The really sad thing is this ani flaw affects servers. Thats one thing that shouldn't be on a server as well as a media player, e-mail client, web browser, etc.

And old news is that vista suffers occasionally :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03...a_copying_bug/

So I finally found the end of this thread--at page 73. From the outset, I should admit that I did not have the time to read all 73 pages carefully, so some were just scanned. Here is my observation on the Microsoft problem:

If you watch the news, you may have noticed a lot of stories about campaign fundraising--who got the most and who is most likely to prevail in the elections. If you do not watch the news, perhaps you remember an old movie called The Magic Christian? The premise of both is that whoever throws more money at an issue usually wins. Yes. It is that simple.

It is known in poli-sci circles that ballots by referendum are victims of this odd social phenomenon. A grass-roots group postulates a law and finds itself with a ninety-something percent approval rating at the outset. The big business money moves in and outspends the long-hairs by about a billion to one and--hey, presto!--they now own the ninety-something percent approval rating.

Microsoft is proof that you can sell shit if you just wrap it in greenbacks. Of course, the fault is more correctly placed on the consumer market endowed with the collective intelligence of a small tick, and we are unlikely to see any change soon, unless greenhouse gases create genetic mutations.

In reference to a post from the first dozen pages of this thread which outlined the ugly history of MicroCrash, I think he forgot to mention that the OS sold by our brave pioneer, Billy the Sociopath, was actually not his to sell. If memory serves, he turned the revenue generated from the sale of the OS over as purchasing capital to buy the system he had just sold. Isn't floating checks illegal?

How can a civilized society uplift a sociopath as a hero model on which to nurture its children?

I think calling ol' Bill a sociopath is going a little bit far, but anyway...
If you look back into history you will find that something like this has happened before, and happened before that...

"He who does not learn from history is doomed to forever repeat it."
So let us learn from this and then not repeat it... or something like that...

(Anyway, what's wrong with us sociopaths?)

lol, I'll second that one Think there quite a few sociopaths involved with linux and computing in general. "money grabbing", "bloodthirsty" and possibly "ba$**rd" may have been closer to home.
Cheers,
Stan

btw, not for hacker supreme

I don't have a problem with Gates himself. He gets a lot of shit that I really don't think he deserves. At this point, he's mostly a figure head trying to change the direction of a freight train with his bare hands. Gates isn't in control anymore. I'm not sure anyone really is. Microsoft has become the definition of Evil, but I don't agree that Gates qualifies for that title.

Microsoft actually stole most of its ideas for the some of the early windows series(3,NT 3.1) from IBM because as some of you remember that IBM was working with Microsoft to make OS/2 and Microsoft kinda took off with there ideas

If you use a MAC over time you'll look like "Jobs", prim proper Mr. Clean and respected.

If you use Windows, you over time you'll pull all your hair out and look like "Balmer"

and if you use gnu/Linux over time you'll you look like "Stallman"

What's a Fogie to do?

Much Love

---------------------
No dancing paper clips were harmed in the making of this silly jest

Ahh, dear God! 256MB of RAM will boot up a Vista partition?!? I don't believe it! *snickers*

Seriously, I toyed around with Vista RC1. 550-750 MB memory usage with nothing open...for comparison, the same machine cruises at about 50MB memory usage in Gentoo Linux, and just under 40MB memory usage in FreeBSD (both with Fluxbox, of course, but jeez...11-15 TIMES the memory usage? Vista ain't THAT pretty...). I'd rather suck up a few hundred MB of memory using XGL/Beryl and get some REAL eye-candy.

Well heck, I use Gentoo Linux and have the following open: Seamonkey, Kopete, Konsole, Konqueror, Kpatience, Gkrellm, foldingathome and several servers running as well. I am currently using about 280MBs. Folding is using about 100MBs of that. Plus Seamonkey has been open a good while and has loaded Java and cached a lot of images too. Considering what I have in use, I think my memory usage is pretty low. I doubt a windoze box could compare. Plus without multiple desktops, it would be messy. lol

Another difference is if I close something, that memory is available for something else. Windoze seems to keep some of the memory locked up for some reason.

I have some friends that recently bought laptops and desktops that had Vista on it and they went back to XP. They could not get drivers for some of the hardware that was being used. Worked fine in XP though. Go figure.

My $0.02 worth.

I have a Windows XP box that I use for development. MSSQL and VS 2005 are usually open on it. It runs about 450MB memory usage. I'd actually like to see what an equivalent Linux box runs (KDevelop or Anjuta and MySQL or PostgreSQL?), so I might set one up just for kicks.

Excuse me, but do you take a swap-file into account? Linux systems are often running without using swapfile at all, while in WinXP with 512 Mb of RAM system uses swapping almost in non-stop mode . And a swap-file is connected with virtual memory...

If you need numbers...:
Unfortunately, I have no SQL-related software on my computer, and I'm not planning to install it. But right now I'm running KTorrent, KDevelop, Opera, Toonel (java traffic compression utility), KSysguard on a KDE desktop, while I'm logged in as root on a virtual console where I'm running a custom multithreaded traffic redirection app. System uses 418192Kb of RAM + 44304 Kb swapspace. Here is per-process memory usage (I'll not write down all processes, just some of them):
Opera: 43724kb of Physical RAM
java: 19136kb --
ktorrent: 20556kb --
kdevelop: 42636kb (MSVC alone eats up to 128..256 mb of RAM on Windows) --

I could easily reduce memory usage by swithing to another desktop. In fact, it is possible to reduce memory usage to 64 megabytes by switching to another
desktop (icewm, for example). Anyway, system is lighting-fast, when compared to windows, where pressing Alt+Ctrl+F3 in MSVC 2005 could produce a relatively long delay (up to 5..9 seconds).

In such situations WinXP often eats all my RAM (512mb), and uses about up to 768mb swapfile).

And even if that much of memory is used, Linux can free some RAM much faster. For example, Half-Life 2 (when started using wine/ARB_shaders) doesn't produce such delays (due to swapping), as when it works on windows.

So.. what do you think?

Yes, I had thought about that, and no, I hadn't accounted for it. I realize that Windows swaps nearly constantly, but I was inquiring as to physical memory usage. I have 1GB of RAM on this machine (housing Gentoo Linux, FreeBSD, and my WinXP install I spoke about earlier), so on Gentoo and FreeBSD, it's *almost* pointless to have a swap partition. Windows, however, eats any swap up like candy...as if it prefers it over physical RAM. I'm well aware of this fact.

Perhaps it's a biased question...I'll give you that. When asking about memory usage with Windows XP involved, I should be fair to Linux/*BSD and include swap in the question. Thanks for pointing that out.

edit -
I think the same I've always thought...Linux and *BSD handle resources much more efficiently than Windows...Vista in particular. When an application (MSSQL or VS, take your pick) sucks up more memory than the already bloated WinXP operating system does, something is definitely wrong.

Guys i think all of us know whats what and its useless to debate.
There are pluses and minuses of both OS's. till 2005 i was using a Windows XP machine and i faced all the problems listed above however Windows usually works though not always that eficiently. It has problems of viruses , spywares , worms, trojans and alike but they could be sorted using good antivirus and anti spyware. I could find an application for anything i wanted if not full version, a trial or a crack. Nothing stopped my work .

Linux i had on my machine since 2000 and i must tell you it was hell of a difficult thing to get it working. Only with recent advents of easy to use distros like ubuntu and freespire have made work easier. using ubuntu dapper i have migrated completely to Linux now . Most of the things work seamlessly now with good high quality software avail.

A few issues we need to focus now and in future (seriously) are package management, development of GUI based servers(if we actually want people to migrate from Windows and Solaris servers, Concentration on Extensive documentation .

Also with each new release and adding of so much of eye candy Linux hardware requirements are on a rise. I have 384 MB of RAM and ubuntu eats up 200-220 MB of RAM without any major applications running. For fedora 6 i read memory reqmt optimum as 512 MB which is on the same curve as Vista. I feel with new distros we are deviating from our main aim of a productive OS to an Eye candy system which is like taking the line of Microsoft. I feel we are going wrong in this.

And herein lies the rub:

If I want an eye candy system that sucks up 512 MB of RAM, I can choose to build one. If I want a production machine, I can install Fluxbox/EvilWM/etc...

Last I checked, you couldn't install a different Desktop Environment on any Microsoft OS. Sure, I can tweak it (turn off theming, change a few colors, etc...), but I can't dig in and rip the crap UI off of Vista and install something more productive. I personally don't see this as a problem, as projects like Fluxbox are alive and well. Want a preconfig'd distro? Then you get what comes with it (hardware requirements and all). Want to roll your own? Then have fun building something that's EXACTLY what you want out of a computer.

You can't have your cake and eat it too...you get eyecandy and ease of use, and pay dearly for it in terms of requirements, or you get a productive and functional desktop and get to keep all of your resources ready at a moment's notice. I personally feel that Gnome is the most useless desktop environment available in the open source world because of their concern that adding additional functionality might "confuse" their users. Who are they trying to cater to? It reminds me of a tactic used by a certain company in the US that took over the market with idiotically easy to use yet utterly useless software...

I don't know what I think of that...Sure, people migrating to Linux will provide more "bodies" for coding, more support, etc...but it's been my experience that two problems exist with this logic: a) Windows admins who know their stuff aren't going to be willing to switch (regardless of GUI capabilities) because they've invested into their knowledge base and don't want to forfeit it...and b) someone who's willing to switch to Linux "because of a GUI" isn't going to assist much in terms of support and/or coding. Yes, there are exceptions...but this has been my experience.

I'm not trying to say that everyone must "pull their weight" (tho it would be nice if everyone coded or lurked in forums ready to pounce on questions), but putting the weight of the Windows universe on Linux would cause quite a bit of chaos. Sure, let Linux grow naturally...it's been doing that for years now...but to actively go after a subset of the Windows world could cause problems.