Interesting, but you can check the my other response for a large number of tidbits. What's "direct app access" mean to you? You have it if you want it. Linux is a mimic of Windows as far as the GUI paradigm goes. OSX is different.
For instance, I like the fact that 99% of apps can be moved from one machine to another by just dragging the app (which is a folder/packaging object). You can also back up an app or move it to another folder or disk if you so desire. Much better than Windows where everything breaks because links/paths/whatever are all hard-coded in the install.
What you might need is to use a multi-button mouse and to download something like QuickSilver and spend about 10-15 minutes learning some of its deeper features (although the default launcher feature was enough to sell me). There's also the Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` hotkeys that make navigating through running apps a cinch compared to the Ctrl-Tab in Windows. Combine those with Expose and you've got just about anything you want in just a couple of keystrokes.
Lastly, I'd have agreed for the most part about your statement with WinXP. At least until I just recently went through 4 Dell laptops, 3 different models, in the past 2 months (new job, Dell only, YUCK!). WinXP is inherently unstable on these boxes and reminds of the days of Win95 and WinME on laptops. I'm lucky if I survive 2 days without rebooting this POS. Is it the Dell hardware? I'm certainly willing to accept that, except for the fact that the problems I'm seeing are the same as those I've seen with every windows laptop I've ever had: failure to go into standby/hibernate reliably, and failure to come out of stanby/hibernate. Re-imaging the drive does not help. Multiple monitors also give XP fits when you connect/disconnect them. This particular box is a brand new decked out Dell D820. The D600 and D610 also had issues, as did some older ones I had a few years ago (2 IBM Thinkpads, another couple of Dells, and a Toshiba) As a desktop OS, WinXP can run reliably provided you configure it correctly (read that as disabling a host of unneeded services).
If you think that a low Bush approval translates into an approval of liberal politics I don't, I think it translates into a disapproval of the Republican policies of promoting religion, business, and friends over science, the populace, and common sense.
The only reason Bush is not at 50% is because of his stance on immigration and his budget. If he were to have come down hard on... You watch. Hillary is the only candidate that has a shot at winning the presidency on the national stage because everyone else is too far to the left. The only reason Bush wasn't @ 25% 3 years ago is because of 9/11. Otherwise, other than some religious crap like banning stem cell research, he's not pushed a single thing anyone supports. (By anyone, I mean regular people, business and personal friends do not count)
And Hillary, she's the anti-Bush, or the liberals version of Bush. She's unelectable. Even GW himself could run against her and very likely win if it wasn't for the 22nd amendment. The problem is that the Dem "leadership" might actually put her up as a candidate, thus swinging all the currently former Republicans and moderates firmly into the Republican camp, no matter how disorganized and unpopular the "leader" of that ragtag crew might be.
That is an interesting take on it. In short, patents should be time specific to their domain. So, by this reasoning, software patents (if allowed at all) should have a maximum lifetime of about 2 years. That makes patenting software almost irrelevant, as the patenting time and costs exceed the value of the patent, since in 2 years the software has historically been obsoleted by the next version or 3.
I've tried Mac, and found the interface to be infuratingly frustrating. I hated only having one mouse button, I hated having to close programs that had no windows associated with them. Note that I didn't suffer those same problems when I was on Linux. Linux had other issues I didn't care for, and contrary to what you seem to think, I've never had hardware that didn't work with Windows. I said you had to unlearn Windows habits, some of them bad. For one thing, the inconsistency in what happens when you close a window depends on what other windows are running. Sometimes windows close without closing their program, and then you have to resort to Task Manager or some other tool to kill a process.
You can easily get a 2-button mouse, or, if you're really adventuresome, a 3 button mouse. This ability has existed for years and years.
As for closing a program, try Cmd-Q. Ooo, that was hard.
Regarding hardware, I never said you specifically had hardware issues, but many I know did, and Vista especially is having hardware driver issues.
But you're right, I'll try again. I can't wait to play RE4 and Halo 3 on the MAC! Oh wait.. Wow, I can't wait to... er, what, play? If the only thing your PC is good for is games, then you and I have entirely different wants/needs/desires for our hardware. I could care less about "yet another FPS POS with slightly better graphics than version 231" known as Halo 3, and I had to look up what version 4 of RE was. I prefer strategy games along the Civilization line and admit I enjoyed Quake/Half Life in network deathmatches. The newer versions I tried didn't offer much over the old ones in the way of game play. The Wii has interested me somewhat precisely because it is a departure from the ever onward grind of same game with better graphics routine that's been pretty much the rule since the first Kung-Fu fighting games and Wolfenstein 3D. Throw in networked play, and you have today's offerings.
Now for things I do, try photo and movie import, organizing, editing, and viewing for starters. You can't beat the software that's available on a Mac, even the bundled applications are pretty darn decent. The Mac also allows me to edit and publish web pages easily and has the full complement of standard tools I need, want, and expect to integrate with outside systems (all non-MS btw). Oh, and let's not forget Mail. Under Tiger (10.4) it just blows away Outlook in pretty much any way you'd like to look at it. Yes, there are one or two hotkeys that I'd like and haven't even looked at whether I can map. But for organizing, searching and managing your mail, it's probably one of the better products out there at the moment. I'm running Outlook 2007 at work and hate the new ribbon interface. About the only redeeming part of it is that it can be minimized from it's pixel sucking default. Outlook still doesn't have a decent rules engine, still can't deal with email threads, and still has that stupid "assistant" as the default.
Sorry, that's just horseshit. People actually do like running Windows. You must be talking about those that crawl willingly through horseshit daily because they've never learned to walk.
Seriously, try a Mac for a couple of months and if you do anything other than Word/Excel, you won't go back. Everything on Macs just work. Unlike buying a "Made for Windows" [TM] printer or "Works with Windows" [TM] camera, in which case, depending upon your specific configuration and driver installation, you may or may not get a working system. (A friend recently spent 3 days getting his cell phone working with his Vista upgrade. He's not sure it's working yet). Now granted, you'll have to unlearn some MS specific crap, but once unlearned, it's like why did I ever have to do A, B, C when just A was good enough?
You've already seen the other comments, I'm sure. But as a consumer, it's almost impossible today to get an XP system. Even as a business it's getting harder and becoming more limited.
We are definitely being forced into Vista. Most of those of us in the know don't like it.
The problem is that while cable and telephone lines are municipality infrastructure, they're not treated as such. Considering those networks were built by taxpayer dollars, perhaps the networks should be "liberated" from their "owners" and provided much as water and electricity is now. When a house is built, run fiber to the house along the power/water lines and take "ownership" away and merely pay a service contract to maintain and improve the network.
You need to go back and read up on Standard Oil some more. In no way were they more efficient. What they did was undercut competitors in an area, take over all business (becoming a monopoly in that area) then set prices as they wished. Rinse, Repeat. They used income from monopoly areas to support the undercutting in non-monopoly areas, steadily increasing their grasp over the country as competitor after competitor fell.
The only clause that they could possibly try to use is the permission one (that's why windows update is still legal - you have to click a button to initiate it, thus giving microsoft software permission to install updates). In this case though you're not giving them permission to modify your computer as far as I can see so it'd be hard to make that stick. And what TOS were included with the botnet malware?
It's not "selling", but rather being forced onto consumers via OEM contracts. Try buying a new PC with XP as joe-consumer would.
There are, however, lots of stories about people "downgrading" their new Vista installations to XP.
I've also heard this comment: "well, it took me 'x' days to get it running, for the most part I like it ok, except it does run slower, even though I have all new hardware." That's a resounding endorsement.:) Oh, except for the things that don't work with Vista, like cell phones, cameras, printers, etc.
Which is why the big boys run serious 64-bit OSs: RHEL, SLES, Solaris, Windows 2003.
You lost all credibility when you included Windows 2003 in that phrase. he even lost some by including RHEL and SLES. Solaris, OS400, and other big iron OSes are really the only serious 64 bit apps at the moment.
The consumer space is about to get its first full 64 bit OS though: OSX Leopard. If you don't think you need 64bit, you haven't done movie editing yet.
AMD has had an 8-core platform since the 8x Opterons came out. They had a 16-core platform with the introduction of dual core CPUs a couple of years ago, and they'll have a 32-core system when Barcelona comes out.
But why not say Intel was "first"? They were the first in the x86 space to slap 4 cores into a single socket package. Let's wait and see how AMD's solution actually performs when it comes out. Either way, it's going to be interesting and prices should drop, so we should all like both Intel and AMD for their continuing competition.
I still think AMD has the better server side solution by far, but for the consumer side Intel is the better bang for the buck since C2D came out.
The MAFIAA (RIAA/MPAA) are nothing more than legal fronts for their members to do these unsavory acts. They're not selling services, they're paid to take certain actions that would be inadvisable for the individual companies to take. Can you imagine the backlash were Sony, Disney, or Universal to try one of these lawsuits on their own?
So, money is not the direct reason for the MAFIAA's existence in and of itself. It is, however, to allow their corporate members to continue to create a "market" wherein they set the prices. By stifling alternatives to their pricing structure, they lock the market. After all, if you want lossless music, they're pretty much the only game in town.
The original CD writers also used caddies. If anyone's even approached 100 rewrites except for inappropriate usage, I'd be surprised.
But, CDs have 16 bit audio while MDs used 12 or 14 bit (I don't recall what it was, the format's been dead for about 15 years after all) and lossy compression - a double whammy.
Now I remember why I stopped using it, it has issues with content from third party caching sites or split web sites (www.somesite.com vs images.somesite.com or site.akami.net e.g.) or used to. It mattered because a specific site I rendered a lot did both of those.
I understand the 6/1 are maxes, but if it's partitioned well, you should almost always have it. It sounds like it's partitioned poorly however, and may not come anywhere close to giving me decent service. And it's got PPPoE? That may actually be the killer, as there's no reason whatsoever for PPPoE anymore.
Thanks for the info, it will definitely make me research it a bit more even though I want desparately to chunk RR. And if you think Comcast's customer service is terrible, try Time-Warner RoadRunner's sometime. It'll make Comcast positively shine, and that's the summation of 4 different customers I know personally including myself that recently were all switched from Comcast to RR. The increased download speed is about the only positive thing to come out of the switch.
You think that is funny until it's your own seven year old that tells a teacher to fuck off, or starts cursing in a WalMart. And then you act like a responsible parent, take charge of your kid and explain why it is wrong to use such language and what the consequences will be in the future should they ever use that word again. Then punish them.
Why do you think it's everyone else's responsibility to "protect" your kid. Maybe they shouldn't be watching that particular TV show in the first place.
I used something like Privoxy if not that product outright. The nice thing about the 3 I've mentioned is that you can selectively enable JS, Flash, and, gasp, ads with a simple right click, and still limit them to specific sites thus avoiding WebBugs of various sorts.
I'm not worried about threats to FF. I prefer to browse without all that bandwasting garbage that makes the desired content difficult to read. (JS Popups are expecially annoying).
Loki... appropriate name for a trouble maker, and an old nick of mine in a time prior to the internet as we know it.:)
I note that only at the bottom do you actually address the specific scenarios that I mentioned (you balked on Outlook's issues entirely). Explorer has problems. Running it as a separate process only separates it from IE, AFAIK (but I'll give it a try) The explorer problems occur on 3 separate single workstations under admin (or any other local account) as well as in 2 separate networked business systems. Despite your insinuations to the contrary, I ditched the Windows sysops route long ago, when that abortion we now know as AD came out. I probably know more about WINS than you, unless you wrote it and dealt with the WAN deployment specification which also applies to large rollouts, but that's neither here nor there. We won't get into the rest of what I used to do regarding MS systems, lets just say that despite being more than 8 years ago most of the problems still exist as the core architecture was never fixed.
I'll also disagree with you on OSes. Win2K was the zenith of MS OSes. XP can be trimmed down to closely approximate it, but that's as far as it goes. Despite the fact that you can run 50 different processes on a Windows OS, it still doesn't get around the fact than any Office app loading a large file across a slow network will lock the GUI, including Outlook (try opening a large PDF within Outlook with the mail sitting on an Exchange server for a very specific example). Explorer has similar issues, although I believe it doesn't categorize zip files on network shares, thus addressing your supposed counterpoint. Try opening that directory on the local machine in an explorer window. Now, for my own counterpoint, I know it's solely an Explorer issue due to the fact that from a command prompt, a 'dir' has no issues and responds quickly.
Oh, and when the GUI lock up occurs, depending on the specifics (I'll take notes in the future) you can't bring up TaskManager. That particular app is supposed to come up no matter what (in a non domain PC you'll get it via the Ctrl-Alt_del sequence). If, however, TM is already up or a command prompt is, you can usually click on it and get to it that way if your mouse is working or via ALT-TAB showing that those two apps, for whatever reason, have separate input/output threads and don't get locked by the GDI as easily, but they still can get locked under certain circumstances. (Using either method to try to get to another app results in no response.)
I don't write to "yell about problems that don't exist" but only to relay facts about how shoddy this steaming pile of OSes are. It doesn't need falsehoods stated about it. The truth is plenty bad enough. Oh, and our production systems in my last 8 years have all been non-MS, despite the crap IS forces us to use for our daily systems.
They only make slanting references to Civ II onward. No mention of the fact that Civ spawned an entire user community, a complete user created manual on the early internet describing all the intricacies of the game and "cheats" (utilizing bugs) that could stretch the game score far beyond what was envisioned.
Then there's the entire segment of history regarding CivNet, the user community generated effort driven by the fact there would be no Civ II originally. Or the fact that CivNet's efforts were wrapped into Civ II. There's a whole set of firsts buried in that time period that probably deserve mention. Civ was the first computer game I'm aware of that spawned such a large and intense interest in it that a user community spawned up around it that also culminated in new code being written.
Interesting. U-verse is Fiber. It's not FIOS though, I'd have to live about 1500ft to the west to get that.
So you're saying that U-verse is actually limited to 1HD stream and 6/1? What if I want to watch 2 HD shows and download something? That's a huge limitation. Perhaps I'll just get the 6/1 and forget the TV aspects. I was going to upgrade my Dish account to HD anyways, as their 622VIP DVR sounds like it's relatively reliable, and I happen to like their implementation far better than Tivo.
So, how's the internet access alone? Seems worth the $40 a month to me, but only if it works reliably at those speeds. Better than the RR crap, even though I've gotten 10Mbps downloads, upload is only 512Kbps. Sucks when you're uploading 8MB pics for printing.
It's standard where MS is concerned. Try it sometime.
Try what ? Multitasking ? I've been multitasking heavily in Windows NT for over a decade now and the occasions that the GUI "grinds to a halt" are few, far between, pretty much always due to some unusual even occurring (eg: hardware failure, network connectivity failure) and occur similarly in other OSes. NT's GUI/interactive responsiveness while multitasking has always been good - certainly, at *worst*, at least as good as Linux, MacOS or OS X, especially when multiple CPUs are involved (better, IMHO, which is the primary reason I use it over any of the alternatives).
I've been multi-tasking since I can't remember, and on PCs since at least 89. There was this little app called Deskview386 for x86 PCs. We're not talking about multi-tasking in context of user running one program, then another, then back to the first. We're talking about actively doing multiple simultaneous things in the CPU space. With MS software, you can break this easily because the framework is fragile.
As for responsiveness, yes, NT based systems since 4.x have been "better" from a user perspective, primarily because they moved the GDI+ into the kernel space. Direct access to interrupts has an amazing effect on latency.... This only holds true of course when the single thread in the GDI isn't otherwise occupied.
It was one of the major points that people were pointing to as failures in NT 4.x onward (when the GDI two other modules were moved into kernel space and all semblance of security and user space/kernel space separation vanished).
Right. Because Windows NT is the only OS in the world that's not a textbook microkernel.
But it is the only major OS that doesn't cleanly separate user space from kernel space.
Yes, you can lock up your entire GUI, even today with the latest XP service packs (don't know about Vista - fortunately I don't have to use it). I'm not sure if you can completely lock out network access post SP2, but you certainly could prior to SP2 (VNC would drop, Remote Desktop would drop, and direct calls to ports 135-139 would time out).
So ? You can "completely lock up" just about any OS's GUI if you're being nasty enough, *especially* if you can interact with it locally with elevated privileges. Heck, if you're trying to multitask in OS X on a machine with less than a gig of RAM, it'll do it fr you a few times an hour.
Well, since I don't run any of my computers with less than 1GB these days, I can't comment on that. I'm going to guess that you're talking about when you start paging out to disk. In that case, when you suffer paging on Windows it isn't any faster or more responsive(hint: it's a disk access issue).
What I'm talking about is that a single program (and an up to date MS program at that) doing a standard function will lock you out completely. That's not a hardware issue, that's an OS architectural issue.
If you want to make statements about "problems", call them typical and relate them to architectural aspects of Windows, more evidence and examples, and less rhetoric, would be helpful.
I'll give you some additional specifics of the problems with Windows. Brand new Dell Latitude 820 w/ 2GB of RAM. Damn thing won't sleep/hibernate reliably. Sometimes it does, sometimes it pretends to, other times it just locks up. It's an OS thing too, as things got even worse when running VMWare while attempting those actions. I've had it 2 months and hate it. It's my work PC, for now. It also weighs 2 more pounds than my MacBook Pro.
Speaking of, my MacBook Pro has never failed to go to sleep when closing the lid, nor to wake up after going to sleep. I've had it 6 months and use it daily. The only GUI lockups/slowdowns are when I'm loading/paging large amounts of memory (loading iPhoto/Aperture, for instance, w/ 6K photos) I can't really argue too much over
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Interesting, but you can check the my other response for a large number of tidbits. What's "direct app access" mean to you? You have it if you want it. Linux is a mimic of Windows as far as the GUI paradigm goes. OSX is different.
For instance, I like the fact that 99% of apps can be moved from one machine to another by just dragging the app (which is a folder/packaging object). You can also back up an app or move it to another folder or disk if you so desire. Much better than Windows where everything breaks because links/paths/whatever are all hard-coded in the install.
What you might need is to use a multi-button mouse and to download something like QuickSilver and spend about 10-15 minutes learning some of its deeper features (although the default launcher feature was enough to sell me). There's also the Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` hotkeys that make navigating through running apps a cinch compared to the Ctrl-Tab in Windows. Combine those with Expose and you've got just about anything you want in just a couple of keystrokes.
Lastly, I'd have agreed for the most part about your statement with WinXP. At least until I just recently went through 4 Dell laptops, 3 different models, in the past 2 months (new job, Dell only, YUCK!). WinXP is inherently unstable on these boxes and reminds of the days of Win95 and WinME on laptops. I'm lucky if I survive 2 days without rebooting this POS. Is it the Dell hardware? I'm certainly willing to accept that, except for the fact that the problems I'm seeing are the same as those I've seen with every windows laptop I've ever had: failure to go into standby/hibernate reliably, and failure to come out of stanby/hibernate. Re-imaging the drive does not help. Multiple monitors also give XP fits when you connect/disconnect them. This particular box is a brand new decked out Dell D820. The D600 and D610 also had issues, as did some older ones I had a few years ago (2 IBM Thinkpads, another couple of Dells, and a Toshiba) As a desktop OS, WinXP can run reliably provided you configure it correctly (read that as disabling a host of unneeded services).
You watch. Hillary is the only candidate that has a shot at winning the presidency on the national stage because everyone else is too far to the left. The only reason Bush wasn't @ 25% 3 years ago is because of 9/11. Otherwise, other than some religious crap like banning stem cell research, he's not pushed a single thing anyone supports. (By anyone, I mean regular people, business and personal friends do not count)
And Hillary, she's the anti-Bush, or the liberals version of Bush. She's unelectable. Even GW himself could run against her and very likely win if it wasn't for the 22nd amendment. The problem is that the Dem "leadership" might actually put her up as a candidate, thus swinging all the currently former Republicans and moderates firmly into the Republican camp, no matter how disorganized and unpopular the "leader" of that ragtag crew might be.
That is an interesting take on it. In short, patents should be time specific to their domain. So, by this reasoning, software patents (if allowed at all) should have a maximum lifetime of about 2 years. That makes patenting software almost irrelevant, as the patenting time and costs exceed the value of the patent, since in 2 years the software has historically been obsoleted by the next version or 3.
You can easily get a 2-button mouse, or, if you're really adventuresome, a 3 button mouse. This ability has existed for years and years.
As for closing a program, try Cmd-Q. Ooo, that was hard.
Regarding hardware, I never said you specifically had hardware issues, but many I know did, and Vista especially is having hardware driver issues. But you're right, I'll try again. I can't wait to play RE4 and Halo 3 on the MAC! Oh wait.. Wow, I can't wait to... er, what, play? If the only thing your PC is good for is games, then you and I have entirely different wants/needs/desires for our hardware. I could care less about "yet another FPS POS with slightly better graphics than version 231" known as Halo 3, and I had to look up what version 4 of RE was. I prefer strategy games along the Civilization line and admit I enjoyed Quake/Half Life in network deathmatches. The newer versions I tried didn't offer much over the old ones in the way of game play. The Wii has interested me somewhat precisely because it is a departure from the ever onward grind of same game with better graphics routine that's been pretty much the rule since the first Kung-Fu fighting games and Wolfenstein 3D. Throw in networked play, and you have today's offerings.
Now for things I do, try photo and movie import, organizing, editing, and viewing for starters. You can't beat the software that's available on a Mac, even the bundled applications are pretty darn decent. The Mac also allows me to edit and publish web pages easily and has the full complement of standard tools I need, want, and expect to integrate with outside systems (all non-MS btw). Oh, and let's not forget Mail. Under Tiger (10.4) it just blows away Outlook in pretty much any way you'd like to look at it. Yes, there are one or two hotkeys that I'd like and haven't even looked at whether I can map. But for organizing, searching and managing your mail, it's probably one of the better products out there at the moment. I'm running Outlook 2007 at work and hate the new ribbon interface. About the only redeeming part of it is that it can be minimized from it's pixel sucking default. Outlook still doesn't have a decent rules engine, still can't deal with email threads, and still has that stupid "assistant" as the default.
Seriously, try a Mac for a couple of months and if you do anything other than Word/Excel, you won't go back. Everything on Macs just work. Unlike buying a "Made for Windows" [TM] printer or "Works with Windows" [TM] camera, in which case, depending upon your specific configuration and driver installation, you may or may not get a working system. (A friend recently spent 3 days getting his cell phone working with his Vista upgrade. He's not sure it's working yet). Now granted, you'll have to unlearn some MS specific crap, but once unlearned, it's like why did I ever have to do A, B, C when just A was good enough?
You've already seen the other comments, I'm sure. But as a consumer, it's almost impossible today to get an XP system. Even as a business it's getting harder and becoming more limited.
We are definitely being forced into Vista. Most of those of us in the know don't like it.
The problem is that while cable and telephone lines are municipality infrastructure, they're not treated as such. Considering those networks were built by taxpayer dollars, perhaps the networks should be "liberated" from their "owners" and provided much as water and electricity is now. When a house is built, run fiber to the house along the power/water lines and take "ownership" away and merely pay a service contract to maintain and improve the network.
You need to go back and read up on Standard Oil some more. In no way were they more efficient. What they did was undercut competitors in an area, take over all business (becoming a monopoly in that area) then set prices as they wished. Rinse, Repeat. They used income from monopoly areas to support the undercutting in non-monopoly areas, steadily increasing their grasp over the country as competitor after competitor fell.
The ISPs aren't the authorities. They are protecting themselves. Does that make it right?
It's not "selling", but rather being forced onto consumers via OEM contracts. Try buying a new PC with XP as joe-consumer would.
:) Oh, except for the things that don't work with Vista, like cell phones, cameras, printers, etc.
There are, however, lots of stories about people "downgrading" their new Vista installations to XP.
I've also heard this comment: "well, it took me 'x' days to get it running, for the most part I like it ok, except it does run slower, even though I have all new hardware." That's a resounding endorsement.
You lost all credibility when you included Windows 2003 in that phrase. he even lost some by including RHEL and SLES. Solaris, OS400, and other big iron OSes are really the only serious 64 bit apps at the moment.
The consumer space is about to get its first full 64 bit OS though: OSX Leopard. If you don't think you need 64bit, you haven't done movie editing yet.
I wish I had a mod point today, you deserve it.
AMD has had an 8-core platform since the 8x Opterons came out. They had a 16-core platform with the introduction of dual core CPUs a couple of years ago, and they'll have a 32-core system when Barcelona comes out.
But why not say Intel was "first"? They were the first in the x86 space to slap 4 cores into a single socket package. Let's wait and see how AMD's solution actually performs when it comes out. Either way, it's going to be interesting and prices should drop, so we should all like both Intel and AMD for their continuing competition.
I still think AMD has the better server side solution by far, but for the consumer side Intel is the better bang for the buck since C2D came out.
The MAFIAA (RIAA/MPAA) are nothing more than legal fronts for their members to do these unsavory acts. They're not selling services, they're paid to take certain actions that would be inadvisable for the individual companies to take. Can you imagine the backlash were Sony, Disney, or Universal to try one of these lawsuits on their own?
So, money is not the direct reason for the MAFIAA's existence in and of itself. It is, however, to allow their corporate members to continue to create a "market" wherein they set the prices. By stifling alternatives to their pricing structure, they lock the market. After all, if you want lossless music, they're pretty much the only game in town.
The original CD writers also used caddies. If anyone's even approached 100 rewrites except for inappropriate usage, I'd be surprised.
But, CDs have 16 bit audio while MDs used 12 or 14 bit (I don't recall what it was, the format's been dead for about 15 years after all) and lossy compression - a double whammy.
Now I remember why I stopped using it, it has issues with content from third party caching sites or split web sites (www.somesite.com vs images.somesite.com or site.akami.net e.g.) or used to. It mattered because a specific site I rendered a lot did both of those.
I understand the 6/1 are maxes, but if it's partitioned well, you should almost always have it. It sounds like it's partitioned poorly however, and may not come anywhere close to giving me decent service. And it's got PPPoE? That may actually be the killer, as there's no reason whatsoever for PPPoE anymore.
Thanks for the info, it will definitely make me research it a bit more even though I want desparately to chunk RR. And if you think Comcast's customer service is terrible, try Time-Warner RoadRunner's sometime. It'll make Comcast positively shine, and that's the summation of 4 different customers I know personally including myself that recently were all switched from Comcast to RR. The increased download speed is about the only positive thing to come out of the switch.
Why do you think it's everyone else's responsibility to "protect" your kid. Maybe they shouldn't be watching that particular TV show in the first place.
I used something like Privoxy if not that product outright. The nice thing about the 3 I've mentioned is that you can selectively enable JS, Flash, and, gasp, ads with a simple right click, and still limit them to specific sites thus avoiding WebBugs of various sorts.
I'm not worried about threats to FF. I prefer to browse without all that bandwasting garbage that makes the desired content difficult to read. (JS Popups are expecially annoying).
Just load NoScript, Adblock, and Flashblock and be on your way.
Loki... appropriate name for a trouble maker, and an old nick of mine in a time prior to the internet as we know it. :)
I note that only at the bottom do you actually address the specific scenarios that I mentioned (you balked on Outlook's issues entirely). Explorer has problems. Running it as a separate process only separates it from IE, AFAIK (but I'll give it a try) The explorer problems occur on 3 separate single workstations under admin (or any other local account) as well as in 2 separate networked business systems. Despite your insinuations to the contrary, I ditched the Windows sysops route long ago, when that abortion we now know as AD came out. I probably know more about WINS than you, unless you wrote it and dealt with the WAN deployment specification which also applies to large rollouts, but that's neither here nor there. We won't get into the rest of what I used to do regarding MS systems, lets just say that despite being more than 8 years ago most of the problems still exist as the core architecture was never fixed.
I'll also disagree with you on OSes. Win2K was the zenith of MS OSes. XP can be trimmed down to closely approximate it, but that's as far as it goes. Despite the fact that you can run 50 different processes on a Windows OS, it still doesn't get around the fact than any Office app loading a large file across a slow network will lock the GUI, including Outlook (try opening a large PDF within Outlook with the mail sitting on an Exchange server for a very specific example). Explorer has similar issues, although I believe it doesn't categorize zip files on network shares, thus addressing your supposed counterpoint. Try opening that directory on the local machine in an explorer window. Now, for my own counterpoint, I know it's solely an Explorer issue due to the fact that from a command prompt, a 'dir' has no issues and responds quickly.
Oh, and when the GUI lock up occurs, depending on the specifics (I'll take notes in the future) you can't bring up TaskManager. That particular app is supposed to come up no matter what (in a non domain PC you'll get it via the Ctrl-Alt_del sequence). If, however, TM is already up or a command prompt is, you can usually click on it and get to it that way if your mouse is working or via ALT-TAB showing that those two apps, for whatever reason, have separate input/output threads and don't get locked by the GDI as easily, but they still can get locked under certain circumstances. (Using either method to try to get to another app results in no response.)
I don't write to "yell about problems that don't exist" but only to relay facts about how shoddy this steaming pile of OSes are. It doesn't need falsehoods stated about it. The truth is plenty bad enough. Oh, and our production systems in my last 8 years have all been non-MS, despite the crap IS forces us to use for our daily systems.
They only make slanting references to Civ II onward. No mention of the fact that Civ spawned an entire user community, a complete user created manual on the early internet describing all the intricacies of the game and "cheats" (utilizing bugs) that could stretch the game score far beyond what was envisioned.
Then there's the entire segment of history regarding CivNet, the user community generated effort driven by the fact there would be no Civ II originally. Or the fact that CivNet's efforts were wrapped into Civ II. There's a whole set of firsts buried in that time period that probably deserve mention. Civ was the first computer game I'm aware of that spawned such a large and intense interest in it that a user community spawned up around it that also culminated in new code being written.
Interesting. U-verse is Fiber. It's not FIOS though, I'd have to live about 1500ft to the west to get that.
So you're saying that U-verse is actually limited to 1HD stream and 6/1? What if I want to watch 2 HD shows and download something? That's a huge limitation. Perhaps I'll just get the 6/1 and forget the TV aspects. I was going to upgrade my Dish account to HD anyways, as their 622VIP DVR sounds like it's relatively reliable, and I happen to like their implementation far better than Tivo.
So, how's the internet access alone? Seems worth the $40 a month to me, but only if it works reliably at those speeds. Better than the RR crap, even though I've gotten 10Mbps downloads, upload is only 512Kbps. Sucks when you're uploading 8MB pics for printing.
It's standard where MS is concerned. Try it sometime.
Try what ? Multitasking ? I've been multitasking heavily in Windows NT for over a decade now and the occasions that the GUI "grinds to a halt" are few, far between, pretty much always due to some unusual even occurring (eg: hardware failure, network connectivity failure) and occur similarly in other OSes. NT's GUI/interactive responsiveness while multitasking has always been good - certainly, at *worst*, at least as good as Linux, MacOS or OS X, especially when multiple CPUs are involved (better, IMHO, which is the primary reason I use it over any of the alternatives).
I've been multi-tasking since I can't remember, and on PCs since at least 89. There was this little app called Deskview386 for x86 PCs. We're not talking about multi-tasking in context of user running one program, then another, then back to the first. We're talking about actively doing multiple simultaneous things in the CPU space. With MS software, you can break this easily because the framework is fragile.
As for responsiveness, yes, NT based systems since 4.x have been "better" from a user perspective, primarily because they moved the GDI+ into the kernel space. Direct access to interrupts has an amazing effect on latency.... This only holds true of course when the single thread in the GDI isn't otherwise occupied.
It was one of the major points that people were pointing to as failures in NT 4.x onward (when the GDI two other modules were moved into kernel space and all semblance of security and user space/kernel space separation vanished).
Right. Because Windows NT is the only OS in the world that's not a textbook microkernel.
But it is the only major OS that doesn't cleanly separate user space from kernel space.
Yes, you can lock up your entire GUI, even today with the latest XP service packs (don't know about Vista - fortunately I don't have to use it). I'm not sure if you can completely lock out network access post SP2, but you certainly could prior to SP2 (VNC would drop, Remote Desktop would drop, and direct calls to ports 135-139 would time out).
So ? You can "completely lock up" just about any OS's GUI if you're being nasty enough, *especially* if you can interact with it locally with elevated privileges. Heck, if you're trying to multitask in OS X on a machine with less than a gig of RAM, it'll do it fr you a few times an hour.
Well, since I don't run any of my computers with less than 1GB these days, I can't comment on that. I'm going to guess that you're talking about when you start paging out to disk. In that case, when you suffer paging on Windows it isn't any faster or more responsive(hint: it's a disk access issue).
What I'm talking about is that a single program (and an up to date MS program at that) doing a standard function will lock you out completely. That's not a hardware issue, that's an OS architectural issue.
If you want to make statements about "problems", call them typical and relate them to architectural aspects of Windows, more evidence and examples, and less rhetoric, would be helpful.
I'll give you some additional specifics of the problems with Windows. Brand new Dell Latitude 820 w/ 2GB of RAM. Damn thing won't sleep/hibernate reliably. Sometimes it does, sometimes it pretends to, other times it just locks up. It's an OS thing too, as things got even worse when running VMWare while attempting those actions. I've had it 2 months and hate it. It's my work PC, for now. It also weighs 2 more pounds than my MacBook Pro.
Speaking of, my MacBook Pro has never failed to go to sleep when closing the lid, nor to wake up after going to sleep. I've had it 6 months and use it daily. The only GUI lockups/slowdowns are when I'm loading/paging large amounts of memory (loading iPhoto/Aperture, for instance, w/ 6K photos) I can't really argue too much over