Sort of. It's not a "licensing issue" in that MS wants you to shell out for some kind of license to use more than 4GB on a 32-bit system Sure they do, it's called the enterprise or datacenter edition of windows server.
If you read to the end of TFA they tell you exactly how to remove the limits in 32 bit vista.
That this is possible is not surprising but it's still interesting that someone has actually done the detailed research and figured out how to enable it.
What i'm wondering is if it's possible to do something similar for XP SP2.
The inability to run 16 bit windows apps is still there*, driver support has improved though it can still be a problem (for example the first generation ICD2 is never going to get a 64 bit driver)
*and whats more annoying is afaict there is no reason it has to be that way for 16 bit windows apps (for real mode dos apps there are real technical reaons but not for win16 apps) IIRC MS just found some issues and couldn't be bothered fixing them, wine runs 16 bit windows apps on 64 bit linux fine;).
Round here at uni it's quite common to run systems with exactly 4GB of physical memory and run a 32 desktop edition of windows (which typically gives about 3-3.5GB usable though I have seen one machine as low as 2.5 due to a very address space hungry graphics card).
I haven't seen many people run such operating systems on machines with more than 4GB of ram, but it wouldn't surprise me if some people do (at least in a dual boot configuration).
I know a few people with multiple PCs on thier desk so they can have one for thier real work (running a 64 bit OS with more than 4GB of ram) and another for stuff that needs 32 bit (netware, some specialised hardware etc).
Excuse me, but both Linux and Mac OS X have very, very good support for 32-bits apps under a 64-bit OS. The only ones that don't seem to be able to pull it off is Microsoft. I had to install Windows XP 64-bit last week for someone trying to access all memory in their machine and a) none of the drivers worked, even for simple things like USB and other 'generic' hardware This is a PITA, the truth is there is little generic hardware in a modern PC, you need specific drivers for almost everything. These drivers need to be ported to 64 bit.
This has been much more of a problem for windows than for linux because of the different approaches taken. In linux driver developers are strongly pushed into sending thier drivers into the kernel tree so the kernel devs can work on things like making them 64 bit clean en-masse. On windows you are generally at the mercy of the hardware vendor.
b) SP3 is not even available yet for Windows XP 64-bit Despite the name XP proffessional x64 edition is not really an edition of XP. It's really an edition of server 2003 so it uses the server 2003 service packs. Server 2003 service pack 2 is only about 6 months older than XP service pack 3.
c) the system is slow and doesn't run half the software. I can't comment on your particular software load but most stuff i've tried ran fine and I didn't notice any performance issues. The lack of a netware client was annoying though.
What software specifically did you have problems with?
In what way is it terrible? Driver availibility isn't brilliant and the lack of a netware client is annoying but other than that I haven't noticed any real problems with it.
Only if Microsoft followed the advice of Slashdot posters and kludged large memory PAE support into 32-bit Windows. As TFA and the server editions of windows demonstrates the support is already there it's just disabled. Still I doubt MS will enable it so that doen't matter much for the OEMs.
I've noticed a lot of OEMS shipping machines with 3GB by default. Presumablly this is because they don't want either complaints about machines that can't use all thier ram or to support 64 bit windows.
Weren't 32-bit machines entry level before 1990? Yet, it took until MS shipped XP in 2001 before most consumers were running a 32-bit OS. That depends whether you count 9x as a 32 bit os.
The question is will OEMs be forced to offer both in thier customised install and/or recovery discs or will users of machines from uncooperative OEMs be forced to hunt down a generic disc and then telephone activate?
How is XP64 nowadays? XP64* is really server 2003 minus the server bits and with a different crippling configuration (less CPUs but more ram than server standard), I haven't heard anything bad about it stability wise and when I briefly ran it (on a dell optiplex 755) I didn't have any stability problems.
Afaict quite a bit of hardware comes with 64 bit drivers that will only install on vista and higher. There may be a way to hack these to run on XP64 but YMMV. So if you want to run XP64 you need to be carefull about your hardware purchases.
* P.S. the proper name for the product reffered to here is "windows XP professional x64 edition", this is not the same thing as "windows XP 64 bit edition" (the latter being the edition for the itanium)
Yeah as TFA says MS limits the physical address space in current client versions of windows (IIRC XP SP1 did not have this limitation but that is no longer supported). The author of TFA has found a way to hack out this limitation.
IIRC MS claims they do this due to driver compatibility issues, the MS haters would claim it's just to push people to the server versions. I suspect the reality is a bit of both.
Fortunately, the law is based on what is provable beyond reasonable doubt. Unfortunately while criminal law is civil law is not and through punitive damages and statutory damages that are so high as to be effectively punitive the civil courts are an effective system for punishing people with.
Now suppose that same friend signed a contract with a company that had burried in the legalese "you authorise us to search your house at any time". Further imagine that the government upheld the contract and the company searched the friends house and looked at the note.
Who do you get mad at? the friend? the company? or the government?
It's still a bit hard to believe that they can create logic gates 18 times the diameter of a silicon atom IIRC process sizes are the size of the smallest feature (typically the mosfet gate length), not the size of a complete gate.
And seems to have largely gone out of fasion. Mostly we brits use the period these days like the americans do.
Decimal commas are annoying and confusing. Particularlly when some idiot manufacturer neglects to change them when making the english version of their documention.
Afaict getting the cops to do something is much much harder than getting the civil courts to do something.
That is one of the reasons you see lawsuits against music downloaders but you don't tend to see them getting arrested (another is the much lower burden of proof in civil court).
>This was either years ago or your bank tried to scam you. IIRC it was a few years ago so probablly before the introduction of SEPA. I can't find the email in question right now though.
>The SEPA (single european payment area) rules by >the EU mandate that a bank transfer within the EU >must not cost more than you would pay for a bank >transfer within your own country. Afaict it stops them charging different ammounts for a euro transaction based on source/destination. However I don't see anything forbidding them from charging through the nose for making/recieving a payment in euro from a sterling account.
It is definitely in Oracle's interest to kill or dillute MySQL. I'd say thier best bet would be to hold it down (don't let it get any better but don't kill it either) and use the mysql code (which they now own) to make a mysql compatibility mode in oracle.
If they kill it they risk it being replaced by postgresql or a mysql fork which they have no control over.
If Oracle decides to put all future resources and features into a closed version, how long do you expect the open version to be able to keep up? It probablly won't. The real question is will it need to? Will the new features be valuable enough to convince developers to break compatibility with the version that every major linux distribution will be shipping as standard?
50G is an awful lot to download or put on flash. True OTOH as the xbox 360 and certain downloadable games for the PS3 (e.g. ratchet and clank future quest for booty) prove it isn't really needed for good HD games. It just means you have to economise a little (e.g. animating cutscenes using the game engine rather than using full motion video)
And afaict flash is continuing to fall in price, there may be a time when it's capacity and cost per gigabyte are low enough that it becomes a good format for game consoles.
And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games Several things put me off PC gaming
1: the activation requirements in newer games 2: the fun of trying to figure out what the real requirements for a game under your conditions are and upgrading the system
There is also the issue that which many games are multi-platform many are exclusives so if you want to play them you have to buy the console in question. Most games I find are just too hard so when I find a series I enjoy and have at least some chance of completing I will buy the consoles I need to continue following it.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside? Two exclusive GTA episodes (which thankfully are also being released together in a standalone form) are the reason i'll probablly end up buying one once i've played out the main game of GTA 4.
P.S. There are a lot of people who will spend more than the cost of an xbox 360 on one day out!
MS has given out a warranty extentions for the most common problems. Therefore unless you hit a rare one by the time you actually have to pay for a replacement console you will have built up a large collection of games (and console games are always console specific) that you probablly won't want to lose (sometimes emulators are availible but modern consoles are very difficult to emulate).
Plus the Xbox 360 is a LOT cheaper than the PS3 (before the recent PS3 price cut it was less than half the price, at current prices it's just over half)
What I'd like to know is how much this fiasco is costing MS. they are giving out a LOT of free replacements and I can't imagine they are making much profit on the units they actually sell given how cheap they are selling them.
P.S. I personally own a PS3 though I do plan to get an XBOX 360 in the future so I can play the MS exclusive "GTA 4 the lost and the dammned" and "GTA the ballad of gay tony" (i'll probablly buy the disc that contains both, I preffer having a physical copy of games so I can still play them years in the future if I want to).
I picked up a Kill-A-Watt off newegg, a while back, and was surprised to find out my gaming computer only consumes ~100 watts from the wall. Is that an idle measurement or one under heavy load?
I'm finding it tricky to find the length of standard PCI connectors and things are also complicated by the fact that PCI express connector go closer to the edge of the motherboard than PCI ones but I'd guess it would reach back about as far as a 64-bit PCI slot does.
Still I agree it would be a routing nightmare (which means more layers and therefore more cost)
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of. It's not a "licensing issue" in that MS wants you to shell out for some kind of license to use more than 4GB on a 32-bit system
Sure they do, it's called the enterprise or datacenter edition of windows server.
If you read to the end of TFA they tell you exactly how to remove the limits in 32 bit vista.
That this is possible is not surprising but it's still interesting that someone has actually done the detailed research and figured out how to enable it.
What i'm wondering is if it's possible to do something similar for XP SP2.
The inability to run 16 bit windows apps is still there*, driver support has improved though it can still be a problem (for example the first generation ICD2 is never going to get a 64 bit driver)
*and whats more annoying is afaict there is no reason it has to be that way for 16 bit windows apps (for real mode dos apps there are real technical reaons but not for win16 apps) IIRC MS just found some issues and couldn't be bothered fixing them, wine runs 16 bit windows apps on 64 bit linux fine ;).
Round here at uni it's quite common to run systems with exactly 4GB of physical memory and run a 32 desktop edition of windows (which typically gives about 3-3.5GB usable though I have seen one machine as low as 2.5 due to a very address space hungry graphics card).
I haven't seen many people run such operating systems on machines with more than 4GB of ram, but it wouldn't surprise me if some people do (at least in a dual boot configuration).
I know a few people with multiple PCs on thier desk so they can have one for thier real work (running a 64 bit OS with more than 4GB of ram) and another for stuff that needs 32 bit (netware, some specialised hardware etc).
Excuse me, but both Linux and Mac OS X have very, very good support for 32-bits apps under a 64-bit OS. The only ones that don't seem to be able to pull it off is Microsoft. I had to install Windows XP 64-bit last week for someone trying to access all memory in their machine and a) none of the drivers worked, even for simple things like USB and other 'generic' hardware
This is a PITA, the truth is there is little generic hardware in a modern PC, you need specific drivers for almost everything. These drivers need to be ported to 64 bit.
This has been much more of a problem for windows than for linux because of the different approaches taken. In linux driver developers are strongly pushed into sending thier drivers into the kernel tree so the kernel devs can work on things like making them 64 bit clean en-masse. On windows you are generally at the mercy of the hardware vendor.
b) SP3 is not even available yet for Windows XP 64-bit
Despite the name XP proffessional x64 edition is not really an edition of XP. It's really an edition of server 2003 so it uses the server 2003 service packs. Server 2003 service pack 2 is only about 6 months older than XP service pack 3.
c) the system is slow and doesn't run half the software.
I can't comment on your particular software load but most stuff i've tried ran fine and I didn't notice any performance issues. The lack of a netware client was annoying though.
What software specifically did you have problems with?
In what way is it terrible? Driver availibility isn't brilliant and the lack of a netware client is annoying but other than that I haven't noticed any real problems with it.
Only if Microsoft followed the advice of Slashdot posters and kludged large memory PAE support into 32-bit Windows.
As TFA and the server editions of windows demonstrates the support is already there it's just disabled. Still I doubt MS will enable it so that doen't matter much for the OEMs.
I've noticed a lot of OEMS shipping machines with 3GB by default. Presumablly this is because they don't want either complaints about machines that can't use all thier ram or to support 64 bit windows.
Weren't 32-bit machines entry level before 1990? Yet, it took until MS shipped XP in 2001 before most consumers were running a 32-bit OS.
That depends whether you count 9x as a 32 bit os.
The question is will OEMs be forced to offer both in thier customised install and/or recovery discs or will users of machines from uncooperative OEMs be forced to hunt down a generic disc and then telephone activate?
How is XP64 nowadays?
XP64* is really server 2003 minus the server bits and with a different crippling configuration (less CPUs but more ram than server standard), I haven't heard anything bad about it stability wise and when I briefly ran it (on a dell optiplex 755) I didn't have any stability problems.
Afaict quite a bit of hardware comes with 64 bit drivers that will only install on vista and higher. There may be a way to hack these to run on XP64 but YMMV. So if you want to run XP64 you need to be carefull about your hardware purchases.
* P.S. the proper name for the product reffered to here is "windows XP professional x64 edition", this is not the same thing as "windows XP 64 bit edition" (the latter being the edition for the itanium)
Yeah as TFA says MS limits the physical address space in current client versions of windows (IIRC XP SP1 did not have this limitation but that is no longer supported). The author of TFA has found a way to hack out this limitation.
IIRC MS claims they do this due to driver compatibility issues, the MS haters would claim it's just to push people to the server versions. I suspect the reality is a bit of both.
Fortunately, the law is based on what is provable beyond reasonable doubt.
Unfortunately while criminal law is civil law is not and through punitive damages and statutory damages that are so high as to be effectively punitive the civil courts are an effective system for punishing people with.
Now suppose that same friend signed a contract with a company that had burried in the legalese "you authorise us to search your house at any time". Further imagine that the government upheld the contract and the company searched the friends house and looked at the note.
Who do you get mad at? the friend? the company? or the government?
On the other hand the cost of phone services in the UK has gone down hugely since BT was forced to open up.
Would that have happened if the governement had still owned BT and hence stood to lose directly from such opening up?
It's still a bit hard to believe that they can create logic gates 18 times the diameter of a silicon atom
IIRC process sizes are the size of the smallest feature (typically the mosfet gate length), not the size of a complete gate.
And seems to have largely gone out of fasion. Mostly we brits use the period these days like the americans do.
Decimal commas are annoying and confusing. Particularlly when some idiot manufacturer neglects to change them when making the english version of their documention.
Afaict getting the cops to do something is much much harder than getting the civil courts to do something.
That is one of the reasons you see lawsuits against music downloaders but you don't tend to see them getting arrested (another is the much lower burden of proof in civil court).
>This was either years ago or your bank tried to scam you.
IIRC it was a few years ago so probablly before the introduction of SEPA. I can't find the email in question right now though.
>The SEPA (single european payment area) rules by
>the EU mandate that a bank transfer within the EU
>must not cost more than you would pay for a bank
>transfer within your own country.
Afaict it stops them charging different ammounts for a euro transaction based on source/destination. However I don't see anything forbidding them from charging through the nose for making/recieving a payment in euro from a sterling account.
It is definitely in Oracle's interest to kill or dillute MySQL.
I'd say thier best bet would be to hold it down (don't let it get any better but don't kill it either) and use the mysql code (which they now own) to make a mysql compatibility mode in oracle.
If they kill it they risk it being replaced by postgresql or a mysql fork which they have no control over.
If Oracle decides to put all future resources and features into a closed version, how long do you expect the open version to be able to keep up?
It probablly won't. The real question is will it need to? Will the new features be valuable enough to convince developers to break compatibility with the version that every major linux distribution will be shipping as standard?
50G is an awful lot to download or put on flash.
True OTOH as the xbox 360 and certain downloadable games for the PS3 (e.g. ratchet and clank future quest for booty) prove it isn't really needed for good HD games. It just means you have to economise a little (e.g. animating cutscenes using the game engine rather than using full motion video)
And afaict flash is continuing to fall in price, there may be a time when it's capacity and cost per gigabyte are low enough that it becomes a good format for game consoles.
And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games
Several things put me off PC gaming
1: the activation requirements in newer games
2: the fun of trying to figure out what the real requirements for a game under your conditions are and upgrading the system
There is also the issue that which many games are multi-platform many are exclusives so if you want to play them you have to buy the console in question. Most games I find are just too hard so when I find a series I enjoy and have at least some chance of completing I will buy the consoles I need to continue following it.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside?
Two exclusive GTA episodes (which thankfully are also being released together in a standalone form) are the reason i'll probablly end up buying one once i've played out the main game of GTA 4.
P.S. There are a lot of people who will spend more than the cost of an xbox 360 on one day out!
MS has given out a warranty extentions for the most common problems. Therefore unless you hit a rare one by the time you actually have to pay for a replacement console you will have built up a large collection of games (and console games are always console specific) that you probablly won't want to lose (sometimes emulators are availible but modern consoles are very difficult to emulate).
Plus the Xbox 360 is a LOT cheaper than the PS3 (before the recent PS3 price cut it was less than half the price, at current prices it's just over half)
What I'd like to know is how much this fiasco is costing MS. they are giving out a LOT of free replacements and I can't imagine they are making much profit on the units they actually sell given how cheap they are selling them.
P.S. I personally own a PS3 though I do plan to get an XBOX 360 in the future so I can play the MS exclusive "GTA 4 the lost and the dammned" and "GTA the ballad of gay tony" (i'll probablly buy the disc that contains both, I preffer having a physical copy of games so I can still play them years in the future if I want to).
I picked up a Kill-A-Watt off newegg, a while back, and was surprised to find out my gaming computer only consumes ~100 watts from the wall.
Is that an idle measurement or one under heavy load?
Looks like a PCIe x32 connector is 210 mm long ( http://az-com.com/pages/pcie/pcie_pdf/ds-06-01.pdf ) compared to 158 mm for x16
I'm finding it tricky to find the length of standard PCI connectors and things are also complicated by the fact that PCI express connector go closer to the edge of the motherboard than PCI ones but I'd guess it would reach back about as far as a 64-bit PCI slot does.
Still I agree it would be a routing nightmare (which means more layers and therefore more cost)