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I frequently hear computer users boasting the superiority of Macs over PC's. Specifically, what traits of Macs makes it better than it's PC counterpart? If Windows and Mac OS X are run on two seperate similarly spec'd computers, which of the operating systems would be generally faster? Thanks. Jamesino 00:53, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
@ 2007-04-16T16:27Z
Okay, I said I wasn't gonna do this, but I gotta dive in anyway. (The only thing more insatiably tempting than an OS flamewar is an OS security flamewar...)
Several people have said, "use whichever you like, use whichever works for you". And that's fine, up to a point. But the problem is that security is a sort of a "sleeper" feature. When it comes right down do it, most users -- and most vendors -- don't really care about security. You may say you want a secure system, and a vendor may claim to provide one, but how do you know? Security bugs don't (necessarily) mean that your system runs too slow, or is missing features, or gets blue screens of death all the time. That is, security problems don't manifest themselves in ways that are immediately obvious to assess.
So if you don't care about security, go ahead, choose the computer that works best for you. But if you do care about security, your definition of "works best" has to include being adequately secure.
Some people will disagree vehemently with me here, but Microsoft Windows is fundamentally less secure than Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. Vista might be adequately secure; it's still too early to tell. (Initial reports don't look too good, however.)
Some people (the people who disagreed vehemently with me above) will tell you that there's nothing inherently wrong with Windows's security, it's just that the nasty evil hackers pick on it more and write more viruses for it. There are two flaws with this argument:
Why is Windows so insecure? One fundamental reason is that Microsoft has always been interested in making it maximally easy for third parties to sell you new software which you can easily -- really easily -- install on your computer. Similarly, it wants to make it really, really easy for web pages that you visit to install keen new extensions to your browser, to improve your browsing experience. These installations -- of new programs, new web browser extensions, new device drivers for some new peripheral you just added, whatever -- require at most one click to install, and quite often zero clicks. Nothing could be more convenient.
The problem, of course, is that when you've made it this easy, there's no way to distinguish between the good and the bad. It's easy -- with little or no intervention from you -- for those programs you bought, and those extensions you want, to be installed. But Microsoft managed to make it precisely as easy for the email viruses and the adware and all the stuff you don't want to also be installed, maximally easily, with zero clicks, whether you want it or not.
Moreover, at this point and to some extent, Microsoft can't fix this problem. So many app vendors have gotten so utterly dependent on all the dangerous things that Microsoft used to let them do that Microsoft can't just turn them all off in the name of security, without risking not only a revolt from those vendors, but renewed antitrust accusations. Microsoft's trying to close some of the loopholes in Vista, but there's a new can of worms brewing with UAC...
-- Steve Summit ( talk) 01:27, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
sudo rm -rf /
or format c:
. But then, I agree with Steve Summit, Windows is engineered to easily installation of softwares, including viruses. Just last Friday when my friend brought over a removable harddrive I caught a vbs script virus from it, just by having autorun automatically run the script. My Windows XP is even a customised version with
nLite that stops autoruns, but Windows still defaults to autorunning whatever inside when you double click on it. Now I have no idea why you need autorun on a harddrive, but this is seriously bad engineering by Microsoft. --
antilived
T |
C |
G 03:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)I'm thinking of buying a nice 15 inch laptop, but all the ones I really like are supposed to have pretty crappy speakers. This is a big problem for me, because I listen to a lot of music out LOUD (not a big fan of wearing headphones all the time) and don't want to have to carry around and plug in external speakers. The hope is that I could buy one of these computers, take it over to a computer shop, or have a computer guy come over and replace the computer's internal speakers with kickass ones. Is this a valid hope? Would it work at all? How good could the sound get? I know part of it is the poisitioning of slits for letting the sound out of the laptop and other stuff. Thanks, 70.108.191.59 02:19, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've heard good sound from a laptop. My mom has a 17" Dell Inspiron with Integrated Sound Blaster® Audigy™HD Software Edition, and it just blasts songs. I can wake people up across the house and downstairs with that thing on full volume. Really impressive. Do you know if I could buy something like that seperately and if it could fit into a 15" computer? 70.108.191.59 03:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with internal speakers, and it's really loud. And the notebook itself is pretty inexpensive too. You can try one of those.
Hasanclk 12:09, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I just heard that Intel is predicted to release a new type of processor on the 22nd of April. Is this accurate? Is this definitely worth waiting for if I'm thinking about buying a computer soon? How soon will it be in laptops? How soon will other processors' prices go down? If I wait, is it smarter to buy the old (not really) Intel Core Duo computers at a lower price, or is this new one going to blow it out of the water? Thanks, 70.108.191.59 03:19, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
@ 2007-04-16T16:33Z
I spilled soup on my trackball and keyboard. When I rebooted my PC, it said it couldn't display my video mode, so I tried again in the last working configuration. That seemed to work, but when I rebooted again to check, it said ntoskrnl.exe was corrupt. In desperation, I tried experimenting and found that if I substitute a mouse, I'm ok. What the heck is going on and should I be worried? This is XP MCE edition by the way. Clarityfiend 04:12, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm assuming this is a laptop computer, right? Do we have any evidence to suggest that your soup didn't make it all the way to the laptop's main board, creating any number of now and future troubles? Soup tends to besalty, and all those chloride ions left lying around can't be good for anything.
Atlant 12:47, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Is it possible to take an inode number, feed it to the OS, and then get back some info on the file quickly, such as the path to the file? It's quite straightforward to get a filename/path and get an inode number, can we do the reverse? (won't find be rather slow?) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.49.240.43 ( talk) 11:00, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
BUGS icat should support more file system types. Right now, support is lim- ited to ext2fs when built on Linux, and ufs when built on Solaris and BSD systems.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.49.240.43 ( talk) 11:50, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
In general, the answer is *no*, since more than one path can point to the same inode (see
hard link), and most filesystems don't keep an inode => path mapping, just path => inode. "find -inum N
" is probably the fastest thing that's guaranteed to work on a vanilla Unix system. --
TotoBaggins 13:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
/proc
filesystem (and perhaps others) such "undead" files can actually be relinked into the filesystem. So the fundamental issue here is the notion (of a file) that you want, which doesn't match the Unix semantics. Now, to be sure, it would be possible to provide an ENOTQUITEDEAD
errno
code for int getpath(ino_t inode,char *buf,size_t size)
that indicated the odd case of a file with no names, but for simplicity, performance, and perhaps security (what if the path returned wasn't accessible to your process?) no one has implemented such a function. --
Tardis 15:03, 16 April 2007 (UTC)In principle, given an inode number, it is easy to get to the associated file's contents, and to its "stat" information (size, mtime, owner, permissions, etc.).
However, under all Unix-like filesystems, it is arbitrarily difficult (and quite often impossible) to determine its path. As several people have already pointed out, a file can very easily have multiple pathnames, or zero pathnames.
As someone already pointed out, the only way to even try to find the path to an inode number is find -inum
. This is, to be sure, horribly inefficient. But there just isn't any other way to do it. The filesystem simply doesn't contain the information that would make the search any easier.
The bottom line is that, for a Unix-like filesystem, if your question is "given only a pointer to an open file, or that file's inode number, how do I determine the path to the file?", the only answer is, "You don't want to do that. Find some other way of arranging things so you don't need to even try."
For similar reasons, it is difficult-to-impossible for a running program to reliably find the directory its executable file is in.
In terms of cat'ing or stat'ing a file given its inode number, which as I said is in principle possible, in practice, there is no way to do it portably. There aren't any standard system calls which take an inode number and which let you get a handle on the actual file. So any program such as the "icat" mentioned above pretty much has to be nonportable, either relying on nonstandard system calls or other hooks into the operating system, or knowing how to grovel over a particular filesystem implementation to track its inodes down. — Steve Summit ( talk) 02:51, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I've installed windows xp sp2 on a portable hard drive. All works fine through the install and copies the setup files. When it reboots to continue it shows a XP loading screen but then goes to a Blue screen of death, saying something about problems with new hard drives or other new hardware. Is this one of those things where microsoft have stoped usage of their stuff on a portable device? I've done it with 95, 98 and ME and they worked fine. Think outside the box 11:19, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I heard of E-duc low cost PC. I think it is in Brazil but I am not sure. I want to know the configuration and price of that PC. But their website is not in English and I cannot read from that. I also found no articles for that PC in Wikipedia and also web search did not help. Anyone knows its
1)screen size? (if possible pixels, is it widescreen?)
2)configuration?
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 59.92.105.38 ( talk) 13:38, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
Their website is www.e-duc.com
Is there a good program for finding the distances between cities and other locations? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ipmin ( talk • contribs) 13:42, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
I have read about some people implanting RFID chips inside the skin, generally between the base of the thumb and index finger. I would like to know specifically which chips are specifically used for this purpose. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 141.213.222.28 ( talk) 13:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
Presumably the ones used for non-human animals would be safe for us, too. PetID is the big one in the USA. -- TotoBaggins 14:04, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I have a directory of around 1,000 HTML documents. I want Konqueror to open and print each one. Is there such thing as KDE scripting where I can script: For each file in dir, konqueror file, tell konqueror to print, tell konqueror to close, end for? -- Kainaw (talk) 16:18, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
What if you just browsed to that directory with Konqueror, selected all the files, right-clicked the selection, and did "Actions => Print"? I've just done that with an ancient version of KDE, and it seemed to do the right thing. -- TotoBaggins 17:17, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
cat reports/* > allreports.html
. Then, add <style>body{page-break-after:always;}</style>
to the top of the conglomerate file. Finally, open the 5.1MB file in Konqueror and print it. --
Kainaw
(talk) 19:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)konqueror & sleep 2 konq=$(dcop 'konqueror-*' | head -1) cd reports/ for i in *.html; do echo "Doing $i" dcop $konq 'konqueror-mainwindow#1' openURL file://$PWD/$i sleep 1 # make this longer if the pages are slow to load dcop $konq html-widget1 print 1 done
for i in *.html; do echo $i dcop $konq 'konqueror-mainwindow#1' openURL file://$PWD/$i sleep 2 dcop $konq html-widget1 print 1 sleep 5 mv /root/print.pdf $i.pdf done
GNU gcc with option -fdump-translation-unit puts out the parse tree to a file. Is there a propper description of the format of this file anywhere? 84.160.218.220 18:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Computing desk | ||
---|---|---|
< April 15 | << Mar | April | May >> | April 17 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives |
---|
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
I frequently hear computer users boasting the superiority of Macs over PC's. Specifically, what traits of Macs makes it better than it's PC counterpart? If Windows and Mac OS X are run on two seperate similarly spec'd computers, which of the operating systems would be generally faster? Thanks. Jamesino 00:53, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
@ 2007-04-16T16:27Z
Okay, I said I wasn't gonna do this, but I gotta dive in anyway. (The only thing more insatiably tempting than an OS flamewar is an OS security flamewar...)
Several people have said, "use whichever you like, use whichever works for you". And that's fine, up to a point. But the problem is that security is a sort of a "sleeper" feature. When it comes right down do it, most users -- and most vendors -- don't really care about security. You may say you want a secure system, and a vendor may claim to provide one, but how do you know? Security bugs don't (necessarily) mean that your system runs too slow, or is missing features, or gets blue screens of death all the time. That is, security problems don't manifest themselves in ways that are immediately obvious to assess.
So if you don't care about security, go ahead, choose the computer that works best for you. But if you do care about security, your definition of "works best" has to include being adequately secure.
Some people will disagree vehemently with me here, but Microsoft Windows is fundamentally less secure than Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. Vista might be adequately secure; it's still too early to tell. (Initial reports don't look too good, however.)
Some people (the people who disagreed vehemently with me above) will tell you that there's nothing inherently wrong with Windows's security, it's just that the nasty evil hackers pick on it more and write more viruses for it. There are two flaws with this argument:
Why is Windows so insecure? One fundamental reason is that Microsoft has always been interested in making it maximally easy for third parties to sell you new software which you can easily -- really easily -- install on your computer. Similarly, it wants to make it really, really easy for web pages that you visit to install keen new extensions to your browser, to improve your browsing experience. These installations -- of new programs, new web browser extensions, new device drivers for some new peripheral you just added, whatever -- require at most one click to install, and quite often zero clicks. Nothing could be more convenient.
The problem, of course, is that when you've made it this easy, there's no way to distinguish between the good and the bad. It's easy -- with little or no intervention from you -- for those programs you bought, and those extensions you want, to be installed. But Microsoft managed to make it precisely as easy for the email viruses and the adware and all the stuff you don't want to also be installed, maximally easily, with zero clicks, whether you want it or not.
Moreover, at this point and to some extent, Microsoft can't fix this problem. So many app vendors have gotten so utterly dependent on all the dangerous things that Microsoft used to let them do that Microsoft can't just turn them all off in the name of security, without risking not only a revolt from those vendors, but renewed antitrust accusations. Microsoft's trying to close some of the loopholes in Vista, but there's a new can of worms brewing with UAC...
-- Steve Summit ( talk) 01:27, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
sudo rm -rf /
or format c:
. But then, I agree with Steve Summit, Windows is engineered to easily installation of softwares, including viruses. Just last Friday when my friend brought over a removable harddrive I caught a vbs script virus from it, just by having autorun automatically run the script. My Windows XP is even a customised version with
nLite that stops autoruns, but Windows still defaults to autorunning whatever inside when you double click on it. Now I have no idea why you need autorun on a harddrive, but this is seriously bad engineering by Microsoft. --
antilived
T |
C |
G 03:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)I'm thinking of buying a nice 15 inch laptop, but all the ones I really like are supposed to have pretty crappy speakers. This is a big problem for me, because I listen to a lot of music out LOUD (not a big fan of wearing headphones all the time) and don't want to have to carry around and plug in external speakers. The hope is that I could buy one of these computers, take it over to a computer shop, or have a computer guy come over and replace the computer's internal speakers with kickass ones. Is this a valid hope? Would it work at all? How good could the sound get? I know part of it is the poisitioning of slits for letting the sound out of the laptop and other stuff. Thanks, 70.108.191.59 02:19, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've heard good sound from a laptop. My mom has a 17" Dell Inspiron with Integrated Sound Blaster® Audigy™HD Software Edition, and it just blasts songs. I can wake people up across the house and downstairs with that thing on full volume. Really impressive. Do you know if I could buy something like that seperately and if it could fit into a 15" computer? 70.108.191.59 03:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with internal speakers, and it's really loud. And the notebook itself is pretty inexpensive too. You can try one of those.
Hasanclk 12:09, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I just heard that Intel is predicted to release a new type of processor on the 22nd of April. Is this accurate? Is this definitely worth waiting for if I'm thinking about buying a computer soon? How soon will it be in laptops? How soon will other processors' prices go down? If I wait, is it smarter to buy the old (not really) Intel Core Duo computers at a lower price, or is this new one going to blow it out of the water? Thanks, 70.108.191.59 03:19, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
@ 2007-04-16T16:33Z
I spilled soup on my trackball and keyboard. When I rebooted my PC, it said it couldn't display my video mode, so I tried again in the last working configuration. That seemed to work, but when I rebooted again to check, it said ntoskrnl.exe was corrupt. In desperation, I tried experimenting and found that if I substitute a mouse, I'm ok. What the heck is going on and should I be worried? This is XP MCE edition by the way. Clarityfiend 04:12, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm assuming this is a laptop computer, right? Do we have any evidence to suggest that your soup didn't make it all the way to the laptop's main board, creating any number of now and future troubles? Soup tends to besalty, and all those chloride ions left lying around can't be good for anything.
Atlant 12:47, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Is it possible to take an inode number, feed it to the OS, and then get back some info on the file quickly, such as the path to the file? It's quite straightforward to get a filename/path and get an inode number, can we do the reverse? (won't find be rather slow?) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.49.240.43 ( talk) 11:00, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
BUGS icat should support more file system types. Right now, support is lim- ited to ext2fs when built on Linux, and ufs when built on Solaris and BSD systems.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.49.240.43 ( talk) 11:50, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
In general, the answer is *no*, since more than one path can point to the same inode (see
hard link), and most filesystems don't keep an inode => path mapping, just path => inode. "find -inum N
" is probably the fastest thing that's guaranteed to work on a vanilla Unix system. --
TotoBaggins 13:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
/proc
filesystem (and perhaps others) such "undead" files can actually be relinked into the filesystem. So the fundamental issue here is the notion (of a file) that you want, which doesn't match the Unix semantics. Now, to be sure, it would be possible to provide an ENOTQUITEDEAD
errno
code for int getpath(ino_t inode,char *buf,size_t size)
that indicated the odd case of a file with no names, but for simplicity, performance, and perhaps security (what if the path returned wasn't accessible to your process?) no one has implemented such a function. --
Tardis 15:03, 16 April 2007 (UTC)In principle, given an inode number, it is easy to get to the associated file's contents, and to its "stat" information (size, mtime, owner, permissions, etc.).
However, under all Unix-like filesystems, it is arbitrarily difficult (and quite often impossible) to determine its path. As several people have already pointed out, a file can very easily have multiple pathnames, or zero pathnames.
As someone already pointed out, the only way to even try to find the path to an inode number is find -inum
. This is, to be sure, horribly inefficient. But there just isn't any other way to do it. The filesystem simply doesn't contain the information that would make the search any easier.
The bottom line is that, for a Unix-like filesystem, if your question is "given only a pointer to an open file, or that file's inode number, how do I determine the path to the file?", the only answer is, "You don't want to do that. Find some other way of arranging things so you don't need to even try."
For similar reasons, it is difficult-to-impossible for a running program to reliably find the directory its executable file is in.
In terms of cat'ing or stat'ing a file given its inode number, which as I said is in principle possible, in practice, there is no way to do it portably. There aren't any standard system calls which take an inode number and which let you get a handle on the actual file. So any program such as the "icat" mentioned above pretty much has to be nonportable, either relying on nonstandard system calls or other hooks into the operating system, or knowing how to grovel over a particular filesystem implementation to track its inodes down. — Steve Summit ( talk) 02:51, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I've installed windows xp sp2 on a portable hard drive. All works fine through the install and copies the setup files. When it reboots to continue it shows a XP loading screen but then goes to a Blue screen of death, saying something about problems with new hard drives or other new hardware. Is this one of those things where microsoft have stoped usage of their stuff on a portable device? I've done it with 95, 98 and ME and they worked fine. Think outside the box 11:19, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I heard of E-duc low cost PC. I think it is in Brazil but I am not sure. I want to know the configuration and price of that PC. But their website is not in English and I cannot read from that. I also found no articles for that PC in Wikipedia and also web search did not help. Anyone knows its
1)screen size? (if possible pixels, is it widescreen?)
2)configuration?
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 59.92.105.38 ( talk) 13:38, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
Their website is www.e-duc.com
Is there a good program for finding the distances between cities and other locations? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ipmin ( talk • contribs) 13:42, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
I have read about some people implanting RFID chips inside the skin, generally between the base of the thumb and index finger. I would like to know specifically which chips are specifically used for this purpose. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 141.213.222.28 ( talk) 13:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC).
Presumably the ones used for non-human animals would be safe for us, too. PetID is the big one in the USA. -- TotoBaggins 14:04, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I have a directory of around 1,000 HTML documents. I want Konqueror to open and print each one. Is there such thing as KDE scripting where I can script: For each file in dir, konqueror file, tell konqueror to print, tell konqueror to close, end for? -- Kainaw (talk) 16:18, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
What if you just browsed to that directory with Konqueror, selected all the files, right-clicked the selection, and did "Actions => Print"? I've just done that with an ancient version of KDE, and it seemed to do the right thing. -- TotoBaggins 17:17, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
cat reports/* > allreports.html
. Then, add <style>body{page-break-after:always;}</style>
to the top of the conglomerate file. Finally, open the 5.1MB file in Konqueror and print it. --
Kainaw
(talk) 19:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)konqueror & sleep 2 konq=$(dcop 'konqueror-*' | head -1) cd reports/ for i in *.html; do echo "Doing $i" dcop $konq 'konqueror-mainwindow#1' openURL file://$PWD/$i sleep 1 # make this longer if the pages are slow to load dcop $konq html-widget1 print 1 done
for i in *.html; do echo $i dcop $konq 'konqueror-mainwindow#1' openURL file://$PWD/$i sleep 2 dcop $konq html-widget1 print 1 sleep 5 mv /root/print.pdf $i.pdf done
GNU gcc with option -fdump-translation-unit puts out the parse tree to a file. Is there a propper description of the format of this file anywhere? 84.160.218.220 18:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC)