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User: Shados

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  1. Re:Suggestion... on Asus Reveals the Eee Keyboard · · Score: 1

    I'd be guessing its to be used as a Sideshow device. Would be more useful if the OS on the computer supported it (it doesn't), but if you used the keyboard with a real computer when you're at your desk, you could use the the LCD screen to view extra info, which is pretty cool.

  2. Re:Do they need more servers !?! on Unemployment Claims Crash State Web Sites · · Score: 1

    I know the previous poster was exaggerating. And I was just making a point that very few servers can process that much. Of course, if your description of the environment is correct (Win2k and IIS5), Im amazed they are able to survive regular traffic.

    That said, even Google doesn't get hit by more than 5 figure hits in a second. (which, keeps in mind, would end up being a trillion hits per day, for estimation sake). Even a fraction of the 2 million submits talked about would take the toll if they happened all at once... If they happened in the spawn of a minute, it would be something else :)

  3. Re:Do they need more servers !?! on Unemployment Claims Crash State Web Sites · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Efficient or not, to process 2 million web submits in one shot, with a database involved, serving the images, bandwidth, database transactions and locks(big deal here!), etc etc etc will trash many data -centers-, nevermind one machine. There's also a lot more involved than the CPU, like memory, which tends to be what goes first =P

  4. Re:This just seems ripe for Identity theft. on A Peek At DHS's Files On You · · Score: 1

    The guy specifically states that his credit card info isn't there, fortunately. The IP doesn't have a timestamp, and I didn't look, but isn't there a time stamp on the ticket purchase? because it would be pretty much the same thing at that point...

  5. And in a REAL natural environment... on How the City Hurts Your Brain · · Score: 1

    In a real natural environment, you have to worrie about where your next meal is going to come from, and if you're going to get killed by a bear while trying to get it...So I doubt its much better.

    So really, they're saying the human mind cannot take the real world. It cannot deal with a natural habitat, it cannot deal with a city...it can only deal with something artificially in between, or in rural areas. Oh yeah, thats slick...

  6. Re:Planning with 'gut feeligns' on Why Game Developers Should Support OS X and Linux · · Score: 1

    for similar development costs

    Thats the issue right there. It is -not- similar development costs. First, you have the extra QA on the other platforms. QA is a very big expenses, and in some cases, its bigger than the development expenses in the first place. Second, the "proprietary" API you talk about is a joke to use, AND will give you an entry point to port the game to a console easily, on top of having frameworks with even lower bar of entry for smaller games, that will port almost 1:1 to console and some MP3 players. That -same- API also handles a bunch of things at the same time, such as controller input (formerly sound too... ::slaps:: microsoft for removing that one...)

    But again: even if it was exactly as easy, just the extra QA and support, as well as taking longer to release, may screw you over more than the extra 10-15% sales will help.

  7. Re:More FOSS developers on Microsoft Rumored To Lay Off Thousands Worldwide · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If i had a guess, I'd think a lot of the people getting laid off will not be the core software engineers... Part of tech support, part in their offshore offices (since they had stated it had caused them more than a little bit of problem in the past), and the people that everyone wants fired but never were (there's always a lot of those, in any team).

    With a sub 20% number of layoffs, very, very few people with the actual talent and drive to work on FOSS would be part of the job cut...unless they do things such as close an office and fire everyone in, regardless of importance.

  8. Re:That's great and all... on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    Preaching to the choir :) I love Vista, and like I said, I have no performance issues with it... If you have very low RAM, 40 meg (its 26 megs on my computer that I haven't rebooted since last month), and superfetch causes zero performance impact at higher end, but I think I had seen on again, very low amounts of RAM, it had issues managing its memory correctly...

    But then again, all that doesn't really matter since it can be turned off at worse, but still would be things that make it so benchmarking on a gaming computer wouldn't be relevent to someone with such crap hardware. A 1% performance drop on a gaming machine will not translate in a 1% performance drop on an EeePC =P So yeah, that other poster is still in his own bubble magic land... that much i think we can agree on :)

  9. Re:A special copy of Vista on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    It really does, even at lower amounts of RAM (and I don't mean "low" amounts of RAM...just, not 3-4 gigs). That was the first thing I noticed when I was forced to use XP after a while of being Vista only (switched job, older job was a vista-only company, new one was still XP). It was seriously unbearable, especially comparing to the time it takes to come back of Sleep in Vista...so I resorted to just logging out and leaving the computer on. XP shows you a desktop a little earlier, Vista can open a big app (let say Visual Studio) and have it usuable earlier by a decent margin, considering similar amounts of startup crap installed.

  10. Re:It could be on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 2, Funny

    UAC can be disabled (and in general, UAC only confirms things that would request confirmation in other OS, or at least priviledge elevation... yeah yeah i know, people say "but in Linux you only have to sudo ONCE!), you can do that in Windows too...just doesn't seem anyone realise you can elevate a Window or a terminal session instead of an operation...which is exactly how you'd do it elsewhere...)

    Changing the control panel back to basic is in plain view. You go to the control panel, and at the top left you see "Classic View". You click it. Poof. Ok, that was soooo hard (and is exactly how it was in XP. It didn't even change!)

    And Vista is pretty much as fast for games as XP, give or take very early driver issues. Fine, you lose 2 fps (if you have such a fast rig, you ARE using vsync, yes? So you don't lose anything anyhow?). But I'll still give you, it is slower... like 0.5%.

    For older machines, you're right. Not that XP was any different back then though.

    Lets face it: This time, the geeks wanted it to fail, regardless of how it was. If MS had released Windows 7 two years ago, the same misinformation barrage coupled with 2-3 legit issues would have happened... it just would have been like XP in the early 2000s...people would have had to be more creative in blasting it and would have had less actual anecdotal arguments.

  11. Re:It could be on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    Bingo. Heck, technically the Vista issue, aside a couple of genuine problems with the early drivers and a few things here and there needing tweak, it was the general "geek" population that didn't want Vista to be good (thus all the misinformation, even on more "broadcasted" channels). Many key people WANTED Vista to fail, and reporters caught on it with wildfire... now the other side is kindda pushing back, as well as Windows 7 being much better...this will be interesting to see.

  12. Re:win7 rocks on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    No, they're not. I have an MSDN Team subscription (basically, the one with the kitchen sink, though there's no difference in the operating system node between a Team, a Premium or a Pro, aside for which you can use for dev only and which you can use for a real install), and there's no Windows 7 beta there. The betas floating around are leaks, usually obtained "sailing the 7 seas".

    Even when Microsoft -does- release OS on MSDN, and even when it releases them to OEMs in RTM versions, the external contents (like links on microsoft's web site that are embedded in the OS) are still not necessarly complete and are still previews: the public isn't supposed to have their hands on it.

    So please quit it with the made up excuses, it just makes you lose the little credibility you had.

  13. Re:That's great and all... on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    Well, I just assumed if you're running a recent game (which can cause the system to swap at 1 gig of RAM), and they have low RAM, the extra that Vista uses for superfetch, Aero, etc (which they most likely did not disable) would push them into swap territory, and there, 70% framerate drop is not unheard of... Thats one reason, there's more similar example on lower end hardware. Probably what happens to them (then again, I have a friend who keeps insisting he's taking a 40% framerate drop in WoW on a 2 gig RAM, Geforce 8600 machine with all of Vista's bells and whistles at off, which I feel is mostly impossible, so who knows!

  14. Re:That depends on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    Some people have to use 4Gigs of RAM just to get Vista running fast enough to matter

    I seriously want to know what these people are doing that would make them bust so much RAM (that wouldn't bust another one). On my workstation, totally bugged down with a bunch of development database server (including "bloated" SQL Server), several visual studio instances, tons of instances of firefox and internet explorer doing ajax stuff and poolings (read: memory leak galore on the IE side), with Office 2007 and a bunch of documents, tons of crap in system tray, outlook running, Photoshop, blah blah blah, and I've never busted 3 gigs.

    Now, I know there are things that can bust it easy (the stuff my girlfriend works on can bust 8 gigs while compiling on -Linux-), but seriously, what do they do that will blow 4 gigs on Vista, and won't come close on another OS? I want to know.

  15. Re:win7 rocks on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    The beta isn't even officially released. So that link you clicked is there as a tentative one. Why would Microsoft point you toward ANYTHING, since you're not even supposed to have your hands on the software? They're pointing their -developers- to it, as a demo of what it should be in RTM, and as a preemptive version of the real thing.

    First thing I do when I get that nag thing is tell it "I'll manage anti-virus myself" in the options near that link. Problem solved.

  16. Re:Where's my 64 bit windows? on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    I don't have first hand experience or anything I can refer to, but some people stated running Windows 7 beta on machines that just barely met Windows XP's requirements... 400 mhz machines with very little RAM, and it ran relatively ok (well, when compared to XP), so a higher end 32 bit CPU, let say a P4, would run fine.

    Also, XP 64 can handle 128 gigs. The only version of Windows 64 bit that is stuck at 8 gigs is Windows Vista Home Basic.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

  17. Re:That's great and all... on 32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP · · Score: 1

    Unless they're benchmarking games on an EeePC, it wouldn't be relevant to you anyhow... Vista SP1 with latest drivers get almost the same performance as XP now ( almost within error tolerance... 1%, 2-3 fps at 80fps, etc). Considering my fairly old machine runs most things aside GTA4 and Crysis at max or near max, yours must be fairly weak (no offense of course...not everyone has gaming as their priority, or the budget to do so...or maybe you're using a lap-top, who knows). So benchmarks on an average computer as of today, or a standard gaming computer, would NOT give you relevant information that would translate to your box...

  18. Re:Why does a music player care what day it is? on Microsoft Issues Workaround For Zune Freeze · · Score: 1

    bah, just realized I read your post too quickly (which is sad considering how short it was). I set the clock on my computer too, doesn't mean it doesn't have an internal one for the rest :). Anyhow, the rest of what i posted still stands. Whoopsies!

  19. Re:Why does a music player care what day it is? on Microsoft Issues Workaround For Zune Freeze · · Score: 1

    Well, for one, the Zune has a clock. For 2, it has an application framework on it that may need date and time stuff (.NET framework, used among other things for XNA...for games...and those often need it). Zunes are somewhere in between the classic Ipod and the Touch, feature wise.

  20. Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share on Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU · · Score: 1

    Both really. There's 4 primary ways of doing it.

    1) Make some macros along with Office's built in database integration to pull data from views or stored procedures from SQL Server/Oracle/Whatever and the process it, let say, with pivot table... Excel 2007 is a really sweet OLAP Client, for example. Probably easier to use than half of the "specialized" solutions for this.

    2) Code in Access/Word/Excel/Whatever with VBA, basically make a normal app and use Office as a GUI. A little bit like Clipper of old. Access is the obvious one, but using Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Infopath, etc with that is fairly powerful.

    3) What I was thinking when I posted that: add-ins and modules for Office. So then you can code in .NET or whatsnot, make a full blown application that will integrate in Office. So the user can go in a new, custom menu or something, pull an option "My Company's Process", and do something...maybe display forms or wizards to manipulate their word documents, applications to work with their spreadsheet, whatever.

    4) (This is whats big lately...) Sharepoint development. Sharepoint is already integrated with Office, so extending it for your business process or workflows is pretty nice. Coding things such as "When a document is uploaded, parse it, put some data in a database, if it breaks email a supervisor, push it for review on another page, then print the result and email a company to the client". Uses bunch of apps from Office at every steps, from Word to Infopath...

    Especially #3 and #4, you don't switch just overnight. Making the same things using other solutions, open source or otherwise, building from scratch, whatever...often it still becomes cost effective to do the above, even if it ties you in. The company I work for right now does that...and there's people keep analysing if its worth it, continually... No one's job is on the line. There's also studies to see if it was cost effective, even in hindsight...and the answer keeps being "yes". Its a lot of work and it IS expensive, so if there were cheaper alternatives, management would jump on it, but its really cost effective if you have a complex company with a lot of stuff going on that requires lots of in-house development.

  21. Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share on Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU · · Score: 1

    Oh, its not everywhere... but considering the amount of companies where Sharepoint is omni-present...it is definately not a small amount :)

  22. Re:Joe 6 packs.... on Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU · · Score: 1

    These are an interesting market for Microsoft as they don't volume-license their software

    No, but they get Office Home and Student edition, at 150$ for 3 licenses. Thats cosmetic at best and pays for the support and the advertisement/box and pretty much nothing else. Net result: not much more than piracy. The only thing "average joes" bring in, is the mindshare, and even that is less important than it used to be, now that Office has some features beyond "its what everyone knows" (which certainly wasn't the case a few versions back).

    That said, its still significant, but as you pointed out, far more so in a "The effect of piracy on commercial software" discussion... the recession has little to do with that.

  23. Re:Don't bet on it. on Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU · · Score: 1

    Straight on the money. Its not just open source vs closed source or whatever that follows this logic. Java shops will push away their plans to make a prototype in Ruby on Rail, dev firms using CMMI cancels their scheduled Scrum implementation... In a recession, companies don't always go for whats cheapest, they go for whatever is conservative and makes them feel secure.

  24. Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share on Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU · · Score: 1

    You really missed it. Its not more "admin work". Office has integration features that are either not found in other suites, or are vastly different... By integration features, read: "Using Office as a development platform". Programming.

    Sure, maybe the UI of OOo will be slightly closer to Office 2003...but the app that you'd have to build around OOo will be a heck of a lot more different, and the totally different skillset required to develop for it (Office's API sucks, OOo's API is Lord of Sith level of evil...), you won't just have to retrain some people, you'll have to reorganise the IT and development department, switch third party products, change the enterprise portal... No fun.

    For companies that just use Office to read documents and write a few, then yes, you're totally right.

  25. Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share on Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but all this is just superficial

    Far from it. In many companies, MS Office is used as a client, data consumer, for the company's server side processes and databases. MS Word or Excel as part of workflows, Excel as a client for datawarehouses, Outlook integrated with customer's systems, ----SHAREPOINT---- development (thats a big one), etc.

    When you're at home using Office to type out a quick document, you may as well be using anything else, doesn't matter much. When Office is an integral part of your processes, you tend to use features that are more..."unique" to it. Its then harder to replace (usually companies that go that route, do so with the idea that the license price of Office is minimal compared to the time saving of using it as a RAD client...). Added to the fact that Office's volume licensing makes it much cheaper than what you'll see if you poke Amazon.com, and in time of recession, its the LAST suite of apps that will be switched over...