I agree with you. When I was younger, I used to be able to tune my car myself... change the sparkplugs, change the contact points in the distributor, adjust the fuel air mixture in the carbs so it idles smoothly, advance or retard the timing by tilting the distributor forwards or backwards, and so on. The only thing remotely electronic needed was the timing light. It was not only a lot more fun but it was good to know I had full control of the car and not a slave to some in car computer which just sets a warning light on the dashboard to let me know there is "a" problem which could only be fixed in the dealership.
I used various Linux distros (Mandrake 9.1, Mandrake 9.2, Mandrake 10, SimplyMepis) as my primary desktop OS for 2 years a couple of years ago and I still currently run Ubuntu inside a VM. I also have Linux running on my Linksys GL routers (OpenWRT, Tomato)... so I know what to like and dislike about it.
The main reason I am installing XP on the eee PC is so I can run SlingBox' SlingPlayer on it so I can stream video to it. Yes I could install Wine but... as I said, I already know what to like and dislike about Linux.
I am buying an eee PC 900 preloaded with Linux because it has a bigger SSD drive. I intend to reformat Linux off it and install an MSDN subscription XP when I get it. I realize I will probably have to "n-Lite" XP first to reduce its size further to get it to fit the 4GB primary drive.
... writing software for it (Linux Desktop) then it might be ready. Or when when smallish companies which bankroll software figure out a way on how to make money of it. I am not talking Office software here but tax preparation and other small business software for Accounting, Billing, Inventory, etc. It may also help if a small company can hire developers that can develop desktop software on it in true RAD fashion without the need for these developers to know how to do it in C ala Linus.
Also when users of these software (outlined above) are confident that nothing will break after 6 months when it is time for them to upgrade to the latest build of Ubuntu or Simply Mepis, Mandriva, or whatever desktop distro it is they are using, then it is ready for the desktop.
Yep, I agree this is FUD. The client where I work issued all of its developers T60s (loaded with Vista Enterprise) which we have been using heavily for development. No problems I have heard of hardware wise from any of my colleagues in almost 1 year since we got these. The only thing that bothers me is the high pitch whine of the cooling fan.
IMO, DVD will be tough to dislodge from its perch. What Sony appears to be ignoring is that freely available tools on the Internets now allow people to rip and encode DVDs so they can load up their Media Centers, their portable players, etc... in much the same way that people rip and encode CDs to mp3s to play on their portable players.
Until Blu-Ray discs can be ripped and encoded economically into other forms of media, and shared/downloaded to other devices, it may well be that only hardcore "videophiles" will collect these discs.
Anyone still remember IBM's MCA which was at the time competing with Compaq, HP, and a consortium of other manufacturers that supported the EISA bus. Then there was also the first port dedicated for graphics card to use, the VESA Local Bus.
I rip entire DVDs to my hard drive which averages to about 7 GB per DVD. Initially I was encoding them to DivX, xViD, or H264 to save space but it was just taking too much time... 2 to 3 hours for high quality compressed file (1.5 - 2 GB on average with AC3 sound) on a quad core. I decided to just dump the raw unencrypted files to disk figuring out (correctly) that the price per gigabyte is bound to keep going down. A 1TB drive would be able to store ~120 un-encoded DVDs.
It's not only Safari that is selected by the Apple updater by default but also iTunes too. I only have QuickTime installed and when the updater prompted me to update QuickTime to a newer version, iTunes and Safari were selected too. I decided to uninstall QuickTime and not be bothered by Apples shenanigans.
He together with 2 or 3 others (who have been identified in TFA as cylons) kept hearing the Bob Dylan song / Jimi Hendrix cover... All along the Watchtower.
The reason the time to sleep (laptop) / hybrid sleep (desktop) is not instantaneous is because Vista also writes out the contents of RAM to the hard drive as a backup. The reason for this is if the power goes off (in case of a power outage in the desktop or battery runs out of juice in the laptop), Vista when woken up, will read from the hard drive since the contents of the RAM has been flushed.
Try this, put your laptop to sleep and then unplug it (if not yet unplugged) and remove the batteries. Put back the batteries and open the lid of your laptop... notice that it will take time to get back to the desktop but you will ultimately get back to where you once where when you put it to sleep.
If your reason for installing is only for performance, Vista SP1 will probably disappoint you. On the other hand I have installed it on 2 laptops and one desktop and the only problem I had was with an HP Printer driver that stopped working. All I had to do was to go to Control Panel, remove the printer, then add the printer back again and that fixed the problem.
Honestly, I did not find any major improvement performance-wise nor stability-wise as my machines were already running relatively smoothly pre-SP1. There appears to be minor improvements in boot times, shutdown times (though I do this maybe once a week per PC/laptop on average); plus getting in and out of sleep, especially for the laptops, appears to go smoother.
I do encode my mp3s using LAME at 192 kbps and even though I would not characterize the sound as sucky, I could detect a difference between the mp3s and the original (CD played on a 13 year old relatively higher end Sony CD Player). The article is on the mark, the bass and the punch of drums at the bottom end is not as strong. I do not detect differences on the high end, perhaps because of my aging ears.
It could be that the mp3s encoded in the latest version of LAME could have closed the gap but it is also likely that the difference is exacerbated by the fact that I am playing the mp3s via the laptop's headphone jack hooked up to the stereo amp. I wish someone would manufacture an mp3 player with better analog output circuitry designed not for headphone / earphone listening but for hooking up to hifi components.
Yes, Slashdot uses Doubleclick, I can see doubleclick as one of the domains/sites blocked by NoScript when I click on its (NoScript) icon when I am on Slashdot.
Printer manufacturers should also encourage inkjet cartridge refilling as opposed to making people throw these away. Some manufacturers even resort to embedding chips in their cartridges to prevent these from being refilled by 3rd party companies or the by the user.
Another one who develops software for a living here and I do prefer Vista over XP even if I had to patch VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 to make them work in Vista.
Some advantages I like: Vista Ultimate now has a disk imaging feature... no need to use 3rd party such as Norton Ghost. I find too that on a decent hardware, Vista boots faster, launches apps faster, and desktop search is also faster. Power management (assuming you have the latest hardware) is much better especially the new Hybrid Sleep. The UI including the sidebar is much better IMHO. I have a 24" WS monitor and I have the sidebar always on top so I can monitor if some run away process is eating all the CPU or network resources. I think the new File Explorer is better than the old one but I have spent a few days to master it so YMMV.
As a Lenovo T60p laptop user (running Vista Enterprise), I too would be more interested in a head to head comparison between the ability of Ubuntu to put the Lenovo into various sleep modes such as S3 (Hybrid Sleep), S4 (Hibernate) as well as take advantage of a CPU's adaptive/variable speed capability. In Vista there is a Lenovo software add-on (Thinkvantage) that allows the user to program the power saving mode of the laptop. Using this software (works hand in hand with Vista's Power Options from the Control Panel), one could optimize the laptop to consume less power with the side-effect of generating less fan noise. I wonder, is Ubuntu able to take advantage of these power saving / noise cancelling options?
The last time I used Linux (Mandrake 10, an older version of Simply Mepis), the PC could not even be programmed to go into standby even though running XP on the same PC allows one to do so. Has this changed on the new Ubuntu (7.04)?
You're not alone in liking Vista here on Slashdot. I have it running on 3 computers and it is great indeed. People who complain about Vista using up too much memory probably don't even realize Vista is just using memory as part of its SuperFetch feature. The result is much faster launch times for applications. Bootup times are also faster and so is the much better "Hybrid Sleep". Just try enabling sleep/hibernate modes in Linux and you will see how much farther ahead Vista is when it comes to environment friendliness.
With regards to drivers, sure there were problems when Vista first came out but much of it has or is being rectified. On my latest Vista install (2 weeks ago), it found drivers for my 5 plus year old HP 1220c printer as soon as I plugged the USB cable. I was able to share it (the printer) on my LAN to my other PCs/Laptops running a mixture of Vista and XP Pro in no time. I had no problems with the other peripherals that I plugged into my Vista PCs including Wireless Keyboards and Mice (from Logitech and Microsoft), and portable hard drive (Vantec enclosure).
Look and feel is IMO also better and I like having gadgets on the sidebar. I was a big fan of gkrellm on the Linux desktop and with the various gadgets available for the sidebar you can pretty much display the same information you could display on gkrellm... monitor CPU, network activity, monitor hard drive usage, wireless strength, and so on.
Bottom line for me is Vista is an improvement over XP especially if you will be running it on a new PC / Laptop.
My experience with Vista (Home Premium on the laptop, Ultimate on the desktop) has been positive overall. On new hardware, the new "Sleep" mode which replaces the old standby and hibernate modes is way better. Turning on the PC and launching applications is much faster.
People also complain about the Vista's memory use but this is just Vista pre-caching applications so they launch much faster. On my old XP machine, Thunderbird and Firefox took tens of seconds to launch. On the Vista PCs they launch almost instantaneously even from a cold boot.
There are things I don't like such as the rearranging and renaming of applets in the control panel which added to the initial confusion. However, I found Vista's Help to find/locate applications was much better than that in XP. There were bugs/compatibility problems in some applications that I installed but most of the time these problems were fixed by googling the web for answers. There are a few bugs which are still awaiting fixes (such as inability to debug scripts when using Visual Studio 2005 Integration Services) but I am confident MS will fix these in future patches, service packs.
With regards to the UAC which Apple makes fun of in TV commercials, how is this much different from Ubuntu which asks the user to enter the SU password when installing applications or modifying system files?
I also find the sidebar useful. Even in Linux I use applets/gkrellm to inform me of my CPU status, etc. On XP I use Samurize to do so. In Vista, I use applets such as CPU utilization to give me an idea if some process or app is taking up CPU resources.
Finally, I have not come across any instance were the dreaded DRM prevented me from doing what I wanted to do... I will say so when I encounter it.
Overall on a C2D laptop and a C2Q desktop, Vista, dare I say it, rocks... I am just telling it like it is from personal experience.
I really like Thunderbird 2.0.x It is more stable than the ver 1.5.x especially with the Lightning calendar extension. Mozilla should highlight one feature that could make more people want to use Thunderbird: it can be used as an excellent backup tool for various web based email including Gmail and Yahoo mail.
Finally, many probably don't realize that Thunderbird/Lighning Calendar could bidirectionally sync to Google's Calendar via the Provider for Google Calendar extension. Here is a link to an article complete with screenshots on how to set this up: Stay in Sync with GCal and Thunderbird
The patches were applied on 3 of the PCs I use and on 1 Virtual Machine (all running XP PRO) running a combination of.NET framework 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. I noticed it took a while for.NET to be updated (especially on the VM) but that was it. I did not notice 100% CPU utilization even on my single core, non hyperthreaded office machine which I use for Visual Studio 2005 development. Overall, no problems with the patches here.
Yes the Belgrano was the first warship that was sunk during the Falklands war... by wire guided torpedoes from a UK sub. After that though it was the Argentine's turn to sink a coupe of UK ships (destroyer Sheffield and some transports) with their daredevil low level attacks and sea skimming Exocet anti-ship cruise missiles.
Aside from VPC not supporting USB, another problem is that XP image FREE from Microsoft expires in 1.5 months. From the blog you linked to: "Just a reminder that both images expire on August 17th, 2007. PEte LePage, Product Manager".
I would rather use VMWare's free VMWare Player assuming I have a legal copy of XP. The latest version of the Player has no problems running on Vista either as a host, or guest. It also supports USB 2.0 for the guest VMs.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you. When I was younger, I used to be able to tune my car myself... change the sparkplugs, change the contact points in the distributor, adjust the fuel air mixture in the carbs so it idles smoothly, advance or retard the timing by tilting the distributor forwards or backwards, and so on. The only thing remotely electronic needed was the timing light. It was not only a lot more fun but it was good to know I had full control of the car and not a slave to some in car computer which just sets a warning light on the dashboard to let me know there is "a" problem which could only be fixed in the dealership.
I used various Linux distros (Mandrake 9.1, Mandrake 9.2, Mandrake 10, SimplyMepis) as my primary desktop OS for 2 years a couple of years ago and I still currently run Ubuntu inside a VM. I also have Linux running on my Linksys GL routers (OpenWRT, Tomato)... so I know what to like and dislike about it. The main reason I am installing XP on the eee PC is so I can run SlingBox' SlingPlayer on it so I can stream video to it. Yes I could install Wine but... as I said, I already know what to like and dislike about Linux.
I am buying an eee PC 900 preloaded with Linux because it has a bigger SSD drive. I intend to reformat Linux off it and install an MSDN subscription XP when I get it. I realize I will probably have to "n-Lite" XP first to reduce its size further to get it to fit the 4GB primary drive.
... writing software for it (Linux Desktop) then it might be ready. Or when when smallish companies which bankroll software figure out a way on how to make money of it. I am not talking Office software here but tax preparation and other small business software for Accounting, Billing, Inventory, etc. It may also help if a small company can hire developers that can develop desktop software on it in true RAD fashion without the need for these developers to know how to do it in C ala Linus.
Also when users of these software (outlined above) are confident that nothing will break after 6 months when it is time for them to upgrade to the latest build of Ubuntu or Simply Mepis, Mandriva, or whatever desktop distro it is they are using, then it is ready for the desktop.
Yep, I agree this is FUD. The client where I work issued all of its developers T60s (loaded with Vista Enterprise) which we have been using heavily for development. No problems I have heard of hardware wise from any of my colleagues in almost 1 year since we got these. The only thing that bothers me is the high pitch whine of the cooling fan.
IMO, DVD will be tough to dislodge from its perch. What Sony appears to be ignoring is that freely available tools on the Internets now allow people to rip and encode DVDs so they can load up their Media Centers, their portable players, etc... in much the same way that people rip and encode CDs to mp3s to play on their portable players.
Until Blu-Ray discs can be ripped and encoded economically into other forms of media, and shared/downloaded to other devices, it may well be that only hardcore "videophiles" will collect these discs.
Anyone still remember IBM's MCA which was at the time competing with Compaq, HP, and a consortium of other manufacturers that supported the EISA bus. Then there was also the first port dedicated for graphics card to use, the VESA Local Bus.
I rip entire DVDs to my hard drive which averages to about 7 GB per DVD. Initially I was encoding them to DivX, xViD, or H264 to save space but it was just taking too much time... 2 to 3 hours for high quality compressed file (1.5 - 2 GB on average with AC3 sound) on a quad core. I decided to just dump the raw unencrypted files to disk figuring out (correctly) that the price per gigabyte is bound to keep going down. A 1TB drive would be able to store ~120 un-encoded DVDs.
It's not only Safari that is selected by the Apple updater by default but also iTunes too. I only have QuickTime installed and when the updater prompted me to update QuickTime to a newer version, iTunes and Safari were selected too. I decided to uninstall QuickTime and not be bothered by Apples shenanigans.
He together with 2 or 3 others (who have been identified in TFA as cylons) kept hearing the Bob Dylan song / Jimi Hendrix cover... All along the Watchtower.
The reason the time to sleep (laptop) / hybrid sleep (desktop) is not instantaneous is because Vista also writes out the contents of RAM to the hard drive as a backup. The reason for this is if the power goes off (in case of a power outage in the desktop or battery runs out of juice in the laptop), Vista when woken up, will read from the hard drive since the contents of the RAM has been flushed.
Try this, put your laptop to sleep and then unplug it (if not yet unplugged) and remove the batteries. Put back the batteries and open the lid of your laptop... notice that it will take time to get back to the desktop but you will ultimately get back to where you once where when you put it to sleep.
For mining those ever growing Home Land Security datawarehouses.
If your reason for installing is only for performance, Vista SP1 will probably disappoint you. On the other hand I have installed it on 2 laptops and one desktop and the only problem I had was with an HP Printer driver that stopped working. All I had to do was to go to Control Panel, remove the printer, then add the printer back again and that fixed the problem.
Honestly, I did not find any major improvement performance-wise nor stability-wise as my machines were already running relatively smoothly pre-SP1. There appears to be minor improvements in boot times, shutdown times (though I do this maybe once a week per PC/laptop on average); plus getting in and out of sleep, especially for the laptops, appears to go smoother.
I do encode my mp3s using LAME at 192 kbps and even though I would not characterize the sound as sucky, I could detect a difference between the mp3s and the original (CD played on a 13 year old relatively higher end Sony CD Player). The article is on the mark, the bass and the punch of drums at the bottom end is not as strong. I do not detect differences on the high end, perhaps because of my aging ears.
It could be that the mp3s encoded in the latest version of LAME could have closed the gap but it is also likely that the difference is exacerbated by the fact that I am playing the mp3s via the laptop's headphone jack hooked up to the stereo amp. I wish someone would manufacture an mp3 player with better analog output circuitry designed not for headphone / earphone listening but for hooking up to hifi components.
Nice list in that link but I was surprised not to see Monster Cable.
Yes, Slashdot uses Doubleclick, I can see doubleclick as one of the domains/sites blocked by NoScript when I click on its (NoScript) icon when I am on Slashdot.
Printer manufacturers should also encourage inkjet cartridge refilling as opposed to making people throw these away. Some manufacturers even resort to embedding chips in their cartridges to prevent these from being refilled by 3rd party companies or the by the user.
Another one who develops software for a living here and I do prefer Vista over XP even if I had to patch VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 to make them work in Vista.
Some advantages I like: Vista Ultimate now has a disk imaging feature... no need to use 3rd party such as Norton Ghost. I find too that on a decent hardware, Vista boots faster, launches apps faster, and desktop search is also faster. Power management (assuming you have the latest hardware) is much better especially the new Hybrid Sleep. The UI including the sidebar is much better IMHO. I have a 24" WS monitor and I have the sidebar always on top so I can monitor if some run away process is eating all the CPU or network resources. I think the new File Explorer is better than the old one but I have spent a few days to master it so YMMV.
As a Lenovo T60p laptop user (running Vista Enterprise), I too would be more interested in a head to head comparison between the ability of Ubuntu to put the Lenovo into various sleep modes such as S3 (Hybrid Sleep), S4 (Hibernate) as well as take advantage of a CPU's adaptive/variable speed capability. In Vista there is a Lenovo software add-on (Thinkvantage) that allows the user to program the power saving mode of the laptop. Using this software (works hand in hand with Vista's Power Options from the Control Panel), one could optimize the laptop to consume less power with the side-effect of generating less fan noise. I wonder, is Ubuntu able to take advantage of these power saving / noise cancelling options?
The last time I used Linux (Mandrake 10, an older version of Simply Mepis), the PC could not even be programmed to go into standby even though running XP on the same PC allows one to do so. Has this changed on the new Ubuntu (7.04)?
You're not alone in liking Vista here on Slashdot. I have it running on 3 computers and it is great indeed. People who complain about Vista using up too much memory probably don't even realize Vista is just using memory as part of its SuperFetch feature. The result is much faster launch times for applications. Bootup times are also faster and so is the much better "Hybrid Sleep". Just try enabling sleep/hibernate modes in Linux and you will see how much farther ahead Vista is when it comes to environment friendliness. With regards to drivers, sure there were problems when Vista first came out but much of it has or is being rectified. On my latest Vista install (2 weeks ago), it found drivers for my 5 plus year old HP 1220c printer as soon as I plugged the USB cable. I was able to share it (the printer) on my LAN to my other PCs/Laptops running a mixture of Vista and XP Pro in no time. I had no problems with the other peripherals that I plugged into my Vista PCs including Wireless Keyboards and Mice (from Logitech and Microsoft), and portable hard drive (Vantec enclosure). Look and feel is IMO also better and I like having gadgets on the sidebar. I was a big fan of gkrellm on the Linux desktop and with the various gadgets available for the sidebar you can pretty much display the same information you could display on gkrellm... monitor CPU, network activity, monitor hard drive usage, wireless strength, and so on. Bottom line for me is Vista is an improvement over XP especially if you will be running it on a new PC / Laptop.
My experience with Vista (Home Premium on the laptop, Ultimate on the desktop) has been positive overall. On new hardware, the new "Sleep" mode which replaces the old standby and hibernate modes is way better. Turning on the PC and launching applications is much faster. People also complain about the Vista's memory use but this is just Vista pre-caching applications so they launch much faster. On my old XP machine, Thunderbird and Firefox took tens of seconds to launch. On the Vista PCs they launch almost instantaneously even from a cold boot. There are things I don't like such as the rearranging and renaming of applets in the control panel which added to the initial confusion. However, I found Vista's Help to find/locate applications was much better than that in XP. There were bugs/compatibility problems in some applications that I installed but most of the time these problems were fixed by googling the web for answers. There are a few bugs which are still awaiting fixes (such as inability to debug scripts when using Visual Studio 2005 Integration Services) but I am confident MS will fix these in future patches, service packs. With regards to the UAC which Apple makes fun of in TV commercials, how is this much different from Ubuntu which asks the user to enter the SU password when installing applications or modifying system files? I also find the sidebar useful. Even in Linux I use applets/gkrellm to inform me of my CPU status, etc. On XP I use Samurize to do so. In Vista, I use applets such as CPU utilization to give me an idea if some process or app is taking up CPU resources. Finally, I have not come across any instance were the dreaded DRM prevented me from doing what I wanted to do... I will say so when I encounter it. Overall on a C2D laptop and a C2Q desktop, Vista, dare I say it, rocks... I am just telling it like it is from personal experience.
I really like Thunderbird 2.0.x It is more stable than the ver 1.5.x especially with the Lightning calendar extension. Mozilla should highlight one feature that could make more people want to use Thunderbird: it can be used as an excellent backup tool for various web based email including Gmail and Yahoo mail.
Finally, many probably don't realize that Thunderbird/Lighning Calendar could bidirectionally sync to Google's Calendar via the Provider for Google Calendar extension. Here is a link to an article complete with screenshots on how to set this up: Stay in Sync with GCal and Thunderbird
The patches were applied on 3 of the PCs I use and on 1 Virtual Machine (all running XP PRO) running a combination of .NET framework 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. I noticed it took a while for .NET to be updated (especially on the VM) but that was it. I did not notice 100% CPU utilization even on my single core, non hyperthreaded office machine which I use for Visual Studio 2005 development. Overall, no problems with the patches here.
Yes the Belgrano was the first warship that was sunk during the Falklands war... by wire guided torpedoes from a UK sub. After that though it was the Argentine's turn to sink a coupe of UK ships (destroyer Sheffield and some transports) with their daredevil low level attacks and sea skimming Exocet anti-ship cruise missiles.
Aside from VPC not supporting USB, another problem is that XP image FREE from Microsoft expires in 1.5 months. From the blog you linked to: "Just a reminder that both images expire on August 17th, 2007. PEte LePage, Product Manager".
I would rather use VMWare's free VMWare Player assuming I have a legal copy of XP. The latest version of the Player has no problems running on Vista either as a host, or guest. It also supports USB 2.0 for the guest VMs.