Text 2947, 126 rader
Skriven 2006-06-28 07:41:00 av Robert E Starr JR (3420.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:52:35 +0000 (UTC), Rob Perkins
<rperkins@usa.net> wrote:

>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> Most of the Windows upgrades I've installed have represented
>> significant improvements -- 3.0 to 3.1, 95, NT 4.0, 2000, XP . . . and
>> were fun to explore. But Vista seems to be XP (or Server 2003) with
>> more eye candy, less performance, and an interface that's gotten
>> worse, almost perversely so: hell, the constant security warnings
>> almost make it unusable. I kept muttering to myself "What were they
>> thinking?"
>
>They were thinking of the current threat profile targeted at Windows 
>computers the world over. They were thinking that since all these PC's 
>have fair-to-middlin' 3D graphics cards, that the interface could use 
>the eye candy now found on OS X, for one thing.
>
>And, with a sufficient graphics card, it really is quite entertaining to 
>watch. Not that you'll get that in a VMWare machine, but there you are.

The eye candy is, from my perspective, neither here nor there. I've
been dual booting & I have a fast graphics card (finally updated my
decrepit computer after five years of neglect), so I do see it, but I
don't find it as interesting as you do. And the menu animation was so
amazingly slow it made the machine too sluggish for a 90-year-old! I
had to turn it off (which I would have done anyway, as many or most
people do with the animation in XP . . . ).

Just kept saying "What were they thinking" . . .

As for the security warnings, I've read lots of complaints in reviews,
so I know I'm not the only one who feels this way . . . I mean, I'm
all in favor of improved security, but the worst pop-up trojan on the
planet is less annoying than Microsoft's "feature." I'd guess it's
going to be one of those new features that they end up disabling
(rather than fixing) in Service Pack 1 (remember the indexing
service)? And the irony of it is that the warnings probably won't do
much good -- naive users will just click through them to get their
stuff to work. (Or worse, they'll call me . . . )

>> Anyway, I found Vista so disappointing that I decided to see if I
>> could install OS X on my computer and, amazingly enough, it worked.
>
>I'd love to see the details of that. OS X is my friend...

It was amazingly easy, really -- or would have been if I hadn't spent
several days reading about it first. The one catch is that it's very
hardware-dependent -- the closer your computer is to an i86 Mac, the
more likely it is to have driver support -- so you have to spend some
time with the HCL. Recent Intel chips and chipsets do best, though
there are patches for older processors that don't have SSE3 and for
AMD chips.

But in my case, pretty much everything worked. No acceleration on the
video card yet since they don't support NVidia (seems they went with
ATI), and while some folks are writing a third-party driver it doesn't
yet support hardware acceleration. Not sure if there's a driver yet
for my secondary ethernet port, but I don't use it anyway -- prefer
the Intel which works fine. Ditto for the extra IDE controllers, which
on my MB don't work very well even under XP. But there is an OS X
driver for my secondary SATA port, which is great because I do use the
eSATA spigot for external backups & wouldn't want to go back to
firewire or IDE 2.0. Triple booting with the Vista and XP bootloaders
worked fine. The main problem I ran up against is that there's no
reliable driver yet for Intel RAID -- there is a FreeBSD driver, but
it doesn't look like it's been tested much. Since I have two RAID 0
arrays that I don't want to dismantle I stuck in a spare IDE drive to
accommodate OS X.

I suspect hardware support will improve when they release the G5
successor.

Anyway, the main source of info is here at the osx86 project:

http://www.osx86project.org/

The are HCL's and other good stuff in the Wiki, and a lively forum.

>> Also exploring Kubuntu -- Linux has come a /long/ way! All very cool,
>> and what with virtualization technology, I could use the Windows
>> programs I can't live without . . .
>
>Meh. I'm still annoyed with the pile of burned CD's I've wasted looking 
>for the distro I want, which installs on a memory key, boots into 512 MB 
>RAM without a swapfile, and is still configurable enough for my 
>low-power computing wants (home automation, firewall, alarm system, etc)
>
>It's still geek-central, over there in penguin land.

To say the least -- though things really have improved from the days
when you spent all your time compiling kernels. What gets me is that
they have two major competing desktops, meaning that programs written
for one won't run on the other -- not a great move when you're trying
to build a competitive library of apps and develop the penetration
necessary to attract commercial developers. They're shooting
themselves in the feet, if you ask me (not that anyone did . . . ).

Anyway, I gather that Knoppix is what people use when they want to
repair a system because it boots nicely from the CD. But what else
would serve? I know that you can shoehorn XP onto a key if you use
third party software and your BIOS boots from USB, but it isn't going
to be pretty on an old, slow box . . .

-- 
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about
the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a
lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer.
And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
                                                                               
               
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