Not sure if this is of any use but the Windows 7 32bit Kernel can be hacked to properly support PAE and allow 64GB accessible memory under W7 32bit. W7 32bit was supposed include full PAE support but was nurfed at the last moment due to third party device drivers getting confused over the > 4GB memory space (I never had this issue).
A couple caveats come to mind:
# You have to patch the 32bit Kernel. Linky: http://superuser.com/a/95309 # Although you have access to >4GB of memory, no single process can use more than 4GB (minus graphics card memory)
I have used such a setup under W7 32bit SP1 for the last six months without issue as I needed the extra memory to run multiple VMs simultaneously.
It would have been very funny seeing this proposal being rejected continuously unless you consider that each iteration of the process costs task payers money.
Why are we continuously footing that bill if it has been shown that the treaty has been overwhelmingly rejected?
"SOUP! The goat fetched SOUP!!" "SOUP?!?11one This makes no sense!"
Forgot to mention that Desktop Linux effectively cut me off from my clients:
1. Skype - All my clients using Skype on both Windows and Mac clients. Linux Skype, 2.5beta, doesn't really play nice with its Windows and Mac siblings. Expect video and screen sharing features to fail.
2. Screen sharing. Again, all my clients use join.me, which is requires wine + magic + luck to run.
Don't Bother. Honestly. Linux, although marvellous on the server, is just not ready yet for the desktop.
This is a long winded response. Please bear with me as I give you some background.
I was first bitten by the computing bug in 1984 when I discovered my uncle's Atari 800 and Xenon, which at the time came on a cassette. I've been programming full time since 1988 on successive platforms starting from the Atari ST (1988) and moving up to PCs in 1993, web in 2001 and mobile just a few of years ago. I am adept at least half a dozen computer languages. I custom build all my computing hardware. Basically, I think I know PCs, computing and operating systems pretty well by now.
My last OS was XP, which I kept squeaky clean, fast and efficient. I had that XP install running for six years and it recently got corrupted when one of my memory modules went sour about a month ago.
I took this opportunity change my OS. As much as I loved my XP install, it had several limitations:
1. Microsoft's decision to nerf proper 36bit PAE mode since Windows 2000, artificially limiting the OS to 4GB (minus graphic card memory) was starting to really hurt; mainly because I use virtual machines to do all my development, having dozens of these for various clients and development platforms. ~3GB memory was becoming a pain as I could only load a handful of VMs at any one time.
2. Games. Yes. Gaming drove me to PCs and programming. I was missing out on DX10 and DX11 titles. Again, thanks Microsoft for nerfing XP.
What did I really want? I wanted a 32bit OS that could give me access to 4GB+. I didn't want a 64bit OS as I have no need for it. I don't see 64bit as mainstream. Sure, its a must for video production or crunching big pharma molecular combinations... but for me... 32bit was more than fine.
I wanted to give Linux on the desktop a shot as I knew Linux 3.0+ had proper 32bit PAE support. I work a lot with Linux servers. I love Linux, first bitten by Gentoo in 2002 (I bootstrapped several installs from Gentoo stage 1 - so I am familiar with Linux's gubbins).
These are the distros I tried about a month ago.
1. Linux Mint Debian Edition - 2011.09. I love Debian. Really really love Debian. So I thought LMDE would be perfect. And it almost was. Bar one issue. Debian. For me, Debian is perfect on the server. Very stable. Very slow for updates. Perfect. On the desktop? Not so perfect. Several widgets and apps that I needed would not install on LMDE due to it having older packages based on Debian testing. Also a fresh install of LMDE has serveral problems, mainly a non working swap and hibernation support which reqires abit of tinkering. This is just the tip of the iceberg though as several things don't work after a vanilla install.
2. Ubuntu 11.04. That lasted all of 10 mins as soon as saw Unity.
3. Linux Mint Lisa Gnome. This lasted 30 mins. Linux mint took Gnome 3 and added a few extensions. Gnome 3 still sucks. _Hard_!
4. Linux Mint Lisa KDE. This lasted about five days. KDE 4.8.1 is actually very impressive. And almost perfect. Sadly, its imperfections eat away at you until you start despising it. These range from a plethora of minor bugs, a flaky window manager that often ignores window rules and doesn't understand full screen apps, broken packages that don't install or run correctly and so on. Many of these issues has bug reports dating back to 2009 and 2010... so quick fixes were well beyond the horizon.
One overriding factor turned me away from Desktop Linux: stability. X11 would crash at least once or twice a day, potentially corrupting my VM images as an X11 crash kills any GUI applications relying on it. This is bad as I spend 90% of my time inside a VM. One bad crash could potentially ruin a VM image. This, for me at least, was not acceptable. These VM images range from a couple of Gig to 20GB in size so daily backups were a non starter.
In the end, I bit the bullet and tried Windows 7 32bit with a hacked Kernel which supports 36bit PAE. I now have Wi
A very impressive demo - and nice eye candy right at the start!!
My only problem with this is the sheer SIZE of required QT Libraries.
During the demo, the author downloaded over 25MB of QT Libraries to run some simple applications. 25MB is just too much.
My HTC Desire 2.2 hovers around the 25MB-30MB free space due to having only about 150MB internal memory to play with (the rest of the 256MB is taken up with bloat that came with the phone and cannot be removed).
I guess this will become far more relevant as the next gen phones hit the scene (these typically have >>> 512MB memory).
I can think of no better gift than a telescope. I still remember the day my father gave me a simple Newtonian telescope in the early 80s. It has shaped and directed my inquisitiveness, curiosity and love of science ever since.
>like the free Deep Sky Stacker to align them into a final image with total exposure time equal to all the shots combines
This is excellent advice on getting a much improved image quality but do note that stacking images will not give you the same results as a single image using the combined stack times.
In other words, if each image in the stack is 20 seconds then 10 stacked images will not give you an equivalent of a 200 second exposure.
Stacking 10 images simply improves the image quality by removing hot pixels. The result, however, is still a 20 second exposure.
The single 200 second exposure image will contain fainter objects (and more noise) when compared to the stacked 20 second image.
I generally do 80 hours coding/debugging documentation (over 6 days) across three projects and two programming languages (five if you count HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and Delphi as separate languages).
I do find that by day six I am mentally exhausted and need a day off, which means no PC time at all.
A day off used to mean playing with a side project... but that got too exhausting.
I don't know if its me (I'm getting jaded and cynical in my old age) but I do keep wondering how Oracle's takeover will affect Sun's OS efforts.
The only reason I mention this is that there has been a noticeable (at least IMHO) change in VirtualBox development. Since the Oracle takeover, VirtualBox development seems to have changed direction or slowed down... I can't really put my finger on it but something noticeable has happened. I don't if the core devs have been affected/left or what.... but certain VirtualBox issues, issues you might think would be simple to fix, have remained unfixed for the last couple of months.
Again, I'm not too sure if Netbeans (I haven't used Netbeans for 6+ months) is affected.
Has anyone else noticed any shifts in Sun's OS offerings?
I know this might come across as flame bait... but please bear with me.
I firmly believe that Microsoft has had a big hand in killing off PC gaming, despite having a big hand in standardising 3D APIs; hands up here who remembers the first 3DFX and Rendition Verite cards... each had their own APIs. It was a mess until DirectX came along...
Then Microsoft goes and kills it all with shenanigans such as making Halo 2 DX10 (and Vista) only when there was no technical reason for to do so. One has to simply fire up Halo2 on XP via WoWLoader to see that Halo2 works fine under DX9 (and runs 30% faster when compared to Vista).
That one experience convinced me that this was the day PC gaming truly died.
Since then a couple of gems have come along (Torchlight.... Borderlands) but the majority have been Console ports or just rehashed iterations of the same FPS games.
Shame since console gaming (yes I have one) these days mostly concentrates on FPS titles... which is shocking considering how utterly SHIT console controllers are at FPS games (good luck with that head shot) when compared to PC mouse based controls. Titles such as Fable 2 and Sacred, which I can multiplay locally with my wife (we are both Diablo addicts) are very far and few between.
I am just wondering if these oppressive regimes wouldn't have such a hard time subjugating their populace if the West wasn't supplying them with the means to exert their power.
Is the Iranian government technically able to censor/throttle the Interwebs? No. Most likely some US or European publicly owned company is supplying the technical capability to do this.
Does anybody know who this is as I for one would like to know and boycott their products.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if this is of any use but the Windows 7 32bit Kernel can be hacked to properly support PAE and allow 64GB accessible memory under W7 32bit. W7 32bit was supposed include full PAE support but was nurfed at the last moment due to third party device drivers getting confused over the > 4GB memory space (I never had this issue).
A couple caveats come to mind:
# You have to patch the 32bit Kernel. Linky: http://superuser.com/a/95309
# Although you have access to >4GB of memory, no single process can use more than 4GB (minus graphics card memory)
I have used such a setup under W7 32bit SP1 for the last six months without issue as I needed the extra memory to run multiple VMs simultaneously.
HTH and good luck!
.. is the most abused word... as was the word, "leverage" a few years ago.
It beggars belief that a company would take out a patent on a diagnosis mechanism that could save lives.
Are patents worth more that a person's life?
task payers = tax payers.... sigh... I should stop reading /. and get back to JIRA.
It would have been very funny seeing this proposal being rejected continuously unless you consider that each iteration of the process costs task payers money.
Why are we continuously footing that bill if it has been shown that the treaty has been overwhelmingly rejected?
"SOUP! The goat fetched SOUP!!"
"SOUP?!?11one This makes no sense!"
It was recently reported that Irises actually change over time. This begs the question of how accurate this data will be in 5 years? 10 years?
Forgot to mention that Desktop Linux effectively cut me off from my clients:
1. Skype - All my clients using Skype on both Windows and Mac clients. Linux Skype, 2.5beta, doesn't really play nice with its Windows and Mac siblings. Expect video and screen sharing features to fail.
2. Screen sharing. Again, all my clients use join.me, which is requires wine + magic + luck to run.
Don't Bother. Honestly. Linux, although marvellous on the server, is just not ready yet for the desktop.
This is a long winded response. Please bear with me as I give you some background.
I was first bitten by the computing bug in 1984 when I discovered my uncle's Atari 800 and Xenon, which at the time came on a cassette. I've been programming full time since 1988 on successive platforms starting from the Atari ST (1988) and moving up to PCs in 1993, web in 2001 and mobile just a few of years ago. I am adept at least half a dozen computer languages. I custom build all my computing hardware. Basically, I think I know PCs, computing and operating systems pretty well by now.
My last OS was XP, which I kept squeaky clean, fast and efficient. I had that XP install running for six years and it recently got corrupted when one of my memory modules went sour about a month ago.
I took this opportunity change my OS. As much as I loved my XP install, it had several limitations:
1. Microsoft's decision to nerf proper 36bit PAE mode since Windows 2000, artificially limiting the OS to 4GB (minus graphic card memory) was starting to really hurt; mainly because I use virtual machines to do all my development, having dozens of these for various clients and development platforms. ~3GB memory was becoming a pain as I could only load a handful of VMs at any one time.
2. Games. Yes. Gaming drove me to PCs and programming. I was missing out on DX10 and DX11 titles. Again, thanks Microsoft for nerfing XP.
What did I really want? I wanted a 32bit OS that could give me access to 4GB+. I didn't want a 64bit OS as I have no need for it. I don't see 64bit as mainstream. Sure, its a must for video production or crunching big pharma molecular combinations... but for me... 32bit was more than fine.
I wanted to give Linux on the desktop a shot as I knew Linux 3.0+ had proper 32bit PAE support. I work a lot with Linux servers. I love Linux, first bitten by Gentoo in 2002 (I bootstrapped several installs from Gentoo stage 1 - so I am familiar with Linux's gubbins).
These are the distros I tried about a month ago.
1. Linux Mint Debian Edition - 2011.09. I love Debian. Really really love Debian. So I thought LMDE would be perfect. And it almost was. Bar one issue. Debian. For me, Debian is perfect on the server. Very stable. Very slow for updates. Perfect. On the desktop? Not so perfect. Several widgets and apps that I needed would not install on LMDE due to it having older packages based on Debian testing. Also a fresh install of LMDE has serveral problems, mainly a non working swap and hibernation support which reqires abit of tinkering. This is just the tip of the iceberg though as several things don't work after a vanilla install.
2. Ubuntu 11.04. That lasted all of 10 mins as soon as saw Unity.
3. Linux Mint Lisa Gnome. This lasted 30 mins. Linux mint took Gnome 3 and added a few extensions. Gnome 3 still sucks. _Hard_!
4. Linux Mint Lisa KDE. This lasted about five days. KDE 4.8.1 is actually very impressive. And almost perfect. Sadly, its imperfections eat away at you until you start despising it. These range from a plethora of minor bugs, a flaky window manager that often ignores window rules and doesn't understand full screen apps, broken packages that don't install or run correctly and so on. Many of these issues has bug reports dating back to 2009 and 2010... so quick fixes were well beyond the horizon.
One overriding factor turned me away from Desktop Linux: stability. X11 would crash at least once or twice a day, potentially corrupting my VM images as an X11 crash kills any GUI applications relying on it. This is bad as I spend 90% of my time inside a VM. One bad crash could potentially ruin a VM image. This, for me at least, was not acceptable. These VM images range from a couple of Gig to 20GB in size so daily backups were a non starter.
In the end, I bit the bullet and tried Windows 7 32bit with a hacked Kernel which supports 36bit PAE. I now have Wi
... Going Forward... /me throws up
... for the simple and painful reason that much of the web, even to this day, is built to account for IE6....
A very impressive demo - and nice eye candy right at the start!!
My only problem with this is the sheer SIZE of required QT Libraries.
During the demo, the author downloaded over 25MB of QT Libraries to run some simple applications. 25MB is just too much.
My HTC Desire 2.2 hovers around the 25MB-30MB free space due to having only about 150MB internal memory to play with (the rest of the 256MB is taken up with bloat that came with the phone and cannot be removed).
I guess this will become far more relevant as the next gen phones hit the scene (these typically have >>> 512MB memory).
Still, very very very impressive.
Batman. Every. Single. Time.
"I see you do much working with the spice... you make paper... plastics... and isn't that chemical explosives?"....
I can think of no better gift than a telescope. I still remember the day my father gave me a simple Newtonian telescope in the early 80s. It has shaped and directed my inquisitiveness, curiosity and love of science ever since.
>like the free Deep Sky Stacker to align them into a final image with total exposure time equal to all the shots combines
This is excellent advice on getting a much improved image quality but do note that stacking images will not give you the same results as a single image using the combined stack times.
In other words, if each image in the stack is 20 seconds then 10 stacked images will not give you an equivalent of a 200 second exposure.
Stacking 10 images simply improves the image quality by removing hot pixels. The result, however, is still a 20 second exposure.
The single 200 second exposure image will contain fainter objects (and more noise) when compared to the stacked 20 second image.
RUN ON LINUX???
Sorry but W7 is NOT faster than XP
I generally do 80 hours coding/debugging documentation (over 6 days) across three projects and two programming languages (five if you count HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and Delphi as separate languages).
I do find that by day six I am mentally exhausted and need a day off, which means no PC time at all.
A day off used to mean playing with a side project... but that got too exhausting.
I was at my local HSBC Bank branch in the UK a few years ago and spied OS/2 in use by their staff as part of their load/mortgage assessment "wizard".
It was either OS/2 or Windows 3.1....
This was around 2005/2006?
I don't know if its me (I'm getting jaded and cynical in my old age) but I do keep wondering how Oracle's takeover will affect Sun's OS efforts.
The only reason I mention this is that there has been a noticeable (at least IMHO) change in VirtualBox development. Since the Oracle takeover, VirtualBox development seems to have changed direction or slowed down... I can't really put my finger on it but something noticeable has happened. I don't if the core devs have been affected/left or what.... but certain VirtualBox issues, issues you might think would be simple to fix, have remained unfixed for the last couple of months.
Again, I'm not too sure if Netbeans (I haven't used Netbeans for 6+ months) is affected.
Has anyone else noticed any shifts in Sun's OS offerings?
I know this might come across as flame bait... but please bear with me.
I firmly believe that Microsoft has had a big hand in killing off PC gaming, despite having a big hand in standardising 3D APIs; hands up here who remembers the first 3DFX and Rendition Verite cards... each had their own APIs. It was a mess until DirectX came along...
Then Microsoft goes and kills it all with shenanigans such as making Halo 2 DX10 (and Vista) only when there was no technical reason for to do so. One has to simply fire up Halo2 on XP via WoWLoader to see that Halo2 works fine under DX9 (and runs 30% faster when compared to Vista).
That one experience convinced me that this was the day PC gaming truly died.
Since then a couple of gems have come along (Torchlight.... Borderlands) but the majority have been Console ports or just rehashed iterations of the same FPS games.
Shame since console gaming (yes I have one) these days mostly concentrates on FPS titles... which is shocking considering how utterly SHIT console controllers are at FPS games (good luck with that head shot) when compared to PC mouse based controls. Titles such as Fable 2 and Sacred, which I can multiplay locally with my wife (we are both Diablo addicts) are very far and few between.
PC Gaming -> RIP
Jumped the gun there fella! April's Fool day is still over a week away.
I recall the same issue with the Ubuntu and the Ruby community over RubyGems.
Ubuntu packagers would have preferred the use of APT instead of RubyGems for Gem installations, despite the fact that APT's lagged behind RubyGems.
I am just wondering if these oppressive regimes wouldn't have such a hard time subjugating their populace if the West wasn't supplying them with the means to exert their power.
Is the Iranian government technically able to censor/throttle the Interwebs? No. Most likely some US or European publicly owned company is supplying the technical capability to do this.
Does anybody know who this is as I for one would like to know and boycott their products.
Yes Yes! But does it run on Linux?