> "Hang on, aren't all Windows RT machines exactly the same hardware? How could there be differences between machines where an update would brick some and not others?"
No. Microsoft Surface RT machines are built with the Nvidia Tegra SoC. Others, like the Dell XPS 10 use Qualcomm's SoC.
I wish Microsoft had included some details about what machines/configs are bricking and which are not. I upgraded two Dell XPS 10 machines with no issues. And I haven't seen any conclusive patterns emerging from various forum posts and tweets complaining about problems.
One possible delta in the environment to which the update is being applied is whether or not the 8.1 PREVIEW had been installed prior to the update. For example, I've heard that people who installed the 8.1 preview on a Dell XPS 10 had to remove the recovery partition before it would work. So, I can imagine an update process failing when it expects to find a recovery partition in place. But the number of these devices is pretty small and you think would be easily identifiable from the problem reports coming in. But I wonder if the problem is anything like this or related to the preview. OTOH, most people upgrading from the preview seem OK outside of having to re-install some applications.
Also important is that it will *upload* torrents while your *nix box is turned off. An important aspect of BT is that the bits you just downloaded are also made available for upload. If the torrents you are interested in just finished downloading and you happen to have no other reason to leave a box on, you're likely to turn it off. That's not as nice for torrent distribution.
And the astronauts in the Apollo program weren't out walking with any of these "explosions" going on nearby, at least none that we knew about. Any dust they brought in was kicked up while they were out driving the buggy around and doing their experiments. I suspect that the dust from an impact must settle quite quickly with no atmosphere to suspend the particles. So the "bringing the dust into the living quarters" issue would exist independent of the impacts and would need to be addressed if we were to go back to the Moon.
Brewster Kahle said on a podcast (IT Conversations) that they are working on an agreement with the library at Alexandria Egypt to back up each other's archives. Sounds like a good deal, since Alexandria doesn't have most of the LOC content and the LOC has little of what Alexandria is archiving.
[cust] Boot time is important to me. I turn off my machine when I am not using it and I frequently jump back and forth between Windows and Linux to get my work done. Can I see how fast this machine reboots?
[sales] I really can't demonstrate that feature. If we reboot the machine too much, the workunits that people are paying us to process have to be restarted and they don't get the results they are paying for.
Note, I realize that good distributed apps can recover from system restarts without losing too much work, but that may not be the case for all applications run on these machines.
Maybe all this makes sense when the stores are closed.
While the search is far from exhaustive, the lack of any results so far certainly makes me reconsider the utility of this sort of research. What we are looking for just isn't there, or the signals aren't what we should be looking for, or the likelihood of finding something is smaller than we thought. Maybe we need a new approach.
SAH is very accessible to casual computer users and makes them aware of the power of distributed computing. This may lead them to become involved in other projects.
Someone had to crunch the numbers. Imagine the costs involved with building dedicated machines to do the work.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Hang on, aren't all Windows RT machines exactly the same hardware? How could there be differences between machines where an update would brick some and not others?" No. Microsoft Surface RT machines are built with the Nvidia Tegra SoC. Others, like the Dell XPS 10 use Qualcomm's SoC. I wish Microsoft had included some details about what machines/configs are bricking and which are not. I upgraded two Dell XPS 10 machines with no issues. And I haven't seen any conclusive patterns emerging from various forum posts and tweets complaining about problems. One possible delta in the environment to which the update is being applied is whether or not the 8.1 PREVIEW had been installed prior to the update. For example, I've heard that people who installed the 8.1 preview on a Dell XPS 10 had to remove the recovery partition before it would work. So, I can imagine an update process failing when it expects to find a recovery partition in place. But the number of these devices is pretty small and you think would be easily identifiable from the problem reports coming in. But I wonder if the problem is anything like this or related to the preview. OTOH, most people upgrading from the preview seem OK outside of having to re-install some applications.
Well the header at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#bt says 9.04, but the actual links below it are for 9.10.
Also important is that it will *upload* torrents while your *nix box is turned off. An important aspect of BT is that the bits you just downloaded are also made available for upload. If the torrents you are interested in just finished downloading and you happen to have no other reason to leave a box on, you're likely to turn it off. That's not as nice for torrent distribution.
And the astronauts in the Apollo program weren't out walking with any of these "explosions" going on nearby, at least none that we knew about. Any dust they brought in was kicked up while they were out driving the buggy around and doing their experiments. I suspect that the dust from an impact must settle quite quickly with no atmosphere to suspend the particles. So the "bringing the dust into the living quarters" issue would exist independent of the impacts and would need to be addressed if we were to go back to the Moon.
Brewster Kahle said on a podcast (IT Conversations) that they are working on an agreement with the library at Alexandria Egypt to back up each other's archives. Sounds like a good deal, since Alexandria doesn't have most of the LOC content and the LOC has little of what Alexandria is archiving.
[cust] Boot time is important to me. I turn off my machine when I am not using it and I frequently jump back and forth between Windows and Linux to get my work done. Can I see how fast this machine reboots?
[sales] I really can't demonstrate that feature. If we reboot the machine too much, the workunits that people are paying us to process have to be restarted and they don't get the results they are paying for.
Note, I realize that good distributed apps can recover from system restarts without losing too much work, but that may not be the case for all applications run on these machines.
Maybe all this makes sense when the stores are closed.