I haven't used OS X to any great extent, so I'll refrain from talking about things I don't know anything about, but...
Codeweaver's Crossover Office. Yes, this might become avaliable for Mac, sometime in the future. Depends on me finding an intel Mac, depends on Codeweaver finishing the port. There are some Windows apps I really like to have.
You'd use Crossoffice to run what? What exactly do you need it for? Macromedia products?
I don't think there's any real argument against the observation that Windows has a ton of software. Crossover Office runs a large chunk of it, and this option isn't currently available on a Mac. He may or may not have Windows only applications that he uses, but if he does, Wine/Crossover Office tends to be a much nicer solution than QEmu/Virtual PC/VMWare. Unfortunately (or sometimes fortunately), not all Windows applications have a cross platform equivalent.
OpenOffice.org 2.0. NeoOffice/J is klunky. OpenOffice.org 2 in XDarwin is klunkier. OpenOffice.org 2.0 on my SuSE 9.3 system is smooth as silk.
MS Office is available for OS X. It runs great. Try it.
Perhaps he's not interested in getting locked into proprietary MS Office formats? That certainly wouldn't be an unusual goal in a corporate environment.
Personal preference? I like how OOo.org doesn't try and baby me with every mundane task and only end up getting in the way.
I certainly wouldn't use MS Office unless forced to.
I *like* KDE. I've spent the past 3 days trying to get KDE to work properly on my powerbook in a full screen X. Each time I try to install it I get a compile error in FinkCommander. I thought this stuff was supposed to be automatic? Either way, SuSE handles it for me; Yes, the hardware is easier to configure with a Mac (because it comes configured). But my software (That I like to use) is actually easier on Linux, because SuSE configured *everything* for me, Out-Of-Box.
Again, if you are using it in a Corporate Environment, do you want to spend 3 days on each user?
Did you read what he said? He said specifically that he spent 3 fruitless days trying to get KDE working like he wanted on his Mac. The same task on SuSE was simple.
Far, far cheaper hardware. My Athlon 64 3200+ with a Geforce 6800 GT beats the crap out of anything Apple manufacturers right now, at any price. I paid significantly less than an iMac for this setup.
True, the hardware is cheaper. However, my experience with Apple hardware is that it generally has a longer life than PC hardware. You can still use an iMac from 2000 to run OS X.
My desktop computer is an Athlon XP 2000+ (processor was essentially a free upgrade about a year ago, was originally a 1.333 Ghz Thunderbird, other parts are original), 512 megs of RAM, and a GeForce 3, its still screaming fast today. I got it in the summer of 2001, and I don't expect it to get any slower in the next year. Even Windows would probably still run tolerably on it, can't say I've tried that though.
At the very least people could prefix strings they're transmitting with the # of bytes in them, so that memory access is efficient.
In a conversation about programming mistakes, that would seem to be a potentially huge one. Just trust the sender that the TCP packet you just recieved really is 8T, or perhaps 1 byte? The marginal benefits in terms of memory access would seem to be heavily outweighed by the potential for buffer overflows, memory wasting, etc.
Just add a note at the bottom of your page saying something along the lines of "This page uses standards compliant code and works properly in (slew of browsers except IE). Use of Internet Explorer is unsupported and not suggested."
Both my father and my mother *still* use OS/2, though it's in the form of eComStation now, this is on relatively new hardware too. They've been using it (both OS/2 and eComStation) roughly since it's introduction. The same goes for all of the (about 4) machines at my father's office too.
I particularly like how the site has a counter... I refreshed the page because I thought it hadn't loaded properly and noticed the counter had already jumped some 600 hits.
I was surprised to see that nobody had mentioned Nessus and/or Nmap yet. They're excellent at showing you what you're exposing to the outside world. I should however caution you that they're merely a companion on your journey to security, not the path.
I know Google tracks and logs every search query by IP address...
Not quite, Google sets a cookie on your computer that uniquely tracks you regardless of what IP you're browsing from. Not only that, but that cookie will probably outlast your hardware. The expiry on my Google cookie as reported by Konqueror, expires: 30/11/37 07:00 pm. You might want to invest in another layer of tinfoil there...
That's a few days vs. a few minutes (including downloading the right drivers from Creative (in my case)).
Does Creative let you actually download sound drivers for their cards now? The one time I was actually using Windows, I tried to get drivers for my SoundBlaster Live! and it turned out that they only offered upgrades, which were useless if you didn't already an install of the drivers. Long story short being that I was forced to dig up the original CD that came with the card if I wanted sound in Windows. When installing Linux, the sound card just worked, I didn't have to dig for the CD or fruitlessly search the Creative site. I'm not the first person I've heard with this problem either, there was someone here who had a story about it linked in his sig for awhile, among others.
Where are those profits going? To the low level workers that actually make it happen, or to the CEO who is already wildy rich? I wouldn't be surprised to see wages not going up for the majority of workers despite increased profits.
I was seeing a similar pattern, I got about 10 FPS less in Quake 3 when running KDE with all of my usual applications open compared to a bare X server. It turns out that it wasn't KDE, but XMMS. After I turned off "autoscroll song title", I got all of those FPS back. There shouldn't be any performance difference in KDE vs nothing running, just start up time for the game will be a little longer because the kernel will be dumping more things into swap to make room for it.
(wouldn't it be cool to store data from your SQL tables in easy-to-parse flat files for instance? That would make recovery and manipulation a lot simpler)
...I really hope you're not involved with databases in *any* way.
The whole point of a database is to isolate you from the actual representation of the data on disk and to make querying for data easy, so you don't have to parse those files at all! For disaster recovery, I pity you if you prefer to try and extract the data manually from the files on disk themselves when you could use one of the (many) tools (that are part of the DBMS!) designed for exactly this purpose.
Microsoft Research's approach gets around this by re-encoding all the pieces, so that each one that is shared is actually a linear combination of all the pieces, fed into a particular function. The blocks are then distributed with a tag that describes the parameters it contains.
So, essentially what they're doing is bundling in a PAR like system. This will add quite a bit of overhead as you need to "recover" the entire file using the PAR files, rather than just copying them into the correct spot. I don't see this as a particularly effective idea, as BitTorrent for example will share the slices of a file in a random order, thus the last 2% doesn't always have to be slow because you've run out of people with that last 2%. Instead of falling to NIH syndrome, perhaps they could just have a BitTorrent client that is more likely to pick slices of a file to share that aren't widely shared yet, this would seem to be much more effective and less processor intensive.
For those of you who doesn't know, PAR is a system similar to RAID 5 and is in wide use on Usenet and other potentially unreliable mediums. Files are usually distributed in a spanned archive, and if you're just missing a few of those, you can grab enough of the PAR files to fill in. For example, if you were missing 50 megs of rar files, you could have 50 megs of PAR files instead, which could be used to reconstruct the rar files.
Linux preinstalled on any Dell computer would be a massive accelerator for Linux on the desktop. Can you imagine the nightmare that would be for Microsoft? Linux may be easier to install than Windows (and most distros are), but that's immaterial because the number of people who actually install Windows is probably smaller than the number of people who install Linux! Most computers keep the same OS for their entire life, at least in terms of the average home user.
Even if only 10% of people opt for Linux over Windows on their brand new Dell, that's still 10% of a huge number, and would amount to a similarly huge spike in the number of Linux users. This would spark more support for Linux, more competition and more choice -- all of which are Microsoft's worst nightmare.
There is no way that Microsoft can maintain it's current monopoly if it doesn't have complete and total control over companies such as Dell. Furthermore, without their monopoly, Microsoft would actually have to compete on the merits of their software rather than just locking out (or, sometimes buying out for the particularly pesky ones) competitors. This currently is almost entirely unbroken ground for Microsoft, no matter how much money you throw at something, it takes time to shake out all the bugs and produce a quality product. The chances of Microsoft pushing a new version of Windows out the door that can compete on it's own merits within a short timeframe is slim to none at best.
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I'm sure some people who are masochistic enough will run IE7 in Wine anyways, much like they already can with IE6.
Last time I checked, it was 2005. Wasn't XP released in 2001?
Really, the version in KDE >=3.4 is incredible.
I don't think there's any real argument against the observation that Windows has a ton of software. Crossover Office runs a large chunk of it, and this option isn't currently available on a Mac. He may or may not have Windows only applications that he uses, but if he does, Wine/Crossover Office tends to be a much nicer solution than QEmu/Virtual PC/VMWare. Unfortunately (or sometimes fortunately), not all Windows applications have a cross platform equivalent.
Perhaps he's not interested in getting locked into proprietary MS Office formats? That certainly wouldn't be an unusual goal in a corporate environment.
Personal preference? I like how OOo.org doesn't try and baby me with every mundane task and only end up getting in the way.
I certainly wouldn't use MS Office unless forced to.
Did you read what he said? He said specifically that he spent 3 fruitless days trying to get KDE working like he wanted on his Mac. The same task on SuSE was simple.
My desktop computer is an Athlon XP 2000+ (processor was essentially a free upgrade about a year ago, was originally a 1.333 Ghz Thunderbird, other parts are original), 512 megs of RAM, and a GeForce 3, its still screaming fast today. I got it in the summer of 2001, and I don't expect it to get any slower in the next year. Even Windows would probably still run tolerably on it, can't say I've tried that though.
*looks over at his empty friends list on /.*
Oh, that thing.
Gotta love first posts that somehow get moderated "Redundant"...
In a conversation about programming mistakes, that would seem to be a potentially huge one. Just trust the sender that the TCP packet you just recieved really is 8T, or perhaps 1 byte? The marginal benefits in terms of memory access would seem to be heavily outweighed by the potential for buffer overflows, memory wasting, etc.
Just add a note at the bottom of your page saying something along the lines of "This page uses standards compliant code and works properly in (slew of browsers except IE). Use of Internet Explorer is unsupported and not suggested."
Both my father and my mother *still* use OS/2, though it's in the form of eComStation now, this is on relatively new hardware too. They've been using it (both OS/2 and eComStation) roughly since it's introduction. The same goes for all of the (about 4) machines at my father's office too.
Kinda like scientology? All the "cool" people are doing it!
I particularly like how the site has a counter... I refreshed the page because I thought it hadn't loaded properly and noticed the counter had already jumped some 600 hits.
I was surprised to see that nobody had mentioned Nessus and/or Nmap yet. They're excellent at showing you what you're exposing to the outside world. I should however caution you that they're merely a companion on your journey to security, not the path.
Not quite, Google sets a cookie on your computer that uniquely tracks you regardless of what IP you're browsing from. Not only that, but that cookie will probably outlast your hardware. The expiry on my Google cookie as reported by Konqueror, expires: 30/11/37 07:00 pm. You might want to invest in another layer of tinfoil there...
Does Creative let you actually download sound drivers for their cards now? The one time I was actually using Windows, I tried to get drivers for my SoundBlaster Live! and it turned out that they only offered upgrades, which were useless if you didn't already an install of the drivers. Long story short being that I was forced to dig up the original CD that came with the card if I wanted sound in Windows. When installing Linux, the sound card just worked, I didn't have to dig for the CD or fruitlessly search the Creative site. I'm not the first person I've heard with this problem either, there was someone here who had a story about it linked in his sig for awhile, among others.
Where are those profits going? To the low level workers that actually make it happen, or to the CEO who is already wildy rich? I wouldn't be surprised to see wages not going up for the majority of workers despite increased profits.
One would think so, perhaps these ants aren't like the other ants in this respect too?
Does this mean that Bush will have to declare war on this "Wasmannia Auropunctata" too? Or is that just for oil?
I was seeing a similar pattern, I got about 10 FPS less in Quake 3 when running KDE with all of my usual applications open compared to a bare X server. It turns out that it wasn't KDE, but XMMS. After I turned off "autoscroll song title", I got all of those FPS back. There shouldn't be any performance difference in KDE vs nothing running, just start up time for the game will be a little longer because the kernel will be dumping more things into swap to make room for it.
The whole point of a database is to isolate you from the actual representation of the data on disk and to make querying for data easy, so you don't have to parse those files at all! For disaster recovery, I pity you if you prefer to try and extract the data manually from the files on disk themselves when you could use one of the (many) tools (that are part of the DBMS!) designed for exactly this purpose.
Perhaps they're just trying to create enough of a distraction so that people forget that Longhorn still hasn't shipped.
You may be interested in the other comment I posted in this discussion.
So, essentially what they're doing is bundling in a PAR like system. This will add quite a bit of overhead as you need to "recover" the entire file using the PAR files, rather than just copying them into the correct spot. I don't see this as a particularly effective idea, as BitTorrent for example will share the slices of a file in a random order, thus the last 2% doesn't always have to be slow because you've run out of people with that last 2%. Instead of falling to NIH syndrome, perhaps they could just have a BitTorrent client that is more likely to pick slices of a file to share that aren't widely shared yet, this would seem to be much more effective and less processor intensive.
For those of you who doesn't know, PAR is a system similar to RAID 5 and is in wide use on Usenet and other potentially unreliable mediums. Files are usually distributed in a spanned archive, and if you're just missing a few of those, you can grab enough of the PAR files to fill in. For example, if you were missing 50 megs of rar files, you could have 50 megs of PAR files instead, which could be used to reconstruct the rar files.
Yet another innovation from our friends at Microsoft...
Linux preinstalled on any Dell computer would be a massive accelerator for Linux on the desktop. Can you imagine the nightmare that would be for Microsoft? Linux may be easier to install than Windows (and most distros are), but that's immaterial because the number of people who actually install Windows is probably smaller than the number of people who install Linux! Most computers keep the same OS for their entire life, at least in terms of the average home user.
Even if only 10% of people opt for Linux over Windows on their brand new Dell, that's still 10% of a huge number, and would amount to a similarly huge spike in the number of Linux users. This would spark more support for Linux, more competition and more choice -- all of which are Microsoft's worst nightmare.
There is no way that Microsoft can maintain it's current monopoly if it doesn't have complete and total control over companies such as Dell. Furthermore, without their monopoly, Microsoft would actually have to compete on the merits of their software rather than just locking out (or, sometimes buying out for the particularly pesky ones) competitors. This currently is almost entirely unbroken ground for Microsoft, no matter how much money you throw at something, it takes time to shake out all the bugs and produce a quality product. The chances of Microsoft pushing a new version of Windows out the door that can compete on it's own merits within a short timeframe is slim to none at best.
Because everyone knows that your TCP/IP stack is useless without a browser.