Right, because putting twice as many cores on the chip isn't going to double the number of transistors. The cores are only, what, 10 transistors each? The rest of the transistors are just there to satisfy moore's law, not to do anything useful.
Each photo detector even in the most 'honest' of cameras contributes to at least 9 pixels in the final 'rasterized' image - depending on the algorithm used to convert from single color points to full color pixels they may contribute even more. Cameras also often contain logic to detect when a sensor is wrong either due to noise or because it is broken and will ignore that sensor's data and interpolate the pixel using the surrounding sensor's values.
Avalon != Aero. Avalon doesn't even ship with Vista and the window manager in Vista involves no managed code at all. There are not very many managed components in Vista and none that run before you get to the normal desktop.
A 13MP RAW image is NOT 39MB. Each 'pixel' in a digital camera only has one color (red, green, or blue typically, sometimes white (Sony), other colors could be used) - it's 8, 10, or 12 bits of data (you won't find 16 bit D/A conversion in a digital camera - it isn't practical and it's well beyond the human eye's ability to discern anyway - though you could argue it would be useful for making very large corrections in saturation or brightness without losing quality) - so stored with no compression at all this is at worst 13 x 12bits = 21.5mb. Add in the fact that you can get a decent compression ration across this data (and your typical 6-8MP DSLRS certainly do) without any loss of data... maybe 15mb... or less.
They "started over" by going back to the RTM Windows Server 2003 code and porting in features from the previous attempt at longhorn selectively. That is, they reset the development of Vista - they did not write a new operating system from scratch.
Art Wolfe (http://www.artwolfe.com/) is a professional photographer who shoots the majority of his work on 35mm film - including tons of work that ends up on large poster sized prints. Granted, it's high quality low speed film - but the best available 35mm film can do a very nice job even at large sizes.
Actually, it's hard to see how the flash drives are even impacted by this issue - they don't have a filesystem (unless the manufacturer formats them which they really don't have to) - the filesystem is used by the software that reads and writes to them. So, it may impact digital cameras, or other OS's that write to FAT, or even printers that can read directly from memory cards - but I don't see how it would impact the card itself any more than it would impact a hard drive or other form of generic storage.
At last year's macworld the mac that steve was using locked up (or at least the app he was using locked up, can't remember clearly) - he calmly noted that 'this is why we have backup systems for demos', pressed a button, and started that portion of the demo over on a different machine. He was demoing something in tiger and did note that it was not 'done' yet.
psst, I guarantee that if FrontRow gets TV functionality it will also get a new remote with more buttons (though most certainly less than 39 - which is about the largest MCE remote available and certainly not the required minimum button set).
CES is not about server products - and Microsoft is a large enough company that they can certainly compete in multiple markets at the same time. I doubt they'll be talking about MCE at MEC just as I doubt they'll be talking about Exchange and Windows Server at CES.
But they DON'T have the necessary hardware. No tuner and a totally insufficient hard drive - also no hardware MPEG encoder. These things would make the device way too expensive as a game console - and really, if you watch TV in more than one place in your house wouldn't you like to have access to all of your content everywhere?
It is most certainly a challenge to get the average consumer interested in setting up a client/server environment in their house but, whether or not you believe it, MCE is well on it's way to pulling it off. The majority of medium to high end desktop PCs now come with MCE (even if most of them don't include tuners) - with Vista this will likely only become more so... live is getting a very large percentage of xboxes plugged into the network - add PC and xbox to the network for reasons totally unrelated to the MCE extender functionality, they see each other, and for many people this will be a pleasent and unexpected bonus.
Not mentioned is the fact that there are MANY media center remote designs and that they do not all have 39 buttons. THe '39 button' version includes a numeric keypad (not necessary, but convenient for skipping around large collections via triple-tap and for the occasinal text entry in search pages) and a number of dedicated buttons like 'recorded tv', 'guide', 'live tv' etc which are NOT necessary since you can get to these parts of the UI without them but they sure make it easier to navigate.
There is a reference design credit card remote available for MCE that has about 25 buttons (no keypad for starters). OEMs make up their own remotes with slightly different button sets (though there is, as I understand it, a list of basic requirements imposed by MCE including the green button).
I do agree, however, that MCE could consider also offering a remote design with some level of button overloading like the FrontRow remote has (up/down/left/right shared perhaps with volume/channel/skip as approproate) but it would actually be pretty annoying if this was the only design available since there are definite downsides to button overloading.
All well and good but now there's talking rain with sucralose added - what do you make of the people who drink that? I've been drinking the 'new green' (which is rather red in color if you pour it into a glass, which no one does) for a while now.
When you've only got a few machines then heat is simply something you need to find a way to get rid of. When you have this many machines in a space this concentrated - you might want to try setting up a liquid cooling system that directs the heat to one area on the outside wall of the crate so that you can turn some of that heat back into usable power using the delta between the cpu temperature and the outside temperature. Even in hot locations a CPU will be quite a bit hotter before it approaches the point of failing...
Deprecated? Like what, the entire Win32 API could be considered deprecated if you take the view that.NET is the replacement for it. COM/DCOM will never leave Windows until a replacement technology is in place, has shipped for several versions, and is the technology in use by every mainstream app that uses COM/DCOM today.
Scratch that, COM/DCOM will never be deprecated. Windows would have to die first. It could happen in the way that anything could happen - but there is absolutely no reason at this time to think it will.
Oh, and for what it's worth - a significant feature of.NET applications is the fact that every object you define, unless you explicitly say otherwise, is a proper COM object (a feature that is used when interoperating with unmanaged code - since it isn't really relevant for managed code since you don't need or want ref counting there.)
The feature everyone is really talking about (document embedding) is a more specific thing known originally as OLE (Object Linking and Embedding.) This is a subset of what COM is used for - as is ActiveX - which is really just the idea of embedding a COM object into a web page.
Of course I'm not saying it's just a recompile. I'm sure there are substantial differences between Windows' APIs Linux's. But Microsoft managed to port to another completely different platform (OS X), and I see no compelling reason for why MS couldn't do the same on Linux if it wanted to.
Office for Mac is not a port of Office for Windows. There was a time, several versions back, that Microsoft tried to do this and the result was atrocious. The current versions of Office for Mac are a completely seperate codebase from the Windows version and anything they share is on an as needed basis (like, ok, we can probably make use of each other's graphing algorithms as an example.) The Mac version doesn't even have the same feature set (has features not in Office for Windows and is missing features in Office for Windows.) Some reviewers have said that the Mac version is actually better and that the Windows version could stand to learn some things from what the Mac Office team has done.
Microsoft pulled PPC and MIPS after a little while because it was WAY too complicated and expensive to make the platform work on that many processors - especially considering that there weren't very many customers using Windows on those platforms (not enough to justify the cost)
Alpha was pulled around the time that Itanium was added. Windows was shipping for two platforms and I guess they didn't want to take on three at a time (again). The Alpha hardware was also stagnating and there was very little customer interest in it (not that interest in the Itanium platform ever panned out)
Now Itanium is largely irrelevant (I don't even know if they are regularly building Vista for Itanium) but there are still two platforms to build for - x86 and amd64.
Windows Rights Management is more than you might think. It's much more about protecting the content *you* (or your employer) own than it is about protecting the RIAA and MPAA's content (which falls into a different DRM bucket and buzzword)
If you haven't seen it... windows rights management allows you to do things like send an email (or create a document) that can not be forward, can not be printed, expires in a specified period of time, etc. The features are indivudally selectable and I don't know the full list. You can't take screenshots of this stuff, you can't copy/paste (if that's what you requested anyway) I imagine they will also be able to enforce encrypted digital connections to the display for this content if the content owner (you) so chooses.
This kind of thing is pretty useful for simple things sending mail that can't be forwarded outside your company - and being able to cryptographically enforce this.
Of course you can always use a camera and take a picture of the screen. I guess you can also grab a pen and paper and write down what you see in the mail.
Furthermore, if this happens, NO platform will be able to display HD-DVD over a non-encrypted digital pipeline. That includes linux. Breaking this would be considered illegal (not that I agree with this, I don't) and it is nothing 'new' to Vista. What is perhaps 'new' is that Vista will have the necessary infrastructure to play HD-DVD through a secure pipeline that it is expected the movie industry will accept. That's the 'feature' being referred to... if you want to call it that. No other platform apparently can do this yet - but I'll bet anything that OSX will have the same support if HD-DVD really pulls this off and really becomes relevant.
20k * 45 years (working from 20 to 65) = 900,000. You won't be a millionare even if you spend nothing. If you're thinking about investments made with that money well... investment gains *are* income.
Accessories have always been profit centers for game consoles. Consider the absurd price per mb charged (on all platforms) for memory / save game cards.
Actually - all threads use the same copy of a loaded DLL since they share the same memory space. Kinda part of the fundamental difference between a thread and a process.
The same can not be said for different processes which communicate with eachother or different AppDomains in a.NET application.
Personally I think the security issue (some processes are still using the old DLL) is the biggest problem with trying to update in-use files without a reboot. Replacing the copy in memory would be difficult to impossible to do without risking breaking the running app.
IMO the approach that Windows Update takes these days of letting you say 'don't reboot' but then harassing you until you do (as of SP2) isn't a particularly bad one.
What ever hole exists has probably existed for a long time. When Microsoft discovers a hole themselves (or when a third party who knows how to keep their mouth shut discovers it and tells Microsoft) there is not that much additional risk created by leaving the hole there until they have the right fix and even more importantly until they have prepared customers (by having set release dates for fixes) to make the update very quickly.
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Right, because putting twice as many cores on the chip isn't going to double the number of transistors. The cores are only, what, 10 transistors each? The rest of the transistors are just there to satisfy moore's law, not to do anything useful.
Each photo detector even in the most 'honest' of cameras contributes to at least 9 pixels in the final 'rasterized' image - depending on the algorithm used to convert from single color points to full color pixels they may contribute even more. Cameras also often contain logic to detect when a sensor is wrong either due to noise or because it is broken and will ignore that sensor's data and interpolate the pixel using the surrounding sensor's values.
Avalon != Aero. Avalon doesn't even ship with Vista and the window manager in Vista involves no managed code at all. There are not very many managed components in Vista and none that run before you get to the normal desktop.
A 13MP RAW image is NOT 39MB. Each 'pixel' in a digital camera only has one color (red, green, or blue typically, sometimes white (Sony), other colors could be used) - it's 8, 10, or 12 bits of data (you won't find 16 bit D/A conversion in a digital camera - it isn't practical and it's well beyond the human eye's ability to discern anyway - though you could argue it would be useful for making very large corrections in saturation or brightness without losing quality) - so stored with no compression at all this is at worst 13 x 12bits = 21.5mb. Add in the fact that you can get a decent compression ration across this data (and your typical 6-8MP DSLRS certainly do) without any loss of data ... maybe 15mb ... or less.
They "started over" by going back to the RTM Windows Server 2003 code and porting in features from the previous attempt at longhorn selectively. That is, they reset the development of Vista - they did not write a new operating system from scratch.
Art Wolfe (http://www.artwolfe.com/) is a professional photographer who shoots the majority of his work on 35mm film - including tons of work that ends up on large poster sized prints. Granted, it's high quality low speed film - but the best available 35mm film can do a very nice job even at large sizes.
Actually, it's hard to see how the flash drives are even impacted by this issue - they don't have a filesystem (unless the manufacturer formats them which they really don't have to) - the filesystem is used by the software that reads and writes to them. So, it may impact digital cameras, or other OS's that write to FAT, or even printers that can read directly from memory cards - but I don't see how it would impact the card itself any more than it would impact a hard drive or other form of generic storage.
At last year's macworld the mac that steve was using locked up (or at least the app he was using locked up, can't remember clearly) - he calmly noted that 'this is why we have backup systems for demos', pressed a button, and started that portion of the demo over on a different machine. He was demoing something in tiger and did note that it was not 'done' yet.
psst, I guarantee that if FrontRow gets TV functionality it will also get a new remote with more buttons (though most certainly less than 39 - which is about the largest MCE remote available and certainly not the required minimum button set).
CES is not about server products - and Microsoft is a large enough company that they can certainly compete in multiple markets at the same time. I doubt they'll be talking about MCE at MEC just as I doubt they'll be talking about Exchange and Windows Server at CES.
Oh, and XP is not a server product.
But they DON'T have the necessary hardware. No tuner and a totally insufficient hard drive - also no hardware MPEG encoder. These things would make the device way too expensive as a game console - and really, if you watch TV in more than one place in your house wouldn't you like to have access to all of your content everywhere?
... live is getting a very large percentage of xboxes plugged into the network - add PC and xbox to the network for reasons totally unrelated to the MCE extender functionality, they see each other, and for many people this will be a pleasent and unexpected bonus.
It is most certainly a challenge to get the average consumer interested in setting up a client/server environment in their house but, whether or not you believe it, MCE is well on it's way to pulling it off. The majority of medium to high end desktop PCs now come with MCE (even if most of them don't include tuners) - with Vista this will likely only become more so
Not mentioned is the fact that there are MANY media center remote designs and that they do not all have 39 buttons. THe '39 button' version includes a numeric keypad (not necessary, but convenient for skipping around large collections via triple-tap and for the occasinal text entry in search pages) and a number of dedicated buttons like 'recorded tv', 'guide', 'live tv' etc which are NOT necessary since you can get to these parts of the UI without them but they sure make it easier to navigate.
There is a reference design credit card remote available for MCE that has about 25 buttons (no keypad for starters). OEMs make up their own remotes with slightly different button sets (though there is, as I understand it, a list of basic requirements imposed by MCE including the green button).
I do agree, however, that MCE could consider also offering a remote design with some level of button overloading like the FrontRow remote has (up/down/left/right shared perhaps with volume/channel/skip as approproate) but it would actually be pretty annoying if this was the only design available since there are definite downsides to button overloading.
All well and good but now there's talking rain with sucralose added - what do you make of the people who drink that? I've been drinking the 'new green' (which is rather red in color if you pour it into a glass, which no one does) for a while now.
When you've only got a few machines then heat is simply something you need to find a way to get rid of. When you have this many machines in a space this concentrated - you might want to try setting up a liquid cooling system that directs the heat to one area on the outside wall of the crate so that you can turn some of that heat back into usable power using the delta between the cpu temperature and the outside temperature. Even in hot locations a CPU will be quite a bit hotter before it approaches the point of failing ...
If you were really using visual studio it would have autocorrected 'TEH' for you.
Deprecated? Like what, the entire Win32 API could be considered deprecated if you take the view that
Scratch that, COM/DCOM will never be deprecated. Windows would have to die first. It could happen in the way that anything could happen - but there is absolutely no reason at this time to think it will.
Oh, and for what it's worth - a significant feature of
The feature everyone is really talking about (document embedding) is a more specific thing known originally as OLE (Object Linking and Embedding.) This is a subset of what COM is used for - as is ActiveX - which is really just the idea of embedding a COM object into a web page.
Office for Mac is not a port of Office for Windows. There was a time, several versions back, that Microsoft tried to do this and the result was atrocious. The current versions of Office for Mac are a completely seperate codebase from the Windows version and anything they share is on an as needed basis (like, ok, we can probably make use of each other's graphing algorithms as an example.) The Mac version doesn't even have the same feature set (has features not in Office for Windows and is missing features in Office for Windows.) Some reviewers have said that the Mac version is actually better and that the Windows version could stand to learn some things from what the Mac Office team has done.
This feature was added in 1997 as part of IE4. If the last time you tried this was on Win95 you might want to try again.
... so I suppose you have tried. Want a referral for a course on how to use Windows? :)
Then again, quicklaunch was also part of IE4
Microsoft pulled PPC and MIPS after a little while because it was WAY too complicated and expensive to make the platform work on that many processors - especially considering that there weren't very many customers using Windows on those platforms (not enough to justify the cost)
Alpha was pulled around the time that Itanium was added. Windows was shipping for two platforms and I guess they didn't want to take on three at a time (again). The Alpha hardware was also stagnating and there was very little customer interest in it (not that interest in the Itanium platform ever panned out)
Now Itanium is largely irrelevant (I don't even know if they are regularly building Vista for Itanium) but there are still two platforms to build for - x86 and amd64.
Windows Rights Management is more than you might think. It's much more about protecting the content *you* (or your employer) own than it is about protecting the RIAA and MPAA's content (which falls into a different DRM bucket and buzzword)
... windows rights management allows you to do things like send an email (or create a document) that can not be forward, can not be printed, expires in a specified period of time, etc. The features are indivudally selectable and I don't know the full list. You can't take screenshots of this stuff, you can't copy/paste (if that's what you requested anyway) I imagine they will also be able to enforce encrypted digital connections to the display for this content if the content owner (you) so chooses.
If you haven't seen it
This kind of thing is pretty useful for simple things sending mail that can't be forwarded outside your company - and being able to cryptographically enforce this.
Of course you can always use a camera and take a picture of the screen. I guess you can also grab a pen and paper and write down what you see in the mail.
Furthermore, if this happens, NO platform will be able to display HD-DVD over a non-encrypted digital pipeline. That includes linux. Breaking this would be considered illegal (not that I agree with this, I don't) and it is nothing 'new' to Vista. What is perhaps 'new' is that Vista will have the necessary infrastructure to play HD-DVD through a secure pipeline that it is expected the movie industry will accept. That's the 'feature' being referred to ... if you want to call it that. No other platform apparently can do this yet - but I'll bet anything that OSX will have the same support if HD-DVD really pulls this off and really becomes relevant.
Uhh.
... investment gains *are* income.
20k * 45 years (working from 20 to 65) = 900,000. You won't be a millionare even if you spend nothing. If you're thinking about investments made with that money well
Accessories have always been profit centers for game consoles. Consider the absurd price per mb charged (on all platforms) for memory / save game cards.
Actually - all threads use the same copy of a loaded DLL since they share the same memory space. Kinda part of the fundamental difference between a thread and a process.
.NET application.
The same can not be said for different processes which communicate with eachother or different AppDomains in a
Personally I think the security issue (some processes are still using the old DLL) is the biggest problem with trying to update in-use files without a reboot. Replacing the copy in memory would be difficult to impossible to do without risking breaking the running app.
IMO the approach that Windows Update takes these days of letting you say 'don't reboot' but then harassing you until you do (as of SP2) isn't a particularly bad one.
What ever hole exists has probably existed for a long time. When Microsoft discovers a hole themselves (or when a third party who knows how to keep their mouth shut discovers it and tells Microsoft) there is not that much additional risk created by leaving the hole there until they have the right fix and even more importantly until they have prepared customers (by having set release dates for fixes) to make the update very quickly.