Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category

My search-fu has failed me

I think already know the answer, but: does GTA: San Andreas for the Xbox still support custom soundtracks when played on the 360?

No, playing music on the Dashboard and then booting San Andreas does not count for the purposes of this question. I’m talking use of the in-game custom music radio station.

December 11th, 2007 · Tags Lazyweb, Microsoft, Music, Video Games, Xbox 360 | Comments Off

Links galore

That about covers it. I’m sort of like a bargain basement Weekend Update. (Obvious pop-culture references linked for my friend Sandra’s sake, who recently revealed she has no idea what movie features the songs “Danger Zone,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and more. Or, for that matter, has never seen SNL.)

February 1st, 2007 · Tags Computers, Development, Gadgets, Internet, Microsoft, News, Science, Shopping, Software, TV, Technology, WTF?, Windows, lol | Comments Off

For once, I’m glad I can’t read Japanese

And you should be too.

What the

(photo tipoff by jtzapp)

January 27th, 2007 · Tags Apple, Mac, Microsoft, WTF?, Windows, lol | Comments Off

“the longest suicide note in history”

You owe it to yourself to read A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection if you ever even remotely considered upgrading to this lackluster joke of an operating system.

Executive Summary
—————–

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary
—————————

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Just more proof that money > you in Microsoftland.

January 14th, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Microsoft, WTF? | Comments Off

Windows Home Server: reinventing a few wheels

Ars Technica reports today on Windows Home Server, built on Windows Server 2003. While most people will just use it as a glorified fileserver (indeed, if anyone gets one at all; they’re not offering an OEM version, and do-it-yourselfers automatically seem like the biggest audience for this kind of thing, but apparently not in MS world), I think my favorite part was where they touted one of their “brand new” technologies:

In terms of storage for files, music, etc., users of the WHS won’t see a “C:\” drive, but instead just a single storage pool which can be almost endlessly expanded thanks to WHS Drive Extender. This is accomplished with a new twist on dynamic disk control. Adding more space will be as simple as adding more hard drives (internal or external, ATA/SATA or USB/Firewire) and using a tool to add that drive’s capacity to the central store. The use of dynamic disks will also allow for a degree of data redundancy. This isn’t RAID, but something more akin to data mirroring.

Now, where have I heard this before… oh right, Sun already did it.

Unlike a traditional file system, which resides on a single device and thus requires a volume manager to use more than one device, ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A pool is constructed from virtual devices (vdevs), each of which is either a raw device, a mirror (RAID 1) of one or more devices, or a RAID-Z group of two or more devices. The storage capacity of all vdevs are then available to all of the file systems in the zpool.

…

Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput means that as additional devices are added to the zpool, the stripe width automatically expands to include them, thus all disks in a pool are used, which balances the write load across them.

There’s no wheel so awesome as the one you reinvent.

January 9th, 2007 · Tags Computers, Microsoft, Sun | Comments Off