My point wasn't what was, but what is. Vista requires a dual CPU for anything approaching acceptable performance. Vista is much less than what Longhorn was envisioned to be. Windows 7 is more than Vista but far less than Longhorn, so who knows what it's going to require.
If truth be told, the WinFS system as described and given MS's coding history would require 1 dedicated core all by itself if not 2, along with at least a 2 disk RAID0 setup or an SSD. We're not talking about anything else there either, like AV, malware detection, the kernel, etc. Odds are those would take up another 2, so the quads might be able to run Longhorn, should it exist, but I doubt much else. (Yes, pure speculation, but having been through 2 iterations of the Cairo FUD machine and having seen the results, I'll bet I'm closer to the truth than MS would like to admit;)
I don't know that MS has another chance. If they had even a single vision involving technology instead of dollar signs, they would take Win64, strip it down and make it perform, and create a modular architecture with it, cleanly breaking with the past. Run Win32 code in VMs. Even if they successfully produced such a product within the year, would it be enough to keep people from jumping ship? I'm afraid the cat's out of the bag - MS has done everything it can to shove people out the door, and their efforts have been wildly successful. According to CIO.com, and several other publications, companies considering alternative desktops went from less than 1% in 2006 to 45+% in 2007, with 20% or so rolling out test systems.
I predicted in 2000 with the release of XP that MS had already peaked. They had some inertia that kept them going, but the signs were clear that the OS was bloating with no discernible improvements over Win2K (DirectX doesn't count - and it could have been supported fully on Win2K in an easier to use mode). Failures to launch Longhorn/Vista along with numerous security missteps, and then the horrible 3-headed abomination that actually appeared in the form of Vista have finally broken down the wall. MS will not completely fail, but its time as a 95+% monopoly is done. It failed in the server market already, and now the desktop market has opened to alternatives. If MS still holds more than 50% of business workstations by 2012, even in the US/Europe, I'd be surprised.
As for why it's attractive, probably as much nostalgia for a time when the majority of morons and trolls were all on AOL instead of the internet proper, and a system that wasn't ad laden to the extreme [insert FF plug here].
"Secret" pictures? Are you projecting? Hint: I'm not anonymous.
well, we need it for Vista, we still don't know what's going to be needed for Longhorn. After all, Windows 7 is barely a microstep towards Longhorn....
Trolling in newsgroups easily goes back to the first advocacy groups I can recall participating in, as well as a few that were probably set up for pure flamefests, at least in hindsight.
USENET won't "die", but it will be used by the few vs the many, because it doesn't have that friendly gooeyness to it that most blog sites etc have, even though there are some pretty nifty readers out there. Then again, do remember that USENET started in the days of the few, before the likes of AOL and Compuserve joined the edu/mil networks and before that, there were the BBS networks like FIDONET. It doesn't take a lot of people to keep something like USENET going.
Actually, that's not 100% correct, as transfer rates are also dependent upon the number of platters, not just rotational speed. 4 platters @ 7200 rpm will perform better overall than a single 10K platter drive.
The earlier SATA drives were single and double platter drives that were competing with multi-platter SCSI drives, hence the much higher numbers for SCSI. Now that SATA drives are coming in at 4 platters (sides?), that seems to be about the limiting factor for both in the 1" configuration.
It's why those full height 50GB old SCSI drives were so good for data transfer and had seek times in the sub 3ms - there were 9 platters in that beast (IIRC).
I read the referenced articles which also had them listed in Mb.
BTW, current HDs can do 60 MB/s (105 MB/s theoretical), so that would be only 1 order of magnitude faster, not 3. Let's not correct a bit of misinformation with an injection of more misinformation, even if quoted. (On a side note, they may be only looking at IOPS, but even then it's less than 2 orders of magnitude - looks like standard marketese: round up to 2 orders plus 1 order = 3 orders... 1000 times faster?)
I took the Fusion IO numbers off of the summary and the referenced articles. If it's supposed to be MB, not Mb, then blame all three sources. (OMG, I just admitted to RTF!!!:)
That said, yes, it depends upon the $/GB and your needs as to which is better.
Just took a look at a few sites reviews on drives. It appears that the current crop of drives in more realistic tests approach 40-60 MB/s. So I'll up my statement to 60MB/s. Still well short of 100MB/s. (Don't believe drive manufacturers or their ad-driven reviewers).
Just FYI: the 60 MB/s surprises me for non SCSI hardware, that's a pretty darn good number.
.....The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power........
It appears that one of these is NOT ready to be used in your next laptop in the near future! Well, if you're looking for the quick and easy cure to procreation....
The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power.
For the BitMicro SSD: 230MB/s >> 800 Mb/s card, and 55K IOPS >> 300 IOPS for todays hard drives.
It sounds to me like the BitMicro is a clear winner, especially considering that today's fastest HDs deliver about 300 IOPS and a max of about 40MB/s sustained data transfer. You can RAID the drives to increase performance, but I imagine the same will hold true of the SSDs. The only issue is price. The Texas Memory System is out of the question - it makes an Intel P4 Extreme look like a power miser.
I'll throw a ten spot Reznor's way for the next one. I'd rather he benefit directly instead of the RIAA morons. I didn't participate in RadioHead's album, because I happen to be the one person that just doesn't like them. I applauded them for their effort though.
KISS, where to begin? KISS was a trumped up stage show, and was outlandish enough with catchy enough riffs no matter how badly played that they became popular. (Let's give them credit, they managed to become mega-stars in an era that barely knew what that was - you had Elvis, the Beatles, ABBA, the Captain and Teneille(sp?), the Osmonds, Beach Boys, and Jacksons, and that was pretty much it across a couple of decades. I don't know that anyone got as in your face marketing wise prior to KISS, although the model was certainly repeated afterwards.
Actually, thinking about it, KISS may be the reason the RIAA exists today. They truly are Knights in Satan's Service, just not the one all the religious moms were worried about.
The older you get, the more you understand the value of your own labour and the more benefits you have to show from it. Hence, when older, you're far more likely to care about the government taking it from you and people like you.
Funny then that the older I get, the more liberal I seem to be in some thought processes. I guess it's because I've gathered enough benefits to be comfortable and have had the time to see how my money is currently being misappropriated by businesses to offer me something less than I should be. By that, I mean that money I pay for things like insurance seem to be funding large double digit gains in insurance company profits instead of offering me better services, and that those services, by sole pain caused by those same insurance companies, cost much more than they should, thus creating a double-whammy to myself.
Oh, and while I'm conservative in quite a few viewpoints, I by no means match the conservative or liberal labels as they currently exist in the US political landscape.
And there's another quote from somewhere that I found funny: a liberal is a person who hasn't gotten robbed, and a conservative is a person who hasn't gotten arrested.
Search indexers hit every file once, most programs hit the same file over and over. The former is bad for cache, the latter is great. I have no indexers running on any of my systems precisely because of the performance hit they cause, and the total lack of any benefit due to what I use my machine for. grep, even on Windows, is good enough for me for the once every 2 or 3 months I actually have to search for something that's not already in another application.
Free ram *is* wasted RAM, after the first few percentage points to deal with immediate allocation needs. It costs you the same to power RAM whether it holds meaningful information or not. So it might as well cache SOMETHING. Agreed. Much more strongly put.
You know, that'd be great if 99% of what I do on my windows box didn't require admin privs anyways (the main reason I still have one). It'd be so much easier if windows had privilege escalation a la su/sudo, because I only have a single account on my windows box. (Oh, I almost never browse the web with it either, even though it has FF installed.
I've gotten to the point where I don't care any more. My main work is done on a Mac with a PC held around for the occasional game and a couple of interconnects to devices that don't yet/may never have Mac drivers. We'll see.
That won't protect you if the drive contents are available to the first machine. Unfortunately with XP, MS finally can read multiple primary partitions. Of course, they can't read ext2... but then, Blizzard could implement a driver...
So nope - must effectively have a second machine via HD hotswap/disable features. Then again, if a game is this invasive, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
HD video, at least as defined by HD DVD and Blu-ray are 24fps. I don't know why they continued that with HD video when every TV out there and broadcast is in 30 fps (at least in the US, elsewhere where electricity is 50Hz, I think 25 fps is the norm.
First, there's no such thing as wasted RAM as long as there is free RAM.
Second, you're wholly incorrect about the file system cache filling up. It's one of the things that gets cleaned out. Hitting a directory that you had open prior to leaving and closed, then come back to reopen will take forever, especially if it contains archive files that explorer "understands" (i.e., zip files). Matter of fact, if there's a registry setting to disable the asinine scanning of zip files upon opening a directory with explorer, please share. Heck, if there's one for disabling the search feature as well for the explorer brain dead search (when you're only looking for a file name) that would be wunderbar too.
If the machine's idle, it should remain "idle" and not "free" RAM for no reason. There's a reason my desktop is left with programs running. It's not so I can essentially wait a time almost equal to a program startup to access it upon returning. It's so bad I now put my machine into S3 sleep. It's faster than waiting on the disk swap to come back.
Actually, most movies should fall into the '3' category, with those you watched but didn't like as 2's, and those you couldn't watch as 1's (even some technical 2's might become 1's). Anything you have no interest in should be tagged as such. 4's are for those you really liked, and 5 for outstanding movies which in most cases you'd watch several times and possibly buy. (Sixth Sense was a 5 but is a one time only movie unless you're interested in dissecting it. There's too many movies in my queue for that;)
I find it less than useful since if you actually use it with installed programs, you can get ambiguous results, instabilities, and crashes.
How about if they actually created a real multi-user OS with the ability to run a process as another user? (Yes, there's some silly add-on with yet more stupid configuration tricks that will allow you to masquerade as another user or run as a service, but both of those entail significant bloat as there's yet more crap running in the box.)
I'll admit they got a lot smarter about it, but the OS still swaps crap out that I don't want to be swapped, so the less swap space, the better. It doesn't appear to free up "in-use" ram either, so there doesn't appear to be any benefit on larger memory windows machines.
The real issue with swap space existing is when the machine goes unused for a time. The OS swaps "unused" things out, for no reason other than to swap them out. So when you come back online, voila - massive lag until the unnecessarily swapped memory comes back online.
Unless you set your page file to the same initial and max sizes then it is going to grow in increments and cause fragmentation. And this should be the default. Page file fragmentation is bad, and having a default setting that allows for that is stupid.
...Word of warning you should keep a very small page file, under 50 meg, on drive C there there is older software that expect it and can cause problems and slowdowns if not found; also good in an emergency when your main pagging file cannot come on-line and is required if you want crashdumps or have they fixed that? WTF? Why should a program even have access to it? That's some seriously bad programming. (Yes, I vaguely recall running into this problem a while ago, I chunked the program) There's also the issue that Windows, at least prior to Vista (and I'm sure it does too) will always swap out part of the kernel, no matter how large your memory size is. IIRC, there's an obscure (of course!) registry key to force the entire kernel to remain in RAM.
IIRC, The setting of the no page file was an old performance idea and will now not work, windows creates an temporary page file if it cannot find one. And a good one:) I ran that way on 1+GB boxes for a long long time until my in-use space exceeded 2GB on a regular basis. This has caused me to at last have an unassailable argument to install Ubuntu on my work machine and remove myself from AD managed hell.:-D Now if I only could get my co to buy me the $1999 MBP instead of the $1900 Dell Latitudes.... I'd be a happy camper. (Oh, and that would be without the docking station et al)
My solution was never to address the corruption in such a system post election, but to remove the corruption in the election process to put corporate puppets into office. At least with my proposal, there will a mostly level playing field for the opportunity to be elected to office. What happens after that is a different problem. You have yet to provide a single reason why the stated goals would not be met.
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My point wasn't what was, but what is. Vista requires a dual CPU for anything approaching acceptable performance. Vista is much less than what Longhorn was envisioned to be. Windows 7 is more than Vista but far less than Longhorn, so who knows what it's going to require.
If truth be told, the WinFS system as described and given MS's coding history would require 1 dedicated core all by itself if not 2, along with at least a 2 disk RAID0 setup or an SSD. We're not talking about anything else there either, like AV, malware detection, the kernel, etc. Odds are those would take up another 2, so the quads might be able to run Longhorn, should it exist, but I doubt much else. (Yes, pure speculation, but having been through 2 iterations of the Cairo FUD machine and having seen the results, I'll bet I'm closer to the truth than MS would like to admit;)
I don't know that MS has another chance. If they had even a single vision involving technology instead of dollar signs, they would take Win64, strip it down and make it perform, and create a modular architecture with it, cleanly breaking with the past. Run Win32 code in VMs. Even if they successfully produced such a product within the year, would it be enough to keep people from jumping ship? I'm afraid the cat's out of the bag - MS has done everything it can to shove people out the door, and their efforts have been wildly successful. According to CIO.com, and several other publications, companies considering alternative desktops went from less than 1% in 2006 to 45+% in 2007, with 20% or so rolling out test systems.
I predicted in 2000 with the release of XP that MS had already peaked. They had some inertia that kept them going, but the signs were clear that the OS was bloating with no discernible improvements over Win2K (DirectX doesn't count - and it could have been supported fully on Win2K in an easier to use mode). Failures to launch Longhorn/Vista along with numerous security missteps, and then the horrible 3-headed abomination that actually appeared in the form of Vista have finally broken down the wall. MS will not completely fail, but its time as a 95+% monopoly is done. It failed in the server market already, and now the desktop market has opened to alternatives. If MS still holds more than 50% of business workstations by 2012, even in the US/Europe, I'd be surprised.
Buy a MacBook Pro. Refurbs are getting pretty darn inexpensive, especially one generation back.
http://gopher.quux.org:70/ (Yes, I had to look it up)
As for why it's attractive, probably as much nostalgia for a time when the majority of morons and trolls were all on AOL instead of the internet proper, and a system that wasn't ad laden to the extreme [insert FF plug here].
"Secret" pictures? Are you projecting? Hint: I'm not anonymous.
well, we need it for Vista, we still don't know what's going to be needed for Longhorn. After all, Windows 7 is barely a microstep towards Longhorn....
Trolling in newsgroups easily goes back to the first advocacy groups I can recall participating in, as well as a few that were probably set up for pure flamefests, at least in hindsight.
USENET won't "die", but it will be used by the few vs the many, because it doesn't have that friendly gooeyness to it that most blog sites etc have, even though there are some pretty nifty readers out there. Then again, do remember that USENET started in the days of the few, before the likes of AOL and Compuserve joined the edu/mil networks and before that, there were the BBS networks like FIDONET. It doesn't take a lot of people to keep something like USENET going.
Actually, that's not 100% correct, as transfer rates are also dependent upon the number of platters, not just rotational speed. 4 platters @ 7200 rpm will perform better overall than a single 10K platter drive.
The earlier SATA drives were single and double platter drives that were competing with multi-platter SCSI drives, hence the much higher numbers for SCSI. Now that SATA drives are coming in at 4 platters (sides?), that seems to be about the limiting factor for both in the 1" configuration.
It's why those full height 50GB old SCSI drives were so good for data transfer and had seek times in the sub 3ms - there were 9 platters in that beast (IIRC).
I read the referenced articles which also had them listed in Mb.
BTW, current HDs can do 60 MB/s (105 MB/s theoretical), so that would be only 1 order of magnitude faster, not 3. Let's not correct a bit of misinformation with an injection of more misinformation, even if quoted. (On a side note, they may be only looking at IOPS, but even then it's less than 2 orders of magnitude - looks like standard marketese: round up to 2 orders plus 1 order = 3 orders... 1000 times faster?)
I took the Fusion IO numbers off of the summary and the referenced articles. If it's supposed to be MB, not Mb, then blame all three sources. (OMG, I just admitted to RTF!!!:)
That said, yes, it depends upon the $/GB and your needs as to which is better.
Just took a look at a few sites reviews on drives. It appears that the current crop of drives in more realistic tests approach 40-60 MB/s. So I'll up my statement to 60MB/s. Still well short of 100MB/s. (Don't believe drive manufacturers or their ad-driven reviewers).
Just FYI: the 60 MB/s surprises me for non SCSI hardware, that's a pretty darn good number.
.....The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power........It appears that one of these is NOT ready to be used in your next laptop in the near future! Well, if you're looking for the quick and easy cure to procreation....
The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power.
For the BitMicro SSD: 230MB/s >> 800 Mb/s card, and 55K IOPS >> 300 IOPS for todays hard drives.
It sounds to me like the BitMicro is a clear winner, especially considering that today's fastest HDs deliver about 300 IOPS and a max of about 40MB/s sustained data transfer. You can RAID the drives to increase performance, but I imagine the same will hold true of the SSDs. The only issue is price. The Texas Memory System is out of the question - it makes an Intel P4 Extreme look like a power miser.
Love the Bill Hicks reference. :)
I'll throw a ten spot Reznor's way for the next one. I'd rather he benefit directly instead of the RIAA morons. I didn't participate in RadioHead's album, because I happen to be the one person that just doesn't like them. I applauded them for their effort though.
KISS, where to begin? KISS was a trumped up stage show, and was outlandish enough with catchy enough riffs no matter how badly played that they became popular. (Let's give them credit, they managed to become mega-stars in an era that barely knew what that was - you had Elvis, the Beatles, ABBA, the Captain and Teneille(sp?), the Osmonds, Beach Boys, and Jacksons, and that was pretty much it across a couple of decades. I don't know that anyone got as in your face marketing wise prior to KISS, although the model was certainly repeated afterwards.
Actually, thinking about it, KISS may be the reason the RIAA exists today. They truly are Knights in Satan's Service, just not the one all the religious moms were worried about.
Funny, because I've always interpreted it as:
The older you get, the more you understand the value of your own labour and the more benefits you have to show from it. Hence, when older, you're far more likely to care about the government taking it from you and people like you.
Funny then that the older I get, the more liberal I seem to be in some thought processes. I guess it's because I've gathered enough benefits to be comfortable and have had the time to see how my money is currently being misappropriated by businesses to offer me something less than I should be. By that, I mean that money I pay for things like insurance seem to be funding large double digit gains in insurance company profits instead of offering me better services, and that those services, by sole pain caused by those same insurance companies, cost much more than they should, thus creating a double-whammy to myself.Oh, and while I'm conservative in quite a few viewpoints, I by no means match the conservative or liberal labels as they currently exist in the US political landscape.
And there's another quote from somewhere that I found funny: a liberal is a person who hasn't gotten robbed, and a conservative is a person who hasn't gotten arrested.
You know, that'd be great if 99% of what I do on my windows box didn't require admin privs anyways (the main reason I still have one). It'd be so much easier if windows had privilege escalation a la su/sudo, because I only have a single account on my windows box. (Oh, I almost never browse the web with it either, even though it has FF installed.
I've gotten to the point where I don't care any more. My main work is done on a Mac with a PC held around for the occasional game and a couple of interconnects to devices that don't yet/may never have Mac drivers. We'll see.
That won't protect you if the drive contents are available to the first machine. Unfortunately with XP, MS finally can read multiple primary partitions. Of course, they can't read ext2... but then, Blizzard could implement a driver...
So nope - must effectively have a second machine via HD hotswap/disable features. Then again, if a game is this invasive, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
HD video, at least as defined by HD DVD and Blu-ray are 24fps. I don't know why they continued that with HD video when every TV out there and broadcast is in 30 fps (at least in the US, elsewhere where electricity is 50Hz, I think 25 fps is the norm.
First, there's no such thing as wasted RAM as long as there is free RAM.
Second, you're wholly incorrect about the file system cache filling up. It's one of the things that gets cleaned out. Hitting a directory that you had open prior to leaving and closed, then come back to reopen will take forever, especially if it contains archive files that explorer "understands" (i.e., zip files). Matter of fact, if there's a registry setting to disable the asinine scanning of zip files upon opening a directory with explorer, please share. Heck, if there's one for disabling the search feature as well for the explorer brain dead search (when you're only looking for a file name) that would be wunderbar too.
If the machine's idle, it should remain "idle" and not "free" RAM for no reason. There's a reason my desktop is left with programs running. It's not so I can essentially wait a time almost equal to a program startup to access it upon returning. It's so bad I now put my machine into S3 sleep. It's faster than waiting on the disk swap to come back.
Not all of us live in our parent's basements...
Actually, most movies should fall into the '3' category, with those you watched but didn't like as 2's, and those you couldn't watch as 1's (even some technical 2's might become 1's). Anything you have no interest in should be tagged as such. 4's are for those you really liked, and 5 for outstanding movies which in most cases you'd watch several times and possibly buy. (Sixth Sense was a 5 but is a one time only movie unless you're interested in dissecting it. There's too many movies in my queue for that;)
I find it less than useful since if you actually use it with installed programs, you can get ambiguous results, instabilities, and crashes.
How about if they actually created a real multi-user OS with the ability to run a process as another user? (Yes, there's some silly add-on with yet more stupid configuration tricks that will allow you to masquerade as another user or run as a service, but both of those entail significant bloat as there's yet more crap running in the box.)
I'll admit they got a lot smarter about it, but the OS still swaps crap out that I don't want to be swapped, so the less swap space, the better. It doesn't appear to free up "in-use" ram either, so there doesn't appear to be any benefit on larger memory windows machines.
The real issue with swap space existing is when the machine goes unused for a time. The OS swaps "unused" things out, for no reason other than to swap them out. So when you come back online, voila - massive lag until the unnecessarily swapped memory comes back online.
...Word of warning you should keep a very small page file, under 50 meg, on drive C there there is older software that expect it and can cause problems and slowdowns if not found; also good in an emergency when your main pagging file cannot come on-line and is required if you want crashdumps or have they fixed that? WTF? Why should a program even have access to it? That's some seriously bad programming. (Yes, I vaguely recall running into this problem a while ago, I chunked the program) There's also the issue that Windows, at least prior to Vista (and I'm sure it does too) will always swap out part of the kernel, no matter how large your memory size is. IIRC, there's an obscure (of course!) registry key to force the entire kernel to remain in RAM. IIRC, The setting of the no page file was an old performance idea and will now not work, windows creates an temporary page file if it cannot find one. And a good oneMy solution was never to address the corruption in such a system post election, but to remove the corruption in the election process to put corporate puppets into office. At least with my proposal, there will a mostly level playing field for the opportunity to be elected to office. What happens after that is a different problem. You have yet to provide a single reason why the stated goals would not be met.