The Windows Classic 9X I would market towards the low end, people with older systems who cannot run modern operating systems
I hope at least in your own mind you were trying to be funny.
The Win9x code base with no security and roots to 3.1 and DOS is why developers have screwed up many applications still in use on XP.
Also consider XP runs well on 80MB and a 200mhz processor (faster than Win95 or Win98 did), it is time to let these computers die, as most Linux distributions won't even run on them.
Reason #188 was their restocking policy, if you buy a defective device and they don't have the exact same one on the shelf, they charge you 15% to change to another brand or model. Such a nice company... (gag)
Seriously CompUSA has become the laughing stock of consumer tech PC industry. If your techs had more background or training, this would not be their response to people, the driver issues would be something they would know the workarounds to, and people getting 10-15fps on and AMD 4000+ is irrelevant, the GPU is what makes or breaks a games performance. So when you are selling systems with on board Geforce 1150 Video, or Intel 945G chipsets, it doesn't matter if they are in XP or Vista, Video performance is going to suck in games. PERIOD.
In our labs any Geforce 5200 or ATI 9600 or higher system do great under Vista and with the latest drivers in almost EVERY game out perform XP 5-10%, let alone the speed increases in multi-tasking the games and load times. Here is the trick, to beat XP performance, the system need 1GB of RAM. PERIOD. This is not a huge jump, as 90% of gamers have had 1GB in their systems for a couple of years now.
So considering that a Geforce 5600 and ATI 9600 are SEVERAL years old and AT THE BOTTOM of what is required for 99% of games made since 2002, there is no reason that people should continue to believe Vista takes high end hardware for good graphics and YES all the Glass Eye Candy.
Vista with only 512mb will run as fast as XP for general business applications, games being the exception since most games load in at 700-800mb...
If people are serious about Vista and don't know where to start, even freaking BestBuy has a track record with trained personnel for the Vista launch. They have the tech teams that usually have the 'right' answers and even their PC sales teams understand Vista enough to answer most people's questions on why Vista is better beyond common marketing hype.
For almost 10 years, the lock on OSes to hardware with companies like Dell has not been mandated by MS, and finally we see one of these companies stepping up to the plate and doing the right things.
The Windows and or OSes tied to hardware are for pure support cost reasons at this point with companies like Dell/HP/etc.
Even prior to the dissolving of MS only contracts, any hardware company had the choice to not buy into an exclusive package from MS and pay the $5/10 bucks more per copy. And even though MS took the flack for this, it was not an uncommon model in the software/OEM industry and it was also something that the greed of OEMs were eager to take advantage of to the loss of their customers.
I was part of a fairly large OEM company during this timeframe, and we chose not to save the $5 a copy on OEM Windows, and still maintained a great relationship with MS even still we sold naked and *nix preloaded on many systems.
Sure we could have signed a bundling deal, just like we were offered by Corel and even IBM in the early years for OS/2, however saving a couple of $$ per Windows system was less important than providing our customers what they wanted.
So Kudos to Dell for finally stepping up and taking responsibility for the product they are selling...
From my perspective as developer of both real-time data acquisition systems and graphical user interfaces, I would say that it is difficult to make Windows do anything "useful". At least, it's often way more difficult than it ought to be. And no, I'm not a god, but there are times when I sit at my workstation and wish that I was.
Well, I would buy your argument, but one of the main reasons Windows was as successful as it was in the development world in the early 1990s was based on the fact it was the most centralized and easiest OS to develop for at the time.
This includes the largest and most encompassing abstracted driver support for developers, making the concepts of Video, Sound, and Printing an agnostic concept for developers.
Windows is like the melting pot of development, in that anyone that can drag a textbox on a form can write an application and someone with a beginners knowledge can easily mimic what was seen as complex applications of the late 80s and early 90s rather easily.
I'm not saying that the VB mentality of Windows development is always a good thing, but it allows simple IT people to knock out functional software that meets their particular needs.
I can remember working with EDS several years back and they designed a full set of assembly-line diagnostic tools for GM/Delco using VB. This was a fairly complex and large scale project that they were able to bring to testing in a matter of weeks.
And although it was not a realtime system in the true sense, it did provide realtime features that met their plant's needs quite well. So next time you turn up your Bose sound system in a Vette, you might want to give a shout out to Windows and VB.
This would be far easier to debate if the standard development tools in other OSes all looked like Kylix and were more agnostic about the variant they were running on.
It's trivial to make fun of Microsoft products, but it takes a real man to make them work, and a god to make them do anything useful.
Wow, that is so insightful. This means that everyone here that has a grandma checking email with Outlook or Entourage and using MS Word to write letters are Gods? Very Cool!
Also the DOSCALL1.DLL in NT was quite similar to the DOSCALL1.DLL in OS/2 ver 1.3 and I'd imagine that it is similar when comparing the WIN32 DLLs between WIN9x and NT. Naturally this does cause some confusion.
Ya, it does cause confusion, but this is like 15 years ago, and yet people still don't seem to understand, yet people from the timeframe that all this was happening were 'quite' aware.
As for the DLLs these are subsystem DLLs, not NT DLLs. I understand that in the SlashDot world, NT is a bit weird and the concepts of subsystems seem to escape a lot of knowledgeable people.
But people have to understand that Win32 is basically an OS that sits in a subsystem on NT, just as OS/2 1.3 was and the UNIX BSD subsystem MS also ships for Windows.
To say that these DLLS in these subsystems are a part of NT would be like looking at the BSD libraries in the BSD Subsystem that runs on NT and say that NT and BSD are also the same OS. Which is very far from the truth and even sounds crazy for anyone that understands BSD.
I try to suggest to people all the time in my professional realm to take a few minutes and just read the Wiki pages on NT, as they do have some inaccuracies, but for the most part are pretty good at defining what NT is and how the client/server nature of the kernel design inherently allows for the subsystem architecture it supports.
NT cannot be defined by Win32, nor any other subsystem that runs on NT, as ANY of them could be replaced. So it doesn't matter what DLLs or applications are running in the subsystems, they have nothing to do with the NT architecture.
You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2
Actually as an OS Engineer that has spent time working with and tearing both apart, they are very much night and day.
You would have more success in selling OS/2 is the same as BSD.
Here are a couple of things to get you started, and I could point out a few inaccuracies in each of these, but for the most part they will send you down the right path:
Now where you are partially correct. NT started out in the OS/2 3.0 development stages, but by the time MS and IBM split, NT was a start from scratch OS as Dave Cutler thought the OS/2 codebase was horrible.
MS even looked at using *nix concepts in the early days of NT, since it was being written from the ground up, and why MS held on to Xenix at the time in case that is the direction the NT team wanted to go with NT or base it on
However the NT team felt the *nix architecture concepts were too limited and instead decided to take the best OS theories at the time and see if they could truly make a new OS technology.
I get so tired of kids today confusing simple things and I see this crap on here all the time. NT is not VMS, NT was not OS/2, NT and Win95 are not related other than the Win32 subsystem, WinXP does not contain Win9x code, etc etc...
No wonder people think Windows is more of a joke than it already is, if I saw it as a hybrid and hodgepodge of Win9x and OS/2 and NT I would think it was an insane code base too; however, it is not.
It is easy to poke fun at Windows, but when you find real OS engineers, the NT architecture/kernel isn't quite so funny and gets quite a bit of respect even if they hate the Win32 subsystem.
This is not a bad idea, but not a fix for most....
People that run BitTorrents and are having performance issues is NOT always related to a generic NIC.
The fact is that most Torrent clients saturate the entire available bandwidth. So if you are running more than one computer in your house, all internet performance goes to hell on every computer because of one machine running a BitTorrent client.
This card will NOT help people like this, although it make take some of the load off the machine it is attached to. But if your internet bandwidth is STILL being saturated, your online performance is still going to suck with a BitTorrent Client active.
And as others have noted, there are OK mid range NICs out there that don't consume CPU as much as the generic cards, are in the 30-60 dollar range, and with a modern processor from the past two-three years will give you the same boost this NIC will for generic gaming performance.
And with HT and Dual Core technology becoming the norm, even this benefit is reduced considerably.
If anyone has paid attention to the changes in Vista in the network stack and audio stack, you will see a common progression. They both have adapted technology from the 360 development, and are moving toward a model that works better in a multi-core environment than having external hardware assisted technologies as was popular in XP.
In a year or so when quad cores are the basic standard, utilizing a fraction of one core to handle audio and networking is no longer going to be a performance issue, especially with this many cores sitting around waiting to be used. Even the 360 with 3 cores does rather well with pushing the audio and nic processes through one of the cores and still leaves a lot of room for gaming.
So this product is a good idea, but a very Niche product and people with older systems would be better off investing this kind of money into a new MB and CPU.
guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
Yes, but rebooting should not be the option people are using. Go the power management route and do things like enter low power mode, or do a full suspend to disk (hibernate).
Rebooting really should not the solution to using less power, especially with the Power management concepts can be automated based on idle usage, turn themselves back on to run tasks and back off.
I got into this habit from carrying a couple of laptops full time, and it is something I carry over to my personal desktops as well.
People need to just exchange Off with Hibernate in their minds. Even with Windows, which doesn't have bad boot times, it is just easier to tell the system your power button is the hibernate button, and hit it and go on my way. Then turning on the computer is a few seconds and I don't have to worry about what I left running ever. Especially with someone like me that has tons of crap running all the time, including several VMs which I don't have to individually suspend to disk if I were to shut down the computer everytime.
And thank god OSX finally added a true hibernate in 10.4 on their notebooks, cause not having it about drove me flipping insane.
So now that 99% of all OSes have ok power management, rebooting should be a thing of core updates only.
PS The boot times on Linux are really not bad in a default install on most distributions. And people shouldn't take this article as evidence that Linux is slow or sucks at boot times.
However, I do applaud the efforts to improve boot times, and wish there was a bit more generic optimization like people from the Windows world are use to.
Vista for example monitors the last 5 boot times, and will continually adjust disk layout and process order, etc to continue to speed up boot times. There is no reason all OSes couldn't add a generic form of optimization like this.
I also have found memories of Norton, editing partion tables by hand, running Disk Doctor, and Defrag back when they did a good job and didn't screw with stuff it shouldn't touch. Even Norton Desktop on Win 3.1 wasn't so bad as Program Manger replacment and early versions of Norton Anti-Virus software was light, and did a good job.
Today when I see Norton or Symantec, I want to run screaming. They have found ways to be more problematic and invasive for something like simple Virus detection than anyone could imagine. Hence why MS wrote their own low level API interfaces to keep Symantec out of the lower levels of Vista. (McAfee use to be light weight and is just as bad now too.) But Norton and McAfee whined to get around these restrictions by using EU threats, so their Vista versions will continue to be just as scary.
People are probably better off getting the virus than having Symantec screwing up things on the computer all the time. I have watched Norton lock up and shut down people's network, suspend startup times to ridiculous lengths because Norton doesn't understand the DSL login is not yet active, hit a size error on an email and not let the users send anything out of any email application, and degrade system performance as much as 25-50% while just checking EXEs and DLLs.
Anyone with a Windows Computer that has Symantec Norton Anti-Virus or Security Center or McAfee should rip it off immediately and put on something free and lite. Sadly, a lot of systems come with this crap pre-installed, and most users don't realize how much better their Windows experience and performance would be with almost any other solution.
MS has taken the biggest hit and done some of the stupidest things when it comes to enforcing OS security.
Take WinXP, the NT security is rather good, but not enforced so MS screwed their users and let developers cross boundaries by not understanding security. Hence XP started out as a security nightmare to the point MS pulled development on Windows 2003 server to reorganize with a security first model.
Mistakes MS have made in strange ways helped the entire industry, at the very least as an example of 'how not' to do things in an OS. So when IE or XP would get hit with exploit, a lot of these exploits had potential to exist in other OSes and browsers. MS gets the lumps, and everyone benefits to ensure they don't do what MS did wrong.
However, there comes a point when known vulnerabilities decrease rapidly. And this is what is happening here.
1) MS has gotten better about security, better code, better compilers, better implementation. 2) Known categories of exploits are better known now than ever. 3) Apple took some hits this last year with some of their arrogance, their ads were the equivalent of Bush saying 'Bring em on'.
So as all OSes are closing in on an optimal level of security, the amount of problems to be found will continue to decrease. Not only in Windows but all OSes.
Also new general categories of how to exploit computers are found, they will have less of an impact as people are now paying attention, even MS.
Apple will have a few bad months ahead still, as they currently don't have the security focus yet that they need to, because they put too much stake in the BSD foundation but overlook the actual Mac code running on top of it. (Very much like MS was with NT in the 90s, as its security was far above consumer versions of Windows and like OSX immune to many of the 'common' exploits of the time. So just as NT learned its lesson that Win32 needed to be super secure as well, OSX will need to comb through a lot of the upper layers of OSX.)
I do think Apple is is getting this, so just give them a few months or a year and their numbers should be back to the norm for patches and exploits and once again be in line with all other OSes.
The bad news about the capping of exploit concepts is that MS probably will continue to remain competitive with a low number of exploits, just as all OSes are maturing to the same levels of security. This means running MS OSes won't be a security concern in the future, and the advantages of using previously more secure OSes will no longer be a great reason to move from MS to these platforms.
MS was a lot slower than they should have ever been, especially with XP. Vista shows a lot of signs of MS 'getting it' to also help against the social engineering exploits as well as fundamental changes in the way Vista works. XP SP2 did a rather good job of stopping the Windows Security leak in the boat as the number of patches since it was relased have kept decreasing in mass amounts. Also the work from Windows 2003 server security refocus helped XP SP2, as well as made Windows 2003 server the most secure server OS MS ever produced.
And if everyone keeps paying attention, to not only their own OS projects, but exploits found in other OSes, there is no reason everyone shouldn't be able to keep ahead of the curve for the first time in mainstream computing.
You're wrong there. Apple has made it easier by making it act just like an iPod. Millions of people have bought and used iPods; how many millions have bought and used media extenders? Oh that's right... not that many.
The XBox 360 is a Media Extender to the FULL Extent, and there are few million of them out there, and most people I know with them are using them as a Media Extender in one form or another. (PS you can even hook your iPod to the 360 and use the 360's Media interface.)
Also notice that most Windows based PCs, even the budget ones at Walmart ship with the Media Center Edition of XP or Vista. And there are more of them in peoples homes than iPods.
Again define Apple making it easier? Media Extenders hooked to a Windows PC, use the Window Media Interface, which has been very successful in the market as being easy to use in addition to doing many things the Apple TV will not ever do...
But you are correct, if you are an iPod user and have a lot of purchased content from iTunes and don't care about Video Quality, recording your own shows, or viewing real HD Disc or HD IP content, then maybe this is the perfect product for you.
Sadly though this is so limited to iTunes and Apple controlled content. In Vista for example within its media center or via an extender in another room, you can already rent and buy movies online from Vongo, Movielinks, etc. There are 20-30 content providers already, with DVD quality and some adding HD content like is available on XBox Live.
Also note for Cable users, Vista is the ONLY OS that natively supports CableCards for digital programming via Vista Media Center and Vista Media Center extenders, and this includes HD content and other cable provider features. All you have to do is plug the card into a Vista PC and not worry about a separate digital cable box to serve your home for TV.
People seem to either hate MS or Love Apple too much, and don't notice the good things going on in the world that is outside their normal focus.
If my 82yr old grandma can easily use Media Center Windows machines and extenders to record Oprah and rent movies online from her remote control, I'm pretty sure even Mac users could figure it out. But then again, Apple told Mac users two buttons on the mouse was too confusing for their users for years, and their users believed them...
Apple just made a media extender that's actually capable of being used by somebody that doesn't understand home networking, Unix, and codecs. That's about 99% of the target market.
Ok, you apparently miss the part where Media Extenders are PRIMARILY used in Windows environments, on home networks, by non-techie people to watch tv and content in other rooms than their Media Center Windows PC?
They CAN be used in a *nix environment as many of them support standards that *nix also use, but they were PRIMARILY designed to plug into the wall for GRANDMA and let her watch her recorded TV, Movies, etc in another room than where her Media Center PC exists...
Apple has done nothing new here, nor have they made it easier. They just have better marketing apparently if people can be so easily fooled into thinking this is anything new.
I will repeat, the ONLY market for this product that makes sense is someone that has invested a lot of money in iTunes DRMed content...
I understand why a person that has a considerable investment in iTunes content would want one of these devices, but beyond that or a new market is something this is not.
What scares me is that Media Extenders have been around for 4 or 5 years, cost about $100, and do everything this product does and more. Also considering a lot of the Media Extenders are UPnP and various other forms, they are not MS Media Center exclusive and I know people that use them with their *nix servers all the time.
So if you can buy a Media Extender that can watch live TV from your computers, watch recorded content, watch DVDs, watch downloaded content, listen to all your music, watch early forms of IPTV, why on earth you would you buy this product instead and lock yourself into iTunes or iTunes only converted content?
Want to play DIVX, WMV, just buy a Media Extender, even hooking it up to a freaking Windows Media Center computer or Vista will allow you to do all of this, and Vista Media Center Extenders natively support HD video out of the box, in a TRUE HD resolution, something Apple isn't even offering or planning to.
Media Extenders are silent, wireless or wired and can access every storage device, computer or computer based Tuner in your house.
As some have suggested, you would be smarter to spend the money on an XBox 360 which also gives you all these features and you can play a game on it once in a while as well. Again in real HD.
Why is it everyone has seen Media Extenders at Circuit City and Best Buy for years and years now, and when Apple tries to create their 'very closed' version of one, they are seen as doing something new?
How is their marketing team always smarter than the people buying this stuff?
GeForce MX 5500, it would crash every 15 minutes with an infinite loop driver
Ok, did you happen to read the drivers? the 100.xx NVidia drivers DO NOT YET have support for any card lower than the 6000 series of Geforce cards.
Use the non-OpenGL ICD MS drivers in the box, or find the 97.xx or 98.xx series of drivers for the 5xxx series of NVidia cards. If not, the drivers usually lock up, just as you describe.
My Mac Pro has two dual-core 2.66GHz Woodcrests in it, along with three PCI Express nVidia 7300GT's (and one open slot!). Price starts around $2,500.
This is to say nothing of the phenomenal industrial design on the case. I've never seen any other mass-market Intel-based machine that has this level of quality.
If you think Apple has middle-of-the-road hardware, then you haven't been paying attention lately.
Wow, that is impressive, and with a pretty case too. That should make all the people like you that don't know anything computer hardware or performance just drool.
I can't believe that you ran to this post to defend Apple and in doing so, put exact facts of what I was saying.
This is their 'PRO' line even, and it is still at best, middle of the road.
Shall we review for you, and I will be as honest as I can.
CPU: 2 Dual Core Xeon processors...............This is actually good. No complaints.
Video: NVidia Geforce 7300GT 256/mb RAM...............This is horrible, and sad, the 7300s can't even outperform a 2 year old NVidia Geforce 6800 Ultra, as the 7300s are middle to LOW end. It also only has 256mb of Video RAM. This is so, so sad that this is the 'PRO' Mac. This is also the main hardware reason Macs are NOT the best choice for graphic professionals, let alone someone that wants to play games, or edit video, let alone a 3D developer or designer. In contrast middle of the Road to High end PCs come with at least an NVidia 7900 or 7950 in Dual SLI with 512mb of RAM at minimum. It is hard to even buy a non-Apple Notebook that is in the gaming market that doesn't have a MUCH faster video card than the Mac 'PRO' desktop.
RAM: 1GB..............Considering OSX is as RAM hungry as XP at the minimum and closer to Vista, this is what Apple is giving people in their PRO systems? Even UMPC computers are coming with 1GB at base level.
HD: 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive..............Again, middle of the road. In the non-Apple world 10,000rpm Drives is what you find medium to high end computers using. Also, no RAID at this price? In the non-Apple world RAID is pretty common on high end systems, even again in Notebooks.
Again, I will repeat what I said, people that have no clue about hardware or performance think Apple is doing a good job; however, everyone else in the IT world looks at Apple and goes, OMG, that is borderline crap.
Re:Still too much in the kernel
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ReactOS Revealed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
ReactOS still, apparently, has much of the graphics system in the kernel. Along with drivers. It emulates NT 4/2000/XP architecture, not NT 3.51, which actually had a cleaner kernel.
So when they move to mimic Vista's kernel, this will all be moot then...
But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.
Um, you act like an independent OS subsystem is a bad thing. The client/server kernel of NT is WHAT MAKES IT INTERESTING, and also is part of why the NT kernel gets the respect it does in spite of the Win32 shorcomings of Windows. PS You do realize that even Win32 is just 'a' subsystem and could be replaced at anytime?
I know this is a time when bloggers think what they say is important, but these articles were just bloody awful.
Not only does the article contradict itself over and over, the facts it proposes are so out of touch with reality it is scary that people can make themselves believe what they are writing.
Maybe if they spent more time on fact checking rather than making the conclusion fit their ideas, it might have been at least less painful to read.
As other have noted, even the earning numbers from MS and Apple were not only wrong, but so misleading it is in the realm of hyperbole. Not only are the numbers wrong, but they fail to mention 'little' things like the R&D that tends to define a company's market viability and future progression. MS spent more on R&D than Apple made in the last year. And this is R&D money that is for not used in any product development.
Also who in their right mind EVER said the Zune would kill the iPod? Even Apple is having problems selling new iPods because of their own market saturation. It would take years for any company to replace a vast installed user base like this.
Shall we even comment on how the article confuses the Zune with the MS PlaysforSure program? Zune is not a PlaysforSure device, it is something completely different. In the PlaysforSure world, there are a lot of popular devices like the Creative Zen M that do rather well for people that want features over the iPod name.
And the article does briefly mention the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, but then goes on and on how Apple made it fit the market and why it is so great. Then in later paragraphs, the same freaking article talks about how computers introduced into new markets didn't give Apple a surge since they were not Apple markets.
So which is it, a company is good for making their product successful and expanding a market or the numbers don't matter because the new market didn't fit the company as it tries to illustrate with PCs? (This is where the author needs a reality smack upside the head.)
I personally don't care that Creative and iRiver were around a long time before iPod, and Apple basically beat them with a great marketing team, but don't give Apple a handicap in the computer world because they failed to do the very same thing when it comes to PCs.
The only thing this article proves and instills is that Apple is good at selling their products to a technically unaware audience. That is why the 'First 64bit' and other goofy claims from Apple never worked well in the computer world.
Even today, if you want a FAST computer or a FAST laptop, Apple is NOT the brand to buy. The hardware is middle of the road, and OSX is not well known for performance in any areas. However for people that know little about technology, they will continue to pick up users, just as they did with the iPod.
In the computer world the IT and decision makers and even most home users are more in touch with the technology than Apple realizes; hence why they continue to push a computer for the non-technical crowd in a market that is dominated by technical people, and it doesn't work as well as they expect, even if their marketing is better than their products.
Oh, and the claim that Apple OSX 10.4 still runs on 1997 hardware (FTA), this was not only scary but very laughable. Many of the 1997 Macs don't have DVDs, don't even have the ability to have 256-512mb of RAM. So sure in theory it supports a G3, but that doesn't mean it works, or works well.
Vista can run just fine on computers from the same timeframe if you can find one that supports 256-512mb of RAM, there is no difference here.
So since this is an OSS advocacy news site, any word on when we will stop putting up non-credible pro Apple articles? Apple is kind of on the other end of the spectrum from OSS, in fact a bit beyond even MS.
Maybe I should submit a bunch of MS opinion articles, I'm sure they will be accepted. Oh wait,
This is when you and your neighbors within 5-10 miles of each other invest in a T1 line, and distribute good old 802.11 between each other and split the costs.
This isn't rocket science, and can be an easy way to ok bandwidth for everyone with costs lower than cable high speed for people depending on your population density.
I was from a rural area that still has limited high speed, but everyone I know that still lives there has pooled together wireless communities, many even making a business out of it.
Sadly the US does suck when it comes to customer delivered High Speed, too bad people didn't elect Gore(or at least get him in office), someone that wanted to force the Telcos to provide the end user bandwidth they got discounts to provide.
Not all servers are connected to the internet. There are some installations that are so secure they are not remotely accessible by any means. I actually did download win2k sp4 via modem which I then sneakerneted to the real installation. Now, did I really need to know it was going to take 17 hours, thats debatable. But at Least I know someone in redmond cares about me.
Ya, this is important to people, oh wait, most people would at the very least go to a freaking Hotspot or the library and slam the update on a Flash USB or CD... So why on hell did you download this via dial up again?:)
Sadly in today's corporate world it is hard when companies are encouraged to abandon ethics in the wake of profits.
Maybe Google can do like Halliburton, and when we get pissed enough at them, they commit treason and fraud or they get involved in anti-trust issues, they can just move to India.
For the MS crowd, this is good news, it proves even the so called good companies can be evil.
I can remember when Sun was a 'good' company, and Oracle was a 'good' company, and AOL was a 'good' company, and even a time when MS was the anti-establishment and was the 'good' company.
Life moves on and we all learn that most corporations suck, and even if they don't try to suck, they either have a few bad apples in the company or they purposely suck and let their marketing machine spin them as the good guys anyway. Strange how Apple leeching off the OSS world, comes to mind on the last one.;)
It's just that you GNU fanboys and followers of the Stallman Cult think that, when others behave differently, they have lost their way. In a nutshell: you cry "heresy!"
You wrote this assuming I have some sort of Linux bias. Wrong. I wrote this as an 'OLD TIME' BSD user that hates the crap Apple has pulled. I personally use many OSes, but my primary desktop is either running Vista or BSD and the other OSes are VMed, including OSX.
I also agree that some of the OSS licensing is insane, even GPL. It prevents the technology from being used more than it lets it be used. This is why MS walks such a tightrope in their OS division, even though there are many OSS advocates at MS now. MS would rather see people using real 'free and non-restrictive' licenses if the goal is to be about Open and Free software. Go see Port25 for more info.
Apple used the OSS world, and somehow they still seem to get the respect of people like you who are also BSD users.
I would rather see people pay MS respect, MS at least invented their own kernel and didn't just pick the best OSS kernel, comply to the LEAST they had to and then close the project as Apple did with Darwin. Then strap on all their closed crap and pretend like they are the good guys and the new Unix. (gag)
I actually have more respect for MS in this regard. They ship a real Free BSD for NT, but they don't pretend to be the new Unix or the darlings of Open Source. Instead, they are very honest about being primarily a closed source company with no attempted tricks to get OSS to believe they are doing them any favors like Apple has tried, and apparently did with fools that don't care or know any better.
PS I hope you enjoyed your anti-Linux rant, too bad I wasn't talking about or even thinking about Linux.
That's wrong. Whenever possible, OS X does things how other modern *NIXs do things. Aside from Quartz, Cocoa, and Carbon, most everything in OS X is built off open technologies. OpenGL, LDAP, CUPS, NFS, SSH, etc are all part of the core platform.
i.e. They suck every free technology and contribute almost nothing back to the OSS community, yet take full advantage of all the OSS work. And the stuff that makes a Mac a Mac is all closed software. Until I can download the source to Finder or iPhoto or iTunes, they are no different than MS.
Ironically, a lot of the same comments people are using in this thread could also be made about Windows, as MS provides a BSD Unix subsystem that is Open and uses OSS software quite easily, it is just the NT Kernel and the Win32 that they keep closed, the rest is all open and great just like Apple. (gag)
Apple is the biggest OSS leach in the industry, and people on SlashDot run to fight for Apple's right to be one of the worst OSS predators in the world. If MS cannibalized the same OSS technologies for their 'closed' OS and 'closed' hardware, the community here would have a cow about how it is embrace, extend, extinguish.
Do you see Apple pushing OSS development anywhere? Do you even see Apple encouraging or supporting non-Mac APIs other than a few crumbs thrown around. (MS actually provides more Unix tools for its BSD subsystem than you can get from Apple for its entire OS.) Instead we get the Mac APIs shoved at us as the 'only' or 'correct' way, and what OSS and OSS GUI development that exists comes from dedicated people outside Apple.
I know this will get modded as Troll, as every Mac user that can click a single button mouse will run here to defend Apple's OSS credentials.
SlashDot has been taken over from an OSS advocacy site to a Mac fan site and Apple and OSS could not be any farther apart by being a closed source OS, with closed source applications and running on closed hardware.
PS Does anyone else find it ironic that a Mac article would tell the world how important it is to have 512MB of RAM in all their computers (because OSX needs it) when Apple itself is running Mac ads on TV making fun of Vista for requiring 512MB of RAM and needing tons of upgrades to get the 512MB of RAM? So Vista is evil because of the outrageous need for 512MB to run smooth, and Apple is cool because it also wants 512MB of RAM to run smooth? (gag)
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The Windows Classic 9X I would market towards the low end, people with older systems who cannot run modern operating systems
I hope at least in your own mind you were trying to be funny.
The Win9x code base with no security and roots to 3.1 and DOS is why developers have screwed up many applications still in use on XP.
Also consider XP runs well on 80MB and a 200mhz processor (faster than Win95 or Win98 did), it is time to let these computers die, as most Linux distributions won't even run on them.
Reason #189 not to shop at CompUSA.
Reason #188 was their restocking policy, if you buy a defective device and they don't have the exact same one on the shelf, they charge you 15% to change to another brand or model. Such a nice company... (gag)
Seriously CompUSA has become the laughing stock of consumer tech PC industry. If your techs had more background or training, this would not be their response to people, the driver issues would be something they would know the workarounds to, and people getting 10-15fps on and AMD 4000+ is irrelevant, the GPU is what makes or breaks a games performance. So when you are selling systems with on board Geforce 1150 Video, or Intel 945G chipsets, it doesn't matter if they are in XP or Vista, Video performance is going to suck in games. PERIOD.
In our labs any Geforce 5200 or ATI 9600 or higher system do great under Vista and with the latest drivers in almost EVERY game out perform XP 5-10%, let alone the speed increases in multi-tasking the games and load times. Here is the trick, to beat XP performance, the system need 1GB of RAM. PERIOD. This is not a huge jump, as 90% of gamers have had 1GB in their systems for a couple of years now.
So considering that a Geforce 5600 and ATI 9600 are SEVERAL years old and AT THE BOTTOM of what is required for 99% of games made since 2002, there is no reason that people should continue to believe Vista takes high end hardware for good graphics and YES all the Glass Eye Candy.
Vista with only 512mb will run as fast as XP for general business applications, games being the exception since most games load in at 700-800mb...
If people are serious about Vista and don't know where to start, even freaking BestBuy has a track record with trained personnel for the Vista launch. They have the tech teams that usually have the 'right' answers and even their PC sales teams understand Vista enough to answer most people's questions on why Vista is better beyond common marketing hype.
For almost 10 years, the lock on OSes to hardware with companies like Dell has not been mandated by MS, and finally we see one of these companies stepping up to the plate and doing the right things.
The Windows and or OSes tied to hardware are for pure support cost reasons at this point with companies like Dell/HP/etc.
Even prior to the dissolving of MS only contracts, any hardware company had the choice to not buy into an exclusive package from MS and pay the $5/10 bucks more per copy. And even though MS took the flack for this, it was not an uncommon model in the software/OEM industry and it was also something that the greed of OEMs were eager to take advantage of to the loss of their customers.
I was part of a fairly large OEM company during this timeframe, and we chose not to save the $5 a copy on OEM Windows, and still maintained a great relationship with MS even still we sold naked and *nix preloaded on many systems.
Sure we could have signed a bundling deal, just like we were offered by Corel and even IBM in the early years for OS/2, however saving a couple of $$ per Windows system was less important than providing our customers what they wanted.
So Kudos to Dell for finally stepping up and taking responsibility for the product they are selling...
From my perspective as developer of both real-time data acquisition systems and graphical user interfaces, I would say that it is difficult to make Windows do anything "useful". At least, it's often way more difficult than it ought to be. And no, I'm not a god, but there are times when I sit at my workstation and wish that I was.
Well, I would buy your argument, but one of the main reasons Windows was as successful as it was in the development world in the early 1990s was based on the fact it was the most centralized and easiest OS to develop for at the time.
This includes the largest and most encompassing abstracted driver support for developers, making the concepts of Video, Sound, and Printing an agnostic concept for developers.
Windows is like the melting pot of development, in that anyone that can drag a textbox on a form can write an application and someone with a beginners knowledge can easily mimic what was seen as complex applications of the late 80s and early 90s rather easily.
I'm not saying that the VB mentality of Windows development is always a good thing, but it allows simple IT people to knock out functional software that meets their particular needs.
I can remember working with EDS several years back and they designed a full set of assembly-line diagnostic tools for GM/Delco using VB. This was a fairly complex and large scale project that they were able to bring to testing in a matter of weeks.
And although it was not a realtime system in the true sense, it did provide realtime features that met their plant's needs quite well. So next time you turn up your Bose sound system in a Vette, you might want to give a shout out to Windows and VB.
This would be far easier to debate if the standard development tools in other OSes all looked like Kylix and were more agnostic about the variant they were running on.
It's trivial to make fun of Microsoft products, but it takes a real man to make them work, and a god to make them do anything useful.
Wow, that is so insightful. This means that everyone here that has a grandma checking email with Outlook or Entourage and using MS Word to write letters are Gods? Very Cool!
Also the DOSCALL1.DLL in NT was quite similar to the DOSCALL1.DLL in OS/2 ver 1.3 and I'd imagine that it is similar when comparing the WIN32 DLLs between WIN9x and NT.
Naturally this does cause some confusion.
Ya, it does cause confusion, but this is like 15 years ago, and yet people still don't seem to understand, yet people from the timeframe that all this was happening were 'quite' aware.
As for the DLLs these are subsystem DLLs, not NT DLLs. I understand that in the SlashDot world, NT is a bit weird and the concepts of subsystems seem to escape a lot of knowledgeable people.
But people have to understand that Win32 is basically an OS that sits in a subsystem on NT, just as OS/2 1.3 was and the UNIX BSD subsystem MS also ships for Windows.
To say that these DLLS in these subsystems are a part of NT would be like looking at the BSD libraries in the BSD Subsystem that runs on NT and say that NT and BSD are also the same OS. Which is very far from the truth and even sounds crazy for anyone that understands BSD.
I try to suggest to people all the time in my professional realm to take a few minutes and just read the Wiki pages on NT, as they do have some inaccuracies, but for the most part are pretty good at defining what NT is and how the client/server nature of the kernel design inherently allows for the subsystem architecture it supports.
NT cannot be defined by Win32, nor any other subsystem that runs on NT, as ANY of them could be replaced. So it doesn't matter what DLLs or applications are running in the subsystems, they have nothing to do with the NT architecture.
You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2
o ws_NT
Actually as an OS Engineer that has spent time working with and tearing both apart, they are very much night and day.
You would have more success in selling OS/2 is the same as BSD.
Here are a couple of things to get you started, and I could point out a few inaccuracies in each of these, but for the most part they will send you down the right path:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Wind
Now where you are partially correct. NT started out in the OS/2 3.0 development stages, but by the time MS and IBM split, NT was a start from scratch OS as Dave Cutler thought the OS/2 codebase was horrible.
MS even looked at using *nix concepts in the early days of NT, since it was being written from the ground up, and why MS held on to Xenix at the time in case that is the direction the NT team wanted to go with NT or base it on
However the NT team felt the *nix architecture concepts were too limited and instead decided to take the best OS theories at the time and see if they could truly make a new OS technology.
I get so tired of kids today confusing simple things and I see this crap on here all the time. NT is not VMS, NT was not OS/2, NT and Win95 are not related other than the Win32 subsystem, WinXP does not contain Win9x code, etc etc...
No wonder people think Windows is more of a joke than it already is, if I saw it as a hybrid and hodgepodge of Win9x and OS/2 and NT I would think it was an insane code base too; however, it is not.
It is easy to poke fun at Windows, but when you find real OS engineers, the NT architecture/kernel isn't quite so funny and gets quite a bit of respect even if they hate the Win32 subsystem.
This is not a bad idea, but not a fix for most....
People that run BitTorrents and are having performance issues is NOT always related to a generic NIC.
The fact is that most Torrent clients saturate the entire available bandwidth. So if you are running more than one computer in your house, all internet performance goes to hell on every computer because of one machine running a BitTorrent client.
This card will NOT help people like this, although it make take some of the load off the machine it is attached to. But if your internet bandwidth is STILL being saturated, your online performance is still going to suck with a BitTorrent Client active.
And as others have noted, there are OK mid range NICs out there that don't consume CPU as much as the generic cards, are in the 30-60 dollar range, and with a modern processor from the past two-three years will give you the same boost this NIC will for generic gaming performance.
And with HT and Dual Core technology becoming the norm, even this benefit is reduced considerably.
If anyone has paid attention to the changes in Vista in the network stack and audio stack, you will see a common progression. They both have adapted technology from the 360 development, and are moving toward a model that works better in a multi-core environment than having external hardware assisted technologies as was popular in XP.
In a year or so when quad cores are the basic standard, utilizing a fraction of one core to handle audio and networking is no longer going to be a performance issue, especially with this many cores sitting around waiting to be used. Even the 360 with 3 cores does rather well with pushing the audio and nic processes through one of the cores and still leaves a lot of room for gaming.
So this product is a good idea, but a very Niche product and people with older systems would be better off investing this kind of money into a new MB and CPU.
guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
Yes, but rebooting should not be the option people are using. Go the power management route and do things like enter low power mode, or do a full suspend to disk (hibernate).
Rebooting really should not the solution to using less power, especially with the Power management concepts can be automated based on idle usage, turn themselves back on to run tasks and back off.
I got into this habit from carrying a couple of laptops full time, and it is something I carry over to my personal desktops as well.
People need to just exchange Off with Hibernate in their minds. Even with Windows, which doesn't have bad boot times, it is just easier to tell the system your power button is the hibernate button, and hit it and go on my way. Then turning on the computer is a few seconds and I don't have to worry about what I left running ever. Especially with someone like me that has tons of crap running all the time, including several VMs which I don't have to individually suspend to disk if I were to shut down the computer everytime.
And thank god OSX finally added a true hibernate in 10.4 on their notebooks, cause not having it about drove me flipping insane.
So now that 99% of all OSes have ok power management, rebooting should be a thing of core updates only.
PS
The boot times on Linux are really not bad in a default install on most distributions. And people shouldn't take this article as evidence that Linux is slow or sucks at boot times.
However, I do applaud the efforts to improve boot times, and wish there was a bit more generic optimization like people from the Windows world are use to.
Vista for example monitors the last 5 boot times, and will continually adjust disk layout and process order, etc to continue to speed up boot times. There is no reason all OSes couldn't add a generic form of optimization like this.
Your post is so sad and so true...
I also have found memories of Norton, editing partion tables by hand, running Disk Doctor, and Defrag back when they did a good job and didn't screw with stuff it shouldn't touch. Even Norton Desktop on Win 3.1 wasn't so bad as Program Manger replacment and early versions of Norton Anti-Virus software was light, and did a good job.
Today when I see Norton or Symantec, I want to run screaming. They have found ways to be more problematic and invasive for something like simple Virus detection than anyone could imagine. Hence why MS wrote their own low level API interfaces to keep Symantec out of the lower levels of Vista. (McAfee use to be light weight and is just as bad now too.) But Norton and McAfee whined to get around these restrictions by using EU threats, so their Vista versions will continue to be just as scary.
People are probably better off getting the virus than having Symantec screwing up things on the computer all the time. I have watched Norton lock up and shut down people's network, suspend startup times to ridiculous lengths because Norton doesn't understand the DSL login is not yet active, hit a size error on an email and not let the users send anything out of any email application, and degrade system performance as much as 25-50% while just checking EXEs and DLLs.
Anyone with a Windows Computer that has Symantec Norton Anti-Virus or Security Center or McAfee should rip it off immediately and put on something free and lite. Sadly, a lot of systems come with this crap pre-installed, and most users don't realize how much better their Windows experience and performance would be with almost any other solution.
A matter of simple computing evolution...
MS has taken the biggest hit and done some of the stupidest things when it comes to enforcing OS security.
Take WinXP, the NT security is rather good, but not enforced so MS screwed their users and let developers cross boundaries by not understanding security. Hence XP started out as a security nightmare to the point MS pulled development on Windows 2003 server to reorganize with a security first model.
Mistakes MS have made in strange ways helped the entire industry, at the very least as an example of 'how not' to do things in an OS. So when IE or XP would get hit with exploit, a lot of these exploits had potential to exist in other OSes and browsers. MS gets the lumps, and everyone benefits to ensure they don't do what MS did wrong.
However, there comes a point when known vulnerabilities decrease rapidly. And this is what is happening here.
1) MS has gotten better about security, better code, better compilers, better implementation.
2) Known categories of exploits are better known now than ever.
3) Apple took some hits this last year with some of their arrogance, their ads were the equivalent of Bush saying 'Bring em on'.
So as all OSes are closing in on an optimal level of security, the amount of problems to be found will continue to decrease. Not only in Windows but all OSes.
Also new general categories of how to exploit computers are found, they will have less of an impact as people are now paying attention, even MS.
Apple will have a few bad months ahead still, as they currently don't have the security focus yet that they need to, because they put too much stake in the BSD foundation but overlook the actual Mac code running on top of it. (Very much like MS was with NT in the 90s, as its security was far above consumer versions of Windows and like OSX immune to many of the 'common' exploits of the time. So just as NT learned its lesson that Win32 needed to be super secure as well, OSX will need to comb through a lot of the upper layers of OSX.)
I do think Apple is is getting this, so just give them a few months or a year and their numbers should be back to the norm for patches and exploits and once again be in line with all other OSes.
The bad news about the capping of exploit concepts is that MS probably will continue to remain competitive with a low number of exploits, just as all OSes are maturing to the same levels of security. This means running MS OSes won't be a security concern in the future, and the advantages of using previously more secure OSes will no longer be a great reason to move from MS to these platforms.
MS was a lot slower than they should have ever been, especially with XP. Vista shows a lot of signs of MS 'getting it' to also help against the social engineering exploits as well as fundamental changes in the way Vista works. XP SP2 did a rather good job of stopping the Windows Security leak in the boat as the number of patches since it was relased have kept decreasing in mass amounts. Also the work from Windows 2003 server security refocus helped XP SP2, as well as made Windows 2003 server the most secure server OS MS ever produced.
And if everyone keeps paying attention, to not only their own OS projects, but exploits found in other OSes, there is no reason everyone shouldn't be able to keep ahead of the curve for the first time in mainstream computing.
You're wrong there. Apple has made it easier by making it act just like an iPod. Millions of people have bought and used iPods; how many millions have bought and used media extenders? Oh that's right... not that many.
The XBox 360 is a Media Extender to the FULL Extent, and there are few million of them out there, and most people I know with them are using them as a Media Extender in one form or another. (PS you can even hook your iPod to the 360 and use the 360's Media interface.)
Also notice that most Windows based PCs, even the budget ones at Walmart ship with the Media Center Edition of XP or Vista. And there are more of them in peoples homes than iPods.
Again define Apple making it easier? Media Extenders hooked to a Windows PC, use the Window Media Interface, which has been very successful in the market as being easy to use in addition to doing many things the Apple TV will not ever do...
But you are correct, if you are an iPod user and have a lot of purchased content from iTunes and don't care about Video Quality, recording your own shows, or viewing real HD Disc or HD IP content, then maybe this is the perfect product for you.
Sadly though this is so limited to iTunes and Apple controlled content. In Vista for example within its media center or via an extender in another room, you can already rent and buy movies online from Vongo, Movielinks, etc. There are 20-30 content providers already, with DVD quality and some adding HD content like is available on XBox Live.
Also note for Cable users, Vista is the ONLY OS that natively supports CableCards for digital programming via Vista Media Center and Vista Media Center extenders, and this includes HD content and other cable provider features. All you have to do is plug the card into a Vista PC and not worry about a separate digital cable box to serve your home for TV.
People seem to either hate MS or Love Apple too much, and don't notice the good things going on in the world that is outside their normal focus.
If my 82yr old grandma can easily use Media Center Windows machines and extenders to record Oprah and rent movies online from her remote control, I'm pretty sure even Mac users could figure it out. But then again, Apple told Mac users two buttons on the mouse was too confusing for their users for years, and their users believed them...
Apple just made a media extender that's actually capable of being used by somebody that doesn't understand home networking, Unix, and codecs. That's about 99% of the target market.
Ok, you apparently miss the part where Media Extenders are PRIMARILY used in Windows environments, on home networks, by non-techie people to watch tv and content in other rooms than their Media Center Windows PC?
They CAN be used in a *nix environment as many of them support standards that *nix also use, but they were PRIMARILY designed to plug into the wall for GRANDMA and let her watch her recorded TV, Movies, etc in another room than where her Media Center PC exists...
Apple has done nothing new here, nor have they made it easier. They just have better marketing apparently if people can be so easily fooled into thinking this is anything new.
I will repeat, the ONLY market for this product that makes sense is someone that has invested a lot of money in iTunes DRMed content...
$100 Media Extender Anyone, Anyone?
I understand why a person that has a considerable investment in iTunes content would want one of these devices, but beyond that or a new market is something this is not.
What scares me is that Media Extenders have been around for 4 or 5 years, cost about $100, and do everything this product does and more. Also considering a lot of the Media Extenders are UPnP and various other forms, they are not MS Media Center exclusive and I know people that use them with their *nix servers all the time.
So if you can buy a Media Extender that can watch live TV from your computers, watch recorded content, watch DVDs, watch downloaded content, listen to all your music, watch early forms of IPTV, why on earth you would you buy this product instead and lock yourself into iTunes or iTunes only converted content?
Want to play DIVX, WMV, just buy a Media Extender, even hooking it up to a freaking Windows Media Center computer or Vista will allow you to do all of this, and Vista Media Center Extenders natively support HD video out of the box, in a TRUE HD resolution, something Apple isn't even offering or planning to.
Media Extenders are silent, wireless or wired and can access every storage device, computer or computer based Tuner in your house.
As some have suggested, you would be smarter to spend the money on an XBox 360 which also gives you all these features and you can play a game on it once in a while as well. Again in real HD.
Why is it everyone has seen Media Extenders at Circuit City and Best Buy for years and years now, and when Apple tries to create their 'very closed' version of one, they are seen as doing something new?
How is their marketing team always smarter than the people buying this stuff?
Apple was right about iTunes--do NOT install it yet, it will hose the system
:)
Of course iTunes won't work, this is just another example of 'Apple' flexing its market dominance to hurt a competitor.
How can I uninstall 80% of Vista after I have installed it on my 128-megabyte Pentium-II system?
I am 63 years young, and I use my computer only for e-mail and Yahoo! chat.
Wow you must be really talented, as Vista is locked to not install with only 128mb of RAM.
I guess MS decided they didn't want 1000s of support calls like yours.
GeForce MX 5500, it would crash every 15 minutes with an infinite loop driver
Ok, did you happen to read the drivers? the 100.xx NVidia drivers DO NOT YET have support for any card lower than the 6000 series of Geforce cards.
Use the non-OpenGL ICD MS drivers in the box, or find the 97.xx or 98.xx series of drivers for the 5xxx series of NVidia cards. If not, the drivers usually lock up, just as you describe.
My Mac Pro has two dual-core 2.66GHz Woodcrests in it, along with three PCI Express nVidia 7300GT's (and one open slot!). Price starts around $2,500.
...............This is actually good. No complaints.
...............This is horrible, and sad, the 7300s can't even outperform a 2 year old NVidia Geforce 6800 Ultra, as the 7300s are middle to LOW end. It also only has 256mb of Video RAM. This is so, so sad that this is the 'PRO' Mac. This is also the main hardware reason Macs are NOT the best choice for graphic professionals, let alone someone that wants to play games, or edit video, let alone a 3D developer or designer. In contrast middle of the Road to High end PCs come with at least an NVidia 7900 or 7950 in Dual SLI with 512mb of RAM at minimum. It is hard to even buy a non-Apple Notebook that is in the gaming market that doesn't have a MUCH faster video card than the Mac 'PRO' desktop.
..............Considering OSX is as RAM hungry as XP at the minimum and closer to Vista, this is what Apple is giving people in their PRO systems? Even UMPC computers are coming with 1GB at base level.
..............Again, middle of the road. In the non-Apple world 10,000rpm Drives is what you find medium to high end computers using. Also, no RAID at this price? In the non-Apple world RAID is pretty common on high end systems, even again in Notebooks.
This is to say nothing of the phenomenal industrial design on the case. I've never seen any other mass-market Intel-based machine that has this level of quality.
If you think Apple has middle-of-the-road hardware, then you haven't been paying attention lately.
Wow, that is impressive, and with a pretty case too. That should make all the people like you that don't know anything computer hardware or performance just drool.
I can't believe that you ran to this post to defend Apple and in doing so, put exact facts of what I was saying.
This is their 'PRO' line even, and it is still at best, middle of the road.
Shall we review for you, and I will be as honest as I can.
CPU: 2 Dual Core Xeon processors
Video: NVidia Geforce 7300GT 256/mb RAM
RAM: 1GB
HD: 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive
Again, I will repeat what I said, people that have no clue about hardware or performance think Apple is doing a good job; however, everyone else in the IT world looks at Apple and goes, OMG, that is borderline crap.
ReactOS still, apparently, has much of the graphics system in the kernel. Along with drivers. It emulates NT 4/2000/XP architecture, not NT 3.51, which actually had a cleaner kernel.
So when they move to mimic Vista's kernel, this will all be moot then...
But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.
Um, you act like an independent OS subsystem is a bad thing. The client/server kernel of NT is WHAT MAKES IT INTERESTING, and also is part of why the NT kernel gets the respect it does in spite of the Win32 shorcomings of Windows. PS You do realize that even Win32 is just 'a' subsystem and could be replaced at anytime?
Sadly, I actually read both articles linked.
I know this is a time when bloggers think what they say is important, but these articles were just bloody awful.
Not only does the article contradict itself over and over, the facts it proposes are so out of touch with reality it is scary that people can make themselves believe what they are writing.
Maybe if they spent more time on fact checking rather than making the conclusion fit their ideas, it might have been at least less painful to read.
As other have noted, even the earning numbers from MS and Apple were not only wrong, but so misleading it is in the realm of hyperbole. Not only are the numbers wrong, but they fail to mention 'little' things like the R&D that tends to define a company's market viability and future progression. MS spent more on R&D than Apple made in the last year. And this is R&D money that is for not used in any product development.
Also who in their right mind EVER said the Zune would kill the iPod? Even Apple is having problems selling new iPods because of their own market saturation. It would take years for any company to replace a vast installed user base like this.
Shall we even comment on how the article confuses the Zune with the MS PlaysforSure program? Zune is not a PlaysforSure device, it is something completely different. In the PlaysforSure world, there are a lot of popular devices like the Creative Zen M that do rather well for people that want features over the iPod name.
And the article does briefly mention the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, but then goes on and on how Apple made it fit the market and why it is so great. Then in later paragraphs, the same freaking article talks about how computers introduced into new markets didn't give Apple a surge since they were not Apple markets.
So which is it, a company is good for making their product successful and expanding a market or the numbers don't matter because the new market didn't fit the company as it tries to illustrate with PCs? (This is where the author needs a reality smack upside the head.)
I personally don't care that Creative and iRiver were around a long time before iPod, and Apple basically beat them with a great marketing team, but don't give Apple a handicap in the computer world because they failed to do the very same thing when it comes to PCs.
The only thing this article proves and instills is that Apple is good at selling their products to a technically unaware audience. That is why the 'First 64bit' and other goofy claims from Apple never worked well in the computer world.
Even today, if you want a FAST computer or a FAST laptop, Apple is NOT the brand to buy. The hardware is middle of the road, and OSX is not well known for performance in any areas. However for people that know little about technology, they will continue to pick up users, just as they did with the iPod.
In the computer world the IT and decision makers and even most home users are more in touch with the technology than Apple realizes; hence why they continue to push a computer for the non-technical crowd in a market that is dominated by technical people, and it doesn't work as well as they expect, even if their marketing is better than their products.
Oh, and the claim that Apple OSX 10.4 still runs on 1997 hardware (FTA), this was not only scary but very laughable. Many of the 1997 Macs don't have DVDs, don't even have the ability to have 256-512mb of RAM. So sure in theory it supports a G3, but that doesn't mean it works, or works well.
Vista can run just fine on computers from the same timeframe if you can find one that supports 256-512mb of RAM, there is no difference here.
So since this is an OSS advocacy news site, any word on when we will stop putting up non-credible pro Apple articles? Apple is kind of on the other end of the spectrum from OSS, in fact a bit beyond even MS.
Maybe I should submit a bunch of MS opinion articles, I'm sure they will be accepted. Oh wait,
This is when you and your neighbors within 5-10 miles of each other invest in a T1 line, and distribute good old 802.11 between each other and split the costs.
This isn't rocket science, and can be an easy way to ok bandwidth for everyone with costs lower than cable high speed for people depending on your population density.
I was from a rural area that still has limited high speed, but everyone I know that still lives there has pooled together wireless communities, many even making a business out of it.
Sadly the US does suck when it comes to customer delivered High Speed, too bad people didn't elect Gore(or at least get him in office), someone that wanted to force the Telcos to provide the end user bandwidth they got discounts to provide.
Not all servers are connected to the internet. There are some installations that are so secure they are not remotely accessible by any means. I actually did download win2k sp4 via modem which I then sneakerneted to the real installation. Now, did I really need to know it was going to take 17 hours, thats debatable. But at Least I know someone in redmond cares about me.
:)
Ya, this is important to people, oh wait, most people would at the very least go to a freaking Hotspot or the library and slam the update on a Flash USB or CD... So why on hell did you download this via dial up again?
Google = Microsoft 2.0?
;)
Sadly in today's corporate world it is hard when companies are encouraged to abandon ethics in the wake of profits.
Maybe Google can do like Halliburton, and when we get pissed enough at them, they commit treason and fraud or they get involved in anti-trust issues, they can just move to India.
For the MS crowd, this is good news, it proves even the so called good companies can be evil.
I can remember when Sun was a 'good' company, and Oracle was a 'good' company, and AOL was a 'good' company, and even a time when MS was the anti-establishment and was the 'good' company.
Life moves on and we all learn that most corporations suck, and even if they don't try to suck, they either have a few bad apples in the company or they purposely suck and let their marketing machine spin them as the good guys anyway. Strange how Apple leeching off the OSS world, comes to mind on the last one.
It's just that you GNU fanboys and followers of the Stallman Cult think that, when others behave differently, they have lost their way. In a nutshell: you cry "heresy!"
You wrote this assuming I have some sort of Linux bias. Wrong. I wrote this as an 'OLD TIME' BSD user that hates the crap Apple has pulled. I personally use many OSes, but my primary desktop is either running Vista or BSD and the other OSes are VMed, including OSX.
I also agree that some of the OSS licensing is insane, even GPL. It prevents the technology from being used more than it lets it be used. This is why MS walks such a tightrope in their OS division, even though there are many OSS advocates at MS now. MS would rather see people using real 'free and non-restrictive' licenses if the goal is to be about Open and Free software. Go see Port25 for more info.
Apple used the OSS world, and somehow they still seem to get the respect of people like you who are also BSD users.
I would rather see people pay MS respect, MS at least invented their own kernel and didn't just pick the best OSS kernel, comply to the LEAST they had to and then close the project as Apple did with Darwin. Then strap on all their closed crap and pretend like they are the good guys and the new Unix. (gag)
I actually have more respect for MS in this regard. They ship a real Free BSD for NT, but they don't pretend to be the new Unix or the darlings of Open Source. Instead, they are very honest about being primarily a closed source company with no attempted tricks to get OSS to believe they are doing them any favors like Apple has tried, and apparently did with fools that don't care or know any better.
PS I hope you enjoyed your anti-Linux rant, too bad I wasn't talking about or even thinking about Linux.
That's wrong. Whenever possible, OS X does things how other modern *NIXs do things. Aside from Quartz, Cocoa, and Carbon, most everything in OS X is built off open technologies. OpenGL, LDAP, CUPS, NFS, SSH, etc are all part of the core platform.
i.e. They suck every free technology and contribute almost nothing back to the OSS community, yet take full advantage of all the OSS work. And the stuff that makes a Mac a Mac is all closed software. Until I can download the source to Finder or iPhoto or iTunes, they are no different than MS.
Ironically, a lot of the same comments people are using in this thread could also be made about Windows, as MS provides a BSD Unix subsystem that is Open and uses OSS software quite easily, it is just the NT Kernel and the Win32 that they keep closed, the rest is all open and great just like Apple. (gag)
Apple is the biggest OSS leach in the industry, and people on SlashDot run to fight for Apple's right to be one of the worst OSS predators in the world. If MS cannibalized the same OSS technologies for their 'closed' OS and 'closed' hardware, the community here would have a cow about how it is embrace, extend, extinguish.
Do you see Apple pushing OSS development anywhere? Do you even see Apple encouraging or supporting non-Mac APIs other than a few crumbs thrown around. (MS actually provides more Unix tools for its BSD subsystem than you can get from Apple for its entire OS.) Instead we get the Mac APIs shoved at us as the 'only' or 'correct' way, and what OSS and OSS GUI development that exists comes from dedicated people outside Apple.
I know this will get modded as Troll, as every Mac user that can click a single button mouse will run here to defend Apple's OSS credentials.
SlashDot has been taken over from an OSS advocacy site to a Mac fan site and Apple and OSS could not be any farther apart by being a closed source OS, with closed source applications and running on closed hardware.
PS Does anyone else find it ironic that a Mac article would tell the world how important it is to have 512MB of RAM in all their computers (because OSX needs it) when Apple itself is running Mac ads on TV making fun of Vista for requiring 512MB of RAM and needing tons of upgrades to get the 512MB of RAM? So Vista is evil because of the outrageous need for 512MB to run smooth, and Apple is cool because it also wants 512MB of RAM to run smooth? (gag)