No, I used the then-current drivers for both OSes for my GTS 250.

Windows 7 is solid? Can someone explain to me why my GDI apps are like eight times slower than under Windows XP on the exact same hardware?

D:

Hey, they have a Linux version too!

I never noticed that.

SecureCRT for Linux, here I come!!

(and to Clived, putty has excellent features/performance to cost/size ratio. But that's because it's small and free. Otherwise, it's kinda like those little donut-type spare tires...)

Eh, back in the day, those guys WERE the end-destination anyways. You didn't connect to Compuserve to get to the Internet; you connected to Compuserve to get to their own resources.

Their logging wouldn't be any different than say, Slashdot's. When you're accessing Compuserve's content, they probably have a right to know.

They added Internet gateways as an afterthought, anyways. Real net connections didn't involve those over-sized BBSes. They involved borrowing a professor's account at York Uni .. er oops ahem nevermind.

A 22 minute x 24-episode season re-compressed from blu-ray©®(no copyright infringement implied, attempted, or done) is bigger than most mobile devices.

The ones that can store such a season can store one and ONLY one season.

Thin clients will never, ever win. The network will become less reliable with time, not more so. Unless you're a big company who can afford a private MPLS network. We're actually pulling hardware out of overloaded public IP networks and plunking them into MPLS because, like browers, there's no money in the 'net, in clouds, in Scott McNealy or IBM's retarded 5-computer vision. Especially not when you can charge 30K/mo for a PIP/MPLS E1/T1 network with five nodes.

I can't believe that I'm seeing a comment about clouds in the same place as the "How can I best destroy stacks of hard drives to sate my rampant paranoia?" discussion.

Supercomputers don't have hundreds of processors, they have tens of thousands of processors. The Japanese K-computer, currently leading the TOP500, has 60,000+ processors. And you'll need one to run Windows 10. Actually you'll need five of them. Start saving now...you'll need a bigger house.

And while many problems can't be solved by throwing more processors at it, much of the CS field thinks that most problems can be, and that for those that can't, it's still The Right Thing To Do, so you'll need to have SMP capability out the wazoo until they stop doing lines. And if you happen to come across things that really CAN be solved by threading, you'll need a beefy machine with lots of cores to gnaw through the latest problems (like video encoding, image editing, nuclear explosion modelling, and of course notepad).

Also, I doubt there will be any significant advancement past 22nm. Maybe a cycle or two more, and then Moore's Law dies and manufacturers start making up more BS to move basically the same model as last year.

Information state changes require energy and will always produce waste heat. Even if you can make a 600W CPU fit inside a wristwatch, do you really want to wear it? I guess it wouldn't matter in the end though, as it would eat through a 3.7v, 1500mAh battery (roughly that size for high end phones) in what ... 33.3 seconds?

You think data storage will EVER pull ahead of data requirements? EVER? Windows for Mobile Devices (which will have a bizarre, meaningless name, of course) will require 2^60 sectors of drive space sometime in 2050, assuming that space becomes available. OSS alternatives will be much tighter, of course, only requiring 2^56 sectors of drive space.

As for hard drives, hard-drive-less devices have essentially died out. Very few people do PXE boot, and almost nobody does floppy boot outside of vintage machines. Just because it doesn't have magnetic platters doesn't mean it's not a hard drive. An SSD is just as non-floppy as a conventional magnetic disk hard drive.

You didn't think that 32G of space in an iPad* was DRAM, did you?

Also, you can put flash chips in parallel to increase data rates (that's why an SSD is so fast; the individual chips are pathetically slow, but they're placed in a great amount of parallelism in a high end SSD unit, allowing them to saturate the latest SATA bus completely)

As for making things faster by making them smaller, if that were the case, we'd all be using 32nm 386s. They'd probably look like grains of sand. It would be 1/3600th of the size of a 4-core Sandy Bridge chip.

Note that all of the TOPS500 computers are of the fill-a-room size or larger.

The consequence of advancing abstraction and this horrible fascination with multiprocessing for even the simplest of programs will eventually result in a requirement for 16-core machines to run "dir" or "ls". And even if people didn't have this.. fixation on threading everything, there actually are some problems that can be solved easily by subdivision and parallel processing. Image processing comes to mind.

You'll need a building-sized TOPS500 computer to run the new hyper-dimensional desktop or whatever retarded thing is next.

Eventually Moore's "law" will break down, which will basically forever limit the amount of shrinking that can happen. When that happens, minimum sizes for various computing targets will become etched in stone.

And as for land speed holders red herring:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThrustSSC ..is 10.5 tonnes and 16.5m long.
Or 14.4 smart cars heavy and 6.1 long. Small? NO.

Nevermind that the Apollo capsules were pretty much the fastest manned anything and a Saturn V, which imparted them with their great speed, is (or should I say, sadly, was?) 110m tall and 3,000 tonnes.

* = there are medium format digital camera backs that can fill an entire iPad worth of memory in less than a hundred shots. How does 268 meg raw hit you?

Heh, that's totally ASUS-like.

Nice systems, documentation which is only so-so at best.

Wrong. If you can make something X powerful in Y volume, you can make something 2X powerful in 2Y volume. And a desktop is considerably more than two times the volume of an iPad-sized device.

Even if we eventually hit an upper limit for CPU speed and such, and then manage to miniaturize those CPUs into little shitboxes, there will always be a desktop tower with 4096 of those CPUs inside that can do any parallel task in a fraction of the time.

"Powerful" applies to storage as well. Can you fit 40 terabytes into a microSD card (assuming your tablet even has any I/O slot)?

You can? Great! I'll stuff ten thousand of those in my full-tower computer* and save five medium format pictures to it. Or maybe even six!

Same with RAM storage as well. I run a 12 gig desktop. is there an iPad with 12 gigs of DRAM? No. By the time there IS one, I'll probably be inching into the terabyte range RAM-wise.

* = it's actually really more like an oversized mid tower than actually fully tower. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to carry the full-tower version home.

Science was outsourced to China as well. Soon there will be nothing but service jobs in North America.

Repeat after me -- "Do you want fries with that?"

I think the definition of "trusted" is being stretched here.

The only thing I trust about Windows is that it's going to somehow line Microsoft's wallet with good old-fashioned dollars, directly or indirectly.

They can't even say the name honestly. Windows 8? Hello? It's an earlier version than Windows 95? It's an upgrade to Windows 3.11? What the hell is wrong with "Windows NT version 6.3" ???

Shut down Verizon!!

Not that I work there or anything >.>

I can totally see Asus having those features installed, and giving it some silly Asus name. "Super SafeBoot Deluxe!"

On the other hand, they will allow users to disable it in the "Boot" section of the BIOS setup.

Super SafeBoot Deluxe [No ]

(Description: "Enable/disable Super SafeBoot Deluxe" -- not very helpful).

I don't see why that ever happened anyways. They were still making revisions to 8088 machines in 1985 and slowly moving towards the 80286 with a few models. The clone makers were a bit faster off the mark, but they were still making PC-BIOS/DOS machines.

I fail to see how a single-tasking, segmented-memory, 1-meg-max machine could be considered even remotely "professional", when even a lowly CoCo could run a multitasking system (OS-9. The non-Apple one). The IBM-PC was completely and totally a member of the 8-bit home computer club. Real IBMs even had a BASIC ROM!

Windows was a complete bomb too. It was fat, bloated, unresponsive and slow. 386enh mode did nothing for stability. Lack of responsiveness killed user experience, and resulted in RS-232 communication difficulties. What's the point of memory protection if you crash hard anyhow?

Yeah, sure, there were lots of games for the other systems*, but that didn't mean you had to put up with DOS / Win3.x hell just to run business apps.

NT-class Windows addressed some of the issues, but at the expense of uncontrolled bloat, DLL hell, and registry BS.

To give an idea to Win3.x people who buried their heads in the sand, here's a translation of Amiga technologies to modern PC technologies:

AUTOCONFIG -> Plug and Play
Datatypes -> codecs/filters
RigidDiskBlock(RDB) -> EFI boot (only leaner, faster, and less retarded)
Intuition Screens -> Whatever Windows 8 Metro term applies to having those full-screen Metro apps. Only Intuition screens could be shared by apps(feature) but could only tile vertically (limitation) and didn't restrict one to Metro-style only (feature++)
Preemptive multitasking -> Name hasn't changed~
Blitter -> GUI hardware acceleration (95% abandoned in Vista, 10% added back to Windows 7).
Volume name -> Like a volume label in Linux.
Drive name -> like a drive letter in Windows, only it's 30 characters in legacy AmigaDOS instead of 1 or 2.
DosPacket interface -> Asynchronous I/O.
DosPacket interface -> zero copy read/write.
AllocMem/AllocVec -> uhh nothing? Windows/Linux compilers/VMs still brk()s for memory and almost never gives it back, even under Java?

* = the PC was a fairly game-oriented system then, just not as good as the competitors. The irony is that it became the primary game system for a very long time, and is still a major force despite the number of "durp! I just want it to work!" people who have trouble double clicking.

As far as I know, all instructions are implemented in microcode... aside from in 6502s.

Actually that's 4G address space in the original 68000.

The address registers were fully populated with 32 bits with the very first 68k. Only 24 address lines were actually connected (er, 23, was something odd with the odd addresses if I recall correctly), or 20 address lines in the 68008. Motorola (and Commodore, but NOT Apple) documentation said not to use the upper 8 bits of the address registers as they would one day be connected to address lines.

Lo and behold, the 68020 came out, and it had a full 32 address lines. Commodore's 32-bit clean code was validated, and Apple had to rush to fix code where they were using those "extra" bits as flags.

Also, the 68000, although only possessing a 16-bit-at-a-time ALU and 16 data lines, is effectively a full 32-bit architecture, just a bit pokey. It's lack of 32bit x 32bit = 64bit multiply was pointed out repeatedly by 386 programmers, but by and large, most high level programming languages even today don't support that. (usually they're limited to 32x32=32 or 64x64=64). Since it could do pretty much any 32 (op) 32 = 32 operation, you could write your high level code, and then expect it to be twice as fast on a 68020.

IBM should have used at least the 68008. It wasn't much bigger than an 8088 (used in the IBM PC and XT), being only a 44-pin DIP (vs 40-pin), and had full 68k functionality. The PC-AT could have then used the full-on 68000 instead of the 80286.