From what I have heard, it is just Vista with the retarded parts removed.
I use Vista right now, and it's fairly stable, but it's a little slow, even after I had to turn all the retarded parts off.
What I find strange is that the people that use MS software out of choice continually put up with and reward a company that regularly bends them over a barrel and gives them downright awful or just mostly awful software with every other release.
Because Apple is not convicted of abusing monopoly powers to control a market.
You have to give the context here. When Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist because, even if you wanted to, you couldn't delete IE in Windows 98. I'm not sure about the PC world, but any applications that Apple installs are easily deleted in Mac OS X, you just drag the to the trash, and empty it. It's that simple. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist because they abused their position as the dominant OS manufacturer to force people to run IE, Apple may include lots and lots of applications on their software (and even automatically download or install them) but they have never forced you to use their application, and this is precisely why they are not a convicted monopolist whereas Microsoft is.
Even desktop users who use linux often have to dual boot into windows. Sometimes virtual machines or wine is good enough for what you want, but for something like games or software that couples closely to hardware (e.g. AnyDVD or most games), this doesn't work. Having a faster boot on linux makes switching between OSes nicer. On my machine my Debian it's already faster than Vista (I forgot by how much, I'll have to remeasure it), and that's including running some slow services at startup for linux like uploading firmware for an HD card and starting the smartd.
Not only that, I just checked and according to fedex it costs $7.39 to mail that same letter from coast to coast for their cheapest option. That's only what, nearly 17 times more expensive? Travel times are 5 days compared to about 7 for the USPS, not much faster. I'm sure the libertarians will chime in that they could do that much cheaper if the (subsidized) USPS weren't in the way, but I suspect it would be like the way that CD prices went down after the technology became established, or the way that cable and telephone prices went down after the markets were deregulated (i.e., they didn't). Bottom line is that the USPS is an astonishingly inexpensive with a low failure rate for the price. It's a great service that our government provides. While I'm glad that they are saving this money, I'd rather that they put it to work on avoiding reductions in service or balancing their budget rather than reducing the price of postage.
Oh, I don't know, there's lots of cat species. I myself an breathlessly awaiting Mac OS X version Iberian Lynx, which will be one better than Asiatic Lion. Perhaps that doesn't have quite the same ring to it though. They could also do extinct species, like sabertooth, which would be a decent name.
In all honesty, I do wonder why they haven't done a Lion version yet.
The worst project I know of for this is e17. It hasn't been released yet, but they started with e16 and started adding decimal places until they got to version 0.16.9999, then they skipped the 9999 and just started counting again, so what I have installed on my PC is version 0.16.9999.050 or so and then they lost track of version numbers all together and just started using svn to update everything. Now they've changed yet again and they're using snapshots based on dates, which is a little more reasonable. But then again, e17 was begun in 2000, so it's been "in development" for 9 years now and things are bound to get a little confused (even though it's been used in commercial OSes already). It is getting done slowly, but by the time they "release" it, it's going to be so far out of date it's not even funny. They've already had to redo the default theme because it looked dated.
Yeah, I suppose that's true. In the past though companies have used Microsoft's promises as an excuse to stay on the MS upgrade path when they do upgrade, at least in part. This may just be an excuse to not bother with having to look for an alternative though. However, maybe the sword cuts both ways in that now that the economy is down the tubes as it were (and in all likelihood, we're in for at least another year or two of hard times), some companies won't upgrade and it doesn't matter how good Win7 is.
You have to believe that PC upgrades are probably the first thing on the chopping block when it comes to hard times. My experience with the federal government is that computer upgrades don't just happen every few years like they used to, you have to have a more substantive reason than just "it's old" to get an updated computer. E.g., when Obama took over the White House, they found a lot of legacy hardware, including 6 year old MS software, which I presume means they were running XP SP1.
But you are getting old and are going to die and you probably have no intention of buying a new version of Word since you are happy with the current one.
Besides linux people, the people that I personally see using openoffice most often are young, hip college students. The reason? They have no money to spend on things like software. You forget that young people also grew up with the internet and are accustomed lots of free software and see no reason to pay to use something that some other software does just as well but is free.
Well it's a good thing that your incredulity doesn't override statistical evidence.
You want statistical evidence? Look here, from a survey of Excel users from May, 2009:
Month in and month out, the respondents have said that Excel's Ribbon has reduced their productivity by an average of about 20%. And users with a negative opinion of the Ribbon estimate that it's reduced their productivity by about 35%.
They found that 36% of advanced and 29% of intermediate users "hate or dislike" the ribbons, which vastly outweighs the people who "love or like" the ribbons at 20 and 24%, respectively.
Forrester Research surveys have shown that the percentage of people who liked the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 was in the mid to high 80s while the percentage who found it "significantly more difficult" to use was 2.4%.
I find that hard to believe. How many of those people they asked actually used office as a mission critical application in their day to day use? In my admittedly small sample, nobody that I work with at all enjoys using the ribbons, which is about 5 that I have spoken to about it. The majority of people have Office 2003 put on instead, only those who are reluctant to change software on their computers leave it on.
In fact, darwin itself is open source, meaning if you really, really have a hard on to run just linux apps, you could run the core OS with the drivers and all with X11 on top of it. Beeslebob's point is spot on, there's no reason to take a perfectly good unix that has drivers custom written for it to replace it with a one-size fits all OS like linux (as awesome as linux is, hardware drivers are its Achilles' Heel because the hardware is often propietary).
It wasn't a bug, it was a feature request. The "feature" is explained here. Basically, if you click on a special location, like home or documents, and you are in column view, the finder roots you to that location and removes access to any directories higher level than that.
Don't forget that if you have more than about 100 files or so, the file picker slows to a crawl and literally takes about a second or so to display its contents. That has gotten a little better with recent releases, it used to take tens of seconds. It's still so terrible though that in firefox I usually switch back to the native file picker and stop using the gtk one because at least that one is fast. (Instructions here.)
I'm an IT professional, a power user, and consider myself a connoisseur of good interface design. But I've never coded a line of C++ in my entire life. Does this make my input useless?
I'm a scientist who writes C code on a weekly or semi-weekly basis on average and have written a theme for e17 as well as done some writing some small "in house" type guis used for interface with instruments. My bug reports to open source projects are largely ignored as well (to the point that I rarely issue one now). But then again, Apple devs ignored all my complaints about the Finder when they removed the horizontal scroll bar from the Finder when you clicked on a special location awhile back too. They had a vision of what they wanted to do and they did that and didn't care what I thought. It's nothing to do with you, it's that open source developers are doing this usually for some small salary or part time and what they get paid to do is sometimes not what what you want them to do and there's only so many hours in a day.
I also worry about the amount of rainfall that would be lost if Bill Gates plan actually works. Believe it or not there are some useful aspects to a hurricane and more importantly tropical storms.
Here is the chart of the water levels of Lake Lanier, which is Atlanta's only major water supply. The record low elevations line that you see was set last year, which was the second year of a drought (you might recall our governor's response to the drought, which was to pray for rain, aside from suing all of the neighboring states to try to take their water). The big bump that you see in the minimum recorded lake elevations just before September was hurricane Gustav, which essentially saved us from a situation where the lake would have been within 10 feet of a standing pool, and Atlanta gets its water on the outlet of the power generators. In fact, most of Atlanta's problems were because the El Niño shut down the hurricanes into the gulf for a couple of years after katrina. Now that they're back, and the wet weather in general, our water supply is fine for the moment.
The entire thing is ridiculous. Hurricane Katrina had hurricane force winds that extended out 120 miles from the center of the storm. If we use that as the radius, the area of the storm was 45,239 square miles. You don't even need to look at that, you just need to look a photo of the storm to see it occupied the majority of the Gulf of Mexico. I don't care how much money you have, you aren't going to be able to move that much water to make one dent in it.
The diagram in TFA shows 30 dots, which presumably are ships, but they have a little arrow with 500 too, so we'll use both. For 500 ships, that's one ship for every 90 square miles of storm area, which is a box 9.5 x 9.5 miles. One ship, mixing all the ocean water in a box 10 miles on a side. If we use 30 ships, it's one ship every 1500 square miles, one ship in a box 39 x 39 miles. And don't forget that storm tracking is very difficult, so they're going to have to do this after the storm is already formed and on it's way, which means they'll have less than a week to move that much water.
How in the world did that guy ever get to be the world's richest man?
I mean, if everyone else is insured where's the problem if I skip out.
That assumes that all cars are created equal. If it were the mid-1980s and I owned a toyota or honda, you're saying I'd have to pay to insure the repairs of faulty parts on Fords and GMs, or even a Chevy "unsafe at any speed" Corvair: you choose to buy a car that is completely unsafe and unreliable, and you're forcing me to help subsidize the cost of repair and accidents caused by faulty design, even though I myself am a very conscientious auto buyer.
One could make the argument that as long as unsafe cars are on the road, everyone must pay the extra price to insure themselves, but as far as I know, insurance companies do actually look at types of car when considering your insurance premium, and of course there's the "safe driver" discount, so I guess this effect is somewhat mitigated.
Huh, interesting, color me surprised. However, one point: you have to install the pirated version of the software to get the trojan and give it an administrator's password before it can pwn the machine, i.e., it's not a virus. Also, I can't click on a web-link and get infected, or open a document that somebody sends me, I have to install the software and run it as root. There's an easy solution to this particular trojan: don't pirate software, or if you do, be suspicious of any software installer on OS X that requires root privileges and check the md5sums of the packages you download against a trusted source.
Most applications on the mac can simply be dragged onto the applications directory and don't require an administrator's password, so that's a red-flag right there. I'll be snarky here and attribute the lax attitude to administrator privileges to microsoft too, since they are the ones that practically made their old OSes force you to run as root to be able to do anything. To be fair though, this is currently a problem not necessarily because of Microsoft, but some programmers still write their code in such a way to require administrator privileges for installation.
The browser that opened the world up to every sort of malware out there.
This is a key point, because this affects not just windows users. I had my IT person up in my office a few weeks ago installing landesk monitoring software and virus software on my macintosh because of this. I know, I know, there's all sorts of arguments that macs can get viruses, but really, until I hear about a botnet of macs, I'm going to be skeptical that virus software is necessary on a mac. The IT person justified it by saying that PC viruses can get transmitted over USB keys and files stored on my mac, which is I suppose is true (but I have yet to see it).
I can't wait to see what the new windowing system is.
You and me both, but I'm a little confused. What do they mean by "windowing system"? Are they doing a rewrite of X11, or do they mean they are designing new window decorations and widgets (e.g. gtk or qt), or do they mean the whole desktop environment (e.g., kde, gnome)?
If it's a replacement for X11, why are they doing that? I could see that maybe X11 has too much legacy code and really isn't designed to be the most efficient for a single screen laptop where you don't need an X windows server per se, but on the other hand, I can't imagine that they are going to need something that can outperform X11 for gpu intensive applications like gaming development. I'd love to be wrong about that last bit though. Whatever they mean by it though, it'll be nice to see.
Hi there, submitter here. I left a typographical error in the summary. "in the beginning of June" should read "in the beginning of July". Oops, sorry about that.
Re:Hardware acceleration
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You might want to read this then. It appears that there are even patches available for vdpau (=NVIDIA's hardware acceleration). I haven't tried this yet myself though (but will be as soon as I get home from work).
Slashdot Mirror
I use Vista right now, and it's fairly stable, but it's a little slow, even after I had to turn all the retarded parts off.
What I find strange is that the people that use MS software out of choice continually put up with and reward a company that regularly bends them over a barrel and gives them downright awful or just mostly awful software with every other release.
You have to give the context here. When Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist because, even if you wanted to, you couldn't delete IE in Windows 98. I'm not sure about the PC world, but any applications that Apple installs are easily deleted in Mac OS X, you just drag the to the trash, and empty it. It's that simple. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist because they abused their position as the dominant OS manufacturer to force people to run IE, Apple may include lots and lots of applications on their software (and even automatically download or install them) but they have never forced you to use their application, and this is precisely why they are not a convicted monopolist whereas Microsoft is.
Even desktop users who use linux often have to dual boot into windows. Sometimes virtual machines or wine is good enough for what you want, but for something like games or software that couples closely to hardware (e.g. AnyDVD or most games), this doesn't work. Having a faster boot on linux makes switching between OSes nicer. On my machine my Debian it's already faster than Vista (I forgot by how much, I'll have to remeasure it), and that's including running some slow services at startup for linux like uploading firmware for an HD card and starting the smartd.
TPB was purchased by a gaming company and has gone legitimate.
Not only that, I just checked and according to fedex it costs $7.39 to mail that same letter from coast to coast for their cheapest option. That's only what, nearly 17 times more expensive? Travel times are 5 days compared to about 7 for the USPS, not much faster. I'm sure the libertarians will chime in that they could do that much cheaper if the (subsidized) USPS weren't in the way, but I suspect it would be like the way that CD prices went down after the technology became established, or the way that cable and telephone prices went down after the markets were deregulated (i.e., they didn't). Bottom line is that the USPS is an astonishingly inexpensive with a low failure rate for the price. It's a great service that our government provides. While I'm glad that they are saving this money, I'd rather that they put it to work on avoiding reductions in service or balancing their budget rather than reducing the price of postage.
Oh, I don't know, there's lots of cat species. I myself an breathlessly awaiting Mac OS X version Iberian Lynx, which will be one better than Asiatic Lion. Perhaps that doesn't have quite the same ring to it though. They could also do extinct species, like sabertooth, which would be a decent name.
In all honesty, I do wonder why they haven't done a Lion version yet.
The worst project I know of for this is e17. It hasn't been released yet, but they started with e16 and started adding decimal places until they got to version 0.16.9999, then they skipped the 9999 and just started counting again, so what I have installed on my PC is version 0.16.9999.050 or so and then they lost track of version numbers all together and just started using svn to update everything. Now they've changed yet again and they're using snapshots based on dates, which is a little more reasonable. But then again, e17 was begun in 2000, so it's been "in development" for 9 years now and things are bound to get a little confused (even though it's been used in commercial OSes already). It is getting done slowly, but by the time they "release" it, it's going to be so far out of date it's not even funny. They've already had to redo the default theme because it looked dated.
Yeah, I suppose that's true. In the past though companies have used Microsoft's promises as an excuse to stay on the MS upgrade path when they do upgrade, at least in part. This may just be an excuse to not bother with having to look for an alternative though. However, maybe the sword cuts both ways in that now that the economy is down the tubes as it were (and in all likelihood, we're in for at least another year or two of hard times), some companies won't upgrade and it doesn't matter how good Win7 is.
You have to believe that PC upgrades are probably the first thing on the chopping block when it comes to hard times. My experience with the federal government is that computer upgrades don't just happen every few years like they used to, you have to have a more substantive reason than just "it's old" to get an updated computer. E.g., when Obama took over the White House, they found a lot of legacy hardware, including 6 year old MS software, which I presume means they were running XP SP1.
You must be new here :) When was the last time that MS delivered everything it promised?
Besides linux people, the people that I personally see using openoffice most often are young, hip college students. The reason? They have no money to spend on things like software. You forget that young people also grew up with the internet and are accustomed lots of free software and see no reason to pay to use something that some other software does just as well but is free.
You want statistical evidence? Look here, from a survey of Excel users from May, 2009:
They found that 36% of advanced and 29% of intermediate users "hate or dislike" the ribbons, which vastly outweighs the people who "love or like" the ribbons at 20 and 24%, respectively.
How 'about them apples?
I find that hard to believe. How many of those people they asked actually used office as a mission critical application in their day to day use? In my admittedly small sample, nobody that I work with at all enjoys using the ribbons, which is about 5 that I have spoken to about it. The majority of people have Office 2003 put on instead, only those who are reluctant to change software on their computers leave it on.
Just a brief list of linux stuff that runs on top of OS X:
X11
kde
e17
For everything else there's fink and darwin ports.
In fact, darwin itself is open source, meaning if you really, really have a hard on to run just linux apps, you could run the core OS with the drivers and all with X11 on top of it. Beeslebob's point is spot on, there's no reason to take a perfectly good unix that has drivers custom written for it to replace it with a one-size fits all OS like linux (as awesome as linux is, hardware drivers are its Achilles' Heel because the hardware is often propietary).
It wasn't a bug, it was a feature request. The "feature" is explained here. Basically, if you click on a special location, like home or documents, and you are in column view, the finder roots you to that location and removes access to any directories higher level than that.
Don't forget that if you have more than about 100 files or so, the file picker slows to a crawl and literally takes about a second or so to display its contents. That has gotten a little better with recent releases, it used to take tens of seconds. It's still so terrible though that in firefox I usually switch back to the native file picker and stop using the gtk one because at least that one is fast. (Instructions here.)
I'm a scientist who writes C code on a weekly or semi-weekly basis on average and have written a theme for e17 as well as done some writing some small "in house" type guis used for interface with instruments. My bug reports to open source projects are largely ignored as well (to the point that I rarely issue one now). But then again, Apple devs ignored all my complaints about the Finder when they removed the horizontal scroll bar from the Finder when you clicked on a special location awhile back too. They had a vision of what they wanted to do and they did that and didn't care what I thought. It's nothing to do with you, it's that open source developers are doing this usually for some small salary or part time and what they get paid to do is sometimes not what what you want them to do and there's only so many hours in a day.
Here is the chart of the water levels of Lake Lanier, which is Atlanta's only major water supply. The record low elevations line that you see was set last year, which was the second year of a drought (you might recall our governor's response to the drought, which was to pray for rain, aside from suing all of the neighboring states to try to take their water). The big bump that you see in the minimum recorded lake elevations just before September was hurricane Gustav, which essentially saved us from a situation where the lake would have been within 10 feet of a standing pool, and Atlanta gets its water on the outlet of the power generators. In fact, most of Atlanta's problems were because the El Niño shut down the hurricanes into the gulf for a couple of years after katrina. Now that they're back, and the wet weather in general, our water supply is fine for the moment.
The entire thing is ridiculous. Hurricane Katrina had hurricane force winds that extended out 120 miles from the center of the storm. If we use that as the radius, the area of the storm was 45,239 square miles. You don't even need to look at that, you just need to look a photo of the storm to see it occupied the majority of the Gulf of Mexico. I don't care how much money you have, you aren't going to be able to move that much water to make one dent in it.
The diagram in TFA shows 30 dots, which presumably are ships, but they have a little arrow with 500 too, so we'll use both. For 500 ships, that's one ship for every 90 square miles of storm area, which is a box 9.5 x 9.5 miles. One ship, mixing all the ocean water in a box 10 miles on a side. If we use 30 ships, it's one ship every 1500 square miles, one ship in a box 39 x 39 miles. And don't forget that storm tracking is very difficult, so they're going to have to do this after the storm is already formed and on it's way, which means they'll have less than a week to move that much water.
How in the world did that guy ever get to be the world's richest man?
That assumes that all cars are created equal. If it were the mid-1980s and I owned a toyota or honda, you're saying I'd have to pay to insure the repairs of faulty parts on Fords and GMs, or even a Chevy "unsafe at any speed" Corvair: you choose to buy a car that is completely unsafe and unreliable, and you're forcing me to help subsidize the cost of repair and accidents caused by faulty design, even though I myself am a very conscientious auto buyer.
One could make the argument that as long as unsafe cars are on the road, everyone must pay the extra price to insure themselves, but as far as I know, insurance companies do actually look at types of car when considering your insurance premium, and of course there's the "safe driver" discount, so I guess this effect is somewhat mitigated.
Huh, interesting, color me surprised. However, one point: you have to install the pirated version of the software to get the trojan and give it an administrator's password before it can pwn the machine, i.e., it's not a virus. Also, I can't click on a web-link and get infected, or open a document that somebody sends me, I have to install the software and run it as root. There's an easy solution to this particular trojan: don't pirate software, or if you do, be suspicious of any software installer on OS X that requires root privileges and check the md5sums of the packages you download against a trusted source.
Most applications on the mac can simply be dragged onto the applications directory and don't require an administrator's password, so that's a red-flag right there. I'll be snarky here and attribute the lax attitude to administrator privileges to microsoft too, since they are the ones that practically made their old OSes force you to run as root to be able to do anything. To be fair though, this is currently a problem not necessarily because of Microsoft, but some programmers still write their code in such a way to require administrator privileges for installation.
Maybe they're looking to port Photoshop to linux....
And make pigs fly while they'e at it!
This is a key point, because this affects not just windows users. I had my IT person up in my office a few weeks ago installing landesk monitoring software and virus software on my macintosh because of this. I know, I know, there's all sorts of arguments that macs can get viruses, but really, until I hear about a botnet of macs, I'm going to be skeptical that virus software is necessary on a mac. The IT person justified it by saying that PC viruses can get transmitted over USB keys and files stored on my mac, which is I suppose is true (but I have yet to see it).
You and me both, but I'm a little confused. What do they mean by "windowing system"? Are they doing a rewrite of X11, or do they mean they are designing new window decorations and widgets (e.g. gtk or qt), or do they mean the whole desktop environment (e.g., kde, gnome)?
If it's a replacement for X11, why are they doing that? I could see that maybe X11 has too much legacy code and really isn't designed to be the most efficient for a single screen laptop where you don't need an X windows server per se, but on the other hand, I can't imagine that they are going to need something that can outperform X11 for gpu intensive applications like gaming development. I'd love to be wrong about that last bit though. Whatever they mean by it though, it'll be nice to see.
Hi there, submitter here. I left a typographical error in the summary. "in the beginning of June" should read "in the beginning of July". Oops, sorry about that.
You might want to read this then. It appears that there are even patches available for vdpau (=NVIDIA's hardware acceleration). I haven't tried this yet myself though (but will be as soon as I get home from work).