You seem to be missing the point of the technology, which is that *everyone* who wants to run Windows 7 will be doing this with the a large number of their apps for several years after Windows 7 comes out.
Bull***t, I'm running the RC code, and I haven't found a single application that doesn't work. I'm sure there are applications out there that don't work, but the idea that most people will need this technology is just crap.
So a few people on a bulletin board "is most of us" only if "us" is defiend as the people what
1. Read that board
2. Have performance problems with W7
I'm don't meet either of those requirements, so I guess I'm not part of this mythical "us"
I thought so as well, but over time, the number of applications installed on my system tends to grow to the point where finding the application (particularly if I don't use it all the time) becomes increasingly painful.
The simple search function added to the start menu in Vista resolved that problem to the point where I don't miss the classic menu system at all.
I don't think the article is really talking about the OS per-se, more the applications that run on it. Both LINUX and Windows are pretty good in terms of SMP support in the kernel, and scale quite well. The problem is applications, many of which are not written to make best use of multiple cores (or any use at all).
Then again, many of the applications we use day to day have limited scope for multi-threading because they simply don't parallelize well and no amount of compiler trickery or fancy coding is going to help these apps.
"just about every app runs in admin mode" is the most utter rubbish I've seen for a while. I have a wide selection of apps installed on my system, the only ones that trip UAC are:
DVDdecrypt (runs without admin, but bitches about it)
Core Temp (has to run as admin)
Handbrake (can't update profiles unless it's running as admin)
Everything else runs just fine. (Office, Paintshop Pro,Firefox, Thunderbird,utorrent, Omea RSS reader, and dozen or more other applications that I'm too lazy to list)
It's nice to see someone who actually gets it. Yes, SSD is epxensive, but not when you compare it to the price you'd pay for a similar number of hard drives that can match the IOPs performance
It's just a bug in the way that W7 interacts with XP graphics drivers. It's been discussed in the private beta groups, an d a fix will be in the next build that the private beta testers get.
Just ran windirstat on a fresh install of the x4 version on an Intel system. The actual OS files are less than 11 GB, of which more than 50% by size are in the winsxs folder which could take some real serious pruning (full of AMD64 files which are not used on a Intel EMT64 CPU amongst other things.) Another GB is for WoW64 files that wouldn't be installed on a 32-bit netbook. These files are also somewhat larger than the released code (my guess) because of debug code.
So a combination of a little more customization of the install on Netbooks along with code shrinkage as debug gets taken out, and I could easily see the basic install being shrunk to 5GB or less. Combine that with increased SSD capacity and it looks quite feasible as a Netbook platform.
Writing drivers doesn't, and never has required access to the source code of the OS. So since that part of your story is bollocks, it doesn't augur well for the rest.
I've run my systems on UPS for about the last 15 years, so it's hard to say for sure. However, when I've been at my PC and the UPS has switched, I've noticed lights flicker or go out momentarily, so my guess is that the interruption in those cases would have been sufficient to bring the system down.
Frequency of power failure is going to depend a lot on where you are. According to the logging software on my UPS, it has switched to battery 38 times in the last 24 weeks, so it has saved my system an average of 1.5+ times/week. The UPS cost me about $100 bucks, so it seems like a pretty solid investment!
I've been running Vista as my primary OS since the early days beta releases. I don't have any problems with applications or drivers, not one, zero, zilch, nada.
I think you are confusing OS stability with the experience of the operator. Folks turning W2K08 into a desktop OS are not your average user so I would expect them to see it as stable. The same phenomenon occurs with Vista, I have absolutely zero stability problems with Vista, my desktop has been rock solid starting way back in the Vista beta. It has never blue screened, never had to be reinstalled, never had to be rebooted to fix problems. The only time it gets rebooted is when MS delivers a patch that requires a reboot.
You'd be surprised, 3ft floppies did exist! I worked with a company that made a business of retrieving seismic data from very old recording devices, and one of them was basically a 3ft floppy disk! Probably analog recording data, but still, it was floppy and it was disk shaped:-)
All the Windows versions continually ask for the CD/DVD...
You must be doing some really strange things, I can't recall *ever* being asked for the Windows CD/DVD unless I'm installing some optional component like a web server. As for applications, same thing, I use Office every day, and it never asks me for the CD/DVD.
It's not just AMD that's putting dedicated cores into general purpose CPUs. Intel is also going down that path with integrated graphics, and Larrabee is graphics engine implemented with lots of general purpose x86 CPU cores, I believe Sun has also done it with a 10 GBit/s Ethernet I/F. The real problem at the moment is deciding what to do with all those transistors, do you keep throwing them at more general purpose cores and honking big caches or do you have cores with specialized functions. The problem only gets more pronounced as we move to smaller and smaller scale fabrication where building processors with billions of transistors becomes the norm.
I've been running Vista since the early beta days and it's my main desktop system and also powers my mediacenter. The only XP drivers that definitely wont work are video drivers, drivers for things like NIC, disk controllers etc all work fine. On my main system, Only HP and Microtek (prinet and scanner respectively) have yet to provide fulle Vista drivers for my system, and the XP drivers work just fine.
Joe user != dumb. If someone is knowledgeable enough to have MP3's on their system to play, they are knowledgeable enough to google "play mp3 in ubuntu", hit I'm feeling lucky, and find their answer right there.
Yeah, because we all know that playing MP3s on a computer is serious nerdy stuff that only true propeller heads can grok. Jeez. On Windows, they just play, you don't have to google anything.
Today we have government departments funding researchers who always say what the politicians want. What's the difference?
So why does Bush keep having to deny the global warming his scientists predicts? By contrast, research funded by the oil companies always seems to deny global warming, strange that, don't you think?
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You seem to be missing the point of the technology, which is that *everyone* who wants to run Windows 7 will be doing this with the a large number of their apps for several years after Windows 7 comes out.
Bull***t, I'm running the RC code, and I haven't found a single application that doesn't work. I'm sure there are applications out there that don't work, but the idea that most people will need this technology is just crap.
So a few people on a bulletin board "is most of us" only if "us" is defiend as the people what 1. Read that board 2. Have performance problems with W7 I'm don't meet either of those requirements, so I guess I'm not part of this mythical "us"
I thought so as well, but over time, the number of applications installed on my system tends to grow to the point where finding the application (particularly if I don't use it all the time) becomes increasingly painful. The simple search function added to the start menu in Vista resolved that problem to the point where I don't miss the classic menu system at all.
I don't think the article is really talking about the OS per-se, more the applications that run on it. Both LINUX and Windows are pretty good in terms of SMP support in the kernel, and scale quite well. The problem is applications, many of which are not written to make best use of multiple cores (or any use at all). Then again, many of the applications we use day to day have limited scope for multi-threading because they simply don't parallelize well and no amount of compiler trickery or fancy coding is going to help these apps.
"just about every app runs in admin mode" is the most utter rubbish I've seen for a while. I have a wide selection of apps installed on my system, the only ones that trip UAC are:
DVDdecrypt (runs without admin, but bitches about it)
Core Temp (has to run as admin)
Handbrake (can't update profiles unless it's running as admin)
Everything else runs just fine. (Office, Paintshop Pro,Firefox, Thunderbird,utorrent, Omea RSS reader, and dozen or more other applications that I'm too lazy to list)
It's nice to see someone who actually gets it. Yes, SSD is epxensive, but not when you compare it to the price you'd pay for a similar number of hard drives that can match the IOPs performance
It's just a bug in the way that W7 interacts with XP graphics drivers. It's been discussed in the private beta groups, an d a fix will be in the next build that the private beta testers get.
The freeze issue with video playback is a known problem if you are using old XP video drivers with W7.
So a combination of a little more customization of the install on Netbooks along with code shrinkage as debug gets taken out, and I could easily see the basic install being shrunk to 5GB or less. Combine that with increased SSD capacity and it looks quite feasible as a Netbook platform.
They've dropped the 2.5m limit, anybody can download for the next two weeks. See: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/01/10/here-s-where-we-stand.aspx
Writing drivers doesn't, and never has required access to the source code of the OS. So since that part of your story is bollocks, it doesn't augur well for the rest.
I've run my systems on UPS for about the last 15 years, so it's hard to say for sure. However, when I've been at my PC and the UPS has switched, I've noticed lights flicker or go out momentarily, so my guess is that the interruption in those cases would have been sufficient to bring the system down.
Frequency of power failure is going to depend a lot on where you are. According to the logging software on my UPS, it has switched to battery 38 times in the last 24 weeks, so it has saved my system an average of 1.5+ times/week. The UPS cost me about $100 bucks, so it seems like a pretty solid investment!
I've been running Vista as my primary OS since the early days beta releases. I don't have any problems with applications or drivers, not one, zero, zilch, nada.
I pay (well actually my employer pays ;-)) $73/month for an 8Mbit/1Mbit connection from Knology, and they don't require me to have Knology cable TV
Good luck persuading people of this, I've tried to explain the same point for Vista on numerous occasions :-)
I think you are confusing OS stability with the experience of the operator. Folks turning W2K08 into a desktop OS are not your average user so I would expect them to see it as stable. The same phenomenon occurs with Vista, I have absolutely zero stability problems with Vista, my desktop has been rock solid starting way back in the Vista beta. It has never blue screened, never had to be reinstalled, never had to be rebooted to fix problems. The only time it gets rebooted is when MS delivers a patch that requires a reboot.
You'd be surprised, 3ft floppies did exist! I worked with a company that made a business of retrieving seismic data from very old recording devices, and one of them was basically a 3ft floppy disk! Probably analog recording data, but still, it was floppy and it was disk shaped :-)
You must be doing some really strange things, I can't recall *ever* being asked for the Windows CD/DVD unless I'm installing some optional component like a web server. As for applications, same thing, I use Office every day, and it never asks me for the CD/DVD.
It's not just AMD that's putting dedicated cores into general purpose CPUs. Intel is also going down that path with integrated graphics, and Larrabee is graphics engine implemented with lots of general purpose x86 CPU cores, I believe Sun has also done it with a 10 GBit/s Ethernet I/F. The real problem at the moment is deciding what to do with all those transistors, do you keep throwing them at more general purpose cores and honking big caches or do you have cores with specialized functions. The problem only gets more pronounced as we move to smaller and smaller scale fabrication where building processors with billions of transistors becomes the norm.
I've been running Vista since the early beta days and it's my main desktop system and also powers my mediacenter. The only XP drivers that definitely wont work are video drivers, drivers for things like NIC, disk controllers etc all work fine. On my main system, Only HP and Microtek (prinet and scanner respectively) have yet to provide fulle Vista drivers for my system, and the XP drivers work just fine.
Yeah, because we all know that playing MP3s on a computer is serious nerdy stuff that only true propeller heads can grok. Jeez. On Windows, they just play, you don't have to google anything.
So why does Bush keep having to deny the global warming his scientists predicts? By contrast, research funded by the oil companies always seems to deny global warming, strange that, don't you think?
http://www.seanodes.com/
http://www.revstor.com/
Both claim to be able to pool unused storage on desktops and application servers and make it available to hosts on the network.
Yes dear.