Win7 has superfast wifi connect and resume. Big benefit on laptops.
And how does the latency spike every 60sec counts in? It was present since vista beta, vista rtm, now it is in even in Win7 beta. That was the problem with vista, one step forward, one step back. In Win7 it is 1/2 step back but that is not saying much.
And that "superfast" wifi interface (not the connection itself) waited for 2 windows versions to be fixed. Now if they would only fix other windows like this... But well, that should wait windows 8 I guess.
(...)it's a still camera that threatens to cannibalize Canon's entire prosumer video line
Yeah, every camera operator is extremely interested in a canon digital still camera which has a movie mode as an added bonus (to a excellent still camera). I've got news for you. Average camera operator isn't interested in canon digital still cameras, much less replacing his professional video camera with a still camera. And by average, I mean all of them.
(...)I work with video every day, and I have a hard time not using our 5D mkII over our $8000 Sony XDCAM on many shoots.
You are just trolling. I work as a photographer and I'm too considering using a video camera for some of my photo shoots.
You can use somewhat classic (ie vista's) task bar in windows 7 though. You just disable taskbar grouping. And concerning grouping (aka icons only in task bar) it is just another proof of microsofts copying bad and good things from os x. Besides these icons, I can only remember how well the awful copy of expose went down in history, flip-3d. One of the good things that they copied though is the 50% reduction of windows in networking. When they cut down the click count for everything else that would be some serious progress.
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
Actually, the default appearance of the task bar is just a little better than horrible. Those huge icons are frankly unusable. But good news is that you can easily configure the task bar (task bar->properties) to have the *same* layout as in vista/xp. Moreover, you can keep the new transparency of the taskbar (I personally don't like it because it is distracting when you have maximized windows) and at the same time get that cool mouse tracking effect and other extras (like taskbar button coloring, group mini-preview etc).
I'm just surprised how few reviewers could miss that setting.
The difference is not that small. That can be 5-10fps difference when looking at static objects but can grow even to 15-20fps difference when there is a lot of movement/object going on. And then every frame counts, especially if you're limited to 60/70fps for lcds. At least this is my experience with vista.
Latency spike which occurs exactly every 60 seconds when you are connected through wifi, which cripples your surfing experience and completely disables *any* online gaming. This problem was present at least since vista rc1, still present even in windows 7 pre-beta versions. Add to that complete unreliability of ad-hoc created networks. Random and long disconnects, have to manually connect to ad-hoc networks every time you login (even from resume) etc. They work fine in xp, why are suddenly broken in vista?
Network connections settings have not much less than 100 windows. It is almost physically painful to go through them when trying to setup anything. (Hint: look at os x equivalent window, 3 different windows at most). And wtf do I need to click (or even see) 800x600 window telling me that I'm now connected to $NETWORK? Which leads me to my next point.
Windows settings are fragmented and sometimes they are hard to find. (ie first char underlining when pressing the alt key). I know where to find pretty much every setting there is in vista but it is all very hard and unnecessary work. Try to explain someone over the phone where to find setting to disable cleartype or anything else. Everything is completely unnecessary buried deep in some obscure windows. It is a clickfest. It is like a diablo, but not fun.Btw, windows 7 can even search directly for settings like this. So you can press start, type "cleartype" and click on the link. Then the proper window will open. Nice isn't it?
NOT!
Why? Completely wrong design philosophy. If you need a friggin search tool to find a window with a correct setting, well sorry folks, but your OS has too many windows and settings. Why bother with designing normal windows at all? Just give us a query tool (start menu) and generate windows dynamically with appropriate wanted settings. (gosh! I should patent that!) But it is a bullshit design anyway.
Speaking of windows design; a severely crippled amoeba could designed them better. A majority of vista's windows have this layout: menus on top (ok), main settings below on the right side, and settings which are not that major have links (on another windows no less) on the left (buzzword: sidebar). The problem is that the left part takes no less than 200px. And the items on the sidebar are just thrown there because retarded designers couldn't be bothered to integrate them logically in the same window. Just look at this example: (this is windows 7 screenshot, but vista is no better, only worse) Power Options screenshot
File IO is much slower than xp's. No need to expand on that.
Games performance is worse. I will tell it again,
Games performance is worse on vista than on xp. Those who don't notice the difference should have their eyes examined or have Space Odyssey's monolith-rivaling high performance computer. Or they are just kids who don't know how to check fps rating when playing games.
These are just some of the problems vista has over xp. I'm first to admit that xp has a lot of problems too, but those problems in my opinion are smaller than vista's. And vista's benefits are just to small to hide its design flaws.
The voice calls to another country are extremely expensive, and in the case of DR Congo I would imagine that call would cost more than the value of the town they were in.
So why sms messages? Because when you send a message to another country you get charged the same as you were texting anyone else in the country you are in (which is not expensive). This is the reason why they've used sms messages.
And to apply your theory to the latest mobile phone disinformation that is spreading like wildfire.
rant_mode_on
For example, on quite a many sites there is news like this:
Huge headline on a gadget/geek site: "Whoa! Phone X will cost only $200!".
Then later in the text you come across that you have to take 2 year subscription and a monthly plan which is like 10x the price of the phone.
Then some time later:
Huge headline on a gadget/geek site: "OMG, Phone Y will cost only $100! Half the price of Phone X." Even though Phone Y comes with a (usually different) subscription/plan too.
It just annoys me to no end when I read or hear stuff like this. No Steve Jobs, you are not lowering the price of the iphone by half by lowering the price of the first payment (notice my avoidance of the term "price") by half.
Don't be so sure though. Peli cases (heavy duty, watertight, plastic cases) are almost indestructible. Yet their lifetime guarantee says: "The guarantee does not cover shark bite, bear attack and children under five." (emphasis mine)
Don't be so quick to give a model m to a child. You won't believe how much havoc and destruction they can create;)
And the sad truth is that they expect to pay the mechanic for the car, but generally don't expect to pay the nerd to repair their computer (which can take much more time to do it anyway)...
it is good enough to keep it. I had tested Vista/w sp1 on the same computer but generally uninstalled it the same day. I just couldn't live with all that bloat and 30+ windows in networking. But I have this pre-beta on the wind for 10 days now.
Windows 7 (build 6801) is completely another animal. I'll concede right away its not windows xp. But it is no worse either.
Firstly, most of the bloat is gone. Networking has at least half of the windows cut down and selecting a wireless network is much more simpler now (almost like os x). Still there are problems which are carried over from vista (not xp, evidence that 7 is based on vista). For example: 60sec lag spike is still present which makes web browsing less pleasant than on the xp and online gaming impossible which isn't a small deal. I just cannot fathom why still they haven't fixed it. The problem was present at least from Vista RC1, and today it thrives in 7 too. There are other issues too (including major ones) but its late and I want to write about other stuff.
Windows explorer has some new features which is nothing but bloat unfortunately. Almost all the new gains in UI are offset with this. Why on earth there is Favorites, Libraries and Homegroup in the folder list (left part of explorer)? They cannot be removed and all of them are placed above (My) Computer and your local disks which are used the most. And every time you open explorer, Libraries are open by default. This is completely unacceptable.
Task bar is new and by default it is two rows high and only shows icons. This is a bad decision to have this by default. You can switch to normal windows information display (icon + app title text) and then it looks and handles nicely. Hats off to the guy who designed that cool mouse tracking effect on the taskbar. There are minor aesthetical issues with other taskbar features but this is not a place to expand on it.
They added some new features like creating a recovery disk (which can be used for reimaging from a backup, finally!), new backup and restore application (to make backups/images), character editor, keyboard shortcut to connect a projector or an external display (pretty slick and useful actually, win-p), new calculator (I like xp power toy one better though) etc.
Other than that, stability is great in this 10 days. Haven't had one single problem. All hardware devices were recognized and drivers automatically installed once you connected to the internet. Battery lasts at least as long on the xp, maybe even more because the indicator says that at full charge battery will last for 2:20 (vs 2:00 with xp). And yes, power management was streamlined, but that could be done even further though. And finally, yes, it runs very very well on Wind, just as xp. Contrary to Vista which feels very slow most of the time, and extremely slow some of the time.
Just to conclude the post. Win 7 is windows on the right track. Vista definitely was like Me, but 7 is not to Vista as xp was to 98. It is something in between. It is not bad at all (even this early, but as a sidenote, I don't think they will change much after this pre-beta), but it is not game changing like xp was to 98. At the same time one could say that 7 will be a good replacement for aged xp. It will be what vista should have been from day one. But I still long for a real desktop mac, more customizable os x, and lower prices in europe at least...
I'm writing this from my MSI Wind which has Windows 7 build 6801. UI is much faster and streamlined than the vista. New task bar looks absolutely great when you put turn off button grouping. From the usability standpoint taskbar is at least as good as on win xp. But to address your bloat concerns. True, this version is not windows xp but it isn't vista either. Lets say that it has more features than vista, but it is just a little bit slower (actually hardly noticeable) than xp.
I naturally agree on the points you make, but hardware is the problem too. Intel's Atom processor really sips the battery, but other components are the problem. Chipset and GPU drain the battery releasing copious amounts of heat in the process. My point is that the battery on my subnotebook could last much longer if it weren't for wasteful chipset and gpu, not OS (which is idling most of the time).
Just to add a datapoint, my iphone's wifi was doa (and a fast draining battery as a consequence). They didn't want to even look at it. Just because it wasn't activated. I've read the whole warranty and the crap they put on the web too which explicitly said that you don't have to have to have iphone activated (you need to enter the serial number of the phone there) to receive the service under warranty.
And Italian cities are planned for scooters? How? Have you seen how many scooters are there? Those cities have relatively narrow streets because most of them are pretty ancient. To many people over there scooter is the *main* vehicle they use.
1. Having a fast booting OS is good in any case. 2. Having a special fast-boot mode is useless.
Let me give you an example.
Take a normal mobile phone. I can press two buttons and the phone is ready to be used. Does anyone on this planet cares how fast a mobile phone boots its OS? Pretty much nobody cares if the phone boots in 15, 30, or 60 seconds. They boot it once a day at most. I can't even remember when was the last time I rebooted mine.
Can you already see where I'm going with this? I got only few words:
Suspend/hibernation/hybrid sleep.
I already wrote a post similar to this. Take my macbook (or pretty much any other computer) for example. I can't even remember when was the last time I (re)booted it. Consequentially, I don't even care how fast it boots. I just close the lid when I'm done with my work and the computer goes to hybrid sleep. When I want to resume with my work, I just open the lid and the computer is *instantly* ready to accept my input.
This is just like a mobile phone. But even better! As the mobile phone does drain the battery slowly, computer actually doesn't (if it is hibernated).
So to finish with my post. Of course it is good for a OS to boot fast. But in my view this isn't one of it's main features. Instead they should really be working on improving suspend/resume mechanic on desktop and laptop computers. Too many brand new laptops dont' resume when I open their lids. I usually have to press their power button to resume. And sometimes, they don't resume at all. So instead of doing a whole another windows mode, they should instead focusing on better suspend/resume support.
I still can see like 98% of windows users and 90% of mac users regularly shut down their laptops/desktops. One can consider this a bad habit from the "good old times. Modern computer architecture really should be making great suspend/resume architecture.
Replying to my own post I know, but I wanted to add a small interesting bit of insight.
As we have concluded that apple won't let other apps which mimic apple's own apps on the iphone, is is not far fetched to conclude that apple won't develop pretty much no other major iphone app?
Lets say that apple wants to develop a flashlight app. From the previous argument we can conclude that other flashlight app writers just got their apps rejected from the iphone platform. That means if we ever get to see a voice recording app from apple, does it mean that SpeakEasy's VR app would be discontinued? Or will they arbitrary reject some apps, and keep others?
Honestly, how many people would buy an apple computer if the osx only allows you to run apple's mail.app (no thunderbird/entourage), only safari (no firefox), only iwork, only finder etc? I guess probably nobody would, except a few brain dead people.
So we can conclude that apple's computers and iphones are substantially different. The former lets you use competitor's software (eg firefox instead of safari) which the latter won't.
Another conclusion is that apple can leverage their obsessive control on iphones, which to be frank, don't have much of a direct competition, but in the field of personal computers (where the competition is much greater) the situation is very different and they have to do their best to stay afloat.
Even if I don't support it in any case, it is about duplication of *apple's* software functionality. So it doesn't matter if there are 45 versions of flashlight apps, apple doesn't have one so they don't care. When you start to design your music player, mail and itunes app, then you get into the problems.
But by using a different distribution method (jailbroken device + cydia or installer.app) you could duplicate the functionality of apple's own apps.
On a macbook you can have OSX suspended all the time. Just open the laptop's lid and the OS will resume instantly. You don't even have to press a key to resume it. And of course, no need to boot it. Actually, the only time I get my macbook restarted is after software patches.
I really don't get why other laptops don't have this feature*, because it works great and it is such a pleasure to use it.
As a sidenote, is OS boot time really such an important thing? Lets look a the a mobile phone for example. Nobody cares how much it takes it to boot. When you have it on "standby" you just press a combination of buttons and your phone is ready to use. I still don't get why don't we have computers who have better suspend modes etc.
*they can suspend/hibernate when you close the lid, but never resume automatically after you open the lid.
Even if you manage to install drivers for your wireless card and everything seems to work ok, there is still a "little feature" vista has.
Exactly every 60seconds vista creates a ping spike of around 1500ms. You probably won't notice it if you are just web browsing, but try to play any online game and the experience is completely unusable.
This problem was visible since beta, and they still haven't fixed it which is frankly outrageous. There are some workarounds but they haven't worked for me.
You can check your ping spike from command prompt:
ping [some other computer/router] -t//and then wait for at least a minute to see the lag spike you get.
Actually the evidence for warm blooded dinosaurs is slim at best.
According to this paper there might be a possibility for some number of warm blooded dinosaurs, but it is a more of a stretch to say that all (or even majority) of them were warm blooded. You should read that paper because it answers much of your points (with arguments/data).
I have pretty much no knowledge about dinosaurs but you can use a bit of common sense here. Size has its limits. It doesn't matter if the animal is cold or warm blooded, the bigger the animal, the relatively slower it is. So just to clarify, t-rex probably was relatively slow. If it were fast, its leg muscles should be bigger than whole its body, which is impossible. And you can always use elephants for the example. Elephants can't run. They can walk a bit faster. But to say they are fast is a exaggeration.
Slashdot Mirror
And how does the latency spike every 60sec counts in? It was present since vista beta, vista rtm, now it is in even in Win7 beta. That was the problem with vista, one step forward, one step back. In Win7 it is 1/2 step back but that is not saying much.
And that "superfast" wifi interface (not the connection itself) waited for 2 windows versions to be fixed. Now if they would only fix other windows like this... But well, that should wait windows 8 I guess.
(...)full high-quality 1080 24p video footage
Actually, it is 1080p, 24fps.
(...)it's a still camera that threatens to cannibalize Canon's entire prosumer video line
Yeah, every camera operator is extremely interested in a canon digital still camera which has a movie mode as an added bonus (to a excellent still camera). I've got news for you. Average camera operator isn't interested in canon digital still cameras, much less replacing his professional video camera with a still camera. And by average, I mean all of them.
(...)I work with video every day, and I have a hard time not using our 5D mkII over our $8000 Sony XDCAM on many shoots.
You are just trolling. I work as a photographer and I'm too considering using a video camera for some of my photo shoots.
Not.
Three words my young padawan:
Meet the Spartans.
You can use somewhat classic (ie vista's) task bar in windows 7 though. You just disable taskbar grouping. And concerning grouping (aka icons only in task bar) it is just another proof of microsofts copying bad and good things from os x. Besides these icons, I can only remember how well the awful copy of expose went down in history, flip-3d. One of the good things that they copied though is the 50% reduction of windows in networking. When they cut down the click count for everything else that would be some serious progress.
Well, what about Elbonia then?
Kinda cool name, I only have a funny feeling that I've heard it somewhere before.
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
Actually, the default appearance of the task bar is just a little better than horrible. Those huge icons are frankly unusable. But good news is that you can easily configure the task bar (task bar->properties) to have the *same* layout as in vista/xp. Moreover, you can keep the new transparency of the taskbar (I personally don't like it because it is distracting when you have maximized windows) and at the same time get that cool mouse tracking effect and other extras (like taskbar button coloring, group mini-preview etc).
I'm just surprised how few reviewers could miss that setting.
The difference is not that small. That can be 5-10fps difference when looking at static objects but can grow even to 15-20fps difference when there is a lot of movement/object going on. And then every frame counts, especially if you're limited to 60/70fps for lcds. At least this is my experience with vista.
Just from the top of my head:
Latency spike which occurs exactly every 60 seconds when you are connected through wifi, which cripples your surfing experience and completely disables *any* online gaming. This problem was present at least since vista rc1, still present even in windows 7 pre-beta versions. Add to that complete unreliability of ad-hoc created networks. Random and long disconnects, have to manually connect to ad-hoc networks every time you login (even from resume) etc. They work fine in xp, why are suddenly broken in vista?
Network connections settings have not much less than 100 windows. It is almost physically painful to go through them when trying to setup anything. (Hint: look at os x equivalent window, 3 different windows at most). And wtf do I need to click (or even see) 800x600 window telling me that I'm now connected to $NETWORK? Which leads me to my next point.
Windows settings are fragmented and sometimes they are hard to find. (ie first char underlining when pressing the alt key). I know where to find pretty much every setting there is in vista but it is all very hard and unnecessary work. Try to explain someone over the phone where to find setting to disable cleartype or anything else. Everything is completely unnecessary buried deep in some obscure windows. It is a clickfest. It is like a diablo, but not fun.Btw, windows 7 can even search directly for settings like this. So you can press start, type "cleartype" and click on the link. Then the proper window will open. Nice isn't it?
NOT!
Why? Completely wrong design philosophy. If you need a friggin search tool to find a window with a correct setting, well sorry folks, but your OS has too many windows and settings. Why bother with designing normal windows at all? Just give us a query tool (start menu) and generate windows dynamically with appropriate wanted settings. (gosh! I should patent that!) But it is a bullshit design anyway.
Speaking of windows design; a severely crippled amoeba could designed them better. A majority of vista's windows have this layout: menus on top (ok), main settings below on the right side, and settings which are not that major have links (on another windows no less) on the left (buzzword: sidebar). The problem is that the left part takes no less than 200px. And the items on the sidebar are just thrown there because retarded designers couldn't be bothered to integrate them logically in the same window. Just look at this example: (this is windows 7 screenshot, but vista is no better, only worse) Power Options screenshot
File IO is much slower than xp's. No need to expand on that.
Games performance is worse. I will tell it again,
Games performance is worse on vista than on xp. Those who don't notice the difference should have their eyes examined or have Space Odyssey's monolith-rivaling high performance computer. Or they are just kids who don't know how to check fps rating when playing games.
These are just some of the problems vista has over xp. I'm first to admit that xp has a lot of problems too, but those problems in my opinion are smaller than vista's. And vista's benefits are just to small to hide its design flaws.
The voice calls to another country are extremely expensive, and in the case of DR Congo I would imagine that call would cost more than the value of the town they were in.
So why sms messages? Because when you send a message to another country you get charged the same as you were texting anyone else in the country you are in (which is not expensive). This is the reason why they've used sms messages.
That is the best joke I've seen in the last few weeks.
I for one admire your text-mode imagination Sir.
And to apply your theory to the latest mobile phone disinformation that is spreading like wildfire.
rant_mode_on
For example, on quite a many sites there is news like this:
Huge headline on a gadget/geek site: "Whoa! Phone X will cost only $200!".
Then later in the text you come across that you have to take 2 year subscription and a monthly plan which is like 10x the price of the phone.
Then some time later:
Huge headline on a gadget/geek site: "OMG, Phone Y will cost only $100! Half the price of Phone X." Even though Phone Y comes with a (usually different) subscription/plan too.
It just annoys me to no end when I read or hear stuff like this. No Steve Jobs, you are not lowering the price of the iphone by half by lowering the price of the first payment (notice my avoidance of the term "price") by half.
rant_mode_on
All in all, couldn't agree more.
Don't be so sure though. Peli cases (heavy duty, watertight, plastic cases) are almost indestructible. Yet their lifetime guarantee says: "The guarantee does not cover shark bite, bear attack and children under five." (emphasis mine)
Don't be so quick to give a model m to a child. You won't believe how much havoc and destruction they can create;)
And the sad truth is that they expect to pay the mechanic for the car, but generally don't expect to pay the nerd to repair their computer (which can take much more time to do it anyway)...
it is good enough to keep it. I had tested Vista /w sp1 on the same computer but generally uninstalled it the same day. I just couldn't live with all that bloat and 30+ windows in networking. But I have this pre-beta on the wind for 10 days now.
Windows 7 (build 6801) is completely another animal. I'll concede right away its not windows xp. But it is no worse either.
Firstly, most of the bloat is gone. Networking has at least half of the windows cut down and selecting a wireless network is much more simpler now (almost like os x). Still there are problems which are carried over from vista (not xp, evidence that 7 is based on vista). For example: 60sec lag spike is still present which makes web browsing less pleasant than on the xp and online gaming impossible which isn't a small deal. I just cannot fathom why still they haven't fixed it. The problem was present at least from Vista RC1, and today it thrives in 7 too. There are other issues too (including major ones) but its late and I want to write about other stuff.
Windows explorer has some new features which is nothing but bloat unfortunately. Almost all the new gains in UI are offset with this. Why on earth there is Favorites, Libraries and Homegroup in the folder list (left part of explorer)? They cannot be removed and all of them are placed above (My) Computer and your local disks which are used the most. And every time you open explorer, Libraries are open by default. This is completely unacceptable.
Task bar is new and by default it is two rows high and only shows icons. This is a bad decision to have this by default. You can switch to normal windows information display (icon + app title text) and then it looks and handles nicely. Hats off to the guy who designed that cool mouse tracking effect on the taskbar. There are minor aesthetical issues with other taskbar features but this is not a place to expand on it.
They added some new features like creating a recovery disk (which can be used for reimaging from a backup, finally!), new backup and restore application (to make backups/images), character editor, keyboard shortcut to connect a projector or an external display (pretty slick and useful actually, win-p), new calculator (I like xp power toy one better though) etc.
Other than that, stability is great in this 10 days. Haven't had one single problem. All hardware devices were recognized and drivers automatically installed once you connected to the internet. Battery lasts at least as long on the xp, maybe even more because the indicator says that at full charge battery will last for 2:20 (vs 2:00 with xp). And yes, power management was streamlined, but that could be done even further though. And finally, yes, it runs very very well on Wind, just as xp. Contrary to Vista which feels very slow most of the time, and extremely slow some of the time.
Just to conclude the post. Win 7 is windows on the right track. Vista definitely was like Me, but 7 is not to Vista as xp was to 98. It is something in between. It is not bad at all (even this early, but as a sidenote, I don't think they will change much after this pre-beta), but it is not game changing like xp was to 98. At the same time one could say that 7 will be a good replacement for aged xp. It will be what vista should have been from day one. But I still long for a real desktop mac, more customizable os x, and lower prices in europe at least...
I'm writing this from my MSI Wind which has Windows 7 build 6801. UI is much faster and streamlined than the vista. New task bar looks absolutely great when you put turn off button grouping. From the usability standpoint taskbar is at least as good as on win xp. But to address your bloat concerns. True, this version is not windows xp but it isn't vista either. Lets say that it has more features than vista, but it is just a little bit slower (actually hardly noticeable) than xp.
I naturally agree on the points you make, but hardware is the problem too. Intel's Atom processor really sips the battery, but other components are the problem. Chipset and GPU drain the battery releasing copious amounts of heat in the process. My point is that the battery on my subnotebook could last much longer if it weren't for wasteful chipset and gpu, not OS (which is idling most of the time).
Just to add a datapoint, my iphone's wifi was doa (and a fast draining battery as a consequence). They didn't want to even look at it. Just because it wasn't activated. I've read the whole warranty and the crap they put on the web too which explicitly said that you don't have to have to have iphone activated (you need to enter the serial number of the phone there) to receive the service under warranty.
But it was a painful experience, full story and details at prosperouspoverty.blogspot.com
Most cities are just not planned for scooters
And Italian cities are planned for scooters? How? Have you seen how many scooters are there? Those cities have relatively narrow streets because most of them are pretty ancient. To many people over there scooter is the *main* vehicle they use.
Let me get this as simple as possible:
1. Having a fast booting OS is good in any case.
2. Having a special fast-boot mode is useless.
Let me give you an example.
Take a normal mobile phone. I can press two buttons and the phone is ready to be used. Does anyone on this planet cares how fast a mobile phone boots its OS? Pretty much nobody cares if the phone boots in 15, 30, or 60 seconds. They boot it once a day at most. I can't even remember when was the last time I rebooted mine.
Can you already see where I'm going with this? I got only few words:
Suspend/hibernation/hybrid sleep.
I already wrote a post similar to this. Take my macbook (or pretty much any other computer) for example. I can't even remember when was the last time I (re)booted it. Consequentially, I don't even care how fast it boots. I just close the lid when I'm done with my work and the computer goes to hybrid sleep. When I want to resume with my work, I just open the lid and the computer is *instantly* ready to accept my input.
This is just like a mobile phone. But even better! As the mobile phone does drain the battery slowly, computer actually doesn't (if it is hibernated).
So to finish with my post. Of course it is good for a OS to boot fast. But in my view this isn't one of it's main features. Instead they should really be working on improving suspend/resume mechanic on desktop and laptop computers. Too many brand new laptops dont' resume when I open their lids. I usually have to press their power button to resume. And sometimes, they don't resume at all. So instead of doing a whole another windows mode, they should instead focusing on better suspend/resume support.
I still can see like 98% of windows users and 90% of mac users regularly shut down their laptops/desktops. One can consider this a bad habit from the "good old times. Modern computer architecture really should be making great suspend/resume architecture.
Replying to my own post I know, but I wanted to add a small interesting bit of insight.
As we have concluded that apple won't let other apps which mimic apple's own apps on the iphone, is is not far fetched to conclude that apple won't develop pretty much no other major iphone app?
Lets say that apple wants to develop a flashlight app. From the previous argument we can conclude that other flashlight app writers just got their apps rejected from the iphone platform. That means if we ever get to see a voice recording app from apple, does it mean that SpeakEasy's VR app would be discontinued? Or will they arbitrary reject some apps, and keep others?
Honestly, how many people would buy an apple computer if the osx only allows you to run apple's mail.app (no thunderbird/entourage), only safari (no firefox), only iwork, only finder etc? I guess probably nobody would, except a few brain dead people.
So we can conclude that apple's computers and iphones are substantially different. The former lets you use competitor's software (eg firefox instead of safari) which the latter won't.
Another conclusion is that apple can leverage their obsessive control on iphones, which to be frank, don't have much of a direct competition, but in the field of personal computers (where the competition is much greater) the situation is very different and they have to do their best to stay afloat.
Even if I don't support it in any case, it is about duplication of *apple's* software functionality. So it doesn't matter if there are 45 versions of flashlight apps, apple doesn't have one so they don't care. When you start to design your music player, mail and itunes app, then you get into the problems.
But by using a different distribution method (jailbroken device + cydia or installer.app) you could duplicate the functionality of apple's own apps.
On a macbook you can have OSX suspended all the time. Just open the laptop's lid and the OS will resume instantly. You don't even have to press a key to resume it. And of course, no need to boot it. Actually, the only time I get my macbook restarted is after software patches.
I really don't get why other laptops don't have this feature*, because it works great and it is such a pleasure to use it.
As a sidenote, is OS boot time really such an important thing? Lets look a the a mobile phone for example. Nobody cares how much it takes it to boot. When you have it on "standby" you just press a combination of buttons and your phone is ready to use. I still don't get why don't we have computers who have better suspend modes etc.
*they can suspend/hibernate when you close the lid, but never resume automatically after you open the lid.
who will be the rescue ship for Endeavour?
It gets even more ugly.
Even if you manage to install drivers for your wireless card and everything seems to work ok, there is still a "little feature" vista has.
Exactly every 60seconds vista creates a ping spike of around 1500ms. You probably won't notice it if you are just web browsing, but try to play any online game and the experience is completely unusable.
This problem was visible since beta, and they still haven't fixed it which is frankly outrageous. There are some workarounds but they haven't worked for me.
You can check your ping spike from command prompt:
ping [some other computer/router] -t //and then wait for at least a minute to see the lag spike you get.
For more info just google "vista 60 second lag".
Actually the evidence for warm blooded dinosaurs is slim at best.
According to this paper there might be a possibility for some number of warm blooded dinosaurs, but it is a more of a stretch to say that all (or even majority) of them were warm blooded. You should read that paper because it answers much of your points (with arguments/data).
I have pretty much no knowledge about dinosaurs but you can use a bit of common sense here. Size has its limits. It doesn't matter if the animal is cold or warm blooded, the bigger the animal, the relatively slower it is. So just to clarify, t-rex probably was relatively slow. If it were fast, its leg muscles should be bigger than whole its body, which is impossible. And you can always use elephants for the example. Elephants can't run. They can walk a bit faster. But to say they are fast is a exaggeration.