OEM vs Retail XP Pro

  • Thread starter Thread starter jeh
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Mxsmanic said:
Linux fans bend over backwards to hide the fact that the desktop is not
part of Linux.

Come to think of it, practically the entire OS is not part of Linux,
either, but I don't see anyone working to keep that in the minds of
users.
Click to expand...

Because we point out that what makes Linux...Linux is the Linux kernel. If
it had the Mach kernel, or some other kernel, it's not Linux. Just about
every other part of Linux turns up in FreeBSD and other Unix flavors.
However, Linux is Linux only because it uses the Linux kernel.
 
Conor said:
You've not answered the question. All that article says is some people
from MS turned up to have a look.

I'll ask again.

What ideas have Microsoft taken from KDE and incorporated into their
Longhorn desktop?

OTOH there's a long list of stuff in KDE thats in Win9x.
Click to expand...

Draw your own conclusions. I don't have anything specific because I haven't
seen the final Longhorn desktop. If MS is snooping at the KDE booth,
looking at the desktop, they're looking to a) copy something b) develop an
alternative c) get some ideas. They're not there for no reason at all.

There is a very, very long list of stuff Win9x has that Apple had long ago.
There's no secret that KDE came long after the Mac and Windows, and used
them as models to quickly build a usable GUI, but current versions of KDE
far outstrip Windows GUI, IMHO.
 
Conor said:
We weren't on about Intel being involved in Linux, we were discussing
companies who ignore 10% of the world market.
Click to expand...

My mistake. I thought you were saying Intel was ignoring 10% of the market
by ignoring Linux.
 
Conor said:
<wriggle wriggle>

Plenty of previews on windows enthusiast sites.
Click to expand...

Sorry, haven't seen them, not being a Windows enthusiast... Windows is
boring and nothing to get enthusiastic about. I do run it, but don't get on
that machine that much, as I have a perfectly good machine running Debian
Sarge right next to it. :o)
Really? Will KDE even start with 32MB of RAM?
Click to expand...

Haven't tried it. It has run on 128MB of RAM, which I previously ran it with
on my old P3 Dell machine. I somehow doubt if WinXP actually does run on 32
MB of RAM that it's actually usable. It was using my swap file quite a bit
in the P3 with 128MB of RAM and slowing down as a result. When I installed
SuSE Linux 8.1 on it (running KDE 3.0), it had quite a bit more pop to it.
Linux executed much faster than WinXP ever did on that machine. Now, Win98
also had a bit more pop to it, as well.

Now, I'm running an Athlon XP 2800+ machine and Debian Linux with a kernel
pre-compiled for the K7 architecture, and it seems to be faster in
execution than my 2.6 GHz P4 Northwood machine that's been OC'd to 3 GHz
running WinXP Professional.
 
Draw your own conclusions. I don't have anything specific because I haven't
seen the final Longhorn desktop.
Click to expand...

<wriggle wriggle>

Plenty of previews on windows enthusiast sites.

There is a very, very long list of stuff Win9x has that Apple had long ago.
There's no secret that KDE came long after the Mac and Windows, and used
them as models to quickly build a usable GUI, but current versions of KDE
far outstrip Windows GUI, IMHO.
Click to expand...
Really? Will KDE even start with 32MB of RAM?
 
Conor said:
Windows XP won't but Windows 95 will run on 8MB and still allow you to
run programs as well. Windows NT4 required only 24MB. Sort of puts the
whole X server/desktop/window manager hash up Linux uses into
perspective.
Click to expand...

What's minimally required, and what actually required to make is usable are
not one in the same.
 
Conor said:
Plenty of previews on windows enthusiast sites.
Click to expand...

Okay, I finally went and looked at the Longhorn desktop @ this site:

http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/longhorn/

The information bar that sits to the right of the desktop heavily favors one
of the many SuperKaramba themes such as these:

http://kde-look.org/content/preview...=22606-1.jpg&file2=&file3=&name=Krystal_Clear
http://kde-look.org/content/preview...le3=&name="Stylus+Sysinfo"+superkaramba+theme
http://kde-look.org/content/preview...-2.jpg&file3=&name=kstatus+superkaramba+theme
http://kde-look.org/content/preview...-2.jpg&file3=20847-3.jpg&name=hds+kubicaramba
http://kde-look.org/content/preview...-1.jpg&file2=&file3=&name=fantastik+systemtux
http://kde-look.org/content/preview...3238-1.jpg&file2=&file3=&name=awesome_karamba
http://kde-look.org/content/preview...1.jpg&file2=23318-2.jpg&file3=&name=sysALYZER
 
Conor said:
Guess I've been into PCs a bit longer than you. Windows 95 was very
usable with 8MB. Believe it or not, when Windows 95 came out, 8MB was
the average RAM for a computer. RAM back then cost around 500 times
more than it does now. 1MB would set you back £25.

I'd go as far as to say, from my experience, that Windows 95 on a P100
with 8MB RAM felt as fast as Linux does running KDE 3.x on an Athlon
XP200+ with 256MB RAM.
Click to expand...

Maybe Windows PC's, but I was using a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III back in
1982, followed by an Apple IIe, Apple IIGS, PowerComputing Macintosh clone,
then my first Windows PC, which was a Dell XPS T-600. I first installed
Linux on my brother's computer, which was a Compaq with a 450 MHz P2, and
it was Red Hat 5.2. Talk about crude... Linux today is a far cry from that
release of Red Hat. I now build my own systems and for my friends. Current
machines are a Soyo SY-KT600 Dragon Plus 1.0/Athlon XP 2800+ machine that
Linux rides on and a Gigabyte GA-8IRXP/Pentium 4 Northwood 2.6 (OC'd to
3.0) machine that WinXP rides on. I'll probably build myself a new machine
again when the dual core Athlon 64 processors are widely available and
sorted out.
 
Mxsmanic said:
Interesting. Each new release of Windows wastes more and more space on
the desktop. But that seems to be true for a lot of GUIs.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we'll probably need one of those wide screen 23" monitors just to have
space to work before long.
 
Ruel said:
My mistake. I thought you were saying Intel was ignoring 10% of the market
by ignoring Linux.
Click to expand...

No, that would have been 0.3% of the market (for desktops, at least).
 
Sorry, haven't seen them, not being a Windows enthusiast... Windows is
boring and nothing to get enthusiastic about. I do run it, but don't get on
that machine that much, as I have a perfectly good machine running Debian
Sarge right next to it. :o)


Haven't tried it. It has run on 128MB of RAM, which I previously ran it with
on my old P3 Dell machine. I somehow doubt if WinXP actually does run on 32
MB of RAM that it's actually usable.
Click to expand...

Windows XP won't but Windows 95 will run on 8MB and still allow you to
run programs as well. Windows NT4 required only 24MB. Sort of puts the
whole X server/desktop/window manager hash up Linux uses into
perspective.
 
What's minimally required, and what actually required to make is usable are
not one in the same.
Click to expand...
Guess I've been into PCs a bit longer than you. Windows 95 was very
usable with 8MB. Believe it or not, when Windows 95 came out, 8MB was
the average RAM for a computer. RAM back then cost around 500 times
more than it does now. 1MB would set you back £25.

I'd go as far as to say, from my experience, that Windows 95 on a P100
with 8MB RAM felt as fast as Linux does running KDE 3.x on an Athlon
XP200+ with 256MB RAM.
 
Conor said:
Windows XP won't but Windows 95 will run on 8MB and still allow you to
run programs as well. Windows NT4 required only 24MB. Sort of puts the
whole X server/desktop/window manager hash up Linux uses into
perspective.
Click to expand...

Win95 and NT4 will let you run in that little memory but it isn't practical.

And on the Linux side of the coin, comparing to KDE isn't fair. Icewm,
fvwm95, blackbox, etc., will run in small memory footprints.
 
Conor said:
I'd go as far as to say, from my experience, that Windows 95 on a P100
with 8MB RAM felt as fast as Linux does running KDE 3.x on an Athlon
XP200+ with 256MB RAM.
Click to expand...

It was. That's software bloat for you.

I've noticed that no matter how fast the hardware has become, the actual
response time of computers has changed very little over the past twenty
years. The screen looks a bit prettier, but that's all. The amount of
work one can accomplish in a given time is pretty much the same.

Nowadays, we have lots of memory, but all of it is filled by bloat, and
though it is inexpensive, it is also very slow, so much so that
processors spend most of their time in wait states. And since
everything is so bloated, every application is constantly doing disk I/O
as well, and disks are only slightly faster than they were 20 years ago.
So you still spend a lot of time waiting for a computer to respond:
because of slow disks, bloated billions of lines of code, or a slow
network connection.

For me, a truly fast computer is one in which there is no perceptible
delay between pressing a key and getting the complete result on the
screen. I have yet to see any computer with a GUI that runs this fast.

However, systems that still have a command-line interface run at
absolutely astonishing speeds sometimes on modern hardware. This
includes most flavors of UNIX and Linux (once you remove all the GUI
bloat). It reminds one of the fact that the average desktop today has
more than enough horsepower to support a thousand users or more on
timesharing terminals. And to think that all of that is being sucked up
just to paint pretty graphics on a screen! And it won't get better.
 
Ruel said:
Mxsmanic wrote:




Yeah, we'll probably need one of those wide screen 23" monitors just to have
space to work before long.
Click to expand...

Ain't that the truth.

However, I predict that after the initial complaints it's little more than
a morass of useless toys all over the desktop people will end up loving it
because it's a morass of neat toys all over the desktop.

What a difference one word makes ;)
 
David said:
And on the Linux side of the coin, comparing to KDE isn't fair. Icewm,
fvwm95, blackbox, etc., will run in small memory footprints.
Click to expand...

If you want to see Linux or UNIX running truly blazingly fast, just yank
out all that GUI junk. Then you'll appreciate just how fast modern
hardware really is.

I ran a little test. I did a "find /" at the console on my UNIX system.
In three seconds it listed just under 200,000 files. Then I tried the
same thing from an SSH session running under Windows. That took 92
seconds. In other words, Windows require 89 seconds of processor time
just to display the file names on the GUI, whereas walking the entire
file structure for a quarter-million files on the server required less
than three seconds of processor time (and most of that was probably
video management, too, since the console is a VGA in text mode). And
no, it wasn't network traffic; on my LAN at 100 Mbps, the entire
transfer takes less than a second to complete.

If I hide most of the SSH window on the Windows machine, the find
completes in 38 seconds. So nearly a full minute of processor time is
saved just by removing the GUI processing.

This demonstrates just how much processor time is wasted and burned by
GUIs. Now, if you are running a server, it means that your total system
capacity is reduced by orders of magnitude if you are running an active
GUI on the machine, because so much time is required to drive the GUI.
Yet another reason to never run a GUI on a server. (Of course, if you
have a Windows server, there's no choice, which is why you need more
hardware to get the same job done on a Windows server).
 
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