Warp wrote:
> so there's no way any country can force MS to keep
> supporting their own old OS by law.

Especially since MS tells you they'll stop supporting the OS at a certain 
date when they release it. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:17:28 -0400, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:

> Mono

Mono's not a Linux distro, perhaps you meant openSUSE? ;-)

Jim

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On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:07:14 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Warp wrote:
>> so there's no way any country can force MS to keep supporting their own
>> old OS by law.
> 
> Especially since MS tells you they'll stop supporting the OS at a
> certain date when they release it. :-)

Yeah, there's no need - if they change their minds, it's possible they 
could get sued for changing the support EOL of the product.

Jim

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> I am seriously considering just ridding myself of the windows scourge 
> permanantly in favor of either OpenSolaris, Gentoo, Mono or Ubuntu, after 
> imaging my windows HDD after a reformat and reinstall of all requisite 
> apps, and then running that from within linux whenever I wanted to use 
> something none of the nix variants support.

If you don't need any Windows specific software, and you're happy to learn 
about a new OS then I see no reason at all to stick with Windows, you're 
just wasting money.

> It is really just getting to the point where I can no longer justify the 
> annoyance of running 'doze.
> I'd be happy to stay with xp pro...but MS seems hellbent on forcing the 
> issue with pissta, and that I do not like..they seem more concerned with 
> flashy doodads and humdinger thingamabobs than stable 
> functionality...which is stupid.

Of course some people have different experiences, but I've been running 
Vista for a while now as my main work machine (and at home) and have never 
had any stability issues.  So far I've only found benefits, my big chunky 
CAD application loads 5-10x faster than on XP (identical hardware) which is 
a real plus for me.

Anyway, can you blame MS for wanting people to switch to their current OS? 
The longer people keep using XP the longer MS have to support it, and that 
costs money.  With Windows 7 around the corner I would imagine MS really 
want to get rid of XP before having to support 3 OSs.

> I'd rather my OS freakin work and do so quickly than have some asinine 
> glass interface crap,

Actually the new GUI uses your 3D card to draw the graphics, under XP your 
3D card sat idle while the CPU did all the graphics...  BTW you can always 
turn it off if you don't like it.

> and a kernel that requires half of my system resources.

I wish the kernel would use ALL of my system resources ALL the time.  What's 
the point of 4GB or the fastest RAM sitting unused while the kernel 
continues to load and save things from a slow HD?  I'm sitting here now on 
Vista, nothing open apart from Live Mail and 4663 MB out of 8GB is "used". 
I'm pretty sure the entirety of my CAD software is in that "used" figure, 
along with every other app I have recently used.  This is a GOOD thing!

> This is what happens when natural selection has been so stifled that the 
> population can be distracted for weeks at a time by small shiny objects. 
> We get crappy a OS catering to subhuman feces hurling key-eaters.

Hehe, your SP3 experience is definitely not the norm, we had SP3 rolled out 
at work a while back.  Maybe it's installing some driver update that is not 
compatible with a certain piece of your hardware?  I think with some 
googling and investigation work you could find out what the problem really 
is.

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> Actually the new GUI uses your 3D card to draw the graphics, under XP your 
> 3D card sat idle while the CPU did all the graphics...

  Certainly not true. Go to the proper system setting configuration dialog
and turn off display hardware acceleration and then try eg. dragging a window
around. See if you can notice any difference between the CPU doing all the
work vs. the display hardware doing it.

> > and a kernel that requires half of my system resources.

> I wish the kernel would use ALL of my system resources ALL the time.

  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
make any sense.

>  What's 
> the point of 4GB or the fastest RAM sitting unused while the kernel 
> continues to load and save things from a slow HD?

  So you would want a 4GB RAM disk? And exactly how do you expect to run
any application after that? (And what if an application would want to use
4 GB of memory?)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>  Certainly not true. Go to the proper system setting configuration dialog
> and turn off display hardware acceleration and then try eg. dragging a 
> window
> around. See if you can notice any difference between the CPU doing all the
> work vs. the display hardware doing it.

That's 2D acceleration, not 3D.  In the graphics card it's quite separate, 
and XP didn't use any of the 3D capabilities of the card.  Nowadays any 
decent 2D game will use the 3D capabilities of your card as it is much more 
efficient and flexible than using the "old" 2D accelerated functions, so 
it's only right than the OS should do the same.  Maybe on new graphics cards 
the 2D accelerated functions will be removed completely?

>  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
> increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
> that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
> make any sense.

Why not? If a new app needs to be loaded and I have no free RAM, the OS 
simply decides which bit to disregard to free up space for the new app.  It 
seems more ludicrous to "wipe" the RAM every time an app is closed if you 
don't need it for something else.  People need to get out of the habit of 
thinking lower "used" RAM is better, it just doesn't make any sense because 
the OS can free up RAM whenever it needs to in an instant.

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> That's 2D acceleration, not 3D.

  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

> Maybe on new graphics cards 
> the 2D accelerated functions will be removed completely?

  Your jokes are not all that funny, really.

> >  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
> > increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
> > that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
> > make any sense.

> Why not?

  Because you want to keep the CPU as idle as possible to conserve energy
(especially relevant in laptops, but also on desktop computers, and not
only from energy conserving point of view, but because running the CPU
at 100% all the time shortens its life).

> If a new app needs to be loaded and I have no free RAM, the OS 
> simply decides which bit to disregard to free up space for the new app.

  I thought you wanted apps to load faster rather than slower?

  Why would the kernel deliberately keep the full RAM allocated just to
free it when an app needs it?

>  It 
> seems more ludicrous to "wipe" the RAM every time an app is closed if you 
> don't need it for something else.  People need to get out of the habit of 
> thinking lower "used" RAM is better, it just doesn't make any sense because 
> the OS can free up RAM whenever it needs to in an instant.

  Your sentences are contradictory. First you say it doesn't make sense for
the kernel to free the RAM, and then you say that freeing RAM is a practically
free operation because it can be done "in an instant".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
> CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

I said 3D card.  I meant the 3D part of a graphics card.

>  Why would the kernel deliberately keep the full RAM allocated just to
> free it when an app needs it?

So that in the likely event that you run an app that was run before and 
still in RAM, it would load much faster.

>  Your sentences are contradictory. First you say it doesn't make sense for
> the kernel to free the RAM,

Not when it doesn't need to, no.

> and then you say that freeing RAM is a practically
> free operation because it can be done "in an instant".

Of course - what's contradictory about that?

The slow part is loading from HD to RAM, that should be avoided at all 
costs.  Marking RAM as "empty" when it is not needed for anything else at 
that moment seems a silly idea, and is why Vista has things like SuperFetch.

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
> > CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

> I said 3D card.  I meant the 3D part of a graphics card.

  You clearly contrasted it with the CPU. You explicitly said that XP
draws everything with the CPU. That rather clearly means that when you
said "3D card" you were talking about the graphics card.

> The slow part is loading from HD to RAM, that should be avoided at all 
> costs.

  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even configure
how much is cached.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even configure
> how much is cached.

Isn't Vista's SuperFetch just a very clever disk cache that uses more RAM 
than its predecessors?

Really, what is the disadvantage with keeping as much stuff from disk in RAM 
as possible?  It just seems silly to me to erase stuff from RAM for the sole 
reason of making the "free RAM" counter higher, why not just erase it later 
when that RAM is actually needed by something else?

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