You may have seen the Slashdot article on it a few weeks ago, but I'd seriously recommend checking out Barts PE Builder. I've been using it since October on customer's machines and you'd be amazed how often just an Adaware scan will bring a machine from barely running on its knees to being extremely usable again. It's an amazing tool, and it's saved me a ton of time that otherwise would've been spent doing a full reload, restoring settings and other software.
Trust me, I understand how badly the average user abuses their machine, and that sometimes reloads are the only way out. I've just noticed that there's a rather large percentage of Slashdotters that experience the same problems when they should know better. If you're one of the more technically inclined, I don't really see an excuse. That's the reason I felt compelled to jump up in XP's defense, even though I far prefer Linux or OS X over Windows.
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\Documents and Settings\Slacker>systeminfo
Host Name: CHAOTIC OS Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional OS Version: 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 Build 2600 OS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation OS Configuration: Standalone Workstation OS Build Type: Uniprocessor Free Registered Owner: XXXXXXX Registered Organization: XXXXXXX XXXXXX Product ID: XXXXX-XXX-XXXXXX-XXXXX Original Install Date: 6/9/2003, 5:13:39 PM [...]
Emphasis on "Original Install Date." Product ID and so forth removed for the obvious reasons.
This is my gaming box that constantly has software installed/removed hardware swapped, taken the LAN parties and generally abused. The load of XP is still completely stable. I still prefer doing actual work on my Linux boxes, but honestly, keeping an XP load running and running stable isn't THAT hard. The biggest key is not to let 26 different apps load to the system tray on boot like most users. That, combined with using Firefox over IE and anything in the world over Outlook, will do wonders for keeping an XP machine running.
For one thing, PPC is pretty capable at emulating x86. For another, don't forget Microsoft's recent purchase of Connectix for their VirtualPC software. So most of the work is already done, Microsoft would just need to do a little fine tuning and make sure the clock speed on the XBox2 was high enough to compensate for the emulation hit. Throw in a more powerful video chipset and the idea of backwards compatibility with the XBox really isn't that far fetched.
As for your other suggestion - how do you think that'd be possible? Unless the XBox2 is going to have a few gigs of non-volatile RAM or something equally as unlikely, there's not really any way to "simulate the hard drive."
Not really. PPC is extremely good at emulating x86, and the video chipset shouldn't particularly be affected so long as it's using a compatible API - likely since it's essentially DirectX.
You're assuming that the G5 is going to be significantly more expensive than the G4. We already know that IBM seels the G5 to Apple for less than they're buying G4's from Moto, so it's quite possible that G5's could be introduced into the Powerbook line without any major price hikes.
Somebody please mod this disinformation down. There are no 'heat dissipation issues' with regards to the G5. Yes, Apple does use a heatsink that's about 5" tall and a ton of fans in the G5 tower, but that's done to keep noise down, but because it's running scorchingly hot. I got to thoroughly check out a Dual 2.0GHz G5 at a LAN party last weekend, and the machine is near silent under normal use. I can't say that about my Athlon or the P4's I use at school.
If you're still not satisfied that's the reason, pull the side cover off a G5, then pull off the plastic panel that seperates the different airflow compartments - the computer will sense that the panel's been removed, thus disrupting the airflow and kick all the fans into high speed. You'll suddenly have the machine go from being near silent to about as loud as you'd expect a PC to be.
The G5 towers are amazingly well engineered machines, and it's really getting tiring to hear people mistake Apple's emphasis on quiet computing (extremely well executed) be mistaken for a non-existant heat problem.
And get back under the bridge, troll. I live not far from ATL and spend about every other weekend there with friends, and I laughed at the original post. It was supposed to be funny, and it was if you don't have a stick up your ass.
Interesting idea, but there's actually already a Windows equivalent of exactly that. I'm not sure how widespread it is (though I do know my University uses it on all non-faculty machines), but it's called Deep Freeze. Basically, the admin sets up a machine to a 'stock' state and then activates Deep Freeze which completely sets it clean after every reboot.
Anyone have any idea how this actually works? They claim that it "does not use an image" and I've heard talk that it somehow sits between the BIOS and OS, but I've been unable to find any solid info. It is vulnerable to an attack using, say, a Knoppix disc, but from within Windows, you can change anything you want, down to reformatting the drive and it'll be fixed when the computer's restarted. I'm curious as to how they pull this off.
Admittedly, the version recorded by the directional mic is pretty funny, but if you had actually been standing there, you wouldn't have been able to hear the man.
That really is great news, even if I am 12 hours late on it.:) Between this and the fact that Intel has finally admitted that they'll eventually have to move to an x86-64 architechture, it looks like they're finally starting to get their act together and leave the Megahertz Marketeering behind.
I'm an admitted AMD fanboy, but I've always really liked the Pentium M, and it irked me that it wasn't essentially being left to itself in the notebook segment rather than leveraged in the desktop market as well because Intel was too busy ramping up clock speed with the comparitively hugely inefficient P4. This is one of the better pieces of news I've heard today, thanks.:)
I know you were joking, but just so you can sleep easier at night, all the pictures I've seen have shown 16x PCIe slots being physically larger than 1x PCIe slots. Not saying that wouldn't stop some of our more ingenious computer "experts" from "making it fit" but it should at least make things more difficult for them.;)
The Pentium M and the P-4 Mobile actually have little in common. The Pentium M is much closer to a PIII in design, borrowing some elements of the P4 such as SSE2 support, adding in some power saving functions of its own, and adding a ton of cache. Clock-for-clock the Pentium M eats the P4 alive, and it's really a shame that we'll probably never see a desktop version of this chip made available as Intel has invested far too much marketing money into the ridiculous scaling of the MHz with the P4.
I agree with you completely. I had heard about Bart's PE before, but finally taking the time to put together my own build a few months ago was one of the best things I've done in a while. It's really amazing how many machines that are barely even running can be brought back to life simply by popping PE in and running an AV and spyware scan.
The networking support is also a lifesaver - it makes recovering data from a crashed install a simple matter of a second machine and a crossover cable rather than having to tear the machine down and install the harddrive in the second machine (a real pain when the machine in question is a laptop).
Really, I think the comparison to Knoppix is a bit unfair as Knoppix is supposed to be a demonstration of what desktop Linux is like. Bart's PE, on the other hand, is a very stripped down version of Windows with system administration tools as it's sole driving focus. It's much closer to say Knoppix STD than it is to vanilla Knoppix.
Bart's PE Builder actually lets you include ERD Commander as a plugin to your PE Build. This way, you get all the tools available with that, as well as networking support, AV and spyware scanning, and you can throw in other tools such as Nero and Ghost as well. It's an incredibly useful tool that I use just about every day and has saved me more time in fixing customer's machines than I care to think about.
So Bart's PE isn't really a replacement for ERD Commander so much as it lets you build many tools into a single, minimal runtime environment which is extremely useful for system diagnostics. If you like ERD Commander, you really should check this out because it allows you to not only have the features available in ERD Commander, but a good deal more as well.
The original MOO and MOO2 were two of my all time favorite games, hence why I was so disappointed with MOO3. It had a lot of potential, but they half implemented too many gameplay changes and the AI was so half done that it pretty much ruined it for me. Speaking of Star Control, SC2 is one of the best space-adventure type games ever in my book.;)
I never played Ultima 9 personally, but I didn't think KOTOR was half bad (I did play the PC version though, so maybe the bugs were fixed by then?).
I don't care much for EA, but honestly Infogrames/Atari is worse. They've pretty much developed a reputation for releasing unfinished titles between MOO3 and Civ3. Moo3 shipped with a totally broken AI and half finished UI. It got about 3 months of support and patches and is *kind of* playable now, but just barely, and the AI still has major issues. Even so, Atari ceased funding of further patches and it's been left to die. Sad, really.
At the same time, I know of two very recent cases of "push it out the door, NOW" that ruined two games that could have been tripple A titles if the developers had taken the time/been allowed to finish - Deus Ex: Invisible War and Master of Orion 3. Deus Ex suffered from holiday season syndrome, pushed out the door in a rushed state. Master of Orion was already later, and Infogrames(now under the Atari name) pushed it out the door before it was actually complete. It sucks because these were the only two titles I had REALLY been looking forward to in the past six months or so, and I got bitten on both.
Except isn't source code classified for copyright purposes as a "work of literature?" While I'd agree that this classification is a little bit off, I think outright saying that it's not subject to the same rules is a little bit misleading. That said, you are absolutely correct that the issue generally isn't copyright, but the patent and trade secret issues surrounding it.
Not only did GEOS have fonts, it was possible to overload the system memory and crash the computer, forcing a reboot if you tried to load too many of them at once. Man, those were the days.:)
Believe it or not, the GEOS codebase is still alive and kicking. I haven't gotten around to trying it personally, but it's supposedly updated for modern hardware and is capable of browsing the web. Breadbox, the company that apparently owns the code now is marketing it as a low-cost alternative to Windows for schools that could be run on older hardware. Interesting in the least.
It has a regime where it can require (literally) millions of people to work their way through the code, write as many utterly hideous virii as they can and release them all. Make no mistake, while China might get a slap on the wrist it's nothing worse than they continually get for their human rights record: on the other hand
So China is already forcing people to write code for Windows? *shudder*;)
Slashdot Mirror
You may have seen the Slashdot article on it a few weeks ago, but I'd seriously recommend checking out Barts PE Builder. I've been using it since October on customer's machines and you'd be amazed how often just an Adaware scan will bring a machine from barely running on its knees to being extremely usable again. It's an amazing tool, and it's saved me a ton of time that otherwise would've been spent doing a full reload, restoring settings and other software.
Trust me, I understand how badly the average user abuses their machine, and that sometimes reloads are the only way out. I've just noticed that there's a rather large percentage of Slashdotters that experience the same problems when they should know better. If you're one of the more technically inclined, I don't really see an excuse. That's the reason I felt compelled to jump up in XP's defense, even though I far prefer Linux or OS X over Windows.
Suse is pronounced Soo-Suh. They're a German company, and that's how it works out phonetically in German. HTH.
This is my gaming box that constantly has software installed/removed hardware swapped, taken the LAN parties and generally abused. The load of XP is still completely stable. I still prefer doing actual work on my Linux boxes, but honestly, keeping an XP load running and running stable isn't THAT hard. The biggest key is not to let 26 different apps load to the system tray on boot like most users. That, combined with using Firefox over IE and anything in the world over Outlook, will do wonders for keeping an XP machine running.
For one thing, PPC is pretty capable at emulating x86. For another, don't forget Microsoft's recent purchase of Connectix for their VirtualPC software. So most of the work is already done, Microsoft would just need to do a little fine tuning and make sure the clock speed on the XBox2 was high enough to compensate for the emulation hit. Throw in a more powerful video chipset and the idea of backwards compatibility with the XBox really isn't that far fetched.
As for your other suggestion - how do you think that'd be possible? Unless the XBox2 is going to have a few gigs of non-volatile RAM or something equally as unlikely, there's not really any way to "simulate the hard drive."
Not really. PPC is extremely good at emulating x86, and the video chipset shouldn't particularly be affected so long as it's using a compatible API - likely since it's essentially DirectX.
That's pretty impressive, what with XP only being 2 1/2 years old.
You're assuming that the G5 is going to be significantly more expensive than the G4. We already know that IBM seels the G5 to Apple for less than they're buying G4's from Moto, so it's quite possible that G5's could be introduced into the Powerbook line without any major price hikes.
Somebody please mod this disinformation down. There are no 'heat dissipation issues' with regards to the G5. Yes, Apple does use a heatsink that's about 5" tall and a ton of fans in the G5 tower, but that's done to keep noise down, but because it's running scorchingly hot. I got to thoroughly check out a Dual 2.0GHz G5 at a LAN party last weekend, and the machine is near silent under normal use. I can't say that about my Athlon or the P4's I use at school.
If you're still not satisfied that's the reason, pull the side cover off a G5, then pull off the plastic panel that seperates the different airflow compartments - the computer will sense that the panel's been removed, thus disrupting the airflow and kick all the fans into high speed. You'll suddenly have the machine go from being near silent to about as loud as you'd expect a PC to be.
The G5 towers are amazingly well engineered machines, and it's really getting tiring to hear people mistake Apple's emphasis on quiet computing (extremely well executed) be mistaken for a non-existant heat problem.
Westwood. It wouldn't really surprise me to see Maxis eventually suffer the same fate, either.
And get back under the bridge, troll. I live not far from ATL and spend about every other weekend there with friends, and I laughed at the original post. It was supposed to be funny, and it was if you don't have a stick up your ass.
Interesting idea, but there's actually already a Windows equivalent of exactly that. I'm not sure how widespread it is (though I do know my University uses it on all non-faculty machines), but it's called Deep Freeze. Basically, the admin sets up a machine to a 'stock' state and then activates Deep Freeze which completely sets it clean after every reboot.
Anyone have any idea how this actually works? They claim that it "does not use an image" and I've heard talk that it somehow sits between the BIOS and OS, but I've been unable to find any solid info. It is vulnerable to an attack using, say, a Knoppix disc, but from within Windows, you can change anything you want, down to reformatting the drive and it'll be fixed when the computer's restarted. I'm curious as to how they pull this off.
And for those of you who haven't heard what actually happened.
Admittedly, the version recorded by the directional mic is pretty funny, but if you had actually been standing there, you wouldn't have been able to hear the man.
That really is great news, even if I am 12 hours late on it. :) Between this and the fact that Intel has finally admitted that they'll eventually have to move to an x86-64 architechture, it looks like they're finally starting to get their act together and leave the Megahertz Marketeering behind.
I'm an admitted AMD fanboy, but I've always really liked the Pentium M, and it irked me that it wasn't essentially being left to itself in the notebook segment rather than leveraged in the desktop market as well because Intel was too busy ramping up clock speed with the comparitively hugely inefficient P4. This is one of the better pieces of news I've heard today, thanks. :)
I know you were joking, but just so you can sleep easier at night, all the pictures I've seen have shown 16x PCIe slots being physically larger than 1x PCIe slots. Not saying that wouldn't stop some of our more ingenious computer "experts" from "making it fit" but it should at least make things more difficult for them. ;)
The Pentium M and the P-4 Mobile actually have little in common. The Pentium M is much closer to a PIII in design, borrowing some elements of the P4 such as SSE2 support, adding in some power saving functions of its own, and adding a ton of cache. Clock-for-clock the Pentium M eats the P4 alive, and it's really a shame that we'll probably never see a desktop version of this chip made available as Intel has invested far too much marketing money into the ridiculous scaling of the MHz with the P4.
I agree with you completely. I had heard about Bart's PE before, but finally taking the time to put together my own build a few months ago was one of the best things I've done in a while. It's really amazing how many machines that are barely even running can be brought back to life simply by popping PE in and running an AV and spyware scan. The networking support is also a lifesaver - it makes recovering data from a crashed install a simple matter of a second machine and a crossover cable rather than having to tear the machine down and install the harddrive in the second machine (a real pain when the machine in question is a laptop). Really, I think the comparison to Knoppix is a bit unfair as Knoppix is supposed to be a demonstration of what desktop Linux is like. Bart's PE, on the other hand, is a very stripped down version of Windows with system administration tools as it's sole driving focus. It's much closer to say Knoppix STD than it is to vanilla Knoppix.
Bart's PE Builder actually lets you include ERD Commander as a plugin to your PE Build. This way, you get all the tools available with that, as well as networking support, AV and spyware scanning, and you can throw in other tools such as Nero and Ghost as well. It's an incredibly useful tool that I use just about every day and has saved me more time in fixing customer's machines than I care to think about.
So Bart's PE isn't really a replacement for ERD Commander so much as it lets you build many tools into a single, minimal runtime environment which is extremely useful for system diagnostics. If you like ERD Commander, you really should check this out because it allows you to not only have the features available in ERD Commander, but a good deal more as well.
The original MOO and MOO2 were two of my all time favorite games, hence why I was so disappointed with MOO3. It had a lot of potential, but they half implemented too many gameplay changes and the AI was so half done that it pretty much ruined it for me. Speaking of Star Control, SC2 is one of the best space-adventure type games ever in my book. ;)
I never played Ultima 9 personally, but I didn't think KOTOR was half bad (I did play the PC version though, so maybe the bugs were fixed by then?).
I don't care much for EA, but honestly Infogrames/Atari is worse. They've pretty much developed a reputation for releasing unfinished titles between MOO3 and Civ3. Moo3 shipped with a totally broken AI and half finished UI. It got about 3 months of support and patches and is *kind of* playable now, but just barely, and the AI still has major issues. Even so, Atari ceased funding of further patches and it's been left to die. Sad, really.
At the same time, I know of two very recent cases of "push it out the door, NOW" that ruined two games that could have been tripple A titles if the developers had taken the time/been allowed to finish - Deus Ex: Invisible War and Master of Orion 3. Deus Ex suffered from holiday season syndrome, pushed out the door in a rushed state. Master of Orion was already later, and Infogrames(now under the Atari name) pushed it out the door before it was actually complete. It sucks because these were the only two titles I had REALLY been looking forward to in the past six months or so, and I got bitten on both.
Except isn't source code classified for copyright purposes as a "work of literature?" While I'd agree that this classification is a little bit off, I think outright saying that it's not subject to the same rules is a little bit misleading. That said, you are absolutely correct that the issue generally isn't copyright, but the patent and trade secret issues surrounding it.
Not only did GEOS have fonts, it was possible to overload the system memory and crash the computer, forcing a reboot if you tried to load too many of them at once. Man, those were the days. :)
Sorry, I messed up the link in that post. The link is http://www.breadbox.com/
Believe it or not, the GEOS codebase is still alive and kicking. I haven't gotten around to trying it personally, but it's supposedly updated for modern hardware and is capable of browsing the web. Breadbox, the company that apparently owns the code now is marketing it as a low-cost alternative to Windows for schools that could be run on older hardware. Interesting in the least.