I don't imagine AMD will have as big a problem as many seem to think. They have plenty of FABs that can be used to make Opterons whether they are AMD owned or owned by the likes of IBM and countless others. I imagine timing is based on AMD dealings finally being able to guarantee delivery of a certain quantity threshold Dell set for them. It's a good sign considering the inherent lack of high end products from Intel these days.
Of course Intel is coming back with some impressive new technology so the battle ahead looks good for us!
I would think a *nix sysadmin would be first on the chopping block since everything can be remotely managed pretty easily. Windows is getting there with Monad and all that jazz but a lot of infrastructure already exists for it.
It is quite odd how corporate world of today doesn't understand the difference between soft and hard dollars. Screwing up quality of service costs real money, its just harder to quantify so they can hide their performance better.
Personally I think your infrastructure you want to keep close to home regardless of platform. I'm sure a DNS admin can be just as affective in any place. Of course this opens up remote admin fun since they have to connect over the Internet just like any hacker.
I feel sorry for the remaining guy. Probably overworked and underpaid and has to forget about vacation. Server dies while he's in Hawaii? Good luck with that. With the hard money saved you potentially cost your computer a lot of soft dollars.
Some positions can be done affectively remotely but when it comes to networking you really want people to stay put especially in terms of security. Unless a PTP link between here and India has gone down dramatically in price. Got to love adding attack vectors to a network to save money.
I agree with you, I was merely responding to the gasp that came over the crowd here stating that the new requirements are ridiculous when they aren't even the minimum specs. The two metrics in the article were "Vista-Ready" and "Premium." The official minimum is exactly like "Vista-Ready" but it runs perfectly fine on much less hardware. You could easily cut everything in half and Vista would still be a perfectly useable environment. Any lower than that and you run into the dark days of my and it sounds like your, past.
KDE turns off all the bells and whistles if it detects a slow processor. Turn them all back on and you'll see I'm not being too harsh;)
I tried with a quad pentium pro 200mhz server I had. You can get it to run most definitely but it will not be a happy experience. Fortunately it was just for giggles, I wiped the whole thing and put Gentoo on. It's been my firewall/file server ever since. That was about 5 years ago btw so KDE might be faster. You're not the first person I've heard say that about it.
Maybe you should have looked more closely at the article. 512meg is fine for Vista and 8megs of video ram will do just fine. So will a 500mhz processor. The DVD is the only sticking point but that is only needed for the initial install since they have chosen to only provide DVD ISOs. There is no reason I couldn't split it up into a couple of CDs. Of course the media center functions of Vista would be pretty pointless with a cd-drive.
haha, tell that to a dos user trying to do advanced 3d CAD. or a Linux user trying to mix 400 audio channels from the CLI. Sure it might very well be possible but wouldn't it be a whole lot easier with OS features that enable you to see and manipulate everything in realtime? Wouldn't it be great to see more than one app on your screen at one time without having to resort to multiple monitors?
I agree OS bloat needs to be controlled, but as the needs get more complex the OS will too in order to keep up with increasing demands. Is SUSE Enterprise bloated because it won't run on a 386? It OS X bloated because it won't run on a 68k? Instruction sets have changed with newer hardware too, I would tend to say that Vista is quite a bit more than just an OS at this point. Isn't a firewall an application? What about the graphics subsystem? All of these things are included with Vista which add to its profile.
I'm not saying the bloat isn't there but I don't think its near as bad as people are making it out to be.
You can't compare X to the experience you get with OS X, KDE, or Windows. It's pointless to cloud the issue with that bullspit. There is a reason SUSE and RH do a ram check before finishing the install process. Compare like capabilities please. Not going to be able to look at a photo with 1900x1200 res on a 386 with 8meg of ram. It might work on the P2 if it had a nice AGP video card in it.
haha, I hadn't thought of that but it would make sense. I too know for a fact Vista runs on much less than they are saying it does. That would be a good motivator, I would tend to wonder about the number of people that buy OS upgrades vs the number that would rather buy a new PC.
Sounds like you should read more closely. Those are specs for all features turned on and are the recommended configuration. Vista already works on much less hardware than that.
Interestingly enough I know that Vista works on processors much slower than 800mhz so I imagine there is quite a bit of padding in there. With minimal effort I can setup a responsive Vista box with less than 512megs of ram. MS is just playing it safe here saying that people with these specs will be happy with the performance out of the box. People with less will have to tweak to get themselves where they want to be. Like me running XP on a 400mhz P2 with 64megs of ram. Sucked out of the box, but I got it fairly responsive in short order. System profiling is a good thing, if you have a slow machine automatically shut off the stuff that isn't needed. That is one good feature with Vista. Not perfect since the other stuff shouldn't be running anyways but its a desktop OS so its intended to be as friendly as possible out of the box which means leaving a lot of stuff running.
As for your other examples, let's see you run the latest release of KDE with all the bells and whistles on a Pentium 90. Not gonna happen, not even close. The OS X comparison at least compares OSes with similar graphics capabilities.
We'll grant OS X is more efficient though Vista does quite a bit more in terms of management and monitoring so the comparison is still a little off.
Why should I have to setup afp when both Linux and Windows can speak SMB without an issue? The whole point is the two interoperate smoothly. I can setup AFP on the Windows server just like any Linux box. The whole point is that I shouldn't have to.
Personally I tend to say, good choice there. OS X pisses me off on an almost daily basis. SMB shares disconnecting themselves, the shares only working anonymously across subnets, not closing sessions on file servers. Needlessly adding hundreds of tiny files to the file server that all start with a "."
A linux box plays well with others which is very important in my world where Windows also plays a part. Linux and Windows interoperate beautifully while the OS X boxes seem to be happier playing with themselves.
It's getting better though, noticed a lot of differences between 10.2 and 10.4 but there are still a lot of networking related problems unless you're using all OS X, then things seem to work.
SFC I've never had to use it myself but under most extreme circumstances its available should someone need it.
Exactly what software breaks the Windows kernel? Are you talking about drivers? If so then Linux damn well does have the same problem. I've had bad drivers screw it up on the order of thousands of times.
Now I'll add in that I live and work here in Phoenix and guess what? It is very rare that I ever come across a linux box. So by your logic just because I never see it that means the rest of the people in this country aren't using it. Here's a link 4 Years old even.
Here's another its two years old.
Okay, back to fudd land. Exactly what software screws up the Windows kernel these days? Or do you mean to say software that makes it difficult for the user to use his/her computer? Plenty of software out there can cause the same problem with linux. That is unless you know how to get around them, every OS gives you the tools to do it;-)
You also seem to think I was praising Windows when I was simply defending it. I've been an admin of Novell's Netware, Microsoft's Windows, and various distros of Linux in my life and I've found problems with all of them. That is why I use Windows in some places and especially for machine and user management. Backend databases are usually Linux based with Oracle. Unfortunately I don't get to play with Netware much anymore. People were spreading misinformation about the current state of the OS and that serves no one's best interest. Convincing someone that the average user can easily switch over to linux is ludicrous at this point. This goes double if we're talking about a home user with that fancy digital camera, scanner, and/or printer. Sure most of the drivers work on any modern distro but you'll have to find them, in some cases compile them, and then configure them. This is in no way as easy as Windows.
Being an OEM I can state that Microsoft does not tell OEM to put everything on a system partition. OEMs do this to save money on support later since people invariably lose their install media. They always have the option for the media and they may even charge for it but this is not the fault of Microsoft and even if they did it has nothing to do with the OS being backwards.
None of the problems you mentioned are Windows specific. I've encountered them on multiple versions of Linux as well as OS X, even with FreeBSD. If someone has malicious intent they can and will screw things up. I haven't seen an OS yet that didn't have their own way of organizing files that was different than a similar OS. Compared SUSE and Red Hat or Gentoo!
As for OS X, don't get me started with PPDs and Toast problems.
As for fudd about 3rd party software corrupting Windows I'll just say that you should join the new millenium. Reinstalling Windows to fix a problem is a thing of the past. Worst case is a simple sfc command.
The rest of your issues have nothing to do with Windows being backwards. A better answer might have been allowing incoming connections before the firewall is active rather than activating the firewall before networking services. Of course this change was already made with XP SP2. I can't think of any other examples although I'm sure there are more. Basically I'd say that most of what Windows does these days makes sense and you can't really consider backwards.
Please feel free to come up with a real answer rather than griping about what OEMs are doing. As for China, he was in a small village and the kids had never used computers before. China is also one of the largest users of Linux. Windows definitely has a presence there but it is no where near as prevalent as here in the U.S.
You are correct, I should have specified that he indeed did use multiple operating systems to see which one worked best. I made a bad assumption that you and others would have realized that as with most good teachers they try out multiple lesson plans before they decide on one. Unreasonable expection on my part and I apologize.
The whole point was that the word Start is a better indication of where to begin than a foot or KDE gear. The dock for OS X is pretty good, since it reacts to your mouseover its a decent indication that you should click there.
Macs are used around here, so I won't be staying away from them. And the dual G5 takes more power during sleep than you are suggesting. Regardless it is a waste of resources of all kinds. Whether or not it is necessary is left up to opinion. The cost of the "decent user experience" is that you have a system which could perform faster and be more reliable. How many times has the G5 here not waken up properly? I don't have enough fingers to count them. Reboot the thing and shut it down, its good for it. Don't have to do it everyday but its good to not run power through the computer occasionally. Especially with the apparently quality of the G5. It came with some bad ram, I've had to replace the hard drive which died because it overheated.
The thing isn't perfect. Had issues with other machines in the company as well but the universal constant here is that more processes take more resources. It's plain and simple, its not linear but thats not the point.
Congratulations on providing no insight whatsoever and completely ignoring the topic at hand. Sleep still requires power, VM still takes up resources, and processes do take up CPU time regardless of what you seem to think about the magical OS X platform.
I'll also add that you completely ignored the whole post considering it was about problems with the UI that don't make it intuitive. Force Quit is another example of something most users couldn't find without instruction. Windows has the same problem there as most users wouldn't know to hit ctrl+alt+del to bring up taskmanager, or flag+pause.
So please, actually read the post before you attack what you don't understand. More importantly, how about next time you actually add something, anything of value to the conversation at hand?
I wasn't using one definition over the other. I was stating what I thought the purpose of VM SHOULD be. It's largely a problem of semantics although there are differences as you suggest. I still stick to my original point that open processes that aren't being used are a waste of resources regardless of VM practices. They still take up resources ableit less and less as things improve. There is still an added layer of complexity which can and does impact performance and reliability. I've opened network folders on a bogged OS X system only to get a memory error.
It closes, I re-open and it works. Since the OS doesn't give you a lot of hints as to what is going on the true reasons could have nothing to do with VM, although I find it highly unlikely as I've seen similar behavior on my old RH box with mySQL running on it. Eats and eats, whether it needs to or not. Most of it is in VM so system impact is minimal but it is very real. In the end it was a config problem involved in recycling processes but the example holds.
Never said I was an expert at either. I don't use the term as it implies there's nothing more to learn. If you aren't running extra processes then there is no need to move data from ram to VM. All you are simply doing is calling the program and its data and putting the result in ram. It's one step instead of multiple steps for VM management. It adds a layer of complexity which often makes things easy but at the expense of performance and reliability.
The connection between the desktop world and the oracle world I had thought was straight forward. In both cases you want all of your resources available for your primary task whatever it may be. Oracle is very strict about VM so that is why I threw it in although in retrospect I should have left it out as it only clouded the subject.
Oracle uses VM as a lifesaving measure. If the DB is having problems and there is no ram left for connections you can use VM for a slow connection and get in to clear out whatever process flooded the system. This happened to me recently when I did a data migration from our old SQL 2000 backend to the new Oracle 10g server. Data went too quick and the thing simply overloaded itself. I got in to see where we were at, killed the migration, let the processes recycle themselves then started again where we left off. Just an example of how I think VM should work. I don't think you should be using it in day to day operations. Of course, that is just my opinion on the matter.
I agree with most everything you just said except that its not Microsoft forcing us to change, it is us forcing Microsoft to change. I recently went to a Microsoft Management Summit in San Diego. I felt really out of place there but one thing I noticed that all the project leads were very interested in what we had to say about the new changes in the products they were developing. The changes happen because large businesses request the changes. That is why you see so much of Vista being policy driven. Furthermore there are ghost email accounts on microsoft's domain which are for specific product suggestions. Microsoft gives the addresses out to their larger customers but when enough people request a feature they definitely take the input and a lot of times reverse their decisions based on that feedback.
I definitely agree with the whole use the right tool for the job deal although the lines are getting mighty blurry on the video and graphics editing front. Mac had the early lead, then all the best tools were Windows, now it seems to be picking back up now that performance is competitive again. Good for us as consumers since the OS you're most comfortable with is almost always the one that will make you the most productive. Of course that's not always the case. Mac's don't seem to handle file management as well on network shares so those tasks are usually a lot faster and easier on the Windows side even though the user is primarily familiar with Macs. All and all I tend to say that operating systems are like languages. The more you know the more you'll understand the differences. Sometimes C# is the best tool, other times you'll need to revert all the way back to ASM. Depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
Just try it, the reality doesn't support your claims. You have to move the memory around, you also have to clear whatever is currently in ram and write it to virtual memory before you can recall what is already in virtual memory. That's already two round trips to get the information on your screen. If you are opening the program from scratch all you're doing is copying the data from hdd to ram.
I'm of the mind that VM is backup memory when you don't have enough physical memory to support your operations. Of course I'm an Oracle dba so VM is a big part of my life regardless of the platform. Minimizing the number of processes taking cpu and ram is critical in my world, coincidentally why the Oracle installs are on Linux boxes. Open apps just take up resources that could be used for other tasks. Maybe that fancy filter in photoshop would render faster if you didn't have that 30gig movie still open in your video editor of choice. 30gig is a bit much, suppose 4.5gig so it fits comfy on a regular dvd. Stuff that routinely happens here and I can see that it makes a huge difference. Why allocate, deallocate, and reallocate when you can just allocate? Seems simpler and more reliable to me. I've been known to be a little crazy from time to time though.
Very well put and I agree with most of what you said. First and foremost I'll say that Windows isn't for everybody. There is a reason I use Linux in my organization. There are times when you need a more straight forward interface than one that hides the complexity like most Microsoft apps.
I definitely agree that the all in one solution works great on the Mac side, the ability to copy an application folder from one system to another and actually have it work is wonderful. Of course this is becoming an issue on the Mac side of things. This used to be the case for Windows, why did they break it up into program files, the registry, now active directory and SMS databases? Quite simply Microsoft is all about seemless integration. Complex processes working together in such a way that the user doesn't even realize that they aren't opening Internet Explorer, just one particular dll that Windows uses to render html. This approach has obvious problems as it adds complexity but at the same time it makes for a modular system that can be disconnected with relative ease. I do administrative installs of Office where I work and this means I have to store less on each workstation. More importantly when Quickbooks needs to render an html help screen all it has to do is call the same dll that iexplore.exe does. Shodoc.dll to be more specific. This same philosphy works throughout Windows with DirectX and other APIs that they provide. Apple is trying their hardest to avoid this scenario but I think it will start to change as their products integrate more and more other other products. iTunes, Quicktime, iFilm, iPhoto, iLife all have shared libraries and the complexity is rising.
I do think Apple is better at hiding the complexity of the underlying system but I also think that it limits them in ways that Windows fixed 6 years ago with proper group policies. Customization of the OS is possible but quite difficult which is evident in the fact that I couldn't get a Savin printer driver install on an OS X box. The thing installed but when you did a test print you just got garbage out. In the end I had to go into the CLI and modify a config file to get the thing to work. It was a simple case of, the system wasn't designed to operate that way so I'm not going to give you anyway to do it through the GUI. Makes OS X great for new people with limited requirements and advanced people that don't mind the cli every now and then. Windows caters more to the middle of the road and new users. So there is some overlapping going on.
As for Windows, I'm not exactly sure what's inflexible about it? Also, is the word Start more friendly than a foot? or the KDE logo? I tend to think that it is more intuitive although it implies the user knows they have to click on something. Not sure how that could be improved without cluttering the screen.
I think I've rambled long enough. All and all I think you made some good points but I'll argue that Microsoft is more middle of the road than most other OS's out there. OS X puts their applications in easy to find folder structure while most Linux distros/software have their components strewn about all over the drive. Is a required tool in/bin or/usr/bin? Yes there are distinct differences about what goes where so its not arbitrary but its certainly not easy for someone to learn without significant instruction. Three platforms, three stategies.
rrrrright, just try and open photoshop with 1.8gig image loaded in virtual memory. Reloading the app is definitely quicker regardless of your platform. Sorry, but we're talking about OS X, which is the Mac platform supposedly the "best" for video and graphics editing. That means you have tools you use, these tools can take up a lot of resources very easily. I haven't seen an OS yet that handled virtual memory well enough to make smooth transitions from 60 or so apps that often stay running on a Mac these days. The dock clouds the issue but more importantly uses up cpu resources which theoretically should be used to oh say, render a video or perform a filter on a PSD.
Haven't seen a distro of Linux yet which can do this effectively, not version of Windows, no OS X. Having needless apps running is never a good idea regardless of your platform.
Actually, yes I do, because I can either script that for all machines in the domain or I can set a group policy which will make it that way for everyone. Many people also find the XP Start Menu quite easy to use although personally I hate the wasted cpu so I disable themes in my policy as well. Keeps things consistent for the users. Microsoft wants to improve upon the Start Menu, its quite amazing how people moan and complain that they don't innovate and then when they attempt you bitch more about it being different. They are trying, they will get there eventually. Surprisingly enough the rule with Vista is to give administrators the options to customize via policy or script. So some things out of the box may seem crazy but there is indeed a lot of thought behind them.
Right or wrong there are changes to the UI that are happening, some make tasks like searching easier while others are more complicated. It's a tough balance to maintain. There will be mistakes along the way
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Of course Intel is coming back with some impressive new technology so the battle ahead looks good for us!
It is quite odd how corporate world of today doesn't understand the difference between soft and hard dollars. Screwing up quality of service costs real money, its just harder to quantify so they can hide their performance better.
Personally I think your infrastructure you want to keep close to home regardless of platform. I'm sure a DNS admin can be just as affective in any place. Of course this opens up remote admin fun since they have to connect over the Internet just like any hacker.Some positions can be done affectively remotely but when it comes to networking you really want people to stay put especially in terms of security. Unless a PTP link between here and India has gone down dramatically in price. Got to love adding attack vectors to a network to save money.
I agree with you, I was merely responding to the gasp that came over the crowd here stating that the new requirements are ridiculous when they aren't even the minimum specs. The two metrics in the article were "Vista-Ready" and "Premium." The official minimum is exactly like "Vista-Ready" but it runs perfectly fine on much less hardware. You could easily cut everything in half and Vista would still be a perfectly useable environment. Any lower than that and you run into the dark days of my and it sounds like your, past.
I tried with a quad pentium pro 200mhz server I had. You can get it to run most definitely but it will not be a happy experience. Fortunately it was just for giggles, I wiped the whole thing and put Gentoo on. It's been my firewall/file server ever since. That was about 5 years ago btw so KDE might be faster. You're not the first person I've heard say that about it.
Maybe you should have looked more closely at the article. 512meg is fine for Vista and 8megs of video ram will do just fine. So will a 500mhz processor. The DVD is the only sticking point but that is only needed for the initial install since they have chosen to only provide DVD ISOs. There is no reason I couldn't split it up into a couple of CDs. Of course the media center functions of Vista would be pretty pointless with a cd-drive.
haha, let me get my eyes checked and read at something lower than score:2
I agree OS bloat needs to be controlled, but as the needs get more complex the OS will too in order to keep up with increasing demands. Is SUSE Enterprise bloated because it won't run on a 386? It OS X bloated because it won't run on a 68k? Instruction sets have changed with newer hardware too, I would tend to say that Vista is quite a bit more than just an OS at this point. Isn't a firewall an application? What about the graphics subsystem? All of these things are included with Vista which add to its profile.
I'm not saying the bloat isn't there but I don't think its near as bad as people are making it out to be.You can't compare X to the experience you get with OS X, KDE, or Windows. It's pointless to cloud the issue with that bullspit. There is a reason SUSE and RH do a ram check before finishing the install process. Compare like capabilities please. Not going to be able to look at a photo with 1900x1200 res on a 386 with 8meg of ram. It might work on the P2 if it had a nice AGP video card in it.
haha, I hadn't thought of that but it would make sense. I too know for a fact Vista runs on much less than they are saying it does. That would be a good motivator, I would tend to wonder about the number of people that buy OS upgrades vs the number that would rather buy a new PC.
Interestingly enough I know that Vista works on processors much slower than 800mhz so I imagine there is quite a bit of padding in there. With minimal effort I can setup a responsive Vista box with less than 512megs of ram. MS is just playing it safe here saying that people with these specs will be happy with the performance out of the box. People with less will have to tweak to get themselves where they want to be. Like me running XP on a 400mhz P2 with 64megs of ram. Sucked out of the box, but I got it fairly responsive in short order. System profiling is a good thing, if you have a slow machine automatically shut off the stuff that isn't needed. That is one good feature with Vista. Not perfect since the other stuff shouldn't be running anyways but its a desktop OS so its intended to be as friendly as possible out of the box which means leaving a lot of stuff running.
As for your other examples, let's see you run the latest release of KDE with all the bells and whistles on a Pentium 90. Not gonna happen, not even close. The OS X comparison at least compares OSes with similar graphics capabilities.We'll grant OS X is more efficient though Vista does quite a bit more in terms of management and monitoring so the comparison is still a little off.
Why should I have to setup afp when both Linux and Windows can speak SMB without an issue? The whole point is the two interoperate smoothly. I can setup AFP on the Windows server just like any Linux box. The whole point is that I shouldn't have to.
A linux box plays well with others which is very important in my world where Windows also plays a part. Linux and Windows interoperate beautifully while the OS X boxes seem to be happier playing with themselves.
It's getting better though, noticed a lot of differences between 10.2 and 10.4 but there are still a lot of networking related problems unless you're using all OS X, then things seem to work.Exactly what software breaks the Windows kernel? Are you talking about drivers? If so then Linux damn well does have the same problem. I've had bad drivers screw it up on the order of thousands of times.
Now I'll add in that I live and work here in Phoenix and guess what? It is very rare that I ever come across a linux box. So by your logic just because I never see it that means the rest of the people in this country aren't using it. Here's a link 4 Years old even. Here's another its two years old.Okay, back to fudd land. Exactly what software screws up the Windows kernel these days? Or do you mean to say software that makes it difficult for the user to use his/her computer? Plenty of software out there can cause the same problem with linux. That is unless you know how to get around them, every OS gives you the tools to do it ;-)
You also seem to think I was praising Windows when I was simply defending it. I've been an admin of Novell's Netware, Microsoft's Windows, and various distros of Linux in my life and I've found problems with all of them. That is why I use Windows in some places and especially for machine and user management. Backend databases are usually Linux based with Oracle. Unfortunately I don't get to play with Netware much anymore. People were spreading misinformation about the current state of the OS and that serves no one's best interest. Convincing someone that the average user can easily switch over to linux is ludicrous at this point. This goes double if we're talking about a home user with that fancy digital camera, scanner, and/or printer. Sure most of the drivers work on any modern distro but you'll have to find them, in some cases compile them, and then configure them. This is in no way as easy as Windows.Being an OEM I can state that Microsoft does not tell OEM to put everything on a system partition. OEMs do this to save money on support later since people invariably lose their install media. They always have the option for the media and they may even charge for it but this is not the fault of Microsoft and even if they did it has nothing to do with the OS being backwards.
As for OS X, don't get me started with PPDs and Toast problems.
As for fudd about 3rd party software corrupting Windows I'll just say that you should join the new millenium. Reinstalling Windows to fix a problem is a thing of the past. Worst case is a simple sfc command.The rest of your issues have nothing to do with Windows being backwards. A better answer might have been allowing incoming connections before the firewall is active rather than activating the firewall before networking services. Of course this change was already made with XP SP2. I can't think of any other examples although I'm sure there are more. Basically I'd say that most of what Windows does these days makes sense and you can't really consider backwards.
Please feel free to come up with a real answer rather than griping about what OEMs are doing. As for China, he was in a small village and the kids had never used computers before. China is also one of the largest users of Linux. Windows definitely has a presence there but it is no where near as prevalent as here in the U.S.The whole point was that the word Start is a better indication of where to begin than a foot or KDE gear. The dock for OS X is pretty good, since it reacts to your mouseover its a decent indication that you should click there.
Usability is a tough concept thats for sure.The thing isn't perfect. Had issues with other machines in the company as well but the universal constant here is that more processes take more resources. It's plain and simple, its not linear but thats not the point.
I'll also add that you completely ignored the whole post considering it was about problems with the UI that don't make it intuitive. Force Quit is another example of something most users couldn't find without instruction. Windows has the same problem there as most users wouldn't know to hit ctrl+alt+del to bring up taskmanager, or flag+pause.
So please, actually read the post before you attack what you don't understand. More importantly, how about next time you actually add something, anything of value to the conversation at hand?I wasn't using one definition over the other. I was stating what I thought the purpose of VM SHOULD be. It's largely a problem of semantics although there are differences as you suggest. I still stick to my original point that open processes that aren't being used are a waste of resources regardless of VM practices. They still take up resources ableit less and less as things improve. There is still an added layer of complexity which can and does impact performance and reliability. I've opened network folders on a bogged OS X system only to get a memory error. It closes, I re-open and it works. Since the OS doesn't give you a lot of hints as to what is going on the true reasons could have nothing to do with VM, although I find it highly unlikely as I've seen similar behavior on my old RH box with mySQL running on it. Eats and eats, whether it needs to or not. Most of it is in VM so system impact is minimal but it is very real. In the end it was a config problem involved in recycling processes but the example holds.
The connection between the desktop world and the oracle world I had thought was straight forward. In both cases you want all of your resources available for your primary task whatever it may be. Oracle is very strict about VM so that is why I threw it in although in retrospect I should have left it out as it only clouded the subject.
Oracle uses VM as a lifesaving measure. If the DB is having problems and there is no ram left for connections you can use VM for a slow connection and get in to clear out whatever process flooded the system. This happened to me recently when I did a data migration from our old SQL 2000 backend to the new Oracle 10g server. Data went too quick and the thing simply overloaded itself. I got in to see where we were at, killed the migration, let the processes recycle themselves then started again where we left off. Just an example of how I think VM should work. I don't think you should be using it in day to day operations. Of course, that is just my opinion on the matter.I definitely agree with the whole use the right tool for the job deal although the lines are getting mighty blurry on the video and graphics editing front. Mac had the early lead, then all the best tools were Windows, now it seems to be picking back up now that performance is competitive again. Good for us as consumers since the OS you're most comfortable with is almost always the one that will make you the most productive. Of course that's not always the case. Mac's don't seem to handle file management as well on network shares so those tasks are usually a lot faster and easier on the Windows side even though the user is primarily familiar with Macs. All and all I tend to say that operating systems are like languages. The more you know the more you'll understand the differences. Sometimes C# is the best tool, other times you'll need to revert all the way back to ASM. Depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
I'm of the mind that VM is backup memory when you don't have enough physical memory to support your operations. Of course I'm an Oracle dba so VM is a big part of my life regardless of the platform. Minimizing the number of processes taking cpu and ram is critical in my world, coincidentally why the Oracle installs are on Linux boxes. Open apps just take up resources that could be used for other tasks. Maybe that fancy filter in photoshop would render faster if you didn't have that 30gig movie still open in your video editor of choice. 30gig is a bit much, suppose 4.5gig so it fits comfy on a regular dvd. Stuff that routinely happens here and I can see that it makes a huge difference. Why allocate, deallocate, and reallocate when you can just allocate? Seems simpler and more reliable to me. I've been known to be a little crazy from time to time though.
I definitely agree that the all in one solution works great on the Mac side, the ability to copy an application folder from one system to another and actually have it work is wonderful. Of course this is becoming an issue on the Mac side of things. This used to be the case for Windows, why did they break it up into program files, the registry, now active directory and SMS databases? Quite simply Microsoft is all about seemless integration. Complex processes working together in such a way that the user doesn't even realize that they aren't opening Internet Explorer, just one particular dll that Windows uses to render html. This approach has obvious problems as it adds complexity but at the same time it makes for a modular system that can be disconnected with relative ease. I do administrative installs of Office where I work and this means I have to store less on each workstation. More importantly when Quickbooks needs to render an html help screen all it has to do is call the same dll that iexplore.exe does. Shodoc.dll to be more specific. This same philosphy works throughout Windows with DirectX and other APIs that they provide. Apple is trying their hardest to avoid this scenario but I think it will start to change as their products integrate more and more other other products. iTunes, Quicktime, iFilm, iPhoto, iLife all have shared libraries and the complexity is rising.
I do think Apple is better at hiding the complexity of the underlying system but I also think that it limits them in ways that Windows fixed 6 years ago with proper group policies. Customization of the OS is possible but quite difficult which is evident in the fact that I couldn't get a Savin printer driver install on an OS X box. The thing installed but when you did a test print you just got garbage out. In the end I had to go into the CLI and modify a config file to get the thing to work. It was a simple case of, the system wasn't designed to operate that way so I'm not going to give you anyway to do it through the GUI. Makes OS X great for new people with limited requirements and advanced people that don't mind the cli every now and then. Windows caters more to the middle of the road and new users. So there is some overlapping going on.As for Windows, I'm not exactly sure what's inflexible about it? Also, is the word Start more friendly than a foot? or the KDE logo? I tend to think that it is more intuitive although it implies the user knows they have to click on something. Not sure how that could be improved without cluttering the screen.
I think I've rambled long enough. All and all I think you made some good points but I'll argue that Microsoft is more middle of the road than most other OS's out there. OS X puts their applications in easy to find folder structure while most Linux distros/software have their components strewn about all over the drive. Is a required tool inHaven't seen a distro of Linux yet which can do this effectively, not version of Windows, no OS X. Having needless apps running is never a good idea regardless of your platform.
Right or wrong there are changes to the UI that are happening, some make tasks like searching easier while others are more complicated. It's a tough balance to maintain. There will be mistakes along the way