 'old timers' aren't still around and are still paying attention to technology.
I am personally somewhat OS agnostic in the religious war, but have admiration for technology in almost every OS, and in this regard Vista has some OS engineering that is quite impressive. I also believe that for 99.9% of the people running XP out there, Vista is a much better OS on many levels. Even for some Linux, or OS X users, Vista would be a better OS for them if they ever got past the 'MS $ucks!' mentality.
3 BSODs? You might want to call Dell, unless you were installing a driver or something you knew was flaky, even one is considered abnormal, especially if the Diagnotic system doesn't have an answer or solution for a bad driver that is known. Also with Vista, considering you can rip out a video card and put it back in while it is running and not BSOD the OS, if Vista is having a problem this frequent you have a bad piece of hardware or a really bad low level driver. Don't just assume this is normal, call Dell and don't let them pass the blame. Stability is something Vista does do very well.
The UAC blackout thingy actually wrecks havoc with multi screen setups and DirectDraw applications. Or at least, it did for me
Video Driver - Update your video driver from ATI or NVidia even if you have to use www.laptopvideo2go.com to get the inf for newer drivers than your mfr provides.
The UAC 'blackout thingy' is changed is SP1 and can be turned off. (It basically locks the UI, so another app can't try input device trickery to confirm a UAC prompt, which can be done on other OSes like OS X. It is just about how much security you think you need or are willing to deal with the extra steps to have it.) You can also open the policy editor and give yourself and other admin level accounts silent elevation, which leaves UAC on and other non admin level users are still prompted for a password.
designed from the beginning around animation (since that's all that Flash did back when it was first introduced) is a "hack on hack of a animation scripting language
You take offense and then argue and repeat EXACTLY my argument not even realizing you are arguing my point.
There is more to XAML and SilverLight than Animation, and combined with additional languages like JScript and native C#/VB, etc it is a full range environment.
ActionScript was originally a 'scripting' ONLY language and has been 'hacked' and 'hacked' to try to be more THAN ANIMATION in terms of trying to provide an application framework. This is why it is a hacked animation scripting language pretending to be an application language, when it was DESIGNED for animation scripting, and outside of animation scripting is nothing but hacks upon hacks.
So I agree with you, but you don't get it, and think it is a good thing that ActionScript is a native animation language hacked to try to do UI, media, and application programming.
If you don't get this basic concept or even the fact you are arguing what is wrong with ActionScript as being 'good' then there is no reason to even try to respond to rest of your post point by point.
Silverlight is not perfect, but it is better designed to fit into today's web design constructs. It also has a strong design background, as it is a subset extension of the Vista WPF framework, that is far more rich than even the best PDF or press page description concepts, let alone competing with cute animations on the Web.
You can't bill Flex and Flash as even close to Silverlight in functionality unless you stick exclusively to simplistic animation properties, and there are very few that Flash has any advantage.
When my designers export their SWF project and half the animation layering is rasterized in the SWG, or the bit code of the file format does incredibly stupid things like support drawing constructs of line/left-fill/right-fill types of processing, it is time for Flash to pony up and kill the legacy crap and define a 'real' graphical animation UI platform, or just become graphical animation and leave it at that.
(Go look up SWF to XAML converters, the process is insane as the way Flash handles basic graphical drawing and animation, when the same concepts in XAML (Silverlight) are so simple and light it show how 'old' the animation concepts Flash uses internally and how Flash is aged kludge.)
Then go look at PHP and ASP and AJAX interoperability that is just native to Silverlight and you don't have to dive into XML Remote Connectors, AMFPHP, or other solutions for dealing with binary image stuctures of Flash. Silverlight could provide a simple XAML based interface, graphics, and animations and dynamically be changed via PHP or ASP without any code even existing for the Silverlight Interface, truly as easy and can even be worked like a right CSS site, that can change the entire look on the fly with simple stylesheet changes, and yet you are changing a complex animated drawing and RIA UI that is extremely light and no actionscript, hacks or remote ties ins to change any and all elements, behaviors, etc.
Finish off your trip with indexing and bot/crawling problems with Flash, that is a concept designed into Silverlight so that Google and other search engines see Silverlight content as easily as basic HTML and don't have to try to decode strings and tag resources inside a Flash binary.
Flash needs to completely retool to catch up on these very simple things that have KEPT it from becoming a viable RIA for the web that Silverlight looked at and was designed specifically to fit into the XML/HTTP world seamlessly with endless amounts of integration possibilities from pre-processing to client side communication.
Flash isn't junk, it just has not yet addressed some of the major aspect that keep hard core developers from adopting it in situations it should have been ruling 5 years ago. Even look at most SlashDot users, they hate Flash for t
I don't see how can you reach the conclusion that Vista is faster for actual gaming, based in those links.
Well those links weren't to showcase FPS advantages of Vista, there are tests out there on hardware and gaming review sites that show some games like Oblivion for example to push 20% faster than XP in most test senarios. This is dramatic and opens the box of 'what is' possible with some WDDM/Vista optimization.
Tests are hard to reign in, as you will find some sites use canned tools, some use canned portions of a game to be more real world, yet none are entirely accurate in the scope of user experience, or variance in the product to product marriage that is consistent in the PC world of 1,000,000 hardware variations. Take a new ATI card and put it in 10 different mainboards, on 4 of them, it will beat NVidia, and 6 of them it will lose and sometimes lose horribly in most games and tests.
So it comes down to what you say as a gamer and 'your' experience is what counts. Well you are reading online tests only, you don't know what 'your' experience is or will be. Take an hour, make a dual boot setup for XP and Vista and see what you can get out of both based on your personal knowledge of the games and testing.
With regard to this suggested challenge, our internal techs 9 to 10 prefer Vista for gaming, espeically after the performance growths in the Vista drivers from both ATI and NVidia from June-Sept 07 timeframe when MS went to both companies and worked to get optimizations more in line with how WDDM works instead of thinking like XPDM or even single application GPU usage performance profiling.
I also notice you are disregarding a major aspect of the gaming tests from even the links I provided.
As for Vista being faster at gaming, there is more to gaming than just FPS. Losing even 5% FPS is losing less than two (2) FPS when a game is stuck at a 'low' 30fps. This is OUTSIDE the human ability to fully notice a 5% FPS difference. And when you take this to modern gaming where 60-100fps is normal, 2-5FPS at these rates is virtually non-existent.
So lets take 'only' the tests from the links I posted, you are losing 5 or lets even say 10% FPS on average. Yet your game runs smoother because there is less HD bottleneck, you can run massively higher quality textures with Vista's WDDM VRAM virtualization system, and also push higher levels of AA without any FPS loss beyond the base 5-10% range.
Would you give up 2-5 fps in a game so that you could run with 4x AA and Ultra High Textures vs XP with 2x AA and Medium or High Textures? Most games would without question, and this is just ONE area the WDDM in Vista outshines XP in terms of what resources it makes available to games and the GPU.
This is also contextually talking about ANY 3D application not just DirectX10, as the WDDM in Vista works across all OpenGL and DirectX equally, meaning that GPU RAM Virtualization and GPU scheduling are handled at the OS level even for a very old 3D game from 10 years ago, so even OLD games get a performance, or quality boost in Vista because of the WDDM, and it is not dependant on just new games.
There is also the 'multi-tasking' aspect of the WDDM and the way Vista can handle multi and multi-core GPUs, as well as schedule single GPUs across several 3D applications. Vista WDDM essentially gives the OS pre-emptive scheduling control of the GPU as well as managing RAM assets.
For people playing single games this will not always add benefit, but if you are running the game in a Window under the 3D Aero composer (as the example of my Tech playing CoX) it does matter as both Aero and the game assume they have 100% control of the GPU 3D operations and assets and technically neither do, Vista does. This is why the game's FPS doesn't drop to horrible numbers. In fact, you run multiple instances of several games at the same time inside Windows on Vista, you will lose surprising few FPS in each game because of Vista multi-tasking the GPU between the applications with
Not really, OpenGL and DirectX have always been more than competitive.
Also OpenGL technically benefits MORE from the new WDDM in Vista because of the RAM allocation system and GPU scheduling as the OS handles all these details for OpenGL and OpenGL applications.
The ICD still has to be optimized to pass through and work with the new Vista WDDM model, so as Vista was first released to now, just like with DirectX - OpenGL on current drivers is considerably faster than the horrid RTM drivers from both NVidia and ATI for Vista.
Right now in MOST circumstances, even games running in an Aero Window, they are running faster under Vista than XP, no matter if they are OpenGL or DirectX.
One game a technician here plays is City of Heroes, that is a hybrid DirectX/OpenGL application (see NCSoft for more details), the tech runs the game inside a Window with Aero active, as it is 10% faster than running it full screen, which turns off Aero's composer. Why the improved performance with Aero is unknown, but measurable and a testament to the speed of how Aero is implemented with the shared device context and texture methods it uses instead of dual memory or double buffering like you find with Linux or OS X.
I personally have more regard for DirectX because of being involved with SGI and the 90s OpenGL specifications, where MS couldn't force the OpenGL participants to move to 3d Hardware gaming type constructs, even after writing a few test specifications for OpenGL. If OpenGL would have had a better view of the future, there would have NEVER been DirectX as MS wanted to be a big OpenGL proponent.
I think OpenGL shot themselves and a lot of users in the head with their closed minded moves, and if it hadn't been for the gaming movement of Linux when 3D acceleration was becoming a normal aspect of computing, OpenGL to this day might have disappeared or remained a 'high brow' 3D specification that didn't want to dirty their hands with more direct 3D hardware support or features condusive to gaming.
Anyway, check out the link, there are several posted about OpenGL performance on Vista in the past few months comparing both it and DirectX to various situations and XP, showing that the rewriting and optimizataion of the Vista drivers fro NVidia and ATI for the past few months are finally as mature as the XP drivers. (Which isn't too bad considering they were written from scratch late 2006, with no real world performance or game profiling optimizations that the XP drivers had built on for years.)
Here is another thread a tech here has been following and forwarded to me this morning, since I was reading it right before I flipped to SlashDot, I thought I might as well include it as well, not a concrete study or test, but more of what users are experiencing to their surprise after all the negative Vista vs XP press:
AJAX and Silverlight are not in direct competition. Again, think of Silverlight as a cool new picture/animation element on the page that co exists and works with JScript in the AJAX context even. AJAX is only limited by the standard DOM level html contructs available to it, and sadly there is not a good animation standard with this level of complexity, nor a good drawing standard with this level of complexity, let alone one that has inherent code understanding, accessible objects, and event handling.
(This is where people would go SVG, blah blah... There are so many things SVG can't do that Silverlight can it would take a long ass post to point them out. Think of it like this Silverlight understand vector drawing and bitmaps rendering better than PDF or any other more advanced format, and there is no way SVG can even come close to this, let alone do the animation and other aspects.)
Consider this one simple concept, you can even use Ink natively with Silverlight, something that is both complex and out of reach of anything out there. Imagine a Signature box on an AJAX page that retains the ink level data of the person's signature, not just a line or pixel representation.
Also realize that Google is using some pretty heavy backend lifting for some of their AJAX projects that end up shooting realtime rendered PNG/JPG images to the browser. Even for them it would be far easier, and lighter if they could use the new HD(JPEG) photo format and inherent Vector based RIA instead of hit testing an on the fly rendering bitmap image.
(Lookup the new DeepZoom demonstration control of Silverlight for how this plays out in both bandwidth/speed and user experience, and would not be possible without Silverlight.)
One would expect MSFT to support VC1 as it is their own invention....
Ok, a few points here.
VC1 is usually regarded as the better format, as most BluRay and (past HDDVD) titles use VC1 for quality, size and performance reasons. (Search for VC1 and BluRay)
Yes VC1 is basically WMV v9; however, just because this is Microsoft's codec, does not mean it is bad. Let's refresh people of a couple of concepts here. The early MPEG4 specifications for the 1990s is what Microsoft used to created their MPEG4 codecs which XVid/DivX are DIRECTLY based upon. And a lot of people think DivX/XVid do a pretty damn good job, and don't realize the orginal code and concepts were Microsoft interpretations of the early MPEG4. VC1 and WMV are even more advanced versions of codec research from inside Microsoft and can usually beat most other formats in terms of quality or size.
Additionally, the important part of Silverlight supporting HD and VC1 and WMV is that it ALSO supports multi-cast streaming, so you can have one feed using 800kbps and let 1,000,000 people view it at the same time, still only using 800kbps for the streaming content. Additionally, inherent progressive download streaming is an ability of WMV and therefore silverlight, so a dedicated streaming server is not needed for basic video streaming, unlike Flash.
1) As far as performance in general is concerned, ActionScript 3 is extremely fast. Though I definitely wouldn't say the same about ActionScript 2, it's not fair to compare an old version of Flash against a recent version of Silverlight.
Ok, there is more to performance than the scripting, especially when you are dealing with vector and animation drawing.
The part you also omit for the viewers is that ActionScript 3 is 'faster' which MOST people and sites do not use yet. The older Flash 8 and earlier standards are significantly slower than JavaScript, and this is ALSO not a comparison of the native code speeds of Silverlight that use.NET.
The Flash 8 will remain the industry standard until Flash Lite is brought up to Flash 9 standards, and by that time SilverLight will have just as much of an opportunity to entice developers, especially Windows developers that can take existing code sets and existing WPF/.NET applicaitons and build for Silverlight.
You are also dismissing the importance of Silverlight using 'standard' languages. ActionScript is is a hack on hack of a animation scripting language and in no way compares to even JScript let alone running native C# or even VB code.
2) Flash Player 9 Update 3, which was released in December of last year, supports H.264 and HE-AAC.
Why yes it does, but it still DOES NOT SUPPORT multi-cast Streaming. There is more to HD support than just providing the VC1 codec and rendering it properly, there is the bandwidth and server side issues as well. And again, this is with Player 9 only content as this is the first version of Flash to try to offer accelerated Video playback, something Silverlight already handles easily as it was designed around HD VC1.
) Flex uses a similar XML...
You really need to go look up more about the Flex - Flash confusion people like to add to this argument. The flash format is not as open as you seem to think it is, nor is Flex fully interoperable as well.
4a) Flash has a "rich vector/bitmap based environment"
This is kind of scary... Silverlight also uses Vector/Bitmap etc... Who said it didn't? The key differences here are what is available in terms of drawing and animation abilities. Even with Silverlight 1.0 being a subset of WPF/.NET the drawing and animation abilities are more advanced not only in terms of abilities, but in final quality output, in addition to size of content and client side rendering.
Silverlight is closer to Display PDF in terms of graphical abilities, can you honestly argue that Flash is that advanced with their simplistic rendering of vector and bitmaps that in final output has no concept of layers, and defaults to bitmap rendering to not lose the presentation?
Technically WPF/.NET/Silverlight is even ahead of PDF and Display PDF in several areas, as it is based on the WPF specifications and does understand complex alpha layering and other graphical composition effects that PDF is forced to render to bitmaps to maintain.
5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".
Really? It has low level DOM access, seamless integration, can pass through PHP or ASP filtering as well to be modified, and you can load 30 Flash controls on one page without any performance concerns.
You really don't get this do you?
)6) Have you even looked at what Flash provides lately? ActionScript 3
Again, this is not an argument that ActionScript is horrible, this is an argument that people would rather stick with what they know, like JavaScript, and C#, VB, C++, etc. Even in moving to AJAX models (as Google and the XML11 movement is on) people will not want to abandon JScript or learn a new scripting syntax to deal with page elements.
7) I've not personally experienced performance issues with Flash applications on OS X, but YMMV. Since I don't use Windows
If I were trying to lock people in, I would develop the technology for all popular platforms at first. After it became very popular, I would slowly drop support for platforms other than my own, first Linux, then Mac, then non-IE browsers
Ok, first, lol...
Actually the main reason Microsoft is assisting with the Linux Mono development of.NET and Silverlight for Linux is to help keep it 100% OSS on Linux.
If MIcrosoft developed it themselves, it would be a conflict of licensing issues. However, by MS just 'helping' with the project this ENSURES that it will remain 100% OSS on Linux and can be distributed through any OSS License as the authors see fit.
If they wanted to give and take away as you suggest, then the Linux player for Silverlight would be internally produced, and released as closed source so they could discontinue the project down the road, and instead they are working to keep it 100% FOSS so that it can't be killed by any one party.
Slashdot Mirror
Much faster than selecting the desired search provider in the box at the right.
Faster, maybe, but easier for grandma to use to find something on Ebay instead of doing a google, probably not, especially when IE 7 supports the Open Search specifications and all that makes it pretty easy for grandma to type test and add any search to her dropdown.
Since you threw in a good tip, I thought I would pass one on to you, as this is something you would use more than the average person.
Do yourself a favor and go look up Start++ for Vista.
Then, hit the Windows Key and type "goo donkey", or "weather 99999" to show the weather in 99999. It taps into web, applets, or even acts based on results of a search or Vista virtual search folders.
So like "pa Madoona" plays all the Madonna on your system or "p fire" plays all the songs or groups with "fire" in their name. And if you like the "wp [keywords]" stuff in Firefox you will fall in love with this, as you don't even have to open the browser and results can return in the browser or inside the Vista Start Pane as you like.
It also does all the dictionary stuff that every new Leopard user thinks makes Jobs a god, and also several users have taken the pictures and movies and map concepts that are fashionable web applets/pages and threw them in as well.
It is kind of a cool idea, especially since it is just using off the shelf search, applet, and/or scripting capabilities of Vista. Basic idea, but clever levels of extensibility. It was written by a MS developer in his spare time, but is something MS should seriously looking at making a Vista standard feature.
What restrictions? Not being able to (legally) copy a +20gig hard drive to my file for just the movie content alone?
I had people yell almost the exact same crap at me back in 1995 when I suggested that CDs would also move to this model. Do you still think I was wrong about that too?
I already have 30 movies on the Creative Zen 30gb, in DVD quality - in addition to 200 audio books and thousands of songs. These are NOT huge numbers in terms of HD space available today.
As for the 'restrictions' - Yes Sony was foolish, and criticized by all 'open' advocates for keeping the 'media' restricitons on Blu-Ray, to the point they were willing to give up the support of MS and any alliance with Toshiba at the time, not based on the technology/format, but on how it could be used.
Now that things have finalized, Sony is adding these features to their products, but not allowing others to do this. Fair uh? Glad Blu-Ray won uh? The biggest Movie Studio DRM whores of the century (Sony) and their DRMed up the ass Blu-Ray won. And they did it by selling it to OSS idiots as be 'anti-MS'. And it is the PS3 and SlashDot crowds that bought into it, despite it was against everything they stand for. LOL
You all wish online hd content will be a big thing soon. It's not. the ISPs aren't going to look to kindly on that.
Um, what you don't see to realize is that cable companies are ALREADY providing high capacity bandwidth. Do you think that QAM HDTV or MPEG4 or VC1 cable boxes shoving 1080i to people's TVs is any lighter on bandwidth? There are cable companies ready to shove over 90 Channels in HD in the next year.
One download stream for a user's data modem is going to be negligible compared to the HD content they are already going to be providing.
Another thing you don't seem to get is the size of HD content.
720p in VC1 for a 2hr Movie is around 4GB in size. This is another reason MS said HDDVD and BluRAY were not movie content technologies, but should be pushed as data content technologies. As current DVDs could already host HD Content. (Go look up the WMV HD Version of Terminator 2 from about 5 years ago. HD Content, using WMV/VC1 on a regular DVD.)
So a HD 720p movie can ALREADY fit on a regular DVD, it is the interactivity and additional features of HD content that requires the 25GB disk space. (Just like regular DVDs that don't usually use more than 4GB of space for the older MPEG2 movie Content.)
Next you are missing the point that ISPs in the US are behind the rest of the world. Go visit several countries in Europe, their cell phones are faster than our home connections, let alone most people have 20GB bandwidth to their homes in many countries as 'base'.
(The Telcos were subsidized to provide Fiber to all homes, got their money and tax credits, and didn't ever do this in the United States, the government will eventually force this to happen if the US gets a competent administration.)
The last point you are missing is that HD online distribution is already happening. There are 1000s of HD movie and TV show downloads daily off of XBox Live alone. Let alone the other online Video stores like Vongo and such that are adding HD download content as well. This isn't something that 'will' happen, it is something that is 'happening' , even on 1.5mbps DSL connections, for a lot of consumers, and just because you aren't one of them, doesn't mean it don't already exist and work well.
Spoken like a true window user. If something doesn't work on the first click it must be broken
Spoken like a true *nix developer. Assume the users are willing to edit tons of text configuration files, set permissions themselves, and then provide them with an application that's UI guidelines were outdated in 1995. Oh, and remmove any intelligence from the application or any allowance of intelligence to the OS, because if the OS is smart and improves the abilites of the application, that is bad.
There is nothing wrong with 'pushing the envelope' and making software as automatic and self-repairing as possible.
Sadly as Apple moved to OS X, they didn't spend much time taking their old school System 1-9 ideals an fully incorporating them in OS X. This is why administrating a Windows box or Windows server the need for a CLI or editing esoteric settings/files in various locations no longer exists. The only true GUI based OS that implemented even 'tough' and complex tools management in the GUI is Windows now, and there is nothing wrong with this.
This reminds me of people bitching about NT4.0 leaving the GUI running on Servers, it consumed less than 250kb of RAM and 0 CPU resources, and still was faster than Novell and *nix solutions from the time.
Having easy to use and 'intelligent' software does not always have a performance or usability penalty. Once the *nix developers get this through their heads, and actually take 5 minutes to understand the 'modern' usability concepts that companies like Microsoft are implementing, maybe we can see some good OSS again that does 'rival' commerical software.
As long as we are left with the horrid non-intelligence of software installation, inability to self-repair, and old interface ideas, people will continue to mock OSS software in large scale or consumer environments.
Even the freaking firefox UI is based on 1990s UI principles, and this is the first thing people new to it notice, and go, what the hell is wrong with this company... (Even freaking tabbed browsing form Opera and Firefox was a ripoff of the taskbar 'tab' concept of Windows 95, and since IE opened each browser in a separate window, tabbed browsing looked like old MDI concpets to cutting edge UI designers). People didn't get it, still don't get it, and MS added tabs for these people, sadly reverting UI design back 10 years.
Plus if I want to try a new version and keep the old version that is allowed even encouraged. Try that with IE6, 7, or 8
OS level applications have been the only expection, so your argument is cherry picked, and to this day there are easy ways to install all versions at the same time, even though they are considered OS components.
In comparison, you can have every version of Office installed on a single system at the same time, so to define stuff like this as a 'problem with Windows' is misleading at best.
Most of them just involve deleting the directory they are installed in and unzipping or untaring a new version
And leaving the OS with no knowledge of the application, is a major flaw. The OS should know about applications for document associations, accounting of installed content, interoperability, etc.
The Applications should also not limit themselves to their directory when dealing with settings. This is why OSS software breaks in multi-user and roaming environments. If my user profile can't even keep my settings, bookmarks, etc when moving to another computer in the office, or at a remote office half way around the world, the application is worthless in the business world.
There are levels of automation and intelligence that an OS can and does provide, and yet a lot of OSS developers reject this, and then wonder why corporations pick MS again and again.
Look at Windows 2008 Server and Vista, and how they intelligently work together. There has never been a more simplistic yet rich stuctured client/server pairing in history, and this is why Business will roll them out together
Nice modding...
Obscured racism and sexism gets +5 Insightful.
Nice to see the stereotypes still live on in the SlashDot world as well. Anyone that asserts as fact that women or non-white Americans are automatically 'victim groups' is perpetuating both sexism and racism, and this oddly gets modded up?
Are the readers here really in agreement with this, or do they not 'get' what the person is saying, even though the poster didn't directly come out and use derogatory words beyond 'victim groups'?
the HDi interface for HD-DVD had *nothing* to do with it.
Remember though, this was late in the game. Long after Sony told MS they would not allow off media standardized use of Blu-Ray format. (Which Sony is now going back on for their own products)
Sadly, even to this day, Blu-Ray's interface and specifications are not even finailized or fully implemented, where HD-DVD and HDi by Microsoft were complete years ago now, with predictable and elegant pathways for future features. Blu-Ray looks like a kludge in comparison. Sony is NOT A GOOD software company and even as hated as MS can be, they are a good software company, even if all their products are not perfect.
Sony would have been smarter to 'play along' with the rest of the industry in the FIRST PLACE, and allow off media Blu-Ray licensing and usage. If they don't then Blu-Ray gets completely taken out of the online HD equation, that MS begged and warned them about years ago.
People will have home Video Jukeboxes, just like we do for Music; however, unless Sony drastically changes Blu-Ray licensing and opens the format to allow for 'storage' chances are our Jukebox Video content will be filled with online sources, not Blu-Ray.
What seems to be missed in the HDDVD/BluRay and BluRay winning is that the studios 'liked' the closed licensing of BluRay so content had to stay on the Media, and this is what won the format war, DRM greed from the Media industry, not anything about the format itself. HDDVD was the open format and allowed for backups and non-optical storage, etc...
And strangely, MS's fight for the reduction of DRM is what made them choose HDDVD because Sony wouldn't open BluRay. MS was actually fighting for the consumers on this one, and the industry still shoved them out, and idiots around the world thought BluRay was great because MS didn't want to support it, when it is the DRM of BluRay that MS hated in the first place.
So the industry and DRM and idiots that didn't know better got what they wanted - BluRay won. So now to avoid the Blu-Ray restrictions, your only other option is to buy HD content online. PERIOD.
1) MS Stated YEARS ago that HD Media probably would not be market successful because online accessible content would prevail instead. Today this rings true, as HD sales and Rental on XBox Live is very lucrative and most XBox 360 owners didn't give a crap about HD-DVD because they could already access HD Movie content even before you could easily buy an HD-DVD player.
2) MS specifically SUPPORTED HD-DVD based on both jukebox archiving and online concepts that Sony rejected - BluRay would not add to their specification licensing that would allow content to be used 'off the media' - Strangely this is exactly what Sony is now proposing to do with their PSP converter for BluRay so people can take BluRay content on their PSP. If Sony would have open this licensing in the first place MS would never have supported only one of the HD media formats.
3) MS and Sony are competitors, but MS is NOT HD DVD. If MS wanted BluRay they would put in BluRay, as they already provide and license VC1 to Sony because it is a HD Standard that is preferred even in BluRay content distribution.
4) MS now is going forward with its plans for online content distribution.
This is really not news for anyone that has been paying attention.
Agreed, but I never said that people don't honestly disagree with Hillary or dislike her for other reasons. My assessments were not in just the results of the elections, but also how issues that are purely sexist by nature are handled in the media as if they were 'ok'.
Also, take Texas, she wins the state in private primaries, but in the caucuses she loses considerably, even though they are made up of the same segments of society, near each other. For this large of a discrepancy it would have to be a massive statistical anomaly at best.
When put in a room where you have to pick your candidate in front of your spouse and neighbors, societal pressures and accepted stereotypical attachments come into play. I strongly think caucuses are antiquated and anti-American in their inception, as they force public proof of support, which is strictly forbidden, to the point we can't even film or have witness to our votes in main elections so we can't 'prove' who we voted for to showboat or 'pay back' interests outside of our own.
I'm not even saying the statistical anomaly in Texas is a pure sexist issue, as many of the people in the caucus may have voted for Barack when they were on the fence between the two and didn't want to appear racist. But see again here, people would be more afraid of being painted racist than sexist. It may be as much passion and plain peer pressure as well.
I know growing up as a white male in middle America (Iowa even) that racism and sexism is programmed into a tremendous amount of our basic lives and influences that shape our thoughts that are still as old as slavery or 'rule of thumb' thinking and persist in sly ways. I detest racism and sexism both on principle, but honestly can't say I am free from them, as I don't even fully understand the levels that my life has been indoctrinated by them.
I try to seek them out and identify them, and this makes me a bit more sensitive or aware of these issues, but no more free from them than anyone else raised in this generation.
Generational differences were the topic of Barack's Speech last week, and he was very much on target that many of these issues feather out but don't disappear and it still doesn't break down the divide of generational differences in views. But this applies to sexism as much as it does race, but that aspect of the conversation is being left out, and I think we should be openly addressing it as well while we have the courage.
I guess my main point is that sexism was a larger part of this election cycle than I expected it to be, and back room 'guys' talk even emerged into the mainstream media as 'ok', which I don't understand how they could either A) Be so blind or ignorant to not realize it. or B) Know it is there and not care.
Thanks for the intelligent input on the subject, it is something that is complicated and the more collective thought always helps.
PS As for your preference against a 'Clinton', I have a lot of friends like that feel the same way, although I personally tend to put my support into people that get results and have respectable intelligence, and even if I don't like Hillary or Bill, I would choose their intelligence over a idealist or idiot with set beliefs that their low level of intelligence can't challenge or change. (Barack is also brilliant, so it makes the Democratic primary tough for a lot of people that respect intelligence.)
I don't know enough about Cynthia McKinney to make a comment (I would have to do a Google or wiki to even catch up or remember who she is for sure, and won't discredit this conversation with my admitted lack of knowledge.)
Smart people are more apt to change their minds, or even do the right thing against their personal interests. Bill Clinton was a good example of this on a number of issues, and other 'intelligent' leaders have also represented the power intelligence plays in policy and decision making.
This is why I wasn't a big fan of Gore personally or on many issues, but I respected his intelligence, especially in comparison to Dubya. And Dubya has more than lived up to 'his' level of intelligence and it is still painful to watch.
Thanks again...
two different victim groups
Black and Female are victim groups?
You are a myopic ignorant fuck, now aren't you...
Poll after poll has one consistent trend; people still find passive sexism normal and acceptable.
If you want the media, from the SNL skit to even hard topics the past weeks, the media is very afraid of walking the racism line (except FOX that might as well wear white hoods).
However the media isn't as afraid of walking the sexism line and even pander to sexist tendencies that are instilled in Americans to the point they disappear from perception.
The media shouldn't be as afraid of race as they are, even Barack pushes this issue and says we need a more open dialogue to help in breaking down the latent fences that are still left in portions of the country and in portions of people's minds that have been indoctrinated by it their entire.
We need the media to realize this about sexism as well, and reopen that dialogue as well. I met a student on her way to becoming a constitutional lawyer just last year, and she even had sexist ideals that made her believe Hillary being a woman disqualified her. And in other aspects of life this person is smart, liberal even, and wants to be a federal judge. Anyone else find that mouth dropping that conflicted 'beliefs' like this still exist?
Sadly though, if you are sensitive to sexist tones, remarks, etc - you like me would be horrified with the current election cycle and how little progress has been made in this regard.
There are an enormous amount of items from this primary that I take issue with from the press to the other presidential candidates regarding sexism. We are still in the 60s and 70s with regard to sexism, and sadly people are more PC so it is just more hidden.
From the press pointing out how 'emotional' Hillary is, but when other canidates did the same thing, it was candor and 'emotional' was never used. There are too many of these examples to note.
Anyway, I truly had hoped Americans had come further with regard to sexism, and the ignorance associated, and sadly the IT world isn't any better. You would think that the IT world would respect Intelligence and stop to realize on average Woman run 20% smarter than men, and the highest IQ goes to women, beating the highest male IQ by almost 40 points. But I guess if geeks like to look at dumb blondes and boobs, maybe this is all they will think of when crossing the issue of the gender differences.
In contrast to the Democratic candidates, McCain is a tool. McCain lost all conservative respect when he started supporting the Bush admin economic policies, even though he had voted against most of them.
McCain may be from Arizona, but he doesn't have the disciplined principles that Goldwater did.
(This is where I recommend any of the last 3 John Dean books for Republicans/Conservatives/Anyone to read that think the current party is either conservative or believes in smaller government. In addition to being in the middle of the Nixon administration, Dean was a friend of Goldwater and Conservatives WIHTOUT a Conscience is a book they started together, as a direct response to the movement of the party from Reagan to Newt and how horribly off track Goldwater felt they were.)
I like both Hillary and Barack, they have some real principles and 'new' ideas from the horrifying Bush legacy. At this point, I would seriously vote for Colbert before I would Republican for President or Congress. At lesat he knows he's joking. They had 6 years of all Republican controlled government with rubberstamp everything, and it was the largest spending and worst policy period in American History. No more chances for Republicans until their party finds it ideals and real conservatism at its core.
When Intel contributes something beyond a mainboard chipset or a NON IGP based video card, get back to me, until then, they are sucking the life out of the PC gaming market for their own financial interests and are directly hurting consumers by not being honest with them or OEMs being honest about the horrid level of Intel GPU performance.
And then X and Intel's Open-ness keeps getting brought up. WTH?
I don't care how much effort they put into X, as even X itself is being replaced with more modern non-bitmap based versions already, and Intel is DOING NOTHING in these areas that are the future of the X protocol.
Intel = Crap Gaming
Intel = Crap Performance GPUs
IBM was the first company to push accelerated video in the PC market, followed up by low cost solutions from ATI. It was then ATI and S3 that introduced the FIRST 3D acceleration hardware for consumer PCs, NOT INTEL, NOT 3DFX...
The same crap keeps being repeated about how 'helpful' Intel is in the GPU arena, and yet nothing new is provided to support this, other than, 'they have been good to us before, blah blah.'
Go look up Moore's 'Law', Intel Processor release schedules, and collusion... Then come back and explain how wonderful Intel is to the computing world.
Geesh
Sorry. Some of us had 3dFX cards with fully Open 3D a really long time ago, and we didn't like the way that 3dFX got murdered by nVidia, and we're worried about the same happening - through some back-room deal - to Intel's 3D division and ATI's efforts to go open.
Bruce
And you think Intel is your savior? Inventor of HDCP? Inventor of CPUID?
Now I've heard everything...
OpenGL is going to keep 3D open, not Intel. Even Microsoft's DirectX is going to keep GPU manufacturers agnostic when it comes to provided features, not Intel.
Instead of Intel providing at least quality entry level graphics, they have been milking the business and onboard market for years now with more than sub par GPU chipsets.
This is WHAT has continued to make gaming a problem for PCs. Even all Intel chipsets were abolished and every computer had a 'real' dedicated GPU (even an entry level Geforce 6100LE), then gaming could me far more lucrative and standardized on the PC platform.
This has nothing to do with being OPEN, OSes or any other aspect. This is about a hardware company being allowed to cripple a market, along with OEMs that try to makea buck off of computer buyers that don't know better.
Microsoft even has been fighting against this crap for years with OEMs and Intel (Intel don't like MS over this issue, see lawsuits). This is also why MS decided to go ahead with the new WDDM in Vista to shove low level gaming level hardware even into the hands of ALL computer users, sadly Intel pushed back on this and made their crap 950 and newer chipsets that are continuing to water down the market, even though at least they have full hardware PS 2.0 support in the 3100 series FINALLY.
Also when did 3dFX become the Open 3D hero of gaming or the industry? Did I miss the memo back then? Sure NVidia screwed over 3dFX, but its technology was horrid at best in comparison to today's 3D technology. In the timeframe 3DFX died, ATI was aleady getting ready to kick ass.
Remember 3dFX and NVidia said that users didn't need anything more than 16bit 3D bit depth, and performance would not be able to handle 24bit or 32bit Alpha. Then less than two months later ATI introduces their Rage series which not only did full 32bit Alpha bit depth but was several times faster than 3dFX and NVidia technologies. If we would have been left to the 'awesome' 3dFX, who knows how limited gaming technology would be, especially if they were willing to insist on secondary acceleration and 16bit level bit depth technologies. Holy Cow...
You can't get much more open than OpenGL, and their support is virtually on par with DirectX and NVidia's code engine. NVidia isn't going to strong arm anyone here, as they no longer have to deal with just ATI or Intel, but the OpenGL group AND Microsoft.
Again, this is scary. Intel has a horrible track record when it comes to standards, horrible track record when it comes to consumers, and a horrible track record when it comes to GPU technology.
CPUs they do fine, but keep everything artificially in the economic Moore's law, GPUs on the other hand they suck the life out of the PC industry... (Even Apple has fallen for their idiotic standards with SSE2/SSE2 video optimizations in the Core of Leopard, which completely suck in terms of comparative performance. Apple would have been smarter to use OpenGL at core level instead, but no, they lock themselves to Intel and deliver crap video performance in return for Quartz Desktop.)
Don't forget that several generations of Intel GPU chipsets use CPU operations to function fully.
Even the big Intel argument for 915 chipset to be 'Vista Ready' and promising Aero(WDDM) drivers, and then realizing there was no way technically to implement this since the 915 chipset shoved too many of the DirectX features though the CPU/SSE instead of handling the opertions inherently.
Intel's bastard stepchildren from the 915 to the current x3100 STILL shove operations though the CPU and use SSE optimization to try to get real GPU performance, and then people wonder why their gaming performance with an Intel base Video card is 10x slower than the cheapest native GPU technolog from ATI and NVidia.
To the GP......
I'm sure Intel does give good X support, but this is because they are a business class company providing business class GPU products that perform horribly outside of an X protocol bitmap world, you know, like with gaming...
Anyone that would argue that Intel GPUs are good for gaming or only perceived as bad because they have good X support and MS doesn't like that, is 'really' digging for a reason to hate MS beyond the normal SlashDot kneejerk response. GP, Microsoft's like of the Intel GPU has nothing to do with how much the Intel GPU technologies SUCK!
I can't believe someone would really be out to defend intel's graphics technology, this is just a bit scary...
1) He claims to be a 3D expert, but for some reason he only worked on the 2D aspects of DirectX while he was at Microsoft. (DirectDraw, etc)
2) His current software and games are very much NOT 3D, so he is commenting on the 3D market why again?
3) His argument about PCs not being good gaming platforms is that they don't contain enough DRM? Truly, go back and read this again. What the hell does he want, a gun pointing a peoples faces if their mouse gets near the rip or copy button?
4) Throughout the article they keep talking about WildTangent Orb, which is a program that competes DIRECTLY with Windows Vista & Windows Marketplace & Games for Windows, in Rating games based on system performance, and providing a consistent expectation for the gamer.
5) WildTangent huh... Ok, anyone that installed this software or has removed it from a friends computer would shudder to think that this guy has any insight when it comes to programming at all, let alone 3D gaming. (WildTangent is borderline Spyware, and the games are kludges, slow, etc.)
6) He thinks DirectX is bad and Vista is bad, but argue that they the best that can be done with 3D gaming. Hmm..
7) He talks about the DirectX hardware abstraction levels and implies DirectX 10 is further from the hardware than previous versions. This is really really inaccurate, as DirectX even opens a new diret pipeline for shoving calculations and physics to the GPU. The only place DirectX 10 is 'further' from hardware is the removal of DirectSound, but this has been replaced in 10.1 with a new hardware layer that is compatible with the new Vista sound subsystem. This stuff makes me think the guy is insane, has a chip or both.
8) His argues about current 3D technology is tricks, but raytracing is real 3D? Um, raytracing is also freaking tricks, especially if you work to get any performance out of it. (And this is just in studio level rendering we are talking about, let alone gaming). Moving raytracing to games or adding it to current 3D technologies would be great, but it is going to take more 'tricks' for good performance and STILL WILL NOT BE REAL 3D, any more than current gaming technologies. He is an expert and yet doesn't understand this? Holy cow...
9) The only thing I can agree with in the article is the portion about onboard Video being a bane to the gaming industry, and Intel being a horrible proponent of bad entry level 3D chipsets that can't even run Flight Sim 98, let alone a current game with more than 15fps.
I think this guys needs to be taken with the grain of salt he deserves.
You realize the whole PC vs Console argument for HIM is because PCs don't have enough DRM to ensure games don't get pirated. His viewpoint on DRM makes Microsoft look like the anti-DRM corporation.
PS Anyone that installed Wild Tangent knows to just run from anything this guy touches. The best thing that happened to Microsoft and DirectX was this guy leaving.
BTW HE DID NOT WORK ON THE 3D ASPECTS of DirectX as much as he would like people to believe, he worked with Direct Draw the 2D portion of DirectX. Strange uh?
Great. So if I'm a gamer, will it be unusably slow when I go to organise my photos once every month or so? Or if I use it mainly for music processing, the odd time I have for gaming will be pointless, because I need to play games for two days before it's acceptable?
No...
You won't notice the system performance when indexing, unless you dump 1,000,000 new documents/photos in your User directory, then you might see your HD light a little bit... Moving or organizing index items is INSTANT in Vista, as changes are applied at the time of NTFS operations. This is why Vista's indexing system is considerably faster than Windows Desktop in XP and CONSIDERABLY faster than OS X's search/index system. (Even on my freaking laptop with an 'INDEXED' 500GB hard drive full of documents and photos (about 3 million INDEXED items) there is never any performance lag, ever, and searching is instant. Try throwing this amount of data at OS X and watch it choke...
Let me get this straight: The OS doesn't perform well when it's installed. It gets better at some things when it figures out what things the user does on a regular basis?
No...
The system will run just fine on first installation, just like XP. However part of the technology in Vista 'LEARNS' how applications ask for data, what data they use, how the user loads applications, etc. In this regard, the system DOES GET FASTER by a considerable margin. This is what makes Vista a performance contender.
Go look up PRELOAD for Linux - it is a generic variant of SuperFetch and something the *nix community wants for their OSes too. Still think Superfetch is bad or marketing hype, if so you better tell the Linux community how stupid they are too...
Geesh, go read about caching technology, and the theorical advances that 'need' to be made, and notice that many of the OS engineers talking about 'theorical' ideas are things MS added to Vista, being the first consumer OS with these technologies. And then there are people like you that are slamming these technologies? I suppose you are the same person that would disable Smartdrv on a DOS computer?
A vanilla Vista installation is going to run like a vanilla XP installation, but with the VIsta services overhead. So all the 'performance' optimizing technology does nothing until you at least run the application or game ONE FREAKING time.
Vista also does intelligent asset and texture managemnet in the WDDM via VRAM virtualization, in addition to basic Superfetch HD caching based asset management. There are several layers of what is happening in Vista in addition to SuperFetch, do a Google search and find out for yourself.
I love how you can twist a new technology that can improve application performance 6x on AVERAGE to somehow be a bad thing...
Performance Side Notes...
After installing SP1, performance will initially be reset as all prefetch and superfetch optimizations are recalculated after installing SP1. To properly evaluate SP1 performance of Vista, the system must be used for a day or two so that Vista can once again assess the user's habits and software's data and load sequences.
So just like Vista RTM, if you try to benchmark the improved caching, load times, application performance, etc you need to actually USE the system for a day or two so that Vista can learn how to optimize applications that gives Vista the application and load time performance increases over a day one install or a standard XP installation. The same is true for SP1, as this information is discarded to work with the updated code in SP1 so it created new again.
This information was provided by Microsoft during the SP1 beta, and sadly, many of the review sites and people performance testing SP1 have NOT done this.
Sadly most Vista RTM or SP1 reviews are of a day one installation of Vista with no real world usage to optimize the applications with regard to prefetch, cachcing, and memory allocation (which now even includes GPU performance because of the GPU virtualization in Vista).
So as you read any reviews of Vista RTM or Vista SP1 performance reviews, check to see if they are using 'clean' day one installs, or have been using the machine for a couple of days so that it is able to use the intelligence in the caching and prefetching systems to speed up the OS and applications.
A day one Vista install with newly loaded benchmark software or applications compared to a Vista system running for a few days and the user actually running the benchmarks or applications during that time frame is up to a 20x performance difference in load and application performance times, and at the very least Vista's application and performace times are usually about 6x XP or a Day One Vista install.
Additional side note: SP1 also has many multi-user improvements that are not widely known or mainstream issues, so people that use Vista in Domains/Workgroups, or even at home with multi-users on the same system will see shared resources used more efficiently.
Most of us can say phpBB or even the 1000s of php based 'pre-packaged' web sites out there are disasters waiting to happen. Either being poorly coded, not keeping up to date with the latest patches or able to use the current secure versions of PHP, etc.
The problem here is most of the people using this software has limited HTML/Web programming skills and find these as easy solutions to what they want, a site for their MMO Clan, their band, etc.
These packages are not only presented as free and easy, but safe because they are built on non-MS technologies, which is where the anti-MS FUD actually hurts the Web and consumers.
In contrast, if these projects were built on ASP for pre-processing instead of PHP, they wouldn't break with each security update as often happens in PHP land, and unlike PHP, ASP stays updated and has proven to be highly secure. The kicker with mainstream ASP is it requires an IIS server and Windows server is not always cheap or the cheapest hosting solution for these same users.
I am hoping that MS's interest in help PHP to play nice with Windows 2008 IIS even better, that as MS is able to quality check PHP code used through IIS, that MS's automation security investments will pay back to even the PHP world, as potential security risks would be something that is now also in Microsoft's interest to publish back to the PHP group.
I know this isn't saying PHP is inherently insecure, we are talking about phpBB and similar products, but if they can get into a cycle of consistent security minded models and staying current with PHP updates without having to worry about applications breaking it will make a big difference.
Developing for PHP and/or working with pre-built PHP applicaitons, I have watched developers spend the majority of their time working around bugs in the applications or in PHP itself. Where an ASP developer there are very few known problems that have to be coded around and they also don't have the hours of ensuring version matching to make the application work like you end up doing with PHP pre-built apps.
This is one area where ASP gets a nod, as keeping the versions up to date is seamless, and applications and sites designed around ASP simply don't break even with the most massive updates.
I am probably the only one on slashdot who uses Vista AND likes it.
Probably not...
SlashDot was a great place of news and commentary from 1997 to about 2001. You could comment with industry movers in the FOSS world and discuss high minded concepts.
Sadly, then like when the Web was invaded by AOL, so was SlashDot by everyone's computer genius child that had just ripped WinME off their parents computer and managed finally to get a version of Linux to load successfuly. Welcome to the 98% of the new SlashDot crowd.
Sadly, most of them have grown up and still don't realize that WinME was considered crap even by Microsoft, and there is a huge technilogical difference between DOS with a 32bit Environment and NT. Heck, most don't even realize that Vista is NT or why that is a good thing.
Sadly what you find here is an interesting article or two and the rest is pretty much M$ Sucks and *nix pwns all now. But that doesn't mean that some of us 'old timers' aren't still around and are still paying attention to technology.
I am personally somewhat OS agnostic in the religious war, but have admiration for technology in almost every OS, and in this regard Vista has some OS engineering that is quite impressive. I also believe that for 99.9% of the people running XP out there, Vista is a much better OS on many levels. Even for some Linux, or OS X users, Vista would be a better OS for them if they ever got past the 'MS $ucks!' mentality.
3 BSODs? You might want to call Dell, unless you were installing a driver or something you knew was flaky, even one is considered abnormal, especially if the Diagnotic system doesn't have an answer or solution for a bad driver that is known. Also with Vista, considering you can rip out a video card and put it back in while it is running and not BSOD the OS, if Vista is having a problem this frequent you have a bad piece of hardware or a really bad low level driver. Don't just assume this is normal, call Dell and don't let them pass the blame. Stability is something Vista does do very well.
The UAC blackout thingy actually wrecks havoc with multi screen setups and DirectDraw applications. Or at least, it did for me
Video Driver - Update your video driver from ATI or NVidia even if you have to use www.laptopvideo2go.com to get the inf for newer drivers than your mfr provides.
The UAC 'blackout thingy' is changed is SP1 and can be turned off. (It basically locks the UI, so another app can't try input device trickery to confirm a UAC prompt, which can be done on other OSes like OS X. It is just about how much security you think you need or are willing to deal with the extra steps to have it.) You can also open the policy editor and give yourself and other admin level accounts silent elevation, which leaves UAC on and other non admin level users are still prompted for a password.
Good luck.
designed from the beginning around animation (since that's all that Flash did back when it was first introduced) is a "hack on hack of a animation scripting language
You take offense and then argue and repeat EXACTLY my argument not even realizing you are arguing my point.
There is more to XAML and SilverLight than Animation, and combined with additional languages like JScript and native C#/VB, etc it is a full range environment.
ActionScript was originally a 'scripting' ONLY language and has been 'hacked' and 'hacked' to try to be more THAN ANIMATION in terms of trying to provide an application framework. This is why it is a hacked animation scripting language pretending to be an application language, when it was DESIGNED for animation scripting, and outside of animation scripting is nothing but hacks upon hacks.
So I agree with you, but you don't get it, and think it is a good thing that ActionScript is a native animation language hacked to try to do UI, media, and application programming.
If you don't get this basic concept or even the fact you are arguing what is wrong with ActionScript as being 'good' then there is no reason to even try to respond to rest of your post point by point.
Silverlight is not perfect, but it is better designed to fit into today's web design constructs. It also has a strong design background, as it is a subset extension of the Vista WPF framework, that is far more rich than even the best PDF or press page description concepts, let alone competing with cute animations on the Web.
You can't bill Flex and Flash as even close to Silverlight in functionality unless you stick exclusively to simplistic animation properties, and there are very few that Flash has any advantage.
When my designers export their SWF project and half the animation layering is rasterized in the SWG, or the bit code of the file format does incredibly stupid things like support drawing constructs of line/left-fill/right-fill types of processing, it is time for Flash to pony up and kill the legacy crap and define a 'real' graphical animation UI platform, or just become graphical animation and leave it at that.
(Go look up SWF to XAML converters, the process is insane as the way Flash handles basic graphical drawing and animation, when the same concepts in XAML (Silverlight) are so simple and light it show how 'old' the animation concepts Flash uses internally and how Flash is aged kludge.)
Then go look at PHP and ASP and AJAX interoperability that is just native to Silverlight and you don't have to dive into XML Remote Connectors, AMFPHP, or other solutions for dealing with binary image stuctures of Flash. Silverlight could provide a simple XAML based interface, graphics, and animations and dynamically be changed via PHP or ASP without any code even existing for the Silverlight Interface, truly as easy and can even be worked like a right CSS site, that can change the entire look on the fly with simple stylesheet changes, and yet you are changing a complex animated drawing and RIA UI that is extremely light and no actionscript, hacks or remote ties ins to change any and all elements, behaviors, etc.
Finish off your trip with indexing and bot/crawling problems with Flash, that is a concept designed into Silverlight so that Google and other search engines see Silverlight content as easily as basic HTML and don't have to try to decode strings and tag resources inside a Flash binary.
Flash needs to completely retool to catch up on these very simple things that have KEPT it from becoming a viable RIA for the web that Silverlight looked at and was designed specifically to fit into the XML/HTTP world seamlessly with endless amounts of integration possibilities from pre-processing to client side communication.
Flash isn't junk, it just has not yet addressed some of the major aspect that keep hard core developers from adopting it in situations it should have been ruling 5 years ago. Even look at most SlashDot users, they hate Flash for t
I don't see how can you reach the conclusion that Vista is faster for actual gaming, based in those links.
Well those links weren't to showcase FPS advantages of Vista, there are tests out there on hardware and gaming review sites that show some games like Oblivion for example to push 20% faster than XP in most test senarios. This is dramatic and opens the box of 'what is' possible with some WDDM/Vista optimization.
Tests are hard to reign in, as you will find some sites use canned tools, some use canned portions of a game to be more real world, yet none are entirely accurate in the scope of user experience, or variance in the product to product marriage that is consistent in the PC world of 1,000,000 hardware variations. Take a new ATI card and put it in 10 different mainboards, on 4 of them, it will beat NVidia, and 6 of them it will lose and sometimes lose horribly in most games and tests.
So it comes down to what you say as a gamer and 'your' experience is what counts. Well you are reading online tests only, you don't know what 'your' experience is or will be. Take an hour, make a dual boot setup for XP and Vista and see what you can get out of both based on your personal knowledge of the games and testing.
With regard to this suggested challenge, our internal techs 9 to 10 prefer Vista for gaming, espeically after the performance growths in the Vista drivers from both ATI and NVidia from June-Sept 07 timeframe when MS went to both companies and worked to get optimizations more in line with how WDDM works instead of thinking like XPDM or even single application GPU usage performance profiling.
I also notice you are disregarding a major aspect of the gaming tests from even the links I provided.
As for Vista being faster at gaming, there is more to gaming than just FPS. Losing even 5% FPS is losing less than two (2) FPS when a game is stuck at a 'low' 30fps. This is OUTSIDE the human ability to fully notice a 5% FPS difference. And when you take this to modern gaming where 60-100fps is normal, 2-5FPS at these rates is virtually non-existent.
So lets take 'only' the tests from the links I posted, you are losing 5 or lets even say 10% FPS on average. Yet your game runs smoother because there is less HD bottleneck, you can run massively higher quality textures with Vista's WDDM VRAM virtualization system, and also push higher levels of AA without any FPS loss beyond the base 5-10% range.
Would you give up 2-5 fps in a game so that you could run with 4x AA and Ultra High Textures vs XP with 2x AA and Medium or High Textures? Most games would without question, and this is just ONE area the WDDM in Vista outshines XP in terms of what resources it makes available to games and the GPU.
This is also contextually talking about ANY 3D application not just DirectX10, as the WDDM in Vista works across all OpenGL and DirectX equally, meaning that GPU RAM Virtualization and GPU scheduling are handled at the OS level even for a very old 3D game from 10 years ago, so even OLD games get a performance, or quality boost in Vista because of the WDDM, and it is not dependant on just new games.
There is also the 'multi-tasking' aspect of the WDDM and the way Vista can handle multi and multi-core GPUs, as well as schedule single GPUs across several 3D applications. Vista WDDM essentially gives the OS pre-emptive scheduling control of the GPU as well as managing RAM assets.
For people playing single games this will not always add benefit, but if you are running the game in a Window under the 3D Aero composer (as the example of my Tech playing CoX) it does matter as both Aero and the game assume they have 100% control of the GPU 3D operations and assets and technically neither do, Vista does. This is why the game's FPS doesn't drop to horrible numbers. In fact, you run multiple instances of several games at the same time inside Windows on Vista, you will lose surprising few FPS in each game because of Vista multi-tasking the GPU between the applications with
Not really, OpenGL and DirectX have always been more than competitive.
Also OpenGL technically benefits MORE from the new WDDM in Vista because of the RAM allocation system and GPU scheduling as the OS handles all these details for OpenGL and OpenGL applications.
The ICD still has to be optimized to pass through and work with the new Vista WDDM model, so as Vista was first released to now, just like with DirectX - OpenGL on current drivers is considerably faster than the horrid RTM drivers from both NVidia and ATI for Vista.
Right now in MOST circumstances, even games running in an Aero Window, they are running faster under Vista than XP, no matter if they are OpenGL or DirectX.
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/
One game a technician here plays is City of Heroes, that is a hybrid DirectX/OpenGL application (see NCSoft for more details), the tech runs the game inside a Window with Aero active, as it is 10% faster than running it full screen, which turns off Aero's composer. Why the improved performance with Aero is unknown, but measurable and a testament to the speed of how Aero is implemented with the shared device context and texture methods it uses instead of dual memory or double buffering like you find with Linux or OS X.
I personally have more regard for DirectX because of being involved with SGI and the 90s OpenGL specifications, where MS couldn't force the OpenGL participants to move to 3d Hardware gaming type constructs, even after writing a few test specifications for OpenGL. If OpenGL would have had a better view of the future, there would have NEVER been DirectX as MS wanted to be a big OpenGL proponent.
I think OpenGL shot themselves and a lot of users in the head with their closed minded moves, and if it hadn't been for the gaming movement of Linux when 3D acceleration was becoming a normal aspect of computing, OpenGL to this day might have disappeared or remained a 'high brow' 3D specification that didn't want to dirty their hands with more direct 3D hardware support or features condusive to gaming.
Anyway, check out the link, there are several posted about OpenGL performance on Vista in the past few months comparing both it and DirectX to various situations and XP, showing that the rewriting and optimizataion of the Vista drivers fro NVidia and ATI for the past few months are finally as mature as the XP drivers. (Which isn't too bad considering they were written from scratch late 2006, with no real world performance or game profiling optimizations that the XP drivers had built on for years.)
Here is another thread a tech here has been following and forwarded to me this morning, since I was reading it right before I flipped to SlashDot, I thought I might as well include it as well, not a concrete study or test, but more of what users are experiencing to their surprise after all the negative Vista vs XP press:
http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72298
Just a few quick notes...
AJAX and Silverlight are not in direct competition. Again, think of Silverlight as a cool new picture/animation element on the page that co exists and works with JScript in the AJAX context even. AJAX is only limited by the standard DOM level html contructs available to it, and sadly there is not a good animation standard with this level of complexity, nor a good drawing standard with this level of complexity, let alone one that has inherent code understanding, accessible objects, and event handling.
(This is where people would go SVG, blah blah... There are so many things SVG can't do that Silverlight can it would take a long ass post to point them out. Think of it like this Silverlight understand vector drawing and bitmaps rendering better than PDF or any other more advanced format, and there is no way SVG can even come close to this, let alone do the animation and other aspects.)
Consider this one simple concept, you can even use Ink natively with Silverlight, something that is both complex and out of reach of anything out there. Imagine a Signature box on an AJAX page that retains the ink level data of the person's signature, not just a line or pixel representation.
Also realize that Google is using some pretty heavy backend lifting for some of their AJAX projects that end up shooting realtime rendered PNG/JPG images to the browser. Even for them it would be far easier, and lighter if they could use the new HD(JPEG) photo format and inherent Vector based RIA instead of hit testing an on the fly rendering bitmap image.
(Lookup the new DeepZoom demonstration control of Silverlight for how this plays out in both bandwidth/speed and user experience, and would not be possible without Silverlight.)
One would expect MSFT to support VC1 as it is their own invention....
Ok, a few points here.
VC1 is usually regarded as the better format, as most BluRay and (past HDDVD) titles use VC1 for quality, size and performance reasons. (Search for VC1 and BluRay)
Yes VC1 is basically WMV v9; however, just because this is Microsoft's codec, does not mean it is bad. Let's refresh people of a couple of concepts here. The early MPEG4 specifications for the 1990s is what Microsoft used to created their MPEG4 codecs which XVid/DivX are DIRECTLY based upon. And a lot of people think DivX/XVid do a pretty damn good job, and don't realize the orginal code and concepts were Microsoft interpretations of the early MPEG4. VC1 and WMV are even more advanced versions of codec research from inside Microsoft and can usually beat most other formats in terms of quality or size.
Additionally, the important part of Silverlight supporting HD and VC1 and WMV is that it ALSO supports multi-cast streaming, so you can have one feed using 800kbps and let 1,000,000 people view it at the same time, still only using 800kbps for the streaming content. Additionally, inherent progressive download streaming is an ability of WMV and therefore silverlight, so a dedicated streaming server is not needed for basic video streaming, unlike Flash.
1) As far as performance in general is concerned, ActionScript 3 is extremely fast. Though I definitely wouldn't say the same about ActionScript 2, it's not fair to compare an old version of Flash against a recent version of Silverlight.
.NET.
Ok, there is more to performance than the scripting, especially when you are dealing with vector and animation drawing.
The part you also omit for the viewers is that ActionScript 3 is 'faster' which MOST people and sites do not use yet. The older Flash 8 and earlier standards are significantly slower than JavaScript, and this is ALSO not a comparison of the native code speeds of Silverlight that use
The Flash 8 will remain the industry standard until Flash Lite is brought up to Flash 9 standards, and by that time SilverLight will have just as much of an opportunity to entice developers, especially Windows developers that can take existing code sets and existing WPF/.NET applicaitons and build for Silverlight.
You are also dismissing the importance of Silverlight using 'standard' languages. ActionScript is is a hack on hack of a animation scripting language and in no way compares to even JScript let alone running native C# or even VB code.
2) Flash Player 9 Update 3, which was released in December of last year, supports H.264 and HE-AAC.
Why yes it does, but it still DOES NOT SUPPORT multi-cast Streaming. There is more to HD support than just providing the VC1 codec and rendering it properly, there is the bandwidth and server side issues as well. And again, this is with Player 9 only content as this is the first version of Flash to try to offer accelerated Video playback, something Silverlight already handles easily as it was designed around HD VC1.
) Flex uses a similar XML...
You really need to go look up more about the Flex - Flash confusion people like to add to this argument. The flash format is not as open as you seem to think it is, nor is Flex fully interoperable as well.
4a) Flash has a "rich vector/bitmap based environment"
This is kind of scary... Silverlight also uses Vector/Bitmap etc... Who said it didn't? The key differences here are what is available in terms of drawing and animation abilities. Even with Silverlight 1.0 being a subset of WPF/.NET the drawing and animation abilities are more advanced not only in terms of abilities, but in final quality output, in addition to size of content and client side rendering.
Silverlight is closer to Display PDF in terms of graphical abilities, can you honestly argue that Flash is that advanced with their simplistic rendering of vector and bitmaps that in final output has no concept of layers, and defaults to bitmap rendering to not lose the presentation?
Technically WPF/.NET/Silverlight is even ahead of PDF and Display PDF in several areas, as it is based on the WPF specifications and does understand complex alpha layering and other graphical composition effects that PDF is forced to render to bitmaps to maintain.
5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".
Really? It has low level DOM access, seamless integration, can pass through PHP or ASP filtering as well to be modified, and you can load 30 Flash controls on one page without any performance concerns.
You really don't get this do you?
)6) Have you even looked at what Flash provides lately? ActionScript 3
Again, this is not an argument that ActionScript is horrible, this is an argument that people would rather stick with what they know, like JavaScript, and C#, VB, C++, etc. Even in moving to AJAX models (as Google and the XML11 movement is on) people will not want to abandon JScript or learn a new scripting syntax to deal with page elements.
7) I've not personally experienced performance issues with Flash applications on OS X, but YMMV. Since I don't use Windows
Then you would be shocked
If I were trying to lock people in, I would develop the technology for all popular platforms at first. After it became very popular, I would slowly drop support for platforms other than my own, first Linux, then Mac, then non-IE browsers
.NET and Silverlight for Linux is to help keep it 100% OSS on Linux.
Ok, first, lol...
Actually the main reason Microsoft is assisting with the Linux Mono development of
If MIcrosoft developed it themselves, it would be a conflict of licensing issues. However, by MS just 'helping' with the project this ENSURES that it will remain 100% OSS on Linux and can be distributed through any OSS License as the authors see fit.
If they wanted to give and take away as you suggest, then the Linux player for Silverlight would be internally produced, and released as closed source so they could discontinue the project down the road, and instead they are working to keep it 100% FOSS so that it can't be killed by any one party.