LeoDavidson said:

blowdart said:

*snip*

Cannonical's statement seems odd to me on some levels. You could search & replace "C#" and "Mono" with "FAT32" and "LFN" and get a statement which could've been said in the past and we know is wrong now. It's not clear what makes C#/Mono different (though maybe they are different; I don't know).

On the other hand, perhaps Cannonical don't see it as their job to get in the way of what people use unless someone takes legal action. They can't stop people using Mono; all they can do is choose whether or not to include it in any builds by default (which in turn may encourage/discourage its use by people who hope to get their software included in the same builds, but that's about it). Whether or not important software for the Linux community depends on Mono is up to the community, not Cannonical, so their statement makes sense on that level.

 

And yet, Ubuntu still has FAT32 drivers included by default; including Mono should seem less risky than that.

blowdart said:

Bas said:

*snip*

And it's reformat and reinstall time.

And it's a limited time offer. For all of two months from the release date (although to be fair maybe an upgrade version will appear after that)

Can you not upgrade in the Full versions at all? I know it's possible in the RC, and I'd imagine it ought to be the same as that. Or is it just the E versions that can't upgrade?

Ubuntu said:

matthews said:

*snip*

Dude, everything you wrote in your post is BS.

1. Could you be more specific and tell us which are the features that you miss in OpenOffice so much that you think it's 'horrible'?

2. If nvidia and Ati-AMD open-sourced their drivers there would be no reason to have an open-source 2D driver

3. If your kernel gets updated you may still choose in your boot menu to boot using the old one - didn't you notice that?

4. If you update to a newer kernel you should expect for the supported devices coverage to increase rather than decrease (the opposite to Windows)

I had sh*t to do, and after 3 years on that garbage, I gave up, installed Vista

You mean that WinXP prior to SP2 (at that point in time) was a better choice? It had poor stability and serious security issues.

I won't comment on the rest of your post because it's simply ridiculous - you have your agenda you want to put forward and there is no point in arguing.

Another problem is the breakage that occurs pretty much constantly. A new kernel point release gets pushed through apt? Something’s going to break, and you're going to spend the requisite hour or two figuring out how to fix it, until you finally find some post on a forum (the 8^th you’ve looked at) that solves your problem. Samba get updated? Well odds are the new version makes some small change to the way it reads config files, and suddenly your network shares are open to everyone on the network. Upgrading to a whole new release of Ubuntu of Fedora? Well you'd better hold onto your hats, and hope that wifi, sound, graphics, and flash don't all break at once.

How about Linux as a platform? How can a developer of a closed source application (say a game) be expected to target Linux, when the core bits in the system gets slaughtered with each point release? Not just the kernel, the core libraries and X11 do the exact same thing. Linux isn't so much a platform as it is a plate of spagatti, that might just run Firefox if it was custom compiled with a whole bunch of hooks for the specific point release of your distro, but don't you dare try to run the binary provided by Mozilla of a new version or you're sure to run into a world of hurt. Yes, if you completely lock down the system and make sure to only update everything very carefully on your own, like on a phone, an ebook reader, or a server, you can get a stable platform to target apps to, but that's nowhere near the reality of Linux on the desktop. Ever tried to run an old game (that is, more than a couple years old) on Linux? I don’t think I was ever able to get Doom 3 to run.

I abandoned Linux almost 2 years ago because I got tired of the constant fiddling and sacrifices I was making as a user; I had sh*t to do, and after 3 years on that garbage, I gave up, installed Vista, and have never been happier or more productive. The last thing I need is to watch OpenOffice, X, or my newly broken nvidia driver (thanks to some daily update somewhere) crash while I'm in the middle of writing a term paper -- again.

Really, there isn't a problem with "widespread concerns about Mono", there's a core group of morons from the Boycott-Novell crowd who are paranoid and misinformed trying to get rid of something for what is essentially software religious reasons. Most of these people aren't even devs, they're just users who are trying to tell devs who give up their free time to work on OSS how to work.

This post summarizes pretty well why all the anti-mono stuff is just astroturfing on the part of what is really a very small group of crazies: http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/ (edit: didn't realize this same thing was linked in the first post)

GoddersUK said:

I've have a linux install on my hdd I use occasionaly and I've been using it for the past few days.

Do you know what the first thing I noticed when i came back to Windows was?

Disk activity - Linux, I'm not doing something - it sits there doing nothing. Windows - Disk access (not constant thrashing, but probably a couple of times a minute).

(note, not and entirely fair comparison as my windows install is used far more than my linux and has a large detritus of software installed on it (inc. the stuff I have in the sys tray).

The other thing I notice: not having wobbly Windows... makes Windows feel so old

(except my graphics drivers aren't properly supported by the latest version of the kernel so no compiz for me )

 

Vista and 7 aggressively fill a memory cache with hard drive pages during non-peak hard drive access in order to reduce hard drive access during peak access. The effect is more hard drive access overall but faster reads and writes.

AndyC said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

I'm not overly familar with the Sony Vaio range, though to me it looks like the only difference in names based on color is the trailing letter (eg P11Z/W is white, P11Z/R is red). As to Dell, I don't think you can level that complaint at them at all, their product range is very well segregated and I've certainly never seen differently named models varying only by colour.

Apple's laptop range is only easier to understand because they basically have 2 models: "Cheap, small, underpowered" and "Large, overly powerful and very expensive". Unless you count the Air, but you'd have to be crazy drunk to buy one of those things.

Vostro 1500 is just an all black Inspiron 1520.

Sven Groot said:

Evil SEO said:

*snip*

Fair enough. On my system, most games suffer about a 20-40% loss in performance in DX10 mode compared to DX9 mode, but this is likely due to my video card.

It's true that pure 64 bit mode isn't going to help straight computation much. Sure, the extra registers will make some difference, but you won't see it except in some very specific situations.

However, Paolo's original assertion was that 32/64 bit context switches on MacOS X causes overhead. I don't really see how comparing 64 bit and 32 bit Windows to each other has any relevance to that at all.

On my 8600GTm, I get performance drops from like 40fps to 2fps in some areas in Crysis when turning on DX10. I think it has to to with the volumetric fog and cloud effects that are added in with DX10 mode that aren't available at all in DX9 that causes the problem.

littleguru said:

Koogle said:

*snip*

Don't tell me you are still on 1024x768. Please don't!

PaoloM said:

AndyC said:

*snip*

CannotResolveSymbol said:

Bas said:

*snip*

That holds up for Word and Excel (where you traditionally had a two-row toolbar layout with other toolbars available as needed (like the Drawing toolbar).  Outlook, however, only has one toolbar in its main window (plus the menu bar), which means the ribbon takes up quite a bit of space.

The most interesting screenshot there for me is that they're going to be supporting Firefox and Safari for Outlook Web Access's premium mode...  would be really nice to have, but I don't expect my employer to upgrade any time soon:  moving to Exchange 2007 or newer from 2003 requires a pretty substantial hardware investment for relatively little benefit (we probably wouldn't be taking advantage of many of the new features like voice mail).

Dr. Cameron said:

Ray7 said:

*snip*

Absolutely! With 256mb of ram part of which reserved, CPU performance killed by the hypervisor, no video acceleration, one of the slowest hard drives, the meager 380 watts of power consumption and no included keyboard/mouse it would be the perfect linux box. How many firefox tabs could you open before running out of ram? one? Also, aren't you forgetting the lack of some important softwares that is not available on the PPC platform like, I dunno, Flash? I bet there is a full dozen of sites somewhere that still support flash 7 so you'd better add them to your bookmarks before they get sucked into the empty void of obsolescence.

KevinB said:

Maddus Mattus said:

*snip*

I made an effort to use Live instead of Google for a while to see what I thought of it, I just set it as my home page. I have never bothered going back.

It gives me nearly identical results to Google. I know this because sometimes whne I am searching and can't find what I need, I get annoyed at Live and paste the same query into Google expecting it to magically give me the answer and it gives me pretty much the same results.

I do miss youtube integration, I wish they would add this to Live.

Live also does some very cool stuff in the 'vertical' markets like :

http://search.live.com/xrank

https://ssl.search.live.com/health/results.aspx?q=flu&form=HEALTH

which are promising for things to come.

So, do I think Live is better than Google, definitely not, do I think that Google is better than Live, maybe by about 1% and certainly not worth my time and effort to go Tools > Options and change my home page. And just before I get accused of it, I am not just a fanboy saying it is the same because it is a MS product, I own an iPhone and use several Google products, Google search just isn't that much better anymore....

Koogle said:

Evil SEO said:

*snip*

Explorer is still hopelessly rubbish in Win7 last time I checked.. which should mean it will come out to be the exact same crap in the final release.. so just thought I'd say   I hope for MS sake Quizo comes back to update his explorer shell addon, it at least makes using the sh\te Explorer bareble for the power user or those that just like to get things done and not have to mess around a with clunky pile of noob crap.

Its just a shame 1 man can't fully replace and improve all the rest of retardation in explorer and all that associated with it like *cough* uber crap WDS implementation etc

ManipUni said:

Nobody said that... Walmart has been selling them for years.