Everyone thought they were bluffing, and it turns out they were not. So now you start seeing all these comments about other issues that nobody cared about to begin with (like how it compares with the Apple hardware).
I've been thinking about it myself and I wondered why a company would dare to do something like this. And all I could think of is that it is a disruptive product, and if they did their legal homework, they know they can get away with it. Because the product is so disruptive, they basically get free marketing without even trying. Apple should go after them to protect the brand and market, but it is probably a lose-lose scenario for Apple at this time. Chances are there isn't a whole lot of money there right now and Psystar might have thought about the legal issues beforehand. That means right now Apple will probably lose money in lawyer fees even if they come out winning because there's no money flowing into the company yet. But if they allow this company to continue it could potentially cause problems with the Apple brand and market. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to this (lock down their software? lawsuit? or ignore it all together?).
There's something wrong with the Vista boot and shutdown process because it seems slower than it needs to be. Anytime I have to restart or cold boot it takes considerably longer than a plain XP install. (Though XP tends to slow down over time as you add drivers, other software, and files get fragmented.) Vista boot kind of reminds me of Win2k, where nothing was optimized and everything happened sequentially even if it wasn't doing anything particularly useful (like timing out). My guess is vista is probably doing something stupid like waiting for each network interface to get assigned DHCP or something. Kinda like old linux distros that configured init and the network interfaces with DHCP to wait half a minute to a minute before they timed out.
It isn't too much a problem since there's the sleep function which sleeps and wakes up within seconds. With the right hardware, power consumption in sleep mode is 1 or 2 watts more than when your computer is considered "off" (PSU still plugged in, so it is technically in standby). In fact the default shutdown option (little power button on the start menu) is to put the computer into sleep rather than shutdown. I guess they figured they didn't need to worry about boot and shutdown times if everyone just used the sleep function.
bloodninja: Slip out of those pants baby, yeah. BritneySpears14: I slip out of my pants, just for you, bloodninja. bloodninja: Oh yeah, aight. Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat. BritneySpears14: Oh, I like to play dress up. bloodninja: Me too baby.
I believe some of the previous postings made very clear statements that already answered your question. Now that MS has infected OLPC, the kids will be limited to what corporate mindsets will allow.
(I'll probably get my karma burned, especially after replying to an AC who probably has moderator points, but whatever.)
No, the previous postings do not make it clear. Every post that claims open source = good and Windows = bad assumes that Microsoft and other corporations will control the OLPC. I argue that is not true. All Negroponte has said is that his goal is to provide laptops to poor kids. That means that if he feels that Microsoft is doing something shady like DRM or limiting the functionality of available software, he will likely no longer choose Microsoft. On the same token, if he feels that open source is limiting the functionality of available software, he will likely no longer choose open source. He is basically saying that nobody, not even open source or Microsoft, controls the path of the project, but that ultimately the goals and requirements for the project do. The posts here only argue that there might be a requirement for open source in the project. Negroponte has just said that open source failed to meet the necessary requirements and that a Windows XP OS might meet the requirements better. To some degree he is correct, you can't run and distribute proprietary flash on a GPLed system, but you can with Windows.
All I have read in these comments are whines from the open source evangelism camp that Negroponte is not who they thought he was. The man was very clear about his goals, and open source advocates are surprised and in disgust that what they thought was there is no longer. Sorry, it wasn't true love after all. Get over it.
If the coder is already aware of the possible failures, then he should be fixing the code instead of writing a test.
The purpose of a unit test testing for failure cases is not to detect places where the code has issues, but to ensure that the code performs as expected given the initial requirements/specifications. When people talk about "failure cases" they mean that they expect the code to return some sort of exception, not that they expect the code to fail in how it operates.
For example consider that a block of code is required to perform a "division" operation. A unit test case to test for a failure case would be one that provides a denominator of zero. In this case we can expect that the code will throw a divide-by-zero exception or return a special error code rather than halt the entire program.
And after a "unit" of code is written correctly, it shouldn't be changed a lot. Any big changes means a change in semantics, which means the original unit tests are useless anyway.
Not necessarily. An easy example is a developer writes division function and test cases are written to ensure it operates as expected. A month later we determine that we need to improve performance of the software that utilizes the division function, and the current division function performs poorly. So given the unit test cases, we can re-implement an optimized version of the function, and testing for accuracy of the function is almost free.
Another example is a developer starts working on a big software project. 6 months later he conveniently leaves the company without notice and his portion of the project is only 50% complete. Would you rather have 50% of code that you are not sure works or 25% of code that you are not sure works, but 100% of the unit test cases required for the existing code to tell you whether or not it works?
An even more useful example is dealing with bugs. You receive a bug report on some software that performs some function. You eventually find the cause of the bug in a particular function, but realize that it requires a specific state of the system. You fix the bug in the software but it results in "ugly code" that at first glance is unexplainable. How should you ensure that this code is not modified accidentally? A unit test case of course! This is a good example for very special bugs that are the result of hardware issues or other software systems that are out of your control.
There are valid argument against unit test cases (and automated testing in general). One argument is that in order to do automated testing, you are required to write more code for the test cases. This is a problem because now you have new code that does not have test cases for itself and can have bugs. So if the test case is written incorrectly, then it may point out that the original code is working incorrectly when in fact the test case is the culprit.
Another argument (which is what I think you were trying to say) is that when the specifications for the code change, so must the test cases. This can potentially double the maintenance work required when updating the software.
So I don't think that every piece of code needs a unit test case. But for code that will be reused considerably and is closer to the foundation of your project, you probably should make unit test cases.
The grand parent wasn't saying that was how he decided, but rather that is how companies decide. I agree with what you're trying to say, it is stupid for a company to buy into a worthless support contract because legally the software vendor is not responsible for any problems that occur or are they even responsible for providing a solution. Support contracts are basically there so you have a number to call and whine to when shit hits the fan, and when your boss comes around and asks "why isn't it working," you can say, "well it's proprietary software vendor's X's fault." Which sounds a little better than "it broke."
I know how useless support contracts are because we just canceled one. We had an annual "support" contract with an old and dying vendor with some old and dying software. One day we decided to actually talk to them to see if they could fix our issue. And their answer was "pay us more money and we *might* fix it." We replied "nevermind." A month later I figured out what the issue was after dumping their junk software into a test environment and playing with the inputs we had access to. Eventually I found that it had a shitty algorithm for doing something stupid and we happen to have data that ran into the algorithm's worst case run-time. Altered how the data was being fed and the problem went away. I saved the company ten's of thousands of dollars that day.
Next when it came time to renew our annual support contract with this vendor, we decided to not renew it because not only did we know they were trying to leech huge amounts of money from us, but we also had plans to eventually retire the aging system. Bam, thousands of dollars saved for the company again.
Don't think that MS is the only "bad guy" when it comes to "support" contracts. Every big software vendor does it and everyone makes sure to cover their butts. If you honestly think you can save your company a lot of money just by terminating support contracts and ensuring that you can take the responsibility for supporting the software then by all means do it. But there are some support contracts that I think are stupid, but others that I think are essential. The easy way to figure that out is if the system fails, and you can't bring it back up in a reliable amount of time, then you probably shouldn't take that responsibility because you'll probably lose your job.
Compared to those others, Java is an absolute dream with regard to consistency.
The language for a specific Java version might be consistent but the libraries won't be. Between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 there were/are huge changes in the language and libraries, some which broke some of our applications because they went ahead and deprecated some functionality.
I agree that C and Javascript are also a huge pain to work with between versions but you can't say the same about perl. Perl has maintained an incredible job at being backwards compatible with some pretty ugly code. We've been able to take perl code that was written 6 to 8 years ago under perl 5.5 and dump it on perl 5.8.7 without any changes. Some perl libraries you can get from cpan are only compatible with a certain newer version of perl (usually 5.6) but that's because they probably utilize/need newer features in perl. The same is true for Java where 1.4.2 has things that 1.3 didn't have and 1.5 has things that 1.4 didn't have.
You also mention ActiveState perl which kinda went in their own direction as far as packages and other things. But if you want perl for windows that is closer to perl for nix then you might want to try Strawberry perl. Strawberry perl includes a Mingw C/C++ compiler and a "make" tool so you can use cpan.
I think this is a great move for Sony because it sets them up to move to digital downloads if the competition is fierce but also packages Blu-ray into the same device. Either way, they win the movie-rentals and movie-player game.
Compared to something like the Apple TV, the PS3 is superior if Sony can push out their movie rental service soon. If the PS3 supported movie download rentals, you would have the best of both worlds in one device. Want to rent a (high def) movie from the store or netflix? Play it on your PS3. Want to rent a movie download? Play it on your PS3. It may sound funny, but I've been considering buying the PS3, not because of the game console features, but because of the movie download potential and the bluray player. Hell, if they had a PS3 that came with a remote instead of a controller, I'd probably buy that instead.
While the actual solution may not be exactly OpenID what the AC means is that this is an identification problem, not an AI problem.
CAPTCHAs are an AI problem: you are asking a computer to determine if what is on the other end is a human or not.
While you have an email account (or ten), a social network account here and there, and a forum account here and there, nothing is tied together. Each account is independent and each can be assigned a different persona and different background information--and by today's internet standards that is all acceptable.
What has allowed this to occur is the result of an anonymous internet. What we are trying to do is maintain an anonymous environment while asking computers to determine whether a particular account is owned/operated by a human or not. That's like going to a liquor store and asking the person a number of different questions OTHER than proof of their age to discern that they are in fact older than the required drinking age. For example rather than asking for ID, the store clerk would ask the person about some historical event that only people older than a certain age would be aware of. And of course this is flawed, once people younger than the required drinking age attain information on how to answer the question, the system breaks. This is what is and always will happen with CAPTCHAs.
The true solution is to provide a trusted credential that services can use to authenticate a user. OpenID is one piece of that because it hopes to allow you to use one id across all services. I think the next step would be to tie the OpenID to something tangible and hard to get without a real-world presence. Something like a bank account or a credit card number, or a government agency like a passport or drivers license would probably be the start.
I suspect that that this "not ready for the desktop" meme that I see constantly being reinforced is just part of the FUD campaign that Microsoft
Nice unnecessary stab at Microsoft but anyway...
When people say "not ready for the desktop" the mean it from a business viewpoint. The view you've taken is a very simplified view from a user-only viewpoint. The difference between the business viewpoint and the user-only viewpoint is the business viewpoint accounts for all of the other glue needed outside of just building the product. That includes things like marketing the product to ensure the product sells or is adopted by the market.
There are two major problems with linux that are preventing it from entering the desktop market:
Nobody has put a significant effort into marketing Linux as a desktop distribution.
Linux cannot be distributed with bundled proprietary software.
The first item costs money and your average programmer-geek probably doesn't understand one thing about marketing. I admit I didn't and everyday in my marketing classes I am amazed at how different their world is. But the impact marketing has is amazing in terms of the success of a product because it all boils down to how accessible the product is within the user's mind. That is if you go out on the street and ask some random person if they know what linux is, chances are pretty high they will say "no". Now if you ask them if they know what Apple is, chances are pretty high they will say "yes". You can run surveys to see how much awareness your product or company has within the population. If the results are low, you have some marketing work to do.
The second problem is a problem that causes other problems. For example if a company wanted to sell a PC loaded with ubuntu linux and MP3 and DVD support...well you can't do that. You can tell the user to install it after they open the box, but in their minds, why should they need to do that? I've seen a good deal of windows desktops still running the default settings from the desktop to the crapware loaded. People simply don't configure their systems like geeks do. They buy PCs as products and will only install or configure if they need something or if something breaks.
But the baseline of things that are supposed to work out of the box has already been set. For example on windows if an mp3 is double-clicked, windows media player plays the file. If a dvd is inserted, either windows compatible software is automatically installed or windows media player begins playing the dvd. And more importantly if the user buys something like a digital camera or a piece of proprietary software from the store, it is probably pretty clear if it works with windows or mac.
And the fact that the store even has an isle for "mac" or "windows" gadgets and software is another big issue. Businesses will go to great lengths to make sure they have shelf space or have contracts with retailers to sell their products. Even the mighty Dell has caved in to putting effort into making a brick and mortar presence for the consumer line of products. For linux, no such thing exists. You could say there were attempts like at Walmart with the linux PCs or even the eee.
In fact the eee is a good example. When the eee first came out it only shipped with linux, but now windows loaded versions are hitting the market. Why? Because there is a demand and windows has good market awareness and product compatibility. That is if I go out and buy a fancy 5 button mouse from Best Buy for my new eee, if I had windows, the mouse probably came with clear instructions, step by step, on how to install the mouse and make all the buttons work on windows. For linux? RTFM? Go on a mailing list or forum? Most people probably haven't heard of all three of those things. Asus held up their end of the bargain in making the computer work out of the box. But now to go and say, "we'll make it so that when people go into bestbuy, they can buy from the 'linux' sh
The problem with Linux is the GPL. It's unfortunate to say this but the GPL is a big roadblock in terms of Personal Computers and businesses. If a company wants to sell a PC with linux, that's fine. Now if the company wants to bundle proprietary hardware with proprietary driver from company B with their linux PC... well they can't because of the GPL.
Sure, the GPL was written to purposely prevent such a case, a case where a company could protect the source to their software while taking advantage of open source software. But most normal PC consumers don't give a shit about open source software politics. They want to play their dvd, they want to play their mp3s, they want to go to the store and not "think" about buying a product and have everything work with the fewest hassles. And people will line up and pay good money for such an experience. So until the ideals of linux, free software, and the GPL match up with consumers (hint: free is not the most important criteria) then linux will not be ready for the desktop.
Now think of doing the same, but this time not to build the most destructive weapon on the planet, but to get rid of oil as the primary energy source, lose the handcuffs of oil dependency, and save the climate.
Fix energy problem and save the earth OR go shoot up some "bad guys."
I think we know which one won in the last decade...
You'll note there are innumerable operating systems out there which are stable as a rock, and yet support a vast range of hardware. Linux/BSD are the first to come to mind, but there are others (Solaris, BeOS, et al.)
Define "vast range". If you want the OS that has the greatest compatibility (meaning I walk into the store and without checking buy software/hardware and try it) that would be Windows XP. There have been numerous times when I bashed my head for something not working in Linux because I forgot to check to make sure a driver was available. And with FreeBSD (or worse OpenSolaris) you have to make sure your hardware is compatible first before even attempting the install--because there probably isn't going to be some random linux post that is similar to your problem due to a much smaller user base.
One thing MS got right was opening the doors to any shop that wanted to build hardware or build software for Windows.
One thing MS got wrong was opening the doors to any shop that wanted to build hardware or build software for Windows.
It's a double edged sword. By allowing any manufacturer in the world to write a driver and sell you some hardware, they made competition so fierce in the hardware market that we have dirt cheap PCs today. But by allowing anyone to write any driver without a decent QA process, people could buy garbage hardware that could make their systems unstable.
No matter what kind of hardware you have, 2+2=4 (Intel CPU bugs aside). Crashes should not happen. Period.
That's a load of BS. I've had crashes (kernel panics) in Linux and FreeBSD with "supported" hardware. The truth is once a manufacturer releases a piece of silicon or a board, all of the fixes to problems in the hardware get done in software (the driver). If your hardware is in charge of something critical, like say a disk controller, you can bet that a bug in the disk controller will crash your OS. I don't care if your MS or a Linux kernel hacker, it will happen--there is nothing you can do when the virtual memory magically disappears or presents corrupted data. The only solution is either to update the driver or get new (or redundant) hardware.
You ought to look and read some kernel source code sometime. For example I tried troubleshooting (meaning modifying a driver) in my FreeBSD kernel to figure out if I could prevent a kernel panic with a dirt cheap SATA controller. I looked in the ata controller and saw all of the workarounds for hardware issues related to my hardware. It was ugly, but that was the reality. In the end I couldn't fix my issue and realized that the hardware I had really was "cheap".
I don't expect a free open source developer to fix or get all of the errata on every piece of junk hardware out there. So until we have infinite resources, kernel panics will happen in any OS that attempts to support every piece of hardware. Apple knows that, that's why they don't go out to try to support things like hackintoshes. Linus knows that and that is why he hates proprietary drivers. Microsoft learned that lesson for the last decade or so and are now they have more restrictive driver requirements.
The problem with a 4:3 screen is that most applications are written with the idea that they will be more like a box or 4:3 in aspect ratio. Therefore, when you have two windows on the screen, it is harder to make them fit next to each other; usually one corner will be cut off by the other window leaving two unused corners of the screen (though not usable to display anything). Though you are partially correct that widescreen doesn't offer much of a benefit if the resolution is too low.
I do dislike the fact that progress in screen resolution and dpi isn't progressing very fast as one would hope. For example times new roman is actually a very good print font like other serif fonts, but requires high dpi. On our screens the dpi is too low so times new roman looks like crap.
I was driving up the 5 in OC area during normal morning rush-hour. The average speed for every vehicle including the big rigs was about 10 to 15mph. To my right there was a big rig in the far right lane and just as we pass an on-ramp, a car speeds down the on-ramp and tries to beat the big rig. Of course he didn't win and lost his left rear-view mirror in the process.
The parent was not implying that everyone should not own a car, but rather that there should be a means to traveling to most places without one. Today, you cannot rely on public transportation in the United States for anything.
For example I live in southern California where owning 1 car per an adult is a requirement. That means if a household has 3 adults (2 parents, and 1 old teenager) you are likely to see 3 cars in the driveway. And when gas prices get expensive and the family needs to adjust to energy demands, they'll ensure that the adults have efficient cars but they still have a need for the "family" car like an SUV or a mini-van. So the family of 3 now has 4 cars.
This is ridiculous. I have the belief that a household should own one or two cars tops. These vehicles would be used to satisfy the things you claim: weekend groceries, or the weekend family trip. But for weekdays, when most commuting is from home to work, public transportation should reliably perform that role.
When I was applying for college way back in 2000-2001, the UC (University of California) schools only allowed you to count a limited number of AP courses as 5.0 credit and "honors" courses were required to be on the 4.0 scale. After you reached the maximum, you were supposed to drop down the remaining AP courses to the 4.0 scale. So it was possible to get above 4.0, but it was not possible to get astronomically high gpas (5.0). As you might guess, the UC schools had their own system of calculating GPA compared to my high school. So if you play by their rules, your GPA could be higher or lower than what your high school calculated. My school was pretty conservative about calculating GPA (not even AP counted as 5.0) so my GPA appeared lower, but when I calculated it based on the UC rules it appeared higher. Compared to other high schools with relaxed GPA calculations (honors A = 5.0), students were able to get ridiculously high GPAs. But on the UC scale, their GPAs probably went down.
The nice thing about the UC application process (then) was that it required a plethora of different types of data about your high school performance in addition to grades and test scores. So a student who focused on sports or the arts could be considered for admission as long as their other stats (gpa, test scores) were acceptable. However, this did not completely eliminate the fact that you were up against every other student applying to that school; if the school received 100,000 applicants and could only admit 10,000, then obviously the school would try to select what they deemed as the top 10%.
With that system there are two major "gotchas". The first is that if they consider one metric that is over a certain threshold as automatic acceptance, then you could theoretically not care about every other part of the application. For example, if you were guaranteed admission as long as your UC calculated GPA was above a certain threshold, then you were automatically accepted regardless of anything else on your application. The other "gotcha" is that if too many students apply and a metric has a ceiling (which they all do, maximum possible gpa, maximum possible test score), then granting automatic acceptance is no longer possible for the school to do. This means that if you had the highest gpa possible, but so did a 100,000 other students applying to the same school you did, then other traits of your application would be evaluated to see how you compared. This is usually why a certain combination of test scores and gpa can grant automatic acceptance, but one alone (high test score only, or high gpa only) will not. That is also why you should focus on extracurricular activities whether they be academic (debate team, special awards or competitions) or sports and the arts. Not just on GPA and test scores alone because it is likely that you are probably not in the top percentile in gpa and test scores alone.
Some colleges do have what I think are flawed admission processes. For example, I was able to get into 4 of 6 UC schools, many ranked in the top 100 universities on USnews. However, I was not able to get admission into some state schools like Cal Poly. The major difference between the California state and University of California admission processes was that state only allowed GPA, and SAT/ACT scores while the UC system required other things like if you played on a school sports team, performed with a school band, or other school sponsored activities. So effectively these state schools are only saying that GPA and test scores determine how well you will do in college, but other schools think there is more to it than that. And I agree, it is hard to predict the future performance of any individual. But if you can find some sort of academic accomplishment or trait within their performance that indicates that they will at least make your school worthy of its name, then that is all that matters. (Of course in the perfect world we would also have enough resources to throw at evaluating individuals but we don't. So the ne
There's no reason Vista can't be made compatible with XP's faster video drivers, except that Microsoft is being stubborn.
I believe the reasoning is that output drivers now run in a new model where if a driver fails, it will not crash the system. There have been many cases where my ATI driver crashed but Vista 64 was able to restart it without bluescreening. In XP a driver crash will take down your entire system whether it be some stupid usb device like a microphone or the video driver.
making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bit
I actually like the fact that the driver system is more restrictive. There were a lot of companies selling hardware that they claimed "compatible" with WinXP but would ultimately make your system unstable. To date, I have 2 vista computers and they have not crashed while in use.
Let us easily turn them the fuck off.
That's a good idea. They'd probably listen if you submitted that one to them.
the background services made my system run like a *dog*
I disabled indexing and it didn't do much. Next I disabled Windows defender (aka windows antivirus) and now my disk is much quieter. I still have the superfetch or whatever they call the aggressive caching feature on so my programs load almost instantaneously (including firefox).
I also still run aero, but I disabled all animations. The animations make the system feel slower even though it actually isn't. The same was true in Win95 to Win98 when they made the start menu scroll up when you opened it rather than instantly appear.
The price has crept up to within $100 of a "standard" basic notebook.
I'm tired of hearing this. The price is on target because it is not a basic notebook. It is an ultra portable device at an affordable price point compared to other ultra portable devices (read ultra portable does not necessarily mean laptop). People buying the eee don't care that the resolution is low, that the device can't play crysis, or that they can get a bigger brick at the same price. All they care about is: is it portable and does it allow me to do email, internet (yes people think browsing web pages == 'internet'), read documents, and run my little apps (IM, youtube, and mp3s).
Until the eee pc came out, every computer manufacturer failed at getting the requirements right for a laptop. It just so happened that asus got it right and that the tech needed (SSDs, CPU speed increases, ram capacity increases) was cheap enough.
However, I still give the OLPC/XO most of the credit for helping to create the market. If all of the news and media coverage of the OLPC never came to be, Asus and others may never have attempted such a device.
Syntax mistake? I haven't written C/C++ for almost a decade but the == operator is still the equivalence operator so all you are doing is comparing two portions of memory from (possibly) different starting points. If dst and src are equivalent (the same pointer) you could potentially run forever.
Perhaps this is what you wanted? (strcpy)
while( *dst++ = *src++ );
The src is copied into dst until a 0 (null character) is encountered (after the assignment operation).
While you are 100% correct, that is not the entire picture because you cannot determine which hands are "wrong" until after they have committed a crime. By outlawing all guns, you force all criminals to commit at least one crime before committing the crime they intended to commit (unless the crime was simply to own a gun).
So for example if a college kid is deemed to be an honest and lawful citizen until one day he just "snaps." He can use his current perceived "law abiding citizen" status to legally purchase a gun and then use the legally purchased gun to commit murder. If guns were illegal, he would first have to commit the crime of acquiring a gun before he could accomplish his true goal.
Obviously this would not prevent all crimes associated with guns, but it would make it harder for people to commit the crimes best performed through the use of a gun.
I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I can attest the opposite. I don't notice any slowdowns in vista when it has loaded. In fact, I just know that my firefox on vista loads way faster than on xp. I will admit the fancy animations can simulate less responsiveness (but those can be turned off) and that vista cold boot time is fairly slow. But XP cold boots can be just as slow with poor drivers and enough software set to run themselves in the background on startup (aka quicktime and other stupid programs).
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
You went in the wrong direction in my opinion. I left UAC on but run as a normal user so anytime the UAC pops up I have to type in the admin password. It is how I know that software is either written incorrectly or trying to do something I probably don't approve of. There have been many instances where I installed a piece of software only to find itself trying to install other crapware because the UAC window would popup when the other software tried to start installing itself.
I didn't disable vista's memory caching features first because I think that better memory utilization is a good idea for any OS especially with today's cheap memory prices. So instead I disabled other culprits that cause high disk activity. First I disabled indexing because there aren't very many times when I want to search my entire hard disk. I just don't have that many document files that are worth searching. But the disk activity was still too high. So next I disabled windows defender which is window's new built-in malware scanner (aka antivirus). Bingo, disk utilization has dropped significantly.
Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
And I say let it use every bit of "free" memory. Free memory is like letting that fancy convertible you bought sit in the garage while you go off and use your old car. You paid for the resource, now your OS has magically decided that it should not be used!? If I knew that my OS didn't need that extra 1.5gb most of the time then I ought to take that 1.5gb of ram and sell it on ebay.
People think that cached memory is some kind of huge tax when it isn't. If a block of memory is allocated to a program, it does not need to be zero'ed out. It can be handed with all of its garbage to the program requesting a new block of memory. So a block of cache or a block of free memory is all the same. The only tax paid in caching is filling the cache.
Additionally, Windows XP already "surveys" you. When you go into the add/remove programs control panels in XP it will show you how often you utilize each piece of software you have installed.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Turn off windows defender.
I have a vista machine with an intel dual core 1.8ghz and 2gb of ram. I'd rather use it than my single core laptop with 1gb of ram or my work desktop with a 3.4ghz p4, 2gb of ram, and windows xp.
hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of thei
Bachelor engineering degrees are actually worth their value because it is likely you will be able to get a good paying job after you graduate. For the social science and humanities degrees that is not necessarily true. For example one of my buddies graduated with a social science bachelors in criminology and for months could not find any jobs. When he finally got a job at a tax firm he told me his salary was around 40k and I was surprised that you could get paid that amount of money after spending what we did on tuition.
Later, I looked towards getting a higher degree because I wasn't satisfied with my current job so I figured getting some kind of masters whether it be in business or engineering would help me out. Turns out after a bachelors in any kind of engineering field, the returns for getting more education (masters or doctorates) diminish significantly even if it is an MBA. I found that I would make more money sitting at my current job with a bachelors than to quit my job for 2 years, get a masters degree in anything, and go back to work. There are some programs that allow you to get an MBA while working, but I didn't feel that that would be worth the effort either. I'd be worse off than I was as an undergrad with 40 hours at work and 3 night classes.
So my recommendation for kids going into college who have expectations to get paid well with their degree is to go in with either an engineering or biotech friendly degree and double major or minor into a social science or business field. Extend your undergrad time to 5 years so you won't feel as much pressure. And understand that if you plan on working after college, your GPA only impacts your first job and helps you negotiate a higher starting salary (but will not guarantee it). For example I graduated in the same class and same degree as another buddy and he graduated in the top 10% while I did not. In the end I still have a higher salary than he does.
Of course there are other degrees with good returns on investment like accounting. You simply have to do your research and figure out how much time your want to spend in education and what you think will actually be interesting to do after you're finish. If you are expecting to be really affluent, forget it. Any professional that has a high salary probably puts in a good amount of hours. For example investment banking has terrible hours but those guys get paid huge salaries. Doctors have pretty good salaries but ridiculous work weeks (30+ hour shifts, 80 hour work weeks).
The big secret to getting really wealthy really fast is to become a successful entrepreneur, and unfortunately, there are no degrees that will ensure that path. Things like MBAs can help, but they won't guarantee your success.
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Everyone thought they were bluffing, and it turns out they were not. So now you start seeing all these comments about other issues that nobody cared about to begin with (like how it compares with the Apple hardware).
I've been thinking about it myself and I wondered why a company would dare to do something like this. And all I could think of is that it is a disruptive product, and if they did their legal homework, they know they can get away with it. Because the product is so disruptive, they basically get free marketing without even trying. Apple should go after them to protect the brand and market, but it is probably a lose-lose scenario for Apple at this time. Chances are there isn't a whole lot of money there right now and Psystar might have thought about the legal issues beforehand. That means right now Apple will probably lose money in lawyer fees even if they come out winning because there's no money flowing into the company yet. But if they allow this company to continue it could potentially cause problems with the Apple brand and market. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to this (lock down their software? lawsuit? or ignore it all together?).
There's something wrong with the Vista boot and shutdown process because it seems slower than it needs to be. Anytime I have to restart or cold boot it takes considerably longer than a plain XP install. (Though XP tends to slow down over time as you add drivers, other software, and files get fragmented.) Vista boot kind of reminds me of Win2k, where nothing was optimized and everything happened sequentially even if it wasn't doing anything particularly useful (like timing out). My guess is vista is probably doing something stupid like waiting for each network interface to get assigned DHCP or something. Kinda like old linux distros that configured init and the network interfaces with DHCP to wait half a minute to a minute before they timed out.
It isn't too much a problem since there's the sleep function which sleeps and wakes up within seconds. With the right hardware, power consumption in sleep mode is 1 or 2 watts more than when your computer is considered "off" (PSU still plugged in, so it is technically in standby). In fact the default shutdown option (little power button on the start menu) is to put the computer into sleep rather than shutdown. I guess they figured they didn't need to worry about boot and shutdown times if everyone just used the sleep function.
Nah, more like a robe and wizard hat.
(I'll probably get my karma burned, especially after replying to an AC who probably has moderator points, but whatever.)
No, the previous postings do not make it clear. Every post that claims open source = good and Windows = bad assumes that Microsoft and other corporations will control the OLPC. I argue that is not true. All Negroponte has said is that his goal is to provide laptops to poor kids. That means that if he feels that Microsoft is doing something shady like DRM or limiting the functionality of available software, he will likely no longer choose Microsoft. On the same token, if he feels that open source is limiting the functionality of available software, he will likely no longer choose open source. He is basically saying that nobody, not even open source or Microsoft, controls the path of the project, but that ultimately the goals and requirements for the project do. The posts here only argue that there might be a requirement for open source in the project. Negroponte has just said that open source failed to meet the necessary requirements and that a Windows XP OS might meet the requirements better. To some degree he is correct, you can't run and distribute proprietary flash on a GPLed system, but you can with Windows.
All I have read in these comments are whines from the open source evangelism camp that Negroponte is not who they thought he was. The man was very clear about his goals, and open source advocates are surprised and in disgust that what they thought was there is no longer. Sorry, it wasn't true love after all. Get over it.
The purpose of a unit test testing for failure cases is not to detect places where the code has issues, but to ensure that the code performs as expected given the initial requirements/specifications. When people talk about "failure cases" they mean that they expect the code to return some sort of exception, not that they expect the code to fail in how it operates.
For example consider that a block of code is required to perform a "division" operation. A unit test case to test for a failure case would be one that provides a denominator of zero. In this case we can expect that the code will throw a divide-by-zero exception or return a special error code rather than halt the entire program.
And after a "unit" of code is written correctly, it shouldn't be changed a lot. Any big changes means a change in semantics, which means the original unit tests are useless anyway.Not necessarily. An easy example is a developer writes division function and test cases are written to ensure it operates as expected. A month later we determine that we need to improve performance of the software that utilizes the division function, and the current division function performs poorly. So given the unit test cases, we can re-implement an optimized version of the function, and testing for accuracy of the function is almost free.
Another example is a developer starts working on a big software project. 6 months later he conveniently leaves the company without notice and his portion of the project is only 50% complete. Would you rather have 50% of code that you are not sure works or 25% of code that you are not sure works, but 100% of the unit test cases required for the existing code to tell you whether or not it works?
An even more useful example is dealing with bugs. You receive a bug report on some software that performs some function. You eventually find the cause of the bug in a particular function, but realize that it requires a specific state of the system. You fix the bug in the software but it results in "ugly code" that at first glance is unexplainable. How should you ensure that this code is not modified accidentally? A unit test case of course! This is a good example for very special bugs that are the result of hardware issues or other software systems that are out of your control.
There are valid argument against unit test cases (and automated testing in general). One argument is that in order to do automated testing, you are required to write more code for the test cases. This is a problem because now you have new code that does not have test cases for itself and can have bugs. So if the test case is written incorrectly, then it may point out that the original code is working incorrectly when in fact the test case is the culprit.
Another argument (which is what I think you were trying to say) is that when the specifications for the code change, so must the test cases. This can potentially double the maintenance work required when updating the software.
So I don't think that every piece of code needs a unit test case. But for code that will be reused considerably and is closer to the foundation of your project, you probably should make unit test cases.
The grand parent wasn't saying that was how he decided, but rather that is how companies decide. I agree with what you're trying to say, it is stupid for a company to buy into a worthless support contract because legally the software vendor is not responsible for any problems that occur or are they even responsible for providing a solution. Support contracts are basically there so you have a number to call and whine to when shit hits the fan, and when your boss comes around and asks "why isn't it working," you can say, "well it's proprietary software vendor's X's fault." Which sounds a little better than "it broke."
I know how useless support contracts are because we just canceled one. We had an annual "support" contract with an old and dying vendor with some old and dying software. One day we decided to actually talk to them to see if they could fix our issue. And their answer was "pay us more money and we *might* fix it." We replied "nevermind." A month later I figured out what the issue was after dumping their junk software into a test environment and playing with the inputs we had access to. Eventually I found that it had a shitty algorithm for doing something stupid and we happen to have data that ran into the algorithm's worst case run-time. Altered how the data was being fed and the problem went away. I saved the company ten's of thousands of dollars that day.
Next when it came time to renew our annual support contract with this vendor, we decided to not renew it because not only did we know they were trying to leech huge amounts of money from us, but we also had plans to eventually retire the aging system. Bam, thousands of dollars saved for the company again.
Don't think that MS is the only "bad guy" when it comes to "support" contracts. Every big software vendor does it and everyone makes sure to cover their butts. If you honestly think you can save your company a lot of money just by terminating support contracts and ensuring that you can take the responsibility for supporting the software then by all means do it. But there are some support contracts that I think are stupid, but others that I think are essential. The easy way to figure that out is if the system fails, and you can't bring it back up in a reliable amount of time, then you probably shouldn't take that responsibility because you'll probably lose your job.
Are you trying to make us believe that because a student attends MIT that they are a good software architect?
The language for a specific Java version might be consistent but the libraries won't be. Between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 there were/are huge changes in the language and libraries, some which broke some of our applications because they went ahead and deprecated some functionality.
I agree that C and Javascript are also a huge pain to work with between versions but you can't say the same about perl. Perl has maintained an incredible job at being backwards compatible with some pretty ugly code. We've been able to take perl code that was written 6 to 8 years ago under perl 5.5 and dump it on perl 5.8.7 without any changes. Some perl libraries you can get from cpan are only compatible with a certain newer version of perl (usually 5.6) but that's because they probably utilize/need newer features in perl. The same is true for Java where 1.4.2 has things that 1.3 didn't have and 1.5 has things that 1.4 didn't have.
You also mention ActiveState perl which kinda went in their own direction as far as packages and other things. But if you want perl for windows that is closer to perl for nix then you might want to try Strawberry perl. Strawberry perl includes a Mingw C/C++ compiler and a "make" tool so you can use cpan.
I think this is a great move for Sony because it sets them up to move to digital downloads if the competition is fierce but also packages Blu-ray into the same device. Either way, they win the movie-rentals and movie-player game.
Compared to something like the Apple TV, the PS3 is superior if Sony can push out their movie rental service soon. If the PS3 supported movie download rentals, you would have the best of both worlds in one device. Want to rent a (high def) movie from the store or netflix? Play it on your PS3. Want to rent a movie download? Play it on your PS3. It may sound funny, but I've been considering buying the PS3, not because of the game console features, but because of the movie download potential and the bluray player. Hell, if they had a PS3 that came with a remote instead of a controller, I'd probably buy that instead.
Oh and BTW, the PS3 does run linux!
While the actual solution may not be exactly OpenID what the AC means is that this is an identification problem, not an AI problem.
CAPTCHAs are an AI problem: you are asking a computer to determine if what is on the other end is a human or not.
While you have an email account (or ten), a social network account here and there, and a forum account here and there, nothing is tied together. Each account is independent and each can be assigned a different persona and different background information--and by today's internet standards that is all acceptable.
What has allowed this to occur is the result of an anonymous internet. What we are trying to do is maintain an anonymous environment while asking computers to determine whether a particular account is owned/operated by a human or not. That's like going to a liquor store and asking the person a number of different questions OTHER than proof of their age to discern that they are in fact older than the required drinking age. For example rather than asking for ID, the store clerk would ask the person about some historical event that only people older than a certain age would be aware of. And of course this is flawed, once people younger than the required drinking age attain information on how to answer the question, the system breaks. This is what is and always will happen with CAPTCHAs.
The true solution is to provide a trusted credential that services can use to authenticate a user. OpenID is one piece of that because it hopes to allow you to use one id across all services. I think the next step would be to tie the OpenID to something tangible and hard to get without a real-world presence. Something like a bank account or a credit card number, or a government agency like a passport or drivers license would probably be the start.
I suspect that that this "not ready for the desktop" meme that I see constantly being reinforced is just part of the FUD campaign that Microsoft
Nice unnecessary stab at Microsoft but anyway...
When people say "not ready for the desktop" the mean it from a business viewpoint. The view you've taken is a very simplified view from a user-only viewpoint. The difference between the business viewpoint and the user-only viewpoint is the business viewpoint accounts for all of the other glue needed outside of just building the product. That includes things like marketing the product to ensure the product sells or is adopted by the market.
There are two major problems with linux that are preventing it from entering the desktop market:
The first item costs money and your average programmer-geek probably doesn't understand one thing about marketing. I admit I didn't and everyday in my marketing classes I am amazed at how different their world is. But the impact marketing has is amazing in terms of the success of a product because it all boils down to how accessible the product is within the user's mind. That is if you go out on the street and ask some random person if they know what linux is, chances are pretty high they will say "no". Now if you ask them if they know what Apple is, chances are pretty high they will say "yes". You can run surveys to see how much awareness your product or company has within the population. If the results are low, you have some marketing work to do.
The second problem is a problem that causes other problems. For example if a company wanted to sell a PC loaded with ubuntu linux and MP3 and DVD support...well you can't do that. You can tell the user to install it after they open the box, but in their minds, why should they need to do that? I've seen a good deal of windows desktops still running the default settings from the desktop to the crapware loaded. People simply don't configure their systems like geeks do. They buy PCs as products and will only install or configure if they need something or if something breaks.
But the baseline of things that are supposed to work out of the box has already been set. For example on windows if an mp3 is double-clicked, windows media player plays the file. If a dvd is inserted, either windows compatible software is automatically installed or windows media player begins playing the dvd. And more importantly if the user buys something like a digital camera or a piece of proprietary software from the store, it is probably pretty clear if it works with windows or mac.
And the fact that the store even has an isle for "mac" or "windows" gadgets and software is another big issue. Businesses will go to great lengths to make sure they have shelf space or have contracts with retailers to sell their products. Even the mighty Dell has caved in to putting effort into making a brick and mortar presence for the consumer line of products. For linux, no such thing exists. You could say there were attempts like at Walmart with the linux PCs or even the eee.
In fact the eee is a good example. When the eee first came out it only shipped with linux, but now windows loaded versions are hitting the market. Why? Because there is a demand and windows has good market awareness and product compatibility. That is if I go out and buy a fancy 5 button mouse from Best Buy for my new eee, if I had windows, the mouse probably came with clear instructions, step by step, on how to install the mouse and make all the buttons work on windows. For linux? RTFM? Go on a mailing list or forum? Most people probably haven't heard of all three of those things. Asus held up their end of the bargain in making the computer work out of the box. But now to go and say, "we'll make it so that when people go into bestbuy, they can buy from the 'linux' sh
The problem with Linux is the GPL. It's unfortunate to say this but the GPL is a big roadblock in terms of Personal Computers and businesses. If a company wants to sell a PC with linux, that's fine. Now if the company wants to bundle proprietary hardware with proprietary driver from company B with their linux PC... well they can't because of the GPL.
Sure, the GPL was written to purposely prevent such a case, a case where a company could protect the source to their software while taking advantage of open source software. But most normal PC consumers don't give a shit about open source software politics. They want to play their dvd, they want to play their mp3s, they want to go to the store and not "think" about buying a product and have everything work with the fewest hassles. And people will line up and pay good money for such an experience. So until the ideals of linux, free software, and the GPL match up with consumers (hint: free is not the most important criteria) then linux will not be ready for the desktop.
Fix energy problem and save the earth OR go shoot up some "bad guys."
I think we know which one won in the last decade...
Define "vast range". If you want the OS that has the greatest compatibility (meaning I walk into the store and without checking buy software/hardware and try it) that would be Windows XP. There have been numerous times when I bashed my head for something not working in Linux because I forgot to check to make sure a driver was available. And with FreeBSD (or worse OpenSolaris) you have to make sure your hardware is compatible first before even attempting the install--because there probably isn't going to be some random linux post that is similar to your problem due to a much smaller user base.
One thing MS got right was opening the doors to any shop that wanted to build hardware or build software for Windows.
One thing MS got wrong was opening the doors to any shop that wanted to build hardware or build software for Windows.
It's a double edged sword. By allowing any manufacturer in the world to write a driver and sell you some hardware, they made competition so fierce in the hardware market that we have dirt cheap PCs today. But by allowing anyone to write any driver without a decent QA process, people could buy garbage hardware that could make their systems unstable.
No matter what kind of hardware you have, 2+2=4 (Intel CPU bugs aside). Crashes should not happen. Period.That's a load of BS. I've had crashes (kernel panics) in Linux and FreeBSD with "supported" hardware. The truth is once a manufacturer releases a piece of silicon or a board, all of the fixes to problems in the hardware get done in software (the driver). If your hardware is in charge of something critical, like say a disk controller, you can bet that a bug in the disk controller will crash your OS. I don't care if your MS or a Linux kernel hacker, it will happen--there is nothing you can do when the virtual memory magically disappears or presents corrupted data. The only solution is either to update the driver or get new (or redundant) hardware.
You ought to look and read some kernel source code sometime. For example I tried troubleshooting (meaning modifying a driver) in my FreeBSD kernel to figure out if I could prevent a kernel panic with a dirt cheap SATA controller. I looked in the ata controller and saw all of the workarounds for hardware issues related to my hardware. It was ugly, but that was the reality. In the end I couldn't fix my issue and realized that the hardware I had really was "cheap".
I don't expect a free open source developer to fix or get all of the errata on every piece of junk hardware out there. So until we have infinite resources, kernel panics will happen in any OS that attempts to support every piece of hardware. Apple knows that, that's why they don't go out to try to support things like hackintoshes. Linus knows that and that is why he hates proprietary drivers. Microsoft learned that lesson for the last decade or so and are now they have more restrictive driver requirements.
The problem with a 4:3 screen is that most applications are written with the idea that they will be more like a box or 4:3 in aspect ratio. Therefore, when you have two windows on the screen, it is harder to make them fit next to each other; usually one corner will be cut off by the other window leaving two unused corners of the screen (though not usable to display anything). Though you are partially correct that widescreen doesn't offer much of a benefit if the resolution is too low.
I do dislike the fact that progress in screen resolution and dpi isn't progressing very fast as one would hope. For example times new roman is actually a very good print font like other serif fonts, but requires high dpi. On our screens the dpi is too low so times new roman looks like crap.
I was driving up the 5 in OC area during normal morning rush-hour. The average speed for every vehicle including the big rigs was about 10 to 15mph. To my right there was a big rig in the far right lane and just as we pass an on-ramp, a car speeds down the on-ramp and tries to beat the big rig. Of course he didn't win and lost his left rear-view mirror in the process.
The parent was not implying that everyone should not own a car, but rather that there should be a means to traveling to most places without one. Today, you cannot rely on public transportation in the United States for anything.
For example I live in southern California where owning 1 car per an adult is a requirement. That means if a household has 3 adults (2 parents, and 1 old teenager) you are likely to see 3 cars in the driveway. And when gas prices get expensive and the family needs to adjust to energy demands, they'll ensure that the adults have efficient cars but they still have a need for the "family" car like an SUV or a mini-van. So the family of 3 now has 4 cars.
This is ridiculous. I have the belief that a household should own one or two cars tops. These vehicles would be used to satisfy the things you claim: weekend groceries, or the weekend family trip. But for weekdays, when most commuting is from home to work, public transportation should reliably perform that role.
When I was applying for college way back in 2000-2001, the UC (University of California) schools only allowed you to count a limited number of AP courses as 5.0 credit and "honors" courses were required to be on the 4.0 scale. After you reached the maximum, you were supposed to drop down the remaining AP courses to the 4.0 scale. So it was possible to get above 4.0, but it was not possible to get astronomically high gpas (5.0). As you might guess, the UC schools had their own system of calculating GPA compared to my high school. So if you play by their rules, your GPA could be higher or lower than what your high school calculated. My school was pretty conservative about calculating GPA (not even AP counted as 5.0) so my GPA appeared lower, but when I calculated it based on the UC rules it appeared higher. Compared to other high schools with relaxed GPA calculations (honors A = 5.0), students were able to get ridiculously high GPAs. But on the UC scale, their GPAs probably went down.
The nice thing about the UC application process (then) was that it required a plethora of different types of data about your high school performance in addition to grades and test scores. So a student who focused on sports or the arts could be considered for admission as long as their other stats (gpa, test scores) were acceptable. However, this did not completely eliminate the fact that you were up against every other student applying to that school; if the school received 100,000 applicants and could only admit 10,000, then obviously the school would try to select what they deemed as the top 10%.
With that system there are two major "gotchas". The first is that if they consider one metric that is over a certain threshold as automatic acceptance, then you could theoretically not care about every other part of the application. For example, if you were guaranteed admission as long as your UC calculated GPA was above a certain threshold, then you were automatically accepted regardless of anything else on your application. The other "gotcha" is that if too many students apply and a metric has a ceiling (which they all do, maximum possible gpa, maximum possible test score), then granting automatic acceptance is no longer possible for the school to do. This means that if you had the highest gpa possible, but so did a 100,000 other students applying to the same school you did, then other traits of your application would be evaluated to see how you compared. This is usually why a certain combination of test scores and gpa can grant automatic acceptance, but one alone (high test score only, or high gpa only) will not. That is also why you should focus on extracurricular activities whether they be academic (debate team, special awards or competitions) or sports and the arts. Not just on GPA and test scores alone because it is likely that you are probably not in the top percentile in gpa and test scores alone.
Some colleges do have what I think are flawed admission processes. For example, I was able to get into 4 of 6 UC schools, many ranked in the top 100 universities on USnews. However, I was not able to get admission into some state schools like Cal Poly. The major difference between the California state and University of California admission processes was that state only allowed GPA, and SAT/ACT scores while the UC system required other things like if you played on a school sports team, performed with a school band, or other school sponsored activities. So effectively these state schools are only saying that GPA and test scores determine how well you will do in college, but other schools think there is more to it than that. And I agree, it is hard to predict the future performance of any individual. But if you can find some sort of academic accomplishment or trait within their performance that indicates that they will at least make your school worthy of its name, then that is all that matters. (Of course in the perfect world we would also have enough resources to throw at evaluating individuals but we don't. So the ne
I believe the reasoning is that output drivers now run in a new model where if a driver fails, it will not crash the system. There have been many cases where my ATI driver crashed but Vista 64 was able to restart it without bluescreening. In XP a driver crash will take down your entire system whether it be some stupid usb device like a microphone or the video driver.
making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bitI actually like the fact that the driver system is more restrictive. There were a lot of companies selling hardware that they claimed "compatible" with WinXP but would ultimately make your system unstable. To date, I have 2 vista computers and they have not crashed while in use.
Let us easily turn them the fuck off.That's a good idea. They'd probably listen if you submitted that one to them.
the background services made my system run like a *dog*I disabled indexing and it didn't do much. Next I disabled Windows defender (aka windows antivirus) and now my disk is much quieter. I still have the superfetch or whatever they call the aggressive caching feature on so my programs load almost instantaneously (including firefox).
I also still run aero, but I disabled all animations. The animations make the system feel slower even though it actually isn't. The same was true in Win95 to Win98 when they made the start menu scroll up when you opened it rather than instantly appear.
If I could lay down $80,000 like that I'd probably think the room is cheap.
I'm tired of hearing this. The price is on target because it is not a basic notebook. It is an ultra portable device at an affordable price point compared to other ultra portable devices (read ultra portable does not necessarily mean laptop). People buying the eee don't care that the resolution is low, that the device can't play crysis, or that they can get a bigger brick at the same price. All they care about is: is it portable and does it allow me to do email, internet (yes people think browsing web pages == 'internet'), read documents, and run my little apps (IM, youtube, and mp3s).
Until the eee pc came out, every computer manufacturer failed at getting the requirements right for a laptop. It just so happened that asus got it right and that the tech needed (SSDs, CPU speed increases, ram capacity increases) was cheap enough.
However, I still give the OLPC/XO most of the credit for helping to create the market. If all of the news and media coverage of the OLPC never came to be, Asus and others may never have attempted such a device.
Syntax mistake? I haven't written C/C++ for almost a decade but the == operator is still the equivalence operator so all you are doing is comparing two portions of memory from (possibly) different starting points. If dst and src are equivalent (the same pointer) you could potentially run forever.
Perhaps this is what you wanted? (strcpy)
The src is copied into dst until a 0 (null character) is encountered (after the assignment operation).
While you are 100% correct, that is not the entire picture because you cannot determine which hands are "wrong" until after they have committed a crime. By outlawing all guns, you force all criminals to commit at least one crime before committing the crime they intended to commit (unless the crime was simply to own a gun).
So for example if a college kid is deemed to be an honest and lawful citizen until one day he just "snaps." He can use his current perceived "law abiding citizen" status to legally purchase a gun and then use the legally purchased gun to commit murder. If guns were illegal, he would first have to commit the crime of acquiring a gun before he could accomplish his true goal.
Obviously this would not prevent all crimes associated with guns, but it would make it harder for people to commit the crimes best performed through the use of a gun.
I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I can attest the opposite. I don't notice any slowdowns in vista when it has loaded. In fact, I just know that my firefox on vista loads way faster than on xp. I will admit the fancy animations can simulate less responsiveness (but those can be turned off) and that vista cold boot time is fairly slow. But XP cold boots can be just as slow with poor drivers and enough software set to run themselves in the background on startup (aka quicktime and other stupid programs).
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
You went in the wrong direction in my opinion. I left UAC on but run as a normal user so anytime the UAC pops up I have to type in the admin password. It is how I know that software is either written incorrectly or trying to do something I probably don't approve of. There have been many instances where I installed a piece of software only to find itself trying to install other crapware because the UAC window would popup when the other software tried to start installing itself.
I didn't disable vista's memory caching features first because I think that better memory utilization is a good idea for any OS especially with today's cheap memory prices. So instead I disabled other culprits that cause high disk activity. First I disabled indexing because there aren't very many times when I want to search my entire hard disk. I just don't have that many document files that are worth searching. But the disk activity was still too high. So next I disabled windows defender which is window's new built-in malware scanner (aka antivirus). Bingo, disk utilization has dropped significantly.
Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
And I say let it use every bit of "free" memory. Free memory is like letting that fancy convertible you bought sit in the garage while you go off and use your old car. You paid for the resource, now your OS has magically decided that it should not be used!? If I knew that my OS didn't need that extra 1.5gb most of the time then I ought to take that 1.5gb of ram and sell it on ebay.
People think that cached memory is some kind of huge tax when it isn't. If a block of memory is allocated to a program, it does not need to be zero'ed out. It can be handed with all of its garbage to the program requesting a new block of memory. So a block of cache or a block of free memory is all the same. The only tax paid in caching is filling the cache.
Additionally, Windows XP already "surveys" you. When you go into the add/remove programs control panels in XP it will show you how often you utilize each piece of software you have installed.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Turn off windows defender.
I have a vista machine with an intel dual core 1.8ghz and 2gb of ram. I'd rather use it than my single core laptop with 1gb of ram or my work desktop with a 3.4ghz p4, 2gb of ram, and windows xp.
hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of thei
Bachelor engineering degrees are actually worth their value because it is likely you will be able to get a good paying job after you graduate. For the social science and humanities degrees that is not necessarily true. For example one of my buddies graduated with a social science bachelors in criminology and for months could not find any jobs. When he finally got a job at a tax firm he told me his salary was around 40k and I was surprised that you could get paid that amount of money after spending what we did on tuition.
Later, I looked towards getting a higher degree because I wasn't satisfied with my current job so I figured getting some kind of masters whether it be in business or engineering would help me out. Turns out after a bachelors in any kind of engineering field, the returns for getting more education (masters or doctorates) diminish significantly even if it is an MBA. I found that I would make more money sitting at my current job with a bachelors than to quit my job for 2 years, get a masters degree in anything, and go back to work. There are some programs that allow you to get an MBA while working, but I didn't feel that that would be worth the effort either. I'd be worse off than I was as an undergrad with 40 hours at work and 3 night classes.
So my recommendation for kids going into college who have expectations to get paid well with their degree is to go in with either an engineering or biotech friendly degree and double major or minor into a social science or business field. Extend your undergrad time to 5 years so you won't feel as much pressure. And understand that if you plan on working after college, your GPA only impacts your first job and helps you negotiate a higher starting salary (but will not guarantee it). For example I graduated in the same class and same degree as another buddy and he graduated in the top 10% while I did not. In the end I still have a higher salary than he does.
Of course there are other degrees with good returns on investment like accounting. You simply have to do your research and figure out how much time your want to spend in education and what you think will actually be interesting to do after you're finish. If you are expecting to be really affluent, forget it. Any professional that has a high salary probably puts in a good amount of hours. For example investment banking has terrible hours but those guys get paid huge salaries. Doctors have pretty good salaries but ridiculous work weeks (30+ hour shifts, 80 hour work weeks).
The big secret to getting really wealthy really fast is to become a successful entrepreneur, and unfortunately, there are no degrees that will ensure that path. Things like MBAs can help, but they won't guarantee your success.