Bullshit. A stock Media Center PC, running a freshly installed Windows Media Center Edition XP, which only runs on fully 'supported' hardware, goes down more often than most hookers in Times Square. Since MSWMCEXP ONLY runs on FULLY supported hardware, how do you explain this?
XP is better than 95/98/Millennium, but is less reliable than 2000. It still doesn't touch any free / open source Unix (including OS X) for reliability. Once you start serving files or doing anything even remotely heavy-duty (like encoding video) the system begins to break down.
So, while you can insist that XP never BSODs unless it's due to user error, people will know you are a liar and full of shit!
It's like the one bolt that holds together an entire vehicle in Looney Tunes cartoons. The reason the registry exists is so that one thing can get screwed up and take a whole running system with it.
I think it serves a more nefarious purpose, though. Most home users and many businesses buy a computer with Windows pre-installed. To these folks, the OS and the computer might as well be the same thing. Every 2-3 years the registry gets so full of shit that, knowing not that a fresh install would fix their problems, the option that most folks exercise is to throw it away and get a new machine.
Think of all the extra licensing revenue MS gets from these practices! I wouldn't doubt that there are home users with only one computer but 3 or 5 Windows licenses from boxen they have thrown away.
That's because XP has a control panel option called 'Show Error Messages' that comes un-checked by default. Check the box, and you'll see the blue screens again.
No, the goal of this book was to create a twisted version of history that completely distorted the facts. The author and his nefarious project have been outed for what they are - prostitutes. Bought and paid by SCO, Microsoft, and probably Sun, they play the game.
You can do this already. Anticipate when you'll want to run a certain program, and have it stream its component files (and libraries that it'll be using) to/dev/null. The problem is that to do such a thing automatically would kill other kinds of disk performance. Because the computer doesn't really know what you'll be doing at any given time, the best it could do is always have the programs you use most often read in.
The folks who designed and implemented Unix demand-paged virtual memory knew what they were doing. Everything is a tradeoff.
The real funny thing - why spend engineering on making booting faster? Because XP STILL crashes all the time!
This is technology that recovers perhaps billions of dollars in wasted IT labor - reboot the box faster so the worker can resume his toil! Windows and components are so cobbled together that almost every patch requires a reboot, and some reboot without advance notification! I would assert that no properly maintained modern computing platform requires as much rebooting, both scheduled and unscheduled, as Windows.
Users of more adult computers of course belly laughed when they heard the boasts of a much faster boot cycle - they probably only reboot once in a great while, for particular reasons, and seldom unexpectedly.
For me, with an personally preened and protected XP installation (Media Center Edition) I manage to get about three days to a week or so, depending on usage. If I am hammering on it for the samba shares (it has massive storage) from the Mac upstairs, it lasts three or four days at most. Less if you want to watch TV with it!
Explorer has so many ways of dying, some of which are logged and generate an error dialog, some of which are logged but produce no dialog, and some of which produce no dialog or log. I think that MS makes only a weak attempt at letting its software die gracefully and produce useful error messages.
Hell, when I have to reboot XP (often enough) I often manage to launch Tribes2 and have it tell me that it can't find an update server. Then, I have to wait 10 seconds or so, and try again. Magically, it works.
To make XP look faster than it is, they load up the GUI as soon as frickin possible, even before what in many environments may be more crucial services. Then they claim it 'boots faster'! Well, when is a computer booted - when you can launch a program, or when the system is completely ready for user interaction?
I don't think the problem is memory use. Memory's cheap. Put crap into memory, by all means. The problem with commercial software is that the deadlines are tight, and if it runs it ships. Now more than ever - the customer probably has an extremely powerful machine just to run the OS and the package! Why optimize code to run well? Computers are fast enough these days that anyone can hardly tell (interactive programs at least). Back in the day, poor software ran way more slowly and tended to be obviously kludgy! It's difficult to feel the difference these days, where the beautiful solution takes 1 ms and the kludgy one takes 35 ms!
You also seem not to exactly grasp how Unix dynamic paging works. A good book telling all about in great detail is 'The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System' by McCusick et al.
The real problem is that tripwire isn't really designed for OS X. It's a Unix package, and expects an ordinary Unix system, which OS X isn't. This problem also exists with many Carbon applications. They're really OS 9 (or previous) applications rigged up to just barely work under X. Just because it runs doesn't make it right.
The 1D (now retired) lacks two things that the 10D has. A CMOS sensor (which is critical for very long exposures of 30+ seconds) and much resolution. The 1D Mk. II clearly blows away the 10D. Anyway, I am a 10D owner as well, and find the 1D a bit lacking for my kind of work (macro, landscape, candid / street and astro). If you're shooting at the track, it sure would be nice, but even in such an environment I do quite well with the 10D.
I had the same US West brand caller ID box (yours might not have been US West brand, as the same box was branded many different ways). I didn't happen to have my soldering iron handy, so I just JB Welded a wire to short out the connection, and then scraped the previous solder point off with a razor. It still works.
Despite the fact that the 10D and the 300D aren't really marketed as pro cameras, many photographers are using them in jobs, in exchange for which they receive money. So, I guess a 'pro' camera is defined by the people who are behind the finder, and not the cost or build quality.
Digital SLRs and slide film have about the same exposure latitude. It's not really a 'problem' but rather one must come to a decision as to what parts of the image to expose for.
Since most serious color photographers use slide film, I don't think this is really a big problem at all. Sure, it'd be nice to have a wider latitude, but it isn't a problem, more a parameter to work within.
Soviet reactor designs from the '60s and '70s could be quite impressive indeed. For a good look into some of their more advanced designs, see http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/row/rus/70 5.htm and enjoy the reading. The Alfa class subs used a sealed reactor compartment (fully automated) that used a liquid metal coolant (bismuth + others IIRC)! It was the fastest and deepest diving sub of its era, and it could outrun the majority of torpedos. When it was introduced it could outrun all torpedos.
Chernobyl was an older design, and it wasn't mechanical failure but operator failure which initiated the meltdown. Control rods were withdrawn and, when reinserted to try to control the out-of-control reaction initiated by that action melted (or were vaporized) by the molten sulphur coolant.
I wouldn't be so eager to use coal, either. It pollutes quite terribly. Even with more modern exhaust procedures - 'scrubbers' - you end up with much sludge that must be disposed of. Also, the effects of large-scale coal mining is terrible for the immediate and surrounding environments. I don't know what Australian coal companies do with the strip or pit mines after they're exhausted, but here in the USA they generally flood 'em or leave 'em.
You do have a lot of hot, desert territory in Aussie that would be perfect for wind or solar. There's an initial cost, of course, but after that the power is free!
Well, resident evil has been the exact same game, more or less, for its entire existence as a 'series'.
Shoot zombies. Find curious star-shaped indentation on a pedestal at police station. Proceed to other area. Shoot more zombies. Find door which needs to be opened from first area. Go back to first area. Shoot more zombies. Open door remotely. Return to collect star-shaped gem. Shoot more zombies. Return to first area. Place star-shaped gem into slot on pedestal. Enter door that just revealed itself. Find 'red' and 'green' herbs. Take 'red' and 'green' herb, combine on small sheet of paper (check it out in the games) and roll into doobie. Use doobie to recover health and / or recover from toxin.
Sure, a jet engine could get you into space! Even a cannon could. If you have facilities within the craft to absorb much of the force of acceleration, the human occupants could even survive! Of course the resulting craft would be quite large.
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Bullshit. A stock Media Center PC, running a freshly installed Windows Media Center Edition XP, which only runs on fully 'supported' hardware, goes down more often than most hookers in Times Square. Since MSWMCEXP ONLY runs on FULLY supported hardware, how do you explain this?
XP is better than 95/98/Millennium, but is less reliable than 2000. It still doesn't touch any free / open source Unix (including OS X) for reliability. Once you start serving files or doing anything even remotely heavy-duty (like encoding video) the system begins to break down.
So, while you can insist that XP never BSODs unless it's due to user error, people will know you are a liar and full of shit!
It's like the one bolt that holds together an entire vehicle in Looney Tunes cartoons. The reason the registry exists is so that one thing can get screwed up and take a whole running system with it.
I think it serves a more nefarious purpose, though. Most home users and many businesses buy a computer with Windows pre-installed. To these folks, the OS and the computer might as well be the same thing. Every 2-3 years the registry gets so full of shit that, knowing not that a fresh install would fix their problems, the option that most folks exercise is to throw it away and get a new machine.
Think of all the extra licensing revenue MS gets from these practices! I wouldn't doubt that there are home users with only one computer but 3 or 5 Windows licenses from boxen they have thrown away.
You say that UNIX and VMS were what "really counted", I say horse pockey because most users never had access (and still don't).
Sure! There are these new-fangled 'Free' OSes such as Linux, BSD, and others around now available to anyone with a computer!
I got my first taste of Linux in 1993. It was free then, and it's still free now.
I'm waiting for the brushed bismuth look in Ocelot.
Actually, when I just tried it the query "Microsoft sucks" turned up several pages of hits.
It ain't no panopticon though.
If they included a 'Widget' on the 'Dashboard' to 'massage' my 'nuts' on this hot summer day.
That's because XP has a control panel option called 'Show Error Messages' that comes un-checked by default. Check the box, and you'll see the blue screens again.
No, the goal of this book was to create a twisted version of history that completely distorted the facts. The author and his nefarious project have been outed for what they are - prostitutes. Bought and paid by SCO, Microsoft, and probably Sun, they play the game.
They're losing.
Or a hog like Photoshop CS. It'll slow the system to a crawl sometimes for no good reason.
You can do this already. Anticipate when you'll want to run a certain program, and have it stream its component files (and libraries that it'll be using) to /dev/null. The problem is that to do such a thing automatically would kill other kinds of disk performance. Because the computer doesn't really know what you'll be doing at any given time, the best it could do is always have the programs you use most often read in.
The folks who designed and implemented Unix demand-paged virtual memory knew what they were doing. Everything is a tradeoff.
The real funny thing - why spend engineering on making booting faster? Because XP STILL crashes all the time!
This is technology that recovers perhaps billions of dollars in wasted IT labor - reboot the box faster so the worker can resume his toil! Windows and components are so cobbled together that almost every patch requires a reboot, and some reboot without advance notification! I would assert that no properly maintained modern computing platform requires as much rebooting, both scheduled and unscheduled, as Windows.
Users of more adult computers of course belly laughed when they heard the boasts of a much faster boot cycle - they probably only reboot once in a great while, for particular reasons, and seldom unexpectedly.
For me, with an personally preened and protected XP installation (Media Center Edition) I manage to get about three days to a week or so, depending on usage. If I am hammering on it for the samba shares (it has massive storage) from the Mac upstairs, it lasts three or four days at most. Less if you want to watch TV with it!
Explorer has so many ways of dying, some of which are logged and generate an error dialog, some of which are logged but produce no dialog, and some of which produce no dialog or log. I think that MS makes only a weak attempt at letting its software die gracefully and produce useful error messages.
Hell, when I have to reboot XP (often enough) I often manage to launch Tribes2 and have it tell me that it can't find an update server. Then, I have to wait 10 seconds or so, and try again. Magically, it works.
To make XP look faster than it is, they load up the GUI as soon as frickin possible, even before what in many environments may be more crucial services. Then they claim it 'boots faster'! Well, when is a computer booted - when you can launch a program, or when the system is completely ready for user interaction?
5 megabytes used to be huge. Now it's nothing.
I don't think the problem is memory use. Memory's cheap. Put crap into memory, by all means. The problem with commercial software is that the deadlines are tight, and if it runs it ships. Now more than ever - the customer probably has an extremely powerful machine just to run the OS and the package! Why optimize code to run well? Computers are fast enough these days that anyone can hardly tell (interactive programs at least). Back in the day, poor software ran way more slowly and tended to be obviously kludgy! It's difficult to feel the difference these days, where the beautiful solution takes 1 ms and the kludgy one takes 35 ms!
You also seem not to exactly grasp how Unix dynamic paging works. A good book telling all about in great detail is 'The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System' by McCusick et al.
The real problem is that tripwire isn't really designed for OS X. It's a Unix package, and expects an ordinary Unix system, which OS X isn't. This problem also exists with many Carbon applications. They're really OS 9 (or previous) applications rigged up to just barely work under X. Just because it runs doesn't make it right.
The 1D (now retired) lacks two things that the 10D has. A CMOS sensor (which is critical for very long exposures of 30+ seconds) and much resolution. The 1D Mk. II clearly blows away the 10D. Anyway, I am a 10D owner as well, and find the 1D a bit lacking for my kind of work (macro, landscape, candid / street and astro). If you're shooting at the track, it sure would be nice, but even in such an environment I do quite well with the 10D.
I had the same US West brand caller ID box (yours might not have been US West brand, as the same box was branded many different ways). I didn't happen to have my soldering iron handy, so I just JB Welded a wire to short out the connection, and then scraped the previous solder point off with a razor. It still works.
Despite the fact that the 10D and the 300D aren't really marketed as pro cameras, many photographers are using them in jobs, in exchange for which they receive money. So, I guess a 'pro' camera is defined by the people who are behind the finder, and not the cost or build quality.
Digital SLRs and slide film have about the same exposure latitude. It's not really a 'problem' but rather one must come to a decision as to what parts of the image to expose for.
Since most serious color photographers use slide film, I don't think this is really a big problem at all. Sure, it'd be nice to have a wider latitude, but it isn't a problem, more a parameter to work within.
Soviet reactor designs from the '60s and '70s could be quite impressive indeed. For a good look into some of their more advanced designs, see http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/row/rus/70 5.htm and enjoy the reading. The Alfa class subs used a sealed reactor compartment (fully automated) that used a liquid metal coolant (bismuth + others IIRC)! It was the fastest and deepest diving sub of its era, and it could outrun the majority of torpedos. When it was introduced it could outrun all torpedos.
Chernobyl was an older design, and it wasn't mechanical failure but operator failure which initiated the meltdown. Control rods were withdrawn and, when reinserted to try to control the out-of-control reaction initiated by that action melted (or were vaporized) by the molten sulphur coolant.
I wouldn't be so eager to use coal, either. It pollutes quite terribly. Even with more modern exhaust procedures - 'scrubbers' - you end up with much sludge that must be disposed of. Also, the effects of large-scale coal mining is terrible for the immediate and surrounding environments. I don't know what Australian coal companies do with the strip or pit mines after they're exhausted, but here in the USA they generally flood 'em or leave 'em.
You do have a lot of hot, desert territory in Aussie that would be perfect for wind or solar. There's an initial cost, of course, but after that the power is free!
Apple isn't going to port to x86. Wake the fuck up and smell the coffee.
Oh SO FUNNY!
1992 called. They want their joke back.
No, you can play it. You just can't experience the 'full compliment of Doom 3's stunning visual effects.'
Well, resident evil has been the exact same game, more or less, for its entire existence as a 'series'.
Shoot zombies. Find curious star-shaped indentation on a pedestal at police station. Proceed to other area. Shoot more zombies. Find door which needs to be opened from first area. Go back to first area. Shoot more zombies. Open door remotely. Return to collect star-shaped gem. Shoot more zombies. Return to first area. Place star-shaped gem into slot on pedestal. Enter door that just revealed itself. Find 'red' and 'green' herbs. Take 'red' and 'green' herb, combine on small sheet of paper (check it out in the games) and roll into doobie. Use doobie to recover health and / or recover from toxin.
Repeat.
Sure, a jet engine could get you into space! Even a cannon could. If you have facilities within the craft to absorb much of the force of acceleration, the human occupants could even survive! Of course the resulting craft would be quite large.