Posted 11/17/2009 at 12:07:44pm

Do you know the difference between these two domains?

http://www.paypal.com
http://www.pаypal.com

They look exactly the same. But the bottom one is using a Cyrillic A.

This nonsense political correctness has gone too far. This just opens the door right up for a whole new breed of phishing attacks. As an IT administrator, I plan to block all non-Latin domain names from my network. And I know of many others who plan to do the same thing. 

Posted 11/16/2009 at 09:11:37am

I cannot believe that people continue to put up with this BS from Microsoft.

Fortunately for me, I use Linux so I don't have to worry about this nonsense. I'm free to install my operating system on as many computers as I want for no cost.

Posted 11/04/2009 at 09:57:26pm

I prefer df if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb/backup.img bs=128k

Posted 10/31/2009 at 08:00:30pm

DirectX 10 was a complete failure and almost everything that was wrong with DirectX 10 remains in DirectX 11. The fact that the majority of games coming out today are still using DirectX 9 should be telling.

Game developers should do everyone a favour and just use OpenGL.

Posted 10/27/2009 at 11:02:59am

Linux is not Windows.

http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

Posted 10/27/2009 at 12:47:56am

Just because you can download something for free doesn't mean you also have the legal right to redistribute it.

In addition, Canonical, being a company, is subject to a lot more liability. Patent holders don't waste time going after individuals but they will go after a company, especially one with as much money as Canonical.

I suggest simply using free formats instead. Vorbis is superior to MP3 as a lossy compression codec in just about every way. You could also use FLAC.

Posted 10/23/2009 at 05:44:55pm

1.I haven't edited any 4 gigabyte word files today because I don't use word files or the word file format. I use OpenDocument.

2.Mac OS 7 (more specifically, System 7), came out in 1991. Back then, Windows 3.0 was the latest version of Windows. Try running a 16-bit 3x program under the x64 version of Windows 7 sometime and tell me how it works. 

Wine on the other hand is more than capable of running said 16-bit applications, even using a 64-bit version of Linux.

It's not even a proper comparison. Mac OS backwards compatibility issues arrive from the result of two separate platform transitions (m68k -> PowerPC and PowerPC -> x86) and have nothing to do with the design of the operating system itself. If Microsoft had decided that Windows would only be for the PowerPC, they'd have the same issues (and they would have done this with IA64/Itanic if AMD hadn't stepped in and offered a superior x86-based 64-bit solution).

3.By UNIX hobbyist geeks, I assume you mean people like Intel, IBM, Red Hat and Novell? Right? Because they contribute a huge amount of code to the Linux world.

And you're right, millions aren't dependant on the work of the "UNIX hobbyist geeks". Billions are. 

Banks do not use Windows Server, they use UNIX. Researchers all over the world use *NIX. The very website you are on now is running on a Linux server. The majority of servers on the internet are *NIX based (despite Microsoft's attempt to inflate their numbers by bribing GoDaddy to use Windows Server on their domain parking pages.

The root domain servers of the internet do not run Windows Server, they run *NIX. Even Microsoft has used Linux in the past; using Linux servers to shield their unstable Windows servers from denial of service attacks that they couldn't handle.

Chances are, your new fancy HDTV is running an embedded version of Linux. Your GPS too. Google runs on Linux. Walmart uses both UNIX and Linux extensivel.

Need I go on?

4.You've answered your own question.

Proper programming practises dictate that you do not make any hardcoded assumptions about the environment your program will compile on and that you plan for the future.

With the exception of programs using legacy x86 features (e.g virtual 8086 mode) and programs using assembly,  it is not that difficult to port a program to x86-64 provided you wrote clean code that is written independent of any target architecture. Using carefully constructed conditional compilation blocks and carefully constructed identifier definitions is called "good programming". Your program should not be written with assumptions about the target platform and any necessary platform specific code should be written so that it is easily isolated and substituted with code for another platform.

As for the time consuming nature of 64-bit work and the expenses of it, it would be a lot less time consuming had people written their code in an architecture-independent format. I might add that every program I am using on this computer (running 64-bit Debian Linux) is a NATIVE 64-bit application. I have no 32-bit software whatsoever. 

Why?

A.UNIX coders tend to have a better idea of what they are doing. That's not to say there aren't plenty of idiot programmers on the UNIX side of things but UNIX doesn't have "tools" like Visual Studio that do all the work for you. The problem with Windows programming nowadays is that no one actually learns anything about programming anymore; they just learn how to use Visual Studio. They know nothing about what goes on underneath the hood and most of the people they churn out of the college factories' C# classes probably couldn't even tell the difference between the heap and the stack or how many registers x86 or x86-64 has.

B.The Linux world is mostly free software. This is another reason why proprietary closed-source software is bad. Pretty much everything in the Linux world has been ported to 64-bit at this point in time. Also, Linux, being non-exclusive to the x86, has had 64-bit versions years before the first 64-bit x86 ever came out.

There are 64-bit crossplatform programs on Linux that even Windows doesn't have versions of. Where is the Windows x64 version of Flash? I'm on Linux and using a 64-bit browser with 64-bit flash and 64-bit java. Given Firefox's ever increasing appetite for memory usage (on all platforms), this is a good thing. The need for 64-bit drivers on Linux has rarely been a problem since the majority of them are open-source anyways.

5.As someone who both works for a company who produces commercial software and as someone who has to deal with big software companies in a B2B relationship on a daily basis, I am very familiar with the amount of BS that goes on in commercial software development on a daily basis.

Commercial software development is riddled with ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy and managers who don't know the first thing about programming computers. Software development would be a lot faster and a lot cheaper without the mountains of red tape and incompetent managers who both interfere in the work of a programmer (whilst themselves having not the first clue about what they are interfering in) and who drive the direction of a program (despite, again, having no interference).

Posted 10/22/2009 at 07:38:53pm

I have done my research. You, obviously, haven't. I can also provide a citable source : http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html (Windows uses LLP64, Linux, the BSDs, Mac OSX, Solaris and most others use LP64).

I am not talking about WoW32.

"64-bit" Windows programs by default, still uses a 32-bit data model. A program must be rewritten to use a long long data type in order to get a 64-bit data type. In Linux, recompiling a program is all you have to do to get it using 64-bit data types. In Windows, you must do significant replumbing in order for an application to get the most benefit from a 64-bit port (which is probably why most 64-bit vs 32-bit benchmarks on Windows show little difference; as it is most companies couldn't be bothered to even port their programs to 64-bit let alone properly optimize them for it. This is all because Microsoft chose to cater to a bunch of sloppy programmers that couldn't be bothered to figure out how to use typedef to avoid making hardcoded assumptions about data types.

As for Compiz, it works fine with games if you use it with DRI2/Gallium3D.

Posted 10/22/2009 at 02:47:31pm

There is not much difference from Vista. It's basically just Vista with a few shiny new graphics, a few new applications, a new taskbar and some other minor tweaks. It's not worth the upgrade price 

And it's still Windows. And it's still loaded with DRM and "Protected Media Paths" designed to restrict how you use your computer. And it still has the Windows Activation/Windows Genuine DISadvange malware.

There still isn't a true 64-bit version of Windows. Windows 7 "x64" is really a 32-bit operating system that uses 64-bit memory addresses, similar to how Windows 3.1 was a 16-bit operating system with 32-bit memory addresses. The data types are still the same as in 32-bit Windows unless you use a special non-standard long long data type that is not portable. And you still can't use unsigned kernel mode drivers on Windows x64 (code signing, and certificates in general, are, in and of themselves, a big scam based on creating an artificial scarcity). So with Windows 7 x64, my computer will only run kernel drivers approved by Microsoft and their cohorts (read : Verisign). Contrast that to Linux where my computer does what I tell it to, and not what Microsoft tells it to (why do you think they removed the My from My Computer with Vista?).

The new Aero is only impressive to those who have never used anything besides Windows. Compiz can do everything the new Aero can do and a lot more. Compiz makes both Aero/DWM and Quartz look like toys by comparison. 

Posted 10/20/2009 at 02:48:15pm

There is a version of KDE for Windows. (It's still experimental though). It does not have Compiz.

Windows will never have compiz because compiz is heavily written around the X-Windows System. To implement it on Windows would require nothing short of a complete rewrite.

See : http://windows.kde.org/