We hear this all the time from Windows lovers. As though speed is the single most burning issue for users. I've never noticed any particular speed issue with Windows 7. On the other hand, users are seriously slowed down when their knowledge base is discarded by wholesale (and random) changes to the user interface (Ribbon, Win8,...)
It's only a Cloud if it lives up in the sky. Down here on the ground we call it fog. You know, the stuff that causes us to loose our frame of reference, wander around aimlessly, and drive into other fog-bound denizens at high speed.
I don't get the "lets deny CO2 exists" mentality. It does and it's a natural way to "store" hydrogen safely. Methanol (which can used almost directly as a gasoline replacement) can be produced from CO2 and Hydrogen directly. But since the CO2 gets released upon burning, no one is interested. Pure hydrogen fuel cells on the other hand, have so many problems it's hard to enumerate them all (cost, safety, production, transport, storage, net efficiency, poisoning,...)
The Hydrogen economy is a fantasy, or more accurately a feint by Big Oil to hinder Alternative Energy research, upon whose teat many researchers latched (untli that is, the US Govt cut off funding).
If you take a step back, it's even more tragic than that.
Pulse purported to "fix" problems that weren't even problems for the vast majority of users, at the expense of undermining the integrity of the whole OS (not just sound).
Now, systemd purports to fix efficiency problems with using shell scripts, even though (on machines of 20+ years ago) shell scripts worked perfectly fine on CPU's a 1000 times slower, and text logging worked perfectly fine on disks a 1000 times smaller.
Aside from the draconian Windows account requirement, I think MS and it's shills have just lost all credibility. Examples claims about Win8 that defy belief are:
- Install classic shell and all your problems will be solved.
- If you just give it a chance you'll learn to love Win 8.
- Win8 is an advanced user interface.
- There's no difference between Win7 and Win8.
- It's not that bad, really.
To sum up our experience: we did give Win8 a chance, found it to be a regressive UI, and it really was that bad.
It gets a little tiring to hear that all Win8 needs is a bunch of reconfigurion and/or installing classic-shell/charms to make it perfectly usable. Win7 didn't require that!
Look, although there is some truth to your assertions, an OS is supposed to be above all a means for launching and running programs (eg. Chrome). Instead Win8 has been turned into the program itself. While Win7 quietly stayed out of the way, Win8 insists on imposing the Windows Store experience on everyone, at every turn.
Apologies if this sounds curt. I just finished 30+ hours of downgrading my mother-in-laws laptop to Win7, at her insistence.
Sadly, it is no longer true that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux. Aside from Win 8 being a fiendishly clever torture device, Windows in general is THE major target for viruses. When you try to search for help with anything Windows related, you'll wade through endless minefields of scamware. And you'll need scanners that endlessly bog down your system, but only end up finding a portion of the intruders.
Linux systems may have their share of problems, but intrusion is not one of them.
"Why does anyone think that it's "more convenient" to use NPC than swiping a credit card?" Because then you can say "this payment was sent from my iphone"! whoppee
We use a set of ~30 sheets in Excel to describe inputs to our application. I cringe when I have to use Excel because:
1) the dialog to pick a sheet is limited to like 12 sheets, and clicking "See All" pops a window that can be scrolled, but also shows only 12 sheets at a time. This window can not be resized so I spend endless amounts of time scrolling back and forth in it.
2) Excel lets me open multiple spreadsheets, but they all inhabit a single window. I guess side-by-side viewing could be dangerous.
3) We have to export to Excel-2007, so our extraction tool can read it. And Excel only lets you export to CSV a single sheet at a time.
4) And we have to version control the CSV so that we can tell the differences between one release and the next, because Sharepoint does squat in this realm.
If important websites all used a captcha with login, it would make brute force attacks more difficult.
Password managers are fine, but if compromised they have access to everything! We've probably reached the point where everyone should have two personas, represented by 2 email addresses, a real one and a disposable one. For sites that insist you have an email (like facebook, linkedin, etc) can use the disposable one and feel good about never reading mail sent to it. The real email is used for banking, amazon, etc. This pretty much also means using a browser with a second profile so your passwords are firewalled.
How good you a distribution is for you really depends upon what you want to do with it. In my case, I'm becoming increasingly fed-up with distro-bloat. They all seem to take 2.5 Gig of disk space, have big memory footprints, are slow to boot, enslave you to their repos, and are built on bloat-ware like pulse audio and systemd.
In the case of SliTaz:
- The ISO boot image is 36Meg.
- A bootable ISO with the complete packages is available (3 Gig).
- After installing in VirtualBox, +gcc, +guest-additions disk usage is under 500 Meg.
As I am increasingly interested in running my OS's under VM's, efficient resource usage trumps everything. (eg. I don't need man pages as they're on the net).
I've used Linux continuously as my only desktop top every year since 1994, except for 2011 when I switched all our machines to Windows 7 for a year. It was an awful experience, but what made me do that was pulse-audio pooching every distribution. Not sure how it came about, and I'm not casting blame, but what made it so frustrating was I don't even use sound on the PC.
C++ simplifies by implicitly performing actions. These implicit actions are what undermines C++ use in system/multi-threaded code.
- A data declaration *may* invoke code (constructors)
- Method calls *may* invoke other (virtual) code.
- Use of STL *may* do whatever it wants.
In short, C++ tries to do what it thinks you want, rather than what you tell it to do. Whereas system coders need to know exactly what a piece of code does, just by looking at it, with C++ you pretty much need to step through the code in a debugger to be sure what is going on. Anyone who has spent any time debugging g++ knows how much fun that can be as you are continuously stepping into constructors for std::string, STL, etc. Add threads for a new level of debugging debauchery. And of course the pinnacle of masochism is debugging kernel code.
"unbraced ifs" is a classic example of blaming the symptom instead of the disease. The actual problem is misleading indentation. The actual solution (particularly in a multi-developer project) is to use a code formatter.
People use Windows not because they love MS, or because it's great, but rather because it provides a product that is good enough. Not the best, nor the cheapest, but a familiar, relatively convenient, and easily customized product.
Suddenly MS sees Apple/Android eating its lunch. So it reacts by opening an App-Store, pushing the Surface tablet, and changing the OS to make the PC look like a tablet.
The result: Windows is now unfamiliar, inconvenient, and frustratingly inflexible. So people are unimpressed and businesses are saying no. It's like MS is trying to make everyone believe "see, we're really just a tablet now, so you see, you don't really need that Apple/Android after all..."
I have used chrome as my primary browser for about a year. However, for anything like purchases, banking or important stuff, I have to switch to Firefox. Chrome is just broken, more often than not.
Slashdot Mirror
Its faster than Windows 7 across the board...
We hear this all the time from Windows lovers. As though speed is the single most burning issue for users. I've never noticed any particular speed issue with Windows 7. On the other hand, users are seriously slowed down when their knowledge base is discarded by wholesale (and random) changes to the user interface (Ribbon, Win8, ...)
The truth is that if Pottering was not the author, systemd would probably not be the issue it has become. Call it the legacy of Pulse.
It's only a Cloud if it lives up in the sky. Down here on the ground we call it fog. You know, the stuff that causes us to loose our frame of reference, wander around aimlessly, and drive into other fog-bound denizens at high speed.
I don't get the "lets deny CO2 exists" mentality. It does and it's a natural way to "store" hydrogen safely. Methanol (which can used almost directly as a gasoline replacement) can be produced from CO2 and Hydrogen directly. But since the CO2 gets released upon burning, no one is interested. Pure hydrogen fuel cells on the other hand, have so many problems it's hard to enumerate them all (cost, safety, production, transport, storage, net efficiency, poisoning, ...)
The great thing about the Hydrogen economy,...
The Hydrogen economy is a fantasy, or more accurately a feint by Big Oil to hinder Alternative Energy research, upon whose teat many researchers latched (untli that is, the US Govt cut off funding).
a time honoured marketing tradition
You mean like those things on your house that you look outside through. Can't think of the name right now.
If you take a step back, it's even more tragic than that.
Pulse purported to "fix" problems that weren't even problems for the vast majority of users, at the expense of undermining the integrity of the whole OS (not just sound).
Now, systemd purports to fix efficiency problems with using shell scripts, even though (on machines of 20+ years ago) shell scripts worked perfectly fine on CPU's a 1000 times slower, and text logging worked perfectly fine on disks a 1000 times smaller.
Obnoxious!
I was looking for a single word that accurately described Windows 8, and you just came up with it. Thanks!
Aside from the draconian Windows account requirement, I think MS and it's shills have just lost all credibility. Examples claims about Win8 that defy belief are:
- Install classic shell and all your problems will be solved.
- If you just give it a chance you'll learn to love Win 8.
- Win8 is an advanced user interface.
- There's no difference between Win7 and Win8.
- It's not that bad, really.
To sum up our experience: we did give Win8 a chance, found it to be a regressive UI, and it really was that bad.
It gets a little tiring to hear that all Win8 needs is a bunch of reconfigurion and/or installing classic-shell/charms to make it perfectly usable. Win7 didn't require that!
Look, although there is some truth to your assertions, an OS is supposed to be above all a means for launching and running programs (eg. Chrome). Instead Win8 has been turned into the program itself. While Win7 quietly stayed out of the way, Win8 insists on imposing the Windows Store experience on everyone, at every turn.
Apologies if this sounds curt. I just finished 30+ hours of downgrading my mother-in-laws laptop to Win7, at her insistence.
I did the same thing, except instead of Start8 I installed Ubuntu, using the overwrite partition option.
Sadly, it is no longer true that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux. Aside from Win 8 being a fiendishly clever torture device, Windows in general is THE major target for viruses. When you try to search for help with anything Windows related, you'll wade through endless minefields of scamware. And you'll need scanners that endlessly bog down your system, but only end up finding a portion of the intruders.
Linux systems may have their share of problems, but intrusion is not one of them.
"Why does anyone think that it's "more convenient" to use NPC than swiping a credit card?"
Because then you can say "this payment was sent from my iphone"! whoppee
Windows has become "Brazil". Between UEFI, and Win 8, a level of distopia has been created that rivals the movie.
Since you asked...
We use a set of ~30 sheets in Excel to describe inputs to our application. I cringe when I have to use Excel because:
1) the dialog to pick a sheet is limited to like 12 sheets, and clicking "See All" pops a window that can be scrolled, but also shows only 12 sheets at a time. This window can not be resized so I spend endless amounts of time scrolling back and forth in it.
2) Excel lets me open multiple spreadsheets, but they all inhabit a single window. I guess side-by-side viewing could be dangerous.
3) We have to export to Excel-2007, so our extraction tool can read it. And Excel only lets you export to CSV a single sheet at a time.
4) And we have to version control the CSV so that we can tell the differences between one release and the next, because Sharepoint does squat in this realm.
and I hardly even use the beast...
If important websites all used a captcha with login, it would make brute force attacks more difficult.
Password managers are fine, but if compromised they have access to everything! We've probably reached the point where everyone should have two personas, represented by 2 email addresses, a real one and a disposable one. For sites that insist you have an email (like facebook, linkedin, etc) can use the disposable one and feel good about never reading mail sent to it. The real email is used for banking, amazon, etc. This pretty much also means using a browser with a second profile so your passwords are firewalled.
How good you a distribution is for you really depends upon what you want to do with it. In my case, I'm becoming increasingly fed-up with distro-bloat. They all seem to take 2.5 Gig of disk space, have big memory footprints, are slow to boot, enslave you to their repos, and are built on bloat-ware like pulse audio and systemd.
In the case of SliTaz:
- The ISO boot image is 36Meg.
- A bootable ISO with the complete packages is available (3 Gig).
- After installing in VirtualBox, +gcc, +guest-additions disk usage is under 500 Meg.
As I am increasingly interested in running my OS's under VM's, efficient resource usage trumps everything. (eg. I don't need man pages as they're on the net).
I've used Linux continuously as my only desktop top every year since 1994, except for 2011 when I switched all our machines to Windows 7 for a year. It was an awful experience, but what made me do that was pulse-audio pooching every distribution. Not sure how it came about, and I'm not casting blame, but what made it so frustrating was I don't even use sound on the PC.
C++ simplifies by implicitly performing actions. These implicit actions are what undermines C++ use in system/multi-threaded code.
- A data declaration *may* invoke code (constructors)
- Method calls *may* invoke other (virtual) code.
- Use of STL *may* do whatever it wants.
In short, C++ tries to do what it thinks you want, rather than what you tell it to do. Whereas system coders need to know exactly what a piece of code does, just by looking at it, with C++ you pretty much need to step through the code in a debugger to be sure what is going on. Anyone who has spent any time debugging g++ knows how much fun that can be as you are continuously stepping into constructors for std::string, STL, etc. Add threads for a new level of debugging debauchery. And of course the pinnacle of masochism is debugging kernel code.
The following page lists c++/gdb issues: http://pdqi.com/cgi-bin/cgiwra...
"unbraced ifs" is a classic example of blaming the symptom instead of the disease. The actual problem is misleading indentation. The actual solution (particularly in a multi-developer project) is to use a code formatter.
People use Windows not because they love MS, or because it's great, but rather because it provides a product that is good enough. Not the best, nor the cheapest, but a familiar, relatively convenient, and easily customized product.
Suddenly MS sees Apple/Android eating its lunch. So it reacts by opening an App-Store, pushing the Surface tablet, and changing the OS to make the PC look like a tablet.
The result: Windows is now unfamiliar, inconvenient, and frustratingly inflexible. So people are unimpressed and businesses are saying no. It's like MS is trying to make everyone believe "see, we're really just a tablet now, so you see, you don't really need that Apple/Android after all..."
Give me a break.
FYI, despite the anti-google bias of theregister (implied by the Chocolate Factory epithet) , I found this story while reading news.google.ca
Disabling TTY switching is probably not necessary: It would only help them if they had a userid/passwd for the 'kiosk'
I have used chrome as my primary browser for about a year. However, for anything
like purchases, banking or important stuff, I have to switch to Firefox.
Chrome is just broken, more often than not.