I'm not familiar with prefetching application data. I was not aware that any OS kept track of my application usage for this sort of thing. I would expect it to be resource expensive to tabulate the information needed to make predictions concerning my work habits, I'm no CS person, so maybe this is a better idea than it sounds like to me.
I was under the impression that Vista did just this, which was largely a reason of why it appeared to be using so much memory. Obviously the actual processes aren't running until you open the app so logically it may be listed as a part of the OS if you check your usage monitor. I could be completely wrong on this, but I'm sure that I've read it from multiple sources.
Anecdotally, apps seem to open faster in Vista than in XP (in a 2GB machine), though to be fair I use OS X almost exclusively at home and have better things to do at work than screw about with memory management and compare XP to Vista on that regard (like, say, post this message). Of course, at home that 2GB machine also has a 10k RPM Raptor drive in it and I tend to have an auto-defragging utility enabled, but that's true in both environments so should be able to be safely ignored. Vista certainly has plenty of flaws, but in my experience speed is not one of them.
Certainly things can be expected to be slower on an older machine. It's just what happens when you throw six years of OS development, a completely new UI, and bad programming on a system. MS dropped some amount of backwards compatibility in order to push forward technologically. I think they blew it there, as people installing manually will likely have high-end systems they built themselves and everyone else will be getting it on a new machine that's reasonably up-to-date. They could have dropped more backwards compatibility in order to further optimize things by making assumptions about current hardware. It got half-assed in order to try to broaden their target market, while failing to realize that they included maybe three more people by ruining it for a couple million. At the end of the day, when you've got an install-base of 90% of computers worldwide it's impossible to please everyone, especially when so many people are looking for reasons to hate you.
I don't really care, to be honest. Were it not for a couple networking-related issues, I'd have all of my non-Macs running Vista. It runs fine on my machines.
You can't compare a breaker box to PoE. Just like fuses, breakers can be designed to either trip immediately or to allow a quick surge for high startup power items. While PoE is probably reasonably flexible, solid-state electronics like wireless access poitns don't have a surge of power during startup to get the motors cranking. Power draw may fluctuate depending on usage, but expect a relatively constant power requirement. A battery/capacitor based solution would in theory work fine, though of course will increase costs at all access points (and of course relies on being able to draw sufficiently less power than the source can supply in order to charge your backup power source).
Of course unused RAM isn't wasted if you're not doing anything. I want my OS to use some ram, but most I want to be used by the applications I'm running on top of the OS. Most people don't do most of their work inside the OS itself. They do their work inside the applications running on top of the OS and if the OS is hogging all of the RAM then their work will take longer as RAM constraints get tight and everything slows down. No OS in this day in age should require 4GB RAM just to make the OS run "snappier"
That unused memory could be holding prefetched application data. When I said the OS should fill up empty RAM, I meant that as a verb - the OS should have good enough memory management to realize that there's unused RAM, and based off of past usage data for apps attempt to preload apps into that space. My understanding is that Vista's memory manager is designed to function very similarly to this. No, explorer.exe shouldn't require 4GB of RAM. But wouldn't it be great if it knows you tend to fire up Outlook around 9am and at 8:55 starts preloading the data so it's nice and speedy when you end up clicking that icon?
This may be fine for desktops, but not for Laptops which make up > 50% of machines sold to individuals these days. The drives available for a reasonably sized laptop don't reach that much storage, and are a lot more expensive at any size. I bought my laptop less than a year ago and the most storage offered was 120GB, I don't want >10% of my drive, or more than half of my installed ram devoted just to the OS.
Most people don't have any need for that amount of space - not until video download-to-own services really start to take off anyways. Slashdotters are a different breed as we've got our entire DVD collections ripped to our server as.avi files and grab an entire discography off of TPB even though we only wanted one song. They could absolutely trim a lot of things down (or at least make the stuff they're installing worth the space), but most people probably aren't going to be using more than 30GB between their music, photos, and documents - and even they are on the outer edge of usage. It's somewhat of a two-sided thing - in practical terms, it really doesn't matter, but in principle it's much more concerning than RAM/CPU/GPU/VRAM use.
I certainly can't think of a better way to manage resources than to make sure there's as much free RAM as possible. It's not like it's two or more orders of magnitude faster than reading from the hard drive or anything.
Seriously, is anyone going to ever realize that unused RAM is wasted RAM? As long as it's smart about what's being swapped in and when, then so much the better. I'd love to see apps pre-cached.
I'll give you hard drive space, not that it really matters these days with half a terabyte at under $100. But the rest of the system's resources are not consumed the same way, and as such unused resources are being wasted. I didn't buy 4GB just so I can win a pissing contest about how much RAM my system has free. I bought 4GB so my computer can use it. I don't care how it's allocated so long as it provides me a snappier experience (and it does).
No, just one who makes it a prominent part of his/her campaign *cough*Huckabee*cough*. Most of the country is religious. Doesn't bother me so long as our leader's religion is confined to personal choices and not enforced.
Price is hardly an issue with this kind of thing. A wire would certainly be more reliable, but then of course you have the inconvenience of a wire dangling out of your ass (which, I can only assume, is rather severe).
How could a VC firm not be intelligent enough to realize that mail-order perishables isn't going to work out well, especially on cheap heavy things that would be a logistical nightmare to ship?
I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk. I suppose an online milkman type thing would stand a chance but people are so used to running out for milk every day anyways that it just wouldn't make sense. Margins on most foods are just too low for anything of that nature to make sense. I suppose filet mignon could work (and, indeed, I'm pretty sure you can buy it from Amazon these days) since it's got a much more workable price/weight ratio, but this is like pets.com thinking that shipping fifty-pound bags of kitty litter would work out.
In theory that's a great idea, but that can get dog slow unless you have hardware that supports virtualization nicely (VT-supporting processors). Well, I'm sure you can do it better than that without virtualization as other OSs have been doing it long before VT hardware emerged (or it always existed on non-x86 chips) but we're talking about MS here.
Other than for security reasons, a lot of the reason that people recommend using a browser to others that isn't MSIE is page rendering. If they can remedy that, people have less of an incentive to use or recommend alternate browsers - the practical upshot of which to MS is presumably more people using MSN search which translates to ad revenue.
Plus it shows a lot of goodwill. Even as a MS-hating Mac user, I have to admit that they're doing a lot more recently to actually make their customers happy, or at least try. If you create stuff that people want, they'll use it on their own. The old model was lock-in by force, creating all sorts of ill-will and getting a lot of people looking for ways out of the platform. If you just give people what they want, there's no need for the shackles. Sort of making software for their customers rather than their business model, if you will.
For ME, I've locked myself into Firefox because it offers all the features I want (namely, extensions). Previously, I was locked into IE because I had no other choice. The old approach not only meant that I jumped ship as soon as an opportunity arose, but it meant that I love their competition. You know how marketing experts say that you absolutely do not want to have price be your only selling point? It's even worse when your only selling point is a lack of options. When Firefox became a viable option for me, I made the switch. Same for the Mac platform. There's a lot for Microsoft to lose by having their only competitive advantage being their having enough leverage to force their products down your throat. Making IE not suck is certainly in their best interest.
Let's not forget that, at present time, there's no legal way to virtualize OS X in order to this exact type of testing. You can hack it together with an OSX86 install but that defeats the purpose anyways as you're no longer really replicating your original environment.
In my experience, Mail.app's threading doesn't work much better. Desktop apps really need to behave more like Gmail if you ask me - tagging and archiving, and being able to do really fast searches on that metadata. I'd say labels is a slightly imperfect approach if only because the equivalent of Mail's smart folders or saved searches just isn't implemented as well in Gmail. Ironic for a search company I know, but that's life.
Depends on how long you want it in standby. I had OSx86 Tiger on my school Thinkpad last year (T60 I think), and it allowed me to leave my MBP in the room. While it had a crappy screen, it was much easier to carry around and more comfortable to use, not to mention much better battery life. While I experienced those same standby issues, I just disabled standby on closing the lid and carrying it between classes wasn't a problem, even if you couldn't leave it on all night.
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I was under the impression that Vista did just this, which was largely a reason of why it appeared to be using so much memory. Obviously the actual processes aren't running until you open the app so logically it may be listed as a part of the OS if you check your usage monitor. I could be completely wrong on this, but I'm sure that I've read it from multiple sources.
Anecdotally, apps seem to open faster in Vista than in XP (in a 2GB machine), though to be fair I use OS X almost exclusively at home and have better things to do at work than screw about with memory management and compare XP to Vista on that regard (like, say, post this message). Of course, at home that 2GB machine also has a 10k RPM Raptor drive in it and I tend to have an auto-defragging utility enabled, but that's true in both environments so should be able to be safely ignored. Vista certainly has plenty of flaws, but in my experience speed is not one of them.
Certainly things can be expected to be slower on an older machine. It's just what happens when you throw six years of OS development, a completely new UI, and bad programming on a system. MS dropped some amount of backwards compatibility in order to push forward technologically. I think they blew it there, as people installing manually will likely have high-end systems they built themselves and everyone else will be getting it on a new machine that's reasonably up-to-date. They could have dropped more backwards compatibility in order to further optimize things by making assumptions about current hardware. It got half-assed in order to try to broaden their target market, while failing to realize that they included maybe three more people by ruining it for a couple million. At the end of the day, when you've got an install-base of 90% of computers worldwide it's impossible to please everyone, especially when so many people are looking for reasons to hate you.
I don't really care, to be honest. Were it not for a couple networking-related issues, I'd have all of my non-Macs running Vista. It runs fine on my machines.
You can't compare a breaker box to PoE. Just like fuses, breakers can be designed to either trip immediately or to allow a quick surge for high startup power items. While PoE is probably reasonably flexible, solid-state electronics like wireless access poitns don't have a surge of power during startup to get the motors cranking. Power draw may fluctuate depending on usage, but expect a relatively constant power requirement. A battery/capacitor based solution would in theory work fine, though of course will increase costs at all access points (and of course relies on being able to draw sufficiently less power than the source can supply in order to charge your backup power source).
That unused memory could be holding prefetched application data. When I said the OS should fill up empty RAM, I meant that as a verb - the OS should have good enough memory management to realize that there's unused RAM, and based off of past usage data for apps attempt to preload apps into that space. My understanding is that Vista's memory manager is designed to function very similarly to this. No, explorer.exe shouldn't require 4GB of RAM. But wouldn't it be great if it knows you tend to fire up Outlook around 9am and at 8:55 starts preloading the data so it's nice and speedy when you end up clicking that icon?
Most people don't have any need for that amount of space - not until video download-to-own services really start to take off anyways. Slashdotters are a different breed as we've got our entire DVD collections ripped to our server as
You took your Geiger counter to Ruggles Mine?
And to think that I was the paranoid one.
I certainly can't think of a better way to manage resources than to make sure there's as much free RAM as possible. It's not like it's two or more orders of magnitude faster than reading from the hard drive or anything.
Seriously, is anyone going to ever realize that unused RAM is wasted RAM? As long as it's smart about what's being swapped in and when, then so much the better. I'd love to see apps pre-cached.
I'll give you hard drive space, not that it really matters these days with half a terabyte at under $100. But the rest of the system's resources are not consumed the same way, and as such unused resources are being wasted. I didn't buy 4GB just so I can win a pissing contest about how much RAM my system has free. I bought 4GB so my computer can use it. I don't care how it's allocated so long as it provides me a snappier experience (and it does).
No, just one who makes it a prominent part of his/her campaign *cough*Huckabee*cough*. Most of the country is religious. Doesn't bother me so long as our leader's religion is confined to personal choices and not enforced.
There was more than goatse on that page. Much more...
god damn it, why do I keep checking the comment replies?! *shudder*
Price is hardly an issue with this kind of thing. A wire would certainly be more reliable, but then of course you have the inconvenience of a wire dangling out of your ass (which, I can only assume, is rather severe).
If only there was a -1, Gross moderation...
(other sites could have earned you a +1, Gross yet Intriguing point, but we're talking about MySpace)
I know the legal answer is yes, but should it really count if they take and post the pics themselves?
Huh, truth in advertising... a rare occurrence these days. And certainly better than goatse.
Oh goatse... that will haunt me forever.
Ugh, damn. I'm thinking about it again.
Having been super-goatse'd from following a slashdotter's advice before, do I dare probe this domain for a sarcasm tag from work?
Replace "meat" with "whitehouse" and you did an excellent job summing up some awkward situations in middle school.
Luckily back then, websites had about a 22% uptime so you had a pretty good chance of 404ing when a teacher was nearby.
How could a VC firm not be intelligent enough to realize that mail-order perishables isn't going to work out well, especially on cheap heavy things that would be a logistical nightmare to ship?
I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk. I suppose an online milkman type thing would stand a chance but people are so used to running out for milk every day anyways that it just wouldn't make sense. Margins on most foods are just too low for anything of that nature to make sense. I suppose filet mignon could work (and, indeed, I'm pretty sure you can buy it from Amazon these days) since it's got a much more workable price/weight ratio, but this is like pets.com thinking that shipping fifty-pound bags of kitty litter would work out.
Way too late. Just be creative with the Wiimote placement.
I think you were just looking at the other side of the portal, looking at a different window entirely. She's even more clever than you know.
Just keep her away from the cake. Between the sugar and the disappointment to find out about the lie, it'll be a bad experience.
In theory that's a great idea, but that can get dog slow unless you have hardware that supports virtualization nicely (VT-supporting processors). Well, I'm sure you can do it better than that without virtualization as other OSs have been doing it long before VT hardware emerged (or it always existed on non-x86 chips) but we're talking about MS here.
This is the point where I invoke Godwin's Law, right?
Other than for security reasons, a lot of the reason that people recommend using a browser to others that isn't MSIE is page rendering. If they can remedy that, people have less of an incentive to use or recommend alternate browsers - the practical upshot of which to MS is presumably more people using MSN search which translates to ad revenue.
Plus it shows a lot of goodwill. Even as a MS-hating Mac user, I have to admit that they're doing a lot more recently to actually make their customers happy, or at least try. If you create stuff that people want, they'll use it on their own. The old model was lock-in by force, creating all sorts of ill-will and getting a lot of people looking for ways out of the platform. If you just give people what they want, there's no need for the shackles. Sort of making software for their customers rather than their business model, if you will.
For ME, I've locked myself into Firefox because it offers all the features I want (namely, extensions). Previously, I was locked into IE because I had no other choice. The old approach not only meant that I jumped ship as soon as an opportunity arose, but it meant that I love their competition. You know how marketing experts say that you absolutely do not want to have price be your only selling point? It's even worse when your only selling point is a lack of options. When Firefox became a viable option for me, I made the switch. Same for the Mac platform. There's a lot for Microsoft to lose by having their only competitive advantage being their having enough leverage to force their products down your throat. Making IE not suck is certainly in their best interest.
Let's not forget that, at present time, there's no legal way to virtualize OS X in order to this exact type of testing. You can hack it together with an OSX86 install but that defeats the purpose anyways as you're no longer really replicating your original environment.
In my experience, Mail.app's threading doesn't work much better. Desktop apps really need to behave more like Gmail if you ask me - tagging and archiving, and being able to do really fast searches on that metadata. I'd say labels is a slightly imperfect approach if only because the equivalent of Mail's smart folders or saved searches just isn't implemented as well in Gmail. Ironic for a search company I know, but that's life.
I see you've excluded the former step 6 - performing random, pointless hacks in order to get it working reasonably well in IE6.
Depends on how long you want it in standby. I had OSx86 Tiger on my school Thinkpad last year (T60 I think), and it allowed me to leave my MBP in the room. While it had a crappy screen, it was much easier to carry around and more comfortable to use, not to mention much better battery life. While I experienced those same standby issues, I just disabled standby on closing the lid and carrying it between classes wasn't a problem, even if you couldn't leave it on all night.
Don't remind me. Exactly how a text editor can load slower than Photoshop will perplex me until the end of time.
Well, they're clearly not dedicated enough.