ATI never really had an answer for the 7950 sli-on-a-card setup, they're still to release a card that is conclusively faster all around. Prior to that, ATI's x19xx's were on par with the 79xx's, but in smaller supply and generally priced higher. If money was no object we'd all be buying renderfarms.
It's quite possible the R600 gear will be quicker than the 88xx's, but as usual it will be a paper launch from AMD, and since I'm in Australia, the channel is gutted and we won't get anything until much later in the piece. And it will be proportionately more expensive than the US prices anyway. Also, you have to take into account that AMD are way late in delivering a product this cycle, giving Nvidia, what, three months of lead time to fine tune their chip to again outperform the AMD chip when it comes out? Three months is an eternity...
It does DirectX 10. It does DirectX 10 much better than any other card that does DirectX 10. The G80 is the only chipset you can buy that does DirectX 10 at this point in time. So if you want to do DirectX 10, you must buy this card. It has no competition.
AMD won't have anything to compete until next year, and if recent (last 12 months) are any indication, it will be a "me too" offering from AMD rather than the glory days of the old ATI Radeon 9xxx series.
If I wasn't a gamer, I'd be running Linux everywhere, that's for sure. It does everything but the game. Sure the UI isn't as slick feeling, it looks okay, though. Integration isn't very tight, but the functionality is there. A few driver problems but I would probably do the work and overcome them.
I'd say there's a choice, but the best choice is often Windows anyway.
Having said that, Microsoft have never tried to pull the kind of crap Sony did with that rootkit. WGA is less intrusive than outright backdooring and spying on your userbase. And Sony's official line on that right up until they got their arses kicked was "Users don't know what a rootkit is, so why should they care?"
Microsoft has never done anything that evil or stupid. Worst thing MS ever did in my opinion was knifing Netscape. But companies do that kind of thing all the time anyway. From what I can tell, half the people on/. are kind of happy that MS is doing it to Symantec's AV section.
Yeah they have made it just tolerable enough that buying a license for Vista doesn't seem like a waste of money, because once you're licensed, you effectively own it for life now. Which is kind of how it's supposed to be, and what people really want.
I don't want to buy a license for my computer. I want to buy a license for me!
But the downside is that this looks like it will be effective enough to make people buy and install Vista, which in turn justifies WGA and other horrible customer-spying activities.
At the end of the day though, Sony is still a much more evil company. Never forget the rootkits!
First off, I'm Australian so I can only view the political crisis in the former USA from an external viewpoint.
When will the USA cease calling itself a democracy? Is it truly the will of the people and their "democratically elected" power base to invade sovereign nations and depose their leaders? Will GWB renounce the title of President for something more appropriate like Czar or King or Father? What's the new name for this new north american empire?
Seriously, from outside, the transition from democracy to authoritarian autocracy looks like a kind of funny joke, although funny in the same way you might laugh at a train wreck victim to try and break the gutwrenching horror you're feeling.
Who cares that they do see it as a joke? IMO that would be almost as effective anyway. No such thing as bad publicity. In a lot of ways, if a kid picks it up and plays it as a joke and derides it, at the same time he's subconsciously picking up the awareness that there's dodgey people on the 'net.
People make jokes about serious and bad things, murder, injury, kidney-bathtub-ice abductions. But at the same time there's a serious undertone that you pick up on. How many jokes were made about, say, being mugged in NYC? Even if you never had a serious warning about crime in NYC, if you heard all the jokes you're more likely to watch your personal safety.
Yes, I know widgets come from Konfabulator, but Apple made them famous
And mousey-gui-windows are from Apple, but Microsoft made it famous... ahh, you'll never hear a mac fanboy say that!
It's nice to see that Apple is having a go at security, although it's still largely academic because Apple marketshare is still too low to make them a worthwhile target. In fact, very academic, which is exactly what TFA is all about, an academic dissecting bits of OS/X. Still it's a good sign because the more they poke, the more holes inevitably come out. And no, coders who work for Apple are not somehow immune to the average statistical failure rates that all other coders are subject to. The vulnerabilities are there. There's just little interest in finding them at this stage for anyone outside of Apple. Market share is creeping upwards thanks to the iPod giving Apple a budget to leverage their PC business out of the swamp, so if we're lucky we'll see Apple zombies soon, too.
It's reasonably amusing that someone should misname the company McAffee as McCafe, which produces cheap and bland products for the masses that do awful things to your system, because at the same time it is quite true that McAffee also produces cheap and bland products that do awful things to your system.
I think that perhaps you were down in a coal mine at the time I posted the message, thus enabling the joke to soar completely over your head. How's the canary doing?
In Australia, McCafe is a cafe extension of McDonalds restaurants selling cheap and bland coffee, donuts and cakes of average quality. Quite amusing to liken McAffee to McCafe.
This is all well and good for Microsoft to say "No access to 64 bit Kernel!".
But two questions come to mind:
1) If other A/V companies can do A/V software without kernel access, why do McAffee (or as some other slashdotter erroneously called it, McCafe) and Symantec need kernel access? Why are they so special? 2) Does Windows Defender/OneCare have kernel access, Microsoft?
I would expect that the clear best answers in a perfect world that we probably won't get are:
1) They don't, they're bastard parasites with no real business model who'll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes 2) It doesn't, because Microsoft works on a level playing field.
This left in the dust comment troubles me. It implies that Leopard will be in a position to compete with Windows.
Is Leopard going to run on standard x86 hardware from Dell, HP, or a whitebox built from components from any one of the hundreds of retail and online PC parts stores out there?
Perhaps it's best to not compares apples and oranges then. Vista is still going to hold a lot of new sales and marketshare because of entrenchment and compatibility. If OS/X wasn't just a mechanism to sell overpriced PC hardware, and became a competitive choice OS, it probably would stand a decent chance against Vista, given just how much MS is going to charge upgraders.
Unless, by "left in the dust by Leopard", you mean "will continue to hold a goodly 85% of the desktop market over Leopard and other OS's".
Games are still single threaded. Even after you give away a whole CPU to coping with the sheer workload that all the extra Vista fluff adds (indexing/precaching/readyboost/generate thumbnails/run WGA/phone Bill with regular updates on all the pr0n you're surfing lately) and one CPU to run the game because that's all you can use for it, the other two cores are going to be idle anyway.
Practically a waste of money for most users at this stage. Maybe if the games industry magically learns to make multithreaded games overnight... it'll never happen.
Often a true word is spoken in jest, there seems no choice in the windows world.
Having never seriously contemplated which filesystem I want to use, and living mostly in a Windows world where your choice between FAT32 and NTFS is simple, and WinFS is not to be seen, I beg to ask some questions.
How do these file systems compare to NTFS? If NTFS was open source, would people use that instead of xfs/etc? Are there windows drivers for these filesystems so we can mount them in Windows? Should these be used instead of NTFS? What's the lowdown?
I appreciate what Apple is doing, they're getting their user profile management stuff in order (I am actually a little surprised this wasn't the case previously, which is why I made my original point, that Microsoft had already supplied user profile management tools to admins to help them move user data around).
MacOS really does integrate the GUI and the OS quite tightly, like modern Windows does, so they are clearly facing the same problems where information is stored in more than one single location, and they are making that information more portable.
Of course someone already made the point that Knoppix is far superior to any of these OS's because it allows you to dump the info to a USB thingy and it looks for that info whenever you boot it wherever you boot it. That's close to the holy grail of user portability. Internet based is of course ideal, assuming you have internet everywhere and it's fast and reliable.
Wouldn't it be handy to have all your stuff everywhere you go? Wouldn't it be even more handy if you didn't have to carry it with you, it was just "there" waiting for you wherever you switch on? So this is Apple's approach.
Yeah, the tools are needed because of a few failed evolutions of Windows. I'm not saying it's better but I am saying it's been there for a long time, and it seems to be the same thing Apple is trying to push now, they've invented portable user profiles, perhaps this is nothing new, certainly it's not new to a network OS designed from scratch around multiple users (UNIX and it's many children).
What we originally had with Windows was the first major single user-oriented GUI OS, so anywhere you should put your data would be fine because you're using a PC, and it's not networked it's a black box (once upon a time every PC was a black box), and so all the data could only really belong to one person, the user. Win3.11, Win95, Win98, they were all single user really, you had to change settings to make it present a logon prompt at all. So that's where we came from.
Now Microsoft tried to unify all the settings for each application so they were in one place, and governed by a single security model. This is the beast known as the Registry. The registry also had provision for individual user hives (NTUSER.DAT anyone?) which becomes HKeyCurrentUser when it loads into the registry when you log on. At the same time Microsoft had to turn Windows into a multi-user OS where previously it wasn't, so quite a big change for the majority of all business desktops which run the windows OS (by this time MS was truly a monopoly beast). Unfortunately it was a real mess under NT4.0 and it didn't look good until 2000/XP where they had the Documents and Settings part containing all the profile and My Documents and some of the application data too (why does an application need to components in a single users profile? Windows developers make windows bad, not always Microsoft, perhaps it is a hangover from the 3.11 days where the devs think only one person uses a system).
So you have your registry and you have your profile and My Documents and App data and they're all in different places. And more importantly, these things are in use while you're logged on because the registry stuff is mounted. So if you want to back all this stuff up you need a tool to do it, not quite as simple as copying a folder (well you can do that if you don't mind mucking around, which is basically what you have to do under UNIX because there's no tool for it that I know of).
So really, Microsoft tried to answer the question of the easy-to-find location with the registry, and that in turn made the whole OS more complex and required the use of tools to extract that information. It would have been quite easy to stick with an arbitrary number of arbitrarily located config files, that was the case in Win3.11, and it certainly was a dogs breakfast of an OS, because application developers are *never* consistent. Microsoft continually tries to muscle consistency into the apps that sit on their OS, which causes a lot of resentment, but you can either have chaos or order and people resent both.
How could you write a user migration tool that knows that a particular config file sits in a particular subdirectory a particular number of levels from the root if a particular application with a particular version is installed? In Windows you are most of the time assured it's in the registry. Where is it in Unix?
Hmm, I think that may be a misunderstanding of the law - generally (certainly with the Canadian version of the levy), the levy on media is simply to compensate the copyright owners for the fair-use copying of a personal non-distributed backup of the CD/DVD you purchased in case something happens to that disk.
That doesn't really cover downloading a movie or MP3 that you didn't pay the copyright holder for.
Again, with regards to downloading etc. It is legal for you to watch your movie on Linux. It's just not legal for you to use DeCSS to unscramble the Vobs (a technicality I know because there's no licensed player for Linux so the only way you could play the movie is to use DeCSS or similar). But assuming the copyright holder released a non-DRM'd version of the movie without CSS it would be quite legal to watch that. Likewise yes it is legal for you to watch any movie you download. But you can't legally download the movie even if you own a DVD of it, because you don't have the copyright holder's permission to do such, nor do you have the copyright holder's permission to copy the disk as many times as you want.
The killer app for this kind of mobility is obviously storing either your ~user/ or Windows profile or MacOS whatever on the internets and synching it when you're online.
Ideally, internet access should be fast and everywhere. When you have internet access fast and everywhere, it is obvious to then store your stuff on it.
While this is very convenient for us it is also very convenient for the US govt to carefully spy on everyone, so I am surprised this has not been made mandatory by the US world government DRM constitution, whose words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONRY.
Presumably by "User Account" we really mean all the stuff associated with a user preferences and profile and data.
Windows has always included tools to migrate user data from one system to another, and of course Windows Server has allowed centralised user data storage since the NT4.0 days through roaming profiles.
Windows Vista contains several new tools to automate migration, backup, import and export of user data, and even more beneficial, Vista is designed from the start to combine the profile data, user files and other miscellaneous profile stuff into one folder, stored under "Users". No more "Documents and Settings", which was a little unwieldy to remember.
So Apple is finally playing catch-up to MS? Or are they pushing this out the door before October 25 so they can say MS ripped them off again?
Bollocks. Acrobat is designed to sit there and ignore a shutdown request when it's given one. That's bad design. Windows tries to handle it by flagging the app and prompting the user, which is more than enough OS handling if you ask me.
Don't even think about telling me the OS should abnormally terminate every app that's running when a shutdown command is given, either. That's sheer stupidity. I've had enough 4-AM disaster recoveries from data corruption caused by hardware failing to even think about allowing the OS itself to cause the same problem deliberately.
Or are you the kind of person who just powers off the computer at the socket when your day is done? I don't even know what happens to Linux when you don't close it off cleanly, it sure goes through a lot of activity during a shutdown operation. Windows is pretty much the same.
Please, away put your crack pipe, we mean you no harm.
Vista adoption rates will be almost precisely equal to 90% of the number of new PCs sold every year. How many PCs is that? I don't have the figures, but by golly I bet it's a lot. At a bare minimum, I wouldn't be surprised if some people bought it seperate from a PC.
If I sold software and my software sold at even half that rate I would be thrilled.
The attrition rate of existing home PCs is probably equal to the rate at which new versions of the Windows OS are adopted. Certainly that is a good analog to the rate at which Windows XP propagated. The business market is slower as business deliberate much longer on new desktop OS revs, as building and maintaining a SOE is not cheap. Smaller businesses and businesses with poor IT management (and therefore heterogenous environments including Mac and Linux on the desktops) will actually involve Vista earlier as they often won't replace the bundled OS on a desktop when it is delivered. Larger corps, even if they do get vista OEM licenses, will likely replace those with existing XP desktop SOE.
Either way, if you believe you don't need even a contemporary version of Windows, clearly you are not representative of the general computer using public and the bizarre, windows-only proprietary Brother MFD they bought from WalMart.
I can type way faster than anyone I know can handwrite. Typing is simply a better interface. No keyboard is a step backwards. Ergo, tablets will only pose even a hint of competition to a desktop/laptop if you can hook them up to a keyboard (thus effectively untabletising it).
Tablets are niche because of their limited usability compared with desktop/laptop configurations. They may replace palmtops in restaurants, but even UMPC's have a higher chance of succeeding in this space than a tablet simply because of the richer physical UI.
Furthermore, the only real advantage that a tablet has over a regular UMPC or laptop is the touchscreen, and laptops are beginning to include touchscreens as a matter of course... further invalidating any real benefit the tablet brings over UMPC or laptop.
In terms of FPS, Toms Hardware many years ago after the release of WinXP demonstrated that generally you can get 1-2fps better in XP than 2000.
Now, you might say that is nothing, but then, there really are people out there who put literally thousands of dollars worth of watercooling heatpipes/silver gunk and all night sessions tweaking voltages for those 1-2 extra frames. Madness perhaps, but also, to those at least, notable.
Also, XP has some nicer, slicker management interfaces, it's generally more pleasant to administer simply because it's got those 20 months of minor evolutions and improvements behind it.
Likewise with Server 2003, it is remarkably nicer to administer than the old 2000 Server, again purely because of those little improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
ATI never really had an answer for the 7950 sli-on-a-card setup, they're still to release a card that is conclusively faster all around. Prior to that, ATI's x19xx's were on par with the 79xx's, but in smaller supply and generally priced higher. If money was no object we'd all be buying renderfarms.
It's quite possible the R600 gear will be quicker than the 88xx's, but as usual it will be a paper launch from AMD, and since I'm in Australia, the channel is gutted and we won't get anything until much later in the piece. And it will be proportionately more expensive than the US prices anyway. Also, you have to take into account that AMD are way late in delivering a product this cycle, giving Nvidia, what, three months of lead time to fine tune their chip to again outperform the AMD chip when it comes out? Three months is an eternity...
A rather redundant question, but here goes:
It does DirectX 10. It does DirectX 10 much better than any other card that does DirectX 10. The G80 is the only
chipset you can buy that does DirectX 10 at this point in time. So if you want to do DirectX 10, you must buy this card. It has no competition.
AMD won't have anything to compete until next year, and if recent (last 12 months) are any indication, it will be a "me too" offering from AMD rather than the glory days of the old ATI Radeon 9xxx series.
If I wasn't a gamer, I'd be running Linux everywhere, that's for sure. It does everything but the game. Sure the UI isn't as slick feeling, it looks okay, though. Integration isn't very tight, but the functionality is there. A few driver problems but I would probably do the work and overcome them.
/. are kind of happy that MS is doing it to Symantec's AV section.
I'd say there's a choice, but the best choice is often Windows anyway.
Having said that, Microsoft have never tried to pull the kind of crap Sony did with that rootkit. WGA is less intrusive than outright backdooring and spying on your userbase. And Sony's official line on that right up until they got their arses kicked was "Users don't know what a rootkit is, so why should they care?"
Microsoft has never done anything that evil or stupid. Worst thing MS ever did in my opinion was knifing Netscape. But companies do that kind of thing all the time anyway. From what I can tell, half the people on
Yeah they have made it just tolerable enough that buying a license for Vista doesn't seem like a waste of money, because once you're licensed, you effectively own it for life now. Which is kind of how it's supposed to be, and what people really want.
I don't want to buy a license for my computer.
I want to buy a license for me!
But the downside is that this looks like it will be effective enough to make people buy and install Vista, which in turn justifies WGA and other horrible customer-spying activities.
At the end of the day though, Sony is still a much more evil company. Never forget the rootkits!
Time to discover root cause is greater than 4 hours.
Man... you must be *really* bad at diagnosis.
Did it ever occur to you that whatever is broken, especially if it's hardware, will almost certainly prevent you from rebuilding from scratch anyway?
And if it's software, your user is just going to reinstall it and cause the problem to occur again?
First off, I'm Australian so I can only view the political crisis in the former USA from an external viewpoint.
When will the USA cease calling itself a democracy? Is it truly the will of the people and their "democratically elected" power base to invade sovereign nations and depose their leaders? Will GWB renounce the title of President for something more appropriate like Czar or King or Father? What's the new name for this new north american empire?
Seriously, from outside, the transition from democracy to authoritarian autocracy looks like a kind of funny joke, although funny in the same way you might laugh at a train wreck victim to try and break the gutwrenching horror you're feeling.
Who cares that they do see it as a joke? IMO that would be almost as effective anyway. No such thing as bad publicity. In a lot of ways, if a kid picks it up and plays it as a joke and derides it, at the same time he's subconsciously picking up the awareness that there's dodgey people on the 'net.
People make jokes about serious and bad things, murder, injury, kidney-bathtub-ice abductions. But at the same time there's a serious undertone that you pick up on. How many jokes were made about, say, being mugged in NYC? Even if you never had a serious warning about crime in NYC, if you heard all the jokes you're more likely to watch your personal safety.
Yes, I know widgets come from Konfabulator, but Apple made them famous
And mousey-gui-windows are from Apple, but Microsoft made it famous... ahh, you'll never hear a mac fanboy say that!
It's nice to see that Apple is having a go at security, although it's still largely academic because Apple marketshare is still too low to make them a worthwhile target. In fact, very academic, which is exactly what TFA is all about, an academic dissecting bits of OS/X. Still it's a good sign because the more they poke, the more holes inevitably come out. And no, coders who work for Apple are not somehow immune to the average statistical failure rates that all other coders are subject to. The vulnerabilities are there. There's just little interest in finding them at this stage for anyone outside of Apple. Market share is creeping upwards thanks to the iPod giving Apple a budget to leverage their PC business out of the swamp, so if we're lucky we'll see Apple zombies soon, too.
will we see false positives, where police cars screech to a halt beside hugging couples?"
Unref: "false positive"
Ref newspeak: facecrime, thoughtcrime, bodycrime. Attend MiniLuv.
It's reasonably amusing that someone should misname the company McAffee as McCafe, which produces cheap and bland products for the masses that do awful things to your system, because at the same time it is quite true that McAffee also produces cheap and bland products that do awful things to your system.
I think that perhaps you were down in a coal mine at the time I posted the message, thus enabling the joke to soar completely over your head. How's the canary doing?
In Australia, McCafe is a cafe extension of McDonalds restaurants selling cheap and bland coffee, donuts and cakes of average quality. Quite amusing to liken McAffee to McCafe.
This is all well and good for Microsoft to say "No access to 64 bit Kernel!".
But two questions come to mind:
1) If other A/V companies can do A/V software without kernel access, why do McAffee (or as some other slashdotter erroneously called it, McCafe) and Symantec need kernel access? Why are they so special?
2) Does Windows Defender/OneCare have kernel access, Microsoft?
I would expect that the clear best answers in a perfect world that we probably won't get are:
1) They don't, they're bastard parasites with no real business model who'll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes
2) It doesn't, because Microsoft works on a level playing field.
This left in the dust comment troubles me. It implies that Leopard will be in a position to compete with Windows.
Is Leopard going to run on standard x86 hardware from Dell, HP, or a whitebox built from components from any one of the hundreds of retail and online PC parts stores out there?
Perhaps it's best to not compares apples and oranges then. Vista is still going to hold a lot of new sales and marketshare because of entrenchment and compatibility. If OS/X wasn't just a mechanism to sell overpriced PC hardware, and became a competitive choice OS, it probably would stand a decent chance against Vista, given just how much MS is going to charge upgraders.
Unless, by "left in the dust by Leopard", you mean "will continue to hold a goodly 85% of the desktop market over Leopard and other OS's".
Games are still single threaded. Even after you give away a whole CPU to coping with the sheer workload that all the extra Vista fluff adds (indexing/precaching/readyboost/generate thumbnails/run WGA/phone Bill with regular updates on all the pr0n you're surfing lately) and one CPU to run the game because that's all you can use for it, the other two cores are going to be idle anyway.
Practically a waste of money for most users at this stage. Maybe if the games industry magically learns to make multithreaded games overnight... it'll never happen.
Nothing to see here!
Often a true word is spoken in jest, there seems no choice in the windows world.
Having never seriously contemplated which filesystem I want to use, and living mostly in a Windows world where your choice between FAT32 and NTFS is simple, and WinFS is not to be seen, I beg to ask some questions.
How do these file systems compare to NTFS? If NTFS was open source, would people use that instead of xfs/etc?
Are there windows drivers for these filesystems so we can mount them in Windows? Should these be used instead of NTFS? What's the lowdown?
I appreciate what Apple is doing, they're getting their user profile management stuff in order (I am actually a little surprised this wasn't the case previously, which is why I made my original point, that Microsoft had already supplied user profile management tools to admins to help them move user data around).
MacOS really does integrate the GUI and the OS quite tightly, like modern Windows does, so they are clearly facing the same problems where information is stored in more than one single location, and they are making that information more portable.
Of course someone already made the point that Knoppix is far superior to any of these OS's because it allows you to dump the info to a USB thingy and it looks for that info whenever you boot it wherever you boot it. That's close to the holy grail of user portability. Internet based is of course ideal, assuming you have internet everywhere and it's fast and reliable.
Wouldn't it be handy to have all your stuff everywhere you go? Wouldn't it be even more handy if you didn't have to carry it with you, it was just "there" waiting for you wherever you switch on? So this is Apple's approach.
Yeah, the tools are needed because of a few failed evolutions of Windows. I'm not saying it's better but I am saying it's been there for a long time, and it seems to be the same thing Apple is trying to push now, they've invented portable user profiles, perhaps this is nothing new, certainly it's not new to a network OS designed from scratch around multiple users (UNIX and it's many children).
What we originally had with Windows was the first major single user-oriented GUI OS, so anywhere you should put your data would be fine because you're using a PC, and it's not networked it's a black box (once upon a time every PC was a black box), and so all the data could only really belong to one person, the user. Win3.11, Win95, Win98, they were all single user really, you had to change settings to make it present a logon prompt at all. So that's where we came from.
Now Microsoft tried to unify all the settings for each application so they were in one place, and governed by a single security model. This is the beast known as the Registry. The registry also had provision for individual user hives (NTUSER.DAT anyone?) which becomes HKeyCurrentUser when it loads into the registry when you log on. At the same time Microsoft had to turn Windows into a multi-user OS where previously it wasn't, so quite a big change for the majority of all business desktops which run the windows OS (by this time MS was truly a monopoly beast). Unfortunately it was a real mess under NT4.0 and it didn't look good until 2000/XP where they had the Documents and Settings part containing all the profile and My Documents and some of the application data too (why does an application need to components in a single users profile? Windows developers make windows bad, not always Microsoft, perhaps it is a hangover from the 3.11 days where the devs think only one person uses a system).
So you have your registry and you have your profile and My Documents and App data and they're all in different places. And more importantly, these things are in use while you're logged on because the registry stuff is mounted. So if you want to back all this stuff up you need a tool to do it, not quite as simple as copying a folder (well you can do that if you don't mind mucking around, which is basically what you have to do under UNIX because there's no tool for it that I know of).
So really, Microsoft tried to answer the question of the easy-to-find location with the registry, and that in turn made the whole OS more complex and required the use of tools to extract that information. It would have been quite easy to stick with an arbitrary number of arbitrarily located config files, that was the case in Win3.11, and it certainly was a dogs breakfast of an OS, because application developers are *never* consistent. Microsoft continually tries to muscle consistency into the apps that sit on their OS, which causes a lot of resentment, but you can either have chaos or order and people resent both.
How could you write a user migration tool that knows that a particular config file sits in a particular subdirectory a particular number of levels from the root if a particular application with a particular version is installed? In Windows you are most of the time assured it's in the registry. Where is it in Unix?
Hmm, I think that may be a misunderstanding of the law - generally (certainly with the Canadian version of the levy), the levy on media is simply to compensate the copyright owners for the fair-use copying of a personal non-distributed backup of the CD/DVD you purchased in case something happens to that disk.
That doesn't really cover downloading a movie or MP3 that you didn't pay the copyright holder for.
Again, with regards to downloading etc. It is legal for you to watch your movie on Linux. It's just not legal for you to use DeCSS to unscramble the Vobs (a technicality I know because there's no licensed player for Linux so the only way you could play the movie is to use DeCSS or similar). But assuming the copyright holder released a non-DRM'd version of the movie without CSS it would be quite legal to watch that. Likewise yes it is legal for you to watch any movie you download. But you can't legally download the movie even if you own a DVD of it, because you don't have the copyright holder's permission to do such, nor do you have the copyright holder's permission to copy the disk as many times as you want.
The killer app for this kind of mobility is obviously storing either your ~user/ or Windows profile or MacOS whatever on the internets and synching it when you're online.
Ideally, internet access should be fast and everywhere.
When you have internet access fast and everywhere, it is obvious to then store your stuff on it.
While this is very convenient for us it is also very convenient for the US govt to carefully spy on everyone, so I am surprised this has not been made mandatory by the US world government DRM constitution, whose words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONRY.
Presumably by "User Account" we really mean all the stuff associated with a user preferences and profile and data.
Windows has always included tools to migrate user data from one system to another, and of course Windows Server has allowed centralised user data storage since the NT4.0 days through roaming profiles.
Windows Vista contains several new tools to automate migration, backup, import and export of user data, and even more beneficial, Vista is designed from the start to combine the profile data, user files and other miscellaneous profile stuff into one folder, stored under "Users". No more "Documents and Settings", which was a little unwieldy to remember.
So Apple is finally playing catch-up to MS? Or are they pushing this out the door before October 25 so they can say MS ripped them off again?
Please. 2 cores, 4 cores, 8 cores, it will never take off until someone invents multithreaded porn.
Bollocks. Acrobat is designed to sit there and ignore a shutdown request when it's given one. That's bad design. Windows tries to handle it by flagging the app and prompting the user, which is more than enough OS handling if you ask me.
Don't even think about telling me the OS should abnormally terminate every app that's running when a shutdown command is given, either. That's sheer stupidity. I've had enough 4-AM disaster recoveries from data corruption caused by hardware failing to even think about allowing the OS itself to cause the same problem deliberately.
Or are you the kind of person who just powers off the computer at the socket when your day is done? I don't even know what happens to Linux when you don't close it off cleanly, it sure goes through a lot of activity during a shutdown operation. Windows is pretty much the same.
Microsoft is going to have trouble selling Vista
Please, away put your crack pipe, we mean you no harm.
Vista adoption rates will be almost precisely equal to 90% of the number of new PCs sold every year. How many PCs is that? I don't have the figures, but by golly I bet it's a lot. At a bare minimum, I wouldn't be surprised if some people bought it seperate from a PC.
If I sold software and my software sold at even half that rate I would be thrilled.
The attrition rate of existing home PCs is probably equal to the rate at which new versions of the Windows OS are adopted. Certainly that is a good analog to the rate at which Windows XP propagated. The business market is slower as business deliberate much longer on new desktop OS revs, as building and maintaining a SOE is not cheap. Smaller businesses and businesses with poor IT management (and therefore heterogenous environments including Mac and Linux on the desktops) will actually involve Vista earlier as they often won't replace the bundled OS on a desktop when it is delivered. Larger corps, even if they do get vista OEM licenses, will likely replace those with existing XP desktop SOE.
Either way, if you believe you don't need even a contemporary version of Windows, clearly you are not representative of the general computer using public and the bizarre, windows-only proprietary Brother MFD they bought from WalMart.
I call troll.
I can type way faster than anyone I know can handwrite. Typing is simply a better interface. No keyboard is a step backwards. Ergo, tablets will only pose even a hint of competition to a desktop/laptop if you can hook them up to a keyboard (thus effectively untabletising it).
Tablets are niche because of their limited usability compared with desktop/laptop configurations. They may replace palmtops in restaurants, but even UMPC's have a higher chance of succeeding in this space than a tablet simply because of the richer physical UI.
Furthermore, the only real advantage that a tablet has over a regular UMPC or laptop is the touchscreen, and laptops are beginning to include touchscreens as a matter of course... further invalidating any real benefit the tablet brings over UMPC or laptop.
In terms of FPS, Toms Hardware many years ago after the release of WinXP demonstrated that generally you can get 1-2fps better in XP than 2000.
Now, you might say that is nothing, but then, there really are people out there who put literally thousands of dollars worth of watercooling heatpipes/silver gunk and all night sessions tweaking voltages for those 1-2 extra frames. Madness perhaps, but also, to those at least, notable.
Also, XP has some nicer, slicker management interfaces, it's generally more pleasant to administer simply because it's got those 20 months of minor evolutions and improvements behind it.
Likewise with Server 2003, it is remarkably nicer to administer than the old 2000 Server, again purely because of those little improvements.