clicking into a window only bringing it forward rather than activating the button I clicked on.
What sucks is that they decided to do the same for Quicktime on Windows. It's the only app that doesn't do anything when you click the play/pause button if the window is in the background. Annoying. Especially for a media app. I couldn't imagine WinAMP, which is designed to take up a portion of the screen, leaving the rest to browser/whatever, and is very frequently in the background, having such poor UI behavior.
Aren't newer x86 processors essentially CISC that convert the instructions down to RISC? And RISC processors, like G4/G5, that use instruction sets such as Altivec are actually using some aspects of CISC?
That was my understanding, after reading articles like this one on Ars Technica. If true, it would make fighting over CISC vs. RISC not make a lot of sense.
"The eight-core Xeon 5355 system managed to render our multithreaded POV-Ray test scene using the least total energy, even though its peak power consumption was rather high, because it finished the job in about half the time that the four-way systems did. Similarly, the Xeon 5160 used the least energy in completing our multithreaded MyriMatch search, in part because it completed the task so quickly."
Presumably, the article tests power consumption because businesses are concerned with how much running each of these systems will cost them. If the Xeons managed to win in power consumption because they completed the task in half the time, that has other cost-saving benefits even beyond power consumption. They can use fewer systems to complete tasks within the deadline, complete tasks ahead of schedule (making their business slightly more agile), and/or spend less money on animators waiting for their animations to render.
The same sort of thing applies to web servers; the bottleneck is never the processor.
I've seen a number of shared hosts with the CPU tapped out from PHP processes. It's also the primary reason that people get booted from shared hosts: using too much CPU.
That said, I don't know if a specialized processor would help it any. Many shared hosts seem to be more interested in balancing the load with virtualization.
Here, I'll add another link for the second person to say it didn't exist in XP: PC World
SuperFetch builds on the prefetch capability in Windows XP, which preloads frequently used apps into memory to speed up launch times. Microsoft says SuperFetch not only knows which applications you use most frequently, but which ones you're most likely to use on different days of the week and at different times of day.
The primary difference is SuperFetch ties in with ReadyBoost and accounts for time of day, apparently. Other links say it is more aggressive than Prefetch. But it serves the same purpose as what was already there in XP.
But in the case of FF for Windows, the problem is that Win9x users (and there are many left) will find themselves in the same situation they were with IE: they'll have to keep running the latest older version of the browser that works with their OS, which will quickly become out of date.
If lots of people run Firefox on old PCs, there will be lots of people to develop patches for Fx 2.x.
It works the same as any open source project. The more common the scenario of your use of the project, the more likely lots of other people will be working on it.
In other words, you have nothing to worry about if in fact lots of people run Fx 2.x on old PCs.
Testers will test after the changes. This alpha will give them a good reference point to pull up and verify that the major changes in subsequent versions were what caused any new bugs, rather than the bugs being preexisting and previously undiscovered. Much like a control group in social sciences.
That assumes that there aren't any quirks in the IT departments' design of the company network, systems, or policies, that any quirks are already documented, that the dev's system doesn't have any bugs, and that the dev's testing environment is completely equivalent to the production environment.
Short of all that, they're going to need to work together on something.
And that preference is probably closely linked to a lot of socioeconomic factors like income level, education level, and occupation, all of which could cause people to be more or less well-informed. Unless you control for all those factors, you can't say (and shouldn't imply) that Fox News makes you stupid. It might be that Fox News' viewers were stupid already.
But you can compare coverage of stories side-by-side, and see who got it wrong more often, statistically. Or who interjected more obvious bias more frequently, simply by counting incidents. Websites such as mediamatters.org do that type of thing, or you can compare coverage in various other places on the web. Or look at any study on this type of thing from any group concerned with accuracy in reporting.
If you discover (as I have) that Fox News gets it wrong, likely intentionally, more than any major news source, you can't just say that the people were stupid to start with, even though it certainly plays a part in them choosing to watch it in the first place. If you consider what people watch on TV news to be informing or educating them in any way, then it follows that they must be affected by incorrect and biased news sources, regardless of why they chose to watch those poor news sources in the first place.
So yeah, you're right, they self-select. But that's kind of irrelevant. What they select is inaccurate anyway. And, by definition of it being an "infomation source," it makes them less informed, or worse, misinformed. We can look at the effects (misinformed people), or we can look at the causes (abundant inaccuracies and interjected bias on their shows), and we come to the same conclusion.
A outbound firewall is going to stop popups, spyware and trojans.
A while back, I used to run as admin, like most Windows users. I used ZoneAlarm and had it prompt me every time IE tried to connect. I used Firefox, but all the spyware apps that I came across popped up their ads in IE. So I basically knew if ZoneAlarm prompted me about IE, anytime, it was just about guaranteed to be adware.
I've also caught SaveNow, which was bundled with Bearshare. And a few others. I don't bother running it anymore, and spyware was a bit less vicious then, but it definitely helped some.
Now, running as non-admin, spyware has to ask permission from Windows to install its crap instead of installing, then getting warned by ZoneAlarm. I haven't gotten any spyware in quite a while though, at least a couple years. And I don't run ZoneAlarm because it's not as necessary for me now.
But I still think it would help someone who doesn't have any other defenses.
As someone who has contributed bits and pieces of code here and there, and considering some bigger ideas to be released as GPL, I'm interested in why you'd prefer Apache 2 and MPL. It's all rather murky to me what the differences are. Mind elaborating?
Stopping outgoing traffic is for the obsessively insane.
Not for people who: - run Windows - don't update their OS - don't use a router/firewall - use IE or Outlook Express - run as admin - install anything and everything from warez sites/P2P - visit shady pr0n sites - open random email attachments - don't understand why every website they go to suddenly has popups and why the intarweb is so slow
AllOfMP3.com is still very active. Visa has stopped allowing payments from the US to them, but that's not very surprising. They did the same with online gambling, while the overseas gambling sites are still very much in existence.
Russia is planning to join the WTO though, and in the process may be enacting legislation to satisfy American trade organizations, because essentially, that's what the WTO does to other sovereign nations. At that time, which is sometime not that soon, it may or may not become illegal for AllOfMp3.com to operate under new Russian legislation. That is up to Russia to decide, obviously.
ffdshow is in the middle of the pack, behind mplayer/VLC and ahead of Nero. CoreAVC, while not tested there, is considered to be faster than all of the above.
Re:h264 decoding on vlc player kicks ass!
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Really? I thought doom9.org's semi-consensus was that ffdshow was the best performing decoder for h264?
Could have changed since I last checked I suppose.
"No longer true" is going a bit far. Looking at the details of those cases shows the first determined that "knock and announce" is not required, meaning the perps subject to a granted search warrant have 30 seconds less time to hide their stash. Not a big loss in the freedom dept.
The second determined that if you agree to searches any time, day or night, in your parole conditions, it apparently is Constitutional for the state authorities to follow through on those searches.
It's a far cry from stating that "illegal evidence can't be used in trial" is "no longer true."
Not that we aren't actually losing rights in many areas, but I don't see these 2 cases as particularly unreasonable, or worth any outrage, unless perhaps they took place in your state and you wish for your state to have strong "knock-and-announce" or parole statutes.
HDs are comparatively slow and flash drives are approaching the big enough state where they could replace them in e.g. laptops and workstations.
Way off there. SATA 300 bus is 300 MB/s. Common new drives like the Seagate 320GB 7200.10 transfer at around 70 MB/s. (maximum read)
Meanwhile, USB 2.0 is limited to ~50 MB/s. But the current flash drives aren't even close to reaching that limit:
Typical overall file transfer speeds are about 3 MBytes/s. The highest current overall file transfer speeds are about 10-25 MByte/s. Older, "full speed" 12 Mbit/s devices are limited to a maximum of about 1 MByte/s.
1. Dump c:\windows\prefetch, and lock it where it can't read/write.
That's idiotic.
In fact, all "performance tweaks" involving "cleaning out" anything related to prefetch or prefetch's registry settings are all bogus.
Prefetch is designed to relocate all of your most frequently used programs, and all drivers, system files, etc. required during boot to the outer tracks of the partition, generally in order that they are loaded. Interfering with that will just slow your computer down.
Go into System CP in the Performance section and set the Pagefile to a fixed size. If you let Windows manage it, and you didn't give the VM enough real memory, Windows will go ahead and expand the pagefile as needed.
When I first got my computer in 2002, I got really into tweaking the performance for a while. I turned off services, used BootVis to see exactly what was slowing down the boot and by how much, and multiple defrags with different apps. I got the boot time from [BIOS]->[usable desktop] down to 11 seconds on an essentially clean install plus OEM drivers and updates up to SP1. Everything except the nVidia driver. Installing that brought it to 18 seconds.
What I found was that XP prefetching helps a lot, especially if you force prefetching optimization several times after defragging with the built-in defrag without really changing much on disk in between. Services hurt a lot. And obviously nVidia's driver (or any large driver) slowed it down a lot. Most utilities like Norton CrapAV will slow it down more than almost anything. And SP2 slowed it down considerably.
Currently my boot time is probably about 45 seconds and I don't really have time to reformat/reinstall/tweak to get it back under 20 seconds. You can't really keep it there on XP without constant tweaking anyway.
For that matter, nobody should distribute DVDs, because MPEG-2 is licensed by the same MPEG-LA group.
(Personally, I can't wait for people to move off of XviD and DivX, and on to modern codecs like H.264 and VC-1. Theora doesn't really seem to be part of the picture.)
In my experience, many of these spreadsheets become 3x more complicated than Excel was meant to handle, requiring 3x as much time from the owner to maintain than they should, when assigning a consultant to build a simple solution for the managers/coordinators who wrote the spreadsheet would have cost 1/3 of the amount you're paying said managers/coordinators to tweak a spreadsheet.
Not that spreadsheets are not good for one-offs or basic record-keeping/reporting, or that VBA is not a handy solution for dealing with the limitations of Excel, but that type of spreadsheet is a notorious candidate for major scope creep, at least at the companies where I have worked.
You can either pay "that Excel guru" for wasting his well-paid time tweaking spreadsheets or you can bite the bullet and pay someone who can design systems (or select and customize off-the-shelf solutions) more upfront to solve the problem and save more money in the intermediate to long term. Of course, I've been working with managers long enough to be more than aware of which path you are likely to choose, but I feel it's at least worth your consideration.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, misguided and ill timed though they may be, were most certainly about justice and freedom and, to a lesser extent, WMD and the president has said as much. Should we not at least on this, his beliefs, take him at his word?
You can write a book about your opinion of the President and his policies, but without accounting for widespread public knowledge which contradicts those opinions, your book is not worth the paper it is printed on.
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What sucks is that they decided to do the same for Quicktime on Windows. It's the only app that doesn't do anything when you click the play/pause button if the window is in the background. Annoying. Especially for a media app. I couldn't imagine WinAMP, which is designed to take up a portion of the screen, leaving the rest to browser/whatever, and is very frequently in the background, having such poor UI behavior.
Aren't newer x86 processors essentially CISC that convert the instructions down to RISC? And RISC processors, like G4/G5, that use instruction sets such as Altivec are actually using some aspects of CISC?
That was my understanding, after reading articles like this one on Ars Technica. If true, it would make fighting over CISC vs. RISC not make a lot of sense.
Presumably, the article tests power consumption because businesses are concerned with how much running each of these systems will cost them. If the Xeons managed to win in power consumption because they completed the task in half the time, that has other cost-saving benefits even beyond power consumption. They can use fewer systems to complete tasks within the deadline, complete tasks ahead of schedule (making their business slightly more agile), and/or spend less money on animators waiting for their animations to render.
I've seen a number of shared hosts with the CPU tapped out from PHP processes. It's also the primary reason that people get booted from shared hosts: using too much CPU.
That said, I don't know if a specialized processor would help it any. Many shared hosts seem to be more interested in balancing the load with virtualization.
Yes there was. SuperFetch is an evolution of Prefetch.
Here, I'll add another link for the second person to say it didn't exist in XP: PC World
The primary difference is SuperFetch ties in with ReadyBoost and accounts for time of day, apparently. Other links say it is more aggressive than Prefetch. But it serves the same purpose as what was already there in XP.
Newsflash: in XP it was called Prefetch. It did most of what SuperFetch does, although I assume SuperFetch does it better.
Here, I googled it for you: Channel 9 post complete with illustrations.
If lots of people run Firefox on old PCs, there will be lots of people to develop patches for Fx 2.x.
It works the same as any open source project. The more common the scenario of your use of the project, the more likely lots of other people will be working on it.
In other words, you have nothing to worry about if in fact lots of people run Fx 2.x on old PCs.
Testers will test after the changes. This alpha will give them a good reference point to pull up and verify that the major changes in subsequent versions were what caused any new bugs, rather than the bugs being preexisting and previously undiscovered. Much like a control group in social sciences.
That assumes that there aren't any quirks in the IT departments' design of the company network, systems, or policies, that any quirks are already documented, that the dev's system doesn't have any bugs, and that the dev's testing environment is completely equivalent to the production environment.
Short of all that, they're going to need to work together on something.
But you can compare coverage of stories side-by-side, and see who got it wrong more often, statistically. Or who interjected more obvious bias more frequently, simply by counting incidents. Websites such as mediamatters.org do that type of thing, or you can compare coverage in various other places on the web. Or look at any study on this type of thing from any group concerned with accuracy in reporting.
If you discover (as I have) that Fox News gets it wrong, likely intentionally, more than any major news source, you can't just say that the people were stupid to start with, even though it certainly plays a part in them choosing to watch it in the first place. If you consider what people watch on TV news to be informing or educating them in any way, then it follows that they must be affected by incorrect and biased news sources, regardless of why they chose to watch those poor news sources in the first place.
So yeah, you're right, they self-select. But that's kind of irrelevant. What they select is inaccurate anyway. And, by definition of it being an "infomation source," it makes them less informed, or worse, misinformed. We can look at the effects (misinformed people), or we can look at the causes (abundant inaccuracies and interjected bias on their shows), and we come to the same conclusion.
A while back, I used to run as admin, like most Windows users. I used ZoneAlarm and had it prompt me every time IE tried to connect. I used Firefox, but all the spyware apps that I came across popped up their ads in IE. So I basically knew if ZoneAlarm prompted me about IE, anytime, it was just about guaranteed to be adware.
I've also caught SaveNow, which was bundled with Bearshare. And a few others. I don't bother running it anymore, and spyware was a bit less vicious then, but it definitely helped some.
Now, running as non-admin, spyware has to ask permission from Windows to install its crap instead of installing, then getting warned by ZoneAlarm. I haven't gotten any spyware in quite a while though, at least a couple years. And I don't run ZoneAlarm because it's not as necessary for me now.
But I still think it would help someone who doesn't have any other defenses.
As someone who has contributed bits and pieces of code here and there, and considering some bigger ideas to be released as GPL, I'm interested in why you'd prefer Apache 2 and MPL. It's all rather murky to me what the differences are. Mind elaborating?
Not for people who:
- run Windows
- don't update their OS
- don't use a router/firewall
- use IE or Outlook Express
- run as admin
- install anything and everything from warez sites/P2P
- visit shady pr0n sites
- open random email attachments
- don't understand why every website they go to suddenly has popups and why the intarweb is so slow
aka your average computer user.
AllOfMP3.com is still very active. Visa has stopped allowing payments from the US to them, but that's not very surprising. They did the same with online gambling, while the overseas gambling sites are still very much in existence.
d =181919743 &d=12886483
Russia is planning to join the WTO though, and in the process may be enacting legislation to satisfy American trade organizations, because essentially, that's what the WTO does to other sovereign nations. At that time, which is sometime not that soon, it may or may not become illegal for AllOfMp3.com to operate under new Russian legislation. That is up to Russia to decide, obviously.
You can read their legal FAQs for more info:
http://www.allofmp3.com/press/centre.shtml?s=993&
http://music.allofmp3.com/press/centre.shtml?s=99
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=99402
Ahh, I guess I was wrong.
ateme: 58.78
libav-mplayer: 58.22
moonlight: 55.48
libav-ffdshow: 52.15
libav-ffdshow_old: 52.11
nero: 50.74
elecard: 44.04
ffdshow is in the middle of the pack, behind mplayer/VLC and ahead of Nero. CoreAVC, while not tested there, is considered to be faster than all of the above.
Really? I thought doom9.org's semi-consensus was that ffdshow was the best performing decoder for h264?
Could have changed since I last checked I suppose.
"No longer true" is going a bit far. Looking at the details of those cases shows the first determined that "knock and announce" is not required, meaning the perps subject to a granted search warrant have 30 seconds less time to hide their stash. Not a big loss in the freedom dept.
The second determined that if you agree to searches any time, day or night, in your parole conditions, it apparently is Constitutional for the state authorities to follow through on those searches.
It's a far cry from stating that "illegal evidence can't be used in trial" is "no longer true."
Not that we aren't actually losing rights in many areas, but I don't see these 2 cases as particularly unreasonable, or worth any outrage, unless perhaps they took place in your state and you wish for your state to have strong "knock-and-announce" or parole statutes.
Way off there. SATA 300 bus is 300 MB/s. Common new drives like the Seagate 320GB 7200.10 transfer at around 70 MB/s. (maximum read)
Meanwhile, USB 2.0 is limited to ~50 MB/s. But the current flash drives aren't even close to reaching that limit:
Hard drives vastly outperform flash drives.
That's idiotic.
In fact, all "performance tweaks" involving "cleaning out" anything related to prefetch or prefetch's registry settings are all bogus.
Prefetch is designed to relocate all of your most frequently used programs, and all drivers, system files, etc. required during boot to the outer tracks of the partition, generally in order that they are loaded. Interfering with that will just slow your computer down.
Go into System CP in the Performance section and set the Pagefile to a fixed size. If you let Windows manage it, and you didn't give the VM enough real memory, Windows will go ahead and expand the pagefile as needed.
When I first got my computer in 2002, I got really into tweaking the performance for a while. I turned off services, used BootVis to see exactly what was slowing down the boot and by how much, and multiple defrags with different apps. I got the boot time from [BIOS]->[usable desktop] down to 11 seconds on an essentially clean install plus OEM drivers and updates up to SP1. Everything except the nVidia driver. Installing that brought it to 18 seconds.
What I found was that XP prefetching helps a lot, especially if you force prefetching optimization several times after defragging with the built-in defrag without really changing much on disk in between. Services hurt a lot. And obviously nVidia's driver (or any large driver) slowed it down a lot. Most utilities like Norton CrapAV will slow it down more than almost anything. And SP2 slowed it down considerably.
Currently my boot time is probably about 45 seconds and I don't really have time to reformat/reinstall/tweak to get it back under 20 seconds. You can't really keep it there on XP without constant tweaking anyway.
For that matter, nobody should distribute DVDs, because MPEG-2 is licensed by the same MPEG-LA group.
(Personally, I can't wait for people to move off of XviD and DivX, and on to modern codecs like H.264 and VC-1. Theora doesn't really seem to be part of the picture.)
One-offs are not the issue (as posted).
In my experience, many of these spreadsheets become 3x more complicated than Excel was meant to handle, requiring 3x as much time from the owner to maintain than they should, when assigning a consultant to build a simple solution for the managers/coordinators who wrote the spreadsheet would have cost 1/3 of the amount you're paying said managers/coordinators to tweak a spreadsheet.
Not that spreadsheets are not good for one-offs or basic record-keeping/reporting, or that VBA is not a handy solution for dealing with the limitations of Excel, but that type of spreadsheet is a notorious candidate for major scope creep, at least at the companies where I have worked.
You can either pay "that Excel guru" for wasting his well-paid time tweaking spreadsheets or you can bite the bullet and pay someone who can design systems (or select and customize off-the-shelf solutions) more upfront to solve the problem and save more money in the intermediate to long term. Of course, I've been working with managers long enough to be more than aware of which path you are likely to choose, but I feel it's at least worth your consideration.
Not when his "word"--his policy--in Iraq was that the "the intelligence and facts were being fixed [by the US] around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein from power.
You can write a book about your opinion of the President and his policies, but without accounting for widespread public knowledge which contradicts those opinions, your book is not worth the paper it is printed on.