VISTA is also MUCH slower on an older (3yrs) "normal" PC than either XP or Win2K. It is well known that Windows has *always* slower with each "upgrade" on any given hardware Your first sentence is correct; your second is not.
Most new Microsoft OSes perform faster than their predecessors on recent, current, and future hardware; but slower on older hardware (> 1yr old usually).
This should not be news, and the reason is fairly trivial: new features require more resources, and hence slow performance on fairly old hardware; but at the same time newer OSes can take advantage of advances in hardware -- dual-cores, increases in RAM, SSE{x} etc. -- so would be better performing than older OSes on newer hardware that has features of which the older OS cannot take advantage.
as of a month or two ago (last results i saw), those web analyzing stats that supposedly tell who is running what had OS X instals way ahead of MS Vista. obviously XP is still the tops, and a lot of people are waiting to upgrade a stable XP machine, but i was totally surprised to see OS X outnumbering Vista by such a significant lead. True, but you get a more informativbe picture by looking at trends rather than just the latest figures. E.g. from Net Applications, last two quarters:
-------------- Vista ---- Mac (combined) 2007 Q1 --- 1.05% --- 6.22% 2007 Q2 --- 3.75% --- 6.23%
Yes, Mac outnumbers Vista; but the Vista figure's nearly tripled between Q1 and Q2, wheras the Mac one's stayed pretty constant...
Few people want tablets. They've comprehensively failed to take the world by storm. Apple did well to avoid jumping on that bandwagon, spotting that it was on fire and heading over a cliff. They may not have "taken the world by storm", but to say it's "heading over a cliff" is bemusing and wrong. My mother has one, for example: it's not in a funky keyboardless form-factor or anything; it's just a normal IBM black notebook with a central hinge that happens to have an active touchscreen. She finds pointing and pushing with a pen easier than using a mouse, trackpad, or IBM nipple. No, it's not a revolution, and it's not being advertised as one; it's just a better input method than a mouse for some people. Simple as that.
For a decent Vista experience... you need... a DX10 GPU. Yeah, you lost most of your credibility with that. You need a DX*9* GPU for Aero, not a DX10 one; Aero uses DirectX 9Ex, with shader model 2.0 in hardware as the crucial factor. Actually, a DX10 GPU might even give you a worse Vista "experience" (I hate that word) than a DX9 one, since the only option at the moment is the Geforce 8800, which has drivers worth crap.
Yes, because using virtualization software which has only recently begun supporting a new operating system is clearly going to be the best way to get accurate performance benchmarks.
The number of games that work perfectly under Wine is dwarfed by the number of native Mac games. Exactly! Look at the number of games which run under Mac OS X natively... Let's see, there's:
The Sims
The Sims: Livin' Large expansion pack
The Sims: House Party expansion pack
The Sims: Hot Date expansion pack
The Sims: Vacation expansion pack
The Sims: Unleashed expansion pack
The Sims: Superstar expansion pack
The Sims: Makin' Magic expansion pack
The Sims Deluxe Edition
The Sims Double Deluxe
The Sims Mega Deluxe
The Sims Complete Collection
The Sims: Expansion Collection Volume One
The Sims: Expansion Collection Volume Two
The Sims: Expansion Collection Volume Three
The Sims: Expansion Three-Pack Volume One
The Sims: Expansion Three-Pack Volume Two
The Sims 2
The Sims 2: University expansion pack
The Sims 2: Nightlife expansion pack
The Sims 2: Open for Business expansion pack
The Sims 2: Pets expansion pack
The Sims 2: Seasons expansion pack
The Sims 2: Bon Voyage expansion pack
The Sims 2: Family Fun Stuff
The Sims 2: Glamour Life Stuff
The Sims 2: Happy Holiday Stuff (The Sims 2: Festive Holiday Stuff in the UK and Ireland)
The Sims 2: Celebration Stuff
The Sims 2: H&M Fashion Stuff
The Sims 2: Teen Style Stuff
The Sims 2: Special DVD Edition
The Sims 2: Holiday Edition (2005) (The Sims 2: Christmas Edition in the UK and Ireland)
The Sims 2: Holiday Edition (2006) (The Sims 2: Festive Edition in the UK and Ireland)
The Sims 2: Deluxe
See, look at the size of that list! Loads of games run on a Mac!
Your post certainly proves something, but I'd say that that something is more along the line of how minimum system requirements aren't a good way to judge performance; because I have Office 2007 and OO.o sitting in front of me, and OO.o takes more than twice as long to start up. And no, I don't have osa.exe or any office-related process running at startup.
I consider the extra "free" PDF generation in MS Office to be pretty meaningless. A perfectly reasonable position to take; but I think you can understand the GP's confusion regarding your position, given that the post they were replying to was one by you, saying that OOo was better because Office couldn't generate PDFs
I'm rather amused to hear that most of your complaints involve being forced to use "the mouse as opposed to the keyboard" in order to access functions on the ribbon. Were you not aware that you can press "alt" in Office 2007 to bring up the ribbon keyboard accelerators, just like it did for menus in Office 2003?
Also, all the fuss about how in Office 2003, "I... place buttons for these in the toolbar", which you can't in Offcie 2007 -- well, actually, you can. Right click on them and click "Add to quick access toolbar". Puts them right at the top of the screen, which makes them easier to click, too -- Fitt's law. And you get dedicated keyboard accelerators too.
But then, I suppose complaining is easier than thinking, right?
Tell me, in any random Windows application I care to name (other than Office 2007 of course) how do you open a file? Alt, f, o. Which works exactly the same in Office 2007.
How do you quit the application? Alt+space, c. Or Alt+F4. Neither of which have ever failed for me, in any application, ever.
What happens when you drag something to the desktop? I have to admit that I've never done it. I only rarely touch the mouse; I do everything by the keyboard; but even so I can't imagine a situation where I'd do this.
What are the shortcut key combinations to achieve these? Ummm, what shortcut key drags something to the desktop?...I'll pass on that one, if you don't mind...
The the new inferface is probably great for somebody who has never used a microsoft office suite before, but for people who have been doing things the same way for the last 10+ years the change was too much. Really? Strange, I don't know many people who've used Office for 10+ years who still point and click at toolbars -- almost all the really experienced Office users I know just use keyboard shotcuts, which all still work in the new Office -- both sets of alt+*+* ones work (the 2003 menu ones and the 2007 ribbon ones) as well as all the ctrl ones.
...warns you square whenever that boundary is breached(by opening a PDF, EXE or SCR, for example). Additionally, if the EXE requests admin privileges(required to install a rootkit, for example), the infamous UAC dialog appears. Actually, technically the first dialogue is a UAC dialogue as well. The "sandbox mode" is really just another privilege level; just a really low one -- much lower than standard user -- so the normal "sandbox dialogue" is an elevation request from "really low" to "standard user".
Incidentally, that's another reason why it's a bad idea to turn off UAC.
Ummm... You what? You start with the supposition that "now it's possible to disable Windows machines remotely", which, unless you've been reading a different story to me, appears to have been plucked out of thin air. I was reading a story about how, if Vista isn't activated for 30 days, it goes into a "reduced functionality mode" involving a black background with no taskbar. Now, for a remote attacker get a copy of Windows to think it's not activated when it is, it needs admin access to the box. But if it's got admin access to the box, it can do whatever the hell it likes with it, including arbitary code execution and things a lot worse than "reduced functionality mode"...
I have no idea which OS disk came with which computer. When I am reinstalling the OS, for whatever reason, I just grab a disk and a serial number. It's not that hard to view your CD ley in Windows. If you don't want to mess about with regedit, there are loads of small freeware apps that'll let you view and change the key.
crosoft suddenly turns off the computer for potentially thousands, if not millions of people? Yep, that's going to win them a lot of friends. I'm not sure that Microsoft will be that bothered to no longer have as "friends" people who pirate their software...
Firstly -- 4GB is the "sweet spot"? If you've got a 32-bit CPU the entire address space is only 4GB big; if you put 4GB of RAM in there you'll never see more than about 3.5GB of it; less if it's got dedicated video memory.
And for Lenovo to suggest that 2GB is not enough memory is frankly a load of crap. I'm sitting here (in Vista) with uTorrent, Word, Outlook, Opera with 22 tabs, AVG, Daemon tools, and Adobe photo downloader all open, and my physical memory usage is 1.07GB (out of 2GB) (and the system's perfectly responsive). Even taking into account the vast amount of crapware that Lenovo preload to run at startup, there should be no way 2GB isn't enough.
BTW -- "reading forums and turning off all the crap services in hopes of speeding it up"? Let me guess, you turned off superfetch because the forum users said it used up all your memory and, of course, services always only slow things down, right? Uh-huh. Also, did you try turning all the services back on when trying to get shared printers to work? Services are sometimes used for things, you know...
Sounds to me like a massive iPhone. I wonder if any patents were violated with this thing? Possibly, but only by Apple. Table-top multi-touch interfaces have been around long before the iphone. E.g. see this video.
The argument is not well served by taking figures like this from the air. If you care to cite a particular study, we can debate its methodology, statistical power, and freedom from confounds such as selective sampling or lack of blinding to the "true" result. I didn't realise there was much of an argument to be had. The 70% figure was remembered from a chapter on polygraph testing in a book I read about 5 years ago, not any particular study; if you want to read the details of particular studies, there are a few hundred out there, and Google is your friend (for example this 2003 meta-study). They all seem to broadly agree that polygraph testing, whilst significantly better than chance, still isn't very good (e.g. the meta-study linked to concluded that a polygraph test regarding a specific incident can discern the truth at "a level greater than chance, yet short of perfection"; not very specific, but I have no particular desire to pay $3 to read the conclusions in more detail). If you are either so convinced that this is incorrect, or desperately wish to pin down one particular specific figure for accuracy, that you wish to "debate [the] methodology, statistical power, and freedom from confounds such as selective sampling or lack of blinding to the 'true' result" for each study in turn, feel free; I personally don't really see much point. That's what meta-studies are for.
Theories aren't proof. Science can only disprove by experiment, and FTL has not been disproven by experiment. It's hard to think of an experiment that could rigorously (thoroughly) disprove [sic] that limit. So, as science works, we can now say only that current theories disagree on the possibility of FTL. And that there are current experiments that might be consistent with disproving one theory that limits the velocity. I presume that you thought that by restating your -- incorrect -- position at the end of a mini-lecture on naive scientific method, fewer people would object to it. No, current theories do not disagree on the possibility of FTL communication. Relativity and quantum mechanics have a number of fundamental incompatibilities, as you point out, but your implication that FTL communication is one of them is not correct. As, I believe, I pointed out in the post you replied to but seemingly didn't read.
You also, once again, state your belief that the experiment in TFA involved FTL communication (previous time: "But here it is in action"). About half the posts here are ones explaining why it does not; I trust I shall not need to repeat them.
(BTW, I assume that you mean "prove" rather than "disprove" above: it is easy enough to conceive of an experiment that does the former: just show that information has travelled faster than c; wheras the latter puts us into the position of having to prove a negative (i.e. that you can't travel faster than c), which is, presumably, what you are objecting to.)
insisting that c is absolute, ignoring the new evidence in new experiments that are consistent with exceptional results from old experiments, is certain to prevent us from producing FTL. That's not science, that's dogma. I can only assume you're being deliberately obnoxious here; or else just going rather overboard in building your straw man. At no point have I, or anyone else, "insisted c is absolute [and FTL communication impossible]"; only that it is, contrary to your insistence, fundamentally inconsistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics (if causality is not to be violated). Indeed, I have actually gone to some lengths to emphasise the point that though it is inconsistent with QM and relativity, that does not exclude the possibility that QM and Relativity are both wrong (in my original post: "to the best of our knowledge at the present time", GP post: "In our current quantum-mechanics-based understanding").
And once again you make the incorrect implication ("insisting that c is absolute, ignoring the new evidence in new experiments") that this experiment, and quantum entanglement in general, is inconsistent with the principle that no information can be transmitted faster than c. I once again refer you to... everyone else's posts apart from your own.
Regarding Feynman, I don't have QED to hand, so if you'll permit me to quote from someone who does: "These virtual photons, however, do not violate causality or special relativity, as they are not directly observable and information cannot be transmitted acausally in the theory".
even experiments established for decades have shown that there is a way to exceed c, ...And if I were to restrict "exceed" to exclude group velocity, phase velocity, and all those other effects that don't actually allow communication, would there be any of these experiments left?...
The most common figure for the accuracy of polygraph tests is 70%. Which sounds reasonable, until you realise that since the situation is binomal -- i.e. the only possible results are "truth" and "lie", so pure chance (e.g. flipping a coin) would give you 50% accuracy; at which point 70% starts to look considerably less impressive.
As I understand it, the most useful (from the police's point of view) way to use of lie detectors is psychological: pretend that they're 100% accurate, get the suspect to say "I didn't do it", bluff and claim that "The Machine Knows You're Lying", and get them to give a confession that way. Of course, such a strategy will fail if the polygraph becomes so widely used that everyone becomes familiar with its limitations.
"Spooky action at a distance" was derided by Einstein precisely because it would contradict Einstein's models supporting c as the fastest velocity.
But here it is in action. We'll see whether we can't by further experimentation with this new apparatus and others related to it. The fact that you can't transmit information faster than c is not merely a hunch of Einstein's based on not wanting to contradict relativity. It has been proven from first principles under Quantum theory (specifically, Quantum information theory), where it is called the No-Communication Theorem. Once again, I repeat: In our current quantum-mechanics-based understanding, you can not transmit information instantaneously across an entanglement.
Slashdot Mirror
Most new Microsoft OSes perform faster than their predecessors on recent, current, and future hardware; but slower on older hardware (> 1yr old usually).
This should not be news, and the reason is fairly trivial: new features require more resources, and hence slow performance on fairly old hardware; but at the same time newer OSes can take advantage of advances in hardware -- dual-cores, increases in RAM, SSE{x} etc. -- so would be better performing than older OSes on newer hardware that has features of which the older OS cannot take advantage.
Yes, Mac outnumbers Vista; but the Vista figure's nearly tripled between Q1 and Q2, wheras the Mac one's stayed pretty constant...
Yes, because using virtualization software which has only recently begun supporting a new operating system is clearly going to be the best way to get accurate performance benchmarks.
- The Sims
- The Sims: Livin' Large expansion pack
- The Sims: House Party expansion pack
- The Sims: Hot Date expansion pack
- The Sims: Vacation expansion pack
- The Sims: Unleashed expansion pack
- The Sims: Superstar expansion pack
- The Sims: Makin' Magic expansion pack
- The Sims Deluxe Edition
- The Sims Double Deluxe
- The Sims Mega Deluxe
- The Sims Complete Collection
- The Sims: Expansion Collection Volume One
- The Sims: Expansion Collection Volume Two
- The Sims: Expansion Collection Volume Three
- The Sims: Expansion Three-Pack Volume One
- The Sims: Expansion Three-Pack Volume Two
- The Sims 2
- The Sims 2: University expansion pack
- The Sims 2: Nightlife expansion pack
- The Sims 2: Open for Business expansion pack
- The Sims 2: Pets expansion pack
- The Sims 2: Seasons expansion pack
- The Sims 2: Bon Voyage expansion pack
- The Sims 2: Family Fun Stuff
- The Sims 2: Glamour Life Stuff
- The Sims 2: Happy Holiday Stuff (The Sims 2: Festive Holiday Stuff in the UK and Ireland)
- The Sims 2: Celebration Stuff
- The Sims 2: H&M Fashion Stuff
- The Sims 2: Teen Style Stuff
- The Sims 2: Special DVD Edition
- The Sims 2: Holiday Edition (2005) (The Sims 2: Christmas Edition in the UK and Ireland)
- The Sims 2: Holiday Edition (2006) (The Sims 2: Festive Edition in the UK and Ireland)
- The Sims 2: Deluxe
See, look at the size of that list! Loads of games run on a Mac!(Oh, and Quake)
Your post certainly proves something, but I'd say that that something is more along the line of how minimum system requirements aren't a good way to judge performance; because I have Office 2007 and OO.o sitting in front of me, and OO.o takes more than twice as long to start up. And no, I don't have osa.exe or any office-related process running at startup.
I'm rather amused to hear that most of your complaints involve being forced to use "the mouse as opposed to the keyboard" in order to access functions on the ribbon. Were you not aware that you can press "alt" in Office 2007 to bring up the ribbon keyboard accelerators, just like it did for menus in Office 2003?
Also, all the fuss about how in Office 2003, "I... place buttons for these in the toolbar", which you can't in Offcie 2007 -- well, actually, you can. Right click on them and click "Add to quick access toolbar". Puts them right at the top of the screen, which makes them easier to click, too -- Fitt's law. And you get dedicated keyboard accelerators too.
But then, I suppose complaining is easier than thinking, right?
Incidentally, that's another reason why it's a bad idea to turn off UAC.
Ummm... You what? You start with the supposition that "now it's possible to disable Windows machines remotely", which, unless you've been reading a different story to me, appears to have been plucked out of thin air. I was reading a story about how, if Vista isn't activated for 30 days, it goes into a "reduced functionality mode" involving a black background with no taskbar. Now, for a remote attacker get a copy of Windows to think it's not activated when it is, it needs admin access to the box. But if it's got admin access to the box, it can do whatever the hell it likes with it, including arbitary code execution and things a lot worse than "reduced functionality mode"...
The first actually informative post I've seen in this thread...
A few points:
Firstly -- 4GB is the "sweet spot"? If you've got a 32-bit CPU the entire address space is only 4GB big; if you put 4GB of RAM in there you'll never see more than about 3.5GB of it; less if it's got dedicated video memory.
And for Lenovo to suggest that 2GB is not enough memory is frankly a load of crap. I'm sitting here (in Vista) with uTorrent, Word, Outlook, Opera with 22 tabs, AVG, Daemon tools, and Adobe photo downloader all open, and my physical memory usage is 1.07GB (out of 2GB) (and the system's perfectly responsive). Even taking into account the vast amount of crapware that Lenovo preload to run at startup, there should be no way 2GB isn't enough.
BTW -- "reading forums and turning off all the crap services in hopes of speeding it up"? Let me guess, you turned off superfetch because the forum users said it used up all your memory and, of course, services always only slow things down, right? Uh-huh. Also, did you try turning all the services back on when trying to get shared printers to work? Services are sometimes used for things, you know...
You also, once again, state your belief that the experiment in TFA involved FTL communication (previous time: "But here it is in action"). About half the posts here are ones explaining why it does not; I trust I shall not need to repeat them.
(BTW, I assume that you mean "prove" rather than "disprove" above: it is easy enough to conceive of an experiment that does the former: just show that information has travelled faster than c; wheras the latter puts us into the position of having to prove a negative (i.e. that you can't travel faster than c), which is, presumably, what you are objecting to.) insisting that c is absolute, ignoring the new evidence in new experiments that are consistent with exceptional results from old experiments, is certain to prevent us from producing FTL. That's not science, that's dogma. I can only assume you're being deliberately obnoxious here; or else just going rather overboard in building your straw man. At no point have I, or anyone else, "insisted c is absolute [and FTL communication impossible]"; only that it is, contrary to your insistence, fundamentally inconsistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics (if causality is not to be violated). Indeed, I have actually gone to some lengths to emphasise the point that though it is inconsistent with QM and relativity, that does not exclude the possibility that QM and Relativity are both wrong (in my original post: "to the best of our knowledge at the present time", GP post: "In our current quantum-mechanics-based understanding").
And once again you make the incorrect implication ("insisting that c is absolute, ignoring the new evidence in new experiments") that this experiment, and quantum entanglement in general, is inconsistent with the principle that no information can be transmitted faster than c. I once again refer you to... everyone else's posts apart from your own.
Regarding Feynman, I don't have QED to hand, so if you'll permit me to quote from someone who does: "These virtual photons, however, do not violate causality or special relativity, as they are not directly observable and information cannot be transmitted acausally in the theory".
even experiments established for decades have shown that there is a way to exceed c, ...And if I were to restrict "exceed" to exclude group velocity, phase velocity, and all those other effects that don't actually allow communication, would there be any of these experiments left?...
The most common figure for the accuracy of polygraph tests is 70%. Which sounds reasonable, until you realise that since the situation is binomal -- i.e. the only possible results are "truth" and "lie", so pure chance (e.g. flipping a coin) would give you 50% accuracy; at which point 70% starts to look considerably less impressive.
As I understand it, the most useful (from the police's point of view) way to use of lie detectors is psychological: pretend that they're 100% accurate, get the suspect to say "I didn't do it", bluff and claim that "The Machine Knows You're Lying", and get them to give a confession that way. Of course, such a strategy will fail if the polygraph becomes so widely used that everyone becomes familiar with its limitations.