How workable is Vista?

Consider the following products:

1940s - ENIAC "Electronic Brain": Memory = 0.02K. Clock = 0.06 MHz. Cost = $5,000,000.00+ Weight = 60,000 Lbs. Power = 140,000 Watts

1960s - IBM System 360 Mainframe Computer: Memory = 64K. Clock = 1.3 MHz. Cost = $1,000,000.00 Weight = 2.000 Lbs. Power = 2,000 Watts.

1980s - Commodore 128 Personal Computer: Memory = 128K. Clock = 2 MHz. Cost = $300.00 Weight = 10 Lbs. Power = 70 Watts.

2000s - Mattel high-end toy CPU: Memory = 512K. Clock = 3.3 MHz. Cost = Less than $1.00 Weight = Less than 1 oz. Power = Less than 0.1 Watt.

What will we be running in the 2020s?

Reply to
Guy Macon
Loading thread data ...

VMWare Workstation running under Vista or Linux running the appropriate old OS runs every kind of old software I have been able to throw at it.

Reply to
Guy Macon

So you are saying it's *not* a good plan to replace a two dollar deck of playing cards with a multi-thousand dollar PC running Solitaire? What a concept! :)

Reply to
Guy Macon

If Microsoft only put the DRM in Media Center Edition, then you could circumvent the DRM by repacing Media Center Edition with one of the other editions.

Reply to
Guy Macon

I think one trend is ubicomp

formatting link
You'll not buy single computers, but just computing power, maybe integrated in clothes etc., which integrates nicely in your environment. And if they manage to build quantum computers and develop better light switches and holographic memory, everything will be smaller by magnitudes again. Maybe not in 10 years, but in 20 year. Nice challenges and possiblities for software developers like me.

--
Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Reply to
Frank Buss

I have a wee hope to be able to cling to XP until I retire. The idea may not be too far out. The only reason I decommissioned a 10+ year old NT4 box here was that there were some signs of impending hardware failure, worn out fans and so on. Still got it, might fix it up again for lab use. One of the other PCs around here runs Win2K and is still humming along just fine. Must be 6-7 years old now.

Old SW is sometimes a blessing. Bought a CAD package from a liquidator, for about ten (!) bucks. 2-3 versions back, total overkill for me with

3D and all that, type the license request in, license key arrived within 60secs and, voila. All I needed was AutoCad file format compliance with editing privileges and now I've got that. For ten bucks ...
--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Joerg

If you set up a standard starting disk with, say, XP (and of course all your favorite apps) on it, register your cpy of XP, get all the updates, run "Windows Genuine Advantage" and then use XXCOPY (XXCOPY, not XCOPY) to clone it multiple times, all the cloned disks will boot and run just fine.

Reply to
Guy Macon

Reminds me of "talk-thru". Many of my classmates bought these expensive Walkman type devices, effectively tuning themselves out of social life. Plus depleting pretty much their whole savings. Then came _the_ breakthrough: A button that allowed the wearer of said device to communicate with the people around him or her. Just like it was before the Walkman came to market. What a concept!

Of course now that privilege of socialization commanded premium pricing for the device and regular purchases of batteries. That's called progress ...

Vista isn't all that different. Remember when writing a letter required a pencil for, oh, maybe 50 cents? Now you first have to make sure that there is at least 1GB of RAM. If you want to sketch something up the pencil needed no upgrades. With Vista plus a graphics or CAD package chances are that those 1GB aren't going to cut it.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Joerg

Hmm. Didn't know about that. Keep in mind that I do NOT run with any other disk in the system, so there is no single "boot disk" that is kept in the machine. There is only the one disk, itself.

That said, and assuming I understand you correctly, I'm going to try out your suggestion. If it works out well enough, then that will greatly enhance WinXP in my use here.

Sincere thanks, Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

That is a specious argument. The purpose of a microwave is to *heat* food. In fact, part of the utility of a microwave is measured by how fast it can heat food which means how much power it can consume. So of course it uses a lot of power... duh!

PCs use a lot less power than a space heater, or a heat pump or... well, not a lot of other electrical stuff in the home actually.

A refrigerator uses less power than a PC. A HiFi uses less power, even if you have it cranked up to anything below the threshold of pain. My TV uses less power than a PC and even the old fashioned 100 Watt incandescent lightbulb I have lighting the room uses less power than a PC.

I think the point is that PCs are finally headed in the direction of using less power. New software, such as Vista, requires even more processing, memory and storage which push the power demands back up.

Let's leave microwave ovens out of this...

Rick

Reply to
rickman

If Vista is "off-limits" in your office, how do you buy new hardware? It is pretty hard to buy a new laptop with anything other than Vista now that Dell has quit selling XP. I can build my own desktop and run any OS I want, but I can't do much about a laptop.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

Easy: Go to the next PC wrench shop. They'll build whatever you like. Or order the pieces including something like this:

formatting link

Heck, if you'd like to go totally retro and rock-bottom cost:

formatting link
IIUC it's for 20 clients so that would come to about $17 per seat. Can't beat that I guess.

I could imagine Dell losing quite a bit of revenue, starting yesterday. $50 more for the "privilege' of not wanting Vista can push very savvy buyers over to the local markets. Of which there are plenty.

Old American saying: If you don't listen to what your customers want, someone else will.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Joerg

... snip MCs over long lines ...

Maybe better. That might train some users. BTW, the actual recommended limit is 80, better is 72, and I consider 67 superior.

--
 [mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) 
 [page]: 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
CBFalconer

If you ever do run into a a DOS app that won't run on XP, or you want to run the app in a window instead of full screen, or you want to run your DOS apps on OS X, Linux, BSD, PalmOS, PlayStation Portable, OS/2, BeOS or Risc OS, just run DOSBox:

[
formatting link
] [
formatting link
] [
formatting link
] [
formatting link
]
--
Guy Macon
Reply to
Guy Macon

Are you trying to destroy the economy? The PC requires men working extensive hours preparing the solitaire software. In turn, they require other PCs, and much compilation and linking software, which provide employment to system programmers, who also require PCs. Then there is the whole replacement market, handling such things as memory, disk drives, etc. The whole system is feeding people all over the world. Not to mention the MicroSnerdians.

By contrast, the deck of cards requires little more than a man with an axe in the woods.

--
 [mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) 
 [page]: 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
CBFalconer

That's the configuration I have been using, and it works fine.

One thing to keep in mind is that, while the resulting cloned disks work fine as the only disk in the system, you need a different setup to *make* the clones. Firstly, obviously you have to have two hard drives to clone one to another. With XXCopy, they can be on the same machine or on two machines connected with ethernet. Secondly, you can't boot from the target hard drive, because it will be competely erased and all data replaced with a clone of the source drive. Thirdly, you can't boot from the target hard drive, because Windos won't let XXCopy access some system files. My solution was to partition my hard drives into two partitions

-- Data and OS -- and to install a copy of XP on each. Thus I boot to C: on my two computers to clone D: over the network, then I boot to D: on my two computers to clone C: over the network.

Reply to
Guy Macon

That's the configuration I have been using, and it works fine.

One thing to keep in mind is that, while the resulting cloned disks work fine as the only disk in the system, you need a different setup to *make* the clones. Firstly, obviously you have to have two hard drives to clone one to another. With XXCopy, they can be on the same machine or on two machines connected with ethernet. Secondly, you can't boot from the target hard drive, because it will be competely erased and all data replaced with a clone of the source drive. Thirdly, you can't boot from the source hard drive, because Windos won't let XXCopy access some system files. My solution was to partition my hard drives into two partitions

-- Data and OS -- and to install a copy of XP on each. Thus I boot to C: on my two computers to clone D: over the network, then I boot to D: on my two computers to clone C: over the network.

--
misc.business.product-dev: a Usenet newsgroup 
about the Business of Product Development.
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Guy Macon

Then it is not a solution for me. I won't permit ANY access at all -- even entirely accidental via some crash. The drives must be completely bootable.

Oh, well. You almost made me happy. :)

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Or, perhaps, I should say "maybe." I'm honestly not sure I understood your explanation.

I need rackable disks. Yes, I can hook up two on the machine at once, so I can handle performing a copy from one disk to another without a network involved. But the result of the operation, however involved it may be, must be a separately bootable drive that I can label, install various software tools onto, update with _different_ drivers as needed, and then develop on for decades. I may, at times, need to keep a second copy of the drive which must be a complete image copy -- sector by sector -- so that installed software which may use special hidden marks on the drive for legitimate authorization (I try very hard to avoid such things, but some customers may insist on certain tools that do such nasty things to me) don't cause trouble if I shift to the backup drive when the primary one fails.

If some software crash (or virus) occurs and, as a result, some random bit of code just happens to be lucky enough to enter ring 0, take complete control of my computer, and accidentally or intentionally erases every byte from every sector, trashes the partitions and all data in other partitions, and otherwise messes with the sector headers on the drive as well, that I can just forget the drive and grab the backup and slap it in and reboot from it or else go on to another project's drive and reboot. And there should be no possibility of injury to other projects or their operating system environments, etc.

Does all the cloning operations you mention achieve that if I want it to?

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

The Visual C++ compiler works on Vista. The VC++ 6.0 debugger doesn't seem to work,

--

formatting link
Sequence diagram based embedded systems design tool

Reply to
EventHelix.com

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.