You are correct, that was the other half of the 4X4 - 4GPUs in current top-end configurations. I also agree it's overkill for its intended market. So is the quad Intel chip at the moment.
The real point, I think, of the 4X4 was to show that Intel's best new processor could be equaled with AMDs last generation tech. It certainly took the stomping rights wind right out of Intel's sails, because I haven't heard a peep about how Intel owns the server market or any other market a quad chip would be king. (If their quad had really been as big an evident leap as their C2D was under single threaded apps, I think we'd be hearing all about it daily.)
Speaking of C2D, I don't notice any real performance differnce between the 2.33GHz C2D laptop and my 2.4 GHz X2 desktop. (The desktop is OC'd and cost me a whopping $340 to upgrade including a 7900 GS OC'd graphics card - but that's another story)
No fanboy here. I own an X2 and a C2D. I also have dual Ultrasparc II and III boxes, as well as a dual P-III. Whoop de doo. (Just to show I'm relatively agnostic when it comes to processors.)
My quote relates to the imminent release of AMD's new architecture and the expected market price adjustments.
AMD's 4+ way systems only keep up because the CPUs aren't starved due to HyperTransport.... AMD 4x4 is a marketing hack and utterly useless outside of their brochures. So what's your point exactly?
You explicitly supported my point in the first sentence that a 2P system can keep up with Intel's top of the line newest architecture quad. I certainly would think a single 4 core CPU (Barcelona) won't have any issues either.
BTW, 4X4 is a simple 2P system, nothing more or less. Or are you stating that the Mac Pro is
a marketing hack and utterly useless outside of their brochures ?
Once before a big naval battle, the captain told his aide "Get me my red shirt and brown pants". The aide says "But sir! The bright red shirt will make you easy to target. Why would you want that shirt?" The captain says "it's so my men won't see me bleed if I get injured." The aide then asks "But why the brown pants?" The captain replies "So they won't see me crap my pants."
The 4X4 and Intel Quadcore are both 4 CPU cores. Intel's 2 brand-new architecture 65nm dual core CPUs in a single chip package should have trounced the AMD 2 separate 3+ year old architecture 90nm dual core CPUs in a single system. The fact that it couldn't....
Your reading comprehension sucks eggs too:
Until Barcelona ships, Intel holds the 1-2 CPU crown. When it ships, we'll finally be able to compare CPUs. AMD still holds the 4-way and up market,
There were many reasons OS/2 failed, including internal IBM politics. But OS/2's failure is not what this is about.
I too wish AMD would get a move on. However, they rule the server space for a good reason, and Intel, from what I have seen, won't even be able to touch it until 2008, at the earliest. AMD should be in the same ball park shortly and should at the least equal Intel's offerings from the average consumer's viewpoint, and according to published reports exceed Intel for specialty applications such as multi-media production and editing. I don't expect AMD's fortunes to go extremely negative, especially with their move to a smaller die this round as well.
Intel's saving grace has been the huge roll they have in the bank and exclusive deals they've had wtih some distributors. Now that all the majors are also selling AMD CPUs, AMD will hopefully stabilize as a strong second player whose existence will continue to drive innovation at both companies.
Intel's quad is 2 CPUs glued together. And AMD was talking about a chip that's on its way. This Intel announcement is 2 generations down the line, and sounds very much like MS by "hey, we know that competitor 'x' is about to release this great product that's going to make us look like special needs preschoolers, but look at our roadmap! Stick with us, we have great ideas!!!!"
BTW, Nice usage of technically correct emphasized time statements to make it seem like a larger time difference than it is. There was a known 6 month gap between Intel and AMD releases. AMD could have slapped two CPUs together, but it wouldn't have improved the situation over their 2-way systems much at delayed their next release. Their new architecture promises much more, so let's wait and see what the results are before condemning them to the dustbin, shall we?
Look at some of the memory tests done on the Mac Pro. The memory bus issue most definitely rears its ugly head there, and is the reason that the new 2-way systems only run with the slower FBDIMMs. The integrated memory controller is needed for any serious server work, which is why Intel is getting trounced in the server market.
Integrated GPU... SGI? I can't think of another high-end modularly integrated GPU, and I'm not even 100% sure about the SGI one.
The 8 core Intel offering has no equivalent matching new AMD offering, you're comparing it to 3 year old tech with double the cores. When the quad AMDs come out and are tested, then it will be apples to apples again, with current technology. It will be interesting.
Oh, and AMD rules the roost on servers because they have 4-way plus systems, their power consumption is lower, and they have a few other goodies internally. The next generation of Opterons should shine even more, but we won't know until they're released whether they'll live up to everyone's expectations. If not, Intel may regain some of the 2-way market.
I think you missed the point. The AMD 4X4 solution kept pace with Intel's best under the types of loads where multiple cores are actually loaded. From your link:
When only running one or two CPU intensive threads, Quad FX ends up being slower than an identically clocked dual core system, and when running more threads it's no faster than Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700. But it's more expensive than the alternatives and consumes as much power as both, combined. My point was that 3 year old tech could keep pace with Intel's newest. The 4X4 system is effectively nothing more than a 2-way Opteron system. With an identical number of cores, AMD keeps pace with Intel's top of the line quad. That would concern me if I were Intel, especially with AMD coming out with a quad on a smaller die than those running in the 4X4 system within the next couple of months. You can expect at least equivalent performance to the 4X4 with the new quad (they just co-located the two CPUs together) and because of the new additional shared L3 cache with individual L2 caches per core (Intel has two L2 caches in its quad, each L2 is shared between 2 cores) things should be much better for the Barcelona chip. Now imagine if you plug 2 Barcelona's into that 4X4 system....
In any case, I'm waiting on Barcelona to come out and see what the effects of that release is on the market in general, including expected price cuts on the QX. Price vs performance is what it's all about, after all.
First off, what you're describing is largely powerful dumb terminals. If there's nothing personal stored locally, your scenario works flawlessly. Take me for instance. I have thousands of files on my HD. I do development. Most of those files are in a source code control (SCC) system (hey, that's outside the desktop IT folks control! Look at that!) Sometimes, during development, files exist only locally, due to limitations of how this particular SCC has been implemented. That's one problem. The other is that swapping out my system means a rather large set developer tools (which almost never work as images) need to be installed and then have to be customized and configured, source code accessed and configured, etc. Swapping out my machine means at least 1-2 days downtime. So there's holes in your scenario.
The second major issue is that Dell changes its models about every 6-12 months. So that image you have is only good for a maximum of 12 months. Then you get to build a new one. Gateway was even worse - you'd order 10 systems and get 5 different configurations (internal pieces were different, 3 different motherboards, for instance, in a single order). I don't know how stable Dell's builds are these days.
Bottom line - managing large deployments of Windows machines and servers is still a pain in the ass, and every 2-3 years you get bent over as some large-scale change in the system happens (software update, hardware update, virus, etc) If you think otherwise, you just need to wait another couple of years.
Oh, and I did manage a large scale MS installation (larger than yours, guaranteed, I don't know anyone responsible these days for >> 100K seats). I'm very very very happy that I'm no longer involved with that aspect of IT. I sleep much better at night.
It seems that AMD has lost, and I'm not trying to troll. It just seems that fortunes have truly reversed and that AMD is being beaten by 5 steps everywhere by AMD. Anybody have an opposing viewpoint? (Being an AMD fan, I am depressed.) Oh, good lord. Intel announces the "new" technology for something that's not due for years (most likely 2) which happens, just happens, to be tech you can already buy from AMD today (or with their next CPU release in the next few months) and you're running around "the sky is falling, the sky is falling".
This reminds me of MS during the OS/2 days, when they first announced Cairo with its DB file system and OO interface (sound familiar? It should - features of Longhorn, then moved to Blackcomb, and now off the map as a major release). Unlike MS, I don't doubt Intel will finally release most of what they've announced, but to think that they're "ahead" is ludicrous. At this moment, their new architecture will barely beat AMD's 3+ year old architecture (See Anandtech or Tom's, I forget which, but there was a head to head comparison of AMD's 4X4 platform with Intel's latest and greatest quad CPU, and AMD's platform kept pace. That should scare the bejeebers out of Intel, and apparently it has, because they're now following the architectural trail blazed by AMD, or announced previously, like multi-core chips with specialty cores.
In other words, not much to see here, wake me when the chips come out. Until Barcelona ships, Intel holds the 1-2 CPU crown. When it ships, we'll finally be able to compare CPUs. AMD still holds the 4-way and up market, hence its stranglehold in the enterprise. Intel's announcement of an onboard memory controller in Nehalem indicates that they're finally maybe going to try to tackle the multi-CPU market again, depending upon how well architected that solution is.
I record the Tonight show and skip through most of it (probably some advertiser's nightmare) and just watch what I want. Usually process the entire thing in about 20m max. I like the monologue and, like you, lost all interest in Dave a while back. I used to watch him and disparage Leno, but that pendulum swung a long time ago and got stuck. Recent Letterman shows made me question why CBS paid him so much.
I probably have more bands on my list, I'll gather them together and post when I've got it done. I'll only concentrate on recent or obscure artists, as neither of us seem to care much for the mainstream:). One obscure artist that's long gone is An Emotional Fish. I liked quite a few songs on Junk Puppets, although according to reviews I read recently that was their fans most hated album. Supposedly the other two framing Junk Puppets were much more Doors like.
As for Metallica... I liked their Black album, and tolerated most of the next two, which were mostly apparently throwaways from the Black album. Their last "effort" must have been aimed at P2P "pirates", and they succeeded - no one even stole it.:) I wonder what Lars' stance on downloading is now - would he rather have people "stealing" his music or not listening to it at all?
I don't do playlists either - I just dump everything in my iPod and just shuffle, don't want to hear something? Press next....
And for a trip down memory lane... I just listened to Dokken's Without Warning, the intro to Tooth and Nail. Great 2 minute guitar intro in classic arena rock style.
Anyways, I'll track you down for an admittedly offtopic post when I get that list together. I'm archiving my entire music collection on disk for easy jukebox access. My CDs are halfway done. My albums, that's going to be a chore.
I've heard one track from the new NIN CD, and it's sounding prety good to me. More original NIN than even With Teeth, which was thankfully a huge step back in the right direction for him. I thought the Fragile just a little too artsy - I have to be in the mood to listen to the CDs, but there are some decent songs on them. With Teeth has some great tracks, Getting Smaller is my favorite yet didn't get airplay from what I could tell.
I almost fell for Evanescence. What turned me off is that every song sounds the same. She has the range of Whitney Houston. Well, ok, she can sing at least two notes so it greater than Whitney's range.
I agree with the music channels as well. Fuse is so-so, IMF is better in that it at least has a large percentage of acts I don't see anywhere else.
As for some interesting music you may not have heard of: Goldfrapp, Kasabian, Futon and from the Tonight Show the other night, oddly enough, Mika. (Now that says worlds right there - the Tonight Show introduces more acts than radio, since Goldfrapp and Mika have both been on there.)
Oh please. Vista had the largest public beta program in the history of software. If this were a widespread problem, it would've been fixed. You're at least partially right. The beta program started in Jan 2007. The fix isn't out yet.
As for why people may not have noticed, not too many apparently were willing to trust or were able to run the type of workloads that results in large amounts of files being moved/copied/deleted. I don't know of more than a very small minority that ran Vista with anything approaching daily use, since most do more than browse the internet and weren't willing to trust their primary system to Vista. Smart move on their part.
The original format 45s allowed for 5 and 1/2 minutes of music (circa 1949 via a google search). Fine grooves were added later to increase play time when the manufacturing process allowed for it.
As for "We are the World", they could have reduced the recording levels to '0' and done us all a favor....
Here's a back in the day story, that starts out, originally enough "Back in the day..."... of Usenet News, there was this one rather contentious news group that had a lot of fanatical religious folk on one side and scholarly level-headed ordinary folk on the other. So these ordinary folk would bait the fanatics, exposing their own contradictions and hypocrisy for all to see. One fanatic was so inflamed that first he threatened one of the ordinary folk in the manner common of the day, with vile threats known as flames. He started responding to every post with something along the lines of "your mother was an unwed ape" and so on. He also prolifically posted his dribblings in other posts, which assured that there was plenty of cannon fodder to bait him with, which a small group took on to see if they couldn't make the fanatic see the light, so to speak, including the original target. This inflamed the fanatic to such an extent that he started making bodily harm threats to the original target and the community at large. He actually showed up at the original targets work 1500 miles away.) Look up David J. Rasmussen some time. I believe he may have been the first, or one of the first, net.loons.
The difference at that time was everyone on the net was traceable.
Boot camp will supposedly let you play Windows games on an Intel C2D system. I'm about to find out - I installed Boot Camp on my MBP yesterday. I now have to slipstream SP2 into Windows XP, according to the docs, so that I can have 1 XP partition to run under both Boot Camp and Parallels. I'm also going to give OS/2, possibly Warp Server, a go in a Parallels partition just for nostalgia's sake.
DirectX will only work under Boot Camp, so that requires rebooting, which is a bummer but acceptable, considering that I probably will only play games on it as an exception rather than the rule. (I've gotten very used to the 1 s and ready to work with my Mac:)
You may be able to get an appropriately priced Mini or iMac off the refurbished list or ebay or craigslist, if you're really gung-ho. Or just wait until you need a new one. I'm sure your current system works nicely, my home desktop's about the same.
Try OSX. But seriously, I turn off most of the "glitz" even on XP, because it slows me down enough to be very annoying. And this is on a machine that should easily be able to run Vista (256MB 7900 nVidia graphics card and dual core ~5000+ AMD CPU w/ 2GB RAM) I'd do the same with OSX, but for some reason, OSX's interface isn't annoyingly slowed down by the prettiness.
Yeah, let's blame MS for blowing the QA because they missed such an obvious problem! Anyone find it odd that is was never complained about anywhere previously to the release? Surely, the slashdot Anti-Microsoft Fanboys would have brought it up if it were so obvious and wide spread. You find it odd given the audience you're addressing? Most of us are perfectly happy not running MS's latest. I personally don't plan on having a Vista system until one accidentally or forcibly falls into my lap. I don't do single user programming, so I don't expect this to happen anytime soon, as in years. The businesses I work for/with are either running Win2K or just started running WinXP within the past couple of years. There's 0 desire to migrate to Vista in these enterprises, as such migrations entail large additional costs.
What is Windows not "delivering"? Stable, reliable, performant, cost-effective server platforms. Which is why almost no large scale business I'm aware of runs MS software for their money-making customer facing web sites.
I'm sure some are going through the pain of doing it, but even the one I'm aware of currently that runs their custom code on Windows is moving to a non-MS solution because Windows has stopped scaling for them.
But how do you miss a fundamental core process? That's like hmm, should we see if IE7 connects to the internet? Naah, no need, of course it does.
I've noticed issues with Explorer deleting/copying/moving files (since the IE switchover). This is in XP btw, not Vista, so I'm not so sure that it's due to rebuilding anything. It's bad enough that I drop to the command line when I have a particularly large directory tree of files to delete or copy (we're talking a few 10s of thousands of files here in a heavily treed directory structure). Takes almost no time from the command line. Whatever explorer does adds eons (in computing time) to the process.
Isn't the big "secret" of Vista that they actually didn't rebuild so much of it, but took the 2003 server codebase to start from and yet again slapped "pretty" on it?
It used to be the case that a "song" was limited to the amount you could fit on a 7" 45RPM record. That approximate length became the norm for a long time - driven by the limitations of the technology. So 6-8 minute songs are the norm?
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You are correct, that was the other half of the 4X4 - 4GPUs in current top-end configurations. I also agree it's overkill for its intended market. So is the quad Intel chip at the moment.
The real point, I think, of the 4X4 was to show that Intel's best new processor could be equaled with AMDs last generation tech. It certainly took the stomping rights wind right out of Intel's sails, because I haven't heard a peep about how Intel owns the server market or any other market a quad chip would be king. (If their quad had really been as big an evident leap as their C2D was under single threaded apps, I think we'd be hearing all about it daily.)
Speaking of C2D, I don't notice any real performance differnce between the 2.33GHz C2D laptop and my 2.4 GHz X2 desktop. (The desktop is OC'd and cost me a whopping $340 to upgrade including a 7900 GS OC'd graphics card - but that's another story)
No fanboy here. I own an X2 and a C2D. I also have dual Ultrasparc II and III boxes, as well as a dual P-III. Whoop de doo. (Just to show I'm relatively agnostic when it comes to processors.)
My quote relates to the imminent release of AMD's new architecture and the expected market price adjustments.
AMD 4x4 is a marketing hack and utterly useless outside of their brochures. So what's your point exactly?
You explicitly supported my point in the first sentence that a 2P system can keep up with Intel's top of the line newest architecture quad. I certainly would think a single 4 core CPU (Barcelona) won't have any issues either.
BTW, 4X4 is a simple 2P system, nothing more or less. Or are you stating that the Mac Pro is a marketing hack and utterly useless outside of their brochures ?
That reminds me:
Once before a big naval battle, the captain told his aide "Get me my red shirt and brown pants".
The aide says "But sir! The bright red shirt will make you easy to target. Why would you want that shirt?"
The captain says "it's so my men won't see me bleed if I get injured."
The aide then asks "But why the brown pants?"
The captain replies "So they won't see me crap my pants."
Your reading comprehension sucks eggs too: Until Barcelona ships, Intel holds the 1-2 CPU crown. When it ships, we'll finally be able to compare CPUs. AMD still holds the 4-way and up market,
There were many reasons OS/2 failed, including internal IBM politics. But OS/2's failure is not what this is about.
I too wish AMD would get a move on. However, they rule the server space for a good reason, and Intel, from what I have seen, won't even be able to touch it until 2008, at the earliest. AMD should be in the same ball park shortly and should at the least equal Intel's offerings from the average consumer's viewpoint, and according to published reports exceed Intel for specialty applications such as multi-media production and editing. I don't expect AMD's fortunes to go extremely negative, especially with their move to a smaller die this round as well.
Intel's saving grace has been the huge roll they have in the bank and exclusive deals they've had wtih some distributors. Now that all the majors are also selling AMD CPUs, AMD will hopefully stabilize as a strong second player whose existence will continue to drive innovation at both companies.
Intel's quad is 2 CPUs glued together. And AMD was talking about a chip that's on its way. This Intel announcement is 2 generations down the line, and sounds very much like MS by "hey, we know that competitor 'x' is about to release this great product that's going to make us look like special needs preschoolers, but look at our roadmap! Stick with us, we have great ideas!!!!"
BTW, Nice usage of technically correct emphasized time statements to make it seem like a larger time difference than it is. There was a known 6 month gap between Intel and AMD releases. AMD could have slapped two CPUs together, but it wouldn't have improved the situation over their 2-way systems much at delayed their next release. Their new architecture promises much more, so let's wait and see what the results are before condemning them to the dustbin, shall we?
The virtualization solution in Barcelona should improve AMD's performance even more.
Look at some of the memory tests done on the Mac Pro. The memory bus issue most definitely rears its ugly head there, and is the reason that the new 2-way systems only run with the slower FBDIMMs. The integrated memory controller is needed for any serious server work, which is why Intel is getting trounced in the server market.
Integrated GPU... SGI? I can't think of another high-end modularly integrated GPU, and I'm not even 100% sure about the SGI one.
Whoops - missed responding to one part:
The 8 core Intel offering has no equivalent matching new AMD offering, you're comparing it to 3 year old tech with double the cores. When the quad AMDs come out and are tested, then it will be apples to apples again, with current technology. It will be interesting.
Oh, and AMD rules the roost on servers because they have 4-way plus systems, their power consumption is lower, and they have a few other goodies internally. The next generation of Opterons should shine even more, but we won't know until they're released whether they'll live up to everyone's expectations. If not, Intel may regain some of the 2-way market.
In any case, I'm waiting on Barcelona to come out and see what the effects of that release is on the market in general, including expected price cuts on the QX. Price vs performance is what it's all about, after all.
AMD rules the server market, especially once you go beyond 2 processors.
First off, what you're describing is largely powerful dumb terminals. If there's nothing personal stored locally, your scenario works flawlessly. Take me for instance. I have thousands of files on my HD. I do development. Most of those files are in a source code control (SCC) system (hey, that's outside the desktop IT folks control! Look at that!) Sometimes, during development, files exist only locally, due to limitations of how this particular SCC has been implemented. That's one problem. The other is that swapping out my system means a rather large set developer tools (which almost never work as images) need to be installed and then have to be customized and configured, source code accessed and configured, etc. Swapping out my machine means at least 1-2 days downtime. So there's holes in your scenario.
The second major issue is that Dell changes its models about every 6-12 months. So that image you have is only good for a maximum of 12 months. Then you get to build a new one. Gateway was even worse - you'd order 10 systems and get 5 different configurations (internal pieces were different, 3 different motherboards, for instance, in a single order). I don't know how stable Dell's builds are these days.
Bottom line - managing large deployments of Windows machines and servers is still a pain in the ass, and every 2-3 years you get bent over as some large-scale change in the system happens (software update, hardware update, virus, etc) If you think otherwise, you just need to wait another couple of years.
Oh, and I did manage a large scale MS installation (larger than yours, guaranteed, I don't know anyone responsible these days for >> 100K seats). I'm very very very happy that I'm no longer involved with that aspect of IT. I sleep much better at night.
This reminds me of MS during the OS/2 days, when they first announced Cairo with its DB file system and OO interface (sound familiar? It should - features of Longhorn, then moved to Blackcomb, and now off the map as a major release). Unlike MS, I don't doubt Intel will finally release most of what they've announced, but to think that they're "ahead" is ludicrous. At this moment, their new architecture will barely beat AMD's 3+ year old architecture (See Anandtech or Tom's, I forget which, but there was a head to head comparison of AMD's 4X4 platform with Intel's latest and greatest quad CPU, and AMD's platform kept pace. That should scare the bejeebers out of Intel, and apparently it has, because they're now following the architectural trail blazed by AMD, or announced previously, like multi-core chips with specialty cores.
In other words, not much to see here, wake me when the chips come out. Until Barcelona ships, Intel holds the 1-2 CPU crown. When it ships, we'll finally be able to compare CPUs. AMD still holds the 4-way and up market, hence its stranglehold in the enterprise. Intel's announcement of an onboard memory controller in Nehalem indicates that they're finally maybe going to try to tackle the multi-CPU market again, depending upon how well architected that solution is.
I record the Tonight show and skip through most of it (probably some advertiser's nightmare) and just watch what I want. Usually process the entire thing in about 20m max. I like the monologue and, like you, lost all interest in Dave a while back. I used to watch him and disparage Leno, but that pendulum swung a long time ago and got stuck. Recent Letterman shows made me question why CBS paid him so much.
:). One obscure artist that's long gone is An Emotional Fish. I liked quite a few songs on Junk Puppets, although according to reviews I read recently that was their fans most hated album. Supposedly the other two framing Junk Puppets were much more Doors like.
:) I wonder what Lars' stance on downloading is now - would he rather have people "stealing" his music or not listening to it at all?
I probably have more bands on my list, I'll gather them together and post when I've got it done. I'll only concentrate on recent or obscure artists, as neither of us seem to care much for the mainstream
As for Metallica... I liked their Black album, and tolerated most of the next two, which were mostly apparently throwaways from the Black album. Their last "effort" must have been aimed at P2P "pirates", and they succeeded - no one even stole it.
I don't do playlists either - I just dump everything in my iPod and just shuffle, don't want to hear something? Press next....
And for a trip down memory lane... I just listened to Dokken's Without Warning, the intro to Tooth and Nail. Great 2 minute guitar intro in classic arena rock style.
Anyways, I'll track you down for an admittedly offtopic post when I get that list together. I'm archiving my entire music collection on disk for easy jukebox access. My CDs are halfway done. My albums, that's going to be a chore.
I've heard one track from the new NIN CD, and it's sounding prety good to me. More original NIN than even With Teeth, which was thankfully a huge step back in the right direction for him. I thought the Fragile just a little too artsy - I have to be in the mood to listen to the CDs, but there are some decent songs on them. With Teeth has some great tracks, Getting Smaller is my favorite yet didn't get airplay from what I could tell.
I almost fell for Evanescence. What turned me off is that every song sounds the same. She has the range of Whitney Houston. Well, ok, she can sing at least two notes so it greater than Whitney's range.
I agree with the music channels as well. Fuse is so-so, IMF is better in that it at least has a large percentage of acts I don't see anywhere else.
As for some interesting music you may not have heard of: Goldfrapp, Kasabian, Futon and from the Tonight Show the other night, oddly enough, Mika. (Now that says worlds right there - the Tonight Show introduces more acts than radio, since Goldfrapp and Mika have both been on there.)
Vista had the largest public beta program in the history of software. If this were a widespread problem, it would've been fixed. You're at least partially right. The beta program started in Jan 2007. The fix isn't out yet.
As for why people may not have noticed, not too many apparently were willing to trust or were able to run the type of workloads that results in large amounts of files being moved/copied/deleted. I don't know of more than a very small minority that ran Vista with anything approaching daily use, since most do more than browse the internet and weren't willing to trust their primary system to Vista. Smart move on their part.
The original format 45s allowed for 5 and 1/2 minutes of music (circa 1949 via a google search). Fine grooves were added later to increase play time when the manufacturing process allowed for it.
As for "We are the World", they could have reduced the recording levels to '0' and done us all a favor....
Here's a back in the day story, that starts out, originally enough "Back in the day..." ... of Usenet News, there was this one rather contentious news group that had a lot of fanatical religious folk on one side and scholarly level-headed ordinary folk on the other. So these ordinary folk would bait the fanatics, exposing their own contradictions and hypocrisy for all to see. One fanatic was so inflamed that first he threatened one of the ordinary folk in the manner common of the day, with vile threats known as flames. He started responding to every post with something along the lines of "your mother was an unwed ape" and so on. He also prolifically posted his dribblings in other posts, which assured that there was plenty of cannon fodder to bait him with, which a small group took on to see if they couldn't make the fanatic see the light, so to speak, including the original target. This inflamed the fanatic to such an extent that he started making bodily harm threats to the original target and the community at large. He actually showed up at the original targets work 1500 miles away.) Look up David J. Rasmussen some time. I believe he may have been the first, or one of the first, net.loons.
The difference at that time was everyone on the net was traceable.
Boot camp will supposedly let you play Windows games on an Intel C2D system. I'm about to find out - I installed Boot Camp on my MBP yesterday. I now have to slipstream SP2 into Windows XP, according to the docs, so that I can have 1 XP partition to run under both Boot Camp and Parallels. I'm also going to give OS/2, possibly Warp Server, a go in a Parallels partition just for nostalgia's sake.
DirectX will only work under Boot Camp, so that requires rebooting, which is a bummer but acceptable, considering that I probably will only play games on it as an exception rather than the rule. (I've gotten very used to the 1 s and ready to work with my Mac:)
You may be able to get an appropriately priced Mini or iMac off the refurbished list or ebay or craigslist, if you're really gung-ho. Or just wait until you need a new one. I'm sure your current system works nicely, my home desktop's about the same.
Try OSX. But seriously, I turn off most of the "glitz" even on XP, because it slows me down enough to be very annoying. And this is on a machine that should easily be able to run Vista (256MB 7900 nVidia graphics card and dual core ~5000+ AMD CPU w/ 2GB RAM) I'd do the same with OSX, but for some reason, OSX's interface isn't annoyingly slowed down by the prettiness.
I'm sure some are going through the pain of doing it, but even the one I'm aware of currently that runs their custom code on Windows is moving to a non-MS solution because Windows has stopped scaling for them.
But how do you miss a fundamental core process? That's like hmm, should we see if IE7 connects to the internet? Naah, no need, of course it does.
I've noticed issues with Explorer deleting/copying/moving files (since the IE switchover). This is in XP btw, not Vista, so I'm not so sure that it's due to rebuilding anything. It's bad enough that I drop to the command line when I have a particularly large directory tree of files to delete or copy (we're talking a few 10s of thousands of files here in a heavily treed directory structure). Takes almost no time from the command line. Whatever explorer does adds eons (in computing time) to the process.
Isn't the big "secret" of Vista that they actually didn't rebuild so much of it, but took the 2003 server codebase to start from and yet again slapped "pretty" on it?