Maybe it just means Microsoft hasn't decided to optimize for your extraordinarily rare use-case. The caching changes you mention benefit the vast majority of Windows users.
While WinXP64 didn't boot as fast or launch applications as quickly, it never crashed (Win7 crashed multiple times),
If you literally mean Windows crashed (and not your application), then that is one of two things: 1) You have faulty hardware (perhaps overheating if it only happens after a long run?) 2) You have a faulty driver
Windows 7 is rock-solid, at least as much as XP 64-bit. (And, it's a lot more likely to have mature drivers, unlike XP 64-bit.)
performance within the applications I use was exponentially better
Again, assuming this isn't a blatant lie, you're dealing with a hardware or driver fault. This could be the result of a drive in PIO mode, for example. (My guess is that it's a blatant lie.)
In reality it's Vista with an extremely efficient booting process and nothing more.
That's not a bad thing.
MS continues to push the bar though! XP used to be the worst OS you could make your machine suffer to run, but if history repeats I'm sure they'll release something so far worse in the future, after XP is deprecated and beyond maintaining, that will make me fall absolutely in *love* with the features of Win7.
Then stop using it. Nobody's holding a gun to your head, there are many alternatives available, and you'd save us all a lot of whining.
And this is the reason why people still play Rogue, and will be tapping away at Nethack and Dwarf Fortress long after WoW is gone.
I am not trying to claim that these games will ever be as "successful" (read: profitable) as World of Warcraft, but I would say they far more closely approach video-games-as-art.
If you define "art" as "tedium", then I agree.
But seriously, you are using a pretty limited definition of the word "art" there. They may be "art" in the same way that, say, chess is. But many video games are already "art" in the way that a good movie is... they put you in a character's shoes, they elicit emotions from the player other than frustration, they tell a story and they sometimes even teach you something new.
It's silly to say that Nethack is "art" but (for example) System Shock 2 isn't. Or Starsiege: Tribes isn't. They're all "art" and they're all equally valid, just in different ways.
(And Nethack doesn't appeal to me at all, not in the slightest. While I played WOW for several years. So, be careful not to assume that everybody is exactly like yourself.)
What I want is the ability to save my browser session back to google somehow "in the cloud" or whatever so that I can close my browser on one computer, start up a generic copy of chrome somewhere else, login, and get my entire session restored.
Are you serious? That's been around for ages. I first used it as part of.Mac back when Safari 1.0 was the hot shit, but Chrome and Firefox both have add-ons to do exactly that. In fact, I'm reasonably sure IE does, too, although I haven't looked into it in a few years.
If you get selected, can you call up your ISP and give them a head's up? Maybe you could get a... special price for a big upgrade in speed.
More seriously, since my only realistic option to get decent Internet speed is Verizon Fios, and they've basically given up on rolling that out, I'm basically screwed for at least another few years. Serves me right for being a loyal Verizon customer for over a decade, my fault.
I just rebooted my Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu 10.04 into a Gnome 2.30 environment. According to free, it's using a whopping 152 MB of RAM
So it uses hundreds of MB. Wow, way to show me up!
Nice strawman. If you actually read, you'd see that I said hundreds of MB's and my Ubuntu netbook requires 152.
WTF? Maybe you should look up the meaning of the word "hundreds." Here, I'll help you out: 4. hundreds The numbers between 100 and 999: an attendance figure estimated in the hundreds.
Excuses. Firstly, I'm inclined to believe the problem was that Win7 runs like a dog on the processor that was in the slate we're talking about which most emphatically is MS's fault.
And I'm "inclined" to believe I'm an attractive millionaire surrounded by tons of hot girls, but that's not true either.
Maybe Windows 7 is running like a dog because ASUS has it running on a CPU it's not approved for. Or maybe Windows 7 is running fine, and the tablet's touch-screen driver is a screwed-up piece of shit. Or maybe the OS and driver are fine, and the hardware is finicky. Or maybe the OS, driver, and hardware are fine and the guy demoing it isn't actually touching the screen on his first try.
Maybe you should be a little more creative when coming up with possibilities instead of immediately jumping to blame Microsoft.
Dude, he's CrazyJim. He literally thinks God speaks to him. Believe me, he's beyond hope.
At least he's not talking about his crazy-retarded game ideas, or how he invented all of the innovations in Starsiege Tribes only a year after Tribes came out. Or his comic book about the guy with two katanas with rockets in the hilt that he uses to fly.
He's some of Slashdot's best comic relief. Just Friend him and lay off, k? Or you'll deprive us of the entertainment.
The automatic sharing of the C: drive as \\hostname\c$\, for example, has been nearly impossible to turn off for even a competent systems administrator without ripping out parts of the operating system you may want....
And users are not forced to run "Internet Explorer", that festering cesspool of security vulnerabilities, because someone locked the software update mechanism to a web browser with too many "features" to possibly secure.
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE noble time traveler!
You'll be happy to note that here, in the year 2010, all of your gripes are fixed! But in the future you might want to make it clear that your missive was penned from 1999, otherwise we'll all be confused.
i.e. can Microsoft employees even do their JOB nowadays without Google?
Probably to the exact same degree Google employees can do their JOB without Microsoft.
The IT field is pretty well-integrated at this point. I'm sure Google relies as much on Microsoft technologies as Microsoft relies on Google technologies.
What kind of pile of shit OS needs hundreds of MB's of memory just to run?
What current, desktop-oriented, OS does't? Hell, OS X (you know, the one Slashdot raves about) requires significantly more RAM than Windows 7 does. Where's your criticism of it?
And sure, you can run a Linux install on less than 100 MBs, but the fact is: 1) It won't do shit 2) None of the shipping desktop-oriented Linux OSes have that small a footprint
And how are buggy ASUS touch drivers Microsoft's fault?
You're spreading the exact kind of FUD this thread is talking about.
No integrated version control. I used it a few years ago; it might have it now... but that's a killer feature of Office, and I don't consider any competitor "serious" about it if they don't have it.
No Mr AC, Exchange and Outlook need to go in order to enable better advancements via competition. Not because Exch-Outlook are bad products. Two completely different things here. Just because a product is good enough does not mean we should be happy to maintain it's monopoly status.
Wow, you have some weird backwards priorities here.
If we break AD-Exch-OL we break Windows on the server.
How do you imagine that will happen, without a superior replacement to AD/Exchange/Outlook? Companies aren't going to switch away from quality, inexpensive, working solutions to your crummier "competitive" software out of the goodness of their hearts.
Now, if you did have a better alternative, and it was being choked out by a monopoly, then I might have a little sympathy. But... there ain't one.
I'm not entirely up-to-date with the latest versions, but do they have collaboration features yet? Without integrated versioning control, it can't replace PowerPoint or Word.
You can disable wifi location, but only by disabling wifi altogether. AFAIK, you can't disable wifi location-finding while keeping wifi on.
Note that if you have wifi off, the iPhone/iWhatever will use the nearest cell tower as your "base" when showing maps, before it gets a fix from the GPS. Maybe someone should sue those cell phone companies for making their towers broadcast their location...
As if Apple would ever release a portable under $500! Hah. Netbooks run counter to all of Apple's most deeply-held beliefs. "Laptops that poor people can afford? Fuck that noise!"
And when it breaks because your provider is going bankrupt...?
Better than it breaking because we have an incompetent admin and/or can't afford to buy good equipment. At least with a cloud service, it's next to trivial to migrate to another.
Hopefully you at least back up your customer/inventory/product database in an open format on a regular basis.
I don't deal with that part of the business, but all their data is on our own network. Presumably, that's backed-up, I dunno-- I do the tech stuff.
It's not so much the cloud hosting that's dangerous, it's outsourcing all the knowledge of how your site works to people who may not be there in 5 years.
How's that different at all? Plopping somebody a cloud login and saying "figure it out" is just as confusing as giving them a few server logins and saying the same. The only slight difference is that cloud services have a bit more terminology to learn.
In any case, it's all documented. If the next generation are too stupid to make it work, well, I did all I could. I don't see how any of that would change if it were hosted in-house.
My company (which doesn't have a single IT person qualified to run a Internet-facing server) runs a high-availability Internet-accessible product using a Cloud provider. We don't buy servers, we don't buy bandwidth (directly), we don't have to worry about DNS issues or anything of the type-- someone else handles all of that for us. Hell, we don't even have to worry about database administration mostly.
The best part? We can run the product on the cloud service for 5 years for the cost of setting up our own infrastructure (if we do a decent job of it.)
Now if your company already has the infrastructure, already has the qualified people, maybe it's not such a great deal. For us? It's amazing.
Lemme guess, the game was Dwarf Fortress, or some other Linux-based antique?
I was talking about gamers, not "Linux users who self-select as gamers, even though they've never bought a commercial game in their lives and haven't played any title newer than 2005."
Well, part of the point is to be a deterrent. In any case, "if you can't pay the fine, don't do the crime"... that's how I look at it.
The only possible problem here is that people who pirate the movie/game don't know how much it will cost if they are caught. But whose fault is that? There's enough settled cases now that there's pretty much no excuse for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it just means Microsoft hasn't decided to optimize for your extraordinarily rare use-case. The caching changes you mention benefit the vast majority of Windows users.
While WinXP64 didn't boot as fast or launch applications as quickly, it never crashed (Win7 crashed multiple times),
If you literally mean Windows crashed (and not your application), then that is one of two things:
1) You have faulty hardware (perhaps overheating if it only happens after a long run?)
2) You have a faulty driver
Windows 7 is rock-solid, at least as much as XP 64-bit. (And, it's a lot more likely to have mature drivers, unlike XP 64-bit.)
performance within the applications I use was exponentially better
Again, assuming this isn't a blatant lie, you're dealing with a hardware or driver fault. This could be the result of a drive in PIO mode, for example. (My guess is that it's a blatant lie.)
In reality it's Vista with an extremely efficient booting process and nothing more.
That's not a bad thing.
MS continues to push the bar though! XP used to be the worst OS you could make your machine suffer to run, but if history repeats I'm sure they'll release something so far worse in the future, after XP is deprecated and beyond maintaining, that will make me fall absolutely in *love* with the features of Win7.
Then stop using it. Nobody's holding a gun to your head, there are many alternatives available, and you'd save us all a lot of whining.
You type that post as if you're *proud* of it. Christ, man.
And this is the reason why people still play Rogue, and will be tapping away at Nethack and Dwarf Fortress long after WoW is gone.
I am not trying to claim that these games will ever be as "successful" (read: profitable) as World of Warcraft, but I would say they far more closely approach video-games-as-art.
If you define "art" as "tedium", then I agree.
But seriously, you are using a pretty limited definition of the word "art" there. They may be "art" in the same way that, say, chess is. But many video games are already "art" in the way that a good movie is... they put you in a character's shoes, they elicit emotions from the player other than frustration, they tell a story and they sometimes even teach you something new.
It's silly to say that Nethack is "art" but (for example) System Shock 2 isn't. Or Starsiege: Tribes isn't. They're all "art" and they're all equally valid, just in different ways.
(And Nethack doesn't appeal to me at all, not in the slightest. While I played WOW for several years. So, be careful not to assume that everybody is exactly like yourself.)
What I want is the ability to save my browser session back to google somehow "in the cloud" or whatever so that I can close my browser on one computer, start up a generic copy of chrome somewhere else, login, and get my entire session restored.
Are you serious? That's been around for ages. I first used it as part of .Mac back when Safari 1.0 was the hot shit, but Chrome and Firefox both have add-ons to do exactly that. In fact, I'm reasonably sure IE does, too, although I haven't looked into it in a few years.
If what you say is true, then why is this a patent violation suit and not a breach-of-contract suit?
Sorry, I'm not sure I buy it. As an Australian, do you have a cite to back up your claim?
If you get selected, can you call up your ISP and give them a head's up? Maybe you could get a ... special price for a big upgrade in speed.
More seriously, since my only realistic option to get decent Internet speed is Verizon Fios, and they've basically given up on rolling that out, I'm basically screwed for at least another few years. Serves me right for being a loyal Verizon customer for over a decade, my fault.
So wait, you get bacon?
I don't see the problem.
You should be ashamed you watched enough voyager to get the reference.
What if I've only heard of them from the video game "Voyager: Elite Force." What does that count as?
You make a usually misinformed but seldom boring MS 'turfbot
By quoting the dictionary?
Christ, man.
I just rebooted my Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu 10.04 into a Gnome 2.30 environment. According to free, it's using a whopping 152 MB of RAM
So it uses hundreds of MB. Wow, way to show me up!
Nice strawman. If you actually read, you'd see that I said hundreds of MB's and my Ubuntu netbook requires 152.
WTF? Maybe you should look up the meaning of the word "hundreds." Here, I'll help you out: 4. hundreds The numbers between 100 and 999: an attendance figure estimated in the hundreds.
Excuses. Firstly, I'm inclined to believe the problem was that Win7 runs like a dog on the processor that was in the slate we're talking about which most emphatically is MS's fault.
And I'm "inclined" to believe I'm an attractive millionaire surrounded by tons of hot girls, but that's not true either.
Maybe Windows 7 is running like a dog because ASUS has it running on a CPU it's not approved for. Or maybe Windows 7 is running fine, and the tablet's touch-screen driver is a screwed-up piece of shit. Or maybe the OS and driver are fine, and the hardware is finicky. Or maybe the OS, driver, and hardware are fine and the guy demoing it isn't actually touching the screen on his first try.
Maybe you should be a little more creative when coming up with possibilities instead of immediately jumping to blame Microsoft.
I dunno.
EA has a lot of (presumably) smart coders who seem to end up in similar circumstances-- then their wives have to fight their battles for them.
Dude, he's CrazyJim. He literally thinks God speaks to him. Believe me, he's beyond hope.
At least he's not talking about his crazy-retarded game ideas, or how he invented all of the innovations in Starsiege Tribes only a year after Tribes came out. Or his comic book about the guy with two katanas with rockets in the hilt that he uses to fly.
He's some of Slashdot's best comic relief. Just Friend him and lay off, k? Or you'll deprive us of the entertainment.
The automatic sharing of the C: drive as \\hostname\c$\, for example, has been nearly impossible to turn off for even a competent systems administrator without ripping out parts of the operating system you may want. ...
And users are not forced to run "Internet Explorer", that festering cesspool of security vulnerabilities, because someone locked the software update mechanism to a web browser with too many "features" to possibly secure.
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE noble time traveler!
You'll be happy to note that here, in the year 2010, all of your gripes are fixed! But in the future you might want to make it clear that your missive was penned from 1999, otherwise we'll all be confused.
i.e. can Microsoft employees even do their JOB nowadays without Google?
Probably to the exact same degree Google employees can do their JOB without Microsoft.
The IT field is pretty well-integrated at this point. I'm sure Google relies as much on Microsoft technologies as Microsoft relies on Google technologies.
What kind of pile of shit OS needs hundreds of MB's of memory just to run?
What current, desktop-oriented, OS does't? Hell, OS X (you know, the one Slashdot raves about) requires significantly more RAM than Windows 7 does. Where's your criticism of it?
And sure, you can run a Linux install on less than 100 MBs, but the fact is:
1) It won't do shit
2) None of the shipping desktop-oriented Linux OSes have that small a footprint
And how are buggy ASUS touch drivers Microsoft's fault?
You're spreading the exact kind of FUD this thread is talking about.
No integrated version control. I used it a few years ago; it might have it now... but that's a killer feature of Office, and I don't consider any competitor "serious" about it if they don't have it.
No Mr AC, Exchange and Outlook need to go in order to enable better advancements via competition. Not because Exch-Outlook are bad products. Two completely different things here. Just because a product is good enough does not mean we should be happy to maintain it's monopoly status.
Wow, you have some weird backwards priorities here.
If we break AD-Exch-OL we break Windows on the server.
How do you imagine that will happen, without a superior replacement to AD/Exchange/Outlook? Companies aren't going to switch away from quality, inexpensive, working solutions to your crummier "competitive" software out of the goodness of their hearts.
Now, if you did have a better alternative, and it was being choked out by a monopoly, then I might have a little sympathy. But... there ain't one.
I'm not entirely up-to-date with the latest versions, but do they have collaboration features yet? Without integrated versioning control, it can't replace PowerPoint or Word.
You can disable wifi location, but only by disabling wifi altogether. AFAIK, you can't disable wifi location-finding while keeping wifi on.
Note that if you have wifi off, the iPhone/iWhatever will use the nearest cell tower as your "base" when showing maps, before it gets a fix from the GPS. Maybe someone should sue those cell phone companies for making their towers broadcast their location...
Apple netbooks
As if Apple would ever release a portable under $500! Hah. Netbooks run counter to all of Apple's most deeply-held beliefs. "Laptops that poor people can afford? Fuck that noise!"
Yeah, they should have called it something like "GIMP." That's much better.
And when it breaks because your provider is going bankrupt...?
Better than it breaking because we have an incompetent admin and/or can't afford to buy good equipment. At least with a cloud service, it's next to trivial to migrate to another.
Hopefully you at least back up your customer/inventory/product database in an open format on a regular basis.
I don't deal with that part of the business, but all their data is on our own network. Presumably, that's backed-up, I dunno-- I do the tech stuff.
It's not so much the cloud hosting that's dangerous, it's outsourcing all the knowledge of how your site works to people who may not be there in 5 years.
How's that different at all? Plopping somebody a cloud login and saying "figure it out" is just as confusing as giving them a few server logins and saying the same. The only slight difference is that cloud services have a bit more terminology to learn.
In any case, it's all documented. If the next generation are too stupid to make it work, well, I did all I could. I don't see how any of that would change if it were hosted in-house.
My company (which doesn't have a single IT person qualified to run a Internet-facing server) runs a high-availability Internet-accessible product using a Cloud provider. We don't buy servers, we don't buy bandwidth (directly), we don't have to worry about DNS issues or anything of the type-- someone else handles all of that for us. Hell, we don't even have to worry about database administration mostly.
The best part? We can run the product on the cloud service for 5 years for the cost of setting up our own infrastructure (if we do a decent job of it.)
Now if your company already has the infrastructure, already has the qualified people, maybe it's not such a great deal. For us? It's amazing.
Lemme guess, the game was Dwarf Fortress, or some other Linux-based antique?
I was talking about gamers, not "Linux users who self-select as gamers, even though they've never bought a commercial game in their lives and haven't played any title newer than 2005."
Well, part of the point is to be a deterrent. In any case, "if you can't pay the fine, don't do the crime"... that's how I look at it.
The only possible problem here is that people who pirate the movie/game don't know how much it will cost if they are caught. But whose fault is that? There's enough settled cases now that there's pretty much no excuse for that.