I'm kind of surprised they're doing this, but if it works as advertised, I think it'll solve a lot of headaches for corporate installations.
eg, our work environment uses an interesting mix of VB6 apps, delphi, a couple of VB3 apps thrown in for good measure, plus very version-specific IBM middleware that fails to work properly on Vista (AIX terminal sessions via an IE6 activex control, mmm.)
Some of these components fail to run on IE7/Vista and our software vendor's not interested in supporting it on anything newer than XP.
Xp emulation in Windows 7 will solve our current problem getting new hardware that can run this system. I'm sure we're not the only company out there with crap like this going on.
So, on the one hand, our crappy mission-critical "enterprise" software can continue working - but on the other hand, there's no impetus for the vendor to upgrade it to work on a new version of windows.
Yes, but at least you get sane error messages from Linux, or at least a string to search for with google, as opposed to "Windows encountered an unknown error", or the service just failing with no error message at all.
I'm battling with sharepoint's search service right now, the latest error message was "User does not have permission to alter database 'sharepoint_search'. ALTER DATABASE statement failed."
In my experience selling PC's for, many people expect the PC to come with Ms Office, or at least Word, and maybe Excel included. Windows is just the thing that makes Word and "the Internet" run.
When you mention the PC comes with Windows XP/Vista or whatever they seem to hear "Windows" as "Word". Much angst ensues after they get the PC home and realise they haven't paid for a copy of Office on their new PC, even after subtle prompting at sale time.
While this sounds cool, this seems to be yet another technology that we'll eventually be able to print with our inexpensive inkjet printers.
hopefully they'll release the "nanotube buckyball solar panel" cartridge to fit in the same printer as the OLED display cartridge... etc.
Can't wait to read some word documents written using solar panel nanotube ink, too.
Re:Good start. Are Sony getting better?
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 1
Sony recently updated SonicStage, so you can now move atrac3-encoded tracks to and from a minidisc player with NO restrictions (provided you ripped it with no drm restrictions in the first place.) Sonicstage itself also lets you rip straght to atrac3 without any DRM restrictions - it actually asks you if you want to include DRM copy protection or not before ripping the CD. (well, duh.)
This means I can now rip music on one PC, download it to my minidisc player and upload it to another PC and play it there, or copy it to cd, etc. I believe that's more open than the ipod these days.
And before you start on how crap minidisc is, find me an affordable player with an AM/FM radio as well and i'll start listening. (Hi-MD - 1GB per disc - minidisc with am/fm cost me $AU140. )
Ignoring the fact Sony still force the use of use atrac3 rather than a more open/commonly used music format, this is a 180 degree shift in their DRM policy for minidisc. A while back there were heavy restrictions even for stuff you'rd recorded on the minidisc yourself. Again, perhaps this is in response to the rootkit debacle?
I've had problems recovering data from tape (dds), old CD-Roms, Iomega Zip disks (no shock there), and normal hard disks (in my case, a 52MB Quantum disk that used to hang off my Amiga 500, was completely blank after a couple of years on the bookshelf)
For backups at home, I now use Fujitsu "DynaMO" 640MB magneto-optical disks and a couple of drives for my home backups, that I aquired from a local uni, along with a bunch of disks.
From what I've read, Magneto-Optical is pretty much unbeatable for long-term archival storage, in terms of media reliability and longevity. The manufacturers claim 100 years plus archival life.
As the media is in a cartridge, it's hard to accidentally scratch. Due to the way it works, the disk must be heated and subjected to a strong magnetic field to accidentially erase or change the information contained on then disk, so it's reasonably safe from magnetic interference.
More importantly, all brands using this technology I know of (Sony, including MiniDisk, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP) are generally backwards-compatible; ie I can record to and play back 230 and 60MB disks on my 640MB drive, and I can read my 6240MB disks in the latest model 3.5in drive from fujitsu also.
so, in 10 years time you can probably find a working drive that can read back the media. This is a big problem with tape storage formats (can anyone sell me a reel-to-reel quarter inch tape drive?)
Recording speed is pretty slow on my setup ie maybe 300-400Kbps but playback is about as fast as DVD-Rom. I know the technology has advanced to hold more per disk, and performs better.
i've had no complaints so far, and absolutely no cartridges i cound't read back (yet.)
One thing that has irked me about ISA/PCI/VLB/Sbus expansion cards (all the way back to the apple ][ actually ) is how clunky it is to install these things into a PC or server.
That is, you have to crack open the case, exposing delicate bits like memory, cpu, power supplies and so on, unscrew the blanking plate (hopefully without losing the screw in the bottom of the PC) and lever the card in, with considerable force sometimes. That's fine for us techos, but daunting for Joe average, and a PC warranty nightmare.
Hopefully video / nic / other expansion cards for the desktop pc will eventually look something like a game console cartridge, ie all the electronics are safely enclosed in plastic, (with relevant cooling slots if so required.)All you need to do is find a blank slot at the back of the PC (protected by a spring loaded dust cover, super nintendo style) and ram it in. The card powers up, The BIOS/OS detects and configures the card and you're good to go!
I was hoping CompactPCI would filter down to the consumer level, as this comes close to realising this level of convenience for an expansion card. ie, the connector is at the back rather than the bottom of the card, and each card comes with a nice, convenient self-locking lever to help levering the card into place and locking it down.
Hopefully the PCI group come up with some sane "device bay" standard to make this a reality.
Perhaps the HDD/storage device manufacturers will agree on a standard hdd mounting system so we can hot-mount all our SATA devices too, without opening the box. If only..
Yes, you *could* use windows policy editor, but there are some major issues with it (having just locked down a standalone windows box for kiosk use I'm well versed in the pain of poledit for Win 2000..)
Note that policy editor is now primarily designed for a computer in a Active directory tree - without active directory you have to edit a "local" policy, ie edit the registry directly.
A disclaimer: maybe an active directory policy is nicer to play with, I don't know - local policies were enought of a pain for me as it was..
here's the fun with local policies.. firstly - the policies affect ALL users, INCLUDING the administrator. (WTF?!?!? you say?) so.. lock out all registry tools, disable "command prompt" and run on the start menu - and you're screwed - no more windows administration. time to reformat the box. (or at least attempt to "rescue disk" it..
second - policies quite often are applied in REAL TIME. hmm.. disable registry editing.. (screen flashes) - oh bugger, policy editor has stopped working..
The way to get around this is to remove access to the %winnt%/system32/GroupPolicy dir for the administrator (that's right, you remove access to the root user to prevent the policy applying to that user.) of course, this dir has to be accessible to make any changes. And the changes apply immediately. Forget to reapply the restictions to the admin user and it's reformat time, again.
if you want to use policy editor I suggest having a recovery cd lying around, as I guarantee you *will* be locked out of your system, unless you're extremely careful.
2002: Buy apple hardware (G4, say) with Mac OSX and perhaps a geforce 4.
2003: IBM/Motorola bring out the G5 / ATI Nvidia et al bring out their latest incarnations. Apple announce OSXI
2004: Apple desupport G4 hardware - all OS updates will support the G5 only, or - Apple decide the Motorola architecture is too outmoded and move to 64-bit itanium or something. All "G4 compatible" software development ceases, either this year of the next.
2005: The next "killer app" comes out on the OSXI platform only. All apple compatible hardware (printers etc) come out with OSXI drivers only.
so, 3 years on, my expensive, proprietary apple hardware is totally unsupported (just like the 680x0 series, and the "powerpc" series before it.)
Compare this to IBM/intel or even Sun - it's possible to load Windows 2000/Xp and Solaris 9 on quite old machines - eg early pentiums / Sparcstation 5's etc. - It's not fast, but possible. Of course, you can run Linux on almost anything. Not so with Apple.
IF I were to buy apple hardware it's with the knowledge that it will most certainly be totally desupported by Apple within 5-6 years. If the power supply dies, too bad. At least you can strip PC hardware for the parts, eg monitor, internal bits.
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Just to clarify - New South Wales state government is not the Australian federal government.
So now I can print my own batteries, recharge them with my own printed solar panels, to power my inkjet printed LCD panels.
Awesome! If only I could get a printer that does the whole lot.
I'm kind of surprised they're doing this, but if it works as advertised, I think it'll solve a lot of headaches for corporate installations.
eg, our work environment uses an interesting mix of VB6 apps, delphi, a couple of VB3 apps thrown in for good measure, plus very version-specific IBM middleware that fails to work properly on Vista (AIX terminal sessions via an IE6 activex control, mmm.)
Some of these components fail to run on IE7/Vista and our software vendor's not interested in supporting it on anything newer than XP.
Xp emulation in Windows 7 will solve our current problem getting new hardware that can run this system. I'm sure we're not the only company out there with crap like this going on.
So, on the one hand, our crappy mission-critical "enterprise" software can continue working - but on the other hand, there's no impetus for the vendor to upgrade it to work on a new version of windows.
We'll wait and see.
Yes, but at least you get sane error messages from Linux, or at least a string to search for with google, as opposed to "Windows encountered an unknown error", or the service just failing with no error message at all.
I'm battling with sharepoint's search service right now, the latest error message was "User does not have permission to alter database 'sharepoint_search'.
ALTER DATABASE statement failed."
Which user? I have no fricken idea.
Give me Linux any day.
In my experience selling PC's for, many people expect the PC to come with Ms Office, or at least Word, and maybe Excel included. Windows is just the thing that makes Word and "the Internet" run.
When you mention the PC comes with Windows XP/Vista or whatever they seem to hear "Windows" as "Word". Much angst ensues after they get the PC home and realise they haven't paid for a copy of Office on their new PC, even after subtle prompting at sale time.
While this sounds cool, this seems to be yet another technology that we'll eventually be able to print with our inexpensive inkjet printers.
hopefully they'll release the "nanotube buckyball solar panel" cartridge to fit in the same printer as the OLED display cartridge... etc.
Can't wait to read some word documents written using solar panel nanotube ink, too.
Sony recently updated SonicStage, so you can now move atrac3-encoded tracks to and from a minidisc player with NO restrictions (provided you ripped it with no drm restrictions in the first place.) Sonicstage itself also lets you rip straght to atrac3 without any DRM restrictions - it actually asks you if you want to include DRM copy protection or not before ripping the CD. (well, duh.)
This means I can now rip music on one PC, download it to my minidisc player and upload it to another PC and play it there, or copy it to cd, etc. I believe that's more open than the ipod these days.
And before you start on how crap minidisc is, find me an affordable player with an AM/FM radio as well and i'll start listening. (Hi-MD - 1GB per disc - minidisc with am/fm cost me $AU140. )
Ignoring the fact Sony still force the use of use atrac3 rather than a more open/commonly used music format, this is a 180 degree shift in their DRM policy for minidisc. A while back there were heavy restrictions even for stuff you'rd recorded on the minidisc yourself. Again, perhaps this is in response to the rootkit debacle?
I've had problems recovering data from tape (dds), old CD-Roms, Iomega Zip disks (no shock there), and normal hard disks (in my case, a 52MB Quantum disk that used to hang off my Amiga 500, was completely blank after a couple of years on the bookshelf)
For backups at home, I now use Fujitsu "DynaMO" 640MB magneto-optical disks and a couple of drives for my home backups, that I aquired from a local uni, along with a bunch of disks.
From what I've read, Magneto-Optical is pretty much unbeatable for long-term archival storage, in terms of media reliability and longevity. The manufacturers claim 100 years plus archival life.
As the media is in a cartridge, it's hard to accidentally scratch. Due to the way it works, the disk must be heated and subjected to a strong magnetic field to accidentially erase or change the information contained on then disk, so it's reasonably safe from magnetic interference.
More importantly, all brands using this technology I know of (Sony, including MiniDisk, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP) are generally backwards-compatible; ie I can record to and play back 230 and 60MB disks on my 640MB drive, and I can read my 6240MB disks in the latest model 3.5in drive from fujitsu also.
so, in 10 years time you can probably find a working drive that can read back the media. This is a big problem with tape storage formats (can anyone sell me a reel-to-reel quarter inch tape drive?)
Recording speed is pretty slow on my setup ie maybe 300-400Kbps but playback is about as fast as DVD-Rom. I know the technology has advanced to hold more per disk, and performs better.
i've had no complaints so far, and absolutely no cartridges i cound't read back (yet.)
Hutchinson's/Orange already sell this in Australia under the "3" brand (their 3g network).
Apparently it works well as long as you don't mind the AUS$10 per MB download charge and are in the reevant coverage areas.
Details are here.
I managed to write a game in arexx, just to see if I could.
worked Ok too (a bit slow mind you, but heay it was in an A500)
I Agree - it took me a couple of days to get my head around the interface - but after that's it's great!
(Still hard to use without a numeric keypad though, eg in a laptop)
One thing that has irked me about ISA/PCI/VLB/Sbus expansion cards (all the way back to the apple ][ actually ) is how clunky it is to install these things into a PC or server.
That is, you have to crack open the case, exposing delicate bits like memory, cpu, power supplies and so on, unscrew the blanking plate (hopefully without losing the screw in the bottom of the PC) and lever the card in, with considerable force sometimes. That's fine for us techos, but daunting for Joe average, and a PC warranty nightmare.
Hopefully video / nic / other expansion cards for the desktop pc will eventually look something like a game console cartridge, ie all the electronics are safely enclosed in plastic, (with relevant cooling slots if so required.)All you need to do is find a blank slot at the back of the PC (protected by a spring loaded dust cover, super nintendo style) and ram it in. The card powers up, The BIOS/OS detects and configures the card and you're good to go!
I was hoping CompactPCI would filter down to the consumer level, as this comes close to realising this level of convenience for an expansion card. ie, the connector is at the back rather than the bottom of the card, and each card comes with a nice, convenient self-locking lever to help levering the card into place and locking it down.
Hopefully the PCI group come up with some sane "device bay" standard to make this a reality.
Perhaps the HDD/storage device manufacturers will agree on a standard hdd mounting system so we can hot-mount all our SATA devices too, without opening the box. If only..
Yes, you *could* use windows policy editor, but there are some major issues with it (having just locked down a standalone windows box for kiosk use I'm well versed in the pain of poledit for Win 2000..)
Note that policy editor is now primarily designed for a computer in a Active directory tree - without active directory you have to edit a "local" policy, ie edit the registry directly.
A disclaimer: maybe an active directory policy is nicer to play with, I don't know - local policies were enought of a pain for me as it was..
here's the fun with local policies..
firstly - the policies affect ALL users, INCLUDING the administrator. (WTF?!?!? you say?) so.. lock out all registry tools, disable "command prompt" and run on the start menu - and you're screwed - no more windows administration. time to reformat the box. (or at least attempt to "rescue disk" it..
second - policies quite often are applied in REAL TIME. hmm.. disable registry editing.. (screen flashes) - oh bugger, policy editor has stopped working..
The way to get around this is to remove access to the %winnt%/system32/GroupPolicy dir for the administrator (that's right, you remove access to the root user to prevent the policy applying to that user.) of course, this dir has to be accessible to make any changes. And the changes apply immediately. Forget to reapply the restictions to the admin user and it's reformat time, again.
if you want to use policy editor I suggest having a recovery cd lying around, as I guarantee you *will* be locked out of your system, unless you're extremely careful.
I love windows security, it rocks.
"What happened to the car son?"
"Sorry Dad! I left it outside in the rain - the moss got to it and chewed up all the sheetmetal!"
Hmm. Let me see:
2002: Buy apple hardware (G4, say) with Mac OSX and perhaps a geforce 4.
2003: IBM/Motorola bring out the G5 / ATI
Nvidia et al bring out their latest incarnations.
Apple announce OSXI
2004: Apple desupport G4 hardware - all OS updates will support the G5 only, or - Apple decide the Motorola architecture is too outmoded and move to 64-bit itanium or something. All "G4 compatible" software development ceases, either this year of the next.
2005: The next "killer app" comes out on the OSXI platform only. All apple compatible hardware (printers etc) come out with OSXI drivers only.
so, 3 years on, my expensive, proprietary apple hardware is totally unsupported (just like the 680x0 series, and the "powerpc" series before it.)
Compare this to IBM/intel or even Sun - it's possible to load Windows 2000/Xp and Solaris 9 on quite old machines - eg early pentiums / Sparcstation 5's etc. - It's not fast, but possible. Of course, you can run Linux on almost anything. Not so with Apple.
IF I were to buy apple hardware it's with the knowledge that it will most certainly be totally desupported by Apple within 5-6 years. If the power supply dies, too bad.
At least you can strip PC hardware for the parts, eg monitor, internal bits.
You can also do stuff like "finger @britney"
Hours of fun.