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So I've just finished setting up several Win7 beta 1 VM's that I will be testing with. I had assumed that a 10GB hard drive would be enough for the limited testing I will be doing; however a 2.4 GB iso file would become almost 7GB installed. I doubt that many people are still using 10 GB hard drives but, if Microsoft is really targeting netbooks and low cost systems it may be a good idea to slim down the install image a bit more before going gold.
I would like to point out that telnet is missing from Windows 7 (this is also true on Windows Vista.) Last support call I was on I asked this very question to Microsoft, the reason given was to limit the installed operating systems footprint. They removed a very useful ~700KB program, boy am I glad they are trying to keep the size down.
Labels: Win7
I just finished installing the Virtual PC. It looks as if setting it up as a vista guest OS everything works even the virtual pc additions. After rebooting it brought up the Startup Repair Wizard, which is pretty nice, once it realized that windows couldn't boot it asked me to roll back to a system restore point or to repair. I chose repair since I was pretty sure a roll back would have worked I want to see how effective the repair is.
Labels: Win7
A few years ago there were countless VoIP start-ups, each had their own way to provide free or cheap calls. Some offered anonymous calling, other would intergrades with your existing land lines. Most jumped on the social networking bandwagon, many of them - Jangl, TalkPlus and EQO went bust. They learned the harsh lesson that selling cheap minutes or offering free calls isn't really a business. One such company in Menlo Park, Calif. based Jaxtr (http://www.jaxtr.com) apparently hasn't learnt that lesson.
It is still hanging around; thanks to $10 million venture capital infusion it received in June 2008 from Lehman Venture Partners (http://www.jaxtr.com/press/june_24_2008.jsp) Earlier they sent out a press release (http://www.jaxtr.com/user/press/december_17_2008.jsp) touting Freeconnect, their free member-to-member calling service, that has been tried unsuccessfully by other VoIP start-ups. The whole process of using Jaxtr to make free phone calls seems so cumbersome and in this day of increasingly cheap wireless plans - almost pointless. Also the wide spread acceptance of Skype (www.skype.com) makes for some difficult competition, maybe they can help add some competition to the market, but I think they will fail.
I see the usefulness of a netbook and in this era of cheap systems, netbooks thrive especially in this economy. I think that these are a great system for browsing the web, after all that's what they were designed to do but they fall short on anything more. Its no secret I have been using touch screens since my first palm pilot in 1997, in fact it's hard to ignore me talking about it. I love inking, jotting notes, pointing/ clicking and amazing people who haven't seen tablets before and never imagined such technology existed.
I needed a mobile system to enable me to do everything I do on a day to day basis, programing, system administration, testing software mostly in VM's, and writing papers yep in MS Word. I needed a small powerful system, something to give my main desktop something to worry about. This is where the Lenovo X200 tablet comes in, so far Vista performance have been fantastic. I will be looking to upgrade the hard drive to an SSD model once the price per GB drops a bit more, and Windows 7 gets better support for reading/ writing to Solid State Disks. With the 8 cell battery I have been getting a bit over 5 hours of life. Lenovo did a great job with the LED back lit screen and the ULV Processor.
- Intel Core 2 Duo processor SL9400 (1.86GHz)
Labels: tablet
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx and http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605271/windows-7-allows-directx-10-acceleration-on-the-cpu.html to quote the second link
“In what could be seen as an easy answer to the Vista-capable debacle, Microsoft has introduced a 'fully conformant software rasterizer' called WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) 10, which does away with the need for a dedicated hardware 3D accelerator altogether. Microsoft says that WARP 10 will support all the features and precision requirements of Direct3D 10 and 10.1, as well as up to 8x multi-sampled anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and all optional texture formats. The minimum CPU spec needed is just 800MHz, and it doesn't even need MMX or SSE, although it will work much quicker on multi-core CPUs with SSE 4.1. Of course, software rendering on a single desktop CPU isn't going to be able to compete with decent dedicated 3D graphics cards when it comes to high-end games, but Microsoft has released some interesting benchmarks that show the system to be quicker than Intel's current integrated DirectX 10 graphics. Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics.”
So the game went from unplayable at the lowest settings possible, to being still unplayable at the lowest settings possible? Great move MS, youv'e really solved a problem there. I know it was made to enable fancy desktop effects but, why demo it with Crysis.
Also if we are talking about the whole "Vista Capable" debacle, aren't we talking about low spec machines that coughed and wheezed when running the low-end version of the OS. Great, lets add 3D rendering to the processor load on those machines.
My main system at home is running Vista 64-bit, this means I run into my share of compatibility issues. I have a Virtual PC set up with XP that I use for a few things that I still need XP for. Since it's a virtual system I stop and start it when needed and dont think much of it. I started thinking I hadn't updated it in a while. I ran "systeminfo|findstr Time" to check the uptime and it came back with "266 Days, 22 Hours, 2 Minutes, 25 Seconds" That's got to be some type of record for Win XP SP2. Oh well I think it's time to install SP3 for XP and the latest patches.
The Nevada Lightning Laboratory (http://www.lightninglab.org/) has experimented with Nicola Tesla's methods of wireless power transmission to push 800 Watts over 5 meters(http://www.lightninglab.org/papers/WirelessPower/index.html) besting MITs mark of 60W over 2 meters last year.
This unit collects energy from the ambient electric fields using an on-board 'reverse Tesla Coil,' which in turn charges a large, on-board capacitor bank. The capacitors then drive a DC motor connected to one of the wheels, providing motive effort for the machine.
I wonder how much ambient electricity can be captured in a large city as an alternate means of powering an electric car?
Another problem that any physics professor will tell you (after pointing out that "the boys" are not going to be in any more danger from that than they are from your cell phone, since neither would be likely to operate at a frequency at which the human body is resonant) is that any bit of metal can act as an antenna. All it takes is to have one piece of wire inside your laptop that happens to be the right resonant frequency for the power that is being transmitted and ZAP! I for one would not want my sensitive electronics that can be fried by static electricity in the wrong place to be anywhere near something like that
I want to see a replacement AA, AAA, C, and D sized "batteries" that just receives "wireless power" from the "wireless transmitter" would let you power anything as long as you have the wireless transmitter plugged in. That is the only way we will get wide scale acceptance.
Register Hardware http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/05/arm_op_by_sms/
and
CNN http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/12/04/text.message.operation/index.html?eref=rss_tech#cnnSTCText
Labels: WTF