I've played through Half-Life 2, with its (in)famous physics engine, and I've also put a couple of days into Oblivion. One of these two games has a lot of content to go with its eye candy, and is a game I'll likely replay again. The other is Half-Life.
Except for some of the silly physics (like being able to run the horse along a steep cliff without falling), I don't think Oblivion would gain much from being super-real-istic. I don't play Oblivion because I'm interested in real-world physics.
Once you start demanding virtual-circuit type services over an interface like ethernet (CSMA/CD), you'll want better support at lower levels for quality of service and the like. I don't see it as a kludge so much as an alternate way of handling things. ATM handles mixed traffic type fairly well, with mixed streams of voice and IP traffic going through backbones everywhere.
I don't think TDMA/CDMA/etc and token ring are really super close in design, although some elements are similar.
The big issues are that LANs are point-to-point. That means CSMA/CD works fine. For shared-mediums (anything radio), you'll want TDMA/CDMA/etc to help control regular access to the medium, and minimize the negative effects of over subscription (and also why WiMax rules).
As for QoS, that's a matter of keeping within your boundaries of a network. With Ethernet, hitting the ceiling means the end of your traffic -- unless you do selective traffic control (TCP's congest control right now is stupid, and UDP -- used for VOIP -- doesn't respect it all) via another protocol.
"Okay, maybe this is actually too simplistic a view."
That's correct.
"I don't think that its unfair to say that both sides will claim to be better than the other. Microsoft claims to be better all the time, and advertises heavily to that effect. How does the average consumer tell the difference?"
You're a consumer who just bought a PC, and it has Windows on it. Either you made a mistake, or Microsoft is right. Which will you say out of the gate? Why, you will say that Microsoft is right, and believe its advertising.
Microsoft started off being better than the others by dint of having a product, which helped IBM make its choice. Because IBM hardware was cheaper (over time, thanks to clones and Intel's budget pricing of their processers), the majority of computers sold over time became x86 compatble machines. Microsoft leveraged the original IBM contract such that it could provide an OS cheaper than the competition to OEMs. Again, Microsoft comes out "better" because it's cheaper and available.
Better doesn't always mean that something has been sat down with and thoroughly reviewed. Few people make such rational choices in life. Better means it was cheaper, it was easier to get (came with the computer), or that they simply don't know better because they believe the marketters once they get their first PC.
You seem to understand this when mentioning FireFox. Internet Explorer is "better" because it comes with the PC. For FireFox to beat it requires phenominal effort -- but that just shows how bad Internet Explorer is.
Ethernet's big thing is that it uses CSMA instead of passing a token around. It seems dumb at first (and is!), until you realize all the things that can go wrong with token ring, and some of the other logistics of it.
Ethernet won't work so well for a bus layout, but it works great for a star layout. Token ring is supposed to be awesome on a bus layout, because of how it manages access to the network resources, but it's not something that's better in reality (only in theory).
Plus, as devices scale up, the simpler (and thus cheaper and easier to design) ethernet go there first. Token ring just is not efficient from a cost perspective. We don't use token ring for the same reason we don't use RISC machines -- money and economies of scale:)
So if you use a word which is widely used to label homosexuals, and then use it in the context which means bad, well, you're changing the meaning of the word, and building up an association.
Negroid means having characteristics of a negro. The was slanged up into the form known as nigger.
nigger \nig"ger\, n.
A negro; -- in vulgar derision or depreciation. It is usually
intended and interpreted as highly insulting and vulgar.
So if "gay" is intended or interpreted as highly insulting and vulgar, why is gay more acceptable to use in that way than nigger?
"/ignore users that say things you don't want to hear and please don't try to force your nigger agenda on the rest of us."
If you turn a blind eye to ignorance, you let it grow. Showing these people who seem to think it's acceptable, that such vulgarities are not cool or acceptable, is the perfect response. Do not tollate intellorance, no matter how people will dress it up.
"iTunes' features aren't enough to justify its horrible interface on Windows."
That's your opinion, not mine. We don't agree.
The OP wanted to know what people would suggest on the Windows platform. I suggest iTunes because I use it. The rest of your post is, frankly, a waste of both our times. Don't worry, I didn't read it.
"free" MS software is not site licenced. It's a one-to-one licencing deal, with all the software requiring activation.
I don't "continue to use Windows 2000" -- I use it on the order of once every 4-6 months. No Windows 2000 machine is hooked directly to the Internet. All applications run on it come from a known-good repository on the network, which I verify in a VMWare environment before it gets run on my test machine. As I said, it's rare that games don't work with Cedega, and (due to school) it's rare that I play games which require a reboot (as well as games in general, but that's another story).
Internet Explorer is not secure, nor is it designed to be. Windows Vista is the first Windows since 95 that might be more secure due to the change of approach to integrating an insecure binary like the IE blob into the system. You can't patch shit into a good design. Sendmail proved that decades ago (I did giggle about the recent remote root in Sendmail). There are some very good SE principles and also algorithm correctness reasons why this is, but I'm going to assume you know them, and are just being insouciant about IE.
As for iTunes, it's not the interface, it's the features. Most of the time, I use it on my Powerbook. The rare (2x times a year) time I use it on Windows, it's close enough, and supports the same playlists, streaming radio, streaming to AirTunes enabled speakers, etc, that I use. Again, you're totally ignoring my use case in favour of your view of what the world Should Be (TM). I expect such arrogance on Slashdot, though, so I'm sure I can forgive you.
Not my Windows. Windows 2000 does not have any archiving tools, nor does it have remote desktop support out of the box. That's why you need WinRAR and TightVNC. The Windows XP and up GUI terminal client doesn't seem as flexible as TightVNC, although I have used it.
Windows 2000 is the Windows I use for those games that don't work (yet) in Cedega. I use it with Daemon tools. It works great with all my Blizzard games (although these are well behaved in Cedega), and also work with other games like Alpha Centauri, Civ 3, SimCity 4, etc. I can use the same network share of ISOs for Linux loop back and Windows daemon tools loopback. I've never bought any game with asshole copyprotection, although the intentional corrupted sectors on Civ3's install disc meant that I'm not buying an Atari title again.
I look forward to putting Galactic Civ 2 into my share once I order the game online.
You mention a lot of things in WinXP+ that I simply don't use, because those newer versions of Windows have that activation bullshit attached to them. I get them for "free" because I'm an upper-year CS student, but it's not worth the hassle.
As for IE: any program that isn't dangerous if you use it "for only a few websites" is a program too dangerous to run on machines with access to my network. FireFox tends to get security updates with a day of there being an issue, and it's rarely used for browsing on the Windows machine anyway -- Unix exploits are much rarer than any other kind, giving me further protection:)
I'm not sure why you don't like iTunes. Although replication of playlists/data is not so good (because my Powerbook goes with me, it's not always around the network, but I would like the network to have a duplicate of that data), it is a great ripper, playlist organizer, and also handles streaming well (either from other iTunes sources, or to my Airport Express). I can also copy music from other people when they bring their shared iTunes to the same subnet. I don't think WMP has that support.
These are the "essential" applications (note: I use Linux and MacOS primarily, and I only have Windows around for testing; these are things I miss from "real" operating systems).
* WinRAR. Yup, Windows doesn't ship with a decent compression tool. * PuTTY. No SSH included either. * Cygwin. Basics command environment, for working with the rest of your tools in a normal way. * TightVNC. Windows is not network aware out of the box. * Daemon tools. Much like MacOS, Windows doesn't have a good loopback tool. Daemon tools fixes this. * iTunes. Yes, I install it on all Windows installations:) * Azureus. How else do you download files nowadays? * FireFox. IE is not an option.
This will take your basic Windows system, and give you proper text and gui network shells, a decent local shell, loop back, media organization, compression/decompression, and modern file downloading. I keep an NFS/SMB share with the latest version of these tools for when I wipe/restore Windows test boxes.
I see lots of suggestions for anti-virus, keylogger, and spyware apps here. It's a waste of your time if you do not use Windows for anything other than games. The only way you'll get spyware is if you do something stupid like run IE or execute random programs downloaded while websurfing.
I don't watch video on Windows, period, so I don't have applications for it; my Powerbook connects to my TV readily enough, and Mplayer's fullscreen mode looks great. I only use Windows for the rare PC game that doesn't load in Cedega, or testing.
It only takes 2 minutes to reboot if I don't have a bevy of applications open, with lots of data I'm working on.
I have spare HDs with Win2k and Mac OS X for Intel on them. They get used roughly never because I'd have to close all the work I perpetually have open in Linux (which has been my desktop OS for over half a decade now). If I could instantly suspend and resume Linux in a stateful manner, and MacOS X had this same feature, then you could treat going into Windows as a dedicated gaming environment.
"As for CS. Lets be honest here. 99% of what you are learn is out of date or off no use or just wrong. The remaining 1% you can get out of a book."
No. Computational science (computer science is a bit of a misnomer, since computers are just the physical representation of a Turing machine) is loaded with lots of information that is not out of date or wrong.
If you are in a job situation where all that you learn and use regularly is something easy to pick up from a book and changes periodically, you are in a technical occupation. People who change oil on cars are in a technical occupation. Compared to those grease monkeys, people with real CS degrees who have taken their theory and understand the true breadth of CS are like the mechanical engineers who design engines, know exactly how to measure and project how an engine will perform given a situation, have an understanding of the minimum strength values the chasis needs along certain axis to resist the twist of the engine in its mounts, etc.
Actually writing program code into a computer or reading someone else's program code and fixing it is such a small part of CS.
Data structures and common algorithms for manipulating them, modelling problems, proving correctness, designing network protocols, understanding principles of HCI, knowing the basics of processor design, how databases work, etc, the list of CS topics is very long!
Your statement, "You will be suprised how many people in IT got the best grades in maths and now end up spending a year getting all the code to be adjusted for a simple tax change. Yeah, that is high science!" shows how you don't appreciate this.
Modeling complex tax law changes is certainly not research, but it's still a big project given how labrythine tax law is. It's a lot of domain-specific knowledge to draw on. You have to get it 100% correct if you don't want to be drawn and quartered by your customers. It's software engineering.
Do you think that physics is not a science because people who are mechanical engineers know physics?
to say this: there is a very, very large difference between a law that says you can't be fired unless there is just cause (and if so, you get a time unit of notice so you can find another job), and a law that says you can fire anyone under the age of 26 with no reason, and no time delay, whenever you want.
Oh, you won't sleep with the boss? Fired. You called in sick too much this week. Fired. I don't like how you're dressing. Fired. We hired on my 40-year-old brother. Fired.
Instead of working with the worker to correct behaviour that is causing a problem (and optionally letting them go after they have time to find another job), it makes firing be a big, ugly stick over everything.
is that I can use the correct XML DOM in my Javascript and other complex web applications. If people's stupid IE 5 and IE 6 can't handle it (because they only implement the proprietary MSHTML DOM), I can say stuff it to them.
I always could before, but the fact that it's another Quality Microsoft Product (TM) means that folks who are unwilling to be persuaded by reason can still use the Internet when the Internet stops being proprietary.
" I'm not really sure I understand your complaint. Or that you even understand your complaint.
You can rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive, yes. "
You don't. I'm talking about the Xbox. It's half-baked. I'm sure the same half-baked folks who made the Xbox rip at 128kbps have equalled crippled the Xbox 360 (from my limited time playing with it at a friend's place, pointless FWOOSHING menus comes to mind).
They have improved the MP3 usage if what you say is true, but they should've had enough brains to get it right the first time.
You were talking out of your ass. Let me illustrate:
"And as the other poster pointed out, older versions of glibc are not compatible with the current version of the library. How many 10-year-old binaries do you have that are statically linked with glibc?"
glibc wasn't used 10 years ago in many distributions, libc4 and 5 were. Anything that did link with glibc was likely statically linked so that they could be run on libc4 and libc5 systems. The glibc movement didn't occur until a few years later when glibc2 became a viable library.
"Do you really want to install and maintain older versions of that and dozens of other libraries? Don't you realize that that's even more confusing and convoluted than Windows?"
No, it's less confusing and convoluted because under Windows, where your DLL files were not strongly versioned or protected.
mfc42.dll had a number of versions more than 10 and less than 40. Netscape 3, 4 both had different mfc42.dll files shipped with them. Any shareware application that shipped with it and didn't check before hand could overwrite it and turf your system. Only in Win2k and up do they have a DLL cache that resists such behaviour.
I can install libc4 and 5 alongside my modern glibc2 easily and without troubles. Provided they use the POSIX interface, they will run cleanly. On a BSD, I'm even better off, because the Linux personality can take care of any nasty differences to the non-POSIX APIs.
Linux can have a setup similar to Windows, except it has fewer gotchas lurking. Thanks to the way the Open source philosophy is, we don't have to worry about it.
Your original argument was a straw man. When I reply to your statement about binary compatibility ("You have a modern system running Linux that can run a binary that was compiled 10 years ago? That's honestly pretty hard to believe. Can you give an example?") such that I show it's a non-issue due to the different social behaviours around free software, you claim I am attacking you personally and make a further straw man about binary compatibility. You are a troll.
If you have lots of hearing damage in the high end, perhaps it is ok. However, to me, I can hear the distortion in vocals over the engines in Sega GT and Project Gotham. That means it's bad.
What's bad about a higher bitrate? Nothing. It chews less CPU time to encode and decode (after all, the trade off is compressed representation vs. CPU power), and results in a better representation of the music file. The Xbox HD is fast enough loading that you can have your 64mb of ram section up such that you have a buffer window of 128kbytes - 512kbytes, which can cover several seconds of MP3 data at 192 or 256kbits (4 - 16 seconds depending on if you pick lower or upper size). This assumes CBR encoding -- VBR encoding will be better.
So there are no technical reasons they could not have done this. The XBox is, as you pointed out, limited, so people wouldn't be loading their entire MP3 collection on to the device without running out of room for save games.
On the other hand, I would be able to load the songs I like onto my Xbox. Even 1gb of music would be plenty (my Shuffle is only 512mb in size, and with my 10-15mb MP3 files, I still get 3 hours of non-repeat music, which means I hear every song twice before the battery dies). So storage isn't a problem either.
The fact is that these people at Microsoft put out half-baked products. They put in just enough to get a bullet point on the box, but don't really invesitage the use cases or consider it in the context of the rest of the device. The only equivalent half-baked thing I can think of from a company like Apple would be the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X, which performs so terribly as to be useless.
Half-baked designs are why iPods are more popular than all those other, more complex players. They're also why I have no desire to buy any WinCE PDAs depite the half-baked feeling of modern Palm devices. Microsoft just happens to be another company that lacks vision in this space; it's hardly unique to them.
Be careful how far out your ass you talk.
on
Why Windows is Slow
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I can grab the statically linked binaries off of my Simtel CD set that includes Slackware 2.x and run them. The old statically linked a.out files will run if I put that executable support in, and any statically linked ELF binaries also load fine. Both of those existed 10 years ago (right around when most people had switched to ELF).
Dynamically linked ones can work, too, provided I install the libraries that support them (and I can install them concurrently with modern libraries, since their names include the versions of their interfaces). Only libraries and programs that directly use the Linux system call interface (not the POSIX interface) are unlikely to work.
Quake binaries of that era function. The OpenGL 1.x interface they use is provided via my OpenGL libraries. OSS is emulated by Alsa. I can use fancy new binaries given by the Quake source code, if I want, but it's not required.
In fact, the best part about Linux you could say, is that I am not locked to archaic binary interfaces because most of my code is available in source form to everyone, including people who are willing to recompile it for me and provide it in a nice distribution (Kuuntu) with minimal interaction on my part.
So we can support legacy, but we choose not to. This choice is important in software use freedom.
There are some replies that will point you to shareware applications (which may or may not be for your kind of "Smartphone") that claim to address the issue for a low, one-time (per phone) fee!
That list is about a bunch of games that, frankly, work with models that are SPCH-30001. If you have an SPCH-30001 that's not dead due to the defective lasers that were used in the 1999-2000 production run of 1st gen PS2s that still functions, you're lucky and due for a replacement anyway.
My PS2 plays Final Fantasy Anthology perfectly fine, and brings the load times of the FF6 menus down to something approaching playability, although it's still not as nice as the SNES rom.
From Wikipedia: "Early versions of the PlayStation 2 console were incompatible with both the North American and European versions of Final Fantasy Anthology, although these incompatibilities have since been addressed in later hardware revisions."
Reiser is not the first file system with this idea:"Third, (and EVERYONE seems to be missing this) some file systems DON'T waste slack space in a sector. Reiserfs (v3 and v4) actually takes the underused blocks at the end of the files (called the "tail" of the file) and creates blocks with a bunch of them crammed together (often mixed in with metadata). This has been shown to actually increase performance, because the tail of files are usually where they are most active and tail blocks collect those tails into often accessed blocks (which have a better chance of being in the disk cache)."
Most filesystems don't, and haven't for decades, wasted these final blocks: "With larger block sizes, disks with many small files would waste a lot of space, so BSD added block level fragmentation, where the last partial block of data from several files may be stored in a single "fragment" block instead of multiple mostly empty blocks."
The performance boost is that we can store small dot files together in 1 block, and (with readahead) speed up things like logins and other operations that read in this small set of data.
FAT and FAT32 couldn't handle this, though (nor many other FS features). While I haven't studied NTFS in the detail that I've studied UNIX file systems, I doubt they don't have support for this. NTFS as of 5.0 supports pretty much every feature of a modern UNIX file system.
I already donated today. Cheque, credit card (my preferred method), and Paypal are all easily listed. I guess having the donations link on the main page (just below project goals) was not obvious enough.
As Maddog put it: "I believe it was at a conference in Australia (also in the 1996-1998 time frame) that I ran into a rather despondent Theo de Raadt, who told me that for lack of $300. his ISP was going to turn off the project's servers. I took out my checkbook and immediately wrote him a personal check for $300., to keep the OpenBSD servers alive. My comment to Theo was that "your project is too valuable to let die over a measly $300.""
Slashdot Mirror
I've played through Half-Life 2, with its (in)famous physics engine, and I've also put a couple of days into Oblivion. One of these two games has a lot of content to go with its eye candy, and is a game I'll likely replay again. The other is Half-Life.
Except for some of the silly physics (like being able to run the horse along a steep cliff without falling), I don't think Oblivion would gain much from being super-real-istic. I don't play Oblivion because I'm interested in real-world physics.
Once you start demanding virtual-circuit type services over an interface like ethernet (CSMA/CD), you'll want better support at lower levels for quality of service and the like. I don't see it as a kludge so much as an alternate way of handling things. ATM handles mixed traffic type fairly well, with mixed streams of voice and IP traffic going through backbones everywhere.
I don't think TDMA/CDMA/etc and token ring are really super close in design, although some elements are similar.
The big issues are that LANs are point-to-point. That means CSMA/CD works fine. For shared-mediums (anything radio), you'll want TDMA/CDMA/etc to help control regular access to the medium, and minimize the negative effects of over subscription (and also why WiMax rules).
As for QoS, that's a matter of keeping within your boundaries of a network. With Ethernet, hitting the ceiling means the end of your traffic -- unless you do selective traffic control (TCP's congest control right now is stupid, and UDP -- used for VOIP -- doesn't respect it all) via another protocol.
"Okay, maybe this is actually too simplistic a view."
That's correct.
"I don't think that its unfair to say that both sides will claim to be better than the other. Microsoft claims to be better all the time, and advertises heavily to that effect. How does the average consumer tell the difference?"
You're a consumer who just bought a PC, and it has Windows on it. Either you made a mistake, or Microsoft is right. Which will you say out of the gate? Why, you will say that Microsoft is right, and believe its advertising.
Microsoft started off being better than the others by dint of having a product, which helped IBM make its choice. Because IBM hardware was cheaper (over time, thanks to clones and Intel's budget pricing of their processers), the majority of computers sold over time became x86 compatble machines. Microsoft leveraged the original IBM contract such that it could provide an OS cheaper than the competition to OEMs. Again, Microsoft comes out "better" because it's cheaper and available.
Better doesn't always mean that something has been sat down with and thoroughly reviewed. Few people make such rational choices in life. Better means it was cheaper, it was easier to get (came with the computer), or that they simply don't know better because they believe the marketters once they get their first PC.
You seem to understand this when mentioning FireFox. Internet Explorer is "better" because it comes with the PC. For FireFox to beat it requires phenominal effort -- but that just shows how bad Internet Explorer is.
Ethernet's big thing is that it uses CSMA instead of passing a token around. It seems dumb at first (and is!), until you realize all the things that can go wrong with token ring, and some of the other logistics of it.
:)
Ethernet won't work so well for a bus layout, but it works great for a star layout. Token ring is supposed to be awesome on a bus layout, because of how it manages access to the network resources, but it's not something that's better in reality (only in theory).
Plus, as devices scale up, the simpler (and thus cheaper and easier to design) ethernet go there first. Token ring just is not efficient from a cost perspective. We don't use token ring for the same reason we don't use RISC machines -- money and economies of scale
Gay.
/ignore users that say things you don't want to hear and please don't try to force your nigger agenda on the rest of us."
Denotation: Happy. Loose or lewd.
Connotation: Homosexual.
So if you use a word which is widely used to label homosexuals, and then use it in the context which means bad, well, you're changing the meaning of the word, and building up an association.
Negroid means having characteristics of a negro. The was slanged up into the form known as nigger.
nigger \nig"ger\, n.
A negro; -- in vulgar derision or depreciation. It is usually
intended and interpreted as highly insulting and vulgar.
So if "gay" is intended or interpreted as highly insulting and vulgar, why is gay more acceptable to use in that way than nigger?
"
If you turn a blind eye to ignorance, you let it grow. Showing these people who seem to think it's acceptable, that such vulgarities are not cool or acceptable, is the perfect response. Do not tollate intellorance, no matter how people will dress it up.
"iTunes' features aren't enough to justify its horrible interface on Windows."
That's your opinion, not mine. We don't agree.
The OP wanted to know what people would suggest on the Windows platform. I suggest iTunes because I use it. The rest of your post is, frankly, a waste of both our times. Don't worry, I didn't read it.
"free" MS software is not site licenced. It's a one-to-one licencing deal, with all the software requiring activation.
I don't "continue to use Windows 2000" -- I use it on the order of once every 4-6 months. No Windows 2000 machine is hooked directly to the Internet. All applications run on it come from a known-good repository on the network, which I verify in a VMWare environment before it gets run on my test machine. As I said, it's rare that games don't work with Cedega, and (due to school) it's rare that I play games which require a reboot (as well as games in general, but that's another story).
Internet Explorer is not secure, nor is it designed to be. Windows Vista is the first Windows since 95 that might be more secure due to the change of approach to integrating an insecure binary like the IE blob into the system. You can't patch shit into a good design. Sendmail proved that decades ago (I did giggle about the recent remote root in Sendmail). There are some very good SE principles and also algorithm correctness reasons why this is, but I'm going to assume you know them, and are just being insouciant about IE.
As for iTunes, it's not the interface, it's the features. Most of the time, I use it on my Powerbook. The rare (2x times a year) time I use it on Windows, it's close enough, and supports the same playlists, streaming radio, streaming to AirTunes enabled speakers, etc, that I use. Again, you're totally ignoring my use case in favour of your view of what the world Should Be (TM). I expect such arrogance on Slashdot, though, so I'm sure I can forgive you.
Not my Windows. Windows 2000 does not have any archiving tools, nor does it have remote desktop support out of the box. That's why you need WinRAR and TightVNC. The Windows XP and up GUI terminal client doesn't seem as flexible as TightVNC, although I have used it.
:)
Windows 2000 is the Windows I use for those games that don't work (yet) in Cedega. I use it with Daemon tools. It works great with all my Blizzard games (although these are well behaved in Cedega), and also work with other games like Alpha Centauri, Civ 3, SimCity 4, etc. I can use the same network share of ISOs for Linux loop back and Windows daemon tools loopback. I've never bought any game with asshole copyprotection, although the intentional corrupted sectors on Civ3's install disc meant that I'm not buying an Atari title again.
I look forward to putting Galactic Civ 2 into my share once I order the game online.
You mention a lot of things in WinXP+ that I simply don't use, because those newer versions of Windows have that activation bullshit attached to them. I get them for "free" because I'm an upper-year CS student, but it's not worth the hassle.
As for IE: any program that isn't dangerous if you use it "for only a few websites" is a program too dangerous to run on machines with access to my network. FireFox tends to get security updates with a day of there being an issue, and it's rarely used for browsing on the Windows machine anyway -- Unix exploits are much rarer than any other kind, giving me further protection
I'm not sure why you don't like iTunes. Although replication of playlists/data is not so good (because my Powerbook goes with me, it's not always around the network, but I would like the network to have a duplicate of that data), it is a great ripper, playlist organizer, and also handles streaming well (either from other iTunes sources, or to my Airport Express). I can also copy music from other people when they bring their shared iTunes to the same subnet. I don't think WMP has that support.
These are the "essential" applications (note: I use Linux and MacOS primarily, and I only have Windows around for testing; these are things I miss from "real" operating systems).
:)
* WinRAR. Yup, Windows doesn't ship with a decent compression tool.
* PuTTY. No SSH included either.
* Cygwin. Basics command environment, for working with the rest of your tools in a normal way.
* TightVNC. Windows is not network aware out of the box.
* Daemon tools. Much like MacOS, Windows doesn't have a good loopback tool. Daemon tools fixes this.
* iTunes. Yes, I install it on all Windows installations
* Azureus. How else do you download files nowadays?
* FireFox. IE is not an option.
This will take your basic Windows system, and give you proper text and gui network shells, a decent local shell, loop back, media organization, compression/decompression, and modern file downloading. I keep an NFS/SMB share with the latest version of these tools for when I wipe/restore Windows test boxes.
I see lots of suggestions for anti-virus, keylogger, and spyware apps here. It's a waste of your time if you do not use Windows for anything other than games. The only way you'll get spyware is if you do something stupid like run IE or execute random programs downloaded while websurfing.
I don't watch video on Windows, period, so I don't have applications for it; my Powerbook connects to my TV readily enough, and Mplayer's fullscreen mode looks great. I only use Windows for the rare PC game that doesn't load in Cedega, or testing.
MacOS still wins.
How do you install Camino in MacOS X?
1) Drag the Camino icon to your Applications folder!
How do you uninstall Camino in MacOS X?
1) Drag the Camino icon from your Applications folder to the trash.
It only takes 2 minutes to reboot if I don't have a bevy of applications open, with lots of data I'm working on.
I have spare HDs with Win2k and Mac OS X for Intel on them. They get used roughly never because I'd have to close all the work I perpetually have open in Linux (which has been my desktop OS for over half a decade now). If I could instantly suspend and resume Linux in a stateful manner, and MacOS X had this same feature, then you could treat going into Windows as a dedicated gaming environment.
"As for CS. Lets be honest here. 99% of what you are learn is out of date or off no use or just wrong. The remaining 1% you can get out of a book."
No. Computational science (computer science is a bit of a misnomer, since computers are just the physical representation of a Turing machine) is loaded with lots of information that is not out of date or wrong.
If you are in a job situation where all that you learn and use regularly is something easy to pick up from a book and changes periodically, you are in a technical occupation. People who change oil on cars are in a technical occupation. Compared to those grease monkeys, people with real CS degrees who have taken their theory and understand the true breadth of CS are like the mechanical engineers who design engines, know exactly how to measure and project how an engine will perform given a situation, have an understanding of the minimum strength values the chasis needs along certain axis to resist the twist of the engine in its mounts, etc.
Actually writing program code into a computer or reading someone else's program code and fixing it is such a small part of CS.
Data structures and common algorithms for manipulating them, modelling problems, proving correctness, designing network protocols, understanding principles of HCI, knowing the basics of processor design, how databases work, etc, the list of CS topics is very long!
Your statement, "You will be suprised how many people in IT got the best grades in maths and now end up spending a year getting all the code to be adjusted for a simple tax change. Yeah, that is high science!" shows how you don't appreciate this.
Modeling complex tax law changes is certainly not research, but it's still a big project given how labrythine tax law is. It's a lot of domain-specific knowledge to draw on. You have to get it 100% correct if you don't want to be drawn and quartered by your customers. It's software engineering.
Do you think that physics is not a science because people who are mechanical engineers know physics?
to say this: there is a very, very large difference between a law that says you can't be fired unless there is just cause (and if so, you get a time unit of notice so you can find another job), and a law that says you can fire anyone under the age of 26 with no reason, and no time delay, whenever you want.
Oh, you won't sleep with the boss? Fired.
You called in sick too much this week. Fired.
I don't like how you're dressing. Fired.
We hired on my 40-year-old brother. Fired.
Instead of working with the worker to correct behaviour that is causing a problem (and optionally letting them go after they have time to find another job), it makes firing be a big, ugly stick over everything.
Egalitarian societies should not tollerate such laws.
is that I can use the correct XML DOM in my Javascript and other complex web applications. If people's stupid IE 5 and IE 6 can't handle it (because they only implement the proprietary MSHTML DOM), I can say stuff it to them.
I always could before, but the fact that it's another Quality Microsoft Product (TM) means that folks who are unwilling to be persuaded by reason can still use the Internet when the Internet stops being proprietary.
" I'm not really sure I understand your complaint. Or that you even understand your complaint.
You can rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive, yes. "
You don't. I'm talking about the Xbox. It's half-baked. I'm sure the same half-baked folks who made the Xbox rip at 128kbps have equalled crippled the Xbox 360 (from my limited time playing with it at a friend's place, pointless FWOOSHING menus comes to mind).
They have improved the MP3 usage if what you say is true, but they should've had enough brains to get it right the first time.
You were talking out of your ass. Let me illustrate:
"And as the other poster pointed out, older versions of glibc are not compatible with the current version of the library. How many 10-year-old binaries do you have that are statically linked with glibc?"
glibc wasn't used 10 years ago in many distributions, libc4 and 5 were. Anything that did link with glibc was likely statically linked so that they could be run on libc4 and libc5 systems. The glibc movement didn't occur until a few years later when glibc2 became a viable library.
"Do you really want to install and maintain older versions of that and dozens of other libraries? Don't you realize that that's even more confusing and convoluted than Windows?"
No, it's less confusing and convoluted because under Windows, where your DLL files were not strongly versioned or protected.
mfc42.dll had a number of versions more than 10 and less than 40. Netscape 3, 4 both had different mfc42.dll files shipped with them. Any shareware application that shipped with it and didn't check before hand could overwrite it and turf your system. Only in Win2k and up do they have a DLL cache that resists such behaviour.
I can install libc4 and 5 alongside my modern glibc2 easily and without troubles. Provided they use the POSIX interface, they will run cleanly. On a BSD, I'm even better off, because the Linux personality can take care of any nasty differences to the non-POSIX APIs.
Linux can have a setup similar to Windows, except it has fewer gotchas lurking. Thanks to the way the Open source philosophy is, we don't have to worry about it.
Your original argument was a straw man. When I reply to your statement about binary compatibility ("You have a modern system running Linux that can run a binary that was compiled 10 years ago? That's honestly pretty hard to believe. Can you give an example?") such that I show it's a non-issue due to the different social behaviours around free software, you claim I am attacking you personally and make a further straw man about binary compatibility. You are a troll.
If you have lots of hearing damage in the high end, perhaps it is ok. However, to me, I can hear the distortion in vocals over the engines in Sega GT and Project Gotham. That means it's bad.
What's bad about a higher bitrate? Nothing. It chews less CPU time to encode and decode (after all, the trade off is compressed representation vs. CPU power), and results in a better representation of the music file. The Xbox HD is fast enough loading that you can have your 64mb of ram section up such that you have a buffer window of 128kbytes - 512kbytes, which can cover several seconds of MP3 data at 192 or 256kbits (4 - 16 seconds depending on if you pick lower or upper size). This assumes CBR encoding -- VBR encoding will be better.
So there are no technical reasons they could not have done this. The XBox is, as you pointed out, limited, so people wouldn't be loading their entire MP3 collection on to the device without running out of room for save games.
On the other hand, I would be able to load the songs I like onto my Xbox. Even 1gb of music would be plenty (my Shuffle is only 512mb in size, and with my 10-15mb MP3 files, I still get 3 hours of non-repeat music, which means I hear every song twice before the battery dies). So storage isn't a problem either.
The fact is that these people at Microsoft put out half-baked products. They put in just enough to get a bullet point on the box, but don't really invesitage the use cases or consider it in the context of the rest of the device. The only equivalent half-baked thing I can think of from a company like Apple would be the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X, which performs so terribly as to be useless.
Half-baked designs are why iPods are more popular than all those other, more complex players. They're also why I have no desire to buy any WinCE PDAs depite the half-baked feeling of modern Palm devices. Microsoft just happens to be another company that lacks vision in this space; it's hardly unique to them.
I can grab the statically linked binaries off of my Simtel CD set that includes Slackware 2.x and run them. The old statically linked a.out files will run if I put that executable support in, and any statically linked ELF binaries also load fine. Both of those existed 10 years ago (right around when most people had switched to ELF).
Dynamically linked ones can work, too, provided I install the libraries that support them (and I can install them concurrently with modern libraries, since their names include the versions of their interfaces). Only libraries and programs that directly use the Linux system call interface (not the POSIX interface) are unlikely to work.
Quake binaries of that era function. The OpenGL 1.x interface they use is provided via my OpenGL libraries. OSS is emulated by Alsa. I can use fancy new binaries given by the Quake source code, if I want, but it's not required.
In fact, the best part about Linux you could say, is that I am not locked to archaic binary interfaces because most of my code is available in source form to everyone, including people who are willing to recompile it for me and provide it in a nice distribution (Kuuntu) with minimal interaction on my part.
So we can support legacy, but we choose not to. This choice is important in software use freedom.
And not a single screen dedicated to setting the bitrate used for ripping music from CDs to be used as a soundtrack in the games.
Why design a 5.1 hifi Dolby Digital Surround capable box if all you're going to do is rip audio at the equivalent of 128kbits?
Sounds like one of those things "Smartphones" don't do!
There are some replies that will point you to shareware applications (which may or may not be for your kind of "Smartphone") that claim to address the issue for a low, one-time (per phone) fee!
That list is about a bunch of games that, frankly, work with models that are SPCH-30001. If you have an SPCH-30001 that's not dead due to the defective lasers that were used in the 1999-2000 production run of 1st gen PS2s that still functions, you're lucky and due for a replacement anyway.
My PS2 plays Final Fantasy Anthology perfectly fine, and brings the load times of the FF6 menus down to something approaching playability, although it's still not as nice as the SNES rom.
From Wikipedia: "Early versions of the PlayStation 2 console were incompatible with both the North American and European versions of Final Fantasy Anthology, although these incompatibilities have since been addressed in later hardware revisions."
"When piracy is widespread and enforcement is difficult, penalties must be disproportionately high to have a deterrant effect."
The $250,000 FBI fine on the front of all DVDs doesn't appear to have slowed down US copyright infringement activity.
Reiser is not the first file system with this idea:"Third, (and EVERYONE seems to be missing this) some file systems DON'T waste slack space in a sector. Reiserfs (v3 and v4) actually takes the underused blocks at the end of the files (called the "tail" of the file) and creates blocks with a bunch of them crammed together (often mixed in with metadata). This has been shown to actually increase performance, because the tail of files are usually where they are most active and tail blocks collect those tails into often accessed blocks (which have a better chance of being in the disk cache)."
Most filesystems don't, and haven't for decades, wasted these final blocks: "With larger block sizes, disks with many small files would waste a lot of space, so BSD added block level fragmentation, where the last partial block of data from several files may be stored in a single "fragment" block instead of multiple mostly empty blocks."
The performance boost is that we can store small dot files together in 1 block, and (with readahead) speed up things like logins and other operations that read in this small set of data.
FAT and FAT32 couldn't handle this, though (nor many other FS features). While I haven't studied NTFS in the detail that I've studied UNIX file systems, I doubt they don't have support for this. NTFS as of 5.0 supports pretty much every feature of a modern UNIX file system.
http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html
Once again, with feeling:
http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html
I already donated today. Cheque, credit card (my preferred method), and Paypal are all easily listed. I guess having the donations link on the main page (just below project goals) was not obvious enough.
As Maddog put it:
"I believe it was at a conference in Australia (also in the 1996-1998 time frame) that I ran into a rather despondent Theo de Raadt, who told me that for lack of $300. his ISP was going to turn off the project's servers. I took out my checkbook and immediately wrote him a personal check for $300., to keep the OpenBSD servers alive. My comment to Theo was that "your project is too valuable to let die over a measly $300.""
If you're really poor, just donate 5$.