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Comment Re:Well, as long as the summary is trolling (Score 2) 422

This is why not.

From the linked article - emplasis mine to illustrate my point:

The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported its findings in January 2011. It concluded that "the crisis was avoidable and was caused by: Widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages; Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk; An explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street that put the financial system on a collision course with crisis; Key policy makers ill prepared for the crisis, lacking a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw; and systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels."

Comment Re:This article was written by Upper Management (Score 1) 214

I understand what you're saying, but I can relate to the parent's cynicism. I've been involved in many i-device rollouts to upper management at various companies.

Most of the time it's pretty darn obvious that the upper managers just want the latest toys to show off to their upper manager friends so they can compare their iPenis sizes. Another reason is because CIOs don't like it when their kids have better technology then they do. So they tell IT to take this technology, implement it now and we can figure out how to integrate it with our actual IT systems later on.

Guess what? Most of the time these technologies are not enterprise-ready enough to actually fit in corporate environments. Things like security and integration with existing systems aren't considered prior to the rollout. I cannot take an iPad or iPhone, plug it into an MS or Linux based ldap network, and expect it to work as a client. All that time spent building and maintaining user policies is thrown out the window. Hacks and security holes are created just to make things work.

And what if the IT department pushes back? Well they're getting in the way of progress. Never mind that IT are responsible for keeping the IT infrastructure up and running. And hey if putting this crap in breaks things, then IT is bl00dy useless! How hard can it be?

The correct approach for any rollout is to identify the requirements before choosing the technology. But this rarely happens because if the requirements can be delivered without compromising the infrastructure, and the solution doesn't involve the guys at the top getting new gadgets, then it's the wrong solution.

The same thing happened when Blackberry was the new must-have executive toy.

Comment Nothing New (Score 1) 528

We've already got the task bar, which pretty much works like tabs. Plus with the task bar you get the novel thing of being able to place multiple windows side by side, whereas with tabs and mdi interfaces in general this ability seems to be generally limited and/or removed lately (unless you open a new window of course, but this renders tabs useless)

How is this a novel step forward?

Comment This may be overly optimistic, but... (Score 4, Interesting) 189

First, when they shut down, we saw the screenshots. Now, we're seeing the gameplay footage.

I'm quitely (well not so quietly now that I'm talking about it) suspecting that we may next see the leaked marketing materials, then the playable demo, then behold! The laid off staff members actually finished the game! Here it is in all its glory!

Given the fact that this game has been one of the most famous vapourware titles for over a decade, could this simply be a marketing stunt leading up to it's release?

Comment Re:Hmmmm. (Score 5, Informative) 835

<quote>Not a lot to go on, though as a freebie, XP doesn't do jack with that extra gig of RAM...You could put in 100gigs and it won't use any more than 3 (less you're using the 64 bit version, iirc).</quote>

Just FYI, the reason for this is because with 32 bits, you're system is limited to 2^32 bits of address space = 4GB of memory in total, which has to include both RAM and the memory on your graphics card.

So in many cases, users with 4GB of RAM will only see 3GB becuase they have a 1GB graphics card. It follows that if a user only have a 512MB graphics card, then they will see (and XP will use) 3.5GB RAM.

This is not a design flaw for XP, it's a limitation if the 32 bit architecture. Switching to 64 bits solves this because then your total address space increases to 2^64 = 16EB. Which ought to be enough for anyone ;-)

Comment Re:.. and .. (Score 1) 374

I'm a big fan of moving as many of my applications into virtual machines as I can, especially ones that are rarely used and/or have a significant system overhead.

As a result I have several VMs powered by Virtual Box, and very minimal apps installed on my host OS. One for development, one for multimedia, one for internet.

It's a good setup, only it still has a long way to go before it can be used for games. DX or 3d graphics rendering aside, another problem it has that I haven't found too much discussion on is the audio latency. On Virtual Box it absolutely sucks. In fact there's about a half a second lag between the guest and host OS/s, and we're talking straight Windows XP on Windows XP, no esoteric OSes or drivers in play here. VMWare Workstation nails this quite nicely, and VMware server is only slightly behind (because it has to route all video and audio through a network socket)

Having said that however, it's still an excellent product, and I highly recommend it for anything that isn't realtime. It's much lighter than VMware (both server and workstation. Hell, even VMware player) and its system overhead is very minimal.

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