I know what you mean, and it's the same for me learning in the 90s. I know degrees Celsius, but not Fahrenheit (except for the vague understanding that 32 is freezing), I know cm, inches, feet, and metres, but I can't really grasp how far a kilometre or mile is (I just know the distance in miles to a few places, and how many miles my car does on a tank). I know a pint and litres, but not gallons, kilograms but not pounds, ounces or stones. I know how fast miles per hour are, but not kilometres per hour.
Personally I'd be in favour of changing to all metric, but road signs are the major problem. Changing mph to kph and miles to kilometres across the whole country, then educating everyone about the change would be crazily hard.
Drill through it. People aren't going to re-use it after that, and by the time someone can recover any data from it it will all be very irrelevant to you.
Photoshop is Windows only? Since when? It's an Adobe product, that means that it is primarily MacOS software, and Windows software second. That's quite a way from "Windows-only".
My understanding is that the Power PC chips are actually SLOWER than x86-64 processor, but run much cooler, so MS went with them.
I don't know the details, I just dev for the thing.
And are you telling me that a Quad-core x86-64 machine couldn't emulate a TRI core power PC system? I find that hard to believe, even with the difference in instruction-sets.
Yep, that's what I'm telling you. Even better, you can't magically parallelize code, so having more than 3 cores wouldn't help much. So instead of getting the 4x performance you need for emulation by having a 12-core 3.2GHz cpu, you'd need a 3-core machine running at 12.8GHz. And even that might not be enough, as the theoretical performance of the 3-core Xenon cpu of the xbox is actually twice that of the fastest quad-core desktop cpu.
You're not going to emulate a 360 any time soon. Hell, your wonderful quad-core system will struggle to emulate a PS2! Try it for yourself.
Let's keep in mind, Virtual machines are ALL emulation already. They are emulating a specific type of hardware that your system may or may not already have. The only limitation is core amounts. You can't emulate a CPU core your system doesn't have. Other than that, I really don't see how hard it would be to emulate a power-PC based system, as long as your machine had more cores than the system you were emulating.
Nope. There are two kinds of virtual machine, fully emulated machines which are horrifically slow (but compatible with a different instruction set), and virtualized machines which run directly on the cpu of the host (so must use the same instruction set as the host), only dropping back to the host to emulate a few devices, e.g. keeping the virtual machine's hard-disk in a file on the host's disk.
Most virtual machine software implements direct hardware passthrough to allow the child OS to have even a little performance at using the graphics card. You can't have direct hardware passthrough if the virtual hardware in the virtual machine doesn't match the hardware in the host.
Because the xbox 360 is a 3-core power-pc cpu - based system, you couldn't virtualize it on a desktop, you'd have to emulate it. And to emulate, you need a machine at least 4 times as powerful (for a mature dynamic recompiling emulator) as the original machine.
PCs that fast just don't exist yet.
The original XBOX could be done easily, as it used a Pentium 3 cpu, instead of something more exotic. There was even an experimental xbox -> pc recompiler at one point, but IIRC it only worked for one game.
GTA4 is known to have a terrible PC port. Most recent games would run just fine on a couple-of-year-old pc. A surprising number of games even run on my parents' TIME (who've now gone bust) pc from 2003, and that has integrated graphics (admittedly it's an integrated geforce 4, not a via or sis crap).
Explore both? You get more chance of good stuff then.
Though in games, not everything can be truly random, as otherwise a string of bad luck can ruin the player's perception of the game. Likewise, a string of good luck can make a game too easy.
On a related note, I always hated oblivion due to the fact that the game levelled enemies everywhere up with you, so you didn't really gain anything by killing anything. Why bother levelling if it doesn't help you to kill anything because they all level too?
Nope, black holes are caused by too much mass in one place, such as a collision between stars (they typically orbit each other as a binary or more system for a long while first). Black holes have a tendency to absorb anything nearby (including other black holes), so over time they tend to "grow". The galaxy is denser with stars near the centre, so it's natural for a HUGE black hole to form there.
At least that's the theory. There's also some stuff about energy getting back out limiting their size, but that's a fairly recent addition to the theory.
My car radio (a Sony) has bluetooth, supporting not only hands-free for my phone (a Sony-Ericsson), but also music streaming. I get in to my car, pick a playlist on my phone and press play and the sound comes from my car speakers. As the phone has a 2GB micro-memory-stick in it, I can bring quite a lot of music around with me.
Much better than a tape emulator, burning cds repeatedly, or using a short-range FM transmitter.
Nice the way you reply to only one of the points I made.
For your other points: I never said it didn't make hibernate work (in fact I suggested a reason why it could), I just said that there was no way it did what it said (i.e. defrag ram).
After going into standby twice during the workday, it blue screened on the third "wake up."
I'm a little confused at your mention of standby, standby and hibernate are completely different. Weren't we talking about hibernate?
Just like Microsoft included a full disk defragmenter with XP
Microsoft did include a disk defragmenter with XP. You might not like it, but it DOES work.
The way they included anti-spyware software with it? The way they included anti-virus with it?
only needed if the user is an idiot (some would say that this is a truism). Disk defrag is needed, as the disk fragments under normal use. The machine isn't supposed to need anti-malware protection as part of normal use. However, MS have realised that users are idiots and have added a firewall to their OS, and are working on MS anti-spyware (released already) and MS antivirus, for users that are both too stupid to not run malware, and don't use a 3rd-party AV. Contrary to popular belief, very few viruses can spread and execute completely by themselves any more, they're normally crap on websites that you have to visit yourself, or crap in email you have to run yourself.
My machine did not see more than 2GB until I enabled PAE.
2GB? It should see at least 3GB. Something must be seriously screwy with your motherboard for it to limit you to 2GB. Either that or you have 2GB of graphics ram, which I wouldn't expect to work on a 32-bit system due to not being able to map it all into system virtual memory.
There were arcane incantations required in order to make the configuration change.
This is because MS don't support PAE's expanded address space on their desktop OSs. Support for it in drivers can't be detected automatically, and as it wasn't required for drivers for their desktop OSs to support it to get WHQL certified, there are a lot of signed drivers that crash and burn with PAE's extended address space (often confused with PAE itself) enabled.
Perhaps that's your problem? Does it still crash without PAE manually fully enabled?
Nice the way you reply to only one of the points I made.
"PAE is enabled by default if DEP is enabled on a computer that supports hardware-enabled DEP" i.e. all Athlon 64s and Intel cpu since the Core 1 (including celerons). aka, any pc in the last few years.
You clearly didn't read what I'd said. I said PAE is enabled, but Windows won't use the extended address space despite that, it only uses things like NX, which require PAE.
Modern cpus support virtual memory in hardware, meaning it causes no slowdown at all (unless the referenced page isn't in ram of course). AMD's prototypes even support the nested virtual memory layout used by virtual machines.
Read the KB article. 1. Installing the patch didn't fix the problem 100% of the time. 2. Service Pack 2 reduces the frequency of the failures, but doesn't eliminate the problem.
There was probably another problem. There is ALWAYS another problem.
3. The KB article explicitly mentions fragmentation.
So it does. However it doesn't say that you could fix that by running a ram defragmenter. If you could, MS would have included a little ram defrag routine into the hibernate code:)
4. In my experience, use of the ram defragmenter tool eliminates the hibernation issue.
I'd be shocked if it did anything like defragmenting. Only Windows system code has access to programs' virtual memory physical memory mapping table, and if you defrag'd ram by rearranging the physical ram you'd have to update every program's virtual memory table. Some of these programs would be RUNNING while the defrag tool runs, especially in a modern multi-core / multi-cpu system. Much more likely is that works like all "ram optimisers": it simply allocates a large amount of ram to itself, forcing all other applications into the page file. After freeing its ram again, any stats of the amount of physical ram in use will be much lower than before, because nearly everything will be in the pagefile instead. The total amount of memory in use (RAM+PageFile) will be exactly the same! Having more free physical ram won't do anything helpful though, because it's not being used. In fact everything will run slower until it gets loaded back out of the pagefile into ram again, which will put you back where you started. This would also trash Windows' file cache, which is what normally makes use of "free" ram, because it gets purged in favour of active programs that need ram, such as this "defragmenter". Despite this, it IS possible that this could help with the old hibernating with over 1GB of ram issue, as only physical ram needs to be saved to disk when hibernating. If you've just forced everything into the pagefile, there will be very little to write. However, this is a side-effect of what the program actually does, not it actually working, and the problem with hibernating with lots of ram has been fixed now.
5. Windows is STUPID when it comes to seeing more than 1GB of RAM. Look into the gyrations required to to enable the PAE settings. Yikes!
PAE is enabled by default in Windows these days, it just doesn't use the extended address space feature on the desktop versions, only things like NX. PAE is required to see more than 3 to 3.5 GB of ram, not 1GB. If you're using that much, you really should be using a fully 64-bit system, not a hack like PAE. The best reason (and there are a few) is because not all drivers support PAE's extended address space, and they need to for your system to be stable. With a 64-bit system, they wouldn't load if they weren't 64-bit.
Slashdot Mirror
"Lord of War"?
I know what you mean, and it's the same for me learning in the 90s. I know degrees Celsius, but not Fahrenheit (except for the vague understanding that 32 is freezing), I know cm, inches, feet, and metres, but I can't really grasp how far a kilometre or mile is (I just know the distance in miles to a few places, and how many miles my car does on a tank). I know a pint and litres, but not gallons, kilograms but not pounds, ounces or stones. I know how fast miles per hour are, but not kilometres per hour.
Personally I'd be in favour of changing to all metric, but road signs are the major problem. Changing mph to kph and miles to kilometres across the whole country, then educating everyone about the change would be crazily hard.
Drill through it. People aren't going to re-use it after that, and by the time someone can recover any data from it it will all be very irrelevant to you.
Only if it all stays aligned. If you add a byte to the start, it thinks the entire file has changed.
Photoshop is Windows only? Since when?
It's an Adobe product, that means that it is primarily MacOS software, and Windows software second.
That's quite a way from "Windows-only".
Bet you we don't get a response from the original guy saying "thanks for the info, I was wrong".
My understanding is that the Power PC chips are actually SLOWER than x86-64 processor, but run much cooler, so MS went with them.
I don't know the details, I just dev for the thing.
And are you telling me that a Quad-core x86-64 machine couldn't emulate a TRI core power PC system? I find that hard to believe, even with the difference in instruction-sets.
Yep, that's what I'm telling you. Even better, you can't magically parallelize code, so having more than 3 cores wouldn't help much. So instead of getting the 4x performance you need for emulation by having a 12-core 3.2GHz cpu, you'd need a 3-core machine running at 12.8GHz.
And even that might not be enough, as the theoretical performance of the 3-core Xenon cpu of the xbox is actually twice that of the fastest quad-core desktop cpu.
You're not going to emulate a 360 any time soon. Hell, your wonderful quad-core system will struggle to emulate a PS2! Try it for yourself.
Let's keep in mind, Virtual machines are ALL emulation already. They are emulating a specific type of hardware that your system may or may not already have. The only limitation is core amounts. You can't emulate a CPU core your system doesn't have. Other than that, I really don't see how hard it would be to emulate a power-PC based system, as long as your machine had more cores than the system you were emulating.
Nope. There are two kinds of virtual machine, fully emulated machines which are horrifically slow (but compatible with a different instruction set), and virtualized machines which run directly on the cpu of the host (so must use the same instruction set as the host), only dropping back to the host to emulate a few devices, e.g. keeping the virtual machine's hard-disk in a file on the host's disk.
Most virtual machine software implements direct hardware passthrough to allow the child OS to have even a little performance at using the graphics card. You can't have direct hardware passthrough if the virtual hardware in the virtual machine doesn't match the hardware in the host.
Because the xbox 360 is a 3-core power-pc cpu - based system, you couldn't virtualize it on a desktop, you'd have to emulate it. And to emulate, you need a machine at least 4 times as powerful (for a mature dynamic recompiling emulator) as the original machine.
PCs that fast just don't exist yet.
The original XBOX could be done easily, as it used a Pentium 3 cpu, instead of something more exotic. There was even an experimental xbox -> pc recompiler at one point, but IIRC it only worked for one game.
GTA4 is known to have a terrible PC port. Most recent games would run just fine on a couple-of-year-old pc.
A surprising number of games even run on my parents' TIME (who've now gone bust) pc from 2003, and that has integrated graphics (admittedly it's an integrated geforce 4, not a via or sis crap).
A business user shouldn't have permission to run executables from his home folder if you don't want him installing stuff.
Explore both? You get more chance of good stuff then.
Though in games, not everything can be truly random, as otherwise a string of bad luck can ruin the player's perception of the game. Likewise, a string of good luck can make a game too easy.
On a related note, I always hated oblivion due to the fact that the game levelled enemies everywhere up with you, so you didn't really gain anything by killing anything. Why bother levelling if it doesn't help you to kill anything because they all level too?
Nope, black holes are caused by too much mass in one place, such as a collision between stars (they typically orbit each other as a binary or more system for a long while first). Black holes have a tendency to absorb anything nearby (including other black holes), so over time they tend to "grow". The galaxy is denser with stars near the centre, so it's natural for a HUGE black hole to form there.
At least that's the theory. There's also some stuff about energy getting back out limiting their size, but that's a fairly recent addition to the theory.
In three weeks!
Travelling back in time is bad enough when it's only jet-lag, imagine being days out: "Sorry I'm late boss, my body still thinks it's Christmas"
That is a pretty good analogy :) ...but I don't currently have any mod points.
My car radio (a Sony) has bluetooth, supporting not only hands-free for my phone (a Sony-Ericsson), but also music streaming. I get in to my car, pick a playlist on my phone and press play and the sound comes from my car speakers. As the phone has a 2GB micro-memory-stick in it, I can bring quite a lot of music around with me.
Much better than a tape emulator, burning cds repeatedly, or using a short-range FM transmitter.
Nice the way you reply to only one of the points I made.
For your other points:
I never said it didn't make hibernate work (in fact I suggested a reason why it could), I just said that there was no way it did what it said (i.e. defrag ram).
After going into standby twice during the workday, it blue screened on the third "wake up."
I'm a little confused at your mention of standby, standby and hibernate are completely different. Weren't we talking about hibernate?
Just like Microsoft included a full disk defragmenter with XP
Microsoft did include a disk defragmenter with XP. You might not like it, but it DOES work.
The way they included anti-spyware software with it? The way they included anti-virus with it?
only needed if the user is an idiot (some would say that this is a truism). Disk defrag is needed, as the disk fragments under normal use. The machine isn't supposed to need anti-malware protection as part of normal use. However, MS have realised that users are idiots and have added a firewall to their OS, and are working on MS anti-spyware (released already) and MS antivirus, for users that are both too stupid to not run malware, and don't use a 3rd-party AV. Contrary to popular belief, very few viruses can spread and execute completely by themselves any more, they're normally crap on websites that you have to visit yourself, or crap in email you have to run yourself.
My machine did not see more than 2GB until I enabled PAE.
2GB? It should see at least 3GB. Something must be seriously screwy with your motherboard for it to limit you to 2GB. Either that or you have 2GB of graphics ram, which I wouldn't expect to work on a 32-bit system due to not being able to map it all into system virtual memory.
There were arcane incantations required in order to make the configuration change.
This is because MS don't support PAE's expanded address space on their desktop OSs. Support for it in drivers can't be detected automatically, and as it wasn't required for drivers for their desktop OSs to support it to get WHQL certified, there are a lot of signed drivers that crash and burn with PAE's extended address space (often confused with PAE itself) enabled.
Perhaps that's your problem?
Does it still crash without PAE manually fully enabled?
Nice the way you reply to only one of the points I made.
Did I miss any of your points now?
"PAE is enabled by default if DEP is enabled on a computer that supports hardware-enabled DEP"
i.e. all Athlon 64s and Intel cpu since the Core 1 (including celerons). aka, any pc in the last few years.
You clearly didn't read what I'd said. I said PAE is enabled, but Windows won't use the extended address space despite that, it only uses things like NX, which require PAE.
I got a +5 already, so it doesn't matter :) /joking
But seriously, if something is 20 billion times fainter it's going to be barely visible, regardless of how bright the original is.
It's also more impressive journalism to use "20 billion times fainter" than "1.3 candles" or some other actual measurement.
xxx times less than yyy == yyy/xxx.
It's common language these days, learn it!
Because swap can be added while the system is turned on :)
More importantly, swap is cheaper than ram, because hard disks are cheaper per GB than ram is.
No. However last time I tried it it broke my 8800GTX, because it couldn't map 768MB of system address space to itself anymore.
Modern cpus support virtual memory in hardware, meaning it causes no slowdown at all (unless the referenced page isn't in ram of course).
AMD's prototypes even support the nested virtual memory layout used by virtual machines.
Read the KB article.
1. Installing the patch didn't fix the problem 100% of the time.
2. Service Pack 2 reduces the frequency of the failures, but doesn't eliminate the problem.
There was probably another problem. There is ALWAYS another problem.
3. The KB article explicitly mentions fragmentation.
So it does. However it doesn't say that you could fix that by running a ram defragmenter. If you could, MS would have included a little ram defrag routine into the hibernate code :)
4. In my experience, use of the ram defragmenter tool eliminates the hibernation issue.
I'd be shocked if it did anything like defragmenting. Only Windows system code has access to programs' virtual memory physical memory mapping table, and if you defrag'd ram by rearranging the physical ram you'd have to update every program's virtual memory table. Some of these programs would be RUNNING while the defrag tool runs, especially in a modern multi-core / multi-cpu system.
Much more likely is that works like all "ram optimisers": it simply allocates a large amount of ram to itself, forcing all other applications into the page file. After freeing its ram again, any stats of the amount of physical ram in use will be much lower than before, because nearly everything will be in the pagefile instead. The total amount of memory in use (RAM+PageFile) will be exactly the same! Having more free physical ram won't do anything helpful though, because it's not being used. In fact everything will run slower until it gets loaded back out of the pagefile into ram again, which will put you back where you started. This would also trash Windows' file cache, which is what normally makes use of "free" ram, because it gets purged in favour of active programs that need ram, such as this "defragmenter".
Despite this, it IS possible that this could help with the old hibernating with over 1GB of ram issue, as only physical ram needs to be saved to disk when hibernating. If you've just forced everything into the pagefile, there will be very little to write. However, this is a side-effect of what the program actually does, not it actually working, and the problem with hibernating with lots of ram has been fixed now.
5. Windows is STUPID when it comes to seeing more than 1GB of RAM. Look into the gyrations required to to enable the PAE settings. Yikes!
PAE is enabled by default in Windows these days, it just doesn't use the extended address space feature on the desktop versions, only things like NX.
PAE is required to see more than 3 to 3.5 GB of ram, not 1GB. If you're using that much, you really should be using a fully 64-bit system, not a hack like PAE. The best reason (and there are a few) is because not all drivers support PAE's extended address space, and they need to for your system to be stable. With a 64-bit system, they wouldn't load if they weren't 64-bit.
Sure there is. Data IS a mass noun these days, no-one uses "datum/data" any more. Data is a mass noun, "37 items of" or "435 bytes of" are the units.