Yep, I really hope that Vista doesn't have these same problems. I'm posting from OS X, though like many millions of computer users I use Windows at work, and am looking forward to the really cool Vista GUI. Here are some other specific issues that I hope Vista and future service packs will address:
Some kind of warning, similar to what GMail does with phishing sites, anytime that a program is being downloaded. "Some applications may compromise personal information. Only install this application if you trust the web-site 'spyware.com'"
Perhaps OS-managed tagging of applications to restrict what they could access, similar to a Java sandbox. Of course, this would need users to be running at a user level, rather than admin level, otherwise an application could simply reset its permissions. Does anyone know if current spyware messes with the Windows firewall?
A preemptive scan of any application that could warn the user of network access code, registry code etc.
A watertight way to track and remove applications, preventing them from reinstalling themselves.
Restricting the ability of applications to coinstall, e.g. when one application brings in others.
There are many many ways that Microsoft could address the millions of hours and productivity lost to spyware. Windows Firewall is a decent first step. It would be great if we could see some more effort.
In other news, Microsoft encourages consumers to choose Windows 3.1, whilst emphasizing the coming collaboration with IBM on OS/2 as the future OS for business users.
Wow, had a powerbook for ages, and not seen that. Cool.
Mind you, My Dell Precision M60 blue screened for the first time the other night. It was provoked, a screw had fallen out and I accidentally pulled the hard drive out while the machine was on. Oops.
Yeah, I have a D70, see my blog for some great pics taken using it... but manual focussing on it sucks. It's all but unusable unless you have a bright light and/or a fast (f4 or better) lens.
I thought I was gonna get some good usage out of my old 80-200/4 but it's pretty unusable really, especially considering you can only shoot totally manual on it. [This lens is still pretty good for macro since you can stop right down and crank the flash up and just focus by moving nearer or farther from the target]
I caved and got a used AF-D 80-200/2.8 for $400 off of ebay and I'm much happier. The results from this camera so far seem as good as from slide film and my Nikon Coolscan, but with vastly less hassle.
My Dell has a 15.4 screen and 1900x1600, but my eyes cant't take anything above 1280x800 for extended (work) use. Ithink the 1440x900 will be just fine.
Yep, and anyone who'd ever heard the grinding, shuddering and slowing down/speeding up of those Amiga drives would know why. Almost as bad as those awful Apple II floppies.
It's hard to believe anyone ever trusted those things with any data at all. Thank goodness for USB drives.
This is really pretty much a non-story as the whole point of new launches like this is to drive new hardware sales. My local experience is that PCs are largely disposable. Kinda expensive sure, but I've seen quite a few perfectly good PCs get tossed simply because they wouldn't work properly due to spyware, crappy hardware, dodgy network card.
Very very few copies of Vista will be installed on any machine older than a couple of years. What's the point? If an upgrade copy costs $200, only another $200-$400 will get a base Dell that will already have Vista Home installed and sorted out on it.
Slashdot users may do a new install, but let's face it, pre-installed on new hardware is really the only thing that most users can really cope with.
Why not just rename it 'Image', maybe 'gnuImage' to keep RMS happy? You can already see the difference between 'Image' and 'gnuIMage'. One is catchy and the other isn't.
"I use the open source 'Image' program. Sounds good huh?"
MiniDisc rocked. I used to record live music with it, then edit it down, right on the little minidisc recorder. Let's see anyone edit music on an iPod.
The killer for the minidisc was that the DRM prevented you from even uploading your own taped music to the computer. Even worse, getting mp3s, ripped CDs onto minidisc was only possible through either recording from line out, or using Sony's awful SonicStage software.
If Sony had laid off the DRM a bit, then the small music player industry might look a lot different. The success of the minidisc in the Japanese market shows there probably wasn't much inherently wrong with it, and my experience confirmed that the hardware was great, excellent battery life, easy to use, reasonably tough, pretty cool looking etc. Shame about the DRM.
Interesting to see J F Allen's name up on Slashdot. He was still around when I was an undergraduate at St Andrews university in the late 80's. He made a number of very interesting 'event' lectures there, and was my father's Ph.D. supervisor back in the very early 60's working on superfluid helium.
Apparently, with a machine that looked like something that Jules Verne might have used, they managed to cool He down to around 2K where it became superfluid and able to do interesting things like flow upwards and straight through the substance known as jewelers rouge.
It looks like Microsoft has transitioned from an engineer led company where it's best to get in at the bottom and ride a great product to the top, to a comfortable retirement home with a steady stream of income from old products where notable managers and industry 'celebrities' can eke out an interesting retirement hob-nobbing with the great and the good of the various research centers.
I'm sure it's a great job, but sending in a few 'shiny' tugs is *not* going to change the direction of the 'Titanic'.
I actually worked at CC where I coded a bunch of the user interface for (at the time) the one decent piece of Archimedes software, Impression. In assembler, using the built-in BBC BASIC 2 pass assembler, with no hard-drive ! Seems bloody hilarious now.
And this is what gets me... That machine did decent graphics, anti-aliased text, with a 8 (?) MHz ARM3 chip, and you could typeset magazines on the damn thing (IIRC part of Gramaphone magazine was typset using Impression). Why aren't the current crop of machines (most of the windows based PDAs) that run the 400 MHz ARM chip absolutely spectacular ?????? With 100 times the poooower, they should be awesome.
I hate to even think about it, but my father trashed the following:
o My entire collection of PCW from Vic-20 issue (Nov 81?) onwards thru 88 o My similar collection of Your Computer o My Home Computer Weekly collection (that really was pretty sad) o My collection of Byte (from 88 - 90)
Other actions including tossing out all my BBC Micro software including all Acornsoft Elite versions (all mint), Aviator, etc.
Everyone seems to be getting very excited about ePaper, but all the articles so far that I've seen don't show it to be anymore advanced than those Nintendo Game and Watch type devices.
Cool, but probably nothing desparately exciting. Certainly not a general purpose deal like the development toolkits.
I've done some programming on my Powerbook 12" using XCode, and apart from the really annoying 'integration' with the layout tool, the overall effect is pretty good. I've only seen a single crash, and that was from me slamming the autocomplete feature a bit more frequently than it was ready for.
The GDB based visual debugging works great, and for *once* a tool is actually on a par with MSVC 6, which is the primary tool of my bread and butter programming job.
In short, if you want a stable programming and debugging tool on a good OS, that can run plenty of Open Source stuff, you could do a lot worse than XCode (free) on OS X.
Mine will do 5 hours (just) as long as you are just reading saved HTML and not hitting the hard drive a lot. This is with minimum screen brightness. PB G4 12".
It's been over for the Pentium 4's since Dell launched the Precision M60/M70 Pentium M laptops that kick the ass of the middle to high end desktops with 3.0 Gig P4s.
I wouldn't have believed it, but the M60 conclusively hammered my desktop VC++ box when running a full compile of our gas pipeline software.
The Pentium M is a great chip, fitting, since it springs from the Pentium Pro, itself a very very good chip for its time.
I think as Linux penetrates to more varied hardware, we'll see more of these types of complaints. I have a MythTV box on wireless that also does DHCP and DNS for my home network, and it drops off the network about once a week.
I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue, but a simple restart of local brings it right back up. PITA.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many many ways that Microsoft could address the millions of hours and productivity lost to spyware. Windows Firewall is a decent first step. It would be great if we could see some more effort.
In other news, Microsoft encourages consumers to choose Windows 3.1, whilst emphasizing the coming collaboration with IBM on OS/2 as the future OS for business users.
Wow, had a powerbook for ages, and not seen that. Cool.
Mind you, My Dell Precision M60 blue screened for the first time the other night. It was provoked, a screw had fallen out and I accidentally pulled the hard drive out while the machine was on. Oops.
No harm done though!
Here's a linkie to Spongebob's drivers license if you do live under the sea.
Yeah, I have a D70, see my blog for some great pics taken using it ... but manual focussing on it sucks. It's all but unusable unless you have a bright light and/or a fast (f4 or better) lens.
I thought I was gonna get some good usage out of my old 80-200/4 but it's pretty unusable really, especially considering you can only shoot totally manual on it. [This lens is still pretty good for macro since you can stop right down and crank the flash up and just focus by moving nearer or farther from the target]
I caved and got a used AF-D 80-200/2.8 for $400 off of ebay and I'm much happier. The results from this camera so far seem as good as from slide film and my Nikon Coolscan, but with vastly less hassle.
My Dell has a 15.4 screen and 1900x1600, but my eyes cant't take anything above 1280x800 for extended (work) use. Ithink the 1440x900 will be just fine.
It's shrinkage
Yep, and anyone who'd ever heard the grinding, shuddering and slowing down/speeding up of those Amiga drives would know why. Almost as bad as those awful Apple II floppies.
It's hard to believe anyone ever trusted those things with any data at all. Thank goodness for USB drives.
This is really pretty much a non-story as the whole point of new launches like this is to drive new hardware sales. My local experience is that PCs are largely disposable. Kinda expensive sure, but I've seen quite a few perfectly good PCs get tossed simply because they wouldn't work properly due to spyware, crappy hardware, dodgy network card.
Very very few copies of Vista will be installed on any machine older than a couple of years. What's the point? If an upgrade copy costs $200, only another $200-$400 will get a base Dell that will already have Vista Home installed and sorted out on it.
Slashdot users may do a new install, but let's face it, pre-installed on new hardware is really the only thing that most users can really cope with.
Why not just rename it 'Image', maybe 'gnuImage' to keep RMS happy? You can already see the difference between 'Image' and 'gnuIMage'. One is catchy and the other isn't.
"I use the open source 'Image' program. Sounds good huh?"
MiniDisc rocked. I used to record live music with it, then edit it down, right on the little minidisc recorder. Let's see anyone edit music on an iPod.
The killer for the minidisc was that the DRM prevented you from even uploading your own taped music to the computer. Even worse, getting mp3s, ripped CDs onto minidisc was only possible through either recording from line out, or using Sony's awful SonicStage software.
If Sony had laid off the DRM a bit, then the small music player industry might look a lot different. The success of the minidisc in the Japanese market shows there probably wasn't much inherently wrong with it, and my experience confirmed that the hardware was great, excellent battery life, easy to use, reasonably tough, pretty cool looking etc. Shame about the DRM.
And Houston charges, though I think they at least let you get the news without charging.
Interesting to see J F Allen's name up on Slashdot. He was still around when I was an undergraduate at St Andrews university in the late 80's. He made a number of very interesting 'event' lectures there, and was my father's Ph.D. supervisor back in the very early 60's working on superfluid helium.
Apparently, with a machine that looked like something that Jules Verne might have used, they managed to cool He down to around 2K where it became superfluid and able to do interesting things like flow upwards and straight through the substance known as jewelers rouge.
It looks like Microsoft has transitioned from an engineer led company where it's best to get in at the bottom and ride a great product to the top, to a comfortable retirement home with a steady stream of income from old products where notable managers and industry 'celebrities' can eke out an interesting retirement hob-nobbing with the great and the good of the various research centers.
;-)
I'm sure it's a great job, but sending in a few 'shiny' tugs is *not* going to change the direction of the 'Titanic'.
Who are they going to hire next? Dvorak?
Yeah, me too, I loved the 6502, 68000, then ARM. I really need to have a go on the PowerPC. It looks cool too.
;-)
Oooh, and there's one right in this Mac!!
I actually worked at CC where I coded a bunch of the user interface for (at the time) the one decent piece of Archimedes software, Impression. In assembler, using the built-in BBC BASIC 2 pass assembler, with no hard-drive ! Seems bloody hilarious now.
... That machine did decent graphics, anti-aliased text, with a 8 (?) MHz ARM3 chip, and you could typeset magazines on the damn thing (IIRC part of Gramaphone magazine was typset using Impression). Why aren't the current crop of machines (most of the windows based PDAs) that run the 400 MHz ARM chip absolutely spectacular ?????? With 100 times the poooower, they should be awesome.
And this is what gets me
I hate to even think about it, but my father trashed the following:
o My entire collection of PCW from Vic-20 issue (Nov 81?) onwards thru 88
o My similar collection of Your Computer
o My Home Computer Weekly collection (that really was pretty sad)
o My collection of Byte (from 88 - 90)
Other actions including tossing out all my BBC Micro software including all Acornsoft Elite versions (all mint), Aviator, etc.
I'll never forgive this action.
Everyone seems to be getting very excited about ePaper, but all the articles so far that I've seen don't show it to be anymore advanced than those Nintendo Game and Watch type devices.
Cool, but probably nothing desparately exciting. Certainly not a general purpose deal like the development toolkits.
I've done some programming on my Powerbook 12" using XCode, and apart from the really annoying 'integration' with the layout tool, the overall effect is pretty good. I've only seen a single crash, and that was from me slamming the autocomplete feature a bit more frequently than it was ready for.
The GDB based visual debugging works great, and for *once* a tool is actually on a par with MSVC 6, which is the primary tool of my bread and butter programming job.
In short, if you want a stable programming and debugging tool on a good OS, that can run plenty of Open Source stuff, you could do a lot worse than XCode (free) on OS X.
Man this is freaky, my gf just read that momoirs of a geisha and is demanding to see it at the movies. I guess all the advertising is paying off. :-(
Let's just hope Oprah doesn't start to spread out of the daytime schedules.
Hey, you insensitive clod, my school nickname was Wigger.
"My momma always said that 'Stupid is, as stupid does.'"
Mine will do 5 hours (just) as long as you are just reading saved HTML and not hitting the hard drive a lot. This is with minimum screen brightness. PB G4 12".
It's already here ... apart from the thin and light part ... $5000 for a Dell Precision M70. (oh, not cheap either)
But it does kick ass.
It's been over for the Pentium 4's since Dell launched the Precision M60/M70 Pentium M laptops that kick the ass of the middle to high end desktops with 3.0 Gig P4s.
I wouldn't have believed it, but the M60 conclusively hammered my desktop VC++ box when running a full compile of our gas pipeline software.
The Pentium M is a great chip, fitting, since it springs from the Pentium Pro, itself a very very good chip for its time.
I think as Linux penetrates to more varied hardware, we'll see more of these types of complaints. I have a MythTV box on wireless that also does DHCP and DNS for my home network, and it drops off the network about once a week.
I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue, but a simple restart of local brings it right back up. PITA.