Friday 3 July 2009, 3:20 PM
PreSales Canabalize Retailers' Opening Day Sales!
(My attempt at writing a tabloid headline.)
A Very Interesting Microsoft event just occurred. Microsoft is offering at a deep discount and through direct retail sale their FUTURE mainstay product. Since I deliberately avoid paying attention to Microsoft outside of office hours, I don't remember if they've ever done that before. Not quite a going-out-of-business sale but certainly one that ought to p.o. a number of the big computer manufacturers.
They aren't doing it in a small way either. Microsoft.com has the announcement taking up about a third of the top of the page. The expiration date of the deal though is only found in the small print on another page detailing pre-sales.
Win 7 Home at $49 US is a loss-leader for sure. It will cover the price to the OEMs, shipping & handling and their margin whatever it is. That is going to eat into Visaster sales between now and past Opening Day sales for DELL, HP etc. My guess is that Microsoft has already covered their backside with the major OEMs by offering to pay them part of the take of the pre-sales. I would suggest they do it as an apportioned measure of the opening week's worth of sales. (Since I'm offering free business advice! Ha!) By the end of the first week everybody will have forgotten the pre-sales.
Offering to hand out copies of Win7 to purchasers of new Visaster equipped systems is also part of this deal.
Why buy a new computer if you can put the deeply discounted Win 7 DVD on your old Visaster hardware? This deal though only appeals to power users, geeks and tech-savvy early adopters. (Was that redundant?)
Maybe they think they can generate some pre-opening chatter especially from the ones who down-loaded the RC.
I think Microsoft is running a little scared. They want to jazz the numbers with the pre-sales counts added to the numbers for the opening day stats like a movie opening up on a weekend. In fact Oct 22 is a Thursday, the traditional Movie Opening day in the US.
In some ways I feel like Microsoft is trying to do everything it can to erase the bad ju-ju they got with Visaster. Maybe this time they won't need to run those idiotic "Mojave" and Seinfeld ads! If we get lucky, maybe the ads will be even worse!
Tuesday 30 June 2009, 2:13 AM
Windows 7 on a Read-only Flash Drive?
Considering that the price of a 4GB USB flash drive has been as low as 5 dollars on close-out specials, financially it wouldn't make sense UNLESS Microsoft decides to go into the Flash RAM business. The full Win 7 Ultra install DVD is 3.9GB large. Even stripped down it will be better than 2 GB so 4GB sounds like the right size for the Win7 USB Flash drive.
The price per Win 7 Starter license I was seeing for netbooks was around $3 each license in volume. That would mean the price of USB flash drives need to be much lower than that to make it possible to do economically.
Then think about what it would take to make a mass assembly line operation to clone the image onto USB flash drives thousands or millions of times! I suppose you could use something like Ghost to make 128 copies at a time through a massively wicked USB "router". The time it would take to plug in and out all the USB flash drives would be tremendous!
Actually its been done sort of by SanDisk. They have a number of U3-based USB flash drives that have a "read-only" partition that plays like a CDR. When its up and running, the USB flash drive looks like 2 drives, a CDR and a HDD. It has some software on it that makes Windows XP Pro work better when it comes time to unmount the USB flash drive. Actually fairly nice.
I don't know how they are doing it. There is likely some sort of JTAG software interface hidden in "plain sight" connected to the USB signal pins. With special commands to special hidden registers, part of the drive is marked as read only.
If you delete the partitions you kill the U3 interface. If you are careful, the read-write partition can be formatted in NTFS and it coexists nicely with the U3 CD-ROM type partition.
I could see SanDisk turning out millions of Win7 USB flash disks on the U3 read-only "CDR"-like partition for Microsoft. But to do it for a price the netbook owners will be willing to pay, hmmm, I don't know about that.
I think most likely Microsoft is going to make the netbook owners that want it on their old netbooks eat the price. It probably won't be available in anything other than download ISO form. Buy your own USB drive. Buy the download on Shop Microsoft. Copy the image over to the Flash. Use an updated tool based on ufdprep.exe to prep the flash drive. It will have a file converter program that will open enough of the image to mount a bootstrap loader on the netbook and then mount and install the ISO onto the system hard drive or internal flash drive or SSD. (Sounds like a job for a really small install of Linux!)
Don't expect this function above to be available until late in the year until after the retailers get an idea how netbook sales with Win 7 pre-installed are doing. Microsoft will think of the USB based install to be a loss-leader, a way to get users hooked on Windows 7 so they'll buy it pre-installed on their next computer or as shrink-wrap for their old desktops or regular laptops. That's what the Win7 RC is by the way, a form of digital "crack" to get the neighborhood geeks all hooked. Call it Windows 7 Express!
Its prettier than XP Pro but not faster. It is definitely better than Vista on substantial hardware, like a dual core CPU with 4 GB of RAM.
I have no clue how well it will work stripped down enough to work on a netbook. I've already had my taste of "Windows-7-crack". Would I buy it?
No.
Sunday 28 June 2009, 8:13 PM
Constricted Internet Connections
The MJ event and the Iranian and Chinese governments' choke-holds on its citizen's Internet connections demonstrate in two different ways how vulnerable network endpoint access really is for the entire world's Internet users. The death of a single individual managed to do in some measure worldwide what paranoid governments attempt to achieve within their own borders. To the user within those borders the effect of remote server congestion is the same as local government deep packet inspection.
No Internet server is directly connected to an end-user, there is a lot of intervening hardware and software impeding the flow of data. Users at the mercy of their government's control of the network will experience varying degrees of responsiveness from various remote servers. Between governments and commercial vendors controlling or regulating Internet access and unusual events bringing large sections of the network to a crawl or a complete halt, there isn't a truly open, full-speed network connection for any Internet user in every server situation.
Compounding the troubles on the network itself, the existence of zombies in parasitic botnets that siphon away even more computing cycles on infected systems contribute to the data flow throttling. Even non-infected systems are affected due to the need to run malware protection software and the effects of DDOS attacks on popular network servers. Anti-malware running in any of the server computers or routers in the data paths that make up the network connection serving the end-user likewise impede the data flow.
For typical Internet users, the result is varying speeds of access to differently sourced servers. For any given connection speed to an ISP there will be an constriction of data that can vary due to:
where the data is sourced;
the connection management policy on the server (does it impose throttling, limit the number of connections from a single IP, etc);
the content of the data (in deep packet inspection) ;
the paranoia of the local government;
commercial interests of the ISP itself (for instance, does the data displayed come with ISP generated advertising?);
is the connection being dynamically shuffled through different paths by routers? (ie a tenuous routing or using something like TOR will cause more traffic delays);
the effects of anti-malware software hosted at the ISP necessary to prevent the user from complaining;
and finally: the effects of the anti-malware software on the user's computer.
From an engineering perspective this suggests the twin concepts of network-access “impedance” and “data device impedance”. A low network access impedance would be when the data servers are providing data at the highest speed possible up the limit of the user's connection speed. If the connection never matches the connection speed then there is the effect of the “network access impedance”. Most of the network access impedance causes are out of control of the User.
Within the User's computer, the speed at which the data can be utilized would be a measure of how fast the data downloaded is displayed on screen, played through the speakers, or saved to disk. The concept could be applied to broadband, other wireless and wired network connections. This impedance could be different for every connection or connection type established by the user but is likely to be similar for most connections.
Some would argue that “network impedance” is simply a measure of system bandwidth. The problem with labeling it as “bandwidth” does not take into account the fact that the User might not be paying for a fully unlimited speed connection or that connected servers might be deliberately throttling speed. Most ISPs offer slower connections at discounts. Users on a budget will buy slower service. In addition, the data sources or the equipment in between the User and the server might be deliberately delaying the data stream. Presumably two systems with the same data device impedance would have similar network service quality when accessing the Internet through the exact same ISP connection.
A measure of specific system impedance with a known set of applications running and anti-malware measures running might give a more useful figure of merit, the “data device impedance”, to the potential Customer/User. The ability of the device drivers, the design of the radio components in the wireless Ethernet adapter and the operating system to deliver the desired data product to the User will probably be the major components of this “data device impedance”. A good chip set with efficient drivers will have a low impedance.
The release of the Intel Atom provoked this line of reasoning because it is designed to be specifically a single threaded processor. The ATOM question is; “How does the processor fare when compared to multi-threaded processors when running Internet related applications?” A number of reviewers were comparing the ATOM to (in one case a quad core CPU !) low power Celerons, VIA CPUs etc. Even in cases where the CPU speed was the same or nearly so, the tests did not really get into the operating mode of the intended device for the ATOM, a pda or netbook processor.
In areas of electrical engineering, the most efficient transfer of power occurs when the impedance of the source (Internet connection) and the impedance of the power sink (netbook or desktop computer) match. This might be stretching the analogy too far. However it stands to reason that a User intending to buy a netbook for an networking environment he's most likely to encounter could save quite a bit of cash by buying enough CPU and OS capacity to match his probable networking environment and not more. Especially true if the networking is less than optimum. Along with CPU speed, a “data device impedance” might be a useful characteristic.
Wednesday 24 June 2009, 4:57 AM
Compact Hot Flashes
No not a new medical condition.
Well I spent the day at home yesterday working on a code project for a system release I'm about to do. It was a nice change of pace from having to ride home @ 5 or 6 or even 7PM in a hot car for at least the first 15 minutes or so. Hot meaning the freaking flesh frying 150 degrees the seats get up to in the wonderful 95 plus days we've been having for the last three weeks! Its so nice now that SUMMER is here for real, not!
I've done some experiments with CPU boards running in 120 degree heat. I have an oven at work that can be controlled plus/minus 1 degree F or about ½ degree C up to 150F. Turns out that not many CPU boards continue to run with crappy consumer grade Compact Flash drives as the hard drive media. There really is a reason to pay extra for good Industrial temp range Compact Flash drives. Obviously this is work related experimentation. (But cleverly, it applies to my home projects as well!)
I'm trying to see if there are some high-quality consumer Compact Flash drives that might be able to take Industrial temperature ranges especially on the top end. Of course there are other issues that are intruding into this test.
Determining whether or not the NAND or NOR memory cells are single level (SLC) or multi-level cells (MLC). As much as I'd like to have the expanded size of the MLC based CF drives, the scary part is the ECC algorithms used in the MLC drives might trash executable files with certain bit errors but not bother JPGs or PNGs files at all. Meaning they really are good media for media. Eh hemmm.
Most of the Compact Flashes out there play lip service to the specifications setup by SanDisk, the company that invented the form-factor and the interface specifications. With a good socket and short leads to the IDE interface, some of them seem to run fine at ATA33 speed, very few to be sure. Most seem to just barely make ATA speed or ISA bus speed for the real slow ones.
Another stinky trick I've seen is that the CF parts will work at 5 Volts to full speed but not at 3.3V. Really tacky. They are supposed to work at both voltages interchangeably.
At home the CF will be the drive for my solar energy data collection/management system.
The problem with calling up my favorite Industrial parts vendor is that the CF drives I know will work cost $90 to $150 depending on the size of the drive. I'm angling for at least 2GB so I can put a full desktop on it to start with. Eventually it will have an honest command line Linux server install.
I found some old low-power 500 MHz P3 CPUs chips that I would like to try in the board. The current CPU runs at 1GHz and runs at about 25 watts. The low power ones are supposed to be good for 12 watts and max out at 500 MHz, so we'll see.
So I was wondering if I could leave the salvaged SBC I've talked about before outside in the hot weather. Part of the process was trying to install a Linux distro on a Compact Flash and letting it cook in the lovely spring weather we've been having lately. Obviously I wasn't fast enough and the weather has gone way past “lovely”. Well I get to do the worst case test first. I was thinking about running it off a battery and a solar panel in the eventual installation. For the test, I'll run it off an AC/DC power supply and hope BOTH of them survive the heat.
Tuesday 16 June 2009, 3:22 AM
Clonezilla, here to stay, not fade away!*
Now that I've downloaded it and started testing it, I'm really impressed with Clonezilla. Running as a “Linux live CD” iso image just over 100 megabytes large, one method touted is to operate it on a USB drive pen. Since all the test-victims in-house have CDROM/DVD Rom drives, I tested it purely as a CDROM image and it works exactly as advertised. Since I have tried booting a Linux “Live CDROM” off a USB drive before, I didn't think it would be much of an issue. But I will be testing it that way soon.
There are multiple file formats supported. FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2 and ext3 all were listed and that sold me right off. Drive-to-drive, partition-to-image, drive-to-image, multi-cast and peer-to-peer-casting and probably a couple other methods that I missed are all possible.
I tried booting up the CDROM image on 4 different computers with 4 different NICs and all netted up without any issues. I used a Linksys router as a DHCP server for IP addresses et al and it worked each time without a hitch. It also accepts multi-cast DHCP addresses from a Linux server.
Debbietoo served as the server/target of the Clonezilla distro (http://www.clonezilla.org/) booted up on both paqman (old P3 Compaq Enpro with Ubuntu 9.04) and the Windows XP Pro box (P4) and got viable clones out of both of them. There is a script that gets made as part of the process that can be used for the same cloning operation at another time, but I haven't tried copying it from the RAM image to debbietoo for future use.
I've been using the Clonezilla CDROM iso as the boot disk to make the clones manually. The best trick would be to host the iso in a separate partition on each of the systems you want to clone and have a way to trigger a reboot into that partition at a specified time. Cron and at on the Linux and Windows systems would work for the scheduling. The rest could be handled by writing or renaming some files to cause them to be executed on the reboot. As long as you have enough drive space for the images, this could give you a way to do a full “backup” without user intervention required.
Automatic clones of system drives has been something I've wanted to do for some time now. It just never percolated up to the top of the “to-do” stack. Its at the top now. My son's Windows XP Pro box has become practically unusable AGAIN. I've spent a lot of time copying and cleaning drive space. His computer is not going back onto the Internet before I get a clone of the clean system so I can just “drop” it back onto the C drive and reboot. Clonezilla looks a lot like the tool I need to do it.
The interface is not as “clean” as Norton Ghost but it also doesn't have the dozens of command line options of Norton that allow for scripting but make it almost impossible to use right away. Most of the options are text menu driven so it is easier to use.
In the compression department, it doesn't use a proprietary scheme so single files can be extracted using the gzip or other zip type utility.
The image itself becomes a folder with files inside it. The bulk of the image becomes a single compressed file, or a series of sections sized by user's choice in the compression choice made by the user. Some are heavily compressed but slow but one option is no compression at all, which of course is the fastest. Going from Debian 4.0 on a Celeron server 2.4 GHz (debbietoo) to a Windows XP Home edition bare metal restore on a P4 1.2 GHz took an hour and a half over an Ethernet 100TX copper connection. The original image was over 33GB.
II haven't tested the entire feature set yet of Clonezilla but already its a keeper.
* a rip from Buddy Holly
Wednesday 10 June 2009, 4:57 AM
Microsoft, Internet Pirates and Web 2.0+
Microsoft needs to do something truly pro-active to rid the Internet of Windows zombies. The programming design of Windows from the beginning has been flawed. Consider the resulting bot-net zombies to be car-jacked vehicles on the “Information highway”. Now consider the manipulative digital sociopathic “car-jackers” that control the botnets as practicing a true form of piracy. Bot-net piracy is potentially more economically damaging than anything the movie industry in Hollywood and the RIAA could conceive of.
Beyond the easy to appreciate theft of massive distributed CPU cycles while riding on millions of users' computers, the bot-nets also consume tremendous chunks of Internet bandwidth with their email spam, malware and server crashing behavior. Overall the cost to the entire Internet consumer market probably exceed all the payouts to date made to the Somali pirates.
Microsoft Windows project managers over the years obviously have focused their programming staff on goals other than operating system security. Microsoft owns the software on 90% of the desktops, probably approaching 50% of all the various servers and an untold percentage of all the applications running behind the pathetic software firewalls on various forms of Windows. Yet outside of Windows Updates and/or Microsoft Updates, there is no real mechanism for even an informed user to be able to repair his/her system after becoming Internet roadkill and a menace to all the other Internet users.
Outside of shackling the typical user's computer with third-party anti-malware software, there is no real security product that addresses the real issue of the operating system, the code itself. In this regard, most Internet users truly have been shafted by their vendor - Microsoft. Users should be able to buy an off-the-shelf computer with an operating system product that is secure and able to fend off intrusion or at the very least report to Microsoft that it has been infected. Why bother to put in Remote Assistance with a Microsoft logon user if it doesn't do anything useful?
The typical Windows user who has had his/her hardware compromised can't really be considered the cause of the bot-nets. The typical Windows user hasn't a freaking clue that his system has been snatched by a pirate and is running as a part of a DDOS or has begun vomiting email spam. Worse, the user even if aware doesn't know what to do to fix the infestation.
Even if the user were inclined and technically savvy-enough to do everything possible to prevent the home system from being subverted, most users are thwarted from regaining control of their system outside of wiping the drive and re-installing the exact same (or worse - an earlier service pack) version of the operating system!
What is really scary is that these same Microsoft programmers and project managers in congregate are writing operating system code that either starts or ends up as code in server applications. One day this same code will begin floating around on the vaporous flotillas of real and virtual “cloud” servers. What's to keep the digital-sociopaths from planting their Jolly Roger on those systems as well?
Putting Windows Defender into Visaster is good but its still an reactive, “after-the-fact” add-on, not an intrinsic and secure means of actively preventing the operating system from getting snagged in the first place by a pirate.
The solution is easy. Outlaw the EULA. Do not allow Microsoft to duck its responsibility for the chaos they have indirectly created on the Internet. Force Microsoft to operate a free service to wipe its operating systems on Internet connected desktops clean.
If Microsoft wants to get into “Web 2.0 cloud services”, a truly wonderful and extremely useful service would be a “Wipe-Clean Windows” website. The user connects up and the system is scoured clean remotely. If Microsoft doesn't want to operate the site then for a fee paid by Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and Zone Labs might. A few years or decades spent paying for wiping clean millions of computers will provide the economic incentive Microsoft seems to need to get the job done right.
Think of it as getting rid of the Tribbles as on Star Trek! Even the Linux users on the Internet would approve of that!
Friday 5 June 2009, 11:16 AM
DIY Dual Atom Nettop System
As this is my first week of unemployment, I decided to spend some time assembling a low cost desktop system for simple tasks like email, web browsing and light office work. Sounds like a desktop version of a netbook, so I suppose nettop is an appropriate name, and I saw it used a few times as I was looking for components.
The first thing I found was the biggest surprise - a Dual Atom motherboard from Intel (D945GCLF2)! I didn't even know Intel made a dual Atom CPU, perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention? Anyway, in addition to the CPU it has the 945 GC Express chipset, which includes a GMA 950 graphic controller. Sounds even more like a netbook now, doesn't it? It also has 10/100/1000 LAN, four USB 2.0 ports, and of course the usual array of VGA, Parallel, Serial, and PS/2 connections. In fact the latter is another reason that I chose this board, because I still have quite a few PS/2 keyboards and trackballs around here that I would like to use with it, rather than having to buy everything new. It also has both ATA and SATA connections, and a single DDR2 667/533 SDRAM slot.
The motherboard form factor is Mini-ITX / MicroATX compatible, so I got an A+ Cupid 1 case. It is made to match the Intel board, so it has all the correct plugs and connectors, plus it adds front-panel sockets for two more USB ports, and a 56-in-1 memory card reader. I particularly liked the fact that this case uses an external power supply, like a laptop, which keeps the size and weight of the case down.
All I then had to add was 2 GB of DDR2 memory and a 160 GB SATA disk, and I had a complete system - total cost less than SFr 300, about 175 British Pounds. Note that there is no operating system listed - adding XP Professional would have cost SFr 160, which increases the cost by 50%!!! No thanks, I'll happily load a variety of Linux distributions, and I'll feel good about not paying the Microsoft Surcharge for my computer.
Plugging it all together took about an hour, being very careful at all times to double-check everything as I went. Almost all of the plugs are keyed, and many are color coded, so it is pretty easy to get it all right. Once I had it assembled, I connected a keyboard, mouse and display that I dragged out of the closet, and turned it on. The power on tests completed normally, and I got into the BIOS setup screen. Everything looked fine, it reported the correct amount of memory and the disk drive. I connected the USB CD/DVD drive that I use on the netbooks, put in the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD, and rebooted.
Wow! It booted right up! Ubuntu saw all the hardware just fine, and even reported the CPU as a Quad-Atom system! Intel says that the hyperthreading in the Atom causes the Dual CPU to appear as four processors, so that is normal. I went ahead and installed Ubuntu, and was finished with that in 15 minutes, as usual. Boot the installed system, do my normal configuration and package installations, and it looks very, very good. Programs start and run quickly, including Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.
Next I installed Mandriva One 2009.1 (Spring), and it was equally as easy and smooth to install. I chose to install their standard KDE version this time, since I have the Gnome version installed on my laptops.
Next up a bit bigger challenge - the Fedora 11 Preview. I have tried to install this on my laptops with no success, it always either crashes or hangs during installation. This time, though, it installed without any problems! Hooray! It looks good, too - a nice improvement over Fedora 10, at first glance. I'll be checking it out more over the weekend.
Then I decided to try the openSuSE 11.2 Milestone 2 distribution. This is another one that I have not been able to install on my laptops. The Live CD wouldn't boot on the nettop, the same as on my laptops. I downloaded the DVD distribution, and was able to install it, but then couldn't log in. I suspect that this is actually the same problem as with the Live CD, since in that case it is trying to login automatically on boot. So, I gave up on that one and went back to openSuSE 11.1. That installed perfectly, of course.
So now I have a very nice, small, quiet desktop system, which is so far multi-booting four good Linux distributions. I'll continue working with it over the weekend, install a couple more distributions, and see how it all works. So far I am quite pleased.
One last small note. As I said above, I used an external USB DVD/CD drive for the installations. The A+ Cupid case acutally has room for a slimline DVD/CD drive, so after I had the system running, I decided to order one of those as well. It came the next day, but unfortunately it requires a special cable with a single data/power connector on the drive, split to separate SATA and standard 4-pin power plugs. It only costs 12 francs, but you have to be sure to get it... or you get to wait a couple more days for it, as I am now.
jw 5/6/2009
Tuesday 2 June 2009, 1:17 AM
Windows 7 RC Cracker Jack Surprise.
Windows 7 RC surprised me today with some computational behavior that was totally unexpected. You know sometimes I really hate giving bananas to the code monkeys at Redmond. But when the monkeys do it right, you gotta give them the whole bunch.
I was doing about three things at once as usual. I've been building/debugging a special Windows XP Embedded image that depends on a bunch of code and requires a lot of time consuming processes that leave me with my hands and mind free simultaneously for chunks of time. The old adage about free hands and the devil etc., in any case I was also punching at the Windows 7 RC installed on a DELL 755. It has 2GB of RAM, a Celeron CPU running about 2.2GHz. Not an especially impressive system but typical of our rental fleet.
I had installed Win7RC on it a week or two ago. I knew what the answer would be but I tried using Intel's VT reporting utility on the Celeron. I wasn't surprised when it reported that the Celeron was non-VT. Duh. (I only did it because every now and then I have found surprises inside the box. Like a Pentium Core2 Duo mounted inside a DELL that had a Celeron sticker on the outside. A real Cracker Jack surprise.)
I installed Sun's virtual box software on the Celeron running Win7RC. Everything was going great. It installed fine, then it was time to install Windows XP Pro SP3 in the VM. It got all the way to “6” minutes left to install. A message popped up on the screen telling me I had run out of hard drive space! What? I was installing XP Pro onto an “expando-matic” virtual drive. Well after looking at it for a minute or two, I realized I had run out of REAL hard drive space on the C drive. I had 64 Megabytes of empty space left (that didn't used to sound like a tiny drive space).
One of the really annoying things with Sun's Virtual Box is that it likes to install the first time into the User's profile, usually on C. I didn't even think about that. I had the REAL drive partitioned into 2 sections, C was 25GB and D was 55GB. What to do?
I put the VM into pause mode and closed the virtual box application. Wiped all the junk off the D drive I didn't need, all of it except the DELL drivers folder. I discovered that installing the Win 7 RC on top of the Win Beta left this big folder on C named Windows.old. Well I didn't need that. That saved me about 6 GB or so of space. I'm not really sure because I never could get Win7 to finish indexing the damn thing, no swap space.
I started deleting folders from inside the Windows.old folder piece-meal since it turns out the idiotic index service sits there and tries to keep track of all the folders being deleted. Once I got enough room to copy the DELL driver folder to C, with some spare room, I did it.
Then the original driver folder on D gets deleted. I go into Drive Manager via MMC and delete the D partition. Click on C and use the extend (or the REAL expando-matic) command in Drive Manager to make the C drive about 20 GB bigger. Finished deleting all the crap folders in Windows.old and then re-established the D drive.
Started Virtual Box. Un-paused the installation of Windows XP Pro SP3. Viola!!! It finished without burping or crashing. Everything was back to where it was supposed to be! Freaking amazing.
Now why am I giving the monkeys bananas? Windows 7 RC did NOT crash once during the entire procedure, it did not require I turn it off, it only “whited-out” Explorer once for about 3 or 4 minutes and it came back all by itself. It dealt with the lack of swap space, it dealt with the lack of hard drive space and it kept running. XP Pro would have crashed. Vista would have come to a complete dead stop with no apparent reason. It operates almost as stable as Debian Linux 4.0.
I am impressed with Windows 7 RC.
Tuesday 12 May 2009, 4:14 AM
Extreme Computer Hardware
Had a good lunch and launch today. I got onto nasa.gov and watched the launch of the Atlantis on its Hubble repair mission. Usually it's cold cut sandwiches and lukewarm website news.
Hubble is possibly the best large-scale cold-war “technology spin-off” that I am aware of outside of Google's Earth application. Hubble is obviously based on the KH10/11 spy satellite series. Google's Earth displays the output of similar satellite technology for a lot of its maps combined with aero-survey footage used all around the world.
What was especially impressive was that some months back when the primary control computer on Hubble failed, the secondary took over with just a couple of hiccups and a little work. Not bad for a 19 year old computer that has been freezing and baking in hard vacuum and being blasted with radiation for all that time!
Turns out NASA had a spare computer on Earth that was also 19 years old. It got all the testing required to qualify as a new piece of space hardware and it passed. So the astronauts will be taking the spare with them to replace the failed primary. I realize that it's probably an 8 or 16 bit-banger with limited amount of radiation-hardened RAM. But imagine having a still working computer after sitting in a high radiation environment for 19 years. I wish some of our industrial computers were half that tough!
Tuesday 28 April 2009, 1:22 PM
Linux Distro Smack-down
I stuck another hard-drive in Debbietoo and installed Debian 5.0. Actually got it to boot-up enough times (2) to start configuring the desktop. Discovered that the video driver had the resolution set to 1600 x1050. Reset the resolution to 1280 x1024, the native resolution of the rebuilt LCD panel. Yes I'm running debbietoo, my household server, with a Gnome desktop. Its been handy more than once. Now X-server reports a "fatal" error on boot up and won't allow a GUI bootup. Thankfully the error message is self-referential. I tried another CD copy of the Debian 5.0 download, checked the checksums and re-installed. No dice, same issue.
Pulled the CD-R out of the drive and put a Ubuntu 9.04, Jay-Jay CDR in the CD drive. Ran the install. System comes up. Desktop logon works. Gnome starts without complaint. All the GUI tools seem to be working fine. System is setup with the new grub. It triple-boots without complaint. Now I can boot either into Debian 4.0 etch (2 kernel versions) or Ubuntu 9.04 without problems.
Winner and Desktop-weight Linux Champion of the world? Ubuntu 9.04!
Previous
