I second that. I run an 8800GTS/320 on a triple 17'' 1280x1024 setup (using a matrox triplehead2go digital to split the DVI signal in 3). The card pushes out 3840x1024, which amounts to about 4MP, and it's been happy so far in Gothic, Oblivion, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and a bunch of other titles, giving very reasonable frame rates with either all or practically all the graphics bells and whistles turned on.
Memory doesn't make a card faster, except on REALLY insane resolutions (way higher than 4MP I suspect) when you really need all those textures close at hand, and what with PCIe bus being nowhere near saturated, putting said textures closer, latency-wise, to the plate is really more than its made out to be. Ton-of-memory-cards are just a tax on people who don't understand what the fuck really matters in their system. Sorta like uber-expensive-RAM which gives an entire 2% improvement over what el-cheapo brandless stuff does.
What *does* a fast card make, at least as of 8th generation GF's which have many parallel stream processors, is a LOT of processors. The jump from 32 in the mid-range cards, to 96 or 128 in the high-end ones, is what makes these cards kick royal ass.
>> Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"
wtf is this idiot smoking?
When XP came out, it was replacing a 90%-of-all-PCs-in-the-world install base of a largely dysfunctional OS - Windows 9x (or 2K, which, at that point in time, didn't appeal to many home users)
So everyone flocked to it.
Note this was despite: 1. Shoddy XP driver support at the time, much hardware having 9x-only drivers. Situation is nowhere near as bad now, as most XP drivers work in Vista and only the graphics driver model was replaced with a new one. 2. The cost of XP was way higher than 9x/ME 3. The insane resources the software used at the time (~100-200MB RAM occupied by XP, compared to ~30MB for 98)
Now, based on this behavior, some stupid marketers industry who're either religiously in favor of vista or against it, and the idiot who wrote TFA, expected consumers to flock to Vista same as they did then.
This turned out to be wrong, because consumers aren't total idiots 100% of the time. Most of them are already running a working product at home that is nowhere as dysfunctional and maintenance-expensive as 98 was. XP is reasonably stable, and offers next-to-everything vista does, except a worked out sudo-for-homeusers solution that Vista introduced, and which is not worth an immediate upgrade.
The result? Rather than everyone flocking to vista at once, people are carrying on with whatever lifecycle their PC has, getting Vista (and I highly recommend doing so) if buying a new computer (which also makes the RAM-sufficiency problem completely minor, as ram is dirt cheap and even with Vista sitting on 700MB rather than XP's 200MB, 1-1.5GB of RAM is enough to run most home setups), and the percent of people upgraded resembles the number of people who'se PC's reached their end-of-life for some reason and got new ones.
There's some *relatively* niche groups of people that deviate from this model - Enthusiasts (minus the anti-vista or anti-microsoft religious ones) may show a higher upgrade %. Gamers will likely show a much lower one (for multiple reasons - lacking driver support - late, unimplemented features found in xp, etc - due to reworked graphics driver model, no games the DX10 front yet, and most gamers who can do math would rather give the extra 500MB (difference between Vista and XP) in their system to the game rather than to Vista, even if they're running 4GB boxes). But both of these populations are relatively tiny compared to all the Joes out there in the world who just use their PC for internet, office and photos.
Moral? A. There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING fundamentally wrong with Vista. Not the resource usage (500MB more and optionally use basic graphics capabilities found in any, even ubercheap, GPU from the past 5 years minus via unichrome). B. permissions & sudo for non-IT-savvy-homeusers is a DAMN FUCKING GOOD THING. Not a reason to run and switch, but DEFINITELY a reason to prefer XP over Vista on a new install, given sufficient RAM. Joe-Can-Do-Math user would rather spend 30$ more on RAM initially than run-as-root and consequently call me out to fix his malware three additional times every year for WAY more than 30$. C. In a corporate environment this has existed forever on NT4, 2K and XP, so it is an UTTERLY IRRELEVANT advantage in that segment. I see ZERO reason why any corporate IT manager should switch his install base to Vista - OS costs more, kit to run it costs more, near-zero added value and some expected level of compatibility issues. Unless M$ gives some financial incentive to go down that route, there is no benefit and great expense. Use XP.
If you want 'Ghost Love Score' (which is the best piece on the album and the one song I actually wanted), you're forced to buy the entire album. "Now you don't need to buy the entire album for one song", they said.
So much for the "buy only the song you want" bit. They deliberately prevent you from buying the best songs seperately.
What they really meant was "Now you don't need to buy the entire album if you're just looking to buy the song you don't want". Yay! Go Amazon!
When I was a youth, the school had us rebuild a working ENIAC out of used teabags and rusted scrap metal from the schoolyard, then forced us to stay overnight and pedal dynamos to power it so the professor could play PONG using the bulbs.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya.
Looks like you Canadians don't have it too right either: Fact: the fact that Bush is the #1 threat to world peace does NOT absolve opressive fundamentalist hate-mongering regimes of responsibility over their respective actions. These nations STILL ARE a significant threat to world peace, regardless of whether America is being headed by George Dubya , other republicans, democrats, or a stoned bunch of hippie carebears.
That a 500$ non-x86 glorified PDA in a UMPC form factor and lacking wireless capabilities would not sell in 2007, when Asus intends to push an XP-capable PentiumM-based EeePC that will harness the Windows application base for 200$-300$?
When two weeks after its announcement, VIA showed a reference C7-based UMPC (reworked nano-itx rig with a screen, really)?
GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. I'd be surprised if palm managed to sell more than four of these units. Whoever made the call to do this product is a clueless idiot, and the engineers working for him are clueless idiots for not having pointed just how pathetically backward such a product would be in light of existing competition. It wouldn't have sold a decade ago. NOW?
And don't forget that the information doesn't have to be factual or right to sway public opinion.
If you and I run for an election, I can sway public opinion by running a poll asking questions like "Would you (poll answerer) still vote for [[you]] if you were to suddenly find out he is a child molester?"
I haven't actually accused you of molesting children by running that poll, there may not have been any child-molesting story to speak of, but simply by suggesting the possibility of such a hypothetical scenario I'd be turning away people from you. (After people have done just that, it's now very very illegal in most developed countries).
My point being that the site does not have to be factual to do damage.
The other side of the same coin, of course, is that it also doesn't have to be CIA/reuters-grade-reliable do do good. It's not a news site and does not need to act as such. It's goal is not for the purpose of churning up public opinion. It's for someone to point the powers that be at where it stinks of fish. After that gets done, the information can be properly re-collected and assessed. In other words, the purpose of the site is not to actually dig up shit, it's to point at where digging needs to take place for shit to be likely found.
Where do all these idiots come from, who think that people should reinstall an OS just because a new one came out?
People's computers have an average lifespan. Even when narrowed down to the gamer demographic. Most won't shorten that lifespan and buy a new box just because Vista came out, and most who periodically upgrade their OS won't install a new OS just because. They'll wait for their existing one to require replacing - the OS too has an "average lifespan". Let's wait for that average lifespan, and measure vista acceptance then.
That said, let's narrow down to what Vista has to offer to the gamer demographic.
* PRO (though perceived by most as CON): It has sudo and a user model. As a sysadmin, I generally regard that as a good thing and have been pissed at microsoft for not having implemented it and educated their users to use it 20 years ago, but most gamers will regard this more as an annoyance than a feature that does them good, and what should have been a cause to adopt vista is effectively deterring its adoption due to "spoiled" users who want to "continue working as root".
* CON: Vista guzzles 500MB of RAM more than XP (~700MB rather than ~200MB). True, RAM is dirt cheap, but [a] Unlike Mum's PC, gamers NEVER have enough, (typical games can easily lop 1, 2 or even more GB of RAM) let alone too much of it. Further, many already have all their memory banks occupied (if due to former upgrades or to take advantage of dual-bus memory controllers, and upgrading RAM means replacing existing chips, not adding more. So with vista, RAM that can be used for gaming is used to simply keep vista around. Many also run a bankful of sweet-spot priced chips (say, have two banks and 2x1GB), and plugging in 2GB ones is not as cheap as buying an additional 2x1GB. Not nearly as painless as dropping a single new 1GB chip in mum's PC for that vista upgrade. [b] Mum's PC doesn't go anywhere near saturating memory bandwidth. Mum can be using PC133 and wouldn't feel it impact her in the slightest (not due to ignorance, just due to not ever noticeably saturating CPU to RAM bus). Gamers will not want to be a mixed assortment of old and new slow and fast RAM chips.
* CON: I game. I've got both an XP install and a vista install. I run a dual-head rig using both outputs for a wider viewport. 8 months out, Nvidia VISTA 8800 drivers still do not support SPAN (aka making windows think it has one virtual 2560*1024 screen rather than two 1280*1024 heads) required for gaming on both. That's an Nvidia thing, but that's a dead showstopper keeping ME back.
* NOT-PRO: Hey Id CEO dude. What fucking DX10 games? WHERE? when it's on STEAM rather than vapor, give me a yell.
* Gamers are typically neither insanely rich nor uninformed. Vista costs $$ that can be alternatively spent on a faster graphics card, which will impact their experience unfathomably higher on the benefit scale. A huge block of that demographic will not have the cash to do both. (and that in itself is an oversimplification - there are yet other things that will give more benefit than the vista upgrade - more RAM, etc).
The above list of CONS makes a no-brainer choice: Do I throw money at making my life better or worse?
For the gamer demographic, Vista offers damn little, even debatably NEGATIVE value as an upgrade. As a new computer initially bought with it rather than XP and already full of RAM to the point of not being affected by the "loss" of 500MB, it makes more sense, but for that we need to wait a couple of years for gamers to "cycle out" their PCs. In addition, strip out the gamers that never actually "buy a PC" and get a bundled OS, but who just keep upgrading parts.
To sum:
Take gamer XP install base. [1] Remove "upgraders", they gain no benefit, most will not buy vista (this could very well be the majority, though I have no numbers). This will not change until there is something that Vista can do that the XP product they already own can't. DX10 comes to mind.
Flash memory has a finite amount of write cycles before it craps out (unlike a harddrive that could, in theory and disregarding eventual mechanical failure, keep going forever). Reads can be done indefinitely.
Here's some stuff to consider:
1. First generation flash had about 10,000 writes per cell (after which that cell would become bad, like a bad sector on a harddrive)
2. I've heard estimates on modern flash ranging from 100K to 1000K.
3. FACT: If you grind flash with an application that writes continuously (say, run a database server off it), your flash will die in days.
4. FACT: If you do browsing/office stuff on a flash card, you're likely to upgrade your computer long before the flash will fail (and assuming you use it for 15 years, by the time it will, insanely higher capacities will be available for near-zero money (like, say, 2GB is available for 20$ today). The caveat is computers with too little memory (say, if you run XP on 256MB of RAM or lower, or vista on 512MB) which resort to swapping very often and do so intensively. Another is if you get infected by some malware that does a lot of writing to disk. These scenarios may land you squarely in [3] above.
5. SSD products coming out have other nice features like write averaging - the card makes sure to use all its memory cells equally rather than just dumping data on the first available cells, so some cells don't wear out quicker and optimizing the card for longer life.
6. CF-to-IDE controllers often don't go past implementing PIO4 or do crappy implementation of UDMA33 modes, giving very sorry (5-10MB/sec) performance bottlenecks. Modern cards are well capable of >20MB/sec (by comparison, an el-cheapo 7200RPM harddrive will write at about 40-50MB/sec on the start of the platter and ~20-30MB/sec at the other end, and read at ~60-70MB/sec on the start and ~40MB/sec at the end, sustained speed (bursty bits of tiny data are often prefetched and are waiting on the RAM cache in the drive, giving you full bus (100, 133, 150 or 300MB/sec) speeds when fetched.
By harddrive standards, Flash is still expensive per GB and relatively slow, but quiet, dense and consumes little power. Suitable for some.
Depends how you define an embedded system. Is it anything that comes on mini-itx form-factor or smaller? Is it arm/mips/other-non-x86-arch?
I want x86 compatibility on my game rig. Guess why. I also want PCIe16 etc.
For my game rig, I use a mobile-on-desktop motherboard (with PCIe) and a T5600 Core2Duo (similar to an E4600 only with 667MHz FSB instead of an 800 one, and a TDP of 34 Watts rather than 65 Watts. Oh, and look ma, no fan.
For my living room box I use a VIA Eden EN12000 board with a PicoPSU-120.
I seem to have had the impression that my Soekris firewalls, running a National (today AMD) Geode SC1100 at 266MHz, a P1-class CPU that, coupled with 3 100MBit NICs, 128MB of RAM, IDE, USB etc eat a whopping 3-5 Watts for the entire machine, was x86.
The FreeBSD kernel I run on them seems to think so too.
Kudos to Via for taking ULV to a whole new level and giving us P2-class performance in that watt range, but this is by no means revolutionary, just evolution that allows us to do more with a ULV box.
Guys, hate to break it to you, but anyone who wants to be running on solid state, is.
3 IDE-CF adapters cost me 8$ including shipment on ebay last week. My game box runs of a 16GB CF card (200$ - new - on ebay, available for months now) with vista (yes, vista on a 22MB/sec CF, though I've gotten it there via ghosting rather than via a regular install), and my living room PC runs XP off a 2GB CF card that cost about 25$ new (again, ebay price, store prices typically a tad higher).
Yes, 20MB/sec is less than the 50-70MB/sec read speed an average harddrive gives, but that is offset by near-zero seek times.
If under windows, make sure you turn off: * SWAP * ntfs Access time writes (fs tuning utility, one command from shell, or a reg key)
And if you want to be even more thorough and flash-friendly: * 8_3 filename writes (in ntfs every file has two filenames one that is backwards-compatible to 8_3 naming. No need to waste CF writes on that) * Any software that routinely writes stuff to disk.
If you're fanatic, do: * Event logger * Indexing
If you want >16GB, you can buy several, then use LVM/dynamic disk/multiple partitions depending on your OS to use that.
I just have the core 16GB (about 8GB occupied) on the game box, and do the rest of the storage (aka keep the Program Files directory) on the RAID5 fileserver over Gigabit LAN, which gives me about 40MB/sec read and write, which is IMHO sufficient. Were I not to rely on that, I'd get another two 16GB cards on a CF-IDE adapter, plonk a RAID0 on them and voilla (assuming you can get windows to make dynamic disks of removable storage, which the CF cards are still recognized as, even when on the IDE bus), which I am by no means certain. If you're on Linux, no problem there. anything and verything can be raided and LVM'd at will.
A RAID0 of these would cost 400$, give 32GB and give about 40MB/sec performance.
So no need to get overly excited with SSD. They're just an overpriced nicely bundled version of what is already cheaply available, kinda like external harddrives. And they'll keep on being that for a while yet.
Google has spent a decade and some on one side of a very big coin. Search, ads, gmail, google maps, google docs, google this, that, everything translates into one simple thing - they have the "Where Joe wants his browser to be" for a VERY big number of Joes worldwide.
Buying up the 700MHz band will make them, in the US, own the "Where Joe is coming from". A mountain of dark fiber they've been purchasing lately will supply the infrastructure to connect side A to side B.
Together, these are worth more than the sum of their parts. Coupled, rather than Google wanting to hookup to tier-1 ISP's, it will be tier-1 ISP's who will be jumping through hoops to get closer to the wirelessgoogle plate.
They seem to be using the momentum of their products to try and catch a rather big chunk of the internet backbone and haul it right up onto their own back (just the bit that involves peoples traffic going to them). Quite admirable in its own right, if they manage to pull it off.
Rather than bean-counting and looking for a direct profit, a move like that would reposition them in an entirely different league of players, give them way more power, regulation leverage and later translate into an insanely bigger profits.
I'm eager to see if they manage to pull this off, if for the sheer ability to outsmart all of the established competition for that power. And frankly, even without them being holier than the bloody pope, I'd much rather have them have it than any other player their size.
I wasn't talking specifically about either obesity or weight problems (though they're an obvious place where being a food junkie can lead you). Good or bad diet can have many adverse affects on standard-weight people as well - from simply bad food that increases your chances of getting cancer (say, deep fried in oil or salty foods), to foods that increase chances of liver failure, to the sheer fact that dropping your calorie intake to about 40-50% of your RDI may very well (albeit the jury's still out on scientific proof) buy you at least another 10 years of life (by which coin, eating them kills you early), if it does indeed turn out that CR works on humans same as it does on every animal ever tested for it in age-related research.
Food addiction is not limited to weight problems - weight is just one (very obvious) indicator of several possible indicators that you're prematurely trashing your body. There's others that are independent of weight.
Food is an addictive drug that interferes with thought (and consequently, your priorities), same as with many other drugs.
There is a problem with your holier-than-thou approach, however, as applied to food.
With (illegal) drugs, you can squarely lay the blame with the junkie. You can't really blame him when he's in junkie stage, his brain is past telling him to stop at that point, but you can say he should have been responsible when he still had a working sense of judgement and be right. He chose to do something stupid when he had a functional head on his shoulders, and he carries full responsibility for his actions.
With food, nobody, not even you, can avoid exposure, and that exposure is dictated by our environment way before we make informed conscious choices about what and how much to eat. In modern-day America, many are food junkies long before they reach the point of actively choosing their diet, and are letting their "habit" (in the "addiction" sense) dictate their diet from that moment on. It's not the same for everyone either. Some have a metabolism that soaks up fat like a sponge, others don't. Some had folks that got them on MCD's from age 3, others gave them good food. Couple a few of these wrong parameters together, and some people become mature before becoming hooked, others get hooked before maturity and end up never having sat behind the steering wheel of their diet - they're effectively addicts from zero to the day they die, with a high "will" barrier to cross to get out (which statistically, many of them will not have the means to traverse).
Without any intention of lessening the load of personal responsibility on any individual, some people really never get to a point where they can choose to stop with a clear head, and blaming them is halfway to blaming someone who was born in a coma and stayed in a coma for all his life for being in a coma. If any person's (yours not excluded) sense of judgement is distorted enough by chemicals, liability over his decisions while so becomes a slippery slope you're on the right side of only by chance.
You're not better than many of those people, just luckier, and are thus on very slippery moral ground. I suggest you tread lightly.
That'll take a while yet. There's more important things on the list for specifically-targeting-certain-professions department. Spammers, telemarketers, MAFIAA-endorsing studio executives, SCO executives and a few other breeds of bottom-feeding scum.
We could, of course, take the practical DA approach and stage a fake planetwide disaster, put them on a spaceship and "evacuate" them first, claiming to follow in the next ships right after...
If you get "Allow or Deny" messages when you try to work done, you're probably working incorrectly (outside your userspace).
I run a gemtpp box, hardly anything to do with MS, and if I stray from my userspace, it asks me exactly the same. I can either sudo, or not be allowed access. Nevertheless, once the proper working habits are adopted, routine work rarely requires you do this. All you're doing is bitching about your own incorrect working habits.
When will you clueless idiots stop bashing MS for doing what is pro'lly the best thing they did in Windows in the last decade, which is moving the home user (or, any use that does not have a policy applied to him) from a work-as-root model to work-as-user+sudo model? No, it doesn't make the box bulletproof, much as it doesn't make my gentoo box bulletproof, but it's a darn good thing, even if it's 20 years late. In fact, it's one of the biggest things we were bashing them about for said 20 years.
1. Start where the most benefit is (for us, we go joint on almost everything to minimize cost, hassle and clutter).
2. When we step on each other's toes, go the other way (in most cases, this means SPLIT).
This has resulted in us doing: * (still) joint finance - cheaper than paying for double the banking services, additional credit card holders are way cheaper than additional credit accounts, our combined borrowing power is better (for when you do risky investment), and one single big resource pool is way more flexible to manage. Some would say you may have different considerations here if, say, you start at very different ends of the financial spectrum (and wish to perpetuate that), have a wildly different tolerance to risky investment etc. (the latter being the only justification I'd be able to find in a relationship I'd still want to be a part of, but that's just me). Your life, your considerations, use your brain, that's what it's for. * Separate emails (doh).. (can't even see the benefit of using a joint one, it's not like a mailbox costs anything nowadays). Individual forum/web/online/msn accounts everywhere. * ALWAYS Seperate machines (above technique applied here). Not so much a privacy thing (we both have full access to each other's boxes and the tech know-how to do stuff covertly without the other knowing were we so inclined), just a major convenience issue. Worth the extra cost (not to mention that the various machines are specced out to our individual requirements). Pro'lly biggest problem with one machine is that two people can't be using it at once, and for us that's a big requirement. * Separate cars - which is the classic example of the above. Let the requirement dictate the resource allocation. Just like anywhere else.
etc.
Worked wonderful for the last decade or so. Why isn't this totally and utterly obvious? sheesh...
And if you want to keep shit away from the eyes of your better half (for whatever, legit or sinister reason), the technical ability is always there, but I'm assuming that's not the purpose of this debate. If you want to cheat or plan a surprise party, do (or don't, or whatever).
They will not upgrade NOW, just because vista came out, they will wait for the end of life of their desktops and consider the correct upgrade path (hinging mostly on what microsoft provides the best support horizon for, really, and sooner or later XP support will be stopped, as with any old product) when that becomes relevant. And if it'll be Vista then - so be it.
Nothing to see here (except for the few puzzled idiots who're scratching their heads and asking questions like "What, not EVERYBODY in the corporate world just dumped all their existing long-term desktop OS strategies and just ran wildly to upgrade everything to Vista the moment it came out?!"), move along.
I'm betting Rowling has already hired several datacenters to spider google images, with professional hitmen standing by in case other identifying images were made by this guy.
Assuming, of course, she hasn't simply bought google and/or canon for this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
I second that. I run an 8800GTS/320 on a triple 17'' 1280x1024 setup (using a matrox triplehead2go digital to split the DVI signal in 3). The card pushes out 3840x1024, which amounts to about 4MP, and it's been happy so far in Gothic, Oblivion, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and a bunch of other titles, giving very reasonable frame rates with either all or practically all the graphics bells and whistles turned on.
Memory doesn't make a card faster, except on REALLY insane resolutions (way higher than 4MP I suspect) when you really need all those textures close at hand, and what with PCIe bus being nowhere near saturated, putting said textures closer, latency-wise, to the plate is really more than its made out to be. Ton-of-memory-cards are just a tax on people who don't understand what the fuck really matters in their system. Sorta like uber-expensive-RAM which gives an entire 2% improvement over what el-cheapo brandless stuff does.
What *does* a fast card make, at least as of 8th generation GF's which have many parallel stream processors, is a LOT of processors. The jump from 32 in the mid-range cards, to 96 or 128 in the high-end ones, is what makes these cards kick royal ass.
>> Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"
wtf is this idiot smoking?
When XP came out, it was replacing a 90%-of-all-PCs-in-the-world install base of a largely dysfunctional OS - Windows 9x (or 2K, which, at that point in time, didn't appeal to many home users)
So everyone flocked to it.
Note this was despite:
1. Shoddy XP driver support at the time, much hardware having 9x-only drivers. Situation is nowhere near as bad now, as most XP drivers work in Vista and only the graphics driver model was replaced with a new one.
2. The cost of XP was way higher than 9x/ME
3. The insane resources the software used at the time (~100-200MB RAM occupied by XP, compared to ~30MB for 98)
Now, based on this behavior, some stupid marketers industry who're either religiously in favor of vista or against it, and the idiot who wrote TFA, expected consumers to flock to Vista same as they did then.
This turned out to be wrong, because consumers aren't total idiots 100% of the time. Most of them are already running a working product at home that is nowhere as dysfunctional and maintenance-expensive as 98 was. XP is reasonably stable, and offers next-to-everything vista does, except a worked out sudo-for-homeusers solution that Vista introduced, and which is not worth an immediate upgrade.
The result?
Rather than everyone flocking to vista at once, people are carrying on with whatever lifecycle their PC has, getting Vista (and I highly recommend doing so) if buying a new computer (which also makes the RAM-sufficiency problem completely minor, as ram is dirt cheap and even with Vista sitting on 700MB rather than XP's 200MB, 1-1.5GB of RAM is enough to run most home setups), and the percent of people upgraded resembles the number of people who'se PC's reached their end-of-life for some reason and got new ones.
There's some *relatively* niche groups of people that deviate from this model -
Enthusiasts (minus the anti-vista or anti-microsoft religious ones) may show a higher upgrade %.
Gamers will likely show a much lower one (for multiple reasons - lacking driver support - late, unimplemented features found in xp, etc - due to reworked graphics driver model, no games the DX10 front yet, and most gamers who can do math would rather give the extra 500MB (difference between Vista and XP) in their system to the game rather than to Vista, even if they're running 4GB boxes).
But both of these populations are relatively tiny compared to all the Joes out there in the world who just use their PC for internet, office and photos.
Moral?
A. There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING fundamentally wrong with Vista. Not the resource usage (500MB more and optionally use basic graphics capabilities found in any, even ubercheap, GPU from the past 5 years minus via unichrome).
B. permissions & sudo for non-IT-savvy-homeusers is a DAMN FUCKING GOOD THING. Not a reason to run and switch, but DEFINITELY a reason to prefer XP over Vista on a new install, given sufficient RAM. Joe-Can-Do-Math user would rather spend 30$ more on RAM initially than run-as-root and consequently call me out to fix his malware three additional times every year for WAY more than 30$.
C. In a corporate environment this has existed forever on NT4, 2K and XP, so it is an UTTERLY IRRELEVANT advantage in that segment. I see ZERO reason why any corporate IT manager should switch his install base to Vista - OS costs more, kit to run it costs more, near-zero added value and some expected level of compatibility issues. Unless M$ gives some financial incentive to go down that route, there is no benefit and great expense. Use XP.
D. Adaptation will happen over the course of
Check this out:
Nightwish - End of an Era
If you want 'Ghost Love Score' (which is the best piece on the album and the one song I actually wanted), you're forced to buy the entire album. "Now you don't need to buy the entire album for one song", they said.
So much for the "buy only the song you want" bit. They deliberately prevent you from buying the best songs seperately.
What they really meant was "Now you don't need to buy the entire album if you're just looking to buy the song you don't want". Yay! Go Amazon!
When I was a youth, the school had us rebuild a working ENIAC out of used teabags and rusted scrap metal from the schoolyard, then forced us to stay overnight and pedal dynamos to power it so the professor could play PONG using the bulbs.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya.
Looks like you Canadians don't have it too right either:
Fact: the fact that Bush is the #1 threat to world peace does NOT absolve opressive fundamentalist hate-mongering regimes of responsibility over their respective actions. These nations STILL ARE a significant threat to world peace, regardless of whether America is being headed by George Dubya , other republicans, democrats, or a stoned bunch of hippie carebears.
That a 500$ non-x86 glorified PDA in a UMPC form factor and lacking wireless capabilities would not sell in 2007, when Asus intends to push an XP-capable PentiumM-based EeePC that will harness the Windows application base for 200$-300$?
When two weeks after its announcement, VIA showed a reference C7-based UMPC (reworked nano-itx rig with a screen, really)?
GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. I'd be surprised if palm managed to sell more than four of these units. Whoever made the call to do this product is a clueless idiot, and the engineers working for him are clueless idiots for not having pointed just how pathetically backward such a product would be in light of existing competition. It wouldn't have sold a decade ago. NOW?
1999 called. They want their Jornada back.
And don't forget that the information doesn't have to be factual or right to sway public opinion.
If you and I run for an election, I can sway public opinion by running a poll asking questions like "Would you (poll answerer) still vote for [[you]] if you were to suddenly find out he is a child molester?"
I haven't actually accused you of molesting children by running that poll, there may not have been any child-molesting story to speak of, but simply by suggesting the possibility of such a hypothetical scenario I'd be turning away people from you. (After people have done just that, it's now very very illegal in most developed countries).
My point being that the site does not have to be factual to do damage.
The other side of the same coin, of course, is that it also doesn't have to be CIA/reuters-grade-reliable do do good. It's not a news site and does not need to act as such. It's goal is not for the purpose of churning up public opinion. It's for someone to point the powers that be at where it stinks of fish. After that gets done, the information can be properly re-collected and assessed. In other words, the purpose of the site is not to actually dig up shit, it's to point at where digging needs to take place for shit to be likely found.
Where do all these idiots come from, who think that people should reinstall an OS just because a new one came out?
People's computers have an average lifespan. Even when narrowed down to the gamer demographic. Most won't shorten that lifespan and buy a new box just because Vista came out, and most who periodically upgrade their OS won't install a new OS just because. They'll wait for their existing one to require replacing - the OS too has an "average lifespan". Let's wait for that average lifespan, and measure vista acceptance then.
That said, let's narrow down to what Vista has to offer to the gamer demographic.
* PRO (though perceived by most as CON): It has sudo and a user model. As a sysadmin, I generally regard that as a good thing and have been pissed at microsoft for not having implemented it and educated their users to use it 20 years ago, but most gamers will regard this more as an annoyance than a feature that does them good, and what should have been a cause to adopt vista is effectively deterring its adoption due to "spoiled" users who want to "continue working as root".
* CON: Vista guzzles 500MB of RAM more than XP (~700MB rather than ~200MB). True, RAM is dirt cheap, but
[a] Unlike Mum's PC, gamers NEVER have enough, (typical games can easily lop 1, 2 or even more GB of RAM) let alone too much of it. Further, many already have all their memory banks occupied (if due to former upgrades or to take advantage of dual-bus memory controllers, and upgrading RAM means replacing existing chips, not adding more.
So with vista, RAM that can be used for gaming is used to simply keep vista around. Many also run a bankful of sweet-spot priced chips (say, have two banks and 2x1GB), and plugging in 2GB ones is not as cheap as buying an additional 2x1GB. Not nearly as painless as dropping a single new 1GB chip in mum's PC for that vista upgrade.
[b] Mum's PC doesn't go anywhere near saturating memory bandwidth. Mum can be using PC133 and wouldn't feel it impact her in the slightest (not due to ignorance, just due to not ever noticeably saturating CPU to RAM bus). Gamers will not want to be a mixed assortment of old and new slow and fast RAM chips.
* CON: I game. I've got both an XP install and a vista install. I run a dual-head rig using both outputs for a wider viewport. 8 months out, Nvidia VISTA 8800 drivers still do not support SPAN (aka making windows think it has one virtual 2560*1024 screen rather than two 1280*1024 heads) required for gaming on both. That's an Nvidia thing, but that's a dead showstopper keeping ME back.
* NOT-PRO: Hey Id CEO dude. What fucking DX10 games? WHERE? when it's on STEAM rather than vapor, give me a yell.
* Gamers are typically neither insanely rich nor uninformed. Vista costs $$ that can be alternatively spent on a faster graphics card, which will impact their experience unfathomably higher on the benefit scale. A huge block of that demographic will not have the cash to do both. (and that in itself is an oversimplification - there are yet other things that will give more benefit than the vista upgrade - more RAM, etc).
The above list of CONS makes a no-brainer choice:
Do I throw money at making my life better or worse?
For the gamer demographic, Vista offers damn little, even debatably NEGATIVE value as an upgrade. As a new computer initially bought with it rather than XP and already full of RAM to the point of not being affected by the "loss" of 500MB, it makes more sense, but for that we need to wait a couple of years for gamers to "cycle out" their PCs. In addition, strip out the gamers that never actually "buy a PC" and get a bundled OS, but who just keep upgrading parts.
To sum:
Take gamer XP install base.
[1] Remove "upgraders", they gain no benefit, most will not buy vista (this could very well be the majority, though I have no numbers). This will not change until there is something that Vista can do that the XP product they already own can't. DX10 comes to mind.
The remainder, "ful
Flash memory has a finite amount of write cycles before it craps out (unlike a harddrive that could, in theory and disregarding eventual mechanical failure, keep going forever). Reads can be done indefinitely.
Here's some stuff to consider:
1. First generation flash had about 10,000 writes per cell (after which that cell would become bad, like a bad sector on a harddrive)
2. I've heard estimates on modern flash ranging from 100K to 1000K.
3. FACT: If you grind flash with an application that writes continuously (say, run a database server off it), your flash will die in days.
4. FACT: If you do browsing/office stuff on a flash card, you're likely to upgrade your computer long before the flash will fail (and assuming you use it for 15 years, by the time it will, insanely higher capacities will be available for near-zero money (like, say, 2GB is available for 20$ today). The caveat is computers with too little memory (say, if you run XP on 256MB of RAM or lower, or vista on 512MB) which resort to swapping very often and do so intensively. Another is if you get infected by some malware that does a lot of writing to disk. These scenarios may land you squarely in [3] above.
5. SSD products coming out have other nice features like write averaging - the card makes sure to use all its memory cells equally rather than just dumping data on the first available cells, so some cells don't wear out quicker and optimizing the card for longer life.
6. CF-to-IDE controllers often don't go past implementing PIO4 or do crappy implementation of UDMA33 modes, giving very sorry (5-10MB/sec) performance bottlenecks. Modern cards are well capable of >20MB/sec (by comparison, an el-cheapo 7200RPM harddrive will write at about 40-50MB/sec on the start of the platter and ~20-30MB/sec at the other end, and read at ~60-70MB/sec on the start and ~40MB/sec at the end, sustained speed (bursty bits of tiny data are often prefetched and are waiting on the RAM cache in the drive, giving you full bus (100, 133, 150 or 300MB/sec) speeds when fetched.
By harddrive standards, Flash is still expensive per GB and relatively slow, but quiet, dense and consumes little power. Suitable for some.
Depends how you define an embedded system.
:-)
Is it anything that comes on mini-itx form-factor or smaller?
Is it arm/mips/other-non-x86-arch?
I want x86 compatibility on my game rig. Guess why.
I also want PCIe16 etc.
For my game rig, I use a mobile-on-desktop motherboard (with PCIe) and a T5600 Core2Duo (similar to an E4600 only with 667MHz FSB instead of an 800 one, and a TDP of 34 Watts rather than 65 Watts. Oh, and look ma, no fan.
For my living room box I use a VIA Eden EN12000 board with a PicoPSU-120.
Embedded enough?
I seem to have had the impression that my Soekris firewalls, running a National (today AMD) Geode SC1100 at 266MHz, a P1-class CPU that, coupled with 3 100MBit NICs, 128MB of RAM, IDE, USB etc eat a whopping 3-5 Watts for the entire machine, was x86.
The FreeBSD kernel I run on them seems to think so too.
Kudos to Via for taking ULV to a whole new level and giving us P2-class performance in that watt range, but this is by no means revolutionary, just evolution that allows us to do more with a ULV box.
Guys, hate to break it to you, but anyone who wants to be running on solid state, is.
3 IDE-CF adapters cost me 8$ including shipment on ebay last week. My game box runs of a 16GB CF card (200$ - new - on ebay, available for months now) with vista (yes, vista on a 22MB/sec CF, though I've gotten it there via ghosting rather than via a regular install), and my living room PC runs XP off a 2GB CF card that cost about 25$ new (again, ebay price, store prices typically a tad higher).
Yes, 20MB/sec is less than the 50-70MB/sec read speed an average harddrive gives, but that is offset by near-zero seek times.
If under windows, make sure you turn off:
* SWAP
* ntfs Access time writes (fs tuning utility, one command from shell, or a reg key)
And if you want to be even more thorough and flash-friendly:
* 8_3 filename writes (in ntfs every file has two filenames one that is backwards-compatible to 8_3 naming. No need to waste CF writes on that)
* Any software that routinely writes stuff to disk.
If you're fanatic, do:
* Event logger
* Indexing
If you want >16GB, you can buy several, then use LVM/dynamic disk/multiple partitions depending on your OS to use that.
I just have the core 16GB (about 8GB occupied) on the game box, and do the rest of the storage (aka keep the Program Files directory) on the RAID5 fileserver over Gigabit LAN, which gives me about 40MB/sec read and write, which is IMHO sufficient. Were I not to rely on that, I'd get another two 16GB cards on a CF-IDE adapter, plonk a RAID0 on them and voilla (assuming you can get windows to make dynamic disks of removable storage, which the CF cards are still recognized as, even when on the IDE bus), which I am by no means certain.
If you're on Linux, no problem there. anything and verything can be raided and LVM'd at will.
A RAID0 of these would cost 400$, give 32GB and give about 40MB/sec performance.
So no need to get overly excited with SSD. They're just an overpriced nicely bundled version of what is already cheaply available, kinda like external harddrives. And they'll keep on being that for a while yet.
Google has spent a decade and some on one side of a very big coin. Search, ads, gmail, google maps, google docs, google this, that, everything translates into one simple thing - they have the "Where Joe wants his browser to be" for a VERY big number of Joes worldwide.
Buying up the 700MHz band will make them, in the US, own the "Where Joe is coming from". A mountain of dark fiber they've been purchasing lately will supply the infrastructure to connect side A to side B.
Together, these are worth more than the sum of their parts. Coupled, rather than Google wanting to hookup to tier-1 ISP's, it will be tier-1 ISP's who will be jumping through hoops to get closer to the wirelessgoogle plate.
They seem to be using the momentum of their products to try and catch a rather big chunk of the internet backbone and haul it right up onto their own back (just the bit that involves peoples traffic going to them). Quite admirable in its own right, if they manage to pull it off.
Rather than bean-counting and looking for a direct profit, a move like that would reposition them in an entirely different league of players, give them way more power, regulation leverage and later translate into an insanely bigger profits.
I'm eager to see if they manage to pull this off, if for the sheer ability to outsmart all of the established competition for that power. And frankly, even without them being holier than the bloody pope, I'd much rather have them have it than any other player their size.
Wimax sorts last-mile-limited places.
Most of world has no problems with the last mile, and upgrading it is cheap.
The problem lies in expensive intercontinental links.
I wasn't talking specifically about either obesity or weight problems (though they're an obvious place where being a food junkie can lead you).
Good or bad diet can have many adverse affects on standard-weight people as well - from simply bad food that increases your chances of getting cancer (say, deep fried in oil or salty foods), to foods that increase chances of liver failure, to the sheer fact that dropping your calorie intake to about 40-50% of your RDI may very well (albeit the jury's still out on scientific proof) buy you at least another 10 years of life (by which coin, eating them kills you early), if it does indeed turn out that CR works on humans same as it does on every animal ever tested for it in age-related research.
Food addiction is not limited to weight problems - weight is just one (very obvious) indicator of several possible indicators that you're prematurely trashing your body. There's others that are independent of weight.
Food is an addictive drug that interferes with thought (and consequently, your priorities), same as with many other drugs.
There is a problem with your holier-than-thou approach, however, as applied to food.
With (illegal) drugs, you can squarely lay the blame with the junkie. You can't really blame him when he's in junkie stage, his brain is past telling him to stop at that point, but you can say he should have been responsible when he still had a working sense of judgement and be right. He chose to do something stupid when he had a functional head on his shoulders, and he carries full responsibility for his actions.
With food, nobody, not even you, can avoid exposure, and that exposure is dictated by our environment way before we make informed conscious choices about what and how much to eat. In modern-day America, many are food junkies long before they reach the point of actively choosing their diet, and are letting their "habit" (in the "addiction" sense) dictate their diet from that moment on. It's not the same for everyone either. Some have a metabolism that soaks up fat like a sponge, others don't. Some had folks that got them on MCD's from age 3, others gave them good food. Couple a few of these wrong parameters together, and some people become mature before becoming hooked, others get hooked before maturity and end up never having sat behind the steering wheel of their diet - they're effectively addicts from zero to the day they die, with a high "will" barrier to cross to get out (which statistically, many of them will not have the means to traverse).
Without any intention of lessening the load of personal responsibility on any individual, some people really never get to a point where they can choose to stop with a clear head, and blaming them is halfway to blaming someone who was born in a coma and stayed in a coma for all his life for being in a coma. If any person's (yours not excluded) sense of judgement is distorted enough by chemicals, liability over his decisions while so becomes a slippery slope you're on the right side of only by chance.
You're not better than many of those people, just luckier, and are thus on very slippery moral ground.
I suggest you tread lightly.
That'll take a while yet.
There's more important things on the list for specifically-targeting-certain-professions department.
Spammers, telemarketers, MAFIAA-endorsing studio executives, SCO executives and a few other breeds of bottom-feeding scum.
We could, of course, take the practical DA approach and stage a fake planetwide disaster, put them on a spaceship and "evacuate" them first, claiming to follow in the next ships right after...
If you get "Allow or Deny" messages when you try to work done, you're probably working incorrectly (outside your userspace).
I run a gemtpp box, hardly anything to do with MS, and if I stray from my userspace, it asks me exactly the same. I can either sudo, or not be allowed access. Nevertheless, once the proper working habits are adopted, routine work rarely requires you do this. All you're doing is bitching about your own incorrect working habits.
When will you clueless idiots stop bashing MS for doing what is pro'lly the best thing they did in Windows in the last decade, which is moving the home user (or, any use that does not have a policy applied to him) from a work-as-root model to work-as-user+sudo model? No, it doesn't make the box bulletproof, much as it doesn't make my gentoo box bulletproof, but it's a darn good thing, even if it's 20 years late. In fact, it's one of the biggest things we were bashing them about for said 20 years.
But it does mean they've cost the dosbox IP holders BILLIONS of dollars in lost imaginary revenue!
1. Start where the most benefit is (for us, we go joint on almost everything to minimize cost, hassle and clutter).
.. (can't even see the benefit of using a joint one, it's not like a mailbox costs anything nowadays). Individual forum/web/online/msn accounts everywhere.
2. When we step on each other's toes, go the other way (in most cases, this means SPLIT).
This has resulted in us doing:
* (still) joint finance - cheaper than paying for double the banking services, additional credit card holders are way cheaper than additional credit accounts, our combined borrowing power is better (for when you do risky investment), and one single big resource pool is way more flexible to manage. Some would say you may have different considerations here if, say, you start at very different ends of the financial spectrum (and wish to perpetuate that), have a wildly different tolerance to risky investment etc. (the latter being the only justification I'd be able to find in a relationship I'd still want to be a part of, but that's just me). Your life, your considerations, use your brain, that's what it's for.
* Separate emails (doh)
* ALWAYS Seperate machines (above technique applied here). Not so much a privacy thing (we both have full access to each other's boxes and the tech know-how to do stuff covertly without the other knowing were we so inclined), just a major convenience issue. Worth the extra cost (not to mention that the various machines are specced out to our individual requirements). Pro'lly biggest problem with one machine is that two people can't be using it at once, and for us that's a big requirement.
* Separate cars - which is the classic example of the above. Let the requirement dictate the resource allocation. Just like anywhere else.
etc.
Worked wonderful for the last decade or so. Why isn't this totally and utterly obvious? sheesh...
And if you want to keep shit away from the eyes of your better half (for whatever, legit or sinister reason), the technical ability is always there, but I'm assuming that's not the purpose of this debate. If you want to cheat or plan a surprise party, do (or don't, or whatever).
And will THEY ship before DNF?!
THEY did not say.
They will not upgrade NOW, just because vista came out, they will wait for the end of life of their desktops and consider the correct upgrade path (hinging mostly on what microsoft provides the best support horizon for, really, and sooner or later XP support will be stopped, as with any old product) when that becomes relevant. And if it'll be Vista then - so be it.
Nothing to see here (except for the few puzzled idiots who're scratching their heads and asking questions like "What, not EVERYBODY in the corporate world just dumped all their existing long-term desktop OS strategies and just ran wildly to upgrade everything to Vista the moment it came out?!"), move along.
Sheesh.
>> Why not make a system that generates energy under the force of collapsing Big Dig tunnel sections?
Yep. Stacks up neatly next to selling screenspace on BSODs for advertising.
Gotta love our new economy.
OneNote
The best thing Microsoft did in the last decade.
I'm betting Rowling has already hired several datacenters to spider google images, with professional hitmen standing by in case other identifying images were made by this guy.
Assuming, of course, she hasn't simply bought google and/or canon for this purpose.