Bugs are not technical limitations. Converting a cheaper version into a more expensive is. Hacking a non-administrator account into full-access is. Hell, I think that they may be referring to "don't try to run Vista RC2 after the beta license expires". Or "don't try to install drivers that are known to cause crashes and are forbidden to be installed".
Uhm, perhaps they're meaning "You may not hack Vista Home Basic (or whatever the cheapest version is named) into Vista Ultimate by changing a registry key".
That's like saying: "Don't buy HDDs, they're outdated and will be replaced with flash memory in 10 years". Or even better, "Don't buy HDDs or RAM because they'll both be soon be replaced with MRAM".
My guess is: "You see a door with lights on it. If you want to open it, turn to page 42. If you want to wait, turn to page 13." These things can be fun, but I hate it when the book has "branching" resulting in 64 unique stories with 16 different endings. If you want to read everything you'll have to do recursive reading while remembering the "branches" you've already read. Makes you feel like a directory-browsing algorithm:-)
Most windows installations have Cleartype turned off. And Tahoma is a font designed to look good even without smoothing. By default, Windows does anti-aliasing only on really big font sizes.
KDE is fast compared to Gnome (at least in my opinion). Most Linux DEs run slower than Windows because anti-aliasing is turned on. I turned on Cleartype in Windows and simple scrolling of a source code file became significantly slower than without it. And the PC was a Celeron-1300 with 256 megs of RAM and a Radeon 9200, which perfectly runs Quake 3, UT2004 and other games, which need much more power than simple window drawing. As for memory usage, you haven't seen Vista yet. 300 megs right after boot (if you're lucky!). KDE has vector-based icons, an advanced GUI toolkit (much better than MFC) etc.
A truly random distribution can give you one song more than others. After all, it's random, right? So basically everything is possible, including the stuff people usually complain about. Now, if it carefully selects songs so that the same one won't play too frequently, that's not random. You get uniform distribution only at really large numbers, at least 10^3 or more for a two-song playlist.
DRM? What DRM? I'm using RC1 right now and I don't see any sign of Trusted Computing or whatever kind of DRM there may be. What's more, I've heard people whine that it doesn't support unsigned drivers - well, I have an old Geforce 4 MX440 videocard (not supported anymore) and a hacked driver combining things from the XP Forceware, Vista Forceware and a custom *.inf. Windows shows a warning message that the driver's unsigned, and that's all. Works perfectly.
If you notice *any* lag before any dialog box comes up, you should be questioning why. You obviously haven't seen any Java or.NET apps... After I upgraded my Pentium3-1000 with 256 megs of RAM to Pentium D 3200 with 1 gig or RAM, my scanner's driver (written in.NET) is launched just as slow as it did before. And Java apps gobble up memory like candy - most serious apps allocate about 100 megs right after startup and about 170 megs when they're busy doing something. And Java is becoming more and more popular, especially among scientists. Most math software is rewritten or being rewritten in Java. I imagine the nightmare of having 3-4 Java apps running on Vista. 2 gigs of RAM will probably be the minimal amount.
In Europe the standarts are different. I'm not sure but I think that US has GSM-1900 and GSM-800 and some kind of AMPS (D-AMPS or something like that) while in Europe it's GSM-1800 and GSM-900. If someone flies from Europe on a business trip and discovers that their phone won't work, buying a phone that will definetly work at the airport without those shop assistants trying to sell you the most expensivething is a good option.
The money Microsoft loses on Zune is less than on the Xbox. And besides, they have a subscription-based fee, something like 15$/month for unlimited music. They have an opportunity to charge users for EVERY MONTH for a long time because if you don't pay, you won't be able to play DRMd music.
Simple. Microsoft: "We don't have 1080p". Sony: "We'll be the only hi-def console! We are going to gain all hi-def marketshare! We'll base our entire strategy on hi-def!" Microsoft, when Sony's console is about to be released: "We had hi-def the whole time! And because our console is sold for nearly a year, we have a lot more titles than PS3!" This reminds me how Intel released their first 1Ghz chip only two days after AMD did theirs.
How about using this in a non-evil way? Like using an RFID scanner to track your CDs. You can detect if the box contains the wrong DVD (not the one written on the label). Or answer the "what DVDs are in my suitcase" question.
What some people hate is that cameras record everything you do. And if you do something stupid, your potential boss may see it. Remember the story when a guy bought a laptop that was broken and posted everything from its harddrive on the internet? If the camera records someone dancing a jig in the street and the camera operator thinks it's funny, it may appear on YouTube. Can't see why people complain about sound though.
Hehe... When I'm asked to enter a credit card number, I usually enter my real one. It only works in Russia, there's no money on it (and the only reason I got it was because it was free) but the bastards may be charged with CC fraud. Hell, I think there are more carders in Russia than legitimate CC owners:-)
>Guess which one will have the biggest market share? I wouldn't bet on any of them. Remember how bad the iPod was compared to the Nomad? Well, it still won.
But what if you have a spare PC that's just collecting dust anyway? On the other hand, you can turn your kitchen/living room TV into something more useful. Imagine reading a recipe from a kitchen TV screen or checking the weather (or playing a simple game) during some ad. I don't have a PC in my living room and I don't want to run around the whole house after pressing "play".
XP has integrated data CD/DVD burning as well as audio CD burning/ripping. So what? Advanced users use Nero because it's more powerful and an integrated CD burning app can be actually useful. It's guaranteed that a new PC with a burner will be actually able to burn stuff right out of the box. It also lowers the price of drives because they don't have to include Roxio/Nero as they did in the past.
Avast tends to detect a lot of false positives, thinking that keygens/patches or even software I wrote myself are trojans. And its virus database is updated with a significant delay - once I got a 2-day virus in the mail and Avast failed to detect it. Personally, I prefer Kaspersky because its definitions are updated almost instantly after a new virus comes out. And what's more, it's easy to disable. I turn it off completely except when I'm doing risky stuff and of course I do complete monthly checks. It doesn't shout "OMG YOUR VIRUS PROTECTION IS DISABLED YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL DATA". Unfortunately, it slows down the whole system, especially on slow machines.
Have you noticed that most commercial distros are split in two: a free community version and a bit more closed paid-for version? Redhat, Novell and Sun all have "free" distros, but these are less stable and more like something geeks download, use, hack, modify and contribute. In fact ANY distro I've used (Fedora, Mandrake, OpenSuse and (K)ubuntu) required at least one update after a clean install because something (like sound, Konqueror, Kdevelop, or some weird device driver) was always broken. On the other hand, paid versions were more stable and easier to use (and had more software). If you want the "free" version of Windows you can always download Vista Beta and enjoy submitting bugs. You won't be able to hack anything, but the instability will be just the same as in any Linux "testing" distro. When Fedora is released a week after Gnome, you definetly know that it will have bugs. The only consumer-friendly (and fairly stable) distro I know is Ubuntu and that doesn't generate any cash to Canonical.
Betas may be feature complete, but if users complain about the interface or request a feature that's easy to implement, it would be silly to leave everything as it is, right? I've used both Beta 1 and Beta 2 of Windows Media Player 11 (haven't used any other of Microsoft's betas though) and I hardly find any differences except that Beta 2 feels a lot faster and more stable.
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Bugs are not technical limitations. Converting a cheaper version into a more expensive is. Hacking a non-administrator account into full-access is.
Hell, I think that they may be referring to "don't try to run Vista RC2 after the beta license expires". Or "don't try to install drivers that are known to cause crashes and are forbidden to be installed".
Uhm, perhaps they're meaning "You may not hack Vista Home Basic (or whatever the cheapest version is named) into Vista Ultimate by changing a registry key".
Well, my case has a sticker saying "powered by ASUS" referring to the motherboard.
That's like saying: "Don't buy HDDs, they're outdated and will be replaced with flash memory in 10 years". Or even better, "Don't buy HDDs or RAM because they'll both be soon be replaced with MRAM".
My guess is: :-)
"You see a door with lights on it.
If you want to open it, turn to page 42.
If you want to wait, turn to page 13."
These things can be fun, but I hate it when the book has "branching" resulting in 64 unique stories with 16 different endings. If you want to read everything you'll have to do recursive reading while remembering the "branches" you've already read. Makes you feel like a directory-browsing algorithm
Most windows installations have Cleartype turned off. And Tahoma is a font designed to look good even without smoothing. By default, Windows does anti-aliasing only on really big font sizes.
KDE is fast compared to Gnome (at least in my opinion).
Most Linux DEs run slower than Windows because anti-aliasing is turned on. I turned on Cleartype in Windows and simple scrolling of a source code file became significantly slower than without it. And the PC was a Celeron-1300 with 256 megs of RAM and a Radeon 9200, which perfectly runs Quake 3, UT2004 and other games, which need much more power than simple window drawing.
As for memory usage, you haven't seen Vista yet. 300 megs right after boot (if you're lucky!). KDE has vector-based icons, an advanced GUI toolkit (much better than MFC) etc.
A truly random distribution can give you one song more than others. After all, it's random, right? So basically everything is possible, including the stuff people usually complain about. Now, if it carefully selects songs so that the same one won't play too frequently, that's not random.
You get uniform distribution only at really large numbers, at least 10^3 or more for a two-song playlist.
DRM? What DRM? I'm using RC1 right now and I don't see any sign of Trusted Computing or whatever kind of DRM there may be. What's more, I've heard people whine that it doesn't support unsigned drivers - well, I have an old Geforce 4 MX440 videocard (not supported anymore) and a hacked driver combining things from the XP Forceware, Vista Forceware and a custom *.inf. Windows shows a warning message that the driver's unsigned, and that's all. Works perfectly.
I think RC2 accepts RC1 serials; if that's the case, it'll expire somewhere around June 2007.
If you notice *any* lag before any dialog box comes up, you should be questioning why. .NET apps... .NET) is launched just as slow as it did before.
You obviously haven't seen any Java or
After I upgraded my Pentium3-1000 with 256 megs of RAM to Pentium D 3200 with 1 gig or RAM, my scanner's driver (written in
And Java apps gobble up memory like candy - most serious apps allocate about 100 megs right after startup and about 170 megs when they're busy doing something. And Java is becoming more and more popular, especially among scientists. Most math software is rewritten or being rewritten in Java. I imagine the nightmare of having 3-4 Java apps running on Vista. 2 gigs of RAM will probably be the minimal amount.
In Europe the standarts are different. I'm not sure but I think that US has GSM-1900 and GSM-800 and some kind of AMPS (D-AMPS or something like that) while in Europe it's GSM-1800 and GSM-900. If someone flies from Europe on a business trip and discovers that their phone won't work, buying a phone that will definetly work at the airport without those shop assistants trying to sell you the most expensivething is a good option.
The money Microsoft loses on Zune is less than on the Xbox.
And besides, they have a subscription-based fee, something like 15$/month for unlimited music. They have an opportunity to charge users for EVERY MONTH for a long time because if you don't pay, you won't be able to play DRMd music.
Simple.
Microsoft: "We don't have 1080p".
Sony: "We'll be the only hi-def console! We are going to gain all hi-def marketshare! We'll base our entire strategy on hi-def!"
Microsoft, when Sony's console is about to be released: "We had hi-def the whole time! And because our console is sold for nearly a year, we have a lot more titles than PS3!"
This reminds me how Intel released their first 1Ghz chip only two days after AMD did theirs.
How about using this in a non-evil way? Like using an RFID scanner to track your CDs. You can detect if the box contains the wrong DVD (not the one written on the label). Or answer the "what DVDs are in my suitcase" question.
What some people hate is that cameras record everything you do.
And if you do something stupid, your potential boss may see it. Remember the story when a guy bought a laptop that was broken and posted everything from its harddrive on the internet?
If the camera records someone dancing a jig in the street and the camera operator thinks it's funny, it may appear on YouTube.
Can't see why people complain about sound though.
Hehe... :-)
When I'm asked to enter a credit card number, I usually enter my real one. It only works in Russia, there's no money on it (and the only reason I got it was because it was free) but the bastards may be charged with CC fraud. Hell, I think there are more carders in Russia than legitimate CC owners
This reminds me of WINE.
>Guess which one will have the biggest market share?
I wouldn't bet on any of them.
Remember how bad the iPod was compared to the Nomad? Well, it still won.
But what if you have a spare PC that's just collecting dust anyway?
On the other hand, you can turn your kitchen/living room TV into something more useful. Imagine reading a recipe from a kitchen TV screen or checking the weather (or playing a simple game) during some ad.
I don't have a PC in my living room and I don't want to run around the whole house after pressing "play".
XP has integrated data CD/DVD burning as well as audio CD burning/ripping. So what? Advanced users use Nero because it's more powerful and an integrated CD burning app can be actually useful. It's guaranteed that a new PC with a burner will be actually able to burn stuff right out of the box. It also lowers the price of drives because they don't have to include Roxio/Nero as they did in the past.
Two years ago IBM actually made CPUs for Apple's toy computers.
Avast tends to detect a lot of false positives, thinking that keygens/patches or even software I wrote myself are trojans. And its virus database is updated with a significant delay - once I got a 2-day virus in the mail and Avast failed to detect it.
Personally, I prefer Kaspersky because its definitions are updated almost instantly after a new virus comes out. And what's more, it's easy to disable. I turn it off completely except when I'm doing risky stuff and of course I do complete monthly checks. It doesn't shout "OMG YOUR VIRUS PROTECTION IS DISABLED YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL DATA". Unfortunately, it slows down the whole system, especially on slow machines.
Have you noticed that most commercial distros are split in two: a free community version and a bit more closed paid-for version?
Redhat, Novell and Sun all have "free" distros, but these are less stable and more like something geeks download, use, hack, modify and contribute. In fact ANY distro I've used (Fedora, Mandrake, OpenSuse and (K)ubuntu) required at least one update after a clean install because something (like sound, Konqueror, Kdevelop, or some weird device driver) was always broken. On the other hand, paid versions were more stable and easier to use (and had more software).
If you want the "free" version of Windows you can always download Vista Beta and enjoy submitting bugs. You won't be able to hack anything, but the instability will be just the same as in any Linux "testing" distro. When Fedora is released a week after Gnome, you definetly know that it will have bugs. The only consumer-friendly (and fairly stable) distro I know is Ubuntu and that doesn't generate any cash to Canonical.
Betas may be feature complete, but if users complain about the interface or request a feature that's easy to implement, it would be silly to leave everything as it is, right?
I've used both Beta 1 and Beta 2 of Windows Media Player 11 (haven't used any other of Microsoft's betas though) and I hardly find any differences except that Beta 2 feels a lot faster and more stable.