The thing I love about Firefox that never gets a mention is that it enables you to always use your choice of fonts over the fonts specified in a webpage. Chrome and IE don't let you do this - if a webpage specifies Times New Roman, you're stuck with its god awful screen presence. That single feature, plus Adblock (which can be done now) is all I really really want.
But I am not going to look at webpages unless I choose the fonts.
Quite right. Friend of mine bought an HP Jornada back in 1999. Was fine for just typing shit (what she wanted) and a good battery life. Ugly as fuck to look at though (WinCE that is). Eventually she dropped it and cracked the screen, wised up, cashed up, and bought a 12" iBook. Converted!
Nope. What you say is true of the G5 iMacs. The intel iMacs are a fucking nightmare to pull apart. Google it. There's tape around the screen and thermistors to glue and unglue and sorts of fun stuff. Doable but order of magnitude more complicated and awkward than fiddling with a generic PC (or even bog standard wintel laptop).
The driver thing is a real shit. But, unless you hang the printers off a W2000/XP or linux box, you'll never be able to move off XP. Windows 7 will have exactly the same problem. Microsoft were really in bind on that, since a great many older drivers blatantly break the rules about requiring Admin privileges to run. They brought it on themselves for allowing this game to go one for a decade after they new it would be a problem.
Hmmm. Mine doesn't and I also run beefy apps (I do RF chip design on it, so run 3D EM simulators and suck like). I'm pretty happy with it. Do you have indexing turned off, and how have you configured swap?
Quite right, and the Japanese in Manchuria were completely shocked by how quickly the Soviets defeated them. No other western or Chinese army had ever done anything like it to them, but the soviets did use some of their better (and very hardened) troops from the European campaign. In fact, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria is arguably the best text book WW2-style campaign ever mounted. (Of course, the Soviet/Russian and US armies keep themselves trained to re-fight WW2 since that keeps them in business, except the future of warfare is not that...)
That's utter bollocks. I have a workstation with 8GB of RAM running Vista64. No such thing happens. All open apps spring back to life pretty much instantly no matter how long they have been dormant. There's something fucked up in your setup, or you're trolling.
You twat. That attitude is exactly what's screwed up about the US armed forces (and those of most western countries). You assume war is about large armed forces clashing and killing each other. The future of war is not that. Please understand: designing your armed forces to refight WW2 is not going to help you at all.
You're quite right. The biggest problem is identifying targets, and that needs to be done flying low and slow. The modern fetish for very expensive aircraft flying at 25000 feet and 500 knots trying to hit small targets is a complete waste of time and next to useless. The A10 is by far the most useful aircraft the US army and airforce has flown in the last 40 years, but the hierarchy hates it because it doesn't fit in with their macho fighter jock mentality (as per the rest of the armed forces, they are trained only to refight WW2).
PAE seems to barf on some motherboards - even with latest firmware. It's a really annoying problem, and seems to be a combination of poorly implemented chipsets and BIOS code. It shouldn;t happen, but it does. And not just cheap mobos either. (The same mobos probably wouldn't support a 64bit OS either - it's not just the CPU.)
The other thing - related to what you say - is that a lot of the default settings on Vista suck. It takes five minutes tweaking to get a large performance gain out of Vista (in fairness, Microsoft really did do a shit job of file search indexing compared to google or apple's efforts). When it's set up right, Vista is a significant performance improvement on XP (I agree with your performance to RAM numbers). Superfetch is worth it alone.
Utter tosh. I run 64bit vista for a CAE workstation and it is rock solid and a shitload faster than 32bit XP (never tried 64bit XP) - once it's been tweaked a little (ie, turn off indexing and a few other things).
all of which is completely true, except if the piece of software you need to make your living only runs under windows.
it's been said many times, but really the only thing holding linux back from (plucks number from air), say, 30% market penetration is industry specific software.
in the main market where it really competes on apps, it is doing very well (servers + database).
completely agree. XP does not feel like a modern OS any more, anbd vista fixes a ton of things wrong or daft with XP. vista needs some tweaking out if the box to get large performance gains, so i think microsoft chose a pretty shitty default set up, for reasons i do not understand. the directX 10 thing is silly, but i'm not a gamer so i'm not much affected.
vista64 also seems to have had the happy effect of finally pulling 64 bit computing thru to mainstream, which is a good thing for me as i want to use a few apps with >4gig of memory. i am noticing more developers with 64 bit apps. i hope i am not being naively optimistic.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing I love about Firefox that never gets a mention is that it enables you to always use your choice of fonts over the fonts specified in a webpage. Chrome and IE don't let you do this - if a webpage specifies Times New Roman, you're stuck with its god awful screen presence. That single feature, plus Adblock (which can be done now) is all I really really want.
But I am not going to look at webpages unless I choose the fonts.
It's going to be a long wait for the fapFone.
Quite right. Friend of mine bought an HP Jornada back in 1999. Was fine for just typing shit (what she wanted) and a good battery life. Ugly as fuck to look at though (WinCE that is). Eventually she dropped it and cracked the screen, wised up, cashed up, and bought a 12" iBook. Converted!
Nope. What you say is true of the G5 iMacs. The intel iMacs are a fucking nightmare to pull apart. Google it. There's tape around the screen and thermistors to glue and unglue and sorts of fun stuff. Doable but order of magnitude more complicated and awkward than fiddling with a generic PC (or even bog standard wintel laptop).
Confirmed. I have been doing that since 2007. A 20" iMac, C2D (2dn generation Intel). Spanning. Works beautifully.
Three screens I don;t know about.
Frak me. Ronald, is that you....
The driver thing is a real shit. But, unless you hang the printers off a W2000/XP or linux box, you'll never be able to move off XP. Windows 7 will have exactly the same problem. Microsoft were really in bind on that, since a great many older drivers blatantly break the rules about requiring Admin privileges to run. They brought it on themselves for allowing this game to go one for a decade after they new it would be a problem.
Hmmm. Mine doesn't and I also run beefy apps (I do RF chip design on it, so run 3D EM simulators and suck like). I'm pretty happy with it.
Do you have indexing turned off, and how have you configured swap?
In summary: just follow the money!
Common misconception. The Soviets had far bigger designs, and beat the crap out of the Japanese in Manchuria. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_August_Storm
Quite right, and the Japanese in Manchuria were completely shocked by how quickly the Soviets defeated them. No other western or Chinese army had ever done anything like it to them, but the soviets did use some of their better (and very hardened) troops from the European campaign. In fact, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria is arguably the best text book WW2-style campaign ever mounted. (Of course, the Soviet/Russian and US armies keep themselves trained to re-fight WW2 since that keeps them in business, except the future of warfare is not that...)
I was replying to a guy who also had 8GB of memory. Read the parent post next time.
Which is a nice irony since so many of the UI changes in Vista make it look and feel like KDE.
That's utter bollocks. I have a workstation with 8GB of RAM running Vista64. No such thing happens. All open apps spring back to life pretty much instantly no matter how long they have been dormant.
There's something fucked up in your setup, or you're trolling.
nope. i know of about 50 guys in one BU that caught a bullet in 2004. terms were very generous though.
You twat. That attitude is exactly what's screwed up about the US armed forces (and those of most western countries). You assume war is about large armed forces clashing and killing each other. The future of war is not that. Please understand: designing your armed forces to refight WW2 is not going to help you at all.
You're quite right. The biggest problem is identifying targets, and that needs to be done flying low and slow. The modern fetish for very expensive aircraft flying at 25000 feet and 500 knots trying to hit small targets is a complete waste of time and next to useless.
The A10 is by far the most useful aircraft the US army and airforce has flown in the last 40 years, but the hierarchy hates it because it doesn't fit in with their macho fighter jock mentality (as per the rest of the armed forces, they are trained only to refight WW2).
and the head magnets make fantastic fridge magnets - they can hold about a year's worth of bills each.
PAE seems to barf on some motherboards - even with latest firmware. It's a really annoying problem, and seems to be a combination of poorly implemented chipsets and BIOS code. It shouldn;t happen, but it does. And not just cheap mobos either. (The same mobos probably wouldn't support a 64bit OS either - it's not just the CPU.)
Depends entirely on the driver.
The other thing - related to what you say - is that a lot of the default settings on Vista suck. It takes five minutes tweaking to get a large performance gain out of Vista (in fairness, Microsoft really did do a shit job of file search indexing compared to google or apple's efforts). When it's set up right, Vista is a significant performance improvement on XP (I agree with your performance to RAM numbers). Superfetch is worth it alone.
Utter tosh. I run 64bit vista for a CAE workstation and it is rock solid and a shitload faster than 32bit XP (never tried 64bit XP) - once it's been tweaked a little (ie, turn off indexing and a few other things).
Agreed on the brands being corner-cutting shit. I go Gigabyte or Asus, depending on where we are in the chipset cycle etc and cost etc. Usually Asus.
Any thoughts on Sun or Apple motherboards (I have no idea who designs or makes them)?
all of which is completely true, except if the piece of software you need to make your living only runs under windows.
it's been said many times, but really the only thing holding linux back from (plucks number from air), say, 30% market penetration is industry specific software.
in the main market where it really competes on apps, it is doing very well (servers + database).
completely agree. XP does not feel like a modern OS any more, anbd vista fixes a ton of things wrong or daft with XP. vista needs some tweaking out if the box to get large performance gains, so i think microsoft chose a pretty shitty default set up, for reasons i do not understand. the directX 10 thing is silly, but i'm not a gamer so i'm not much affected.
vista64 also seems to have had the happy effect of finally pulling 64 bit computing thru to mainstream, which is a good thing for me as i want to use a few apps with >4gig of memory. i am noticing more developers with 64 bit apps. i hope i am not being naively optimistic.