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Vista - iPod Killer?
JMB wrote us with a dire warning, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News. Apple is cautioning its Windows-using iTunes customers to steer clear of Vista until the next iTunes update. The reason for this is a bit puzzling. Apparently, if you try to 'safely remove' your iPod from a Vista-installed PC, there's a chance you may corrupt the little music player. They also claim that songs may not play, and contacts may not sync with the device. Apple went so far as to release a detailed support document on the subject, which assures users that a new Vista-compatible version of the software will be available in a few weeks. Is this just some very creative FUD? If it is not who do you think is 'at fault' here, Microsoft or Apple?
Win2K had write-caching (lazy writes) on by default, consequently you needed to use the "Safely Remove" option to flush any open file buffers to disk. XP has write-caching OFF by default, so it isn't quite so necessary: just make sure your access LED stops flickering before you yank your stick out.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You are trivializing this. I recently built a PC with 4 GB of RAM, and have been introduced to the world of pain this means in the mainstream PC world. Starting with the fact many boards only have two slots, and 2 MB chips are incredibly expensive, next on to BIOS compatibility issues, then on to operating system compatibility issues. Maybe in a year this will be a non issue, but for now it's painful, and it means so many more PCs are effectively obsoleted by "improvements" that can't even be explained clearly. http://www.chrisjordan.com/
It might not be much of an improvement for you, but if you can stand to use Winamp5 (or use it already anyway) there is a plugin that allows it to sync with the iPod. It works a lot better and has more features than iTunes, including the ability to take songs off an iPod. Still short of true drag and drop compatibility, but that's all Apples doing trying to tie iTunes and the iPod together (thus getting more market penetration for their ITMS).
http://www.mlipod.com/
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The songs are stored in a hidden folder: /iPod_Control/iTunes/Music/ or something like that. No separate partitions required; just enable the viewing of hidden files, and you're good to go. Be warned, however, that iTunes renames files to random 4 letter names for database efficiency (which is why you can't just drag and drop music and whatnot; iTunes (or another third party program) edits and builds the database for the iPod, and the iPod just reads the database).
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
because http://rockbox.org/ has software to put in new firmware avoiding this big mess. I agree that it should just be usb mass storage device. This site can make that happen.
someone mod this up for "the peoples". I've hunted for something other then Apple's filename switching firmware for a while now. Easy drag and drop songs and delete/rename them from the ipod. There are even themes to make the ipod look like winamp or other skins from users.
rock box is like firefox for yer Ipod. Open code wins again!
"but if you can stand to use Winamp5"
I can't stand to use anything but Winamp! Well, that's not true, but I won't go anywhere near the limited functionality that is iTunes. No ogg vorbis support out of the box, etc.
there is a plugin that allows it to sync with the iPod
The newest versions of winamp5 include an updated version of this plug-in by default.
Another great reason to use winamp5 with your ipod is that it'll transcode songs that the ipod firmware can't handle for you. (yes I know it's bad.. but I don't notice the difference when I'm jogging) So all those wma's & ogg vorbis files will at least be playable on your yet again limiting apple ipod.
if you really wanted to make your ipod useful, you should check out rockbox.org
What are you doing? Looking at task manager?
Task manager never was and still isn't an accurate picture of physical memory in use. It's total combined address space, it duplicates the counts for standard system dlls, it counts stacks that are reserved but not committed - and among other things microsoft significantly increased the default (reserved) stack size for every thread of every process in Vista to decrease the incidence of stack overflow problems in applications. This doesn't cost any "real" memory, though it does cost address space within a process. Processes which may actually run out of address space on a 32-bit machine (like server apps) typically specify the stack sizes they want, and they are lower than the OS default. Server apps are rapidly moving to 64-bit anyway where this is a non-issue (for now).
Now, Vista *does* consume significantly more memory than XP at idle, and certainly needs more memory to run well - but it's not using 544mb without any apps running and, remarkably, it is extremely difficult to answer the question "how much memory is in use" in part because that question isn't specific enough to give an answer.
- Pages in memory?
- Does cache count (windows uses *everything* left as a cache, and in Vista it proactively fills that cache before you even run apps based on your page-usage-history, that is, what apps you tend to run though vista is not considering "applications" here but rather a much more generic concept of image-backed pages)
- Does it count if it's been written to the page file but is still in memory as well (like most OS's, windows proactively writes out private pages to the pagefile before it really needs to so that it can free physical memory quickly when needed - this also helps the system reach hybrid sleep state faster)
- Does it count if it's image-backed (sharable)? What if it's still in memory? What if it was never read into memory or was read into memory at process start and will never be touched again, thrown away as soon as memory pressure reqires it?
There is no easy answer other than "add memory until it performs well" and for Vista that seems to be a minnimum of 1GB, depending on the system, more "real" graphics card memory lowers the requirement, slower hard drives (and thus greater need for caching) increase the requirement.