So now since MS is going to spend a ton of money on marketing the idea of home users running file servers, I think this is a perfect opportunity for the likes of Dell and HP to sell their own, less expensive HomeNAS. They take a NAS device, that they already make for the enterprise, throw on a lightweight Linux.
Those NAS servers from DELL and HP already run Windows Storage Server, so certifying the new MS Home Server is a no-brainer. Certifying LINUX and supporting it is non-trivial, especially if the target market is Joe Consumer who is a long way from ready for LINUX (that or LINUX is a long from ready for Joe Consumer) That said, these boxes are probably overkill for home server applications anyway.
A service pack that just happens to "upgrade" you to vista-style DRM shit and lock-down existing files.
There is nothing, repeat nothing in Vista that locks down non-DRM content, you can rip CDs and DVDs with the same tools you used in XP and Vista does nothing to them. How long will mindless knee-jerk anti-MS folks continue to push this BS.
Here's a challenge, find one example of Vista applying DRM to non-DRMed content, come on, just one example!!!!
It's not like we haven't known this since day one, and it's not like you can go and buy PCs with other operating systems that don't have these restrictions. How much does anybody want to bet that when Apple supports a BD drive that they won't have to support HDCP/HDMI restrictions just like everybody else.
Depends on what you need to store, I've already got around 2TB of storage scattered around my house, and I seem to be like most corporates in that it's doubling every year. I have no doubt that I'll be looking at 1TB drives real soon and that larger drives are going to become increasingly attractive for me.
I daresay much the same arguments were made about 10MB, 100MB drives, 1GB drives, 100GB and so on yet markets for these emerged pretty quickly.
They're the real reason why we stick with x86. Should Microsoft release an ARM9 or PPC version of Windows, vendors will recompile their apps and games for the new arches and suddenly x86 will look too expensive. And no WindowsCE does not count.
The idea that software vendors would support other CPU architectures like ARM or PPC if only MS ported Windows to them is just plain wrong. We know it's wrong because we have experience of just that scenario. By the late 90s, Windows NT had been ported to PPC (never saw the light of day) CLIPPER (stillborn), MIPS (shipped) and Alpha (there was even work done at SUN on a port for SPARC) Of those platforms, both MIPS and Alpha shipped commercially, but were always handicapped because it was almost impossible to persuade ISVs to port to them when 99% of the available NT market was on Intel. Vendors look at much more than just porting costs when they consider a new platform, they also look at support, maintenance etc and amortize those costs over the number of licenses they think they can sell on the new platform and the economics just never make sense.
The only way this would ever happen is if the new platform can run apps from the old platform without any work by the ISV and without the performance & stability of the application sucking. So far nobody has managed to achieve this.
For something burst there has to be significant pressure, the LINIX Desktop market has never been more than wishful thinking to begin with. So, no burst, more of a small gentle fart.
I agree, being able to import message folders should be an option, it's not that hard to, MozBackup on Windows can save an existing profile, everything, passwords, mails, accounts, plug-ins etc and import them into a new install, made life bearable when loading each new Vista build:-(
> How about a MW output. That's a specific number that can
> be compared to other forms of electric generation.
According to the Register, it's 1.3GW
> Or is that one million homes in the middle of summer when
> whole power grids collapse from the strain?
You are confusing US power requirements with UK. Vast majority of UK homes don't have A/C so you don't see that massive summer energy consumption spike, in fact quite the reverse, with fewer houses needing heat and daylight from 6am-10pm (give or take) the electricity requirements in the UK typically drop during the summer.
> According to TFA: If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use
> it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.
That's not what the USB memory thing in VISTA does at all, what it does do is effectively use that drive as an L2 cache (write-thru) which means that frequently accessed files end up on cached on the USB memory stick which has excellent random-IO performance. Since it operates in write-thru mode there is no danger in the USB stick being removed at any time, the OS just goes to hard disk to get the file if this happens. So in now way is the flash memory used in the same way as main memory, and depending on your system configuration and usage patterns, the speed boost can be quite considerable. Still with memory at the price it is, if your system can handle it, then I'd put 2GB in, I find VISTA improved dramatically going from 1GB to 2GB with all the memory hungry Apps I tend to have open.
What on earth are you doing with your machines, I've got an assortment of five XP and Vista machines (+ 1 LINUX) on my network at home and I've had any of them zombied!
I keep hearing this thing about "draconian DRM measures in Vista" and I still can't work out what they are. I've been using VISTA for over a years (installed RTM at the end of November and haven't rebooted since)and have yet to find a non-DRM file that VISTA isn't quite happy playing. I can still decrypt & RIP DVDs, rip CDs to MP3 etc, the only thing that I know that might hurt in the future (if I used a PC to watch DVD) is that you'll need an HDCP compliant graphics card to get full resolution from HD & BluRay disks.
So come on, enlighten us, where is all this DRM in VISTA that is so bad?
Apples & Oranges, the data you get from the disk on a Series 1 is no-DRM, unencrypted marginally proprietary MPEG-2, the stuff you get from a series 2 via Tivo to Go is DRMed and not easy to un-DRM, so you need a TIVO-annointed software component to read it, this is about removing the TIVO-annointed requirement;-)
The need to distribute the same file via BitTorrent doesn't seem like a big problem. Distribute the movie as encrypted in some way and once you've got it you have to get your unique and probably hardware specific decrypt key before you can play it. Decryption of the movie is done on the fly, so the unencrytped version is never stored on disk, doesn't seem like a big technology problem.
It seems to me like there might be a need to have a rolling release for the GPL, especially since even when trying to stop the problems associated with patents they initially failed... A lot of programs use the "or latest version" anyway so changing this to "GPL latest version" might be a way to keep dynamic threats to software freedom at bay.
So with all the commercial companies out there who are wary of Open Source, now you want to make the GPL be subject to retroactive change, i.e. A company deploys a GPL app to do something that at the time doesn't infringe the GPL3 licence, then a subsequent update to the license makes it illegal. This is a sure fire way to get corporations to run screaming from GPL software because they have no way of understanding any risks associated with the GPL.
But you are not talking about how the vast majority of corporates do there hardware/software purchasing. Most corporates do their purchasing from large vendors (DELL, HP etc) not small custom white box shops and do periodic hardware refreshes which tends to tie into their software upgrade cycle because that's the logical time to do an upgrade.
Theoretically true, but given that W2K will be unsupported shortly (if it isn't already) I think it's higly unlikely that anybody will be making new hardware purchases to run W2K on.
I'm sure that several years ago, many enterprises were still using W2K, they rarely switch OS on desktop hardware, so if they were like most companies and did a major round of hardware upgrades in the late 90s/early 2Ks they would not deploy XP until the next desktop hardware refresh. Same is true for Vista, it's not a question of them not wanting XP or Vista, simply that they replace hardware on a cycle, and get whatever OS is current at that point.
I'll make this prediction now, that by mid-08 Vista will be more than 50% of market and upwards of 90% by '09 because that's how long the hardware refresh will take.
Do you really want to have to replace an entire system when you upgrade? You buy a Dell, a new game comes out 6 months and your system can't play it reasonably well.
So then you either
a) buy a new system
or
b) gut in a video card and not use the one on the proc.
Integrating the GPU with the CPU will be about driving down cost and power consumption, not something that is usually a high-priority for folks that want to run the latest greatest games and get all the shiniest graphics. So, I'd be very surprised if this is intended to hit that part of the market, more likely it's designed to address the same market segment that Intel hits with graphics embedded in the CPU's supporting chipset.
That said, having the CPU & GPU combined (from the point of view of register and memory access etc) might open up some interesting new possibilities of using the the power of the GPU for certain non-graphic functions.
Back in the day at Intergraph we had a graphics processor that could be combined with a very expensive (and for the time powerful) dedicated floating point array processor. To demonstrate the power of that add-on somebody handcoded an implementation of the Mandelbrot Fractal algorithm on the add-on and it was blistering fast. I can imagine similar highly-parallelized algorithms doing very well on a GPU/CPU combo.
I actually worked for a company that a did a lot of the initial work in designing the storage system used at StarFire (which had some pretty nasty data capture requirements because of the highly "bursty" nature of the data capture.)
From what I understood of the limited amount we were told the idea was to use an array of smaller optical telescopes and image analysis software to create a "mosaic" of the overall image that was corrected for atmospheric distortion. While nothing was said at the time, the implication was that this was for ABM, not anti-satellite, i.e. it was to make easier to shoot something down with a laser inside the atmosphere. Of course, the trick was not producing the image per-se, but producing it fast enough to be useful as part of a firing solution, i,.e a crystal clear shot of the target that takes 5 minutes to produce is of limited utility:-)
Of course the technology has a number of potential uses, both military and non-military, but that's true of just about any large hi-tech experiment. Given that StarFire is run and funded by the USAF (not NASA or a University institute like JPL), I don't think should come as any great surprise that they are rather more interested in it's military applications.
Run each application in it's own virtual machine. Xen has a low enough overhead and is clean code. Browser compromised - reload from know good source.
Are you fscking crazy, the whole design of the OLPC is about using the bare minimum to get the job done, very low-end CPU, tiny amount of memory, minimal storage etc And you want to load this thing up with a boatload of VM images that suck CPU, memory etc!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I've been running it for about 18 months and it has never done anything to my non-DRM content except play it without hesitation.
There is nothing, repeat nothing in Vista that locks down non-DRM content, you can rip CDs and DVDs with the same tools you used in XP and Vista does nothing to them. How long will mindless knee-jerk anti-MS folks continue to push this BS.
Here's a challenge, find one example of Vista applying DRM to non-DRMed content, come on, just one example!!!!
It's not like we haven't known this since day one, and it's not like you can go and buy PCs with other operating systems that don't have these restrictions. How much does anybody want to bet that when Apple supports a BD drive that they won't have to support HDCP/HDMI restrictions just like everybody else.
Depends on what you need to store, I've already got around 2TB of storage scattered around my house, and I seem to be like most corporates in that it's doubling every year. I have no doubt that I'll be looking at 1TB drives real soon and that larger drives are going to become increasingly attractive for me. I daresay much the same arguments were made about 10MB, 100MB drives, 1GB drives, 100GB and so on yet markets for these emerged pretty quickly.
For something burst there has to be significant pressure, the LINIX Desktop market has never been more than wishful thinking to begin with. So, no burst, more of a small gentle fart.
I agree, being able to import message folders should be an option, it's not that hard to, MozBackup on Windows can save an existing profile, everything, passwords, mails, accounts, plug-ins etc and import them into a new install, made life bearable when loading each new Vista build :-(
> How about a MW output. That's a specific number that can
> be compared to other forms of electric generation.
According to the Register, it's 1.3GW
> Or is that one million homes in the middle of summer when
> whole power grids collapse from the strain?
You are confusing US power requirements with UK. Vast majority of UK homes don't have A/C so you don't see that massive summer energy consumption spike, in fact quite the reverse, with fewer houses needing heat and daylight from 6am-10pm (give or take) the electricity requirements in the UK typically drop during the summer.
> According to TFA: If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use > it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost. That's not what the USB memory thing in VISTA does at all, what it does do is effectively use that drive as an L2 cache (write-thru) which means that frequently accessed files end up on cached on the USB memory stick which has excellent random-IO performance. Since it operates in write-thru mode there is no danger in the USB stick being removed at any time, the OS just goes to hard disk to get the file if this happens. So in now way is the flash memory used in the same way as main memory, and depending on your system configuration and usage patterns, the speed boost can be quite considerable. Still with memory at the price it is, if your system can handle it, then I'd put 2GB in, I find VISTA improved dramatically going from 1GB to 2GB with all the memory hungry Apps I tend to have open.
Based on that flight of fancy, I think a case could be made.
What on earth are you doing with your machines, I've got an assortment of five XP and Vista machines (+ 1 LINUX) on my network at home and I've had any of them zombied!
I keep hearing this thing about "draconian DRM measures in Vista" and I still can't work out what they are. I've been using VISTA for over a years (installed RTM at the end of November and haven't rebooted since)and have yet to find a non-DRM file that VISTA isn't quite happy playing. I can still decrypt & RIP DVDs, rip CDs to MP3 etc, the only thing that I know that might hurt in the future (if I used a PC to watch DVD) is that you'll need an HDCP compliant graphics card to get full resolution from HD & BluRay disks. So come on, enlighten us, where is all this DRM in VISTA that is so bad?
Apples & Oranges, the data you get from the disk on a Series 1 is no-DRM, unencrypted marginally proprietary MPEG-2, the stuff you get from a series 2 via Tivo to Go is DRMed and not easy to un-DRM, so you need a TIVO-annointed software component to read it, this is about removing the TIVO-annointed requirement ;-)
The need to distribute the same file via BitTorrent doesn't seem like a big problem. Distribute the movie as encrypted in some way and once you've got it you have to get your unique and probably hardware specific decrypt key before you can play it. Decryption of the movie is done on the fly, so the unencrytped version is never stored on disk, doesn't seem like a big technology problem.
But you are not talking about how the vast majority of corporates do there hardware/software purchasing. Most corporates do their purchasing from large vendors (DELL, HP etc) not small custom white box shops and do periodic hardware refreshes which tends to tie into their software upgrade cycle because that's the logical time to do an upgrade.
Theoretically true, but given that W2K will be unsupported shortly (if it isn't already) I think it's higly unlikely that anybody will be making new hardware purchases to run W2K on.
I'll make this prediction now, that by mid-08 Vista will be more than 50% of market and upwards of 90% by '09 because that's how long the hardware refresh will take.
Integrating the GPU with the CPU will be about driving down cost and power consumption, not something that is usually a high-priority for folks that want to run the latest greatest games and get all the shiniest graphics. So, I'd be very surprised if this is intended to hit that part of the market, more likely it's designed to address the same market segment that Intel hits with graphics embedded in the CPU's supporting chipset.
That said, having the CPU & GPU combined (from the point of view of register and memory access etc) might open up some interesting new possibilities of using the the power of the GPU for certain non-graphic functions.
Back in the day at Intergraph we had a graphics processor that could be combined with a very expensive (and for the time powerful) dedicated floating point array processor. To demonstrate the power of that add-on somebody handcoded an implementation of the Mandelbrot Fractal algorithm on the add-on and it was blistering fast. I can imagine similar highly-parallelized algorithms doing very well on a GPU/CPU combo.DataCore at the time, never visited the site, but worked on the proposed solution that InfraStor implemented.
You may not remember it Kevin, but you were actually working with me (NSIM=Nik Simpson) :-)
I actually worked for a company that a did a lot of the initial work in designing the storage system used at StarFire (which had some pretty nasty data capture requirements because of the highly "bursty" nature of the data capture.) From what I understood of the limited amount we were told the idea was to use an array of smaller optical telescopes and image analysis software to create a "mosaic" of the overall image that was corrected for atmospheric distortion. While nothing was said at the time, the implication was that this was for ABM, not anti-satellite, i.e. it was to make easier to shoot something down with a laser inside the atmosphere. Of course, the trick was not producing the image per-se, but producing it fast enough to be useful as part of a firing solution, i,.e a crystal clear shot of the target that takes 5 minutes to produce is of limited utility :-)
Of course the technology has a number of potential uses, both military and non-military, but that's true of just about any large hi-tech experiment. Given that StarFire is run and funded by the USAF (not NASA or a University institute like JPL), I don't think should come as any great surprise that they are rather more interested in it's military applications.