The arguable difference here is that you didn't agree to only eat the peach as a condition of the purchase. In this case you agreed to the condition of only using Apple hardware as a condition of the purchase.
Perhaps Apple makes customers agree to some sort of terms like that when you purchase the OS from Apple directly, but the software is sold by a variety of resellers. And I find it unlikely that Apple requires its distributors to only sell to resellers who will require their customers to agree to Apple's license terms in order to buy the software. I also find it unlikely that you'd have to sign such an agreement when purchasing Leopard with cash at Best Buy.
Thats interesting, because I'm typing this on my quad-core laptop.. www.pcmicroworks.com www.sager.com www.dell.com/xps
Quadcore laptops arent even rare anymore. Expensive, yes, but still pretty common..
Yes, they are still rare. The few "laptops" with quad-core CPUs are using power-hungry desktop or server class CPUs and weigh over >10 lbs. You won't see a quad-core CPU in a traditional (less than 7 lbs.) laptop until these hit the market in the near future.
I think this is a step in the wrong direction. Id rather have them throttle my torrent or whatever then just kick me off the network. Or give me 5GB per month like Verizon does.
I see nothing wrong with this. On DSL networks, the bottleneck is between the DSLAM and the Internet. When congestion occurs, it's easy to add more bandwidth to a node. On cable networks, it's a little worse: each DOCSIS channel is ~38 mbit and shared. When congestion occurs between customers & the node, providers have to split up the node or possibly add more channels(?) for data service. Still, cable providers can just add new equipment & fiber and move some customers to it.
When wireless networks get congested, things aren't as simple. Licensees have a limited amount of bandwidth that must be shared with other services (be it GSM/EDGE vs. HSDPA or CDMA2000/1xRTT vs. 1xEV-DO.) If there's no more bandwidth to allocate, providers can add more capacity with additional base stations (expensive, difficult in some areas), reduce usage, or deploy new technology. And it seems like most providers already do all three to avoid congestion on data networks: those who use large amounts of bandwidth aren't welcome, new base stations are built when needed, and the technology is being upgraded every few years. None of these options can really be implemented
Compared to DOCSIS or ADSL, 3G cellular technologies are slow. DOCSIS is a ~38 mbit shared downstream (per channel). HSDPA (AT&T's current 3G technology) is 1.8 mbit on most devices and 3.6 mbit on newer phones.
I also dont like the idea that they can designate any traffic as P2P. Who decides what is P2P? Seems like a lot of power for them to wield.
P2P isn't very ambiguous: it's any appliation where every user works as a client and a server (BitTorrent, Skype, etc.) There's no clear client-server relationship. Protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, enterprise VPNs, etc. are not P2P. It's clear that the client is connecting to the server.
I see this a lot on Slashdot, and I wonder... where do you keep your money? Banks are companies, as are brokerages. If you bought a house, there is a stunning amount of personal data stored with your realtor and title agency. Schools contain your entire academic record. Hell, the big 3 credit agencies have records that are very easy to access.
Why a mistrust for Google, but not these other services that people use so regularly? Or is everyone here just universally paranoid?:)
My bank/education/credit records are about me, but the data itself isn't mine. It's generated by someone else as a result of my actions. Any company who keeps this kind of data is regulated and uses these records to conduct business. The information is valuable to them and valuable to me.
On the other hand, my address book, mail box, and other documents are all for my own personal use. The contents of the documents stored on a hosted service aren't so important to those offering the services. If a service provider loses all my information, they will lose a customer. The information itself is valuable only to me.
The 1.8GHz Nano setup gets about 25% more performance than the 1.6GHz Atom setup. However the Nano setup uses about 75W under load, while the Atom box uses about 60W. That's about 25% more power consumption/heat output. I imagine an Atom and a Nano setup of equal performance would use equal amounts of juice, or in other words this is a tie in terms of work-per-joule, which is what we're after in mobile processors.
The Intel board could be a lot better if they used mobile chipsets. I have an old Shuttle desktop system based on Intel mobile hardware (915GM chipset.) With a 2.13 GHz Pentium M, the system idled around 35w and peaked just over 51w.
OTOH, people that configure their Apache usually don't use Ubuntu. You don't belong their target market.
Do they? People certainly use Debian, and the Apache configuration is the same. I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people are using Ubuntu on servers instead of Debian; Ubuntu LTS server releases get support for much longer (5 years from release.) The current 8.04.1 LTS server release will receive security updates until 2013. The Debian policy is support for one year after the release of the next version (so if 5.0 is released on time, 4.0 will be unsupported in September 2009.) The last few Linux servers I've set up have been Ubuntu LTS Server instead of Debian stable.
Considering today's free Linux distributions (as in free to download & updates), I'd pick CentOS or Ubuntu LTS for a Linux server because of their long security update periods.
Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going.
I was unaware that my hardware had the ability to report this information to the operating system. Exactly how does this feature work? At what voltage can Vista be sure that a recording device has been attached? What if my VGA cable is connected to a distribution amplifier? What if my DVI signal is connected to a fiber optic extender? What if I'm using optical audio? What if I've hooked up a recording device to the headphone jack on my amplifier?
High resolution video decoding, so the processor doesn't have to chug so much on it? From the article, it sounds like this might be one use of the cell?
It might be possible, but within a year or two, any system sold will probably be able to playback HD video.
Most CPUs sold today can decode 1920x1080 MPEG2 and many can handle VC1 (including the 2.0 GHz Core 2 in this laptop), and just about any GPU sold today can deinterlace 1080i video (although some cards are better than others.) High-end/overclocked Core 2 chips can also decode h.264 1080p. All modern GPUs also do some sort of upscaling (once again, some are better than others.) This laptop's GeForce 9600M GPU should be able to fully decode h.264 1080p video as found on Blu-ray discs, which is the most CPU-intensive video distributed to consumers. Current ATI GPUs decode VC-1 and H.264 and upcoming Intel GPUs will decode H.264 (and possibly VC-1.)
So: - the Cell is unnecessary for 1080p content, unless you're doing heavy postprocessing that can't be implemented on the GPU (or you're using a monitor > 1920x1200 and the Cell can do a better job of scaling) - the Cell is unnecessary for 1080i video content, unless it's been programmed to do better deinterlacing than your video card. (any modern GPU should have pulldown detection, so 1080i film content won't be deinterlaced.) - the Cell is unnecessary for upscaling video, unless it's been programmed to do better scaling than your video card. (this is possible - but for low resolution content, modern CPUs can produce better results than some GPUs as it is.)
In summary, today's mid to high-end systems can already play back HD video without difficulty. The Cell might be able to do some processing tasks better, but how much better?
Because true QoS means that your available bandwidth is shared better between applications, so your Quake session, bittorrent downloads and Internet Phone can coexist. It means you can actually use the machine, rather than wait for other network activity to cease.
This would be a nice feature. But it doesn't solve congestion on a shared connection, and doesn't make a difference on local networks.
It is no more pre-emptible than Linux is when you have the Big Kernel Lock enabled. You will frequently see the machine lock when an application is hogging a resource (usually the network). That is a BIG no-no when doing anything with multimedia or gaming. Lock-ups, however temporary, are a Bad Thing.
Could you elaborate on when this might actually be noticeable?
You even need to ask, given all of the hotfixes and patches out there for security holes? Yeesh. It also eliminates the need for the Vista-style security engine or the XP-style close-everything-see-what-breaks service packs. This means your games, multimedia packages, etc, are more likely to work, and more likely to work well, with far fewer workarounds needed by corporations, which in turn means the software can be used NOW rather than a decade from now.
How will meeting arbitrary security requirements make single-user applications (games, media players) work better? The typical problems with games & multimedia are simply unrelated to security.
Tha's easy. It doesn't have one. That's why you had all those security vulnerabilities due to JPEG images, and why Windows boxes are notoriously hard to secure against even rudimentary Skript Kiddie attacks.
What is your arbitrary definition of "network security"? Windows is not the only operating system vulnerable to buffer overflows, and features have been implemented in Windows 6 (and its contemporaries) to avoid them.
How exactly are Windows boxes notoriously hard to secure against these unnamed rudimentary Skript Kiddie attacks?
Have you seen the bandwidth requirements of a typical LAN party? Have you seen the bandwidth requirements of anyone running their own webcams? Have you seen the overheads and wasted space on networks due to inefficient windowing, crappy MTUs, poor timeouts (you DID look at the replies to the router reboot issue?), lousy buffering and horrible collision avoidance?
What do any of those have to do with Windows networking performance? Are there reproducible deficiencies that you can actually describe? Do they affect anything but a small subset of a minority of Windows?
And no, I don't go to LAN parties; nor do most computer users. Nearly all digital video transmission is compressed and does not use a lot of bandwidth.
Well, maybe you should. A gigabit ethernet card rarely delivers a gigabit, not because it can't but because the OS is so nauseatingly bad that that volume of data simply can't be shifted in a sustainable way.
And until I have storage systems capable of sustaining reads/writes in excess of 100 mbytes/sec, I won't care. Even today, I can get pretty close to 1000 mbit transferring data from RAM to RAM.
No point having a webcam if you can't even shift one copy of the image at the data collection rate.
How many people transmit uncompressed video over a packet-switched network in real-time? How many of them use webcams?
Not much point in using TCP if the windows or buffers are the wrong size - you'd be better off downloading the information via the US postal service. And there's no friggin' way you are going to be able to compete in any serious LAN party gaming if your UDP can't cut it with the jumbo packets, compared to everyone else.
How exactly could Windows be improved in this regard? Would
Yes, but you can't customize any existing Windows install to the amount I can for Linux. For example, my router runs Linux, it is rather minimal, my desktop runs Linux too, as does my laptop, and so does a supercomputer that takes up an entire room.
So what if you can run the same kernel on a small embedded platform and a supercomputer? The kernel configuration optimized for a 200MHz MIPS router with 16 MB of RAM won't be optimal on a 32-core Opteron x86_64. It is because Linux includes so much (different schedulers, tuning paramters, etc.) that it is able to adapt to radically different environments. The ability of Linux to run on an embedded device or a supercomputer doesn't make a standard Linux desktop or server perform better than the same hardware running Windows.
Windows isn't that versatile. And for customizing the kernel I was referring to an easy way to chose what moduals (or whatever the Windows equivalent are) that get loaded on boot and such.
Windows and Linux will only load drivers/modules for things that are being used. On Linux you can disable modules from loading; on Windows you can disable hardware that won't get loaded.
Here's a list of things Windows 7 MUST have, if people are to take it seriously:
How would these features matter to a wide variety of people? Most of them wouldn't make a significant difference for the majority of desktop and server usage. How many people would understand, care, and take Windows seriously because these features were included?
True QoS, not just RSVP (which almost nobody uses and which doesn't scale)
Why do I care?
True pre-emptible support (you need this for better multimedia)
The Windows kernel is already preemptible since at least Windows 2000. What exactly are the deficiencies in the current Microsoft implementation, and how is multimedia usage impaired?
True host security using mandatory access controls and role-based security models (B3 or better, on the Orange Book scale)
How would this enhance gaming, multimedia, or scientific use?
True network security (Microsoft has more programmers than the OpenBSD team, so can audit more code more thoroughly)
What are the current deficiencies in Windows network security?
True logging filesystem (journaling doesn't cut it any more with data centers)
How would this enhance gaming or multimedia use?
True object-oriented desktop (associations by file extension? CP/M called and wants its ideas back)
Can you propose something better than file extensions that won't break compatibility with every other operating system? Would the average user notice anything different than the current implementation of "hide extension"?
True high-performance networking (where's Microsoft's WEB100? you seen much VNIC or RNIC support either?) True clustering (sorry, recompiling MPICH and calling it Windows Cluster Edition doesn't cut it)
How would this be useful to anyone besides those running high-end clusters (that is, a few)?
The 16-bit subsystem. It's time. Ten years ago you could run NT 3.51 without loading the 16 bit subsystem, and it worked fine. Some legacy apps wouldn't run. Any of those left?
The 16-bit subsystem is gone on 64-bit Windows.
Non-USB mouse and keyboard port support. Again, it's time.
Why? I think most laptops still use an internal PS/2 interface for the keyboard & pointing device.
Codecs running in kernel mode. No, the codecs and the DRM do not need to run in kernel mode.
Which codecs run in kernel mode, besides those that are hardware accelerated (in which case the driver/GPU does the work)? I am not aware of any.
Silverlight It solves a problem nobody has.
It wasn't even included in Windows 6.
Implicit Internet Explorer invocation. The user's browser of choice is invoked when necessary, not IE.
It's very rare that I see an application launch IE instead of my default browser. The only application I use regularly that doesn't respect system-wide browser settings is Lotus Notes. The last time this happened to me, the (non-MS) application explicitly launched IE instead of the preferred web browser.
Autorun for media. No running stuff from an inserted disk until a dialog has asked the user if they want to run it.
How would this differ from Windows Vista's current implementation, which lets the user lauch an autorun program if one exists, or perform other tasks (such as opening up a CD/DVD burning program if a blank disk is inserted, or opening up a photo manager if removable media with photos is inserted)?
I want "safe mode" to include a video driver that supports 800x600,1024x768, and 1600x1200 at 16 bit color.
I do not know if Windows lets you change the resolution/bit depth in safe mode, but the driver supports VESA resolutions.
Heck, I'd want "safe mode" now to include internet support for downloading drivers and such.
Safe Mode has supported network access since at least Windows 2000.
I want a tech logon that doesn't give the tech access to anything other than desktop, start menu, control panel, and what apps get loaded of the users. The best buy tech or random computer tech doesn't need access to Joe Users my documents and his entire family's documents to trouble shoot his computer.
Then create an account that does so. Or would you prefer there to be a universal backdoor account?
If a technichian wanted to see unencrypted documents, a separate account won't stop him from getting them.
I'd actually like the tech logon to be able to apply default profile setup over an existing user to fix most of those minor users glitches.
You mean like renaming a user's profile folder (so a new one gets generated,) then copying the user's documents to a new profile folder? Something that would either require a tech to have access to those files, or would be automated? (And if it was automated, why wouldn't the end user be able to do it?)
I want that tech log in logged and the admin user to see a nice readable list of what the tech did/didn't do.
How would this be useful to anyone who can't fix the system him or herself?
Wouldn't anyone who cares enough about this just install a proper screen/activity recording tool?
If this was prevalent, wouldn't techs anticipate it and do anything malicious without booting the operating system?
I want this utility http://www.tgrmn.com/ [tgrmn.com] to be be bought and made part of the base system
This seems like a niche application - way more advanced than what most users care about.
and a defrag service that is trivial to set and forget about.
Windows XP does limited defragmentation of the files used to boot the system. Windows Vista includes background defragmentation.
Recent VM software can show guest windows on the host's desktop. VMware Fusion on Mac calls it Unity; Parallels Desktop on Mac calls it Coherence; VirtualBox (on all host platforms) calls it seamless mode. This feature will be coming to VMware Workstation in the next version, I believe.
I use VMware Fusion right now and recently tried the latest CrossOver Mac 7.0 demo.
The first issue became apparent shortly after I began to install an application. There's no text antialiasing. On VMware, I can use ClearType.
The applications running in CrossOver don't get their own dock icon. They all run under the CrossOver logo. This is most likely due to OS X's X server, which does not seem to have the ability to create dock icons for clients. Nevertheless, this is different than Xming on win32, which does show each application on the taskbar with the window title & its icon.
With VMware's Unity or Parallels' Coherence, each opened Windows application gets its own dock icon.
With Crossover, Window redraws seemed much slower than in VMware, especially when resizing.
Using CrossOver (or Wine) is certainly better than not being able to run Windows applications at all. But virtualized environments have much better compatibility for apps that don't use 3D, can run programs seamlessly on the host desktop, and (in my case) have better looks and performance.
No I don't recall what the actual color limit was, I just remember reading that new line of Mac LCD screens had appeared to revert to pseudo-color emulation using some very small subset of typically available colors...
This is actually true of most LCDs under 24", and increasingly, LCDs under 30". Cheap TN screens are present in almost all laptops and consumer level PC monitors. What are the disadvantages? Most (if not all) are natively 6-bit per color (instead of 8-bit per color). Viewing angles are poor compared to higher quality IPS or PVA/MVA/CPA panels. But response times are typically better, so "high-end" TN panels are popular with gamers.
Not too long ago, panel sizes like 20" 1600x1200 and 24" 1920x1200 were non-TN, but this has changed. The current 20" iMac uses a TN screen - the previous model did not, causing a decrease in picture quality.
Still, bigger LCD panels aren't TN for at least one good reason. The viewing angles would be unacceptable in many environments.
AFAIK services like FiOS and U-verse handle HDTV over IP by making the breakout box an IP multicast client.
FiOS TV service is standard cable TV that runs over fiber right up to the customer's home - thus, it works with analog tuners, unencrypted QAM tuners, and CableCard devices.
I would guess that Verizon went this route (instead of going over IP, like U-verse) for a good reason. AT&T didn't, and the service is limited in the amount of simultaneous streams.
Microsoft has a similar model going with MSDN and lesser licenses and so do thousands of other vendors with a proprietary platform and a paid SDK/API/dev environment.
You can run unsigned/self-signed code on Windows Mobile, which could be made with a free compiler if you like. With the iPhone, you have to pay to run your own software on your own device (unless you resort to hacking it.)
If you make an open source program for the iPhone and distribute it through Apple, users can't take that source and run their own modified version unless they are also reigstered iPhone developers or have hacked their phone.
That's $99 for permission to run your own software on your own device and to distribute applications to others. That's $99 you don't have to pay to run software on Windows Mobile devices. Sure, Apple's distribution method is nice, but for developers, it is not Free (as in Freedom) or free (as in cost). You have to pay Apple to run your own software on the device you paid for, and if you want to distribute your software to people who aren't also paid iPhone developers, you have to go through Apple... who could choose not to distribute it.
Without paying the $99 cost of admission, you can't run your software on a real iPhone without hacking it (although you can run software on the iPhone simulator, which basically runs the iPhone environment compiled for x86.)
Of course, you'd probably want Visual Studio if you did enough Windows Mobile development, but there is a gcc environment available. And a Visual Studio license won't be revoked if you do things that the carrier or device manufacturer don't like.
And if you're a PC developer, then you can be independent without having to go through anyone full stop. It's a crying shame, and a testament to the egregious and undue influence the telecom industry has over our government, that the cell phone market isn't like that too. This kind of shit -- that is, requiring apps to have the "blessing" of the device manufacturer or service provider to work -- ought to be illegal!
Apple's iPhone is the only smartphone that is so restrictive - and out of the current mass market smartphones/PDAs, Windows Mobile seems to be the most free (as in freedom to run what you want.) WM lets you do just about anything short of using certain restricted OS functions (think replacing OS files or overwriting the bootloader.) No application signature is required - the signature requirements can be disabled or you can install your own root certificate. Of course, the native API is the Win32-like Windows CE and the primary development tool, Visual Studio, costs money. (You should be able to write software without it - the SDK is freely downloadable but it requires Visual Studio to install the normal way.) And WM lets you multitask.
All recent Symbian devices do require application signing, although Symbian signs applications free for developers (each application has to be signed for the specific device it will run on.)
I'm a former Opera user, but the thing is that I feel Firefox 3's new Javascript speed enhancements and memory fixes making it so fast (and with the scrolling plugin YASS giving it the final touch of smooth "speed scrolling"), that I can't really switch back at this point. I did with Firefox 2 due to the memory issues, but I doubt I will again until perhaps Opera 10 or something is released.
Opera 9.5 is coming soon. Test builds are available. I've been using the Opera 9.5 betas for the past few months and find it to be much faster than Opera 9.2.
WEP might be easily defeatable to those with the right tools, but it is still a working security measure. It's significantly more than a deterrent (and therefore not security theater).
Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly, because OS X is mostly BSD with a nice GUI and although Linux is very similar to BSD (and other UNIX variants) OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD.
I would argue that OS X is not "mostly BSD with a nice GUI"; that kind of description would be more apt for something like a BSD-based Ubuntu. Instead, I would call it a nice OS that happens to include portions of BSD. It's not like KDE or Gnome, which clearly run on top of the underlying OS. The things that made Nextstep / make OS X notable are not from BSD. You can't take the OS X unique portions of OS X and run them on any other BSD.
Many parts of OS X are significant departures from BSD or anything traditionally considered Unix, such as the kernel's unique driver structure (IOKit; object oriented code in the kernel via Embedded C++), the entire Cocoa API (object oriented API, using Objective-C), the window server (uses PDF; higher level than X11), etc. The Openstep API that Cocoa is based from was ported to other operating systems, including NT - and reimplemented as GNUStep.
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Perhaps Apple makes customers agree to some sort of terms like that when you purchase the OS from Apple directly, but the software is sold by a variety of resellers. And I find it unlikely that Apple requires its distributors to only sell to resellers who will require their customers to agree to Apple's license terms in order to buy the software. I also find it unlikely that you'd have to sign such an agreement when purchasing Leopard with cash at Best Buy.
Yes, they are still rare. The few "laptops" with quad-core CPUs are using power-hungry desktop or server class CPUs and weigh over >10 lbs. You won't see a quad-core CPU in a traditional (less than 7 lbs.) laptop until these hit the market in the near future.
I see nothing wrong with this. On DSL networks, the bottleneck is between the DSLAM and the Internet. When congestion occurs, it's easy to add more bandwidth to a node. On cable networks, it's a little worse: each DOCSIS channel is ~38 mbit and shared. When congestion occurs between customers & the node, providers have to split up the node or possibly add more channels(?) for data service. Still, cable providers can just add new equipment & fiber and move some customers to it.
When wireless networks get congested, things aren't as simple. Licensees have a limited amount of bandwidth that must be shared with other services (be it GSM/EDGE vs. HSDPA or CDMA2000/1xRTT vs. 1xEV-DO.) If there's no more bandwidth to allocate, providers can add more capacity with additional base stations (expensive, difficult in some areas), reduce usage, or deploy new technology. And it seems like most providers already do all three to avoid congestion on data networks: those who use large amounts of bandwidth aren't welcome, new base stations are built when needed, and the technology is being upgraded every few years. None of these options can really be implemented
Compared to DOCSIS or ADSL, 3G cellular technologies are slow. DOCSIS is a ~38 mbit shared downstream (per channel). HSDPA (AT&T's current 3G technology) is 1.8 mbit on most devices and 3.6 mbit on newer phones.
P2P isn't very ambiguous: it's any appliation where every user works as a client and a server (BitTorrent, Skype, etc.) There's no clear client-server relationship. Protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, enterprise VPNs, etc. are not P2P. It's clear that the client is connecting to the server.
My bank/education/credit records are about me, but the data itself isn't mine. It's generated by someone else as a result of my actions. Any company who keeps this kind of data is regulated and uses these records to conduct business. The information is valuable to them and valuable to me.
On the other hand, my address book, mail box, and other documents are all for my own personal use. The contents of the documents stored on a hosted service aren't so important to those offering the services. If a service provider loses all my information, they will lose a customer. The information itself is valuable only to me.
The Intel board could be a lot better if they used mobile chipsets. I have an old Shuttle desktop system based on Intel mobile hardware (915GM chipset.) With a 2.13 GHz Pentium M, the system idled around 35w and peaked just over 51w.
Do they? People certainly use Debian, and the Apache configuration is the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people are using Ubuntu on servers instead of Debian; Ubuntu LTS server releases get support for much longer (5 years from release.) The current 8.04.1 LTS server release will receive security updates until 2013. The Debian policy is support for one year after the release of the next version (so if 5.0 is released on time, 4.0 will be unsupported in September 2009.) The last few Linux servers I've set up have been Ubuntu LTS Server instead of Debian stable.
Considering today's free Linux distributions (as in free to download & updates), I'd pick CentOS or Ubuntu LTS for a Linux server because of their long security update periods.
Dolby Pro Logic II is matrixed surround audio carried over 2ch stereo. It is not a great substitute for an actual AC3 or DTS track.
I was unaware that my hardware had the ability to report this information to the operating system. Exactly how does this feature work? At what voltage can Vista be sure that a recording device has been attached? What if my VGA cable is connected to a distribution amplifier? What if my DVI signal is connected to a fiber optic extender? What if I'm using optical audio? What if I've hooked up a recording device to the headphone jack on my amplifier?
It might be possible, but within a year or two, any system sold will probably be able to playback HD video.
Most CPUs sold today can decode 1920x1080 MPEG2 and many can handle VC1 (including the 2.0 GHz Core 2 in this laptop), and just about any GPU sold today can deinterlace 1080i video (although some cards are better than others.) High-end/overclocked Core 2 chips can also decode h.264 1080p. All modern GPUs also do some sort of upscaling (once again, some are better than others.) This laptop's GeForce 9600M GPU should be able to fully decode h.264 1080p video as found on Blu-ray discs, which is the most CPU-intensive video distributed to consumers. Current ATI GPUs decode VC-1 and H.264 and upcoming Intel GPUs will decode H.264 (and possibly VC-1.)
So:
- the Cell is unnecessary for 1080p content, unless you're doing heavy postprocessing that can't be implemented on the GPU (or you're using a monitor > 1920x1200 and the Cell can do a better job of scaling)
- the Cell is unnecessary for 1080i video content, unless it's been programmed to do better deinterlacing than your video card. (any modern GPU should have pulldown detection, so 1080i film content won't be deinterlaced.)
- the Cell is unnecessary for upscaling video, unless it's been programmed to do better scaling than your video card. (this is possible - but for low resolution content, modern CPUs can produce better results than some GPUs as it is.)
In summary, today's mid to high-end systems can already play back HD video without difficulty. The Cell might be able to do some processing tasks better, but how much better?
This would be a nice feature. But it doesn't solve congestion on a shared connection, and doesn't make a difference on local networks.
Could you elaborate on when this might actually be noticeable?
How will meeting arbitrary security requirements make single-user applications (games, media players) work better? The typical problems with games & multimedia are simply unrelated to security.
What is your arbitrary definition of "network security"? Windows is not the only operating system vulnerable to buffer overflows, and features have been implemented in Windows 6 (and its contemporaries) to avoid them.
How exactly are Windows boxes notoriously hard to secure against these unnamed rudimentary Skript Kiddie attacks?
What do any of those have to do with Windows networking performance? Are there reproducible deficiencies that you can actually describe? Do they affect anything but a small subset of a minority of Windows?
And no, I don't go to LAN parties; nor do most computer users.
Nearly all digital video transmission is compressed and does not use a lot of bandwidth.
And until I have storage systems capable of sustaining reads/writes in excess of 100 mbytes/sec, I won't care. Even today, I can get pretty close to 1000 mbit transferring data from RAM to RAM.
How many people transmit uncompressed video over a packet-switched network in real-time? How many of them use webcams?
How exactly could Windows be improved in this regard? Would
So what if you can run the same kernel on a small embedded platform and a supercomputer? The kernel configuration optimized for a 200MHz MIPS router with 16 MB of RAM won't be optimal on a 32-core Opteron x86_64. It is because Linux includes so much (different schedulers, tuning paramters, etc.) that it is able to adapt to radically different environments. The ability of Linux to run on an embedded device or a supercomputer doesn't make a standard Linux desktop or server perform better than the same hardware running Windows.
Windows and Linux will only load drivers/modules for things that are being used. On Linux you can disable modules from loading; on Windows you can disable hardware that won't get loaded.
How would these features matter to a wide variety of people? Most of them wouldn't make a significant difference for the majority of desktop and server usage. How many people would understand, care, and take Windows seriously because these features were included?
Why do I care?
The Windows kernel is already preemptible since at least Windows 2000. What exactly are the deficiencies in the current Microsoft implementation, and how is multimedia usage impaired?
How would this enhance gaming, multimedia, or scientific use?
What are the current deficiencies in Windows network security?
How would this enhance gaming or multimedia use?
Can you propose something better than file extensions that won't break compatibility with every other operating system? Would the average user notice anything different than the current implementation of "hide extension"?
How would this be useful to anyone besides those running high-end clusters (that is, a few)?
The 16-bit subsystem is gone on 64-bit Windows.
Why? I think most laptops still use an internal PS/2 interface for the keyboard & pointing device.
Which codecs run in kernel mode, besides those that are hardware accelerated (in which case the driver/GPU does the work)? I am not aware of any.
It wasn't even included in Windows 6.
It's very rare that I see an application launch IE instead of my default browser. The only application I use regularly that doesn't respect system-wide browser settings is Lotus Notes. The last time this happened to me, the (non-MS) application explicitly launched IE instead of the preferred web browser.
How would this differ from Windows Vista's current implementation, which lets the user lauch an autorun program if one exists, or perform other tasks (such as opening up a CD/DVD burning program if a blank disk is inserted, or opening up a photo manager if removable media with photos is inserted)?
I do not know if Windows lets you change the resolution/bit depth in safe mode, but the driver supports VESA resolutions.
Safe Mode has supported network access since at least Windows 2000.
Then create an account that does so. Or would you prefer there to be a universal backdoor account?
If a technichian wanted to see unencrypted documents, a separate account won't stop him from getting them.
You mean like renaming a user's profile folder (so a new one gets generated,) then copying the user's documents to a new profile folder? Something that would either require a tech to have access to those files, or would be automated? (And if it was automated, why wouldn't the end user be able to do it?)
How would this be useful to anyone who can't fix the system him or herself?
Wouldn't anyone who cares enough about this just install a proper screen/activity recording tool?
If this was prevalent, wouldn't techs anticipate it and do anything malicious without booting the operating system?
This seems like a niche application - way more advanced than what most users care about.
Windows XP does limited defragmentation of the files used to boot the system. Windows Vista includes background defragmentation.
Recent VM software can show guest windows on the host's desktop. VMware Fusion on Mac calls it Unity; Parallels Desktop on Mac calls it Coherence; VirtualBox (on all host platforms) calls it seamless mode. This feature will be coming to VMware Workstation in the next version, I believe.
I use VMware Fusion right now and recently tried the latest CrossOver Mac 7.0 demo.
The first issue became apparent shortly after I began to install an application. There's no text antialiasing. On VMware, I can use ClearType.
The applications running in CrossOver don't get their own dock icon. They all run under the CrossOver logo. This is most likely due to OS X's X server, which does not seem to have the ability to create dock icons for clients. Nevertheless, this is different than Xming on win32, which does show each application on the taskbar with the window title & its icon.
With VMware's Unity or Parallels' Coherence, each opened Windows application gets its own dock icon.
With Crossover, Window redraws seemed much slower than in VMware, especially when resizing.
Using CrossOver (or Wine) is certainly better than not being able to run Windows applications at all. But virtualized environments have much better compatibility for apps that don't use 3D, can run programs seamlessly on the host desktop, and (in my case) have better looks and performance.
As a taxpayer, it is not my problem that teachers cannot complete their work efficiently or voluntarily work more than they are required to.
This is actually true of most LCDs under 24", and increasingly, LCDs under 30". Cheap TN screens are present in almost all laptops and consumer level PC monitors. What are the disadvantages? Most (if not all) are natively 6-bit per color (instead of 8-bit per color). Viewing angles are poor compared to higher quality IPS or PVA/MVA/CPA panels. But response times are typically better, so "high-end" TN panels are popular with gamers.
Not too long ago, panel sizes like 20" 1600x1200 and 24" 1920x1200 were non-TN, but this has changed. The current 20" iMac uses a TN screen - the previous model did not, causing a decrease in picture quality.
Still, bigger LCD panels aren't TN for at least one good reason. The viewing angles would be unacceptable in many environments.
FiOS TV service is standard cable TV that runs over fiber right up to the customer's home - thus, it works with analog tuners, unencrypted QAM tuners, and CableCard devices.
I would guess that Verizon went this route (instead of going over IP, like U-verse) for a good reason. AT&T didn't, and the service is limited in the amount of simultaneous streams.
You can run unsigned/self-signed code on Windows Mobile, which could be made with a free compiler if you like. With the iPhone, you have to pay to run your own software on your own device (unless you resort to hacking it.)
If you make an open source program for the iPhone and distribute it through Apple, users can't take that source and run their own modified version unless they are also reigstered iPhone developers or have hacked their phone.
That's $99 for permission to run your own software on your own device and to distribute applications to others. That's $99 you don't have to pay to run software on Windows Mobile devices. Sure, Apple's distribution method is nice, but for developers, it is not Free (as in Freedom) or free (as in cost). You have to pay Apple to run your own software on the device you paid for, and if you want to distribute your software to people who aren't also paid iPhone developers, you have to go through Apple... who could choose not to distribute it.
Without paying the $99 cost of admission, you can't run your software on a real iPhone without hacking it (although you can run software on the iPhone simulator, which basically runs the iPhone environment compiled for x86.)
Of course, you'd probably want Visual Studio if you did enough Windows Mobile development, but there is a gcc environment available. And a Visual Studio license won't be revoked if you do things that the carrier or device manufacturer don't like.
Apple's iPhone is the only smartphone that is so restrictive - and out of the current mass market smartphones/PDAs, Windows Mobile seems to be the most free (as in freedom to run what you want.) WM lets you do just about anything short of using certain restricted OS functions (think replacing OS files or overwriting the bootloader.) No application signature is required - the signature requirements can be disabled or you can install your own root certificate. Of course, the native API is the Win32-like Windows CE and the primary development tool, Visual Studio, costs money. (You should be able to write software without it - the SDK is freely downloadable but it requires Visual Studio to install the normal way.) And WM lets you multitask.
All recent Symbian devices do require application signing, although Symbian signs applications free for developers (each application has to be signed for the specific device it will run on.)
Opera 9.5 is coming soon. Test builds are available. I've been using the Opera 9.5 betas for the past few months and find it to be much faster than Opera 9.2.
WEP might be easily defeatable to those with the right tools, but it is still a working security measure. It's significantly more than a deterrent (and therefore not security theater).
Actually, it makes your card invalid unless your legal signature is also "See ID"
I would argue that OS X is not "mostly BSD with a nice GUI"; that kind of description would be more apt for something like a BSD-based Ubuntu. Instead, I would call it a nice OS that happens to include portions of BSD. It's not like KDE or Gnome, which clearly run on top of the underlying OS. The things that made Nextstep / make OS X notable are not from BSD. You can't take the OS X unique portions of OS X and run them on any other BSD.
Many parts of OS X are significant departures from BSD or anything traditionally considered Unix, such as the kernel's unique driver structure (IOKit; object oriented code in the kernel via Embedded C++), the entire Cocoa API (object oriented API, using Objective-C), the window server (uses PDF; higher level than X11), etc. The Openstep API that Cocoa is based from was ported to other operating systems, including NT - and reimplemented as GNUStep.