Just got the word that the desktop team is pushing out Window 7. Unfortunately, there are "a couple" of printers that they couldn't get working 64b drivers for. So they are pushing the 32b version out to everyone...
Blows my mind... It would cost at most a $5000 to replace those printers, compared to the cost of 600+ copies of Windows 7. Crazy.
-Rick
Considering everywhere I've been plans on staying on XP forever, I'd consider 7-32 bit a good step. The machines can always be switched to 64 bit.
The vast majority of Windows desktops are still running the 32-bit version of Windows XP, and that's not going to change until businesses decide they have a compelling reason to upgrade.
Ah, you mean in a year or two when the machine is upgraded.
My brand new work PC from December with 4GB of RAM has a Windows 7 sticker and CoA key. Around me are coworkers with slightly older models and Vista CoA keys. Yet, the company still runs XP, and I haven't heard of any migration plans.
Or they will implement something after the axe falls, but alpha or at best beta quality. When users call in griping how their product doesn't work, the company will say it was MS who did this. Vista got a lot of flack from lazy development houses because they would not bother making their stuff UAC compatible, or even writing solid drivers for Vista's driver model, blaming any crashes and blue screens on MS.
It is funny how on every other platform but Windows, should a major shift happen, devs gripe, but they deal with it. On Windows, just getting companies to separate user/superuser code causes a major trainwreck because the software companies (or the offshore code sweatshops) are too lazy to deal with it.
I agree that's a reason Vista got a lot of flak. Another reason is OEM preloads. The performance hogging junk the likes of HP preinstall is amazing. NIS 2007/2008 were probably the worst, and right during Vista's prime. An unactivated NIS trial with no tray icons or indication it was running doubled the boot time. I also saw a recent HP i7 laptop with Windows 7 preloaded and it took 5 minutes to boot. Ridiculous. Of course when these computers are downgraded to a fresh blank version of XP, of course it will run better.
BTW, one thing not reflected in pure breakdown of user distribution, is that those "50%" of 64-bit users are the FAR more important ones when it comes to marketing. Users stuck behind the technology train are simply not worth catering to, generally.
Interesting point. Microsoft is cutting XP off of "Windows Live" and IE9, however they released Office 2010 for XP as well. Presumably because of the glacial uptake of Vista or newer in the business world, but generally good uptake of Office 2007.
Windows XP SP3 requires 1GB of memory in the system, SP2 required about 512MB. This is not mentioned anywhere in the SP3 notes that I could find.
That's because it's a figure you made up by yourself. Without any third party tools, the system requirements of Windows XP remain the same as when RTM rolled out in 2001. 64 MB bare minimum (which means it will basically boot), 128MB recommended (which means it will boot in under a day). I have several PIII machines with 256MB RAM that hum along with XP-SP3 quite well. The problem with requirements isn't so much Windows as third party software. Websites have richer and richer content (flash, Javascript) that can take an old machine to it's knees, on-access AV solutions considered "light" on new machines can have a huge performance hit on an older machine. Yet Office 2007, and even Office 2010 still perform better on these machines than Open Office.
Except in most cases the product is created by artists, but for some reason "owned" by the people who print CDs; doesn't actually seem all that fair.
The "some reason" is the artist goes to a publisher who will take on the potential risk of the artist, and invest in marketing the artist. In exchange the publisher "owns" the rights, and will share with the artist as per the contract. In some cases the artist may get an absurdly small share, but they agreed to it. Different artists choose different routes of how they want to publish. Nothing stops the artist from being self-published, and indeed the Internet has helped small artists get a broader audience.
The model numbers are dct6200 (not DCT3416) for the standard issue hi def and dct2524 for low def. The DCT2524 uses 15W whether on or "off. I don't care if there's capability of DVR, they shouldn't use full power when "off".
The box is hooked up to the TV by component. The TV's CC decoder can decode analog channels, on 480i digital channels the TV's decoder will show a high level of error, and on high def the TV shows nothing, forcing you to rely on the unintuitive CC system will hideous, barely legible text.
Further on the horrible UI is the on demand feature. Titles are cut off at like 16 characters, even if there's plenty of space to view it. Though my expectations were set low when the instructions for the volume lock feature on the remote talks about "not having to guess at whether the volume will change"
100W per box is way high; the model Comcast gave me (the Motorola DTA100) uses 5.37 watts while on, per the manufacturer. Not nothing, but over an order of magnitude better than you're claiming.
My cable box, what looks like a Motorola DCT3416 (don't have the unit in front of me) uses about 40W of power whether the unit is on or not. Neither Motorola nor the cable company care about the fact that it adds $4 per month to the power bill. Nor do they care that the UI is an utter disaster. For example, to turn on or off Closed captioning, you have to turn off the unit, press menu, and access it in the service menu. You can't just use the TV's CC decoder because it's garbled on digital channels from the box.
I know how to use USB storage and you don't need any fancy "floppy to usb" converter. You can format a flash drive as a floppy and write a floppy image to it if you really need to. I have a utility from HP that does that.
I'm talking about using it for legacy equipment (386, 486) still used in CNC machines, etc that don't have USB ports and rely on a floppy workflow.
But UBCD4Win uses PROPRIETARY AV solutions. ClamWin is clearly better solely based on the fact that it's open source, even if detection rates are poor or unknown compared to proprietary solutions.
Just the thing you want to be doing firmware flash from, a highly unreliable, painfully slow technology. After doing a BIOS flash from a.BIN file direct from a flash drive, I'd never want to do a floppy flash again (actually I wouldn't want to do one in the first place). Learn to create USB bootable drives. Why limit yourself to uselessly small, painfully slow floppy when you can have 2GB (or more) for cheap. You can boot to DOS if you want for firmware flashes.
One of the last times I used a floppy was to kickstart OS installation on an ancient laptop that couldn't boot straight from CD. It took seven disks before I could get one that would work. Next time if I have to rebuild that system, I'm going to take the laptop apart, take the hard drive out, and put it USB->SATA/IDE adapter. Much less painful.
Most old technologies I can be nostalgic about, but floppies? Good riddance! I hated them 20 years ago when I first used them, and I still hate them now. I only wish for the sanity of ancient CNC operators and similar these adapters saw some more acceptance: http://floppytousb.blogspot.com/2009/08/floppy-to-usb-readerthe-perfect-upgrade.html Connected to the floppy controller, then on the faceplate provided an SD or USB slot, from which a floppy image file would be mounted direct to the hardware. Bring the flash drive back to an ordinary PC, and mount the image file in software. Throw away all that unreliable junk.
My $20 Microsoft Mouse is nine and a half years old. It's a native USB mouse that came with a USB->PS/2 adapter. What kind of old PS/2 mouse are you clinging on to?
If there's an old PS/2 peripheral you want to hang on to, perhaps a model M keyboard, $12 PS/2->USB adapters exist. I've seen them used for PS/2 industrial interfaces connected to newer computers.
. Despite DVI being out for a while, VGA connectors are still strong.
Many low end laptops (including Netbooks) have VGA Output only. Many LCD projector setups are run by VGA. I've seen new 21.5" 1920x1080 monitors with VGA input ONLY.
Even at work, I have two monitors, both with VGA and DVI inputs. The Computer has Native DVI output (and HDMI), yet they connect the monitors with a DVI-dual VGA adapter, and the ghosting is terrible. Incidentally the computers also have LPT ports which aren't used for anything.
Even my EeePC flashes the BIOS like this. At boot press Alt+F2 and it pulls the BIOS file off the USB drive. No floppies, no making USB drives bootable, no Windows utilities.
Driver wise I've had good luck with Windows 7. As long as there's a functioning network interface Windows update will pull in drivers for almost any attached devices.
Getting Windows to work from scratch takes ages, especially when you use anything that a is a bit non-mainstream. . .
getting all the apps you want to run is a hell of a lot easier when you can just do "apt-get install " instead of googling around.
Getting non-mainstream things going on linux is a lot harder than "apt-get install"
American Megatrends as I recall had the graphical UI for the BIOS. I had one in a custom built PC ~1996 and an eMachine ~2000. But yeah, this is EFI which completely replaces the BIOS subsystem with something that doesn't make a quad core i7 think its an 8086 at boot.
But don't dare criticize them for acting unprofessional, trying to milk the story, or otherwise disagree with them. They will ban or unstar you at a moment's notice.
Every fucking day they had an article summarizing the iPhone 4 coverage. Even if there was no actual new content. There were only ever two articles. The first one breaking the news, and then a second on where they showed a tear-down. But what do you expect from a firm that destroys presentations and displays at trade shows with TV-B-gone.
It's interesting how their tone changed. They used to sit around and wax and masturbate at great lengths about anything Apple. Now, not so much. Though it seems they all but forgot that computex was on this week.
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Just got the word that the desktop team is pushing out Window 7. Unfortunately, there are "a couple" of printers that they couldn't get working 64b drivers for. So they are pushing the 32b version out to everyone...
Blows my mind... It would cost at most a $5000 to replace those printers, compared to the cost of 600+ copies of Windows 7. Crazy.
-Rick
Considering everywhere I've been plans on staying on XP forever, I'd consider 7-32 bit a good step. The machines can always be switched to 64 bit.
The vast majority of Windows desktops are still running the 32-bit version of Windows XP, and that's not going to change until businesses decide they have a compelling reason to upgrade.
Ah, you mean in a year or two when the machine is upgraded.
My brand new work PC from December with 4GB of RAM has a Windows 7 sticker and CoA key. Around me are coworkers with slightly older models and Vista CoA keys. Yet, the company still runs XP, and I haven't heard of any migration plans.
Atom N270 and N280 are 32 bit.
Or they will implement something after the axe falls, but alpha or at best beta quality. When users call in griping how their product doesn't work, the company will say it was MS who did this. Vista got a lot of flack from lazy development houses because they would not bother making their stuff UAC compatible, or even writing solid drivers for Vista's driver model, blaming any crashes and blue screens on MS.
It is funny how on every other platform but Windows, should a major shift happen, devs gripe, but they deal with it. On Windows, just getting companies to separate user/superuser code causes a major trainwreck because the software companies (or the offshore code sweatshops) are too lazy to deal with it.
I agree that's a reason Vista got a lot of flak. Another reason is OEM preloads. The performance hogging junk the likes of HP preinstall is amazing. NIS 2007/2008 were probably the worst, and right during Vista's prime. An unactivated NIS trial with no tray icons or indication it was running doubled the boot time. I also saw a recent HP i7 laptop with Windows 7 preloaded and it took 5 minutes to boot. Ridiculous. Of course when these computers are downgraded to a fresh blank version of XP, of course it will run better.
And of course this doesn't necessarily mean compiling 64 bit versions, but at least making sure your 32 bit version runs happily on 64 bit.
BTW, one thing not reflected in pure breakdown of user distribution, is that those "50%" of 64-bit users are the FAR more important ones when it comes to marketing. Users stuck behind the technology train are simply not worth catering to, generally.
Interesting point. Microsoft is cutting XP off of "Windows Live" and IE9, however they released Office 2010 for XP as well. Presumably because of the glacial uptake of Vista or newer in the business world, but generally good uptake of Office 2007.
Windows XP SP3 requires 1GB of memory in the system, SP2 required about 512MB. This is not mentioned anywhere in the SP3 notes that I could find.
That's because it's a figure you made up by yourself. Without any third party tools, the system requirements of Windows XP remain the same as when RTM rolled out in 2001. 64 MB bare minimum (which means it will basically boot), 128MB recommended (which means it will boot in under a day). I have several PIII machines with 256MB RAM that hum along with XP-SP3 quite well. The problem with requirements isn't so much Windows as third party software. Websites have richer and richer content (flash, Javascript) that can take an old machine to it's knees, on-access AV solutions considered "light" on new machines can have a huge performance hit on an older machine. Yet Office 2007, and even Office 2010 still perform better on these machines than Open Office.
Except in most cases the product is created by artists, but for some reason "owned" by the people who print CDs; doesn't actually seem all that fair.
The "some reason" is the artist goes to a publisher who will take on the potential risk of the artist, and invest in marketing the artist. In exchange the publisher "owns" the rights, and will share with the artist as per the contract. In some cases the artist may get an absurdly small share, but they agreed to it. Different artists choose different routes of how they want to publish. Nothing stops the artist from being self-published, and indeed the Internet has helped small artists get a broader audience.
The model numbers are dct6200 (not DCT3416) for the standard issue hi def and dct2524 for low def. The DCT2524 uses 15W whether on or "off. I don't care if there's capability of DVR, they shouldn't use full power when "off".
The box is hooked up to the TV by component. The TV's CC decoder can decode analog channels, on 480i digital channels the TV's decoder will show a high level of error, and on high def the TV shows nothing, forcing you to rely on the unintuitive CC system will hideous, barely legible text.
Further on the horrible UI is the on demand feature. Titles are cut off at like 16 characters, even if there's plenty of space to view it. Though my expectations were set low when the instructions for the volume lock feature on the remote talks about "not having to guess at whether the volume will change"
100W per box is way high; the model Comcast gave me (the Motorola DTA100) uses 5.37 watts while on, per the manufacturer. Not nothing, but over an order of magnitude better than you're claiming.
My cable box, what looks like a Motorola DCT3416 (don't have the unit in front of me) uses about 40W of power whether the unit is on or not. Neither Motorola nor the cable company care about the fact that it adds $4 per month to the power bill. Nor do they care that the UI is an utter disaster. For example, to turn on or off Closed captioning, you have to turn off the unit, press menu, and access it in the service menu. You can't just use the TV's CC decoder because it's garbled on digital channels from the box.
You can always use an SD card. Obviously I wouldn't trust my sole copy of my photos in a card in a kiosk, but you can use it as a read only card.
I know how to use USB storage and you don't need any fancy "floppy to usb" converter. You can format a flash drive as a floppy and write a floppy image to it if you really need to. I have a utility from HP that does that.
I'm talking about using it for legacy equipment (386, 486) still used in CNC machines, etc that don't have USB ports and rely on a floppy workflow.
But UBCD4Win uses PROPRIETARY AV solutions. ClamWin is clearly better solely based on the fact that it's open source, even if detection rates are poor or unknown compared to proprietary solutions.
Just the thing you want to be doing firmware flash from, a highly unreliable, painfully slow technology. After doing a BIOS flash from a .BIN file direct from a flash drive, I'd never want to do a floppy flash again (actually I wouldn't want to do one in the first place). Learn to create USB bootable drives. Why limit yourself to uselessly small, painfully slow floppy when you can have 2GB (or more) for cheap. You can boot to DOS if you want for firmware flashes.
One of the last times I used a floppy was to kickstart OS installation on an ancient laptop that couldn't boot straight from CD. It took seven disks before I could get one that would work. Next time if I have to rebuild that system, I'm going to take the laptop apart, take the hard drive out, and put it USB->SATA/IDE adapter. Much less painful.
Most old technologies I can be nostalgic about, but floppies? Good riddance! I hated them 20 years ago when I first used them, and I still hate them now. I only wish for the sanity of ancient CNC operators and similar these adapters saw some more acceptance: http://floppytousb.blogspot.com/2009/08/floppy-to-usb-readerthe-perfect-upgrade.html Connected to the floppy controller, then on the faceplate provided an SD or USB slot, from which a floppy image file would be mounted direct to the hardware. Bring the flash drive back to an ordinary PC, and mount the image file in software. Throw away all that unreliable junk.
That would be a 486DX.
My $20 Microsoft Mouse is nine and a half years old. It's a native USB mouse that came with a USB->PS/2 adapter. What kind of old PS/2 mouse are you clinging on to?
If there's an old PS/2 peripheral you want to hang on to, perhaps a model M keyboard, $12 PS/2->USB adapters exist. I've seen them used for PS/2 industrial interfaces connected to newer computers.
My life would be complete if I never have to use a floppy ever again.
. Despite DVI being out for a while, VGA connectors are still strong.
Many low end laptops (including Netbooks) have VGA Output only. Many LCD projector setups are run by VGA. I've seen new 21.5" 1920x1080 monitors with VGA input ONLY.
Even at work, I have two monitors, both with VGA and DVI inputs. The Computer has Native DVI output (and HDMI), yet they connect the monitors with a DVI-dual VGA adapter, and the ghosting is terrible. Incidentally the computers also have LPT ports which aren't used for anything.
Even my EeePC flashes the BIOS like this. At boot press Alt+F2 and it pulls the BIOS file off the USB drive. No floppies, no making USB drives bootable, no Windows utilities.
Meanwhile Bill Gates is talking about 640kB RAM.
So Steve Ballmer rips the seat out of a car and throws it at stewbacca's first post.
I've never "wanted" to use a floppy drive. "Been required to" or "forced to" yes, but never wanted.
Getting Windows to work from scratch takes ages, especially when you use anything that a is a bit non-mainstream. . .
getting all the apps you want to run is a hell of a lot easier when you can just do "apt-get install " instead of googling around.
Getting non-mainstream things going on linux is a lot harder than "apt-get install"
American Megatrends as I recall had the graphical UI for the BIOS. I had one in a custom built PC ~1996 and an eMachine ~2000. But yeah, this is EFI which completely replaces the BIOS subsystem with something that doesn't make a quad core i7 think its an 8086 at boot.
But don't dare criticize them for acting unprofessional, trying to milk the story, or otherwise disagree with them. They will ban or unstar you at a moment's notice.
Every fucking day they had an article summarizing the iPhone 4 coverage. Even if there was no actual new content. There were only ever two articles. The first one breaking the news, and then a second on where they showed a tear-down. But what do you expect from a firm that destroys presentations and displays at trade shows with TV-B-gone.
It's interesting how their tone changed. They used to sit around and wax and masturbate at great lengths about anything Apple. Now, not so much. Though it seems they all but forgot that computex was on this week.
I've pretty much abandoned them for Engadget.