98 is faster than XP on the same hardware! Not only that 95 is faster than 98!
Except, XP actually does more for me than 98, and 98SE was actually faster and more stable than 95.
Vista is merely more annoying than XP. The one thing Vista has that I actually might want is DirectX 10, which is so decoupled from Vista that people have backported it to XP.
Aside from that, XP is more compatible, faster, doesn't annoy me with UAC (not even a little bit), more stable than the Vista I've used.
I see a lot of reason for using XP instead of 98 -- try to read a floppy, and 98 hangs, no multithreaded IO, apparently, so yes, XP is faster than 98. Or, as the other poster said, for using XP instead of DOS. What conceivable reason is there for using Vista or Windows 7 instead of XP?
the argument that an OS that is over 7 years old should be the baseline for performance is ridiculous.
That's true. Performance should be improving over those seven years, not eroding. And, indeed, this is what happens with other OSes. The 2.6 Linux kernel was a massive improvement over 2.4, and runs just fine on netbooks, which Vista turns into burning heaps of slag. Compiz is actually sometimes faster than metacity, as opposed to Aero, which is pretty universally slower than XP's GUI -- and Compiz will work fine on crappy intel cards that Aero turns into burning heaps of slag.
So yes, I think it's a fair comparison, considering performance is just one of the many ways that people talk about upgrading from Vista to XP.
By this very nature, to plan for more than 1 makes no sense, since you already think you are ready to release. Planning for 2 RCs is like you are planning for your QA team and Betas to have failed.
It does happen, and it happens often. I would plan for at least 2, and if you only need 1, you're ahead of schedule. But I can't remember when I last saw a large project use only one RC.
How many RC's do most projects plan for? I mean, if it goes to RC, it's a "release candidate" for god's sake! Unless you find a show-stopper bug during that time...
And that's the point. "Release Candidate" is supposed to mean, no known bugs remaining, abuse this until you find one.
So, you put the RC out for a month or so, or until someone finds a showstopper bug. When you find one, you put out another RC.
In other words, "as many as it takes." The fact that Microsoft is planning a specific number of them is kind of irresponsible -- if anyone was wondering that "Release Candidate" is Microsoft's slang for "Beta", this should seal it right here.
For what it's worth, Vista had enough showstopper bugs on release day, it's hard to believe it ran through any kind of release candidate process.
If your town was a little bigger Comcrap would be there and you would get 6Mbps like the rest of us.
Mediacom is here with that 6mbps crap. Lisco is just a better deal.
Maybe if Comcrap was here early enough to buy off the local and state government? Because I'm fairly sure that Lisco has some state government money to pay for installing this stuff. (That $65/mo is straight up, no installation fee.)
Yes, it's true -- "the right to read" is sounding more and more prophetic.
The problem is, RMS doesn't know how to choose his battles. Perfect example right here:
I for one am still using Emacs on GNU/Linux to develop software
I'm using Vim and Kate on Ubuntu... Point is, what is this sticking point about GNU/Linux?
I understand that GNU has made huge contributions. But others have made contributions just as large, both in the amount of code and the significance of the impact. For example: BSD's IP stack. The X Windowing System. You can't even claim that these owe anything to the GPL, as neither was released under that license.
So, I could call it KDE/Xorg/Qt/Ubuntu/BlueZ/Debian/Python/GNU/Linux.
Or I could just pick one of those words. I tend to call it just Ubuntu, or just Linux.
Now, it's fine that RMS has the opinion that it should be called GNU/Linux (and not even Linux/GNU). I think it's a little petty of him, a bit of jealousy that out of nowhere, Linus swept in and stole his spotlight. But that's his opinion.
What I don't like is that he is unwilling to see it as an opinion. From what I understand, he is unwilling to participate in any interview in which the term "Linux" is used instead of "GNU/Linux" -- and that seems a bit extreme and counterproductive.
He also is not only of the opinion that proprietary software can sometimes be a bad thing. He's of the opinion that it is evil, and that all software should be free. That seems, in at least a few areas, to be impractical and not entirely desirable, for publisher or consumer. Certainly, free software is good, and I am glad it exists, but I see it as part of an ecosystem, not as a necessary end in itself.
I find that it's useful to read him sometimes, as he does have some insights, and his precision of language does provide a unique perspective. But at the same time, it is hard to take him seriously, knowing that on any given topic, he may have real insight, or he may simply have a decades-old petty squabble that he won't let go of.
The hair has nothing to do with it -- I look a little like that myself. It's the ability to play well with others.
Now, on the subject at hand, I don't entirely see how merely having free software available helps with DRM. Consumers will either buy DRM'd devices or they won't. Developers will either build DRM'd devices or they won't. Where does free software enter into this equation?
Most of us bought WoW to play a game under a fair playing field.
This isn't about WoW.
Yes, I realize this particular ruling is about WoW. That's not what I'm talking about.
I am talking about the recording industry, which has gotten so used to being able to sell you the same album in a new format every few years (LPs, cassettes, CDs) that they would like nothing more than to force you to buy an album as a download again, rather than letting you rip it from a CD.
Or the movie industry, which, when faced with systems like Slingbox -- take a TV station, or a DVD, and stream it over the network to wherever you happen to be to watch it -- when asked why they wanted to prevent that, even when it was a non-infringing use (a DVD you legally bought), point-blank said "We want to charge you for that service."
It's not about WoW. I'm just saying that I've actually found a legal basis, in that ruling, for that attitude.
The.NET framework is in Windows Update, which users trust because it has Microsoft's name on it and an entry on the Start Menu.
And they're still going to have to download my app, which doesn't have Microsoft's name on it, and isn't an entry in the start menu. With Firefox, they just have to download Firefox.
Firefox is also an order of magnitude smaller, last I checked. That should help with the dialup problem.
that's because it uses KParts, which is, in and of itself, cool.
They are, especially because so much of KDE seems to use them properly.
But I'm still curious exactly what makes them so special. Aren't they just embeddable GUI widgets? Is that really such a unique concept?
People who implement new KDE filemanagers because Konqueror "does too much" just don't get it.
I don't know that I've seen that done, aside from Dolphin, and Dolphin and Konqueror share a KPart. Unless I'm missing something, Dolphin is all about providing a different UI.
Probably not as bad as Outlook in a VM... probably.
This is why I always used IMAP to access the Exchange server, when I worked in a Windows shop. Native support for the rest of it would probably be a Good Thing.
Buzzwords don't magically make the technology irrelevant. They just make it easier to talk about with PHBs -- and, unfortunately, make it easy for PHBs to make stuff up while pretending they know what they're talking about, which is why you probably ignore buzzwords...
Let me point you to another one: AJAX. The tech was already there, mostly, but pretty much overnight, and mostly because of the buzzword, the browser went from a way to view static pages, submit forms, and search, to an actual rich-client platform.
Sure, Google is jumping on it, but it's only another service.
Gmail made Hotmail irrelevant. Combined, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail have made Outlook Express largely irrelevant.
Similarly, Gmail + Google Calendar looks like it could easily make Outlook + Exchange irrelevant.
said guy acknowledged with a straight face that the cloud was the future and laid out Microsoft's plans for it. Does Microsoft really believe in their own planned obsolescence?
They have to, planned or not. It seems very likely that they are jumping on "cloud" for two reasons:
- Customers seem to like it -- they can get their stuff anywhere. Customers moving to Google Apps are customers who won't be buying Office 2010, or Office 2015, or whatever.
- It's a truly great opportunity for even more lock-in, and this goes for both Google and Microsoft. Google seems to be responsible so far -- they use ODF internally, and make files available for download in various formats. Supposing Microsoft doesn't, it doesn't matter if they lose Windows and office sales, they'll more than make up for it in Office subscriptions and/or ad revenue, because people have to use their service to get at their documents.
More likely that they'll be able to analyze it, but also more likely to be decently efficient. I suppose we'll have to see how it's actually implemented...
lack of software, commercial software in particular, for both of these platforms.
There's tons of commercial software for these platforms. Not as much as for Windows, maybe, but enough that whole fields have been known to switch en-masse.
You claim Vista has a problem with compatibility, then complain that Windows is too big because of it's backward compatibility.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. Just because they've funneled a lot of effort into backwards compatibility, doesn't mean it's working.
In fact, my point was that Vista's problem was, it tried to do both at once -- both progress and preserve backwards compatibility -- and didn't do very well at either.
Crying over the Win32 API will get you some mod points, but it really shows you are just way out of touch.
Mentioning mods is starting to be as bad a meme here as Nazi Germany. But since you started it, are you saying the majority of Slashdot moderators are out of touch?
If by "KDE integration" they mean Kontact, I'm all for that.
Mostly because of the design -- Kontact looks and feels like a monolithic, Outlook-esque application. Instead, it merely combines pieces you already have as standalone programs -- KMail, Akregator, KOrganizer, and so on.
Customers have dial-up because they're cheap or rural.
That's changing. Read my sig.
For another, a pure web app has only a couple kilobytes of local storage
Most apps don't need that, if they're going to be online anyway. The ones that do, or need to be offline, might find Google Gears helpful -- which is open source, and which they are trying to turn into a standard.
the DOM still isn't consistent between IE and everyone else.
It's close enough that it can be delt with, without much difficulty.
But, you don't have to -- again, if you're going to be forcing users to download a whole runtime anyway, I don't see how it's easier to force them to download.NET than Firefox. If you've got the kind of users who don't want to do that, they probably don't want to download your standalone app, either.
By that time, you couldn't buy a PC with XP on it already
Depends how much you're willing to spend.
I bought this laptop with Ubuntu on it -- worth it, to avoid doing the research on what hardware would and wouldn't work, and so that Dell can't say a word about it when I need support.
I then found that Newegg is still selling $160 OEM copies of XP Pro.
On the whole, though, it is reasonable to expect Vista to do better for more typical cases, because most (all?) Windows software that's being more or less actively developed either is Vista-compatible already, or will be soon.
Just in time for Windows 7. That's the problem.
Please keep in mind that I'm not a native English speaker, however.
I will.
It can be hard to tell -- there are entirely too many people who are native speakers, and talk like that all the time, rather than just an occasional slip.
you'd essentially need a reasonably proficient Linux developer with deep knowledge of Win32 API
Or a reasonably proficient OS X developer with such knowledge. I bet that's more common.
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98 is faster than XP on the same hardware! Not only that 95 is faster than 98!
Except, XP actually does more for me than 98, and 98SE was actually faster and more stable than 95.
Vista is merely more annoying than XP. The one thing Vista has that I actually might want is DirectX 10, which is so decoupled from Vista that people have backported it to XP.
Aside from that, XP is more compatible, faster, doesn't annoy me with UAC (not even a little bit), more stable than the Vista I've used.
I see a lot of reason for using XP instead of 98 -- try to read a floppy, and 98 hangs, no multithreaded IO, apparently, so yes, XP is faster than 98. Or, as the other poster said, for using XP instead of DOS. What conceivable reason is there for using Vista or Windows 7 instead of XP?
the argument that an OS that is over 7 years old should be the baseline for performance is ridiculous.
That's true. Performance should be improving over those seven years, not eroding. And, indeed, this is what happens with other OSes. The 2.6 Linux kernel was a massive improvement over 2.4, and runs just fine on netbooks, which Vista turns into burning heaps of slag. Compiz is actually sometimes faster than metacity, as opposed to Aero, which is pretty universally slower than XP's GUI -- and Compiz will work fine on crappy intel cards that Aero turns into burning heaps of slag.
So yes, I think it's a fair comparison, considering performance is just one of the many ways that people talk about upgrading from Vista to XP.
By this very nature, to plan for more than 1 makes no sense, since you already think you are ready to release. Planning for 2 RCs is like you are planning for your QA team and Betas to have failed.
It does happen, and it happens often. I would plan for at least 2, and if you only need 1, you're ahead of schedule. But I can't remember when I last saw a large project use only one RC.
Except that XP does just about everything Vista does. Can you say the same for DOS?
* Faster on Less Hardware - They did make it work better on older slower hardware with less memory.
But still slower than XP on the same hardware. Faster than Vista is not saying much.
This should be included into Vista with a service pack
The whole thing strikes me as Vista SP3.
How many RC's do most projects plan for? I mean, if it goes to RC, it's a "release candidate" for god's sake! Unless you find a show-stopper bug during that time...
And that's the point. "Release Candidate" is supposed to mean, no known bugs remaining, abuse this until you find one.
So, you put the RC out for a month or so, or until someone finds a showstopper bug. When you find one, you put out another RC.
In other words, "as many as it takes." The fact that Microsoft is planning a specific number of them is kind of irresponsible -- if anyone was wondering that "Release Candidate" is Microsoft's slang for "Beta", this should seal it right here.
For what it's worth, Vista had enough showstopper bugs on release day, it's hard to believe it ran through any kind of release candidate process.
More cluttered, maybe, but simpler for what you actually need to do with files.
I find it hard to have an informed opinion, though. My file browser is bash.
If your town was a little bigger Comcrap would be there and you would get 6Mbps like the rest of us.
Mediacom is here with that 6mbps crap. Lisco is just a better deal.
Maybe if Comcrap was here early enough to buy off the local and state government? Because I'm fairly sure that Lisco has some state government money to pay for installing this stuff. (That $65/mo is straight up, no installation fee.)
Yes, it's true -- "the right to read" is sounding more and more prophetic.
The problem is, RMS doesn't know how to choose his battles. Perfect example right here:
I for one am still using Emacs on GNU/Linux to develop software
I'm using Vim and Kate on Ubuntu... Point is, what is this sticking point about GNU/Linux?
I understand that GNU has made huge contributions. But others have made contributions just as large, both in the amount of code and the significance of the impact. For example: BSD's IP stack. The X Windowing System. You can't even claim that these owe anything to the GPL, as neither was released under that license.
So, I could call it KDE/Xorg/Qt/Ubuntu/BlueZ/Debian/Python/GNU/Linux.
Or I could just pick one of those words. I tend to call it just Ubuntu, or just Linux.
Now, it's fine that RMS has the opinion that it should be called GNU/Linux (and not even Linux/GNU). I think it's a little petty of him, a bit of jealousy that out of nowhere, Linus swept in and stole his spotlight. But that's his opinion.
What I don't like is that he is unwilling to see it as an opinion. From what I understand, he is unwilling to participate in any interview in which the term "Linux" is used instead of "GNU/Linux" -- and that seems a bit extreme and counterproductive.
He also is not only of the opinion that proprietary software can sometimes be a bad thing. He's of the opinion that it is evil, and that all software should be free. That seems, in at least a few areas, to be impractical and not entirely desirable, for publisher or consumer. Certainly, free software is good, and I am glad it exists, but I see it as part of an ecosystem, not as a necessary end in itself.
I find that it's useful to read him sometimes, as he does have some insights, and his precision of language does provide a unique perspective. But at the same time, it is hard to take him seriously, knowing that on any given topic, he may have real insight, or he may simply have a decades-old petty squabble that he won't let go of.
The hair has nothing to do with it -- I look a little like that myself. It's the ability to play well with others.
Now, on the subject at hand, I don't entirely see how merely having free software available helps with DRM. Consumers will either buy DRM'd devices or they won't. Developers will either build DRM'd devices or they won't. Where does free software enter into this equation?
Most of us bought WoW to play a game under a fair playing field.
This isn't about WoW.
Yes, I realize this particular ruling is about WoW. That's not what I'm talking about.
I am talking about the recording industry, which has gotten so used to being able to sell you the same album in a new format every few years (LPs, cassettes, CDs) that they would like nothing more than to force you to buy an album as a download again, rather than letting you rip it from a CD.
Or the movie industry, which, when faced with systems like Slingbox -- take a TV station, or a DVD, and stream it over the network to wherever you happen to be to watch it -- when asked why they wanted to prevent that, even when it was a non-infringing use (a DVD you legally bought), point-blank said "We want to charge you for that service."
It's not about WoW. I'm just saying that I've actually found a legal basis, in that ruling, for that attitude.
I understand what Glider was made for.
What's your point? Why should the DMCA apply to it?
The .NET framework is in Windows Update, which users trust because it has Microsoft's name on it and an entry on the Start Menu.
And they're still going to have to download my app, which doesn't have Microsoft's name on it, and isn't an entry in the start menu. With Firefox, they just have to download Firefox.
Firefox is also an order of magnitude smaller, last I checked. That should help with the dialup problem.
that's because it uses KParts, which is, in and of itself, cool.
They are, especially because so much of KDE seems to use them properly.
But I'm still curious exactly what makes them so special. Aren't they just embeddable GUI widgets? Is that really such a unique concept?
People who implement new KDE filemanagers because Konqueror "does too much" just don't get it.
I don't know that I've seen that done, aside from Dolphin, and Dolphin and Konqueror share a KPart. Unless I'm missing something, Dolphin is all about providing a different UI.
It's not always there, and it's far from perfect.
Probably not as bad as Outlook in a VM... probably.
This is why I always used IMAP to access the Exchange server, when I worked in a Windows shop. Native support for the rest of it would probably be a Good Thing.
It also seems like it might connect to Kontact. If so, well, Kontact is much better than Evolution, last I checked.
Either way, Evolution's Exchange integration sucks, and this is well known and understood.
All this "cloud" hype is just another buzzword.
Buzzwords don't magically make the technology irrelevant. They just make it easier to talk about with PHBs -- and, unfortunately, make it easy for PHBs to make stuff up while pretending they know what they're talking about, which is why you probably ignore buzzwords...
Let me point you to another one: AJAX. The tech was already there, mostly, but pretty much overnight, and mostly because of the buzzword, the browser went from a way to view static pages, submit forms, and search, to an actual rich-client platform.
Sure, Google is jumping on it, but it's only another service.
Gmail made Hotmail irrelevant. Combined, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail have made Outlook Express largely irrelevant.
Similarly, Gmail + Google Calendar looks like it could easily make Outlook + Exchange irrelevant.
said guy acknowledged with a straight face that the cloud was the future and laid out Microsoft's plans for it. Does Microsoft really believe in their own planned obsolescence?
They have to, planned or not. It seems very likely that they are jumping on "cloud" for two reasons:
- Customers seem to like it -- they can get their stuff anywhere. Customers moving to Google Apps are customers who won't be buying Office 2010, or Office 2015, or whatever.
- It's a truly great opportunity for even more lock-in, and this goes for both Google and Microsoft. Google seems to be responsible so far -- they use ODF internally, and make files available for download in various formats. Supposing Microsoft doesn't, it doesn't matter if they lose Windows and office sales, they'll more than make up for it in Office subscriptions and/or ad revenue, because people have to use their service to get at their documents.
Better:
http://www.arg0.net/encfs
More likely that they'll be able to analyze it, but also more likely to be decently efficient. I suppose we'll have to see how it's actually implemented...
If I mount it with encfs, what information do they have about me?
Amazon is. All they'd have to do is turn on some sort of free access to S3.
So is anyone else with money to throw at S3 -- just put a nice web frontend in front of it...
That's a pretty ignorant notion considering Google itself has an array of online office productivity apps.
Exactly: they already have such an array. What would be the point of doing it again?
It will either need a separate backup solution, or bidirectional replication like Apple's iDisk. I'm betting replication.
If it can be mounted as a filesystem, in what way will that be even remotely hard?
Last time I checked, Google apps couldn't access WebDAV documents. It's too damned obvious, and Google is chock full of Apple users.
Google Calendar provides a CalDAV interface. Both iCal and Sunbird can simply wire directly to that calendar.
How about another example: IMAP. I can back up my entire Gmail account, about as easily as any other IMAP account.
lack of software, commercial software in particular, for both of these platforms.
There's tons of commercial software for these platforms. Not as much as for Windows, maybe, but enough that whole fields have been known to switch en-masse.
You claim Vista has a problem with compatibility, then complain that Windows is too big because of it's backward compatibility.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. Just because they've funneled a lot of effort into backwards compatibility, doesn't mean it's working.
In fact, my point was that Vista's problem was, it tried to do both at once -- both progress and preserve backwards compatibility -- and didn't do very well at either.
Crying over the Win32 API will get you some mod points, but it really shows you are just way out of touch.
Mentioning mods is starting to be as bad a meme here as Nazi Germany. But since you started it, are you saying the majority of Slashdot moderators are out of touch?
If by "KDE integration" they mean Kontact, I'm all for that.
Mostly because of the design -- Kontact looks and feels like a monolithic, Outlook-esque application. Instead, it merely combines pieces you already have as standalone programs -- KMail, Akregator, KOrganizer, and so on.
Let's hope it's implemented as FUSE, for portability...
If it's actually exposed as a local filesystem, then it should be trivial to encrypt the files using something like encfs.
Customers have dial-up because they're cheap or rural.
That's changing. Read my sig.
For another, a pure web app has only a couple kilobytes of local storage
Most apps don't need that, if they're going to be online anyway. The ones that do, or need to be offline, might find Google Gears helpful -- which is open source, and which they are trying to turn into a standard.
the DOM still isn't consistent between IE and everyone else.
It's close enough that it can be delt with, without much difficulty.
But, you don't have to -- again, if you're going to be forcing users to download a whole runtime anyway, I don't see how it's easier to force them to download .NET than Firefox. If you've got the kind of users who don't want to do that, they probably don't want to download your standalone app, either.
DMCA is essential to an orderly society.
That must be why we didn't need it for hundreds of years worth of "orderly society".
Without the ability of a software producer to control how his product is used...
Without that, we might just get some real innovation. You know, people combining existing inventions in new ways. The horror!
People might actually tinker with the things they legitimately own! Think of that! The modding community must be stopped at all costs!
If you have no legal right to use your camera to take pictures of child pornography or use your mega-phone to disrupt a sleeping neighborhood.
And what do either of these have to do with the DMCA? They were illegal before the DMCA, and they'll be illegal if the DMCA is repealed.
By that time, you couldn't buy a PC with XP on it already
Depends how much you're willing to spend.
I bought this laptop with Ubuntu on it -- worth it, to avoid doing the research on what hardware would and wouldn't work, and so that Dell can't say a word about it when I need support.
I then found that Newegg is still selling $160 OEM copies of XP Pro.
On the whole, though, it is reasonable to expect Vista to do better for more typical cases, because most (all?) Windows software that's being more or less actively developed either is Vista-compatible already, or will be soon.
Just in time for Windows 7. That's the problem.
Please keep in mind that I'm not a native English speaker, however.
I will.
It can be hard to tell -- there are entirely too many people who are native speakers, and talk like that all the time, rather than just an occasional slip.
you'd essentially need a reasonably proficient Linux developer with deep knowledge of Win32 API
Or a reasonably proficient OS X developer with such knowledge. I bet that's more common.