I haven't seen Vista, but there's more to "elegance" than "pretty." An elegant machine isn't just one that looks pretty; in engineering terms, an elegant machine is one that has no unnecessary parts, and in which no task requires any unnecessary effort.
You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”
Well, it only seems that way because that's what they did. And what they've done with every Mac OS revision since 1984.
Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it’s important to note that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.
There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.
Aw, hell. If they aren't used to it by now, they will never be. That's the root of Apple's obsession with secrecy on upcoming products; Microsoft can't steal what they don't know about yet.
If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.
You can use a flash drive for swap space? That might be a little faster than using a hard drive, but overall it strikes me as about as useful as teats on a boar hog.
Does Web-based software make operating systems obsolete?
Only the ones that suck.
whatever they are totally different, and as far as flash goes wait till Robson and Snowgrass comes out, I believe mid-'07 then we will start seeing some neat stuff with Vista.
At the Intel developer forum this past spring, Intel announced that the company would include 1GB of flash memory integrated into its upcoming mobile chipsets. The technology, dubbed Robson, is part of the Santa Rosa Centrino platform, expected to launch in the second quarter of 2007.
This inclusion of 1GB of NAND memory is actually the first phase of Robson. Soon after launch, vendors will also have the option to include 512MB instead of 1GB modules, as a cost-down alternative. Both the 1GB and 512MB modules are integrated into the Crestline chipset that makes up the core of the Santa Rosa platform.
Windows Vista is heavily reliant on the ability to use flash memory to cache files with Superfetch. Rather than reading files off the hard drive, Superfetch occasionally writes the files to an available NAND device. Vista will then pool the NAND device for the files, rather than power-up the hard drive. Since the flash memory is integrated right onto the motherboard, the system can read the memory considerably faster than the hard drive while getting a nice power-saving benefit as well.
Intel is also planning a desktop version of Robson, currently dubbed Snowgrass. NAND and hybrid technology are currently slated as a requirement for Windows Vista Premium logo certification in 2007. This NAND requirement can be fullfilled by hybrid solid state storage drives, but technologies like Robson will also fullfill the requirement.
If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.You can use a flash drive for swap space? That might be a little faster than using a hard drive, but overall it strikes me as about as useful as teats on a boar hog.
My brother's XP Pro system is for Dragon Naturally speaking, and has a fast (SATA, I believe it is) hard drive on that account. I'd consider giving him a USB flash drive for Christmas, if it'd nudge up Dragon's performance enough so's you could tell it. But if they mention this as a feature of Vista, XP Pro probably isn't smart enough to take advantage of it.Even if it isn't on the motherboard, at least a USB flash drive would be available in more than 1 GB . . .
That sounds like what you want to accellerate mass data access. Coming Real Soon Now.
I always thought that was an extremely stupid idea. The actual throughput on USB 2 to a flash drive can be about 25 MB/s read and half that for write, with a latency that in cases goes far higher than that of any modern hard drive. And compared to main memory, it's dead slow.
However, hard drive manufacturers are expecting to ship their hard drives with flash memory built in, so you get the boost of what is effectively a huge L2 cache for your hard drive over SATA speeds. I can see this feature, which is also expected for Leopard, to boost speeds quite a bit with that setup.