I don't know why this reply is labeled redundant except to show a bias against stating a legitimate concerns and problems with Wikipedia. It sounds like there is a broken mod system here on
/. as well. Not that this is also stating the obvious.
It could be that the post just before that one by Nwallins (1059978) on 2009.11.25 13:41 (#30228784) makes the same mention of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold. I wouldn't have marked either as redundant though because the other was first and the second one has more material.
I also wouldn't say that
A large government has far more opportunities for graft and corruption than a small one.
That is a good point, but as I see it, having a smaller government would mean fewer congressmen to bribe to reach a majority vote, allowing the company to expand its influence for the same budget. If you meant "small government" figuratively, you are right; a large government tends to have far more public projects to try to push through congress. However, without these, they would then focus their attack on public policy, resulting in additional lobbying against regulation and anything else detrimental to business yet necessary to ensure the rights and safety of the people.
Regardless of the literal and figurative size of the government, however, lobbyists had, have, and will continue to have more influence than entire political parties IMO.
People who want to get laid?
impossible. people on facebook are too busy growing crops in FarmVille or doing epic crimes in Mafia Wars or making creepy comments on attractive friends-of-friends's photos to have time to have mere sex.
2) It may surprise many, but steroids are quite legal also. Unethical, perhaps, but legal.
Umm in most places they are illegal*. For example in Hawaii (which is part of the 9th circuit, which is the same on as mentioned in this article.) steroids are considered a 'harmful drug' and possession of any amount is a misdemeanor.
*: Assuming you mean 'real' steroids and not those used for asthma and so forth. Also there is a huge cat-and-mouse game with law-makers and steroid-makers, law-makers ban substance X, steroid makers tweak it slightly so it does the same thing, but it has a slightly different chemical structure, so law markers ban that one, and so forth. But the law-markers bannings take a long time to do, so any one substance might be legal for a while.
Take a world map, throw a dart...
Unless he's black, Polish, Romani, homosexual or disabled.
Not that Stalin was any better, but Hitler most certainly didn't killed only Jews.
It also offloads the graphics into faster dedicated memory and composets each window seporatly meaning crashes do not cause screen corruption.
Display drivers have always been allowed to store device associated bitmaps in video memory, and draw on them directly. However, you are right that the DWM model in Vista is better. It matches modern hardware much better than the old GDI model.
The new RDP uses far less bandwidth and allows the sending of documents to a printer using a generic driver so that each printer does not need to be installed on both sides. It also supports transport over SSL inside the base program which pipes it easily over the web. It can serve up individual applications and composite them with the other local windows. It also has full support for multiple moniters and video streaming which may be eye candy but is useful.
I thought the single window support was only in the server editions. I wasn't aware of the other features; those do sound quite useful.
BS, XP is shit at wireless. It does connect, if you get everything right and there are no adverse conditions. Enter the key wrong and it will still say it is connected but won't allow net access, it takes a minute or so to figure out it is not connected! The automatic connection method and wireless polling is also inferior in comparison. It also plays its connected but not connected games sometimes when you are using the right keys (observed in Multiple machines and environments).
I know anecdote wars are never very helpful, and I don't know what I have configured differently than you, but XP Wireless support has always just worked for me, at least post SP2 (when I've used it the most).
Using the GPU also means that it is simply a case of switching which pre rendered surface (window) is on top which is much quicker than going through GDI+ where only visible bits windows were rendered as a part of the whole screen. This meant that every move or refresh meant a whole in CPU screen re-render ad a crashed window could corrupt the screen.
Not exactly sure what you're trying to say here. When a window in the XPDDM is redrawn (due to a WM_PAINT message being received), the request is only for the changed/newly visible section. Subsequent drawing to this area and the window area is clipped by region by GDI, which prevents anything outside the changed area inside the window from being painted on. XP and Vista/7 do have a mode where they will display the last image of an unresponsive window, greyed instead of ignoring paint commands (leaving a hall of mirrors effect). Many programs were already caching their window bitmaps privately, simply blitting to WM_PAINT request areas. For compatibility, Vista and 7 still have to send messages like WM_ERASEBKGND and WM_PAINT to applications in many cases, like having the window get focus or when moving partially off screen.
Much better use of multicore CPUs
There is a little more power mgmt stuff, but I wouldn't call it "much better".
GPU acceleration of the GUI
Windows NT has always supported GPU acceleration of the GUI through the display driver. The DWM just uses it differently, mostly for 3d effects and caching window contents.
DLL seperation
What does this mean? DLLs have always been mapped COW in processes, and SXS was introduced in XP.
vastly better RDP
You can use the fancy aero and desktop composition effects in RDP6, in Vista, plus support for more device redirection. This is nice, but mainly eye candy. Not a vast improvement. There isn't much substantive that you can do with RDP 6.1 that you couldn't in 5.1. Or NT4 TSE for that matter.
vastly improved central managment and deployment features for businesses
Group policy, with MSI installation, net boot installation, etc. existed in their current form since Windows 2000. There have been improvements, but no vast revolutions.
Easy 64 bit usage with drivers
XP had AMD64 support first (albeit with the WS2003 code base). The drivers are finally catching up. This is mainly the job of IHVs, not Microsoft. The drivers that Microsoft traditionally provides (most of them, really) were ready in XP64.
Faster installs
Yes, Vista now uses an image based install that supposed to be much faster.
Better power managment and usage of hardware suspend
2000 fully supported ACPI power modes. There have been minor refinements since then, but noting major.
better usage of memory (cacheing for very noticible speed gains)
SuperFetch (new in Vista) does pre-emptively fill unused memory with things that were paged out or the OS otherwise thinks you may use. To support this, the kernel now has 8 memory priorities, which help a lot in determining what should go first when memory gets tight.
Media center!
XP had MCE first.
transparent Bitlocker hard drive encryption (in pro and ultimate) with TPM
Note that per-file encryption has been supported since 2000.
program execution isolation that redirects reg and file system calls to safe locations
There have been some redirection shims since XP at least.
epiclly better wireless support
Epically? It certainly takes more clicks to get into the adapter list control panel. There are automatic locations in Vista that automatically config your firewall and such, but XP works fine if you just want to connect to the network.
support for propper GUI scaleing on high DPI LCDs
It's better, but there's still a lot of apps that break
Automatic driver retrival for most hardware right of Windows update without searching
XP will offer to search for drivers for unknown hardware, and include driver updates in Windows Update.
Faster boot times and UI responce on semi-decent hardware (compared to XP)
XP has prefetching and a lot less to load than Vista or "7". Why would the UI responsiveness be any better?
Windows 7 does have improvements, don't get me wrong I'll probably upgrade to it, but it's not making a major advance in every area. XP still does most of what 7 and Vista do, and using less resources. Besides, Vista was the major version change to 6.0.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.