The problem is that an experienced (note: not admin that does it for a living) user may want to fix a "friends" computer and get very frustrated because he does not have the right tools to help.
"Most non-MS software is even worse than Microsoft software, to be blunt."
This is because MS pushed some APIs that are wrongly designed form the start, and now have to support them (backward compatibility).Also they promote what I call "everyone can be a programmer" topic, so shitty apps (even if they are based on great ideas) come from all over the place. VB is my most hated language, although I never made more than 10 lines of code. But I think the worst programs are made in VB. But don't get me wrong, I'm not saing that all VB apps are bad.
"I'm not sure what people mean by anti-competitive behaviour."
One of the most mediatized anti-competitive behavior was when IE was integrated in Windows. Actually, it was not the problem with integration, but with total-integration. You could not install Windows without IE, at least not without resorting to serious tweaks. So consumers saw an integrated browser and did not look for alternatives, even if their product was highly unsafe (like a web-page that gains access to kernel stuff). This resulted in Netscape stopping development (actually donating the code to the community) and the spreading of spyware/malware. With high-market share to end-users, even web development for other browsers stopped. Many small "web" companies designed pages only for IE, because MS introduced (actually pushed) unsafe/non-standard coding techiques.
Recently, with Vista (at least with latest beta), you cannot install another firewall. So if major bugs are discovered in Vistas firewall, ALL systems are affected. This actually "promotes" the use of malware (badly coded, I might add).
The idea with MS is not that they bundle stuff, but you cannot run Windows without them. And they force you to pay for what you may not want to use and/or give you a false sense of security.
Oh...you cannot buy many new computers without Windows. Even if you ask, not many vendors (large ones) will sell you without Windows. This practice started with IBM+MS-DOS. I know there was a protest by Unix guys in front of one vendor to get the money back for unopened MS-DOS license. But this cannot be considered 100% MSs fault.
1st of all, PEBuilder is just a builder. It has some provided apps for the minimal interface, but the rest is from your Windows CD. If those provided apps would be rootkits, there would be lots of negative feedback, because many of those who use it in rescue ops are experts in Windows.
"What? No. If a person actually does that, then that person is no hardware enthusiast."
Have you tried to continue using XP after a mobo change (with different chipsets)? I tried, many times, and it does not work. There is a chance with the repair option (from the boot CD), but YMMV. It did not work for me always. Also, I had a period when a 3-month old Windows install was a record.
An enthusiast will always try something which can damage an install. The least changed component was the HDD, but even then I used to switch from RAID to independend drives.
I didn't mean that "pagefile" comes from W95. My idea was that the "memory file" was called "swapfile" in Windows =3.11 and "pagefile" from W95. So I believe that MS has switched from a "whole application swap" to a page swap. I know that in WindowsXP you can swap only part of the application. I had experienced it even with firefox. I had contact only with MS-OSes (and compatible) and linux (1st time around '95) and only with x86. I really don't know how linux manages swapping, but I think the idea of swapping all-or-nothing is not good. I also think it (swapping as you describe it) exists for compatibility with processors which cannot work with pages (Windows 3.11 ran on 286, but Windows95 required 386). PS: about Win95 requiring a 386, I know it was because of virtual mode which 286 did not have, but there were many changes in the architecture and paging may be one of them. I'm really bad at hystory.
"One other (Linux) server has big processes (1Gig or more) and when they have to swap out, watch the machine fall apart while the process is swapped out - it takes a while to write 1 gig of ram into swap! Since the process is large, swap needs to be large.... Just hope that server needs to have 3 or 4 multi gig processes swapped out...."
You seems to miss the idea of swap. All modern OSes combined with processors (from 386 in the x86 range) will swap 4KB pages. So if memory is needed, the last accessed page (4KB) in RAM will be swapped (and the algorithm continues until no more RAM is required). When one of the swapped 4KB pages is needed, it's retrieved from swap in free RAM (if no free RAM is available, it swaps out another page). I don't think it swaps out all of your application, and if it does, you should increase you RAM. The thing is that your app can try to access the "just swapped" page, which is a preformance killer. Swapping is done on page chunks, not app chunks. PS: the term pagefile probably comes from windows 95 because it contains "pages". All modern processors have MMU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_un it), which segments the memory in 4-64KB of pages.
First of all, 32-bit processors cannot access more than 4G of memory. Some newer processors have PAE (Physical Address Extension) which enables them to use more, but it's slow and not really useful/used in desktop. Another problem is that physical addresses between 3.6GB and 4GB are used by PCI mappings. So you will never be able to use the full 4GB RAM.
The thing which I hate about Windows XP (and 2000 and NT) is that I cannot limit the cache size (like in Win9x/ME). So if I have 20 applications open which do nothing and then copy some large files (like 1 file the size of my RAM), it will page all of my applications to swap, although the cache data is used only once. And when I get back to my applications I have to wait. Also, the Windows File Sharing cache is treated differently to the system cache. The systems sees it as a normal application. So if you play something (FPS) and someone starts to copy a large file over the network from you (like a 700MB file when you have 1GB), you will not be able to play (even at 10Mbits/s). If the transfer is done using a ftp server, you barely notice (even at 100Mbits/s), but with "server" service, it kills you. So I'm not using a pagefile just to force the cache to not "swap-out" other apps. But if I have a memory leak from an application (or apps which really use a lot of memory), I do get in trouble. It did happen a few times.
"increase disk capacity by 10 times" means it's density will be 10 times higher. The longitudinal (i.e. non-perpendicular) technology has a max of 160GB/platter in 3.5" drives (and this as achieved AFAIK only by Seagate). Your 250GB drive surely has 2x125GB platters. So in the new tehnology it will be 2x1250GB. An like the other reply said, it's regarding laptops (which cannot have more than 1 platter, 2.5").
All Windows jokes start from windows XP (and 2K, 98, 95....). But its kernel is very good. It's the drivers/applications that cause the crashes. But on an ECU (I'm a software developer for car automated transmissions, but with administrator background) you develop a very different code. The goal is to reduce delays to ms timings, whereas in Windows (XP, CE, whatever) a one-time delay of 200ms, you (user), won't even notice. That's the difference between a RTOS and a desktop/server OS. Besides, the Windows (entire code) has hundreds of employees, but on a RTOS you don't need more than 20-30 people. The idea is that Windows has many projects (each app independently), whereas the ECU code forms at most 4-5 bynaries. So you cannot put too many people on one project, because it will delay it even more.
It's still unclear what they will be producing (HW/SW), but it's clear that there will be only one HW platform (not even Intel/AMD types of battles). Also I'm sure that every team can have some software developers to adapt to their engine set, so it won't be entirely MS software.
I once used netcat & tar to transfer lots of small files, but it's a complicated task (archive everything in a big file which is instantly transfered to the other computer). On source computer you have to create a tar archive redirected to netcat, which is instructed to connect to another netcat session (destination computer) that provides its output to tar extraction. Problem is if you give something wrong and need to abort, you will have to restart the server part (destination computer). Server(destination): nc -L -p 22|tar -xvf - Client(source): tar -cf - *|nc sss.sss.sss.sss 22 The only problem I see with Windows is I don't know if netcat's STD_ERR will be transferred to tar (only STD_OUT should be tranfered). This is the fastest way I can see of tranfering lots of small files between computers. You can even use compression with TAR (add z or j to tar parameters;e.g.: tar -cjf - *) if you really are bandwidth limited. But for firewire I saw that between 2 3G P4s you cannot tranfer more than 30MB/s (100% CPU load) because the TCP checksumming/compression is done on the CPU, not accelerated by LAN chips as on ethernet. I don't think you will see inprovement in TAR compression, since TCP will always try to compress.
FTP is great for big files, but for 4K files SMB (aka windows file sharing) is better. FTP has a big overhead: it creates a new TCP connection for every file and closes it when the file is transfered. I'm looking right now for a TAR/netcat solution (I used it once, but don't remember netcat's options).
When NFS Undeground 2 appeared, I wanted to unlock the Subaru Imprezza as fast as possible (one of my preffered cars). I just wanted to make single races with it. Imagine my surprize when I unlocked the last part of the city and the Imprezza was nowhere to be found. Sure, make it harder as you go, but give me all the cars. Juiced on the other hand has very bad graphics, it doesn't have my favorite Imprezza, but I played it lots more that NFS Undeground 2 and Most Wanted combined. Why? because in 1 hour I can have any car, and after 3/4 races with that car I can have any level of performance I want. In 2 hours you can race a 900BHP Viper. That seems to me a lot closer to reality. Oblivion is great in may aspects, but I don't like one thing: leveled items. In Morrowind, when I started the game, I went straight to ghostgate and got myself an almost complete glass armor (I always started with high merchantile). After that I could focus on the quests.
That's correct, the speakers are not directly affected. I used at home an AIWA sound system (main unit+2 speakers) and it responded to my phone from 0.5 meters (that's about 20"), but when I borrowed my brother-in-law's Tehnics amplifier (used with the same speakers), it did not react to the phone even when the phone was left on the unit. Also, the volume of the buzzing (on the AIWA of course) did not change with the volume knob, so it stays the same volume no matter if the music deafens you or not (so when the volume is high, it's not that noticeable). My conclusion is that the op-amps have to be shielded, which is probably done only on the more expensive units.
Almost all filesystems I know of use at least 4Kb clusters. NTFS does come with 512 byte on smaller partitions. LBA accesses on sector boundaries, so for larger HDD's, you need more bits (currently 28-bit LBA, which some older bioses support, means a maximum of 128GB- 2^28*512=2^28*2^9=2^37) Since 512-bytes were used for 30 years, I think it is easy to assume it will not last for 10 more years (getting to LBA32 limit). So why not shave off 3 bits and also make it an even number of bits (12 against 9). Also there is something called "multible block access" where you make only one request for up to 16 (on most HDD's) sectors. For 512-byte sectors you have 8K, but for 4K sectors that means 64K. Great for large files (IO overdead and stuff). On the application side this sould not affect anyone using 64-bit sizes (since only the OS would know of sector sizes), as for 32-bit sizes it already is a problem (4G limit). So this sould not be a problem because on a large partition you will not have too much wasted space (i have around 40MB wasted space on my OS drive for 5520MB of files, and I would even accept 200MB)
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The problem is that an experienced (note: not admin that does it for a living) user may want to fix a "friends" computer and get very frustrated because he does not have the right tools to help.
"Most non-MS software is even worse than Microsoft software, to be blunt."
This is because MS pushed some APIs that are wrongly designed form the start, and now have to support them (backward compatibility).Also they promote what I call "everyone can be a programmer" topic, so shitty apps (even if they are based on great ideas) come from all over the place. VB is my most hated language, although I never made more than 10 lines of code. But I think the worst programs are made in VB. But don't get me wrong, I'm not saing that all VB apps are bad.
"I'm not sure what people mean by anti-competitive behaviour."
One of the most mediatized anti-competitive behavior was when IE was integrated in Windows. Actually, it was not the problem with integration, but with total-integration. You could not install Windows without IE, at least not without resorting to serious tweaks. So consumers saw an integrated browser and did not look for alternatives, even if their product was highly unsafe (like a web-page that gains access to kernel stuff). This resulted in Netscape stopping development (actually donating the code to the community) and the spreading of spyware/malware. With high-market share to end-users, even web development for other browsers stopped. Many small "web" companies designed pages only for IE, because MS introduced (actually pushed) unsafe/non-standard coding techiques.
Recently, with Vista (at least with latest beta), you cannot install another firewall. So if major bugs are discovered in Vistas firewall, ALL systems are affected. This actually "promotes" the use of malware (badly coded, I might add).
The idea with MS is not that they bundle stuff, but you cannot run Windows without them. And they force you to pay for what you may not want to use and/or give you a false sense of security.
Oh...you cannot buy many new computers without Windows. Even if you ask, not many vendors (large ones) will sell you without Windows. This practice started with IBM+MS-DOS. I know there was a protest by Unix guys in front of one vendor to get the money back for unopened MS-DOS license. But this cannot be considered 100% MSs fault.
1st of all, PEBuilder is just a builder. It has some provided apps for the minimal interface, but the rest is from your Windows CD. If those provided apps would be rootkits, there would be lots of negative feedback, because many of those who use it in rescue ops are experts in Windows.
"What? No. If a person actually does that, then that person is no hardware enthusiast."
Have you tried to continue using XP after a mobo change (with different chipsets)? I tried, many times, and it does not work. There is a chance with the repair option (from the boot CD), but YMMV. It did not work for me always. Also, I had a period when a 3-month old Windows install was a record.
An enthusiast will always try something which can damage an install.
The least changed component was the HDD, but even then I used to switch from RAID to independend drives.
I didn't mean that "pagefile" comes from W95. My idea was that the "memory file" was called "swapfile" in Windows =3.11 and "pagefile" from W95. So I believe that MS has switched from a "whole application swap" to a page swap. I know that in WindowsXP you can swap only part of the application. I had experienced it even with firefox.
I had contact only with MS-OSes (and compatible) and linux (1st time around '95) and only with x86. I really don't know how linux manages swapping, but I think the idea of swapping all-or-nothing is not good. I also think it (swapping as you describe it) exists for compatibility with processors which cannot work with pages (Windows 3.11 ran on 286, but Windows95 required 386).
PS: about Win95 requiring a 386, I know it was because of virtual mode which 286 did not have, but there were many changes in the architecture and paging may be one of them. I'm really bad at hystory.
"One other (Linux) server has big processes (1Gig or more) and when they have to swap out, watch the machine fall apart while the process is swapped out - it takes a while to write 1 gig of ram into swap! Since the process is large, swap needs to be large.... Just hope that server needs to have 3 or 4 multi gig processes swapped out...."
n it), which segments the memory in 4-64KB of pages.
You seems to miss the idea of swap. All modern OSes combined with processors (from 386 in the x86 range) will swap 4KB pages. So if memory is needed, the last accessed page (4KB) in RAM will be swapped (and the algorithm continues until no more RAM is required). When one of the swapped 4KB pages is needed, it's retrieved from swap in free RAM (if no free RAM is available, it swaps out another page).
I don't think it swaps out all of your application, and if it does, you should increase you RAM. The thing is that your app can try to access the "just swapped" page, which is a preformance killer. Swapping is done on page chunks, not app chunks.
PS: the term pagefile probably comes from windows 95 because it contains "pages". All modern processors have MMU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_u
First of all, 32-bit processors cannot access more than 4G of memory. Some newer processors have PAE (Physical Address Extension) which enables them to use more, but it's slow and not really useful/used in desktop. Another problem is that physical addresses between 3.6GB and 4GB are used by PCI mappings. So you will never be able to use the full 4GB RAM.
The thing which I hate about Windows XP (and 2000 and NT) is that I cannot limit the cache size (like in Win9x/ME). So if I have 20 applications open which do nothing and then copy some large files (like 1 file the size of my RAM), it will page all of my applications to swap, although the cache data is used only once. And when I get back to my applications I have to wait. Also, the Windows File Sharing cache is treated differently to the system cache. The systems sees it as a normal application. So if you play something (FPS) and someone starts to copy a large file over the network from you (like a 700MB file when you have 1GB), you will not be able to play (even at 10Mbits/s). If the transfer is done using a ftp server, you barely notice (even at 100Mbits/s), but with "server" service, it kills you.
So I'm not using a pagefile just to force the cache to not "swap-out" other apps. But if I have a memory leak from an application (or apps which really use a lot of memory), I do get in trouble. It did happen a few times.
"increase disk capacity by 10 times" means it's density will be 10 times higher. The longitudinal (i.e. non-perpendicular) technology has a max of 160GB/platter in 3.5" drives (and this as achieved AFAIK only by Seagate). Your 250GB drive surely has 2x125GB platters. So in the new tehnology it will be 2x1250GB. An like the other reply said, it's regarding laptops (which cannot have more than 1 platter, 2.5").
All Windows jokes start from windows XP (and 2K, 98, 95....). But its kernel is very good. It's the drivers/applications that cause the crashes. But on an ECU (I'm a software developer for car automated transmissions, but with administrator background) you develop a very different code. The goal is to reduce delays to ms timings, whereas in Windows (XP, CE, whatever) a one-time delay of 200ms, you (user), won't even notice. That's the difference between a RTOS and a desktop/server OS.
Besides, the Windows (entire code) has hundreds of employees, but on a RTOS you don't need more than 20-30 people. The idea is that Windows has many projects (each app independently), whereas the ECU code forms at most 4-5 bynaries. So you cannot put too many people on one project, because it will delay it even more.
It's still unclear what they will be producing (HW/SW), but it's clear that there will be only one HW platform (not even Intel/AMD types of battles). Also I'm sure that every team can have some software developers to adapt to their engine set, so it won't be entirely MS software.
I once used netcat & tar to transfer lots of small files, but it's a complicated task (archive everything in a big file which is instantly transfered to the other computer).
On source computer you have to create a tar archive redirected to netcat, which is instructed to connect to another netcat session (destination computer) that provides its output to tar extraction.
Problem is if you give something wrong and need to abort, you will have to restart the server part (destination computer).
Server(destination): nc -L -p 22|tar -xvf -
Client(source): tar -cf - *|nc sss.sss.sss.sss 22
The only problem I see with Windows is I don't know if netcat's STD_ERR will be transferred to tar (only STD_OUT should be tranfered).
This is the fastest way I can see of tranfering lots of small files between computers. You can even use compression with TAR (add z or j to tar parameters;e.g.: tar -cjf - *) if you really are bandwidth limited. But for firewire I saw that between 2 3G P4s you cannot tranfer more than 30MB/s (100% CPU load) because the TCP checksumming/compression is done on the CPU, not accelerated by LAN chips as on ethernet. I don't think you will see inprovement in TAR compression, since TCP will always try to compress.
FTP is great for big files, but for 4K files SMB (aka windows file sharing) is better. FTP has a big overhead: it creates a new TCP connection for every file and closes it when the file is transfered.
I'm looking right now for a TAR/netcat solution (I used it once, but don't remember netcat's options).
When NFS Undeground 2 appeared, I wanted to unlock the Subaru Imprezza as fast as possible (one of my preffered cars). I just wanted to make single races with it. Imagine my surprize when I unlocked the last part of the city and the Imprezza was nowhere to be found. Sure, make it harder as you go, but give me all the cars. Juiced on the other hand has very bad graphics, it doesn't have my favorite Imprezza, but I played it lots more that NFS Undeground 2 and Most Wanted combined. Why? because in 1 hour I can have any car, and after 3/4 races with that car I can have any level of performance I want. In 2 hours you can race a 900BHP Viper. That seems to me a lot closer to reality.
Oblivion is great in may aspects, but I don't like one thing: leveled items. In Morrowind, when I started the game, I went straight to ghostgate and got myself an almost complete glass armor (I always started with high merchantile). After that I could focus on the quests.
That's correct, the speakers are not directly affected.
I used at home an AIWA sound system (main unit+2 speakers) and it responded to my phone from 0.5 meters (that's about 20"), but when I borrowed my brother-in-law's Tehnics amplifier (used with the same speakers), it did not react to the phone even when the phone was left on the unit.
Also, the volume of the buzzing (on the AIWA of course) did not change with the volume knob, so it stays the same volume no matter if the music deafens you or not (so when the volume is high, it's not that noticeable).
My conclusion is that the op-amps have to be shielded, which is probably done only on the more expensive units.
Almost all filesystems I know of use at least 4Kb clusters. NTFS does come with 512 byte on smaller partitions.
LBA accesses on sector boundaries, so for larger HDD's, you need more bits (currently 28-bit LBA, which some older bioses support, means a maximum of 128GB- 2^28*512=2^28*2^9=2^37) Since 512-bytes were used for 30 years, I think it is easy to assume it will not last for 10 more years (getting to LBA32 limit). So why not shave off 3 bits and also make it an even number of bits (12 against 9).
Also there is something called "multible block access" where you make only one request for up to 16 (on most HDD's) sectors. For 512-byte sectors you have 8K, but for 4K sectors that means 64K. Great for large files (IO overdead and stuff).
On the application side this sould not affect anyone using 64-bit sizes (since only the OS would know of sector sizes), as for 32-bit sizes it already is a problem (4G limit).
So this sould not be a problem because on a large partition you will not have too much wasted space (i have around 40MB wasted space on my OS drive for 5520MB of files, and I would even accept 200MB)