Considering that the hard copy version of the DCL dictionary alone is a two volume set, it's hardly a "pocket guide".
Huh? What on earth does that have to do with my comments?
What does that have to do with VMS on Itanium? Try looking in SYS$HELP for a lot of docs.
Keeping docs off the system to "keep them away from users" is utterly pointless, particularly for VMS. The docs are readily available elsewhere and since VMS meets C2 security standards it is hardly an issue. If you don't give the users privs and keep them in captive or restricted accounts, access to documentation is hardly an issue.
Quite material, as the observations were at different places and different times, all unrelated and the behavior observed was consistent.
The marketing plays to the differentiation, it does not create it.
Different how? The basic functionality of the Windows and OS-X desktops are very similar. The use of desktop icons is virtually the same between the UIs. The two types of users arrangement of those icons is consistently different and is consistent with user type, even across platforms.
Not in this case, as I have observed this differentiation of user type even in the same environment.
That would be true on either OS if you're counting the standard system library routines for display and such. The actual original code would be minuscule in either case.
How do you figure that? The more complex the application the smaller percentage of the code would typically be related to UI calls and the larger percentage to actual data manipulation which is less likely to be as OS dependent.
Much of those UI DLLs and other library routines for the UI have little to do with any other function of the OS. You replace them with different ones and the rest of the OS continues to do it's thing.
Correct, my typo: best history of the modern "GUI" lineage.
You are out of my league with user interface and OS geekiness. You win Pete! :-)
I am not sure what it is, but so far, even with clean fresh installs on my windows boxes, I have never had the same smooth multitasking that I have on Mac. And my 1 YO Dell is no slouch @ 3.2p4, 2GB RAM, Nvidia FX1000..... and I am comparing it to my PowerBook Ti that is 2.5 years old, G4 800Mhz 1GB RAM. But that is my experience and observation. It certainly can be that somewhere I have the hand-brake on and don't know it...
If you get the chance, take a G5 apart. You would enjoy it.
Here is a site from a photographer who is a little bit in love with his G5 and took lots of photos of the sexy details. You can get some sense of the insides there (do click through each page to see).
formatting link
Once you have seen that site (and do see it first) go here for a good laugh (parody)
Never looked at setting process priorities on a Windows system? Processor affinity on a multi processor Windows system? Go to Task Manager, Processes and right click on one.
When was the last time you had 700+ days of continuous reliable uptime on a Windows or MAC system handling hundreds of users and processes daily? Windows and MAC are simply not in the same league.
As I've said, with W2K and above and MAC OS-X and above both OS's work reasonably well. My issue has been with Apple's overpriced hardware, and the UI that I simply don't find useable.
Well, with a "real" OS analysis of error logs and the crash dump will give you a good idea of the cause. With Windows or MAC OS this feature is somewhat lacking although some of the underpinnings are there.
Yep, smoke doesn't typically come from software or user typos.
If that is/was the case then it's a simple matter of the license agreement. That still does not in any way justify Sun's claims that Java was somehow a competitor to Windows.
The Java OE is not an operating system, the closest it comes to that is some of the little embedded Java engines, but even in those cases there is a tiny OS kernel beneath the Java environment.
QNX is a truly crash proof fault tolerant OS for the PC. There are nuclear power plants with controls running over QNX, medical imaging devices, lots of other lives-at-risk on failure apps. Haven't priced it in years, but the last time I bought it, it was $600 Canadian / node in single units.
So you have your machines connected to a gigabit Ethernet switch? How big are the files you regularly move? If they aren't over about 100MB then the difference in time to transfer is pretty negligible.
Also note that 10Mb Ethernet is quite capable of handling streaming of a DVD between systems. I tried this once by mapping a DVD drive on one system from another and playing the DVD remote. It did max out the 10Mb connection, but the DVD played with no glitches. So on a 100Mb connection you could stream several without issues.
As far as the old MAC being more useful than the old PC, that is a marginal assertion at best since dropping in a gigabit card is all that is required. This is $50 and 10 minutes of work.
USB2 is newer and so is 800 Firewire, both technologies have progressed. USB1 was designed for keyboards and mice mostly and then had to grow with it's popularity. Firewire was designed for video use so it started out faster. Firewire has had to grow as it morphed from a video buss to a general purpose buss. Both have been taken in a direction they were not originally intended for.
Well it wasn't that long ago that it was only the VX1000's and GL1's with Firewire. The last time I looked at camcorders I saw quite a few with USB2 and not Firewire.
Well, some of that is indeed true. I see an awful lot of "Fontitis" out there.
The graphic designers do indeed work for Apple as evidenced by all the snazzy packaging they use to try to lure buyers. Too bad the hardware designers all work for Dell, HP, Sun, IBM... :)
As I said, it has also helped people who do have talent get into the video world.
Yes indeed and it's aggravated by products and marketing that convince people that it's really easy and they can do it themselves.
I've suggested to a friend who is in the A/V services business that he should make up a little booklet with covering the fundamentals of doing Power point and similar for the big screen that he can distribute as a promo / advertising piece. Just the simple stuff like minimum font size, color combinations / contrast and the like that cause the bulk of the problems.
Exactly. I have yet to see a computer, PC or MAC successfully play a video directly to a projector / vcr / tv without dedicated video hardware. Every single example I have seen has been full of glitches.
In order to have a useable product, you have to send the finished video back out via Firewire to tape for playback on a dedicated VCR, or to DVD for playback on a dedicated DVD player.
In both cases you are writing the digital data to a medium that is able to absorb timing glitches from the computer when the output is done and then perform the playback of the data with clean consistent timing.
Dropped frames, stutters, pixel dropouts, audio glitches, etc. All caused by timing irregularities in the computer. These errors are readily seen when attempting to play the video to the computers regular display. The same timing glitches are masked / corrected when you output Via Firewire or burn a DVD which is then played by a dedicated machine that does not exhibit these timing errors. It's a similar effect to using a time base corrector with an analog VCR.
Didn't watch the video because it requires Quicktime w/ Spam. Read the accompanying text, looked at the pics and did not see anything described that provided a capability not available in Windows. They approach things a bit differently, but the basic idea is rapid access to windows that may be buried and Windows provides several mechanisms for just as rapid access.
No, all those capabilities most certainly do exist on the PC. I am more or less perpetually on call for work and always have my laptop with me.
Switching between settings for my regular locations is basically non existent since I use a hardwired connection and DHCP for all of them. I simply plug into the net and that's the end of it as far as network settings go. VPN connection and authentication for some locations is a separate thing as it would be on any platform.
For locations where there is not a hardwired connection available I simply pop a WiFi card into the PC card slot and either select a profile I have previously setup if it's a location I've been at before, or more often it's a new location so it takes a moment to create the new profile.
If I'm really in the middle of nowhere and all I can get is a phone line then I popup a dialer utility that has a phone book of possible access points across the country. I enter the local area code and prefix and it presents me with the closest points to choose from. This is of course a third party thing, but if I had regular dialup locations I used I could also save those dialup profiles using the regular Windows dialup networking utility.
One time I ended op dialed in from a town maintenance garage next to a baseball field at 11:30pm after working a live video shoot for a baseball game. Another time I was driving cross country and was paged while on the highway at 2am. I got off the next exit, checked into the first hotel I found and was online via WiFi in short order.
Well, you can setup a DHCP server to only assign IPs to machines in it's MAC address table. Then only known machines would get IPs.
Ick. In the US the providers typically only provide tech support for their approved kit, but have no restrictions on using your own. Most also have white papers on their site that provide some support for other configurations.
From what I hear you guys do have one big advantage over the US, at least for the Home Shop Machinist types. From what I hear you have residential three phase power which is something many people would love to have here. We have to use phase converters or inverter drives for our home three phase stuff.
Well, I suppose that doesn't apply to me as the only time I have ever called support for a PC issue was when the hard drive on my personal laptop (Compaq) died 2 years and 8 months into the three year warrantee. When I gave them my name their system kept trying to route me to their "Gold Support" group since I'm on the contact list for gold support at work. I ended up getting an upgrade since they didn't have any more 12GB drives and they sent me an 18GB instead.
Well, the standard CD-ROM on PCs has been replaced by a standard DVD-ROM for a while now as many things including product distributions and reference materials have outgrown single CDs and are becoming available on DVD-ROM as well. You still have the option of not paying for a DVD burner for systems where you have no expectation of never needing it.
I have some six PCs at home and I only need a DVD burner on one since they are all networked. I will never have a need to burn a DVD directly on my electronics bench PC or my CNC router control PC. I don't even have a need for DVD-ROM on them as I can readily read what I might need over the network from another machine.
1.2 - 2 GB? I think you got that wrong, a raw 7.2mp image would be somewhere around 21 MB and much less with lossless compression. I still use a 3.1 MP camera that produces what appear to be lossless JPGs and the range up to about 1.5 MB for a complex image.
Additionally I may download the images from the camera card on a particular PC, but the images are saved to a separate server PC that has a large hard drive and is backed up regularly. Again use of networking means there is no need to spend extra money to duplicate things on each individual computer.
My point is that more and more people have multiple computer households and home networking. This greatly reduced the need to have items like large drives, CD/DVD burners, scanners and even printers duplicated on every machine.
The parents have their computers in the home office, the kids each have their own computers, there are central color inkjet and laser printers on the network, perhaps a utility PC in the den has a flatbed scanner, and everyone can access whatever resources they need over the network. They don't even have to use the same OS, Windows, OS-X and Linux can all coexist peacefully and share resources. Wouldn't it be nice if all religions could do the same?
That web surfing only requires a fast 'net connection and a reasonably fast CPU. You can still store the illegal MP3s and videos you download directly to your central file server and burn your CDs and DVDs from a different workstation as well.
I store my CAD and CNC G-code files on my central server machine which is always on. If I'm going to do significant CAD work I will boot the dual display workstation to work from. It I'm doing a quick tweak I usually fire up the CAD software on the laptop that I use as my general machine for email and surfing. When I'm going to cut something on the CNC router in the detached shop I just grab the G-code file from the server in the house.
The key to all of this is to fully utilize the capabilities of networking. Not very long ago people didn't have home networks and had to duplicate resources on every computer. In those days the Apple model of everything on every machine had some relevance. Now that multiple computers and home networking are becoming common, that model is becoming obsolete. The concept of thin internet appliances and service provider resources had morphed into shared resources on the home network.
I don't have the big budget, I just grab the older Alphastations and Sparcstations that are headed for the dumpster. Not that I wouldn't like to heat my house with the Alphaserver GS160 and fibrechannel EVA storage array.
It runs automatically when an application crashes. I'm not positive, but I think it should be installed by default, you should be able to find the drwatson.exe and/or drwtsn32.exe in c:\winnt\system32. It may come along with one of the service packs. I don't have any compilers / languages installed on this machine so it didn't come with one of those.
Don't know, not having run into those issues I can't provide any suggestions offhand. I do know there are a number of web sites that have good Windows tuning tips.
Not sure where / when I'll get that opportunity.
Ok, I looked at it and didn't see anything technically different from what I see every day on PCs and various midrange systems. I see that Apple expends time and cost on items that make no technical difference to the machines capabilities, operation or reliability.
On a car engine a painted stamped steel valve cover performs identically to a polished chromed one. If you get your jollies looking at the polished internals that's fine, but they don't perform any better than their stamped steel counterparts.
Have you ever seen the heatsinks that bolt directly to an Alpha CPU? The CPU package has two big bolt studs coming out the top for the heatsink. Of course that was a previous generation of Alpha, the current ones are a leadless package that mounts in a machined aluminum socket / heatsink assembly which clamps it directly to the PC board and makes the connections from the chip package to the board with hundreds of tiny gold springs held in a precision carrier.
If you like fans take a look at the fan in a Alphaserver GS140. It's mounted in the middle of the cabinet with the CPU / Memory / IO backplane above and the PCI adapter frames below. The fan is a squerilcage about 24" in diameter and about 10" high. It's not silent, but it is remarkably quiet and moves a whole lot of air.
Ayep. I guess the bottom line is whether you care if your computer looks purty. Me, I've got my cable modem, router, Ethernet switch, big UPS and several server machines in a 6' rack cabinet in the back corner of the garage. Come to think of it, all the LEDs behind the smoked plex door of the rack do look kinda purty when you open the garage door at night...
Yes, but $600 does still put it a fair amount above the domain of the $200 consumer OS. Those apps you mention also require it to be run of fault tolerant hardware which is also a good deal more expensive than a standard PC or MAC.
Not being a programmer (mostly assembler on PICs) I didn't dig too deep on the site. It seems to me that this is still fundamentally building a tiny OS kernel to integrate with the Java portion.
I'm not sure that's anything dramatically new. The FPGAs also referenced in the article have been around for years and were preceded by the simpler PALs. The reconfigurable aspect has also been around for a while in various forms. The Alphaservers have been using matrix switched backplanes for a while to massively boost I/O bandwidth, particularly in multi CPU configurations. The Latest Marvel series took the switching even further to interprocessor communications.
Indeed, and they had done it in a detrimental way.
Pre-NT is where a large portion of the issues were. Post-NT and moving into W2K and XP much of that had been resolved.
I've had very few issues with applications conflicting with each other or with hardware. The only real headaches with hardware came on a video editing system using hardware CODECs and that was just a bit of a struggle to sort out the interrupts required for the video CODEC card, Audio CODEC card, several SCSI controllers and the regular system graphics card. Once the IRQs were appropriately distributed everything worked just fine. That was also 10 years ago.
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