As someone who does a lot of video and audio editing, I guess my next 'PC' will have to be a Mac. There's absolutely no way I'm going near an operating system that will randomly reduce the quality of the audio and video output; how the hell am I supposed to tell whether the audio is crap because I'm feeding it crap or crap because of some retarded Microsoftism?
If this is true, then it's going to kill Windows as an operating system for content creation. Apple must be laughing.
"I can't help thinking the paging file structure would have to be really poorly designed to require 250MB of writes to initialise it"
This is Windows we're talking about: the operating system that swaps out my web browser if I copy a two gigabyte file from one hard drive to another. 'Really poorly design' could be Microsoft's motto.
Slow? My ordinary, everyday IDE drives can read over 60 megabytes per second. That could fill my PC's entire memory in about fifteen seconds.
I suspect the real problem may be that the operating system is still paging in small parts of DLLs and programs rather than loading them all in one go. Loading 4k pages one at a time made sense when the operating system was a couple of megabytes, but when you're loading a hundred megabytes of crap off the disk just to get to the desktop, you'd be much better to load the entire thing in one go; disk seek times have improved by a factor of two or three in the same time that disk read speeds have increased by maybe a factor of a hundred.
Or not shut down at all. One day last week I told my work PC to shut down, turned off the monitor and went home. Next day I came in, and it was saying 'Adobe Acrobat Reader has crashed, press 'OK' to continue'.
Like I give a crap. When I tell a computer to shut down, I want it to _shut down_; I do not want to come back hours later and find it didn't do what I told it to.
This is particularly annoying in the morning when I've left my home PC running overnight doing video or 3D rendering, and it's swapped out vast megabytes of stuff to make room for a totally pointless disk cache (what's the point in swapping out programs to cache multi-gigabyte video files when I'm processing them from one end to another?), so when I tell it to shut down it first spends five minutes spinning up all the disks and swapping back in all the programs it swapped out... but if I head off to work while it's still shutting down I may come back in the evening to find it still sitting there telling me that some piece of crap little applet that I never even wanted to run crashed while shutting down.
That's even worse than the fact that it takes two or three minutes after logging back in in the evening before it stops thrashing the hard disk and I can actually do something useful. At least I can make coffee or something while it's booting up.
"people don't mind throwing old ones away every couple of years for minor performance improvements"
Which 'people' would that be? My PC here was built in 2003 and will probably still be running until 2010; I don't expect to replace it until 2008 and after that it will be a second computer for basic stuff. My girlfriend's PC is several years older than that, and her mother's PC still runs Windows 3.1.
I don't know which 'people' you know, but I don't know anyone who replaces a PC 'every couple of years for minor performance improvements'. Why does anyone need anything faster than a 500MHz P-III to use a web-browser or write letters in a word processor?
Even corporations don't seem to be replacing their PCs anywhere near as often these days, and they're probably driven more by tax write-offs than performance issues.
"any act which causes an unauthorised modification of the contents of any computer..."
Yes, but then they'll point out that when you downloaded that Naked Britney Spears Screensaver, you clicked on a EULA which authorised them to read all your bank passwords. The fact that no-one in their right mind would do so is irrelevant.
Personally I'm getting close to the point where I'm going to completely disconnect my Windows PCs from the Net and just have a Linux box for web stuff... it's just not worth the risk of having my bank account emptied by Windows scumware.
"The reason the rates increase so much, is because the actual numbers are so low."
And they were much lower a few decades ago when anyone could buy a gun over the counter, no questions asked, and anyone with $2.50 to spare could buy a license to carry it in public.
Britain is rapidly turning into a police state; it's no surprise that a government which pretty much brought about the conclusion of eighty years of gun banning should also want to eliminate trial by jury, the right to silence and habeus corpus, and to cover the country with cameras and force everyone to carry 'license to exist' cards.
"I refuse to support any format where the playback device ever has to tell me "Operation not possible". Skipping an ad or just getting to the bloody movie, for example."
Agreed: I'm so tired of sitting through several minutes of bloody trailers and anti-piracy ads _ON A DVD I'VE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR_ every time I put it in the damn player. At least on my PC I can skip over that crap.
"I don't know anything about EVD, but if this is true, it means that movie studios most certainly won't be releasing EVD discs with their movies on it."
You really think movie studios want to cut themselves out of the Chinese market?
Well, I guess you may be right, they've done stupider things in the past (like opposing VHS when it became a vast money-earner for them).
"Has anybody studied late Roman history and modern Middle Eastern history enough to intelligently compare and contrast the situations?"
Well, Martin van Creveld, one of the most famous recent military historians, called the invasion of Iraq "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them". More recently he's taken to calling the US military in Iraq "stupid" and "totally incompetent"... if that's any help.
But then he's an Israeli, so he'll have to deal with the consequences if the civil war in Iraq spreads out across the Middle East.
"HUDs? Cheap IED? There, you're out of your freaking mind. What do HUDs have to do with an exploding IED taking out a humvee?"
The US government wants to load up the soldiers with more and more expensive hardware, while the 'bad guys' can kill them with a few bucks worth of explosives and a cheap cell-phone. Like managers everywhere, they have an expensive solution to the wrong problem.
"So, you're suggesting the ability to acquire targets more reliably and quickly"
Will allow them to kill more innocent civilians faster, thereby increasing the number of 'bad guys' they have to fight.
"The truth of the matter is, if the US starts to fail to continue developing the technical edge of the military, it can and will fall."
The US military _ALREADY HAS_ failed. It's a cold-war military in 21st century urban combat against guys with AK-47s, RPGs and cell-phones; didn't you even read about that recent US military war game where the officer playing the 'bad guys' took out the US fleet with fishing boats and anti-ship missiles that cost a tiny fraction of the amount the US government spent on their ships?
You talk about how 'the US military can and will fail' when they can't even control Baghdad, for Bob's sake!
"The US system is filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay."
Ah, the usual response: schools suck because teachers aren't paid enough.
So we pay them more, and schools start to suck even more, and then people whine that schools suck because teachers aren't paid enough. Then we pay them more, and schools start to suck even more and then people whine that schools suck because teachers aren't paid enough. Then we pay them more and schools start to suck even more... ad infinitum.
When are people going to stop demanding 'more money for teachers' and actually look at the reasons _why_ schools suck? Why do we reward schools and teachers for performing badly, and then expect them to do better?
"Most of the electricity consumed would be as Direct Current right from your rooftop"
Here's a hint, dude: most of the time I'm at home using electricity it's, like, dark outside. Where exactly is this 'direct current right from my rooftop' going to come from at night?
Worse than that, at over 50 degrees latitude there's far less light per square meter hitting the surface than near the equator, and the weather is crappy which reduces light levels even more.
Finally, when I'm not at home I'm at work, and with as many PCs as we need here, there's no way to power them all from the small amount of roof-space we have here, even if the light wasn't low due to latitude and crappy weather, and even if we didn't often work at night as well as in the day.
The whole idea of sticking a few solar cells on your roof and running your house from them is incredibly stupid; at a minimum it needs a large amount of extra infrastructure to support those cells, like batteries and inverters.
"For dense city sitatuions with high rises who's energy needs can not be met by rooftops, etc., electricity can be sent via conventional AC lines across the conventional power grid from say no more than 50 miles away."
So at night, when it's dark you'll send solar electricity from 50 miles away, where it will magically be daytime?
"And odds are they won't be placed in games where they will be out of place such as WoW."
Ha-ha-ha... you're either naive or optimistic about the games industry.
You're right though, WoW won't have McDonalds' ads for the forseeable future, but that's because they're rolling in so much money that they don't need the ad revenues; other games that are borderline profitable or unprofitable will look at things differently.
"I fail to see the problem with this and why people are crying/up in arms over it."
Because they don't want to see McDonalds' ads on billboards in WoW...
Personally I'd be fine with ads in a game like GTA set in the modern day, provided I get the game for free as a result; but most games are totally unsuited for rampant advertising.
"The moon is a good place to do incremental testing of the systems that they'll use on Mars (despite the environmental differences)."
It's a lousy place for incremental testing _because_ of the environmental differences. You might be able to develop odd bits and pieces of technology that would be useful on Mars, but the vast majority would be pointless because the problems are so different.
For example, one of the biggest issues on the Moon is the extremely abrasive lunar dust, due to the lack of wind and water to wear down the edges on the dust grains; that gets in everywhere, damages equipment and may well cause lung disease if the astronauts breathe in too much, but it's irrelevant on Mars where billions of years of wind-storms have rounded down the dust.
Similarly, space suit and rover designs would be dramatically different in the 1/6 gravity on the Moon to the 1/3 gravity on Mars.
"If we had used a Saturn V to put a refueling station up (Skylab sized, without the 'space station' internals,)"
In other words, you want to use a Saturn V to put an SIVB stage in orbit, to transfer fuel to another SIVB stage that you'll launch on a Saturn 1b? Yeah, that makes so much sense.
"(The IB was used to launch Apollo 5, an unmanned CSM/LM pair.)"
No it wasn't. Hint: take a look at a photo of Apollo 5 sometime.
The Saturn Ib could not launch a CSM and LEM at the same time, and I don't believe it could even launch a lunar CSM. Hint: the Skylab CSMs launched on Saturn 1bs had half the fuel load of the lunar CSMs, since they were way overpowered for Earth-orbital flight.
There would have been absolutely no benefit to your idea; in fact, even if it worked, we'd probably be worse off because we'd fly less Saturn V flights and the fixed costs would be spread across fewer launches. We'd have done better to replace the Saturn 1b with the INT-20 Saturn V derivative and only keep one production line running; NASA is, of course, making the same mistake today by flying two different launchers when they'd save money by only flying one, even if they had to fill any excess payload capacity with water tanks.
Indeed: no-one outside the 'global warming' industry or the local mental hospital would claim that climate doesn't and hasn't changed without human intervention, because that would be really, really silly.
What is denied is that humans are having any significant effect on global temperature from CO2 emissions, or that we could do anything useful about it even if we were.
"What I found shocking is that some of the same scientists who had funding ties to big tobacco and were saying that there was no evidence that smoking caused cancer are now the same scientists with funding ties to big oil and are claiming there is no proof of global warming."
You mean like some of the same scientists who were warning about the Coming Ice Age in the 70s are now warning about the Coming Global Meltdown in the 00s?
Or how scientists who make a living from 'Global Warming' research keep finding more evidence for more and more scary outcomes in their computer models, which coincidentally provides justification to keep funding them?
"I am completely innocent. I have commited no crimes and am not suspected of committing any crimes."
I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that anyone can live in Britain today and not commit any crimes. You've never driven over 70mph on a motorway? You've never put recyclable waste in your dustbin?
There are so many laws in Britain today that you're pretty much a criminal the instant you get out of bed; in fact, you're probably a criminal if you stay in bed all day too. The real problem is _too many laws_, not too many criminals; if the cops stopped chasing people for bullshit crimes with high-tech gadgetry they could get all the real criminals off the streets.
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Why? I, for one, can live without 'premium content' if the alternative is a totally stuffed-up operating system.
I'd much rather have a reliable computer than crappy Hollywood blockbusters on HD DVD.
As someone who does a lot of video and audio editing, I guess my next 'PC' will have to be a Mac. There's absolutely no way I'm going near an operating system that will randomly reduce the quality of the audio and video output; how the hell am I supposed to tell whether the audio is crap because I'm feeding it crap or crap because of some retarded Microsoftism?
If this is true, then it's going to kill Windows as an operating system for content creation. Apple must be laughing.
"I can't help thinking the paging file structure would have to be really poorly designed to require 250MB of writes to initialise it"
This is Windows we're talking about: the operating system that swaps out my web browser if I copy a two gigabyte file from one hard drive to another. 'Really poorly design' could be Microsoft's motto.
"I blame it on our slow ass hard drives."
Slow? My ordinary, everyday IDE drives can read over 60 megabytes per second. That could fill my PC's entire memory in about fifteen seconds.
I suspect the real problem may be that the operating system is still paging in small parts of DLLs and programs rather than loading them all in one go. Loading 4k pages one at a time made sense when the operating system was a couple of megabytes, but when you're loading a hundred megabytes of crap off the disk just to get to the desktop, you'd be much better to load the entire thing in one go; disk seek times have improved by a factor of two or three in the same time that disk read speeds have increased by maybe a factor of a hundred.
Does Windows still do that?
Or not shut down at all. One day last week I told my work PC to shut down, turned off the monitor and went home. Next day I came in, and it was saying 'Adobe Acrobat Reader has crashed, press 'OK' to continue'.
Like I give a crap. When I tell a computer to shut down, I want it to _shut down_; I do not want to come back hours later and find it didn't do what I told it to.
This is particularly annoying in the morning when I've left my home PC running overnight doing video or 3D rendering, and it's swapped out vast megabytes of stuff to make room for a totally pointless disk cache (what's the point in swapping out programs to cache multi-gigabyte video files when I'm processing them from one end to another?), so when I tell it to shut down it first spends five minutes spinning up all the disks and swapping back in all the programs it swapped out... but if I head off to work while it's still shutting down I may come back in the evening to find it still sitting there telling me that some piece of crap little applet that I never even wanted to run crashed while shutting down.
That's even worse than the fact that it takes two or three minutes after logging back in in the evening before it stops thrashing the hard disk and I can actually do something useful. At least I can make coffee or something while it's booting up.
"people don't mind throwing old ones away every couple of years for minor performance improvements"
Which 'people' would that be? My PC here was built in 2003 and will probably still be running until 2010; I don't expect to replace it until 2008 and after that it will be a second computer for basic stuff. My girlfriend's PC is several years older than that, and her mother's PC still runs Windows 3.1.
I don't know which 'people' you know, but I don't know anyone who replaces a PC 'every couple of years for minor performance improvements'. Why does anyone need anything faster than a 500MHz P-III to use a web-browser or write letters in a word processor?
Even corporations don't seem to be replacing their PCs anywhere near as often these days, and they're probably driven more by tax write-offs than performance issues.
"any act which causes an unauthorised modification of the contents of any computer..."
Yes, but then they'll point out that when you downloaded that Naked Britney Spears Screensaver, you clicked on a EULA which authorised them to read all your bank passwords. The fact that no-one in their right mind would do so is irrelevant.
Personally I'm getting close to the point where I'm going to completely disconnect my Windows PCs from the Net and just have a Linux box for web stuff... it's just not worth the risk of having my bank account emptied by Windows scumware.
What kind of fucktard would actually, legitimately, agree to that license?
"The reason the rates increase so much, is because the actual numbers are so low."
And they were much lower a few decades ago when anyone could buy a gun over the counter, no questions asked, and anyone with $2.50 to spare could buy a license to carry it in public.
Britain is rapidly turning into a police state; it's no surprise that a government which pretty much brought about the conclusion of eighty years of gun banning should also want to eliminate trial by jury, the right to silence and habeus corpus, and to cover the country with cameras and force everyone to carry 'license to exist' cards.
"I refuse to support any format where the playback device ever has to tell me "Operation not possible". Skipping an ad or just getting to the bloody movie, for example."
Agreed: I'm so tired of sitting through several minutes of bloody trailers and anti-piracy ads _ON A DVD I'VE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR_ every time I put it in the damn player. At least on my PC I can skip over that crap.
"I don't know anything about EVD, but if this is true, it means that movie studios most certainly won't be releasing EVD discs with their movies on it."
You really think movie studios want to cut themselves out of the Chinese market?
Well, I guess you may be right, they've done stupider things in the past (like opposing VHS when it became a vast money-earner for them).
"Has anybody studied late Roman history and modern Middle Eastern history enough to intelligently compare and contrast the situations?"
Well, Martin van Creveld, one of the most famous recent military historians, called the invasion of Iraq "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them". More recently he's taken to calling the US military in Iraq "stupid" and "totally incompetent"... if that's any help.
But then he's an Israeli, so he'll have to deal with the consequences if the civil war in Iraq spreads out across the Middle East.
"HUDs? Cheap IED? There, you're out of your freaking mind. What do HUDs have to do with an exploding IED taking out a humvee?"
The US government wants to load up the soldiers with more and more expensive hardware, while the 'bad guys' can kill them with a few bucks worth of explosives and a cheap cell-phone. Like managers everywhere, they have an expensive solution to the wrong problem.
"So, you're suggesting the ability to acquire targets more reliably and quickly"
Will allow them to kill more innocent civilians faster, thereby increasing the number of 'bad guys' they have to fight.
"The truth of the matter is, if the US starts to fail to continue developing the technical edge of the military, it can and will fall."
The US military _ALREADY HAS_ failed. It's a cold-war military in 21st century urban combat against guys with AK-47s, RPGs and cell-phones; didn't you even read about that recent US military war game where the officer playing the 'bad guys' took out the US fleet with fishing boats and anti-ship missiles that cost a tiny fraction of the amount the US government spent on their ships?
You talk about how 'the US military can and will fail' when they can't even control Baghdad, for Bob's sake!
"The US system is filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay."
Ah, the usual response: schools suck because teachers aren't paid enough.
So we pay them more, and schools start to suck even more, and then people whine that schools suck because teachers aren't paid enough. Then we pay them more, and schools start to suck even more and then people whine that schools suck because teachers aren't paid enough. Then we pay them more and schools start to suck even more... ad infinitum.
When are people going to stop demanding 'more money for teachers' and actually look at the reasons _why_ schools suck? Why do we reward schools and teachers for performing badly, and then expect them to do better?
"The kind of people who will form their own companies will do so irrespective of whether they work for google first."
But it's much easier with $100,000,000 of stock option money in the bank...
"Most of the electricity consumed would be as Direct Current right from your rooftop"
Here's a hint, dude: most of the time I'm at home using electricity it's, like, dark outside. Where exactly is this 'direct current right from my rooftop' going to come from at night?
Worse than that, at over 50 degrees latitude there's far less light per square meter hitting the surface than near the equator, and the weather is crappy which reduces light levels even more.
Finally, when I'm not at home I'm at work, and with as many PCs as we need here, there's no way to power them all from the small amount of roof-space we have here, even if the light wasn't low due to latitude and crappy weather, and even if we didn't often work at night as well as in the day.
The whole idea of sticking a few solar cells on your roof and running your house from them is incredibly stupid; at a minimum it needs a large amount of extra infrastructure to support those cells, like batteries and inverters.
"For dense city sitatuions with high rises who's energy needs can not be met by rooftops, etc., electricity can be sent via conventional AC lines across the conventional power grid from say no more than 50 miles away."
So at night, when it's dark you'll send solar electricity from 50 miles away, where it will magically be daytime?
"And odds are they won't be placed in games where they will be out of place such as WoW."
Ha-ha-ha... you're either naive or optimistic about the games industry.
You're right though, WoW won't have McDonalds' ads for the forseeable future, but that's because they're rolling in so much money that they don't need the ad revenues; other games that are borderline profitable or unprofitable will look at things differently.
"I fail to see the problem with this and why people are crying/up in arms over it."
Because they don't want to see McDonalds' ads on billboards in WoW...
Personally I'd be fine with ads in a game like GTA set in the modern day, provided I get the game for free as a result; but most games are totally unsuited for rampant advertising.
"You won't see another Moon landing.
You won't see any Mars landing."
We will, but the 'crew' will be a bunch of rich Chinese tourists. If we're lucky, maybe they'll take a few Americans along as servants.
"The moon is a good place to do incremental testing of the systems that they'll use on Mars (despite the environmental differences)."
It's a lousy place for incremental testing _because_ of the environmental differences. You might be able to develop odd bits and pieces of technology that would be useful on Mars, but the vast majority would be pointless because the problems are so different.
For example, one of the biggest issues on the Moon is the extremely abrasive lunar dust, due to the lack of wind and water to wear down the edges on the dust grains; that gets in everywhere, damages equipment and may well cause lung disease if the astronauts breathe in too much, but it's irrelevant on Mars where billions of years of wind-storms have rounded down the dust.
Similarly, space suit and rover designs would be dramatically different in the 1/6 gravity on the Moon to the 1/3 gravity on Mars.
"If we had used a Saturn V to put a refueling station up (Skylab sized, without the 'space station' internals,)"
In other words, you want to use a Saturn V to put an SIVB stage in orbit, to transfer fuel to another SIVB stage that you'll launch on a Saturn 1b? Yeah, that makes so much sense.
"(The IB was used to launch Apollo 5, an unmanned CSM/LM pair.)"
No it wasn't. Hint: take a look at a photo of Apollo 5 sometime.
The Saturn Ib could not launch a CSM and LEM at the same time, and I don't believe it could even launch a lunar CSM. Hint: the Skylab CSMs launched on Saturn 1bs had half the fuel load of the lunar CSMs, since they were way overpowered for Earth-orbital flight.
There would have been absolutely no benefit to your idea; in fact, even if it worked, we'd probably be worse off because we'd fly less Saturn V flights and the fixed costs would be spread across fewer launches. We'd have done better to replace the Saturn 1b with the INT-20 Saturn V derivative and only keep one production line running; NASA is, of course, making the same mistake today by flying two different launchers when they'd save money by only flying one, even if they had to fill any excess payload capacity with water tanks.
Indeed: no-one outside the 'global warming' industry or the local mental hospital would claim that climate doesn't and hasn't changed without human intervention, because that would be really, really silly.
What is denied is that humans are having any significant effect on global temperature from CO2 emissions, or that we could do anything useful about it even if we were.
"What I found shocking is that some of the same scientists who had funding ties to big tobacco and were saying that there was no evidence that smoking caused cancer are now the same scientists with funding ties to big oil and are claiming there is no proof of global warming."
You mean like some of the same scientists who were warning about the Coming Ice Age in the 70s are now warning about the Coming Global Meltdown in the 00s?
Or how scientists who make a living from 'Global Warming' research keep finding more evidence for more and more scary outcomes in their computer models, which coincidentally provides justification to keep funding them?
With idiotic ideas like this around, the IRS would be raking in trillions...
"I am completely innocent. I have commited no crimes and am not suspected of committing any crimes."
I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that anyone can live in Britain today and not commit any crimes. You've never driven over 70mph on a motorway? You've never put recyclable waste in your dustbin?
There are so many laws in Britain today that you're pretty much a criminal the instant you get out of bed; in fact, you're probably a criminal if you stay in bed all day too. The real problem is _too many laws_, not too many criminals; if the cops stopped chasing people for bullshit crimes with high-tech gadgetry they could get all the real criminals off the streets.