There are precisely 6 good things about Vista that are actually real improvements over XP:
Installer supports installing drivers from CD or USB (XP only supported floppies)
Installer doesn't require any key, you can put that in anytime during the 30-day activation window
Built-in calendar application. Why Windows didn't have this before I'll never understand.
Click on the clock in the taskbar and you get a nice calendar pop-up instead of a change the date & time dialog
"C:\Documents and Settings\" has been renamed "C:\Users\" - you know, what everybody did in DOS 4.0 in 1988?
Ability to remove all icons from Desktop (including Recycle Bin which couldn't be done in easily in XP)
As you can see none of these things are really that significant, more nuisances, but when you run into these nuisances many times per day for something like 6 years they start to get REALLY ANNOYING. Vista also has a new folder called "C:\ProgramData\" - note that there is no space (as it should be), but they still left "C:\Program Files\" with a space. So now they fixed this problem in Vista 90% of the way but left this one lingering folder, presumably just to piss me and my OCD off.
AdBlock Plus doesn't need filterset.g, that was just for the original Adblock. The Plus version (different extension) has built-in subscriptions / subscription updater.
Every time the SSD discussion comes up I see numbers quoted from 10,000 to 10,000,000 writes. Keep in mind the one number on Intel's data sheet was guaranteed writes. Also we're at the end of 2007 and this is fast moving technology. I think a lot of the lower numbers quoted are a couple years old and yet people keep quoting them. Too lazy to look up links right now, but instead of looking at data sheets there were a few recent tests done, and I seem to remember that the results were in the 2,000,0000 - 5,000,000 ballpark.
Browser compatibility issues go both ways, I don't think it's a valid argument for people not adopting linux.
As an example, I've recently run into a number of IE7 compatibility issues. Granted they're not "public" websites, but a number of my customers at work need to use certain types of systems (CRM, whatever) that are only IE6 compatible (still). Also I've run into problems on management interfaces of network devices that aren't IE7 compatible - (a few Dell switches, SonicWall Firewalls, etc.). We keep our stuff pretty up to date and it's getting difficult to find an IE6 browser anymore to manage some of these devices. It's almost to the point where it'd be easier to run IEs4Linux than to actually find an IE6 box.
I used up my modpoints yesterday, so I'll just agree instead - "The Intarwebs" port 80 HTTP only - there are plenty of other services that are perfectly acceptable, even designed to be, used directly. Porting everything under the sun over port 80 isn't some panacea. If a network is well-designed, the db servers will be in a DMZ anyway and there will be other layers of security. And there is no reason to believe that a web server is "designed to be publicly available" and other services are not.
The speed limit has everything to do with safety. It's based on what society/government believes to be safe at that time. Speed limits are determined by 50 year old equations that don't take into account improvements in vehicles, tires, road surfaces, traffic control devices, etc. The only time they're changed is when some local old person complains too much, then they're lowered arbitrarily. I've never seen a speed limit raised, except maybe a state-wide raise on limited access highways from 55 to 65.
Also, other speed limits such as around school areas are logical and NOT arbitrary. I don't think anybody thinks that low speed limits in neighborhoods and schools are unreasonable.
Speeding is dangerous in general. Just because you might be able to handle the fast speed most of the time doesn't mean its not dangerous. It only takes one incident to cost you your life. But you're making the incorrect assumption that speed is what CAUSES the "incident" - it almost always is not. People generally know their own capabilities and the capabilities of their vehicles and will stay within their limits. Vehicles are generally built to be fail-safe and catastrophic mechanical failures are extremely rare. In my experience accidents are caused by multiple mistakes in sequence - with one of those mistakes normally being distraction or indecision/hesitation. They're not normally caused by a vehicle that was operating at it's performance limit (braking, steering) but was going just too fast. The largest gains are to be had in reducing accidents by reducing distractions - people simply need to pay attention. Fortunately, my state (PA) is about to pass a law banning cell phone usage in vehicles without a hands free device. I can't wait.
But none of that has to do with speed limits. To me getting speeding tickets is just a "reasonable driving tax". I'm happy to make my $92.17 donation every few years to the local township and I don't worry about getting caught. Actually I think my last donation was $117.50.
If you want something to rant about for being dangerous on the roads, it's not a "teenage idiot who thinks he's invincible", it's drunk drivers. While I've known a few teenage idiots who have gotten killed in car crashes, they normally only kill themselves. I've known far more people killed by drunk drivers, who weren't the drunk drivers. But nobody likes talking about drunk driving, 'cuz, ya know, everybody has to go home from the bar sometime. I'd rather see speed limits removed altogether and have breathalyzers installed in ignitions instead.
None of the behaviors being discussed here have anything to do with the OS. If you need to open WinRAR before Windows knows it can handle RAR files, that's a problem with WinRAR, not Windows. I assure you if you install say MS Office, that a.doc file will open with Word before any Office program has been run. Same thing on Mac - the APPLICATION has to provide information to the OS to tell it what the app can do. If an APPLICATION on a Mac doesn't properly do this then MacOS will have no idea what the application can do. There's also the issue of multiple apps being registered for a single file type. Anyway, both OS's have the same capabilities (though they go about it differently), but also in both OS's it's up to the APPLICATION to tell the OS what it's capable of doing. If some applications choose to do this on first run instead of upon installation that is not in anyway the OS's fault. There is nothing magical about this stuff. It's your own fault for using.rar files anyway, and especially for choosing WinRAR to open them. Try 7zip.
Do any companies give a crap about A+ certs anymore? It seems I've been ignoring them for almost a decade now. Do you know how to open a computer case? Do you know the IRQ for the keyboard? Congrats... you're A+ certified!
First of all I didn't say he was. But it would be a good assumption, and here's why:
Slashdot IS US-centric
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S.
He used the dollar sign (typically US) and didn't specify another form of currency with it (e.g., $CAD), so because of #1 this is a reasonable assumption.
I don't know where you shop but 500 GB hard drives are $100-$110. Anyway, disk storage isn't the (only) problem. Those bits have to be written and read to/from the hard drive (slow performance), stored in memory, sent over the network, sent over the Internet, sent to USB drives, stored on backups, etc. Unneeded / excessive bloat is never a good thing. Attitudes like yours are why computers that are 50 times "faster" than they were 10 years ago perform the same or slower. Have you used Vista?
I'm not sure what "most accounts" you're referring to, XP is easily as good as 2k. It took 4 service packs to get 2k straightened out, and it only took XP two service packs:) And obviously right now XP is better if for no other reason than being more modern and supporting more hardware.
Exactly, I'm not impressed anymore when a company focuses on a single problem like efficiency and makes a whole series of products around it, ignoring other attributes. I'd be all for Hitachi if they took this capability/technology and just incorporated it into every drive they sold from here on out. That would be impressive and a significant step forward, rather than trying to exploit one specific group of people with a specialty product.
First of all, as near as I can tell he is wearing a "polo" style shirt - collared, buttons - not a T-shirt. See this picture.
Secondly, if you examine this picture, you'll see that there are three audience members wearing T-shirts, two of them with logo/graphics on them, and a fourth audience member in an un-tucked flanel shirt. Stallman wasn't exactly the one lowering the standards here, so I don't even understand the root of this discussion.
If you're hung up on him being barefoot, remember he was standing behind a podium so I doubt anybody could see. Also I've worked in a number of "professional" offices where "professional/business" attire has been required and it's not uncommon for people (normally females) to remove their shoes and spend part/most of the day barefoot or in socks. I'd be surprised if you haven't seen this as well.
If you're on an OC-24 or above loop your providers may be able to sell you bandwidth in gigabit increments. If you're on an OC-3 or OC-12 loop you can normally buy in 100 megabit increments. Otherwise "legacy" OC-3 is something like 155mbps and OC-12 is 622mbps if you're using the whole line (not breaking it off into T-1's, DS-3's, etc).
Once you have multiple uplinks from different providers you would typically use the BGP protocol to announce your IP space on both providers, then when people try to get to your site they will come down the provider which is the fewest hops for them. If one of the lines goes down, the other one is still active and then everybody will go down the running line until the broken one gets fixed.
But how big is it if you save it with OpenOffice 2.3? 95K (i just checked). Which one, exactly, is bloated? Huh? That's not exactly apples to apples, is it? I just opened a blank spreadsheet (3 sheets, just the same) in OpenOffice.org and saved it as an ODS file, and it's 5.7k, which is 1/3 the size of the blank Excel document. So, to answer your question: Excel. I know what you're saying about using it exclusively to work with others though and it's a valid point, but...
at work I just uninstalled it in favor of Office 2k3 ... no reason to uninstall OOo - just keep both. At work I use.OD[X] exclusively for stuff internally that will be accessed mostly by myself or others on my team, but of course we have Office installed as well. I try to use OOo as much as possible though. Actually there is a whole set of Word docs on our file server that need to be revised anyway (internal use only) and I keep meaning to just recreate them as.odt, just haven't gotten around to it.
2.5" drives which are used in laptops, a quick google revealed this:
http://www.storagereview.com/2005notebook.sr?page=0%2C6
At idle, all tested drives consume less than 1 watt of power. The Momentus 7200.1 dissipates the most at 0.94 watts while the Travelstar 5K100 carves out a niche of its own through dissipating just 0.47 watts. Under a full-bore seek, however, the 5K100 ties Fujitsu's MHT, consuming a relatively hefty 3.2 watts. The 7200 RPM pair follow up, both dissipating 3.0 watts while seeking. The WD Scorpio and Samsung SpinPoint top the charts, consuming just 2.5 and 2.6 watts respectively. Oh and that review was 2 years ago.
Screw percentages, take the amount of money it takes to run the country and divide by the number of people living here - that becomes EVERYBODY's tax responsibility to pay. That's truly a flat tax. Of course that is even less likely to happen than a flat percentage, as the number is likely more than many lower income people even make.
An experienced driver might be able to adjust his braking about once or twice a second, whereas ABS keeps doing it about 50 times a second. No, ABS pumps the brakes 50 times per second, but it doesn't "adjust [its] braking" 50 times per second. This is a common misunderstanding. Once ABS activates it stays on for some pre-determined minimum amount of time, whether it needs to or not. It also frequently activates more often than it really needs to. This is why it's easier than you think for an experienced driver to out-brake ABS. Also, the purpose of ABS isn't to achieve threshold braking, it's to provide for steering control in a panic situation. And if you need to steer you're better off not braking; ABS doesn't change the laws of physics. This is why experienced drivers prefer not having ABS. See the post below yours for more explanation now that I've repeated myself.
And unless you're a stunt driver, it's unlikely you've ever had adequate experience with threshold braking to be reliable in an emergency. You don't have to be a stunt driver, anybody with any track/autocross experience has decent experience with threshold braking. It is unfortunate, though, that in the US it's extremely easy to get a driver's license - the required driving experience is minimal and the practical test is a joke. We'd be much better served if all drivers were required to have some performance driving training so they have some familiarity with hard braking/steering.
I am sorry, but what you are spewing is a lot of BS. So are you.
Once it slides you do not have enough traction to do anything let alone stop. I assure you that you will stop with locked up tires. In fact you normally have quite a lot of traction even locked up, though you're correct that it is less than at threshold, and of course you lose steering control if it's in the front. But to say that a sliding tire doesn't have enough traction to do anything is completely wrong.
No driver, experienced or not can keep the tires at its maximum grip like ABS can. ABS system applies brakes multiples time within a second - no human can reproduce that. Wrong wrong wrong. Think of it this way - ABS releases the brakes multiple times per second. Once ABS activates, often too aggressively for what would otherwise be a temporary lockup even without ABS, it is engaged for a couple of seconds even if not needed (this varies with different ABS systems, but most have a minimum application time which is typically overkill). Remember two things: 1) ABS doesn't need a wheel to be fully locked before it will activate; a sufficient difference in wheel speed will do, and 2) while ABS "pumps" the brakes faster than any human can, it is slower to figure out if it even needs to be doing that - this is probably one of the most misunderstood things about ABS. Also ABS doesn't achieve threshold braking, it's purpose is to provide steering control in a panic situation. A reasonably experienced driver can absolutely out-brake ABS, and a reasonably trained driver also knows not to brake hard and steer at the same time. ABS is for inexperienced drivers who are likely to panic and don't understand the dynamics of vehicle control, which is certainly the majority.
Only situation where ABS is detrimental is on loose surfaces like gravel and heavy snow where the wheel lock up tend to push the material forward which aids in stopping. Yes, it has to be a material that is loose enough to build up in front of the tire but heavy/sticky enough to still provide additional stopping power. I find that the only time ABS is actually helpful is on snow/ice where finding the threshold is too flaky, so I just let ABS do it's job. 99.9% of the rest of the time I'd be better off without it.
I think the grandparent poster was speaking more specifically of Vista for hard drive activity (I'm guessing), I don't know if you've tried it out but the hard drive in Vista just grinds away continuously and you have no idea what it's doing. Especially if the computer was turned off for any period of time - if it sits for a week suddenly Vista thinks it has all kinds of maintenance tasks to catch up on even though nothing changed.
Exactly, OpenOffice.org Draw is great for people who need to do relatively simple flow/logic diagrams. Our IT staff and developers use Visio, but for the rest of the company Draw is fine.
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- Installer supports installing drivers from CD or USB (XP only supported floppies)
- Installer doesn't require any key, you can put that in anytime during the 30-day activation window
- Built-in calendar application. Why Windows didn't have this before I'll never understand.
- Click on the clock in the taskbar and you get a nice calendar pop-up instead of a change the date & time dialog
- "C:\Documents and Settings\" has been renamed "C:\Users\" - you know, what everybody did in DOS 4.0 in 1988?
- Ability to remove all icons from Desktop (including Recycle Bin which couldn't be done in easily in XP)
As you can see none of these things are really that significant, more nuisances, but when you run into these nuisances many times per day for something like 6 years they start to get REALLY ANNOYING. Vista also has a new folder called "C:\ProgramData\" - note that there is no space (as it should be), but they still left "C:\Program Files\" with a space. So now they fixed this problem in Vista 90% of the way but left this one lingering folder, presumably just to piss me and my OCD off.AdBlock Plus doesn't need filterset.g, that was just for the original Adblock. The Plus version (different extension) has built-in subscriptions / subscription updater.
First google result for "CF-to-SATA": http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/26/the-cf-to-sata-hard-drive-adapter/. Here's where you can buy it, it's about $32.
Every time the SSD discussion comes up I see numbers quoted from 10,000 to 10,000,000 writes. Keep in mind the one number on Intel's data sheet was guaranteed writes. Also we're at the end of 2007 and this is fast moving technology. I think a lot of the lower numbers quoted are a couple years old and yet people keep quoting them. Too lazy to look up links right now, but instead of looking at data sheets there were a few recent tests done, and I seem to remember that the results were in the 2,000,0000 - 5,000,000 ballpark.
Browser compatibility issues go both ways, I don't think it's a valid argument for people not adopting linux.
As an example, I've recently run into a number of IE7 compatibility issues. Granted they're not "public" websites, but a number of my customers at work need to use certain types of systems (CRM, whatever) that are only IE6 compatible (still). Also I've run into problems on management interfaces of network devices that aren't IE7 compatible - (a few Dell switches, SonicWall Firewalls, etc.). We keep our stuff pretty up to date and it's getting difficult to find an IE6 browser anymore to manage some of these devices. It's almost to the point where it'd be easier to run IEs4Linux than to actually find an IE6 box.
I used up my modpoints yesterday, so I'll just agree instead - "The Intarwebs" port 80 HTTP only - there are plenty of other services that are perfectly acceptable, even designed to be, used directly. Porting everything under the sun over port 80 isn't some panacea. If a network is well-designed, the db servers will be in a DMZ anyway and there will be other layers of security. And there is no reason to believe that a web server is "designed to be publicly available" and other services are not.
This already exists, look into .NET Remoting for one example. I'm sure there are open source methods as well.
You do know that over the long term most mutual funds do worse than indexes, right?
But none of that has to do with speed limits. To me getting speeding tickets is just a "reasonable driving tax". I'm happy to make my $92.17 donation every few years to the local township and I don't worry about getting caught. Actually I think my last donation was $117.50.
If you want something to rant about for being dangerous on the roads, it's not a "teenage idiot who thinks he's invincible", it's drunk drivers. While I've known a few teenage idiots who have gotten killed in car crashes, they normally only kill themselves. I've known far more people killed by drunk drivers, who weren't the drunk drivers. But nobody likes talking about drunk driving, 'cuz, ya know, everybody has to go home from the bar sometime. I'd rather see speed limits removed altogether and have breathalyzers installed in ignitions instead.
None of the behaviors being discussed here have anything to do with the OS. If you need to open WinRAR before Windows knows it can handle RAR files, that's a problem with WinRAR, not Windows. I assure you if you install say MS Office, that a .doc file will open with Word before any Office program has been run. Same thing on Mac - the APPLICATION has to provide information to the OS to tell it what the app can do. If an APPLICATION on a Mac doesn't properly do this then MacOS will have no idea what the application can do. There's also the issue of multiple apps being registered for a single file type. Anyway, both OS's have the same capabilities (though they go about it differently), but also in both OS's it's up to the APPLICATION to tell the OS what it's capable of doing. If some applications choose to do this on first run instead of upon installation that is not in anyway the OS's fault. There is nothing magical about this stuff. It's your own fault for using .rar files anyway, and especially for choosing WinRAR to open them. Try 7zip.
Do any companies give a crap about A+ certs anymore? It seems I've been ignoring them for almost a decade now. Do you know how to open a computer case? Do you know the IRQ for the keyboard? Congrats... you're A+ certified!
I don't know where you shop but 500 GB hard drives are $100-$110. Anyway, disk storage isn't the (only) problem. Those bits have to be written and read to/from the hard drive (slow performance), stored in memory, sent over the network, sent over the Internet, sent to USB drives, stored on backups, etc. Unneeded / excessive bloat is never a good thing. Attitudes like yours are why computers that are 50 times "faster" than they were 10 years ago perform the same or slower. Have you used Vista?
I'm not sure what "most accounts" you're referring to, XP is easily as good as 2k. It took 4 service packs to get 2k straightened out, and it only took XP two service packs :) And obviously right now XP is better if for no other reason than being more modern and supporting more hardware.
Exactly, I'm not impressed anymore when a company focuses on a single problem like efficiency and makes a whole series of products around it, ignoring other attributes. I'd be all for Hitachi if they took this capability/technology and just incorporated it into every drive they sold from here on out. That would be impressive and a significant step forward, rather than trying to exploit one specific group of people with a specialty product.
Weight alone still has nothing to do with it; it's density, or weight / sq. ft. of surface area.
First of all, as near as I can tell he is wearing a "polo" style shirt - collared, buttons - not a T-shirt. See this picture. Secondly, if you examine this picture, you'll see that there are three audience members wearing T-shirts, two of them with logo/graphics on them, and a fourth audience member in an un-tucked flanel shirt. Stallman wasn't exactly the one lowering the standards here, so I don't even understand the root of this discussion.
If you're hung up on him being barefoot, remember he was standing behind a podium so I doubt anybody could see. Also I've worked in a number of "professional" offices where "professional/business" attire has been required and it's not uncommon for people (normally females) to remove their shoes and spend part/most of the day barefoot or in socks. I'd be surprised if you haven't seen this as well.
If you're on an OC-24 or above loop your providers may be able to sell you bandwidth in gigabit increments. If you're on an OC-3 or OC-12 loop you can normally buy in 100 megabit increments. Otherwise "legacy" OC-3 is something like 155mbps and OC-12 is 622mbps if you're using the whole line (not breaking it off into T-1's, DS-3's, etc).
Once you have multiple uplinks from different providers you would typically use the BGP protocol to announce your IP space on both providers, then when people try to get to your site they will come down the provider which is the fewest hops for them. If one of the lines goes down, the other one is still active and then everybody will go down the running line until the broken one gets fixed.
at work I just uninstalled it in favor of Office 2k3 ... no reason to uninstall OOo - just keep both. At work I use
Screw percentages, take the amount of money it takes to run the country and divide by the number of people living here - that becomes EVERYBODY's tax responsibility to pay. That's truly a flat tax. Of course that is even less likely to happen than a flat percentage, as the number is likely more than many lower income people even make.
I think the grandparent poster was speaking more specifically of Vista for hard drive activity (I'm guessing), I don't know if you've tried it out but the hard drive in Vista just grinds away continuously and you have no idea what it's doing. Especially if the computer was turned off for any period of time - if it sits for a week suddenly Vista thinks it has all kinds of maintenance tasks to catch up on even though nothing changed.
Exactly, OpenOffice.org Draw is great for people who need to do relatively simple flow/logic diagrams. Our IT staff and developers use Visio, but for the rest of the company Draw is fine.