Woot for Europe!

[Erik Mortis]

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=techShow microslut who's boss! Erik Mortis BrookshireCommoner of Alexandretta

[Zirandorthel]

€497 million, that's a lot of money.. Sun Bless, Earth KeepZirandorthel I of TreesiaNiirus Tinenetuwar, Tivitha e'TarasLotter of the West LotGrand Duke of Lac GlaceiEdited by: Zirandorthel at: 3/23/04 2:42 pm

[Erik Mortis]

EXcellent... Erik Mortis BrookshireCommoner of Alexandretta

[Zirandorthel]

Where will the money go, I wonders..I supposes I should reads the article fully. Sun Bless, Earth KeepZirandorthel I of TreesiaNiirus Tinenetuwar, Tivitha e'TarasLotter of the West LotGrand Duke of Lac Glacei

[Zirandorthel]

Gods, imagine if they'd fined 10% of their profits, then the EU would be 2.8 billion Euro richer.Okay, fuck socialism, it's time for a petition. I need richness. FINE MICROSOFT!! Sun Bless, Earth KeepZirandorthel I of TreesiaNiirus Tinenetuwar, Tivitha e'TarasLotter of the West LotGrand Duke of Lac Glacei

[Erik Mortis]

Fuck microsoft! but fine works too. Erik Mortis BrookshireCommoner of Alexandretta

[Gman Russell]

I don't care what any of you say, I like Microsoft and I think Bill Gates is a genious.

[david northworthy beckfor]

*aims ICBMs at amity...*reconsider that please. "Disclaimer: Whatever is in the above post is probably a result of my blind following of Kieran Bennett, because I have even less of a brain than Kieran. Don't even get me started on my lack of independent thought."

[Gman Russell]

*points to the sign that marks BAM as holy land**grins*

[david northworthy beckfor]

your unholy alliance with the Bill of Gates surely forfiets any protection your lands gave you "Disclaimer: Whatever is in the above post is probably a result of my blind following of Kieran Bennett, because I have even less of a brain than Kieran. Don't even get me started on my lack of independent thought."

[Gman Russell]

If I am to suffer for my beliefs, then I shall do so and glady die a martyr if I have to!*runs into bunker* lol

[Alexandra Decens]

wait..wait...let us give Greg the benefit of the doubt......*asks Greg* For what reasons do you like microsoft and think Bill Gates is a genius?*whispers to david* If the the answers totally suck...then blow him up... I have no custom signature...oh wait...

[Gman Russell]

I like microsoft because they truly revolutionized computers and the internet. Without them we probably wouldn't be talking right now... so in a round-about way, we owe them our friendship.2) Bill Gates came from Poverty to extreme wealth all on his own without the benefit of a fancy degree on his wall, a blue-collar "rags to riches" story in my opinion.3) Yes it is a huge corperation and big companies tend to become alittle heartless, but if you use that reasoning then why aren't you ranting about Wall-mart or Starbucks?4) Why do you say he's evil? Because of a few glitches or a supposed monopoly over the computer industry? Without them there IS no computer industry... (notwithstanding Macintosh, but could they pick up the slack? Hm...)*waits for that to be quoted and disected...*Have at it...

[Kaiser Wyltheow I]

*Notice*The Views expressed by the Baron(s) of Yardistan do not necesarily reflect those held by others in Yardistan, nor do they necesarily reflect the views of the Lord Governor/Duke.Having said that, i offer semi-rebuttals...mostly cuz i don't want to write full ones:1) Haven't you seen a linux server?2) So what? Why should we worship the rich? Makes no logical sense...3) We do. Well, maybe not Wal-mart...but don't get me started....4) It's more than a supposed monopoly...it's a virtual one...aside from a few macs, people who aren't tech-savvy are almost forced to used M$ products. Wylþeow du GrifosThe Kaiser of ShirerothThe gods blessed you with power and a visionThe gods gave you life to accomplish a mission...

[Erik Mortis]

Quote: I like microsoft because they truly revolutionized computers and the internet. Without them we probably wouldn't be talking right now... so in a round-about way, we owe them our friendship.Alex wants me to let her cover the internet thing.. so I'll let her have it. As for Revolutionalizing computers... Microsoft has held back computer technology by preventing competition. Microsoft didn't make dos.. nor anything else really... It buys and steals. All that crap you proly are going to say was invented by microsoft that revolutionalized computing.. was invented by Xerox. Who didn't do anything with it.. so the engineers who created it went and made their own companies.. Novel... HP(I think)..Cisco 3Com... ect.. Mouse, GUI..ect.. IBM put out the first personal computers. Unix is a FAR supior system to MS crap. http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/ Just cuase I like the site. Bill gates basicly invented jack shit. IBM needed a OS for its system so it asked mr. gates.. who said..yeah.. we got one..(But didn't...) than went and bought Dos from someone else. It comes out with "upgrades" constantly that make you continueously buy its products. Most of what it does is just make you think it is the only option and trick you into seeing everyone else as inferior. Ever notice how it only ever compares windows to.. older windows... "Windows 98 is 4 times fast than windows 95..." What about Unix. The only thing you can really say gates was good at was putting money in the right place once.. getting lots of cash.. than buying up his competators.. and if you say something like "well.. that's how it works.." I'll smack you for ignorance.. Monopoly ARE illegal. Microsoft is Illegal. The US tried to do something.. but the lawyer got their way and microsoft ended up screw the goverment. Microsoft had to give money to the govenment for education as a fine.. so they gave like.. er. serveral million in MS... PRODUCTS to schools... See the catch? MS is evil. There is NO way around it. hehe.. Their yearly income could feed some nations... scary aye? They own your soul.. Stop using IE.. it's crap anyways... Save you soul! USE LINUX!.. hell even Mac is better.. (but only after OS'X.. cuase it have a Unix kernal) You don't need microsoft. Shireroth.org is on a Unix server... Windows is junk it is unstable and you constantly have to reboot it. The only thing microsoft could ever make that didn't suck would be a vacume cleaner....I'll stop now... You're on Alex.. Erik Mortis BrookshireCommoner of Alexandretta

[Alexandra Decens]

(using same quote Erik just used)Bill Gates had absolutely nothing to do with the internet...zip..zero...nada..... The internet was first funded by Bob Taylor so that an easy way to move information around (most notibly) government offices so that all the information anyone needed to know would be in one place to prevent running around all day trying to find the needed data. Packet searching was the first step....packets of information that was sent over a network... this developed around the early to mid 1970's..when Bill Gates was only about 15-20 years old...he didnt even start his company until 1975...about a year after the first beginings of the internet. Personal computers weren't even around then... we were still using government mainframes.... Quote:The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today.http://www.isoc.org/internet/his...rief.shtmlThis gives a brief history of the internet in better detail then i could go into......Microsoft basically "created" Internet Explorer as a means of selling more of their products...and as a legitamate means of spyware for your computer...just like most of their products...When you install a new version of MS on your comp and register it an "annonymous" report is sent and a complete list of what hardware you have on your computer is sent when you register your MS products...plus if you dont register your MS product..your system won't work...and if you make too many changes to your system all in one go (enough so that the hardware doent match up to their database) MS will shut down your computer....betcha didn't know that...*catches breath*...i think that that is enough ranting for now..... I have no custom signature...oh wait...

[Zirandorthel]

Quote:Bill Gates came from Poverty to extreme wealth all on his own without the benefit of a fancy degree on his wall, a blue-collar "rags to riches" story in my opinion.Yes, but he's not benefitting anyone except himself. He has billions, billions. Do you think anyone of us will ever even see a million in our bank accounts all at once? NO! The American Dream, so far I can see, is that poor people would make much better rich people than rich people, if only they had the money. It's no reason to let him off. Gates has made a great deal of money from exploiting a monopoly, and should be chastised for it. As we can see, Intel and IBM and even Dell (in the States, at least) are switching to Linux, which is by far a better system, and a better environment. Sun Bless, Earth KeepZirandorthel I of TreesiaNiirus Tinenetuwar, Tivitha e'TarasLotter of the West LotGrand Duke of Lac Glacei

[Ruhan Zarathustra Erudinz]

I'll have to weigh in on Greg's side, cause... well... someone has to, so it'll be me.First off: On instability... you lot /do/ realise that I consitently keep my windows XP box up and running for weeks on end, right?Secondly: Gate's is a gambler, I /hate/ to break it to you... but if the original DOS makers (bloody forget their name) didn't sell their product to IBM, someone would have... oh wait, someone did. That's called lucky business. He risked all he had, hit it big. Gambling at its finest.Thirdly: Don't be so quick to praise people like IBM, those bastards are the ones that limited us to the pathetic number of IRQs, one of the other /original/ proposals for it had 256... but costs a few cents more, so it was axed. That /alone/ would solve a huge number of the glitches and crashes that bring down windows boxes.Fourthly: So Windows stuff costs more and takes up more space, that isn't inheritly Microsofts or Gates' fault. That fault can be nicely laid on the new generation of programmers like.... Erik or myself. Newer programmers never had to deal with trying to fit all that info in a limited amount of space so use longs and doubles (for example) where ints or singles would work just as well.Fifthly: Don't be so quick to condemn Microsoft as some giant evil corporation. Sure, it /may/ make enough money to feed some small countries. But Gates has personally, and QUIETLY (aka... without making a big deal of it), donated huge sums of cash (Again, enough to feed some small countries time and time again) to various research orginisations through his foundation.Sixthly: Do you /honestly/ think that today's average user could use Linux? Great, it's free if you have a good net connection, works better, but... well... that's nice. Basically noone knows how to use the bloody thing, Microsoft is infinetely idiot-friendly (why do you think I use the damn thing so much).Seventhly: Monopoly or not, damnit... most games run on Windows or you have to wait a decade and /hope/ it comes out on Mac or Linux or... you get a bloody WINDOWS EMULATOR for one of those O/S'es to play the games. And they run slower anyhow. A large segment of modern computer users are gamers.Eightly: Again, idiot-friendliness, ease of use, availability. The largest segment of computer users are office workers, teachers, people who just use it to aid in their every day work. They don't really have the time or energy or desire to go learn how to use linux just so the younger generation can have it's digital anarchist rebellion and support Linux... they want something that only requires... click, click, type-typeity-type-type and *POOF* it bloody well did what they wanted it to do without them needing to learn a whole bunch of new information.Ninthly: I'm not going to touch the internet one, we all know Microsoft didn't /invent/ or /create/ the internet. But they bloody well did bring it into common usage. Which is probably as much as a negative as a positive, most internet usage is for porn and games anyhow... and we all know that shit rots your brain (It's why both toxic chemicals stored under your sink /AND/ porn are marked XXX... See? They /BOTH/ melt your hands!)Tenthly: At least Microsoft isn't openly supportive of Yellowism... Eleventhly: If things were reversed and it was IBM PCs running on a linux machine... do you /really/ think things would be better? Hasn't history at least taught us that businesses are businesses? They may /claim/ to support us poor little folk, but if /they/ were the industry leaders... they'd be as bad or worse than Microsoft. And, as the saying goes, I'll take the evil that I know over the evil that I don't know.And this concludes my almost 6 AM and I've not slept yet rant. "Disce quasi semper victurus; vive quasi cras moriturus"

[Zirandorthel]

Quote:Sixthly: Do you /honestly/ think that today's average user could use Linux? Great, it's free if you have a good net connection, works better, but... well... that's nice. Basically noone knows how to use the bloody thing, Microsoft is infinetely idiot-friendly (why do you think I use the damn thing so much).Seventhly: Monopoly or not, damnit... most games run on Windows or you have to wait a decade and /hope/ it comes out on Mac or Linux or... you get a bloody WINDOWS EMULATOR for one of those O/S'es to play the games. And they run slower anyhow. A large segment of modern computer users are gamers.Bullshite. You've never seen some of the Linux systems that resemble Windows to the point of cheekiness, then. I think the name was KEDA, that I saw yesterday, basically looked exactly the same as Windows. If people are too fucking stupid to realise that something is exactly the same, then they probably shouldn't be on a computer in the first place: they might stab themselves in the face with the keyboard or something. I hear this kind of crap all the time. A person with a computer degree whinging that she can't use OpenOffice. I have to question the kind of computer degrees that are being handed out, in that case.Actually, a lot of games these days run for Linux. And you say that "monopoly or not, Linux is slower". But it is because of the monopoly that Linux runs slower. It is because Intel were forced to cater to huge, resource-devouring Microsoft in constructing their chips that Linux runs slower. Get a linux-configured chip, and it runs as fast, if not faster, than any Windows OS you care to name, and certainly XP.Yes, we say stability. And you keep your computer on for weeks at a time? Hooray, but how much of that are you actually using it for? If you have over, say, four programs on Microsoft, it slowwwwly begins to falter, until it starts making distressing lawnmower-like sounds within your machine. Microsoft eats your resources for breakfast until you have to turn it off and on again to get it to work. Sun Bless, Earth KeepZirandorthel I of TreesiaNiirus Tinenetuwar, Tivitha e'TarasLotter of the West LotGrand Duke of Lac Glacei

[Gman Russell]

Ruhan, may God bless you with many gifts for that!Zir: You run 4 programs at once? What 4 things possibly needs to be done at the same time?? Yes alot of games might run for linux, but there's probably programing involved... programming that most people aren't interested in nor care about. *nods*But I digress... keep arguing! *braces*edit: Also, I'd like to point out i'm not anti-linux or anti-mac. It's just that not everyone is a programmer or wants to be. If they just want a computer for email, then they wouldn't want something as complex as linux... *shrugs* Edited by: Gman Russell at: 3/24/04 7:27 am

[Erik Mortis]

"but they bloody well did bring it into common usage."Accually... no... email did that.. invented by some random dude who's name I forgot... had NOTHING to do with ms.. Erik Mortis BrookshireCommoner of Alexandretta

[Ruhan Zarathustra Erudinz]

*coughs*Email? On /which/ kinds of PC, pray tell?And yes, you run an emulator on a system, it runs slower, end of story. Not even Linux can avoid that one.And as for /looking/ like Windows, that's nice it still /isn't/ and that similiarity is more of a pitfall than a blessing. Because it still doesn't act/respond like /Windows/.So now you have Linux /looking/ like a Windows clone but not /acting/ like Windows. And you wonder why the average consumer sticks with Windows?Yes, I've /used/ one of those oh-so-amazing windows-looking Linux version and, I can assure you, it just does not act like windows. The average user wants to unzip and install something? He wants to click it, have WinZip pop up, tell it to extract, then click the new thing. He probably does /not/ want to open a command prompt, enter in a bunch of -gz -tar and crap and fiddle around in a DOS-esque situation that, again, /doesn't/ respond like MS-DOS so, once AGAIN, he has to learn new stuff.Simplicity, people know Windows, so they stick with it. I don't care how much you make Linux /look/ like Windows, it isn't... and those similiarities end up causing more trouble than they're worth. For every feature that Linux programmers add to make it more Windows-esque, that's another feature that is going to be extremely hard for an average, new Linux user to use because it /looks/ and /seems/ like something they know, but doesn't respond or act in the fashion they expect. Which only serves to send them back to Windows.And as for how many programms I run at a time.... hmm, Overnet, Kazaa, MUSHclient, Trillian, generally 3 to 5 (or more) IE instances... and whatever game I happen to be playing at the moment. That'd be a fairly average load for my computer to be handling at any one given moment.And remember, Microsoft doesn't invent much for your computer, they make it user-friendly. They make it popular. Great, they didn't /invent/ PCs, mice, DOS, or most anything else they use. Oh well, in the consumarism of the modern western world... inventing something doesn't really mean much. The ability to /sell/ it does.What an example? My father built a computer (AGGGGGEEEESSSS ago), better than the original apples of the day. So, according to your logic, he should have instantly become rich because his product worked better, right? Well, it doesn't work that way. "Disce quasi semper victurus; vive quasi cras moriturus"

[Ari Rahikkala]

Crikey! This Holy War is a bit stroppy!Let's dissect the post by Ruhan Zarathustra Erudinzadeh (*checks his spelling* ... YAY!) first...Quote:Thirdly: Don't be so quick to praise people like IBM, those bastards are the ones that limited us to the pathetic number of IRQs, one of the other /original/ proposals for it had 256... but costs a few cents more, so it was axed. That /alone/ would solve a huge number of the glitches and crashes that bring down windows boxes.IBM is a huge problem to the open-sorce world right now... on one hand, they're being all goody-goody by investing large amounts of money in advertising Linux (and more importantly, contributing CODE!), on the other hand they're still a big huge megacorporation (*way* bigger than MS) that applies yearly for more patents than any... hm, any other company, I think. I should check that data. Anyway, IBM was ugly in the past and, in many ways, hasn't changed yet (I don't expect to see AIX opensourced in the near future) so people don't really know what to make of it. People like me don't like being confused.What is sure is that the company didn't see the coming of the killer micros... perhaps that's why the XT-PIC can only handly so few interrupts, too. But hey, that's not a problem anymore because you should be using APIC anyway . (I would definitely use APIC if I could, but unfortunately I went for a VIA motherboard for which APIC routing on Linux is broken )Quote:Fourthly: So Windows stuff costs more and takes up more space, that isn't inheritly Microsofts or Gates' fault. That fault can be nicely laid on the new generation of programmers like.... Erik or myself. Newer programmers never had to deal with trying to fit all that info in a limited amount of space so use longs and doubles (for example) where ints or singles would work just as well.Microsoft's history contains some... interesting cases of rather unbelievable coding. Everybody knows Excel. It used to be built (perhaps still is, but I'd doubt that, given that the company is going all .NET) with a C (C++, too?) compiler created specifically for that one program. It also contains - or at least used to contain - a huge amount of bit-banging optimisations, way back from the time of win16, making many operations faster than anyone could implement in a clean, portable way. In other words, it's not the coders that I'd blame for bloat. Microsoft's surely got a lot of brilliant coders. The problem is in the marketing department. Reality isn't particularly important for them when business is at stake (the same is true of most marketing departments, but remember that Microsoft's market penetration in computer desktops is of a different magnitude than that of its competitors, so different rules apply). Remember that MS has claimed that Windows can't be used without WMP - RealNetworks (whose marketing department's evilness index, BTW, is only about 2% lower than that of Prince Kieran) has proved this wrong, IIRC by running their own media player on XP embedded (which doesn't contain WMP) (see news.zdnet.co.uk/business...457,00.htm ).BTW, the 32-bit floating-point data type is float, not single .Quote:Fifthly: Don't be so quick to condemn Microsoft as some giant evil corporation. Sure, it /may/ make enough money to feed some small countries. But Gates has personally, and QUIETLY (aka... without making a big deal of it), donated huge sums of cash (Again, enough to feed some small countries time and time again) to various research orginisations through his foundation.Some people have managed to make this sound evil, too, but I'll refrain from trying it out myself..Quote:Sixthly: Do you /honestly/ think that today's average user could use Linux? Great, it's free if you have a good net connection, works better, but... well... that's nice. Basically noone knows how to use the bloody thing, Microsoft is infinetely idiot-friendly (why do you think I use the damn thing so much).Have you tried Linux? Eoin has. Erik has. A lot of people have. Every damn computer in my school's CS class runs Linux - in fact, a rather newbie-unfriendly distro of it. This far I've heard three complaints... "It's not Word", "It's not Windows" and (the worst) "It doesn't have MS Comic Sans" (this was from someone who was writing a quite serious table on... well, I can't remember what, but let's say it was a small study of geography. Why in the world do people use Comic Sans where it's not the right thing?)Quote:Seventhly: Monopoly or not, damnit... most games run on Windows or you have to wait a decade and /hope/ it comes out on Mac or Linux or... you get a bloody WINDOWS EMULATOR for one of those O/S'es to play the games. And they run slower anyhow. A large segment of modern computer users are gamers.Actually, speed isn't really much of a problem, not with Wine on x86 Linux anyway. This is because of the fact that Wine Is Not an Emulator (that's what the name stands for) - it's merely an executable loader for the PE format (that's the easy part) with an implementation of the win32 API (that's the hard part). Mere calculations that don't use library functions are *exactly* as fast on Wine and native Windows. Library function calls in Wine are sometimes slightly slower, sometimes slightly faster than in native Windows. However... Wine's implementation isn't complete. In theory the target of the Wine project is that one day they'll release a Wine 1.0 that'll implement bug-compatibly every documented API of some modern version of Windows. In practise it's not expected that this goal will ever actually be reached, and there will be stuff that just does not work in Wine for a good while. Do note, however, that WineX (Wine with DirectX support) can be rather slow because there's a lot of overhead in converting Direct3D semantics to OpenGL (after which you'll have to render the OpenGL anyway).Quote:Eightly: Again, idiot-friendliness, ease of use, availability. The largest segment of computer users are office workers, teachers, people who just use it to aid in their every day work. They don't really have the time or energy or desire to go learn how to use linux just so the younger generation can have it's digital anarchist rebellion and support Linux... they want something that only requires... click, click, type-typeity-type-type and *POOF* it bloody well did what they wanted it to do without them needing to learn a whole bunch of new information.These people are exactly the kind that Linux *does* work for pretty well (the gamers and Windows "power users" are a tougher sell). After all, they can just get some geek friend to install a good distro on their box, and *POOF* it'll bloody well do what they wanted... without viruses or worms to worry about. Oh, and if they're using gphoto2, chances are that if they install a digital camera, they'd have to use separate drivers and all that crap on Windows but see things just working in Linux (it's an interesting aberration, it seems, probably caused by USB mass storage being a relatively well-standardised area and thus easy to implement in alternate operating systems) .Quote:Ninthly: I'm not going to touch the internet one, we all know Microsoft didn't /invent/ or /create/ the internet. But they bloody well did bring it into common usage. Which is probably as much as a negative as a positive, most internet usage is for porn and games anyhow... and we all know that shit rots your brain (It's why both toxic chemicals stored under your sink /AND/ porn are marked XXX... See? They /BOTH/ melt your hands!)They didn't. As far as I can tell, the actual killer app of the internet for the public was not email like Erik said but the World Wide Web (I certainly got on the web before I had an email account of my own). That was created by Tim Berners-Lee and brought to public awareness by Netscape. Then Netscape made their browser crappy, MS screwed NCSA over and built their browser on top of Mosaic, a war was fought over the Web and MS came out as winner. Instant messaging, another internet killer app, was pioneered by ICQ (or IRC, if you want to go that far back), now it's all AIM and MSN (and it's really pretty disturbing to see everyone use MSN messenger).Then we'll move on to Eoin...Quote:Bullshite. You've never seen some of the Linux systems that resemble Windows to the point of cheekiness, then. I think the name was KEDA, that I saw yesterday, basically looked exactly the same as Windows. If people are too fucking stupid to realise that something is exactly the same, then they probably shouldn't be on a computer in the first place: they might stab themselves in the face with the keyboard or something.I think it's KDE you're talking about. Anyway, what you stated is a pretty common thought among Linux users. I believe, however, that it's a misconception. KDE definitely looks like Windows at first sight, yes. In fact there's a project called XPde whose purpose is to make a X11 desktop environment that looks *exactly* like Windows XP. However... they aren't the same under the hood. In fact, they aren't the same once you open the first menu, and the differences grow larger as you go deeper in. Because of this, KDE might actually be confusing because it looks just the same on the surface but then does things in completely different ways than you expected when you get to business. Quote:I hear this kind of crap all the time. A person with a computer degree whinging that she can't use OpenOffice. I have to question the kind of computer degrees that are being handed out, in that case.Heh... paper MCSEs are universally despised in the tech world (obviously, paper MCSEs don't despise themselves. Logically, you can deduce that paper MCSEs must not be a part of the tech world), and I guess there are a lot of degrees that don't really mean anything... ... then again, on the other hand, OpenOffice might well be actually unusable. Honestly, that app is the only one that's ever tickled my tonsils that way. I'd rather look at goatse than OpenOffice...Quote:Actually, a lot of games these days run for Linux. And you say that "monopoly or not, Linux is slower". But it is because of the monopoly that Linux runs slower. It is because Intel were forced to cater to huge, resource-devouring Microsoft in constructing their chips that Linux runs slower. Get a linux-configured chip, and it runs as fast, if not faster, than any Windows OS you care to name, and certainly XP.Ayup, except that you seem to need quite a lot of education in the Way of the Computer. I'm not going to assume you meant processors when you were talking about chips but I'll mention them anyway... you see, they're actually a kind of a benefit for Linux. Put in a simple way (and I tried to put it in a complex way and it soon became too involved and technical to be explained in this post - just wait and there might be an explanation of it in the University one day), new processors can do things that old processors can't. If you build your software for an old processor, it'll work on both old and new processors, while if you build your software for a new processor it won't run on old processors but might get a (admittedly small) performance benefit from being able to use instructions that an older processor wouldn't understand. Since most apps for Linux are open-source, you can rebuild them for your own computer's CPU specifically (this is completely automatised by Gentoo Linux), yielding a performance benefit.As for the other kinds of chips... well, there are motherboard chipsets, and perhaps the most talked-about detail of them is the IDE controller. IDE is an interface between the hard disks, CD and DVD drives, and the rest of the computer, and it's commonly (in fact, almost always) used in consumer hardware. To make it work fast, you need to know how the IDE controller works. Fortunately Linux does have its bases covered pretty well in this area, so in general hard disk access tends at least as fast (with a good filesystem and I/O controller it can be *really* fast) on Linux as on WXP.Of course there are problem areas. Take graphics cards, for example. The ATi Radeon series of cards have no less than three different sets of drivers under Linux. The official drivers are crappy and closed-source, and the free software drivers (DRI and GATOS) work only for cards under Radeon 9100 and can't use all of the features of the cards. NVIDIA provides its own closed-source drivers which are a shining example of getting proprietary driver-writing for Linux right, but they still pose problems (for example, due to technical reasons the Linux kernel developers will refuse to debug kernel problems if you're using NVIDIA's drivers).Quote:Yes, we say stability. And you keep your computer on for weeks at a time? Hooray, but how much of that are you actually using it for? If you have over, say, four programs on Microsoft, it slowwwwly begins to falter, until it starts making distressing lawnmower-like sounds within your machine. Microsoft eats your resources for breakfast until you have to turn it off and on again to get it to work.Let's switch to Gman here...Quote:Zir: You run 4 programs at once? What 4 things possibly needs to be done at the same time??Ahh, multitasking. This is how Ari uses his computer. Yes, that's 18 windows, 99 tasks. Believe you me, once you learn to hold enough mental state true multitasking will be the only way you can use a computer at all. Quote:Yes alot of games might run for linux, but there's probably programing involved... programming that most people aren't interested in nor care about. *nods*Not really. Hacking, perhaps, but not programming (unless Wine itself doesn't support something the game needs, in which case there'll be a *lot* of programming involved). Damn. There's so much I want to teach, so little I can write in a post of sane size... and... then there's the University... yes...Man, this is four pages of text (Abiword-2.0, Times New Roman, font size 12, default margins and everything) already. Please, guys, you did know I would have to post something like this, didn't you? Do you really believe Project Bluebook revealed EVERYTHING the Army Air Corps knew? Do you know what REALLY happened at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s? Have you even heard about the Men in Black? Do you have any friends who have `missing days'? Do you sleep with your window unlocked?Be seeing you...Edited by: Ari Rahikkala at: 3/24/04 11:26 am

[Ari Rahikkala]

Quote:And yes, you run an emulator on a system, it runs slower, end of story. Not even Linux can avoid that one.I already explained this but will reiterate: Wine is not an emulator. That said, I'm rather interested in QEMU. It actually converts compiled from one architecture to another, thus resulting in doing the same job as an emulator... but much faster. Do you really believe Project Bluebook revealed EVERYTHING the Army Air Corps knew? Do you know what REALLY happened at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s? Have you even heard about the Men in Black? Do you have any friends who have `missing days'? Do you sleep with your window unlocked?Be seeing you...

[Gman Russell]

Goodness... did little ol' me start this? *laughs*It's a good thing Ruhan was here; i'm not much for debating computers...ari: are you for or against? or both? or neither?

[Erik Mortis]

So in short.. Linux rules? Microsoft (and all evil big corperate empires) suck?as for IBM.. I never said they were angels.. just the they made the first personal comp.. ect..ect.. and microsuck hasn't really done all that much..think about it... 3.11 was ok.. 95 sucked... 98 was just a bug fix for 95.. 98se was just a bugfix for 98... 2000 and ME are the same program.. and both suck. NT was microsoft first attempt to be stable.. (and I hated it cause I couldn't do anything in it. It never let me...).. XP is just NT(and evil.. cause it tell microsoft exactly what is on your computer when you register it (which they FORCE you to do..)...ect.ect? Erik Mortis BrookshireCommoner of Alexandretta

[Ari Rahikkala]

Erik: Hoping that it was only a typo, I won't quote what you said about WinME and 2000... I'm just saying you should fix it ASAP. Do you really believe Project Bluebook revealed EVERYTHING the Army Air Corps knew? Do you know what REALLY happened at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s? Have you even heard about the Men in Black? Do you have any friends who have `missing days'? Do you sleep with your window unlocked?Be seeing you...

[Ari Rahikkala]

Quote:ari: are you for or against? or both? or neither?All of the above. Do you really believe Project Bluebook revealed EVERYTHING the Army Air Corps knew? Do you know what REALLY happened at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s? Have you even heard about the Men in Black? Do you have any friends who have `missing days'? Do you sleep with your window unlocked?Be seeing you...

[Gman Russell]

Hah... A nice vague answer to cover your butt hehehe

[Ari Rahikkala]

It's true, though. Even though I haven't used any other OS than Linux (I've thought of trying the BSDs out but have lacked the HD space and, lately, Internet connectivity) on my home box for years, I'm still good enough at covering my zealotry that people can't really tell what operating system I advocate using. Well, to make it clear... I don't like evangelising. I provide free tech support to people, whatever OS they're using, but I know a lot more about Linux than other OSes so I'm a lot better at supporting it. Ergo, I do evangelise, but only in a way that's hopefully nicer and subtler than the norm...(gah... again I'm reminded of that technicality... every instance of the word "Linux" in this post should actually be replaced by "GNU/Linux" for a reason that I consider quite legitimate... but... I just can't be bothered) Do you really believe Project Bluebook revealed EVERYTHING the Army Air Corps knew? Do you know what REALLY happened at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s? Have you even heard about the Men in Black? Do you have any friends who have `missing days'? Do you sleep with your window unlocked?Be seeing you...