beer4breakfast

Alright dude. Keep equating addressing to access speed in your fantasy land.

You said it yourself. Or did I read that wrong?

don't have time to read all the replies.

you've come to a sad realization... accept or deny?

accept.

Vai1018: Alright dude. Keep equating addressing to access speed in your fantasy land.

You said it yourself. Or did I read that wrong?

Yes, you did. Read the thread again.

cybrwzrd
Running Vista Ultimate x64 here and love it. If anything Vista is the enthusiast OS.

So it's like a jigsaw-puzzled Linux for people with large amounts of disposable income then? Or was a Mac not expensive enough for you?

/not really ripping on you, personally.
//just think it's a funny "favorable" review.

I wish it was fantasy land. Do you realize how easy life would be without these engineeing problems to overcome? Do you know how much better I would sleep at night if I wasn't findimentally aware of just how wonky a lot of new "high performance" technolgy was from a technical standpoint?

Hell, half the crap we learned about in Engineering was 'well we would use this except for it's tendancy to...'. AND GUESS WHAT IS RUNNING YOUR SYSTEM RIGHT NOW. Sure Windows doesn't help, but there's a fair amount of people out there who run into hardware problems because they are building things at the very edge of the performance envelope without a care or consideration for age, random electrical noise, manufacturing variations, etc.

Do you know that computer chips have about an 90% failure rate. 9 out of 10 chips they try to build fail. What you are getting is the cream of the crop that passes several inspection runs. What seperates the good from the bad? Who cares people are buying it!

I'd like to single out a single hardware vendor, but it's an industry wide practice because, frankly, we are still in the stone ages when it comes to nanotechnology.

I've been running Vista Ultimate for about a month now and have had absolutely no problems. I find it more stable than XP. I would certainly recommend it for parents who want to keep their rugrats from loading suspicious programs.

Full disclosure: I was a MS Vista beta tester and got my copy for free. The biggest problem I found during nine months of beta was that manufacturers were slow to get drivers out, which remains a problem today. That said, my four year old Epson scanner runs just fine as does all my other hardware. No crashes yet, no bluescreens. Seems very stable on my homemade computer. For some reason my Apple/Intel, less than a year old is much more prone to lockups and crashes. That's not dumping on Apple -- I like it just fine.

If you really want to have some fun, sign up for the beta of Windows Home Server (now in beta2.) You can use an old junky computer as long as it has 512MB of ram and a decent processor (750 PIII or higher.) It's based on Windows Server 2003 and it does backups on all your computers (and a lot more, i.e. file sharing), even if they're in sleep mode. For the power home user, I see this being a much more revolutionary piece of software than Vista. For that matter, Office 2007 is more revolutionary than Vista.

For most people, I would recommend waiting to buy Vista until they upgrade to a computer they're sure can handle it. But if I had kids, I would consider it since it makes it really hard to install programs without administrative permission. (Yeah, I know Apples do that, too.)

But frankly, I see no reason to be dumping a lot of hate on Vista. If your wife can't use it, get another wife.

JOEKC

But frankly, I see no reason to be dumping a lot of hate on Vista. If your wife can't use it, get another wife.

Well a Mac is far cheaper than a divorce settlement. Plus you don't have the Ex calling you all the time to fix the damn thing.

Evil twin Skippy

"
Fine, drink from the firehose buddy:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5774408.html

You want to talk about f'ing Jargon, go pick through the Jargon on your own. In the mean time, get this, big complex things have equally complex parts, and not all of them scale gracefully.

Memory addressing systems scale up about as well as traffic lights.

And never mind that there is an upward limit on the size we can manufacture components BECAUSE THE DAMN ELECTRONS HAVE A MIND OF THEIR OWN.

Farkers: If your child wants to be and EE, tell them to not be like 'ol Evil Twin Skippy. He used to think that matter was solid, and that the fundimental laws of natures were, well, fundimental laws of nature.

Then he learned about quantumn mechanics, chaos theory... and stuff that had it not been taught in an academic setting would have sounded like something right off a beatnick's pamplet. Our world is bizzarre on a molecular level. The fact that most if not all of your are completely oblivious to the intricacies is a testiment to the skill of Engineers everywhere."

Ok, now you've linked to a DRAM related patent, again: this does not back up your original statement!! There is nothing in there about latency. Can you just admit you are wrong. It's clear you are going to continue blathering about meaningless technical jargon until people simply give up, but your original statement was false and you have done nothing to prove otherwise. Goodnight.

Fun Fact:

The size of computer circuits is not actually dictated by the size we can manufacture them. It's dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics. We can't really tell what an individual electron is going to do. It COULD travel down the circuit. It could decide to say "ah fark it" and tunnel through the walls of the insulator and into another part of the system.

The same is true for storing electrons. Sometimes they get sick of staying put and up and leave.

To get around this we have to use large numbers of electrons to average out the oddball behavior.

And no I'm not making this shiat up.

/Though the Vodka an Cranberry sure is making it easier to explain

MusicMakeMyHeadPound:

Vista sucks for the joe six pack computer. The only redeeming feature of it is that it actively tries to keep joe six pack from farking up his computer like novices usually do.

If your computer falls below the 4.0 level on the Vista internal benchmarks you might as well go back to xp and wait.

If anything, Vista was released two years too early, as it is not worth running unless you have a bleeding edge computer that can fully utilize it's features (notably Dx10) you have no need for it. In two years Dx10 Cards will be commonplace, 2gb+ ram will be common as well as dual and quad-core processors. Hard drive speed is going up too, as even though 10k raptors are uncommon now, in a few years the Perpendicular hard drives will be more commonplace and sustained read times will be higher, as vista likes that for the indexing that it has to do for the instant search feature.

I hate the Mac OS for 2 reasons: I don't like how you interact with it if that makes any sense, and I don't like the idea that I can't build my own. Half the fun I have is in building my rigs and trying to get every last bit of horsepower out of them.

JOEKC
If you really want to have some fun, sign up for the beta of Windows Home Server (now in beta2.)[...] For the power home user, I see this being a much more revolutionary piece of software than Vista.

I'm glad you're glad but please help me out here: how in the world is that "revolutionary"?

I realize Vista was Microsoft's clunky leap out of the 90's and hooray for them for finally making it, but turning an old PC into a file/backup server is not in the least bit new. Hell, I've got one here I built free with LAMP software in 2004 and it wasn't revolutionary then either.

ElBarto79

It's not my job to defend the laws of physics buddy. They defend themselves just fine. Just step in front of a bus of you need a demonstration.

I have offered knowledge. You are being clue repellent. I am under no obligation to overcome clue repellency. Only ignorance.

boot20: Yet, when the drivers are "immature" in Linux, Linux sucks...right?

Vista has shiat for driver support and I really can't be bothered to fight with it to make something work...

There's a big difference though... if my piece of hardware X doesn't work under Vista, I have a strong suspicion that X's manufacturer is probably putting forth a fair effort to get X to work under Vista. If X doesn't work under Linux, I have no reason to believe such claim; if they haven't done it by now, they probably won't. But Vista's new on the market.

My roommate runs Vista on a pretty old computer and he is quite happy with it. He love how Eclipse loads much faster than when he had XP.

evaned

if my piece of hardware X doesn't work under Vista, I have a strong suspicion that X's manufacturer is probably putting forth a fair effort to get X to work under Vista. If X doesn't work under Linux, I have no reason to believe such claim; if they haven't done it by now, they probably won't. But Vista's new on the market.

I must be getting old. To me that would be an argument to roll with neither Vista nor Linux.

Evil Twin Skippy: Well a Mac is far cheaper than a divorce settlement. Plus you don't have the Ex calling you all the time to fix the damn thing.

My wife took to Vista just fine, but it's the year-old Mac she can't figure out. :-)

My son is a Ph.D in C.S. and I keep complaining to him that computers are too damn hard for the average user. He just gives me a patronizing nod and keeps on writing incomprehensible code that will probably never see the light of day. Computers will only come into their own when grandma can yell at the screen "draw a cow" and a beautiful cow will magically appear. Until then the great mass of the population will use them for Web browsing, IMing, email (maybe) and solitaire. One person in this thread said OS's had matured; I disagree. They're only in their infancy.

JOEKC

"But frankly, I see no reason to be dumping a lot of hate on Vista. If your wife can't use it, get another wife."

First off, why is your computer in the kitchen?

/had to go there

evaned: You're lying or you're ignorant. Vista is based on the NT kernel, which was designed from scratch in the years leading up to its first release in 1993, and never booted from MS-DOS.

You can't simultaneously claim that OS X is good because it was redesigned and doesn't share code with its predecessors of the same name and that Windows is bad even though it was redesigned and doesn't share code with its predecessors.

My God...chill out dude. Look, I know Win2k and XP were both built on NT architecture...but do you realize that you're viciously trying to call someone out for not putting more OS particulars in his post? I was only referring to the fact that the last general consumer versions of Windows before XP still had the DOS bootup shtick. You need to step back and take a deep breath before going full throttle into the "You are ignorant" routine...to my knowledge, a vast majority of both Windows and Macintosh users don't have an intimate knowledge of kernel history. With that in mind, you might want to either start avoiding talking to the general populace or switch to decaf.

Evil Twin Skippy: I must be getting old. To me that would be an argument to roll with neither Vista nor Linux.

Oh, I'll agree. Last I checked, there wasn't a Vista driver for my sound card. (I wouldn't upgrade now even if there were, but if I would upgrade if there were, then I wouldn't until there is one. I think that sentence makes sense.)

But it's also an argument to hold off judgment until Vista has been released for a few months.

Oh No Computer: Look, I know Win2k and XP were both built on NT architecture...but do you realize that you're viciously trying to call someone out for not putting more OS particulars in his post? I was only referring to the fact that the last general consumer versions of Windows before XP still had the DOS bootup shtick.

That's irrelevant. The consumer versions of Windows before XP aren't the basis for XP's code. Thus you can't say that "Vista is just a pretty graphical interface on top of a 64-bit extension of a 32-bit OS that was an extension of a 16-bit OS that only started NOT booting from MS-DOS in the last decade" because it's not true unless you are going by just the name of the product, because NT *isn't* an extension of a 16-bit OS.

I don't expect you to put intricate histories of kernel history in your posts, but I do expect you to not put flat-out falsities into them because they sound good.

MusicMakeMyHeadPound:

I'm glad you're glad but please help me out here: how in the world is that "revolutionary"?

I realize Vista was Microsoft's clunky leap out of the 90's and hooray for them for finally making it, but turning an old PC into a file/backup server is not in the least bit new. Hell, I've got one here I built free with LAMP software in 2004 and it wasn't revolutionary then either.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean most people can. In fact, most people don't know shiat about computers. HP for one will be bringing out a home server -- just plug it into your network and it configures itself and runs without any user intervention. It doesn't even need a keyboard or mouse. To a lot of computer doofuses who've lost all their pictures to hard drive crashes, I'd call it revolutionary. To someone like you (or me) who can build their own servers, maybe not.

WhyteRaven74: I'd rather see Intel ditch backwards compatibility.

They did.

/ EPIC FAIL

Crazy Lee
As sis-in-law works for the devil in Redmond, I'm the recipient of `gifts'. The XP and Vista are still shrink wrapped and collecting dust.

If you're wanting to part with them, Let me know (email in profile). I'm interested in checking out vista, but don't want to buy it right off the bat.

odintal: JOEKC

"But frankly, I see no reason to be dumping a lot of hate on Vista. If your wife can't use it, get another wife."

First off, why is your computer in the kitchen?

/had to go there

LOL. Actually our Apple IMac/Intel is in the kitchen where it looks totally cool and doubles as a TV. Our house was wired for CAT5e when we built it, so I feel an obligation to put a computer in almost ever room.

Vista sucks, and the new version of MS word isn't compatible with previous versions of word. WTF
Fark you microsoft for changing the basic framework of the OS. I couldn't even figure out how to save a file in MSword for like 5 minutes. Then I realized that the ghey little Microsoft logo in the upper left hand corner was a button. "Oh, there's where everything that used to be under the File tab is" I burst out. Then I screamed "FARK YOU MICROSOFT!"

I don't know if Microsoft has hired a bunch of fags from apple or something since the Honorable Mr. Gates stepped down, but something is going on at Microsoft, and it is not good. This release is a terrible omen.

odintal: First off, why is your computer in the kitchen?



/ Clicky
// You provide the pop

evaned: There's a big difference though... if my piece of hardware X doesn't work under Vista, I have a strong suspicion that X's manufacturer is probably putting forth a fair effort to get X to work under Vista. If X doesn't work under Linux, I have no reason to believe such claim; if they haven't done it by now, they probably won't. But Vista's new on the market.

I'm not sure I trust vendors to even make Vista drivers. It looks like a lot of vendors are prematurely EOLing hardware or just saying it's not "Vista compatible."

We'll find out in about 6 months, but I have a suspicion that you'll see "new" Vista ready hardware on the shelves rather than new drivers...

beer4breakfast

Well, considering that the original argument was about ETS's assertion that it takes longer to access a larger stick of memory than a smaller stick, let's return to that argument. His statement, and I quote:

I can tell you that the more RAM you have to address, the more connecting hardware will be required to address it.

When I read that, I am taking it to mean that, if you want to avoid any kind of latency, you better increase your bus width to accomodate the increase in memory addressing available on the chip.

Going from a 256MB chip to a 2GB chip on the same memory bus, there is going to be latency (negligible) on the chip itself, since it operates at the same speed but is now accessing 8x the memory addresses. And there will be more latency (again, negligible) between the memory chip and the CPU, since you still have a fixed amount of available bandwidth through the bus to access 8x the amount of memory you previously were accessing.

The latency, as pointed out above, is negligible. Measured in nanoseconds, I'm sure. But it's there, as it is inherent in the design. I'm no quantum theorist, so I'll leave the math to the experts.

Access speed, addressing design, bus width, they all go hand in hand. But the original argument was calling bullshiat on ETS's original statement.

Your example of a mux completely supported ETS's assertion, and his statement above.

If you have a 4to1 mux design, and you update it to an 8to1 mux, but it operates at the same speed, you've increased your capacity by 2, but you have cut the muxes' process time in half. If, though, you add a 4to1 mux to your design (running two simultaneous 4to1 muxes in the same system), you've increased your capacity by 2, and haven't lost any processing time, as you've added an additional output channel to the mix.

As a side note, the problem with memory latency will not be solved until a radical change to the design of memory is made. DDR and DDR2 were vast improvements that removed a lot of dependencies RAM had on system bus speed, and allowed memory speed to catch up to CPU speed. What memory needs now is a more efficient bus to the CPU.

boot20

We'll find out in about 6 months, but I have a suspicion that you'll see "new" Vista ready hardware on the shelves rather than new drivers...

And then you'll also be seeing usage statistics for Linux skyrocket over the same timeframe.

/Hell they might even get up to 3% of the desktop market LOL

Pseudotype

Vista sucks, and the new version of MS word isn't compatible with previous versions of word.

You're kidding, right? Word 2007 is completely backwords compatible with previous versions of Word.

boot20: I'm not sure I trust vendors to even make Vista drivers. It looks like a lot of vendors are prematurely EOLing hardware or just saying it's not "Vista compatible."

I guess that's another alternative.

At least in the case of my sound card, looks like there are drivers released about two weeks ago. Though looks like my SATA controller may have been EOL'd. (Now that I think about it, that was the biggest reason why I didn't even really try Vista even though I had the beta and RC1.)

Vai1018: You're kidding, right? Word 2007 is completely backwords compatible with previous versions of Word.

I think he meant that Word wasn't backwards compatible with his brain.

/Somewhat facetious, somewhat not
//Haven't used office 2k7

I'm guessing that one month's worth of Vista sales is about equal to 10 years of Mac O/S sales.

Isn't desktop market share around 95% for Microsoft, 3% for flavors of linux, and 2% for Mac?

/not joking

evaned: There's a big difference though... if my piece of hardware X doesn't work under Vista, I have a strong suspicion that X's manufacturer is probably putting forth a fair effort to get X to work under Vista. If X doesn't work under Linux, I have no reason to believe such claim; if they haven't done it by now, they probably won't. But Vista's new on the market.


And Linux developers are putting forth a fair effort to get X to work under Linux (with incredible previous success), and I can even put forth a fair effort to make it work (whereas if it doesn't work on MS I'm forced to hope they care enough to try).

MrSteve007

Try six percent

HellFace: And Linux developers are putting forth a fair effort to get X to work under Linux (with incredible previous success)

Incredible success overall, yes, but in terms of certain hardware... not necessarily. I've had my TV tuner (ATI TV Wonder Elite) for over a year now, and there is apparently still no Linux driver to be found for it.

...I can even put forth a fair effort to make it work (whereas if it doesn't work on MS I'm forced to hope they care enough to try).

If you have the knowledge to reverse engineer how a piece of HW works, I salute you. I don't.

I'll be honest. My last laptop (Nice Dell) was running Windows 2000. (my favorite OS btw)

I just earlier this month purchased a new Acer with Vista pre-installed.

/Wish my Dell wasn't stolen.
//'nuff said.

Ubuntu for me. Vista is CRAP, XP not worth the headache.

wangsolo: Also, seeing as how XP is no longer the OS of choice, why didn't it get cheaper? Prevista XP cost $135, postvista $135. Microsoft got us by the short hairs and it makes them giggle.


Because if it stays the same price then people will buy the new software instead of 'overpriced & outdated' software. Dumping the price of XP will just make it fly off the shelves when Microsoft wants to usher in the heyday of their NEW flagship OS. Simple Marketing... keep the old expensive and the new will replace it.

i've been thinking about installing ubuntu for a while now. i'm currently running on xp sp2 and will never, ever buy a windows operating system again. next i'm going for either osX or whatever is fresh at the time on their side of things, or ubuntu.

Evil Twin Skippy: Try six percent

Interesting break down. For the lazy:

98 - 1.50%
2k - 4.75%
XP - 84.33%
Vista - 0.93%

Total: 91.51%

Mac OS - 4.29%
Mac Intel - 2.09%

Total: 6.38%

Other - 2.05%

Total - 99.94

I know 0.06% market share is missing, I'll chalk that up to rounding error.

So basically the desktop market is 8% Mac and Linux. The funny part is that MS is losing market share even though you can squirt songs at people and enjoy their DRM.

evaned: If you have the knowledge to reverse engineer how a piece of HW works, I salute you. I don't.

Didn't you get the memo? The latest Linux distros bundle free programming classes, so everyone who wants to use Linux automatically becomes a programmer... just like all the existing users.

Yes, they assume the rest of the world are all programmers. Your 90 year old mom? Yep, she's a programmer. Your ditsy 16 year old niece? Oh she's definitely a programmer. Yes, there's no shortage of programmers in their world...


/vi sucks
//emacs sucks too
///and you have to learn one or the other because god knows Linux distros can't bundle a useable text editor

MonkeyBoy666

/vi sucks
//emacs sucks too
///and you have to learn one or the other because god knows Linux distros can't bundle a useable text editor

Try nano.

Hahaha you are using vista? And Aero? haha...can it do this on a 1300 mhz machine with a 64 mb graphics card?

Didn't think so.

MonkeyBoy666

Re: Linux

Actually Ubuntu has a candy-coated follow the bouncing ball installer. My techs think it's easier to install than Linux, and we use it on workstation where we know people need to do work without the box getting covered in crap.

But what do I know...

Ok, Here's my system specs:

Intel CoreDuo e6700
1 GB OCZ DDR2
ATI x1650 Pro
WD 7200 RPM SATA 160GB
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Vista with Aero on runs great. Haven't had an issue that locked Explorer up and made me reboot like I would have to do in XP. Running games like Q4 and Titan Quest at 1024 with everything on high detail and plays really good.

Could I use an extra GB of RAM? Sure, but not for running the OS. Would only really help the games. Pretty sure that a faster video card may help more than the RAM. Nothing about it has made me say "Wow" but there's also nothing making me wish I had stayed with XP.

Not sure I'd say the same thing for Vista Home Premium, which is what's getting packaged with new PCs, but Ultimate is not a bad OS so far.

Ok, Here's my System Specs

13" stock MacBook with 2GB of Ram

Runs Tiger Great! What? Where's all the rest of the garbeledy gook? Well considering Apple designs the operating system AND the hardware it runs on I don't fark with that.

/And the 2GB of Ram is so the machine screams at Gimp, and I can fit a copy of Windows-XP in running side-by-side. I'm planning on installing a test copy of Vista just to see how badly it's going to break our network.

SharkUW: You've disabled Microsoft's most affective attempt at preventing security problems.


Effective? That POS that *requires* setup programs to run as install? That lessens security.