I went to Intel's Core 2 Duo list of chips and counted. 18/60 chips don't have the VT extension. That's 30%. I have no idea on the relative popularity of these chips but if 30% of the chips out there can't run the XP emulation mode, I'd say that's pretty significant, wouldn't you? It's not like these chips are ancient or anything either, I'm guessing their Core 2 Duo is their most popular chip for desktops right now and maybe even laptops.
Intel uses VT for product segmentation, regarding it as a high-end feature and charging more for it.
Thus, only high-end chips will be able to emulate XP and I don't see any reason why Intel would change this any time soon (in fact, it could even be that they're the reason Microsoft did this). This looks precisely like a "goof" to me because I bet the corporate world with all their specialized apps and low-end PCs will not be to happy that they can only run XP emulation on some PCs and not others.
Couple this to the lack of a speed increase for 7, it's looking more and more like Windows 7 will replace the Vista installs fairly rapidly, but those computers running XP are only going to be upgraded to 7 through attrition and replacement.
P.S. Is/. completely screwed up today for anyone else? It won't load in Safari at all, and Firefox only shows the RSS feed. Weird. (Mac OS X, running minimal mode while logged in.)
You are just as capable of submitting a story as the original submitter is. If you submitted a story with that anandtech article in it and it was rejected, I have some sympathy for you, but if you're just bitching about how another story was posted instead of the one you wanted, I couldn't care less.
Incidentally, the summary didn't include comparisons to XP because the article didn't benchmark 7 versus XP. If the article had, I'm sure it would have been included instead of the one from 2006. But I'm sure you're much happier seeing conspiracies in everything where there aren't any. I think you probably need to find somebody to give you a hug.
we are at an age where "fast enough and cheaper" is more important than "fastest"
Exactly. One big argument for why people didn't pick up Vista was that that XP is good enough, plenty fast and runs on cheap hardware and there was no reason to upgrade. Will Windows 7 change that? We have been hearing about some new features of windows 7 that sound interesting so maybe people will see some advantage but unless it's a lot faster on cheaper hardware like you say, I don't think they will. If I had to guess though, I'd say it's more likely that Windows 7 will rapidly replace most of the Vista installs, but people who haven't upgraded yet will probably stick with XP.
As somebody else pointed out, Vista SP1 is pretty stable, and now that everyone has figured out what services to turn off to make it run better, it's not all too bad (speaking as a die hard linux and mac os x geek who only installs windows to play games). By services I mean Aero, Superfetch, indexing, and some network services that slow down your system noticeably but don't provide a huge benefit.
But, even though Vista SP1 is stable, people aren't installing it at the same rate as they did a year ago, and Vista growth peaked well below what XP did when it was replacing Win 2k (see this comment and the chart that goes with it). Right now I think that the only new users of Vista now are ones that are buying it on a new computer, or incidental installs (i.e., somebody trashed their system and decided to upgrade while they were at it). I suspect that XP is just good enough, and the only loss for XP's market share now is people replacing their old computers. If I'm right, Windows 7 might be stuck at ~25% usage share for a while (Vista is currently at 23.9% give or take a few percentage points).
That said, I cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who says glibc toasted their system. What they usually really mean is "I installed this unsupported sid package, which required a newer glibc version, and it brought in the kitchen sink with it because of the dependency tree, and now I'm toast."
It was actually during a dist-upgrade, but from sarge to etch (kde was hugely out of date for an end user). In my defense though, why should my system get so hosed while trying to do that? I thought the entire point of having a package manager was to make those kinds of things seamless. glibc is the only package that hosed my whole system doing that. Even having problems with locales required me to revert and just reinstall some things. I think that having a package maintainer who is more open to fixing bugs in existing releases (such as is shown in some of those bug reports that people have listed here) would make life much easier for transitioning and make it more flexible about which packages depend on it. This is especially important for such a low level package like glibc. But hey, what do I know.
Speaking as a Debian user who has had some major upgrade problems directly caused by glibc, anything that's "more upstream friendly" is okay by me. I've had my system totally screwed by glibc problems before, so badly that the only thing I could think of to do was to reinstall (it was while installing on a new machine, so it was okay). Whenever I see that glibc in the upgrade list for apt-get upgrade, I get a little queasy to this day though, along with upgrading the locales package.
The only trick would be convincing game developers to write anything for a platform with fewer users.
You should definitely read this then. The rumor on the street is that Apple might buy EA. Now, I know better than to listen to these types of rumors, but if that did happen, they would suddenly have a lot of games being written for them. Who knows if this is true or not, but it is makes a hell of a lot more sense than Apple buying Twitter of all things.
I agree, of course Apple won't buy Twitter, what would be the point of that? (Admittedly, I'm biased because I don't know what Twitter is beyond some new internet fad and something about a crippled IRC).
... But while we're speculating wildly out of our asses, why not something fun? MacRumors is reporting that Apple might buy Electronic Arts. That at least might provide me as a mac user some decent fucking games. Good thing too, I'm getting really tired of NWN, Warcraft III and Myth II. Maybe then I could finally dump that windows partition for a hacked OS X partition.
That's funny, because I feel the exact opposite!:) When I use a windows system, I get annoyed that I can't just open a package manager and install whatever software I need instantly. Linux just feels like a complete operating system and my distro. (debian) has software to do just about every thing I need to do. WIndows has an operating system, a web browser and other useful apps that come with it, but nothing like debian which has over 20,000 packages. For the few programs I might want that aren't in debian, usually I can download them from the internet (legally). Also, debian is a compiled for a multitude of system architectures, so I can run the same OS on my old PPC mac laptop as my Intel core duo, it's sweet.
Okay dude, I hate to break this to you, while all those things you mention are great tools and are surely exciting, nothing you've posted is terribly innovative. It's ALL been done somewhere else...
When you copy files the taskbar thumbnail shows a progress bar.
Right here is the class reference for changing the icon of an application in OS X. An example of this being used is Xcode provides you with a progress bar in the icon of the application to show the status of the project as it builds. Granted, this isn't for copying files, but the potential is there if you wanted your application to do that.
You can search from the Start button for any program, email, or document, and all without touching the mouse.
One of the default modules, exebuf, of the e17 desktop manager allows the same behavior, and has had it since e17 was started about six years ago. Press Alt-escape, and then type in your command and it gives you suggestions as you type. Also, you can add keystrokes to navigate the start menu, just like windows.
When you're managing files you can drag 2 windows to either side of the screen to stack them horizontally, keeping each window fully in view, and when you're done you can move them away from the edge and they return to their previous size.
This is surely nice and useful, but you can do the same in a number of file managers, the oldest I think being norton commander.
You can pin document shortcuts to program icons so that you can right-click the program to directly jump to that document with that app, instead of having to open the app and browse to the desired document.
In OS X you drop a file onto an application icon and it opens it. No browsing required.
You can repurpose the "shut down" button on the Start Menu to restart, hibernate, sleep, or whatever you want.
This is nice, but in OS X I can hit my monitor power button and get the shut down menu, I can hit the power button on the computer to get the same, or I can use the apple menu, or in e17 I can add a short cut for whichever command I want. The point is that similar customizable functionality exists elsewhere.
I will grant you that windows 7 may combine these useful features in a good way, but to say that windows is innovating, I'll believe it when I see it. I will believe you and try installing windows 7 over my vista partition though, because frankly, using vista is like having to have a wet dog in a tent. It stinks.
Windows' sleek UI and excellent vendor driver support save the user time worth more than the entry price over its lifespan, plus Microsoft offers tech support for its products.
What are you a microsoft salesman? Or did you miss e17, kde4.2, or gnome with some translucency effects running composite. These are sleek, are they not? As for support, you do know you can buy support from any number of companies for linux: redhat, suse, ubuntu, etc. I really don't get this statement.
As for the rest of your comment, yes, linux plays a lot of catch-up. BUT, I argue that any OS with 1% market share would be playing catch-up as well. Remember also that linux has innovated quite a few things. All those more powerful command line tools you get in Windows Vista and presumably 7 is Windows playing catch-up to unix shells. All that flash and sleekness you see in Windows 7 and in aero is Windows playing catch-up to OS X, but in fact the composite managers in linux have more eye-candy and cool effects than anything in either windows or OS X (e.g., when I close window, it bursts into some short-lived flames, it's awesome!). So every company and organization copies from each other, it's not just linux doing it.
What makes you assume that all companies are doing this? The way I see it, the companies who are actually paying their taxes, or are too small to afford this kind of creative accounting, are being penalized for being honest. That sucks.
For starters, maybe if corporations started paying their taxes, we could take down the debt some, or maybe we could lower taxes on the rest of us. I don't feel bad for the corporations, maybe they'll just have to forgo paying their executives their excessively huge salaries.
Also, every time Obama does something wrong, we see a bunch of people making sarcastic comments here on how Obama represents "change we can believe in". I do not agree with everything he has done, but I do like to see this sort of thing, he seems like he is honestly trying to run the government in a fiscally responsible way. That's a big difference from our previous president who refused to cut spending to pay for his tax cuts, and even refused to allow the cost of his several hundred billion dollar unnecessary war to be included in the normal budget. We're all paying for that kind of "limited government" now, as will be our children and grandchildren.
Atmospheric contaminants are routinely used to date the age of groundwater (e.g., in wells) and even to measure the residence time for water in the watershed of rivers. The most commonly used radioactive element is the hydrogen isotope, tritium. You can see a curve for it here, where the tritium level peaks in 1964 or so. You measure how much tritium is in the groundwater, then you compare it to that curve to which I linked after accounting for the decay of the tritium (half-life = 12.32 years), the match shows when that water fell as rainfall. Lot's of different contaminants are that way: CFC's used in air conditioners were useful until they were banned, SF6 is used in industrial transformers and does the same job.
You're absolutely right.:) I found this site which might help. I'm running adblocking and it still picks up my OS and browser correctly. Presumably Net Applications is using something similar.
The PS3 is accounted for. Rather than look at the trend, if you click on the April, 2009 link in the linked article, it breaks it down by device (the PS is at 0.05%): Windows 87.90%
Mac 9.73%
Linux 1.02%
iPhone 0.55%
iPod Touch 0.15%
Java ME 0.07%
Android 0.07%
Symbian 0.06%
Windows Mobile 0.05%
Playstation 0.05%
BlackBerry 0.03%
FreeBSD 0.02%
Palm 0.02%
Nintendo Wii 0.01%
SunOS 0.01%
BREW 0.00%
OpenBSD 0.00%
OpenVMS 0.00%
HP-UX 0.00%
SCO 0.00%
SCP 0.00%
AIX 0.00%
NetBSD 0.00%
Web TV 0.00%
Nintendo DS 0.00%
Presumably, the "linux" here is linux desktops and laptops and not linux devices, nor unix (if you believe that).
Hi there, submitter here. One certainly wonders what the statistical variability is, it's probably pretty high for month to month data. That's what I was trying to do by reporting the 12 month average increase or decrease. I posted a chart of that data here. Rather than look at percent usage share, this is the percent change in usage share for a given month. If it's positive, it means the OS grew, if it's negative it means it shrank.
Ultimately this is one of those things like political polling data, nobody can really know what the actual answer is. What's interesting here is that there are big bumps in all the OSes, which is the random error, but if you look at the averages, they follow what you might expect. That is, XP stopped increasing a long time ago, but didn't start to shrink (go negative) until Vista was released. Vista really is slowing in its growth, you can clearly see the peak in the average data right at Jan or Feb 2008. For linux, the latest little uptick is this newest data, which in itself is probably insignificant (as is the arbitrary 1% mark), but what is significant is that linux on average is enjoying positive growth as there's more upticks than downticks, as is OS X.
Apple is a hardware company that also makes software. Microsoft is a software company that also makes hardware. The MS hardware I can think of is their keyboards and mice, the Zune and Xbox 360. Considering that the entertainment division of microsoft that builds the zune and xbox lost 31 million dollars last quarter, I wouldn't hold Microsoft up as the paragon of what is possible to do in hardware.
er, oops, I just realized that Clinton pardoned his friends after the election was decided, it must of been one of all those other things that clinton did that pissed people off that made my old boss vote for bush.
I would suggest that Fox is correct in stating that there are many (R) who are feeling betrayed today.
I bet he won't change his voting behavior much, arguably, the citizens of PA are going to benefit now because it is ensured that their representative can at least voice their concerns and those concerns are going to be heard and there's some chance they will be acted on. There's little chance of that as a Republican.
For the future elections, the republicans could still vote for him even though he's a democrat now. I'm a registered Democrat and I voted against Diane Feinstein in every election when I lived in California because of her stance on criminalization of reproduction of digital works. My boss usually voted Democrat too but he not only voted for Schwarzenegger against the Democrat Davis in the special election because of Davis' corruption but voted for Bush the first time too because he couldn't stand Clinton pardoning his friends at the end of his term. While I recognize where you're coming from with that sentiment, I think we as a country, but especially the Republicans, need to move past this us versus them mentality and emphasizing wedge issues. All U.S citizens are "us" and I'm not a terrorist if I disagree with you.
Eventually we'll hit the point where there's simply not enough benefit to be gotten out of an expensive GPU. For me, that time is long past. For others, it may come in the next few years.
I agree. I haven't played Crysis, but I'm on my second time through Far Cry 2, and playability issues aside, the game looks just astounding. E.g., 1) the human models are so realistic they're descended deep into the Uncanny Valley and creep you out. 2) While the various areas you can go into do have a lot of artificial constraints about where you can walk (cliffs in this case, in the original doom it was walls of hallways and rooms), there is plenty of areas that don't have that and there is no fog of war or limited sight distance needed. I remember there were some hacks to remove the limited sight distance for NWN 1, and it looked okay right up until you started moving around and then it would make the game laggy and crash a lot. 3) Segregated areas. Again, with NWN 1 and lot of other similar games you had to segregate various areas to keep the number of polygons manageable, but with Far Cry 2 they seem to scale things in the distance to a lower resolution so that it stays manageable. They do have distinct areas, but they seem to have made the transition between the two relatively seamless, you only notice a little stuttering when you cross from one map to the next.
Anyhow, it seems that these sorts of games are very close to as realistic as you'd really want before you get diminishing returns for what can physically be portrayed on a 2-D screen. Now in FC2 they could have made a great game if only in addition to the graphics they would have worked on the AI of the soldiers and some decent factions instead of the 100% accurate aim, "x-ray specs vision" soldiers who are in separate factions but all hate you and instantly recognize you and will shoot you on sight.
Rather than being a change in personal convictions, Specter claims the opposite: that the Republicans have shifted away from him, i.e. more to the right. I think that sounds pretty accurate, don't you? For example, the chair of the Republican party has recently been apologized to Rush Limbaugh for stating the obvious, that Limbaugh is incendiary. While this is circumstantial, it's still pretty compelling that the Republican party has become more radical from the 1980s where it was a "big tent" kind of party.
This will be interesting though! Just for yucks, I went over to fox news to see what they had to say about it, and their first headline read "Specter abandons millions of GOP voters to join the democratic party." I think that's pretty funny since Specter himself says the GOP voters are abandoning the GOP. That is, he says 200k registered republicans switched parties in the last election in pennsylvania. (They've got something else up now about him being a party pooper.)
Point of reference: Apple Q2 sales of Macs fell 3% as opposed to MS' 6%, but ipods and iphones were still growing, giving the company a net profit. Couple this to the data over the last year or so showing that usage share of windows operating systems has been eroding a 1-3% a year for the last four years, it appears that microsoft seems to be losing, but it's slow going. It could easily turn around with a new successful operating system by MS.
Have you tried Stacks again after the 10.5.2 update (came out in Feb 2008)? Just have your folder with a large number of items display as a list. Works great and has turned me from a Dock hater into a Dock lover.
Yah, that's what I meant when I said parenthetically that the stacks behavior has gotten better in an update.
And I don't understand your complaint about Spaces. It got a major fix with 10.5.3 (came out in May 2008). You can see all Spaces and what windows are where by hitting F8 (you can change which key to press in Preferences).
I don't want to hit F8, I want to just look, it's easier and faster. A normal pager usually pages window location every so often and draws little rectangles and maybe icons showing which windows are on what desktop. That way, you just look over and figure out what desktop you're on, and what desktop you want to be based on the window arrangements. By hitting F8, not only is it an extra key stroke, but it takes you away from your current desktop. If you're used to spaces, you probably don't even notice it, but the unix way that I'm used to seems more efficient and comfortable.
As far as the speed thing goes, 10.5 is very fast on my 12" G4. That's running at 1.33GHz with only 768GB. The only time it slows down is when more than one crappy Flash animation tries to run at a time.
Benchmarks here. Leopard is slower than Tiger on all G5 and only the 64 bit version is faster than Tiger on the Intel Macs. I seem to recall that which version is faster 64 biut or 32 bit depends on what kind of benchmark you're doing but pretty much every benchmark I've seen shows that Tiger is faster on PPC chips.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but that your anecdotes just don't match up with my experience and you may just need to try things again since they've been updated.
These aren't huge complaints, and maybe that since I'm a long time OS X user (since 10.0 beta) I expect too much out of Apple, but the fact is that Leopard doesn't totally blow Tiger out of the water is just not what I'm used to from a company whose OSes got faster on the same hardware from 10.0 beta to 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4.
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I went to Intel's Core 2 Duo list of chips and counted. 18/60 chips don't have the VT extension. That's 30%. I have no idea on the relative popularity of these chips but if 30% of the chips out there can't run the XP emulation mode, I'd say that's pretty significant, wouldn't you? It's not like these chips are ancient or anything either, I'm guessing their Core 2 Duo is their most popular chip for desktops right now and maybe even laptops.
Thus, only high-end chips will be able to emulate XP and I don't see any reason why Intel would change this any time soon (in fact, it could even be that they're the reason Microsoft did this). This looks precisely like a "goof" to me because I bet the corporate world with all their specialized apps and low-end PCs will not be to happy that they can only run XP emulation on some PCs and not others.
/. completely screwed up today for anyone else? It won't load in Safari at all, and Firefox only shows the RSS feed. Weird. (Mac OS X, running minimal mode while logged in.)
Couple this to the lack of a speed increase for 7, it's looking more and more like Windows 7 will replace the Vista installs fairly rapidly, but those computers running XP are only going to be upgraded to 7 through attrition and replacement.
P.S. Is
Here's one from 2008 that says that Vista isn't quick. How 'bout that?
You are just as capable of submitting a story as the original submitter is. If you submitted a story with that anandtech article in it and it was rejected, I have some sympathy for you, but if you're just bitching about how another story was posted instead of the one you wanted, I couldn't care less.
Incidentally, the summary didn't include comparisons to XP because the article didn't benchmark 7 versus XP. If the article had, I'm sure it would have been included instead of the one from 2006. But I'm sure you're much happier seeing conspiracies in everything where there aren't any. I think you probably need to find somebody to give you a hug.
Exactly. One big argument for why people didn't pick up Vista was that that XP is good enough, plenty fast and runs on cheap hardware and there was no reason to upgrade. Will Windows 7 change that? We have been hearing about some new features of windows 7 that sound interesting so maybe people will see some advantage but unless it's a lot faster on cheaper hardware like you say, I don't think they will. If I had to guess though, I'd say it's more likely that Windows 7 will rapidly replace most of the Vista installs, but people who haven't upgraded yet will probably stick with XP.
As somebody else pointed out, Vista SP1 is pretty stable, and now that everyone has figured out what services to turn off to make it run better, it's not all too bad (speaking as a die hard linux and mac os x geek who only installs windows to play games). By services I mean Aero, Superfetch, indexing, and some network services that slow down your system noticeably but don't provide a huge benefit.
But, even though Vista SP1 is stable, people aren't installing it at the same rate as they did a year ago, and Vista growth peaked well below what XP did when it was replacing Win 2k (see this comment and the chart that goes with it). Right now I think that the only new users of Vista now are ones that are buying it on a new computer, or incidental installs (i.e., somebody trashed their system and decided to upgrade while they were at it). I suspect that XP is just good enough, and the only loss for XP's market share now is people replacing their old computers. If I'm right, Windows 7 might be stuck at ~25% usage share for a while (Vista is currently at 23.9% give or take a few percentage points).
It was actually during a dist-upgrade, but from sarge to etch (kde was hugely out of date for an end user). In my defense though, why should my system get so hosed while trying to do that? I thought the entire point of having a package manager was to make those kinds of things seamless. glibc is the only package that hosed my whole system doing that. Even having problems with locales required me to revert and just reinstall some things. I think that having a package maintainer who is more open to fixing bugs in existing releases (such as is shown in some of those bug reports that people have listed here) would make life much easier for transitioning and make it more flexible about which packages depend on it. This is especially important for such a low level package like glibc. But hey, what do I know.
Speaking as a Debian user who has had some major upgrade problems directly caused by glibc, anything that's "more upstream friendly" is okay by me. I've had my system totally screwed by glibc problems before, so badly that the only thing I could think of to do was to reinstall (it was while installing on a new machine, so it was okay). Whenever I see that glibc in the upgrade list for apt-get upgrade, I get a little queasy to this day though, along with upgrading the locales package.
You should definitely read this then. The rumor on the street is that Apple might buy EA. Now, I know better than to listen to these types of rumors, but if that did happen, they would suddenly have a lot of games being written for them. Who knows if this is true or not, but it is makes a hell of a lot more sense than Apple buying Twitter of all things.
I agree, of course Apple won't buy Twitter, what would be the point of that? (Admittedly, I'm biased because I don't know what Twitter is beyond some new internet fad and something about a crippled IRC).
... But while we're speculating wildly out of our asses, why not something fun? MacRumors is reporting that Apple might buy Electronic Arts. That at least might provide me as a mac user some decent fucking games. Good thing too, I'm getting really tired of NWN, Warcraft III and Myth II. Maybe then I could finally dump that windows partition for a hacked OS X partition.
That's funny, because I feel the exact opposite! :) When I use a windows system, I get annoyed that I can't just open a package manager and install whatever software I need instantly. Linux just feels like a complete operating system and my distro. (debian) has software to do just about every thing I need to do. WIndows has an operating system, a web browser and other useful apps that come with it, but nothing like debian which has over 20,000 packages. For the few programs I might want that aren't in debian, usually I can download them from the internet (legally). Also, debian is a compiled for a multitude of system architectures, so I can run the same OS on my old PPC mac laptop as my Intel core duo, it's sweet.
Right here is the class reference for changing the icon of an application in OS X. An example of this being used is Xcode provides you with a progress bar in the icon of the application to show the status of the project as it builds. Granted, this isn't for copying files, but the potential is there if you wanted your application to do that.
One of the default modules, exebuf, of the e17 desktop manager allows the same behavior, and has had it since e17 was started about six years ago. Press Alt-escape, and then type in your command and it gives you suggestions as you type. Also, you can add keystrokes to navigate the start menu, just like windows.
This is surely nice and useful, but you can do the same in a number of file managers, the oldest I think being norton commander.
In OS X you drop a file onto an application icon and it opens it. No browsing required.
This is nice, but in OS X I can hit my monitor power button and get the shut down menu, I can hit the power button on the computer to get the same, or I can use the apple menu, or in e17 I can add a short cut for whichever command I want. The point is that similar customizable functionality exists elsewhere.
I will grant you that windows 7 may combine these useful features in a good way, but to say that windows is innovating, I'll believe it when I see it. I will believe you and try installing windows 7 over my vista partition though, because frankly, using vista is like having to have a wet dog in a tent. It stinks.
What are you a microsoft salesman? Or did you miss e17, kde4.2, or gnome with some translucency effects running composite. These are sleek, are they not? As for support, you do know you can buy support from any number of companies for linux: redhat, suse, ubuntu, etc. I really don't get this statement.
As for the rest of your comment, yes, linux plays a lot of catch-up. BUT, I argue that any OS with 1% market share would be playing catch-up as well. Remember also that linux has innovated quite a few things. All those more powerful command line tools you get in Windows Vista and presumably 7 is Windows playing catch-up to unix shells. All that flash and sleekness you see in Windows 7 and in aero is Windows playing catch-up to OS X, but in fact the composite managers in linux have more eye-candy and cool effects than anything in either windows or OS X (e.g., when I close window, it bursts into some short-lived flames, it's awesome!). So every company and organization copies from each other, it's not just linux doing it.
What makes you assume that all companies are doing this? The way I see it, the companies who are actually paying their taxes, or are too small to afford this kind of creative accounting, are being penalized for being honest. That sucks.
For starters, maybe if corporations started paying their taxes, we could take down the debt some, or maybe we could lower taxes on the rest of us. I don't feel bad for the corporations, maybe they'll just have to forgo paying their executives their excessively huge salaries.
Also, every time Obama does something wrong, we see a bunch of people making sarcastic comments here on how Obama represents "change we can believe in". I do not agree with everything he has done, but I do like to see this sort of thing, he seems like he is honestly trying to run the government in a fiscally responsible way. That's a big difference from our previous president who refused to cut spending to pay for his tax cuts, and even refused to allow the cost of his several hundred billion dollar unnecessary war to be included in the normal budget. We're all paying for that kind of "limited government" now, as will be our children and grandchildren.
Atmospheric contaminants are routinely used to date the age of groundwater (e.g., in wells) and even to measure the residence time for water in the watershed of rivers. The most commonly used radioactive element is the hydrogen isotope, tritium. You can see a curve for it here, where the tritium level peaks in 1964 or so. You measure how much tritium is in the groundwater, then you compare it to that curve to which I linked after accounting for the decay of the tritium (half-life = 12.32 years), the match shows when that water fell as rainfall. Lot's of different contaminants are that way: CFC's used in air conditioners were useful until they were banned, SF6 is used in industrial transformers and does the same job.
You're absolutely right. :) I found this site which might help. I'm running adblocking and it still picks up my OS and browser correctly. Presumably Net Applications is using something similar.
The PS3 is accounted for. Rather than look at the trend, if you click on the April, 2009 link in the linked article, it breaks it down by device (the PS is at 0.05%):
Windows 87.90%
Mac 9.73%
Linux 1.02%
iPhone 0.55%
iPod Touch 0.15%
Java ME 0.07%
Android 0.07%
Symbian 0.06%
Windows Mobile 0.05%
Playstation 0.05%
BlackBerry 0.03%
FreeBSD 0.02%
Palm 0.02%
Nintendo Wii 0.01%
SunOS 0.01%
BREW 0.00%
OpenBSD 0.00%
OpenVMS 0.00%
HP-UX 0.00%
SCO 0.00%
SCP 0.00%
AIX 0.00%
NetBSD 0.00%
Web TV 0.00%
Nintendo DS 0.00%
Presumably, the "linux" here is linux desktops and laptops and not linux devices, nor unix (if you believe that).
Hi there, submitter here. One certainly wonders what the statistical variability is, it's probably pretty high for month to month data. That's what I was trying to do by reporting the 12 month average increase or decrease. I posted a chart of that data here. Rather than look at percent usage share, this is the percent change in usage share for a given month. If it's positive, it means the OS grew, if it's negative it means it shrank.
Ultimately this is one of those things like political polling data, nobody can really know what the actual answer is. What's interesting here is that there are big bumps in all the OSes, which is the random error, but if you look at the averages, they follow what you might expect. That is, XP stopped increasing a long time ago, but didn't start to shrink (go negative) until Vista was released. Vista really is slowing in its growth, you can clearly see the peak in the average data right at Jan or Feb 2008. For linux, the latest little uptick is this newest data, which in itself is probably insignificant (as is the arbitrary 1% mark), but what is significant is that linux on average is enjoying positive growth as there's more upticks than downticks, as is OS X.
Apple is a hardware company that also makes software. Microsoft is a software company that also makes hardware. The MS hardware I can think of is their keyboards and mice, the Zune and Xbox 360. Considering that the entertainment division of microsoft that builds the zune and xbox lost 31 million dollars last quarter, I wouldn't hold Microsoft up as the paragon of what is possible to do in hardware.
er, oops, I just realized that Clinton pardoned his friends after the election was decided, it must of been one of all those other things that clinton did that pissed people off that made my old boss vote for bush.
I bet he won't change his voting behavior much, arguably, the citizens of PA are going to benefit now because it is ensured that their representative can at least voice their concerns and those concerns are going to be heard and there's some chance they will be acted on. There's little chance of that as a Republican.
For the future elections, the republicans could still vote for him even though he's a democrat now. I'm a registered Democrat and I voted against Diane Feinstein in every election when I lived in California because of her stance on criminalization of reproduction of digital works. My boss usually voted Democrat too but he not only voted for Schwarzenegger against the Democrat Davis in the special election because of Davis' corruption but voted for Bush the first time too because he couldn't stand Clinton pardoning his friends at the end of his term. While I recognize where you're coming from with that sentiment, I think we as a country, but especially the Republicans, need to move past this us versus them mentality and emphasizing wedge issues. All U.S citizens are "us" and I'm not a terrorist if I disagree with you.
I agree. I haven't played Crysis, but I'm on my second time through Far Cry 2, and playability issues aside, the game looks just astounding. E.g., 1) the human models are so realistic they're descended deep into the Uncanny Valley and creep you out. 2) While the various areas you can go into do have a lot of artificial constraints about where you can walk (cliffs in this case, in the original doom it was walls of hallways and rooms), there is plenty of areas that don't have that and there is no fog of war or limited sight distance needed. I remember there were some hacks to remove the limited sight distance for NWN 1, and it looked okay right up until you started moving around and then it would make the game laggy and crash a lot. 3) Segregated areas. Again, with NWN 1 and lot of other similar games you had to segregate various areas to keep the number of polygons manageable, but with Far Cry 2 they seem to scale things in the distance to a lower resolution so that it stays manageable. They do have distinct areas, but they seem to have made the transition between the two relatively seamless, you only notice a little stuttering when you cross from one map to the next.
Anyhow, it seems that these sorts of games are very close to as realistic as you'd really want before you get diminishing returns for what can physically be portrayed on a 2-D screen. Now in FC2 they could have made a great game if only in addition to the graphics they would have worked on the AI of the soldiers and some decent factions instead of the 100% accurate aim, "x-ray specs vision" soldiers who are in separate factions but all hate you and instantly recognize you and will shoot you on sight.
Rather than being a change in personal convictions, Specter claims the opposite: that the Republicans have shifted away from him, i.e. more to the right. I think that sounds pretty accurate, don't you? For example, the chair of the Republican party has recently been apologized to Rush Limbaugh for stating the obvious, that Limbaugh is incendiary. While this is circumstantial, it's still pretty compelling that the Republican party has become more radical from the 1980s where it was a "big tent" kind of party.
This will be interesting though! Just for yucks, I went over to fox news to see what they had to say about it, and their first headline read "Specter abandons millions of GOP voters to join the democratic party." I think that's pretty funny since Specter himself says the GOP voters are abandoning the GOP. That is, he says 200k registered republicans switched parties in the last election in pennsylvania. (They've got something else up now about him being a party pooper.)
Point of reference: Apple Q2 sales of Macs fell 3% as opposed to MS' 6%, but ipods and iphones were still growing, giving the company a net profit. Couple this to the data over the last year or so showing that usage share of windows operating systems has been eroding a 1-3% a year for the last four years, it appears that microsoft seems to be losing, but it's slow going. It could easily turn around with a new successful operating system by MS.
Yah, that's what I meant when I said parenthetically that the stacks behavior has gotten better in an update.
I don't want to hit F8, I want to just look, it's easier and faster. A normal pager usually pages window location every so often and draws little rectangles and maybe icons showing which windows are on what desktop. That way, you just look over and figure out what desktop you're on, and what desktop you want to be based on the window arrangements. By hitting F8, not only is it an extra key stroke, but it takes you away from your current desktop. If you're used to spaces, you probably don't even notice it, but the unix way that I'm used to seems more efficient and comfortable.
Benchmarks here. Leopard is slower than Tiger on all G5 and only the 64 bit version is faster than Tiger on the Intel Macs. I seem to recall that which version is faster 64 biut or 32 bit depends on what kind of benchmark you're doing but pretty much every benchmark I've seen shows that Tiger is faster on PPC chips.
These aren't huge complaints, and maybe that since I'm a long time OS X user (since 10.0 beta) I expect too much out of Apple, but the fact is that Leopard doesn't totally blow Tiger out of the water is just not what I'm used to from a company whose OSes got faster on the same hardware from 10.0 beta to 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4.