No microphone. Sorry for mentioning again what's been commented on earlier in this discussion, but those were usually in reference to Skype on the iPod Touch. Without a mic, you can't do voice recording, any form of VoIP, or audio in from, for example, a guitar amp or soundboard.
No camera either, which given the quality of photos you get from a lens that size is no big loss to me... apparently some people like them though.
I must say your list of capabilities surely increased my interest in the iPhone, especially with the price drop. I've completed my current phone's contract and am thinking about getting a smartphone.
While I'm not making any recommendations here, I just wanted to mention that IE7's zooming also resizes Flash and while I almost never use it, I've found that it's very very smooth (I scale some oversized sites down to 75%, and occasionally scale up to 150% or 200% for older eyes using my 17" 1680x1050 display). I'm not sure if it matters, but I have ClearType enabled and tuned for my display.
Sorry for the OT. Please return to your discussion of everything non-MS (although you *can* run Linux, with backup images, in VirtualPC which is a free download these days...)
Quick question: Where is the info about the number of pre-release users coming from? Neither linked page has the number, in either digit or text form, anywhere Ctrl-F could find it.
I ask because I'd like to be one of these people, if possible. I ran pre-release versions of Vista for over a year before it was released to the public, and in general am happy testing things, sending feedback, and finding obscure but usually reproducible errors.
Remember that Vista installs every feature, including the ones you can't even access with the version of the OS you're running, onto the hard drive (this is why you can do an in-place upgrade from, say, home basic to home premium with nothing but a new license key... the features are already installed, and just need to be unlocked). So, everything from the full capabilities of ISS to Media Center to all the tablet, accessibility, and voice command software is already installed. I'm not quite saying this is a good thing - it makes Vista's install footprint vaguely absurd (over 12GB for the 32-bit edition) - but it's nice to never again need the DVD it came on.
As for the service pack being that big, remember that standalone service packs include all the prior patches as well as new fixes. Patching a fresh install of the newest edition of XP media center (either called SP or 2005, I forget, in any case based off the XP SP2 code base) requires a couple hundred megs of patches and updates. That's an OS with an install footprint only a bit over 3GB that has already received a service pack update to the point that most people considered it "ready" (FWIW, I count Vista as ready enough that I've refused to use XP since RC2, but I'm talking about the public perceptions of XP vs. Vista not my own). I'm not surprised that the standalone pack is so large. The size downloaded to the typical user's machine, which has been kept up to date in general, will probably be at worst a few hundred megs. It will be downloaded by Windows' BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) service, which downloads when the connection has idle bandwidth and is quite good at handling connection loss and automatically resumes where it was left off. In other words, while the standalone may be a bitch, the general user's update shouldn't be too hard.
AFAIK, ReadyBoost is nothing but a SuperFetch cache location. Disabling SuperFetch will make ReadyBoost more-or-less useless, although Windows may still use it they way it (and all other mainstream OSes) have cached for years (decades for some) in that they assume whatever you have just accessed, you are likely to access again.
Using ReadyBoost as RAM (or swap, which is much the same) wouldn't work for a couple reasons. First of all, Flash memory is much too slow on write, especially since the ReadyBoost file is encrypted so that if somebody got hold of your ReadyBoost device they couldn't get any useful info off it that you hadn't intentionally put there. Second, a requirement for ReadyBoost was that the device could be pulled from the system at any time, with no warning, without causing any system instability. I'm not saying it's a good thing - pulling a Flash device in the middle of a write is a good way to end up with blocks in an indeterminate state, and msot of them use a version of the FAT filesystem which means there's no journaling - but it's possible, at least from ReadyBoost's perspective. Obviously, the system can't afford to have active memory yanked out from under it.
The one exception to that, for swap, is that data in swap must be mapped into main memory before use. The longest delay in doing this, by far, is the hard drive seek and read times. Flash has no seek and reads pretty fast, so it may be possible to that when the OS is paging RAM out to swap, it could also put a copy on a ReadyBoost store. Then, when it needs that memory, it first checks if the ReadyBoost store is still accessible, and if so it reads the data into main memory from there (faster than pulling it off the hard disk).
Incidentally, SuperFetch is a feature that, personally, I find quite excellent. People with systems several times as powerful as mine (including vastly faster hard drives) wonder how I can start, for example, EVE Online (install footprint ~1GB) whole seconds faster than they can. Answer: I almost always run EVE at about the same time in the evenings and weekends, and so Vista goes ahead and pre-loads it (unless I'm using that RAM for something else, although I do have a ReadyBoost device as well). For all my dual-core 1.83GHz processor is nothing next to their quad 3.2GHz processors, it's a lot faster because I don't have to wait while the OS pulls stuff off the hard drive. This applies to other programs as well, it's just most noticeable on those that need a lot of data loaded at startup. Many smaller programs start effectively instantly for me, which makes the computer feel far more responsive than it did with XP.
<flameproof>I really wish there was a similar service for Linux; watching that bloody bouncing icon get really tiresome for some programs.</flameproof> If anybody knows of one, or of a way to configure something to give this behavior (hell, I'd recompile the kernel to get this), please let me know. Thanks!
IANAL and I have no idea about Spain's IP laws, but I assure you that the entire point of the GPL/LGPL/any other "copyleft" license is that it is a copyright license. There is no contract anywhere. The GPL is not an EULA either; there is no limit on use or modification of GPL software such as you'll find in most End User License Agreements... the only restriction in the GPL covers the act of providing copies. The GPL is nothing but a limited license to redistribute. Since it's a copyright license, its only limitations are on distribution (which is a copyright issue) so violating the GPL is, by definition, copyright violation
Without getting into the Fair Use/RIAA/"music piracy is good!" arguments or discussing what the finer points of definition on "boot-legging", the GPP's point #2 is correct. The laws prohibiting unlicensed music redistribution are exactly the same as the laws prohibiting unlicensed (outside the terms of the GPL, in this case) software redistribution.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that, while I have mod points, I chose to comment instead; there is no moderation -1: Wrong for a reason.
I'm suspect it just downloads the swf or whatever file, although I could be completely wrong about that. In any case, RealPlayer 11 claims it can play Flash movies, which suggests it would work even with local ones... thus, downloading the file itself makes the most sense.
As somebody who, back in the Win9x days (I forget, 95 or 98) installed a early version of RealPlayer that hijacked my entire sound card while in Windows (neither system sounds nor sound from other players would play, whether RP was running or not, although I could get sound in other programs like Warcraft 2) I can certainly appreciate your view on this. That was, however, roughly a decade ago, and while I still don't care for the company and certainly won't claim they've been perfect angels since then, every now and then you should give somebody a second chance.
RealPlayer 11 is actually a pretty good product, considering its beta status (the version I downloaded had a couple showstopper bugs on Vista, mainly involving volume control, so I don't use it much). RP10 is absolute garbage on Windows - huge, slow, bloated, ad-filled, and aggressive system changes set by default (although they can be unchecked) that I really don't care for. The version for Linux is actually a good product though - I prefer Amorak for casual listening, but for some video formats RP is a better bet than anything else I have installed.
Also, Real has recently begun selling DRM-free MP3s through their Rhapsody online music store. The tracks are ripped at 256kbps (same as their DRMed versions) and cost the same as well. Most of their catalog is still DRMed, and the Rhapsody player itself isn't going to win any awards from me for being great software, but moving even a little away from DRM earns them big points IMO. Now, if only they would make it possible to purchase MP3s on Linux it would be even better...
While Aero, since it requires a WDDM Driver (as does DX10) could be called "DX10 mode", it actually doesn't require DX10-capable hardware. None of my computers (laptops all for the last few years) support DX10, but I can get Aero on all but the oldest.
Indeed, it sounds like you have an Intel Integrated graphics accelerator, which AFAIK has no DX10-capable version yet. Even ATI is only just now releasing DX10-capable cards. If there are any DX10 dedicated cards (let alone integrated) that can be put in a laptop, I have yet to encounter them. In your case, you probably just don't have enough video RAM - Vista uses the GPU and VRAM to streamline video decoding, so trying to do that while also using the VRAM to buffer the screen frames and the GPU to render them in 3D may overload low-end video cards. Turning off the desktop compositor (Basic mode) eliminates the second source of load.
Out of curiosity, are you using full screen by simply maximizing the player window or by actually switching to a windowless full-screen display mode? If you're just maximizing the window, you're basically using the max amount of VRAM. Windowless full-screen mode should cause Windows to move the window frames for other programs out of the VRAM (at least it does on mine, and I have 256MB dedicated VRAM and about as much shared).
http//baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ is a site offering free downloads or online reading of all the books Baen has released on CD (which is quite a lot of them). The CD's are licensed for free redistribution, and while the baencd webmaster does encourage people to purchase from Baen and is in touch with the publishing house, he neither pays not is paid by them, and offers the books for people to read with no strings attached.
While I was hoping that WiFi coming to commercial airliners would make it possible to access the site while in the air, making those books accessible through in-seat computer terminals would be both satisfactory for me and probably very commercially beneficial to Baen.
Interesting... I'm a developer, and have nothing to do with sales, but I wasn't under the impression that foreign Visa cards or such would be blocked. That's very interesting indeed. Except for the currency conversion and such, which would already be handled anyhow since physical goods are available for purchase, I wouldn't expect there to be any reason online stores couldn't take your card. Very odd...
I suppose you've never heard of the Mono project? Many of the projects on CodePlex are.NET, yes. But, many of them are version 2 or below, which runs fine on Mono in almost all cases. Anyhow, they're open source, so you can modify them if need be. Sheesh, do you also claim that nobody should work on Linux (the kernel and immediately related code, such as drivers) either, since they only work on a single system?
Yes, some of those projects are designed to enhance (or otherwise depend on) proprietary software. They are still open-source, and no matter how much you may dislike Windows, the projects in and of themselves are quite cool.
If MS were genuinely interested in Open Source, they'd use a known approved license instead of coming up with their own. Two resons I can see:
1) NIH (Not Invented Here). Almost certainly a part of it. 2) Patent clauses. This is almost certainly why the license says it applies to use as well as distribution: you're allowed to patent the software (I think, IANAL), but you're not allowed to file a patent suit or collect patent royalties for it's use against anybody else who has agreed to the license. This is interesting as it appears to be an effective anti-patent-troll measure; if MS-licensed software is patented, then nobody can use those algorithms, whatever without agreeing to the license. They can get and redistribute the software freely, even the source if it's the Community license, but they can't use patents to try and shut down a competing project (as, for example, Microsoft might be trying to do with Linux). Obviously, this seems a little unlike them, so if anybody who is more familiar with patent law could examine my analysis (and the license itself) I'd apprecate that.
I work for the e-commerce section of a company that has an international online store (of bits and bytes, not physical products). The effort to add an additional country vastly exceeds that to check somebody's country and deny them access. We're trying (hard) to support more countries and payment methods, but it's not trivial at all.
Problems range from standard internationalization issues that anybody selling software overseas encounters to legal trade limits (usually not something that can be legally circumvented, and yes we're a US company). The most common significant problem is handling payment types. In the US we only have a few credit/debit card providers (less than 5, depending on your definition of "major). What's more, it's usually worth more for us (and less effort) to support the minority payment methods here in the US since this is the primary region where we're known. Internationally, the number of payment methods rapidly becomes quite extreme, and each one requires setting up the client-side support for the necessary authentication data and server-side infrastructure to handle payment authorization with each provider. This is, of course, after price adjustments and exchange rates are taken into account. There's a lot more I didn't even understand - I work on one small project that's one part of a fairly large team - but your complaint that you were unable to purchase online because you "needed an American credit card" doesn't surprise me in the least. Adding each additional payment method/provider adds a lot of cost to the project.
As a rule, companies make as much money as they can. Thinking things like "Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers?" is a clear sign that you don't know what is involved. I didn't either until a meeting a month or so back; as an American, my credit/debit cards have always been accepted internationally... but most of the names and icons of cards accepted by overseas ATMs and such are completely unknown to me; nothing here in the US accepts them because it's simply too much effort for the level of reward. I'm sure it's worth a bit more to online stores, but it's still a long road for relatively little economic reward most of the time.
On Vista, at least, IE7 and D2 now get along a lot better. The scrolling is smooth now, page updates are instant (faster than on Firefox, sometimes, but that probably has to do with what's being updated), and by and large it's fairly usable now.
Problems still in IE7: 1) Clicking on an AJAX link is still likely to scroll your brownser almost all the way to the bottom of the page. I have no idea why this happens but it is by far the most annoying bug. 2) The visibility levels (white, light grey, dark grey) still float to the right of the sliders (and occsionally cover some content near the top of the screen). 3) Expanding a comment occasionally causes the title bar of a different comment to detach from the top of its comment. This can be easily solved by very slightly resizing the window.
Problems in Firefox: 1) Pages still seem to take inordinately long to download (even if I disable ads). The incredibly annoying bug where expanding a comment wouldn't expand it fully and or show the Reply button thankfully seems to be fixed.
Problems in Konqueror: 1) Render speed is iffy. The page jumps around a bit before settling down to a readable state.
I still like IE7 for its tab management (control-tab cycling through recently visited tabs in order of visiting them) and RSS feed reader. The jump-down-the-page-on-click bug is annoying, but at least the scrolling is now so smooth that it's possible to quickly get back where you were. In Linux I prefer to use Konqueror, but I do wish I could close a tab by middle-clicking it (not Slashdot's fault in any way, just a general browser gripe).
Don't even try using D2 in Links. It will load the page, and then go nowhere until you uncheck the box and refresh. Lack of CSS support, I suppose, or perhaps no XmlHttpRequest or too limited of a JavaScript engine.
That's really quite an unfair comparison. You chose to go to their site. Your actions initiated all the transfer of data that eats bandwidth and so forth. Your use of the service the webmaster provides (a website you can access) and expects payment for (from advertising) is not being compensated. Don't play the "I'm the victim here; I went to a website and it started transmitting data and eating my bandwidth!!" game; it's not one you're likely to win. Complain about the intrusiveness of the ads, or the fact that Flash adverts occasionally crash Firefox, or that ad servers pose a privacy concern, but don't pretend that anybody is sending you anything that you didn't, directly or indirectly, request that they send.
Yes, I use Adblock Plus. No, I don't use it because it costs me bandwidth (although if my ISP charged by the megabyte that might be different). I certainly don't play the victim as if by choosing to visit a website I hadn't also chosen to download all content the site tells my browser to download. Give me a break, that's just whining.
I realize you're trying to be funny, and were moderated that way, but I actually disagree strongly with the sentiment of what you just said. The whole point of the "blocking ads is stealing" argument is that you're using a service (the website's content is provided as a service to the site visitor) and not paying the provider of the service (who expects payment in the form of revenue from advertisers). While this almost certainly is not "stealing" in the legal sense, it is of questionable morality. It's perfectly acceptable to say "if you don't like the ads, don't visit the site" but rather questionable to get full usage of the site while blocking the ads.
Posting this from Firefox with ABP enabled, so don't think I hate the concept of ad blocking or any such, but looked at from a different angle, your little joke quite clearly indicates the moral weakness of ad blocking: by visiting a site and blocking its ads, you are using a (commercial) service and denying its provider any compensation for that use.
Hopefully I'm not the only one who knows this, but... have you noticed how much faster Firefox is with Adblock (Plus) than without it? The reason is simple: Firefox dpoesn't even download blocked media. Doesn't even request it from the server. It hits the primary server, gets a page of HTML, including links to things like flash adverts, advertising-related scripts, and image files with "advert" in the filename... and it just skils them when rendering the page. By default, it doesn't even allocate space on the rendered page for them ads (this breaks some poorly written pages so you can turn this feature off, but it still won't actually go download the pictures/scripts/flash/cookies/whatever).
On broadband it matters less, but on dial-up it makes one hell of a difference. In any case, it reduces bandwidth needs, improves privacy (advertisers don't even know you visited the page; they never even get a ping from you on their server), and improves security a bit (some exploits lately have been delivered through third-party advertising on pages like MySpace).
The tendency of the Slashdot community to automatically ensure anything containing the words "children" and "safety" is a "but won't somebody think of the children?" situation is starting to piss me off. While there ARE risks involved (a friend of a friend lost her virginity at 16 to a 42-year-old man who has a record of such things... but he seemed only a few years older than she was on MySpace), the real problem is that people are operating complicated and expensive technology with little to no idea of how to do so properly. In my more despairing moments I figure that computers need to have some sort of certification/authentication system where anybody who hasn't passed a certification test is unable to gain admin/root permissions on an Internet-connected machine. (Yes, I realize this wouldn't work, and would have many problems even if it was feasible to implement. The point remains though; those who are not educated about safe computer usage cause all kinds of trouble for everybody else.) The problem is, people have a distict tendency to treat computers in one or more of a few extremely stupid ways: "The computer (or occasionally the program) is smarter than I am about this, shouldn't it have realized the file was dangerous?" Computers aren't smart, they are just machines that do what they are made to do: run programs. "Somebody sent me a dangerous file? Don't be silly, why would anybody bother to do that?" Malware is big business these days, and they need huge botnets to effective flood spam and such. Every computer they can infect is worth something, and that's leaving aside those who do it just to see if they can. They aren't really sending it to you in particular anyhow; they're sending it to everybody on a list of people who sent somebody an online greeting card or some such crock. "I have Norton Antivirus (or other security program) installed, so I'm safe." Nope. Security software at best only protects against established and known issues, and often fails even at that. New malware, outdated definitions, poorly implemented or configured scanning engine... people need to know that antivirus programs aren't shields of invulnerability. "It doesn't matter if my computer gets some adware, it's not a real problem." Even pure adware (no spying, redirecting or URLs, changing files, sending emails, or anything like that) slows your computer down and wastes a considerable amount of your time. Other forms of malware are typically much worse; they will send spam emails, try and take over other people's computers, be used to attack remote networks (denial of service) or possibly to flood your own network (many worms do this, intentionally or otherwise), watch everything you do and tell somebody every password/credit card number/email message/document you enter or read, and/or possibly even use your computer as storage for illegal software, kiddie porn, or similar things you don't want on your machine. "I downloaded this from a website that said it was safe, so it shouldn't cause any problems." People can put any damn thing they want on their website, and there's no guarantee it's true. At the very least get a third-party opinion. In fact, extend this policy to any unverified claim on a web site; there is a lot of false info out there. Don't believe it just because somebody typed it out and put it online!
Consider random things like the infamous ILoveYou worm, which caused all kinds of trouble... all because users were too damn stupid to know better than to open such attachments. It wasn't hard to figure out, even if you had known file extensions hidden, that it was NOT a greeting card (IIRC, it was originally intended as a Valentine's Day thing, which - given that by the first time I read about it in the news, summer vacation had already started - should give one an idea of how long it took people to wise up to it).
While I am in no way confident it will be implemented correctly, I think this idea in general is a very good one. The types of things taught in computer classes in our public schools w
Put win.exe in your autoexec.bat (or its full path if for some reason it wasn't in your PATH) and you would effectively boot right into Windows (technically, as soon as DOS was done booting).
Using.pif files, you could launch programs with full resources. It took longer starting and stopping them due to getting Windows out of the way, then restarting it, but it was possible. However, true DOS programs (real mode) were so resource constrained that it didn't really matter; with a not-unreasonable amount of 4MB of RAM, you could run a couple of them and run Windows at the same time with no RAM penalty (although the CPU would take a hit, of course, although I think 386 CPUs were capable of virtual Real Mode machines).
Having never seen a Compiz/Beryl desktop with only a half-GHz processor (you only need 1GHz to run Aero, as I said most of the work is supposed to be offloaded to the GPU) I find your claims of "half the horsepower" a little dubious. That said, with so little RAM, if you had force-enabled Aero, yes your machine would probably have had difficulty and been swapping constantly. If you want to factor RAM into the "horsepower" equation then you're on slightly better ground, but honestly the DWM (desktop window manager, the program responsible for handling the 3D compositor in Vista) only uses 16MB-20MB of RAM on my machine. At a guess, the whole "minimum 1GB" deal for Aero has almost nothing to do with the needs of Aero itself, and is simply because MS knows the OS will perform better (its design assumes you have lots of RAM, and performs quite well if you do) with that much. The only time that Aero would be expected to use much system RAM would be a machine with shared video memory (and even then, it would only use up to the amount that can be set aside for video use).
The 3D features argument is bullshit and you know it; the fact that MS didn't put in wobbly windows didn't mean they couldn't, merely that it was not deemed a worthwhile feature (in my experience, most features of Aero - Flip3D and possibly the glass borders aside - are purely functional, not eye candy... and you can adjust the transparency of the borders, at least). The one and only feature of those you listed that I wish Windows had is the multiple desktops (I suppose it might be nice if they were on a rotating cube, but that's an immensely secondary concern). Aero is also (in my experience) far less likely to crash your desktop display than Compiz (I leave it turned off these days).
As for the speed argument, bear in mind that you're talking about a 1.6GHz proc with 512MB of RAM some of which will be eaten by the video card... you're well behind the state of the art, and yet you were running a very new and heavyweight OS on it (yes, I know it came with the machine. That doesn't change anything.) Vista out of the box does consume more resources than OS X Tiger or most Linux distros, yes. If this surprises you, consider that Vista does things like Volume Shadow Copies, ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization, which certainly incurs a CPU penalty when running programs but makes it extremely difficult to use a buffer overflow attack), SuperFetch (learning the patterns of what you run when, and pre-fetching it), and a lot of other behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm not trying to say I think Vista is fast or that MS couldn't have done a better job on it (though they did just release a performance-enhancing patch that fixed some of the worst slowdowns in the filesystem and startup/shutdown) but I certainly wouldn't call it slow. On my machine, Vista feels faster than Linux on the same hardware, probably because Vista makes much better use of the amount of RAM available to it. I'd say the problem is that Vista is an OS designed with the assumption that you have a lot of RAM. Aside from the old test computer with 384MB (which would run IE7 just fine, by the way), all my Vista machines have had over 1GB of system RAM and I've never had performance issues with any of them.
First off, I said "Unless you got it with under a gig of RAM..." and what's one of the first things you say? 512 MB of RAM. Last time I checked, that was well under a gig (right at the nominal minimum for Vista, although as I said I've gotten it run, slowly, with 384 MB). Except for the RAM, everything else you need for Aero is there, so I stand by what I said: put in a RAM upgrade (and higher edition of Vista) and you could have Aero.
Second, you claim that "Vista without Aero is painfully slow" as if Aero is some kind of speed enhancement. WTF?!? I ran Vista - unoptimized beta versions of it, no less - on a machine with a video card that didn't even support Aero, and Vista ran fine (buggy beta versions aside). If I want to, I can turn off the desktop compositor (on my modern machine) in a few clicks; Vista will then just use the same graphical system found in previous versions of Windows. Sure, it'll increase CPU load a bit (desktop compositing offloads a lot of work to the GPU) but it actually saves power (because you can pretty much turn off the GPU then).
Third, believe it or not I have indeed used a computer with Aero where Mandriva 2007 would not/could not do 3D desktop compositing. Personally I blame ATi and their crappy Linux drivers (the laptop's Radeon Xpress 200M chip was only semi-supported by the proprietary driver and not really supported at all by the OSS one) but the fact remains that Vista (and Aero) ran beautifully, while Mandriva's desktop would crash on bootup if I even used a theme with glowing buttons or a transparent kicker (until I upgraded to the proprietary driver, at least). With the proprietary driver, it didn't crash as it loaded the theme and I could play 3D games, but drak3d still claimed that my hardware was incapable of compiz or xgl (and yes, all necessary packages were installed).
If you had a real video card, doing "3D desktop stuff" would barely affect your CPU utilization; that stuff normally goes through the GPU. Intel GMA sucks, but it does have functional Linux drivers. That said, on the laptop with the Xpress 200M (also integrated) doing lots of Aero effects would increase CPU utilization noticeably. My new computer, with a real (dedicated) video card, doesn't have that problem. Incidentally, specs for my laptop with the Xpress 200M weren't far from yours, except in amount of RAM: AMD Turiun64 (1.8GHz), 1.25GB (1280MB) of System RAM (clocked at 333MHz), ATi Radeon Xpress 200M with 128MB Video RAM.
Apologies for the OT, but a lot of people seem to be upset about the (lack of) quality in Adobe Reader, so I thought I'd quickly mention my favorite alternative: Foxit Reader. Works with embedded and desktop versions of Windows and Linux (no sign of a Mac port, sorry) and doesn't require rebooting or anything when installing or updating. It starts instantly and has a much lower footprint. It doesn't have a browser plugin in the usual sense (.pdf files open in another window, which is fine with me at least) but embedded PDFs will display correctly. For the icing on the cake, according to Secunia it doesn't seem like anybody has found any vulnerabilities in its rendering or Javascript support yet (such vulnerabilities are one of the biggest driving forces behind Adobe Reader updates).
Even in fusion, the actual amount of converted mass (the m in e=mc2) (sorry, Slashdot doesn't seem to like the tag) is pretty minimal... less than a percent perhaps, less than 10 percent for sure. There will be plenty of waste helium being produced, and since fusing He4 is much harder than He3 or H isotopes, that helium effectively wastes reactor energy until it is removed. Whether it would be possible to remove it without removing all the remaining fuel isotopes (and starting the reaction from scratch) I really can't say.
It would be fun, though perhaps frustrating, to be a nuclear physicist researching fusion power.
Unless you got it with under a gig of RAM (apparently people still do this, but I don't like to run even Linux with that little... of course, I'm a gamer) then any computer capable of Mandriva's eye candy could easily do Aero (and not always the other way around, as I discovered with an ATi laptop video card once). If nothing else, I'm sure you could have slapped in a memory upgrade and a better version of Windows and had Aero, no problem.
Actually, if you're saying Vista was slow, then I strongly suspect you did, in fact, get a laptop with only 512MB of RAM. Vista will run fine on that in and of itself (I've run it on as little as 384MB, though at that point swapping would become an issue even before I started any programs above and beyond those which start automatically), but you lose pretty much all the advantages of the intelligent pre-fetch and things like that... in normal usage, my machine runs MUCH faster with Vista than it did with XP, just because it very very rarely needs to stall for a hard drive hit. Then again, I have 2GB of RAM and nearly a gig of ReadyBoost flash storage.
Slashdot Mirror
No microphone. Sorry for mentioning again what's been commented on earlier in this discussion, but those were usually in reference to Skype on the iPod Touch. Without a mic, you can't do voice recording, any form of VoIP, or audio in from, for example, a guitar amp or soundboard.
No camera either, which given the quality of photos you get from a lens that size is no big loss to me... apparently some people like them though.
I must say your list of capabilities surely increased my interest in the iPhone, especially with the price drop. I've completed my current phone's contract and am thinking about getting a smartphone.
While I'm not making any recommendations here, I just wanted to mention that IE7's zooming also resizes Flash and while I almost never use it, I've found that it's very very smooth (I scale some oversized sites down to 75%, and occasionally scale up to 150% or 200% for older eyes using my 17" 1680x1050 display). I'm not sure if it matters, but I have ClearType enabled and tuned for my display.
Sorry for the OT. Please return to your discussion of everything non-MS (although you *can* run Linux, with backup images, in VirtualPC which is a free download these days...)
Quick question: Where is the info about the number of pre-release users coming from? Neither linked page has the number, in either digit or text form, anywhere Ctrl-F could find it.
I ask because I'd like to be one of these people, if possible. I ran pre-release versions of Vista for over a year before it was released to the public, and in general am happy testing things, sending feedback, and finding obscure but usually reproducible errors.
Remember that Vista installs every feature, including the ones you can't even access with the version of the OS you're running, onto the hard drive (this is why you can do an in-place upgrade from, say, home basic to home premium with nothing but a new license key... the features are already installed, and just need to be unlocked). So, everything from the full capabilities of ISS to Media Center to all the tablet, accessibility, and voice command software is already installed. I'm not quite saying this is a good thing - it makes Vista's install footprint vaguely absurd (over 12GB for the 32-bit edition) - but it's nice to never again need the DVD it came on.
As for the service pack being that big, remember that standalone service packs include all the prior patches as well as new fixes. Patching a fresh install of the newest edition of XP media center (either called SP or 2005, I forget, in any case based off the XP SP2 code base) requires a couple hundred megs of patches and updates. That's an OS with an install footprint only a bit over 3GB that has already received a service pack update to the point that most people considered it "ready" (FWIW, I count Vista as ready enough that I've refused to use XP since RC2, but I'm talking about the public perceptions of XP vs. Vista not my own). I'm not surprised that the standalone pack is so large. The size downloaded to the typical user's machine, which has been kept up to date in general, will probably be at worst a few hundred megs. It will be downloaded by Windows' BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) service, which downloads when the connection has idle bandwidth and is quite good at handling connection loss and automatically resumes where it was left off. In other words, while the standalone may be a bitch, the general user's update shouldn't be too hard.
AFAIK, ReadyBoost is nothing but a SuperFetch cache location. Disabling SuperFetch will make ReadyBoost more-or-less useless, although Windows may still use it they way it (and all other mainstream OSes) have cached for years (decades for some) in that they assume whatever you have just accessed, you are likely to access again.
Using ReadyBoost as RAM (or swap, which is much the same) wouldn't work for a couple reasons. First of all, Flash memory is much too slow on write, especially since the ReadyBoost file is encrypted so that if somebody got hold of your ReadyBoost device they couldn't get any useful info off it that you hadn't intentionally put there. Second, a requirement for ReadyBoost was that the device could be pulled from the system at any time, with no warning, without causing any system instability. I'm not saying it's a good thing - pulling a Flash device in the middle of a write is a good way to end up with blocks in an indeterminate state, and msot of them use a version of the FAT filesystem which means there's no journaling - but it's possible, at least from ReadyBoost's perspective. Obviously, the system can't afford to have active memory yanked out from under it.
The one exception to that, for swap, is that data in swap must be mapped into main memory before use. The longest delay in doing this, by far, is the hard drive seek and read times. Flash has no seek and reads pretty fast, so it may be possible to that when the OS is paging RAM out to swap, it could also put a copy on a ReadyBoost store. Then, when it needs that memory, it first checks if the ReadyBoost store is still accessible, and if so it reads the data into main memory from there (faster than pulling it off the hard disk).
Incidentally, SuperFetch is a feature that, personally, I find quite excellent. People with systems several times as powerful as mine (including vastly faster hard drives) wonder how I can start, for example, EVE Online (install footprint ~1GB) whole seconds faster than they can. Answer: I almost always run EVE at about the same time in the evenings and weekends, and so Vista goes ahead and pre-loads it (unless I'm using that RAM for something else, although I do have a ReadyBoost device as well). For all my dual-core 1.83GHz processor is nothing next to their quad 3.2GHz processors, it's a lot faster because I don't have to wait while the OS pulls stuff off the hard drive. This applies to other programs as well, it's just most noticeable on those that need a lot of data loaded at startup. Many smaller programs start effectively instantly for me, which makes the computer feel far more responsive than it did with XP.
<flameproof>I really wish there was a similar service for Linux; watching that bloody bouncing icon get really tiresome for some programs.</flameproof> If anybody knows of one, or of a way to configure something to give this behavior (hell, I'd recompile the kernel to get this), please let me know. Thanks!
IANAL and I have no idea about Spain's IP laws, but I assure you that the entire point of the GPL/LGPL/any other "copyleft" license is that it is a copyright license. There is no contract anywhere. The GPL is not an EULA either; there is no limit on use or modification of GPL software such as you'll find in most End User License Agreements... the only restriction in the GPL covers the act of providing copies. The GPL is nothing but a limited license to redistribute. Since it's a copyright license, its only limitations are on distribution (which is a copyright issue) so violating the GPL is, by definition, copyright violation
Without getting into the Fair Use/RIAA/"music piracy is good!" arguments or discussing what the finer points of definition on "boot-legging", the GPP's point #2 is correct. The laws prohibiting unlicensed music redistribution are exactly the same as the laws prohibiting unlicensed (outside the terms of the GPL, in this case) software redistribution.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that, while I have mod points, I chose to comment instead; there is no moderation -1: Wrong for a reason.
I'm suspect it just downloads the swf or whatever file, although I could be completely wrong about that. In any case, RealPlayer 11 claims it can play Flash movies, which suggests it would work even with local ones... thus, downloading the file itself makes the most sense.
As somebody who, back in the Win9x days (I forget, 95 or 98) installed a early version of RealPlayer that hijacked my entire sound card while in Windows (neither system sounds nor sound from other players would play, whether RP was running or not, although I could get sound in other programs like Warcraft 2) I can certainly appreciate your view on this. That was, however, roughly a decade ago, and while I still don't care for the company and certainly won't claim they've been perfect angels since then, every now and then you should give somebody a second chance.
RealPlayer 11 is actually a pretty good product, considering its beta status (the version I downloaded had a couple showstopper bugs on Vista, mainly involving volume control, so I don't use it much). RP10 is absolute garbage on Windows - huge, slow, bloated, ad-filled, and aggressive system changes set by default (although they can be unchecked) that I really don't care for. The version for Linux is actually a good product though - I prefer Amorak for casual listening, but for some video formats RP is a better bet than anything else I have installed.
Also, Real has recently begun selling DRM-free MP3s through their Rhapsody online music store. The tracks are ripped at 256kbps (same as their DRMed versions) and cost the same as well. Most of their catalog is still DRMed, and the Rhapsody player itself isn't going to win any awards from me for being great software, but moving even a little away from DRM earns them big points IMO. Now, if only they would make it possible to purchase MP3s on Linux it would be even better...
While Aero, since it requires a WDDM Driver (as does DX10) could be called "DX10 mode", it actually doesn't require DX10-capable hardware. None of my computers (laptops all for the last few years) support DX10, but I can get Aero on all but the oldest.
Indeed, it sounds like you have an Intel Integrated graphics accelerator, which AFAIK has no DX10-capable version yet. Even ATI is only just now releasing DX10-capable cards. If there are any DX10 dedicated cards (let alone integrated) that can be put in a laptop, I have yet to encounter them. In your case, you probably just don't have enough video RAM - Vista uses the GPU and VRAM to streamline video decoding, so trying to do that while also using the VRAM to buffer the screen frames and the GPU to render them in 3D may overload low-end video cards. Turning off the desktop compositor (Basic mode) eliminates the second source of load.
Out of curiosity, are you using full screen by simply maximizing the player window or by actually switching to a windowless full-screen display mode? If you're just maximizing the window, you're basically using the max amount of VRAM. Windowless full-screen mode should cause Windows to move the window frames for other programs out of the VRAM (at least it does on mine, and I have 256MB dedicated VRAM and about as much shared).
http//baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ is a site offering free downloads or online reading of all the books Baen has released on CD (which is quite a lot of them). The CD's are licensed for free redistribution, and while the baencd webmaster does encourage people to purchase from Baen and is in touch with the publishing house, he neither pays not is paid by them, and offers the books for people to read with no strings attached.
While I was hoping that WiFi coming to commercial airliners would make it possible to access the site while in the air, making those books accessible through in-seat computer terminals would be both satisfactory for me and probably very commercially beneficial to Baen.
Interesting... I'm a developer, and have nothing to do with sales, but I wasn't under the impression that foreign Visa cards or such would be blocked. That's very interesting indeed. Except for the currency conversion and such, which would already be handled anyhow since physical goods are available for purchase, I wouldn't expect there to be any reason online stores couldn't take your card. Very odd...
I suppose you've never heard of the Mono project? Many of the projects on CodePlex are .NET, yes. But, many of them are version 2 or below, which runs fine on Mono in almost all cases. Anyhow, they're open source, so you can modify them if need be. Sheesh, do you also claim that nobody should work on Linux (the kernel and immediately related code, such as drivers) either, since they only work on a single system?
Yes, some of those projects are designed to enhance (or otherwise depend on) proprietary software. They are still open-source, and no matter how much you may dislike Windows, the projects in and of themselves are quite cool.
1) NIH (Not Invented Here). Almost certainly a part of it.
2) Patent clauses. This is almost certainly why the license says it applies to use as well as distribution: you're allowed to patent the software (I think, IANAL), but you're not allowed to file a patent suit or collect patent royalties for it's use against anybody else who has agreed to the license. This is interesting as it appears to be an effective anti-patent-troll measure; if MS-licensed software is patented, then nobody can use those algorithms, whatever without agreeing to the license. They can get and redistribute the software freely, even the source if it's the Community license, but they can't use patents to try and shut down a competing project (as, for example, Microsoft might be trying to do with Linux). Obviously, this seems a little unlike them, so if anybody who is more familiar with patent law could examine my analysis (and the license itself) I'd apprecate that.
I work for the e-commerce section of a company that has an international online store (of bits and bytes, not physical products). The effort to add an additional country vastly exceeds that to check somebody's country and deny them access. We're trying (hard) to support more countries and payment methods, but it's not trivial at all.
Problems range from standard internationalization issues that anybody selling software overseas encounters to legal trade limits (usually not something that can be legally circumvented, and yes we're a US company). The most common significant problem is handling payment types. In the US we only have a few credit/debit card providers (less than 5, depending on your definition of "major). What's more, it's usually worth more for us (and less effort) to support the minority payment methods here in the US since this is the primary region where we're known. Internationally, the number of payment methods rapidly becomes quite extreme, and each one requires setting up the client-side support for the necessary authentication data and server-side infrastructure to handle payment authorization with each provider. This is, of course, after price adjustments and exchange rates are taken into account. There's a lot more I didn't even understand - I work on one small project that's one part of a fairly large team - but your complaint that you were unable to purchase online because you "needed an American credit card" doesn't surprise me in the least. Adding each additional payment method/provider adds a lot of cost to the project.
As a rule, companies make as much money as they can. Thinking things like "Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers?" is a clear sign that you don't know what is involved. I didn't either until a meeting a month or so back; as an American, my credit/debit cards have always been accepted internationally... but most of the names and icons of cards accepted by overseas ATMs and such are completely unknown to me; nothing here in the US accepts them because it's simply too much effort for the level of reward. I'm sure it's worth a bit more to online stores, but it's still a long road for relatively little economic reward most of the time.
On Vista, at least, IE7 and D2 now get along a lot better. The scrolling is smooth now, page updates are instant (faster than on Firefox, sometimes, but that probably has to do with what's being updated), and by and large it's fairly usable now.
Problems still in IE7:
1) Clicking on an AJAX link is still likely to scroll your brownser almost all the way to the bottom of the page. I have no idea why this happens but it is by far the most annoying bug.
2) The visibility levels (white, light grey, dark grey) still float to the right of the sliders (and occsionally cover some content near the top of the screen).
3) Expanding a comment occasionally causes the title bar of a different comment to detach from the top of its comment. This can be easily solved by very slightly resizing the window.
Problems in Firefox:
1) Pages still seem to take inordinately long to download (even if I disable ads).
The incredibly annoying bug where expanding a comment wouldn't expand it fully and or show the Reply button thankfully seems to be fixed.
Problems in Konqueror:
1) Render speed is iffy. The page jumps around a bit before settling down to a readable state.
I still like IE7 for its tab management (control-tab cycling through recently visited tabs in order of visiting them) and RSS feed reader. The jump-down-the-page-on-click bug is annoying, but at least the scrolling is now so smooth that it's possible to quickly get back where you were. In Linux I prefer to use Konqueror, but I do wish I could close a tab by middle-clicking it (not Slashdot's fault in any way, just a general browser gripe).
Don't even try using D2 in Links. It will load the page, and then go nowhere until you uncheck the box and refresh. Lack of CSS support, I suppose, or perhaps no XmlHttpRequest or too limited of a JavaScript engine.
That's really quite an unfair comparison. You chose to go to their site. Your actions initiated all the transfer of data that eats bandwidth and so forth. Your use of the service the webmaster provides (a website you can access) and expects payment for (from advertising) is not being compensated. Don't play the "I'm the victim here; I went to a website and it started transmitting data and eating my bandwidth!!" game; it's not one you're likely to win. Complain about the intrusiveness of the ads, or the fact that Flash adverts occasionally crash Firefox, or that ad servers pose a privacy concern, but don't pretend that anybody is sending you anything that you didn't, directly or indirectly, request that they send.
Yes, I use Adblock Plus. No, I don't use it because it costs me bandwidth (although if my ISP charged by the megabyte that might be different). I certainly don't play the victim as if by choosing to visit a website I hadn't also chosen to download all content the site tells my browser to download. Give me a break, that's just whining.
I realize you're trying to be funny, and were moderated that way, but I actually disagree strongly with the sentiment of what you just said. The whole point of the "blocking ads is stealing" argument is that you're using a service (the website's content is provided as a service to the site visitor) and not paying the provider of the service (who expects payment in the form of revenue from advertisers). While this almost certainly is not "stealing" in the legal sense, it is of questionable morality. It's perfectly acceptable to say "if you don't like the ads, don't visit the site" but rather questionable to get full usage of the site while blocking the ads.
Posting this from Firefox with ABP enabled, so don't think I hate the concept of ad blocking or any such, but looked at from a different angle, your little joke quite clearly indicates the moral weakness of ad blocking: by visiting a site and blocking its ads, you are using a (commercial) service and denying its provider any compensation for that use.
Hopefully I'm not the only one who knows this, but... have you noticed how much faster Firefox is with Adblock (Plus) than without it? The reason is simple: Firefox dpoesn't even download blocked media. Doesn't even request it from the server. It hits the primary server, gets a page of HTML, including links to things like flash adverts, advertising-related scripts, and image files with "advert" in the filename... and it just skils them when rendering the page. By default, it doesn't even allocate space on the rendered page for them ads (this breaks some poorly written pages so you can turn this feature off, but it still won't actually go download the pictures/scripts/flash/cookies/whatever).
On broadband it matters less, but on dial-up it makes one hell of a difference. In any case, it reduces bandwidth needs, improves privacy (advertisers don't even know you visited the page; they never even get a ping from you on their server), and improves security a bit (some exploits lately have been delivered through third-party advertising on pages like MySpace).
The tendency of the Slashdot community to automatically ensure anything containing the words "children" and "safety" is a "but won't somebody think of the children?" situation is starting to piss me off. While there ARE risks involved (a friend of a friend lost her virginity at 16 to a 42-year-old man who has a record of such things... but he seemed only a few years older than she was on MySpace), the real problem is that people are operating complicated and expensive technology with little to no idea of how to do so properly. In my more despairing moments I figure that computers need to have some sort of certification/authentication system where anybody who hasn't passed a certification test is unable to gain admin/root permissions on an Internet-connected machine. (Yes, I realize this wouldn't work, and would have many problems even if it was feasible to implement. The point remains though; those who are not educated about safe computer usage cause all kinds of trouble for everybody else.) The problem is, people have a distict tendency to treat computers in one or more of a few extremely stupid ways:
"The computer (or occasionally the program) is smarter than I am about this, shouldn't it have realized the file was dangerous?" Computers aren't smart, they are just machines that do what they are made to do: run programs.
"Somebody sent me a dangerous file? Don't be silly, why would anybody bother to do that?" Malware is big business these days, and they need huge botnets to effective flood spam and such. Every computer they can infect is worth something, and that's leaving aside those who do it just to see if they can. They aren't really sending it to you in particular anyhow; they're sending it to everybody on a list of people who sent somebody an online greeting card or some such crock.
"I have Norton Antivirus (or other security program) installed, so I'm safe." Nope. Security software at best only protects against established and known issues, and often fails even at that. New malware, outdated definitions, poorly implemented or configured scanning engine... people need to know that antivirus programs aren't shields of invulnerability.
"It doesn't matter if my computer gets some adware, it's not a real problem." Even pure adware (no spying, redirecting or URLs, changing files, sending emails, or anything like that) slows your computer down and wastes a considerable amount of your time. Other forms of malware are typically much worse; they will send spam emails, try and take over other people's computers, be used to attack remote networks (denial of service) or possibly to flood your own network (many worms do this, intentionally or otherwise), watch everything you do and tell somebody every password/credit card number/email message/document you enter or read, and/or possibly even use your computer as storage for illegal software, kiddie porn, or similar things you don't want on your machine.
"I downloaded this from a website that said it was safe, so it shouldn't cause any problems." People can put any damn thing they want on their website, and there's no guarantee it's true. At the very least get a third-party opinion. In fact, extend this policy to any unverified claim on a web site; there is a lot of false info out there. Don't believe it just because somebody typed it out and put it online!
Consider random things like the infamous ILoveYou worm, which caused all kinds of trouble... all because users were too damn stupid to know better than to open such attachments. It wasn't hard to figure out, even if you had known file extensions hidden, that it was NOT a greeting card (IIRC, it was originally intended as a Valentine's Day thing, which - given that by the first time I read about it in the news, summer vacation had already started - should give one an idea of how long it took people to wise up to it).
While I am in no way confident it will be implemented correctly, I think this idea in general is a very good one. The types of things taught in computer classes in our public schools w
2 quick comments:
.pif files, you could launch programs with full resources. It took longer starting and stopping them due to getting Windows out of the way, then restarting it, but it was possible. However, true DOS programs (real mode) were so resource constrained that it didn't really matter; with a not-unreasonable amount of 4MB of RAM, you could run a couple of them and run Windows at the same time with no RAM penalty (although the CPU would take a hit, of course, although I think 386 CPUs were capable of virtual Real Mode machines).
Put win.exe in your autoexec.bat (or its full path if for some reason it wasn't in your PATH) and you would effectively boot right into Windows (technically, as soon as DOS was done booting).
Using
Having never seen a Compiz/Beryl desktop with only a half-GHz processor (you only need 1GHz to run Aero, as I said most of the work is supposed to be offloaded to the GPU) I find your claims of "half the horsepower" a little dubious. That said, with so little RAM, if you had force-enabled Aero, yes your machine would probably have had difficulty and been swapping constantly. If you want to factor RAM into the "horsepower" equation then you're on slightly better ground, but honestly the DWM (desktop window manager, the program responsible for handling the 3D compositor in Vista) only uses 16MB-20MB of RAM on my machine. At a guess, the whole "minimum 1GB" deal for Aero has almost nothing to do with the needs of Aero itself, and is simply because MS knows the OS will perform better (its design assumes you have lots of RAM, and performs quite well if you do) with that much. The only time that Aero would be expected to use much system RAM would be a machine with shared video memory (and even then, it would only use up to the amount that can be set aside for video use).
The 3D features argument is bullshit and you know it; the fact that MS didn't put in wobbly windows didn't mean they couldn't, merely that it was not deemed a worthwhile feature (in my experience, most features of Aero - Flip3D and possibly the glass borders aside - are purely functional, not eye candy... and you can adjust the transparency of the borders, at least). The one and only feature of those you listed that I wish Windows had is the multiple desktops (I suppose it might be nice if they were on a rotating cube, but that's an immensely secondary concern). Aero is also (in my experience) far less likely to crash your desktop display than Compiz (I leave it turned off these days).
As for the speed argument, bear in mind that you're talking about a 1.6GHz proc with 512MB of RAM some of which will be eaten by the video card... you're well behind the state of the art, and yet you were running a very new and heavyweight OS on it (yes, I know it came with the machine. That doesn't change anything.) Vista out of the box does consume more resources than OS X Tiger or most Linux distros, yes. If this surprises you, consider that Vista does things like Volume Shadow Copies, ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization, which certainly incurs a CPU penalty when running programs but makes it extremely difficult to use a buffer overflow attack), SuperFetch (learning the patterns of what you run when, and pre-fetching it), and a lot of other behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm not trying to say I think Vista is fast or that MS couldn't have done a better job on it (though they did just release a performance-enhancing patch that fixed some of the worst slowdowns in the filesystem and startup/shutdown) but I certainly wouldn't call it slow. On my machine, Vista feels faster than Linux on the same hardware, probably because Vista makes much better use of the amount of RAM available to it. I'd say the problem is that Vista is an OS designed with the assumption that you have a lot of RAM. Aside from the old test computer with 384MB (which would run IE7 just fine, by the way), all my Vista machines have had over 1GB of system RAM and I've never had performance issues with any of them.
Hmm... you seem to be misunderstanding something.
First off, I said "Unless you got it with under a gig of RAM..." and what's one of the first things you say? 512 MB of RAM. Last time I checked, that was well under a gig (right at the nominal minimum for Vista, although as I said I've gotten it run, slowly, with 384 MB). Except for the RAM, everything else you need for Aero is there, so I stand by what I said: put in a RAM upgrade (and higher edition of Vista) and you could have Aero.
Second, you claim that "Vista without Aero is painfully slow" as if Aero is some kind of speed enhancement. WTF?!? I ran Vista - unoptimized beta versions of it, no less - on a machine with a video card that didn't even support Aero, and Vista ran fine (buggy beta versions aside). If I want to, I can turn off the desktop compositor (on my modern machine) in a few clicks; Vista will then just use the same graphical system found in previous versions of Windows. Sure, it'll increase CPU load a bit (desktop compositing offloads a lot of work to the GPU) but it actually saves power (because you can pretty much turn off the GPU then).
Third, believe it or not I have indeed used a computer with Aero where Mandriva 2007 would not/could not do 3D desktop compositing. Personally I blame ATi and their crappy Linux drivers (the laptop's Radeon Xpress 200M chip was only semi-supported by the proprietary driver and not really supported at all by the OSS one) but the fact remains that Vista (and Aero) ran beautifully, while Mandriva's desktop would crash on bootup if I even used a theme with glowing buttons or a transparent kicker (until I upgraded to the proprietary driver, at least). With the proprietary driver, it didn't crash as it loaded the theme and I could play 3D games, but drak3d still claimed that my hardware was incapable of compiz or xgl (and yes, all necessary packages were installed).
If you had a real video card, doing "3D desktop stuff" would barely affect your CPU utilization; that stuff normally goes through the GPU. Intel GMA sucks, but it does have functional Linux drivers. That said, on the laptop with the Xpress 200M (also integrated) doing lots of Aero effects would increase CPU utilization noticeably. My new computer, with a real (dedicated) video card, doesn't have that problem. Incidentally, specs for my laptop with the Xpress 200M weren't far from yours, except in amount of RAM: AMD Turiun64 (1.8GHz), 1.25GB (1280MB) of System RAM (clocked at 333MHz), ATi Radeon Xpress 200M with 128MB Video RAM.
Apologies for the OT, but a lot of people seem to be upset about the (lack of) quality in Adobe Reader, so I thought I'd quickly mention my favorite alternative: Foxit Reader. Works with embedded and desktop versions of Windows and Linux (no sign of a Mac port, sorry) and doesn't require rebooting or anything when installing or updating. It starts instantly and has a much lower footprint. It doesn't have a browser plugin in the usual sense (.pdf files open in another window, which is fine with me at least) but embedded PDFs will display correctly. For the icing on the cake, according to Secunia it doesn't seem like anybody has found any vulnerabilities in its rendering or Javascript support yet (such vulnerabilities are one of the biggest driving forces behind Adobe Reader updates).
Even in fusion, the actual amount of converted mass (the m in e=mc2) (sorry, Slashdot doesn't seem to like the tag) is pretty minimal... less than a percent perhaps, less than 10 percent for sure. There will be plenty of waste helium being produced, and since fusing He4 is much harder than He3 or H isotopes, that helium effectively wastes reactor energy until it is removed. Whether it would be possible to remove it without removing all the remaining fuel isotopes (and starting the reaction from scratch) I really can't say.
It would be fun, though perhaps frustrating, to be a nuclear physicist researching fusion power.
Unless you got it with under a gig of RAM (apparently people still do this, but I don't like to run even Linux with that little... of course, I'm a gamer) then any computer capable of Mandriva's eye candy could easily do Aero (and not always the other way around, as I discovered with an ATi laptop video card once). If nothing else, I'm sure you could have slapped in a memory upgrade and a better version of Windows and had Aero, no problem.
Actually, if you're saying Vista was slow, then I strongly suspect you did, in fact, get a laptop with only 512MB of RAM. Vista will run fine on that in and of itself (I've run it on as little as 384MB, though at that point swapping would become an issue even before I started any programs above and beyond those which start automatically), but you lose pretty much all the advantages of the intelligent pre-fetch and things like that... in normal usage, my machine runs MUCH faster with Vista than it did with XP, just because it very very rarely needs to stall for a hard drive hit. Then again, I have 2GB of RAM and nearly a gig of ReadyBoost flash storage.