Lots of people think MS are scum, quite undestandablly when you consider what they do to partners and competiors alike when they grow tierd of them. For example pushing playsforsure for years and then bringing out thier own player with it's own incompatible DRM scheme.
They also go in for crap like product activation making pirate copies better than legitimate copies and making life far more of a PITA for those who have to fix computers.
And crap like making it expensive (and probablly impossible soon) for OEMs to sell XP when that is the version that many users want on thier machines.
The server version of Windows are not even in the same generation. It seems since XP MS has been releasing a server version a couple of years after a desktop version with relatively minor changes. Gives them a bit of time to tweak it for server use and fix any of the nastier bugs before they let it loose on the more discerning server audiance.
The last server windows was the windows 2003, which had no desktop versions. It did actually, they just didn't market them as such. They marketed them as "windows XP 64 bit edition, Version 2003" and "windows XP proffesional x64 edition"
However I don't think i've seen a desktop board that could go over 8 gigabytes and most top out at four. Server boards can go higher BUT
* intel xeon boards requires FBDIMMs which are expensive. * AMD opteron boards can use ordinary DDR2 but the CPU performance sucks compared to the aforementioned xeons.
does the atom need a fan? According to wikipedia the atom N270 has a TDP of 2.5W and the atom+chipset has a TDP 11.8W. If we assume we can operate the chip at 70 degrees celcius and ambiant is 30 degrees celcius that gives us a requirement for a 3.6 celcius per watt heatsink. That is achivable passively afaict.
XScale was is a threat to Intel's profits and marketshare so it had to go. It had nothing to do with low performance. IMO If that was the case why did they sell it rather than just killing it.
Linux on arm is improving but there are still problems.
One big one is the lack of FPU standards, that means that any general purpose linux distro for arm has to compromise in the floating point department. The old debian arm port is targeted at a FPU almost noone uses anymore meaning floating point generally has to be done through kernel emulation (which is encrediblly slow). The new debian armel port uses software floating point which is faster but still not brilliant. There was talk of offering optimised versions of some particularlly performance critical packages for the armel port but I don't think anything has come of that yet.
Another issue is java, some arm chips have java accelleration but sun and arm won't release the specs to allow them to be used by the likes of debian. Openjdk is availible on debian armel but it's interpreter only and so very slow (and arm chips aren't exactly speed demons to start with)
Another is flash, you can get an arm port for your device if you pay enough but the user will probablly never be able to update it.
Then there is acrobat reader, it is a bit bloated but i've never found another PDF reader that does as good a job when handling large documents.
So for a machine whose primary purpose is to be an internet terminal (portable or otherwise) I see a lot of advantages for going for a low power x86 chip like the atom or the C3.
looks like it was arround january 2007 that they were announced ( http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/01/05/1tb.hard.drive.unveiled/ ). So that would put about two years between the announcement of the first one TB drive and the announcement of the first 2TB drive. I would expect a similar gap between the shipping dates.
Well binary units make sense for the size of solid state memories because they were almost always produced in power of two sizes (for good reasons, if they weren't the address decode logic would be a LOT more complex). Binary kilobytes also made sense for floppies since they were usually an integer number of power of two sized sectors.
And if your OS is already using a measuring system for memory and floppies doesn't it make sense to also use it for hard drives? MS clearly thought so. Unfortunately the hard drive vendors throught differently (whether for technical reasons or because it allowed them to advertise higher capacities is unclear) and so we ended up with two different systems in wide use.
Worse with each unit we go up the discrepancy gets worse. At kilo it was only 2.4% , at terra it's nearly 10%.
So on my headless linux boxen I use nano, I can do everything I need to do without a cheatsheet. Try mcedit. Like nano it's piss easy to use but unlike nano it has things like syntax highlighting and a display of your current line number (this is very important when something says error on line xxx and you need to find that line in the file to correct it).
It does have a couple of annoyances (like if you forget to unselect stuff it's very easy to accidently delete it later and it doesn't understand dos line endings) but generally I've found it to be very nice.
I'm in the UK so our converter boxes are on different tech but i've found the age of the box to be far more significant than the cost.
The boxes sold just after the switchover from ITV digital to freeview when everyone was trying to get the price down seem to be the worst whereas nowadays even the dirt cheap boxes seem pretty good.
Considering that WinCE, or Mobile (or whatever it's called this week) has been around the longest Depends what you count. If you count epoc16 as an old version of symbian then symbian is older.
The hardware vendors did NOT have the means to test anything On what information do you base this claim
Wikipedia claims
"After Longhorn was named Windows Vista in July 2005, an unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies. In September of that year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers. The first of these was distributed at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and was subsequently released to beta testers and Microsoft Developer Network subscribers."
I'm finding it hard to find an introduction date for windows vista capable I found a PC world article from april 2006 saying it was about to appear next month though the fact it was dated april 1st makes me a little suspicious.
If we accept these dates and make the reasonable assumption that these big vendors could afford msdn subscriptions then yes they did have the opertunity to test these machines with vista albiet a beta version.
BTW these machines COULD run vista, they just couldn't run it very well and couldn't run aero.
Theese machinees could run vista, they just couldn't do so very well. In particular aero one of vista's most advertised features could not be used on them.
I'm sure those PC manufacturers have access to the betas and release candidates a long time in advance of the actual release. Hell windows 7 is already in public beta.
If they didn't know theese machines were incapable of running aero which was one of the most advertised features of vista then frankly they were incompetant. I find it fare more likely that they played along because the alternatives were either losing the "vista capable" marketing sticker or being more expensive than thier competitors.
It seems in terms of astronaut losses the american and russian programs were pretty similar. The soviets seem to have lost a lot more ground crew but given that the bulk of those losses come from only a handfull of incidents there isn't really enough data to draw any significant conclusions.
Of course all these losses are tiny compared to the lives lost in the various wars between american influenced countries and soviet influenced countries.
It's not uncommon (actually designed this way) for your '12 VDC' auto electrical system to vary between 13.6VDC-11.8VDC. (11.8 may be stretching the low end, but have have started my vehicle with low of 11.2VDC a few years back---I will gladly pass the baton here) I was under the impression that many cars had a much wider band of variation that that.
And then there is the ignition system which can put pretty big spikes and dips in the supply.
As you say it's not an insurmountable problem but you certainly do need to buy PSUs that are designed for the job, not just any old 12V input PSU intended for use with a power brick.
If you do use a DC psu make sure you buy one that is explicitly designed for use with automotive power. Automotive power while "nominally" 12V has a wide voltage range depending on current conditions (whether the engine is running, if so how fast, if not the condition of the battery etc)
IIRC it limits to two processor chips so it will use all cores in a dual quad but not in a quad dual.
at least that is the case for XP proffesional x64 edition, MS claim it is also the case for XP proffessional but I don't have first hand confirmation of that.
Except that plants respire, which requires oxygen Sure but they produce more oxygen than they use, so if you have a bit of oxygen to start the process the only ongoing supplies it requires are CO2 and water.
You can of course recycle the CO2 and water people produce during respiration but there are bound to be some losses so having local sources to replenish them from would be very usefull (though there is the complication that most of the water on mars is at the poles whereas any marsbase would probablly want to be near the equator)
1: they say this water is 90% pure, that is FAR from what most people would consider pure water. The "natural mineral water" you buy in the shop is more than 99.9% pure water. 2: a local supply of water that has to be treated (either by adding stuff or more likely removing stuff) to be drinkable is still far preferable to carting water all the way from earth.
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Lots of people think MS are scum, quite undestandablly when you consider what they do to partners and competiors alike when they grow tierd of them. For example pushing playsforsure for years and then bringing out thier own player with it's own incompatible DRM scheme.
They also go in for crap like product activation making pirate copies better than legitimate copies and making life far more of a PITA for those who have to fix computers.
And crap like making it expensive (and probablly impossible soon) for OEMs to sell XP when that is the version that many users want on thier machines.
The server version of Windows are not even in the same generation.
It seems since XP MS has been releasing a server version a couple of years after a desktop version with relatively minor changes. Gives them a bit of time to tweak it for server use and fix any of the nastier bugs before they let it loose on the more discerning server audiance.
The last server windows was the windows 2003, which had no desktop versions.
It did actually, they just didn't market them as such. They marketed them as "windows XP 64 bit edition, Version 2003" and "windows XP proffesional x64 edition"
Desktop memory is indeed cheap.
However I don't think i've seen a desktop board that could go over 8 gigabytes and most top out at four. Server boards can go higher BUT
* intel xeon boards requires FBDIMMs which are expensive.
* AMD opteron boards can use ordinary DDR2 but the CPU performance sucks compared to the aforementioned xeons.
does the atom need a fan? According to wikipedia the atom N270 has a TDP of 2.5W and the atom+chipset has a TDP 11.8W. If we assume we can operate the chip at 70 degrees celcius and ambiant is 30 degrees celcius that gives us a requirement for a 3.6 celcius per watt heatsink. That is achivable passively afaict.
XScale was is a threat to Intel's profits and marketshare so it had to go. It had nothing to do with low performance. IMO
If that was the case why did they sell it rather than just killing it.
Linux on arm is improving but there are still problems.
One big one is the lack of FPU standards, that means that any general purpose linux distro for arm has to compromise in the floating point department. The old debian arm port is targeted at a FPU almost noone uses anymore meaning floating point generally has to be done through kernel emulation (which is encrediblly slow). The new debian armel port uses software floating point which is faster but still not brilliant. There was talk of offering optimised versions of some particularlly performance critical packages for the armel port but I don't think anything has come of that yet.
Another issue is java, some arm chips have java accelleration but sun and arm won't release the specs to allow them to be used by the likes of debian. Openjdk is availible on debian armel but it's interpreter only and so very slow (and arm chips aren't exactly speed demons to start with)
Another is flash, you can get an arm port for your device if you pay enough but the user will probablly never be able to update it.
Then there is acrobat reader, it is a bit bloated but i've never found another PDF reader that does as good a job when handling large documents.
So for a machine whose primary purpose is to be an internet terminal (portable or otherwise) I see a lot of advantages for going for a low power x86 chip like the atom or the C3.
looks like it was arround january 2007 that they were announced ( http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/01/05/1tb.hard.drive.unveiled/ ). So that would put about two years between the announcement of the first one TB drive and the announcement of the first 2TB drive. I would expect a similar gap between the shipping dates.
Well binary units make sense for the size of solid state memories because they were almost always produced in power of two sizes (for good reasons, if they weren't the address decode logic would be a LOT more complex). Binary kilobytes also made sense for floppies since they were usually an integer number of power of two sized sectors.
And if your OS is already using a measuring system for memory and floppies doesn't it make sense to also use it for hard drives? MS clearly thought so. Unfortunately the hard drive vendors throught differently (whether for technical reasons or because it allowed them to advertise higher capacities is unclear) and so we ended up with two different systems in wide use.
Worse with each unit we go up the discrepancy gets worse. At kilo it was only 2.4% , at terra it's nearly 10%.
So on my headless linux boxen I use nano, I can do everything I need to do without a cheatsheet.
Try mcedit. Like nano it's piss easy to use but unlike nano it has things like syntax highlighting and a display of your current line number (this is very important when something says error on line xxx and you need to find that line in the file to correct it).
It does have a couple of annoyances (like if you forget to unselect stuff it's very easy to accidently delete it later and it doesn't understand dos line endings) but generally I've found it to be very nice.
I'm in the UK so our converter boxes are on different tech but i've found the age of the box to be far more significant than the cost.
The boxes sold just after the switchover from ITV digital to freeview when everyone was trying to get the price down seem to be the worst whereas nowadays even the dirt cheap boxes seem pretty good.
It's a while since i've seen any stats but last I heard the percentage was much lower tha 99% though it was over half.
I don't remember the exact percentage though.
taking pictures and picture messaing them to your friends.
text messaging (assuming it has a vibrating alert)
web browsing.
talking using a hands free kit.
XP professional x64 edition is supported using the same version as server 2003 x64.
There don't seem to be any downloads for any version of windows on itanium though.
Considering that WinCE, or Mobile (or whatever it's called this week) has been around the longest
Depends what you count. If you count epoc16 as an old version of symbian then symbian is older.
Some OEMs do already bundle firefox afaict.
The hardware vendors did NOT have the means to test anything
On what information do you base this claim
Wikipedia claims
"After Longhorn was named Windows Vista in July 2005, an unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies. In September of that year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers. The first of these was distributed at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and was subsequently released to beta testers and Microsoft Developer Network subscribers."
I'm finding it hard to find an introduction date for windows vista capable I found a PC world article from april 2006 saying it was about to appear next month though the fact it was dated april 1st makes me a little suspicious.
If we accept these dates and make the reasonable assumption that these big vendors could afford msdn subscriptions then yes they did have the opertunity to test these machines with vista albiet a beta version.
BTW these machines COULD run vista, they just couldn't run it very well and couldn't run aero.
The problem is the definition of support vista.
Theese machinees could run vista, they just couldn't do so very well. In particular aero one of vista's most advertised features could not be used on them.
I'm sure those PC manufacturers have access to the betas and release candidates a long time in advance of the actual release. Hell windows 7 is already in public beta.
If they didn't know theese machines were incapable of running aero which was one of the most advertised features of vista then frankly they were incompetant. I find it fare more likely that they played along because the alternatives were either losing the "vista capable" marketing sticker or being more expensive than thier competitors.
It seems in terms of astronaut losses the american and russian programs were pretty similar. The soviets seem to have lost a lot more ground crew but given that the bulk of those losses come from only a handfull of incidents there isn't really enough data to draw any significant conclusions.
Of course all these losses are tiny compared to the lives lost in the various wars between american influenced countries and soviet influenced countries.
It's not uncommon (actually designed this way) for your '12 VDC' auto electrical system to vary between 13.6VDC-11.8VDC. (11.8 may be stretching the low end, but have have started my vehicle with low of 11.2VDC a few years back---I will gladly pass the baton here)
I was under the impression that many cars had a much wider band of variation that that.
And then there is the ignition system which can put pretty big spikes and dips in the supply.
As you say it's not an insurmountable problem but you certainly do need to buy PSUs that are designed for the job, not just any old 12V input PSU intended for use with a power brick.
If you do use a DC psu make sure you buy one that is explicitly designed for use with automotive power. Automotive power while "nominally" 12V has a wide voltage range depending on current conditions (whether the engine is running, if so how fast, if not the condition of the battery etc)
IIRC it limits to two processor chips so it will use all cores in a dual quad but not in a quad dual.
at least that is the case for XP proffesional x64 edition, MS claim it is also the case for XP proffessional but I don't have first hand confirmation of that.
A lot of buisnesses who care about security updates will be interested in moving direct from XP to 7 (most buisnesses have skipped vista afaict).
Most will probablly do it by reimaging anyway though.
Except that plants respire, which requires oxygen
Sure but they produce more oxygen than they use, so if you have a bit of oxygen to start the process the only ongoing supplies it requires are CO2 and water.
You can of course recycle the CO2 and water people produce during respiration but there are bound to be some losses so having local sources to replenish them from would be very usefull (though there is the complication that most of the water on mars is at the poles whereas any marsbase would probablly want to be near the equator)
Two points
1: they say this water is 90% pure, that is FAR from what most people would consider pure water. The "natural mineral water" you buy in the shop is more than 99.9% pure water.
2: a local supply of water that has to be treated (either by adding stuff or more likely removing stuff) to be drinkable is still far preferable to carting water all the way from earth.