What happens if the devil swallows you?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

As a previous user of a Danger designed cellphone (which my son now uses without a data plan) it came to me as a surprise that their servers died and with them all the data from their Sidekick users.

To compound said surprise I discover (I guess I've been living under a rock) that no other than Microsoft bought Danger for US$500 millions about a year ago, and now some supposed insiders allege that the server crash was sabotaged by an insider:

Dilger quotes his inside source as saying the Pink project existed before Danger was acquired and that contractual obligations delayed Danger's engineers from immediately joining Pink. When they did, the source said, "innumerable bad decisions had already been made by clueless idiots."
[snip]
The source says one scenario for the problem could be that Microsoft wanted to use its own technology to run Sidekick -- what it often calls "eating its own dog food" -- and blew an attempt to replace Sidekick's Oracle Real Application Cluster.Dilger says there is evidence to suggest "there was no reason for a major transition or upgrade to be occurring" because Microsoft was interested in Danger's phone expertise and not the Sidekick service. His conclusion: "intentional sabotage by a disgruntled employee."

Is it that hard to believe that elements inside M$ would love to kill the Sidekick when the last version of Windows mobile just went out to receive a shower of criticisms on the clunkyness of the system and it's growing irrelevance to confront RIMs Blackberry's, Iphones, and the Android system?
---
Why do I remember Borland now?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Why d'ya think I went out of my way to *avoid* anything by M$ or Crapple, when I went shopping for a new smartphone?



I love's me new G1, I do... multiple locations for me precious data.  This is basic stuff, firmly hammered home since 1982....

[ivor]

Resistance is futile!  You will be assimilated.

We need a Borg smiley.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

The G1 rulez! And as time passes it becomes more and more useful without fear from Apple's closed model regarding their systems.
---
On a marginally related note I was reading a thread in the M$ forums about their problem while moving files on Vista (which happens to a significant percentage of installations) and to my surprise the problem apparently still subsists in 7.

I guess I won't be upgrading to 7 either.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I guess I won't be upgrading to 7 either.

Everything I read about 7 is more or less positive with a side of "gotcha".  Fairly typical of M$, when I think about it.

But, the main consensus is 7 is what Vista *should* have been, had the marketing idiots allowed the developers time to get it right.... 

I skipped buying Vista.  I had traded labor for a copy of XP, so I did not really pay for it, either---but, I'll be getting 7 from a local computer builder-- at cost, and the el'cheapo "OEM" version, too.

It seems that the newest hardware needs 7 to make it work as it should... and my old box is old enough, that a total-re-vamp is in order.  I haven't done that in years and years.

I may even buy a full-on kit, this time out, instead of piece-meal like I'm used to; by that, I mean: motherboard, cpu, memory, video, hard drive. 

7 allows full use of more RAM than I can afford-- easily uses 8 gig RAM, I'm told.  Contrast with XP, where 2gig is the max used (anything more is wasted-- ignored by the OS....XP/32, obviously.  XP/64?  Not compatible enough to frack with, or so I'm told).

Dammit, if only Linux would let me play my beloved computer games.... I'd tell MicroSquish to Go Fish, and go full-on Linux.

*sigh*

[ivor]

Wine is a lot better than it used to be.  You should Xperamint!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

XP can handle 3.2GB of RAM, XP 64 can handle more. In fact Vista 32 has the same memory limitation of XP  and only Vista 64 does more, so I wouldn't be surprised if 7 is the same thing.

Of course to use 64 bits you must use a 64 bit processor (all AMD since Athlon 64 and Intel since Core 2*). Also if you really want to use the whole shebang ATi (now part of AMD) just released the 5000 series which supports DirectX 11 (W7 only), the 5770 and 5750 seem quite a big bang for your buck or if you want more you can take any of the 5850 and 5870 for a price.

If you have money, buy an good SSD for the OS and a big HD for files (leaving the swap in the HD), the performance is really incredible with those things.

* some Pentium 4 processors are 64 bit capable but it depends on the model.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Sorry?  What is "SSD" please?

[The Meromorph]

Solid State Device. Bit like an SD card. but internal.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Solid State Device. Bit like an SD card. but internal.

aaah.  Thanks.

Actually?

I tried that experiment:  I have a couple of older laptops, and I purchased a holder for a compact flash card, when when plugged into the drive's bus, acts like a hard drive.  The thing fit into a laptop's drive bay.

But...I found that the performance was worse than with spinning metal-- much worse.  The flash cards were mainline brands, fast, etc.  (32gig in size-- plenty for what I wanted).

That project is currently on back-burner, until I can figure out how to disable the RAM cache-- the computers have plenty of RAM for what we want, and that seems to be the bottleneck.

(Win2k is the OS I'm trying-- but maybe I should go to Linux on these... Hmmmm.  Just now thought of that.)

In any case, I'm underwhelmed by SSD's as they are currently implemented.

[Bluenose]

I have worked on a couple of Toshiba notebooks with solid state hard drives and I was very impressed with the performance.  They were extremely fast to boot and general pergformance was excellent, much dfaster than the same models with spinning metal.  One each of these machines were running XP and Vista (32 bit).

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Bob, SSD (or essentially a Hard Disk made of flash memory) performance depends on the controller, so using a regular USB/SD/CompactFlash/etc will never be the same as having a SSD. On the same token the best SSDs have a better controller than the cheap ones, currently the best on the market are Intel (and more expensive) followed closely by a little known company called Indilinx which are available in the OCZ Vertex series of SSDs (and now other companies are using them).

Anandtech has series of very detailed articles about SSDs worth reading if you want to learn more on the subject.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Anandtech has series of very detailed articles about SSDs worth reading if you want to learn more on the subject.

Too bad:  all they offer are SATA.... no good for an older laptop.  Price is not as bad as I'd seen about 6 months ago, when I was messing around with these things.  But SATA is a deal-breaker.

Oh well.

_________

Your second link explains what's going on, and explained why my experience was so poor.   I doubt a controller will fix that issue, unless a fundamentally new underlying tech is found.

You've got me thinking about those would-be no-moving-parts laptop project again.... I must dig them up and continue my work-- even slow, the SSD is superior to spinning metal in a rough-suspension work truck (my original reason for beginning the project-- spinning metal crashes too much in these trucks).

I must take a second hard look at Linux-- I betcha you could tweak it, so that memory-cache is eliminated.  All I really need for those 'tops is spreadsheet, document-writer and occasional 'net.  Oh, and PDF file  reading is a must (technical docs, natch).  I know all of those are available on Linux-- in fact, I already use OpenOffice  and Firefox on my Windoze boxes, so I wouldn't have to learn anything new....

hmmmm.

This weekend, I really must try it out...

[ivor]

You can get those flash cards for cameras that are much faster than ordinary flash drives.  They are much more expensive though.  Then you can run Knoppix from a CD or a DVD and be able to save your configuration, files and such.  You shouldn't even need a hard drive.

[Griffin NoName]

You shouldn't even need a hard drive.

Roll on the day when we can say you shouldn't even need a computer