Apple's infamous closed-mouthed approach to major OS releases, while great for marketing purposes, isn't always so great for the IT world.
The thing is, they don't wanna be great in the IT world. They wanna show the Mac fans "see? we can do it" and simulatenously provide something to tie together Mac based little networks, where it's not the cheapest or more powerful option, it's the EASIEST option. "It just works" - you know, this is Apple.
While certainly possible (and being done in some datacenters), Apple based server for public facing sites is a terrible idea, though unless you have money to waste and don't care for industry-grade support, so don't confuse the one kind of servers with the other.
You see, the IT world is boring and predictable, it's like the PC guy. The PC guy will put out public betas years in advance and listen to feedback.
The Mac guy will keep quiet and at the last moment, wow the audience with the latest gimmick.
But he's not the kinda guy you'd normally hire in your company. You'll hire the boring and predictable guy, who delivers.
Bottom line: file operations in Vista suck, even if your HD is fast and you have lots of RAM.
My question is: for all users, or some...? I really doubt this happens everywhere, I had the Vista RC2 until recently on my modest machine and copying/moving was as fast as on XP (i.e. normal).
Generalizing that in Vista these are slow kinda skews the issue: quite possibly this is not just unfixable bloat, but is caused by something specific and will be fixed in the coming weeks.
--snip-- "I've seen this bug in action, and trust me, it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM," one Reg reader complained. --snip--
Um, how does this have anything to do with the iPhone?
It's a phone. Don't nitpick.
Wink-wink. Did I say that out loud question mark
What is the point in comparing the two devices? For all I know this phone will turn out to be successful, but it is a completely different product.
Apple sells.. newspapers, most of all. I bet Apple sold more worth of site articles, newspapers and magazines than all business Apple ever had on its own.
Which is why, with all this free advertisement iPhone gets, it'll be quite the shame if it bombs when it's actually released, smiley face.
If you read the article, you would have found out that the problem occured when people were using the device with one hand. So, not that your "combinator" button idea doesn't have merit, it just doesn't apply to this situation.
I find it hard to believe you'll be running down a hallway, with a bag in one of your hand, and trying to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL with the other.
If they intend to make this usable with one hand behind your back at all times, they have much bigger problem on their "hand" -> you can't type any sort of combo at all (shift+key, ctrl+key etc.).
Which means they would turn on Sticky Keys in the XP/Vista accessibility features.. Which means they can hit CTRL+ALT+DEL with one finger, one key at a time.
My suggestion was more about easily dialing more than 2 keys at once in a tiny device with two thumbs.
Sorry, but you'd need either more experience in a lot of other industries to base that against, or have read a detailed study (which wouldn't need you to have any experience in any industry) - either way, just working in one industry (or two, or three) does not qualify you to make that statement.
Common sense still beats the logical fallacy I'm supposed to participate in. How often do you believe (and I don't use a study for this, warning) these happen in the real world:
Building a house. Almost done, the client says: "hm.. I knew it, this kinda makes the street look dark, chop off the last floor, won't be hard I think".
Building a sedan, the entire factory is set and ready to start mass production. Client shows up: "guys, good news, we're making this a truck! Cool huh!?"
``Viacom Says "YouTube Depends On Us"`` -> well, we're not part of their game, so sending empty messages out there does us no good.
From our point of view, there's only one way to prove YouTube is dependent on Viacom or not: Viacom, either do whatever you'll do, or shut the hell up.
With the current: "nothing from the date of the creation of the Mouse will ever enter the public domain situation", I've got zero sympathy for copyright holders.
Oh, that was uncalled for:(
Signed, the copyright holder of over 1500 Slashdot comments.
You're surely thinking of the Windows Security dialog, although if you're not participating in a domain windows XP does behave differently so you might be seeing somethign different.
Yea, I was mislead by the original post (I have XP Pro and it shows the Task Manager/Welcome screen by default.. but.. when you turn it off, then you see the old-school dialog).
Their boss might "insist" on this being implemented, because it was in the signed off functional spec. which the developer is paid to implement.
Since I work in this industry, I know it's the industry with the most terrible feature creep of all. I bet their boss didn't have a clue what he wanted when they started it and they were making up their mind as they go.
I can literally hear the devs arguing this idea is insane, but their boss insisting on being implemented.
And so it came to be. It's crazy not just because it's deceptive, but because it's a security nightmare. If you give your passwords to random sites even for the nicest purposes (which isn't even the case here) it's guaranteed they'll be leaked, and your accounts abused.
What's next: signing a warrant of attorney so the great Flixster, so they could send your buddies free gifts, funded by your bank accounts and credit cards? It's definitely in the same line of thought as this preposterous scheme here.
Ctrl + Alt + Del doesn't open the Task Manager on all versions of Windows, just "Home" versions. "Pro" or "Business/Enterprise/Ultimate" versions instead have a menu which allows you to launch the task manager, log off, switch user, lock the computer, or change your password.
This "menu" is known as the "Task Manager" in XP and above. There's no longer separate screen.
The size of the actual computer is of absolutely no importance whatsoever. What matters is the size of the input and output components. These are the interfaces to humans and must exist on a human size scale, i.e. large enough to handle.
That's one reason to believe portable computers (as in really portable, PDA and down) will never develop to the point where they are used for apps requiring complex input.
But we may see the development of tiny pearl-sized computer you can "anchor" in any host monitor/keyboard and work with your personal data everywhere.
And around year 2080, I suppose, we'll be able to drop it into a hole in the back of our skull and make it work with our brain directly.:P
Well, that's a windows issue, not a PC issue. The solution? (You can tell FlipStart is a project from one of the founders' of Microsoft):
How is it a Windows issue? Is Windows the only piece of software out there to use multi-key combos? Also you can open the task manager without any keyboard keys at all (right-click on the task back, pick Task Manager.. now I suppose they have some way to right-click on this device).
That said the ctrlaltdel button solution seems stupid. I'd rather implement a "combinator" button: a button that accumulates the keys pressed while it's down, and fires the signals at once when release.
Example of usage:
1. Hold the combinator button with the left hand. 2. With the right hand tap in succession, one by one: ctrl, alt, del. 3. Release the combinator button.
That said don't think low of people who wants more from their phones but being good phones. We all have different needs I barely talk on my phone, but apps, GPS, camera... all the time).
It's this kind of lack of foresight that made the whole x86 architectue crappy.
Well notice how "crappy" stuff dominated the world, and mostly works fine. Then you realize that "crappiness" or "beauty" of a design or concept, is but one of the important things that could make a product or service successful.
Human DNA is also crappy as hell, inside our mother's womb, we grow tails and drop 'em, develop hails and drop 'em, we have organs that if removed don't seem to make any change, and have worse sight and hearing than some basic insects.
This is exactly what RIAA wants, to instill a belief that they are evil and they will sue anyone, and they will win, because they are right. That they didn't care when it was granny or a child. PR does the later part of the job.
You're misled, my friend. These stories come up in this particular fashion on Slashdot, since they are controversial and spark a flamed discussion in series of comments, and people replying to the comments (i.e. like me now), and so on and so on.
Almost all of the articles on Slashdot are so chosen as to spark a big angry discussion about something, or if not, tons of "funny" comments. It's just business as usual.
RIAA doesn't benefit from just appearing evil. That's contrary to their reason to exist. They want the "pirates" to understand how dangerous is to share copyrighted content, but their means are lame and ill conceived. After all, they aren't Internet experts, or psychologists, or even great businessmen. They're just a bunch of lawyers being paid to do *whatever* to reduce piracy (or seem to).
Suing the wrong people, or suing 10 year old girls isn't instilling fear in pirates, it's instilling hatred in everyone. The thing is, they don't know if they sue the wrong people or 10 year old girls in advance. They ask for the information from the ISP, and then are *forced* to pursue their case, even if it's not in their best interest.
He's the richest dude in the world and his OS is on almost every PC in the world, but let's laugh that he predicted something wrong in 1989! Hahaha, that totally evens things out.
Flash isn't totally silent - if a website requires it you are prompted to install it if you don't have it but it usually comes pre-installed on an OEM PC in any case - just like a media player would be.
To support my previous point, consider this: how can it be Flash popping up a dialog to install it if you don't have Flash.. Unless.. it's the browser's generic plugin dialog having to do nothing with Flash in particular.
Also, just update your IE/Windows. Popping up dialogs doesn't happen in any browser but IE 6 before XP SP2.
if it uses the WMP control, then how come it can play AVIs that WMP10 and VLC both fail to play?
To be honest I oversimplified my explanation. It's not just a skin for WMP, but uses the windows media subsystem in Windows (codecs, ACM and, renderer and so on).
There are some *container* formats (like some deviations from the "old avi" format) which aren't supported by WMP, but MPC will open the container and pass encoded data to the windows media subsytem to decode manually.
Also in addition to the standard WMP overlay renderer, it supports the DirectX 2D/3D rendering surfaces, but the decoded bitmaps are coming from the windows media subsystem.
Same situation with the sound.
Of course, substitute "windows media system" with "quicktime media system" / "real media system" when playing RM/QT formats using the QT/RM Alternative packs..
I don't think it's insurmountable. Air bags cause unnecessary death sometimes, but they're a big net gain and we keep them.
I do think we'll see unmanned transport planes first, though. Flying is easy. There's less to crash into, you only land at a pre-set number of known locations, and planes can be much more expensive than cars to cover the costs of new technology.
That's insightful, although I wonder if they will want to shift so much responsibilities for a so expensive machine onto AI for a plane. A pilot is held to much stricter requirements than a casual driver.
I think we'll see various helpers gradually implemented in all of those transport vehicles, not giving the AI full autonomy. In fact we already have lots of electronic helpers, so this will be met with less resistance.
Use media player classic instead, it's open source and generally works better.
You do realize Media Player Classic (which I use) actually uses the WMP control right? No WMP, no MPC. Maybe now my orignal point is clear: without standard media support in the OS, other apps have to work much harder to achieve the same results.
Look at MPC: it's a tiny exe running on top of WMP and DirectX. Without those, the same Media Player Classic would be around 40-50 MB at least and have lots of legal issues implementing commercial proprietary codecs for some of the formats.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's infamous closed-mouthed approach to major OS releases, while great for marketing purposes, isn't always so great for the IT world.
The thing is, they don't wanna be great in the IT world. They wanna show the Mac fans "see? we can do it" and simulatenously provide something to tie together Mac based little networks, where it's not the cheapest or more powerful option, it's the EASIEST option. "It just works" - you know, this is Apple.
While certainly possible (and being done in some datacenters), Apple based server for public facing sites is a terrible idea, though unless you have money to waste and don't care for industry-grade support, so don't confuse the one kind of servers with the other.
You see, the IT world is boring and predictable, it's like the PC guy. The PC guy will put out public betas years in advance and listen to feedback.
The Mac guy will keep quiet and at the last moment, wow the audience with the latest gimmick.
But he's not the kinda guy you'd normally hire in your company. You'll hire the boring and predictable guy, who delivers.
Bottom line: file operations in Vista suck, even if your HD is fast and you have lots of RAM.
My question is: for all users, or some...? I really doubt this happens everywhere, I had the Vista RC2 until recently on my modest machine and copying/moving was as fast as on XP (i.e. normal).
Generalizing that in Vista these are slow kinda skews the issue: quite possibly this is not just unfixable bloat, but is caused by something specific and will be fixed in the coming weeks.
This just in! It's confirmed that Firefox loads slower than Opera! I'll have to submit that as an article I guess.
If it was "just in" (and not known for years), and it was loading 10 times slower, then sure, it's Slashdot-worthy.
What the heck is this supposed to mean:
--snip--
"I've seen this bug in action, and trust me, it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM," one Reg reader complained.
--snip--
Is the guy trying to be sarcastic or something?
Um, how does this have anything to do with the iPhone?
It's a phone. Don't nitpick.
Wink-wink. Did I say that out loud question mark
What is the point in comparing the two devices? For all I know this phone will turn out to be successful, but it is a completely different product.
Apple sells.. newspapers, most of all. I bet Apple sold more worth of site articles, newspapers and magazines than all business Apple ever had on its own.
Which is why, with all this free advertisement iPhone gets, it'll be quite the shame if it bombs when it's actually released, smiley face.
If you read the article, you would have found out that the problem occured when people were using the device with one hand. So, not that your "combinator" button idea doesn't have merit, it just doesn't apply to this situation.
I find it hard to believe you'll be running down a hallway, with a bag in one of your hand, and trying to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL with the other.
If they intend to make this usable with one hand behind your back at all times, they have much bigger problem on their "hand" -> you can't type any sort of combo at all (shift+key, ctrl+key etc.).
Which means they would turn on Sticky Keys in the XP/Vista accessibility features.. Which means they can hit CTRL+ALT+DEL with one finger, one key at a time.
My suggestion was more about easily dialing more than 2 keys at once in a tiny device with two thumbs.
Who'd pay $10 - $15 for a CD of third rate material with effects and dynamic range compression 'compensating' for lack of artist talent?
That sounds pretty cool, I would! But.. I'm afraid of viruses. CD-s are scary...
Sorry, but you'd need either more experience in a lot of other industries to base that against, or have read a detailed study (which wouldn't need you to have any experience in any industry) - either way, just working in one industry (or two, or three) does not qualify you to make that statement.
Common sense still beats the logical fallacy I'm supposed to participate in. How often do you believe (and I don't use a study for this, warning) these happen in the real world:
Building a house. Almost done, the client says: "hm.. I knew it, this kinda makes the street look dark, chop off the last floor, won't be hard I think".
Building a sedan, the entire factory is set and ready to start mass production. Client shows up: "guys, good news, we're making this a truck! Cool huh!?"
``Viacom Says "YouTube Depends On Us"`` -> well, we're not part of their game, so sending empty messages out there does us no good.
From our point of view, there's only one way to prove YouTube is dependent on Viacom or not: Viacom, either do whatever you'll do, or shut the hell up.
With the current: "nothing from the date of the creation of the Mouse will ever enter the public domain situation", I've got zero sympathy for copyright holders.
:(
Oh, that was uncalled for
Signed, the copyright holder of over 1500 Slashdot comments.
You're surely thinking of the Windows Security dialog, although if you're not participating in a domain windows XP does behave differently so you might be seeing somethign different.
Yea, I was mislead by the original post (I have XP Pro and it shows the Task Manager/Welcome screen by default.. but.. when you turn it off, then you see the old-school dialog).
Really? Literally, actually hear them?
Yes, literally. It's a mental disorder.
Their boss might "insist" on this being implemented, because it was in the signed off functional spec. which the developer is paid to implement.
Since I work in this industry, I know it's the industry with the most terrible feature creep of all. I bet their boss didn't have a clue what he wanted when they started it and they were making up their mind as they go.
I can literally hear the devs arguing this idea is insane, but their boss insisting on being implemented.
And so it came to be. It's crazy not just because it's deceptive, but because it's a security nightmare. If you give your passwords to random sites even for the nicest purposes (which isn't even the case here) it's guaranteed they'll be leaked, and your accounts abused.
What's next: signing a warrant of attorney so the great Flixster, so they could send your buddies free gifts, funded by your bank accounts and credit cards? It's definitely in the same line of thought as this preposterous scheme here.
Ctrl + Alt + Del doesn't open the Task Manager on all versions of Windows, just "Home" versions. "Pro" or "Business/Enterprise/Ultimate" versions instead have a menu which allows you to launch the task manager, log off, switch user, lock the computer, or change your password.
This "menu" is known as the "Task Manager" in XP and above. There's no longer separate screen.
The size of the actual computer is of absolutely no importance whatsoever. What matters is the size of the input and output components. These are the interfaces to humans and must exist on a human size scale, i.e. large enough to handle.
:P
That's one reason to believe portable computers (as in really portable, PDA and down) will never develop to the point where they are used for apps requiring complex input.
But we may see the development of tiny pearl-sized computer you can "anchor" in any host monitor/keyboard and work with your personal data everywhere.
And around year 2080, I suppose, we'll be able to drop it into a hole in the back of our skull and make it work with our brain directly.
Well, that's a windows issue, not a PC issue. The solution? (You can tell FlipStart is a project from one of the founders' of Microsoft):
How is it a Windows issue? Is Windows the only piece of software out there to use multi-key combos?
Also you can open the task manager without any keyboard keys at all (right-click on the task back, pick Task Manager.. now I suppose they have some way to right-click on this device).
That said the ctrlaltdel button solution seems stupid. I'd rather implement a "combinator" button: a button that accumulates the keys pressed while it's down, and fires the signals at once when release.
Example of usage:
1. Hold the combinator button with the left hand.
2. With the right hand tap in succession, one by one: ctrl, alt, del.
3. Release the combinator button.
My dream phone:
makes calls
6 hours of active battery life
Motorola C115.
That said don't think low of people who wants more from their phones but being good phones. We all have different needs I barely talk on my phone, but apps, GPS, camera... all the time).
It's this kind of lack of foresight that made the whole x86 architectue crappy.
Well notice how "crappy" stuff dominated the world, and mostly works fine. Then you realize that "crappiness" or "beauty" of a design or concept, is but one of the important things that could make a product or service successful.
Human DNA is also crappy as hell, inside our mother's womb, we grow tails and drop 'em, develop hails and drop 'em, we have organs that if removed don't seem to make any change, and have worse sight and hearing than some basic insects.
Yet, we rule Earth.
This is exactly what RIAA wants, to instill a belief that they are evil and they will sue anyone, and they will win, because they are right. That they didn't care when it was granny or a child. PR does the later part of the job.
You're misled, my friend. These stories come up in this particular fashion on Slashdot, since they are controversial and spark a flamed discussion in series of comments, and people replying to the comments (i.e. like me now), and so on and so on.
Almost all of the articles on Slashdot are so chosen as to spark a big angry discussion about something, or if not, tons of "funny" comments. It's just business as usual.
RIAA doesn't benefit from just appearing evil. That's contrary to their reason to exist. They want the "pirates" to understand how dangerous is to share copyrighted content, but their means are lame and ill conceived. After all, they aren't Internet experts, or psychologists, or even great businessmen. They're just a bunch of lawyers being paid to do *whatever* to reduce piracy (or seem to).
Suing the wrong people, or suing 10 year old girls isn't instilling fear in pirates, it's instilling hatred in everyone. The thing is, they don't know if they sue the wrong people or 10 year old girls in advance. They ask for the information from the ISP, and then are *forced* to pursue their case, even if it's not in their best interest.
He's the richest dude in the world and his OS is on almost every PC in the world, but let's laugh that he predicted something wrong in 1989! Hahaha, that totally evens things out.
Gee, I feel better for me now.
Flash isn't totally silent - if a website requires it you are prompted to install it if you don't have it but it usually comes pre-installed on an OEM PC in any case - just like a media player would be.
To support my previous point, consider this: how can it be Flash popping up a dialog to install it if you don't have Flash.. Unless.. it's the browser's generic plugin dialog having to do nothing with Flash in particular.
Also, just update your IE/Windows. Popping up dialogs doesn't happen in any browser but IE 6 before XP SP2.
I was pointing out an alternative media player since you seem to be totally unaware that there are more than two.
:(
Geez your reasoning skills are surprisingly weak
if it uses the WMP control, then how come it can play AVIs that WMP10 and VLC both fail to play?
To be honest I oversimplified my explanation. It's not just a skin for WMP, but uses the windows media subsystem in Windows (codecs, ACM and, renderer and so on).
There are some *container* formats (like some deviations from the "old avi" format) which aren't supported by WMP, but MPC will open the container and pass encoded data to the windows media subsytem to decode manually.
Also in addition to the standard WMP overlay renderer, it supports the DirectX 2D/3D rendering surfaces, but the decoded bitmaps are coming from the windows media subsystem.
Same situation with the sound.
Of course, substitute "windows media system" with "quicktime media system" / "real media system" when playing RM/QT formats using the QT/RM Alternative packs..
I don't think it's insurmountable. Air bags cause unnecessary death sometimes, but they're a big net gain and we keep them.
I do think we'll see unmanned transport planes first, though. Flying is easy. There's less to crash into, you only land at a pre-set number of known locations, and planes can be much more expensive than cars to cover the costs of new technology.
That's insightful, although I wonder if they will want to shift so much responsibilities for a so expensive machine onto AI for a plane. A pilot is held to much stricter requirements than a casual driver.
I think we'll see various helpers gradually implemented in all of those transport vehicles, not giving the AI full autonomy. In fact we already have lots of electronic helpers, so this will be met with less resistance.
Use media player classic instead, it's open source and generally works better.
You do realize Media Player Classic (which I use) actually uses the WMP control right? No WMP, no MPC. Maybe now my orignal point is clear: without standard media support in the OS, other apps have to work much harder to achieve the same results.
Look at MPC: it's a tiny exe running on top of WMP and DirectX. Without those, the same Media Player Classic would be around 40-50 MB at least and have lots of legal issues implementing commercial proprietary codecs for some of the formats.