"It's only the data that was just (going to be) written that you'll lose."
And if that 'data that was just (going to be) written' is a multi-gigabyte file that IE was downloading overnight, then 'only' is not a very good description of the problem.
Back when I only had 512k broadband I left my PC downloading a 2+GB game installer for a free trial, the power went out after it had completed but before I had closed down IE (which I was using because the game developer's site didn't work with Firefox), and NTFS scandisk kindly went and deleted the file for me because IE had never closed it.
Similarly, Firefox is notorious for losing bookmarks when you cut power on Windows; NTFS seems to lose the most recently added bookmarks whereas FAT32 tends to lose them all.
I've never lost data from pulling the plug on a Unix system, but I've lost gigabytes from doing the same on Windows.
So they compare the power consumption of _Netbook_ CPUs by comparing the power consumption of _Desktop_ motherboards running _Vista_, when every netbook I'm aware of runs XP or Linux and Intel is world-renowned for having tied the desktop Atom to an appallingly crappy, backward and power-hungry chipset?
Then we should be surprised that they discover that a CPU which takes far more power than the Atom gives better performance in tests which are probably single-threaded and hence not even using the Atom's CPU to its full capacity?
Rail is not cheap, unless you want to bumble across the country at 40mph.
The cost of electrifying and increasing the speed limit by about 20mph (120-140? I forget, but it's something like that) on the west coast rail line in the UK has been absolutely enormous; and that's a small country with high population density where rail makes some kind of sense.
"The problem with supersonic passenger planes was that they could not fly at those speed over land"
Concorde will quite happily fly at supersonic speed over land, absent NIMBYs pushing governments to prohibit such flights. It really doesn't care what's ten miles below it.
"Not realizing this cost you your computer literacy card."
If I remember correctly, the original problem was that they were Mac documents, and while the old Windows Word would open Mac files, the new ones just turned them into garbage.
However, even if that wasn't the case, how many people do you really expect to know that they need to REINSTALL THEIR SOFTWARE to open old Word files? It's nearly a decade since I've installed a new version of Word on anything, and most people get it pre-installed and expect it to open anything with a.doc extension.
"ya, but wasn't that what Vista was all about? Causing 80% of the existing windows apps to spontaneously combust and force the developers once and for all to fix their crap?"
Well, that was kind of my point: even if they get developers to fix their broken applications that expect to run as Admin for generic tasks that shouldn't need it, the old versions of those applications will still be around for years to come, and people using those applications will complain until Microsoft have to do something to make them less painful to use.
Microsoft grew big and fat on 'backwards compatibility', and now it's turning from a huge advantage into a huge problem.
"I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency"
Yes, but this is Windows, which has been so poorly engineered for so long that roughly 97% of applications expect to be run as Admin; and thanks to the delights of 'backwards compatibility', Joe Sixpack will be running many of those applications for many years to come (heck, I have a copy of Word from the Windows 3.1 era on my Windows PC because I had to open old Word files and current versions wouldn't read the old format).
"My particular perspective on this is newspapers which are slowly going out of business, for a number of reasons but one of which is that they're giving away their expensive content for free online."
Newspapers just don't get this new-fangled 'Internet' thing; the majority give away the things people buy them for -- access to the latest news stories -- for free, but then charge for access to old stories, which means that they rapidly cut themselves off from the rest of the Internet, as no-one can link to those old stories without expecting people who follow that link to pay for them.
If they had any sense, they'd charge for new stories (or ensure they gained enough advertising revenue from readers to cover their costs), and leave the archives open to access.
"Hell, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, but no one goes around calling him, "evil"."
You should read more blogs; lots of people think Lincoln was evil for destroying the Constitution in order to centralise power in DC.
Re:Leveling off == very bad for Microsoft
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 1
"Levelling off of computer power means that buyers are getting off the upgrade treadmill -- they're not buying new computers every couple of years."
Personally I'm probably going to buy 3-4 new computers this year _because_ of the drop in price and increase in performance per watt; I can build a server and a couple of desktop systems for the cost and power consumption of a single Pentium-4 desktop five years ago.
Of course at most one of those will be running Windows; there's not much room for a $200 operating system on a $250 PC.
"A much simpler explanation is that without tiered pricing fewer people will be able to afford Windows."
Considering that a Windows DVD costs maybe $0.25 to produce, I suspect that without tiered pricing people would still be able to afford it.
The real reason Microsoft have tiered pricing is so that they can charge people $200 for a couple of extra features that they deliberately removed from the other versions.
"Despite their popularity, the actual amount of money to be made selling netbook processors isn't that big."
Processor + host chipset + GPU, on the other hand, is a bigger chunk of cash. If AMD don't have a competitive CPU, then that market will go to Intel at the low end and Intel + Nvidia at the high end.
Seems an odd decision when Intel is selling so many Atoms; the 'Athlon Neo' sounds interesting, but at 15W it's going to have a hard time competing with Atoms at 2-8W even with Intel's crappy inefficient chipsets attached to them.
"The last democratic president BALANCED THE BUDGET."
The President doesn't set the budget, Congress does; and Congress at the time was controlled by... uh... Republicans. I believe most of the record deficits under Bush came from a Democrat-controlled Congress.
And, in any case, the idea that 'Clinton BALANCED THE BUDGET' is nonsense; the US national debt increased every single year that Clinton was in the White House. The Republicans didn't want to point that out because they wanted to take the credit too.
"Why are they giving out the actual phone numbers and not a hash?"
Because a hash of your phone number might match the hash of someone who really, really likes getting telemarketing calls. Because supposedly such people really do exist, or something.
The correct solution would be a 'please call me' list instead, that way none of these problems would occur. And it would be easy to handle because there would only be a dozen numbers on it and ten of those would have been added by their enemies as a prank.
"The "video card" will only use system RAM when it is onboard. If it is an actual video card (as in ISA/AGP/PCI/PCI-e) then it has it's own memory."
Except video cards also map some or all of their framebuffer into the CPU's address space so the CPU can write directly to the memory rather than have to go through DMA buffers. You really don't want to be trying to play HD video by packing into a DMA buffer and waiting for it to get to the screen.
And if your card is mapping 1GB of video RAM into a 4GB address space, that's 1GB of your 4GB of RAM that's unavailable to you in a crippled OS like XP32 which won't let you access memory above 4GB.
"How do you know? Do you have the source code to Windows Vista?"
Do you?
"Everyone I've seen that blames "DRM" for Vista being slow has no idea what they are talking about, and are just going "Vista has DRM and is slow, therefore it must be slow because of DRM"."
At a minimum, the changes to the driver model required to support DRM add a whole load of extra bloat that sucks performance; code that previously would have been tightly integrated into drivers now involves a lot of interaction with the OS.
Government intervention _CREATES_ most of the problems; the current recession is due to government central banks holding interest rates too low for a decade to create an artificial boom which eventually had to go bust.
No company can screw up an economy the way government can.
Slashdot Mirror
"People don't vote because people are generally lazy and apathetic about things outside their immediate sphere of reference."
People don't vote because they don't want either of the two candidates who stand any chance of winning.
"It's only the data that was just (going to be) written that you'll lose."
And if that 'data that was just (going to be) written' is a multi-gigabyte file that IE was downloading overnight, then 'only' is not a very good description of the problem.
Back when I only had 512k broadband I left my PC downloading a 2+GB game installer for a free trial, the power went out after it had completed but before I had closed down IE (which I was using because the game developer's site didn't work with Firefox), and NTFS scandisk kindly went and deleted the file for me because IE had never closed it.
Similarly, Firefox is notorious for losing bookmarks when you cut power on Windows; NTFS seems to lose the most recently added bookmarks whereas FAT32 tends to lose them all.
I've never lost data from pulling the plug on a Unix system, but I've lost gigabytes from doing the same on Windows.
So they compare the power consumption of _Netbook_ CPUs by comparing the power consumption of _Desktop_ motherboards running _Vista_, when every netbook I'm aware of runs XP or Linux and Intel is world-renowned for having tied the desktop Atom to an appallingly crappy, backward and power-hungry chipset?
Then we should be surprised that they discover that a CPU which takes far more power than the Atom gives better performance in tests which are probably single-threaded and hence not even using the Atom's CPU to its full capacity?
Rail is not cheap, unless you want to bumble across the country at 40mph.
The cost of electrifying and increasing the speed limit by about 20mph (120-140? I forget, but it's something like that) on the west coast rail line in the UK has been absolutely enormous; and that's a small country with high population density where rail makes some kind of sense.
"The problem with supersonic passenger planes was that they could not fly at those speed over land"
Concorde will quite happily fly at supersonic speed over land, absent NIMBYs pushing governments to prohibit such flights. It really doesn't care what's ten miles below it.
"Note the wind turbines in the background of the video."
Brilliant; a transport system that only works on windy days.
Why not just stick a sail on top of your car and cut out the middleman?
"Not realizing this cost you your computer literacy card."
If I remember correctly, the original problem was that they were Mac documents, and while the old Windows Word would open Mac files, the new ones just turned them into garbage.
However, even if that wasn't the case, how many people do you really expect to know that they need to REINSTALL THEIR SOFTWARE to open old Word files? It's nearly a decade since I've installed a new version of Word on anything, and most people get it pre-installed and expect it to open anything with a .doc extension.
"ya, but wasn't that what Vista was all about? Causing 80% of the existing windows apps to spontaneously combust and force the developers once and for all to fix their crap?"
Well, that was kind of my point: even if they get developers to fix their broken applications that expect to run as Admin for generic tasks that shouldn't need it, the old versions of those applications will still be around for years to come, and people using those applications will complain until Microsoft have to do something to make them less painful to use.
Microsoft grew big and fat on 'backwards compatibility', and now it's turning from a huge advantage into a huge problem.
"I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency"
Yes, but this is Windows, which has been so poorly engineered for so long that roughly 97% of applications expect to be run as Admin; and thanks to the delights of 'backwards compatibility', Joe Sixpack will be running many of those applications for many years to come (heck, I have a copy of Word from the Windows 3.1 era on my Windows PC because I had to open old Word files and current versions wouldn't read the old format).
"My particular perspective on this is newspapers which are slowly going out of business, for a number of reasons but one of which is that they're giving away their expensive content for free online."
Newspapers just don't get this new-fangled 'Internet' thing; the majority give away the things people buy them for -- access to the latest news stories -- for free, but then charge for access to old stories, which means that they rapidly cut themselves off from the rest of the Internet, as no-one can link to those old stories without expecting people who follow that link to pay for them.
If they had any sense, they'd charge for new stories (or ensure they gained enough advertising revenue from readers to cover their costs), and leave the archives open to access.
"Hell, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, but no one goes around calling him, "evil"."
You should read more blogs; lots of people think Lincoln was evil for destroying the Constitution in order to centralise power in DC.
"Levelling off of computer power means that buyers are getting off the upgrade treadmill -- they're not buying new computers every couple of years."
Personally I'm probably going to buy 3-4 new computers this year _because_ of the drop in price and increase in performance per watt; I can build a server and a couple of desktop systems for the cost and power consumption of a single Pentium-4 desktop five years ago.
Of course at most one of those will be running Windows; there's not much room for a $200 operating system on a $250 PC.
"What video card doesn't support T&L?"
Intel integrated crapsets?
Certainly the one in my Windows laptop doesn't support DX7 hardware T I believe it emulates vertex shaders in software for DX8 and above.
"Intel's Atom processor is 32-bit only."
I'm surprised that mine runs 64-bit Ubuntu then.
In any case, putting a bloated slug like Vista++ on an Atom system would be insane.
"A much simpler explanation is that without tiered pricing fewer people will be able to afford Windows."
Considering that a Windows DVD costs maybe $0.25 to produce, I suspect that without tiered pricing people would still be able to afford it.
The real reason Microsoft have tiered pricing is so that they can charge people $200 for a couple of extra features that they deliberately removed from the other versions.
"And there's no such thing as a 'high end' netbook."
Do the words 'Nvidia' and 'Ion' mean anything to you?
Also, I've read claims that margins on the Atom chips are pretty high; given how tiny they are, they can't cost much to produce.
"Despite their popularity, the actual amount of money to be made selling netbook processors isn't that big."
Processor + host chipset + GPU, on the other hand, is a bigger chunk of cash. If AMD don't have a competitive CPU, then that market will go to Intel at the low end and Intel + Nvidia at the high end.
Seems an odd decision when Intel is selling so many Atoms; the 'Athlon Neo' sounds interesting, but at 15W it's going to have a hard time competing with Atoms at 2-8W even with Intel's crappy inefficient chipsets attached to them.
Same here: I was going to buy it from Steam, but since they insist on installing their crappy DRM as well as Valve's, they've lost another sale.
Which I'm actually somewhat happy about, now I know how slow and buggy it is.
"The last democratic president BALANCED THE BUDGET."
The President doesn't set the budget, Congress does; and Congress at the time was controlled by... uh... Republicans. I believe most of the record deficits under Bush came from a Democrat-controlled Congress.
And, in any case, the idea that 'Clinton BALANCED THE BUDGET' is nonsense; the US national debt increased every single year that Clinton was in the White House. The Republicans didn't want to point that out because they wanted to take the credit too.
"Why are they giving out the actual phone numbers and not a hash?"
Because a hash of your phone number might match the hash of someone who really, really likes getting telemarketing calls. Because supposedly such people really do exist, or something.
The correct solution would be a 'please call me' list instead, that way none of these problems would occur. And it would be easy to handle because there would only be a dozen numbers on it and ten of those would have been added by their enemies as a prank.
"Eight hundred people can't close 464 bugs?"
Not when they don't know how their code works either :).
"The "video card" will only use system RAM when it is onboard. If it is an actual video card (as in ISA/AGP/PCI/PCI-e) then it has it's own memory."
Except video cards also map some or all of their framebuffer into the CPU's address space so the CPU can write directly to the memory rather than have to go through DMA buffers. You really don't want to be trying to play HD video by packing into a DMA buffer and waiting for it to get to the screen.
And if your card is mapping 1GB of video RAM into a 4GB address space, that's 1GB of your 4GB of RAM that's unavailable to you in a crippled OS like XP32 which won't let you access memory above 4GB.
"How do you know? Do you have the source code to Windows Vista?"
Do you?
"Everyone I've seen that blames "DRM" for Vista being slow has no idea what they are talking about, and are just going "Vista has DRM and is slow, therefore it must be slow because of DRM"."
At a minimum, the changes to the driver model required to support DRM add a whole load of extra bloat that sucks performance; code that previously would have been tightly integrated into drivers now involves a lot of interaction with the OS.
Government intervention _CREATES_ most of the problems; the current recession is due to government central banks holding interest rates too low for a decade to create an artificial boom which eventually had to go bust.
No company can screw up an economy the way government can.