As has been pointed out many, many,... many times before.
He's the director, as in, head honcho, manager type, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy funded facility. He's undoubtedly familiar with the rules and regulations of the DoE. In addition, he directs a staff over -over- four thousand scientists and management, and commands a budget -over- five hundred million dollars annually.
What should they run as? Should OEMs sell PCs where users aren't even allowed to elevate to Administrator? And you get outraged at the current status quo, imagine your anger and frustration when instead of UAC, you have to call Dell for a challenge response code to install a program as administrator.
Moreover, the functionality in Vista is the same as the functionality in Ubuntu. Gksudo == UAC lite. UAC is crazy overprotective and has a number of security features that gksudo does not, and a number of flaws--mainly in that UAC currently does not provide an auth token for more than exactly one 'operation' as far as Explorer uses it, which results in 2-4 UAC prompts for something like changing permissions on a folder you don't have access to. Alas, this is fixed in 7.
Windows 7 after boot has half the ram utilized, boots in half the time (even though there's more overhead, given that I run Vista 32 bit and 7 64 bit.)
And they finally went over what seems to be every UI element and Windows Forms application in the OS with a fine tooth comb and got rid of all the oddities.
But hey, I'm not going to go crazy and suggest that post-SP1 and after Nvidia and Creative finally solved their driver issues, there was nothing functionally wrong with Vista, and in fact, there was so much more that was -right- about it. Administering a Vista machine is so much less a chore than XP, the quantity and quality of the information you can gather from the advanced settings is much greater, and by the time Vista was done, many of the server 2008 features were complete and made it into the home/workstation OS. This is why Vista has built in backup imaging and restore. This is why you can apply patches to an uninstalled copy of Vista, that's right, you can apply a patch, a driver update, and much more to the ISO. You can resize volumes without offlining them, you can do software RAID in Vista and it's easy to do, no command line or esoteric lingo necessary.
But hey, that's just scratching the service. You know how Apple charges $129 for "Over 300 new features?" the difference between XP and Vista is easily over 3,000 differences. Apple doesn't even bother to hide the fact that they can't come up with an easy 300. Time Machine alone is listed as eleven different features! Almost all of them are part of Vista by default. Although, regrettably, you do need to use a command line to get to the good stuff there.
You just don't get it, and if I told you that RPN calculators would only work if you typed 2 2 * 3 +, or even 2 2 3 * + you'd call me crazy and say there's a bug, the operators are all messed up.
But that's part of the functioning of the calculator. A scientific calculator understands order of operations, a RPN calculator understands postfix notation, and the vast majority of standard, handheld single-line calculators do not.
Google doesn't care, they've already evaluated the costs, the benefits, done some analysis and then they probably took an afternoon siesta (it is the Google office, after all.) After juggling the proposals and attaching velcro to them and throwing them at walls to see which one sticks the best, they've determined Google Video is of greater cost than it is benefit. Or that envelope had better velcro. Who knows in this crazy messed up world anymore? However, Google still 3 you, and that's why Google Video will still be accessible. They're going to ween you off it by preventing future uploads, but you'll still be able to watch all those timeless classics.
Make more money, duh. Why are you even bothering to ask that question?
What would you do if I told you I could halve your income tax? Exactly what you were doing before, except you'd have -more money-. It's a lot easier to set up a bunch of legal entities to do this than to actually move you physically to Luxembourg though.
I know you're trying to make a joke, but even if your drives all last eight years, the probability of several of them failing nearly simultaneously is much higher when buying in bulk than when buying say, a few hard drives a week over the course of a year, or buying from random manufacturers, etc.
Why are you buying a bunch of drives in bulk and then using them all at the same time? I think the Google study found that drives manufactured in the same plant, at close to the same time have a greater probability of failing in twos or threes within short periods of time. Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.
Here's the relevant quote:
"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data." from http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.
And I could respond with an enormous, a truly mind-bogglingly large list of so-called "physical things" that were obvious in hindsight.
Hindsight bias, it's a tendency for all of us to think, "DUH! I should have thought of that!" All a number of mechanical devices have been patented over the years and of course there have been countless occasions when those devices were considered obvious... after the fact.
Sure, it involves a specific physical processor, and a method for achieving an operation more quickly using a particular set of physical electronic messages, "opcodes" if you will, sent to the processor.
That's what always confused me about people saying software patents aren't physical things. I know the "magic smoke" is a popular myth but surely these people don't think their computers run on fairy dust and little elves pushing bits around?
IMO, with judicious use of prior art and a blanket ban on rewriting Patent X so that it's now Patent X On The Internet or Patent X With A Cellphone, I would have no problem with patents.
Let's be honest, whoever manages to patent some of the first algorithms for quantum computers really does deserve some short-term exclusivity for their methodology. Stuff like Shor's Algorithm, that stuff blows me away.
Reboot for drivers to install? Who does that anymore? Why, just the other day, wait, no, two years ago, I installed Vista and it applied nearly every driver update without a reboot.
False dilemma. The problem doesn't have to be Vista or the sound card hardware. It could be any of a number of driver issues. It could be the manufacturer's add-in software for the driver, it could be a hardware issue that developed around the time Vista was installed.
To add credence to this, it is widely known, and you can easily search for this, that a number of high end audio device drivers were poorly rewritten for Vista's new audio stack and that this problem took over a year for most manufacturers to remedy. A driver update or installing SP1 will most likely fix the issue presented in his post.
And I'd like to reiterate, the simple fact is, using commodity hardware available four years ago, my computer can play audio at a higher specification than his computer without glitching, without stuttering, without freezing. If anything, my ears are the weakest link, being unable to detect the 22-24khz maximum frequency. My example proves the problem is not as broad as "Vista," it has to be something more specific to his computer.
My 4 year old Dell (Pentium D 820, integrated audio) can do 16/48 fine.
The problem is your audio card. That's it. Nothing else, it's your audio card. Or rather, the new drivers for it. Stop blaming everything else, because everyone else's observational evidence proves your theory wrong. It's ok, that's how science works, you make a theory, you find new evidence, you examine your theory in light of the new evidence, and you create a new theory.
Initial evidence: Your computer glitches on audio streams. Theory, if perhaps a little overly broad: Vista can't play an audio stream without glitching. Additional evidence: Other people's computers have been playing high quality audio streams for years (not continuously, I'd guess) and they have reported no incidents. Hypothesis A: Your computer's specific properties (hardware, software, aura, karma) are at fault. Hypothesis B: Nearly everyone else has failed to comment about this issue for two years. Occam's Razor suggests A.
This is actually supported by those same popular Linux distros that I frequently like to install to a partition to try out for a bit before installing a new one.
The biggest problem right now is that writing to Vista's NTFS volumes can cause the accidental erasure of volume shadow copy (read: filesystem snapshot) information.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of those ISPs use a Windows Forms wrapper around what is essentially IE. The Trident rendering engine, specifically.
The most prominent example I can think of is Steam, which uses IE to render content for its storefront and player services.
That's a "prominent" example but just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of applications that use the Trident rendering engine.
" where you have to hold the button for a period of time then hit the most inconvenient button on the controller afterward."
So I can play it with my Rock Band controller? Awesome.
Dear Apple Legal,
We don't care.
Signed,
Your Consumers
Dwight, is that you? Get off Slashdot and sell some paper.
- Jim
Where's the thermite?
As has been pointed out many, many, ... many times before.
He's the director, as in, head honcho, manager type, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy funded facility. He's undoubtedly familiar with the rules and regulations of the DoE. In addition, he directs a staff over -over- four thousand scientists and management, and commands a budget -over- five hundred million dollars annually.
How is he not qualified, again?
Yet an exploit in <Windows program> is considered a travesty.
What should they run as? Should OEMs sell PCs where users aren't even allowed to elevate to Administrator? And you get outraged at the current status quo, imagine your anger and frustration when instead of UAC, you have to call Dell for a challenge response code to install a program as administrator.
Moreover, the functionality in Vista is the same as the functionality in Ubuntu. Gksudo == UAC lite. UAC is crazy overprotective and has a number of security features that gksudo does not, and a number of flaws--mainly in that UAC currently does not provide an auth token for more than exactly one 'operation' as far as Explorer uses it, which results in 2-4 UAC prompts for something like changing permissions on a folder you don't have access to. Alas, this is fixed in 7.
Not that you'd notice.
Windows 7 after boot has half the ram utilized, boots in half the time (even though there's more overhead, given that I run Vista 32 bit and 7 64 bit.)
And they finally went over what seems to be every UI element and Windows Forms application in the OS with a fine tooth comb and got rid of all the oddities.
But hey, I'm not going to go crazy and suggest that post-SP1 and after Nvidia and Creative finally solved their driver issues, there was nothing functionally wrong with Vista, and in fact, there was so much more that was -right- about it. Administering a Vista machine is so much less a chore than XP, the quantity and quality of the information you can gather from the advanced settings is much greater, and by the time Vista was done, many of the server 2008 features were complete and made it into the home/workstation OS. This is why Vista has built in backup imaging and restore. This is why you can apply patches to an uninstalled copy of Vista, that's right, you can apply a patch, a driver update, and much more to the ISO. You can resize volumes without offlining them, you can do software RAID in Vista and it's easy to do, no command line or esoteric lingo necessary.
But hey, that's just scratching the service. You know how Apple charges $129 for "Over 300 new features?" the difference between XP and Vista is easily over 3,000 differences. Apple doesn't even bother to hide the fact that they can't come up with an easy 300. Time Machine alone is listed as eleven different features! Almost all of them are part of Vista by default. Although, regrettably, you do need to use a command line to get to the good stuff there.
You just don't get it, and if I told you that RPN calculators would only work if you typed 2 2 * 3 +, or even 2 2 3 * + you'd call me crazy and say there's a bug, the operators are all messed up.
But that's part of the functioning of the calculator. A scientific calculator understands order of operations, a RPN calculator understands postfix notation, and the vast majority of standard, handheld single-line calculators do not.
Figure this out...
Agh, the 3 needs to be <3.
Google doesn't care, they've already evaluated the costs, the benefits, done some analysis and then they probably took an afternoon siesta (it is the Google office, after all.) After juggling the proposals and attaching velcro to them and throwing them at walls to see which one sticks the best, they've determined Google Video is of greater cost than it is benefit. Or that envelope had better velcro. Who knows in this crazy messed up world anymore? However, Google still 3 you, and that's why Google Video will still be accessible. They're going to ween you off it by preventing future uploads, but you'll still be able to watch all those timeless classics.
Enjoy.
Make more money, duh. Why are you even bothering to ask that question?
What would you do if I told you I could halve your income tax? Exactly what you were doing before, except you'd have -more money-. It's a lot easier to set up a bunch of legal entities to do this than to actually move you physically to Luxembourg though.
I know you're trying to make a joke, but even if your drives all last eight years, the probability of several of them failing nearly simultaneously is much higher when buying in bulk than when buying say, a few hard drives a week over the course of a year, or buying from random manufacturers, etc.
Why are you buying a bunch of drives in bulk and then using them all at the same time? I think the Google study found that drives manufactured in the same plant, at close to the same time have a greater probability of failing in twos or threes within short periods of time. Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.
Here's the relevant quote:
"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data." from http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.
And I could respond with an enormous, a truly mind-bogglingly large list of so-called "physical things" that were obvious in hindsight.
Hindsight bias, it's a tendency for all of us to think, "DUH! I should have thought of that!" All a number of mechanical devices have been patented over the years and of course there have been countless occasions when those devices were considered obvious... after the fact.
Sure, it involves a specific physical processor, and a method for achieving an operation more quickly using a particular set of physical electronic messages, "opcodes" if you will, sent to the processor.
That's what always confused me about people saying software patents aren't physical things. I know the "magic smoke" is a popular myth but surely these people don't think their computers run on fairy dust and little elves pushing bits around?
IMO, with judicious use of prior art and a blanket ban on rewriting Patent X so that it's now Patent X On The Internet or Patent X With A Cellphone, I would have no problem with patents.
Let's be honest, whoever manages to patent some of the first algorithms for quantum computers really does deserve some short-term exclusivity for their methodology. Stuff like Shor's Algorithm, that stuff blows me away.
Reboot for drivers to install? Who does that anymore? Why, just the other day, wait, no, two years ago, I installed Vista and it applied nearly every driver update without a reboot.
Why not take the extra money and donate to charity?
I mean, surely you'd be doing more good than the shmuck they get next time, right?
False dilemma. The problem doesn't have to be Vista or the sound card hardware. It could be any of a number of driver issues. It could be the manufacturer's add-in software for the driver, it could be a hardware issue that developed around the time Vista was installed.
To add credence to this, it is widely known, and you can easily search for this, that a number of high end audio device drivers were poorly rewritten for Vista's new audio stack and that this problem took over a year for most manufacturers to remedy. A driver update or installing SP1 will most likely fix the issue presented in his post.
And I'd like to reiterate, the simple fact is, using commodity hardware available four years ago, my computer can play audio at a higher specification than his computer without glitching, without stuttering, without freezing. If anything, my ears are the weakest link, being unable to detect the 22-24khz maximum frequency. My example proves the problem is not as broad as "Vista," it has to be something more specific to his computer.
P.S.: Please, look up logical fallacies.
More information on the "RAM change forced reinstall" please. Sounds like anecdotal FUD.
My 4 year old Dell (Pentium D 820, integrated audio) can do 16/48 fine.
The problem is your audio card. That's it. Nothing else, it's your audio card. Or rather, the new drivers for it. Stop blaming everything else, because everyone else's observational evidence proves your theory wrong. It's ok, that's how science works, you make a theory, you find new evidence, you examine your theory in light of the new evidence, and you create a new theory.
Initial evidence: Your computer glitches on audio streams.
Theory, if perhaps a little overly broad: Vista can't play an audio stream without glitching.
Additional evidence: Other people's computers have been playing high quality audio streams for years (not continuously, I'd guess) and they have reported no incidents.
Hypothesis A: Your computer's specific properties (hardware, software, aura, karma) are at fault.
Hypothesis B: Nearly everyone else has failed to comment about this issue for two years.
Occam's Razor suggests A.
New theory: your computer has a problem.
Done!
This is actually supported by those same popular Linux distros that I frequently like to install to a partition to try out for a bit before installing a new one.
The biggest problem right now is that writing to Vista's NTFS volumes can cause the accidental erasure of volume shadow copy (read: filesystem snapshot) information.
If it's that easy, then perhaps you should implement it as a feature in Linux and garner the respect of everyone in the field.