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Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
While one has to wonder, like with Vista, how many of the teased features will actually make it into the final OS
If you're going by their track record, it's an easy answer: None.
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Can you imagine a beowolf cluster of those?
Neither can I.
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
I really wish they get rid of their multiple editions. I see only need for Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server
Heck, I wish they'd go further than that. I think there should only be Windows 7, period. If you want to have different sets of optimizations for desktop/server/home/corporate use, make it something you configure in control panel, not something you need a different version of the OS for.
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Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
The Vista DVD pretty much does that. It contains the files for all 5 versions and the key you enter when you install determines which version of Vista will be configured. So you can install Vista Ultimate from the Vista Home DVD, if you use an Ultimate key. This also allows you to perform the "anytime upgrade" to a higher version if you buy it.
The server components are not present however because Windows Server is configured a lot differently. For example, Windows XP is version 5.1 and Windows Server 2003 is version 5.2. Although they contain many of the same features their configuration is a lot different (ie. Windows server has no themes service or system restore and is set to prioritize background processes over foreground). Some people [msfn.org] have configured Windows Server as a workstation but there are a lot of steps involved just to get it to XP style functionality. The kernel and services are also different to optimize the system for serving or workstation tasks.
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Monolithic Operating Systems (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a problem with your argument. You are thinking in terms of a monolithic operating system. They could keep everything on the installation disks and only install the parts that are desired (like Linux is). If you later on needed another service you could put in in with what is on the installation disk.
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Re:Actually, maybe not fair (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Actually, maybe not fair (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention, giving out a laptop with known devices and hardware for a pre-beta built isn't exactly out of the ordinary. That way Microsoft can ensure that all the devices and drivers on that laptop are actually supported (remember: PRE-BETA). Not to mention the specs for those computers aren't exactly out of the ordinary now, and will be either standard or 'underpowered' two years from now when Windows 7 will be released.
But your point is moot anyway, since they've already given out installer discs, and people have installed it on a variety of hardware and still were impressed with the performance.
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Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:5, Insightful)
My browser already supports audio, video, vector graphics and a scripting language.
Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:5, Insightful)
So why the limit?
Are they only having a byte to store the core ID?
Today it's feasible to build yourself a machine with 32 cores using 4-core AMD:s 4-core processors and a Tyan n4250QE [tyan.com.tw] with a M4985 [tyan.com.tw] daughterboard. This will give you 64 cores to play with.
In a not too far future we will see processors with a larger number of cores and therefore we will soon bang our heads into that wall. At least those of us that toy with parallelism.
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Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the point. You can BUY 8 cores right now for your grandma from Dell.
This means that businesses are buying 64 core machines and up for things like graphics rendering, real-time image processing, and server loads. Hell, the place I work for has a 64 core machine for handling E-mail remotely.
Within a 1-2 years, even people that WANT to run Microsoft products in a high-end environment will not be able to.
Yes, you are correct, Grandma will not have a 256 core machine on Windows 7, and will probably not face that choice. However, many things that she interacts with (her E-mail, or ebay, for instance) will not even be supported.
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Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:5, Insightful)
Which I think shows what I have been saying for awhile now,which is that since Ballmer took over they have lost their way by focusing on the home rather than the enterprise. I mean just look at what they have been throwing their weight behind in the last few years: You have Zune=iPod,Xbox=Apple TV, and there is no way that anyone even thought of business needs once when they made Vista. Aero in a business OS? WTF?
IMHO Microsoft under Ballmer has forgotten what made them the 800 pound gorilla in the first place. It was business that bought the long term contracts and support agreements. It was business that bought huge amounts of hardware every 3 years(thus making their customers the OEMs happy) and finally it was business that sat their OS in front of millions of users who then wanted the same OS at home because that was what they were used to.
Hopefully getting laughed at with the Vista debacle has taught them a few lessons. And if this 256 core limit is strictly for the desktop,and they don't cripple their brand by releasing 5 different versions with different levels of crippling to confuse the buyers,then it might sell well. IMHO there should be no more than 3 versions,Home,Business,and volume licensed Enterprise,but going back to Home and Pro would be best. But with the rate of cores seeming to jump almost weekly if the server has that limit it could really be bad news. After all the Intel roadmap already has 8 and 12 core versions on it,and IIRC that only goes to 2011. With a server it is expected to last at least 5 years,and with the market in a downturn Win7 really needs to shine and cut down on the confusion and BS that we saw with Vista. As someone who has to work on Windows machines I personally hope they got their act together. Because it is bad enough trying to find XP drivers for the Vista boxes that folks bring in to be changed,I don't want to even think about having to do that in 2011.
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Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:4, Insightful)
Xbox=Apple TV .5million?
Rofl... apple tv was such a threat they made xbox? I dunno what fantasy land you live in but xbox was definitely about video games not a flopping piece of garbage that sold what
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Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the point. You can BUY 8 cores right now for your grandma from Dell. This means that businesses are buying 64 core machines and up for things like graphics rendering, real-time image processing, and server loads. Hell, the place I work for has a 64 core machine for handling E-mail remotely.
Yes but once you go past 64 it probably makes more sense to cluster several boxen rather than put all your cores in one basket. Four 64-core boxes clustered can operate at 75% while updating each box independently, where one 256-core box comes to a grinding halt for every security update.
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Enough? (Score:5, Funny)
I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody.
I just put the finishing touches on my 257 core machine, you insensitive clod!
Re:Enough? (Score:5, Funny)
I think there is an error in the summary, I believe that 256 cores is the minimum requirement for Windows 7, not the supported number of cores, so your machine might actually be fine with 7.
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Re:Enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's remember for a moment where most installations of windows will be.
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Re:Enough? (Score:5, Funny)
Let's remember for a moment where most installations of windows will be.
In Africa [slashdot.org]?
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Re:Enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our IT deparment must be nuts for running Windows Compute Cluster on their system [hollandhpc.com] then.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
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Re:Enough? (Score:5, Informative)
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Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
...and you'll need a license for every core.
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Another excuse not to RTFA (Score:5, Funny)
Suggestion for new /. poll. Who has installed Silverlight? (Silverlight required)
No Silverlight here. (Score:5, Insightful)
No Silverlight, no Moonlight, it's bad enough that I've got to deal with Microsoft's broken security zones at work, I'm not going to start running son-of-ActiveX at home.
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Re:No Silverlight here. (Score:4, Informative)
and Silverlight is different from Flash how?
Flash isn't interpreted by an interpreter that includes mechanisms to provide full local application privileges to downloaded code.
Silverlight is based on .NET, which has support for full native applications and uses a security model based on "security zones" that has proven extremely unreliable.
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Re:Another excuse not to RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Opera browser and NO Silverlight here. That said there is no article to read but an interview to watch and the summary is wrong - it only requires Silverlight if you're using Internet Explorer. It streams video (.wmv) just fine to me.
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You don't actually need silverlight (Score:4, Informative)
If you look more closely (just below the description section) there are download links for:
* iPod (MP4)
* MP3
* PSP (MP4)
* WMA
* WMV
* WMV (High)
* Zune
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Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Informative)
The most recent mainline Linux release has integrated mature patches for 4096 core scalability, that have been developed by high performance computing corporations and tested in the field for years. Previous versions were rated for "only" 1024 cores. That still makes 256 look like a Gameboy.
It must be really hard for Microsoft to compete in the HPC space. I almost feel bad for them. Almost.
Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Funny)
The most recent mainline Linux release has integrated mature patches for 4096 core scalability, that have been developed by high performance computing corporations and tested in the field for years. Previous versions were rated for "only" 1024 cores. That still makes 256 look like a Gameboy.
It must be really hard for Microsoft to compete in the HPC space. I almost feel bad for them. Almost.
I think these comparisons have to stop. They give Linux an unfair bias. Linux does not have to spend resources on things like cool names their releases, and wages for people with excellent chairthrowing abilities, so naturally they can instead use the resources on developing software. Come back when each release of Linux is given inspiring names like Linux XP and they have proper chairthrowing capabilities, then we shall make a fair assesment.
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Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Funny)
Come back when each release of Linux [...]
You come back when WGA includes source code and a patch. Until then, I'll be sending my money in the direction of http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/source/ [linuxgenui...antage.org] and http://www.alienos.com/wp-content/uploads/linux_gen_adv_crack.patch [alienos.com]
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Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Informative)
Linux XP [linux-xp.com]
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Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:4, Insightful)
What I still am unclear of, is why you have to bitch and moan? If you don't want to use it, don't use it. Simple as that.
If only everyone who doesn't like Windows did that, Slashdot would be much better off.
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Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a moot point. It's likely that processors will eventually have more than 256 cores, but that's going to take a long time, I'm not necessarily convinced that we will. At some point we will hit the smallest possible transister size and I'm not sure that will leave physical room for all the extra cores without moving to a much larger chip size.
That being said, if we're still using Windows 7 when mainstream computers have more than 256 cores there's something very wrong going on. Linux probably will need that kind of scalability, but it's because of the sort of rolling release schedule where releases are expected to be based upon the previous version, if loosely at times.
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Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Informative)
It won't take too long. Sun's T2 chip has 64 threads, and the T5440 that I have at the office has 4 chips in it, for 256 threads, all in a 4u chassis. Granted, it doesn't run windows, but seriously CMT chips are out and growing fast. BTW, the T2 cpu is only about an inch quare, and it's only done on 65nm tech, not even 40nm.
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MS has a really bad habit of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
.... testing the waters via marketing that which may or not come into some form of existence.
They use the same tactic as well, to help suppress any interest a competitor might be getting with some technology by claiming they are doing the same, where often enough they kill teh support teh competitor was getting while never producing that which they claimed they were doing.
So take this current claim in such a light and you'll know "believe it when you know you have it and are using it, not even a split second before".
Re:Differing theory (Score:5, Informative)
You tell me that making OSes that crash every few hours and have to reboot all the time is part of a "mature industry"?
This is obviously your own personal problem for downloading malware or whatever. Just because you break your operating systems doesn't mean they aren't mature. My last reboot was several months ago (not due to a crash -- last crash was probably a year ago), and the last time I used Windows (2003) I actually found XP quite stable and not in need of any regular rebooting (except for security updates).
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Re:Differing theory (Score:4, Informative)
Lets see why Vista was a train wreck: A) It ran pathetically slow B) It renamed things for no apparent reasons and C) It had too much DRM and other crap. I think that anyone could have told you that it wouldn't go over too well. It wasn't because of things developed that "wouldn't go over well in the marketplace" it was the idiot Ballmer trying to push his agenda that is killing MS over developing decent software.
a) What are you running it on? A P-133? If you'll remember, XP was pretty damned slow when it first came out. Slower, in fact, than Vista (comparatively speaking)
b) Like what? Are you talking about the "My Documents" to "Documents" transition? Like how XP moved your docs folder from C:\My Documents to %user%\ ?
c) Did you really expect Microsoft to not include DRM in Vista? They're in a pretty hard place; they have to bow to multiple governments demands as to what they can and cannot include in their OS. Not only that, but they'd get their arses sued off by the media companies, who would then release their own DRM stuff that would only bog Windows down even more.
Funnily enough, it's only Microsoft that's at the mercy of these organisations... I don't see Apple getting yelled at for including iChat, iMovie, iLife, Quicktime, GarageBand and iTunes with their OS. I also don't see nearly as many users bitching about the actual restrictive DRM in their OS as there are about the unintrusive (WGA notwithstanding) DRM in Vista.
Now, there's MS bashing, and there's MS bashing. I am personally sick of seeing "waaa Vista sucks" posts all over the internet. Did you know that you pay more per chip in a bag of potato chips than you do per megabyte of RAM these days?
Think about that. Suck it up and buy some more RAM and enjoy Vista the way it was supposed to be used - XP ran like shit on less than 64MB of RAM, so why is Vista bashed for having the same comparative requirements?
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Yeah right ... (Score:5, Interesting)
"_the_ final OS"? Funny man (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, there will be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 versions. Features vary. Standard upgrade rules on the first four relative to Vista, then they can premium price the last five as "Corporate", "Super-Corporate", "Hyper-Corporate", "Gold" and "Platinum". Should be simple enough.
Re:eh (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:eh (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh, first off, it was 640kb of ram, and second off it's not even his quote. And additionally I'm not sure who really said it, but it wasn't Gates.
The 640kb wasn't meant in the long term it was meant at that point, a time when they were talking about how to divy up the limited ram. It was the sensible way to proceed, it's just that drivers and such didn't get loaded into the rest of the ram causing huge headaches for gaming.
Even at that point it was asinine to suggest that ram wouldn't become more common in machines. I think at that point they'd already seen ram increase by a few thousand percentage points easy if not more.
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Re:eh (Score:5, Informative)
Except the architecture they chose was pretty much limited to 640, so i don't buy your argument.
Sure, soon afterwards ways around it was found, and eventually broken completely but it was a HARD limit at one point and i don't give Bill credit for seeing beyond his nose due to his 'self importance' attitude, which has burnt him more then once ( but with billions in the bank, its easy to buy your way out of a mistake ).
It was also marketing spin against the competing motorola chips ( and systems ) which could address more. "you really don't need that extra headroom, stick with microsoft'
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Re:eh (Score:5, Informative)
Supposedly it's an urban legend that he even said that, because no one on the internet can actually source the quote. And if the internet can't find it, then it probably doesn't exist. To sate those who want at least something, however, here is a relevant quote from 1989:
"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."
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Re:eh (Score:5, Informative)
I've read that it was an IBM engineer who said it. Could be another urban legend.
Anyway, Gates denied saying it: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484 [wired.com] (Oldest link - it's from 1997 - that I could find.)
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
Gates goes on a bit about 16-bit computers and megabytes of logical address space, but the kid's question (will this boy never work at Microsoft?) clearly rankled the billionaire visionary.
"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
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Re:Memory scaling (Score:5, Informative)
Linux supports NUMA which largely solves that problem, and ccNUMA which solves it even better. It's all about locality once again. Linux has been running on multi-thousand CPU machines for years, and has been optimised and refined by the stakeholders of those projects, so it's not a toy project to show off.
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Re:Memory scaling (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Can't Agree (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Can't Agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Because people who get the joke are going to laugh and move on. Only people who don't get the joke, or who want to make a lame follow-on joke, are going to hit the submit button. (Or people who are annoyed by the previous groups.)
Self-selection bias explains a lot about the stuff you find on the Internet.
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Re:256 cores... pfft (Score:5, Informative)
256 cores means that it can be stored in a 16-byte flag
Er... there are 128 bits in 16 bytes. HTH.
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