Will XP be more expensive to get with a new computer than Vista? It depends on the vendor but with the big brand OEMs expect to pay at least as much as you would have paid for the machine with vista and possiblly much more.
As an example here is what dell uk (who have switched to a downgrade based system) are doing
On the vostro (low end buisness) machines i've looked at (which come with vista buisness by default) it is £10 more expensive to get the machine with vista buisness downgraded to XP (you do get both XP and vista media though so you can move back to vista when you wish). vista ultimate and vista ultimate downgraded to XP pro are also availible but obviously at significant extra cost (once again the difference between ultimate and ultimate downgrade is £10).
For the optiplex and precision (higher end buisness) machines i've looked at (which also come with vista buisness by default) the XP downgrade is a free option.
On the home lines (including it seems buying XPS machines through the small buisness site:( ) things look much less rosy. On most of them XP isn't availible at all and where it is availible it is only availible as a downgrade from vista ultimate. At £70 for the upgrade to ultimate plus £10 for the downgrade means you pay £80 extra to get XP on the machine. OUCH
note: comments about buinsess machines are based on the small buisness section of the site, it seems large buisnesses get a wider set of options including a home edition (they don't say if it is basic or premium) of vista.
After June 30, OEMs have to pay retail Wrong, retail availibility ends at the same time as big brand OEM availibility.
System builder packs (which are cheaper than retail, probablly more expensive than the big brand OEMs pay though it is not possible to tell for sure unless you have privilaged access to the records of MS or a big brand OEM) will remain availible until early january (and can be stockpiled if desired). The trouble with using system builder packs is you have to install (or at least re-key) each machine with it's own unique key from the license sticker and then activate it either online or over the phone.
I want to buy another laptop like it soon, but not with Vista. I hope this is still an option. I just checked on that model and it isn't, of course you could buy with vista ultimate and excercise the downgrade rights yourself using existing media (this may require telephone activation though).
It seems to me that sony made the right move with the PS3, sure the high cost of including a blue-ray drive hurt initial sales but it also won them the HD format war. So now you get a player for the victorious HD movie format and a HD game console all rolled into one.
The default file manager and standard file dialogs in gnome (haven't tried kde) have a major flaw, they try and identify files by contents rather than name alone (windows does this for one or two file types but generally relies on the extension). This makes them painfully slow under cetain situations (very large directories and slow drives).
The second option would be to implicitly prepend a / before open requests starting with a drive letter; e.g. C: would become/C:, and D: would become/D:. Set up links at/C: and/D: that point to probably / and/media/cdrom, respectively. Actually this is pretty much what the windows NT line does under the hood. At the kernel level drive letters are just links in a place called "dosdevices".
I think the mistake some people make is to focus on the extremes. At one extreme you have the geeks, they will install whatever they want legally or otherwise.
At the other extreme you have people no technical knowlage, no friends they trust to provide technical advice and no idea that thier are alternatives to the high street. Theese people will end up with vista (and quite likely end up hating it).
But also there are people in the middle, people who have a geek they can turn to for advice but who won't supply and install a pirate copy of whatever windows version they want (either because they are ethically opposed to doing it, because they are afraid of micrsofts anti-pirary measures that encorage people to rat on theier supplier or because they simply aren't prepared to spend the time doing the install). People who have heared vista sucks from friends or had previous bad experiances with it (MS shot themselves in the foot with the whole vista branding on inadequate machines fiasco) and have decided to go out looking for a machine with XP.
And if you go looking for a machine with XP it isn't difficult to find one. Big brand OEMs can easilly offer downgraded systems and whitebox vendors will be able to continue getting system builder packs until next january (and probablly for a bit after as people will stockpile the packs).
At least in my experiance most compilers don't care about encoding beyond expecting the ASCII characters to be in the right place. That is with the exception of quoting characters the bytes from your string constant will just be copied verbatim to your binary.
Yeah, like I said it isn't an imminent problem but one needs to plan where they are going to migrate quite a long time ahead ahead of actually migrating. Especially if the plan is to migrate away from windows.
One somewhat compelling reason is security updates, Running a version of windows that is no longer getting security updates would be a very bad idea in many situations.
It isn't an imminent problem but sooner or later security updates are going to stop for XP. When that happens many are going to feel forced to move (whether it be to vista, windows 7 or away from windows)
Afaict a large chunk of microsofts windows income comes from OEMs. Since MS makes OEM lincenses non transferable demand for those is likely to continue regardless of the rate of new windows releases.
no new releases mean less income from buisnesses, but MS has been working on other carrots to persude companies to buy into software assurance. Most notablly that vista enterprise can only be licensed through software assurance (yes I know there is ultimate but MS has made that deliberately unfriendly to large deployments). The same applies to XP with MUI.
At least from my experiance with dell UK it depends on the machine, on some it's free on others it's chargable and on others it's not availible at all.
also for some reason there are some machines that they refuse to sell you vista buisness with so you have to buy ultimate to get the downgrade rights.
True, but this is something that's not trivial to retrofit onto an application That really depends how the code was structured to start with, if the programmer micro-optimised for the register count on i386 then they probablly won't see much benifit but most programmers don't code like that, they use the number of local variables they need to clearly express the algorithm and let the compiler decide which of them should be stored in registers when.
If the number of local variables used inside tight loops exceeds the number of registers then more registers will be a big benifit.
Most PC's can't handle above 4GB of RAM (not 3GB) because of limitations of the x86 architecture. The limit is 4GB of address space not 4GB of ram, this usually works out to 3.something GB of usable ram (exact ammount will vary depending on what else is in the machine that needs memory addresses).
Intel created Physical Address Extension (PAE) technology to extend this up to (I believe) 8GB IIRC PAE goes up to 64GB of address space.
but it's a kludgy patch on an ancient architecture. correct and if often brings a significant performance loss because of that)
x64 technology bypasses both of these limits In theory maybe, but i've seen plenty of boards that did not support more than 4GB of address space despite having 64 bit processors.
Some 32-bit operating systems for x86 architectures have difficulty supporting more than 3GB of RAM, particularly Windows. 32 bit Windows by default uses a 2G/2G addres space split so no one app can get more than 2GB of ram. It can be reset to a 3G/1G split but this often causes problems with certain drivers. Note that this issue pertains to how much ram one app can get not how much ram all apps together can get.
32 bit Linux usually uses a 3G/1G split though I belive there have been patches to give seperate user and kernel address spaces (this however carries a significant performance penalty on any call into the kernel).
The idea that 64-bit is always faster than 32-bit is a fallacy. 64-bit can be faster than 32-bit if the application was using data structures larger than 32-bit to begin with. Indeed it is sometimes faster sometimes slower, code that uses lots of pointers is likely to be slower (because of the increased pressure on the memory system from larger pointers) arithmetic heavy code is likely to be faster (because it will benifit from the extra general purpose registers).
It's also got that fantastic clause that RMS may retroactively change the terms of your license at any time (Linus ignores that one). The fsf suggest licensing your code under "either version of the license or any later version" but I don't think there is anything in the GPL obliging you to do so.
Unless you're in Britain, in which case it is detrimental to efficiency... as your ass will end up in a cell, because using a phone while driving is illegal. I'm pretty sure that only applies if the phone is handheld, using in car hands free kits while driving was still allowed in britan last time I checked (though whether it should be is another matter)
Dreamhost have about 3 or 4 IP addresses that all Dreamhost-hosted domains resolve to Thier bottom end accounts may well do but "unique IP address" is included in thier list of availible extras and for good reason.
The trouble is with https the ssl negotiation happens before the browser. So you cannot use different certificates based on the name the browser specifies beause you don't have that information yet at the time of ssl negotiation.
Since certificates are almost invariablly for a specific domain this means if you want to use https (and not get scary warnings shown to your users) you need a seperate IP for each domain.
For better or worse most linux distributions have gone down the route of compiling all, it is certainly possible to install the 32 bit compatibility libraries (which most linux distributions do provide though they aren't always installed by default) then rip out the supplied browser and replace it with a 32 bit one but if you do you will have to deal with updating that browser independently and if you used any other plugins provided by your distro find replacements for those too.
and unfortunately the sun plugin can't be used with nspluginwrapper because it is an oji plugin not a npapi plugin.
the real thing to do is to stop letting people transfer ownership of domains mmm it would make life harder for some types of squatter but I get the feeling the cure may be worse than the desise. IMO a site being sold on complete with all it's valuable information in a controlled manner is much better than having it release by the pool to be taken by whatever opertunist takes it up.
what system is this? At least on windows I have never had a problem just downloading the latest java installer from sun and running it regardless of what if any version of sun java was on the machine before.
I'm sure lots of bugs that have potential security implications get quietly fixed (fixed without a security advisory being sent to the distros) in the opensource world too either because the project has a very tight definition of what they count as a security bug (e.g. insisting on a working code execution exploit before considering a bug a security issue), because the project has no mechnism in place for sending security advisories or simply because the people dealing with the bug don't understand it's security implications. Some may even explicitly cover up security issues. (this is one area where it is virtually impossible for an outsider to distinguish between a mistake and a deliberate act).
Firstly openjdk is not pure GPL, it is GPL with a special exception to allow use of the openjdk class libraries with propietry applications. This would severely restrict the number of sources that could be borrowed from even if sun dropped the requirement to grant them permission to use your contribution however they see fit.
I can't see java's licensing model changing in the forseeable future because sun almost certainly has contracts with many customers who want to use Java under other terms and are willing to pay for the privilage.
Slashdot Mirror
Will XP be more expensive to get with a new computer than Vista?
It depends on the vendor but with the big brand OEMs expect to pay at least as much as you would have paid for the machine with vista and possiblly much more.
As an example here is what dell uk (who have switched to a downgrade based system) are doing
On the vostro (low end buisness) machines i've looked at (which come with vista buisness by default) it is £10 more expensive to get the machine with vista buisness downgraded to XP (you do get both XP and vista media though so you can move back to vista when you wish). vista ultimate and vista ultimate downgraded to XP pro are also availible but obviously at significant extra cost (once again the difference between ultimate and ultimate downgrade is £10).
For the optiplex and precision (higher end buisness) machines i've looked at (which also come with vista buisness by default) the XP downgrade is a free option.
On the home lines (including it seems buying XPS machines through the small buisness site :( ) things look much less rosy. On most of them XP isn't availible at all and where it is availible it is only availible as a downgrade from vista ultimate. At £70 for the upgrade to ultimate plus £10 for the downgrade means you pay £80 extra to get XP on the machine. OUCH
note: comments about buinsess machines are based on the small buisness section of the site, it seems large buisnesses get a wider set of options including a home edition (they don't say if it is basic or premium) of vista.
Once support ends there will be no real downside to running a cracked copy.
But personally I think it is unlikely MS will do this.
After June 30, OEMs have to pay retail
Wrong, retail availibility ends at the same time as big brand OEM availibility.
System builder packs (which are cheaper than retail, probablly more expensive than the big brand OEMs pay though it is not possible to tell for sure unless you have privilaged access to the records of MS or a big brand OEM) will remain availible until early january (and can be stockpiled if desired). The trouble with using system builder packs is you have to install (or at least re-key) each machine with it's own unique key from the license sticker and then activate it either online or over the phone.
I want to buy another laptop like it soon, but not with Vista. I hope this is still an option.
I just checked on that model and it isn't, of course you could buy with vista ultimate and excercise the downgrade rights yourself using existing media (this may require telephone activation though).
It seems to me that sony made the right move with the PS3, sure the high cost of including a blue-ray drive hurt initial sales but it also won them the HD format war. So now you get a player for the victorious HD movie format and a HD game console all rolled into one.
The default file manager and standard file dialogs in gnome (haven't tried kde) have a major flaw, they try and identify files by contents rather than name alone (windows does this for one or two file types but generally relies on the extension). This makes them painfully slow under cetain situations (very large directories and slow drives).
it seems like your real problem is badly written software that can't access network resources without a mapped drive letter.
The second option would be to implicitly prepend a / before open requests starting with a drive letter; e.g. C: would become /C:, and D: would become /D:. Set up links at /C: and /D: that point to probably / and /media/cdrom, respectively.
Actually this is pretty much what the windows NT line does under the hood. At the kernel level drive letters are just links in a place called "dosdevices".
I think the mistake some people make is to focus on the extremes. At one extreme you have the geeks, they will install whatever they want legally or otherwise.
At the other extreme you have people no technical knowlage, no friends they trust to provide technical advice and no idea that thier are alternatives to the high street. Theese people will end up with vista (and quite likely end up hating it).
But also there are people in the middle, people who have a geek they can turn to for advice but who won't supply and install a pirate copy of whatever windows version they want (either because they are ethically opposed to doing it, because they are afraid of micrsofts anti-pirary measures that encorage people to rat on theier supplier or because they simply aren't prepared to spend the time doing the install). People who have heared vista sucks from friends or had previous bad experiances with it (MS shot themselves in the foot with the whole vista branding on inadequate machines fiasco) and have decided to go out looking for a machine with XP.
And if you go looking for a machine with XP it isn't difficult to find one. Big brand OEMs can easilly offer downgraded systems and whitebox vendors will be able to continue getting system builder packs until next january (and probablly for a bit after as people will stockpile the packs).
At least in my experiance most compilers don't care about encoding beyond expecting the ASCII characters to be in the right place. That is with the exception of quoting characters the bytes from your string constant will just be copied verbatim to your binary.
Yeah, like I said it isn't an imminent problem but one needs to plan where they are going to migrate quite a long time ahead ahead of actually migrating. Especially if the plan is to migrate away from windows.
One somewhat compelling reason is security updates, Running a version of windows that is no longer getting security updates would be a very bad idea in many situations.
It isn't an imminent problem but sooner or later security updates are going to stop for XP. When that happens many are going to feel forced to move (whether it be to vista, windows 7 or away from windows)
Afaict a large chunk of microsofts windows income comes from OEMs. Since MS makes OEM lincenses non transferable demand for those is likely to continue regardless of the rate of new windows releases.
no new releases mean less income from buisnesses, but MS has been working on other carrots to persude companies to buy into software assurance. Most notablly that vista enterprise can only be licensed through software assurance (yes I know there is ultimate but MS has made that deliberately unfriendly to large deployments). The same applies to XP with MUI.
At least from my experiance with dell UK it depends on the machine, on some it's free on others it's chargable and on others it's not availible at all.
also for some reason there are some machines that they refuse to sell you vista buisness with so you have to buy ultimate to get the downgrade rights.
True, but this is something that's not trivial to retrofit onto an application
That really depends how the code was structured to start with, if the programmer micro-optimised for the register count on i386 then they probablly won't see much benifit but most programmers don't code like that, they use the number of local variables they need to clearly express the algorithm and let the compiler decide which of them should be stored in registers when.
If the number of local variables used inside tight loops exceeds the number of registers then more registers will be a big benifit.
Most PC's can't handle above 4GB of RAM (not 3GB) because of limitations of the x86 architecture.
The limit is 4GB of address space not 4GB of ram, this usually works out to 3.something GB of usable ram (exact ammount will vary depending on what else is in the machine that needs memory addresses).
Intel created Physical Address Extension (PAE) technology to extend this up to (I believe) 8GB
IIRC PAE goes up to 64GB of address space.
but it's a kludgy patch on an ancient architecture.
correct and if often brings a significant performance loss because of that)
x64 technology bypasses both of these limits
In theory maybe, but i've seen plenty of boards that did not support more than 4GB of address space despite having 64 bit processors.
Some 32-bit operating systems for x86 architectures have difficulty supporting more than 3GB of RAM, particularly Windows.
32 bit Windows by default uses a 2G/2G addres space split so no one app can get more than 2GB of ram. It can be reset to a 3G/1G split but this often causes problems with certain drivers. Note that this issue pertains to how much ram one app can get not how much ram all apps together can get.
32 bit Linux usually uses a 3G/1G split though I belive there have been patches to give seperate user and kernel address spaces (this however carries a significant performance penalty on any call into the kernel).
The idea that 64-bit is always faster than 32-bit is a fallacy. 64-bit can be faster than 32-bit if the application was using data structures larger than 32-bit to begin with.
Indeed it is sometimes faster sometimes slower, code that uses lots of pointers is likely to be slower (because of the increased pressure on the memory system from larger pointers) arithmetic heavy code is likely to be faster (because it will benifit from the extra general purpose registers).
It's also got that fantastic clause that RMS may retroactively change the terms of your license at any time (Linus ignores that one).
The fsf suggest licensing your code under "either version of the license or any later version" but I don't think there is anything in the GPL obliging you to do so.
Unless you're in Britain, in which case it is detrimental to efficiency... as your ass will end up in a cell, because using a phone while driving is illegal.
I'm pretty sure that only applies if the phone is handheld, using in car hands free kits while driving was still allowed in britan last time I checked (though whether it should be is another matter)
For better or worse most linux distributions have gone down the route of compiling all,
That should have said
For better or worse most linux distributions have gone down the route of compiling all applications 64 bit (sometimes reffered to as a pure64 setup).
Dreamhost have about 3 or 4 IP addresses that all Dreamhost-hosted domains resolve to
Thier bottom end accounts may well do but "unique IP address" is included in thier list of availible extras and for good reason.
The trouble is with https the ssl negotiation happens before the browser. So you cannot use different certificates based on the name the browser specifies beause you don't have that information yet at the time of ssl negotiation.
Since certificates are almost invariablly for a specific domain this means if you want to use https (and not get scary warnings shown to your users) you need a seperate IP for each domain.
For better or worse most linux distributions have gone down the route of compiling all, it is certainly possible to install the 32 bit compatibility libraries (which most linux distributions do provide though they aren't always installed by default) then rip out the supplied browser and replace it with a 32 bit one but if you do you will have to deal with updating that browser independently and if you used any other plugins provided by your distro find replacements for those too.
and unfortunately the sun plugin can't be used with nspluginwrapper because it is an oji plugin not a npapi plugin.
the real thing to do is to stop letting people transfer ownership of domains
mmm it would make life harder for some types of squatter but I get the feeling the cure may be worse than the desise. IMO a site being sold on complete with all it's valuable information in a controlled manner is much better than having it release by the pool to be taken by whatever opertunist takes it up.
what system is this? At least on windows I have never had a problem just downloading the latest java installer from sun and running it regardless of what if any version of sun java was on the machine before.
I'm sure lots of bugs that have potential security implications get quietly fixed (fixed without a security advisory being sent to the distros) in the opensource world too either because the project has a very tight definition of what they count as a security bug (e.g. insisting on a working code execution exploit before considering a bug a security issue), because the project has no mechnism in place for sending security advisories or simply because the people dealing with the bug don't understand it's security implications. Some may even explicitly cover up security issues. (this is one area where it is virtually impossible for an outsider to distinguish between a mistake and a deliberate act).
Firstly openjdk is not pure GPL, it is GPL with a special exception to allow use of the openjdk class libraries with propietry applications. This would severely restrict the number of sources that could be borrowed from even if sun dropped the requirement to grant them permission to use your contribution however they see fit.
I can't see java's licensing model changing in the forseeable future because sun almost certainly has contracts with many customers who want to use Java under other terms and are willing to pay for the privilage.