Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat
on
A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 4, Informative
Rather than just digesting using some key, It seems to me that you could set up two 'encryption' agents which talk to each other and form a random proprietary "language" that only each other can understand.
You mean, like generating a analogous OTP out of a pseudo-random number generator? Not only has that been done before, but you're still left with a key: The seed which produced the pseudo-random sequence.
The Navajo code-talkers worked because the encoding was extremely obscure (security through obscurity at its finest!) and cryptography was still in its infancy. I sincerely doubt that the Navajo codes would stand up to a modern cryptographic analysis.
No, Atari's defeat was driving Bushnell out. Atari never had another successful console after Bushnell's departure, because Warner lacked the vision necessary. Yes, like most driving forces, Bushnell was a pain in the derry aire. But he did a lot more good for Atari than Yar (excuse me, Ray Kassar) ever did. By the time Tramiel snatched Atari, it was already walking dead. Without Tramiel at the helm, it would have gone under a lot faster. (Scary thought, that.)
My first reaction was the same as yours. The problem is that you can't be negative about everything, or you'll be negative all the time. Thus I decided to take it at face value and try to be positive about it. Ergo, happy bubbly (mildly sickening) post about colorful motherboards.:-P
...wasn't there some sort of memo that was leaked from Microsoft that basically said the only reason why Windows 3.1 became popular was because it was the most pirated software ever?
As it so happens, I used to sell a product which required a simple registration key to upgrade to the full version. (The free version never shut off, but it had fewer features.) After noticing a few Google searches for " crackz", I thought about seeding a few reg numbers to promote the product. Alas, I never got around to it, but it would have been a cool marketing trick.
That being said, I don't agree with piracy in general. Only that it can fullfill certain market needs. If it gets too out of hand, though, it can become a serious problem to the producer. (e.g. Napster) Of course, you don't get in that position unless you're failing to meet your customer's needs in the first place. (e.g. lack of legal MP3s)
All I get from your comment is that you weren't following what I was saying.
Intel's designs are driven by what drives the sales of their processors. For right now, that's gobs of desktop and PC Server machines. The alternative architectures are in no danger of knocking Intel out of that position. They will carve themselves a niche for now, which is why Intel has been more worried about AMD than they've been worried about IBM. Which means that Intel will sit up and take notice of the DSP-oriented chips if and when it actually impacts their bottom line.
Desktop machines are unlikely to need DSP processing anytime soon. (Outside of the similarities in GPU design, that is.) So there needs to be an extensive push inside the server arena to make Intel budge. As it happens, there is an issue that DSP designs can address.
Traditionally, DSPs have been used to process sampled analog data in real-time. They are carefully calibrated to stream the samples at high clock rates, with the expectation that the data will be merely transformed rather than processed by means that would require unexpected (and costly) branching. This expectation allows DSP microprocessor makers to design their chips in certain ways.
Of course, the basic tenets behind DSP microprocessor design do not require that the data I/O be analog in nature. Which is why you're starting to see DSP-derived designs (e.g. the Cell) starting to show up in digital devices with no analog sampling. As you said, the economics of the situation are making DSP microprocessors more effective than traditional GP microprocessors.
Now look at the web. What are we passing around like madmen? Streaming data, of course. These data streams are architecture-independent serializations that potentially lend themselves well to parallel processing of the data. In many cases, it's a simple matter of translating a data stream from a serialized form into an memory form or visa-versa. Sun has already realized this and has begun producing multiprocessor chips designed around streaming data. But their solution is highly focused on existing web loads, and will lose effectiveness as multimedia solutions become more common on the web. Cell is more general purpose, being capable of handling integer and floating point data equally well.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. With the current streaming situation on the web, we're starting to run into resource limitations on individual machines. The interim solution is to develop a pipelined processing stack over the network. As the requests stream into the front-end servers, they should be processed only as far as necessary to branch the stream to the correct server that's next in the pipeline. This server then takes the data and either deals with it directly, or does more processing and branching.
To give an example, take an instant messaging site like Meebo. Let's take a look at how it could be architected in a streaming fashion.
A login to the server produces a ripple effect where each person on the buddy list needs to be notified. This event creates an inverse multiplex for N number of signals, where N is the number of "buddies" in the list. Since these buddies are potentially on different communication protocols, the events can be demuxed to different servers, each one dedicated to maintaining links to that protocol. (e.g. Jabber, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Meebo)
IM packets continually hitting their servers as parallel streams of data. Similar to generating a login event, this requires that the messages be demuxed to the correct server based on their intended destination. It also requires that the incoming stream be transformed from a web stream (e.g. XML, JSON, or other textual format) into the format of the destination protocol. This can be handled by a separate machine from the one that maintains the backend IM connections. The stream can be transformed ahead of time, then forwarded to the protocol server for actual delivery to the IM network.
So when will Intel reverse its epoch of NSP, and deliver new uPs with embedded DSP in HW?
Probably about the same time that web application developers realize that their problems (particularly AJAX) can be solved more efficiently with a DSP architecture and start designing tiers of servers in a pipelined DSP configuration. Considering the amount of computer science exhibited by this industry, I'd peg it at sometime around a quarter to never.
From what I can tell, this is basically good news for anyone who wants an affordable business machine. The updated specs mean that it will be competitive with the latest technologies, while still offering the savings and simplicity of an integrated design. (Assuming you're not die-hard about Intel integrated graphics sucking.)
On another topic, I love the screenshots of the upcoming motherboards. Computer components are getting so colorful. I remember back when you got a green motherboard with black and white parts. (<grumpy-old-man>And we liked it that way!</grumpy-old-man>) Maybe with a few blues for caps. Now you can really see the different parts as they leap out at you in blues, purples, oranges, yellows, and greens! Yeah, it looks a bit Fisher-Price. But it's kind of refreshing at the same time.:-)
Is it just me, or is this guy throwing the baby out with the bathwater? While it's understandable that some of the fanaticism and philosophies associated with the OSS movement might turn him off, that shouldn't stand in the way of the fact that there is quite a bit of great OSS software*. Perhaps tellingly, much of that great software has no ties back to the GNU philosophies. Mozilla, Apache, BSD, etc. have become the underpinnings of the market without directly supporting Stallman's vision. Even Linus takes a cool approach to his ties with the GNU, speaking against decisions when he disagrees.
The truth is that if this guy is as cynical as he's making himself out to be, then he's guilty of the very fanaticism that he's accusing the OSS community of. Because no OSS means no Firefox, no OpenOffice, no Apache, no PHP, etc. If he's really extreme about it, then he can forget about buying products from big names like Apple, Cisco, or Novell. Even Microsoft would be on his list for having dabbled in OSS!
Will he really cut his nose off to spite his face, or will this cynic turn hypocrite?
Ah, ok. Freax does produce some actual Google results on this. So one for the AC. Beyond that, though, he still seems to be confusing a lot of BSD history with Linux history.
2. Xenix was not (to my knowledge) "written for the US Government". You're probably thinking of BSD.
3. Did you copy and paste part of that from Wikipedia? I swear, your line about Microsoft licensing is exactly the same.
4. Linux was not "based on" Minix. It was always its own kernel. (Which is obvious from its monolithic rather than microkernel design.) What it lacked was a userspace, which Minix had when Linus started. So users had make use of certain Minix programs and modules to make a usable system out of Linux.
5. Linus did not "find he had created a new kernel". (Again, you seem to be confusing BSD history in there.) He was reliant on some parts of Minix until the GNU tools became available to replace the userland with something a bit more available than Tanenbaum's research OS.
6. I'm not sure where you got the "freex" idea from. Linux was always called Linux. There is nothing in the historical usenet archives (which are still available) to suggest that Linux was considering any other name.
The Dreamcast was capable of running Windows CE. My memory is fuzzy as to why, but I believe it was intended as the platform upon which game makers could create networked games. AFAIK, the idea never panned out.
I'm sorry to inform you, but you've taught me nothing. Now why don't you go back to Visual Basic and take a good hard look at its design? It's absolutely nothing like Dartmouth BASIC, just as alien to BASICA and GW-BASIC (which I programmed in both when I was younger, thank you very much), and only mildly similar to QuickBASIC.
Now allow me to relieve you of your own ignorance. Visual Basic is a language unto itself with a psuedo-OO design centered around GUI creation rather than procedural flow. Variables are handled by a loose typing system rather than the Number/String naming conventions popular in BASIC. Together, these provide the ability to use dot-notation addressing for modifying instances of objects or components. A variety of new syntactical structures and flow control structures showed up to better handle this foreign language design in the context of classic BASIC keywords. (e.g. "With...End" statements are just weirdness.)
The end result is that if you put Visual Basic code and classic BASIC code (even QuickBASIC!) side by side, the two will not resemble each other in anything more than keywords and a few simple control structures. The two languages are completely separate with practically no real overlap between them. Thus my point that there was no real reason in calling it "Visual Basic" other than to play upon Microsoft's reputation as a BASIC company.
Do yourself a favor next time and don't assume ignorance. There might be a point there. You may not agree with it, but the point still remains. Consider arguing the point rather than displaying your own foolish haste in finding fault with others.
This thing has sounded, looked, and felt like another Phantom since the start...
I don't think that's really fair. The Phantom was constantly promoted as "coming soon!" The Optimus OTOH, started life as a conceptual design. Optimus never promised a product from the design, and in fact stated that it would be too expensive with current OLED prices.
The only reason why they're making this keyboard is because there has been unprecidented demand for it.
I guess I should have applied one more... It's got to do a function in a single line and not a decision tree trying to find out what function will work in the current browser environment.
I was just threatening to yank the impromptu slashdot chat room after a (literally) 12 year old chatter was getting out of hand. You know, I remember being a young teenager with loads of "hacking" scripts. I *don't* remember being so annoying about them.
On the other hand, it's always funny when they fall for the "Alt-F4 to kickban" trick.:P
What worries me is that the "Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it" axiom might be becoming less true.
Nonsense! It's just as true as ever. What happened when Turkey blocked Youtube? Instructions were quickly posted on how to get around the block or download the offending clip from another site. What happened when the AACS owners tried to abuse the DMCA to stop the cracked key from being distributed? The key ended up on nearly every site on the Internets!
Even in highly oppressive regions like China, the users of the Internet are finding new and creative ways to circumvent the Great Firewall. Simply put, there is no way of stopping the information on the 'net. It's like the underground books that were distributed during Communism in Russia: They kept popping up no matter how much the Soviets tried to quash them.
Totalitarian governments (or even democratic/republic governments trying to suppress information) are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The only way to stop the flow of information is to yank the plug. But if they yank the plug or fail to install it in the first place, it's a guarantee that the country will collapse from a failure to be competitive in the Global market. So governments try and find a compromise by suppressing information on the Internet. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't really work all that well.;-)
But you were inviting conclusions about Vista's RAM usage from it; thus, implicitly treating it as if it were a reasonable analysis.
"Since I've been itching to try out the new Charts feature on Google Spreadsheets anyway, I threw together a spreadsheet of the Windows memory requirements," hardly sounds like a reasonable analysis. Especially after the parent poster explicitly stated that such growth is not linear. It was information, and information only. i.e. A spreadsheet of Windows Memory Requirements. Exactly as stated.
Nonwithstanding that in any linear plot of explonentially increasing numbers, the most recent one is always going to far dominate the ones that came before.
I think that's obvious. However, the memory requirements did double with each generation. (The exception was 95 -> 98 which had a 4x increase.) The 8x increase with Vista is a bit of a first for Windows. Which is a true statement regardless of the time between the OSes. However, that doesn't mean it's an analysis. That's your invention, not mine.
Oh, and I should probably mention that the second tab has a link to Global's semilog sheet. I asked him to create it after he requested that a semilog sheet be done.
It wasn't a mistake. It was a simple spreadsheet that charted out RAM requirements across the OSes. It was never intended to be a mathematical analysis of the issue. That came after 500+ viewers and one google@google.com showed up!
They're not *my* recommended requirements. They're pulled from the source pages. (check the column on the right of the first sheet) Those pages appear to pull from the requirements that Microsoft published. I don't know if you remember back in the old days, but Microsoft tended to lowball their memory requirements. (Presumably to sell more copies.)
If you've got a reliable source that gives different values for these features, please share and I'll update the sheet.
The minimums are lower in many cases, but I chose the recommended where more memory was required for standard features. (e.g. ME requires only 32 MB, but 64 MB is required if you want to run Windows Media Player.) I considered separating out different configurations, but I decided that it would simply obscure the point.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, like generating a analogous OTP out of a pseudo-random number generator? Not only has that been done before, but you're still left with a key: The seed which produced the pseudo-random sequence.
The Navajo code-talkers worked because the encoding was extremely obscure (security through obscurity at its finest!) and cryptography was still in its infancy. I sincerely doubt that the Navajo codes would stand up to a modern cryptographic analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Code_Talkers
No, Atari's defeat was driving Bushnell out. Atari never had another successful console after Bushnell's departure, because Warner lacked the vision necessary. Yes, like most driving forces, Bushnell was a pain in the derry aire. But he did a lot more good for Atari than Yar (excuse me, Ray Kassar) ever did. By the time Tramiel snatched Atari, it was already walking dead. Without Tramiel at the helm, it would have gone under a lot faster. (Scary thought, that.)
My first reaction was the same as yours. The problem is that you can't be negative about everything, or you'll be negative all the time. Thus I decided to take it at face value and try to be positive about it. Ergo, happy bubbly (mildly sickening) post about colorful motherboards. :-P
...wasn't there some sort of memo that was leaked from Microsoft that basically said the only reason why Windows 3.1 became popular was because it was the most pirated software ever?
As it so happens, I used to sell a product which required a simple registration key to upgrade to the full version. (The free version never shut off, but it had fewer features.) After noticing a few Google searches for " crackz", I thought about seeding a few reg numbers to promote the product. Alas, I never got around to it, but it would have been a cool marketing trick.
That being said, I don't agree with piracy in general. Only that it can fullfill certain market needs. If it gets too out of hand, though, it can become a serious problem to the producer. (e.g. Napster) Of course, you don't get in that position unless you're failing to meet your customer's needs in the first place. (e.g. lack of legal MP3s)
All I get from your comment is that you weren't following what I was saying.
Intel's designs are driven by what drives the sales of their processors. For right now, that's gobs of desktop and PC Server machines. The alternative architectures are in no danger of knocking Intel out of that position. They will carve themselves a niche for now, which is why Intel has been more worried about AMD than they've been worried about IBM. Which means that Intel will sit up and take notice of the DSP-oriented chips if and when it actually impacts their bottom line.
Desktop machines are unlikely to need DSP processing anytime soon. (Outside of the similarities in GPU design, that is.) So there needs to be an extensive push inside the server arena to make Intel budge. As it happens, there is an issue that DSP designs can address.
Traditionally, DSPs have been used to process sampled analog data in real-time. They are carefully calibrated to stream the samples at high clock rates, with the expectation that the data will be merely transformed rather than processed by means that would require unexpected (and costly) branching. This expectation allows DSP microprocessor makers to design their chips in certain ways.
Of course, the basic tenets behind DSP microprocessor design do not require that the data I/O be analog in nature. Which is why you're starting to see DSP-derived designs (e.g. the Cell) starting to show up in digital devices with no analog sampling. As you said, the economics of the situation are making DSP microprocessors more effective than traditional GP microprocessors.
Now look at the web. What are we passing around like madmen? Streaming data, of course. These data streams are architecture-independent serializations that potentially lend themselves well to parallel processing of the data. In many cases, it's a simple matter of translating a data stream from a serialized form into an memory form or visa-versa. Sun has already realized this and has begun producing multiprocessor chips designed around streaming data. But their solution is highly focused on existing web loads, and will lose effectiveness as multimedia solutions become more common on the web. Cell is more general purpose, being capable of handling integer and floating point data equally well.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. With the current streaming situation on the web, we're starting to run into resource limitations on individual machines. The interim solution is to develop a pipelined processing stack over the network. As the requests stream into the front-end servers, they should be processed only as far as necessary to branch the stream to the correct server that's next in the pipeline. This server then takes the data and either deals with it directly, or does more processing and branching.
To give an example, take an instant messaging site like Meebo. Let's take a look at how it could be architected in a streaming fashion.
A login to the server produces a ripple effect where each person on the buddy list needs to be notified. This event creates an inverse multiplex for N number of signals, where N is the number of "buddies" in the list. Since these buddies are potentially on different communication protocols, the events can be demuxed to different servers, each one dedicated to maintaining links to that protocol. (e.g. Jabber, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Meebo)
IM packets continually hitting their servers as parallel streams of data. Similar to generating a login event, this requires that the messages be demuxed to the correct server based on their intended destination. It also requires that the incoming stream be transformed from a web stream (e.g. XML, JSON, or other textual format) into the format of the destination protocol. This can be handled by a separate machine from the one that maintains the backend IM connections. The stream can be transformed ahead of time, then forwarded to the protocol server for actual delivery to the IM network.
This example is a key area where
Probably about the same time that web application developers realize that their problems (particularly AJAX) can be solved more efficiently with a DSP architecture and start designing tiers of servers in a pipelined DSP configuration. Considering the amount of computer science exhibited by this industry, I'd peg it at sometime around a quarter to never.
From what I can tell, this is basically good news for anyone who wants an affordable business machine. The updated specs mean that it will be competitive with the latest technologies, while still offering the savings and simplicity of an integrated design. (Assuming you're not die-hard about Intel integrated graphics sucking.)
:-)
On another topic, I love the screenshots of the upcoming motherboards. Computer components are getting so colorful. I remember back when you got a green motherboard with black and white parts. (<grumpy-old-man>And we liked it that way!</grumpy-old-man>) Maybe with a few blues for caps. Now you can really see the different parts as they leap out at you in blues, purples, oranges, yellows, and greens! Yeah, it looks a bit Fisher-Price. But it's kind of refreshing at the same time.
Redundant of what? Stupid troll mods.
Is it just me, or is this guy throwing the baby out with the bathwater? While it's understandable that some of the fanaticism and philosophies associated with the OSS movement might turn him off, that shouldn't stand in the way of the fact that there is quite a bit of great OSS software*. Perhaps tellingly, much of that great software has no ties back to the GNU philosophies. Mozilla, Apache, BSD, etc. have become the underpinnings of the market without directly supporting Stallman's vision. Even Linus takes a cool approach to his ties with the GNU, speaking against decisions when he disagrees.
:P
The truth is that if this guy is as cynical as he's making himself out to be, then he's guilty of the very fanaticism that he's accusing the OSS community of. Because no OSS means no Firefox, no OpenOffice, no Apache, no PHP, etc. If he's really extreme about it, then he can forget about buying products from big names like Apple, Cisco, or Novell. Even Microsoft would be on his list for having dabbled in OSS!
Will he really cut his nose off to spite his face, or will this cynic turn hypocrite?
* Doubled up just to annoy the grammar nazis!
Ah, ok. Freax does produce some actual Google results on this. So one for the AC. Beyond that, though, he still seems to be confusing a lot of BSD history with Linux history.
1. What does Xenix have to do with anything?
2. Xenix was not (to my knowledge) "written for the US Government". You're probably thinking of BSD.
3. Did you copy and paste part of that from Wikipedia? I swear, your line about Microsoft licensing is exactly the same.
4. Linux was not "based on" Minix. It was always its own kernel. (Which is obvious from its monolithic rather than microkernel design.) What it lacked was a userspace, which Minix had when Linus started. So users had make use of certain Minix programs and modules to make a usable system out of Linux.
5. Linus did not "find he had created a new kernel". (Again, you seem to be confusing BSD history in there.) He was reliant on some parts of Minix until the GNU tools became available to replace the userland with something a bit more available than Tanenbaum's research OS.
6. I'm not sure where you got the "freex" idea from. Linux was always called Linux. There is nothing in the historical usenet archives (which are still available) to suggest that Linux was considering any other name.
The Dreamcast was capable of running Windows CE. My memory is fuzzy as to why, but I believe it was intended as the platform upon which game makers could create networked games. AFAIK, the idea never panned out.
I'm sorry to inform you, but you've taught me nothing. Now why don't you go back to Visual Basic and take a good hard look at its design? It's absolutely nothing like Dartmouth BASIC, just as alien to BASICA and GW-BASIC (which I programmed in both when I was younger, thank you very much), and only mildly similar to QuickBASIC.
Now allow me to relieve you of your own ignorance. Visual Basic is a language unto itself with a psuedo-OO design centered around GUI creation rather than procedural flow. Variables are handled by a loose typing system rather than the Number/String naming conventions popular in BASIC. Together, these provide the ability to use dot-notation addressing for modifying instances of objects or components. A variety of new syntactical structures and flow control structures showed up to better handle this foreign language design in the context of classic BASIC keywords. (e.g. "With...End" statements are just weirdness.)
The end result is that if you put Visual Basic code and classic BASIC code (even QuickBASIC!) side by side, the two will not resemble each other in anything more than keywords and a few simple control structures. The two languages are completely separate with practically no real overlap between them. Thus my point that there was no real reason in calling it "Visual Basic" other than to play upon Microsoft's reputation as a BASIC company.
Do yourself a favor next time and don't assume ignorance. There might be a point there. You may not agree with it, but the point still remains. Consider arguing the point rather than displaying your own foolish haste in finding fault with others.
I don't think that's really fair. The Phantom was constantly promoted as "coming soon!" The Optimus OTOH, started life as a conceptual design. Optimus never promised a product from the design, and in fact stated that it would be too expensive with current OLED prices.
The only reason why they're making this keyboard is because there has been unprecidented demand for it.
You mean like this?
I was just threatening to yank the impromptu slashdot chat room after a (literally) 12 year old chatter was getting out of hand. You know, I remember being a young teenager with loads of "hacking" scripts. I *don't* remember being so annoying about them.
:P
On the other hand, it's always funny when they fall for the "Alt-F4 to kickban" trick.
Nonsense! It's just as true as ever. What happened when Turkey blocked Youtube? Instructions were quickly posted on how to get around the block or download the offending clip from another site. What happened when the AACS owners tried to abuse the DMCA to stop the cracked key from being distributed? The key ended up on nearly every site on the Internets!
Even in highly oppressive regions like China, the users of the Internet are finding new and creative ways to circumvent the Great Firewall. Simply put, there is no way of stopping the information on the 'net. It's like the underground books that were distributed during Communism in Russia: They kept popping up no matter how much the Soviets tried to quash them.
Totalitarian governments (or even democratic/republic governments trying to suppress information) are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The only way to stop the flow of information is to yank the plug. But if they yank the plug or fail to install it in the first place, it's a guarantee that the country will collapse from a failure to be competitive in the Global market. So governments try and find a compromise by suppressing information on the Internet. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't really work all that well.
No, the point is that those are (AFAIK) Microsoft's figures. Whether they're spectacularly off-base or not is beside the point.
"Since I've been itching to try out the new Charts feature on Google Spreadsheets anyway, I threw together a spreadsheet of the Windows memory requirements," hardly sounds like a reasonable analysis. Especially after the parent poster explicitly stated that such growth is not linear. It was information, and information only. i.e. A spreadsheet of Windows Memory Requirements. Exactly as stated.
I think that's obvious. However, the memory requirements did double with each generation. (The exception was 95 -> 98 which had a 4x increase.) The 8x increase with Vista is a bit of a first for Windows. Which is a true statement regardless of the time between the OSes. However, that doesn't mean it's an analysis. That's your invention, not mine.
Oh, and I should probably mention that the second tab has a link to Global's semilog sheet. I asked him to create it after he requested that a semilog sheet be done.
It wasn't a mistake. It was a simple spreadsheet that charted out RAM requirements across the OSes. It was never intended to be a mathematical analysis of the issue. That came after 500+ viewers and one google@google.com showed up!
The original spreadsheet didn't even map by year!
Sorry, "for these features" should read "for these OSes". I'm a bit distracted by the spreadsheet at the moment.
They're not *my* recommended requirements. They're pulled from the source pages. (check the column on the right of the first sheet) Those pages appear to pull from the requirements that Microsoft published. I don't know if you remember back in the old days, but Microsoft tended to lowball their memory requirements. (Presumably to sell more copies.)
If you've got a reliable source that gives different values for these features, please share and I'll update the sheet.
The 512 MB minimum is with Aero auto-disabled.
According to the source I listed, 1GB is required for Aero-enabled editions. This is in line with Microsoft's own requirements:
v ista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windows
The minimums are lower in many cases, but I chose the recommended where more memory was required for standard features. (e.g. ME requires only 32 MB, but 64 MB is required if you want to run Windows Media Player.) I considered separating out different configurations, but I decided that it would simply obscure the point.