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That flywheel sounds great. Here's a look at the special wheel:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2007815,00.asp

Wish the mouse was less heavy, bulky, and had more than a week's battery life (my wireless lasts a year or so on one battery).

Regular pages that looked fine in IE and Firefox were completely mangled in Opera, so I gave up and said never again.

See here.

Just out of interest, if there are problems with MS providing software to such governments, what does the Linux/GNU community do to make sure their tools are not used instead?

Well, during the Gaza War , Linux Mint developer Clement Lefebvre requested that the Israeli government and anyone who support its actions do not use his system.

Ignorance is bliss isn't it? The real difference between dx9 and dx10 in Crysis is barely noticeable.

How does it feel to be duped?

Both ATI and nVidia have been caught cheating (and by cheating I mean specifically targeting the FutureMark benchmarks to make their products look better than they actually are). The above link is only a single instance. A quick google will net you a good sampling over the last decade or two.

Optimizing a driver for a specific game is not cheating as long as it doesn't affect quality. Optimizing your driver to get inflated scores specifically in a benchmark is cheating.

$38K? That seems expensive to me, but I don't know how big his system is. I'm putting one my house (waiting on electrical inspection) that is 4 kW, and it cost $22k.

Tracking down the original specs, he put in "27 Sunpower panels, each rated at 225W, for a total 6.1KW system." With various ancilliary installation features, such as the monotoring system, sounds like the price is about the same.

Sunpower makes very high end panels, for what it's worth-- he quotes 18% efficient.

Solar panels on the roof are great, and if I lived in a hotter climate I would probably look into buying some, but please not use this story as support for "we don't need centralized energy generation". I'll show you why. Look at the chart "monthly output" on this page: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2338837,00.asp

In December, the panels generate only about 20% of what they do in July. A five-fold variation is a BIG one. He obviously could not disconnect himself from the grid - he had to rely on an external power source during the whole winter. There is no storage technology to alleviate this - right now you simply cannot store large amounts of energy for 6 months with anything resembling decent efficiency. That's why we need a mix of energy sources, and it's rather unlikely that we will ever be able to satisfy our energy needs with 100% renewables.

Or he'll pump the surplus electricity into the grid, and get paid for it.

False. According to his one-month update:

In California, you cannot sell excess power to the local utility. In other words, you can't do better than a zero dollar bill--if you're a consumer. I can sell power to the utility, but only if the net result over a year is zero.

Why the fuck should I have to do the work when experts in the field such as Bruce Schneier has done it for me? of course I guess that Forbes magazine and Bruce Schneier are "less than half a chromosome closer to a chimpanzee" because they don't want a bloated piece of spying pig shit like Vista. Want some more Mr Troll? How about Shane O'Neil of CIO.com writing on PCWorld for the perspective of enterprise companies in all this. His answer: XP works and Vista don't.

I could go on all day troll. I could wallpaper this page with link after link after link, by heads of corporations, by security experts, and of course by the users that have been burnt. Vista is a POS. Accept it and quit sucking the Ballmer cock. If you want an Apple so bad buy one. Ballmer is just as shitty a CEO as the Pepsi guy was for Apple Inc, he just has more money he can piss down a rat hole before they fire his monkey ass. Hell even their own executives got burnt on the whole Vista capable fiasco. Vista is DOA and I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 7 is just as big a can of fail.

Maybe after the next one bombs we can get Steve Ballmer fired and bring in someone who actually will give the customers what they want instead of wanting to be a ripoff of Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. But enjoy your big can of Vista failure troll, suck it down baby! As soon as Win7 comes out they will abandon you just like they did the WinME users a decade ago. Meanwhile I'm making the cash by cranking out new XP builds as fast as I can get the parts. I guess all those customers who are handing me money hand over fist just can't see the Vista "advantage" of protected media either, huh?

I've formed my opinion from working in the trenches as a computer repair tech going to people's home and fixing everyday problems. I don't have studies to cite or focus groups to quote; this is just my personal experience.

Are you really saying that because you had to sit down what sounds like a staunch Microsoftie and teach him OpenOffice.org that it means that Linux isn't ready? Also, what have you plugged into your distro that hasn't worked? When was the last time you used a tar.gz file for anything? Could you have just used the package manager?

He's not a Microsoftie, though. He's a "I don't wanna learn how to do new stuff"-tie, which is the attitude of most of my customers.

They want their computer to be easy, to work reliably, and not to change anytime soon.

I mean, honestly, I'm going to call troll on this one. Perhaps you could explain what you really mean and how you got to your conclusion with the examples you gave?

Okay.

Linux is too damn hard to use for the average user. That's the concise version.

The non-concise version: a Regular Joe's computer breaks down. He finds it'll cost him a couple hundred to repair it at Best Buy, or he could just buy a brand new one for a few hundred extra. (Big bonus: free computer parts that people throw out for garbage.)

He takes it home and plugs it in. Maybe it runs through a short setup, or maybe it works out of the box. Now he has his computer good to go.

Linux doesn't really have this nowadays. You can be pedantic and cite the one or two product lines a big box store might carry, or a little out-of-the-way shop or small franchise that carries a pre-installed Linux box, but it's nowhere remotely on the scale that Windows and Mac are out there. Hell, Linux even had itself in Wal-Mart's online store vis-a-vis Lindows and it was $100 cheaper than the XP PC, yet it's not there anymore and the company has been bought out. I'm not saying correlation = causation, but this is one of the few times that Linux in any form was in a chain of stores (albeit via their online division) and it bombed.

Joe can't drive to Staples or Best Buy and pick up a Linux PC, so he won't.

Next, Joe buys a printer, and wants to hook it up to his Windows or Mac. He plugs it in and reads in the instruction manual that he needs to insert the included CD. How many printers/cameras/devices etc. have Linux drivers on their CD, much less drivers at all?

Most Linux builds IMO ask way too much of the average user. I've had to explain what a .zip file is, what a driver is, etc. many many times to a lot of people who had the money to spend on expensive computers but had no idea on how to use them (much less an inclination to learn how to use them).

The consumer is ultimately lazy and wants a computer to work more like a television or appliance than a complicated device. The above "Vista dude" story was not relating how he was a Microsoft fanboy (he's not) but rather how he, like many average users, are highly resistant to change. Until Linux can unify around a single company and vastly improve the user-friendliness and corporate support (READ: plug & play and/or drivers ON the CD, click to install this downloaded program, a consistent visual theme and menu system, etc.), it's not going to be succeeding on a large consumer scale anytime soon.

Hey, I never said Jobs wasn't a total bastard. And I have never owned an Apple anything, from an iPod(I prefer Sandisk) to a Mac, so I'm not any kind of fanboy. I was simply pointing out that just like Gates he is a SMART total bastard. There is a good reason anytime you talk the history of the PC you see Jobs and Gates come up over and over again. It is because both were ruthless, knew how to get what they wanted, and had no problems running over the little guy like a Kenworth when they stood in their way. I actually miss the hell out of Gates myself. he may have been a total bastard but he knew how to put out a good business OS.

Ballmer on the other hand, is a buffoon. He comes up with one lame ass idea after the next, like "playsforsure" except on their own product, or the whole "let's buy Yahoo!" stupidity, or releasing the 360 knowing it had a major failure problem just to beat the PS3 to market. Hell I could go on all day. He is just like that Pepsi guy at Apple when it comes to racking up the fail points, he just has more money to play with. Honestly can you think of ANYTHING besides Office, which from what I've read is a pretty separate entity at MSFT and was left alone by Ballmer, that has actually been good? Me neither. There is a good reason why there are plenty of sites with lists of why Ballmer should be fired. It is because he is a piss poor CEO. I have bought, built, configured, and serviced MSFT OSes since Win3.x. and I have never seen the company flounder as bad as it has since Gates stepped down and left that oversized failure in charge.

Maybe when he finds a way to screw up Win7 playing buzzword bingo the board will fire his ass and bring in somebody from the Office team and Win8 will be a great business OS. Because I don't see anything in MSFT's future with Ballmer at the lead except one dumb idea after another. When it comes to leadership he is this guy.

Try this one instead http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D240530,00.asp?hidprint=true

"For $200 I can get a card that will play Crysis, STALKER Clear Sky, etc at a reasonable resolution. Try doing that with a budget card."

RTFA Crysis, high settings, 1680x1050... 32.7 fps from the $100 Radeon 4770. Anyone want to argue that 1680x1050 isn't a "reasonable resolution"? And remember this was a benchmark, so no doubt there were 100 guys on the screen moving and shouting and explosions and all that stuff that never really happens when you're playing normally, crouching behind a tree trying not to be sniped.

If that's not enough, spend another $100 and run 1900x1200 at 43fps

And we haven't even touched the 20% fps gains from overclocking: "At 1680x1050, with 4xAA, you're looking at a greater-than 20% boost - nothing short of incredible."

Yes, I bought one and it's amazing for $100. Wonder what I'll be buying in 2-3 yrs? A $70 card?

Here's the single page link: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D240530,00.asp

First, if you want to talk about benchmarking tests speed, actually there's actually very little difference at all now between Vista and XP.

That leads us to "general user responsiveness" benchmarks...a user clicks something; how long before Windows finishes to do what the user said. Well, that's a more tricky one, but given a system has 2Gb RAM+ and has been used for a while Vista & Windows 7 will easily out-perform XP given how SuperFetch doesn't exist in XP. Any less and, well, who knows.

Finally, TFA linked suggesting Vista is slow is (unsurprisingly) dated Dec 27, 2006; probably not the most relevant material nowadays.

Actually the early 80s. You see, before MSFT started the clone market by selling Compaq MS DOS and thus creating the IBM PC compatible market, things were VERY different. It was 'welcome to proprietary land" where my VIC wouldn't talk to your TRS80 which wouldn't talk to that guy's Apple ][, etc. By creating the IBM PC compatible market it meant that I could be a PC from ANYBODY as long as it was "IBM PC Compatible" all my software would run and my compatible PC could talk to yours and we could share data. This was a big deal at the time because most computers couldn't share squat, creating major lock in and support problems.

So you really have to give credit where credit was due. While MSFT today is one big lumbering clusterfuck, which I blame on a certain marketing drone that needs a good firing, back then they really did help free us from the mess that was proprietary land. Funny now that embrace, extend, extinguish seems to be SOP at MSFT.

And say what you want about Darth Gates, at least the guy knew how to put out a decent business OS. The total bling bling mess that is Vista being dumped onto business users as Vista business is a really bad joke. Which is why there are so many sites showing how to turn 2K3 server into workstation just to get away from that bling bling mess without losing all their apps. MSFT today is just....eeewww. Which is ironic, as that is the noise that my customers make when I tell them Vista is an option on their new PC.

You missed the point. Let us put ourselves in MSFT's shoes. We have a product (Vista) that we actually thought was going to sell big. After all, our previous product (WinXP) sold like mad through both the retail and OEM channels, and so we made a whole warehouse full of retail and system builder boxes and pump up the spin. They way we talk about this thing it is the second coming of Win95....

Ooops......we got a problem. Suddenly we got site after site saying Vista should be avoided and is in fact a flop. The OEMs seem to be agreeing with that as they want to sell WinXP and some start even selling Linux boxes. Now we got some sites saying that Win7 won't be much better. And we STILL have retail shelves and warehouses filled with Vista copies that we thought were going to sell like gangbusters AND our numbers are down. What do we do?

Seems pretty obvious to me, you gotta push out those Vista discs before Win7 hits and makes them as worthless as AOL CDs. But how?By doing what they are doing now with the OEMs. By saying ALL copies of Vista sold after X date gets the free upgrade to Win7, you remove the two biggest hurdles to getting folks to buy your product: That they are going to be stuck with an obsolete OS when you come out with Win7 in the fall and the fact that they hate Vista now. Instead by pushing the Win7 upgrade to the OEMs and ONLY the OEMs, you have just made that warehouse and all those retail shelves full of Vista copies even MORE worthless. Does that make ANY sense? It isn't like they only print Vista discs on demand here. Do they think that ANYBODY is going to buy those discs NOW with 7 coming out in the fall causing the Osborne effect to come into play?

This is just one MORE reason why Ballmer should be fired. Instead of moving as many copies of Vista out of those warehouses in preparation for Win7, and getting more users on the new OS driver design to light a fire under the hardware manufacturers, he instead has virtually guaranteed that the boutique builders, the mom & pop shops, the DIY crowd, the gamer box builders, etc will NOT buy a single copy of Vista. Instead they will stick with the less expensive copies of XP to keep from dumping their clients in a dead end OS. At least with XP they will be supported until 2014, whereas with Vista I have no doubt at all it will be swept under the rug like Winme before it.

I myself just got done building 2 more new XP boxes this evening. If I could have given my customers the free Win7 upgrade in the fall they most likely would have gotten the more expensive Vista Home Premium, as this would have given them the longest support path. Instead all the boxes I build between now and Win7 will ONLY come with the lower priced XP. Frankly boneheaded moves like this is why Ballmer is running the corp into the ground. Mark my words, when Win7 comes out they will be some landfill in New Mexico that will be getting a whole buttload of Vista discs. Because without the free upgrade path they are worth as much as ET carts were back in the day, a big fat $0.00.

One thing about this research paper is that they used only one model MemoRight GT MR25.2 in 8/16/32 GB capacities to do their testing before 2008-11-11 publication of the paper in the United Kingdom.

I'm concerned that the research test and results are largely skewed against SSDs because they used only that one model to do all their testing with based on only one price point for the SSDs.

There is a very large difference in performance between many various SSD drives based on the original flawed JMicron JMF602 chipset (stuttering/freezing on write), newer JMF602B (smaller stuttering), Samsung's chipset, Intel's chipset (fastest random writes by 4x), and the newest Indilnix Barefoot chipset (balanced sequential/random read/write). Additionally the huge drops in prices in the last 6-12 months ($1,500->$400) is a big change in the SSD arena. These price, capacity, and performance changes are going to continue fluctuating for the next few years yielding much better drives for the consumers.

I believe that the research in the paper will be shortly obsolete, if it isn't already, given the latest products on the market and price points and the Q3/Q4 new upcoming products from Intel and others.

I'm helping a friend of mine build an all-in-one HTPC / Desktop / Gaming system and I've been doing research into SSDs for the past few weeks based on reviews and benchmarks so I wanted to share my info.

Basically there are only two drives to consider and I list them below. A good alternative at this time is to purchase smaller SSDs and create RAID-0 (stripping) sets to effectively double their performance instead of buying a single large SSD. The RAID-0 article below shows great benchmark results to this effect.

Intel X25-M

The Intel X25-M series of drives is the top performance leader right now, and the 80GB drive is barely affordable for a desktop system build if you consider the increased performance of the drive.

Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $383.00 USD ($ 4.7875 / per GB)

OCZ Vertex

The new OCZ Vertex series of drives with the newer 1275 firmware is the price/performance leader and they are much more affordable than the Intel drives. When you combine two of these smaller 30/60 GB drives into RAID-0 (stripping) you get double the performance at still acceptable prices.

OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX30G 2.5" 30GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $129.00 USD ($ 4.3 / per GB)

OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $209.00 USD ( $ 3.483 / per GB)

Reviews

Required Reading:
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

AnandTech - Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives

AnandTech - The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved

RAID-0 Performance:
ExtremeTech - Intel X25 80GB Solid-State Drive Review - PCMark Vantage Disk Tests

BenchmarkReviews - OCZ Vertex SSD RAID-0 Performance
(Be Warned about BenchmarkReviews! Synthetic benchmark results only, no real-life benchmarks such as PCMark Vantage.)

Did you read the article?

Nah....

Same hardware.

Oh, and in case you haven't heard, Vista is running much better than it did upon release. So much so, in fact, that it does indeed outperform XP in some areas. Sure, it still sucks for the most part, but I have seen *several* (not just one) benchmarks indicating that Vista is slowly gaining a performance advantage over XP....and that Windows 7 is simply schooling both of them in terms of performance *and* usability.

"Vista and Win7 are KNOWN to thrash and pork about in your hard disk like a nosy schoolgirl"

uh, no? That'd be Vista. Win7...not so much. I am running it on 3 machines at home. Will not go back to XP. Ever. ...and Yes, I bought vista Ultimate...and hate it (and hate MSFT for screwing me on "Extras").
[]

Oh, and yes, extremetech also has benchmarks regarding the vista XP thing. Those are ancient though but they still show Vista edging ahead.

Quick Google search provided: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp

Maybe the lads already commented and we forgot?

"Evo is scheduled to be released on October 20 and Samuels swears it will be ready."
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1989914,00.asp

That was Oct 20, 2006.

Wikipedia claims it was released Nov 2008, with 3000 sold.

God knows the Evo website is useless -- would someone kindly explain if these guys ever shipped anything, and how it relates to the mystery console being discussed now? With Google I'm just seeing a pattern of shifting announce dates and revised specs. Have they ever shipped a box? Anyone got one?

While I think your idea of bringing back plus packs is a GREAT idea, as it would cut the bloat without having 400 fricking versions of the OS, there is another idea from that time I believe they desperately need to bring back as well: The WinNT/Win9x divide. Remember how if you remember how if you wanted a HOME OS you could actually BUY a home OS, and if you just wanted to get your work done there was an actual business OS? Now they put out the same bloated as hell, multimedia choked, bling bling to the top, I want to be OSX so damned bad it hurts OS and just cripple a few features for the home market.

That is NOT a business OS. A Windows business OS is a fugly, plain, low resource using, backwards compatible OS with minimum bells and wells and good GPO management. That is why to this day I still say Win2K Pro was the best business OS MSFT has ever made, and frankly everything since then has been downhill. There wasn't any added themes support or multimedia bling bling junk in the Win2K of goodness. Nope, just fugly Grey solid as a rock business goodness. Of course that is why you have tons of sites that show you how to turn Win2K8 server into a workstation. It is because ever since Vista all the business user(one of the most lucrative and largest markets MSFT has) has gotten from MSFT is the finger. It is also why infoworld is declaring Win7 is going to be yet another dud to the enterprise and SMB markets.

That is why I am making this prediction: Win7 is going to be another dud. MSFT has seemed to forgotten that folks want to use at home what they use at the office. That is why I have many customers that still insist on Win2K or WinXP, because that is what they use at work and that is what they want at home. The only good I foresee coming from Win7 is that they may finally fire that damned monkey Ballmer. He has had the company hopping from one boneheaded idea to another like they have ADHD, and his Apple and Google envy is frankly dragging the company down the toilet. If folks wanted an Apple they would BUY a bloody Apple! But of course I'm not the only one that thinks the best thing that can happen is Ballmer be given his walking papers. Bring back the plus packs and for the love of Deity bring back actual Business OSes. Because the shit they are shoveling now sure as hell don't cut it.

I have to agree. i gave my copy of Vista away that I got for beta testing, and last I heard it is still being passed around like an Xmas fruitcake nobody wants. I tried it again when SP1 came out, hoping it didn't suck. Nope, still sucked. While my computer isn't some elite gamer rig it is a hell of a lot closer to what is still out there by the millions in the real world: A 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 2GB of DDR400 RAM, 750GB IDE, and a Geforce 7600GS OC.

Vista ran like a lame elephant with TB. It thrashed my 200GB OS drive to death, crap I hadn't seen since Win9X like network connectivity just dying and needing a reboot(in this day and age? WTF?) hard drive thrashing for no reason, crappy boot times, hell I could go on all day. And yes I tried all the "tweaks", although it is freaking sad that some think you should actually want an OS you have to work like hell on out of the box, but nope, still sucked. The problem with Vista is if you read Gate's interviews before it came out it was supposed to be "a new OS for next gen hardware" which was MSFT speak for needing 4GHz quad cores with 4GB of RAM just to run half as good as XP. After SP2 XP became a really decent OS, not as good IMHO as Win2K Pro SP4, but a decent OS none the less.

The problem was MSFT bet on Moore's law always being there to save their ass. If you think back and remember that Intel was talking about being able to get Netburst up to 10GHz you can understand why they may have thought that. But they didn't see green computing, or the Netbook/Nettop, or the fact that for most homes/SMBs computers passed the "good enough" level a little over 2GHz. From my experience in PC repair I can tell you the current "sweet spot" seems to be a single core between 2.2GHz and 3.6GHz with 1-2GB of RAM and usually Intel or Nvidia integrated graphics. Vista runs like total crap on a machine with that specs.

They also forgot the Joe and Jane Public often buy a PC based solely on price, and both Intel and AMD were happy to sell Celeron/Sempron based single core machines to the Best Buy/Walmart crowd. It has only been in the past few months that I have seen the low end being taken by dual core, and even then they really aren't anything to write home about. Vista was simply designed for a market that they expected to go nowhere but faster in GHz, but instead went green and multicore. while I hope that Win7 is better, from the articles I have been reading it looks like by the time Win7 reaches RTM it may suck just as bad as Vista.

Maybe they will finally fire Mr Steve "We can be as cool as Apple! Really we can! Stop laughing at me!" Ballmer if Vista7 bombs and get someone in there that remembers MSFT is a BUSINESS OS manufacturer, and Windows is not supposed to be OSX. I don't know what it is with his Apple/Google penis envy, but the man needs help. Seriously. But of course I'm not the only one that thinks MSFT would do better if he wasn't there.

Actually, the DSi will be an mp3 player: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2331546,00.asp
It will also take pictures with the built in camera. It's definitely adding capabilities beyond playing video games. I wouldn't be surprised if apps came out for playing videos down the road.

These may seem far fetched to you, but they are possibilities that become unpossibilities one you start switching devices to non-ubiquitous filesystem. So, here's the bigger question: why close those doors?

Its best to avoid making assumptions as to what someone else may find far fetched, I in no way disagree with the value of interoperabilty. The only reason linux and TomTom use FAT is for interoperability not because Microsoft has some amazing "IP" and everyone wants FAT. However, you do bring up an important point, the bigger question, why close those doors? Considering the threat to all the hardware manufacturers affected by the interoperability issues you highlight it seems its time to dump the dead weight baggage of Microsoft's FAT patent lunacy and bring an open format to ubiquity.

April 16, 2008 ELC: Trends in embedded Linux

Usage of Linux in embedded development projects crossed a threshold this year, with more than 50% of the 812 respondents saying that they are currently using it. Usage of Linux has been growing year over year, but didn't cross the halfway mark until 2008. More than 61% believed their company would be using Linux within the next two years.

December 04 2003 Microsoft to Charge for FAT File System

January 11, 2006 Microsoft's FAT Patent Upheld

January 13, 2006 FAT Patent Means Hardware Dollars For Microsoft

February 20, 2007 Ballmer repeats threats against Linux

February 25, 2009 Microsoft sues TomTom over Linux and other patent claims

Hardware manufacturers are caught in a catch 22, decouple from the Microsoft monopoly and risk losing market as I assume you are suggesting or remain fully engaged in the Microsoft monopoly and have your margins, market, and product plans somewhat dictated by Microsoft.

As someone who has worked in the brutally competitive hardware industry for many years I can see that its time for hardware manufacturers to show some back bone and beat down the fat and lazy leech that Microsoft has become.

Actually calls for his firing have already started. When you see that The Win7 hype is just that, and when it comes to enterprise, which is where the big bucks are and where MSFT has always made boatloads of cash, that Win7 doesn't cut it anymore than Vista, I can't say that I blame them.

We have seen that under his watch he has gone from one idea to another like the whole company has ADHD, with Zune(trying to be Apple), trying to shell out WAY too much money for Yahoo(trying to be Google) and finally his very own Spruce Goose Vista, which even MSFT board members couldn't get to work with programs written by MSFT. His tenure has frankly been nothing but one failure after another, and mark my words, when Win7 comes out it will be just as bloated and slow and sell just as badly as Vista.

What the company desperately needs is a new leader that will focus on their core strengths instead of trying to be Apple. Their big money comes from corporations NOT home users who frankly as long as it doesn't crash and runs their games are happy little campers anyway. Yet instead of releasing a low resource backwards compatible enterprise OS it looks like with Win7 they are AGAIN releasing this giant bloated pig of a multimedia OS with more bling per square inch than something off of "pimp my ride". There is a REASON why you find lots of articles including on MSDN giving step by step instructions on turning Win2K8 into a workstation OS. Because WinVista is too damned bloated to be a good enterprise OS and frankly Win7 will most likely be more of the same.

They had better change their direction, starting with a good firing for Ballmer and the bringing in of someone from Office or Win2K8 that knows business. Because I have never seen this kind of mass abandonment of a MSFT OS ever, even when WinME came out. My customers happily pay me chunks of money to make Vista go away, and more and more SOHOs and SMBs are asking me "what do you know about this Linux thing?" and yet Ballmer still tries to force everyone into this multimedia nightmare of an OS instead of keeping business/home separated like it was for WinNT/Win9x. But he ain't Steve Jobs and Win7 ain't no OSX. If they don't change their direction, which I seriously doubt will happen under Ballmer, then their stock price and sales are going nowhere but down. I mean have you EVER seen companies BRAG about giving you the previous MSFT OS THREE YEARS after the new version came out? Nope, me neither.

Actually Mr too cowardly to even have an account, I am a Windows repairman who has made his living with MSFT products sine the days of Win3.1 and am pretty fucking tired of seeing the company whose products I service and support pissed down the drain by Mr. "I want to be Apple so damned bad it hurts!" Ballmer. Of course I am not the only one that think Mr. Ballmer should be righteously fired for his incompetence, and as it gets closer to relase date we are seeing that Win7 is looking more and more like "Vista SE" instead of the new direction which was sorely needed in the company.

What we NEED is to go back to the division we had during the WinNT/Win9x days, where the business OS was a low resource backwards compatible OS with low system requirements so you don't need a gamer rig for your secretary. What it appears we will get AGAIN is another bloated as hell giant pig of an OS with more bling than you can shake a stick at because Ballmer wants to be Steve Jobs. But news flash, Steve Ballmer ain't Steve Jobs and Windows ain't OSX. You can run Leopard just fine on 5 year old machines, in fact according to my Mac friends they even run a little FASTER with the new version.

Compare that to Windows where you need a dual core with 3GB of RAM just to keep Vista from feeling like a 486 struggling to run Win98. I mean it is pretty fucking sad when I have WinXP running smooth and easy on a 733MHz with 384MB of PC100 RAM and Vista ran like a dead elephant on my 3.6GHz HT enabled P4 with 2Gb of RAM. The Vista codebase either needs to be stripped down and rebuilt or tossed over their shoulder into the trash. The consumer has spoken and they don't want it. Putting lipstick on the pig ain't gonna turn pork chops into steak and it ain't gonna sell Vista SE...errr Win7 either.

If they are determined to be Apple then put out the "Apple extra bling" edition for the home users and give us "Win2K10 Professional" for the business users that just want to get their work done without the bloat. Otherwise all of the businesses who got burned with Vista are going to start looking elsewhere. Why do you think there are all these sites including on MSDN showing how to make 2K8 into a desktop OS? Because for the enterprise Vista ain't cutting it and neither will Win7.

But believe what you will, but mark my words: Win7 will fail,just as Vista did. Then maybe Ballmer will be fired and we will have a decent OS by Win8. But I can't keep buying copies of XP for my customers for forever and they have made it clear there will be NO Vista for them.

If this isn't further proof that Ballmer needs a good firing I don't know what is. Time and time again her has had the company bounce from one idea to the next like the whole corporation has ADHD, and killing flight sim and this which I'm willing to bet were both profitable just not insane "Apple" profitable just shows his incompetence as CEO. I am not alone in this assessment, and more and more sites are coming out daily calling for his head after watching their MSFT investments turn more and more worthless with each failure.

They have forgotten their core markets(Desktop OS and Office), they have stopped listening to their customers and more ominously to businesses where the big money has always been, and instead are flopping all over the place as Ballmer tries to figure out how to defeat Google and Apple in a completely pointless pissing contest. If MSFT is to survive they need a leader which can concentrate on the core business and put out what the customers and more importantly corporations want, which is a low resource using desktop OS in the vein of Win2K/XP Pro. But until Ballmer is thrown out of the big chair we will see nothing but mismanagement from this company.

Linux guys, get your A games ready. This is your chance. I predict Win7 is going to be another Vista sized turkey and the home users and small businesses can't keep buying XP forever. This is your chance to grab a chunk of the market before Ballmer gets fired and they bring someone competent in. Fix the winprinter problem, make an easy GUI that makes finding programs easy(look at click n' run for a good example) and a "SMB edition" distro with built in VB6 support couldn't hurt. This is your chance, make it count. Because we need competition in the market for it to work and with Ballmer in charge all anyone is going to get is bloated OSes with a serious case of Apple envy.

Prove that DRM slows down the OS or STFU. Nobody cares that DRM exists if it doesn't interfere with non-drm scenarios. And that continually monitor nonsense is total bollocks. Only a moron (like you) can believe a wiki article and used it to explain kernel design without any proof.

I dont care that MS allows users who choose to purchase DRM content the ability to play their media.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302495,00.asp

XP and Vista performance is almost identical. Go peddle your FUD somewhere else.

Whats unbelievable is that all these blackhats who are able find security vulnerabilities without access to windows source cant prove this simple thing. Prove that the existence of DRM reduces the performance for non-DRM scenarios. That Wiki article has 0 technical details.

Its simple to bypass DRM - Write your own kernel mode graphics driver. Hasn't ATI made specs available for their cards already? No, its not easy, but it is simple.

He could always try to get them going as Rendering-Farm; or Compiler-Farm for OSS-projects/small distros.

extremetech.com gives some insight on the renderfarm idea.

sourceforge about how to join the sourceforge distributed rendering network

That's on Linux. On Windows Opera is faster than Firefox

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2335250,00.asp

Firefox 3.04 = 222
IE7 = 44
Google Chrome = 2936
Opera = 299
Safari = 229

And that means that a single version - Home Premium - will be offered to consumers, with a separate version - Professional - offered to businesses. Both the Home Professional and Business SKUs will contain discrete features that aren't overlapped to the other.

It sounds like Windows 7 Starter, Enterprise, and Ultimate will only be available as OEM, VLK or as upgrades. I personally don't mind the multiple SKUs, as I use features that most users wouldn't use at the same time, such as Remote Desktop and Media Center. There are very few home users that will know about, let alone use the RDC features of Vista/7, but will use MCE. While very few businesses will use the MCE features, but use RDC. While we can complain as much about Microsoft's pricing, they are a business, and it does make sense for them to charge for additional features.

Rockoon, you are mistaken in a lot of your points. Even if you seem a bit angry, please allow me to explain. (I work for nvidia, but I do not speak for them).

Firstly, in rasterization, 4xAA does mean 4 samples per-pixel. The short version is that 4xAA basically means that we render into buffers that are twice as large in the X and Y direction (so 2*2 is 4), and then resolve the extra pixels with hardware when we go to present the backbuffer into the front buffer.

I can't speak to 4xAA in raytracing, but to be apples-to-apples, it would have to literally be extra rays in the X and Y directions. Note that I'm not claiming there's a 4x performance penalty here, though, because modern ray tracers rely a lot on cache coherency to be performant. Algorithmically, I would agree that there really is a potential for 4x the cost, but algorithmically we don't care about the constants we multiply by, right?

Third, it's important to consider what current cards do because they're the largest install base, and they are what developers will target. It's also important if you believe that hybrid raytracing is the future--almost all modern raytracers use rasterization for the eye rays to try to help with the pixel complexity problem.

Fourth, you are correct. In fact, there are probably relatively few hardware inventions that didn't begin their life as a software implementation--CPUs excepted.

Finally, you are incorrect. Raytracing scales O(pixels) and O(ln(complexity)). Rasterization is relatively constant in the number of pixels, and O(complexity). I agree, scene complexity has gone up considerably (and continues to go up considerably) every generation of new titles. Fortunately, in the same time period rasterization has massively decreased the cost of processing geometry while simultaneously increasing the ability to parallelize those types of workloads. Modern GPUs (like the relatively old 8800 GTX) can process in the neighborhood of 300M visible triangles per second. That means that if you're trying to redraw your scene at 60Hz, you can have around 5M triangles per scene per frame. The closest I've seen of most modern titles is in the 500K-1M range, so I think we still have some head room in this regard. Modern techniques, such as soft shadowing and depth-only passes definitely eat into this count, which is why we're seeing much higher counts than we used to.

Regarding pixel complexity, the number of pixels that matters is more than just the resolution, it's also how many times you'd like to draw those pixels in a given second. Seven years ago, you were lucky to find a CRT that drew 1280x1024 (which is a weird, 5:4 resolution, but I digress) at more than 60 Hz. 85 was reasonably common, but finding a monitor that drew at 1600x1200x85 was pretty rare.

Now, you can find monitors that render at 1920x1200x120 for relatively cheap. And 240 Hz is on the way. That's a lot of pixel data to be moving and redrawing. And speaking from experience, I can say that leveraging coherence within a single frame is hard, and leveraging coherence between frames is virtually unheard of.

It's not that raytracing is an impossible dream, it's just that the GP was correct: it's no panacea.

I'd like to reiterate: though I work for nvidia, I do not speak for them.

Wrong. About the only source you could use to back up that claim would be troll fodder pumped out by the likes of Peter Gutmann, who himself doesn't really have a firm grasp of what he's talking about. As we can see with Modern Benchmarks, Vista can match or even beat XP in terms of performance.

But wait, that can't be. You are stealing me that evil DRM hooks are stealing clock cycles. XP doesn't have those hooks, so how can it do worse in some tests?

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1153609,00.asp

That should account for some of the difference, though not all.

That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.

But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.

These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.

That could be even better than they say. Their reasons for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.

That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.

But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.

These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.

That could be even better than they say. Their reasons for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.

That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.

But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.

These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.

That could be even better than they say. Their reasons for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.

That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.

But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.

These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.

That could be even better than they say. Their reasons for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.

Firstly, he's not bitching about it. To quote TFA:

But Is It Really Worth It?
For a variety of reasons: cost, that "green" feeling, and the idea that I have an asset that generates income on my roof, I personally think it's worth it. Overall, the system has been operating smoothly.

Secondly, if you look at the article he wrote when the system was installed, you'll see that he looked into a variety of options and chose the one that he felt fitted his situation best. It is estimated to pay for itself within 10 years, which seems perfectly sensible to me - as he points out, he's pumping money into an asset that increases the value of his house rather than simply giving it away to the electrical company.

I don't see how it's half-assed, it's working perfectly well, it appears cost-effective so far and he says he's happy with it. You don't seem to be trolling, I don't think, but your post just fails to make sense.

In the U.S., for a grid-connected system, the best locations are places where the electrical peaks are summer air conditioning loads, and in which you can sell the electricity at peak rates during the high-solar-input summer daytimes (or, at least, use the solar electricity when your price is high). This does require that you're getting time-dependent rates and not a flat rate.

From his results in TOA, notice that his electricity use from the grid is almost zero in the summer, but high in the winter. If he gets a price differential between summer (peak) and winter (off peak) rates, that's a significant difference.

print link

Our power usage is unusually high for a typical, four person nuclear family. A big part of that is because I have a PC lab and network in the basement. Both my wife and I work out of the house much of the time, with her time almost 100% in the home office. Plus, we have two teenage girls and a pretty beefy HDTV and home audio setup in the family room.

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D235949,00.asp

Here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp [extremetech.com]

Make sure you read the PCMark, then click Next to go to the Gaming Page. Vista outperforms XP in every test. (The only test it is a couple of points behind is the synthetic 3DMark.)

--

For everyone here that blindly follows ZDNet or other journalist reviews, remember this...

Most of the journalists get free Macs. Apple throws free swag and Macs at journalists at an alarming rate. If you even touch the journalism or publishing industry, you get free Apple products for a reason.

One of best friends works as a sales manager for a semi-small column syndicate, and they offer her a new Mac every six months, and she is just in sales. (And yes they come from Apple, not the publishing companies or syndicates and are given to any employee that will take them in way that make it seem 'acceptable' for even hard core journalists. Thankfully there are a few people that say, "No thank you.")

Remember this the next time you are reading an article and who is behind the articles. Stick to the gamers and 'true' tech sites instead of the Apple swag infested sites. There is a reason the guy at the WSJ or NYT sitting with his new free Mac might write a less than glowing review of something not-Mac.

If you watch 'Colbert', he blatantly makes fun of this aspect of Apple, as everyone in the entertainment and journalism industry knows this; he is just smart enough to use it to get free crap while making fun of it at the same time.

> http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp

There is one problem with gaming tests and Vista:
Traditionally, those tests are run with vsync disabled, because otherwise the performance differences are impossible to see for really fast hardware.
On the other hand, for actually playing, disabling vsync is not an option at least for me.
The problem with Vista now is, that it gets _a lot_ slower when you enable vsync compared to XP, at least 10%, sometimes over 20%.
Does anyone know proper tests of this? I suck at benchmarking, so take my numbers with a large grain of salt, but I have not seen anyone doing vsync/no vsync comparisons.

Here is one.. There are a lot of technical information articles out there about Vista's performance and the RAM threshold. Even if you review MS's own technet their white papers talk about where Vista sucks and where it does well, and the dependence on RAM.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp
(Hit Next to view the Gaming results.)

The only benchmark XP SP3 beats Vista is in the synthetic 3DMark, but the games are faster in Vista, showing that 3DMark isn't as accurate as some would like to believe.

If your installation blew chunks it could have been a couple of simple things.

Things like a bad driver (especially if you didn't get the latest from NVIdia), also things like how Vista optimizes itself and the first impressions are usually bad the first day or two.

(Ya MS was really stupid with the OS optimization process in Vista, as it actually waits so many restarts and application loads before things kick in. - Thankfully Win7 doesn't do this, and optimizes during installation and starts with optimization templates even that are working for you when you first see your desktop on the first boot.)

First impressions are important, and MS didn't seem to remember this at all with Vista from the release to even how the OS optimizes the installation.

---

If I was you, wait for the public beta of Win7, and give it a try. Even for an early beta, you will be surprised how well it does, I promise. And if you are keeping Windows around for gaming, you will really like Windows7.

Scheduler in Vista also performs worse than on XP (so MS had to resort to such hacks: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx [technet.com] ).

Saying this with the link you provide pretty much discredits anything you continue to say.

You have no idea what you are talking about...

Here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp

Make sure you read the PCMark, then click Next to go to the Gaming Page. Vista outperforms XP in every test. (The only test it is a couple of points behind is the synthetic 3DMark.)

And this is SP3 - the fastest XP compared to Vista.

So go on again about how horrible the scheduler is in Vista, I am guessing you don't even know what a scheduler does and especially I know you don't know how it works in NT.

If you want to put your hands over your ears and eyes and keep screaming, "Vista is slower", try clicking your heels together too, it is as likely to make it true and take you to Kansas.

The Vista is slower myths need to stop and the idiocy behind them is really getting annoying.

A link to the printable version: here

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D235406,00.asp

There's your readable version. Seriously, why don't the editors or even the submitters do this?

don't know why the parent is modded offtopic; the 'gamepads' he's referring to are the ones referenced in TFA.

in any case, my experiences with my Logitech wireless mouse/keyboard combo have been less than satisfactory. i don't really game much on my computer, so just want a functional conventional keyboard--no wacky key layouts, macro keys, track pads, etc. and while the Logitech set i have looks and feels great, the software leaves much to be desired.

first of all, i need to run Logitech's SetPoint program in order for most of the non-standard function keys to work. but then whenever i run Adobe Illustrator and use the scroll wheel (on either the mouse or keyboard) with SetPoint running the system makes an annoying beeping noise. i've tried contacting Logitech customer service about the problem to see if they have a fix for it (Illustrator is a pretty popular program after all), but i never received a response.

also, the programmable keys are somewhat limited in their function, and a lot of keys either don't work they way they're supposed to or have annoying behaviors. for instance, there's a "MediaLife" key right next to the volume knob that often gets triggered (at the slightest touch) when adjusting the volume. by default it launches Logitech's crappy media library application, which runs in full screen and takes about 20 seconds to load. and then there's the media player buttons (forward, rewind, pause/play, stop, eject), but they only work with Windows Media Player and WinDVD, and there's no way to program them to work with Winamp, iTunes, BS.Player, or any other media player. and even with Windows Media Player the forward & rewind buttons don't work.

frankly, i wish Logitech would just release open hardware/driver specs so that i could program the keys myself. i mean, they've already been paid for the keyboard/mouse, so should they care how their product is used? it's not like they'll lose money by doing so. they're too incompetent to write decent software, and too lazy to even bother with Linux support, so why not open up the specs so that users can get better use out of their hardware?