Hell, I heard about Longhorn years ago and they sure haven't been "scrambling" to do anything with that.
I first heard about Longhorn under another name, in the early 90s when it was called Cairo. Take a look at the "feature list" of that vaporware sometime. Then recall that the feature list was in response to OS/2's actual features, that existed in 93...
How far we haven't come in 14 years.
BTW, take a look at the original feature list for Longhorn, and the current list. It's interesting too. And we're now 2 years later than the original "Longhorn" date, and only 14 years past Cairo.
That's the same thing. By that argument we don't restrict manslaughter, there just may be consequences if it fits certain traits. Making something illegal is the method -- the only method -- the government has to prohibit something. Until we are implanted with inhibitors that physically prevent us from saying certain things, there is no difference between "restricting" and "making a crime". Anyways, even if my choice of words didn't click with you, the 1st Ammendment specifically refers to the passage of laws.
Actually, no, it's not the same thing. I can say you are a lying curr. No slander occurs. I can say the same line on a newscast, now we enter the realm of potential slander. If I only say that line to Joe, it is not legal slander except in very exceptional circumstances.
If manslaughter is committed, it is manslaughter, whether it occurs just between two people or in front of an audience.
Slander has situational dependencies, and also motivational dependencies in many cases.
Exceptions to the 1st Ammendment are treated to the highest standards of scrutiny. We should not allow them lightly. The justification for restricting harmful speech like slander is nothing like restricting obscenity
We don't restrict slander. We do have laws that make slander a crime if it fits certain traits. Note that the speech (slander) isn't restricted, just that there may be consequences. Also note that those consequences are in terms of civil (ie, monetary) penalties, and that those penalties are based on the estimated/alleged harm done.
When I bought my Powerbook over a year ago, I priced a similarly equipped windows notebook (not software, just hardware). The Windows notebook came out about $200 more, was larger, heavier, and had shorter battery life. I couldn't come up with anything closer to a Powerbook.
Granted, the Windows notebook would have been slightly faster at some tasks, but not for the ones I was looking forward to using, namely photo-editing and movie editing software. (Which have some darn good implementations on a mac included with the base OS, although photoshop is loads better, even for minor things such as red-eye correction) Finding similar software for Windows would tack on a hundred or so more to the price tag.
If you really want to argue the bottom of the pile deal, you can buy a "cheap" Mac, used or refurbished.
Well there are a couple of advantages that I know of to RFID
1. Inventory, beeing able to know what is in your store and where it is in a retal setting.
Actually, according to a recent study, RFIDs are only about 90% accurate at best, for large palettes whizzing by on conveyor belts in a warehouse setting.
2. Convinence, things like being able to park a cart next to a teller and have all the items charged instantly.
See #1. I don't know any retailer that would abide by less than 99.999% accuracy. RFID does not meet this requirement at all.
3. RFID is already used sucessfuly for tracking pets and could be used to store medical data in people with alergies or other specal medical requirements, along with other personal data if the individual choses.
Let me say I'm scared of some of the potental abuses to, but there are upsides to this.
Now you're getting to the real meat of why some want RFID to take off. It's much easier to convince someone to accept an injection of a little chip than to be tattooed with a bar code, Henry Rollins not withstanding.
While it may be beneficial, the very reason it's beneficial is also why it's bad in an Orwellian sense. There is no way for this to be beneficial without the bad. You can't cover up an RFID, or make it inoperative, without impairing its usefulness when needed.
inconsistent. Everything about Windows is inconsistent. That was one of the things I really liked about Mac OSX. Things are largely consistent across all apps. Not everything, but certainly a large percentage.
Linux isn't as consistent, but it's more consistent than Windows. Heck, it would have to be designed for inconsistency to be less consistent.
Virtual folder it is not, but IIRC it is a registry entry. Same thing with your User directories under Documents and Settings. You can even set it to/usr if you'd like:)
Finding it is half the fun. Matter of fact, there's lots of things in the registry, if you only had a roadmap. I especially love that obfuscated idiotic key reference scheme for linking different locations throughout the registry. Whoever designed that should be forced to do nothing else but fix registry problems for the rest of their unnatural lives.
And *don't* even get me started on Exchange vs. Sendmail/Postfix/etc. I used to actually think Sendmail was tough and now I find myself lamenting the good old days when Sendmail was all I had to worry about!
Exchange? Tough? Only when you have to retrieve a single email message some dumbass deleted two weeks ago and didn't tell you about until today. Or, whenever you need to update Exchange. Or.. well, have you ever seen what happens when an Exchange DB corrupts? It's not fun. I'm sure those things have not gotten better with the latest releases since all they did was make the freaking monolithic DBs have an even larger capacity.
And AD... now there's something just waiting to get fritzed.
Nope, don't regret leaving the Exchange/Windows sysadmin post at all.
Heck, look at Oblivion. I'm eagerly awaiting it to be released, and see if the screenshots really captured the visual aspect of the game. This will be one game that I'll commit to before the first reviews come up mainly based on the strength of their previous titles.
Here's some shocking news for you: 2GB isn't enough for a real power user.
Here's more shocking news: 1GB is more than enough for 99% of those that play games.
Welcome to 2006, where not everyone is playing WoW or F.E.A.R. on 30" widescreen plasma displays with water or oil cooled dual SLI and quad core systems. Hell, I'm just now cracking open NeverWinter Nights. Doom 3, and, shockingly, Half Life 2, didn't float my boat. (I loved Quake III and Half Life)
Multi-tasking I do all the time. I'm authoring and burning a DVD as I browse/., for instance. It's a P4 2.4, w/ 1GB RAM. I used to run 2GB on it, but it started failing. Turns out the MB is screwed, adding the second 1GB DIMM caused BSODs. 2 512's worked fine. Both 1 GB DIMMs are fine, when tested separately. When I started editing DVs, I had to up the page file to 512, as I overran the 1GB limit.
I'm in the market for a new setup, and am eagerly looking at AMD X2s, but they're still too pricey for me at this time. The Opteron 144/146s aren't bad, but the entire combo is more than I want to pay, and I'm not sure about the performance increase in the DDR2 M2 systems coming out soon. I'll wait a little longer. I have 5 more empty DVs, so I'm not in a super hurry to upgrade.
Interesting. I have run a 2MB swap file for the last 4 years, never got a pop up. What apps are you running that cause that?
Oh, I should qualify this by making these following statements:
I run firefox, never IE. IE can only be instantiated from a commandline.
I run Thunderbird, Outlook is not installed.
Office XP is installed (minus Outlook) but is almost never run.
I do run a lot of java apps, including eclipse. (if I could prevent that from swapping out of memory, I'd be bloody estatic)
This box has up times in the terms of months.
It is also used to burn CDs and DVDs.
My work box was also run this way, except it had Outlook installed (corporate requirement) It also ran an appserver continuously, and an eclipse project that ate up 1GB of RAM.
I missed the digital out feature. That's the deal maker for HTPC/music jukebox use! Now I'm really torn with what I'll be doing. Because the HTPC was going to be a Linux box with remote storage, but now, it might be the mini. Decisions, decisions. Argh!
Oh, and for memory, 2GB runs less than $170. $300 is ridiculous, and $370 astronomical. Check pricewatch.com for the appropriate RAM (PC2-5300).
You might want to set up an antenna and check out your OTA HD reception. I'm about to pull the trigger on a full-blown HD PVR setup based on my OTA reception. It's more than adequate, strong signal, much stronger than analog, and the picture has to be seen to be believed.
>>Hard disk is never the problem- games are not disc intensive.
>>You might speed up laods slightly with a faster disc, but not by much.
This is mostly true, however no matter how much RAM you've got you still need at least a 512MB paging file somewhere on your system.
Untrue. If you have 2GB of RAM and aren't doing things way beyond power user usage (ie, you're playing games, run word and excel, play with email and browse the web) you'd never hit the 2GB limit. If, however, you edit video or RAW photos or do other high memory usage tasks, and you exceed your 2GB limit, then in the windows world you need a swap file.
>>RAM- you need enough RAM so you don't hit swap. For today's >>games, thats 1 GB. After that, the number 1 thing you can do >>to improve system performance is to get low latency RAM. Your >>CPU will be waiting for RAM, minimize the time that it is.
Sorry, I disagree again. 1GB ain't what it used to be. Today's games can populate an entire gig of RAM on their own - especially if the video card has lots of texture memory and is running at high resolution with antialiasing. You're correct about low latencies though. It would be best to get OCZ registered RAM, and no less than the maximum speed for Athlon 64 which is 400mhz.
1 GB will be enough for most people, if they're not playing Battlefield 2 or some of the other newest games. 2GB is better. 4GB or more is even better, but you'd better run 64bit Linux.:)
As for low latencies, the only real reason to get them is so you have better chips that can relax the timings and raise the bus speed, ie, running at 450 instead of 400 resulting in a ~12% increase. Low latencies, in and of themselves, only give you about 2-3% according to some articles posted on Arstechnica or anandtech (forgot which, otherwise I'd reference them)
>>Video card- how much do you insist on high end features? >>All you really need is enough vram to fit all your textures >>in. Over that is wasted.
VRAM is not limited to storing textures; It is used to store the next rendered frame (or frames) in sequence. Nobody really needs more than 256MB of VRAM these days, but that's going to change within a year. More VRAM is particularly important for people with large and\or widescreen monitors since they'll have to play at higher resolutions and probably with antialiasing
Actually, you'll be better off with dual 256MB PCE-X16 cards than a single 512MB card, esp for wide screens. 256MB will still hold you for a couple of years, if you want to save some mullah.
It depends which promo you see. The one I saw today made it look 3 times smaller, some guy with huge hands and fat fingers playing with it.
The longer promo shows several people playing with it, and from those, it definitely appears to be the size of a reasonable hardback book, especially when placed into its traveling case.
On the topic of college books, one of my texts that I still own, is about 4 x 7 x 1" in size.
I watched the initial promo trailer for this thing. Near as I can tell, it's a wireless enabled tablet PC, possibly with Bluetooth - it's implied by the phone camera transfer. It also has Voice Recognition software and hand writing recognition software. Whoop de doo. While neat in concept and allegedly able to do things like tele-conference, there's no phone capability. That seems a huge oversight to me, since that might have made this more enticing, much as anything from MS is enticing. Oh, and it plays games. Can't forget that!;)
Cons: It's large, the size of your larger college textbooks. No built in phone. No built in camera, still or camcorder. Touch screen with no protector, I can see that becoming opague with scratches in no time. VR software on MS hasn't been the greatest, now it's supposedly flawless, and on a tablet no less?
I think I might wait for Apples iTunes PDA phone instead. When it comes to items like this, Apple seems to deliver.
The Opteron 1xx series with the 939 socket are essentially the same as the 1MB cache series. However, if I were buying an Opteron, I'd either go for max overclockability (there's a word) in 939 socket FX type configuration, or a 2xx series pure Opteron solution. Nothing like multiple CPUs to make for multi-core heaven. The beauty is, you can start with a 2xx, drop in a second 2xx, and have 2, 3 or 4 cores, depending on which chips you buy (note: the 3 core option appears to work in some configurations, but has issues)
On the AMD side, dual-core may become more common than single core, very shortly. The fact that dual-core chips are drop-in replacements for single core chips helps, as vendors don't have to change anything other than their CPU order. In the intel world, you have to have a different motherboard.
Also, I think there's about to be a new wave of dual-core buying, as AMD based DDR motherboards start hitting the shelves. Something about making a fast system faster... and the fact that these motherboards will not accept the current non-DDR CPUs.
I know I've been waiting for this. This should leap-frog anything Intel has in the works for the next year and a half at least, performance-wise. The only question is whether to buy an Opteron or X2, and then upgrade later. Given that single core Opterons are running at commodity prices, that makes the most sense from a budget perspective. But, the 3800 X2's are almost in the same commodity category. (Gaming is not my main pursuit, so an X2 is probably the better solution for me).
but western lists most likely wouldn't be comprised primarily of 2 series released by a single company, with an occassional toekn thrown in for "balance"
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I heard about Longhorn years ago and they sure haven't been "scrambling" to do anything with that.
I first heard about Longhorn under another name, in the early 90s when it was called Cairo. Take a look at the "feature list" of that vaporware sometime. Then recall that the feature list was in response to OS/2's actual features, that existed in 93...
How far we haven't come in 14 years.
BTW, take a look at the original feature list for Longhorn, and the current list. It's interesting too. And we're now 2 years later than the original "Longhorn" date, and only 14 years past Cairo.
The new 'Aero' technology is no match for my sisters' Airhead logic.
I feel your pain.
Well presented point. I concede that manslaughter is a killing with specific conditions and motivations, which parallels slander wrt speech.
:)
However, one nit-picking item remains: if I make such a statement to you directly, it will never be slander. Slander requires a third party.
That's the same thing. By that argument we don't restrict manslaughter, there just may be consequences if it fits certain traits. Making something illegal is the method -- the only method -- the government has to prohibit something. Until we are implanted with inhibitors that physically prevent us from saying certain things, there is no difference between "restricting" and "making a crime". Anyways, even if my choice of words didn't click with you, the 1st Ammendment specifically refers to the passage of laws.
Actually, no, it's not the same thing. I can say you are a lying curr. No slander occurs. I can say the same line on a newscast, now we enter the realm of potential slander. If I only say that line to Joe, it is not legal slander except in very exceptional circumstances.
If manslaughter is committed, it is manslaughter, whether it occurs just between two people or in front of an audience.
Slander has situational dependencies, and also motivational dependencies in many cases.
Exceptions to the 1st Ammendment are treated to the highest standards of scrutiny. We should not allow them lightly. The justification for restricting harmful speech like slander is nothing like restricting obscenity
We don't restrict slander. We do have laws that make slander a crime if it fits certain traits. Note that the speech (slander) isn't restricted, just that there may be consequences. Also note that those consequences are in terms of civil (ie, monetary) penalties, and that those penalties are based on the estimated/alleged harm done.
Why not just get a Cell processor. Seems that it was specifically designed for this type of processing.
Besides the fact that Macs just work....
When I bought my Powerbook over a year ago, I priced a similarly equipped windows notebook (not software, just hardware). The Windows notebook came out about $200 more, was larger, heavier, and had shorter battery life. I couldn't come up with anything closer to a Powerbook.
Granted, the Windows notebook would have been slightly faster at some tasks, but not for the ones I was looking forward to using, namely photo-editing and movie editing software. (Which have some darn good implementations on a mac included with the base OS, although photoshop is loads better, even for minor things such as red-eye correction) Finding similar software for Windows would tack on a hundred or so more to the price tag.
If you really want to argue the bottom of the pile deal, you can buy a "cheap" Mac, used or refurbished.
My receipts are certainly more than 90% accurate. Do you think retailers would accept no better than 90% as a replacement? How about 95%?
If they're going to go with something as expensive as a retrofit of RFID will be, I'm guessing they're going to want 99% or better.
Well there are a couple of advantages that I know of to RFID
1. Inventory, beeing able to know what is in your store and where it is in a retal setting.
Actually, according to a recent study, RFIDs are only about 90% accurate at best, for large palettes whizzing by on conveyor belts in a warehouse setting.
2. Convinence, things like being able to park a cart next to a teller and have all the items charged instantly.
See #1. I don't know any retailer that would abide by less than 99.999% accuracy. RFID does not meet this requirement at all.
3. RFID is already used sucessfuly for tracking pets and could be used to store medical data in people with alergies or other specal medical requirements, along with other personal data if the individual choses.
Let me say I'm scared of some of the potental abuses to, but there are upsides to this.
Now you're getting to the real meat of why some want RFID to take off. It's much easier to convince someone to accept an injection of a little chip than to be tattooed with a bar code, Henry Rollins not withstanding.
While it may be beneficial, the very reason it's beneficial is also why it's bad in an Orwellian sense. There is no way for this to be beneficial without the bad. You can't cover up an RFID, or make it inoperative, without impairing its usefulness when needed.
inconsistent. Everything about Windows is inconsistent. That was one of the things I really liked about Mac OSX. Things are largely consistent across all apps. Not everything, but certainly a large percentage.
Linux isn't as consistent, but it's more consistent than Windows. Heck, it would have to be designed for inconsistency to be less consistent.
Virtual folder it is not, but IIRC it is a registry entry. Same thing with your User directories under Documents and Settings. You can even set it to /usr if you'd like :)
Finding it is half the fun. Matter of fact, there's lots of things in the registry, if you only had a roadmap. I especially love that obfuscated idiotic key reference scheme for linking different locations throughout the registry. Whoever designed that should be forced to do nothing else but fix registry problems for the rest of their unnatural lives.
Exchange? Tough? Only when you have to retrieve a single email message some dumbass deleted two weeks ago and didn't tell you about until today. Or, whenever you need to update Exchange. Or.. well, have you ever seen what happens when an Exchange DB corrupts? It's not fun. I'm sure those things have not gotten better with the latest releases since all they did was make the freaking monolithic DBs have an even larger capacity.
And AD... now there's something just waiting to get fritzed.
Nope, don't regret leaving the Exchange/Windows sysadmin post at all.
Heck, look at Oblivion. I'm eagerly awaiting it to be released, and see if the screenshots really captured the visual aspect of the game. This will be one game that I'll commit to before the first reviews come up mainly based on the strength of their previous titles.
Here's some shocking news for you: 2GB isn't enough for a real power user.
Here's more shocking news: 1GB is more than enough for 99% of those that play games.
Welcome to 2006, where not everyone is playing WoW or F.E.A.R. on 30" widescreen plasma displays with water or oil cooled dual SLI and quad core systems. Hell, I'm just now cracking open NeverWinter Nights. Doom 3, and, shockingly, Half Life 2, didn't float my boat. (I loved Quake III and Half Life)
I guess I'll call myself human...
Multi-tasking I do all the time. I'm authoring and burning a DVD as I browse /., for instance. It's a P4 2.4, w/ 1GB RAM. I used to run 2GB on it, but it started failing. Turns out the MB is screwed, adding the second 1GB DIMM caused BSODs. 2 512's worked fine. Both 1 GB DIMMs are fine, when tested separately. When I started editing DVs, I had to up the page file to 512, as I overran the 1GB limit.
I'm in the market for a new setup, and am eagerly looking at AMD X2s, but they're still too pricey for me at this time. The Opteron 144/146s aren't bad, but the entire combo is more than I want to pay, and I'm not sure about the performance increase in the DDR2 M2 systems coming out soon. I'll wait a little longer. I have 5 more empty DVs, so I'm not in a super hurry to upgrade.
Actually, Apple used to recommend several brands of which Patriot, Infineon, Crucial are three. You can't go wrong with Samsung either. :)
Oh, I should qualify this by making these following statements:
My work box was also run this way, except it had Outlook installed (corporate requirement) It also ran an appserver continuously, and an eclipse project that ate up 1GB of RAM.
I missed the digital out feature. That's the deal maker for HTPC/music jukebox use! Now I'm really torn with what I'll be doing. Because the HTPC was going to be a Linux box with remote storage, but now, it might be the mini. Decisions, decisions. Argh!
Oh, and for memory, 2GB runs less than $170. $300 is ridiculous, and $370 astronomical. Check pricewatch.com for the appropriate RAM (PC2-5300).
You might want to set up an antenna and check out your OTA HD reception. I'm about to pull the trigger on a full-blown HD PVR setup based on my OTA reception. It's more than adequate, strong signal, much stronger than analog, and the picture has to be seen to be believed.
>>You might speed up laods slightly with a faster disc, but not by much.
This is mostly true, however no matter how much RAM you've got you still need at least a 512MB paging file somewhere on your system.
Untrue. If you have 2GB of RAM and aren't doing things way beyond power user usage (ie, you're playing games, run word and excel, play with email and browse the web) you'd never hit the 2GB limit. If, however, you edit video or RAW photos or do other high memory usage tasks, and you exceed your 2GB limit, then in the windows world you need a swap file.
>>RAM- you need enough RAM so you don't hit swap. For today's
>>games, thats 1 GB. After that, the number 1 thing you can do
>>to improve system performance is to get low latency RAM. Your
>>CPU will be waiting for RAM, minimize the time that it is.
Sorry, I disagree again. 1GB ain't what it used to be. Today's games can populate an entire gig of RAM on their own - especially if the video card has lots of texture memory and is running at high resolution with antialiasing. You're correct about low latencies though. It would be best to get OCZ registered RAM, and no less than the maximum speed for Athlon 64 which is 400mhz.
1 GB will be enough for most people, if they're not playing Battlefield 2 or some of the other newest games. 2GB is better. 4GB or more is even better, but you'd better run 64bit Linux. :)
As for low latencies, the only real reason to get them is so you have better chips that can relax the timings and raise the bus speed, ie, running at 450 instead of 400 resulting in a ~12% increase. Low latencies, in and of themselves, only give you about 2-3% according to some articles posted on Arstechnica or anandtech (forgot which, otherwise I'd reference them)
>>Video card- how much do you insist on high end features?
>>All you really need is enough vram to fit all your textures
>>in. Over that is wasted.
VRAM is not limited to storing textures; It is used to store the next rendered frame (or frames) in sequence. Nobody really needs more than 256MB of VRAM these days, but that's going to change within a year. More VRAM is particularly important for people with large and\or widescreen monitors since they'll have to play at higher resolutions and probably with antialiasing
Actually, you'll be better off with dual 256MB PCE-X16 cards than a single 512MB card, esp for wide screens. 256MB will still hold you for a couple of years, if you want to save some mullah.
It depends which promo you see. The one I saw today made it look 3 times smaller, some guy with huge hands and fat fingers playing with it.
The longer promo shows several people playing with it, and from those, it definitely appears to be the size of a reasonable hardback book, especially when placed into its traveling case.
On the topic of college books, one of my texts that I still own, is about 4 x 7 x 1" in size.
I watched the initial promo trailer for this thing. Near as I can tell, it's a wireless enabled tablet PC, possibly with Bluetooth - it's implied by the phone camera transfer. It also has Voice Recognition software and hand writing recognition software. Whoop de doo. While neat in concept and allegedly able to do things like tele-conference, there's no phone capability. That seems a huge oversight to me, since that might have made this more enticing, much as anything from MS is enticing. Oh, and it plays games. Can't forget that! ;)
Cons: It's large, the size of your larger college textbooks. No built in phone. No built in camera, still or camcorder. Touch screen with no protector, I can see that becoming opague with scratches in no time. VR software on MS hasn't been the greatest, now it's supposedly flawless, and on a tablet no less?
I think I might wait for Apples iTunes PDA phone instead. When it comes to items like this, Apple seems to deliver.
The Opteron 1xx series with the 939 socket are essentially the same as the 1MB cache series. However, if I were buying an Opteron, I'd either go for max overclockability (there's a word) in 939 socket FX type configuration, or a 2xx series pure Opteron solution. Nothing like multiple CPUs to make for multi-core heaven. The beauty is, you can start with a 2xx, drop in a second 2xx, and have 2, 3 or 4 cores, depending on which chips you buy (note: the 3 core option appears to work in some configurations, but has issues)
On the AMD side, dual-core may become more common than single core, very shortly. The fact that dual-core chips are drop-in replacements for single core chips helps, as vendors don't have to change anything other than their CPU order. In the intel world, you have to have a different motherboard.
Also, I think there's about to be a new wave of dual-core buying, as AMD based DDR motherboards start hitting the shelves. Something about making a fast system faster... and the fact that these motherboards will not accept the current non-DDR CPUs.
I know I've been waiting for this. This should leap-frog anything Intel has in the works for the next year and a half at least, performance-wise. The only question is whether to buy an Opteron or X2, and then upgrade later. Given that single core Opterons are running at commodity prices, that makes the most sense from a budget perspective. But, the 3800 X2's are almost in the same commodity category. (Gaming is not my main pursuit, so an X2 is probably the better solution for me).
but western lists most likely wouldn't be comprised primarily of 2 series released by a single company, with an occassional toekn thrown in for "balance"